ppilliflppflilpd lli^i^^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES I UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA AT LOSANGELBSI ^ LIBRARY MODERN ESSAYS SELECTED AND EDITED BY JOHN MILTOX BEEDAN, Ph.D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE JOHN RICHIE SCHULTZ, M.A. INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE AND HEWETTE ELWELL JOYCE, B.A. ASSISTANT INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN YALE COLLEGE I » «» ojj Oj, *. BY Henry Cabot Lodge The catalogue form may be used also as a convenient summary for a man's achievements. On the two hundredth anniversary of Franklin's birth Henry Cabot Lodge, the brilliant Senator from Massachusetts, was asked to contribute an appreciation. Evidently there were eight features in Franklin's life and character that he felt significant : (a) Franklin's temperament, (6) his character, (c) the breadth of his in- terest, etc. This, the real essay, is introduced by two paragraphs of general appreciation, and three paragraphs in which the background is indicated. The same general scheme is followed also within the paragraph development. The first sentence usually summarizes the preceding thought, and the second introduces the main thought of the paragraph. Then this is expanded and explained. Many years ago, when in London for the first time, I remember being filled with the indignant astonishment of which youth alone is capable at seeing upon the pedestal of a statue placed in a public square the single word "Franklin." A Boston boy, born within a stone's throw almost of the birthplace of "Poor Richard," I had never deemed it possible that any Franklin but one could be referred to by that name alone without further definition or qualification. I knew, of course, who the subject of the British statue was, a brave naval ofiicer and bold ex- plorer, who had lost his life in a futile effort to achieve an almost equally futile object. But I had a vague impres- 1 From "A Frontier Town and Other Essays," by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons. 88 FRANKLIN 89 sion that "heroic sailor souls" had very fortunately been not uncommon among English-speaking people, whereas I had supposed that men like Benjamin Franklin had been rather rare among the people of any race. I have passed the British statue many times since then. My youthful and indignant astonishment has long since vanished, and the humor of the inscription has become very apparent to me. I know now that the inscription merely represents a solid British habit of claiming every- thing, ignoring the rest of mankind, and enlarging to the utmost their own achievements, both great and small, upon the entirely sound principle that a constant and fear- less assertion of one's own virtues will lead a considerable proportion of a very busy and somewhat indifferent world to take one at one's own valuation. The highly humorous side of describing Sir John as the only Franklin, and relegating to obscurity a man who achieved greatness in literature, in science, in politics, and in diplomacy, and who was one of the most brilliant figures in a brilliant century, has come in the lapse of time to give me no little real pleasure. I have also learned that my early estimate of the man commonly referred to outside of England as "Franklin" was not only vague, but, although, right in direction, was still far short of the truth, which a better knowledge enables me to substitute for an ill-defined belief. Two hundred years have elapsed since his birth in the little house on Milk Street in Boston, and as the anniversary of that event is now being celebrated, it is well worth while to pause for a moment and consider him. Few men, be it said, better deserve consideration, for he not only played a great part in shaping events and influencing human thought, but he represents his time more com- 90 MODERN ESSAYS pletely, perhaps, than any other actor in it, something which is always in and of itself a memorable feat. Franklin's time was the eighteenth century, which his long life nearly covered. When he was born Anne was Queen, and England, agitated by dynastic struggles, was with difficulty making head against the world-wide power of Louis XIV. When Franklin died France had been driven from North America, the British Empire had been divided, his own being one of the master hands in the division, the United States of America had started on their career as a nation, and the dawning light of the French Revolution was beginning to redden the skies. Marvellous changes these to be enclosed within the span of one brief human life, and yet they were only part of the story. The truth is that the eighteenth century was a very remarkable period. Not so very long ago this statement would have been regarded as a rather silly paradox, and in a little while it will be looked upon as a commonplace. But as yet we are not wholly free from the beliefs of our fathers in this respect. The nineteenth century, in its lusty youth and robust middle age, adopted as part of its creed the belief that its predecessor upon the roll of time, from whose loins it sprang, deserved only the contempt and hatred of mankind. Incited thereto by the piercing invectives of the Romantic school, brim- ming over with genius, and just then in possession of the earth, and by the clamors of Thomas Carlyle, the nine- teenth century held that the eighteenth was a period of shams and conventions, of indifference and immorality, of unspeakable oppressions and of foul miseries hidden behind a gay and glittering exterior, the heyday of a society which in a word deserved the fate of the cities of the plain. FRANKLIN 91 This view was true enough, so far as it went ; but it was by no means the whole story. It had the fascination of simphcity and of convenience which half-truths nearly always possess ; but as Mr. Speaker Reed once said, "half-truths are simple, but the whole truth is the most complicated thing on earth." The time has now come when we may begin to approximate the whole truth. Indeed, before the nineteenth century had closed it had begun to modify its opinions and to be less sure about the total depravity of its progenitor. Under the skilful manipulations of bric-a-brac dealers the art and furniture of the eighteenth century have become and are now the fashion. It is a pretty trivial art at best, very inferior to that which the nineteenth century, in France at least, has produced ; but it is always pleasant to observe the whirligig of time bring in its revenges, and it must be admitted that the eighteenth-century furniture is an in- describable improvement over the dreadful taste known as Victorian, but which really came forth like the Goths and Vandals of old time from the heart of Germany, to submerge and ruin a careless and unsuspecting world. Still, whatever their merits may be, the eighteenth century in pictures and chairs and tables is again in high fashion, and perhaps we can now begin to see also that it had its great side as well as its bad one, and that it was in reality a very wonderful time. It is usually said as beyond dispute that it had no poetry in the nobler and more imaginative sense ; and if by poetry is meant the immortal work of the Elizabethans on the one hand, and of the Romantic school on the other, we may be sure that, speaking broadly, the eighteenth cen- tury, like Audrey, was not poetical. Yet none the less this unpoetical, unimaginative century produced Gray and 92 MODERN ESSAYS Burns in Great Britain, Chenier and Gilbert in France, the first part of "Faust" — enough glory in itself for many centuries — and the "Wallenstein Trilogy" in Germany. It was, too, the century of Bach and Handel and Haydn ; it gave birth to Mozart and Beethoven, — something of a record for an unimaginative century in the most imagina- tive of arts. Even those who decry it most admit its great- ness in prose, where it developed a style which culminated in Gibbon and Burke. In pure intellect it can hardly be surpassed by any of its fellows, for it was the century of Immanuel Kant. It was likewise the century of Louis XV, perhaps the meanest thing that accident ever cast upon a throne, but it was also the century of Frederick the Great. It was illustrated in its youth by the Regent Orleans, and illuminated at its close by George Washing- ton. It was the century of Casanova, most typical and amusing of rascals, and it was equally the century of John Wesley. It was a time when men persecuted for a religion in which they had no faith, and sneered at the doctrines of the church to which they conformed. The classes revelled in luxury, and the masses were sunk in poverty. Corruption ran riot in the public service, and the oppres- sion of the people was without limit on the Continent, where the lettre de cachet of the French king flung men into prison, and wretched German princelings sold their subjects to die in foreign wars that they might build ugly palaces and maintain still more ugly mistresses. Yet in those evil days more was done to set free human thought and strike off the shackles of priestly rule than in any century which history records. More was then done to give men political liberty and build up constitutional government than in all the previous centuries, for it was the century of Montes- quieu and Rousseau and the Federalist, of the revolt of FRANKLIN 93 the American Colonies and of the French Revolution. It was the century of kings and nobles, yet it gave birth to modern democracy. The spirit of revolt went side by side with the spirit of reaction and convention. There were indeed two voices in the eighteenth century. We know which one truly foretold the coming days. But which was the true voice of the time ? Was it Voltaire, pleading the cause of the Galas family, or that of Foulon, declaring that the people might eat grass .f* Which was the true leader, George Washington at Valley Forge, or George III hiring Indians and Hessians to carry out his mother's injunction, "George, be a king".'* It was veri- tably a wonderful century, full of meaning, rich in intel- lect, abounding in contradictions. It produced, too, many great men, but none more fully representative than Benjamin Franklin of all that made it memorable. He reflected at once its greatness and its contradictions, although not its evil side, because in those years of change and ferment he was ranged with the children of light, and was ever reaching out for new and better things. Of pure English stock, born in a commu- nity where Puritanism was still dominant, where religion was rigid and morality austere, he was an adventurer in his youth, a liberal always, a free-thinker in religion, the moralist of common-sense, and pre-eminently the man of the world, at home in all societies and beneath every sky. He had the gift of success, and he went on and up from the narrow fortunes of a poor, hard-working family until he stood in the presence of kings and shaped the destinies of nations. The Puritanism to which he was born fell away from him at the start, and in his qualities and his career it seems as if he reproduced the type of the men of Eliza- 94 MODERN ESSAYS beth's time who founded Virginia and New England ; for he had all the versatility, the spirit of adventure, the enormous vitality and splendid confidence in life and in the future which characterized that great epoch. Yet he had also the calmness, the self-control, the apparent ab- sence of enthusiasm which were the note of his own time. The restlessness of mind which marked the Elizabethans was his in a high degree, but it was masked by a cool and calculating temperament rarely found in the days of the great Queen. Franklin was born not only a Puritan Englishman, but a colonist ; yet never was there a man with less of the colonist or the provincial about him. A condition of political dependence seems for some mysterious reason to have a depressing effect upon those who remain continu- ously in that condition. The soil of a dependency appears to be unfavorable to the production of ability of a high type in any direction until the generation arrives which is ready to set itself free. Franklin was a colonial subject until he was seventy, and yet no more independent man than he lived in that age of independent thought. He rose to the highest distinction in four great fields of activity, any one of which would have sufficed for a life's ambition ; he moved easily in the society of France and England, he appeared at the most brilliant court in Europe, and no one ever thought of calling him provincial. The atmos- phere of a dependency never clung to him, nor in the heyday of aristocracy was his humble origin ever remem- bered. The large-mindedness, the complete independence, the entire simplicity of the man dispersed the one and destroyed the memory of the other. Modern history contains very few examples of a man who, with such meagre opportunities and confined for FRANKLIN 95 many years to a province far distant from the centres of civilization, achieved so much and showed so much abihty in so many different ways as FrankHn. With only the education of the common school and forced to earn his living while still a boy, he became a man of wide learning, pre-eminent in science, and a writer, in the words of one of the first of English critics,^ "of supreme literary skill." His autobiography is one of the half-dozen great autobiog- raphies which are a perennial joy. His letters are charm- ing, and his almanacs (was there ever a more unlikely vehicle for good literature?) were translated into many languages, delighted with their homely wisdom and easy humor thousands who thought of America only as the abode of wolves and Indians, and made the name of "Poor Richard" familiar to the civilized world. Yet literature, where he attained such a success, winning a high place in the literary history not only of his own country, but of his age and his language, was but his pastime. The intellectual ambition of his life was found in science, and he went so far in that field that the history of one of the great natural forces, which in its development has changed the world, cannot be written without giving one of the first places of pioneer and discoverer to the printer of Boston and Philadelphia. Yet neither literature nor science, either of which is quite enough to fill most lives, sufficed for Franklin. He began almost at the very beginning to take a share in public affairs. His earliest writings when a printer at the case dealt with political questions. He then entered the politics of the city, thence he passed to the larger concerns of the great Province of Pennsylvania, and at every step he showed a capacity for organization, an ^ Mr. Augustine Birrell, in his essay on "Old Booksellers." 96 MODERN ESSAYS ability for managing men and a power of persuasive speech rarely equalled. He had a way of carrying measures and securing practical and substantive results which excites profound admiration, since nothing is more difficult than such achievements in the whole range of public service. This is especially true where the man who seeks results is confronted by active opposition or by that even more serious obstacle, the inertness or indifference of the com- munity. Yet nothing pleased Franklin more than such a situation as arose when in time of war he overcame the Quaker opposition to putting the province in a state of defence. His method was not as a rule that of direct attack. He preferred to outw^it his opponents, an opera- tion which gratified his sense of humor; and a favorite device of his was to defeat opposition by putting forward anonymously arguments apparently in its behalf, which, by their irony and extravagance, utterly discredited the cause they professed to support. To his success in the field of public discussion he added that of administration when he became Postmaster-General for the colonies and organized the service, and then again when he represented Pennsylvania and later other provinces as their agent in London. It was there in England that he defended the cause of the colonies before both Parliament and Ministers when resistance to taxation began. He came home an old man, verging on seventy, to take his place as one of the chief leaders in the Revolution. These leaders of revolution were, as a rule and as is usual at such periods, young men, and yet there was not one among them all with greater flexibility of mind or more perfect readiness to bring on the great change than Franklin. He returned again to Europe to seek aid for his country in the war, and it was chiefly due to him that the French alliance, which FRANKLIN 97 turned the scale, was formed. When the war drew to a close it was he who began alone the task of making peace. He had nearly completed the work when his colleagues appeared in Paris and by incautious words broke the web so carefully spun. Patient and undisturbed, Franklin be- gan again. Again he played one English faction against the other. Again he managed France, turning to good advan- tage the vigorous abilities of Adams and the caution of Jay. Finally, boldly disregarding the instructions of Congress, he emerged from all complications with a triumphant peace. Even then his work was not done. He came back to America to govern in Pennsylvania and to share in making the Constitution of the United States, thus exhibiting the power to build up as well as to pull down, something most uncommon, for the man of revolution is rarely a constructive statesman. He closed his great career by setting his hand to the Constitution of the United States, as he had already done to the Declaration of Independence. Yet after his achievements and services have all been recounted we still come back to that which was most remarkable, — the manner in which he at once influenced and reflected his time. The eighteenth century has for long been held up to scorn as destitute of enthusiasm, lacking in faith and ideals, indifferent and utterly worldly. Franklin was certainly devoid of enthusiasm, and yet one unbroken 'purpose ran strongly through his life and was pursued by him with a steadiness and force which are frequently wanting in enthusiasts. He sought unceasingly the improvement of man's condition here on earth. Whether it was the invention of a stove, the paving of Philadelphia, the founding of a library, the movement of storms, the control of electric currents, or the defence 98 MODERN ESSAYS of American liberty, lie was always seeking to instruct and help his fellow-men and to make their lot a better and happier one. The morals he preached were indeed worldly ; there never was a bit of morality more purely of the account-book kind than the familiar aphorism about honesty, and yet it may be doubted whether all the pulpits in America did more to make men honest and thrifty, and to develop good and sober citizens than the uninspired preachings of "Poor Richard." He was a sceptic, as were nearly all the great men of the century, but his honest doubt helped to free the human mind and dispel the darkness which had stayed the march of intel- lect. He never scoffed at religion ; he did not hesitate to appeal to it at a great crisis to sway the minds of his fellows, but he suffered no dogmas to stand in the way of that opening of the mind which he believed would advance the race and soften by its discoveries the hard fate of humanity. He was conservative by nature in accordance with the habit of the time, but that which was new had no terrors for him, and he entered upon the path of revolu- tion with entire calmness when he felt that revolution had become necessary to the welfare and happiness of his people. There was nothing inevitable about the American Rev- olution at the particular time at which it came. It would have failed indeed on the field of battle had it not been for George Washington. But when the British Government, among their many blunders, insulted Frank- lin and rejected his counsel they cast aside the one man whose wisdom might have saved the situation, and, so far as they could, made the revolt of the colonies unavoid- able. It was an indifferent, cold-blooded century, and both epithets have been applied to Franklin, no doubt FRANKLIN 99 with some justice. But it is never fair to judge one cen- tury or its people by the standards of another. FrankUn was a man of extraordinary self-control combined with a sense of humor which never deserted him and which is easily mistaken for cold-blooded indifference. He signed the Declaration of Independence, it is said, with a jest ; yet no man measured its meaning or felt its gravity more than he. He stood silent in the Cock-Pit while the coarse invective of Wedderburne beat about his head, and made no reply. The only revenge he took, the only answer he ever made, if tradition may be believed, was to wear when he signed the treaty acknowledging American indepen- dence the same coat of Manchester velvet which he wore when the pitiless abuse of England's Attorney-General was poured out upon him. He was not a man who dis- played emotion — it was not the fashion of his time. He was a philosopher and a stoic. Perhaps, as Mr. Birrell says, he was neither loving nor tender-hearted, yet he manged both in his life and in the disposition of his prop- erty to do many kindnesses and much good to those to whom the battle of life was hardest. His sympathies were keen for mankind rather than for the individual, but that again was the fashion of his time — a fashion which shattered many oppressions gray with the age of centuries and redressed many wrongs. Franklin was very human, far from perfect in more than one direction. It is easy enough to point out blem- ishes in his character. But as a public man he sought no private ends, and his great and versatile intellect was one of the powerful influences which in the eighteenth century wrought not only for political liberty, but for freedom of thought, and in so doing rendered services to humanity which are a blessing to mankind to-day. We accept the 100 MODERN ESSAYS blessings and forget too often to wliose labors in a receding past they are due. We owe a vast debt to the great men of the eighteenth century who brought out of the shams and conventions and oppressions of that time the revolu- tions in politics, in society, and in thought the fruits of which we of to-day now enjoy. To no one of these men is the world's debt larger than to Franklin. THE SERIOUS PEPYS i BY Wilbur Cortez Abbott Much the same problem as that solved by Senator Lodge confronted Professor Abbott. There is, however, in the latter case a large amount of popular misunderstanding first to be cleared away. Naturally his essay falls into three well-defined divisions. First, he states briefly the known facts of Pepys's life. Secondly, he considers very fully the effect upon Pepys's reputation due to the discovery of the famous " Diary." By this means, — and he has already used half the space of the total essay, — he has gained the reader's confidence by showing that he is quite familiar with the usual interpretation of Pepys's character. Then follow eloquent paragraphs in which this conception is overthrown. Point by point a new Pepys is built up. Little by little this new figure emerges until from the ruins of the reader's previous picture of the dis- solute rake rises the conception of the great public servant. "Whoever," says Montaigne, "will justly consider and with due proportion, of what kind of men and of what sort of actions the glory sustains itself in the records of history, will find that there are very few actions and very few persons of our times who can there pretend any right." "Of so many thousands of valiant men who have died within these fifteen hundred years in France with their swords in their hands," he goes on, "not a hundred have come to our knowledge. The memory not of the commanders only, but of battles and victories is buried 1 From The Yale Revieiv, for April, 1914, by permission of the author and of the editor of The Yale Review. 101 102 MODERN ESSAYS and gone ; the fortunes of above half the world for want of a record stir not from their place and vanish without duration ; ... it must be some very eminent greatness or some consequence of great importance that fortune has added to it that signalizes" an action to make it, and the actor, remembered. But there is no recipe for immortality, even for the greatest ; and if fame's vagaries thus affect captains and kings, what chance have men in lesser stations ; if con- querors are so frequently forgotten, what of the men of peace — which has its oblivion far more profound than war ! Above all, perhaps, what hope has one who devotes himself not to the destruction or manipulation of his fellow men but to their service, in particular as that bul- wark of organized society, an honest and able civil ser- vant ? Little enough, indeed. The worst of demagogues, the most incompetent of commanders, the harshest of tyrants, the most depraved of rakes, has far better chance for an undying, if an undesirable, fame under present his- torical conditions than even the best of those "sons of Martha." Save when preserved by other means, some share in politics, some gift to literature, their fame is mingled with the air. Only among the unwritten tradi- tions of their service and its unread documents their repu- tations lie, safe from the praise or blame of those they served. Of this great class, paradoxical as it may seem, there is no better representative than the well-known subject of this essay. On the twenty-sixth of May, 1703, while England girded herself for that far-spreading conflict which in a twelve- month was to bring to her Gibraltar and the great Marl- borough's "famous victory" of Blenheim, there died at Clapham, near London, one Samuel Pepys, sometime a THE SERIOUS PEPYS 103 notable figure in the world he left. Member of Parlia- ment, Treasurer of Tangier, Surveyor General of the Victualling Office, Clerk of the Acts, and Secretary of the Admiralty, he had played no trifling part in the event- ful years of the last Stuart kings. Aside from his official life, Pepys had been scarcely less well known in widely different fields. Master of Trinity House and of the Clothworkers' Company, Governor of Christ's Hospital, twice President of the Royal Society ; a patron and critic of the arts, music, the drama, literature ; an indefatigable collector of manuscripts and books, broadsides, ballads, music-scores, and curios ; he had been no less at home in gatherings of scientists and virtuosos, in Covent Garden and in Drury Lane, or the booksellers' shops about old St. Paul's, than in the Navy Office and dockyards. He had arranged, even composed, some music, and he was no mean amateur performer on certainly one instrument ; he had contributed to the Royal Society ; not a few books had been dedicated to him ; and he himself had published at least one. His portrait had been painted three times by Kneller, once by Lely, and again by artists of less note. Among his friends were statesmen and scientists, authors, officials, musicians, royalties : Hans Sloane, Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, John Evelyn, John Dryden, and that "admirable Lord High Admiral but less than admi- rable king," James the Second, now long an exile at the court of France. Surely, if a man's achievements are to count for anything, here was a candidate for at least a moderate immortality. " In the judgment I make of another man's life," says the old French moralist-philosopher, "I always observe how he carried himself at his death ; . . . this is the day that must be the judge of all the foregoing years." This 104 MODERN ESSAYS supreme test the Secretary met bravely. "Last night," wrote the nonjuring clergyman, George Hickes, who was with him at the end, "I did the last offices for Samuel Pepys. . . . The greatness of his behaviour in his long and sharp tryall before his death was in every respect answerable to his great life, and in accordance with his motto, Mens cujusque is est quisque,'" — as a man's mind is, so is he. "This day," wrote old John Evelyn, "died Mr. Sam. Pepys, a very worthy, industrious, and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed thro' all the most consid- erable offices ... all which he performed with great in- tegrity. . . . He was universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation ; . . . for neere 40 yeares . . . my particu- lar friend." Such was the esteem of his contemporaries for one who had been called successively the right hand, the Nestor, and the father of the English navy ; reckoned the ablest civil servant of his time, a shrewd, strict, serious man of business, a faithful friend, a generous patron, an accomplished gentleman, and an honest man. May none of us have a worse epitaph. His will bore out the character of his life and death. The wide distribution of mourning and rings, according to the custom of the time, witnessed his many and eminent friendships ; his numerous bequests to his acquaintances and servants further testified to an agreeable side of his nature. The bestowal of his fortvme on his nephew ; and the devising of his library to Magdalene College, Cam- bridge, after that nephew's death ; the gift of his ship- models to his partner and friend, William Hewer, with recommendation "to consider how these, also together THE SERIOUS PEPYS 105 with his own, may be preserved for pubhck benefit," — gave evidence of a strong family, college, and public spirit ; which, again, often contributes somewhat to post- humous reputation. This, for the son of a tailor, who owed small thanks to birth or fortune, some to circumstance, most to himself, for all the blessings he enjoyed in life, and in such unusual and such long unsuspected degree passed on to posterity, was no small achievement as a bid for fame. To his suc- cess his schooling at Huntingdon and St. Paul's, then at Magdalene College, contributed somewhat ; but the de- termining factor in his career had been his connection with his father's cousin and his own patron, Sir Edward Montagu, the friend and relative and follower of Cromwell. When, after a brief excursion in diplomacy, the youthful Pepys entered the service of this capable commander, whom the Protector had summoned from his place in the New Model to a seat in the Council of State with charge of naval operations against Spain, Dunkirk, and the Northern powers ; and, in particular, when, after a period of retirement, the Convention Parliament commissioned Montagu to bring back the exiled Charles to England and the throne, the fortune of his secretary, Pepys, was settled with his own. Clerk of the Acts and of the Admiralty Board ; then, by successive stages of advance, wresting increasing reputation and authority from the catastrophes of fire, plague, and war, Pepys had outgrown the need of a patron long before he became the Secretary of the Admiralty. Through twenty busy years, save for the in- terruption of the Popish Plot, the history of naval admin- istration more and more became the story of his life, as he refashioned his office on the lines it held for more than a century. Not without color and incident, verging more 106 MODERN ESSAYS than once on tragedy as he became involved in the vicissi- tudes of politics, but in the main absorbed in the reform and conduct of naval affairs, until the Revolution drove him and his master James the Second from their posts, his life was one in which increasing purpose ran with vigor and success. Such was the Pepys of the seventeenth century, the greatest Secretary of what is, in one view, England's greatest service ; thus he lived and died. Thus was he not remembered ; it is, indeed, amazing to find how soon he was forgotten and how completely. A dozen years after his death, his name found place in "The Continua- tion of Mr. Collier's Supplement to his Great Dictionary" ; a dozen more, and Burnet noted his connection with the Popish Plot ; while, thanks chiefly to the fact that Kneller painted and White engraved his portrait, Grainger gave him a page in his extraordinary "Biographical History of England." Another fifty years, and Hume observed that naval tradition still recalled Pepys's administration as "a model of order and economy." The rest was all but silence; among the innumerable "characters" which en- tertained the readers of the "Annual Register," his found no place; the long files of the "Gentleman's Magazine," save for a brief note on his library, knew him not ; in its three editions in the eighteenth century not even the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" recorded his name. Mem- bers or visitors of Magdalene College still observed, as now, the building which contained his books, and some even found their way inside ; at least two recorded something of the treasures they discovered there ; and part of the material for Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" was drawn from that source. Frequenters of St. Olave's Church may have taken notice of the Secretary's tomb; THE SERIOUS PEPYS 107 members of corporations or societies to which he once belonged might now and then recall him by his gifts ; lovers of art noted his portraits as examples of the painter's skill. Family pride, the industry of genealogist or anti- quarian, might have found in parish registers the entry of his birth, marriage, and death ; or in the college books, besides the record of his entrance and exit, that he was once reproved for being drunk. An occasional reader may have looked in his "Memoirs of the Royal Navy"; a scholar or an archivist here and there have noted the unread masses of his memoranda in the Public Records Office or the libraries. This was the sum of Pepys's im- pression on the world a century after he left it — a handful of mementos and a fast fading memory. Of these, only his papers and his books still stood be- tween him and oblivion. The books, indeed, had been not seldom used ; the papers were still all but unexplored. Sometime during that eighteenth century, which con- cerned itself so mightily with very many things much less worth while, a now unknown enthusiast began a catalogue of the Pepysian collections in the Magdalene library. He was soon, far too soon, discouraged. There lay "a vast collection from our antient records . . . relating to our naval affairs and those of other countries. Books of musick, mathematicks and several other subjects all excel- lent in their kind." Among them were two hundred and fifty volumes chiefly of naval manuscripts, gathered, doubtless, as a basis for a projected history. There lay the Lethington Collection of Scottish poetry ; masses of tracts and pamphlets ; with the largest body of broadside ballads in existence. Above all, in the mind of at least one bibliophile, was what "he hath collected with respect to the City of London, for the illustration of that famous 108 MODERN ESSAYS city," besides "a vast collection of heads both domestic and foreign, beyond expression, copy-books of all the masters of Europe," and "a large book of title-pages, frontispieces . . . not to be paralleled," the whole crowned with an "admirable catalogue." Besides these, fifty vol- umes more of Pepys's manuscripts had found their way into the hands of the great collector, Rawlinson, and so to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Besides these, still, his documents in public and in private hands, had they been even catalogued in print, would have reared a monument whose very size might have compelled attention and re- vised the eighteenth century's knowledge of the past and of Pepys. But the exploiting of this material was reserved for later generations, when its fulfillment became a romance of literature and scholarship alike. It is a well-known story how, among the masses of historical material which found their way to print in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Diary of John Evelyn, with its mention of the Secretary, inspired the Master of Magdalene College to put in Lord Grenville's hands six volumes of cipher manuscript from Pepys's collections which had long puz- zled curious visitors ; how that accomplished nobleman, having transcribed some pages, found them of such in- terest that an undergraduate, John Smith, was entrusted with the completion of the work ; and how after three years of labor on his part there presently appeared, under Lord Braybrooke's editorship, the "Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F. R. S., Secretary to the Admiralty . . . comprising his Diary from 1659 to 1669 , . . with a selection from his private Correspondence." It is, per- haps, scarcely so well appreciated how, with that event, ensued a revolution in posthumous fame unparalleled in THE SERIOUS PEPYS 109 literary history. From the obscurity of a century emerged no mere man of affairs but a Personality. What a hfe- time of great endeavor could not do, a book accomplished almost in a day. By the transcriber's magic the forgotten Secretary of the Admiralty was transformed into a Prince of Diarists and set among the immortals. So complete was the triumph over oblivion that, within twenty years, even Macaulay, who had drawn largely on the Secretary's books for his History, allowed himself to write of "Samuel Pepys whose library and diary have kept his name fresh to our time" ; so vivid was the book that even the great historian seems to have felt, like many since, that its author had always been well known. It is not surprising that he was misled, nor that the first transcriber often spent fourteen hours a day upon his task, when one considers how amazingly alive the book is still, how every hour promises a fresh surprise. Read but the opening lines with their directness, reminiscent of Defoe, and you feel the charm impelling you to go on : Blessed be God, at the end of last year I was in very good health. . . . I lived in Axe Yard, having my wife and servant Jane and no more in family than us three. . . . The condition of the State was thus, . . . the Rump after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the Army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the river and Monk with his army in Scotland. . . . The new Common Council of the City do speak very high. . . . My own private condition very handsome and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor, besides my goods of my house and my office. . . . This morning ... I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, . . . went to Mr. Gunning's Chapel at Exeter House. . . . Dined at home . . . where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, . . . supt at my father's where in came Mrs. The. Turner and Madam Morrice. ... In the morning . . . Old East brought me a dozen bottles of sack. ... I went . . . to speak with Mr. Calthropp about the £60 due my Lord. . . [and] heard that Lambert was coming up to London. 110 MODERN ESSAYS There you have, in little, Pepys and his Diary ; his house, his clothes, his wife, his food, his health, his office, his acquaintances, his amusements, his relatives, his intimate gossip of affairs. You have, indeed, much more : at once an incredibly lifelike picture of the times, and a true ro- mance, surpassing all fiction, of the life and strange, sur- prising adventures of one Samuel Pepys, who lived, far from alone, for seventy years in the island of Great Britain, and whose activities are here set down with the detail that has charmed generations since in the exploits of his antithesis, Robinson Crusoe, with all the added zest of brilliant environment. There is, indeed, some curious kinship between these two wholly unlike productions. There is the same fas- cination in watching Pepys rescue from the catastrophe of the Cromwellian rule the means to make his fortune as in seeing Crusoe rescue from the shipwreck the means of sustaining life ; the same interest in observing the one build his career and the other build his house, the same suspense over the crises in the affairs of each ; the same pleasure in their triumphs over adversity as they struggle with nature or with the world of men ; the same satisfac- tion over their ultimate victory ; there is even something curiously alike in the accumulation of minute and often apparently trivial detail by which, in truth or fancy, both authors produce their lifelike effects. Pepys has, indeed, had full reward for all his pains. Since the appearance of his Diary in the first abbreviated form which printed scarcely half of its contents, much learned and loving labor has been spent on its elucidation. The ingenuity and industry of successive editors has enlarged our knowledge and understanding of the work ; the two original volumes, what with inclusion of the parts at first THE SERIOUS PEPYS 111 suppressed and a great bulk of comment, have increased to ten. One editor has re-transcribed the manuscript, an- other has compiled a book on Pepys and the world he lived in ; the family genealogy has been unearthed and a study made of one of its members as "a later Pepys" ; so far has the reflected glory shone. The diarist's early life has been laid bare ; his letters published, with his will ; his portraits reproduced ; a whole book on Pepys as a lover of music has appeared ; an essay on the sermons that he heard ; even the medical aspects of his married life have been explained by a physician-author. Essayists and bookmakers still find in him an ever-fertile subject for their pens ; no biographical dictionary or encyclopaedia is without a full account of the great diarist ; and, rising finally to the full stature of a real biography, few names to-day in English literature are better known, few classics more widely read or more enjoyed. If the effect on Pepys has been so great, the influence of the Diary on seventeenth-century history has been no less. The formal even tragic dignity which for a hundred years enveloped that great revolutionary period was de- stroyed almost beyond repair of the dullest historian. " It was as though in a musty library, slumbrous with solemn volumes, a window had suddenly been opened, and the spectator looked out upon the London of the mid-seven- teenth century, full of color and movement, still breathing the Elizabethan enchantment, . . . vehemently returned to the lust of the eye and the pride of the flesh after the restraints and severities of the Puritan dominion." Be- fore the Diary appeared, the England of Charles the Second was the England of Clarendon, Eachard, Rapin, Hume, a dull, tangled interlude between two revolutions ; since his book it has been, for the most of us, the England 112 MODERN ESSAYS of Pepys, amusing, intimate, incredibly alive. Its obscura- tion has not yet been wholly cleared away, the history of the Restoration still remains to be written ; but when it is, secretary-diarist will have no less a share in writing its memoirs than he had in managing its affairs. Already from his book have been evolved more than one history of seventeenth-century manners, music, drama, literature ; even political historians have used it to advantage. It has been supplemented by other works, but to it we owe in greater measure than to any single book the picture of a period which, even now, makes Pepys's time nearer to us than any other decade of English history. When one considers what the Secretary was and did, and how his reputation stood before the Diary appeared, this result seems all the more extraordinary. Eminent as he was in admiralty circles, as a patron of the arts, collector, and philanthropist ; useful as his life had been and notable for honorable success in public service, it gave small promise of eminence in literature. His success, indeed, lies far outside that realm. However great the quaint attraction of his phrase ; however bright the light upon his time, the Diary owes its wide appeal and deepest charm to the infusion of a wholly different quality. It is not merely trite to say that its fascination lies in its frank- ness ; — that is a superficial, obvious, half-truth. To his Diary, Pepys confided every thought, sensation, motive, action, and desire, — good, bad, high, low, important, trivial, absurd, — with a freedom beyond mere frankness. The result is unique, not merely in literature, but almost, if not quite, in life itself. It seldom happens among myriads of human relationships that anyone knows any of his fellows, however near and dear, as well as all of us know Pepys ; most of us scarcely know ourselves as well ; THE SERIOUS PEPYS 113 few of us, or none, would dare admit, even to ourselves, much less commit to paper, in whatever decent obscurity of cipher, all that the diarist records. His work is not mere frankness ; it is self-revelation at its highest power — there is nothing more to tell. It is more than mere literature, it is life itself. Most of such so-called revelations are far from what they profess to be. Some are mere prurience ; some, morbid psychology ; some, simple vanity ; some, conscious or unconscious pose ; the most, mere formal record of an outer life, or merely litera- ture. Pepys's work is the delineation of a very human being, a "natural man," stripped of the convenances of society, who would have been at once the terror and the pride of eighteenth-century prophets who invoked such phantoms constantly and as constantly produced imagina- tive figments in their place. To such vainer sophistica- tions Pepys's Diary bears the same relation as that of frank, unashamed, and proper savage nakedness to the salacious half-revelations of a decadent stage. One has but to compare it with such outpourings from those of Rousseau to those of Marie Bashkirtseff to realize the great gulf fixed between healthy appreciation of a man's triumph over circumstances and the futile conflict with shadows. Being Pepys, nothing human, — and very few other things which came under his observation, — were alien either to him or to his pen. First, his appearance ; one reads to-day with wonder not unmixed with awe of "a velvet cloak, two new cloth suits, ... a new shagg gowne trimmed with gold buttons and twist, with a new hat and silk tops for my legs," — all, as it were, in one mouthful. It is no wonder that his clothes cost some five times those of his wife, but it leads to serious refiection in these days. 114 MODERN ESSAYS Yet it was no less policy than vanity which prompted this display. "I hope I shall, with more comfort," he says, "labor to get more and with better successe than when for want of clothes I was forced to sneake like a beggar." That he got more his accounts reveal. When he went with Montagu to bring back the King, he had scarcely a penny to his name. He came back with near a hundred pounds. After seven years of office he reckoned himself worth some seven thousand pounds ; prepared to set up a coach ; gave his sister, Paulina, six hundred pounds as a marriage portion ; and lent his cousin, Roger, five hun- dred ; — for all of which he blessed God fervently in his Diary. When he died, the Crown owed him twenty-eight thousand pounds ; yet he left a comfortable fortune. And he was neither dishonest nor niggardly. During at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, few fields of human endeavor yielded such rich returns as public office ; and if Pepys took his fees, like other men, unlike too many of them, he gave good service in return. Nor was he ungenerous in spending money. Books, pictures, music, objects of art, furniture, plate, hangings, he purchased with almost lavish hand. Preeminently a Londoner, he was insensible to those charms of country-seat and garden which so engrossed his friend John Evelyn ; a man of weighty affairs, gambling of all kinds appealed to him even less ; cautious and thrifty as became his class, no charge of penuriousness will hold against him, in the large. His tastes, indeed, save two, were such as helped the world along. Devoted to the theatre and a good-fellow- ship which led him sometimes to excess, he made his frequent "vowes against wine and plays" only to break them, as men have done since. The wine at least made no inroads upon his business ; the plays make his Diary THE SERIOUS PEPYS 115 the best of all guides to seventeenth-century London theatres. But at the theatre, still more in church, at home, abroad, one of his chief interests was what the eighteenth century knew as "female charms." One of his crosses was the lack of such loveliness in his own church, St. Olave's ; "not one handsome face in all of them, as if, indeed, there was a curse, as Bishop Fuller heretofore said, upon our parish." What he lacked there he made up fully elsewhere. He kissed Nell Gwyn, besides uncounted others, including the face of the exhumed body of Catherine of Valois, who had been dead more than two centuries, that he might be said to have kissed a queen ! His friend- ship with the actresses, especially Mrs. Knipp ; the trials which arose when she winked at him and he had trouble to make his eyes behave as they should in his wife's pres- ence, — are not such things and many more of like sort writ large throughout the Diary.'' These and the less credit- able story of his relations with his wife's servant. Deb, witness something to those qualities which led the penni- less youth, but two years out of college, to espouse the pretty daughter of a poverty-stricken Huguenot refugee addicted to invention and living chiefly upon charity. All this and even more, in infinite variety of phrase, men have laid stress on since his book appeared. Largely, and no doubt naturally, this side of Pepys's nature and his Diary chiefly appealed to a world concerned for the most part with the trivial, or worse ; and it might be supposed that frankness such as his would win for him a place in the esteem of those who read his book, comparable to that he occupied in his contemporaries' minds. In some de- gree, especially at first, thanks to the bowdlerizing of his too cautious editor, this was the case. That incomparable antiquarian, Walter Scott, hastened to welcome this "man 116 MODERN ESSAYS of business, ... of information if not learning, taste and whim as well as pleasure, statesman, virtuoso, bel esprit," to the world of literature, and many followed in the novel- ist's train. Yet, gradually, as each succeeding issue of the Diary included more and more of intimate, less de- corous detail, omitted by the early editors, Pepys's reputa- tion sank. Like Lucilius, "having dared portray himself as he found himself to be," he proved that "no man writes of himself save to his hurt." Generations smiled, frowned, shrugged, moralized, felt superior. Critics, who fre- quently knew nothing of him save his own revelations and the comments of his editors, often sneered. Coleridge observed he was "a pollard man," without a top, ^ to which Pepys might well have replied that the critic was all top. Lowell, with condescension almost worthy of a foreigner, wrote of "the unconscious blabbings of the Puri- tan tailor's son." Another, admitting his honesty and even a certain cleverness, laughed at his "cockney revels," and his pleasure when Lord Clarendon patted his head ; others still, noted only "the strength and coarseness of the common mind," the " decomposed Puritan mind," of this "typical bourgeois, kindred to Kneller in vulgarity." A no less tolerant soul than Stevenson, following, as often, earlier lead, adduces Pepys's very appearance against him ; says his face shows "no aspiration," only "an animal joy in all that comes," though he admits that " in a corrupt and idle period he played the man, toiled hard, and kept his honor bright." His severest critic elaborates at length the manifold inconsistencies of his character, forgetting the dictum expressed by Lord Rosebery that "if we accept the common and erroneous opinion that human nature is consistent with itself we find it utterly impossible to ex- plain the character of George the Third " — to say nothing of that of other men. THE SERIOUS PEPYS 117 Such, in general, was the judgment of the nineteenth century, hard to persuade to take the diarist seriously. Secure in its superior virtue and manners ; relieved from the gay plumage of the seventeenth-century male ; re- pressing the earlier liberties of English speech ; and at least the open license of its morals ; the Victorian age read, loved, despised, what seemed to it a garrulous, amusing man. It scorned the confession of his little weak- nesses perhaps even more than the weaknesses them- selves — his love of company, theatre, dress, diversion, deference ; looked down upon his simple vanity ; above all resented what he told of his dealings with women. Some even wrote of him in terms appropriate to Sedley or Rochester — the comparison is Pepys's best defense — forgetting to read the Diary and Gramont's "Memoirs," or the Restoration drama, side by side. Viewed thus, one may well wonder whether, after all, the Secretary would not have preferred by far the honorable obscurity of a dead lion which he enjoyed during the eighteenth century to this contemptuously affectionate regard for a living ass, which the nineteenth century has bestowed on him. The difficulty of comprehending Pepys has arisen from two circumstances : the fact that the critics have known little or nothing of him beyond what they found in his own pages or the comment of his editors ; and the fact that, most unfortunately for himself and for us, Pepys ceased to be a diarist before he became a secretary. From the eighteenth-century historians, even had the men of literature read their books, — which there is no reason to believe they did, — little could have been gleaned, and the earlier editors, at least, were not much better. In what spirit they began let Lord Braybrooke's own words de- clare. As Pepys "was in the habit of recording the most 118 MODERN ESSAYS trifling occurrences," he wrote, "it became absolutely necessary to curtail the manuscript materially,'" — and so he omitted an entertaining half. Bright, daring greatly, printed some four-fifths ; Wheatley, all but about thirty pages. It was, then, nearly seventy years before the world saw anywhere near the whole Diary. Even so, had the critics paid more attention to the serious element and dwelt less on those frivolities — and worse — for whose insertion they condemned — and read — the diarist, they might have approximated the truth more nearly. But, as the old philosopher has said, "The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon," and we ought, per- haps, to expect no more of the men of letters. Yet when even the latest, and in some ways the best-informed of them falls in error what can we expect ? He denounces Lowell's description of Pepys as a Philistine; he reviles the historians of English literature for the "amazing fallacy" that Pepys lacked enthusiasm; he blames those who have made literary capital out of the diarist for the small pains they have taken to correct their "childish impressions" by the results of recent studies. And, with all this, he permits himself to say that "the diary was the one long deliberate effort of Pepys's life" ! So hard it is for men to realize the fundamental fact that Samuel Pepys was not a diarist who happened to be connected with the Navy Office, but was the greatest of all Secretaries of the Admiralty who happened, in his earlier years, to write a diary. Fortunately the Diary has not been the end of the Secre- tary's striving against oblivion ; what literature and the literary historians have failed so signally to do for him thus far, historical scholarship seems likely to accomplish. THE SERIOUS PEPYS 119 When, nearly forty years ago, the English government began to print calendars of the state papers of the Restora- tion period, it soon became apparent that the famous dia- rist had played a greater part in public affairs than had previously been recognized. The development of naval history, in particular, has gradually re-created the Secre- tary, and the service to which he gave his life seems likely to be the final means of securing for him an appropriate immortality. His "Memoirs of the Royal Navy" has been reprinted ; the naval historians have chronicled his achievements ; studies have been made of his activities in many public posts ; and, within a decade, the Navy Rec- ords Society has begun the publication of a catalogue of his papers preserved in Magdalene College which has already reached the proportions of three stout volumes. Hereafter we shall have even more of such material, since we are promised the "Navalia" memoranda, further mem- oirs and calendars, filling out the record of his manifold activities. In view of all this publication, it is not too much to say that, had Pepys's Diary never seen the light, we should in time have had adequate knowledge of the Secretary's work, however little we should have known of the man. The result of all this is that we have another and a better Pepys than the amusing figure which did duty for him throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century. Though even to-day few readers of the Diary will be likely to delve into this mass of calendars, inaccessible to a previous generation, and any alteration in opinion will, therefore, probably be slow, it is high time to begin to realize what the true Pepys was like, to do him the justice which he has, in a sense, denied himself. For we are too apt to forget that to his own generation 1^0 MODERN ESSAYS there was no such person as the diarist. Amid the silks and paduasoy of the Diary, its days of cheer and its nights at the play, its family secrets and its personal details, men have lost sight of the more serious side of him who found comfort in pouring out those things which he concealed from all the world beside into the safe cipher of his only confidant. As we go through the mass of correspondence ; as we read the endless list of orders and memoranda, catalogues of ships, reports, recommendations, statements of accounts, and observe the operation and results of his administration, we perceive the petty, childish, simple figure, evoked by literary critics from the Diary, trans- formed into the truer character of the historian — a man shrewd, cautious, able, conscientious, honest, brave, wholly devoted to his service and his government. The story of naval administration and reform between the revolutions whence emerged the modern system of the admiralty is, indeed, no glittering chronicle. The "building of our ships more burdensome"; construction by the state rather than contractors ; reform in victualling and sailors' pay ; the manning and the officering of the fleet and the re-rating of its vessels ; the reorganization of the ordnance ; long experiment in sailing and in fighting qualities ; elaborate calculations of speed, strength, and sea- worthiness ; investigations in the source and quality of all supplies ; accounting, storage ; — this infinite variety of detail, much now of but an antiquarian interest even to the most technical of experts, is not easy reading and provides little enough material for epigram. But it does give us what is far more to the purpose, and that is a correct view of Samuel Pepys. Here is the civil servant at his best. " J^quiponderous," to his colleagues, "in moral, and much superior in philo- THE SERIOUS PEPYS 121 sopliical knowledge of the oeconomy of the navy," as he appeared to the men of his own day, his latest critics declare that the principles of his naval statesmanship may even now be lessons to a "sea economy as valid as they were two centuries ago." It is, indeed, almost incredible how acute and diligent he was. The single holiday of a busy life he spent in looking over Dutch and French naval establishments. Upon his first and only visit to Tangier, he found out in an hour's walk about the town what twenty years of costly statesmanship and military occu- pation had scarcely learned, — that it was no fit place for English occupation. It would be too long even to enumer- ate here all the changes which he made in admiralty ad- ministration ; it is perhaps enough to say that a century and a quarter after he left office, in the midst of England's struggle with Napoleon, a naval commission found in his system scarcely a thing to change or blame. Nor was he, through all of this, a man of "sweet, uncritical mind," much less the time-server he has often been pictured. Under the transparent guise of a report to his chief, the Duke of York, which set the wheels of reform in motion, he criticised with frank courage Comptroller, Treasurer, Surveyor, Navy Board, colleagues, courtiers, contractors, every powerful interest of his service, whose alienation might well have meant ruin to him. He was, in Marvel's phrase, one of that "handful of salt, a sparkle of soul that . . . preserved this gross body from putrification, . , . con- stant, invariable, indeed. Englishmen." It is with high appropriateness that, in the two-hundredth year after his death, the editor of the "Catalogue of Pepysian Manu- scripts" dedicates his work "To the memory of Samuel Pepys, a great public servant." After so long an interval, and through such great vicissitudes, the Secretary of the 122 MODERN ESSAYS seventeenth century takes on his proper guise in the be- ginning of the twentieth, and appears again in something hke the form he doubtless would have chosen for himself. We must then, in this view, re-read the Diary and revise our estimate of Pepys. As long presented, he has unques- tionably antagonized many persons of highly moral minds or highly cultivated taste ; — and even more of those in- clined merely to prudishness. The spectacle of a man who dared to set down the acts and thoughts common to many men, is so unusual in human affairs, so contrary to all those instincts of pride and shame which drive us to conceal or to condone our weaknesses not only from our fellows but from ourselves, that it has done Pepys's reputation great damage. One who so far out-Boswelled Boswell as to paint not his friend's portrait but his own, has suffered accordingly. That he was garrulous the very Diary, on which the accusation rests, disproves. The confidence reposed in him by men of every rank ; his rapid rise to high responsibilities ; his reputation as a safe man of affairs ; the fact that only once, and then by accident, did he reveal the secret of his book, — bear out his charac- ter as one not given to betrayal of his trust. That, with all his dallyings and philanderings, he was as licentious as most men of his own day, no one familiar with the period will assert. That Pepys was dishonest no one believes, or if he does, let him read the editor's informing paragraph prefacing his papers which declares : "There is no trace of anything of the kind in the official corre- spondence," and "even official letters, when they are numbered by thousands may be witnesses to character, for by an infinite number of delicate strokes they at length produce a portrait of the writer." Tested by this there is "no evidence of corruption." THE SERIOUS PEPYS 123 In Pepys's case it certainly has not been true that actions speak louder than words. Bacon's saying more nearly hits the mark, that "Fame is like a river which bears up things light and swollen, but drowns things heavy and solid." Of all the charges brought against the Secretary, one of the worst is that he was not brave. Let the great crises of his life attest. A young man, new in office and affairs, dependent on the favor of Montagu, he yet ventured to remonstrate with his powerful patron for improprieties unworthy of his station and himself, in a reproof which is a model of its kind. "I judge it," he writes, "very unbecoming the duty which every bit of bread I eat tells me I owe your Lordship to expose your honor to the uncertainty of my return . . . but, sir, your Lordship's honor being such as I ought to value it to be, and finding both in city and court that discourses pass to your prejudice, ... I shall, my Lord, without the least greatening or lessening the matter, do my duty in laying it shortly before you." When the Plague fell on London and all who could had fled — Court and Society, as usual, the first, — among the few bold spirits who remained to carry on the business of the state -^ the brave, bigoted Bishop of London, Sheldon; the "best justice of the peace in England," Godfrey ; the grim Duke of Albemarle, old General Monk, — amid this courageous company of picked men, the Clerk of the Acts stuck to his post in daily peril of his life. Read his letter to Coventry if you would have a measure of the man. "The sickness in general thickens round us," thus he writes, "particu- larly upon our neighborhood. You, sir, took your turn of the sword ; I must not, therefore, grudge to take mine of the pestilence." When, following the Plague, the Great Fire of London threatened to consume the entire 124 MODERN ESSAYS city, he hastened to have workmen brought from the dock- yards, to suggest destroying houses in the path of the conflagration, and planned, worked, commanded, till the Navy Offices were saved. When the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and the Thames, burning and sink- ing helpless, laid-up English men-of-war, and threatening the capital itself; while Monk rallied forces to resist, threw up entrenchments, mounted guns, and sank vessels to oppose further advance ; — Pepys labored no less manfully to meet the clamorous demands for adequate supplies by day and night, "alone at the office . . . yet doing the king good service." When a hostile House, hungry for vengeance, seeking a scapegoat for a mis- managed war, fell on the Navy; when "the whole world was at work blaming one another," and even the Duke advised his friends to save themselves, Pepys, unused to public speech, alone before the Commons, defended his service, his colleagues, and himself with such conspicuous ability and success "as gave great satisfaction to every one." Amid the revelations of corruption and malad- ministration which followed the war, he dared to beard even Prince Rupert before the Navy Board — and to prove his point. Ten years thereafter he was accused, by no less dangerous an enemy than Shaftesbury, of being a Catholic and possibly involved in Popish plots. He lost his office and his liberty, he stood to lose his life ; but he did not lose his courage or resource, and, in the Tower, prepared defense so ample as to make the absurd charge fall of its own weight. Through all he was, he tells us, horribly afraid — but he was never too frightened to do his duty ; incredible as it seems in view of the conception of the man with which we have been instilled, his conscience was continually THE SERIOUS PEPYS 125 too much for him. Over and over again he resolves to follow the dictates of prudence and not involve himself in Montagu's affairs — but finally he does. " I was fearful of going to any house," he writes in the Plague year — but he went. "I do see everybody is on his own defense and spare not to blame another, and the same course I shall take" — but he did not. "I was afraid," he writes at another crisis in affairs, "but I did not shew it." Amid the difficulties which confronted him in the naval investigation he even found time to advise a per- secuted colleague, "poor weak brother," in his defense. Proud as he was of his success in life, his house, his clothes, his coach, his dignities, his place, — not all his vanity nor all his fears prevented his risking them for what he thought was right. If this be cowardice, then make the most of it. If, finally, you would have a fairer measure of the man, compare Pepys with Gibbon, the historian, who most nearly occupies an eminence in one department of histori- cal literature commensurate with that of the Secretary in another. Not merely does each owe his present repu- tation to his literary skill in that field, but the outlines of their lives show certain similarities. Both were of middle class ; both rose through their abilities from relative ob- scurity to distinction ; both were members of Parliament ; both held public office ; and the private life of the historian has been approved by sober folk almost as much as that of the diarist has been condemned. Gibbon, accustomed to inherited means, refrained from marriage with one of the most attractive women on the Continent from prudent fear of his father's displeasure, "sighed as a lover but obeyed as a son"; the penniless Pepys, with a rash un- worldliness the more remarkable in a man conspicuous 126 MODERN ESSAYS above his fellows for his sound judgment, married in defiance of every prudent consideration. The one, financially independent of his place, gave silent votes against his conscience for a poHcy which led to England's quarrel with America ; the other, owing his living to his place, dared oppose the Commons' anger and his superiors' ill will wherever he believed his cause was right. One slumbered with his colleagues of the Board of Trade over the duties of a pleasant sinecure, while the imperial policy went down to ruin ; the other spent his days and, not in- frequently, his nights in furthering the interests of his government. "I have entered Parliament," wrote the historian, "without patriotism and without ambition; ... all my views are bounded by the comfortable and modest position of a Lord of Trade." " My great design," wrote Pepys, "is to get myself to be a Parliament man . . . both for the King's and Service's sake and for the Duke of York's." Reverse Gibbon, and you get Pepys. Neither could have succeeded in the other's field : Pepys failed as much at history as Gibbon in affairs. From the desert of family and official life which the his- torian created and called peace, there rose, indeed, a splendid history : from the varied and fertile plain of everyday affairs the Secretary brought a no less immortal Diary. Like character, like book ; the style was in each case the man himself. "The manner of the 'Decline and Fall,'" says Bagehot, "is not a style in which you can tell the truth. . . . Truth is of various kinds ; grave, solemn, dignified, — petty, low, ordinary : and a historian who has to tell the truth must be able to tell what is little as well as what is amazing. Gibbon is at fault here : he cannot mention Asia Minor. The petty order of sub- lunary matters, the common existence of ordinary people. THE SERIOUS PEPYS 127 the necessary littlenesses of necessary life are little suited to his sublime narrative." One may not venture to declare what the ideal style of diaries should be ; but, by whatever chance, all men agree that Pepys has hit upon it ; and, whatever charges may be brought against him, none can say he was not competent to tell the truth in whatever form it showed itself to him, that he failed to find an apt expression for every emotion or experience he had, or that his book does not conform to the "necessary littlenesses of necessary life." One cannot imagine writing of Pepys that "the way to reverence him is not to read him at all, but look at him from the outside . . . and think how much there is within." Rather his book is "actually read, a man is glad to take it up and slow to lay it down ; . . . once having had it in his library he would miss it from its shelves," the more so that it was not the product of "a life-time of horrid industry." Least of all did the diarist, with the peculiar vanity of the historian, identify himself with the world's greatness. Gibbon, it has been said, confused himself with the Roman Empire ; describing his pilgrimages from Buriton to London and London to Buri- ton in the same majestic periods that record the fall of states and empires ; his amateur experiences with the English yeomanry in phrases that recall the tramp of Roman legions ; his voiceless and insignificant presence in the House of Commons in a manner suited to an account of the deliberations of the Roman senators. Whatever form the diarist's egotism took, he realized his place within the universe. Nor can we well believe that the great work of the historian would have suffered from some infusion of the Secretary's qualities. Comparisons, however invidious, are in this case at least illuminating ; for to many minds the smug, impec- 128 MODERN ESSAYS cable career of the historian has seemed far to surpass the garrulous, inconsequent, vain pursuits of the gossipy diarist in all those enviable qualities which make for virtue and true success ; in particular it has seemed to stand for the accomplishment of a great purpose nobly planned, idealistic, admirable, as opposed to Pepys's selfish strivings after the pleasures and profits of a worldly existence. Nothing could be much farther from the truth. If the one made a success of intellect, the other made a success of life ; if the historian did much for the past and the future, the Secretary did no less for his own day and for posterity. We would not willingly give up the work of either; but, if one should fail, we could more easily replace the work of Gibbon than the work of Pepys ; if we should have to choose between selfish ascetic and hard-working hedonist — let each man make his choice. That one shall ask more of life than life can give, that is the great tragedy. From it, save in perhaps a single particular, Pepys was spared. But that a man may reasonably expect of posterity an honorable remembrance for eminent service well performed, and receive instead a familiar, half-contemptuous regard as a light-minded, evil-mannered, amusing babbler, that height of fame's tragi-comic irony has been his fate too long. In the records of his service, and in the Diary read by their light, there resides the quality which the critics have found wanting and blamed him for lacking — devotion to high purpose and ideals, and a sense of duty which served at once as lofty patriotism or sustaining belief in a great cause might have to another type of mind. This does not mean that he was a perfect character, only a very human man, eminent in more than one field of THE SERIOUS PEPYS 129 human endeavor and of great service to his fellow men. To the appreciation of this world's goods and pleasures, to intellectual and philanthropic tastes, to the. doctrines of Franklin and Polonius, he added a sense of public duty and an unremitting industry, with talents which lift him far above the level of his present reputation, as they raised him above the generality of his own times. He was, in short, an admirable representative of a class not uncommon during the Restoration yet not typical of it, the left-over Puritans, bred in the sterner, more efficient school of the Protectorate ; on whom, amid the corrup- tion and extravagance of shifty politicians and dissolute courtiers, rested the burden of the state. What he said of another applies no less to himself: "It is pretty to see that they are fain to find out an old-fashioned man of Cromwell's time to do their business for them." "If it comes to fighting," observed one of his acquaintances when dangers thickened about Charles the Second's path, "the King must rely on the old party"; and this proved, throughout, scarcely less true of administration. With all its faults, the Cromwellian regime had one virtue which was clearly revealed under its successor — it bred strong men. They were not seldom far from immaculate, and the most made of their failings was by their royalist rivals ; but in morals they were, at worst, below the level of their generation, and in efficiency they rose far above it. Among these worthies Pepys holds high place. Admitting all the frailties, and the inconsistencies of this Puritan in Restoration garb, his manners and his morals not untouched with something of the weakness of his day, there yet remains a man whom it is next to impossible to dislike, and whom it would be wholly im- possible, in the light of adequate knowledge of his career, 130 MODERN ESSAYS not to respect. His motto, which in the half-light of his Diary has long seemed so appropriate Mens cujusque is est quisque — "as a man's mind is, so is he," — may, in this view, well be replaced by one far more appro- priate to his life, "Seest thou a man diligent in his business, he shall stand before kings." \ WHAT THE TEN- YEAR SERGEANT OF POLICE TELLS 1 BY Henry Hastings Curran Mr. Curran has some very real suggestions to make regarding the conditions of the police force of New York City. The difficulty in regard to the police there is that (a) criminals enter the police force, (6) that the policeman is untrained, (c) that he is inadequately paid, (d) that promotion may be bought, etc. Similar criticisms individually and collectively have been made so often that the public has lost interest. Therefore logically he introduces his main essay by a narrative section in which he tells about the dramatic murder of the gambler Rosenthal and how the subject came to have a particular appropriateness at present. Having by this means gained both the reader's interest and his con- fidence, he proceeds to enumerate his proposed criticisms. In his yearning for other lands and other days, Kipling's Tommy Atkins laments that he is "learnin' 'ere in London what the ten -year soldier tells." New Yorkers have been learning through the last winter something of what the ten-year sergeant of police tells. Their equanimity is not increased by the fact that this veteran's recital holds true of many another American city. The school was set in motion by the latest accident in government by investigation. One Herman Rosenthal, a professional gambler, who had fallen out with his police ^ From The Yale Review, for July, 1913, by permission of the author and of the editor of The Yale Review. 131 132 MODERN ESSAYS protector, had agreed to call on the District Attorney on a July morning and tell what he knew. The appoint- ment was not kept. Rosenthal stepped out of the Hotel Metropole at two o'clock that morning in response to a message that a friend wished to see him, and was shot to death the moment he set foot upon the sidewalk. The murderers made their escape from this brilliantly lighted spot in the Tenderloin with ridiculous ease. If a bystander had not caught the number of the fleeing automobile, the efforts of the District Attorney to call these gunmen to account might well have failed. As events turned out, not only were the four gunmen caught, tried, and con- victed, but the police lieutenant involved was convicted of complicity in the affair, and all five are in Sing Sing Prison, sentenced to death. Meanwhile, the horrified amazement of the people of the city had turned into fiery indignation as the revela- tions following the shots became more and more sinister in their indications of police complicity in the murder itself. The idea that a lieutenant of police could turn to organized murder to protect his "graft" from exposure was enough to shake the complacency of the blindest. In less than a week from that early morning's work, a move- ment was on foot in the Board of Aldermen to investigate the police department. When the investigating committee began its work there was many a wiseacre to predict that "a little graft would be dug up — enough to satisfy the public — then it would all blow over, and the game would go on as before." Others scented a political move and speculated upon the chance of elevating a moral spasm into a "moral issue." And still others, while greedy of the sensations to come, fell back upon the folly of attempting to improve WHAT TEN-YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 133 conditions without changing the substantive law on gambling, excise, and prostitution. "The people want to gamble," argued these last doubters, "and laws against gambling cannot be enforced ; the people want the saloons open on Sunday, and you cannot keep them shut by law ; and no law for the prohibition of prostitution has been possible of enforcement since the beginning of time. These are State-made laws, and the legislators from the rural districts, who are still in the majority at Albany, have imposed their own more rigorous ideas of morality upon a liberty-loving metropolis that systematically sets the imposition at naught. Until the law represents the will of the people of this city, policemen will profit by its non-enforcement ; and all the investigations in the world will not cut out the cancer." With a vigorous plea for home rule for the city in these matters, this school of critics usually dismissed the subject as exhausted and settled, on that basis. The language of the city's charter with respect to alder- manic investigations is simple indeed : The Board of Aldermen shall have power and it shall be its duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws and ordinances of the city ; and it may appoint from time to time a special committee to inquire whether the laws and ordinances of the city relating to any subject or to any de- partment of the city government are being faithfully observed, and the duties of the officers of such department are being faithfully dis- charged. . . . The charter framers took it for granted that law is made to be enforced. They decreed further that it be the "duty," as well as the power, of the Board of Aldermen "to see to the faithful execution of the laws ... of the city " ; and nowhere do the fathers countenance such deceitful sacrifices to a distorted conception of personal 134 MODERN ESSAYS liberty as "partial" or "proportionate" or "reasonable" enforcement of law. There is no hint in the books of a twilight zone between what is and is not crime, save as the law prescribes. The committee therefore, in obedience to its charter mandate, held aloof from that engaging field of "when is a crime not a crime," and went in straight pursuit of an answer to the question, "Is the law enforced and are the officers of the police department faithfully discharging their duties?" In other words, New York for the first time studied its police department as a problem of adminis- tration. Committees have come and gone, startling the city with the depth of their revelations and revolting their audiences to the point of satiety. They operated, but they took no steps to heal the disease uncovered ; the surgeon dropped his work with his knife, and, after calling his clinic to witness what the gash revealed, left the patient to recover as he might. This committee had a different conception of its task. The police problem is one of character, and the key to a policeman's character is the kind of administration under which he lives. A police career should be as honorable as an army career, with its incentive to ambition and its reward for merit. Is it aided, then, or hindered, by the way in which the department is managed.'* Is the policeman fortified by his environment and handling to resist temptation, or is the fortitude he brings into the department with him sapped and buffeted to exhaustion by bad management ? Let the ten-year sergeant — one of the honest majority — give a few glimpses of his ex- perience, as seen through the lens of this latest investi- gation, and perhaps even this fragmentary kaleidoscope will reveal something of the intense directness of the pres- WHAT TEN- YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 135 sure which administration brings to bear upon the charac- ter of the "cop." When a square- jawed, well-framed young fellow leaves his truck or workshop and " makes the cops " in New York, he does so by way of a civil service examination, mental and physical. He may be of very ordinary mental calibre, but must be physically without a flaw. In his application he must give his previous history and employment, and answer under oath whether he has been arrested, indicted, or convicted, giving the circumstances. Then he is looked up. New York recruits its police force at the rate of thirty men a month, and the Civil Service Commission confesses to having to look up the char- acter of this human stream with the aid of just two investigators. Prior to the present police administra- tion, an effective character investigation bureau was maintained at police headquarters, under the capable direction of Lieutenant John Stanton, to supplement the absurdly inadequate staff of the Civil Service Commission. This bureau delved into such refinements as the detection, by watermarks, of bogus Irish county birth-certificates, whereby many an intending "copper" was caught swearing falsely as to his age and promptly prevented from begin- ning a police career with a successful lie upon his lips. But this bureau was abolished by the present administration, and the ten-year sergeant has seen thirty-eight men appointed by the present commissioner who were known by him to have sworn falsely that they had never been arrested. How many more of this ilk have come in since, the public will never know, for the machinery of detection has been thrown into the scrap heap. One of these men had been acquitted of murder (shooting), and of felonious assault (stabbing), after arrest, in addition to having 136 MODERN ESSAYS been sued by his wife for non-support and brutal treatment. Letters against his character were on file in the depart- ment, and the boy he had stabbed, in his barber shop in Brooklyn, had protested both to the Mayor and the com- missioner against making the man a policeman. When the boy told his story before the committee, the deep red of the scar he bore from the stabbing, running from the ear to the point of the jaw, was visible across the whole space of the aldermanic chamber. A present deputy commissioner accounted, on the witness stand, for the assailant's appointment as follows : Q. Then if anybody can escape going to jail, he is a good enough policeman for you — is that right ? A. Yes, sir ; he is a good enough policeman for me. And the commissioner thus explained : I am stating that, in my opinion, when a man has been tried for a crime and has been acquitted, it is not incumbent upon any public official to condemn him or conduct any further prosecution of him. . . . Any man who, after indictment, has been acquitted, is good enough for me. The commissioner did not seem to perceive that it was not a question of prosecuting or condemning a man, but of clothing him in blue, giving him a gun and a club, and making him a guardian of the peace and the State's witness for twenty-five years to come. Another applicant- perjurer had been arrested for seduction, discharged upon agreeing to marry, had then cruelly beaten his wife and abandoned her, and, finally, had struck a bargain with his mother-in-law to pay her five dollars a month if she would keep those incidents from the knowledge of the depart- ment. They came to the present commissioner's knowl- edge and he promptly made the man a policeman. Still another man, appointed a few years ago and escaping WHAT TEN- YEAR FOLfCE SERGEANT TELLS IST even the vigilanee of the department's character investiga- tion, had served a year" in the King's County Penitentiary for burglary. Thus the ten^^y^a)?' sergeant, standing at the gate of the citadel of police headcfuarter's^ has seen this band of liars enter and made welcome in the places where truth should be the first quality ; and many a truth-telling young fellow he has seen left standing without, because the liars spelled or punctuated a little better. He has also seen the dismissal from the force of that Lieutenant Stanton who testified to the committee, under subpoena, of his character investigation work, before the present commissioner did away with it. Follow- ing his testimony, came a charge of attempted extortion, suddenly remembered after three years by the com- missioner's former policeman-chauffeur ; then Stanton's trial and dismissal, though his record in the department was clean for seventeen years back. This extraordinary charge was, immediately after the police trial, thoroughly sifted and exploded before the aldermanic committee, but Stanton remains the sacrifice of the investigation. When the new policeman has run the preliminary gaunt- let and is finally appointed to be one of "the finest," he is corralled for thirty days in the school of recruits to be *' halter-broken." Here he receives competent instruction in pistol practice, drilling, and humane handling of prisoners, with many a sharp fall from the wrestling teacher who shows the different grips. In the old days, there was also fruitf id schooling in the law of crime, gathering of evi- dence, and presentation of the State's case in court, with an active moot court in session to demonstrate indelibly this vital part of a policeman's work. The mental training, however, has fallen into decay, and its old vigor is now replaced by hours of monologue from a captain to a score 138 MODERN ESSAYS of perspiring truckmen who neither ask nor are asked questions. With no running stimulus to independent tliinking, there is also no test at the end, in which respect the police probationer may wake a chord of envy in the collegiate heart. London schools its police neophytes for six weeks, and Diisseldorf, supplying schooled recruits to the Rhine provinces, for eleven weeks, while a German policeman must first have been a "non-com" in the German Army, with at least six years of army experience. That New York, without the extra safeguards of the British and the Germans, should turn its policemen out on the street equipped with thirty days of mental malnutri- tion, serves to show another of the honest policeman's initial handicaps. A more serious instance of starting a man on his race with a hobble about his knees is encountered in the rate of pay of the first and second year patrolmen, and this is a matter that the ten-year sergeant has been through himself. The $800 of the first year becomes $900 in the second, and then ranges upward by degrees until it reaches the patrolman's maximum of $1400 at the end of the fifth year. The $800 is quite fictitious. It is in fact only $556.64, as the city takes back the balance by com- pelling the new patrolman to buy his entire equipment out of his own pocket. Summer and winter uniforms, raincoat, boots, billet, locust night-stick, whistle, nippers, revolver and cartridges, rawhide straps, cap-devices — these and a thousand and one other expenses must be footed by the patrolman. He must even pay for his bed- ding at the station-house, where he is required to be when asleep on reserve ; and his pension and benevolent associa- tion dues complete the rebate that he thus furnishes the city. The wives of 175 patrolmen picked at random WHAT TEN-YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 139 have told the committee their experience, with figures of household budgets. They pass muster in thrift and frugality, but their little savings cannot bridge the gap between a salary of $556.64 and an average budget for family purposes of $848.71. It is only debt that finds room in this gap, with the tradesman and the doctor vying for the monthly pay cheque, and the loan shark ever at the door. One of these parasites finally collected $60 from a patrolman for a loan of $30. It needs only a slight dereliction of duty to bring down a fine upon the patrol- man's head, and then it is the wife and babies who are punished. Fines are deducted from the offender's pay, and there has been much thoughtful condemnation of this instrument of discipline. The New York policeman thus begins his career in debt, and if he yields before some of the graft that is thrust at him, must the condemnation be blind to all causes.^ One has little patience with those sympathetic souls who would excuse a policeman from wrong-doing because he is peculiarly tempted ; the town is thoroughly sated with this maudlin fashion of talk. But has the city done its part when it fastens the shield with the city's seal on the breast of the new "cop" with one hand, and with a niggardly clutch of the other pulls him aside into unavoidable debt ? The old saying, "You must take 'em young," applies to the policeman. Let him "get away" with a fraud at his entrance, and he will try another before he has long been in. The next step is promotion, and on this point a police captain, of years gone by, has testified to the follow- ing miniature of high finance : A. I was not three months on the police before somebody came to me and wanted $300 to have me detailed to the Harbor Squad. Q. Did you pay it ? UO MODERN ESSAYS A. No, sir. Q. Were you detailed ? A. No, sir. Five or six months after that my grandmother died, and she left a little money to my mother, and the scouts heard about that, and they came around and wanted to make me a roundsman for $600. This captain was under examination concerning a story that he had done some negotiating for the payment of $10,000 to a politician for his promotion to his captaincy. The colloquy over this reveals a refreshing degree of frankness. Q. Would you be willing to pay $10,000 for your promotion ? A. If somebody else paid it for me. I would not have paid it. Q. You would have consented to have had it paid ? A. Most assuredly I would. I wanted to get promoted. Q. How would you get the $10,000 back ? A. I do not know (lavyhtcr). There is a legacy coming to me, and I would be able to pay it back some day. Q. How would you get the $10,000 back that you had to put up for a captaincy ? A. Why the job was worth it (laughter). Q. How ? A. For the simple reason that you do not have to work nights. You can sleep all night (laughter). If ever a department of city government should have its drawbridge up and gates bolted against politicians, how- ever well-intentioned, the police department is that one. The insidious plague that has suddenly destroyed the chestnut trees of a continent is no more potent in its blight than is the devastation of discipline that political access can work in a police department. The police commissioners who have come and gone are a unit on this point. Is anj^one yet so simple as to think that a policeman who benefits in his calling by political favor WHAT TEN-YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 141 will not some day have to repay that favor by winking at an infraction of the law? And that is quite apart from many a cash payment made in bygone days, if rumor be true. Ten years ago, Captain Miles O'Reilly, who bears the distinctive appellation of "Honest Miles O'Reilly," was in command of the Oak Street precinct and on the look-out for malingerers. So, when at three o'clock one morning, four of his men were discovered "shooting craps" in the back room of a saloon when they were supposed to be on duty, there was trouble ahead. O'Reilly was a good deal of a disciplinarian in his day, and the particular "crap- shooter" who figures in this drama was promptly dismissed from the force. With an ambition to return to the fold, the dismissed patrolman went to court ; he was rejected with equal promptness by two courts, the second being the court of last resort of the State. He then accom- plished the passage, by the legislature of the State of New York, of a special Act reinstating him as a policeman, which was vetoed by Mayor McClellan. Then came a general Act, with a retroactive clause to admit the "crap- shooter," but General Bingham, then commissioner, used the discretion given him by turning this bad penny down again. The fifth attempt, made upon the present commissioner, succeeded, and "Honest Miles O'Reilly's" tarrier is back again after nine years of lobbying, with a new uniform and a service stripe, as lively as a cricket, while the passing decade has seen the honorable retire- ment of his old commander. The slang phrase that "they never come back" boasts two notable exceptions in Rip Van Winkle and this peripatetic patrolman. The ten-year sergeant knows this as "a reinstatement," and he has seen more than one man justly dismissed by the 142 MODERN ESSAYS last administration but cheerfully reinstated under the present regime, with rank still equal to that of his comrade who had escaped this vacation by steadily doing his duty. When the aldermanic investigation began, the ten-year sergeant had not only seen a dismissed patrolman come back after nine years of lobbying, but he had also seen eight police commissioners come and go in eleven years. Birds of passage, a former deputy commissioner has testi- fied that " the force gets a glimpse of them flying over and hardly has time to determine their species." Commis- sioners come and go, but the policeman goes on forever. And with this tradition, has come about a sort of police peerage, a group of powerful barons in the department who, holding the higher offices, can make and unmake a commissioner. If the barons become disaffected, the commissioner's days are numbered. Judge McAdoo, a former commissioner, has testified that in November, 1905, standing odds of two to one were posted in every gambling house in town that "McAdoo would not last beyond the year." There were no takers, and McAdoo went when the clock struck twelve on New Year's Eve. The police barons manufacture "crime waves," bring pressure upon a mayor vested with power to remove the commissioner, stir up political sorties by the "outs" against the "ins" of police officialdom, and never yet have they failed to get the head of the ruler. That these Igorrotes administer the lair of such "crooks" as the department harbors, might well be believed, even in the absence of the recent conviction of four inspectors now in stripes on Blackwell's Island. The young police- man is under the command of these higher officers, and he has his own existence to look to, with always the chance of a "frame-up" if he displeases the barons by unwelcome WHAT TEN- YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 143 zeal in protected fields of law-breaking. This is the "system." The presence of a number of higher officers of sterling uprightness only emphasizes the "gait" of the others. With these men so difficult to dislodge that some have, uncannily enough, been honorably retired on pension just to get them out of the department, the barons command respect in the ranks when the commissioner cannot. General Bingham has testified that when the peerage carried its power into the legislature, he was compelled, to his military amazement, to take the defen- sive before the legislative committee and, in trying to defeat their legislation, to face a volley of questions from spokesmen of his own subordinates. In other words, the head of the house was called sharply to account for opposing a bill emanating from his own entourage ! That each of these commissioners who succeeded each other so rapidly has different ideas from those of his predecessor, which he invariably puts into effect, only increases the confusion of the policeman who must do his work in such a remarkable household. There are few young policemen who do not cherish an ambition to serve in the detective bureau. The plain clothes of the "bull" are a magnet of envy that n^er fails to draw. With a sense of romance and responsibility begotten of boyhood, the chance of a high esprit de corps here would seem second to none. That opportunity is now in abeyance. Maladministration has emptied head- quarters of detectives and scattered them to the precincts, with the inevitable disappearance of cohesion, team work, and conference. The "Italian Squad," a famous set of men who under the valiant Petrosino proved the first effective check to bomb-throwing, kidnapping, and the "Black Hand," has been abolished. The pickpocket 144 MODERN ESSAYS squad, specialists in capturing these disciples of Fagin, is gone. Captain Carey's homicide squad has been scattered, and his human bloodhounds are more likely now to be found on the trail of Saturday-night street brawls than of murder. In short, specialization, the main support of detective efficiency, has received its death blow. Abolished also is the "morning hne-up," the daily array of crooks at headquarters for inspection and identification by detectives under mask. Worst of all, 8,400 pictures in the "Rogues' Gallery" have been burned up in the furnace at headquarters, by official order, to- gether with the accompanying Bertillon records, and this invaluable aid to criminal justice in all parts of the country is a thing of the past. The number of arrested persons now "mugged" is so paltry as to be negligible — O personal liberty, "what crimes are committed in thy name!" With the temple thus pulled down over the departmental head, and the detectives searching for tools to work with, the rotation of members of the bureau has proceeded so fast that in fifteen months 254 men went in and 290 went out and back to patrol duty, out of an average complement of 500 in the bureau. The prophet has not yet appeared who will essay to prove that detec- tives may thus be made overnight. The ten-year sergeant found the detective's climax capped when he heard of the ostrich feather exploit of a June night last year. The detective bureau, with a laudable ambition to put three known "loft burglars" behind the bars, engaged the services of a "stool-pigeon," that is to say, another "crook," who cheerfully agreed to lead his comrades into a police trap for the price. Twenty-five dollars of the city's money was spent for a kit of burglar tools, and further funds for wining and WHAT TEN-YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 145 dinmg the three "crooks," the vouchers for all of which now lie in state in the comptroller's office. The plan was prettily set for a midnight melodrama opposite old Grace Church on Broadway, and the appointed time and place found the three burglars and their obliging "stool-pigeon" friend busily blowing a hole into the loft building which contained the goal of their hopes, the dynamite being also a municipal investment. The trio being engaged in the loft, their automobile and chauffeur accomplice waiting in Union Square, a few blocks away, for the signal, and the department's detectives planted in adjacent doorways, the little drama came to its climax upon the collision of these three expeditions. The burglars were on the sidewalk with bags stuffed with several thousand dollars' worth of ostrich feathers, the automobile speeding to the rescue had slowed up at the curb to take aboard the thieves and their loot, when at the proper moment a swarm of de- tectives swept down upon the adventurers and captured the entire outfit, without a shot or a struggle. This con- stitutes the official burglary, but the unofficial burglary came to light the next morning when the merchant who had unwittingly provided the scenery for the drama counted up his losses and then, in the station-house of the precinct, whither the feathers had been taken, made an inventory of the capture. As the value of the feathers in the hands of the police was $1,500 less than that of the feathers taken from the loft, and a hard-hearted burglar insurance company had felt certain enough of the loss to pay over the $1,500 to the merchant, the disappearing difference in the feathers survived as the greater mystery. Although no one but the detectives and the crooks had been on the spot, and the detectives had captured the crooks, they vouchsafed no answer to the mystery of who 146 MODERN ESSAYS had captured tlie missing feathers. The play became still more a burlesque when the lieutenant of detectives a few days later demanded and received from the merchant $175 as a reward for personal bravery. Mary Goode's testimony marked the beginning of the committee's inquiry into the department's methods of handling vice. Self-confessed proprietress of a disorderly house, she passed across the stage with a modesty of de- meanor and modulated gentility of speech that well-nigh gave the lie to her vocation. When attacked by a hostile member of the committee, her discerning retort, complete in its answer, was delivered so quietly and with such evident sincerity that her story has never since been questioned. Her tale is worn threadbare in private knowledge but seldom told in public under oath. The shifting of zones of prostitution, the dreariness of the trade, the cupidity of police officials, and the incessant payment of "protection" money to their collectors were only a few of the familiar incidents related. The ten-year sergeant knows this story by heart. It concerns more than him. He could not, however, know her estimate of the number of prostitutes, showing a total of 35,000 fallen women in New York City. One need not stand aghast when he compares this figure with that of the 10,000 similarly unfortunate women that an aldermanic com- mittee found domiciled in the town seventy years ago. There were some 500,000 people in the present city area in 1843, where there are now 5,250,000. So the old propor- tion was one prostitute to every fifty of population, where now it is only one to every one hundred and fifty. Hope may lie there. George A. Sipp, who had kept a "hotel" in Harlem, fol- lowed the Goode story within a week, and his unadorned WHAT TEN- YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 147 tale of consistent pajanent for police protection was equally convincing. He served the additionally useful purpose of introducing the committee to the "friendly collar," a species of arrest that is visited from time to time upon protected law breakers, to keep the precinct record straight. The difference between an ordinary "collar" and a "friendly collar" is that the arresting officers suffer a lapse of memory when they appear in court against the victim of the latter, so that the case fails and is "turned out"; but the record of arrests shows a fine degree of activity, pro bono publico, on the part of the profiting police protectors. The ten-year sergeant knows Sipp's story as well as he knows Mary Goode's, for the police barons rule more by fear than by secrecy. But he knows more. He is aware that citizens constantly write to the commissioner accusing police officers of "grafting" from gambling and dis- orderly houses, and has learned to his amazement that the practice of the present commissioner is to refer all such complaints to the officers accused for investigation. In a test period of fourteen months, in the present adminis- tration, out of 301 such complaints, 270 are found to have been politely forwarded to the accused policemen, or their immediate superiors involved by inference in the accusa- tion, with a request to investigate themselves. As many as 190 were referred to the officers in question merely for their "information." When these Spartan police- men investigated, they invariably found themselves not guilty and solemnly so reported to the commissioner, who must have been immensely relieved to find his offi- cers so sure of themselves. One letter, addressed to the Mayor and forwarded to the commissioner, ran as follows : 148 MODERN ESSAYS March 27, 1912. Hon. W. J. Gaynor : I would like to have you investigate quietly Lieut. Becker. He is now collecting more money than Devery, and it is well known to every- one at Police Headquarters. Please do this and you will be surprised at the result. Yours, Henhy Williams. This was "respectfully referred to Lieutenant Becker for investigation and report," and the Lieutenant himself, in this case, respectfully suggested in his report that someone else might better do the investigating. The Lieutenant is now in prison for the murder of Rosenthal. A complaint that one of Inspector Sweeney's "wardmen" was "graft- ing" was referred to the Inspector for investigation and report, and the latter promptly absolved himself. He is now confined in the penitentiary for conspiracy. With no system of informing himself of conditions, to check the reassurances of his lying subordinates, the present commissioner has coupled an honest effort to enforce the gambling law with a studied indifference to Sunday liquor-selling and to the heyday of disorderly house ac- tivity that has reigned ; and his idea of "auto-investiga- tion" by accused policemen has led straight into the Rosen- thal murder. The ten-year sergeant wonders that the explosion did not come before. When the agitation for this investigation was begun, the sensation-loving portion of the public found its food in the committee's struggle for permission to exist. With high city officials of every persuasion offering obstacle after obstacle to a police inquiry of any kind, there was presented a steeplechase of such stiffness and variety that all New York took a sporting interest in the running. The jumps all taken and the course to the arena run, there followed WHAT TEN-YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 149 the period of "great expectations." The audience clamored for blood. "Show us the graft! Give us the 'man higher up.' Produce or get off !" Thus the cry of the crowd, the yearning for a human sacrifice, with its opportunity for the turning down of tliumbs. Meanwhile the committee had been going about its business seeking the answer to the question, "Is the law of the city faith- fully observed and are the duties of its officers faithfully discharged .f* " The administration of the department was and is the problem, and the driest details received their due notice in the sclieme. In December the inquiry was pointing up, in its logical course, to the department's method of handling gambling and prostitution, and its machinery was working smoothly, and fruitfully, with every promise of the beneficial results that must accrue from careful study as distinguished from sensation seeking. From the point of view of the sensation lovers, however, the affair was quite in the doldrums, and was becoming generally labelled as a humdrum, sewing-machine matter, soon to die and best forgotten. Most serious of all, the modest appropriation was nearly exhausted, and those hostile to the inquiry could prevent the granting of another dollar unless there were a public demand that would not brook denial. That a great number of thinking people wanted the inquiry completed along its proper lines did not lessen the opportunity of the hostile. At this point of peril, Mary Goode's story came to the rescue with the spectacular suddenness of lightning. Back came the special writers of the newspapers who had "featured" the inquiry in the beginning but had long since fled to more exciting fields. Back came the audience, which had dwindled to a dozen when Mary Goode took the stand, but now thronged the chamber at every hearing. 150 MODERN ESSAYS Back came public interest, with three-column headlines in the papers and animated discussion wherever in the town one man might meet with another. The chasm was crossed, the extra appropriation granted with eulogies from friend and foe alike, and the street-corner comment changed to, "Now you're doing something — keep it up !" Sipp's story a week later settled all uncertainty, and his- tory records the punitive aftermath of that revelation of revenge : A score of policemen indicted, two patrolmen convicted and in Sing Sing, a captain and another patrol- man who have confessed, awaiting sentence. And, finally, for the first time in its history. New York has witnessed the spectacle of four inspectors of police — the highest rank in the uniformed force — in stripes, with heads shaved, making brooms and mending shoes within the gray walls of a penitentiary. That the story of one man before an aldermanic committee should give the District Attorney an opportunity to carry his masterly pursuit of crooked policemen to the point already reached, was a chance by-product of an administrative investigation that looms larger and larger in its educational benefit to the police and the community. Having set the Sipp saturnalia in motion, the committee returned to its patient, closed its ears to the clamor of the clinic, and quietly finished its work. Will the analysis be followed by synthesis? Will the public remember long enough to see that punitive de- struction is followed by administrative construction? Preventive hygiene will be required to follow convales- cence. If the call is not heeded, the consequences will come in the shape of another police explosion and another police investigation. The ten-year sergeant knows this. He will well know, too, whether the events of 1913 have WHAT TEN- YEAR POLICE SERGEANT TELLS 151 helped to give the police the administrative backbone of a "career." If they have not, the adage that "the police- man's lot is not a happy one," will still apply to him, for he is of the honest and preponderant portion of an army that New York honors to a man for its courage, and wants to honor to a man for its uprightness. But if they have, the ten-year sergeant may translate Tommy Atkins for a new toast to the spirit of the corps : When you've 'eard your city caliin', W'y you won't 'eed nothin' else. THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT ^ BY William Howard Taft To every American the exact extent and the exact limitation of the powers of the President of the United States is of necessity interesting. Still more interesting does it become when the subject is treated by one who himself has been President. He rightfully speaks with authority. Consequently the first paragraph simply states the question, but states is in a very personal way. There are six Is in that first paragraph. The succeeding paragraphs treat each function, defining and limiting it. Then the final paragraph returns to the comparison between the king of England and the President with which the essay opened. There- fore as a whole the structure is severely simple. The development within the paragraph, the precision of phrase, the accuracy of definition, and the clarity of exposition, make it a model of legal acuteness. It has been said that the President of the United States has more real power than most monarchs of Europe. I do not know that I am able to institute an intelligent com- parison, because to do that one ought to be quite familiar with the extent of the royal or imperial power to be measured with that of our President ; and I have not suffi- cient knowledge on the subject. I know something with respect to the real governing power of the King of England, and, except in an indirect way, the President's power far exceeds that of King George ; and I think it is very consid- erably more than that of the President of France. When, ^ From The Yale Review, for October, 1914, by permission of the author and of the editor of The Vale Review. 152 THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 153 however, one examines the imperial power in governments like Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, the question is much more difficult ; and I presume no one would say that the President's power was equal to that of the Czar of Russia. With us, a President is elected for four years, and nothing can get him out of office except his death, or his resigna- tion — which never comes, — or his impeachment. The certainty of his tenure for four years makes our executive administration a little more rigid and less subject to quick changes of public opinion than in the parliamentary coun- tries. I am inclined to think that our system is a good thing for our country, however much parliamentary government may suit the countries where it is in use. Of course, it has this disadvantage. In a parliamentary government there is a union between the executive and the legislative branches, and they, therefore, work to- gether, because those who constitute the executive lead and direct the legislation ; whereas in the separation of the great branches of the government with us, the Presi- dent represents the executive. Congress the legislative, and the courts the judicial branch ; and the plan of the men who framed the Constitution was to preserve these branches separate. The President is able to recommend legislation to Congress, and he may go in person to argue the wisdom of it if he chooses. Mr. Wilson has restored an old custom of that sort, which was abandoned by President Jefferson, and I think he was right in doing so. It em- phasizes his recommendations and focusses the eyes of the people on that which he regards as important to the public welfare, and it puts a greater responsibility on Congress to give attention to his suggestions. The British constitution gives the power of veto to the 154 MODERN ESSAYS King ; but it has not been exercised for more than two centuries, and were it attempted, it would shake the throne. The exercise of the President's veto always rouses eloquence on the part of those who are much disappointed at the defeat of the measure, and the walls of Congress not infrequently resound with denunciation of his tyranni- cal exercise of a kingly prerogative. But the fact is it has come to be a more frequent characteristic of a republic than of a modern monarchy. For a king or an emperor to interpose a veto to an Act of the popular legislature is really to obstruct the people's will, because he was not chosen by their votes but inherited his royal power. He must, indeed, be careful in exercising a veto lest he incur a protest and arouse a feeling dangerous to his dynasty. The case of the President is very different. The Constitution established by the people requires the President to withhold his signature from a bill if he dis- approve it, and return it with his objections to the House in which it originated. For the President is quite as much the representative of the people as are the mem- bers of the two Houses. Indeed, the whole people of the United States is his constituency, and he therefore speaks and acts for them quite as certainly as the members elected from congressional districts or the Senators from the States. He is not exercising a kingly power in a veto. He is acting in a representative capacity for the whole people, and is preventing a law that he thinks would work to the detriment of the whole country. On this account, the roar of the young lions of Congress against a veto never frightens the occupant of the White House. He is not obstructing popular will ; he is only seeking to express it in his veto, as he has the duty and power to do. It is much more to the point for those who hurl THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 155 their burning words into the Congressional Record to gather votes enough to pass the bill over the veto. If they fail in this, they are not likely to disturb anybody's equa- nimity by trying to establish an analogy between the royal prerogative and a power given the President by the people for their own protection. Again, the President is, by the Constitution, the com- mander-in-chief of the army and navy. That gives him the constitutional right to issue orders to the army and navy to do what he wishes them to do within the law and the restrictions of the Constitution. He can send them to any place in the country, can change their stations, can mass them where he will, and he can call upon them to help him in the execution of the laws. Ordinarily, of course, the law is enforced, so far as the United States is concerned, by the civil executive officers, like United States marshals, post-office employees, collectors of in- ternal revenue and of customs, public land ofiicers, and forestry agents. But wherever the United States law is resisted by violence, wherever the decrees of a United States court are so resisted, and the court calls upon the President to enforce its decree, it is the business of the President to see that this is done ; and if his United States marshals are unable to do it, he may call upon the army to do so. In the Debs strike, or "rebellion," as it w^as called, when an association, known as the "American Railway Union," sought to boycott all the railways, to prevent by violence their operation, and to stop the mail cars in transportation of the United States mail, the federal courts issued injunctions against the leaders ; but the enforcement of these was forcibly resisted. Then President Cleveland called out the army, and the law was enforced. In a subsequent case, involving the validity 156 MODERN ESSAYS of Mr. Cleveland's action, the Supreme Court of the United States fully sustained him. There was a time when under the Constitution the Republican party sought to make possible the legitimate negro vote in the South, and elaborate laws were passed, called "force laws," to subject congressional elections to the supervision of United States election officers, and the army was used to protect them in the discharge of their duty. The Democratic party came into power with a Republican President, Mr. Hayes, and insisted upon imposing a rider upon the army appropriation bill, for- bidding the use of the army to help in the enforcement of the election laws. Mr. Hayes vetoed the army appro- priation bill because it contained such a rider, and the army went without money for one year. Subsequently, however, it was passed. The question never arose as to whether such a restriction upon the executive power was valid. I think it was not. It is a constitutional duty on the part of the President to execute the laws ; and as long as he has an army, and the Constitution contemplates his having an army under his command, he cannot be deprived of the power to use that army to execute all the laws. But the President's constitutional function as com- mander-in-chief of the army and navy gives him a very great scope in the exercise of much wider power than merely issuing military orders to generals for the use of troops. The President was, of course, commander-in- chief in the Spanish War, and as such, under the declara- tion of war that Congress made, he sent troops to Cuba, and subsequently to the Philippines. After the war was over, we continued in occupation of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines ; and until Congress intervened by legis- lation, President McKinley carried on the military govern- h THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 157 ment in these three important dependencies. There were a million people in Porto Rico. There were two and one- half million people in Cuba, and there were upwards of eight millions in the Philippines ; and he exercised not only executive power but legislative power over those twelve millions of people. His executive orders were law. There were some restrictions upon the character of laws he could make, where the question involved the customs laws of the United States ; but all laws that had force in the dependencies themselves, he was able to make and enforce. The protocol which stopped hostilities in the Spanish War was signed in xVugust of 1898, and the Treaty of Paris that ended the war and transferred to us Porto Rico, the Philippines, and the control of Cuba, was signed late in the same year. From that time on, the President created courts, enacted criminal and civil laws, collected taxes, and administered the government through his power as commander-in-chief of the army and the navy, and he did not need to use military agents to accomplish this purpose. In 1900 he sent to the Philippines a Commission of five men to institute a government in the islands. It was called civil government, and it was in fact civil govern- ment, and yet it was established under his military power. At first he retained in the Philippines a military governor, and a major-general of the army was the executive, while the Commission enacted such civil legislation as was needed there and established such municipal and pro- vincial governments as the condition of the country permitted. The President, through the Secretary of War, who acted for him, appointed in July, 1901, a civil governor in the Philippines, under his military power. That civil governor assumed office on the fourth of July, 1901, and it was not until June, 1902, nearly four years after we 158 MODERN ESSAYS acquired possession of the Philippines, that Congress took a hand at all. It was a very wise arrangement, because through the ease with which the President and the Secretary of War could mould the government to suit the conditions, the character of the people, and the exi- gencies of the campaign to tranquillize the islands, by executive orders and Acts of the Commission, a govern- ment was created that fitted the country as a suit would be fitted to a man by a tailor. And then after it was all done, after the work was seen to be good, Congress took up the matter and confirmed what had been done, and established the present government there, on the exact lines of the government that the President had built up under his power as commander-in-chief. The same thing is more or less true of Cuba and Porto Rico, though we did not retain Cuba but turned the island over to the Cubans, in accordance with our promise made when we began the war, and although the government of Porto Rico was not fitted to the necessities of Porto Rico, by experimental administration, as fully and as successfully as in the case of the Philippines. The second interven- tion in Cuba in 1906 was by order of the President, with- out special congressional action or authority. He acted under his power to see that the laws are executed, and by virtue of his power as commander-in-chief of the army and navy. The President has no right to declare war. That rests by the Constitution with Congress. While he cannot declare war, he can direct the action of the army and the navy, and so he could direct an invasion of a foreign country, but that would be an act of war which would necessarily bring on war. There have been cases where the President has used the marine force and landed men to THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 159 protect American property, but such landing is not to be regarded as an invasion. Certainly a President would violate his duty if he directed such an invasion without the consent of the constituted authority in a foreign country, and thus brought on war. But in the case of Cuba and the intervention to which I have referred, Cuba had consented in the treaty which she made with the United States, and had provided in her own constitution that the United States might intervene at its discretion for the purpose of maintaining law and order. So far as the President was concerned, this put Cuba within the jurisdiction of the United States to that extent, and so it became the President's duty to see that the laws were executed in Cuba, without receiving special congressional authority. And he did it with the army and the navy, because he was their commander-in-chief. Another instance. The Canal Zone on the Isthmus of Panama is a territory belonging to the United States, in which we exercise authority equal to absolute dominion. Congress passed a law authorizing the President to es- tablish a government there, and to appoint officers to exercise governmental authority ; but the law, by its own terms, expired within a year after its enactment. Meantime we were on the Isthmus building the canal . Congress had given the President authority to build the canal, indeed had made it his duty to do so, but there was absolutely no authority expressly given to him to continue a government after the expiration of the law to which I have referred. But the President went right on exercising the same authority that he had been exercising ; and he did so, under his constitutional authority to see that the laws of the United States are executed. In the absence of congressional action, when there is a piece of United 160 MODERN ESSAYS States territory without a government, he has to take charge of it, and govern it as best he can. Congress knows the conditions and does not act, and so the President is compelled to do so. Judges may be appointed, hiws administered, men imprisoned and executed for crime, and all by direction of the executive power. Another power of the President, and one of his greatest powers, is expressed in a very innocent and simple sen- tence : "He shall receive all Ambassadors and public Ministers." He can make treaties, but he cannot do that without the ratification, or, as it is called in the Constitu- tion, without "the advice and consent of the Senate," by a vote of two-thirds of those present. He cannot declare war, because that is a power that Congress exercises under the Constitution. Except for these specific limitations, he controls entirely our international relations. In the first place, no treaty can be made unless he initiates it. The Senate may pass a resolution suggesting his making a treaty, and so might the House, and so might Congress, but he is not obliged to follow their recommendation. All our intercourse, except the formal making of treaties with foreign countries, is carried on by the President through the State Department. Now that involves the presentation of claims and complaints by our citizens against foreign countries, and the presentation by us of petitions for all sorts of action by foreign governments. It involves a correspondence as to the complaints by foreign citizens or subjects against our government. It involves a constant reference to treaties made and their construction by our government, which construction after a while practically fixes our attitude. The President recognizes foreign governments. Thus we see in Mexico, which fell into a state of revolution and almost anarchy, THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 161 President Wilson declined to recognize Huerta as provi- sional president. He had the right to do so. He had the right to recognize him if he chose ; and the resulting crisis made it evident what a very important and re- sponsible power that is. Take the case of the fur seals. Congress passed a law, punishing anyone who resorted to pelagic sealing in the Bering Sea. The government owned the Pribilof Islands, upon which was a herd of seals. The destruction of the female seals out at sea was very injurious to the herd. That was the occasion for the enactment of the congres- sional law to which I referred. Now under the construc- tion that international law would ordinarily put upon such a statute, it could only apply to sealing within three miles of United States land, or else in some way or other we would have to establish ownership in the seals themselves. Mr. Blaine, who was then Secretary of State, took the position that the grant of Alaska to the United States in 18G7 carried with it dominion over the Bering Sea for the purpose of preserving these seals, and he went back into the records to show that Russia had claimed such dominion and attempted to prove that it had been ac- quiesced in by the Powers. Following that view, the United States Court of Alaska sustained the seizure of certain Canadian fishing vessels that had been caught in pelagic sealing by one of our revenue cutters, forfeited them under the congressional Act and sold them. The British government, through Canadian agents, brought a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States to secure a writ of prohibition against the Alaska court to prevent that court from carrying out its decree, on the ground that there was no jurisdiction over the Bering Sea which Congress could assert or which the President could maintain. The M 162 MODERN ESSAYS Supreme Court dismissed the application, on the main ground that the question of the dominion of the United States was a poHtical question, to be determined by the President or Congress ; and because the President had asserted the claim through the Secretary of State that we had dominion over the Alaskan waters beyond the three- mile limit, the court would be bound by it. Then we had an international arbitration in which the court con- sidered the question and held that the Secretary of State was wrong. For the purposes of my present discussion, it is a good illustration of the very great power that the President can exercise in his control over foreign relations. By the Constitution, the President has the right to appoint all ambassadors, ministers, consuls, and judges of the Supreme Court, subject to confirmation by the Senate of the United States. Congress may place the appointment of all other officers, with the consent of the Senate, in the President alone, or in the heads of depart- ments, or in the courts. Practically, the general power of appointment of all officers, except very inferior and unim- portant officers, is in the President, and generally confir- mation is required by the Senate. This, of course, is a great power. It is a power, so far as the great offices are concerned, that the President must have in order that he may have his policies carried out. That is, he must appoint his Cabinet, because, as the Supreme Court has said, they are the fingers of his hand, and they must do his will and exercise his discretion. Therefore, if there is to be uniformity, if there is to be consistency, if there is to be solidarity of movement and force in the executive branches of the government, the President must appoint the men who act at the heads of departments and form his Cabinet. THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 163 In respect to all the other executive offices, however, a different rule should obtain. With the exception of the judges of the courts, of the ambassadors and ministers, of the members of his Cabinet, and the appointment of the general officers of the army, I think that the action of the President ought practically to be nothing more than a formal acquiescence in a system which prevails in other well-governed countries, by which the selection and pro- motion of all officers is by examination, and their tenure is for life. The President should not be bothered, as he is now, with having to exercise an arbitrary discretion enabling him, if he choose, to use the offices for political purposes, and involving him in controversies that interfere with his effectiveness as the chief executive officer of the nation and do not help the public weal. It is entirely possible to put all these offices, except the ones I have named, under the system called the classified civil service. If popular government is to be a success, the success will be measured by the ability of the government to use the services of experts in carrying it on. The selection of other than the highest officers on political grounds will not result in the use of experts to carry on the various functions that the government performs. We are acquiescing now, all of us, in the view that the government can accomplish and ought to accomplish much more benefit for the people than Mr. Jefferson and his school of political thinkers admitted. Mr. Jefferson contended that the least government was the best govern- ment ; that the function of government should be confined, as nearly as possible, to the administration of justice through the courts, and the maintenance of law and order through the police. But we now take a different view, and hold that there are many things the government can 164 MODERN ESSAYS do well and better than private contractors. For instance, we have always run the post office, and now we run the parcels post. We have built the Panama Canal ; and the state governments are discharging many functions that it was formerly thought would be better performed by pri- vate agency. But such functions for their successful per- formance require the highest experts. If we are to change such officers every four years with the political complexion of the administration, then we lose the benefit of experi- ence, we lose the benefit of the disinterested devotion to the public service that a life-tenure brings about, and we take away from the public service its attractiveness for the many whose service would be valuable, but who because of the uncertainty of tenure in the government service decline to accept positions of responsibility in it. I speak whereof I know when I say it injures the dignity and the usefulness of a President to be bothered about the preference to be given to candidates for post offices, for collectors of customs, collectors of internal revenue all over this country. Under the present law, the Senate is required to confirm them. That necessity gives to the Senators an oppor- tunity to use duress, for that is what it amounts to, upon the President to establish a custom by which he shall consult their political views as to who shall be appointed to those local offices. The office of President is one of the greatest responsi- bility. No one knows the burden he has to carry in the Presidency until he has laid it down and realizes the ex- haustion of his mental and nervous energy which un- consciously was going on while he attempted to discharge his duties. One of the most aggravating features of his present duties is this constant attention that he has to pay to the visits of Congressmen and Senators in regard THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 165 to the local patronage. He ought not to have to do with such offices at all. Thus far the Senate has not been willing to give up its power in this regard. While I was in the White House I recommended it every year. I believe it is coming. We have made great progress in this matter. We have now a civil service law that covers many of the inferior offices, but what we ought to have is a permanent machinery of the government reaching up to include the assistant secretaries in the various depart- ments. It will make for efficiency ; it w^ill make for economy ; it will make for saving of the time and energy of the President and Senators and Congressmen. It will take away opportunities for political machines ; it will tend towards purity in politics and effectiveness of govern- ment ; and, therefore, it will make for the weal of the people of the United States ; and it can all be accomplished by an Act of Congress, and a President who will approve the Act and carry out its spirit. It is coming. The Lord is on that side, but sometimes He moves more slowly than we impatient mortals think necessary. The other great power which the President has, in addition to being commander-in-chief of the army and navy, conducting the foreign relations of the government, making treaties and declaring war, and the power of appointment and the power to see the law executed, is in the granting of reprieves and pardons to those suffering punishment for violating laws of the United States. This is a very wide power. The President may exercise it after a crime is committed and before any trial begins; may exercise it before the man is arrested ; may issue an amnesty — that is, a pardon of a number of people by a class description. The power of pardon in States has been greatly abused by some governors, but I 166 MODERN ESSAYS never heard that any President had called down on himself just criticism for his use of this great and merci- ful instrument. In the exercise of the pardoning power, there is no certain line to guide the executive to a safe conclusion. He has to balance in his mind the considera- tions for which punishment is provided. The aim of punishment of a criminal is, first, to furnish an example to induce others who are about to commit similar crimes to avoid them ; second, to reform the criminal, if possible, that is, to chasten him and then treat him in such a way as to bring him back into the law-abiding classes of the community. If one takes up an individual case there are always circumstances that suggest, and appeal for, mercy because it happens so frequently that the imprisonment of the criminal inflicts a heavier punishment on those who are related to him by blood or kinship, than upon himself, and the pardoning power is deeply moved to save them from undeserved suffering. But the interests of society require that such a consideration should be rejected in order that the example of punishment may be effective and persuasive. It is a most dangerous power to entrust to the executive with a big heart and a little head, or a man with a big heart and very little power over his feelings. By such governors, criminals will be let loose on society and the whole effort of those who are conducting the machinery of assistance will be paralyzed. One never knows until he has been in the Presidency the amount of pressure that is brought in one way and another to stay the prosecutions and to pardon criminals. I had two cases once before me, in which it was represented to me that both the convicts were near death, and I instituted an investigation to find out the truth through the Army Medical Corps. Examinations were made, watches were THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 167 established over the sick men, and it was reported to me that they were both in the last stages of a fatal disease. One of them died soon after he was released from the peni- tentiary. The other is apparently in excellent health and seeking to reestablish himself in the field in which he committed a penitentiary offense. This shakes one's faith in expert examinations. Then there are many appli- cations in advance of prosecutions to prevent indictments and prevent trials. The influences brought are insidious, and usually the very fact of seeking such influences is an indication that the person charged is guilty. I have referred to the duty and the power of the Presi- dent to see that the laws are executed. This is stated in the Constitution, but it involves considerably more than seeing that the letter of the law is carried out. It involves the construction of the law by the President and his sub- ordinates, because he cannot execute it until he finds out what it means, and frequently laws are very blind and the interpretation of the law covers so much that it involves the exercise of an important function. Of course, courts in litigated cases are called upon to consider laws, but there are many laws of the national government that can never be brought before courts of law — acts of appropriation, for instance, as to what the appropriation includes and how to be expended. These questions are settled by the Attorney-General, by the Comptroller of the Currency, appointees of the President, and sometimes by the Presi- dent himself. Then there are a great many projects to be carried out by the government, and Congress naturally vests the control of them in the President. That is what it did in the case of the Panama Canal. The Spooner Act in 1902 directed the President to construct the canal. It required him to do it through a commission, 168 MODERN ESSAYS but the commission was subject to his appointment and removal. However, "money makes the mare go." You cannot have a government unless you have a treasury full of funds with which to run it, and all these executive func- tions of the President are to be performed by agents who must be paid in order that they shall serve. In other words, while these powers that I have pointed out are very broad, Congress retains very great restraining power in that clause of the Constitution which provides that no money shall be paid out of the Treasury except upon appropriation of Congress ; and if the President is left without money, he is well-nigh helpless. By refusal to vote supply bills, the Commons of England brought the Stuarts and kings before them to a realization of the power of the people, and this same power still exists in our Congress to restrain any executive who may seek to exceed his constitutional limitations. Of course, I am speaking now of the legal powers of the President. I am not speaking of those powers that natur- ally come to him through our political system, and because he is the head of the party. He can thus actually exercise very considerable influence, sometimes a controlling in- fluence, in the securing of legislation by his personal inter- vention with the members of his party who are in control in each House. I think he ought to have very great in- fluence, because he is made responsible to the people for what the party does ; and if the party is wise, it will bend to his leadership as long as it is tolerable, and especially where it is in performance of promises that the party has made in its platform and on the faith of which it must be assumed to have obtained its power. But such power as he exercises in this way is not within the letter of the law THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 169 and probably does not come within the legitimate bounds of such an article as this. The functions of the President which I have enumerated seem very broad ; but when many speak of the enormous power of a President, they have in mind that what the President does goes like kissing, by favor. Now the Presidency offers but few opportunities for discretion of that sort. The responsibility of the office is so heavy, the earnest desire of every man who fills the place to de- serve the approval of his countrymen by doing the thing that is best for the country so strong, and the fear of just popular criticism so controlling, that it is difiicult for one who has been brought through four years of it to remember any personal favor that he was able to confer. There are certain political obligations that the custom of a party requires the President to discharge on the recommenda- tion of Senators and Congressmen, and of the men who have had the conduct of the political campaign in which he was successful. I think, as I have already said, that this kind of obligation should be reduced to its lowest terms by a change of the law, and that the custom which has been maintained since the beginning of government, and which has not been in the interest of good government, ought to be minimized to a point where it will cease to be harm- ful. But I refer now to that kind of power that imagina- tion clothes the President and all rulers with, to gratify one man and humiliate another and punish a third, in order to satisfy the whim or the vengeance of the man in power. That does not exist, and the truth is that great as these powers are, when a President comes to exercise them, he is much more concerned with the limitations upon them to see that he does not exceed them, than he is affected by personal gratification over the big things he can do. 170 MODERN ESSAYS The President is given $25,000 a year for travelling expenses ; and this enables him to travel in a private car, and it is wise that it should be so. Were he to travel in a Pullman car, where the public could approach him, the ordinarily commendable curiosity of the American people to see their President close at hand would subject to such annoyances both him and the travelling public with whom he might happen to be that both he and they would be made most uncomfortable. There is an impression that the President cannot leave the country and that the law forbids. This is not true. The only provision of law which bears on the subject at all is that which provides that the Vice-President shall take his place when the President is disabled from performing his duties. Now if he is out of the country at a point where he cannot dis- charge the necessary functions that are imposed on him, such disability might arise ; but the communication by telegraph, wireless, and telephone are now so good that it would be difficult for a President to go anywhere and not be able to keep his subordinates in constant informa- tion as to his whereabouts and his wishes. As a matter of fact. Presidents do not leave the country very often. Occasionally it seems in the public interest that they should. President Roosevelt visited the Canal Zone for the purpose of seeing what work was being done on the canal and giving zest to that work by personal contact with those who were engaged in it. I did the same thing later on, travelling, as he did, on the deck of a government vessel which is technically the soil of the United States. The Zone is the soil of the United States. He was not out of the jurisdiction of the United States except for a few hours. He went into the city of Panama, as I did, and dined with the President of the Panamanian Republic. THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 171 So, too, I dined with President Diaz at Juarez, in Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, but nobody was heard to say that in any of these visits we had disabled ourselves from performing our constitutional and statutory functions. The assassination of three Presidents has led Congress to provide that the chief of the Secret Service shall furnish protection to the President as he moves about, either in Washington or in the country at large. I presume that experience shows this to be necessary. While President, I never was conscious of any personal anxiety while in large crowds, and I have been in many of them. Yet the record of assaults upon Presidents is such that Congress would be quite derelict if it disregarded it. The necessary pre- cautions are a great burden on the President. He never can go anywhere that he does not have to inflict upon those whom he wishes to see the burden of the presence of a body guard, and it is a little difficult to get away from the feeling that one is under surveillance himself rather than being protected from somebody else. The Civil Service men are level-headed, experienced, and of good manners, and they are wise in their methods and most expert in detecting those from whom danger is most to be expected. I mean the partially demented and "cranks." If a person is determined to kill a President and is willing to give up his life for it, no such protection will save his victim. But such persons are very rare. The worst danger is from those who have lost part or all of their reason, and whom the presence of a President in the community excites. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that with the experts that we now have and the system that is now pursued, the assassination of Presi- dent McKinley at Buffalo might j^ossibly have been 172 MODERN ESSAYS avoided. The presence of the assassin with a revolver under his handkerchief would now be detected long before he could get within range of the object of his per- verted purpose. The President is in office for only four years or at most eight, and the social influence that he and his family can exercise is quite limited. It is sufficient for our democratic purposes ; but it does not compare with the social influence that is exercised by the head of the state in a country like Great Britain. The truth is that the chief and almost the only power that the King of Britain has, except in an advisory way, is as the social head of the kingdom. The moral influence that he exercises over his court may thus be made strong. It always permeates to those who do not come directly within the court circles. There is, too, a political influence that the King and the royal family can exert in this way, not affirmative and direct, but conserving, softening, and conciliatory, alle- viating party bitterness and moderating extreme views. The ancient and still living respect for royalty is strong in itself to discourage violent methods, to compel good manners. In this respect, of course, because the King is permanent during his life and the members of the royal family likewise, this social rule is vastly stronger than that of the President. But in every other respect as be- tween the King of England and the President of the United States, the President really rules within the limit of the functions entrusted to him by the Constitution, while the King has lost much of his former power in the progress of democracy to complete control in Great Britain, and merely reigns as the titular and social head of the state. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER ^ BY George Edward Woodberry The death of Whittier in 1889 furnished the occasion for Professor Woodberry's essay. It opens logically with two paragraphs giving the immediate reason for writing ; although Whittier was local to New Eng- land, he is really national so far as the spirit of New England has passed into the nation at large ; and, the New England of Whittier has become historical. The next paragraph defines the subject, that Whittier will be treated as a poet. The following paragraphs, therefore, take up in succession various phases and characteristics of his poetic activity. The whole is bound together by the concluding thought, that among the honored names of the New England past his place is secure. There is no biographical introduction, and there is little more than an occasional trenchant sentence of biographical detail. The assumption is made that the reader is both familiar with the subject and already sufficiently in- terested in it to desire a succinct presentation of literary judgment free from the introduction of irrelevant detail. Thus this is a good example of a clean-cut critical essay. On the other hand, there is no appeal to the casual reader. The time has come to pay tribute of farewell upon the occasion of the death of Whittier. The popular instinct which long ago adopted him as the poet of New England is one of those sure arbiters, superior to all academic judgments upon the literary works of a man, which con- fer a rightful fame in life, and justify the expectation of a long remembrance. Whittier was distinctly a local 'From "Makers of Literature," by permission of The Macmillan Co. 173 174 MODERN ESSAYS poet, a New Englander ; but to acknowledge this does not diminish his honor, nor is he thereby set in a secondary place. His locality, if one may use the expression, was a country by itself ; its inhabitants were a peculiar people, with a strongly marked social and moral character, with a landscape and an atmosphere, with historical traditions, legends often romantic, and with strong vitalizing ideas. There was something more than a literary fancy in the naturalness with which Whittier sought a kind of fellow- ship with Burns ; there was a true resemblance in their situation as the poets of their own kin and soil, in their reliance upon the strength of the people of whom they were born, and in their cherished attachment to the places and scenes where they grew. New England, moreover, had this advantage, that it was destined to set the stamp of its character upon the larger nation in which it was an ele- ment ; so that if Whittier be regarded, as he sometimes is, as a representative American poet, it is not without justice. He is really national so far as the spirit of New England has passed into the nation at large ; and that vast body of Western settlers who bore New England to the frontier, and yet look back to the old homestead, find in him the sentiment of their past. There can be little question, too, that he is representative of a far larger portion of the American people than any other of the elder poets. His lack of the culture of the schools has here been in his favor, and has brought him closer to the common life ; he is more democratic than he otherwise might have been ; and the people, recognizing in him their own strain, have accepted him with a judgment as valid as that with which cultivated critics accept the work of the man of genius who is also an artist. One calls him a local poet rather to define his qualities than to characterize his range. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 175 The New England which Whittier represents has now become historical. The length of his life carried him beyond his times. It is plainer now than it was at an earlier day that his poems are one of the living records of a past which will be of perennial interest and ever held in honor. That his early poetic career fell in with the anti-slavery movement was not a misfortune for his Muse ; the man fed upon it, and drew therefrom an iron strength for the moral nature which was the better half of his endowment. He was, too, one who was destined to develop, to reach his powers, more by exercising than by cultivating his poetic gift ; and in the events of the agita- tion for the abolition of slavery he had subjects that drew out his moral emotions with most eloquent heat, and exalted his spirit to its utmost of sympathy, indignation, and heroic trust. The anti-slavery movement was his education, — in a true sense, the gymnastic of his genius ; but in the whole body of his work it was no more than an incident, although the most stirring and most noble, in his literary career, just as it was no more in the career of New England. The great events with which a man deals, and part of which he is, obscure the other portions of his life ; but it should not be forgotten that Whittier began as a poet, and not as a reformer, and it may be added that the poet in him was, in the long run, more than the reformer. He did not resort to verse as an expedient in propagandism ; rather, wearing the laurel, — to use the good old phrase, — he descended into the field just as he was. He had begun with those old Indian legends in lines which still echoed with Byron's tales, and he had with them much the same success that attended other aboriginal poetry. It seems, as one reads the hundred weary epics, from which Whit- 176 MODERN ESSAYS tier's are hardly to be distinguished, that the curse of ex- tinction resting on the doomed race clung also to the Muse that so vainly attempted to recompense it with immortality in the white man's verse. These were Whittier's juvenile trials. lie came early, nevertheless, to his mature form in the ballad and the occasional piece ; his versification was fixed, his manner determined, and thenceforth there was no radical change. This is less remarkable inasmuch as it is a commonplace to say that he owed nothing to art ; the strength of his native genius was all his secret, and when he had freed a way for its expression the task of his novitiate was done. He had now a mould in which to run his metal, and it satis- fied him because he was not exacting of perfect form or high finish ; probably he had no sense for them. Tliis in- difference to the artistic workmanship, which a later day prizes so much as to require it, allowed him to indulge his natural facility, and the very simplicity of his metres was in itself a temptation to difluseness. The conse- quence w'as that he wrote much, and not always well, unevenness being usually characteristic of poets who rely on the energy of their genius for the excellence of their work. To the artist his art serves often as a conscience, and forces him to a standard below which he is not content to fall. Whittier, however, experienced the compensa- tions which are everywhere to be found in life, and gained in fullness, perhaps, more than he lost in other ways. The free flow of his thought, tlie simplicity of his structure, the willingness not to select with too nice a sense, but to tell the whole, all helped to that frankness of the man which is the great charm of his w^orks, taken together, and assisted him in making his expression of old New England life complete. No man could have w'ritten JOHN GREENLEAF WIIITTIER 177 Snow-Bound who remembered Theocritus. In Whittier, Nature reminds us, as she is wont to do from time to time, that the die which she casts exceeds the diploma of the schooL Art may lift an inferior talent to higher estima- tion, but genius makes a very little art go a long way. This was Whittier's case. The poetic spark was inborn in him, living in his life ; and when academic criticism has said its last word, he remains a poet, removed by a broad and not doubtful line from all stringers of couplets and filers of verses. Whittier had, in addition to this clear native genius, character ; his subject, too. New England, had character ; and the worth of the man blending with the worth of the life he portrayed, independent of all considerations of art, has won for him the admiration and affection of the com- mon people, who know the substance of virtue, and always see it shining with its own light. They felt that Whittier wrote as they would have written, had they been gifted with the miraculous tongues ; and this feeling is a true criterion to discover whether a poet has expressed the people rather than himself. They might choose to write like the great artists of letters ; they know they never could do so ; but Whittier is one of themselves. The secret of his vogue with the plain people is his own plainness. He appeals directly to the heart, as much in his lesser poems as in those which touch the sense of right and wrong in men with stinging keenness, or in those which warm faith to its ardor. He has the popular love of a story, and tells it more nearly in the way of the old ballad-makers. He does not require a tragedy, or a plot, or any unusual action. An incident, if it only have some glamour of fancy, or a touch of pathos, or the likeness of old romance, is enough for him ; he will take it and sing it merely as N 178 MODERN ESSAYS something that happened. He was famihar with the legendary lore and historical anecdote of his own county of Essex, and he enjoyed these traditions less as history than as poetry ; he came to them on their picturesque and human side, and cared for them because of the emo- tions they could still awake. It is to be acknowledged, too, that the material for these romances was just such as delights the popular imagination. The tales of the witches, notwithstanding the melancholy of the delusion, have something of the eeriness that is inseparable from the thought of the supernatural, and stir the dormant sense of some evil fascination ; and the legends of spectral shapes that haunted every seacoast in old times, and of which New England had its share, have a similar quality. Whether they are told by credulous Mather or the make- believing poet, they have the same power to cast a spell. When to this sort of interest Whittier adds, as he often does, the sights of religious persecution, or some Lochinvar love-making, or the expression of his faith in heaven, his success as a story-teller is assured. In reality, he has managed the ballad form with more skill than other measures ; but it is because he loves a story and tells it for its own sake, with the ease of one who sits by the fire- side, and with a childish confidence that it will interest, that he succeeds so well in pleasing. In his sea-stories, and generally in what he writes about the ocean, it is ob- servable that he shows himself to be an inland-dweller, whose acquaintance with the waves is by distant glimpses and vacation days. He is not a poet of the sea, but this does not invalidate the human truth of his tales of voyag- ing, which is the element he cared for. Perhaps the poetic quality of his genius is most clear in these ballads ; there is a freer fancy ; there are often verses about woman's JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 179 eyes and hair and cheeks, all with similes from sky and gold and roses, in the old fashion, but not with less natural- ness on that account ; there is a more absorbing appeal to the imagination both in the characters and the incidents. If these cannot be called his most vigorous work, they are at least most attractive to the purely poetic taste. In the ballads, nevertheless, one feels the strong under- tow of the moral sense dragging the mind back to serious realities. It is probably true of all the English stock, as it certainly is of New England people, that they do not object to a moral, in a poem or anywhere else. Whittier's moral hold upon his readers is doubtless greater than his poetic hold. He appeals habitually to that capacity for moral feeling which is the genius of New England in its public life, and the explanation of its extraordinary in- fluence. No one ever appeals to it in vain ; and with such a cause as Whittier took up to champion, he could ring out a challenge that was sure to rank the conscience of his people upon his side. His Quaker blood, of which he was proud, pleaded strongly in his own veins. He was the inlieritor of suffering for conscience' sake ; he was bred in the faith of equality, of the right of every man to private judgment, and the duty of every man to follow it in public action ; and he was well grounded in the doctrines of political liberty which are the foundation of the common- wealth. It is more likely, however, that his enthusiasm for the slave did not proceed from that love of freedom which is the breath of New England. It arose from his humanity, in the broad sense ; from his belief, sincerely held and practiced, in the brotherhood of men ; from the strong conviction that slavery was wrong. It was a matter of conscience more than of reason, of compassion and sympathy more than of theoretical ideas. These 180 MODERN ESSAYS were the sources of his moral feeHng ; his attitude was the same whether he was deahng with Quaker outrages in the past or with negro wrongs in the present. In expressing liimself upon the great topic of his time, he was thus able to make the same direct appeal to the heart that was natural to his temperament. The people either felt as he did, or were so circumstanced that they would respond from the same springs which had been touched in him, if a way could be found to them. Outside of the reserves of political expediency, the movement for abolition was harmonious with the moral nature of New England. Yet Whittier's occasional verses upon this theme made him only the poet of his party. In themselves they have great vigor of feeling, and frequently force of language ; they have necessarily the defects, judged from the artistic standpoint, of poems upon a painful subject, in which it was desirable not to soften, but to bring out the tragedy most harshly. The pain, however, is entirely in the facts presented; the poetry lies in the indignation, the eloquence, the fine appeal. These verses, indeed, are nearer to a prose level than the rest of his work, in the sense of partaking of the character of eloquence rather than of poetry. Their method is less through the imagina- tion than by rhetoric. They are declamatory. But rhetoric of the balanced and concise kind natural to short metrical stanzas is especially well adapted to arrest popular attention and to hold it. Just as he told a story in the ballad with a true popular feeling, so he pleaded the cause of the abolitionists in a rhetoric most effective with the popular taste. In the war time, he rose, under the stress of the great struggle, to finer poetic work ; the softer feelings of pity, together with a solemn religious trust, made the verses of those battle-summers different JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 181 in quality from those of the literary conflict of the earlier years. He never surpassed, on the lower level of rhetoric, the lines which bade farewell to Webster's greatness, nor did he ever equal in intensity those rallying-cries of de- fiance to the South, in which the free spirit of the North seemed to speak before its time. In these he is urging on to the conflict, — a moral and peaceful one, he thought, but not less real and hard ; in the war pieces, he seems rather to be waiting for the decision of Providence, while the fight has rolled on far in the van of where he stands. The power of all these poems, their reality to those times, is undeniable. Their fitness for declamation perhaps spread his reputation. Longfellow is distinctly the children's poet ; but Whittier had a part of their suffrages, and it was by such stirring occasional verses that he gained them. In those years of patriotism he was to many of them, as he was to me, tjie first poet whom they knew. At that time his reputation in ways like these became established. If he had not then done his best work, he had at times reached the highest level he was to attain, and he had already given full expression to his nature. His place as the poet of the anti-slavery movement was fixed. It is observable that he did not champion other causes after that of abolition was won, and in this he dif- fered from most of his companions. The only other cause that roused him to the point of poetic expression was that of the Italian patriots. Some of his most indignant and sharpest invective was directed against Pope Pius IX., who stood to Whittier as the very type of that Christian obstructiveness to the work of Christ which in a lesser degree he had seen in his own country, and had seen always only to express the heartfelt scorn which descended to him with his Quaker birthright. 182 MODERN ESSAYS It would be unfitting to leave this part of the subject without reference to the numerous personal tributes, often full of grace, of tender feeling, and of true honor paid to the humble, which he was accustomed to lay as his votive wreath on the graves of his companions. One is struck once more by the reflection how large a part those who are now forgotten had in advancing the cause, how many modest but earnest lives entered into the work, and what a feeling of comradery there was among those engaged in philanthropic service in all lands. The verses to Garrison and Sumner naturally stand first in fervor and range as well as in interest, but nearly all these mementos of the dead have some touch of nobility. The victory of the Northern ideas left to Whittier a freer field for the later exercise of his talent. It was natural that he should have been among the first to speak words of conciliation to the defeated South, and to offer to forget. He was a man of peace, of pardons, of all kinds of catholic inclusions ; and in this temperament with regard to the future of the whole country, fortunately, the people agreed with him. With the coming of the years of reconciliation his reputation steadily gained. His representative quality as a New Englander was recog- nized. It was seen that from the beginning the real spirit of New England had been truly with him, and, the cause being now won and the past a great one, his country- men were proud of him for having been a part of it. At this happy moment he produced a work free from any entanglement with things disputed, remarkable for its truth to life, and exemplifying the character of New Eng- land at its fireside in the way which comes home to all men. It is not without perfect justice that Snow-Bound takes rank with The Cotter's Saturday Night and The JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 183 Deserted Village ; it belongs in this group as a faithful picture of humble life. It is perfect in its conception and complete in its execution ; it is the New England home, entire, with its characteristic scene, its incidents of house- hold life, its Christian virtues. Perhaps many of us look back to it as Horace did to the Sabine farm ; but there are more who can still remember it as a reality, and to them this winter idyl is the poetry of their own lives. It is, in a peculiar sense, the one poem of New England, — so completely indigenous that the soil has fairly created it, so genuine as to be better than history. It is by virtue of this poem that Whittier must be most highly rated, be- cause he is here most impersonal, and has succeeded in expressing the common life with most directness. All his affection for the soil on which he was born went into it ; and no one ever felt more deeply that attachment to the region of his birth which is the great spring of patriot- ism. In his other poems he had told the legends of the country, and winnowed its history for what was most heroic or romantic ; he had often dwelt, with a reiteration which emphasized his fondness, upon its scenery in every season, by all its mountains and capes and lakes and rivers, as if fearful lest he should offend by omission some local divinity of the field or flood ; he had shared in the great moral passion of his people in peace and war, and had become its voice and been adopted as one of its memo- rable leaders ; but here he came to the heart of the matter, and by describing the homestead, which was the unit and centre of New England life, he set the seal upon his work, and entered into all New England homes as a perpetual guest. There remains one part of his work, and that, in some respects, the loftiest, which is in no sense local. The 184 MODERN ESSAYS Christian faith which he expressed is not to be limited as distinctly characteristic of New England. No one would make the claim. It was descended from the Quaker faith only as Emerson's was derived from that of the Puritan. Whittier belongs with those few who arise in all parts of the Christian world and out of the bosom of all sects, who are lovers of the spirit. They illustrate the purest teachings of Christ, they express the simplest aspirations of man ; and this is their religious life. They do not trouble themselves except to do good, to be sincere, to walk in the sight of the higher powers with humbleness, and if not without doubt, yet with undiminished trust. The oj)timism of Whittier is one with theirs. It is in- dissolubly connected with his humanity to men. In his religious as in his moral nature there was the same sim- plicity, the same entire coherency. His expression of the religious feeling is always noble and impressive. He is one of the very few whose poems, under the fervor of religious emotion, have taken a higher range and become true hymns. Several of these are already adopted into the books of praise. But independently of these few most complete expressions of trust and worship, wherever Whittier touches upon the problems of the spiritual life he evinces the qualities of a great and liberal nature ; indeed, the traits which are most deeply impressed upon us, in his character, are those which are seen most clearly in his religious verse. It is impossible to think of him and forget that he is a Christian. It is not rash to say that it is probable that his religious poems have reached many more hearts than his anti-slavery pieces, and have had a profounder influence to quiet, to console, and to refine. Yet he was not distinctly a poet of religion, as Herbert was. He was a man in whom religion was vital, just as JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 185 affection for his home and indignation at wrongdoing were vital. He gave expression to his manhood, and conse- quently to the religious life he led. There are in these revelations of his nature the same frankness and the same reality as in his most heated polemics with the oppressors of the weak ; one cannot avoid feeling that it is less the poet than the man who is speaking, and that in his words he is giving himself to his fellow-men. This sense that Whittier belongs to that class of writers in whom the man is larger than his work is a just one. Over and above his natural genius was his character. At every step of the analysis, it is not with art, but with matter, not with the literature of taste, but with that of life, not with a poet's skill, but with a man's soul, that we find ourselves dealing ; in a word, it is with character almost solely : and it is this which has made him the poet of his people, as the highest art might have failed to do, because he has put his New England birth and breeding, the common inheritance of her freedom-loving, humane, and religious people which he shared, into plain living, yet on such a level of distinc- tion that his virtues have honored the land. The simplicity and dignity of Whittier's later years, and his fine modesty in respect to his literary work, have fitly closed his career. He has received in the fullest measure from the younger generation the rewards of honor which belong to such a life. In his retirement these un- sought tributes of an almost affectionate veneration have followed him ; and in the struggle about us for other prizes than those he aimed at, in the crush for wealth and notoriety, men have been pleased to remember him, the plain citizen, uncheapened by riches and unsolicitous for fame, ending his life with the same habits with which he began it, in the same spirit in which he led it, without any / MODERN ESSAYS compromise with the world. The Quaker aloofness which has always seemed to characterize him, his difference from other men, has never been sufficient to break the bonds which unite him with the people, but it has helped to secure for him the feeling with which the poet is always regarded as a man apart ; the religious element in his nature has had the same effect to win for him a peculiar regard akin to that which was felt in old times for the sacred office ; to the imagination he has been, especially in the years of his age, a man of peace and of God. No one of his contemporaries has been more silently beloved and more sincerely honored. If it be true that in him the man was more than the poet, it is happily not true, as in such cases it too often is, that the life was less than it should have been. The life of Whittier affects us rather as sin- gularly fortunate in the completeness with which he was able to do his wdiole duty, to possess his soul, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. He was fortunate in his humble birth and the virtues which were about his cradle ; he was fortunate in the great cause for which he suffered and labored in his prime, exactly fitted as it was to develop his nature to its highest moral reach, and lift him to real greatness of soul ; he was fortunate in his old age, in the mellowness of his humanity, the repose of his faith, the fame which, more truly than can usually be said, was "love disguised." Lovers of New England will cherish his memory as that of a man in whom the virtues of this soil, both for public and for private life, shine most purely. On the roll of American poets we know not how he may be ranked hereafter, but among the honored names of the New England past his place is secure. THACKERAY'S CENTENARY i BY Henry Augustine Beers In this very delightful and acutely critical essay by Professor Beers the use of the catalogue should be noted, — and equally how that use b concealed. The first paragraph frankly states the two objects of the paper : first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since Thackeray's death ; secondly, to give Professor Beers' own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray. But the first question is dismissed in two short paragraphs. The rest of the essay discusses the critical aspect of Thackeray's work in the guise of personal reminiscence. Thackeray is a satirist, is imperfectly realistic, detested sham heroics, has a mixture of humor and pensiveness, etc. But, by means of the device of the personal experience, this criticism is kept from disagreeable dogmatic assertion. And the whole is unified by the charm of a single personality. After all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things : First to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others. What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth ; and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism ; or rather by time, that far more 1 From The Yale Review for October, 1911, by permission of the author and of the editor of The Vale Review. 187 188 MODERN ESSAYS corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the EngUsh fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names : Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said — what has been said — for others : Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading, Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast. The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that ; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their be- setting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection. I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens's world, though perhaps he and Scott some- what overlapped at the edge — I cannot quite remember- THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 189 I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. "Dear old Thackeray is gone," they told each other, and proceeded to re-read all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up "Vanity Fair" and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott's picturesque page and Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky ! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings ! " It's just about a lot of old girls," I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, "My boy, those old girls are life." I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into "Vanity Fair," hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it "the poorest of Thackeray's novels — crude, heavy-handed, cari- catured." I ought to have begun, as he did, with "Pen- dennis," of which he writes : "I am still not sure but it is the author's greatest book." I don't know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray's that I have read most often and like the best, better than "Henry Esmond" or "Vanity Fair"; just as I prefer "The Mill on the Floss" to "Adam Bede," and "The House of the Seven Gables" to "The Scarlet Letter" (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way) ; or as I agree with Dickens that "Bleak House" was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author's masterpiece and we ought to like it best — only we don't. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for "Esmond," my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. 190 MODERN ESSAYS I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recom- mended, and I know how intimately Thackeray's imagina- tion was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for : he was a Queen Anne man — like Austin Dobson : he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Gold- smith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray's report of the London of his day ; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them. I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a Freshman in College, that I really got hold of Thackeray ; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. "Dickens knows," said Thackeray, "that my books are a protest against him : that, if the one set are true, the other must be false." There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one's back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one's education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth, "The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold. Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old." But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray's destroyed each other. I have continued to re-read them THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 191 both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Ehot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual : the psychology of her characters more deeply studied : the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contem- porary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray's characters are "delineated rather than dissected." There is little analysis, indeed hardly any liter- ary criticism in his "English Humorists" : only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its tech- nique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power. In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites "Martin Chuzzlewit." Is "Martin Chuzzlewit" a satire on the Americans .f* It is a caricature — a very gross caricature — a piece of bouffe. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it dif- ferently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsouian sense : his field was the odd, the eccentric, 192 MODERN ESSAYS the grotesque — sometimes the monstrous ; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson's dramatis personcB. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally ; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody ? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous exaggeration of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous hnitation for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of in- vention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad /aceftop — " Sketches by Boz" and the "Pickwick Papers" ; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock heroic "Timbuctoo," the subject for the prize poem of the year — a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, "Rebecca and Rowena" and "Novels by Eminent Hands." In " Fitzboodle's Confessions" he wrote a sentimental ballad, "The Willow Tree," and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to "A violet shrinking meanly Where blow the March winds ' keenly — A timid fawn on wildwood lawn Where oak-boughs rustle greenly." * Unquestionably Lady Jane pronounced it winds. THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 193 I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (et nos in Arcadia). The passage is in "Blue- Beard's Ghost." "As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings, O the heart is a soft and delicate thing, O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string, A spirit that floats on a gossamer's wing. Such was Fatima's heart." Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney 's complete poems : they are not there. Thackeray's humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery) which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease : I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those de- lightful "Roundabout Papers" and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic : "Memorials of Gormandiz- ing," the "Ballads of Policeman X," "Mrs. Perkins' Ball," where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoological gardens, and how "First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black. Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back. Chorus of Ch ildren : Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back." o 194 MODERN ESSAYS Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in "The Newcomes," e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens's clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the greatest of English realists. "I have no head above my eyes," he said. "I describe what I see." It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in special, Trollope writes : "The ear is never wounded by a tone that is false." It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the roman naturaliste of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to forms of realism so much more drastic, that Thackeray's realism seems, by comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him and he submitted to them willingly. "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was buried," he wrote, "no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, to his utmost power, a Man." Thackeray's latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a curtain over Etty's nudities. Goethe's "Wahlver- wandtschaf ten " scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas "profoundly immoral and absurd"; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blas- phemer of Shakespeare, speaks of Thackeray's "enslaved mind," yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of him- THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 195 self. "He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but he gives you the facts about him faithfully." But the denial of Thackeray's realism goes farther than this and attacks in some in- stances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thack- eray was "a true naturalist," finds that the personages in several of his novels are "drawn in varying planes." Charles Honeyman and Fred Bay ham, e.g., are frank caricatures ; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and "Stunning" Warrington are somewhat unreal ; Col. Newcome is overdrawn — "the travesty of a man" ; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator's masterpiece, is a "picturesque apparition rather than a real woman." And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist : Jane Austen and TroUope are the true realists. Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don't believe the thing exists ; that is, I don't believe that photographic fiction — the " mirror up to nature " fiction — exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day : everything — literally everything — that you have done, said, thought : and everything that you have seen, done, or heard said during twenty -four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make ? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently 196 MODERN ESSAYS from every other artist : he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself : satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their "transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist's personality should be in a portrait." This seems to me true ; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the sub- stance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction — and I don't say it is — then it is an impossible ideal. People are say- ing now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why .'' Because, however well documented, his facts are selected to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray's work seemed so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous carica- ture of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes : a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled grand monarque: and then a spindle-shanked, potbellied, bald little man — a good illustration for a chapter in "Sartor Resartus." The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 197 a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm leaf hat. Thackeray detested pose and strut and sham heroics. He called Byron *'a big sulky dandy." "Lord Byron," he said, "wrote more cant . . . than any poet I know of. Think of the 'peasant girls with dark blue eyes' of the Rhine — the brown-faced, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, dirty wenches ! Think of ' filling high a cup of Samian wine ' : . . . Byron himself always drank gin." The captain in "The White Squall" does not pace the deck like a dark- browed Corsair, but calls "George, some brandy and water!" And this reminds me of Thackeray's poetry. Of course one who held this attitude toward the romantic and the heroic could not be a poet in the usual sense. Poetry holds the quintessential truth, but, as Bacon says, it "subdues the shows of things to the desires of the mind" ; while realism clings to the shows of things, and satire disenchants, ravels the magic web which the imagination weaves. Heine was both satirist and poet, but he was each by turns, and he had the touch of ideality which Thackeray lacked. Yet Thackeray wrote poetry and good poetry of a sort. But it has beauty purely of senti- ment, never of the imagination that transcends the fact. Take the famous lines with which this same "White Squall" closes : "And when, its force expended. The harmless storm was ended. And as the sunrise splendid Came blushing o'er the sea; I thought, as day was breaking. My little girls were waking And smiling and making A prayer at home for me." 198 MODERN ESSAYS And such is the quality of all his best things in verse — "The Mahogany Tree," "The Ballad of Bouillebaisse," "The End of the Play " ; a mixture of humor and pensive- ness, homely fact and sincere feeling. Another modern criticism of Thackeray is that he is always interrupting his story with reflections. This fault, if it is a fault, is at its worst in "The Newcomes," from which a whole volume of essays might be gathered. The art of fiction is a progressive art and we have learned a great deal from the objective method of masters like Turgenev, Flaubert, and Maupassant. I am free to con- fess, that, while I still enjoy many of the passages in which the novelist appears as chorus and showman, I do find myself more impatient of them than I used to be. I find myself skipping a good deal. I wonder if this is also your experience. I am not sure, however, but there are signs of a reaction against the slender, episodic, short-story kind of fiction, and a return to the old-fashioned, bio- graphical novel. Mr. Brownell discusses this point and says that "when Thackeray is reproached with 'bad art' for intruding upon his scene, the reproach is chiefly the recommendation of a different technique. And each man's technique is his own." The question, he acutely observes, is whether Thackeray's subjectivity destroys illusion or deepens it. He thinks that the latter is true. I will not argue the point further than to say that, whether clumsy or not, Thackeray's method is a thoroughly English method and has its roots in the history of English fiction. He is not alone in it. George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Trollope and many others practice it ; and he learned it from his master. Fielding. Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a charge from which Shirley THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 199 Brooks defended him in the well known verses contributed to "Punch" after the great novelist's death. Strange that such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as manifest in his books as in his life : "a big, fierce, weeping man," as Carlyle grotesquely describes him : a writer in whom we find to-day even an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which some- times irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He saw "How very weak the very wise. How very small the very great are." Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a deep melan- choly underlay his fun. Vanitas Vanitatum is the last word of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death better than life. But he was never bitter : his pen was driven by love, not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope ; and Thackeray's dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his chapter on Swift in "The English Humorists." And therefore I have never been able to enjoy "The Luck of Barry Lyn- don" which has the almost unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the book ; main- tained, of course, with superb consistency ; seems to me uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its model, "Jonathan Wild." Swift's irony I enjoy because it is the natural expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask. Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. 200 MODERN ESSAYS The favorite target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the "mean admiration of mean things," such as wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant ob- session with this subject, his acute consciousness of social distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is ridiculing. "Letters four do form his name," to use a phrase of Dr. Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent jealousies, heart burnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it, where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h's, or the Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says hdow, the woman who collates, and the gent who wears pants. In feudal ages the lord might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does not oppress his social inferior : he only calls him a bounder. In primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are accepted quite simply : they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I used to be puzzled by the con- ventional epithet applied by Homer to Eumaeus — " the godlike swineherd" — which is much as though one should say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes "Honor and fame from no condition rise" THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 201 he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth, honor and fame do rise from conditions. Now in the presence of the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and that is the region in which Thackeray's comedy moves — the comedie mondaine, if not the full comedie humaine. It is a world of convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention : but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I sup- pose it is because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes : "When he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs : we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life. . . . This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writing. . . . He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different." In other words, Thackeray was not a socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream. All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was hon- estly fond of mundane advantages. He liked the conver- sation of clever, well mannered gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well dressed women. He liked 202 MODERN ESSAYS to go to fine houses : liked his club, and was gratified when asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devon- shire. Speaking of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to think ill of people who gave you such good claret. This explains his love of Horace. Venables reports that he would not study his Latin at school. But he certainly brought away with him from the Charterhouse, or from Trinity, a knowledge of Horace. You recall what delight- ful, punning use he makes of the lyric Roman at every turn. It is solvuntur rupes when Col. Newcome's Indian fortune melts away ; and Rosa sera moratur when little Rose is slow to go off in the matrimonial market. Now Horace was eminently a man of the world, a man about town, a club man, a gentle satirist, with a cheerful, mun- dane philosophy of life, just touched with sadness and regret. He was the poet of an Augustan age, like that English Augustan age which was Thackeray's favorite; social, gregarious, urban. I never saw Thackeray. I was a boy of eight when he made his second visit to America, in the winter of 1855-56, But Arthur HoUister, who graduated at Yale in 1858, told me that he once saw Thackeray walking up Chapel Street, a colossal figure, six feet four inches in height, peering through his big glasses with that expression which is famil- iar to you in his portraits and in his charming caricatures of his own face. This seemed to bring him rather near. But I think the nearest that I ever felt to his bodily pres- ence was once when Mr. Evarts showed me a copy of Horace, with inserted engravings, which Thackeray had given to Sam Ward and Ward had given to Evarts. It was a copy which Thackeray had used and which has his autograph on the fly leaf. THACKERAY'S CENTENARY 203 And this mention of his Latin scholarship induces me to close with an anecdote that I find in Melville's "Life." He says himself that it is almost too good to be true, but it illustrates so delightfully certain academic attitudes, that I must give it, authentic or not. The novelist was to lecture at Oxford and had to obtain the license of the Vice-Chancellor. He called on him for the necessary permission and this was the dialogue that ensued : V. C. Pray, sir, what can I do for you ? T. My name is Thackeray. V. C. So I see by this card. T. I seek permission to lecture within your precincts. V. C. Ah ! You are a lecturer : what subjects do you undertake, religious or political ? T. Neither. I am a literary man. V. C. Have you written anything ? T. Yes, I am the author of "Vanity Fair." V. C. I presume, a dissenter — has that anything to do with Jno. Bunyan's book ? T. Not exactly : I have also written "Pendennis." V. C. Never heard of these works, but no doubt they are proper books. T. I have also contributed to "Punch." V. C. "Punch." I have heard of that. Is it not a ribald publica- tion? 1 TENNYSON! BY Paul Elmer More In the treatment of an author such as Tennyson, the first assumption is that every reader already knows and has thought about the subject. There is, then, none of the attraction of novelty. Logically, therefore, as Mr. More conceived the solution, the appeal should be made, not by a number of observations, but by a few carefully expanded. His thought /Jivides into the main positions: (a) Tennyson represented his age, '' (6) he was the poet of compromise, and (c) he was the poet of insight. Each of these in turn is very carefully and elaborately defined and ex- plained. For example, to bring out the first, Tennyson is shown in his relation to the men of the time. This is done by anecdote, by quotation from the poet himself, by quotation from the work of others, by citations from diaries, etc. The result is that not only is the essay delightful reading itself, but one lays it aside with a feeling of conviction. By this very elaboration, the writer shows himself impartial, sensitive both to Tennyson's faults as well as his virtues. By his abundant citations from other poets he both explains his own conceptions and gives the reader a standard of judgment. Consequently one feels implicit con- fidence in his final decision. Whatever changes may occur in the fame of Tennyson — and undoubtedly at the present hour it is passing into a kind of obscuration — he can never be deprived of the honour of representing, more almost than any other single poet of England, unless it be Dryden, a whole period of national life. Tennyson is the Victorian age. His Poems, iProm "The Shelburne E.ssays" (seventh series), by permission of the author and of the publishers, G. P. Putnam's Sons. 204 TENNYSON 205 Chiefly Lyrical had been published only seven years when the Queen came to the throne in 1837; he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate in 1850 ; and from that time to his death in 1892 he was the official voice of the Court and the acknowledged spokesman of those who were lead- ing the people through that long period of transition. There was something typical of the heart of England in his birth and childhood. For what better nursery can be imagined for such a poet than one of those village rectories where the ancient traditions of the land are pre- served with religious reverence and tlie pride of station is unaccompanied by the vanity of wealth? And what scenery could be more appropriate than the country of Lincolnshire, rolling up from the salt marshes of the sea and from the low dunes, "where the long breakers fall with a heavy clap and spread in a curdling blanket of seething foam over the level sands"? Tennyson never forgot those sights and sounds of his childhood; their shadows and echoes are in all his later verse. And the surroundings of his early manhood were equally characteristic. In 1828 he went to Cambridge and was matriculated at Trinity College, leaving in 1831 without a degree. Those were years when the spirit stirred in many lands. In France the romantic movement, with Victor Hugo as prophet and Sainte-Beuve as interpreter, was be- ginning its career of high-handed victory. In England it was a time of reform, felt at the two universities as power- fully as in Parliament. At Oxford, Newman and Keble and Ilurrell Fronde were preparing the great reintegration of religion and the imagination which runs througli the cen- tury parallel and hostile to the main current of ideas. In Tennyson's university a group of young men were brood- ing over strange and lofty liberties, and were dreaming 206 MODERN ESSAYS vaguely of a new guide born of the union of idealism and science. A few of these more ardent minds had banded together as the Apostles, a secret debating society which afterwards became famous from the achievement of its members. Among the strongest of the brotherhood was Arthur Henry Hallam, whose sudden death at Vienna caused grief to many friends, and to Tennyson the long sorrow which, with the vexatious problems of human mortality, winds in and out through the cantos of In Memoriam. The meaning of this loss cannot be measured by the scanty remains of Hallam's own writings. He stands with John Sterling and Hurrell Fronde among the inheritors of unfulfilled renown — young men, whose con- fidence in life was, in those aspiring days, accounted as achievement, and whose early death, before the inevitable sordor of wordly concession touched their faces, crowned them with imperishable glory. So the memory of his friend became to Tennyson in a few years a symbol of hopes for him and for the world frustrate. He revisits college and goes to see the rooms where Hallam dwelt ; but, hearing only the clapping of hands and the crashing of glass, thinks of the days when he and his circle held de- bate, and would listen to Hallam's master words : . . . Who, but hung to hear The rapt oration flowing free From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of haw, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him hght his face. And seem to Hf t the form, and glow In azure orbits heavenly wise; And over those ethereal eyes The bar of Michael Angelo. TENNYSON 207 Those who at college have felt the power of such a guiding friendship will tell you it is the fairest and most enduring part of education. I myself know. To Tennyson that high comradeship of youth and those generous ideals lasted as one of the forces that made him the typical poet of the age. You may read through the memoirs of the period, and almost always you will meet him somewhere moving among other men with the mark of the Muses upon him, as a bard in the old daj^s stood amid lords and warriors with the visible insignia of his calling in his hands and on his brow — sacra ferens. Wliether in his free-footed and wandering earlier years, or as the prosperous householder in his beautiful homes at Farringford on the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth on Blackdown, Surrey, "overlooking the vast expanses of light and shadow, golden cornfields, blue distances" — wherever you see him, he is the same bearer of conscious inspiration. Now we have a glimpse of him with Fitz- Gerald, visiting James Spedding in his home in the Lake country — Spedding who devoted a lifetime to the white- washing of Chancellor Bacon, he of the "venerable fore- head"; "No wonder," said his waggish friend, "that no hair can grow at such an altitude ; no wonder his view of Bacon's virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. " The three young men, we know, discoursed endlessly and enthusiastically about the canons of poetry, while the elder Spedding, a staunch squire of the land who "had seen enough of the trade of poets not to like them" — Shelley and Coleridge and Southey and Wordsworth — listened with ill-concealed impatience. It was at this time, probably, that Tennyson and FitzGerald held a contest as to which could produce the worst W^ords- worthian line, with the terrible example claimed by both 208 MODERN ESSAYS of them: "A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman." Again Tennyson is seen with the same friends in London, "very droll, and very awkward ; and much sitting up of nights till two or three in the morning with pipes in our mouths : at which good hour we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which he does between growling and smoking; and so to bed." Or he is at Carlyle's house at Chelsea, with "Jack and a friend named Darwin, both admirers of Alfred's," still talking and interminably smok- ing — "one of the powerfullest smokers I have ever worked along with in that department," writes the experienced host. Or in the Isle of Wight, he is wandering one stormy night with Moncure Daniel Conway, while "his deep bass voice came through the congenial darkness like mirthful thunder." With another guest, perhaps, we go up-stairs to the poet's den on the top-story at Farringford, where in safe seclusion he can pour out his stores of deep questioning and Rabelaisian anecdote ; or climb still higher, up a lad- der to the leads, where he was wont to go to contemplate the heavens, and whence one night, like Plato's luckless philosopher, he fell down the hatch ; whereat a brother bard quoted to him: "A certain star shot madly from his sphere." Such stories could be multiplied endlessly. The best of all pictures of him is that written down in the diary of the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the strange vicar of Morwenstow, near Tintagel, the birthplace of the legendary Arthur, whither Tennyson had come in 1848 to make himself familiar with the country of the Idylls. It is observable in all these accounts that the great per- sonality of Tennyson, with his contempt for little conven- tions, impressed those who lived with him as if he possessed TENNYSON 209 some extraordinary daemonic power not granted to lesser men. And his conversation was like his figure. It is agreeable, when we consider certain finical over-nice quali- ties of his verse, to know that his talk was racy with strong, downright Saxon words ; that, like our Lincoln, he could give and take deep draughts of Pantagruelian mirth. I confess that it does not displease me to touch this vein of earthy coarseness in the man. But I like also to hear that his mind rose more habitually from the soil to the finer regions of poetry and religion. In a hundred recorded conversations you will find him at close grips with the great giants of doubt and materialism, which then, as in the caverns and fastnesses of old fable, were breeding in every scientific workshop and stalking thence over the land. How often you will find him, when these questions are discussed, facing them calmly, and then ending all with an expression of unalterable faith in the spirit-forces that blow like one of his mystic winds about the solid earth ; speaking words which sound common- place enough in print but which, with his manner and voice, seem to have affected his hearers as if they had been surprised by a tongue of revelation. Still oftener his talk was of the poets and their work. Sometimes it was long discourse and rich comparison. Other times it was a flashing comment on the proper emphasis or cadence of a line, as on that day when he visited Lyme Regis with William Allingham, and, sitting on the wall of the Cobb, listened to the passage out of Persuasion where Louisa Mulgrave hurts her ankle. And then, continues Allingham, we . . . take a field-path that brings us to Devonshire Hedge and past that boundry into Devon. Lovely fields, an underclifiF with tumbled heaps of verdure, honeysuckle, hawthorns, and higher trees. Rocks P 210 MODERN ESSAYS peeping through the sward, in which I peculiarly delight, reminding me of the West of Ireland. I quote — - "Bowery hollows crowned with summer sea." T. (as usual), " You don't say it properly " — and repeats it in his own sonorous manner, lingering with solemn sweetness on every vowel sound, — a peculiar incomplete cadence at the end. It is but one example among a thousand of Tennyson's supreme care for the sound of a word and for the true melody of a verse. " When Tennyson finds anything in poetry that touches him," says Coventry Patmore, "not pathos, but a happy line or epithet — the tears come into his eyes." But it was as reciter of his own poems that he main- tained in our modern prosaic society the conscious office of bard. He read on all occasions and to all sorts of people, frankly and seriously, rolling out his verses with the rhythm and magnificent emphasis that poets love to bestow on their own works. Nor can I recall a single instance in which the listener was troubled by our tedious sense of humour — not even when, on the celebrated voyage to Copenhagen with Gladstone and a party of royalties, Tennyson patted time to one of his poems on the shoulder of an unknown lady, whom he afterwards discovered to be the Empress of all the Russias. Best of all these accounts is that of Mrs. J. H. Shorthouse, who, with her husband, the novelist, visited the poet at Farringford : Then the moon rose, and through the great cedar on the lawn we saw its light approach and fill the room, and when the gentlemen came in. and Lady Tennyson returned to her sofa, we had the great pleasure of hearing Lord Tennyson read three of his favourite poems — the Ode to the Duke of Wellington, Blow, Bugle, Blow, and Maud. Only the candles by his side lit up the book of poems from which he read ; the rest of the room was flooded by moonlight. . . . Many of Lord Tennyson's visitors have described his reading of poetry, varying of course, with their own TENNYSON 211 tastes and sympathies. To me, as we sat in the moonlight listening to the words we loved, I seemed to nnxiise the scenes of very olden days when the bards improvised their own lays in great baronial halls to en- raptured listeners. Nothing could better characterise the position of Tenny- son as the official voice of the land, turning its hard affairs and shrewd debates into the glamour of music before flattered eyes and ears. He was beloved of the Queen and the Prince Consort. Men of science like Huxley were " impressed with the Doric beauty" of his dialect poems ; or, like Herschel, Owen, and Tyndall, admired him "for the eagerness with which he welcomed all the latest scien- tific discoveries, and for his trust in truth." Serious judges cited him on the bench, as did Lord Bowen when, being compelled to preside over an admiralty case, he ended an apology to counsel for his inexperience with the punning quotation : And may there be no moaning at the Bar, When I put out to sea. In all this chorus of acceptance there is a single strangely significant discord. Edward FitzGerald, as we have seen, was one of Tennyson's warmest friends ; of all the great men of his acquaintance, and he knew the greatest, Tennyson alone overawed him. " I must, however, say further," he once writes, after visiting with Tennyson, " that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own : this (though it may seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though I have often been with much greater intellects : but I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind." FitzGerald was one of those who first recognized Tennyson's poetic genius ; but after 212 MODERN ESSAYS a while there comes a change in the tone of his comment. In Memoriam, which he read in manuscript before it was puhlishod, he cannot away with; it has to him the "air of being evolved by a Poetical Machine of the highest order " ; and from that time his letters contain frequent hints of dissatisfaction. It was not that Tennyson's later works were inferior to his earlier, but that somehow he seems to have felt, as we to-day are likely to feel, a dis- parity between the imposing genius of the man himself and these rather nerveless elegies and rather vapid tales like The Princess. He cries out once upon "the cursed inactivity " of the nineteenth century for spoiling his poet, coming close to, but not quite touching, the real reason of his discontent. That determined recluse of Little Grange, who, in the silent night hours, loved to walk about the flat Suffolk lanes, among the shadows of the windmills that reminded him of his beloved Don Quixote ; who, as the years passed, could scarcely be got to visit his friends at all, but wrote to them letters of quaint and wistful tenderness — he alone among the busy, anxious Victorians, so far as I know them, stood entirely aloof from the currents of the hour, judging men and things from the larger circles of time ; he alone was completely emancipated from the illusions of the present, and this is the secret of the grave, pathetic wisdom that so fascinates us in his correspondence. And so the very fact that Tennyson was the mouthpiece of his generation, with the limitations that such a charac- ter implies, cooled the praise of our disillusioned philoso- pher, just as it warmed the enthusiasm of more engaged minds. One is impressed by this quality of Tennyson's talent as one goes through his works anew in the Eversley TENNYSON 213 edition^ that has just been published, with notes by the poet and by the poet's son. It is useless to deny that to a later taste much of this writing seems an insubstantial fabric ; that it has many of the qualities that stamp the distinctly Victorian creations as provincial and ephemeral. There is upon it, first of all, the mark of prettiness, that prettiness which has been, and still is, the bane of British art. Look through collections of the work of Landseer and Birket Foster and Sir John Everett Millais, and others of that group, and observe its quality of "guileless beauty," as Holman Hunt calls it, or innocuous senti- mentality as it seems to us. These scenes of meek love- making, of tender home-partings and reconciliations, of children floating down a stream in their cradle with perhaps a kitten peering into the water — it is not their morality that offends us, far from that, but their deliberate blinking of what makes life real and, in the higher sense of the word, beautiful. You will find this same prettiness in many of Tennyson's early productions, such as The May Queen and Dora and The Miller's Daughter. Or take a more preten- tious poem, such as Enoch Arden, and compare it with a similar tale from Crabbe ; set Tennyson's picture of the three children, "Annie Lee, the prettiest little damsel in the port," etc., beside one of the coast scenes of the earlier poet's Aldworth, and you will be struck by the difference between the beribboned daintiness of the one and the naked strength, as of a Dutch genre painting, of the other. Or go still higher, and consider some of the scenes of the Idylls. In its own kind Launcelot and Elaine is certainly a noble work, yet somehow to all its charm there still ^ The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. In six volumes. The Eversley Edition. Annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by Hallam Lord Tennyson. New York : The Macmillan Company, 1908. 214 MODERN ESSAYS clings that taint of prettiness, which is a different thing altogether. I read the words of Gawain to the lily maid of Astolat : "Nay, by mine head," said he, "I lose it, as we lose the lark in heaven, O, damsel, in the light of your blue eyes." ' Tis a sweet compliment, but I remember the same meta- phor in an old play : Once a young lark Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes Mounted and sung, thinking them moving skies, — and by comparison I seem again to note in Tennyson's lines the something false we designate as Victorian. There is in the same poem another scene, one of the most picturesque in all the Idylls, where Launcelot and Elaine's brother ride away from the ancient castle and the lily maid to join the tournament : She stay'd a minute. Then made a sudden step to the gate, and there — Her bright hair blown about the serious face Yet rosy-kindled with her brother's kiss — Paused by the gateway, standing near the shield In silence, while she watch'd their arms far-oEF Sparkle, until they dipt below the downs. One sees it all — the sentimental maiden at the arch, gazing with shaded eyes after the two departing knights, while some flowering vine of an English summer droops from the stones about her slender form ; one sees it, but again it is a painting on the walls of the Burlington House rather than the reality of a more virile art. There is not a little of this effeminate grace in the long TENNYSON 215 elegy In Memoriam, which above any other single poem, I think, seemed to the men of the Victorian age to express the melancholy and the beauty of life. I find a trace of it even in the more exquisite sections, in the nineteenth for instance : The Danube to the Severn gave The darken'd heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore. And in the hearing of the wave. There twice a day the Severn fills ; The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. The imagery of grief's home could not be more melodi- ously uttered, and it is close to the facts. "From the Graveyard," writes the editor of the EversJey edition, "you can hear the music of the tide as it washes against the low cliffs not a hundred yards away " ; and the poet himself adds in the note : "Taken from my own observa- tion — the rapids of the Wye are stilled by the incoming sea." The application is like the image : The Wye is hush'd nor moved along. And hush'd my deepest grief of all. When fiird with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls; My deeper anguish also falls. And I can speak a little then. Such was the music that Tennyson learned from the Wye at Tintern Abbey, where, as the editor tells us, the verses 216 MODERN ESSAYS were actually composed. Exquisitely refined and curious, no doubt ; but the editor's note sets us involuntarily to thinking of other Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tin- tern Abbey, where Wordsworth heard "These waters, roll- ing from their inland springs, with a sweet inland mur- mur," and from that sound conjectured "the still, sad music of humanity." It is not a question here of phi- losophy but of art, and no one can fail to note the thinness of Tennyson's style compared with the larger harmonies of Wordsworth. But however much the prettiness of In Memoriam caught the ears of the sentimental, it was another quality which won the applause of the greater Victorians. There is an interesting letter given among the editor's notes, showing how the men who were leading English thought in those days felt toward the new poem, and in particular toward one of its religious sections : If e'er when faith had faU'n asleep, I heard a voice " beUeve no more " And heard an ever-breaking shore And tumbled in the Godless deep ; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part. And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer' d "I have felt." No, like a child in doubt and fear : But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries. But, crying, knows his father near. "These lines," writes Prof. Henry Sidgwuck in the letter referred to — "these Hues I can never read without tears. I fool in them the indestructible and inahenable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is TENNYSON 217 necessary for life ; and which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the methodical thinker, cannot give up." Now Sidgwick was no ordinary man. He was in fact one of the keenest and hardest-headed thinkers of those days, one of the leaders in the philosophi- cal and economical revolution then taking place ; and these tears of his were no cheap contribution of sentiment, but rose from the deepest wells of trouble. Many men still living can remember the dismay and the sense of home- lessness that fell upon the trusting mind of England when it became aware of a growing hostility between the new school of science and the established creed. When Arthur Hallam died in 1833, Darwin was making his memorable voyage of investigation on the Beagle, and while Tennyson was elaborating his grief in long-linked sweetness, Darwin was writing that "first note-book of Transmutation of Species" which was developed into the Origin of Species of 1859. The alarm of the Church over this assimilation of man and monkey, the bitter fight between Huxley and Wil- berforce and between Huxley and Gladstone — all this is well known, though the tumult of the fray begins to sound in younger ears as distant as the battles about Troy. Meanwhile within the Church itself the scientific criticism of sources was working a havoc no less dreaded than the attacks from without. This breach within the walls, though long a-making, first became generally visible by the publication of the famous Essays and Reviews in 1860, which, harmless as the book now seems, kept two of its principal contributors, Jowett and Mark Pattison, for years from university promotion. To these currents of thought Tennyson was quickly responsive. Without hesitation he accepted the new point of view for his In Memoriam, and those who were 218 MODERN ESSAYS leading the revolution felt this and welcomed enthusiasti- cally a recruit from the writers of the imagination who were commonly against them. "Wordsworth's Attitude towards Nature," says Professor Sidgwick, in the same letter to Tennyson's son, "was one that, so to say, left Science unregarded : the Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feeUngs was Nature as known by simple obser- vation and interpreted by religious and sympathetic in- tuition. But for your father the physical w^orld is always the world as known to us through physical science ; the scientific view^ of it dominates his thoughts about it." And Professor Sidgwick is perfectly right. It is unneces- sary to point out the many passages of In Memoriam in which the law of evolution, the survival of the fittest, and man's kinship to the ape, were clearly hinted before Darwin had definitely formulated them in his epoch-making book. What more impressed men like Sidgwick was the fact that Tennyson felt with them the terrifying doubts awakened by this conception of man as part of a vast, unfeeling, blind mechanism, but still clung to "the indestructible and in- alienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life." And Tennyson, and this is the view to be emphasised, found this minimum of faith, not outside of the new science but at its very heart. He does, indeed, cry out at times against the harsher hypothesis, declaring that we are not "magnetic mockeries" — Not only cunning casts in clay : Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto men, At least to me ? I would not stay. Let him, the wiser man who springs Hereafter, up from childhood shape His action like the greater ape. But I was horn to other things. TENNYSON 219 That note is heard in In Memoriam, but the gist of Tennyson's faith, and what made him the spokesman of the age, was in a bold completion of evolution by the theory of indefinite progress and by a vision of some magnificent consummation wherein the sacrifices and the waste and the pain of the present were to be compensated somehow, somewhere, somewhen — who shall say ? Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will. Defects of doubt, and taints of blood ; That nothing walks with aimless feet ; That not one life shall be destroy'd. Or cast as rubbish to the void. When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain ; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire. Or but subserves another's gain. And the end of the poem is the climax of this comfortable belief : That God, which ever lives and loves. One God, one law, one element. And one far-off divine event. To which the whole creation moves. That reconcilation of faith and science, this discovery of a father near at hand within the inexorable law of evolution, this vision of an eternal state to be reached in the progress of time — all this is what we call the Vic- torian compromise. The prettiness which we found so characteristic of Victorian painting and of Tennyson's non-religious verse was indeed only another phase of the same compromise. The imperious sense of beauty, which has led the great visionaries out of the world and 220 MODERN ESSAYS which Tennyson portrayed trembh'ngly in his Palace of Art, was felt by the Victorians to be dangerous to the British sentiment of the home, and motherhood, and girlish innocence, and so they rested in the middle ground of prettiness where beauty and innocent sentiment might meet. Here also they held to that "indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity" — British humanity at least in those years — could not give up. And men like Professor Sidgwick were stirred to the heart by this compromise, and wept. Undoubtedly the fame of Tennyson in his own day was due largely to his expression of what may be called the official philosophy, but it is a question whether this very trait has not weakened his hold upon a later generation ; whether, for instance, the stoic resolve and self-determina- tion of Matthew Arnold, whom Professor Sidgwick in one of the most scathing essays of the century denounced as a trifling "prophet of culture," have not really expressed the higher meaning of that age — though not the highest mean- ing of all — better than any official and comfortable com- promise ; whether the profounder significance of that time of doubt was not rather in Matthew Arnold's brave disease : And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. Where ignorant armies clash by night. I am confirmed in this view by one of the present editor's observations. I read the stanza of In Memoriam which describes the reception of the poet's dead friend into the heavenly host : The great Intelligences fair That range above our mortal state. In circle round the blessed gate, Received and gave him welcome there ; — TENNYSON 221 and then in the editor's note I read the lines of Milton's Lycidas which Tennyson imitated : There entertain him all the Saints above In solemn troops, and sweet societies. That sing, and singing, in their glory move. And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. Why is it that Tennyson here leaves us so cold, whereas at the sound of Milton's words the heart still leaps as at a bugle call ? Why are these fair Intelligences so meaning- less and so frigid? Is not the cause just the spirit of compromise between religion and science that has entered into Tennyson's image, leaving it neither the simple objec- tive faith of Milton nor the honest questioning of Matthew Arnold ? It may seem that I have dwelt over-much on this weaker side of an admired writer who has so much noble work to his credit, but it was these compromises that gave him his historic position, and, also, it is only by bringing out clearly this aspect of his work that we are enabled to dis- cern the full force of another and contrasted phase, which was not of the age but was the unfettered voice of the poet himself. As we hear of the impression made by the man Tennyson upon his contemporaries, and then consider the sleeker qualities of his verse, we find it difficult to associate the two together ; there was no prettiness or convention in his character, but a certain elusive wildness of beauty and a noble, almost defiant, independence. To distinguish be- tween the two poets in the one writer is the only way rightly to understand and wisely to enjoy him. Now if we examine the spirit of compromise, which made the official poet in Tennyson, we shall see that it rests finally on a denial of religious dualism, on a denial, that is, of the 222 MODERN ESSAYS consciousness, which no reasoning of philosophy and no noise of the world can ever quite obliterate, of two opposite principles within us, one bespeaking unity and peace and infinite life, the other calling us to endless change and division and discord. Just this cleft within our nature the Victorians attempted to gloss over. Because they could not discover the rational bond between the world of time and evolution and the idea of eternity and change- lessness, they would deny that these two can exist side by side as totally distinct spheres, and by raising the former and lowering the latter would seek the truth in some middle ground of compromise. Thus instead of saying, as Michael Angelo said, "Happy the soul where time no longer courses," they placed the faith of religion in some far-off event of time, as if eternity were a kind of enchant- ment lent by distance. Such was the official message of Tennyson. But by the side of this there comes up here and there through his works an utterly different vein of mysticism, which is scarcely English and certainly not Victorian. It was a sense of estrangement from time and personality which took possession of him at intervals from youth to age. In a well-known passage he tries to analyse this state : A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' re- peating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. This was not a reading into youth of a later knowledge gained from Oriental sources. In the notes to the Evers- TENNYSON 223 ley volumes, the editor gives an unpublished juvenile j)oem, The Mystic, in which the same feeling is expressed, if not so clearly, at least with a self-knowledge every way remarkable for a boy : Ye could not read the marvel in his eye. The still serene abstraction ; he hath felt The vanities of after and before. He often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom. The point to note is how Tennyson in such passages feels himself an entity set apart from the flowing of time, whereas in the official compromise of In Memoriam he — not only he, but God Himself — is one with the sum of things in their vague temporal progress. In that differ- ence, if rightly understood, lies, I think, the distinction between faith and naturalism. This sense of himself as a being set apart from change strengthened, if anything, as he grew old. Its most philo- sophic expression is in The Ancient Sage, which was first published in 1885 and was regarded by him as one of his best later poems ; it is rebellious in Vastness, lyrical in Break, Break, Break, purely melodic in Far — Far — Away, dramatic in Ulysses, autobiographical in The Gleam. Always it is the man himself speaking his own innermost religious experience, and no mere "minimum of faith" needed for the preservation of society. For the fullest and most artistic utterance of this faith we must go to the Idylls of the King. I will confess to 224 MODERN ESSAYS being no unreserved lover of that mangled epic as a whole ; it seems to me that in most of its parts the Victorian prettiness is made doubly, and at times offensively, con- spicuous by the contrast between Tennyson's lim]jid sen- timentality and the sturdier fibre of Malory's Morte Darlhur from which he drew his themes. But it is true that here and there, in a line or a musically haunting passage, he has in the Idylls spoken from the depth of his heart, as he has spoken nowhere else, and that one of them. The Holy Grail, has an insight into things spiritual and a precision it would be hard to match in any other English poem. The mystic cup, which had been brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea and had vanished away for the sinfulness of the people, was first seen in vision by a holy sister of Sir Percivale, and by her Galahad was incited to go on the sacred quest. Meanwhile, one day, when the knights were gathered at the Round Table in the absence of the King, Galahad sits in Merlin's magic seat, which, as Tennyson explains, is a symbol of the spiritual imagination, the siege perilous, wherein "no man could sit but he should lose himself": And all at once, as there we sat, we heard A crackling and a riving of the roofs. And rending, and a blast, and overhead Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. And in the blast there smote along the hall A beam of light seven times more clear than day : And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail All over covcr'd with a luminous cloud. And none might see who bare it, and it past. But every knight beheld his fellow's face As in a glory, and all the knights arose. And staring each at other like dumb men Stood, till I found a voice and sware a vow. TENNYSON 225 The vision, in other words, is nothing else but a sudden and bUnding sense of that duaHsm of the world and of the human soul beneath which the solid-seeming earth reels and dissolves away, overwhelming with terror and uncomprehended impulses all but those purely spiritual to whom the earth is already an unreal thing. Then enters the King and perceives the perturbation among his knights. It is characteristic of England and of the age, although it has, too, its universal signijBcance, that Tennyson's Arthur should deplore the search for the Grail as a wild aberration, which is to bring impossible hopes and desolate disappointments to those whose business was to do battle among very material forces. "Go," he says — Go, since your vows are sacred, being made : Yet — for ye know the cries of all my realm Pass thro' this hall — how often, O my knights, Your places being vacant at my side. This chance of noble deeds will come and go Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires Lost in the quagmire ! Only Sir Galahad, in whom is no taint of sin or selfishness, and who was bold to find himself by losing himself, had beheld clearly the vision of the cup as it smote across the hall. I do not know how it may be with others, but to me the answer of Galahad to the King has a mystical throb and exultation almost beyond any other words of English : But I, Sir Arthur, saw the Holy Grail, I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry — "O Galahad," and "O Galahad, follow me." That is the cry and the voice, now poetry and philosophy, which Tennyson had in mind when he wrote of hearing 226 MODERN ESSAYS "the word that is the symbol of myself." He who has once heard it and heard the responding echo within his own breast, can never again close his ears to its sound. To Galahad it meant the vanishing of the world alto- gether, and there is nothing more magnificent in Tennyson, scarcely in English verse, I think, than Sir Percivale's sight of Galahad fleeing over the bridges out into the far horizon, and disappearing into the splendours of the sky, while — . . . thrice above him all the heavens Open'd and blazed with thunder such as seem'd Shoutings of all the sons of God : and first At once I saw him far on the great Sea, In silver-shining armour starry -clear; And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud. There, in the inspiration from Tennyson's own visionary faith and from no secular compromise, we find the lift and the joy and the assurance that Milton knew and sang in Lycidas and that was so sadly missed in the "great Intelligences fair" of In Memoriam. But to Sir Percivale himself the vision brought no such divine transfiguration. He is the one who sees, indeed, and understands, yet cannot lose himself. Because the Holy Grail signifies a dualism which sets the eternal world not at the end of the temporal, but utterly apart from it, he who knows the higher while lacking the courage to renounce the lower, wanders comfortless with neither the ecstatic joy of the one nor the homely satisfactions of the other. So the world and all that it contains turn into dust at his touch, leaving him alone and wearying, in a land of sand and thorns. Another, Sir Bors, the simple, trustful gentleman, who goes out on the word of others, TENNYSON 227 following duty only and trusting in the honour or the act as it comes to him, sees in adversity the Holy Cup shining through a rift in his prison, and abides content that the will of God should reserve these high things as a reward for whomsoever it chooses. Still another, Sir Gawain, finding the vision is not for him, and having turned his eyes from the simple rule of duty, sinks into sensual pleasures, and declares his twelvemonth and a day a merry jaunt. Most fatal of all is the experience of Laun- celot, he, the greatest of all, who brought the sin into the court, who cannot disentangle the warring impulses of good and evil within himself. He, too, rides out of Came- lot on the Quest, and then : My madness came upon me as of old And whipt me into waste fields far away. it: ^! * * * * But such a blast, my King, began to blow. So loud a blast along the shore and sea. Ye could not hear the waters for the blast, Tho' heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea Drove like a cataract, and all the sand Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens Were shaken with the motion and the sound. This is an application to the smaller field of wind and earth and water of that dizzy tempestuous motion which in Tennyson's earlier poem of Lucretius surged through the Epicurean's atomic universe. To the eye of the spirit, Tennyson would seem to say, the material world is a flux and endless, purposeless mutation — leaving the self-possessed soul to its own inviolable peace, or, upon one that perceives yet is still enmeshed in evil desires, thronging in visions and terrors of madness. One need not be a confessed mystic to feel the power of these pas- 228 MODERN ESSAYS sages, any more than one need be a Puritan (standing, that is, at the opposite pole of religion from mystic) to appreciate Milton. To the genuine conviction of these poets our human nature responds as it can never respond to the insincerity of the world's "minimum of faith." With Tennyson, unfortunately, the task is always to separate the poet of insight from the poet of compromise. I REALISM AND REALITY IN FICTION ^ BY William Lyon Phelps Discussion of literary theory is difficult because of lack of definition. In his paper, read before the American Academy, Professor Phelps brings out his thought' by means of concrete illustration. He opens with an anecdote in which the two ideas. Realism and Reality, are brought sharply into contrast. Then follow three paragraphs of gen- eral discussion in which the difference is fully explained. Then seven paragraphs in catalogue form of the predicates of Reality. Each of these paragraphs by illustration, anecdote, dialogue, is made very clear, — so clear that the author feels no need for a summary at the end. And by this omission, the reader is scarcely conscious of the catalogue nature of the essay as a whole. During those early years of his youth at Paris, which the melancholy but unrepentant George Moore insists he spent in riotous living, he was on one memorable occasion making a night of it at a ball in Montmartre. In the midst of the revelry a grey giant came placidly striding across the crowded room, looking, I suppose, something like Gulliver in Lilliput. It was the Russian novelist Turgenev. For a moment the young Irishman forgot the girls, and plunged into eager talk with the man from the North. Emile Zola had just astonished Paris with UAssommoir. In response to a leading question, Tur- genev shook his head gravely and said : "What difference 1 From "Essays on Books," by permission of the author and of The Macmillan Co. 229 230 MODERN ESSAYS does it make whether a woman sweats in the middle of her back or under her arms? I want to know how she thinks, not how she feels." In this statement the great master of diagnosis indicated the true distinction between realism and reality. A work of art may be conscientiously realistic, — few men have had a more importunate conscience than Zola, — and yet be untrue to life, or, at all events, untrue to life as a whole. Realism may degenerate into emphasis on sensational but relatively unimportant detail : reality deals with that mystery of mysteries, the human heart. Realism may degenerate into a creed ; and a formal creed in art is as unsatisfactory as a formal creed in religion, for it is aiji attempt to confine what by its very nature is boundless and infinite into a narrow and prescribed space. Your microscope may be accurate and powerful, but its strong regard is turned on only one thing at a time ; and no mat- ter how enormously this thing may be enlarged, it remains only one thing out of the infinite variety of God's universe. To describe one part of life by means of a perfectly accu- rate microscope is not to describe life any more than one can measure the Atlantic Ocean by means of a perfectly accurate yardstick. Zola was an artist of extraordinary energy, sincerity, and honesty; but, after all, when he gazed upon a dunghill, he saw and described a dunghill. Rostand looked steadfastly at the same object, and beheld the vision of Chanticler. Suppose some foreign champion of realism should arrive in New York at dusk, spend the whole night visiting the various circles of our metropolitan hell, and depart for Europe in the dawn. Suppose that he should make a strictly accurate narrative of all that he had seen. Well and good; it would be realistic, it would be true. But REALISM AND REALITY IN FICTION 231 suppose he should call his narrative America. Then we should assuredly protest. "You have not described America. Your picture lacks the most essential features." He would reply : "But isn't what I have said all true? I defy you to deny its truth. I defy you to point out errors or exaggera- tions. Everything that I described I saw with my own eyes." All this we admit, but we refuse to accept it as a picture of America. Here is the cardinal error of realism. It selects one aspect of life, — usually a physical aspect, for it is easy to arouse strained attention by physical detail, — and then insists that it has made a picture of life. The mod- ern Parisian society drama, for example, cannot possibly be a true representation of French family and social life. Life is not only better than that ; it is surely less monotonous, more complex. You cannot play a great symphony on one instrument, least of all on the triangle. The plays of Bernstein, Bataille, Hervieu, Donnay, Capus, Guinon, and others, brilliant in technical execution as they often are, really follow a monotonous convention of theatrical art rather than life itself. As an English critic has said, "The Parisian dramatists are living in an atmosphere of half- truths and shams, grubbing in the divorce courts and living upon the maintenance of social intrigue just as comfort- ably as any bully upon the earnings of a prostitute." An admirable French critic, M. Henry Bordeaux, says of his contemporary playwrights, that they have ceased to rep- resent men and women as they really are. This is not realism, he declares ; it is a new style of false romanticism, where men and women are represented as though they pos- sessed no moral sense — a romanticism sensual, worldly, 232 MODERN ESSAYS and savage. Life is pictured as though there were no such things as daily tasks and daily duties. Shakespeare was an incorrigible romantic ; yet there is more reality in his compositions than in all the realism of his great contemporary, Ben Jonson. Confidently and defiantly, Jonson set forth his play Every Man in His Humour as a model of what other plays should be ; for, said he, it contains deeds and language such as men do use. So it does : but it falls far short of the reality reached by Shakespeare in that impossible tissue of absurd events which he carelessly called As You Like It. In his erudite and praiseworthy attempt to bring back the days of ancient Rome on the Elizabethan stage Jonson achieved a resurrection of the dead : Shakespeare, unembarrassed by learning and unhampered by a creed, achieved a resur- rection of the living. Catiline and Sejanus talk like an old text; Brutus and Cassius talk like living men. For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. The form, the style, the setting, and the scenery of a work of art may determine w^hether it belongs to realism or romanticism ; for realism and romanticism are affairs of time and space. Reality, however, by its very essence, is spiritual, and may be accompanied by a background that is contemporary, ancient, or purely mythical. An opera of the Italian school, where, after a tragic scene, the tenor and soprano hold hands, trip together to the footlights, and produce fluent roulades, may be set in a drawing-room, with contemporary, realistic furniture. Compare La Traviata with the first act of Die Walkure, and see the difference between realism and reality. In the wildly romantic and mythical setting, the passion of love is intensely real; and as the storm ceases, the portal swings open, and the soft air of the moonUt spring REALISM AND REALITY IN FICTION 233 night enters the room, the eternal reality of love makes its eternal appeal in a scene of almost intolerable beauty. Even so carefullj'^ realistic an opera as Louise does not seem for the moment any more real than these lovers in the spring moonlight, deep in the heart of the whispering forest. A fixed creed, whether it be a creed of optimism, pes- simism, realism, or romanticism, is a positive nuisance to an artist. Joseph Conrad, all of whose novels have the unmistakable air of reality, declares tliat the novelist should have no programme of any kind and no set rules. In a memorable phrase he cries, "Liberty of the imagina- tion should be the most precious possession of a novelist." Optimism may be an insult to the sufferings of humanity, but, says Mr. Conrad, pessimism is intellectual arrogance. He will have it that while the ultimate meaning of life — if there be one — is hidden from us, at all events this is a spectacular universe ; and a man who has doubled the Horn and sailed through a typhoon on what was uninten- tionally a submarine vessel may be pardoned for insisting on this point of view. It is indeed a spectacular universe, which has resisted all the attempts of realistic novelists to make it dull. However sad or gay life may be, it affords an interesting spectacle. Perhaps this is one reason why all works of art that possess reality never fail to draw and hold attention. Every critic ought to have a hospitable mind. His atti- tude toward art in general should be like that of an old- fashioned host at the door of a country inn, ready to wel- come all guests except criminals. It is impossible to judge with any fairness a new poem, a new opera, a new picture, a new novel, if the critic have preconceived opinions as to what poetry, music, painting, and fiction should be. We 234 MODERN ESSAYS are all such creatures of convention that the first impres- sion made by reality in any form of art is sometimes a distinct shock, and we close the windows of our intelligence and draw the blinds that the fresh air and the new light may not enter in. Just as no form of art is so strange as life, so it may be the strangeness of reality in books, in pictures, and in music that makes our attitude one of resistance rather than of welcome. Shortly after the appearance of Wordsworth's Resolu- tion and Independence, "There was a roaring in the wind all night. The rain came heavily and fell in floods," some one read aloud the poem to an intelligent woman. She burst into tears, but, recovering herself, said shame- facedly, "After all, it isn't poetry." When Pushkin, striking off the shackles of eighteenth-century conven- tions, published his first work, a Russian critic exclaimed, "For God's sake don't call this thing a poem!" These two poems seemed strange because they were so natural, so real, so true, just as a sincere person who speaks his mind in social intercourse is regarded as an eccentric. We follow conventions and not life. In operas the lover must be a tenor, as though the love of a man for a woman were something soft, something delicate, something emas- culate, instead of being what it really is, the very essence of masculine virility. I suppose that on the operatic stage a lover with a bass voice would shock a good many people in the auditorium, but I should like to see the experiment tried. In Haydn's Creation, our first parents sing a bass and soprano duet very sweetly. But Verdi gave that seasoned old soldier Otello a tenor role, and even the fear- less Wagner made his leading lovers all sing tenor except REALISM AND REALITY IN FICTION 235 the Flying Dutchman, who can hardly be called human. In society dramas we have become so accustomed to con- ventional inflections, conventional gestures, conventional grimaces, that when an actor speaks and behaves exactly as he would were the situation real, instead of assumed, the effect is startling. Virgin snow often looks blue, but it took courage to paint it blue, because people judge not by eyesight, but by convention, and snow conventionally is assuredly white. In reading works of fiction we have become so accustomed to conventions that we hardly notice how often they contradict reality. In many novels I have read I have been introduced to respectable women with scarlet lips, whereas in life I never saw a really good woman with such labial curiosities. Conversations are conven- tionally unnatural. A trivial illustration will suffice. Some one in a group makes an attractive proposition. "Agreed!" cried they all. Did you ever hear any one say "Agreed".'^ I suppose that all novels, no matter how ostensibly objective, must really be subjective. Out of the abun- dance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Every artist feels the imperative need of self-expression. Milton used to sit in his arm-chair, waiting impatiently for his amanuen- sis, and cry, "I want to be milked." Even so dignified, so reticent, and so sober-minded a novelist as Joseph Conrad says, "The novelist does not describe the world: he simply describes his own world." Sidney's advice, "Look in thy heart, and write," is as applicable to the realistic novelist as it is to the lyric poet. We know now that the greatest novelist of our time, Tolstoi, wrote his autobiography in every one of his so-called works of fiction. The astonishing air of reality that they possess is owing largely to the fact not merely that they are true to life, 236 MODERN ESSAYS but that they are the living truth. When an artist suc- ceeds in getting the secrets of his inmost heart on the printed page, the book hves. Tliis accounts for the ex- traordinary power of Dostoevski, who simply turned him- self inside out every time he wrote a novel. The only reality that we can consistently demand of a novel is that its characters and scenes shall make a per- manent impression on our imagination. The object of all forms of art is to produce an illusion, and the illusion can- not be successful with experienced readers unless it have the air of realit3^ The longer we live, the more diflScult it is to deceive us : we smile at the scenes that used to draw our tears, we are left cold by the declamation that we once thought was passion, and we have supped so full with horrors that we are not easily frightened. We are simply bored as we see the novelist get out his little bag of tricks. But we never weary of the great figures in Fielding, in Jane Austen, in Dickens, in Thackeray, in Balzac, in Turgenev, for they have become an actual part of our mental life. And it is interesting to remem- ber that while the ingenious situations and boisterous swashbucklers of most romances fade like the flowers of the field. Cooper and Dumas are read by genera- tion after generation. Their heroes cannot die, because they have what Mrs. Browning called the "principle of life." The truly great novelist is not only in harmony with life; his characters seem to move with the stars in their courses. "To be," said the philosopher Lotze, "is to be in relations." The moment a work of art ceases to be in relation with life, it ceases to be. All the great novelists are what I like to call sidereal novelists. They belong to the earth, like the procession of the seasons ; they are REALISM AND REALITY EST FICTION 237 universal, like the stars. A commonplace producer of novels for the market describes a group of people that remains nothing but a group of people ; they interest us perhaps momentarily, like an item in a newspaper; but they do not interest us deeply, any more than we are really interested at this moment in what Brown and Jones are doing in Rochester or Louisville. They may be in- teresting to their author, for children are always interest- ing to their parents ; but to the ordinary reader they be- gin and end their fictional life as an isolated group. On the contrary, when we read a story like The Return of the Native, the book seems as inevitable as the approach of winter, as the setting of the sun. All its characters seem to share in the diurnal revolution of the earth, to have a fixed place in the order of the universe. We are considering only the fortunes of a little group of people living in a little corner of England, but they seem to be in intimate and necessary relation with the movement of the forces of the universe. The recent revival of the historical romance, which shot up in the nineties, flourished mightily at the end of the century, and has already faded, was a protest not against reality, but against realism. Realism in the eighties had become a doctrine, and we know how its fetters cramped Stevenson. He joyously and resolutely burst them, and gave us romance after romance, all of which except the Black Arrow showed a reality superior to realism. The year of his death, 1894, ushered in the romantic revival. Romanticism suddenly became a fashion that forced many new writers and some experts to mould their work in its form. A few specific illustrations must be given to prove this statement. Mr. Stanley Weyman really wanted to write a realistic novel, and actually wrote one, but the 238 MODERN ESSAYS public would none of it : he therefore fed the mob with The House of the Wolf, with A Gentleman from France, with Under the Red Robe. Enormously successful were these stirring tales. The air became full of ob- solete oaths and the clash of steel — "God's bodikins ! man, I will spit you like a lark!" To use a scholar's phrase, we began to revel in the glamour of a bogus antiq- uity. For want of a better term, I call all these romances the "Gramercy" books. Mr. Winston Churchill, now a popular discij)le of the novel of manners, gained his reputation by Richard Carvel with a picture of a duel facing the title-page. Perhaps the extent of the romantic craze is shown most clearly in the success attained by the thoroughly sophisticated Anthony Hope with The Pris- oner of Zenda, by the author of Peter Sterling with Janice Meredith, and most of all by the strange Ad- ventures of Captain Horn, a bloody story of buried treas- ure, actually written by our beloved humorist, Frank Stockton. Mr. Stockton had the temperament most fatal to romance, the bright gift of humorous burlesque ; the real Frank Stockton is seen in that original and joyful work. The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Ale- shine. Yet the fact that he felt the necessity of writing Captain Horn, is good evidence of the tide. This romantic wave engulfed Europe as well as America, but so far as I can discover, the only work after the death of Stevenson that seems destined to remain, appeared in the epical historical romances of the Pole Sienkiewicz. Hun- dreds of the romances that the world was eagerly reading in 1900 are now forgotten like last year's almanac ; but they served a good purpose apart from temporary amuse- ment to invalids, overtired business men, and the young. There was the sound of a mighty wind, and the close REALISM AND REALITY IN FICTION 239 chambers of modern realism were cleansed by the fresh air. A new kind of realism, more closely related to reality, has taken the place of the receding romance. We now behold the "life" novel, the success of which is a curious demonstration of the falseness of recent prophets. We were told a short time ago that the long novel was extinct. The three-volume novel seemed very dead indeed, and the fickle public would read nothing but a short novel, and would not read that unless some one was swindled, se- duced, or stabbed on the first page. Then suddenly appeared Joseph Vance, which its author called an ill- written autobiography, and it contained 280,000 words. It was devoured by a vast army of readers, who clamoured for more. Mr. Arnold Bennett, who had made a number of short flights without attracting much attention, pro- duced The Old Wives' Tale, giving the complete life- history of two sisters. Emboldened by the great and well-deserved success of this history, he launched a trilogy, of which two huge sections are already in the hands of a wide public. No details are omitted in these vast struc- tures ; even a cold in the head is elaborately described. But thousands and thousands of people seem to have the time and the patience to read these volumes. Why.? Because the story is in intimate relation with life. A gifted Frenchman appears on the scene with a novel in ten volumes, Jean Christophe, dealing with the life of this hero from the cradle to the grave. This is being translated into all the languages of Europe, so intense is the curiosity of the world regarding a particular book of life. Some may ask. Why should the world be burdened with this enormous mass of trivial detail in rather unevent- ful lives ? The answer may be found in Era Lippo Lippi's 240 MODERN ESSAYS sj)irited defence of his art, which differed from the art of Fra AngeHco in sticking close to reaUty : "For, don't you mark ? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." I find in the contemporary "Ufe" novel a sincere, dignified, and successful effort to substitute reality for the former rather narrow realism ; for it is an attempt to represent life as a whole. TEACHING ENGLISH! BY Henry Seidel Canby To arouse the interest of the ordinary reader in what is after all a technical problem, Professor Canby begins his essay with a careful statement of the difficulty. He then propounds his solution, that the aim of the teacher of English literature should be to teach the pupils to read literature. As this is the main position, he explains and illustrates it through the body of the essay. This is followed by a brief catalogue of the four possible types of teachers, each in its own paragraph. The essay, then, returns to emphasize the main thought in the paragraph, "I have already answered the question according to my own beliefs." Try the effect of omitting the catalogue altogether, of omitting the paragraphs beginning " Thus the effects of English teaching are sometimes hidden" to the paragraph beginning "What is teaching literature?" The continuity of the thought remains unbroken. Exactly what is gained by the insertion of those intervening paragraphs ? The so-called new professions have been given abundant space of late in the Sunday newspaper ; but among them I do not find numbered the teaching of English. Never- theless, with such exceptions as advertising, social service, and efiiciency-engineering, it is one of the newest as well as one of the largest. I do not mean the teaching of English writing. Directly or indirectly that has been taught since the heavenly grace instructed Csedmon in liis 1 From The Yale Reviciv for October, 1914, by permission of the author and of the editor of The Yale Review. E 241 242 MODERN ESSAYS stable. I mean English literature, which has been made a subject of formal instruction in our schools and colleges only since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet already the colleges complain that the popularity of this comparatively recent addition to the curriculum is so great that harder, colder, more disciplinary subjects are pushed to the wall (and this in practical America !) ; and in the schools only the so-called vocational courses are as much talked about and argued over by the educational powers. An army of men and women are teaching or trying to teach us English — which includes American — literature. The results of this new profession — as even those who earn their bread thereby are willing to confess — are some- times humorous. The comicality of scholarship — as when the sweaty hack work of some hanger-on of the great Elizabethans is subjected to elaborate study and published in two volumes — belongs rather to the satire of research than to teaching. But there are many ludicrous sequels to the compulsory study of literature. Poor Hawthorne, shyest and rarest of spirit among our men of letters, be- comes a text-book for the million. Dick Steele, who dashed off his cheerful trifles between sprees, is raised to a dreary immortality of comparison with the style and humor of Addison ; their reputations — like a new torture in the Inferno — seesawing with the changing opinions of critics who edit "The Spectator" for the schools. And Shakespeare, who shares the weaknesses of all mortal workmen, is made a literary god (since this new profession must have its divinity), before whom all tastes bow down. Then in our classes we proceed to paraphrase, to annotate, to question, and cross-question the books these great men have left behind them, until their tortured spirits must envy the current unpopularity of Latin and Greek. As TEACHING ENGLISH 243 one of my undergraduates wrote at the end of an ex- amination : Shakespeare, this prosy paper makes me blush. Your finest fancies we have turned to — mush ! Nevertheless, it is the dillettante, the connoisseur, and the aesthete who sneer at the results of teaching English. The practical man will not usually be scornful, even when he is unsympathetic ; and the wise many, who know that power over good books is better than a legacy, are too thankful for benefits received to judge a profession by its failures. In truth, the finer minds, the richer lives which must be made possible if our democracy is not to become a welter of vulgar commercialism, are best composted by literature. And therefore the teacher of English, provided he can really teach, has a just claim upon the attention of every American parent. But what is teaching litera- ture ? There is a function borrowed from Germany for our graduate schools, in which a group of professors have at their mercy for an hour of oral examination a much-to-be- pitied candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy. They may ask him any question in their field which ap- pears on previous reflection to be sufficiently difficult ; and as the more one knows the more difficulty a given sub- ject presents, and they are specialists, the ordeal is infernal. If I were brought before a like tribunal, composed of parents of our undergraduates, and asked to justify this new profession, I should probably begin by asserting that the purpose of teaching English is to give light for the mind and solace for the heart. The function of the teacher of English as a shedder of light is perhaps more familiar to himself than to the world ; J44 MODERN ESSAYS Ji ii>>t ?iirets. and has even been forced upon him. The teac-ho" of pure science utterly repudiates the notion ^ • " ' ^ is to shed h^ht upon the meaning of life. His _ „. -aS is to teach the observed processes of nature, and he is too busy exploding old theories of ho"w she works, and creating new ones, to concern himself with the spiritual welfare of this generation. Perhaps it is just as well. As for the philosophers, in spite of the efforts of William James, they have not yet consented to elucidate their subjects for the benefit of the democracy ; — with this result, that the average undergraduate learns the little r "■-"..-. p}iy that is taught him, in his class in English re. Indeed, as if by a conspiracy in a practical world anxious to save time for the study of facts, not only the attributes of culture, but even ethics, morality, and the implications of science are left to the English depart- ment. The burden is heavy. The temptation to throw it off, or to mate use of the opportunity for a course in things-in- general and an easy reputation, is great. And yet all the world of thought does form a part of a course in English, for all that has matured in human experience finds its way into literature. And since good books are the emanations of radiant minds, the teacher of English must in the long run teach light. But even if Hterature did not mean light for the mind, it would still be worth while to try to teach it, if only to pre- pare that solace for the weary soul in reading which the most active must some day crave. The undergraduate puts on a solemn face when told that he may need the stimulus of books as an incentive to life, or the relaxation of books as a rehef from it : but he remains inwardly un- impressed. And yet one does not have to be a philosopher TEACHING ENGLISH 245 to know that in this age of hurry and strain and sudden depressions, the power to fall back on other minds and other times is above price. Therefore we teach literature in the hope that to the poets and the essayists, the play- wrights and the novelists, men may be helped to bring slack or weary minds for cure. All essays upon literature discourse upon the light and sweetness which flow from it. But this is not an essay upon literature ; and that is why I have dismissed these hoped-for results so summarily, although profoundly believing that they are the ultimate purpose, indeed the raison d'etre of teaching English. My business is rather with the immediate aim of these English courses to which you are sending your sons and daughters by the tens of thousands. I wish to discuss frankly, not so much the why, as the how, of teaching English. Fine words cannot accomplish it. When I first began to teach, I met my Freshman classes with rich and glowing words, — which I have repeated with more sobriety in the preceding para- graphs. Literature, I said, is the criticism of life ; it is the spur of the noble mind, and the comfort of the depressed. My ardent descrii^tions fell flat. They were too true; the Freshmen had heard them before. Now I begin bluntly with the assertion that the average young Ameri- can does not know how to read ; and proceed to prove it. To read out the meaning of a book ; to interpret literature as it in turn interprets life, — whatever may be our ulti- mate purpose, that I take to be the most immediate aim of teaching English. I do not intend to slight the knowledge to be gained. Facts are well worth picking up on the way, but unless they are used they remain just facts — and usually for- gotten ones. Where are your college note-books, crammed 246 MODERN ESSAYS with the facts of English lectures ? How much does the graduate remember of dates of editions, of "tendencies," and "sources"? What can he say (as the examination paper has it) of Vaughan, of Cynewulf, of the Gothic novel, and Pantisocracy ? Something, somewhere, I hope, for if the onward sweep of English literature is not familiar to him, if the great writers have no local habitation and a name, and Milton must be read in terms of twentieth- century England, and Poe as if he wrote for a Sunday newspaper syndicate, his English courses were dismally unsuccessful. And yet to have heard of Beowulf and Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Fair Rosamond, is not to know English literature. The undergraduate (and his parent) must be able to read literature in order to know it, and to read he must have the power of interpretation. It is easy to read the story in the Sunday supplement, where thoughts of one syllable are clothed in obvious symbols supposed to repre- sent life. It is harder to read contemporary writing that contains real thought and real observation, for the mind and the imagination have to be stretched a little to take in the text. It is still more difficult to enjoy with due com- prehension the vast treasure of our inherited literature, which must always outweigh in value our current gains. There the boy you send us to teach will be perplexed by the peculiarities of language, set astray by his lack of back- ground, and confused by the operations of a time-spirit radically different from his own. A few trivialities of diction or reference may hide from him the life which some great genius has kept burning in the printed page. And even if the unfamiliar and the unexplained do not dis- courage him, even if he reads Shakespeare, or Milton, or Gray with his ardor unchilled, nevertheless, if he does not TEACHING ENGLISH 247 interpret, he gets but half. Here is the chief need for teaching EngHsh. Hotspur, for example, in the first part of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," bursts into enthusiastic speech : By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap. To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon. Or dive into the bottom of the deep. Where fathom line could never touch the ground. And pluck up drowned honor by the locks. Can the Freshman read it ? Not unless he knows what "honor" meant for Hotspur and for Shakespeare. Not unless he comprehends the ardent exuberance of the Renaissance that inspires the extravagance of the verse. Or Milton's famous portrait of Satan : Darkened so, yet shone Above them all the Archangel : but his face Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride Waiting revenge. Do you see him ? Not unless, like Milton, you remember Jove and his lightnings, not unless the austere imagery of the Old Testament is present in your imagination, not unless "considerate" means more to you than an accent in the verse. In truth, the undergraduate cannot read Stevenson's "Markheim," Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters," Kipling's "Recessional," or an essay by Emerson — to gather scattered instances — without background, without an interpretative insight, and without an exact understand- ing of the thought behind the words. Without them, he must be content, at best, with a fifty-per-cent efficiency of comprehension. And fifty per cent is below the margin of enjoyment, and below the point where real profit begins. 248 MODERN ESSAYS Tint even fifty per cent is a higher figure than some undergraduates attain at the beginning of their college careers. Old Justice Shallow, for instance, pompous, boastful, tedious, Justice Shallow with his ridiculous at- tempts to prove himself as wicked as Falstaff, and his empty sententiousness is certainly as well-defined a comic character as Shakespeare presents, and yet it is astonishing how much of him is missed by the reader who cannot yet interpret. "Justice Shallow," writes a Freshman, "seems to be a jolly old man who loves company, and who would do anything to please his guests." "Justice Shallow," says another, "was an easy-going man; that is, he did not allow things to worry him. At times he was very mean." "Justice Shallow," a third proposes, "is kind- hearted. ... He means well, but things do not come out as he had planned them." Shallow jolly! Shallow kind-hearted! Perhaps occa- sionally, — for the benefit of gentlemen from the court. But to describe him thus is as if one should define an ele- phant as an animal with four legs and a fondness for hay. They missed the flavor of Shallow, these boys, not because it was elusive, but because they had not learned to read. All good books, whether new or old, present such diffi- culties of interpretation, — difficulties often small in them- selves but great when they prevent that instant flush of appreciation which literature demands. And therefore, if one cannot read lightly, easily, intelligently, — why the storehouse is locked; the golden books may be purchased and perused, but they will be little better than so much paper and print. Two-thirds of an English course must be learning to search out the meaning of the written word ; must be just learning how to read. TEACHING ENGLISH 249 This is the Enghsh teacher's programme. Does he carry it out? In truth, it is depressing to sit in a recitation room, estimating, while someone recites, and your voice is resting, the volume and the flow of the streams of literary instruction washing over the undergraduates ; — and then to see them bob up to the surface at the end of the hour, seemingly as impervious as when their heads went under. We teachers of English propose, as I have said above, to ennoble the mind by showing it how to feed upon the thoughts of the great, to save the state by sweetness and light ; while our students sell their Miltons and Tennysons to the second-hand bookstore, and buy the machine-made, please-the-million magazines ! The pessimist will assert that there is a screw out somewhere in our intellectual platform. Not out, but loose. My picture of the undergraduate, like Hamlet's picture of Claudius, is a likeness but not a faithful portrait. The college English course certainly carries with it no guarantee of solid literary taste, no cer- tainty that the average bachelor of arts will take a stand against the current cheapening of literature. He may have a row of leather-bound pocket Shakespeares in the living- room book-case, but that is sometimes the only outward evidence of his baptism into the kingdom of English books. Further than that you cannot be sure of what teaching English has done for him. But neither can you be certain that this is all it has done for him. The evidence of his parents is not always to be trusted, for the undergraduate feels that grown-up America does not approve of bookish- ness, and so, if he has any literary culture, keeps it to himself. Men of letters, editorial writers, and other professional critics of our intellectual accomplishments are not good judges, for they are inclined to apply to a 250 MODERN ESSAYS recent graduate the standards of an elegant and allusive brand of culture which is certainly not American, though in its way admirable enough. I am doubtful myself, but this much my experience has taught me, that, dis- appointing as the apparent results of teaching English may be, the actual results are far more considerable than pessimists suppose — as great perhaps as we can expect. The mind of the undergraduate is like a slab of coarse- grained wood, upon which the cabinet-maker lavishes his stain. Its empty pores soak in the polishing mixture, no matter how richly it may be applied, and in many instances we fail to get the expected gloss. Much English teaching, in fact, is (to change the figure) subterranean in its effects. You may remember no Tennyson, and yet have gained a sensitiveness to moral beauty, and an ear for the glory of words. Your Shakespeare may have gathered dust for a decade, and yet still be quickening your sympathy with human nature. That glow in the presence of a soaring pine or towering mountain ; that warmth of the im- agination as some modern struggle recalls an ancient protagonist ; the feeling that life is always interesting some- how, somewhere, — how much of this is due to Words- worth, Shelley, Stevenson, Browning, or Keats, dim in the memory perhaps, but potent in the sub-consciousness, no one can ever determine. The psychologist will answer, much. The layman must consider the spring, the re- cuperative power, the quantity and quality of happiness among the well-read in comparison with the unread, for his reply. The results of my own observation enable me to view even the debris of lectures and study in a "flunker's" examination paper with dejection to be sure, but not with despair. The undergraduate, I admit sorrow- fully, is usually superficial in his reading, and sometimes TEACHING ENGLISH 251 merely barbarous in the use he makes of it ; but there is more gained from his training in literature than meets the sight. Thus the effects of English teaching are sometimes hidden. But English teachers are so common nowadays that of them everyone may form his own opinion. And, indeed, the rain of criticism falls upon just and unjust alike. The undergraduate, if he takes the trouble to classify his teachers of English otherwise than as "hard" or "easy," would probably divide the species into two types : the highly polished variety with somewhat erratic clothes and an artistic temperament ; and the cold scholar who moves in a world of sources, editions, and dates. I would be content with this classification, superficial as it is, were it not that the parent of the undergraduate, who is footing the bills, has made no classification at all, and deserves, if he wants it, a more accurate description of the profession he is patronizing. English teachers, I may say to him, are of at least four different kinds. For convenience, I shall name them the gossips, the inspirationists, the scientists, and the middle-of-the-road men whose ambition it is to teach neither anecdote, nor things in general, nor mere facts, but literature. The literary gossip is the most engaging, and not the least useful of them all. As the horse's hoofs beat "proputty, proputty, proputty" for Tennyson's greedy farmer, so "personality" rings forever in his brain, and constantly mingles in his speech. "The man behind the book," is his worthy motto ; and his lectures are stuffed with biographical anecdote until the good stories spill over. No humorous weakness of the Olympians is left without its jest, and the student learns more of Carlyle's indiges- 252 MODERN ESSAYS tion, Coleridge's abserit-niincledncss, or the deformity of Pope, than of their immortal works. The literary gossip is an artist. He can raise dead authors to life, and give students of little imagination an interest in the books of the past which they never would have gained from mere printed texts. But he has the faults of the artistic temperament. He will sacrifice everything in order to impress his, hearers. Hence he is never dull ; and when he combines his skill in anecdote. with real literary criticism, he becomes a teaclier of such power that college presidents compete for his services. But when his talents do not rise above the ordinary, his courses are better designated vaaitliiville than the teaching of English. As the old song has it, when he is good he is very, very good, for he ploughs up the unresponsive mind so that appreciation may grow there. But when he is bad, he is horrid. The inspirationists held the whole field of English teach- ing until the scientists attacked them in the rear, found their ammunition wagons lacking in facts, and put them upon their defense. The inspirationist was — no is, — for he has been sobered but not routed by the onslaughts of German methodologies, — a fighter in the cause of "uplift" in America. In 1814 he would have been a minister of the gospel, or an apostle of political freedom. In 1914 he uses Shakespeare, Milton, the novelists, the essayists, indifferently to preach ideas — moral, political, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific — to his undergraduates. At the club table after hours, he orates at imaginary Freshmen. "Make 'em think !" he shouts. "Make 'em feel ! Give them ideas — and their literary training will take care of itself ! " And the course he offers is like those famous mediaeval ones, where the whole duty of man, here TEACHING ENGLISH 253 and hereafter, was to be obtained from a single professor. Indeed, since the field of teaching began to be recruited from predestined pastors who found the pulpit too narrow for their activities, it is simply astonishing how much ethics, spirituality, and inspiration generally has been freed in the classroom. Ask the undergraduates. I mean no flippancy. I thoroughly believe that it is far more important to teach literature than the facts about literature. And all these things are among the in- gredients of literature. I am merely pointing out the extremes of extra-literary endeavor into which the re- moteness of the philosophers, the slackening of religious training in the home, and the absence of aesthetic influences in American life, have driven some among us. A friend of mine begins his course in Carlyle with a lecture on the unreality of matter. Browning with a discussion of the immortality of the soul, and Ruskin with an exhibition of pictures. He is responding to the needs of the age. Like most of the inspirationists, he does not fail to teach some- thing ; like many of them, he has little time left for literature. The day does not differ from the night more sharply than the scientist in teaching English from the inspira- tionist. The literary scientist sprang into being when the scientific activity of the nineteenth century reached aesthetics and began to lay bare our inaccuracies and our ignorance. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Defoe — we knew all too little about their lives, and of what we knew a disgraceful part was wrong. Our knowledge of the writers of the Anglo-Saxon period, and of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, of the minor Elizabethan dramatists and the lyricists of the seventeenth century, consisted chiefly of ill-assorted facts or unproved generahzations. 254 MODERN ESSAYS Our catalogue of errors was a long one. The response to this crying need for scholarship, for science, was slow, — but when it came, it came with a rush. Nowadays, the great majority of university teachers of English are specialists in some form of literary research. As far as the teacher is concerned, the result has doubt- less been good. There have been broader backgrounds, more accuracy in statement, less "bluffing" — in a word, more thoroughness ; and the out-and-out scientists have set a pace in this respect which other teachers of English have had to follow. But curiously enough, while the teacher of English, and especially the professed scientist, has become more thorough, the students are said to be less so. How to account for so distressing a phenomenon ! The truth seems to be that science in English literature has become so minute in its investigation of details, so scrupulous in the accuracy of even the most trivial state- ment, that the teacher who specializes in this direction despairs of dragging his classes after him. Scholarship for this scientist has become esoteric. Neither the big world outside, nor his little world of the classroom, can compre- hend his passion for date, and source, and text ; and, like the Mormon who keeps his wives at home, he has come to practice his faith without imposing it upon others. The situation is not entirely unfortunate. Until scientific scholarship has ended its mad scurryings for the un- considered trifles still left uninvestigated, and begun upon the broader problems of criticism and of teaching which will remain when all the dates are gathered and all the sources hunted home, it is questionable whether it has any- thing but facts to contribute to the elementary teaching of English. At present, the scientist's best position is in the upper TEACHING ENGLISH 255 branches of a college education. There he is doing good work, — except when an emotional, sensitive Junior or Senior, eager to be thrilled by literature, and to understand it, is provided with nothing but "scientific" courses. For studying about literature — and this is the scientist's pro- gramme — can in no possible sense be regarded as a satis- factory alternative to studying the thing itself, no matter how great may be its auxiliary value. And many a recent graduate of many a college who reads these lines, will recognize his own plight in that of the youth who, finding only gossips who amused him, inspirationists who sermoned him, and scientists who reduced glowing poetry to a skele- ton of fact, decided that in spite of the catalogue, literature itself was not taught in his university. What is teaching literature.'^ But I have already an- swered that question according to my own beliefs, in the earlier part of this paper. It must be — at least for the undergraduate — instruction in the interpretation of literature ; it must be teaching how to read. For if the boy is once taught how to turn the key, only such forces of heredity and environment as no teaching will utterly over- come, can prevent him from entering the door. It is this that all wise teachers of English realize ; it is this that the middle-of-the-road men try to put in practice. I give them this title because they do keep to the middle of the literary road, — because they understand that the teacher of English should avoid the extremes I have depicted in the preceding paragraphs, without despising them. He should master his facts as the scientist does, because it is too late in the day to impose unverified facts or shaky generalizations even upon hearers as uncritical as the usual run of undergraduates. He should try to inspire his classes with the ideas and emotions of the text, for to 256 MODERN ESSAYS teach the form of a book and neglect its contents, is as if your grocer should send you an empty barrel. He should not neglect the life and color which literary biography brings into his field. And yet the aim of the right kind of instructor is no one of these things. He uses them all, but merely as steps in the attempt to teach his stu- dents how to read. This it is to follow the golden mean and make it actually golden in our profession. And indeed, when one considers that throughout America there are hundreds of thousands calling themselves educated who cannot read Shakespeare, or the Bible, or even a good magazine, with justice to the text ; when one considers the treasures of literature, new as well as old, waiting to be used for the increase of happiness, intelligence, and power, what else can be called teaching English ? EDWARD GIBBON 1 BY James Ford Rhodes Gibbon is a man of one book, but that book is a masterpiece. In 1776, the birth-year of our country, he began writing his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,"' — and to-day at any bookstore, you can find copies in endless editions. How wonderful that is ! That a drama or romance should persist through centuries is easily explainable, since the subject matter of them is human nature, and human nature has changed but slightly. But why a history, written much too long after the events it describes to have contemporaneous value, should survive all more recent studies based on modern research and archeological investiga- tion, — that is the question. And it is this question that our greatest living historian here attempts to answer. The problem is presented in two paragraphs. The answer is then sought in his life, in his intellectual training, in his attitude of mind, and in his own point of view regarding his work. Notice the care with which each phase of the subject is proved by citations, quotations, and references. The aim then is to make the reader intellectually comprehend the writer of the book. And as the essay was first delivered as a lecture at Harvard University, for such an audience Dr. Rhodes rightfully emphasizes the intellectual nature of the appeal. No English or American lover of history visits Rome without bending reverent footsteps to the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. Two visits are necessary, as on the first you are at once seized by the sacristan, who can con- 1 Lecture read at Harvard University, April 6, 1908, and printed in Scribner's Magazine, June, 1909. Reprinted from " Historical Essays," by permission of the author and of The Macmillan Co. s 257 258 IMODERN ESSAYS ceiv'e of no other motive for entering this church on the Capitol Hill than to see the miraculous Bambino — the painted doll swaddled in gold and silver tissue and "crusted over with magnificent diamonds, emeralds, and rubies." When you have heard the tale of what has been called " the oldest medical practitioner in Rome," of his miraculous cures, of these votive offerings, the imaginary picture you had conjured up is effaced ; and it is better to go away and come a second time when the sacristan will recognize you and leave you to yourself. Then you may open your Gibbon's Autobiography and read that it was the subtle influence of Italy and Rome that determined the choice, from amongst many contemplated subjects of historical writing, of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "In my Journal," wrote Gibbon, "the place and moment of conception are recorded; the 15th of October, 1764, in the close of the evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Franciscan friars while they were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol." ^ Gibbon was twenty-seven when he made this fruitful visit of eighteen weeks to Rome, and his first impression, though often quoted, never loses interest, showing, as it does, the enthusiasm of an unemotional man. "At the distance of twenty-five years," he wrote, "I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the Eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum ; each memorable spot where Romulus stood or Cicero spoke or Caesar fell was at once present to my eye." The admirer of Gibbon as he travels northward will stop at Lausanne and visit the hotel which bears the historian's ^ Autobiography, 270. EDWARD GIBBON 259 name. Twice have I taken luncheon in the garden where he wrote the last words of his history; and on a third visit, after lunching at another inn, I could not fail to admire the penetration of the Swiss concierge. As I alighted, he seemed to divine at once the object of my visit, and before I had half the words of explanation out of my mouth, he said, " Oh, yes. It is this way. But I cannot show you anything but a spot." I have quoted from Gibbon's Autobiography the expression of his in- spiration of twenty-seven ; a fitting companion-piece is the reflection of the man of fifty. "I have presumed to mark the moment of conception," he wrote ; "I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. ... I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and perhaps the establish- ment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agree- able companion." ^ Although the idea was conceived when Gibbon was twenty-seven, he was thirty-one before he set himself seriously at work to study his material. At thirty-six he began the composition, and he was thirty-nine, when, in February, 1776, the first quarto volume was published. The history had an immediate success. "My book," he wrote, "was on every table and almost on every toilette ; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day." ^ The first edition was exhausted in a few days, a second was printed in 1776, and next year a third. 1 Autobiography, 333. "^ Ibid., 311. 260 MODERN ESSAYS The second and third vohimes, which ended the history of the Western empire, were pubhshed in 1781, and seven years later the three volumes devoted to the Eastern empire saw the light. The last sentence of the work, written in the summer-house at Lausanne, is, "It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public." This is a brief account of one of the greatest historical works, if indeed it is not the greatest, ever written. Let us imagine an assemblage of English, German, and American historical scholars called upon to answer the question. Who is the greatest modern historian? No doubt can exist that Gibbon would have a large majority of the voices ; and I think a like meeting of French and Italian scholars would indorse the verdict. "Gibbon's work will never be excelled," declared Niebuhr.^ "That great master of us all," said Freeman, "whose immortal tale none of us can hope to displace." ^ Bury, the latest editor of Gibbon, who has acutely criticised and carefully weighed "The Decline and Fall," concludes "that Gibbon is behind date in many details. But in the main things he is still our master, above and beyond date." ^ His work wins plaudits from those who believe that history in its highest form should be literature and from those who hold that it should be nothing more than a scientific narrative. The disciples of Maoaulay and Carlyle, of Stubbs and Gardiner, would be found voting in unison in my imaginary 1 Lectures, 763. 2 Chief Periods European Hist., 75. 3 Introduction, Ixvii. EDWARD GIBBON 261 Congress. Gibbon, writes Bury, is "the historian and the man of letters," thus ranking with Thucydides and Tacitus. These three are put in the highest class, exem- plifying that "brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian." ^ Accepting this authoritative classification it is well worth while to point out the salient differences between the ancient historians and the modern. From Thucydides we have twenty-four years of contemporary history of his own country. If the whole of the Annals and History of Tacitus had come down to us, we should have had eighty- three years ; as it is, we actually have forty-one of nearly contemporary history of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's tale covers 1240 years. He went far beyond his own country for his subject, and the date of his termination is three centuries before he was born. Milman spoke of "the amplitude, the magnificence, and the harmony of Gibbon's design,"^ and Bury writes, "If we take into account the vast range of his work, his accuracy is amaz- ing." ^ Men have wondered and will long wonder at the brain with such a grasp and with the power to execute skillfully so mighty a conception. "The public is seldom wrong" in their judgment of a book, wrote Gibbon in his Autobiography,^ and, if that be true at the time of actual publication to which Gibbon intended to apply the remark, how much truer it is in the long run of years. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has had a life of over one hundred and thirty years, and there is no indi- cation that it will not endure as long as any interest is taken in the study of history. "I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate of British historians," 1 Introduction, xxxi. ^ Introduction, xli. 2 Preface, ix. « p 324. 262 MODERN ESSAYS said Gibbon, referring to Hume and Robertson. But in our day Hume and Robertson gather dust on the shelf, while Gibbon is continually studied by students and read by serious men. A work covering Gibbon's vast range of time would have been impossible for Thucydides or Tacitus. Histori- cal skepticism had not been fully enough developed. There had not been a sufficient sifting and criticism of historical materials for a master's work of synthesis. And it is probable that Thucydides lacked a model. Tacitus could indeed have drawn inspiration from the Greek, while Gibbon had lessons from both, showing a profound study of Tacitus and a thorough acquaintance with Thucydides. If circumstances then made it impossible for the Greek or the Roman to attempt history on the grand scale of Gib- bon, could Gibbon have written contemporary history with accuracy and impartiality equal to his great predecessors ? This is one of those delightful questions that may be ever discussed and never resolved. When twenty-three years old, arguing against the desire of his father that he should go into Parliament, Gibbon assigned, as one of the reasons, that he lacked "necessary prejudices of party and of nation" ; ^ and when in middle life he embraced the for- tunate opportunity of becoming a member of the House of Commons, he thus summed up his experience, "The eight sessions that I sat in Parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian." ^ At the end of this political career. Gibbon, in a private letter to an intimate Swiss friend, gave the reason why he had embraced it. "I entered Parliament," he said, "without patriotism, and without ambition, and 1 Letters, I, 23. " Autobiography, 310. EDWARD GIBBON 263 I had no other aim than to secure the comfortable and honest place of a Lord of Trade. I obtained this place at last. I held it for three years, from 1779 to 1782, and the net annual product of it, being £750 sterling, increased my revenue to the level of my wants and desires." ^ His retirement from Parliament was followed by ten years' residence at Lausanne, in the first four of which he com- pleted his history. A year and a half after his removal to Lausanne, he referred, in a letter to his closest friend, Lord Sheffield, to the "abyss of your cursed politics," and added: "I never was a very warm patriot and I grow every day a citizen of the world. The scramble for power and profit at Westminster or St. James's, and the names of Pitt and Fox become less interesting to me than those of Caesar and Pompey." ^ These expressions would seem to indicate that Gib- bon might have written contemporary history well and that the candor displayed in "The Decline and Fall" might not have been lacking had he written of England in his own time. But that subject he never contemplated. When twenty-four years old he had however considered a number of English periods and finally fixed upon Sir Walter Raleigh for his hero ; but a year later, he wrote in his journal: "I shrink with terror from the modern history of England, where every character is a problem, and every reader a friend or an enemy ; where a writer is supposed to hoist a flag of party and is devoted to damna- tion by the adverse faction. ... I must embrace a safer and more extensive theme." ^ How well Gibbon knew himself ! Despite his coolness and candor, war and revolution revealed his strong Tory prejudices, which he undoubtedly feared might color any 1 Letters, II, 36. 2 Ibid., 127. ^ Autobiography, 196. 064 MODERN ESSAYS history of England that he might undertake. "I took my seat," in the House of Commons, he wrote, "at the beginning of the memorable contest between Great Britain and America; and supported with many a sincere and silent vote the rights though perhaps not the interests of the mother country." ^ In 1782 he recorded the con- clusion : "The American war had once been the favorite of the country, the pride of England was irritated by the resistance of her colonies, and the executive power was driven by national clamor into the most vigorous and coercive measures." But it was a fruitless contest. Armies were lost ; the debt and taxes were increased ; the hostile confederacy of France, Spain and Holland was dis- quieting. As a result the war became unpopular and Lord North's ministry fell. Dr. Johnson thought that no nation not absolutely conquered had declined so much in so short a time. "We seem to be sinking," he said. "I am afraid of a civil war." Dr. Franklin, according to Horace Walpole, said "he would furnish Mr. Gibbon with ma- terials for writing the History of the Decline of the British Empire." With his country tottering, the self-centered but truthful Gibbon could not avoid mention of his personal loss, due to the fall of his patron. Lord North. " I was stripped of a convenient salary," he said, "after having enjoyed it about three years." ^ The outbreak of the French Revolution intensified his conservatism. He was then at Lausanne, the tranquillity of which was broken up by the dissolution of the neighbor- ing kingdom. Many Lausanne families were terrified by the menace of bankruptcy. "This town and country," 1 Autobiography, 310. "I am more and more convinced that we have both the right and power on our side." Letters, I, 248. 2 Hill's ed. Gibbon Autobiography, 212, 213, 314. EDWARD GIBBON 265 Gibbon wrote, "are crowded with noble exiles, and we sometimes count in an assembly a dozen princesses and duchesses." ^ Bitter disputes between them and the triumphant Democrats disturbed the harmony of social circles. Gibbon espoused the cause of the royalists. "I beg leave to subscribe my assent to Mr. Burke's creed on the Revolution of France," he wrote. "I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can almost excuse his reverence for Church establish- ments." ^ Thirteen days after the massacre of the Swiss guard in the attack on the Tuileries in August, 1792, Gibbon wrote to Lord Sheffield, "The last revolution of Paris appears to have convinced almost everybody of the fatal consequences of Democratical principles which lead by a path of flowers into the abyss of hell." ^ Gibbon, who was astonished by so few things in history, wrote Sainte-Beuve, was amazed by the French Revolution.* Nothing could be more natural. The historian in his study may consider the fall of dynasties, social upheavals, violent revolutions, and the destruction of order without a tremor. The things have passed away. The events furnish food for his reflections and subjects for his pen, while sanguine uprisings at home or in a neighboring country in his own time inspire him with terror lest the oft-prophesied dis- solution of society is at hand. It is the difl^erence between the earthquake in your own city and the one 3000 miles away. As Gibbon's pocket-nerve was sensitive, it may be he was also thinking of the £1300 he had invested in 1784 in the new loan of the King of France, deeming the French funds as solid as the English.^ It is well now to repeat our dictum that Gibbon is the 1 Letters, II, 249. 2 Autobiography, 342. ^ Letters, II, 310. * Causeries du Lundi, viii, 469. ^ Letters, II, 98. 266 MODEIIN ESSAYS greatest modern historian, but, in reasserting this, it is no more than fair to cite the oi)inions of two dissentients — tlie great hterary historians of the nineteenth century, Macaulay and Carlyle. "The truth is," wrote Macaulay in his diary, "that I admire no historians much except Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus. . . . There is merit no doubt in Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs." ^ "Gibbon," said Carlyle in a public lecture, is "a greater historian than Robertson but not so great as Hume. With all his swagger and bombast no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; assigning no profound cause for these phenomena, nothing but diseased nerves, and all sorts of miserable motives, to the actors in them." ^ Carlyle's statement shows envious criticism as well as a prejudice in favor of his brother Scotchman. It was made in 1838, since when opinion has raised Gibbon to the top, for he actually lives while Hume is read perfunctorily, if at all. Moreover among the three — Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle — whose works are literature as well as his- tory, modern criticism has no hesitation in awarding the palm to Gibbon. Before finally deciding upon his subject Gibbon thought of "The History of the Liberty of the Swiss" and "The History of the Republic of Florence under the House of Medicis," ^ but in the end, as we have seen, he settled on the later history of the Roman Empire, showing, as Lowell said of Parkman, his genius in the choice of his 1 Trevelyan, II, 232. 2 Lectures on the Hist, of Literature, 185. ' Autobiograi)liy, 19G. EDWARD GIBBON 267 subject. His history really begins with the death of Mar- cus Aurelius, 180 a.d., but the main narrative is preceded by three excellent introductory chapters, covering in Bury's edition eighty-two pages. After the completion of his work, he regretted that he had not begun it at an earlier period. On the first page of his own printed copy of his book where he announces his design, he has entered this marginal note : "Should I not have given the history of that fortunate period which was interposed between two iron ages ? Should I not have deduced the decline of the Empire from the Civil Wars that ensued after the Fall of Nero or even from the tyranny which succeeded the reign of Augustus ? Alas ! I should ; but of what avail is this tardy knowledge .-^ " ^ We may echo Gibbon's regret that he had not commenced his history with the reign of Tiberius, as, in his necessary use of Tacitus, we should have had the running comment of one great historian on another, of which we have a significant example in Gibbon's famous sixteenth chapter wherein he discusses Tacitus's account of the persecution of the Christians by Nero. With his power of historic divina- tion, he would have so absorbed Tacitus and his time that the history would almost have seemed a collaboration between two great and sympathetic minds. "Tacitus," he wrote, "very frequently trusts to the curiosity or reflection of his readers to supply those intermediate circumstances and ideas, which, in his extreme concise- ness, he has thought proper to suppress." ^ How Gibbon would have filled those gaps ! Though he was seldom swayed by enthusiasm, his admiration of the Roman historian fell little short of idolatry. His references in "The Decline and Fall" are many, and some of them 1 Bury's ed., xxxv. ^ Decline and Fall, Smith's ed., 236. 2C8 MODERN ESSAYS are here worth recalling to mind. "In their primitive state of simplicity and independence," he wrote, "the Germans were surveyed by the discerning eye and de- lineated by the masterly pencil of Tacitus, the first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts." ^ Again he speaks of him as "the philo- sophic historian whose writings will instruct the last generation of mankind." - And in Chapter XVI he devoted five pages to citation from, and comment on, Tacitus, and paid him one of the most splendid tributes one historian ever paid another. "To collect, to dispose, and to adorn a series of fourscore years in an immortal work, every sentence of which is pregnant with the deepest observations and the most lively images, was an under- taking sufficient to exercise the genius of Tacitus himself during the greatest part of his life." ^ So much for admiration. That, nevertheless, Gi})bon could wield the critical pen at the expense of the historian he rated so highly, is shown by a marginal note in his own printed copy of "The Decline and Fall." It will be remembered that Tacitus published his History and wrote his Annals during the reign of Trajan, whom he undoubtedly re- spected and admired. He referred to the reigns of Nerva and Trajan in suggested contrast to that of Domitian as "times when men were blessed with the rare privilege of thinking with freedom, and uttering what they thought." ■* It fell to both Tacitus and Gibbon to speak of the testament of Augustus which, after his death, was read in the Senate : and Tacitus wrote, Augustus "added a recommendation to keep the empire within fixed limits," on which he thus commented, "but whether from appre- 1 Decline and Fall, Smith's ed., I, 349. 2 jfj^^i^ jj 35, 3 II, 235. « History, I, 1. EDWARD GIBBON 269 hension for its safety, or jealousy of future rivals, is un- certain." ^ Gibbon thus criticised this comment: "Why must rational advice be imputed to a base or foolish motive? To what cause, error, malevolence, or flattery, shall I ascribe the unworthy alternative ? Was the his- torian dazzled by Trajan's conquests?" ^ The intellectual training of the greatest modern his- torian is a matter of great interest. "From my early youth," wrote Gibbon in his Autobiography, "I aspired to the character of an historian."^ He had "an early and invincible love of reading" which he said he "would not exchange for the treasures of India" and which led him to a "vague and multifarious" perusal of books. Before he reached the age of fifteen he matriculated at Magdalen College, giving this account of his preparation. "I arrived at Oxford," he said, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a Doctor and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." ^ He did not adapt himself to the life or the method of Oxford, and from them apparently derived no benefit. "I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College," he wrote ; "they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." ^ He became a Roman Catholic. It was quite characteristic of this bookish man that his con- version was effected, not by the emotional influence of some proselytizer, but by the reading of books. English translations of two famous works of Bossuet fell into his hands. "I read," he said, "I applauded, I believed . . . and I surely fell by a noble hand." Before a priest in London, on June 8, 1753, he privately "abjured the errors of heresy" and was admitted into the "pale of the church." 'Annals, I, 11. ^ Bury's introduction, xxxv. 3 Autobiography, 193. * Ibid., 48, 59. ^ 7^/^?., 67. 270 MODERN ESSAYS But at that time this was a serious business for both priest and proselyte. For the rule laid down by Blackstone was this, "Where a person is reconciled to the see of Rome, or procures others to be reconciled, the offence amounts to High-Treason." This severe rule was not enforced, but there were milder laws under which a priest might suffer perpetual imprisonment and the proselyte's estate be transferred to his nearest relations. Under such laws prosecutions were had and convictions obtained. Little wonder was it when Gibbon apprised his father in an "elaborate controversial epistle" of the serious step which he had taken, that the elder Gibbon should be astonished and indignant. In his passion he divulged the secret which effectually closed the gates of Magdalen College to his son,^ who was packed off to Lausanne and "settled under the roof and tuition" of a Calvinist minister .^ Edward Gibbon passed nearly five years at Lausanne, from the age of sixteen to that of twenty-one, and they were fruitful years for his education. It was almost entirely an affair of self -training, as his tutor soon perceived that the student had gone beyond the teacher and allowed him to pursue his own special bent. After his history was published and his fame won, he recorded this opinion : " In the life of every man of letters there is an sera, from a level, from whence he soars with his own wings to his proper height, and the most important part of his education is that which he bestows on himself." ^ This was certainly true in Gibbon's case. On his arrival at Lausanne he hardly knew any French, but before he returned to Eng- land he thought spontaneously in French and under- stood, spoke, and wrote it better than he did his mother 1 Autobiography, 86 et seq.; Hill's ed., 69, 291. '/6iire." ^ Between the writing of tlie first tliree and the last three volumes, he took a rest of "near a twelvemonth" and gave expression to a thought which may be echoed Ijy every studious writer, "Yet in the luxury of freedom, I Ijcgau to wish for the daily task, the active pursuit \\ lii
  • i<)Krai)liy, .'525. « LoUcrs, I, :y.'A. " LfU(;iH, II, Hii. EDWARD CilBBOX '■ZS7 count. Tlio two lliinuN one is inosl liiiprossocl wifli ;iro his \o\'c for hooks ;iiul his lo\e t'or Madeira. "Thouuli a lovor of society." ho wrol(\ "my hhrary is the room to wliieh I am most attachoch" ' While ijettim;' settUnl at Luusatuie. he t'lunphiius that his boxes of boiW-cs "loiter oil the road." - .Viul then he harjis on another strint;'. "Good INLuleira." he writes, "is now heeome essential to my health and repiilatiim ;" •' yet a^ain, "If I do not reeei\e a snpply of Madeira in the I'ourse of the summer, I shall he in ureal shame and distrivss." ' His ginnl friend in I'-nj^laiul. Iah-cI Shellield. regarded his prayer and sent him a houshead of "best old Madeira" and a tiereo, ei)ntaininj;' six do/,(Mi bottles of "finest Malmsey," and at the same time wrote: "Von will remember that a hogshead is on his traxels through tiie torrid zone for yi»n. . . . Ni> wine is meliorated to a greater degree by keeping than iNladeira, anil yon latterly ajjpeared so rax'enons for it, that 1 nnist ecnu'iMVt^ yon wish to have a sUx'k." ■• Ciibbon's dt^dtion to Madeira bore its penalty. At the ago of forty-eight he siMit this aeeount to his sli^p- mother: "I was in hopt^s that my t>ld b^.nemy the (uMit had given over tlu^ altai-k, but the N'illain. with his ally the winter, eonvint'ed luc oi my (M-ror, and abi)ut the latter cud of March 1 l\)und mysi>lf a prisoner in my library and my groat chair. I attempted twice to rise, he* twice knocked me down again and ki>i)t poss(\ssion of both my feet and knees long«M' (I nnisl eon fivss) than \\c e\'er had done before." "' I\ager to finish his history, he lauuMited that his "Umg gout " losi him " I linHMUoiilhs in I he s[)ring." Thus JUS you go through his eorri\spondcnce, you find that orders for Mad