GIFT OF 
 MICHAEL REESE 
 
AMERICANISMS 
 AND BRITICISMS 
 
 WITH OTHER ESS A YS 
 ON OTHER ISMS 
 
 BY 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER AND BROTHERS 
 
Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
TO 
 
 THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY 
 YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 My dear Lmmsbury* In reading over the proof-sheets 
 of tkese pages, I have happened on your name more often 
 than 1 thought I had -written it, and yet not so often by 
 once as I wish to write it. So I set it here, in the fore 
 front of this little book, to bear -witness that much of -what 
 may be good in these essaylets of mine is dtie to help given 
 by you, either directly by -word of mouth or indirectly by 
 the printed page. A nd that is why I take pleasure now 
 in subscribing myself as 
 
 Yours gratefully, 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 Columbia College 
 
 September, 1892 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS .... I 
 
 AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" .... 32 
 
 THE LITERARY INDEPENDENCE OF THE 
 
 UNITED STATES Co 
 
 THE CENTENARY OF FENIMORE COOPER . 89 
 IGNORANCE AND INSULARITY . . . .103 
 THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS . . . .114 
 THREE AMERICAN ESSAYISTS 135 
 
 DISSOLVING VIEWS : 
 
 I. OF MARK TWAIN S BEST STORY. . 151 
 II. OF A NOVEL OF M. ZOLA S . . l6l 
 
 in. OF WOMEN S NOVELS 169 
 
 IV. OF TWO LATTERDAY HUMORISTS . 177 
 
AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS 
 
 a novel written in the last 
 decade but one of the nine 
 teenth century by an Aus 
 tralian lady in collaboration 
 with a member of Parlia 
 ment, one of the characters stops another 
 " to ask for the explanation of this or that 
 Australian phrase," wondering whether 
 " it would be better to give the English 
 meaning of each word after the word 
 itself, and to keep on repeating it all 
 through, or would it do to put a foot 
 note once for all, or how would it do to 
 have a little glossary at the end ?" As it 
 happens, oddly enough, the authors of 
 The Ladies Gallery have not themselves 
 done any one of these things ; and there 
 fore, if we chance to read their fiction, 
 we are left to grope for ourselves when 
 in the first two chapters we are told of 
 " the wild howling of the dingoes in the 
 
scrub" and when we learn that the hero 
 had "eaten his evening meal damper 
 and a hard junk of wallabt flesh " while 
 his " billy of tea was warming." Then we 
 are informed that " he had arranged a 
 bed with his blankets, his swag for a pil 
 low," and that he wished for a good mate 
 to share his watch, or even " a black 
 tracker upon whom he could depend as a 
 scout." We are told also that this hero, 
 who "was not intended to grub along," 
 hears a call in the night, and he reflects 
 " that a black fellow would not cou-ee in 
 that way." Later he cuts up " &fig of to 
 bacco ;" he says "we can_yr;z now;" he 
 speaks of living on wild plums and bandi 
 coot ;" and he makes mention of "a cer 
 tain newchum" From the context we 
 may fairly infer that this last term is the 
 Australian equivalent of the Western ten 
 derfoot ; but who shall explain the mean 
 ing of damper and dingoes, cou-ee and ban 
 dicoot? And why have scrub and billy, 
 grub andy^, taken on new meanings, as 
 though they had suffered a sea-change in 
 the long voyage around the Cape or 
 through the canal ? 
 
 As yet, so far as I know, no British 
 critic has raised a cry of alarm against 
 
the coming degradation of the English 
 language by the invasion of Australian- 
 isms. It can hardly be doubted, however, 
 that the necessities of a new civilization 
 will force the Australian to the making 
 of many a new word to define new condi 
 tions. As the San Francisco hoodlum is 
 different from the New York loafer, so 
 the Melbourne larrikin has differentiated 
 himself from the London rough, and in 
 due season a term had to be developed 
 to denote this differentiation. There are 
 also not a few Canadian phrases to be col 
 lected by the curious; and the exiles in 
 India have evolved a vocabulary of their 
 own by a frequent adoption of native 
 words, which makes difficult the reading 
 of certain of Mr. Rudyard Kipling s ear 
 lier tales. To recall these things is but 
 to recognize that the same causes are at 
 work in Canada, in India, and in Australia 
 as have been acting in the United States. 
 It remains to be seen whether the British 
 critic will show the same intolerance tow 
 ards the colonial and dependent Austra 
 lian and Canadian that he has been wont 
 to show towards the independent Amer 
 ican. The controversy, when it comes, is 
 one at which the American will look on 
 
with disinterested amusement, remem 
 bering that those laugh best who laugh 
 last, and that Dean Alford omitted from 
 the later editions of his dogmatic discus 
 sion of the Queens English a passage 
 which was prominent in the first edition, 
 issued in 1863, during the war of the re 
 bellion, and which animadverted on the 
 process of deterioration that the Queen s 
 English had undergone at the hands of 
 the Americans. " Look at those phrases," 
 he cried, "which so amuse us in their 
 speech and books, at their reckless exag 
 geration and contempt for congruity, and 
 then compare the character and history 
 of the nation its blunted sense of moral 
 obligation and duty to man, its open dis 
 regard of conventional right where ag 
 grandizement is to be obtained, and I 
 may now say, its reckless and fruitless 
 maintenance of the most cruel and un 
 principled war in the history of the 
 world." Time can be relied on to quash 
 an indictment against a nation, and we 
 Americans should be sorry to think that 
 there are to-day in England any of those 
 who in 1863 sympathized with the Dean 
 of Canterbury, and who are not now heart 
 ily ashamed of their attitude then. 
 
Owing, it may be, to the consciousness 
 of strength, which is a precious result of 
 the war the British clergyman denounced 
 thus eloquently, the last tie of colonial 
 ism which bound us to the mother-coun 
 try is broken. We know now that the 
 mother-tongue is a heritage and not a 
 loan. It is ours to use as we needs must. 
 In America there is no necessity to plead 
 for the right of the Americanism to exist. 
 The cause is won. No American writer 
 worth his salt would think of withdraw 
 ing a word or of apologizing for a phrase 
 because it was not current within sound 
 of Bow Bells. The most timid of Amer 
 ican authoresses has no doubt as to her 
 use of railroad, conductor, grade, and to 
 switch, despite her possible knowledge 
 that in British usage the equivalents of 
 these words are railway, guard, gradient, 
 and to shunt. On the contrary, in fact, 
 there is visible now and again, especially 
 on the part of the most highly cultivated 
 writers, an obvious delight in grasping 
 an indigenous word racy of the soil. 
 There is many an American expression 
 of a pungent freshness which authors, 
 weary of an outworn vocabulary, seize 
 eagerly. It may be a new word, but it 
 
would not be in accord with our tradi 
 tions to refuse naturalization to a wel 
 come new-comer; or it may be a survival 
 flourishing here in our open fields, al 
 though long since rooted out of the trim 
 island garden on the other side of the At 
 lantic, and in such case we use it unhes 
 itatingly to-day as our forefathers used it 
 in the past, "following," as Lowell re 
 marks, " the fashion of our ancestors, who 
 unhappily could bring over no English 
 better than Shakespeare s." 
 
 In the preface to the first edition of his 
 dictionary, issued in 1825, Noah Webster 
 declared that although in America "the 
 body of the language is the same as in 
 England, and it is desirable to perpetuate 
 that sameness, yet some differences must 
 exist," since " language is the expression 
 of ideas, and if the people of one country 
 cannot preserve an identity of ideas" 
 with the people of another country, they 
 are not likely to retain an absolute iden 
 tity of language; and Webster had no ; 
 difficulty in showing that differences of 
 physical and political conditions had al 
 ready in his day, only half a century after 
 the Revolution, and when the centre of 
 population was still close to the Atlantic 
 
seaboard, produced differences of speech. 
 It is too much to expect, perhaps, that 
 the British critic shall look at this Yankee 
 independence from our point of view. 
 Professor Lounsbury tells us in his admi 
 rable biography that in Fenimore Cooper s 
 time the attitude of the Englishman tow 
 ards the American " in the most favorable 
 cases . . . was supercilious and patroniz 
 ing, an attitude which never permits the 
 nation criticising to understand the na 
 tion criticised." Things have changed 
 for the better since Cooper was almost 
 alone in his stalwart Americanism, but 
 the arrogance which General Braddock 
 of his Majesty s army showed towards 
 Colonel Washington of the Virginia con 
 tingent survives here and there in Great 
 Britain, even though another dean sits in 
 Dr. Alford s stall in Canterbury Cathe 
 dral ; it prompted a British novelist not 
 long ago to be offensively impertinent to 
 an American lady (Atkenaum, September 
 i, 1888), and it allowed Lord Wolseley to 
 insult the memory of Robert E. Lee with 
 ignorant praise. It finds expression in a 
 passage like the following from a Primer 
 of English Composition, by Mr. John Nich 
 ols : "Americanisms, as Britisher, ske- 
 
daddle, and the peculiar use of clever, 
 calculate/ guess, reckon, etc., with the 
 mongrel speech adopted by some humor 
 ists, are only admissible in satirical pict 
 ures of American manners" (p. 35). 
 When we read an assertion of this sort, 
 we are reduced to believe that it must be 
 the dampness of the British climate which 
 has thus rusted the hinges of British man 
 ners. 
 
 Far more often than we could wish can 
 we hear the note of lofty condescension in 
 British discussion of the peculiarities of 
 other races. When Englishmen are forced 
 to compare themselves with men of any 
 other country, no doubt it must be diffi 
 cult for them not to plume themselves on 
 their superior virtue. But modesty is also 
 a virtue, and if this were more often culti 
 vated in Great Britain, the French, for 
 example, would have fewer occasions for 
 making pointed remarks about la morgue 
 britannique. Even the gentle Thackeray 
 if the excursus may be forgiven is not 
 wholly free from this failing. In spite 
 of his familiarity with French life and 
 French art, he could not quite divest 
 himself of his British pride, and of the in 
 tolerance which accompanies it, and there- 
 
fore we find him recording that M. de 
 Florae confided gayly to Mr. Clive New- 
 come the reason why he preferred the 
 coffee at the hotel to the coffee at the 
 great cafe " with a duris urgens in rebus 
 egestsas ! pronounced in the true French 
 manner " (Newcomes, chapter xxviii.). But 
 how should a Frenchman pronounce Lat 
 in ? like an Englishman, perhaps ? When 
 even the kindly Thackeray is capable of 
 a sneering insularity of this sort, it is 
 small wonder that the feeling of the 
 French towards the British is well ex 
 pressed in the final line of the quatrain 
 inscribed over the gate at Compiegne 
 through which Joan Dare went to her 
 capture : 
 
 "Tous ceux-la d Albion n ont faict le bien jamais!" 
 
 And we are reminded of the English lady 
 who was taken to see Mr. Jefferson s per 
 formance of Rip Van Winkle, and who 
 liked it very much indeed, but thought it 
 such a pity that the actor had so strong 
 an American accent ! 
 
 " Ignorance of his neighbor is the char 
 acter of the typical John Bull," says Mr. 
 R. L. Stevenson, who also declares that 
 
"the Englishman sits apart bursting with 
 pride and ignorance." What a Scot has 
 written a Yankee may quote. And the 
 quotation has pertinence here in view of 
 the fact that in the last century the Eng 
 lish were just as keen against Scotticisms 
 and Hibernicisms, and just as bitter, as 
 they have been in this century against 
 Americanisms, and as they may be in the 
 next against Australianisms. Macaulay 
 asserted that there were in Marmion and 
 in Waver ley " Scotticisms at which a Lon 
 don apprentice would laugh ;" and there 
 are to be seen in the English newspapers 
 now and again petty attacks on the style 
 and vocabulary of American authors of 
 distinction, which it is perhaps charita 
 ble to credit to London apprentices. One 
 of these it was no doubt who began a re 
 view of Mr. Brownell ssubtle and profound 
 study of French Traits with the state 
 ment that " the language most depress 
 ing to the educated Englishman is the 
 language of the cultured American." 
 Probably the small sword will always be 
 exasperating to those who cling to the 
 boxing-glove. 
 
 When a London apprentice laughs at 
 the Scotticisms of the North Briton, and 
 
when the London Athenceum is depressed 
 by the language of cultured Americans, 
 there is to be discovered behind the 
 laugh and the scoff an assumption that 
 any departure from the usage which ob 
 tains in London is most deplorable. The 
 laugh and the scoff are the outward and 
 visible signs of an inward and spiritual be 
 lief that the Londoner is the sole guar 
 dian and trustee of the English language. 
 But this is a belief for which there is no 
 foundation whatever. The English lan 
 guage is not bankrupt that it needs to 
 have a receiver appointed ; it is quite 
 capable of minding its own business with 
 out the care of a committee of English 
 men. If indeed a guardian were neces 
 sary, what Englishman would it be who 
 would best preserve our pure English the 
 shepherd of Dorset or the miner of Nor 
 thumberland, the Yorkshire man or the 
 cockney? If it is not the London ap 
 prentice who is to set the standard, but 
 the Englishman of breeding, it is hard to 
 discover the ground whereon this Eng 
 lishman can claim superiority of taste or 
 knowledge over the other educated men 
 to whom English is the mother-tongue, 
 whether they were born in Scotland, Ire- 
 
land, or America, in Australia, India, or 
 Canada. 
 
 The fallacy of the Englishman, be he 
 London apprentice or contributor to the 
 Athenaum, is that he erects a merely per 
 sonal standard in the use of our language. 
 He compares the English he finds in the 
 novels of a Scotchman or in the essays of 
 an American with that which he hears 
 about him daily in London, animadvert 
 ing upon every divergence from this local 
 British usage as a departure from the 
 strict letter of the law which governs our 
 language. It is, of course, unfair to sug 
 gest that a parochial self-satisfaction 
 underlies this utilization of personal ex 
 perience as the sole test of linguistic pro 
 priety ; but the procedure is amusingly 
 illogical. 
 
 The cockney has no monopoly of good 
 English if even he has his full portion. 
 The Englishman in England is but the 
 elder brother of the Anglo-Saxon else 
 where ; and by no right of primogeniture 
 does he control the language which is our 
 birthright. Noah Webster, in the preface 
 from which quotation has already been 
 made, remarked that American authors 
 had a tendency to write " the language in 
 
its genuine idiom," and he asserted that 
 " in this respect Franklin and Washing 
 ton, whose language is their hereditary 
 mother-tongue, unsophisticated by mod 
 ern grammar, present as pure models of 
 genuine English as Addison or Swift." 
 It may be doubted whether English is 
 now more vigorously spoken or better 
 understood in London than in New York 
 or in Melbourne ; but it is indisputable 
 that the student detects in the ordinary 
 speech of the Englishman many a lapse 
 from the best usage. This contaminat 
 ing of the well of English undefiled is not 
 to be defended because it is due to Eng 
 lishmen who happen to live in England. 
 A blunder made in Great Britain is to be 
 stigmatized as a Briticism, and it is to be 
 avoided by those who take thought of 
 their speech just as though the impropri 
 ety were a Scotticism or a Hibernicism, 
 an Americanism or an Australianism. 
 When a locution of the London appren 
 tice is not in accord with the principles 
 of the language, there is no prejudice in 
 its favor because it happened to arise 
 beside the Thames rather than on the 
 shores of the Hudson or by the banks of 
 the St. Lawrence. 
 
Of Briticisms there are as many and as 
 worthy of collection and collocation as 
 were the most of the Americanisms the 
 all-embracing Bartlett gathered into his 
 dictionary. Indeed, if a Scot or a Yankee 
 were to prepare a glossary of Briticisms 
 on the ample scale adopted by Mr. Bart 
 lett, and with the same generous hospi 
 tality, the result would surprise no one 
 more than the Englishman. We should 
 find in its pages many a word and phrase 
 and turn of speech common enough in 
 England and quite foreign to the best 
 usage of those who speak English Brit 
 icisms as worthy of reproof as the worst 
 specimen of "the mongrel speech adopted 
 by some humorists in America." These 
 are to be sought rather in the written lan 
 guage than in oral speech, though there 
 are Briticisms a-plenty in the talk of the 
 Londoner, from the suppression of the 
 initial h among the masses to the dropping 
 of the final - among the classes. Of a truth, 
 precision of speech is not frequent in 
 London, and not seldom the delivery of 
 the Englishman of education nowadays 
 may fairly be called slovenly. As I recall 
 the list of those whom I have heard use 
 the English language with mingled ease 
 
and elegance, I find fewer Englishmen 
 than either Scotchmen or Americans. 
 Ouintilian tells us that an old Athenian 
 woman called the eloquent Theophrastus 
 a stranger, and declared "that she had 
 discovered him to be a foreigner only 
 from his speaking in a manner too Attic." 
 Something of this ultra-precision is per 
 haps to be observed to-day in the modern 
 Athens, be that Edinburgh or Boston. 
 
 In the ordinary speech of Englishmen 
 chere are not a few vocables which grate 
 on American ears. Sometimes they are 
 ludicrous, sometimes they are hideous, 
 sometimes they seem to us simply strange. 
 Thus when Matthew Arnold wrote about 
 Tolstoi, he told us that Anna Karenina 
 "throws herself under the wheels of a 
 goods train." To us Americans this 
 sounds odd, as it is our habit to call the 
 means of self-destruction chosen by the 
 Russian heroine " a. freight train." But 
 it is simply due to the accidental evolu 
 tion of railroad terminology in England 
 and in America at the same time, where 
 by the same thing came to be called by a 
 different name on either side of the At 
 lantic. Neither term has a right of way 
 as against the other ; and it would be in- 
 
teresting to foresee which will get down 
 to our great-grandchildren. In like man 
 ner the keyless watch of Great Britain is 
 the stem-winder of the United States ; 
 and here, again, there is little to choose, 
 as both words are logical. 
 
 The use of like for as, not uncommon in 
 the Southern States, has there always 
 been regarded as an indefensible collo 
 quialism ; but in England it is heard in 
 the conversation of literary men of high 
 standing, and now and again it even gets 
 itself into print in books of good repute. 
 It will be found, for instance, in the 
 sketch of Macaulay which the late Cotter 
 Morrison wrote for the series of English 
 Men of Letters edited by Mr. John Mor- 
 ley. And Walter Bagehot represents the 
 dwellers in old manor-houses and in ru 
 ral parsonages asking, "Why can t they 
 [the French] have Kings, Lords, and 
 Commons, like we have?" Here occa 
 sion serves to remark that Bagehot s own 
 writing is besprinkled with Briticisms; 
 his style is slouchy beyond belief ; it is 
 impossible to imagine a Frenchman or an 
 American capable of thinking as clearly 
 and as cogently as Bagehot, and willing 
 to write as carelessly. 
 
To be noted also is the British habit of 
 saying * very pleased," when the tradition 
 of the language and the best American 
 usage alike require one to say " very much 
 pleased." Equally noteworthy is the mis 
 use of without for unless, condemned in 
 America as a vulgarism, but discoverable 
 in England in the pages of important pe 
 riodical publications; for example, in the 
 number of the New Review for August, 
 1890, we find Sir Charles Dilke, who, as 
 a member of her Majesty s Privy Coun 
 cil, ought to be familiar with the Queen s 
 English, writing that " nothing can be 
 brought before the Vestry without the 
 Vestry is duly summoned." Among the 
 political Briticisms which deserve collec 
 tion as well as political Americanisms, 
 although far less picturesque, are to be 
 recorded the use of the government when 
 the ministry rather is intended, and also 
 the habit of accepting these nouns of 
 multitude as plural, and therefore of writ 
 ing " the ministry are " and " the govern 
 ment are " where an American would 
 more naturally write " the administration 
 is" Another more recent Briticism is 
 the growing habit of dropping the article, 
 and saying that " ministers are," meaning 
 
ifl 
 
 thereby that the cabinet as a whole is 
 about to take action. As yet I have not 
 seen " ministers is," but even this barbaric 
 locution bids fair to be reached in course 
 of time. It must be admitted that the 
 terminology of politics is independent in 
 its tendencies, and frequently " breaks the 
 slate" of the regular grammar. It was 
 the speech-making of an American Sen 
 ator which appeared to the late George T. 
 Lanigan as " a foretaste of that grammat 
 ical millennium when the singular verb 
 shall lie down with the plural noun, and 
 a little conjunction shall lead them." 
 
 Perhaps the two most frequent Briti 
 cisms and the most obvious are the use of 
 different to where the American more ap 
 propriately and logically says different 
 from, and the employment of directly and 
 its synonym immediately for as soon as 
 in such phrases as " directly he arrived, he 
 did thus." Even Thackeray, in his most 
 carefully written and most artistic novel, 
 allowed Henry Esmond to write instantly 
 for as soon as, whereby he was guilty also 
 of an anachronism, as this blunder is a 
 Briticism of comparatively recent origin, 
 and is not yet to be found in the pages of 
 any American author of authority. It is 
 
perhaps worthy of note that in that tri 
 umph of psychologic insight Barry Lyn 
 don, which also is written in the first per 
 son, we find like for as, much as though 
 it were a Hibernicism, which we do not 
 understand it to be. 
 
 I am informed and believe for in mat 
 ters of language I prefer to testify on in 
 formation and belief only, and not to 
 make affidavit of my own knowledge, 
 necessarily circumscribed by individual 
 experience I am informed and believe 
 that an Englishman says lift where we 
 say elevator, and that he calls that man 
 an agricultural laborer whom an Amer 
 ican would term a farm hand. In the one 
 case the Briticism is the shorter, and in 
 the other the Americanism. I am told 
 that an Englishman calls for a tin of con 
 densed milk, when an American would 
 ask for a can, and that an Englishman 
 even ventures to taste tinned meat, which 
 we Americans would suspect to be tainted 
 by the metal, although we have no preju 
 dice against canned meats. I understand 
 that an Englishman stops at a hotel at 
 which an American would stay. I have 
 been led to believe that an Englishwom 
 an of fashion will go to a swagger func- 
 
tion, at which she will expect to meet no 
 end of smart people, meaning thereby not 
 clever folks, but swells. I have heard 
 that an Englishman speaks of a wire, 
 meaning a telegram ; and I know that an 
 English friend of mine in New York re 
 ceived a letter from his sister in London, 
 bidding him hold himself in readiness to 
 cross the Atlantic at a day s notice, and 
 informing him that he might " have to 
 come over on a wire! To an American, 
 going over the ocean " on a wire " seems 
 an unusual mode of travelling, and too 
 Blondin-like to be attempted by less ex 
 pert acrobats. 
 
 The point half-way between us and our 
 adversary seems nearer to him ; but this 
 is an optical delusion, just as the jet of 
 water in the centre of a fountain appears 
 closer to the other side than to ours. So 
 it is not easy for any one on either shore 
 of the Atlantic to be absolutely impartial 
 in considering the speech of those on the 
 other. An American with a sense of the 
 poetic cannot but prefer to the imported 
 word autumn the native and more logical 
 word /"#//, which the British have strange 
 ly suffered to drop into disuse. An Amer 
 ican conscious of the fact that cunning 
 
is frequent in the mouths of his fair coun 
 trywomen, and that it is sadly wrenched 
 from its true significance, is aware also 
 that the British are trying to cramp our 
 mother-tongue by limiting bug to a single 
 offensive species, by giving to bloody an 
 ulterior significance as of semi-profanity, 
 and by restricting sick to a single form of 
 physical wretchedness, forgetful that Pe 
 ter s wife s mother once lay sick of a fever, 
 and that an officer in her Majesty s serv 
 ice may even now go home on sick leave. 
 The ordinary and broader use vi.sick is 
 not as uncommon in England as some 
 British critics affect to think. I have 
 heard an Englishman defend the use of 
 / feel bad for / feel ill, on the ground 
 that he employed the former phrase only 
 when he was sick enough to be above 
 all thought of grammar. 
 
 We Americans have extended the mean 
 ing of transom, which, strictly speaking, 
 was the bar across the top of a door under 
 the fanlight itself. This American en 
 largement of the meaning of transom 
 has not found favor at the hands of 
 British critics, who did not protest in 
 any way against the British restric 
 tion of the meaning of bug, bloody, and 
 
sick. Indeed, in the very number of 
 the London weekly review in which we 
 could read a protest against Mr. Howells s 
 employment of transom in its more mod 
 ern American meaning was to be seen an 
 advertisement of a journalist in want of 
 a job, and vaunting himself as expert in 
 the writing of leaderettes. Surely leaderette 
 is as unlovely a vocable as one could find 
 in a Sabbath day s reading; and, more 
 over, it is almost unintelligible to an 
 American, who calls that an editorial 
 which the Englishman calls a leader, and 
 who would term that an editorial para 
 graph which the Englishman terms a 
 leaderette. Another sentence plucked 
 from the pages of the Saturday Review 
 about the same time is also almost in 
 comprehensible to the ordinary Ameri 
 can : " But he is so brilliant and so much 
 by way of being complete that they will 
 be few who read his book and do not 
 wish to know more of him." From the 
 context we may hazard a guess that so 
 much by way of being is here synonymous 
 with almost. But what would Lindley Mur 
 ray say to so vile a phrase ? that Lind 
 ley Murray whom the British invoke so 
 often, ignoring or ignorant of the fact 
 
that he was an American. Holding with 
 the late Richard Grant White that ours 
 is really a grammarless tongue, and dis 
 trusting all efforts of school-masters to 
 strait-jacket our speech into formulas 
 borrowed from the Latin, I for one should 
 be quite willing to abandon Lindley Mur 
 ray to the British. It is not the first time 
 that an American weed has been exhibited 
 in England as a horticultural beauty ; our 
 common way-side mullein, for example, is 
 cherished across the Atlantic as the 
 " American velvet plant." 
 
 Other divergencies of usage may per 
 haps deserve a passing word. It is an 
 Americanism to call him clever whom we 
 deem good-natured only ; and it is a Brit 
 icism to call that entertainment smart 
 which we consider very fashionable ; and 
 of the two the Briticism seems the more 
 natural outgrowth. So also the British 
 terminus of Latin origin is better than the 
 American depot of French origin ; it is a 
 wonder that so uncouth an absurdity as 
 depot ever got into use when we had at 
 hand the natural word station. 
 
 Sometimes the difference between the 
 Americanism and Briticism is very slight. 
 In America coal is put on the grate in the 
 
singular, while in England coals are put 
 in the grate in the plural. In the United 
 States beets are served at table as a vege 
 table, while in Great Britain beet root is 
 served. Oddly enough, the British do 
 not say potato root or carrot root when 
 they order either of those esculents to be 
 cooked, and as the American usage seems 
 the more logical, perhaps it is more likely 
 to prevail. 
 
 Sometimes and indeed one might say 
 often a word or a usage is denounced by 
 some British critic without due examina 
 tion of the evidence on its behalf. Pro 
 fessor Freeman, for example, who is fre 
 quently finicky in his choice of words, 
 objected strongly to the use of metropolis 
 as descriptive of the chief city of a coun 
 try, rather restricting the word to its 
 more ecclesiastical significance as a cathe 
 dral town, and Mr. Skeat has admitted 
 the validity of the objection. But Mr. R. 
 O. Williams, in his recent suggestive paper 
 on "Good English for Americans," in 
 forms us that metropolis was employed to 
 indicate the most important city of the 
 State by Macaulay, an author most care 
 ful in the use of words, and by De Quincey, 
 a purist of the strictest sect. Nay, more, 
 
he even finds metropolis thus taken in the 
 prose of Addison and in the verse of Milton. 
 In like manner Dr. Fitzedward Hall 
 had no difficulty in showing that reliable, 
 often objurgated as an Americanism, is to 
 be found in a letter written in 1624 by one 
 Richard Montagu, afterwards a bishop, 
 and that it owes its introduction into lit 
 erature to Coleridge, who used it in 1800. 
 Dr. Hall has also shown that scientist, 
 which Mr. A. J. Ellis saw fit to denounce 
 as an "American barbaric trisyllable," 
 was first used by an Englishman, Dr. 
 Whewell, in 1840. One of the abiding 
 advantages of the New English Diction 
 ary of the Philological Society an advan 
 tage which may more than counterbalance 
 the carelessness with which its quotations 
 have been verified is that its columns 
 can be used to convince even the ordinary 
 British critic that many a word and many 
 an expression which he is prompt to con 
 demn as an Americanism, and therefore 
 pestilent, is to be found in the literature 
 of our language long before the Declara 
 tion of Independence broke the political 
 unity of the Anglo-Saxon race. And al 
 though a negative is always difficult of 
 proof, this same New English Dictionary 
 
gives evidence in behalf of the late Mr. 
 White s contention that Britisher is not 
 an Americanism, but a Briticism ; he said 
 that the word was never heard in the 
 mouth of an American, and, as it hap 
 pens, Dr. Murray is not able to adduce in 
 its behalf a single quotation from any 
 American author. 
 
 The effort for precision, the desire to 
 make a word do no more than is set down 
 for it, the wish to have warrant for every 
 syllable, is neither despicable nor futile. 
 It is only by taking thought that language 
 can be bent to do our will. The sparse vo 
 cabulary and the rude idioms of the shep 
 herd or the teamster are inadequate to 
 the needs of the poet and of the student. 
 The ideal of style is said to be the speech 
 of the people in the mouth of the scholar. 
 And Walter Bagehot, in his essay on 
 "Sterne and Thackeray" one of the 
 few of his papers which have art and form 
 as well as sympathy and insight declares 
 that " how language was first invented 
 and made we may not know, but beyond 
 doubt it was shaped and fashioned into 
 its present state by common ordinary 
 men and women using it for common and 
 ordinary purposes. They wanted a carv- 
 
ing-knife, not a razor or lancet ; and those 
 great artists who have to use language 
 for more exquisite purposes, who employ 
 it to describe changing sentiments and 
 momentary fancies, and the fluctuating 
 and indefinite inner world, must use curi 
 ous nicety and hidden but effectual arti 
 fice, else they cannot duly punctuate their 
 thoughts and slice the fine edges of their 
 reflections. A hair s breadth is as im 
 portant to them as a yard s breadth to a 
 common workman." 
 
 To put so sharp a point upon his style, 
 the artist in words must choose his mate 
 rial with unfaltering care. He must se 
 lect and store away in his scrip the best 
 words. He must free his vocabulary 
 from clumsy localisms, whether these be 
 Americanisms or Briticisms. He must be 
 true to the inherent and vital principles 
 of our language, not yielding to temporary 
 defections from the truth, whether these 
 flourish in Great Britain or in the United 
 States. 
 
 It cannot be said too often that there 
 is no basis for the belief that somewhere 
 there exists a sublimated English lan 
 guage, perfect and impeccable. This is 
 the flawless ideal to which all artists in 
 
28 
 
 style strive vainly to attain, whether they 
 are Englishmen or Americans, Austra 
 lians or Canadians, Irish or Scotch. But 
 nowhere is this speech without stain 
 spoken by man in his daily life not in 
 London, where cockneyisms abound, not 
 in Oxford, where university slang is lux 
 uriant and where pedantry flourishes. 
 Nowhere has this pure and undefiled 
 language ever been spoken by any com 
 munity. Nowhere will it ever be spoken 
 other than by a few men here and there 
 gifted by nature or trained by art. The 
 speech of the people in the mouth of the 
 scholar, that is the absolute ideal which 
 no man can find by travel, and which 
 every man must make for himself by toil, 
 avoiding alike the tendency of the people 
 towards slouching inaccuracy and the 
 tendency of the scholar towards academic 
 frigidity. Of the two, the more whole 
 some leaning is towards the forcible 
 idioms of the plain people rather than the 
 tamer precision of the student. The wild 
 flowers of speech, plucked betimes with 
 the dew still on them, humble and homely 
 and touching, such as we find in Franklin 
 and in Emerson, in Lowell and in Tho- 
 reau, are to be preferred infinitely before 
 
the waxen petals of rhetoric as a school 
 master arranges them. The grammarian, 
 the purist, the pernicketty stickler for 
 trifles, is the deadly foe of good English, 
 rich in idioms and racy of the soil. Every 
 man who has taught himself to know good 
 English and to love it and to delight in it, 
 must sympathize with Professor Louns- 
 bury s lack of admiration "for that gram 
 mar-school training which consists in 
 teaching the pupil how much more he 
 knows about our tongue than the great 
 masters who have moulded it, which prac 
 tically sets up the claim that the only men 
 who are able to write English properly are 
 the men who have never shown any ca 
 pacity to write it at all." 
 
 As to the English of the future, who 
 knows what the years may bring forth ? 
 The language is alive and growing and 
 extending on all sides, to the grief of the 
 purist and the pedant, who prefer a dead 
 language that they can dissect at will, and 
 that has come to the end of its useful 
 ness. The existence of Briticisms and of 
 Americanisms and of Austral ianisms is a 
 sign of healthy vitality. " Neither usage," 
 said Professor Freeman, after contrasting 
 certain Americanisms and Briticisms, 
 
" can be said to be in itself better or 
 worse than the other. Each usage is the 
 better in the land in which it has grown 
 up of itself." An unprejudiced critic, if 
 such a one could haply be found, would 
 probably discover an equality of blemish 
 on either side of the ocean more preci 
 sion and pedantry on the one side, and a 
 more daring carelessness on the other. 
 To declare a single standard of speech is 
 impossible. 
 
 That there will ever be any broad di 
 vergence between the English language 
 and American speech, such, for example, 
 as differentiates the Portuguese from the 
 Spanish, is now altogether unlikely. A 
 divergence as wide as this has been im 
 possible since the invention of printing, 
 and it is even less possible since the 
 school-master has been abroad teaching 
 the same A B C in London, New York, 
 Sydney, and Calcutta. Although it has 
 ceased absolutely to be British, the chief 
 literature of North America is still Eng 
 lish, and must remain so, just as the chief 
 literature of South America is still Span 
 ish. Sefior Juan Valera, declaring this 
 truth in the preface to his delightful Pe- 
 pita Ximenez, reminds us that "the litera- 
 
ture of Syracuse, of Antioch, and of Alex 
 andria was as much Greek literature as 
 was the literature of Athens." In like 
 manner we may recall the fact that Lu- 
 can, Seneca, Martial, and Quintilian were 
 all of them Spaniards by birth. 
 
 That any one country shall remain or 
 become at once the political, financial, 
 and literary centre of the wide series of 
 Anglo-Saxon States which now encircles 
 the globe is almost equally unlikely. But 
 we may be sure that that branch of our 
 Anglo-Saxon stock will use the best Eng 
 lish, and will perhaps see its standards of 
 speech accepted by the other branches, 
 which is most vigorous physically, men 
 tally, and morally, which has the most in 
 telligence, and which knows its duty best 
 and does it most fearlessly. 
 
 1891 
 
AS TO "AMERICAN SPELLING" 
 
 the author of " The Ca 
 thedral " was accosted by 
 the wandering Englishmen 
 within the lofty aisles of 
 Chartres, he cracked a joke, 
 
 " Whereat they stared, then laughed, and we were friends^ 
 The seas, the wars, the centuries interposed, 
 Abolished in the truce of common speech 
 And mutual comfort of the mother-tongue." 
 
 In this common speech other English 
 men are not always ready to acknowledge 
 the full rights of Lowell s countryman. 
 They would put us off with but a youngef 
 brother s portion of the mother-tongue, 
 seeming somehow to think that they 
 are more closely related to the common 
 parent than we are. But Orlando, the 
 younger son of Sir Rowland du Bois, was 
 no villain ; and though we have broken 
 with the father-land, the mother-tongue 
 is none the less our heritage. Indeed we 
 
33 
 
 need not care whether the division is per 
 stirpes or per capita, our share is not the 
 less in either case. 
 
 Beneath the impotent protests which 
 certain British newspapers are prone to 
 make every now and again against the 
 " American language " as a whole, and 
 against the stray Americanism which has 
 happened last to invade England, there 
 is a tacit assumption that we Americans 
 are outer barbarians, mere strangers, 
 wickedly tampering with something 
 which belongs to the British exclusively. 
 And the outcry against the " American 
 language " is not as shrill nor as piteous 
 as the shriek of horror with which cer 
 tain of the journals of London greet 
 " American spelling," a hideous monster, 
 which they feared was ready to devour 
 them as soon as the international copy 
 right bill should become law. In the 
 midst of every discussion of the effect of 
 the copyright act in Great Britain, the 
 bugbear of "American spelling" reared 
 its grisly head. The London Times de 
 clared that English publishers would nev 
 er put any books into type in the United 
 States because the people of England 
 would never tolerate the peculiarities of 
 
 3 
 
orthography which prevailed in Ameri 
 can printing-offices. The S/. James s 
 Gazette promptly retorted that " already 
 newspapers in London are habitually 
 using the ugliest forms of American spell 
 ing, and those silly eccentricities do not 
 make the slightest difference in their cir 
 culation." The Times and the St. James s 
 Gazette might differ as to the effect of 
 the copyright act on the profits of the 
 printers of England, but they agreed heart 
 ily as to the total depravity of " Ameri 
 can spelling." I think that any disin 
 terested foreigner who might chance to 
 hear these violent outcries would sup 
 pose that English orthography was as 
 the law of the Medes and Persians, which 
 altereth not ; he would be justified in be 
 lieving that the system of spelling now 
 in use in Great Britain was hallowed by 
 the Established Church, and in some way 
 mysteriously connected w T ith the State 
 religion. Indeed, no other explanation 
 would suffice to account for the vigor, the 
 violence, and the persistency of the pro 
 tests. 
 
 Just what the British newspapers are 
 afraid of it is not easy to say and it is 
 difficult to declare just what they mean 
 
when they talk of " American spelling." 
 Probably they do not refer to the im 
 provements in orthography suggested by 
 the first great American Benjamin 
 Franklin. Possibly they do refer to the 
 modifications in the accepted spelling 
 proposed by another American, Noah 
 Webster not so great, and yet not to be 
 named slightingly by any one who knows 
 how fertile his labors have been for the 
 good of the whole country. Noah Web 
 ster, so his biographer, Mr. Scudder, tells 
 us, " was one of the first to carry a spirit 
 
 of democracy into letters Throughout 
 
 his work one may detect a confidence in 
 the common-sense of the people which 
 was as firm as Franklin s." But the in 
 novations of Webster were hesitating and 
 often inconsistent ; and the most of them 
 have been abandoned by later editors of 
 Webster s American Dictionary of the 
 English Language. 
 
 What, then, do British writers mean 
 when they animadvert upon " American 
 spelling?" So far as I have been able to 
 discover, the British journalists object to 
 certain minor labor-saving improvements 
 of American orthography, such as the 
 dropping of the k from almanack, the 
 
omission of one g from waggon, and the 
 like ; and they protest with double force, 
 with all the strength that in them lies, 
 against the substitution of a single / for 
 a double / in such words as traveller, 
 against the omission of the u from such 
 words as honour, against the substitution 
 of an s for a c in such words as defence, 
 and against the transposing of the final 
 two letters of such words as theatre. The 
 objection to "American spelling" may 
 lie deeper than I have here suggested, 
 and it may have a wider application ; but 
 I have done my best to state it fully and 
 fairly as I have deduced it from a painful 
 perusal of many columns of exacerbated 
 British writing. 
 
 Now if I have succeeded in stating 
 honestly the extent of the British jour 
 nalistic objections to " American spell 
 ing," the unprejudiced reader may be 
 moved to ask : " Is this all ? Are these 
 few and slight and unimportant changes 
 the cause of this mighty commotion ?" 
 One may agree with Sainte - Beuve in 
 thinking that " orthography is the begin 
 ning of literature," without discovering 
 in these modifications from the John 
 sonian canon any cause for extreme dis- 
 
37 
 
 gust. And since I have quoted Sainte- 
 Beuve once, I venture to cite him again, 
 and to take from the same letter of March 
 15, 1867, his suggestion that "if we write 
 more correctly, let it be to express espe 
 cially honest feelings and just thoughts." 
 
 Feelings may be honest though they 
 are violent, but irritation is not the best 
 frame of mind for just thinking. The 
 tenacity with which some of the newspa 
 pers of London are wont to defend the 
 accepted British orthography is perhaps 
 due rather to feeling than to thought. 
 Lowell told us that esthetic hatred burn 
 ed nowadays with as fierce a flame as ever 
 once theological hatred ; and any Ameri 
 can who chances to note the force and 
 the fervor and the frequency of the ob 
 jurgations against " American spelling" 
 in the columns of the Saturday Review, 
 for example, and of the Athenaum, may 
 find himself wondering as to the date of 
 the papal bull which declared the infalli 
 bility of contemporary British orthogra 
 phy, and as to the place where the coun 
 cil of the Church was held at which it 
 was made an article of faith. 
 
 The Saturday Review and the Athe- 
 nceum, highly pitched as their voices are, 
 
yet are scarcely shriller in their cry to 
 arms against the possible invasion of the 
 sanctity of British orthography by "Amer 
 ican spelling " than is the London Times, 
 the solid representative of British thought, 
 the mighty organ-voice of British feeling. 
 Yet the Times is not without orthograph 
 ic eccentricities of its own, as Matthew 
 Arnold took occasion to point out. In 
 his essay on the " Literary Influence of 
 Academies," he asserts that " every one 
 has noticed the way in which the Times 
 chooses to spell the word diocese ; it al 
 ways spells it diocess, deriving it, I sup 
 pose, from Zeus and census. . . . Imagine 
 an educated Frenchman indulging him 
 self in an orthographical antic of this 
 sort! 
 
 When we read what is written in the 
 Times and the Saturday Review and the 
 Athenceum, sometimes in set articles on 
 the subject, and even more often in cas 
 ual and subsidiary slurs in the course of 
 book -reviews, we wonder at the vehe 
 mence of the feeling displayed. If we 
 did not know that ancient abuses are of 
 ten defended with more vigor and with 
 louder shouts than inheritances of less 
 doubtful worth, we might suppose that 
 
the present spelling of the English lan 
 guage was in a condition perfectedly sat 
 isfactory alike to scholar and to student. 
 Such, however, is not the case. The lead 
 ing philologists of Great Britain and of 
 the United States have repeatedly de 
 nounced English spelling as it now is on 
 both sides of the Atlantic. Professor 
 Max Miiller at Oxford is no less emphatic 
 than Professor Whitney at Yale. There 
 is now living no scholar of any repute 
 who any longer defends the orthodox 
 and ordinary orthography of the English 
 language. 
 
 The fact is that a little learning is quite 
 as dangerous a thing now as it was in 
 Pope s day. Those who are volubly de 
 nouncing "American spelling" in the 
 columns of British journals are not stu 
 dents of the history of English speech ; 
 they are not scholars in English ; in so 
 far as they know anything of the lan 
 guage, they are but amateur philologists. 
 As a well-known writer on spelling re 
 form once neatly remarked, " The men 
 who get their etymology by inspiration 
 are like the poor in that we have them 
 always with us." Although few of them 
 are as ignorant and dense as the unknown 
 
unfortunate who first tortured the ob 
 viously jocular Welsh rabbit into a pedan 
 tic and impossible Welsh rarebit, still the 
 most of their writing serves no good pur 
 pose ; to quote the apt illustration of a 
 Western humorist, " It has as little in 
 fluence as the p in pneumonia." Nor do 
 we discover in these specimens of British 
 journalism that abundant urbanity which 
 etymology might lead us to look for in 
 the writing of inhabitants of so large a 
 city as London. 
 
 Any one who takes the trouble to in 
 form himself on the subject will soon 
 discover that it is only the half-educated 
 man who defends the contemporary or 
 thography of the English language, and 
 who denounces the alleged " American 
 spelling " of center and honor. The un 
 educated reader may wonder perchance 
 what the g is doing in sovereign ; the 
 half -educated reader discerns in the g 
 a connecting link between the English 
 sovereign and the Latin regno ; the well- 
 educated reader knows that there is no 
 philological connection whatever between 
 regno and sovereign. 
 
 The most of those who write with ease 
 in British journals, deploring the preva- 
 
lence of " American spelling," have never 
 carried their education so far as to ac 
 quire that foundation of wisdom which 
 prevents a man from expressing an opin 
 ion on subjects as to which he is igno 
 rant. The object of education, it has 
 been said, is to make a man know what 
 he knows, and also to know how much 
 he does not know. Despite the close 
 sympathy between the intellectual pur 
 suits, a student of optics is not qualified 
 to express an opinion in esthetics; and 
 on the other hand, a critic of art may 
 easily be ignorant of science. Now lit 
 erature is one of the arts, and philology 
 is a science. Though men of letters have 
 to use words as the tools of their trade, 
 orthography is none the less a branch of 
 philology, and philology does not come 
 by nature. Literature may even exist 
 without writing, and therefore without 
 spelling. Homer, the trouveres, and the 
 minnesingers practised their art perhaps 
 without the aid of letters. Writing, in 
 deed, has no necessary connection with lit 
 erature, still less has orthography. A lit 
 erary critic is rarely a scientific student 
 of language ; he has no need to be ; but 
 being ignorant, it is the part of modesty 
 
for him not to expose his ignorance. To 
 boast of it is unseemly. 
 
 Far be it from me to appear as the de 
 fender of the " American spelling " which 
 the British journalists denounce. This 
 " American spelling " is less absurd than 
 the British spelling only in so far as it 
 has varied therefrom. Even in these 
 variations there is abundant absurdity. 
 Once upon a time most words that now 
 are spelled with a final c had an added 
 k. Even now both British and Ameri 
 can usage retains this k in hammock, al 
 though both British and Americans have 
 dropped the needless letter from havoc ; 
 while the British retain the k at the end 
 of almanack and the Americans have 
 dropped it. Dr. Johnson was a reaction 
 ary in orthography as in politics ; and in 
 his dictionary he wilfully put a final k to 
 words like optick, without being generally 
 followed by the publick as he would 
 have spelled it. Music was then musick, 
 although, even as late as Aubrey s time, 
 it had been musique. In our own day we 
 are witnessing the very gradual substitu 
 tion of the logical technic for the form 
 originally imported from France tech 
 nique. As yet, so far as I have observed, 
 
no attempts have been made to modify 
 the foreign spelling of cliqite and ob 
 lique. 
 
 I am inclined to think that technic is 
 replacing technique more rapidly or 
 should I say less slowly ? in the United 
 States than in Great Britain. We Amer 
 icans like to assimilate our words and to 
 make them our own, while the British 
 have rather a fondness for foreign phrases. 
 A London journalist recently held up to 
 public obloquy as an " ignorant Ameri 
 canism " the word program, although he 
 would have found it set down in Pro 
 fessor Skeat s Etymological Dictionary. 
 "Programme was taken from the French," 
 so a recent writer reminds us, "and in vi 
 olation of analogy, seeing that, when it 
 was imported into English, we had al 
 ready anagram, cryptogram, diogra7n, 
 epigram, etc." The logical form pro 
 gram is not common even in America, 
 and British writers seem to prefer the 
 French form, as British speakers still 
 give a French pronunciation to charade, 
 which in America has long since been 
 accepted frankly as an English word. So 
 we find Mr. Andrew Lang, in his Angling 
 Sketches, referring to the asphalte: surely 
 
in our language the word is either asphal- 
 turn or asphalt. 
 
 Here, if the excursus may be permitted, 
 I should like to note also that the Ameri 
 can willingness to acknowledge the Eng 
 lish language as good enough for the or 
 dinary purposes of speech shows itself in 
 our acceptance of certain words of for 
 eign origin as now fully naturalized, and 
 therefore so to be treated. The Ameri 
 cans are inclined to consider that formu 
 la, for example, and criterion and memo 
 randum and cherub and bureau are now 
 good English words, forming their plu 
 rals by the addition of an s. Our first 
 cousins, once removed, across the Atlan 
 tic seem to be still in doubt ; and there 
 fore we find them making the plurals of 
 these words in accordance with the rules 
 of the various languages from which the 
 several words were derived. So in Brit 
 ish books we meet the Latin plurals, for 
 mula: and memoranda ; the Greek plural, 
 criteria; the Hebrew plural, cherubim; 
 and the French plural, bureaux. Oddly 
 enough, the writers who use these foreign 
 plurals are unwilling to admit that the 
 words thus modified is a foreign word, 
 for more often than not they print it 
 
without italics, although frankly foreign 
 words are carefully italicized. Possibly 
 it is idle to look for any logic in anything 
 which has to do with modern English 
 orthography on either side of the ocean. 
 
 Perhaps, however, there is less even 
 than ordinary logic in the British jour 
 nalist s objection to the so-called "Amer 
 ican spelling" of meter ; for why should 
 any one insist on metre while unhesita 
 tingly accepting its compound diameter? 
 Mr. John Bellows, in the preface to his 
 inestimable French-English and English- 
 French pocket dictionary, one of the very 
 best books of reference ever published, 
 informs us that " the Act of Parliament 
 legalizing the use of the metric system in 
 this country [England] gives the words 
 meter, liter, gram, etc., spelled on the 
 American plan." Perhaps now that the 
 sanction of law has been given to this 
 spelling, the final er will drive out the re 
 which has usurped its place. In one of 
 the last papers that he wrote, Lowell de 
 clared that " center is no Americanism ; 
 it entered the language in that shape, 
 and kept it at least as late as Defoe." 
 " In the sixteenth and in the first half of 
 the seventeenth century," says Professor 
 
Lounsbury, "while both ways of writing 
 these words existed side by side, the ter 
 mination er is far more common than 
 that in re. The first complete edition of 
 Shakespeare s plays was published in 1623. 
 In that work sepulcher occurs thirteen 
 times ; it is spelled eleven times with er. 
 Scepter occurs thirty -seven times; it is 
 not once spelled with re, but always with 
 er. Center occurs twelve times, and in 
 nine instances out of the twelve it ends in 
 er" So we see that this so-called "Amer 
 ican spelling " is fully warranted by the 
 history of the English language. It is 
 amusing to note how often a wider and 
 a deeper study of English will reveal that 
 what is suddenly denounced in Great 
 Britain as the very latest Americanism, 
 whether this be a variation in speech or 
 in spelling, is shown to be really a sur 
 vival of a previous usage of our language, 
 and authorized by a host of precedents. 
 
 Of course it is idle to kick against the 
 pricks of progress, and no doubt in due 
 season Great Britain and her colonial de 
 pendencies will be content again to spell 
 words that end in er as Shakespeare and 
 Ben Jonson and Spenser spelled them. 
 But when we get so far towards the or- 
 
thographic millennium that we all spell 
 sepulcher, the ghost of Thomas Campbell 
 will groan within the grave at the havoc 
 then wrought in the final line of " Hohen- 
 linden," which will cease to end with even 
 the outward semblance of a rhyme to the 
 eye. We all know that 
 
 " On Linden, when the sun was low, 
 All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, 
 And dark as winter was the flow 
 Of Iser, rolling rapidly," 
 
 and those of us who have persevered may 
 remember that with one exception every 
 fourth line of Campbell s poem ends with 
 aj/ the words are rapidly, scenery, rev 
 elry, artillery, canopy, and chivalry not 
 rhymes of surpassing distinction, any of 
 them, but perhaps passable to a reader 
 who will humor the final syllable. The 
 one exception is the final line of the 
 poem 
 
 "Shall be a soldier s sepulchre." 
 
 To no man s ear did sepulchre ever rhyme 
 justly with chivalry and canopy and ar- 
 tillery, although Campbell may have so 
 contorted his vision that he evoked the 
 dim spook of a rhyme in his mind s eye. 
 
4^ 
 
 A rhyme to the eye is a sorry thing at 
 best, and it is sorriest when it depends 
 on an inaccurate and evanescent orthog 
 raphy. 
 
 Dr. Johnson was as illogical in his keep 
 ing in and leaving out of the u in words 
 like honor and governor as he was in many 
 other things; and the makers of later 
 dictionaries have departed widely from 
 his practice, those in Great Britain still 
 halting half-way, while those in the Unit 
 ed States have gone on to the bitter end. 
 The illogic of the great lexicographer is 
 shown in his omission of the u from ex 
 terior and posterior, and his retention of 
 it in the kindred words intertour and ante- 
 riour ; this, indeed, seems like wilful per 
 versity, and justifies Hood s merry jest 
 about " Dr. Johnson s Contradictionary." 
 The half-way measures of later British 
 lexicographers are shown in their omis 
 sion of the u from words which Dr. John 
 son spelled emperour, governour, oratour, 
 horrour, and dolour, while still retaining 
 it in favour and honour and a few others. 
 
 The reason for his disgust generally 
 given by the London man of letters who 
 is annoyed by the " American spelling" of 
 honor and favor is that these words are 
 
not derived directly from the Latin, but 
 indirectly through the French ; this is 
 the plea put forward by the late Arch 
 bishop Trench. Even if this plea were 
 pertinent, the application of this theory 
 is not consistent in current British or 
 thography, which prescribes the omission 
 of the u from error and emperor, and its 
 retention in colour and honour although 
 all four words are alike derived from the 
 Latin through the French. And this plea 
 fails absolutely to account for the u which 
 the British insist on preserving in har 
 bour and in neighbour, words not derived 
 from the Latin at all, whether directly 
 or indirectly through the French. An 
 American may well ask, " If the u in hon 
 our teaches etymology, what does the 11 
 in harbour teach ?" There is no doubt 
 that the u in harbour teaches a false ety 
 mology ; and there is no doubt also that 
 the u in honour has been made to teach a 
 false etymology, for Trench s derivation of 
 this final our from the French eur is ab 
 surd, as the old French was our, and some 
 times ur, sometimes even or. Pseudo- 
 philology of this sort is no new thing. 
 Professor Max Miiller tells us that the 
 Roman prigs used to spell cena (to show 
 
 4 
 
their knowledge of Greek), coena, as if 
 the word were somehow connected with 
 
 Koivrj. 
 
 Thus we see that the it in honour sug 
 gests a false etymology; so does the ue 
 in tongue, and the^ in sovereign, and the c 
 in scent, and the s in island, and the mp 
 in comptroller, and the h in rhyme ; and 
 there are many more of our ordinary or 
 thographies which are quite as mislead 
 ing from a philological point of view. As 
 Professor Hadley mildly put it, " our com 
 mon spelling is often an untrustworthy 
 guide to etymology." But why should we 
 expect or desire spelling to be a guide to 
 etymology ? If it is to be a guide at all, 
 we may fairly insist on its being trust 
 worthy, and so we cannot help thinking 
 scorn of those who insist on retaining a 
 superfluous u in honour. 
 
 But why should orthography be made 
 subservient to etymology? What have 
 the two things in common? They exist 
 for wholly different ends, to be attained 
 by wholly different means. To bend ei 
 ther from its own work to the aid of the 
 other is to impair the utility of both. 
 This truth is recognized by all etymolo 
 gists, and by all students of language, al- 
 
though it has not yet found acceptance 
 among men of letters, who are rarely 
 students of language in the scientific 
 sense. " It may be observed," Mr. Sweet 
 declares, " that it is mainly among the 
 class of half-taught dabblers in philology 
 that etymological spelling has found its 
 supporters ;" and he goes on to say that 
 "all true philologists and philological 
 bodies have uniformly denounced it as a 
 monstrous absurdity both from a prac 
 tical and a scientific point of view." I 
 should never dare to apply to the late 
 Archbishop Trench and the London jour 
 nalists who echo his errors so harsh a 
 phrase as Mr. Sweet s " half-taught dab 
 blers in philology;" but when a fellow- 
 Englishman uses it perhaps I may vent 
 ure to quote it without reproach. 
 
 As I have said before, the alleged 
 " American spelling " differs but very 
 slightly from that which prevails in Eng 
 land. A wandering New-Yorker who 
 rambles through London is able to col 
 lect now and again evidences of ortho 
 graphic survivals which give him a sud 
 den sense of being in an older country 
 than his own. I have seen a man whose 
 home was near Gramercy Park stop short 
 
in the middle of a little street in Mayfair, 
 and point with ecstatic delight to the strip 
 of paper across the glass door of a bar pro 
 claiming that CYDER was sold within. 
 I have seen the same man thrill with pure 
 joy before the shop of a chymtst in the 
 window of which corn-plaisters were of 
 fered for sale. And this same New-York 
 er was carried back across the years when 
 he noted the extra g in the British wag 
 gon an orthographic fifth wheel, if ever 
 there was one ; he smiled at the k which 
 lingers at the end of the British alma 
 nack ; he wondered why a British house 
 should have storeys when an American 
 house has stories ; and he disliked in 
 tensely the wanton e wherewith British 
 printers have recently disfigured form 
 which in the latest London typographi 
 cal vocabularies appears as forme. This 
 e in form is a gratuitous addition, and 
 therefore contrary to the trend of spell 
 ing reform, which aims at the suppression 
 of all arbitrary and needless letters. Most 
 of the American modifications of the 
 Johnsonian orthography have been labor- 
 saving devices, like the dropping of u in 
 color and of one / in traveler, in an effort 
 at simplification, and in accord with the 
 
irresistible tendency of mankind to cut 
 across lots. 
 
 The so-called "American spelling" dif 
 fers from the spelling which obtains in 
 England only in so far as it has yielded 
 a little more readily to the forces which 
 make for progress, for uniformity, for 
 logic, for common-sense. But just how 
 fortuitous and chaotic the condition of 
 English spelling is nowadays both in 
 Great Britain and in the United States 
 no man knows who has not taken the 
 trouble to investigate for himself. In 
 England, the reactionary orthography of 
 Samuel Johnson is no longer accepted by 
 all. In America, the revolutionary or 
 thography of Noah Webster has been re 
 ceded from even by his own inheritors. 
 There is no standard, no authority, not 
 even that of a powerful, resolute, and 
 domineering personality. 
 
 Perhaps the attitude of philologists 
 towards the present spelling of the Eng 
 lish language, and their opinion of those 
 who are up in arms in defence of it, have 
 never been more tersely stated than in 
 Professor Lounsbury s recent and most 
 admirable Studies in Chaucer, a work 
 which I should term eminently scholarly, 
 
54 
 
 if that phrase did not perhaps give a false 
 impression of a book wherein the results 
 of learning are set forth with the most 
 adroit literary art, and with an uninsist- 
 ent but omnipresent humor, which is a 
 constant delight to the reader : 
 
 " There is certainly nothing more con 
 temptible than our present spelling, un 
 less it be the reasons usually given for 
 clinging to it. The divorce which has 
 unfortunately almost always existed be 
 tween English letters and English schol 
 arship makes nowhere a more pointed 
 exhibition of itself than in the comments 
 which men of real literary ability make 
 upon proposals to change or modify the 
 cast-iron framework in which our words 
 are now clothed. On one side there is an 
 absolute agreement of view on the part of 
 those who are authorized by their knowl 
 edge of the subject to pronounce an opin 
 ion. These are well aware that the pres 
 ent orthography hides the history of the 
 word instead of revealing it ; that it is a 
 stumbling-block in the way of derivation 
 or of pronunciation instead of a guide to 
 it ; that it is not in any sense a growth or 
 development, but a mechanical malfor 
 mation, which owes its existence to the 
 
ignorance of early printers and the ne 
 cessity of consulting the convenience of 
 printing-offices. This consensus of schol 
 ars makes the slightest possible impres 
 sion upon men of letters throughout the 
 whole great Anglo-Saxon community. 
 There is hardly one of them who is not 
 calmly confident of the superiority of his 
 opinion to that of the most famous spe 
 cial students who have spent years in ex 
 amining the subject. There is hardly one 
 of them who does not fancy he is manifest 
 ing a noble conservatism by holding fast 
 to some spelling peculiarly absurd, and 
 thereby maintaining a bulwark against 
 the ruin of the tongue. There is hardly 
 one of them who has any hesitation in dis 
 cussing the question in its entirety, while 
 every word he utters shows that he does 
 not even understand its elementary prin 
 ciples. There would be something thor 
 oughly comic in turning into a fierce inter 
 national dispute the question of spelling 
 honor without the u, were it not for the 
 depression which every student of the lan 
 guage cannot well help feeling in contem 
 plating the hopeless abysmal ignorance 
 of the history of the tongue which any 
 educated man must first possess in order 
 
to become excited over the subject at all." 
 {Studies in Chaucer, vol. iii., pp. 265-7.) 
 
 Pronunciation is slowly but steadily 
 changing. Sometimes it is going further 
 and further away from the orthography ; 
 for example, either and neither are get 
 ting more and more to have in their first 
 syllable the long / sound instead of the 
 long e sound which they had once. Some 
 times it is being modified to agree with 
 the orthography; for example, the older 
 pronunciations of again to rhyme with 
 men, and of been to rhyme with pin, in 
 which I was carefully trained as a boy, 
 seem to me to be giving way before a 
 pronunciation in exact accord with the 
 spelling, again to rhyme with pain, and 
 been to rhyme with seen. These two il 
 lustrations are from the necessarily cir 
 cumscribed experience of a single ob 
 server, and the observation of others 
 may not bear me out in my opinion ; but 
 though the illustrations fall to the ground, 
 the main assertion, that pronunciation is 
 changing, is indisputable. 
 
 No doubt the change is less rapid than 
 it was before the invention of printing; 
 far less rapid than it was before the days 
 of the public-school and of the morning 
 
57 
 
 newspaper. There are variations of pro 
 nunciation in different parts of the United 
 States and of Great Britain as there are 
 variations of vocabulary ; but in the fut 
 ure there will be a constantly increasing 
 tendency for these variations to disap 
 pear. There are irresistible forces making 
 for uniformity forces which are crush 
 ing out Platt-Deutsch in Germany, Pro- 
 vengal in France.. Romansch in Switzer 
 land. There is a desire to see a standard 
 set up to which all may strive to conform. 
 In France a standard of pronunciation is 
 found at the performances of the Comedie 
 Frangaise ; and in Germany, what is al 
 most a standard of vocabulary has been 
 set in what is now known as Buhne- 
 Deutsch. 
 
 In France the Academy was constitu 
 ted chiefly to be a guardian of the lan 
 guage; and the Academy, properly con 
 servative as it needs must be, is engaged 
 in a slow reform of French orthography, 
 yielding to the popular demand deco 
 rously and judiciously. By official action, 
 also, the orthography of German has been 
 simplified and made more logical and 
 brought into closer relation with modern 
 pronunciation. Even more thorough re- 
 
forms have been carried through in Italy, 
 in Spain, and in Holland. Yet neither 
 French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, 
 or Dutch, stood half as much in need of 
 the broom of reform as English, for in no 
 one of these languages were there so 
 many dark corners which needed clean 
 ing out; in no one of them the difference 
 between orthography and pronunciation 
 as wide ; and in no one of them was the 
 accepted spelling debased by numberless 
 false etymologies. Sometimes it seems 
 as though our orthography is altogether 
 vile ; that it is most intolerable and not 
 to be endured ; that it calls not for the 
 broom of reform, but rather for the be 
 som of destruction. 
 
 For any elaborate and far-reaching 
 scheme of spelling reform, seemingly, the 
 time has not yet come, although, for all 
 we know, we may be approaching it all 
 unwittingly, as few of us in 1860 foresaw 
 the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. 
 In the mean while, what is needed on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, in the United States 
 as well as in Great Britain, is a conviction 
 that the existing orthography of English 
 is not sacred, and that to tamper with it 
 is not high-treason. What is needed is 
 
the consciousness that neither Samuel 
 Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his 
 dictionary under direct inspiration. What 
 is needed is an awakening to the fact that 
 our spelling, so far from being immacu 
 late at its best, is, at its best, hardly less ab 
 surd than the hap-hazard, rule-of-thumb, 
 funnily phonetic spelling of Artemus 
 Ward and of Josh Billings. What is need 
 ed is anything which will break up the 
 lethargy of satisfaction with the accepted 
 orthography, and help to open the eyes 
 of readers and writers to the stupidity of 
 the present system and tend to make 
 them discontented with it. 
 
 So the few and slight divergences be 
 tween the orthography obtaining in Great 
 Britain and the orthography obtaining in 
 the United States are not to be deplored. 
 The cyder on the door of the London bar 
 room and the catalog in the pages of the 
 New York Library Journal \>o\\\ subserve 
 the useful purpose of making people alive 
 to the possibilities of an amended orthog 
 raphy. Thus the so-called " American 
 spelling " helps along a good cause and 
 so, also, do the British assaults upon it. 
 
 1892 
 
THE LITERARY INDEPENDENCE 
 OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 ,N the evening of the Tuesday 
 following the first Monday 
 of next November, after the 
 citizens of the several States 
 shall have cast their ballots 
 for the candidates of their choice, the 
 boys of New York, in accord with their 
 immemorial custom on election night, 
 will illuminate the streets of the city with 
 countless bonfires, not knowing, any of 
 them, that they are thus commemorating 
 Guy Faux and the discovery of the Gun 
 powder Plot. And yet such is the fact, 
 as Doctor Eggleston has ascertained be 
 yond all question. What British boys 
 are pleased to remember on the 5th of 
 November, American boys have forgot 
 ten, although they keep alive the memo 
 rial fires on the evening of the Tuesday 
 following the first Monday in November, 
 
Gi 
 
 be that the 5th or not, as the almanac 
 may declare. In like manner the " dress 
 ing up as a Guy " still survives also in 
 New York, in the parades of the " fantas- 
 ticals " on Thanksgiving Day the last 
 Thursday in November. So hard is it 
 for old customs to die out. Perhaps the 
 British 5th of November was in its turn 
 a survival of some pagan rite ignorantly 
 lingering as late as the Gunpowder Plot, 
 and thereafter identified with the fate of 
 Guy Faux. 
 
 We cannot help being the descendants 
 of our ancestors ; and no tariff, however 
 high and however complicated by ad 
 valorem duties, can keep out of these 
 United States the traditions, the beliefs, 
 the habits, the feelings of the immigrants 
 whose children we are. That those who 
 have left a great country, England or 
 France or Germany, should look back to 
 that country as the centre of light, is nat 
 ural perhaps it is inevitable. But that 
 their children should continue to do so, 
 natural enough for a while, is not inev 
 itable. Even though the colonist suc 
 ceeds in breaking the political tie which 
 binds him to the country whence his 
 fathers came, there is no real independ- 
 
ence unless he lays aside also the habit 
 of intellectual deference ; and that is as 
 arduous, as difficult, and as long a task as 
 any one ever undertook. None the less 
 is it absolutely necessary if a people is to 
 speak with its own voice and not with 
 borrowed tongues if its independence is 
 to be complete and final. 
 
 In Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge s interest 
 ing and stimulant volume called Studies 
 in History there is no essay more inter 
 esting or more stimulating than that on 
 " Colonialism in the United States." In 
 two-score pages Mr. Lodge distinguishes 
 colonialism from provincialism, with 
 which it is sometimes confounded, and 
 then shows how the thirteen United 
 States, having once been colonies, still 
 breathed the colonial spirit long after 
 their political independence was fully es 
 tablished. He recalls the fact that one 
 half of the people disliked Washington s 
 proclamation of neutrality as between 
 France and Great Britain, because it 
 seemed " hostile to France," while the 
 other approved of it for the same reason. 
 We Americans at the beginning of this 
 century were still engaged in fighting 
 over again all the battles of Europe. 
 
But Washington was an American, not a 
 European, and so was Hamilton; and 
 they kept us true to the line of our na 
 tional development. 
 
 Even before the Revolution, when " the 
 travelled American, the petit -maitre of 
 the colonies," so Hawthorne reminds us, 
 was "the ape of London foppery, as the 
 newspaper was the semblance of the Lon 
 don journals " even then there were 
 Americans, like Franklin, for example, 
 who had nothing of the colonist about 
 them, who were at once cosmopolitan 
 and American. Mr. Lodge is right in 
 calling Franklin s Autobiography "the 
 corner-stone, the first great work of 
 American literature." 
 
 After the War of 1812 the politics of 
 the United States ceased to depend in 
 any way on the politics of Europe ; and 
 our elections began to turn solely on 
 questions of domestic policy. So our 
 commerce and our manufactures freed 
 themselves from reliance on England or 
 France. An unending succession of in 
 ventions showed the ingenuity of the 
 American. In law, the autonomy of the 
 separate States permitted a variety of 
 juristic experiment, the best results of 
 
4 
 
 which have been copied now in the legis 
 lature of Great Britain. " But the colo 
 nial spirit " to quote Mr. Lodge again 
 "cast out from our politics and fast 
 disappearing from business and the pro 
 fessions, still clung closely to literature, 
 which must always be the best and 
 last expression of a national mode of 
 thought." 
 
 The colonial attitude in literature was 
 unwittingly encouraged by Congress, 
 which, by refusing to pass an interna 
 tional copyright bill, and thus secure to 
 the British author the control of his own 
 works, permitted the foreigner to be plun 
 dered, and forced the native author to 
 sell his wares in competition with stolen 
 goods. Sir Henry Sumner Maine de 
 clared in his work on Popular Govern 
 ment (p. 247) that the neglect to give 
 copyright to foreign "writers has con 
 demned the whole American community 
 to a literary servitude unparalleled in 
 the history of thought." This, of course, 
 is the violent over-statement of an enemy ; 
 but there was a percentage of truth in it 
 once. To show just what the American 
 literary attitude was in the early years of 
 this century, Mr. Lodge instances Coop- 
 
er s first novel, Precaution, now wholly 
 forgotten, and fortunately, for its charac 
 ters, its scenery, " its conventional phrases 
 were all English ; worst and most ex 
 traordinary of all, it professed to be by 
 an English author, and was received on 
 that theory without suspicion." And 
 Mr. Lodge tersely sums up the situa 
 tion by saying that "the first step of an 
 American entering upon a literary career 
 was to pretend to be an Englishman in 
 order that he might win the approval, 
 not of Englishmen, but of his own coun 
 trymen." 
 
 Cooper was too good an American to 
 be content with the cast-off garments of 
 British novelists; and in 1821, a year af 
 ter the appearance of Precaution, he pub 
 lished The Spy, and never thereafter was 
 there any need for an American novelist 
 to masquerade as an Englishman. Yet 
 his fellow-countrymen thought to com 
 pliment Cooper by calling him "the Amer 
 ican Scott." And more than a quarter 
 of a century later, when Lowell put forth 
 his Fable for Critics there was abundant 
 colonialism in our literature, if we may 
 accept the satirist s picture of the mass- 
 meeting of 
 
" 
 
 "The American Bulwers, Disraelis, and Scotts. 
 
 By the way, tis a fact that displays what profusions 
 Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions, 
 That while the Old World has produced barely eight 
 Of such poets as all men agree to call great, 
 And of other great characters nearly a score 
 One might safely say less than that rather than more 
 With you every year a whole crop is begotten, 
 They re as much of a staple as corn is or cotton; 
 Why, there s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties 
 That has not brought forth its own Miltons and 
 
 Dantes ; 
 I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three 
 
 Shelleys, 
 
 Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles, 
 Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, 
 One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
 A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons 
 In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, 
 He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
 Will be some very great person over again." 
 
 After Cooper came Hawthorne and 
 Poe, intensely American, both of them, 
 although in different fashion. In due 
 season Mrs. Stowe brought out one book 
 which set forth fearlessly a situation un 
 deniably (and most unfortunately) Amer 
 ican. Then came the war, which stiffened 
 our national consciousness, and by giving 
 us something to be proud of, killed the 
 earlier habit of brag. Among later story 
 tellers who study American life as it is, 
 
and without any taint of Briticism, are 
 the author of The Adventures of Huckle 
 berry Finn, the author of The Rise of Si 
 las Lapham, the author of The Hoosier 
 Schoolmaster, and the author of Old Creole 
 Days, all aggressively American, all de 
 void of the slightest suggestion of coloni 
 alism, all possessing a wholesome mistrust 
 of British traditions, British standards, 
 and British methods. Some of his fellow- 
 countrymen and contemporaries com 
 plained that Cooper was not proud of 
 being called " the American Scott ;" and 
 if we want to see how far we have trav 
 elled away from colonialism of this sort 
 we have only to imagine the laughter 
 with which Mark Twain would greet any 
 critic who thought to compliment him 
 by calling him the American Burnand ! 
 
 That this is an enormous gain is obvi 
 ous enough. American authors are now 
 writing for their fellow-countrymen and 
 about their fellow-countrymen. If, as 
 Matthew Arnold declared, " the end and 
 aim of all literature is, if one considers it 
 attentively, nothing but that a criticism 
 of life," then the literature likely to be 
 most useful, most invigorating, and most 
 satisfactory to Americans should be a 
 
68 
 
 criticism of life in America. Whether 
 or not the spirit of colonialism still sur 
 vives in these United States sufficiently 
 to make the majority of readers here pre 
 fer books of British authorship is a ques 
 tion hardly worth asking, it seems to me, 
 although there are some, both in London 
 and in New York, who would answer it 
 in the affirmative. To those of us who 
 happened to be in London during the 
 closing days of our long struggle for the 
 Copyright act of 1891 it was obvious that 
 many British authors believed that un 
 bounded affluence was about to burst 
 upon them. They accepted Sir Henry 
 Maine s view as to the literary poverty 
 of America, and apparently did not know 
 that there were American authors stand 
 ing ready to supply the American de 
 mand as soon as they should be relieved 
 from an enforced competition with stolen 
 goods. 
 
 these British authors thought that the 
 passage of the act opened a boundless 
 field for them to enter in and take pos 
 session of; and no doubt some of the 
 American opponents of the bill were of 
 the same opinion. Of course we all see 
 now, what some of us who had studied 
 
the conditions of the book-trade foresaw, 
 that the instant result of the Copyright 
 act must needs be a decrease in the num 
 ber of books of British authorship sold 
 in the United States. As soon as there 
 was only one authorized publisher en 
 gaged in pushing a British book in Amer 
 ica, in the place of a dozen unauthorized 
 publishers forced to a frantic and cut 
 throat competition, the British book had 
 to sell on its merits alone, without the aid 
 of any premium of cheapness. As soon 
 as all books had to be paid for by the 
 publisher, the book of native authorship 
 had its natural preference ; and now the 
 inferior and doubtful books of foreign 
 authorship are ceasing to be reprinted 
 here. This is a tendency which will 
 increase with time, and very properly, 
 since every nation ought to be able to 
 supply its own second-rate books, and to 
 borrow from abroad only the best that 
 the foreigner has to offer it. And it can 
 not be said too often or too emphatically 
 that the British are foreigners, and that 
 their ideals in life, in literature, in poli 
 tics, in taste, in art, are not our ideals. 
 
 The decrease in the proportion of Brit 
 ish books published in America, sharply 
 
accelerated, no doubt, by the Copyright 
 act of 1891, has been going on ever since 
 Cooper published The Spy, now more 
 than threescore years and ten ago. It 
 occurred to me that it would be useful 
 to show exactly the rate at which the 
 American book had been gaining upon 
 the British book, and to discover whether 
 the native author had overtaken the for 
 eigner or was likely to do so. To this 
 end I have considered the books issued 
 during the past thirty years by two of 
 the leading publishing houses of America : 
 Messrs. Harper & Brothers, and Messrs. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Company. Messrs. 
 Harper & Brothers have always main 
 tained very close relations with the lead 
 ing authors of Great Britain ; and to them, 
 far more than to any one other American 
 publishing house, have the most popular 
 writers of England intrusted the Amer 
 ican editions of their works. Messrs. 
 Houghton, Mifflin Company, on the 
 other hand, succeeding to the firms of 
 Ticknor & Fields, and of Fields, Osgood 
 & Company, have always devoted them 
 selves more especially to books of Amer 
 ican authorship. These two great houses 
 represent different traditions, and it 
 
seemed to me therefore that a compari 
 son of their present catalogues with their 
 catalogues of thirty years ago would not 
 be without profit. I have to thank both 
 these firms for their kindly assistance, 
 without which it would have been im 
 possible for me to prepare the present 
 paper. 
 
 I have been furnished with a list of 
 the books published by Messrs. Harper & 
 Brothers in the years 1861, 1871, 1881, and 
 1891 ; and I propose to show how the 
 book of American authorship has gained 
 on the book of British authorship in 
 three decades. From all the lists I begin 
 by discarding the classic authors of our 
 language. There was scarcely any Amer 
 ican literature before Cooper s Spy, and 
 of course all the glorious roll of English 
 authors who wrote before 1776 are as 
 much a part of our having as the com 
 mon law itself. For kindred reasons I 
 throw out all new editions and all text 
 books and all school-books. 
 
 Making these deductions (and they nat 
 urally decrease very much the apparent 
 number of books published during any 
 one year), we find that in the year 1861 
 Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued twen- 
 
ty-four books, of which fourteen were of 
 British authorship (including George El 
 iot s Silas Marner} and seven of Ameri 
 can authorship (including Motley s United 
 Netherlands and Mr. Curtis s Trumps) ; 
 three books sent forth by them were 
 translated from foreign languages. 
 
 In 1871 Messrs Harper & Brothers 
 published fifty-seven books, and of these 
 thirty -six were of British authorship, 
 twenty were by American writers, and 
 one was a translation. 
 
 In 1881 they sent forth ninety -eight 
 books, of which sixty-six were by British 
 authors (including some forty-seven num 
 bers of the Franklin Square Library) and 
 twenty - six were by American authors, 
 while six were translations from foreign 
 languages. It is to be noted that in 1881 
 we were in the very thick of piracy, and 
 that Messrs. Harper & Brothers were en 
 gaged in pushing vigorously the Franklin 
 Square Library, which they had devised 
 as a weapon to fight the reprinters with. 
 
 In 1891 the Copyright act became op 
 erative on the ist of July. During that 
 year Messrs. Harper & Brothers issued 
 seventy-six books, of which twenty-seven 
 were of British authorship and forty-one 
 
of American, while eight were transla 
 tions. It is to be noted here that the 
 translations of 1891 were nearly all made 
 in America, while those of 1861 and of 
 1 88 1 were the work of British writers. 
 In the books of British authorship are in 
 cluded all those issued only in paper cov 
 ers in the new Franklin Square Library. 
 Of course, Messrs. Harper & Brothers is 
 sued ever} r year many more books than I 
 have counted ; but I have, as I said, omit 
 ted all new editions, all school-books, and 
 all reprints of the classics of our own or 
 any other language, as not falling within 
 the scope of this inquiry. To decide ex 
 actly what to include or to exclude was 
 not always easy, but I have tried to be 
 consistent, and I believe that the figures 
 here given are fairly accurate. They 
 show that a house which published in 
 1861 twice as many books of British 
 authorship as of American, published in 
 1891 one-third more books of American 
 authorship than of British. They show 
 also that the actual number of American 
 books issued by this firm increased with 
 every decade, and was in 1891 almost six 
 times as large as it was thirty years be 
 fore. 
 
The present house of Houghton, Mif- 
 flin & Company is descended on one side 
 from the firm of Hurd & Houghton, and 
 on the other from the firm which was 
 successively William D. Ticknor & Com 
 pany, Ticknor & Fields, Fields, Osgood & 
 Company, and James R. Osgood & Com 
 pany. I am sorry to say that I have 
 not been able to get a complete cata 
 logue of the books published by Ticknor & 
 Fields in i86i,but I have found certain 
 lists of books published by them about 
 that time : one of these lists contains 
 four American books, three British, and 
 one translation from a foreign tongue ; in 
 another there are ten books of British 
 authorship and ten of American ; and in 
 a third there are six British authors rep 
 resented and eight American. 
 
 In 1871 the firm was James R. Osgood 
 & Company, and the proportion of books 
 of American authorship was steadily in 
 creasing. I have not been able to find a 
 full and complete list, but I know that 
 the house published that year at least 
 twenty-eight books by American authors, 
 ten by British writers, and three trans 
 lated from a modern language. 
 
 In 1 88 1 the firm had become Hough- 
 
ton, Mifflin & Company, and it has kind 
 ly provided me with an accurate list 
 of its publications during these twelve 
 months. Omitting, as before, all new edi 
 tions, we find that the house issued that 
 year thirty -eight books by Americans, 
 seven by British authors, and eleven vol 
 umes of translations. 
 
 In 1891 the proportion of native works 
 still further increased. The American 
 books published in that year by Messrs. 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Company were six 
 ty-nine, while the firm issued only seven 
 volumes by British authors and two trans 
 lations. A comparison of these figures 
 with those of thirty years before show 
 that the predecessors of Messrs. Hough- 
 ton, Mifflin & Company published in 1861 
 about as many books of British author 
 ship as of American; while in 1891 the 
 firm sent forth ten times as many Amer 
 ican books as it did British. 
 
 In going over the lists of Messrs. Har 
 per & Brothers and of Messrs. Houghton, 
 Mifflin & Company, I have resolutely cast 
 out of account all school-books, because 
 a consideration of these might have giv 
 en a false impression, since the school- 
 books of all Americans who were boys 
 
in 1 86 1 were already 01 American author- 
 ship. I was a boy myself in 1861, and I 
 never saw a school-book of British origin 
 until after I had been in college for a 
 year or two, and then it was only a sin 
 gle manual of political economy. When 
 Noah Webster issued, in 1783, the first 
 part of a Grammatical Institute of the 
 English Language, afterwards known as 
 Webster s Spelling Book, and as such sold 
 for half a century to the extent of a 
 million copies a year, an example was set 
 which other American educators were 
 prompt to follow. 
 
 For nearly a hundred years now the 
 American school-boy has been supplied 
 with American books suited to Ameri 
 can conditions and inculcating American 
 ideas. Nor is there any likelihood that 
 this fortunate condition will ever change. 
 The American Book Company, a pub 
 lishing firm formed by the consolidation 
 of four or five of the leading school-book 
 houses of this country, supplies probably 
 four-fifths of the books used in American 
 schools. I have recently made a careful 
 examination of its complete classified 
 price-list of school and college text 
 books, with the eminently satisfactory 
 
result of finding in the first 500 titles only 
 one book of foreign authorship. 
 
 Perhaps it was in consequence of the 
 wholesome Americanism imparted in the 
 school -room that American boys and 
 girls demanded other books of American 
 authorship. Certain it was that the de 
 partment of the publishing trade which 
 handles "juveniles," as they are called, 
 gave an early preference to books de 
 scribing life in America or from an Amer 
 ican point of view. Peter Parley was a 
 pioneer, and Jacob Abbott followed after ; 
 and I confess I am sorry for the boys and 
 girls of Great Britain who did not know 
 the joy of travelling through Europe with 
 Rollo and Uncle George, the omniscient. 
 From my own childhood I can recall only 
 one volume of British origin, although of 
 American manufacture ; it was a sturdy 
 tome called The Boys Own Book, and it 
 had strange wood-cuts of strangely chub 
 by youths in strange Eton jackets. 
 
 In Doctor Holmes s paper on " The 
 Seasons " (to be found in Pages from an 
 Old Volume of Life), it is made evident 
 that the American children of the second 
 decade of this century were less fortunate 
 than those of the seventh decade. Doc- 
 
tor Holmes tells us that he was educated 
 on Miss Edgeworth and Evenings at Home. 
 " There we found ourselves in a strange 
 world, where James was called Jem, not 
 Jim, as we always heard it ; where one 
 found cowslips in the fields, while what 
 we saw were buttercups ; where naughty 
 school -boys got through a gap in the 
 hedge to steal Farmer Giles s red-streaks, 
 instead of shinning over the fence to hook 
 old Daddy Jones s Baldwins ; where there 
 were larks and nightingales instead of 
 yellow - birds and bobolinks ; where the 
 robin was a little domestic bird that fed 
 at the table, instead of a great, fidgety, 
 jerky, whooping thrush ; where poor peo 
 ple lived in thatched cottages, instead of 
 shingled ten - footers ; where the tables 
 were made of deal ; where every village 
 had its parson and clerk and beadle, its 
 green-grocer, its apothecary who visited 
 the sick, and its bar-maid who served out 
 ale" (pp. 172-3). 
 
 And with the witty wisdom which is 
 the secret of the Autocrat s power over 
 us, he continues : " What a mess there 
 is no other word for it what a mess was 
 made of it in our young minds in the at 
 tempt to reconcile what we read about 
 
with what we saw ! It was like putting a 
 picture of Regent s Park in one side of a 
 stereoscope and a picture of Boston Com 
 mon on the other, and trying to make one 
 of them. The end was that we all grew 
 up with a mental squint which we could 
 never get rid of. We saw the lark and 
 the cowslip and the rest on the printed 
 page with one eye, the bobolink and the 
 buttercup, and so on, with the other in 
 nature. This world is always a riddle to 
 us at best ; but those English children s 
 books seemed so perfectly simple and nat 
 ural, and yet were so alien to our youth 
 ful experiences that the Houyhnhnm 
 primer could not have muddled our in 
 tellects more hopelessly." 
 
 The colonial habit of dependence on 
 England for literature and of deference 
 to British opinion is to be seen in the his 
 tory of the American drama quite as dis 
 tinctly as in the other departments of lit 
 erature, and it is not yet wholly extinct. 
 At first, of course, all our actors were of 
 British birth. When the first American 
 comedy, Royall Tyler s "Contrast," was 
 played at the John Street Theatre in New 
 York in 1787, the character of Jonathan 
 the Yankee was undertaken by Thomas 
 
Wignell, a native of England. Thomas 
 Abthorpe Cooper was criticised in Lon 
 don as an American, but he had been 
 born in Great Britain. Edwin Forrest 
 was the first distinguished tragedian who 
 was a native of our continent. Since he 
 set the example many an American actor 
 has appeared in England, and Mr. Au- 
 gustin Daly has taken his whole com 
 pany of comedians to Europe repeatedly. 
 Nowadays there are always perform 
 ers of American birth and training in 
 half a dozen of the leading London the 
 atres. 
 
 Indeed, it might fairly be said that act 
 ing was the first of the arts to develop 
 here in America; beyond all question it 
 was the first that we began to export. 
 But the art of the native American drama 
 tist long lagged behind that of the native 
 American actor. Perhaps even now there 
 is still a lingering survival of the preju 
 dice in favor of foreign plays, or, at least, 
 against plays of American authorship. 
 At present the foreign play most likely 
 to be in favor is the French, but when 
 the theatre was young in this country our 
 sole reliance was on the British stage. 
 Now we get light from Berlin and from 
 
Paris ; then we saw no ray of hope ex 
 cept from London. 
 
 So complete was the dependence of the 
 Park Theatre on Drury Lane and on Co- 
 vent Garden in the early part of this cen 
 tury, that when our first native dramatist, 
 William Dunlap, made adaptations of 
 Kotzebue s plays he took good care not 
 to avow his share in the work, allowing 
 it to be supposed that his versions of the 
 German originals were those which had 
 been made for the London stage. Even 
 as late as 1812, when Mr. J. N. Barker 
 dramatized Marmion " the prejudice then 
 existing against American authors" to 
 quote the words of Mr. Ireland, the his 
 torian of the New York stage " was so 
 great that the play was announced as the 
 production of an English dramatist, and 
 thus, with its fine cast, commanded an 
 extraordinary success." Perhaps this is 
 even more pitiful than Cooper s pretend 
 ing to be an Englishman in his first novel. 
 
 To show the changes which have taken 
 place in the composition of our play-bills 
 during the past thirty years, I have had 
 lists made of the plays which were adver 
 tised for performance in the first full 
 week of January in 1861, 1871, 1881, and 
 
 6 
 
v 
 
 1891. The result of the consideration of 
 these lists is not as convincing as one 
 could wish, for the performances of a 
 single week are scarcely enough to fur 
 nish matter for the adequate comparison 
 of one year with another. Yet the com 
 parison is not without interest, and it 
 seems to me indisputably instructive. All 
 grand operas, all circuses, all menageries, 
 all dime museums, all negro minstrel en 
 tertainments, and all those strange per 
 formances known, for some inscrutable 
 reason, as "variety shows," are here left 
 out of court, as having little or no con 
 nection with literature. 
 
 Making these deductions, we find that 
 there were open in New York in the first 
 week of January, 1861, seven places of 
 amusement devoted to the drama, at only 
 two of which were the plays wholly of 
 American authorship ; although at a third, 
 where Edwin Forrest was acting, the 
 American tragedy of "The Gladiator" 
 shared the bill with the British tragedy 
 of " Damon and Pythias." At the rest 
 of the theatres the plays were of Brit 
 ish authorship, that at Wallack s being 
 " Pauline," a British dramatization of a 
 French novel. 
 
In the corresponding week of 1871 
 after making the same omissions, and 
 after deducting also the performances in 
 foreign languages, always very frequent 
 in a city with a population as cosmopol 
 itan as ours making these allowances, we 
 find seven theatres, at which three British 
 plays are being performed and three 
 American plays, and one play, if it can so 
 be called, " The Black Crook," which was 
 an American adaptation from the Ger 
 man. There was at this time a temporary 
 prevalence of negro minstrelsy and the 
 variety show. 
 
 In 1 88 1 the New Yorker who went to 
 the theatre during the first week in Jan 
 uary had his choice of fifteen perform 
 ances, and he could see nine plays 
 of American authorship, two American 
 adaptations from the German, two British 
 adaptations from the French, and two 
 plays of British authorship. The pro 
 portion of American plays seems over 
 whelming, and it was probably not main 
 tained throughout the year, although the 
 preceding decade had seen an extraor 
 dinary development of the American 
 drama. Among those to be seen at this 
 time in New York were " The Danites," 
 
" Hazel Kirke,"and" The Banker s Daugh 
 ter." 
 
 When we come to 1891 we see that the 
 list of theatres offering a dramatic enter 
 tainment in the English language has 
 swollen to twenty-one, and we note that 
 the variety shows and the negro minstrel 
 performances are now infrequent. At 
 these twenty-one theatres we could see 
 thirteen plays of American authorship, be 
 sides two American adaptations from the 
 German, while at the same time there 
 were also visible five plays by British au 
 thors and one British adaptation from the 
 French. I may add also, and of my own 
 knowledge, that the plays which were most 
 popular, and therefore most profitable at 
 this time, were all to be found among the 
 thirteen of American authorship. It is a 
 fact also that for fully forty years now the 
 great pecuniary successes of the Ameri 
 can theatre have been gained by plays of 
 American life, and more especially of 
 American character. " Uncle Tom s Cab 
 in," " Rip Van Winkle," " Colonel Sellers," 
 "My Partner," "The Danites," "The 
 Banker s Daughter," " Held by the En 
 emy," and " Shenandoah " have had no 
 foreign rivals in popularity except " The 
 
Two Orphans." Possibly exception should 
 also be made of " The Shaughraun" and 
 " Hazel Kirke," both written in America, 
 although dealing with life in Europe. 
 
 It is to be noted that the Copyright act 
 of 1891 has had, and will have, but little 
 effect upon the foreign dramatist, because, 
 for twenty years and more, judicial deci 
 sions in the United States courts had ac 
 corded him a full protection for his stage- 
 right under the common law. Thus the 
 American dramatist had been freed from 
 the necessity of vending his wares in com 
 petition with stolen goods long before a 
 like privilege had been vouchsafed to the 
 American novelist. 
 
 A careful study of the figures here pre 
 sented will convince the disinterested 
 critic that the American dramatist has 
 passed his foreign rival in the race for 
 popularity, jusT as a careful study of the 
 successive lists of Messrs. Harper & Broth 
 ers and Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & 
 Company will prove that the American 
 author has also overtaken the foreigner. 
 If there was truth once in Sir Henry Sum- 
 ner Maine s assertion that we Americans 
 offered the example of a literary servitude 
 without parallel, that assertion is true no 
 
longer. The American author is now- 
 conscious of a demand from the American 
 public for plays and for books which re 
 flect American life and embody American 
 character. Before another decade has 
 closed the century, the proportion of works 
 of foreign authorship to be seen in our 
 book-stores and in our theatres is certain 
 to be smaller still. Sooner or later the 
 time will come when it will be profitable 
 to reproduce in America only the best of 
 books of foreign authors and only the best 
 plays of foreign dramatists. 
 
 At the same time that the American 
 author has been taking possession of his 
 own country he has also been conquering 
 abroad. I have not had time for the need 
 ful and laborious calculation, but I believe 
 that an examination of the files of the 
 London Athenceum and Satitrday Review 
 of 1 86 1 would show that very few books 
 of American authorship were deemed 
 worthy of reprint and review in England, 
 while an examination of their files for 
 1891 would reveal a surprisingly large pro 
 portion of books of American origin now 
 considered as entitled to criticism. And 
 I believe that this proportion is steadily 
 increasing, and that more and more books 
 
published in the United States are every 
 year reprinted in Great Britain, or ex 
 ported for sale in London in editions of 
 satisfactory size. 
 
 Of course the reputation of American 
 authors has been spread abroad in Eng 
 land largely by the agency of the great 
 American illustrated magazines, which 
 have now an enormous circulation on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. There are at 
 least two American magazines which far 
 outsell in England itself any British mag 
 azine of corresponding pretensions. A 
 few British magazines and reviews con 
 tinue to be imported into the United 
 States, but they are very few indeed ; I 
 think that the total number of copies im 
 ported is less than the number exported 
 of either of the two great American illus 
 trated monthlies. 
 
 It is pleasant to be able to assert that 
 this wide-spread popularity of the Ameri 
 can magazines in England has not been 
 due to any attempt to cater to the English 
 market. On the contrary, the more obvi 
 ously and frankly American these maga 
 zines are, the more marked is their suc 
 cess in England. No doubt a large part 
 of this popularity is due to American 
 
superiority in wood-engraving, in proc 
 ess work, in printing, and to the liber 
 ality of the American publisher in paying 
 for these embellishments ; but a share as 
 large is due to the skill with which the 
 American magazines are edited, to their 
 freshness, their brightness, their vivacity, 
 to their national flavor, and especially to 
 their larger scope and to their stronger 
 understanding of the capabilities and the 
 opportunities of the modern periodical. 
 1892 
 
THE CENTENARY OF FENIMORE 
 COOPER 
 
 jOST appropriate is it that the 
 first literary centenary which 
 we were called upon to com 
 memorate one hundred years 
 after the adoption of the 
 Constitution that knit these States into a 
 nation should be the birthday of the au 
 thor who has done the most to make us 
 known to the nations of Europe. In the 
 first year of Washington s first term as 
 President, on the fifteenth day of Sep 
 tember, 1789, was born James Fenimore 
 Cooper, the first of American novelists, 
 and the first American author to carry 
 our flag outside the limits of our language. 
 Franklin was the earliest American who 
 had fame among foreigners ; but his wide 
 popularity was due rather to his achieve 
 ments as a philosopher, as a physicist, as 
 a statesman, than to his labors as an au- 
 
thor. Irving was six years older than 
 Cooper, and his reputation was as high 
 in England as at home ; yet to this day 
 he is little more than a name to those who 
 do not speak our mother-tongue. But 
 after Cooper had published The Spy, The 
 Last of the Mohicans, and The Pilot his 
 popularity was cosmopolitan ; he was al 
 most as widely read in France, in Ger 
 many, and in Italy as in Great Britain and 
 the United States. Only one American 
 book has ever since attained the inter 
 national success of these of Cooper s 
 Uncle Toms Cabin, and only one Ameri 
 can author has since gained a name at all 
 commensurate with Cooper s abroad 
 Poe. Here in these United States we 
 know what Emerson was to us and what 
 he did for us and what our debt is to 
 him ; but the French and the Germans and 
 the Italians do not know Emerson. When 
 Professor Boyesen visited Hugo some ten 
 years ago he found that the great French 
 lyrist had never heard of Emerson. I 
 have a copy of Evangeline annotated in 
 French for the use of French children 
 learning English at school ; but whatever 
 Longfellow s popularity in England or in 
 Germany, he is really but little known in 
 
France or Italy or Spain. With Goethe 
 and Schiller, with Scott and Byron, Coop 
 er was one of the foreign forces which 
 brought about the Romanticist revolt in 
 France, profoundly affecting the literature 
 of all Latin countries. Dumas owed al 
 most as much to Cooper as he did to 
 Scott ; and Balzac said that if Cooper had 
 only drawn character as well as he painted 
 " the phenomena of nature, he would have 
 uttered the last word of our art." 
 
 In his admirable life of Cooper, one of 
 the best of modern biographies, Professor 
 Lounsbury shows clearly the extraordi 
 nary state of affairs with which Cooper 
 had to contend. Foremost among the 
 disadvantages against which he had to 
 labor was the dull, deadening provincial 
 ism of American criticism at the time 
 when The Spy was written ; and as we 
 read Professor Lounsbury s pages we see 
 how bravely Cooper fought for our intel 
 lectual emancipation from the shackles 
 of the British criticism of that time, more 
 ignorant then and even more insular than 
 it is now. Abroad Cooper received the at 
 tention nearly always given in literature 
 to those who bring a new thing ; and the 
 new thing which Cooper annexed to liter- 
 
ature was America. At home he had to 
 struggle against a belief that our soil was 
 barren of romance as though the author 
 who used his eyes could not find ample 
 material wherever there was humanity. 
 Cooper was the first who proved the fit 
 ness of American life and American his 
 tory for the uses of fiction. The Spy is 
 really the first of American novels, and it 
 remains one of the best. Cooper was the 
 prospector of that little army of indus 
 trious miners now engaged in working 
 every vein of local color and character, 
 and in sifting out the golden dust from 
 the sands of local history. The authors of 
 Oldtown Folks, of the Tales of the Argo 
 nauts, of Old Creole Days, and of In the 
 Tennessee Mountains were but following 
 in Cooper s footsteps though they car 
 ried more modern tools. And when the 
 desire of the day is for detail and for fin 
 ish, it is not without profit to turn again 
 to stones of a bolder sweep. When the 
 tendency of the times is perhaps towards 
 an undue elaboration of miniature por 
 traits, there is gain in going back to the 
 masterpieces of a literary artist who suc 
 ceeded best in heroic statues. And not a 
 few of us, whatever our code of literary es- 
 
thetics, may find delight, fleeting though 
 it be, in the free outline drawing of Coop 
 er, after our eyes are tired by the niggling 
 and cross-hatching of many among our 
 contemporary realists. When our pleas 
 ant duty is done, when our examination 
 is at an end, and when we seek to sum up 
 our impressions and to set them down 
 plainly, we find that chief among Cooper s 
 characteristics were, first, a sturdy, hearty, 
 robust, out-door and open-air wholesome- 
 ness, devoid of any trace of offence and 
 free from all morbid taint ; and, second 
 ly, an intense Americanism ingrained, 
 abiding, and dominant. Professor Louns- 
 bury quotes from a British magazine of 
 1831 the statement that, to an Englishman, 
 Cooper appeared to be prouder of his 
 birth as an American than of his genius 
 as an author an attitude which may 
 seem to some a little old-fashioned, but 
 which on Cooper s part was both natural 
 and becoming. 
 
 The Spy was the earliest of Cooper s 
 American novels (and its predecessor, 
 Precaution, a mere stencil imitation of the 
 minor British novel of that day, need not 
 be held in remembrance against him). 
 The Spy, published in 1821, was followed 
 
in 1823 by The Pioneers, the first of the 
 Leatherstocking Tales to appear, and by 
 far the poorest ; indeed it is the only one 
 of the five for which any apology need be 
 made. The narrative drags under the 
 burden of overabundant detail ; and the 
 story may deserve to be called dull at 
 times. Leatherstocking even is but a faint 
 outline of himself, as the author afterwards 
 with loving care elaborated the character. 
 The Last of the Mohicans came out in 1826, 
 and its success was instantaneous and en 
 during. In 1827 appeared The Prairie, 
 the third tale in which Leatherstocking 
 is the chief character. It is rare that an 
 author is ever able to write a successful 
 sequel to a successful story, yet Cooper 
 did more ; The Prairie is a sequel to The 
 Pioneers, and The Last of the Mohicans 
 is a prologue to it. Eighteen years after 
 the first of the Leatherstocking Tales had 
 been published, Cooper issued the last of 
 them, amplifying his single sketch into a 
 drama in five acts by the addition of The 
 Pathfinder, printed in 1840, and of The 
 Deerslayer, printed in 1841. In the se 
 quence of events The Deer slayer, the latest 
 written, is the earliest to be read ; then 
 comes The Last of the Mohicans, fol- 
 
lowed by The Pathfinder and The Pio 
 neers; while in The Prairie the series ends. 
 Of the incomparable variety of scene in 
 these five related tales, or of the extraor 
 dinary fertility of invention which they 
 reveal, it would not be easy to say too 
 much. In their kind they have never 
 been surpassed. The earliest to appear, 
 The Pioneers, is the least meritorious as 
 though Cooper had not yet seen the value 
 of his material, and had not yet acquired 
 the art of handling it to advantage. The 
 Pathfinder, dignified as it is and pathetic 
 in its portrayal of Leatherstocking s love- 
 making, lacks the absorbing interest of 
 The Last of the Mohicans ; it is perhaps 
 inferior in art to The Deerslayer, which 
 was written the year after, and it has not 
 the noble simplicity of The Prairie, in 
 which we see the end of the old hunter. 
 
 There are, no doubt, irregularities in 
 the Leatherstocking Tales, and the incon 
 gruities and lesser errors inevitable in a 
 mode of composition at once desultory 
 and protracted ; but there they stand, a 
 solid monument of American literature, 
 and not the least enduring. " If anything 
 from the pen of the writer of these ro 
 mances is at all to outlive himself, it is, 
 
unquestionably, the series of the Leather- 
 stocking Tales so wrote the author when 
 he sent forth the first collected and re 
 vised edition of the narrative of Natty 
 Bumppo s adventures. That Cooper was 
 right seems to-day indisputable. An au 
 thor may fairly claim to be judged by his 
 best, to be measured by his highest ; and 
 the Leatherstocking Tales are Cooper s 
 highest and best in more ways than one, 
 Jput chiefly because of the lofty figure of 
 Leatherstocking. Lowell, when fabling 
 for critics, said that Cooper had drawn 
 but one new character, explaining after 
 wards that 
 
 The men who have given to one character life 
 And objective existence, are not very rife ; 
 You may number them all, both prose-writers and sing 
 ers, 
 
 Without overruning the bounds of your fingers ; 
 And Natty won t go to oblivion quicker 
 Than Adams the parson or Primrose the vicar. 
 
 And Thackeray perhaps recalling the 
 final scene in The Prairie, where the dy 
 ing Leatherstocking drew himself up and 
 said " Here !" and that other scene in The 
 Neivcomes, where the dying Colonel drew 
 himself up and said " Adsum !" was fre 
 quent in praise of Cooper ; and in one of 
 
97 
 
 the Roundabout Papers, after expressing 
 his fondness for Scott s modest and hon 
 orable heroes, he adds : " Much as I like 
 these most unassuming, manly, unpreten 
 tious gentlemen, I have to own that I 
 think the heroes of another writer viz., 
 Leatherstocking, Uncas, Hardheart, Tom 
 Coffin are quite the equals of Scott s 
 men ; perhaps Leatherstocking is better 
 than any one in Scott s lot. La Longite 
 Carabine is one of the great prize-men of 
 fiction. He ranks with your Uncle Toby, 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff heroic 
 figures all, American or British, and the 
 artist has deserved well of his country 
 who devised them." 
 
 It is to be noticed that Thackeray sin 
 gled out for praise two of Cooper s Indians 
 to pair with the hunter and the sailor ; and 
 it seems to me that Thackeray is fairer 
 towards him who conceived Uncas and 
 Hardheart than are the authors of A Fa 
 ble for Critics and of Condensed Novels. 
 Muck-a-Muck I should set aside among 
 the parodies which are unfair so far as 
 the red man is concerned, at least ; for I 
 hold as quite fair Mr. Harte s raillery of 
 the wooden maidens and polysyllabic old 
 men who stalk through Cooper s pages. 
 
 7 
 
Cooper s Indian has been disputed and he 
 has been laughed at, but he still lives. 
 Cooper s Indian is very like Mr. Parkman s 
 Indian and who knows the red man bet 
 ter than the author of The Oregon Trail? 
 Uncas and Chingachgook and Hardheart 
 are all good men and true, and June, the 
 wife of Arrowhead, the Tuscarora, is a 
 good wife and a true woman. They are 
 Indians, all of them ; heroic figures, no 
 doubt, and yet taken from life, with no 
 more idealization than may serve the 
 maker of romance. They remind us that 
 when West first saw the Apollo Belve 
 dere he thought at once of a Mohawk 
 brave. They were the result of knowledge 
 and of much patient investigation under 
 conditions forever passed away. We see 
 Cooper s Indians nowadays through mists 
 of prejudice due to those who have imi 
 tated them from the outside. The Last of 
 the Mohicans has suffered the degrada 
 tion of a trail of dime novels, written by 
 those apparently more familiar with the 
 Five Points than with the Five Nations ; 
 Cooper begat Mayne Reid, and Mayne 
 Reid begat Ned Buntline and Buffalo 
 Sill s First Scalp for Custer and similar 
 abominations. But none the less are Un- 
 
casand Hardheart noble figures, worthily 
 drawn, and never to be mentioned with 
 out praise. 
 
 In 1821 Cooper published The Spy, the 
 first American historical novel; in 1823 
 he published The Pioneers, in which the 
 backwoodsman and the red man were first 
 introduced into literature; and in 1824 
 he published The Pilot, and for the first 
 time the scene of a story was laid on the 
 sea rather than on the land, and the in 
 terest turned wholly on marine advent 
 ure. In four years Cooper had put forth 
 three novels, each in its way road-break 
 ing and epoch-making : only the great 
 men of letters have a record like this. 
 With the recollection before us of some 
 of Smollett s highly colored naval char 
 acters, we cannot say that Cooper sketched 
 the first real sailor in fiction, but he in 
 vented the sea tale just as Poe invented 
 the detective story and in neither case 
 has any disciple surpassed the master. 
 The supremacy of the The Pilot and The 
 Red Rover is quite as evident as the su 
 premacy of the The Gold Bug and The 
 Murders in the Rue Morgue. We have 
 been used to the novel of the ocean, and 
 it is hard for us now to understand why 
 
Cooper s friends thought his attempt to 
 write one perilous and why they sought to 
 dissuade him. It was believed that read 
 ers could not be interested in the contin 
 gencies and emergencies of life on the 
 ocean wave. Nowadays it seems to us that 
 if any part of The Pilot lags and stumbles 
 it is that which passes ashore : Cooper s 
 landscapes, or at least his views of a ruined 
 abbey, may be affected at times, but his 
 marines are always true and always capti 
 vating. 
 
 Cooper, like Thackeray, forbade his 
 family to authorize or aid any biographer 
 although the American novelist had as 
 little to conceal as the English. No doubt 
 Cooper had his faults, both as a man and 
 as an author. He was thin-skinned and 
 hot-headed. He let himself become in 
 volved in a great many foolish quarrels. 
 He had a plentiful lack of tact. But the 
 man was straightforward and high-mind 
 ed, and so was the author. We can readily 
 pardon his petty pedantries and the little 
 vices of expression he persisted in. We 
 can confess that his " females," as he would 
 term them, are indubitably wooden. We 
 may acknowledge that even among his 
 men there is no wide range of character ; 
 
Richard Jones (in The Pioneers} is first 
 cousin to Cap (in The Pathfinder), just 
 as Long Tom Coffin is a half-brother of 
 Natty Bumppo. We must admit that 
 Cooper s lighter characters are not touch 
 ed with the humor that Scott could com 
 mand at will; the Naturalist (in The 
 Prairie), for example, is not alive and 
 delightful like the Antiquary of Scott. 
 
 In the main, indeed, Cooper s humor is 
 not of the purest. When he attempted it 
 of malice prepense it was often laboriously 
 unfunny. But sometimes, as it fell acci 
 dentally from the lips of Leatherstocking, 
 it was unforced and delicious (see, for in 
 stance, at the end of chapter xxvii. of The 
 Pathfinder, the account of Natty s spar 
 ing the sleeping Mingos and of the fate 
 which thereafter befell them at the hands 
 of Chingachgook). On the other hand, 
 Cooper s best work abounds in fine ro 
 mantic touches Long Tom pinning the 
 British captain to the mast with the har 
 poon, the wretched Abiram (in The Prai 
 rie) tied hand and foot and left on a ledge 
 with a rope around his neck so that he can 
 move only to hang himself, the death- 
 grip of the brave (in The Last of the 
 Mohicans) hanging wounded and without 
 
hope over the watery abyss these are 
 pictures fixed in the memory and nowun- 
 forgetable. 
 
 Time is unerring in its selection. Coop 
 er has now been dead nearly two-score 
 years. What survives of his work are the 
 Sea Tales and the Leatherstockmg Talcs. 
 From these I have found myself forced 
 to cite characters and episodes. These 
 are the stories which hold their own in 
 the libraries. Public and critics are at 
 one here. The wind of the lakes and the 
 prairies has not lost its balsam, and the 
 salt of the sea keeps its savor. For the 
 free movement of his figures and for the 
 proper expansion of his story Cooper 
 needed a broad region and a widening 
 vista. He excelled in conveying the sug 
 gestion of vastness and limitless space, 
 and of depicting the human beings proper 
 to these great reaches of land and water 
 the two elements he ruled ; and he was 
 equally at home on the rolling waves of 
 the prairie and on the green and irregular 
 hillocks of the ocean. 
 
IGNORANCE AND INSULARITY 
 
 the four quarters of the 
 globe, who reads an Amer 
 ican book ?" asked Sydney 
 Smith in the Edinburgh Re 
 view, in 1820; and for years 
 the American people writhed under the 
 query as though they had been put to the 
 question themselves. In those days the 
 American cuticle was extraordinarily sen 
 sitive, and the gentlest stroke of satire 
 caused exquisite pain. But although Syd 
 ney Smith was unkind, he was not un 
 just ; in the four quarters of the globe no 
 body to-day reads any American book 
 published before 1820 except Irving s 
 Knickerbocker, In the very year that 
 Sydney Smith wrote there was published 
 in England a book which might have ar 
 rested the dean s sarcastic inquiry had it 
 appeared a few months earlier. This was 
 Irving s Sketch Book. The Americans of 
 
104 
 
 seventy years ago did not know it ; but 
 none the less is it a fact that American 
 literature made a very poor showing then, 
 and that there was in existence in those 
 days scarcely a single book with vitality 
 enough to survive threescore years and 
 ten. The men who were to make our lit 
 erature what it is were then alive Irving, 
 Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, 
 Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Poe, Haw 
 thorne, Bancroft, Prescott, and Motley; 
 but Irving s Knickerbocker was the only 
 book then in print which to-day is 
 r.ead or readable. It was only in 1821 
 that Cooper published the Spy, the 
 first American historical novel, and the 
 first of the Leatherstocking Tales did not 
 appear until 1823. Reverberations of 
 the angry roar which answered Sydney 
 Smith s question must have reached his 
 ears, for, in 1824, again in the Edinburgh 
 Review, he wondered at our touchiness : 
 " That Americans . . . should be flung into 
 such convulsions by English Reviewers 
 and Magazines is really a sad specimen 
 of Columbian juvenility." 
 
 Now we have changed all that. In 
 less than three-quarters of a century (a 
 very short time in the history of a nation) 
 
our cuticle has toughened perhaps the 
 process was hastened by the strokes of a 
 long war fought for conscience sake. It 
 is not so easy now to wring our withers, 
 and more often than not it is on the other 
 side of the Atlantic that the galled jade 
 winces. John Bull is not as pachyder 
 matous as once he was, and a chance 
 word of Brother Jonathan s penetrates 
 and rankles. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner 
 once let fall an innocent remark about the 
 British strawberry ; and more than one 
 British journal flushed with rage till it 
 rivalled the redness of that worthy but 
 hollow-hearted fruit. Mr. W. D. Howells 
 suggested a criticism of two British novel 
 ists ; and the editor of the Saturday Re 
 view made ready to accept the command 
 of the Channel Fleet. Mr. Theodore 
 Roosevelt rebuked a British general for 
 insulting Robert E. Lee with blundering 
 laudation ; and Mr. Andrew Lang prompt 
 ly wrote a paper on " International Girl- 
 ishness," in which he very courteously of 
 fered himself as an example of the failing 
 he described. In a little essay on the cen 
 tenary of Fenimore Cooper, I remarked 
 that the reader of Professor Lounsbury s 
 admirable biography could "see how 
 
io6 
 
 bravely Cooper fought for our intellect 
 ual emancipation from the shackles of 
 the British criticism of that time, more 
 ignorant then and even more insular 
 than it is now;" and against this casual 
 accusation that British criticism is or was 
 ignorant and insular, Mr. Andrew Lang 
 again protested, with his wonted suavity, 
 of course, but with energy nevertheless 
 and with emphasis. 
 
 Turn about is fair enough. When Time 
 plays the fiddle, the dancers must needs 
 change places; and we Americans have 
 no call for weeping that the British atti 
 tude to-day resembles ours in the early 
 part of the century more than our own 
 does. The change is pleasant, and Mr. 
 Andrew Lang ought not to object to our 
 enjoyment of it. As regards the special 
 charge that British criticism was more ig 
 norant and more insular fifty odd years 
 ago than it is now well, I do not think 
 that Mr. Andrew Lang ought to object to 
 that either. If I understand my own 
 statement, it means that there has been an 
 improvement in British criticism in the 
 past half-century; and I do not think 
 that this assertion affords a fair ground 
 for a quarrel. Still, when Mr. Andrew 
 
io 7 
 
 Lang throws down the gauntlet, I cannot 
 refuse to put on the gloves; and I decline 
 to avail myself of the small side door he 
 kindly left ajar for my escape. 
 
 First, it is to be noted that when Mr. 
 Andrew Lang writes about "critics," and 
 when I wrote, we were discussing different 
 things. There are two kinds of critics, 
 and the word criticism may mean either 
 of two things. The writer of an anony 
 mous book-review printed in a daily or 
 weekly paper considers himself a critic, 
 and the product of his pen is accepted as a 
 criticism. But there is no other word than 
 criticism to describe the finest work (in 
 prose) of James Russell Lowell and of 
 Matthew Arnold. Mr. Andrew Lang 
 chooses to consider chiefly what might be 
 called the higher criticism, and he sets 
 aside the lower critics as " reviewers," de 
 claring that " reviewers are rarely crit 
 ics, and they are often very tired, very 
 casual, very flippant." Now, it was this 
 sort of British critic, the very casual 
 and very flippant reviewer, that I meant 
 when I spoke of the ignorance and in 
 sularity of British criticism ; and it was 
 the attitude of British critics of this type 
 towards America that I had in mind. It 
 
io8 
 
 was to their ignorance of America and 
 Americans that I referred, and to the in 
 sularity of their position towards us. 
 This ignorance is now less than it was in 
 Cooper s time, and of late the insularity 
 has been modified for the better. But that 
 they were "very tired, very casual, and 
 very flippant " is not an excuse for their 
 constant attitude towards most American 
 authors ; it is not even an adequate rea 
 son. No doubt Mr. Andrew Lang knows 
 the anecdote is there any Merry Jest 
 that he has not heard ? of the Judge 
 who chafed under the insulting demeanor 
 of a certain barrister until at last he was 
 forced to protest : " Brother Blank," he 
 said, " I know my great inferiority to 
 you ; but, after all, I am a vertebrate an 
 imal, and your manner towards me would 
 be unbecoming from God Almighty to a 
 black beetle !" 
 
 It is in relation to America and to 
 American workers that we find British 
 criticism ignorant and insular. The or 
 dinary British critic assumes a very dif 
 ferent tone towards us from that he 
 assumes towards the French or the 
 Germans. He may dislike these, but he 
 accepts them as equals. Us he regards as 
 
10 9 
 
 inferiors as degenerate Englishmen un 
 fortunately cut off from communion with 
 the father-land and the mother-tongue, 
 and to be chided because we do not 
 humbly acknowledge our deficiencies. 
 He does not know that we are now 
 no more English than the English them 
 selves are now Germans. He does not 
 guess that we are proud that we are not 
 English prouder, perhaps, of nothing else. 
 He does not think that we do not like 
 being treated as though we were younger 
 sons in exile wandering prodigals, de 
 serving no better fare than the husks 
 of patronizing criticism. No American 
 likes to be patronized, and even some 
 Englishmen seem to object to it ; appar 
 ently Mr. Andrew Lang did not approve of 
 the critical nepotism of a certain Teutonic 
 reviewer. But the lordliness of the em 
 inent German who reviewed Mr. Andrew 
 Lang s book without reading it was tem 
 pered by the good faith with which he 
 confessed his ignorance ; and his offence 
 was less heinous than that of the critic in 
 the Saturday Review, who dismissed Mr. 
 Aldrich s "Queen of Sheba" with a curt 
 assertion that it was like the author s other 
 poems. 
 
As the Greek felt towards the Barba 
 rian and as the Jew towards the Gentile, 
 so does the ordinary British critic feel 
 towards America. The feeling of the 
 Greek and of the Jew was perhaps based 
 on a serious reason ; but what justifies 
 the lofty superiority of the British critic? 
 Is not its cause the self-satisfaction of 
 ignorant insularity ? using neither word 
 in any offensive sense. And does it not 
 result in a willingness to condemn with 
 out knowledge and without any effort to 
 acquire knowledge ? Any one who re 
 calls Brougham s review of Byron s first 
 book, or Jeffrey s attack on Keats, or 
 Wilson s dissection of Tennyson, knows 
 that there are British criticisms which 
 are not models of sweetness and light; 
 never are sweetness and light more fre 
 quently absent than in British criticism 
 of America and of Americans. " Light," 
 I take it, means knowledge ; and " sweet 
 ness " is incompatible with that form of 
 morgue britanm que which one may call 
 insularity. 
 
 The higher criticism in England, which 
 Mr. Andrew Lang praises perhaps not 
 more than it deserves, has developed 
 greatly within the last twenty years. It 
 
is not ignorant like the very tired, very 
 casual, and very flippant reviewing, nor in 
 the same fashion ; but it has an ignorance 
 of its own, compounded of many simples. 
 Its attitude towards us is not as offensive, 
 but it is not without its touch of superi 
 ority now and again. Mr. Andrew Lang 
 himself, for example, is ignorant of our 
 best critics, and confesses his ignorance 
 as frankly as did his Teutonic reviewer ; 
 and then he reveals what is not wholly 
 unlike insularity in his readiness, despite 
 this ignorance, to make comparisons be 
 tween American critics and British. 
 
 On Mr. Andrew Lang s list of British 
 critics are the names of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. 
 J. A. Symonds, Mr. R. L. Stevenson, Mr. 
 Leslie Stephen, Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. 
 George Saintsbury, Mr. Frederic Har 
 rison, Professor Robertson Smith, Mr. 
 Swinburne, and Mr. Theodore Watts and 
 every reader must instinctively add Mr. 
 Andrew Lang s own name to a list on 
 which it will find no superior. The list 
 seems oddly chosen ; an American misses 
 the name of Mr. John Morley, perhaps 
 the foremost of British critics of our day, 
 and those of Mr. Austin Dobson, and of 
 Mr. William Archer. Of American critics 
 
Mr. Andrew Lang can recall of his own 
 accord, apparently, only the name of Low 
 ell, and he remarks that " Mr. Howells, in 
 an essay on this subject, mentions Mr. 
 Stedman and Mr. T. S. Perry, doubtless 
 with justice." If there were any advan 
 tage in making out a list of American crit 
 ics to place beside the list of British crit 
 ics, I should put down the names of Mr. 
 Curtis, Col. Higginson, Mr. Warner, Mr. 
 R. H. Stoddard, Professor Lounsbury, 
 Professor T. F. Crane, Mr. W. C. Brow- 
 nell, Mr. John Burroughs, Mr. George E. 
 Woodberry, and Mr. Henry James add 
 ing, of course, the names of Mr. Stedman 
 and of Professor Child, mentioned by Mr. 
 Andrew Lang in another part of his pa 
 per. But I fear me greatly that this is 
 idle ; it is but the setting up of one per 
 sonal equation over against another. Or 
 thodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is 
 your doxy. Counting of noses is not the 
 best way to settle a dispute about litera 
 ture. 
 
 Indeed there is no way to settle such a 
 dispute, and there is no hope of coming to 
 an agreement. " It is a very pretty quar 
 rel as it stands ;" and if " we quarrel in 
 print, by the book," let us stop at the first 
 
degree, the Retort Courteous, riot going 
 on even to the third, the Reply Churlish. 
 Also is there much virtue in an If. " If 
 you said so, then I said so." Let us then, 
 while there is yet time, shake hands 
 across the Atlantic and swear brothers. 
 1890 
 
THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS 
 
 criticism was 
 originally benignant, point 
 ing out the beauties of a 
 work rather than its de 
 fects. The passions of man 
 have made it malignant, as the bad heart 
 of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol 
 of repose, into an instrument of torture." 
 So wrote Longfellow a many years ago, 
 thinking, it may be, on English Bards and 
 Scotch Reviewers, or on the Jedburgh 
 justice of Jeffrey. But we may question 
 whether the poet did not unduly idealize 
 the past, as is the custom of poets, and 
 whether he did not unfairly asperse the 
 present. With the general softening of 
 manners, no doubt those of the critic 
 have improved also. Surely, since a time 
 whereof the memory of man runneth not 
 to the contrary, " to criticise," in the ears 
 of many, if not of most, has been synony- 
 
mous with " to find fault." In Farquhar s 
 Inconstant," now nearly two hundred 
 years old, Petit says of a certain lady: 
 " She s a critic, sir ; she hates a jest, for 
 fear it should please her." 
 
 The critics themselves are to blame for 
 this misapprehension of their attitude. 
 When Mr. Arthur Pendennis wrote re 
 views for the Pall Mall Gazette, he settled 
 the poet s claims as though he " were my 
 lord on the bench and the author a mis 
 erable little suitor trembling before him." 
 The critic of this sort acts not only as 
 judge and jury, first finding the author 
 guilty and then putting on the black cap 
 to sentence him to the gallows, but he 
 often volunteers as executioner also, lay 
 ing on a round dozen lashes with his own 
 hand, and with a hearty good-will. We 
 are told, for example, that Captain Shan- 
 don knew the crack of Warrington s whip 
 and the cut his thong left. Bludyer went 
 to work like a butcher and mangled his 
 subject, but Warrington finished a man, 
 laying " his cuts neat and regular, straight 
 down the back, and drawing blood every 
 time." 
 
 Whenever I recall this picture I under 
 stand the protest of one of the most acute 
 
and subtle of American critics, who told 
 me that he did not much mind what was 
 said about his articles so long as they 
 were not called "trenchant." Perhaps 
 trenchant is the adjective which best de 
 fines what true criticism is not. True 
 criticism, so Joubert tells us, is un ex- 
 ercice methodique de discernement. It is 
 an effort to understand and to explain. 
 The true critic is no more an executioner 
 than he is an assassin ; he is rather a seer, 
 sent forward to spy out the land, and most 
 useful when he comes back bringing a good 
 report and bearing a full cluster of grapes. 
 La critique sans bonte trouble le gout 
 et empoisonne les saveurs, said Joubert 
 again ; unkindly criticism disturbs the 
 taste and poisons the savor. No one of 
 the great critics was unkindly. That Ma- 
 caulay mercilessly flayed Montgomery is 
 evidence, were any needed, that Macau- 
 lay was not one of the great critics. The 
 tomahawk and the scalping-knife are not 
 the critical apparatus, and they are not to 
 be found in the armory of Lessing and of 
 Sainte-Beuve, of Matthew Arnold and of 
 James Russell Lowell. It is only inci 
 dentally that these devout students of 
 letters find fault. Though they may ban 
 
now and again, they came to bless. They 
 chose their subjects, for the most part, be 
 cause they loved these, and were eager to 
 praise them and to make plain to the 
 world the reasons for their ardent affec 
 tion. Whenever they might chance to 
 see incompetence and pretension pushing 
 to the front, they shrugged their shoul 
 ders more often than not, and passed by 
 on the other side silently : and so best. 
 Very rarely did they cross over to expose 
 an impostor. 
 
 Lessing waged war upon theories of art, 
 but he kept up no fight with individual au 
 thors. Sainte-Beuve sought to paint the 
 portrait of the man as he was, warts and 
 all ; but he did not care for a sitter who 
 was not worth the most loving art. Mat 
 thew Arnold was swift to find the joints 
 in his opponent s armor ; but there is 
 hardly one of his essays in criticism which 
 had not its exciting cause in his admira 
 tion for its subject. Mr. Lowell has not 
 always hidden his scorn of a sham, and 
 sometimes he has scourged it with a sin ? 
 gle sharp phrase. Generally, however, 
 even the humbugs get off scot-free, for 
 the true critic knows that time will at 
 tend to these fellows, and there is rarely 
 
u8 
 
 any need to lend a hand. It was Bentley 
 who said that no man was ever written 
 down save by himself. 
 
 The late Edouard Schereronce handled 
 M. Emile Zola without gloves; and M. 
 Jules Lemaitre has made M. Georges 
 Ohnet the target of his flashing wit. But 
 each of these attacks attained notoriety 
 from its unexpectedness. And what has 
 been gained in either case ? Since Scher- 
 er fell foul of him, M. Zola has written 
 his strongest novel, Germinal (one of the 
 most powerful tales of this century), and 
 his rankest story, La Terre (one of the 
 most offensive fictions in all the history 
 of literature). M. Lemaitre s brilliant as 
 sault on M. Ohnet may well have excited 
 pity for the wretched victim ; and, dam 
 aging as it was, I doubt if its effect is as 
 fatal as the gentler and more humorous 
 criticism of M. Anatole France, in which 
 the reader sees contempt slowly gaining 
 the mastery over the honest critic s kind 
 liness. 
 
 For all that he was a little prim in taste 
 and a little arid in manner, Scherer had 
 the gift of appreciation the most precious 
 possession of any critic. M. Lemaitre, 
 despite his frank enjoyment of his own 
 
skill in fence, has a faculty of hearty ad 
 miration. There are thirteen studies in 
 the first series of his Contemporams, and 
 the dissection of the unfortunate M. Oh- 
 net is the only one in which the critic 
 does not handle his scalpel with loving 
 care. To run amuck through the throng 
 of one s fellow-craftsmen is not a sign of 
 sanity on the contrary. Depreciation is 
 cheaper than appreciation ; and criticism 
 which is merely destructive is essentially 
 inferior to criticism which is constructive. 
 That he saw so little to praise is greatly 
 against Poe s claim to be taken seriously 
 as a critic ; so is his violence of speech ; 
 and so also is the fact that those whom he 
 lauded might be as little deserving of his 
 eulogy as those whom he assailed were 
 worthy of his condemnation. The habit of 
 intemperate attack which grew on Poe is 
 foreign to the serene calm of the higher 
 criticism. F. D. Maurice made the shrewd 
 remark that the critics who take pleasure 
 in cutting up mean books soon deteriorate 
 themselves subdued to that they work 
 in. It may be needful, once in a way, to 
 nail vermin to the barn door as a warning, 
 and thus we may seek a reason for Ma- 
 caulay s cruel treatment of Montgomery, 
 
and M. Lemaitre s pitiless castigation of 
 M. Ohnet. But in nine cases out of ten, 
 or rather in ninety-nine out of a hundred, 
 the attitude of the critic towards con 
 temporary trash had best be one of abso 
 lute indifference, sure that Time will sift 
 out what is good, and that Time winnows 
 with unerring taste. 
 
 The duty of the critic, therefore, is to 
 help the reader to " get the best " in the 
 old phrase of the dictionary venders to 
 choose it, to understand it, to enjoy it. 
 To choose it, first of all ; so must the critic 
 dwell with delighted insistence upon the 
 best books, drawing attention afresh to 
 the old and discovering the new with alert 
 vision. Neglect is the proper portion of 
 the worthless books of the hour, whatever 
 may be their vogue for the week or the 
 month. It cannot be declared too fre 
 quently that temporary popularity is no 
 sure test of real merit ; else were Prover 
 bial Philosophy, the Light of Asia, and 
 the Epic of Hades the foremost British 
 poems since the decline of Robert Mont 
 gomery; else were the Lamplighter (does 
 any one read the Lamplighter nowadays, 
 I wonder?), Looking Backward, and Mr. 
 Barnes of New York the typical American 
 
novels. No one can insist too often on 
 the distinction between what is "good 
 enough " for current consumption by a 
 careless public and what is really good, 
 permanent, and secure. No one can de 
 clare with too much emphasis the differ 
 ence between what is literature and what 
 is not literature, nor the width of the gulf 
 which separates them. A critic who has 
 not an eye single to this distinction fails 
 of his duty. Perhaps the best way to 
 make the distinction plain to the reader 
 is to persist in discussing what is vital and 
 enduring, pointedly passing over what may 
 happen to be accidentally popular. 
 
 Yet the critic mischooses who should 
 shut himself up with the classics of all 
 languages and in rapt contemplation of 
 their beauties be blind to the best work 
 of his own time. If criticism itself is to 
 be seen of men, it must enter the arena 
 and bear a hand in the combat. The 
 books which have come down to us from 
 our fathers and from our grandfathers are 
 a blessed heritage, no doubt ; but there 
 are a few books of like value to be picked 
 out of those which we of to-day shall pass 
 along to our children and to our grand 
 children. It may be even that some of 
 
our children are beginning already to set 
 down in black and white their impressions 
 of life, with a skill and with a truth which 
 shall in due season make them classics 
 also. Sainte-Beuve asserted that the real 
 triumph of the critic was when the poets 
 whose praises he had sounded and for 
 whom he had fought grew in stature and 
 surpassed themselves, keeping, and more 
 than keeping, the magnificent promises 
 which the critic, as their sponsor in bap 
 tism, had made for them. Besides the 
 criticism of the classics, grave, learned, 
 definitive, there is another more alert, said 
 Sainte - Beuve, more in touch with the 
 spirit of the hour, more lightly equipped, 
 it may be, and yet more willing to find 
 answers for the questions of the day. 
 This more vivacious criticism chooses 
 its heroes and encompasses them about 
 with its affection, using boldly the words 
 "genius" and "glory," however much 
 this may scandalize the lookers-on : 
 
 " Nous tiendrons, pour lutter dans 1 arene lyrique, 
 Toi la lance, moi les coursiers." 
 
 To few critics is it given to prophesy 
 the lyric supremacy of a Victor Hugo it 
 was in a review of Les Femlles d Automne 
 
1*3 
 
 that Sainte-Beuve made this declaration 
 of principles. A critic lacking the in 
 sight and the equipment of Sainte-Beuve 
 may unduly despise an Ugly Duckling, or 
 he may mistake a Goose for a Swan, only 
 to wait in vain for its song. Indeed, to 
 set out of malice prepense to discover a 
 genius is but a wild-goose chase at best ; 
 and though the sport is pleasant for those 
 who follow, it may be fatal to the chance 
 fowl who is expected to lay a golden egg. 
 Longfellow s assertion that " critics are 
 sentinels in the grand army of letters, 
 stationed at the corners of newspapers 
 and reviews to challenge every new au 
 thor," may not be altogether acceptable, 
 but it is at least the duty of the soldier 
 to make sure of the papers of those who 
 seek to enlist in the garrison. 
 
 " British criticism has always been more 
 or less parochial," said Lowell, many years 
 ago, before he had been American Min 
 ister at St. James s. " It cannot quite 
 persuade itself that truth is of immortal 
 essence, totally independent of all assist 
 ance from quarterly journals or the Brit 
 ish army and navy." No doubt there has 
 been a decided improvement in the temper 
 of British criticism since this was written ; 
 
124 
 
 it is less parochial than it was, and it is 
 perhaps now one of its faults that it af 
 fects a cosmopolitanism to which it does 
 not attain. But even now an American 
 of literary taste is simply staggered there 
 is no other word for it whenever he reads 
 the weekly reviews of contemporary fic 
 tion in the Athenceum, the Academy, the 
 Spectator, and the Saturday Review, and 
 when he sees high praise bestowed on 
 novels so poor that no American pirate 
 imperils his salvation to reprint them. 
 The encomiums bestowed, for example, 
 upon such tales as those which are writ 
 ten by the ladies who call themselves 
 " Rita " and " The Duchess " and " The 
 Authoress of The House on the Marsh," 
 seem hopelessly uncritical. The writers 
 of most of these reviews are sadly lack 
 ing in literary perception and in literary 
 perspective. The readers of these re 
 views if they had no other sources of in 
 formation would never suspect that the 
 novel of England is no longer what it was 
 once, and that it is now inferior in art to 
 the novel of France, of Spain, and of 
 America. If the petty minnows are mag 
 nified thus, what lens will serve fitly to 
 reproduce the lordly salmon or the stal- 
 
125 
 
 wart tarpon ? Those who praise the sec 
 ond-rate or the tenth-rate in terms ap 
 propriate only to the first-rate are derelict 
 to the first duty of the critic which is to 
 help the reader to choose the best. 
 
 And the second duty of the critic is 
 like unto the first. It is to help the read 
 er to understand the best. There is many 
 a book which needs to be made plain to 
 him who runs as he reads, and it is the 
 running reader of these hurried years that 
 the critic must needs address. There are 
 not a few works of high merit (although 
 none, perhaps, of the very highest) which 
 gain by being explained, even as Philip 
 expounded Esaias to the eunuch of Can- 
 dace, Queen of the Ethiopians, getting 
 up into his chariot and guiding him. 
 Perhaps it is paradoxical to suggest that 
 a book of the very highest class is per 
 force clear beyond all need of commen 
 tary or exposition ; but it is indisputable 
 that familiarity may blur the outline and 
 use may wear away the sharp edges, until 
 we no longer see the masterpiece as dis 
 tinctly as we might, nor do we regard it 
 with the same interest. Here again the 
 critic finds his opportunity ; he may show 
 the perennial freshness of that which 
 
126 
 
 seemed for a while withered ; and he may 
 interpret again the meaning of the mes 
 sage an old book may bring to a new gen 
 eration. Sometimes this message is val 
 uable and yet invisible from the outside, 
 like the political pamphlets which were 
 smuggled into the France of the Second 
 Empire concealed in the hollow plaster 
 busts of Napoleon III., but ready to the 
 hand that knew how to extract them 
 adroitly at the proper time. 
 
 The third duty of the critic, after aid 
 ing the reader to choose the best and to 
 understand it, is to help him to enjoy it. 
 This is possible only when the critic s own 
 enjoyment is acute enough to be conta 
 gious. However well informed a critic 
 may be, and however keen he may be, if 
 he be not capable of the cordial admira 
 tion which warms the heart, his criticism 
 is wanting. A critic whose enthusiasm is 
 not catching lacks the power of dissemi 
 nating his opinions. His judgment may be 
 excellent, but his influence remains nega 
 tive. One torch may light many a fire ; and 
 how far a little candle throws its beams ! 
 Perhaps the ability to take an intense 
 delight in another man s work, and the 
 willingness to express this delight frankly 
 
I2 7 
 
 and fully, are two of the characteristics 
 of the true critic ; of a certainty they are 
 the characteristics most frequently ab 
 sent in the criticaster. Consider how 
 Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold and 
 Lowell have sung the praises of those 
 whose poems delighted them. Note how 
 Mr. Henry James and M. Jules Lemaitre 
 are affected by the talents of M. Al- 
 phonse Daudet and of M. Guy de Mau 
 passant. 
 
 Having done his duty to the reader, 
 the critic has done his full duty to the 
 author also. It is to the people at large 
 that the critic is under obligations, not to 
 any individual. As he cannot take cog 
 nizance of a work of art, literary or dra 
 matic, plastic or pictorial, until after it is 
 wholly complete, his opinion can be of 
 little benefit to the author. A work of 
 art is finally finished when it comes before 
 the public, and the instances are very few 
 indeed when an author has ever thought 
 it worth while to modify the form in 
 which it was first presented to the world. 
 A work of science, on the other hand, 
 depending partly on the exactness of the 
 facts which it sets forth and on which it 
 is founded, may gain from the suggested 
 
emendations of a critic. Many a history, 
 many a law book, many a scientific trea 
 tise has been bettered in successive edi 
 tions by hints gleaned here and there 
 from the reviews of experts. 
 
 But the work of art stands on a wholly 
 different footing from the work of science ; 
 and the critics have no further duty tow 
 ards the author, except, of course, to treat 
 him fairly, and to present him to the 
 public if they deem him worthy of this 
 honor. The novel or the poem being 
 done once for all, it is hardly possible for 
 critics to be of any use to the novelist or 
 to the poet personally. The artist of ex 
 perience makes up his mind to this, and 
 accepts criticism as something which has 
 little or nothing to do with his work, but 
 which may materially affect his position 
 before the public. Thackeray, who un 
 derstood the feelings and the failings of 
 the literary man as no one else, has shown 
 us Mr. Arthur Pendennis reading the 
 newspaper notices of his novel, Walter 
 Lorraine, and sending them home to his 
 mother. " Their censure did not much 
 affect him ; for the good-natured young 
 man was disposed to accept with consid 
 erable humility the dispraise of others. 
 
I2 9 
 
 Nor did their praise elate him overmuch; 
 for, like most honest persons, he had his 
 own opinion about his own performance, 
 and when a critic praised him in the wrong 
 place he was hurt rather than pleased by 
 the compliment." 
 
 Mr. James tells us that the author of 
 Smoke and Fathers and Sons, a far greater 
 novelist than the author of Walter Lor 
 raine, had a serene indifference towards 
 criticism. Turgenef gave Mr. James " the 
 impression of thinking of criticism as 
 most serious workers think of it that it 
 is the amusement, the exercise, the sub 
 sistence of the critic (and, so far as this 
 goes, of immense use), but that, though 
 it may often concern other readers, it 
 does not much concern the artist himself." 
 Though criticism is of little use to the 
 author directly, it can be of immense serv 
 ice to him indirectly, if it be exposition 
 rather than comment ; not a bald and 
 barren attempt at classification, but a 
 sympathetic interpretation. At bottom, 
 sympathy is the prime requisite of the 
 critic ; and with sympathy come appre 
 ciation, penetration, revelation such, for 
 example, as the American novelist has 
 shown in his criticisms of the Russian. 
 
 9 
 
I 3 
 
 There is one kind of review of no bene 
 fit either to the author or to the public. 
 This is the careless, perfunctory book-no 
 tice, penned hastily by a tired writer, who 
 does not take the trouble to formulate his 
 opinion, and perhaps not even to form one. 
 Towards the end of 1889 there appeared 
 in a British weekly the following notice 
 of a volume of American short stories : 
 
 " A littery gent in one of Mr. [ ] s short stories 
 
 says : A good idea for a short story is a shy bird, and 
 doesn t come for the calling. Alas! alas! it is true. 
 The French can call a great deal better than we can; 
 but the Americans, it would seem, cannot. The best of 
 
 Mr. [ ] s stories is the first, about a tree which grew 
 
 out of the bosom of a buried suicide, and behaved accord 
 ingly to his descendants ; but, so far from being a short 
 story, it is a long one, extending over some hundreds of 
 years, and it suffers from the compression which Mr. 
 [ ] puts upon it. It deserves to have a volume to it 
 self." 
 
 Refraining from all remark upon the 
 style in which this paragraph is written 
 or upon the taste of the writer, I desire 
 to call attention to the fact that it is not 
 what it purports to be. It is not a criti 
 cism within the accepted meaning of the 
 word. It indicates no intellectual effort 
 on the part of its writer to understand the 
 author of the book. An author would 
 need to be superlatively sensitive who 
 
could take offence at this paragraph, and 
 an author who could find pleasure in it 
 would have to be unspeakably vain. To 
 me this notice seems the absolute nega 
 tion of criticism mere words with no 
 suggestion of a thought behind them. 
 The man who dashed this off robbed the 
 author of a criticism to which he was en 
 titled if the book was worth reviewing at 
 all ; and in thus shirking his bounden 
 duty he also cheated the proprietor of 
 the paper who paid him. Empty para 
 graphing of this offensive character is 
 commoner now than it was a few years 
 ago, commoner in Great Britain than in 
 the United States, and commoner in anon 
 ymous articles than in those warranted 
 by the signature of the writer. Probably 
 the man who was guilty of this innocu 
 ous notice would have been ashamed to 
 put his name to it. 
 
 If a book is so empty that there is noth 
 ing to say about it, then there is no need 
 to say anything. It is related that when 
 a dramatist, who was reading a play be 
 fore the Committee of the Corned ie Fran- 
 gatse, rebuked M. Got for slumbering 
 peacefully during this ceremony, the emi 
 nent comedian answered promptly, " Sleep, 
 
132 
 
 Monsieur, is also an opinion." If a book 
 puts the critic to sleep, or so benumbs 
 his faculties that he finds himself speech 
 less, he has no call to proceed further in 
 the matter. Perhaps the author may take 
 heart of grace when he remembers that 
 of all Shakespeare s characters, it was 
 the one with the ass s head who had an 
 exposition of sleep come upon him, as it 
 was the one with the blackest heart who 
 said he was nothing if not critical. 
 
 If I were to attempt to draw up Twelve 
 Good Rules for Reviewers, I should be 
 gin with : 
 
 I. Form an honest opinion. 
 
 II. Express it honestly. 
 
 III. Don t review a book which you 
 cannot take seriously. 
 
 IV. Don t review a book with which 
 you are out of sympathy. That is to say, 
 put yourself in the author s place, and 
 try to see his work from his point of view, 
 which is sure to be a coign of vantage. 
 
 V. Stick to the text. Review the book 
 before you, and not the book some other 
 author might have written ; obiter dicta 
 are as valueless from the critic as from 
 the judge. Don t go off on a tangent. 
 And also don t go round in a circle. Say 
 
133 
 
 what you have to say, and stop. Don t 
 go on writing about and about the sub 
 ject, and merely weaving garlands of flow 
 ers of rhetoric. 
 
 VI. Beware of the Sham Sample, as 
 Charles Reade called it. Make sure that 
 the specimen bricks you select for quota 
 tion do not give a false impression of the 
 facade, and not only of the elevation 
 merely, but of the perspective also, and of 
 the ground-plan. 
 
 VII. In reviewing a biography or a his 
 tory, criticise the book before you, and 
 don t write a parallel essay, for which the 
 volume you have in hand serves only as 
 a peg. 
 
 VIII. In reviewing a work of fiction, 
 don t give away the plot. I n the eyes of the 
 novelist this is the unpardonable sin. And, 
 as it discounts the pleasure of the reader 
 also, it is almost equally unkind to him. 
 
 IX. Don t try to prove every success 
 ful author a plagiarist. It may be that 
 many a successful author has been a pla 
 giarist, but no author ever succeeded be 
 cause of his plagiary. 
 
 X. Don t break a butterfly on a wheel. 
 If a book is not worth much, it is not 
 worth reviewing. 
 
134 
 
 XI. Don t review a book as an east 
 wind would review an apple-tree so it 
 was once said Douglas Jerrold was wont 
 to do. Of what profit to any one is mere 
 bitterness and vexation of spirit ? 
 
 XII. Remember that the critic s duty 
 is to the reader mainly, and that it is to 
 guide him not only to what is good, but 
 to what is best. Three parts of what is 
 contemporary must be temporary only. 
 
 Having in the past now and again fall 
 en from grace myself and written criti 
 cism, I know that on such occasions these 
 Twelve Good Rules would have been ex 
 ceedingly helpful to me had I then pos 
 sessed them ; therefore I offer them now 
 hopefully to my fellow -critics. But I 
 find myself in a state of humility (to which 
 few critics are accustomed), and I doubt 
 how far my good advice will be heeded. 
 I remember that, after reporting the 
 speech in which Poor Richard s maxims 
 were all massed together, Franklin tells 
 us that "thus the old gentleman ended 
 his harangue. The people heard it and 
 approved the doctrine ; and immediately 
 practised the contrary, just as if it had 
 been a common sermon." 
 
 1890 
 
THREE AMERICAN ESSAYISTS 
 
 WHOEVER wishes to attain 
 an English style, familiar 
 but not coarse, and elegant 
 but not ostentatious, must 
 give his days and nights 
 to the study of Addison," said Doctor 
 Johnson a many years ago ; and Doctor 
 Johnson s own style, elaborate if not ar 
 tificial, and orotund if not polysyllabic, 
 might no doubt have been improved if 
 the writer of the Rambler had given more 
 of his days and nights to the study of the 
 chief writer of the Spectator. Doctor 
 Johnson s advice is still quoted often, 
 perhaps it is still followed sometimes. 
 Yet it is outworn and not for to-day. 
 We have nowadays better weapons than 
 the Brown Bess Johnson appreciated so 
 highly breech-loading rifles incompara 
 bly superior to the smooth-bore he praises. 
 Owing in part, no doubt, to the influence 
 
136 
 
 of Addison and to the advice of Johnson, 
 we have had writers of late whose style 
 is easier than Addison s, more graceful, 
 more varied, more precise. Set a page 
 of one of Addison s little apologues be 
 side a page of one of Hawthorne s tales, 
 and note how much more pellucid Haw 
 thorne s style is, how much more beauti 
 ful, how much more distinguished. Con 
 trast one of Addison s criticisms with one 
 of Matthew Arnold s, and observe not 
 only how much more complete is the ter 
 minology of the art now than it was when 
 the Spectator was appearing twice a week, 
 but also how much more acute and how 
 much more flexible the mind of the later 
 critic than the mind of the earlier. 
 
 Compare Addison s essays with those 
 which Mr. George William Curtis has re 
 cently collected into a volume, From the 
 Easy Chair, and you will see no reason to 
 adopt any theory of literary degeneracy 
 in our day. We are all of us the heirs 
 of the ages, no doubt, but it is in an un 
 usual degree that Mr. Curtis is the inher 
 itor of the best traditions of the Eng 
 lish essay. He is the direct descendant 
 of Addison, whose style is overrated ; of 
 Steele, whose morality is humorous ; of 
 
137 
 
 Goldsmith, whose writing was angelic, 
 and of Irving, whose taste was pretty. 
 Mr. Curtis recalls all of these, yet he is 
 like none of them. Humorous as they 
 are and charming, he is somewhat stur 
 dier, of a more robust fibre, with a strong 
 er respect for plain living and high think 
 ing, with a firmer grasp on the duties of* 
 life. 
 
 For the most part these essays of Mr. 
 Curtis s are pleasant papers of reminis 
 cence, of gentle moralizing, and of kindly 
 satire ; but he is a swift and a careless 
 reader who does not detect the underly 
 ing preachment which is at the core of 
 most of them. Mr. Curtis is not content 
 to scourge lightly the snobbery and the 
 vulgarity which cling to the fringe of 
 fashion, and sometimes get nearer to the 
 centre of society ; he also sets up a high 
 standard of morality in public life. The 
 divorce between Politics and Society in 
 the narrower meaning of the words is 
 not wholesome for either party. Mr. Cur 
 tis reminds us that "good government is 
 one of the best things in the world," and 
 that the wise man " knows that good 
 things of that kind are not cheap." This 
 is a quotation from the highly instructive 
 
38 
 
 and permanently pertinent paper on "Ho- 
 nestus at the Caucus," which begins with 
 the assertion that "a man who is easily 
 discouraged, who is not willing to put the 
 good seed out of sight and wait for re 
 sults, who desponds if he cannot obtain 
 everything at once, and who thinks the 
 human race lost if he is disappointed, will 
 be very unhappy if he persists in taking 
 part in politics. There is no sphere in 
 which self-deception is easier." 
 
 There are but few essays with a politi 
 cal intention in this delightful little book. 
 The rest are papers mainly about people, 
 about "Edward Everett in 1862," and 
 about " Emerson Lecturing," and about 
 " Dickens Reading," and about " Robert 
 Browning in Florence," and about "Wen 
 dell Phillips at Harvard," and about " A 
 Little Dinner with Thackeray," and about 
 Thoreau, who had " a staccato style of 
 speech, every word coming separately and 
 distinctly as if preserving the same cool 
 isolation in the sentence that the speaker 
 did in society." Not a few of them have 
 to do with the players of the past, with 
 the vocalists who are now but memories 
 of dead and gone delight, with the per 
 formers on musical instruments " Thai- 
 
139 
 
 berg and other Pianists," "At the Opera in 
 1 864," "Jenny Lind." Was the gentle Jen 
 ny Lind really a vocalist, or was she only a 
 singer of songs, unforgetable now because 
 she sang them ? As we read these re 
 minders of past delights we find ourselves 
 wondering how Jenny Lind would please 
 the denizens of certain Unmusical Boxes 
 at the Metropolitan Opera-house, "who 
 have an insatiable desire to proceed with 
 their intellectual cultivation by audible 
 conversation during the performance." 
 
 In the thick of the tussle of life here 
 in this huge city of ours, where strident 
 voices fill the market-place, the mellow 
 note of the essayist is heard distinctly as 
 he leans back in his Easy Chair, modu 
 lating every syllable with exquisite fe 
 licity. And perhaps the author of the 
 Potiphar Papers is in his way quite as 
 characteristic of New York as any of the 
 more self-seeking notorieties who din 
 into our ears the catalogue of their mer 
 its. In a great city there is room for all, 
 for the boss and the heeler and the tough, 
 as well as for the Tatler, the Spectator, 
 the Idler, the Rambler, and the Citizen 
 of the World. 
 
 A citizen of the world, Mr. Curtis is, 
 
beyond all question, really cosmopolitan ; 
 and, as Colonel Higginson told us a dozen 
 years ago, "to be really cosmopolitan a 
 man must be at home even in his own 
 country." When Colonel Higginson came 
 to New York last year to deliver before the 
 Nineteenth Century Club the lecture on 
 The New World and the New Book, which 
 gives its title to a recent collection of 
 his essays, this epigram was quoted by 
 the president of the club in introducing 
 the speaker of the evening. It is per 
 haps now the best known of Colonel Hig- 
 ginson s many sharp sayings ; it is better 
 known probably than his assertion that 
 the American has " a drop more of nerv 
 ous fluid " than the Englishman an as 
 sertion which Matthew Arnold failed to 
 understand but did not fail to denounce. 
 No doubt it is hard for a writer as witty 
 as Colonel Higginson to find one or two 
 of his acute sentences quivering in the 
 public memory, while others as well aim 
 ed fall off idly. But it is with the epi 
 gram as with the lyric ; we shoot an ar 
 row in the air, it falls to earth we know 
 not where ; and we can rarely foretell 
 which shaft is going to split the willow 
 wand. 
 
Colonel Higginson need not be ashamed 
 to go down to posterity as the author of 
 one phrase, for many a writer is saved 
 from oblivion by a single apothegm ; nor 
 need he be afraid of this fate, for there 
 are "good things" a-plenty in this new 
 volume, and some of them are certain to 
 do good service in international combat, 
 and to go hustling across the Atlantic 
 again and again. There is an arsenal of 
 epigram in the little essay called " Weap 
 ons of Precision," and it is pleasant to 
 see that their effective range is more than 
 3000 miles. At that distance they have 
 already wounded Mr. Andrew Lang, and 
 forced from him a cry of pain. So sensi 
 tive did Mr. Lang show himself to these 
 transatlantic darts that he allowed him 
 self to reveal his ignorance of Colonel 
 Higginson s work, ,of the Peabody Mu 
 seum, and of various other men and things 
 in America a knowledge of which was 
 a condition precedent to debate on the 
 question. 
 
 This question is very simple : Is there 
 such a man as an American? Has he 
 ever done anything justifying his exist 
 ence ? Or is he simply a second-rate, ex 
 patriated Englishman, a colonist who is 
 
to say ditto forever and a day ? If we are 
 only debased duplicates of the Poor Isl 
 anders, then our experiment here is a 
 failure, and our continued existence is not 
 worth while. If we are something other 
 than English, then it may be as well to 
 understand ourselves, and to throw off 
 any lingering bond of colonialism. This 
 is what Colonel Higginson s book was 
 intended to help us to do. " Nothing is 
 further," he has said in his preface, from 
 his " wish than to pander to any petty na 
 tional vanity," his sole desire being to as 
 sist in creating a modest and reasonable 
 self-respect. " The Civil War bequeathed 
 to us Americans, twenty-five years ago, a 
 great revival of national feeling ; but this 
 has been followed in some quarters, dur 
 ing the last few years, by a curious relapse 
 into something of the old colonial and 
 apologetic attitude." No doubt this at 
 titude is not characteristic of the best ; it 
 is to be seen only in the East chiefly in 
 New York and in Boston chiefly among 
 the half-educated, for the man of wide 
 culture looks for light rather to Paris 
 and Berlin than to London. 
 
 Colonel Higginson proves abundantly, 
 with a cloud of witnesses, that one of the 
 
differences between the American and the 
 Englishman is the former s greater quick 
 ness. We are lighter and swifter in our 
 appreciation of humor, for example. In 
 deed, it is amusing to observe that we 
 speak of the English as obtuse in humor, 
 just as they speak of the Scotch. I think 
 that Colonel Higginson succeeds also in 
 showing that there is greater fineness of 
 taste in literature and in art in America; 
 at least we do not take our dime novels 
 seriously, while in England the leading 
 weekly reviews really consider the stories 
 of Miss Marryat and of Mr. Far j eon. 
 
 Of course " the added drop of nervous 
 fluid " must be paid for somehow ; in all 
 international comparisons the great law 
 of compensations holds good. Recently 
 a leading American scientist told me that 
 he thought there was, in American scien 
 tific work, a lack of the energy he had 
 observed in the English. It was of pure 
 science he was speaking ; as far as applied 
 science is concerned, there seems to be no 
 lack of energy visible in the United States. 
 That this criticism is just I cannot deny, 
 having no wish to fall into the pitfall of 
 discussing a subject of which I have no 
 knowledge whatever. But if there is a 
 
- 44 
 
 possible loss of energy, there is an indis 
 putable gain in mental flexibility, in open 
 ness of mind. There are Philistines in 
 the United States, as there are in Great 
 Britain, a many of them on both sides of 
 the Atlantic ; but between the British 
 Philistine and the American there is an 
 essential difference. The British Philis 
 tine knows not the light, and he hates it 
 and he refuses to receive it. The Ameri 
 can Philistine knows not the light, but he 
 is not hostile, and he is not only ready to 
 receive it, but eager. This is a difference 
 which goes to the root of the matter. 
 
 I have delayed so long over the subject 
 of Colonel Higginson s book that I have 
 now no space to speak of its style or of 
 its separate chapters. " Weapons of Pre 
 cision" I have already praised ; it is a pro 
 test against vulgarity of style against 
 the bludgeon and the boomerang as arms 
 of debate ; it is a series of swift, rapier- 
 like thrusts, to be considered by all who 
 think that our language is inferior to the 
 French in point and in brilliancy. In 
 deed, the whole book may be commended 
 to those who can enjoy style and wit and 
 learning and a knowledge of the world 
 and a wisdom derived from men as well 
 
as from books. Especially may the es 
 says on the " Shadow of Europe," on the 
 " Perils of American Humor," on the 
 " Evolution of an American," and on the 
 " Trick of Self-Depreciation " be recom 
 mended to all who are downcast about 
 the position of literature and of the arts 
 in these United States, or about the United 
 States as a nation. These essays are 
 tonic and stimulant ; and if their Ameri 
 canism may seem to some aggressive, this 
 is a failing which might become more 
 common than it is without becoming 
 dangerous if always it were character 
 ized by knowledge as wide as Colonel 
 Higginson s and by wit as keen. 
 
 To no one may I venture to recommend 
 Colonel Higginson s book more urgently 
 than to Miss Agnes Repplier, who has 
 sent forth a second volume of her enter 
 taining magazine articles grouped under 
 the excellent title of Points of View. 
 Miss Repplier is very clever and very 
 colonial. Although a Philadelphian, she 
 has apparently never heard of the Decla 
 ration of Independence. From the com 
 pany she keeps it is perhaps not an un 
 fair inference to suggest that she seems 
 to be sorry that she is not herself a Poor 
 
Islander. She is a well-read woman, with 
 all literature open before her, yet she 
 quotes almost altogether from the con 
 tributors to the contemporary British 
 magazines ; and we feel that if birds of a 
 feather flock together we have here in 
 the eagle s nest by some mischance hatch 
 ed a British sparrow. 
 
 Miss Repplier s subjects are excellent 
 "A Plea for Humor," "Books that 
 Have Hindered Me," " Literary Shibbo 
 leths," " Fiction in the Pulpit," and the 
 like ; and she discusses them with ready 
 humor and feminine individuality. She 
 quotes abundantly and often aptly and 
 apt quotation is a difficult art. But the 
 writers from whom she quotes are not 
 always of that compliment. Bagehot 
 had the gift of the winged phrase, and 
 a quotation from his masculine prose is 
 always welcome. But a glance down the 
 list of the others from whom Miss Rep- 
 plier quotes will show that she mischooses 
 often. She seems to lack the sense of 
 literary perspective ; and for her one 
 writer is apparently as good as another 
 so long as he is a contemporary Eng 
 lishman. 
 
 There is no index to Miss Repplier s 
 
book, but I have found amusement in 
 making out a hasty list of those from 
 whom she quotes. I do not vouch for 
 its completeness or for its absolute ac 
 curacy, but it will serve to show that she 
 is more at home in Great Britain than 
 in the United States, and that her mind 
 travels more willingly in the little com 
 partments of a British railway carriage 
 than in the large parlor cars of her native 
 land. Besides Bagehot she cites Mr. 
 Lang, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Shorthouse, Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison, Mr. Radford, Mr. 
 Swinburne, Mr. George Saintsbury, Mr. 
 Gosse, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Ruskin, 
 Mr. Pater, Mr. Froude, Mr. Oscar Wilde, 
 and Miss "Vernon Lee." There is also 
 one quotation from Doctor Everett, and 
 one more from Doctor Holmes, or per 
 haps two. But there is nothing from 
 Lowell, than whom a more quotable writ 
 er never lived. In like manner we find 
 Miss Repplier discussing the novels and 
 characters of Miss Austen and of Scott, 
 of Dickens, of Thackeray, and of George 
 Eliot, but never once referring to the 
 novels or characters of Hawthorne. Just 
 how it was possible for any clever Amer 
 ican woman to write nine essays in crit- 
 
i 4 8 
 
 icism, rich in references and quotations, 
 without once happening on Lowell or on 
 Hawthorne, is to me inexplicable. 
 
 Colonialism is scarcely an adequate ex 
 planation for this devotion to the first- 
 rate, second-rate, and third-rate writers 
 of a foreign country to the neglect of the 
 first-rate writers of her own. Perhaps 
 the secret is to be sought rather in Miss 
 Repplier s lack of literary standards. In 
 literature as in some other things a wom 
 an s opinion is often personal and acci 
 dental ; it depends on the way the book 
 has happened to strike her ; the angle of 
 reflection is equal to the angle of inci 
 dence. Miss Repplier fails to apprehend 
 the distinction between the authors who 
 are to be taken seriously and the writers 
 who are not to be taken seriously be 
 tween the man of letters who is somebody 
 and the scribbler who is merely, in the 
 French phrase, quelconque nobody in par 
 ticular. There is no need to go over the 
 list of the persons from whom Miss Rep 
 plier quotes, and with whose writings she 
 seems to have an equal familiarity ; cer 
 tain names on it are those of comic per 
 sonalities not to be accorded the compli 
 ment of serious criticism. 
 
149 
 
 Despite Miss Repplier s reliance on 
 those British authors who have come to 
 America to enlighten us with lectures in 
 words of one syllable to borrow a neat 
 phrase of Colonel Higginson s her Points 
 of View are well chosen, and the outlook 
 from them is pleasant. She writes bright 
 ly always, and often brilliantly. She does 
 herself injustice by her deference to those 
 whom she invites to her board, for she is 
 better company than her guests. Her 
 criticism one need not fully agree with to 
 call it generally sensible and well put, 
 and sometimes necessary. Perhaps her 
 best pages contain her protest against 
 critical shams and literary affectations. 
 She has no patience with the man who, 
 while really liking Mr. Haggard s tales of 
 battle, murder, and sudden death, absurd 
 ly pretends to a preference for Tolstoi and 
 Ibsen, whom his soul abhors. She has 
 pleasant humor in her remark that those 
 who read Robert Elsmere nowadays would 
 think it wrong to enjoy Tom Jones, while 
 the people who enjoyed Tom Jones when 
 it first came out would have thought 
 it wrong to read Robert Elsmere; and 
 " that the people who, wishing to be on 
 the safe side of virtue, think it wrong to 
 
5 
 
 read either, are scorned greatly as lacking 
 true moral discrimination." 
 
 A bias in favor of one s own country 
 men is absurd when it leads us to accept 
 native geese for swans of Avon ; but even 
 then it is more creditable than a bias in 
 favor of foreigners. So it is to be hoped 
 that some of Miss Repplier s Philadel- 
 phian friends will take her to Independ 
 ence Hall next Fourth of July and show 
 her the bell that proclaimed liberty 
 throughout the land. Then, on their way 
 home, they might drop into a book-store 
 and make Miss Repplier a present of Colo 
 nel Higginson s The New World and 
 the New Book, and of Mr. Henry Cabot 
 Lodge s Studies in History (wherein is to 
 be found his acute account of " Colonial 
 ism in America"), and also of that volume 
 of Lowell s prose which contains the fa 
 mous essay " On a Certain Condescension 
 in Foreigners." 
 1892 
 
DISSOLVING VIEWS 
 !. OF MARK TWAIN S BEST STORY 
 
 i HE boy of to-day is fortunate 
 indeed, and, of a truth, he is 
 to be congratulated. While 
 the boy of yesterday had to 
 stay his stomach with the un 
 conscious humor of Sandford and Mer- 
 ton, the boy of to-day may get his fill of 
 fun and of romance and of adventure in 
 the Story of a Bad Boy, in Treasure Isl 
 and, in Tom Brown, and in Tom Sawyer, 
 and then in the sequel to Tom Sawyer, 
 wherein Tom himself appears in the very 
 nick of time, like a young god from the 
 machine. Sequels of stories which have 
 been widely popular are not a little risky. 
 Huckleberry Finn is a sharp exception to 
 the general rule of failure. Although 
 it is a sequel, it is quite as worthy of wide 
 popularity as Tom Sawyer. An American 
 
critic once neatly declared that the late 
 G. P. R. James hit the bull s-eye of suc 
 cess with his first shot, and that forever 
 thereafter he went on firing through the 
 same hole. Now this is just what Mark 
 Twain has not done : Huckleberry Finn is 
 not an attempt to do Tom Sawyer over 
 again. It is a story quite as unlike its pre 
 decessor as it is like. Although Huck Finn 
 appeared first in the earlier book, and al 
 though Tom Sawyer reappears in the 
 later, the scenes and the characters are 
 otherwise wholly different. Above all, the 
 atmosphere of the story is different. Tom 
 Sawyer was a tale of boyish adventure in 
 a village in Missouri, on the Mississippi 
 River, and it was told by the author. 
 Huckleberry Finn is autobiographic ; it is 
 a tale of boyish adventure along the Mis 
 sissippi River told as it appeared to Huck 
 Finn. There is not in Huckleberry Finn 
 any one scene quite as funny as those in 
 which Tom Sawyer gets his friends to 
 whitewash the fence for him, and then 
 uses the spoils thereby acquired to attain 
 the highest distinction of the Sunday- 
 school the next morning. Nor is there any 
 situation quite as thrilling as that awful 
 moment in the cave when the boy and the 
 
girl are lost in the darkness ; and when 
 Tom Sawyer suddenly sees a human hand 
 bearing a light, and then finds that the 
 hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one 
 mortal enemy. I have always thought 
 that the vision of the hand in the cave in 
 Tom Sawyer was one of the very finest 
 things in trie literature of adventure since 
 Robinson Crusoe first saw a single foot 
 print in the sand of the sea-shore. 
 
 But though Huckleberry Finn may not 
 quite reach these two highest points of 
 Tom Sawyer, the general level of the later 
 story is indisputably higher than that of 
 the earlier. For one thing, the skill with 
 which the character of Huck Finn is 
 maintained is marvellous. We see every 
 thing through his eyes and they are his 
 eyes, and not a pair of Mark Twain s 
 spectacles. And the comments on what 
 he sees are his comments the comments 
 of an ignorant, superstitious, sharp, healthy 
 boy, brought up as Huck Finn had been 
 brought up; they are not speeches put 
 into his mouth by the author. One of 
 the most artistic things in the book and 
 that Mark Twain is a literary artist of a 
 very high order all who have considered 
 his later writings critically cannot but 
 
confess one of the most artistic things 
 in Huckleberry Finn is the sober self-re 
 straint with which Mr. Clemens lets Huck 
 Finn set down, without any comment at 
 all, scenes which would have afforded the 
 ordinary writer matter for endless moral 
 and political and sociological disquisition. 
 I refer particularly to the accounts of 
 the Grangerford- Shepherdson feud, and 
 of the shooting of Boggs by Colonel Sher- 
 burn. Here are two incidents of the rough 
 old life of the South-western States and 
 of the Mississippi Valley, forty or fifty 
 years ago, of the old life which is now 
 rapidly passing away under the influence 
 of advancing civilization and increasing 
 commercial prosperity, but which has not 
 wholly disappeared even yet, although a 
 slow revolution in public sentiment is 
 taking place. The Grangerford - Shep 
 herdson feud is a vendetta as deadly as 
 any Corsican could wish, yet the parties 
 to it were honest, brave, sincere, good 
 Christian people, probably people of deep 
 religious sentiment. None the less we see 
 them taking their guns to church, and, 
 when occasion serves, joining in what is 
 little better than a general massacre. The 
 killing of Boggs by Colonel Sherburn is 
 
told with equal sobriety and truth ; and 
 the later scene in which Colonel Sherburn 
 cows and lashes the mob which has set 
 out to lynch him is one of the most vigor 
 ous bits of writing Mark Twain has done. 
 In Tom Sawyer we saw Huckleberry 
 Finn from the outside; in the present 
 volume we see him from the inside. He 
 is almost as much a delight to any one 
 who has been a boy as was Tom Sawyer. 
 But only he or she who has been a boy 
 can truly enjoy this record of his advent 
 ures and of his sentiments and of his say 
 ings. Old maids of either sex will wholly 
 fail to understand him, or to like him, or 
 to see his significance and his value. Like 
 Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn is a genuine 
 boy ; he is neither a girl in boy s clothes, 
 like many of the modern heroes of juve 
 nile fiction, nor is he a " little man," a full- 
 grown man cut down ; he is a boy, just a 
 boy, only a boy. And his ways and modes 
 of thought are boyish. As Mr. F. Anstey 
 understands the English boy, and espe 
 cially the English boy of the middle 
 classes, so Mark Twain understands the 
 American boy, and especially the Ameri 
 can boy of the Mississippi Valley of forty 
 or fifty years ago. The contrast between 
 
56 
 
 Tom Sawyer, who is the child of respect 
 able parents, decently brought up, and 
 Huckleberry Finn, who is the child of 
 the town drunkard, not brought up at all, 
 is made distinct by a hundred artistic 
 touches, not the least natural of which is 
 Huck s constant reference to Tom as his 
 ideal of what a boy should be. When 
 Huck escapes from the cabin where his 
 drunken and worthless father had con 
 fined him, carefully manufacturing a mass 
 of very circumstantial evidence to prove 
 his own murder by robbers, he cannot 
 help saying, " I did wish Tom Sawyer was 
 there ; I knowed he would take an interest 
 in this kind of business, and throw in the 
 fancy touches. Nobody could spread him 
 self like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as 
 that." Both boys have their full share of 
 boyish imagination ; and Tom Sawyer, 
 being given to books, lets his imagina 
 tion run on robbers and pirates, having 
 a perfect understanding with himself that, 
 if you want to get fun out of this life, 
 you must never hesitate to make believe 
 very hard ; and, with Tom s youth and 
 health, he never finds it hard to make be 
 lieve and to be a pirate at will, or to sum 
 mon an attendant spirit, or to rescue a 
 
157 
 
 prisoner from the deepest dungeon neath 
 the castle moat. But in Huck this imag 
 ination has turned to superstition ; he is 
 a walking repository of the juvenile folk 
 lore of the Mississippi Valley a folk-lore 
 partly traditional among the white set 
 tlers, but largely influenced by intimate 
 association with the negroes. When Huck 
 was in his room at night all by himself 
 waiting for the signal Tom Sawyer was 
 to give him at midnight, he felt so lone 
 some he wished he was dead : 
 
 " The stars was shining and the leaves 
 rustled in the woods ever so mournful ; 
 and I heard an owl, away off, who-whoo- 
 ing about somebody that was dead, and a 
 whippowill and a dog crying about some 
 body that was going to die ; and the wind 
 was trying to whisper something to me, 
 and I couldn t make out what it was, and 
 so it made the cold shivers run over me. 
 Then away out in the woods I heard that 
 kind of a sound that a ghost makes 
 when it wants to tell about something 
 that s on its mind and can t make itself 
 understood, and so can t rest easy in its 
 grave, and has to go about that way every 
 night grieving. I got so downhearted 
 and scared I did wish I had some com- 
 
i S 8 
 
 pany. Pretty soon a spider went crawling 
 up my shoulders, and I flipped it off and 
 it lit in the candle ; and before I could 
 budge it was all shrivelled up. I didn t 
 need anybody to tell me that that was an 
 awful bad sign and would fetch me some 
 bad luck, so I was scared and most shook 
 the clothes off me. I got up and turned 
 around in my tracks three times and 
 crossed my breast every time ; and then I 
 tied up a little lock of my hair with a 
 thread to keep witches away. But I hadn t 
 no confidence. You do that when you ve 
 lost a horseshoe that you ve found, in 
 stead of nailing it up over the door, but I 
 hadn t ever heard anybody say it was any 
 way to keep off bad 1 uck when you d killed 
 a spider." 
 
 And, again, later in the story, not at 
 night this time, but in broad daylight, 
 Huck walks along a road : 
 
 " When I got there it was all still and 
 Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny the 
 hands was gone to the fields ; and there 
 was them kind of faint dronings of bugs 
 and flies in the air that makes it seem so 
 lonesome like everybody s dead and gone ; 
 and if a breeze fans along and quivers the 
 leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because 
 
you feel like it s spirits whispering spirits 
 that s been dead ever so many years and 
 you always think they re talking about you. 
 As a general thing it makes a body wish he 
 was dead, too, and done with it all." 
 
 Now, none of these sentiments are ap 
 propriate to Tom Sawyer, who had none 
 of the feeling for nature which Huck P inn 
 had caught during his numberless days 
 and nights in the open air. Nor could 
 Tom Sawyer either have seen or set down 
 this instantaneous photograph of a sum 
 mer storm : 
 
 " It would get so dark that it looked all 
 blue-black outside, and lovely ; and the 
 rain would thrash along by so thick that 
 the trees off a little ways looked dim and 
 spider-webby ; and here would come a 
 blast of wind that would bend the trees 
 down and turn up the pale underside of 
 the leaves ; and then a perfect ripper of 
 a gust would follow along and set the 
 branches to tossing their arms as if they 
 was just wild ; and next, when it was just 
 about the bluest and blackest fst ! it was 
 as bright as glory, and you d have a little 
 glimpse of tree -tops a-plunging about, 
 away off yonder in the storm, hundreds 
 of yards further than you could see be- 
 
i6o 
 
 fore ; dark as sin again in a second, and 
 now you d hear the thunder let go with 
 an awful crash, and then go rumbling, 
 grumbling, tumbling down the sky tow 
 ards the under side of the world, like 
 rolling empty barrels down-stairs, where 
 it s long stairs and they bounce a good 
 deal, you know." 
 
 The romantic side of Tom Sawyer is 
 shown in most delightfully humorous 
 fashion in the account of his difficult de 
 vices to aid in the easy escape of Jim, a run 
 away negro. Jim is an admirably drawn 
 character. There have been not a few 
 fine and firm portraits of negroes in recent 
 American fiction, of which Mr. Cable s 
 Bras-Coupe in the Grandissimes is per 
 haps the most vigorous, and Mr. Harris s 
 Mingo and Uncle Remus and Blue Dave 
 are the most gentle. Jim is worthy to 
 rank with these ; and the essential sim 
 plicity and kindliness and generosity of 
 the Southern negro have never been bet 
 ter shown than here by Mark Twain. Nor 
 are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Jim 
 the only fresh and original figures in 
 Mr. Clemens s book; on the contrary, 
 there is scarcely a character of the many 
 introduced who does not impress the 
 
reader at once as true to life and there 
 fore as new, for life is so varied that a 
 portrait from life is sure to be as good as 
 new. That Mr. Clemens draws from life, 
 and yet lifts his work from the domain of 
 the photograph to the region of art, is 
 evident to any one who will give his writ 
 ing the honest attention which it de 
 serves. The chief players in Huckleberry 
 Finn are taken from life, no doubt, but 
 they are so aptly chosen and so broadly 
 drawn that they are quite as typical as 
 they are actual. They have one great 
 charm, all of them they are not written 
 about and about ; they are not described 
 and dissected and analyzed ; they appear 
 and play their parts and disappear ; and 
 yet they leave a sharp impression of in 
 dubitable vitality and individuality. 
 1886 
 
 II. OF A NOVEL OF M. ZOLA S 
 
 IN his most suggestive study of the 
 Greek World Under Roman Sway, where 
 in we find the feelings, the thoughts, 
 and the actions of those who lived in 
 
162 
 
 the first century explained and eluci 
 dated by constant references to simi 
 lar states of feeling, thought, and action 
 still surviving among us who live in the 
 nineteenth century, Professor Mahaffy 
 expresses his belief that the Golden Ass 
 of Apuleius does not give a true picture 
 of the Greek life it purported to repre 
 sent, but that it is rather a reflection of 
 the depravity of the Romans to whom it 
 was addressed ; and then he adds these 
 shrewd suggestions, to be borne in mind 
 by all who ever consider the fiction of a 
 foreign country or of another century: 
 " We might as well charge all society in 
 France with being addicted to one form 
 of vice, because recent French fiction oc 
 cupies itself almost exclusively with this 
 as the material for its plots. The society 
 for which such books are written must 
 have shown that they are to its taste ; the 
 society which such books portray may be 
 wholly different and grossly libelled by 
 being made to reflect the vices of the au 
 thor and his readers." 
 
 If French society were composed exclu 
 sively of the men and women who people 
 most of the Parisian romances of the past 
 fifteen or twenty years ; if the inhabitants 
 
i6 3 
 
 of the cities were like the miserable creat 
 ures we see in M. Zola s Pot-Bouille, and 
 if the dwellers in the fields were like the 
 horrible wretches we see in M. Zola s La 
 Terre, the outlook of France would be 
 black indeed, for no country could exist 
 or should exist which was peopled by such 
 a gang of monsters. But any one who 
 knows French life, any one especially 
 who knows the life of the larger provincial 
 towns, knows that what M. Zola has repre 
 sented as typical and characteristic is, in 
 reality, exceptional and abnormal. Prob 
 ably there is no house in the whole of 
 Paris occupied by as corrupt a set of ten 
 ants as those set before us in Pot-Bouille ; 
 and certainly there is no village in the 
 whole of France wherein all the horrors 
 depicted in La Terre could possibly have 
 taken place. The fact is, the French like 
 to boast about vice as the British like 
 to boast about virtue. I should doubt if 
 there was any great difference in morals 
 between the upper society of Paris and of 
 London, except the overwhelming hypoc 
 risy of the latter. Apparently M. Zola 
 has at last awakened to some conscious 
 ness of the false impression produced by 
 his work. Le Reve was his attempt to 
 
1 6 4 
 
 produce a novel fit for the class to which 
 nearly all English novels are addressed. 
 
 In his recent study, L Argent, there is 
 a fairer balance than in his other books ; 
 there are decent people, kindly folk, men 
 and women of honest hearts and willing 
 hands. We have a cheerful glimpse of 
 the home life of Mazaud, the stock-broker 
 who commits suicide when he fails. The 
 Jordans, husband and wife, are perhaps 
 the pleasantest pair to be found in all M. 
 Zola s novels. With the novelist s in 
 creasing fame, apparently, he is taking 
 brighter views of humanity. And Ma 
 dame Caroline, despite her lapse, might 
 almost be called an honest woman, if this 
 is not a paradox ; she is a strong, whole 
 some, broad-minded creature, admirably 
 realized. The goddess Lubricity, whom 
 Matthew Arnold first named as the pre 
 siding deity of French fiction, is still wor 
 shipped in other parts of the book ; and 
 her worship is out of place in this book at 
 least, for those who are seized with the 
 lust for gain have little time for any other. 
 For example, the whole story of Saccard s 
 relations with the Baroness Sandorff is 
 needlessly offensive and revolting ; and at 
 bottom it is essentially false. But there 
 
i6 5 
 
 is a marked improvement of tone in L Ar 
 gent over certain even of his later books, 
 while the atmosphere is nowhere as foul 
 as it was in most of his earlier novels. 
 
 There is no disputing that M. Zola is 
 a man with a dirty mind with a liking 
 for dirt for its own sake. There is no 
 disputing also that he is a novelist of 
 most extraordinary fecundity and force. 
 Of all the books I have read in the past 
 ten years, I received the strongest impres 
 sion from Zola s Germinal and from Ib 
 sen s Ghosts ; and I can still hear the cry 
 for light, and the pitiful appeal of the son 
 to the mother with which the latter 
 closes ; and I can still feel the chill wind 
 which whistles across the dark plain in 
 the opening pages of the former. There 
 is in L Argent the same power, the same 
 splendid sweep, the same mighty move 
 ment, the same symbolic treatment of the 
 subject, the same epic method. M. Zola 
 thinks himself a naturalist ; he has preach 
 ed naturalism from the house-top ; he 
 is generally taken at his word and crit 
 icised as a naturalist, and as a fact he is 
 not a naturalist at all. M. Zola is not one 
 who sees certain things in life, and who 
 ties them together with a loose thread of 
 
i66 
 
 plot although this is the naturalism he 
 approves of. He has preached it, but he 
 has never practised it. On the contrary, 
 M. Zola picks out a subject and reads up 
 and crams for it, and conceives it as a 
 whole, and devises typical characters and 
 characteristic incidents, and co-ordinates 
 the materials he has thus laboriously ac 
 cumulated into a harmonious work of art, 
 as closely constructed as a Greek tragedy 
 and moving forward towards the inevi 
 table catastrophe with something of the 
 same irresistible impulse. No novelist of 
 our time is affected less by what he sees 
 in nature than M. Zola ; not one is more 
 consciously artful. 
 
 This symbolic method of M. Zola s is 
 shown in L Argent almost as clearly as in 
 Germinal, which I cannot help consider 
 ing his greatest novel, despite its prolixity 
 and the foulness of many of its episodes. 
 As Germinal was the story of a coal-mine 
 with a strike, so L Argent is a story of a 
 gigantic speculation on the stock ex 
 change, treated in the same epic fashion, 
 with typical characters and all the neces 
 sary incidents. Obviously the Union Ge- 
 nerale suggested certain particular details 
 of Saccard s Banque Universelle. Obvi- 
 
i6 7 
 
 ously also Baron Rothschild sat for the 
 portrait of Gundermann. There is the 
 same use of minor figures to personify the 
 crowd, and themselves identifiable by 
 some broad characteristic Moser, the 
 bear; Pellerault, the bull; Amadrin, the 
 speculator who foolishly blundered into a 
 successful operation, and who has wisely 
 held his tongue ever since ; and all these 
 minor characters (and there is a host of 
 them) serve as a chorus, help along the 
 main action of the tale, comment upon it, 
 and typify the throng of men and women 
 who are at the periphery of any great 
 movement. These little people are all 
 vigorously projected ; they are all adroitly 
 contrasted one with another ; they are all 
 carried in the hand of the novelist and 
 manoeuvred with unfailing effect, with a 
 power and a certainty which no other liv 
 ing novelist possesses. 
 
 That many readers should be bored by 
 all of Zola s writing I can readily under 
 stand, for it is not always easy reading. 
 That many more should be shocked by 
 him is even more comprehensible, for he 
 has a thick thumb and he makes dirty 
 marks over all his work. That some 
 even should be annoyed by M. Zola s 
 
1 68 
 
 method or irritated by his mannerisms, I 
 can explain without difficulty. But what 
 I cannot comprehend is that any one 
 having read Une Page d" Amour or Ger 
 minal or U Argent can deny that M. Zola 
 is a very great force in fiction. But there 
 are critics in Great Britain and even in 
 the United States, where we are less 
 squeamish and less hypocritical who re 
 fuse to reckon with M. Zola, and who pass 
 by on the other side. A man must be 
 strong of stomach to enjoy much of M. 
 Zola s fiction ; he must be feeble in per 
 ception if he does not feel its strength 
 and its complex art. M. Zola s strength 
 is often rank, no doubt, and there is a foul 
 flavor about even his most forcible novels, 
 which makes them unfit for the library 
 of the clean -minded American woman. 
 But in any exact sense of the word M. 
 Zola s novels are not immoral, as the 
 romances of M. Georges Ohnet are im 
 moral, for example, or those of the late 
 Octave Feuillet. Yet they are not spoon- 
 meat for babes. 
 1891 
 
1 69 
 
 III. OF WOMEN S NOVELS 
 
 THE reader of Humphrey Clinker if 
 that robust and sturdy British story has 
 any readers nowadays, when the art of 
 fiction has become so much finer and 
 more subtile will remember that little 
 Tim Cropdale " had made shift to live 
 many years by writing novels at the rate 
 of ^5 a volume ; but that branch of busi 
 ness is now engrossed by female authors," 
 so Smollett goes on to tell us, " who pub 
 lish merely for the propagation of virtue, 
 with so much ease and spirit and deli 
 cacy and knowledge of the human heart, 
 and all in the serene tranquillity of high 
 life, that the reader is not only enchanted 
 by their genius but reformed by their 
 mdrality." Humphrey Clinker was first 
 published in 1771, the year of its author s 
 death ; and the names of the women of 
 England who were writing novels six- 
 score years ago are now forgotten. How 
 many of the insatiate devourers of fiction 
 who feed voraciously on the paper-cover 
 ed volumes of the news-stand have ever 
 heard of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bid- 
 
1 7 o 
 
 duJpk for example? Yet Charles James 
 Fox called this the best novel of his age ; 
 and Doctor Johnson found great interest 
 in following the misadventures of Miss 
 Biddulph, and declared to the authoress 
 that he knew not if she had a right, on 
 moral principles, to make her readers suf 
 fer so much. The authoress of the Me 
 moirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph was Fran 
 ces Sheridan, now remembered only be 
 cause she was the mother of the author 
 of the School for Scandal. 
 
 Mrs. Sheridan was an estimable woman, 
 and it was not to her that Smollett turned 
 the edge of his irony. There were in his 
 day not a few fashionable ladies who, in 
 " the serene tranquillity of high life," told 
 stories that neither enchanted by their 
 genius nor reformed by their morality. 
 In most of the novels written by women 
 in the second half of the eighteenth cen 
 tury, the morality is but little more ob 
 vious than the genius. Like the fashion 
 able English novels of the first half of this 
 century, now as carefully forgotten as the 
 tales of Smollett s fair contemporaries, 
 the female fiction with which Little Tim 
 Cropdale found himself unable to com 
 pete was a curious compound of bad 
 
morals, bad manners, and bad grammar. 
 Although stories by female authors who 
 "publish merely for the propagation of 
 virtue " and for the gratification of their 
 own vanity are still to be found in Lon 
 don by anyone who will seek on Mr. Mu- 
 die s shelves, the standard of female fic 
 tion has been greatly elevated in England 
 since Miss Austen put forth her first mod 
 est story. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot fol 
 lowed in due season ; and it would not 
 now be possible to draw up a list of the 
 ten greatest British novelists without 
 placing on it the names of two or three 
 women, at the least. There are diligent 
 readers of fiction who would insist that the 
 name of Mrs. Oliphant should be inscribed 
 among the chosen few, by reason of cer 
 tain of her earlier tales of Scottish life ; 
 and there are others equally insistent that 
 the strange romances of the English lady 
 who calls herself a French expletive en 
 title the name of " Ouida " to be placed on 
 the roll of the chosen few. Indeed, the 
 admiration of those who do admire this 
 lady s stories is so ardent and fervid that 
 I sometimes wonder whether the twen 
 tieth century will not see a Ouida Society 
 
for the expounding of the inner spiritual 
 meaning of Under Two Flags and Held 
 in Bondage, 
 
 In America, since the day when Susan 
 na Rowson wrote Charlotte Temple, and 
 more especially since the day when Mrs. 
 Stowe wrote Uncle Touts Cabin, no list 
 of American novelists could fairly be 
 drawn up on which nearly half the names 
 would not be those of women even when 
 one of these names might seem to be 
 that of a man like Charles Egbert Crad- 
 dock s, for example. Colonel Higginson 
 recently deplored the oblivion into which 
 we have allowed the wholesomely realistic 
 fiction of Miss Sedgwick to fall; and it 
 has been remarked that the vigorous New 
 England tales of Rose Terry Cooke never 
 met with the full measure of success they 
 deserved. But the authoress of Ramona, 
 the authoress of That Lass o Loivries, 
 the authoress of Anne, the authoress of 
 Faith Gartneys Girlhood, the authoress 
 of Signor Monaldini s Niece, the author 
 ess of John Ward, Preacher, the authoress 
 of the Story of Margaret Kent, the au 
 thoress of Friend Olivia, and the author 
 esses of a dozen or of a score of other 
 novels which have had^their day of vogue, 
 
173 
 
 these ladies are able easily to prove that 
 the field of fiction is being cultivated dili 
 gently by the women of America. 
 
 One of the cleverest novels recently 
 published by any American woman is 
 The Anglomanzacs, which came forth 
 anonymously, but which Mrs. Burton Har 
 rison has since acknowledged. It is a 
 sketch only, a little picture of a corner of 
 life, hardly more than an impression, but 
 is brilliant in color and accurate in draw 
 ing. Limited as it is in scope and con 
 tracted as is its framework, it strikes me 
 as the best reflection of certain phases of 
 New York life since the author of the 
 Potiphar Papers made fun of the Rever 
 end Mr. Creamcheese. It echoes the talk 
 of those who 
 
 " tread the weary mill 
 With jaded step and call it pleasure still." 
 
 And, better yet, it suggests the feelings 
 which prompted the talk. At a recent 
 meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club, 
 Mr. Theodore Roosevelt called Mr. Ward 
 McAllister s Society as I Found It an 
 "exposure of the 400;" and certainly it 
 is difficult to believe that even 100 people 
 of fashion could be found anywhere in 
 
74 
 
 New York as dull as those Mr. McAllis 
 ter saw around him, as narrow-minded 
 and as thick-witted. Mrs. Burton Har 
 rison knows what is called Society quite 
 as well as Mr. McAllister; and as she is 
 a clever woman, those she sees about her 
 are often clever also. The company of 
 Anglomaniacs to which she invites our 
 attention are not dullards, nor are they 
 cads, even though an ill-natured philoso 
 pher might be moved to call them snobs. 
 A good-natured philosopher would prob 
 ably find them amusing; and he would 
 make shift to enjoy their companionship, 
 dropping easily into acquaintance and 
 laughing with them quite as often as he 
 laughed at them. 
 
 In these days, when hosts of honest 
 people throughout the United States are 
 reading with delighted awe long accounts 
 of the manners and customs of a strange 
 tribe of human creatures, the female of 
 which is known as a " Society Lady " and 
 the male as a "Clubman," it is pleasant 
 to find novels of New York life written 
 by ladies who move within the charmed 
 circle of what is called Society, and who 
 can write about the doings of their fel 
 lows simply and without either snobbish 
 
wonder or caddish envy. The authoress 
 of The Anglomaniacs and the authoress 
 of Mademoiselle Reseda see Society as it 
 is, and they are not so dazzled by the un 
 expected glare that they need to put on 
 sea -side spectacles to enable them to 
 observe what is going on about them. It 
 is an old saying that to describe well we 
 must not know too well, for long knowl 
 edge blunts the edge of appreciation. 
 But those who, having knowledge, seek 
 rather to reveal than to describe, often 
 render a more valuable service than the 
 more superficial observers who offer us 
 their first impressions. Something of 
 this revelation of Society we find in Mrs. 
 Harrison s brilliant sketch and in the 
 stories of " Julien Gordon." 
 
 Thackeray complained that no British 
 novelist had dared to describe a young 
 man s life since Fielding wrote Tom Jones; 
 and Mr. Henry James, praising George 
 Sand, notes the total absence of passion 
 in English novels. If this reproach is 
 ever taken away from our fiction, it will 
 be by some woman. Women are more 
 willing than men to suggest the animal 
 nature that sheathes our immortal souls; 
 they are bolder in the use of the stronger 
 
176 
 
 emotions; they are more willing to sug 
 gest the possibilities of passion lurking 
 all unsuspected beneath the placidity of 
 modern fine-lady existence. Perhaps they 
 are sometimes even a little too willing: 
 as Mr. Warner reminded us not long ago, 
 " it may be generally said of novelists, that 
 men know more than they tell, and that 
 women tell more than they know." 
 
 It is by slow degrees that woman forges 
 forward and takes her place alongside 
 man in the mastery of the fine arts. The 
 Muses were all women, once upon a time, 
 but those whom they visited were all men. 
 The first art in which the woman made 
 herself manifestly the equal of the man 
 was the art of vocal music or was it that 
 of dancing? The daughter of Herodias 
 was mistress of both accomplishments. 
 Then in time woman divided the stage 
 with man ; the histrionic art was possess 
 ed by both sexes with equal opportunity ; 
 and who shall say that Garrick or Kean 
 surpassed in power Mrs. Siddons or 
 Rachel ? Now prose fiction is theirs 
 quite as much as it is man s ; and when 
 the Critic recently elected by vote the 
 twenty foremost American women of let 
 ters, many more than half were writers of 
 
novels. The readers of Humphrey Clink 
 er did not foresee Jane Austen and George 
 Eliot and George Sand any more than lit 
 tle Tim Cropdale could. 
 
 1891 
 
 IV. OF TWO LATTERDAY HUMORISTS 
 
 " WHOEVER and wherever and however 
 situated a man is, he must watch three 
 things sleeping, digestion, and laughing," 
 said Mr. Beecher; and he added with 
 equal wisdom, "they are three indis 
 pensable necessities. Prayers are very 
 well, and reading the Bible very well in 
 deed ; but a man can get along without 
 the Bible, but he can t without the other 
 three things." When a man has a clear 
 conscience, good digestion ought to wait 
 on appetite ; and when he has a good 
 digestion and a clear conscience, he ought 
 to find it easy to sleep well. Yet as sleep 
 is the only true friend that will not come 
 at one s call, he may be wakeful despite 
 his pure heart and quiet stomach; and in 
 this case he may fairly resort to the Pat 
 ent-office reports or the British comic 
 papers, than which 
 
i 7 8 
 
 " Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world " 
 
 are more potent soporifics. Many of the 
 avowedly humorous publications of the 
 day are better as a cure for sleeplessness 
 than as a cause of laughter. Of all sad 
 words of tongue or pen none is sadder 
 than what is known in many a newspaper 
 office as "comic copy." Wit cannot be 
 made to order, and humor cannot be pur 
 chased by the yard, with a discount if the 
 buyer takes the whole roll. 
 
 In the History of Henry Esmond 
 more veracious than many a more pre 
 tentious history of the reign of Queen 
 Anne and of a broader truth Thackeray 
 speaks of the " famous beaux-esprits," 
 who " would make many brilliant hits- 
 half a dozen in a night sometimes but, 
 like sharp-shooters, when they had fired 
 their shot, they were obliged to retire un 
 der cover till their pieces were loaded 
 again and they got another chance at 
 their enemy." And this figure expresses 
 the exact fact; no wit is a breech-loader- 
 still less is he a repeating rifle capable of 
 discharging sixteen shots without taking 
 thought. The readiest man must have 
 time to reload and the most fertile must 
 
I 7 9 
 
 lie fallow now and again. Richard Brins- 
 ley Sheridan, even when he had most 
 carefully prepared himself, did not spar 
 kle in private conversation as he was able 
 to make his characters scintillate through 
 the long sittings of the scandalous col 
 lege. If needs must and the devil drives 
 a poor wretch to crack jokes unceasingly, 
 then of necessity the edge of his wit will 
 not be as keen nor the strokes of his 
 humor as effective. And this is why the 
 conducting of a comic paper is like the 
 leading of a forlorn hope. Success can 
 scarcely be more than a lucky accident. 
 "Tis not in mortals to command suc 
 cess," and if Cato and Sempronius were 
 joint editors of a comic weekly it may be 
 doubted whether they would even de 
 serve it. Nor would the author of the 
 tragedy from which this last quotation is 
 taken have been a satisfactory office edi 
 tor of a comic weekly, although he con 
 tributed to the Spectator the delightfully 
 and delicately humorous sketch of Sir 
 Roger de Coverley. 
 
 This is why the level of comic journal 
 ism is not as lofty as we could wish. This 
 is why we frequently find poor jokes even 
 in journals where every effort is made to 
 
i8o 
 
 provide good jokes. The supply is not 
 equal to the demand, and the jokesmith 
 often has to set his wits to work when 
 the stock of raw material is running low. 
 Punch and Puck are the representative 
 comic weeklies of the two great branches 
 of the English-speaking race. Punch has 
 had a great past. It may even be ques 
 tioned whether those who declare its de 
 cadence do not exaggerate its former 
 merits almost as much as they do its 
 present failings. It is vaguely remem 
 bered that in Punch Hood published the 
 " Song of the Shirt " and Thackeray the 
 Book of Snobs, and Douglas Jerrold the 
 Story of a Feather, and it is often sup 
 posed that there was a time when all 
 the clever men of London contributed 
 their best things every week to Punch. 
 But one has only to turn over the leaves 
 of any of the earlier volumes of the Brit 
 ish weekly to discover that if this ever 
 were the case, then the clever men of 
 London were a very dull lot. Punch is 
 very much the same now that it was in 
 the past. Hood contributed the " Song 
 of the Shirt," and nothing else ; Douglas 
 Jerrold wrote the Story of a Feather 
 but who reads Douglas Jerrold nowa- 
 
days? A Becket composed a Comic His 
 tory of England, and the few of us who 
 have read it to-day feel as Dickens felt at 
 the time, that it is dull and machine- 
 made. Thackeray wrote Mr. Punch s 
 Prize Novelists and the Snob Papers; 
 and Thackeray was the " Fat Contrib 
 utor;" and there has been no one like 
 Thackeray since he left the paper. 
 
 But the pictures of Punch are as good 
 now as ever they were; perhaps, taking 
 one week with another, they are better. 
 And the letter-press is very much what 
 it has always been rhymes, jingles, puns 
 in profusion, topical allusions "comic 
 copy," in short. Now and then there is 
 something in Punch which is still worth 
 reading. There were Artemus Ward s 
 papers a score of years ago, for instance, 
 and there were more recently some of 
 Mr. F. C. Burnand s earlier parodies and 
 some of his earlier Happy Thoughts. 
 Decidedly the most amusing prose which 
 has appeared in Punch during the past 
 four or five years is the series of over 
 heard conversations called Voces Populi. 
 
 The author of Voces Populi is the " F. 
 Anstey " who is well known in America 
 as the writer of Vice Versa and of the 
 
182 
 
 Tinted Venus. It is an open secret that 
 
 the real name of " F. Anstey" is Guthrie, 
 
 just as everybody knows that the real 
 
 name of " Mark Twain " is Clemens. (The 
 
 conjunction of these names was fortuitous, 
 
 but it serves to remind me that I once 
 
 heard Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson say 
 
 that the two strongest chapters in the 
 
 fiction of the past ten years were to be 
 
 found, one in the Giant s Robe of " F. 
 
 Anstey " and the other in the Huckleberry 
 
 Finn of " Mark Twain.") The first book 
 
 of an unknown author has small chance 
 
 of sudden success, and Vice Versa was Mr, 
 
 Guthrie s first book. Fortunately it came 
 
 into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang a 
 
 few days after it was published, and Mr. 
 
 Lang was so taken with its freshness, its 
 
 truthfulness to boy nature, and its almost 
 
 pathetic humor that he wrote a column 
 
 about it in the Daily News a column 
 
 of the heartiest appreciation. "It was 
 
 Lang s review that made the success of 
 
 Vice Versa," said Mr. Guthrie to me 
 
 once in London, two or three years ago, 
 
 when we were planning to write a story 
 
 together. And it was Mr. Lang who 
 
 afterwards introduced the author of Vice 
 
 Versa to the staff of Punch. 
 
i83 
 
 In Voces Popult Mr. Guthne has gath 
 ered a score and a half of fragmentary 
 dialogues, casual, plotless, but never point 
 less. They are thumbnail sketches of 
 British character, "At a Dinner Party," 
 " At a Wedding," " At the French Play," 
 " At a Turkish Bath," " In an Italian 
 Restaurant," in " Trafalgar Square" dur 
 ing a demonstration, and in " A Show 
 Place." They are photographic in their 
 accuracy, making due allowance for 
 humorous foreshortening. They hit off 
 the foibles of fashionable frivolity ; they 
 depict with unfaltering exactness the in 
 conceivable limitations and narrowness 
 of the middle class; but where they are 
 most abundantly and triumphantly suc 
 cessful is in the rendering of the lower 
 orders of London. Mr. Guthrie has 
 caught the cockney in the very act of 
 cockneyism, and he has here pilloried him 
 for all time, but wholly without bitterness 
 or rancor. Mr. Guthrie knows his roughs* 
 his ruffians, his house-maids, his trav 
 ellers, " Third Class Parliamentary," and 
 his visitors to "An East-End Poultry 
 Show;" he knows them through and 
 through ; he sees their weakness ; and 
 after all he is tolerant, he does not dislike 
 
1 8 4 
 
 them in his heart, he handles them as 
 though he loved them. We confess his 
 kindliness of touch, even though it moves 
 us to no more friendly feeling of our own. 
 " Vox populi, vox Dei," says the adage, as 
 true as most adages ; but these Voces 
 Populi, if not " Voces diaboli," might at 
 least be called to the witness-box by the 
 devil s advocate. It is a terrible indict 
 ment of contemporary British manners 
 that we hear in these conversations, hu 
 morous as they are ; and the indictment 
 is perhaps the severer in that it is wholly 
 unconscious. It is quite unwittingly that 
 Mr. Guthrie offers this evidence to prove 
 the truth of Matthew Arnold s assertion 
 that one could see in England "an aris 
 tocracy materialized and null, a middle 
 class purblind and hideous, a lower class 
 crude and brutal." 
 
 In this respect at least no greater con 
 trast could be found to the Voces Populi 
 of Mr. Guthrie, reprinted from the British 
 Punch, than the Short Sixes of Mr. H. 
 C. Bunner, reprinted from the American 
 Puck. The impression with which one 
 rises from the reading of Mr. Bunner s 
 tales is as different as possible from that 
 with which one rises from the reading 
 
i8 S 
 
 of Mr. Guthrie s dialogues. In the one 
 book we see the British selfish, brutal, 
 narrow-minded; and in the other we 
 see the Americans lively, kindly, good- 
 humored. In each case the volume is 
 made up of matter contributed week by 
 week to a comic journal. If it be ob 
 jected that the satirist is bound perforce 
 to show the seamy side of human nature, 
 the obligation ought to be equally re 
 spected on both sides of the Atlantic; 
 and the fact is that Mr. Guthrie reports 
 conversations which are very clever and 
 very amusing, but which give us no lik 
 ing for his fellow-countrymen ; whereas 
 Mr. Bunner s men and women we are 
 ready and glad to take by the hand, even 
 if we do not take them all to our hearts. 
 Look down the dramatis persona; of Mr. 
 Bunner s thirteen stories, and even the 
 old curmudgeon who befools the little 
 parson of one of " The Two Churches of 
 Quawket " has humor enough to save him 
 from hatred, and the little parson himself 
 is pitiful rather than contemptible. Nei 
 ther Colonel Brereton s Aunty nor the 
 mendacious and persuasive colonel is a 
 character whom any American would 
 cross the street to avoid far from it. 
 
1 86 
 
 And as for the pert young person who en 
 gages in " A Sisterly Scheme," and who 
 is perhaps the most forward and objec 
 tionable young woman of recent fiction, 
 where is the American who could object 
 to her? Where, indeed, is the American 
 who does not envy Muffets the fun of his 
 courtship and the joy of his marriage? 
 
 George Eliot in one of her novels tells 
 us that "a difference of taste in jests is a 
 great strain on the affections " a pro 
 found truth. There is little hope of hap 
 piness in a union where one party has a 
 highly developed sense of humor and the 
 other none at all. That is perhaps the 
 reason why so few international marriages 
 are happy. Certainly, the chief character 
 istic of the figures in Mr. Guthrie s little 
 dramas is their absence of humor, and one 
 of the chief characteristics of the people 
 in Mr. Bunner s prose comedies is their 
 abundance of humor. We laugh at the 
 speakers in Voces Populi, while we laugh 
 with the actors in Short Sixes. And 
 we find in Mr. Bunner s book an un 
 failing variety, an unflagging ingenuity 
 and an unforced humor, now rich and 
 now delicate. We are delighted by wit, 
 playful and incessant and never obtrusive. 
 
i8 7 
 
 We discover ourselves to be dissolved in 
 laughter, and often it is " the exquisite 
 laughter that comes from a gratification 
 of the reasoning faculty," as George Eliot 
 called it in one of her letters. Never is it 
 laughter that we ever feel ashamed of ; 
 near the smile there is often a tear, hid 
 den, and to be found only by those who 
 seek. " The Tenor," for example, which 
 may seem to some hasty readers almost 
 farcical, is in reality almost tragic, in that 
 the heroine sees the shattering of an ideal 
 and stumbles over the clay feet of her idol. 
 The " Love Letters of Smith " are broadly 
 funny, if you choose to think them so, but 
 I feel sorry for the reader who pays that 
 clever sketch the tribute of careless laugh 
 ter only. 
 
 Next, perhaps, to Mr. Bunner s firm 
 grasp of character, to his delicate per 
 ception, to his keen observation, to his 
 faculty of hinting a pathetic undercurrent 
 beneath the flow of humor, comes his 
 felicity in suggesting the very essence of 
 New York. Only three of the thirteen 
 little tales are supposed to happen in 
 this great city, and these are, perhaps, 
 not likely to be the most popular; but 
 they are enough to show again what Mr. 
 
Bunner had already revealed in the Story 
 of a New York House and in the still un- 
 collected Ballads of the Town, that he has 
 a knowledge of this busy city possessed 
 by no other American writer of. fiction. 
 It is knowledge not paraded in his pages, 
 but it permeates certain of his characters. 
 Take "The Tenor," for example. In that 
 lively story the young girl, seeking out 
 the being whom she has worshipped from 
 afar, rashly ventures into the hotel where 
 the singer and his wife live. She goes 
 as a servant, and she has a chance inter 
 view with one of the employees of the 
 house " a good-looking, large girl, with 
 red hair and bright cheeks." This young 
 person sees the name " Louise Levy" on 
 the heroine s trunk. " You don t look 
 like a sheeny," she remarks promptly. 
 "Can t tell nothin about names, can you? 
 My name s Slattery. You d think I was 
 Irish, wouldn t you ? Well, I m straight 
 Ne York. I d be dead before I was Irish. 
 Born here. Ninth Ward, an next to an 
 engine-house." Could anything be more 
 intensely, impressively, essentially Man 
 hattan than this little vignette framed in 
 the doorway of a hotel ? 
 
 There are those who choose to speak of 
 
i So 
 
 Mr. Bunner as a humorist, because he is 
 the editor of Puck. He is a humorist, no 
 doubt, and his humor will endure, for it is 
 founded on observation and on an under 
 standing of his fellow-man. But he is a 
 poet as a true humorist must be. Per 
 haps his best story is " Love in Old 
 Clothes," in which the humor and the 
 poetry are inextricably blended, and in 
 which there is a pure tenderness of touch 
 I cannot but call exquisite. And yet, per 
 haps, I do not like it as well as the vigor 
 ous sketch called the " Zadoc Pine Labor 
 Union." This is an object-lesson in 
 Americanism ; it is a model of applied 
 political economy. And Zadoc Pine him 
 self is one of the most direct and manly 
 characters who has stepped from real life 
 into literature. He has gumption and he 
 has grit; he is an American as Benjamin 
 Franklin was an American, and as Abra 
 ham Lincoln was. He could think as 
 straight as he could shoot ; and the tale 
 of his rise in life is as potent a plea for 
 freedom as Mr. Herbert Spencer s. 
 
 But about Mr. Bunner s writings I con 
 fess that I can never speak with the ex 
 pected coldness of the critic, for the au 
 thor is my friend for now many years. We 
 
have dwelt beneath the same roof for 
 months at a time. We have exchanged 
 counsel day and night; we have heard 
 each other s plans and projects ; we have 
 read each other s manuscript; we have 
 revised each other s proof-sheets; more 
 than once we have written the same story 
 together, he holding the pen, or I, as 
 chance would have it. But shall friend 
 ship blind me to the quality of my com 
 rade s art ? When he puts forth a book, 
 shall I pass by on the other side, silent, 
 and giving no sign? That may be the 
 choice of some, but it is not mine. 
 
HARPER S 
 AMERICAN ESSAYISTS. 
 
 AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS.with 
 Other Essays on Other Isms. By BRANDER 
 MATTHEWS. With Portrait. i6mo, Cloth, 
 Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE 
 HUTTON. With Portrait. i6mo, Cloth, 
 Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 "Some American Book Plates," " Grangerism and 
 the Grangerites," "The Portraits of Mary Queen of 
 Scots," "Portrait Inscriptions," and "Poetical Inscrip 
 tions "and Dedications" are the topics chosen by Mr. 
 Hutton, and the reader gets pleasure even as he gets 
 culture from a perusal of his studies in these fields. 
 Hartford Courant. 
 
 CONCERNING ALL OF US. By THOMAS 
 WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. With Portrait. 
 i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 Colonel Higginson has the advantage of a sound and 
 simple philosophy of life to show off his fine literary 
 culture. The one makes him worth reading strong, 
 open-minded, and wholesome ; the other gives him graces 
 of form, style, and literary attraction in great variety. 
 It is hard to decide whether the charm or the usefulness 
 of the present collection of essays preponderates. In 
 dependent, N. Y. 
 
 [OVER] 
 
Harper s America* Essayists. 
 
 FROM THE EASY CHAIR. By GEORGE 
 WILLIAM CURTIS. With Portrait. i6mo, 
 Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 The essays have lost nothing of their actuality ; their 
 freshness of humor ; their contagion of cheerful philoso 
 phy ; their breathing, historical interest ; their wit, that 
 fits like a cap on Wisdom s head; their tenderness of 
 humanity. Philadelphia Ledger. 
 
 AS WE WERE SAYING. By CHARLES 
 DUDLEY WARNER. With Portrait, and Il 
 lustrated by H. W. McViCKAR and Others. 
 i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 Mr. Warner possesses the faculty of putting his 
 thoughts into excellent English, while the simplicity of 
 his style, the absence of all straining after effect, and the 
 apparently spontaneous character of his wit, sufficiently 
 account for the high reputation he enjoys among the 
 American humorists. Episcopal Recorder, Philadelphia. 
 
 CRITICISM AND FICTION. By WILLIAM 
 DEAN HOWELLS. With Portrait. i6mo, 
 Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 Many a good thing and many a true thing is here 
 
 clothed in the diction of a master, and giving forth the 
 
 bouquet of a style as delicately vigorous, so to say, as any 
 
 in English literature. Independent, N. Y. 
 
 Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 JH3P" The foregoing works are for sale by all booksellers 
 or "will be sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, to any 
 part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt 
 of the price. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 ngf; 
 
 Hfcf 
 
 LIBRARY USE 
 
 JUL 1 2 1956 
 
 ru 
 
 , 
 
 
 _ 
 
 ^l_2__ 
 
 . . 
 
 _ 
 
 : 
 
GENERAL LIBRARY -U.C. BERKELEY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY