I A ONE-SIDED TOBIOGRAPHY [CONTAINING THE STORY OF MY INTELLECTUAL LIFE rof BY OSCAR KUHNS Professor in Wesleyan University * The German and Swiss Settlements of Colonial Pennsylvania,'* *' The Sense of the Infinite," etc. NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM n/\^^ Copyright, 1913, by OSCAR KUHNS u TO THE MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER JOHN BROWN FROM WHOM I INHERITED THAT LOVE OP BOOKS AND READING WHICH HAS ADDED SO MUCH TO THE HAPPINESS OF MY LIFE. 267795 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction 9 II. My Early Book Life 21 III. Intellectual Ideals 53 IV. Reading for Entertainment and Pleasure . . 81 V. Poetry and Poets 115 VI. The World-Poets 169 VII. What Books Have Done for Me 223 A COLLEGE MAN'S IDEAL While here on earth our lives we spend, Be this the goal toward which we tend: A body sound; a mind that sees Deep into life's strange mysteries; A soul that seeks the highest things; A heart where love forever springs; A quiet conscience; God for friend; And at the last a peaceful end. Middletown, Conn., May, 1913. O. K. ^^ INTRODUCTION Far in the Past I peer, and see A child upon the nursery floor, A child with books upon his knee, Who asks, like Oliver, for more! The number of his years is IV, And yet in Letters he hath skill. How deep he dives in Fairy lore! The Books I loved, I love them still! — Andrew Lang. 10 CHAPTER I Introduction The object of the author in writing this book has not been to produce a series of critical essays, nor to record the result of special studies pursued with the direct purpose of publication. Rather have the thoughts, reflec- tions, facts, and fancies contained herein, been the slow accumulation of years, and the book itself aims merely to sum up the experi- ences of a lifetime, mostly spent in the field of study and teaching. In discussing the books I have read, it is my purpose to speak only of those which have had a deep effect and abiding influence upon my own life, which have sunk into my mind and heart, and which have aroused in me a feeling of gratitude for in- formation received, for a pleasant hour's amusement, and, above all, for uplift of mind and soul. I have not said much of books that have not touched me in some way or other. There are many such that I have read, which have either left me utterly indifferent, or have 11 '"A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY impressed upon me feelings bordering upon positive dislike. For books are like men : they may be shallow or deep, good or bad, degrad- ing or uplifting; and it is of as supreme im- portance for us to choose our books as it is to choose our friends. For, after all, the real essence of literature is not the outer form, nor the subject matter pure and simple ; it is, rather, the personality of the writer, his way of looking at the great world-spectacle about him. It is this which distinguishes him from the mere virtuoso of words, on the one hand, and from the tech- nical chronicler of the facts of science or history on the other hand. By the accumu- lation of facts and the laws deduced there- from, we build up the vast superstructure of human science; we have the record of events and movements in the past annals of man- kind — and that is history ; we have the record of the theories of our predecessors as to the interpretation of the universe in which we live, its origin, its meaning, and its final fate — and that is philosophy and theology. But, besides all this, we have another record, not of facts or laws or events, but of the thoughts and feelings, the aspirations and imaginations of mankind, revealed in the personal experience 12 INTRODUCTION of certain individuals, who by means of the written word have opened to the world at large the windows of their soul. From the dawn of civilization to the present time men have looked out upon this world of ours, have seen its sadness and its glory, have brooded over its mysteries, have been gay, serious, melancholy, have lived and loved and been gathered to their fathers, leaving no more trace behind them than the foam upon the crest of the ocean wave, or the snows of yesteryear. From time to time, however, arise certain men, who see the same spectacles, feel the same passions, brood over the same problems, yet, who, having the gift of expressing their thoughts in words, bequeath their inner life to posterity in epic, dramatic, or lyrical poetry, or in the various forms of prose. This, in the larger sense, is literature — not the record of fact or information, but the personality of certain representative minds of all times and lands, through whom nature and life are reflected. Literature, then, representing the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of men, of all degrees of goodness and badness — the cool and sensible, the senti- mental and mystical, the kind and tender, the harsh and unfeeling — must be as varied as 13 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY men themselves; and so we hate good books and bad books, books overflowing with love and tenderness, and books in which "the heart seems all squeezed out by the head/' For myself, this personality of the writer is as important as the book itself. And when I find a man uttering noble thoughts and sentiments, and his character harmonizes therewith, I feel a double pleasure; but when, as may happen, I see a man uttering the same thoughts whose character is small and mean, and not in harmony with what he says, I feel a sense of irritation, and, as Socrates says, in a similar case, the better he speaks the greater my irri- tation. There is always a great temptation in dis- cussing such a theme as one's reading, espe- cially in the case of the great writers, to fall into a certain lack of sincerity, a warm- ing up oneself to enthusiasm for the thing discussed, like those teachers spoken of by a French critic, who are paid to become en- thusiastic over the classics aux heures de legons. And so we often see men discussed as if they were utterly without fault, beautiful passages selected and given as typical of the whole, in such a way that a false impression is often given, and the young student finds 14 INTRODUCTION himself at a loss how to admire many things in a writer his teacher has taught him to look on as impeccable. Then, again, there is the universal tendency to regard great writers as gods, and the man who dares to criticize them is hooted and jeered, a^ Ben Jonson was when he ventured to criticize certain faults in Shakespeare, ^Svhom I love," he says, "as much as any man this side of idolatry." Time especially places a halo around all great men; the human ele- ment is gone and they become demigods. So Ion looked on Homer as the final authority in all things ; Dante is called "the divine," while, in a different field, George Washington seems no longer a real man, but a symbol of patriot- ism, and the type of the ideal American. In order to get a true perspective in read- ing, we must change all this. We must look on even the greatest of men as like unto our- selves, and, while we admire their greatness, not fail to recognize their shortcomings. And yet, in writing this book, I have preferred to dwell on the greatness of the men I discuss, on the gratitude I feel for what they have meant to me, touching only lightly on their failings. In similar manner I have left out many books I have read simply because the 15 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY general impression was one of disagreeable- ness rather than gratitude. Moreover, in trying to know the best in the world, I have felt it necessary to exercise a certain kind of renunciation in my general reading, to give up, for instance, the idea of constant com- munion with all poets, or all even of the great poets. No man can constantly read over and over all of the great writers of all lands. He can do that once in order to get a scholarly perspective; but for his daily reading he must cultivate a process of selection, and, especially in the literature of distant lands and times, devote himself chiefly to those writers who stand out like mountain peaks above the plain of mediocrity. Every student of literature finds his reading di}ddedJat£LJtwjQL4ia£±sj first, those books he reads from the scholar's desire to know the development of literature; and, secondly, those books which grip him and win his 1^^^ This latter experience differs with different persons. No man can tell me just what books I shall love or not; I must find that out for myself. After all, true reading is not select- ing with unerring aim just the best books for us, nor the servile following the advice and dogmatic assertion of those who claim to know 16 INTRODUCTION what are the best hundred or any other num- ber of books. It is, rather, the gradual train- ing of a taste for books, a feeling for the better kind, an unlearning or a distaste for the lighter, more useless kind. It is trying all books and holding fast to those which are good. This every man must do for himself. No true reader should give up his own inde- pendent judgment to follow blindly that of other men. I myself have read many t rashy^ useless books, but I do not know that I feel badly about it. They fed my love for reading, when perhaps more solid books might have hindered it. They gave me many a pleasant hour and pastime. If I have acquired better habits of reading, it is only, as Seneca would say, after many wanderings to and fro. Another thing I have come to see is that mere pleasure is not the chief criterion in reading. Often the pleasure only comes after a great deal of drudgery ; a true reader should train himself to read even dry books, for the sake of the light they will throw on the sub- ject he is studying. Then, often, the same books will afford him pleasure. I have read many books from a sense of duty, not being deeply interested at the time, but knowing they were necessary to round out a period, or to 17 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY complete my view of certain fields of study. Afterwards I have been glad I have done so. The pleasure of having a complete view of a subject, in all its phases, whether in philoso- phy, literature, or history, is of a different kind from the pleasure given by yielding up to the purely aesthetic enjoyment of books, or by a deepening insight into character and life ; and yet it is just as deep and satisfactory. This book is l^ gggl^ b^sed on notes which have been taken down during the course of many years, quotations in poetry and prose, notes of facts, as well as thoughts and reflec- tions of my own. Many of the latter were often made in the flash of a moment, at home, walking in the country, lying on the seashore, or watching the sunset from the western windows of my quiet college study. Not the least important part of my book life has been the notes I have taken. These notes were not made on slips of paper, alphabetically ar- ranged, so as to be consulted at any moment. My object has not been to use the notes as references, but to fill my mind and memory with the important things I have read. Hence my notes have been made in blank books small enough to be carried in the po£^^ These I take with me in my walks, read as I 18 INTRODUCTION go, learn the quotations, or run over the gist of some important book. Many of the passages, such as those from Shakespeare, Plato, etc., I have copied a number of times. Without these notebooks, and my constant review of them in hours of leisure or in the intervals of more severe study, the benefits of my reading would be far less than they are now. In writing this book I have tried to be sin- cere, free from literary cant, endeavoring to say nothing merely for the sake of the effect it might have. I have been more concerned about my own heart and mind than the prob- able critical attitude of the prospective reader. I am fully aware that what I am undertaking here is a delicate thing. I have led a quiet life ; have known few distinguished people, and have no anecdotes to tell or opinions to ex- press concerning them. I have had few oppor- tunities to mingle with the great men in the various walks of life, and the opportunities I have had, I am afraid, have not been utilized as much as, perhaps, they ought to have been. For many years I have lived in a small college community in a quiet old New England town, busy with my classes and my books. What has such a mind to say of interest to the world? Yet; on the other hand, I have had a 19 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY lifelong fondness for and communion with that one great society on earth, ^^the noble living and the noble dead/' I have read over and over again many of the great writers of all lands and all nations. Certain thoughts, inward experiences, feelings of pleasure and uplift have come to me from time to time; and, somehow or other, I have felt an impulse to write them down. I sincerely hope that none of these things, though at times of a per- sonal and intimate nature, will produce the effect of literary vanity, self-complacency, or affectation. Following the injunction of Tho- reau, I have been continually watching the moods of my own mind, as the astronomer watches the aspect of the heavens, and I hope that it may not be altogether useless to regis- ter the results of a not very long life faithfully spent in this wise. I have sought, then, only to give a plain, straightforward account of the book life of a man in ordinary circum- stances, yet one who has always felt a pas- sionate love for literature. v- 20 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE 21 Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western Islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. — John Keats. 22 CHAPTER II My Early Book Life It is now many years since first I began my pilgrimage in the world of books. At first, to use the phrase of Agassiz, I was like a child wandering on the seashore, picking up miscellaneous pebbles and shells. I knew not what I wanted, but read whatever at- tracted my curiosity. But from the very be- ginning I was filled with an intense eagerness for reading, a taste which has afforded me the deepest pleasure, and, I believe, the great- est profit of my life. I was born in Columbia, a small country town^ in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the agricultural district, fondly called by its inhabitants ^^the garden county of the United States." No one who has once seen this beautiful country, with its fertile fields and its magnificent ^^Swisser'^ barns, so called from Switzerland, the ancestral father- land of most of the inhabitants, will blame the 1 In 1789, when Congress was discussing the subject of a site for the seat of the National Government, Colxunbia came within a few votes of being selected. 23 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY ^ Lancaster Countians for being piroud of their native land. The history of the county is just as interesting as its fields are fertile, and resembles in certain respects that of early New England. The first settlement, in 1710, was purely religious, and was made by Swiss Quakers from the cantons of Bern and Zurich, Switzerland, who, forced to leave their native hills and valleys, on account of their refusal to take oath or to perform military service, accepted the invitation of William Penn to take part in his newly established colony — or "Holy Experiment," as he called it — in Penn- sylvania. It was the same spirit that stirred the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers that led these prosperous farmers of the beautiful Emmenthal in the canton of Bern and the green shores of Lake Zurich, to cross the ocean and settle in the midst of an unknown wilderness. Let others boast of their New England ancestry. The natives of Lancaster County may well be proud of their descent from these hardy sons of that land of snow- crowned Alps, blue lakes and grassy lawns, which has not only become the "Playground of Europe,'' but the symbol of a free and happy people. It has become the custom in certain recent 24 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE publications to represent these Lancaster County farmers as narrow, opposed to all education and culture. This is absolutely false. 'Whatever blame attaches to them, however, must be shared in completely by myself. For two hundred years all the mem- bers of my family, both on father's and mother's side, have been bom in the city of Lancaster itself or in the immediate country round about; and it was a direct ancestor of mine. Bishop John Herr, who with Martin Kendig, was a leader of the first settlers.^ What time these farmers of the olden time had to spare from the hard and often sordid labors of the farm was devoted to the read- 1 Rev. John Herr was bom in Switzerland in 1639. He married Elizabeth Kendig, daughter of John Kendig and Jane Meyli, all born in the Canton of Zurich, Switzeriand. His great-granddaughter, Susanna Groff, married my mother's grandfather, Frederick Brown, who is said to have been born on shipboard while his parents were coming over from the North of Ireland. Frederick Brown was a soldier in the American Revolution, having accompanied Benedict Arnold in his march against Quebec. The Browns were among the earliest Methodists in Lancaster County, and were related to Father Henry Boehm, Francis Asbury's traveling com- panion. On my father's side, I am descended from George Kuntz, as the name was then spelled, of Lancaster, Pa., who was a soldier in the American Revolution, having enlisted at the early age of thirteen years and four months, according to the records of the Pension Bureau in Washington. His wife, Susan, daughter of Caspar and Gertrude Hubert, received a pension at his death. George Kuntz was the great-grandson of John Matthew Kuntz, bom about 1650. His father was Theobald Kuntz, one of the founders of the First Reformed Church at Lancaster, and his mother was Mary Margaret Fortund, of French Huguenot descent. The name is now spelled Forney. John W. Forney, Lincoln's War Secretary, be- longed to this family. 25 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGKAPHY ing of the Bible, the hymn book, and certain books of religious edification : Arndt's Wahres Christ en thum, if they were Lutherans ; Stark's Gebet-buch, if Eeformed; and Van Bragt's Blutige Schauplatz oder Martyrer Spiegel, if they were Quakers or Mennonites. To show that they were not altogether without the love for reading, it is of interest to note that the Martyrer-Spiegel above alluded to was pub- lished by the members of the Ephrata Com- munity in 1748. This book, which gives the persecutions and sufferings of those Chris- tians opposed to war, Anabaptists, Quakers, or Mennonites, was the largest book published in America up to that time. Many other books, all of a religious nature, were read by these people. I remember some years ago going to the Bowman farm in Lan- disville, Lancaster County, once in possession of my mother's family, and being directed to the garret, where I found in a box a number of these old books. They are before me as I write, among them being Gerhard Tersteegen's Geistliche Blumengartlein, made up of short poems on all sorts of religious subjects, the gos- pel of Nicodemus, the story of Geneveva, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, one of the many forms of the "patient Griselda" motif in 26 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE literature. One book especially gave me pleas- ure in this find in Landisville, an old Lutheran German hymn book. As a young child I had often heard my mother tell of the death of her mother, who was born on this farm at Landis- ville, and how she sang, as she died, the words of an old German hymn, beginning with the ^ Lasset ab llir meine Lieben, Lasset ab von Traurigkeit; and which I may translate as follows: Cease, O cease, my friends, from weeping. Let your grief no more endure. Why should sorrow fill your bosom, Since for me this thing is sure? All my pain and trouble past, I shall soon be home at last; Where in joy that ceases never, With the Blest I'll live forever. I had never been able to find the words in any book, and now, to my delight, I found them here in this collection of German hymns with a beautifully hand-painted book-plate. The deep religious nature of these people was shown in their love and reverence for the Bible. Nor were their Bibles mere ornaments of the center-table; they formed the daily food of those who possessed them. The people of those days were Bibelfest; their memories were stored with the best passages; this is 27 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY true not only of adults, but of little children as well. The same statements apply to the hymn book, which was held in almost the same reverence as the Bible. It was not left in the pew at church, but shared with the Holy Book the honor of being read constantly and learned by heart. Many examples of this are given by Muhlenberg in his Hallesche Nachrichten; as, for instance, the pathetic death of a six-year-old boy. When too weak himself to sing the hymns, ^^deren er eine schone Anzahl gelernet/^ he would ask his par- ents to sing ; and when his desire had been ful- filled, he gave his father a loving farewell kiss, and w^hile his parents sang, "Breit aus die Fliigel beide, O Jesu, Meine Freude, Und nimm dein Kiichlein ein/* he fell softly and peacefully asleep in his Saviour.^ I have given the above details simply to show that among the Pennsylvania Germans 1 Still more inspiring is the story of John Christian Schell, of Mohawk Valley, New York, and his wife and four sons, who kept at bay a band of sixty-four Indians and Tories, all night long, shooting at them from the windows, and keeping up their courage by singing lustily Luther's battle hymn, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott"; emphasizing, we may well be- lieve, especially the lines, Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wSr, Und woUt' uns gar verschlingen, So fiirchten wir uns nicht so sehr, Es muss uns doch gelingen. 28 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE reading was widespread, although intensive and narrow in the number of books. My own mother was very fond of reading, a fondness which she inherited from her father. It was with a good deal of interest that, some years ago, I came across a book that once belonged to him, a book he had bought when a young man and on the title-page of which he had written these words: "I, John Brown, will buy good books, God helping me." It was among these simple folk that I was born, and from them I derived whatever quali- ties I possess. While I was still a child, how- ever, my parents moved to a large city, and here I found books in plenty, to feed the ris- ing fondness for reading. About the earliest experience of this kind that I can remember is connected with the Sunday school of the Methodist church^ of which my father for many years was a superintendent. At that time there was a custom — a valuable one, I have always thought — of encouraging the children to com- mit verses of the Bible to memory. A green ticket was given for every ten verses of Scrip- ture learned by heart. Ten green tickets 1 This is the Hanson Place M. E. Church of Brooklyn, N. Y. The Sunday school, at that time, was the largest Methodist school in the country. My father, William J. Kuhns, was superintendent of the Infant Class. Mayor Samuel Booth and John French were superintendents of the whole school. 29 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY could be exchanged for one yellow ticket, and ten yellow tickets bought a book. The book I obtained in this way, The Windows of the Soul, is the first book I can remember to have read. Then there was the Sunday school library, fairly well filled with good books. Among them was a complete set of Oliver Optic's stories; but one Sunday a distinguished D.D. — his name was not Fiddle, but well might have been — came to the library, and was hor- ror-struck to see these books there, and they were withdrawn from circulation. I can yet see the clamorous crowd of boys who indig- nantly demanded the return of their favorite author. Times have changed since then, and with them the attitude of pious people toward fiction. My reading, like that of most boys, began on a law plane. I reveled in the famous dime novels published by Munro, in the Boys and Girls' Weekly, Fireside Companion, New York Ledger, and the Waverly Magazine. Certain parts of Jack Harkaway and Alone in the Pirate's Lair still linger, . in a shadowy way, in my memory. As I write these lines the names of many old favorites rise up again before me — Thaddeus of Warsaw^, Cud jo's Cave, Frank on a Gunboat, Last Days of MY EAELY BOOK LIFE Pompeii, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and many others. More solid reading came in gradually in the form of books I found in the libraries of the Sunday school and the Young Men's Christian Association. It was here I got the taste for history which has never left me. Prescott's books on Peru, Mexico, and Spain were sources of never- failing pleasure, as were like- wise Motley's Dutch Republic, Gibbon's De- cline and Pall, and especially Milman's His- tory of Latin Christianity. This last named was read through in one huge draught, night after night, till the whole seven volumes were finished. To Milman I owe the first general conception of the transition from ancient times to the Middle Ages, and thence to mod- ern times, which it has become a pleasure in later years to fill out. Strangely enough for a boy, dreamy and sentimental, as I undoubtedly was at that time, I acquired a taste for scientific litera- ture, and I read with considerable interest, if not with profit, the popular books of such men as Figuier, Proctor, John Tyndall, and others. A friend loaned me the back numbers of the Popular Science Monthly, and I read these from the beginning up to that time. My 81 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY father took regularly the Scientific American, which I would look over with more or less interest; an interest which, however, was far inferior to that with which I pored over the pages of the Guide to and Beauty of Holiness, to which my mother, who had a genius for religion, subscribed. The perusal of this, the ofilcial organ of Sanctification, at the early age of ten or twelve years, undoubtedly gave my mind its first impulse toward the study of transcendentalism, which has made Plato and Emerson among the most constantly read authors in the later years of my life. All the above books were rather episodes in the story of my literary development and were read without set purpose, just as fancy led. Early in life, however, this fancy became a passion for learning and literature. I was unfortunately situated and had to leave school and go to work. Yet in the odd moments, at business, on the way thither and back, on holidays and in the evenings, I managed to find some time in which to indulge that pas- sion for reading which noiw became a consum- ing fire. One can imagine the discouragement which naturally accompanied such apparently hopeless efforts. In fact, this feeling or ten- dency to discouragement has never left me 32 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE wholly. It has probably been due to over- work, nervous weariness, or something of that sort, but from time to time a sense of the futility of all knowledge, the immense num- ber of books to read, and the little time to do it in, has come over me and for the time being put an end to my joy in study and read- ing. I remember reading Dahn's monumental Geschichte der Romanischen Volker with the greatest interest and enthusiasm, and it seemed to me that I was gaining a fairly com- plete knowledge of the subject he treated. And then I turned to his bibliography, over a hundred pages of authorities he had con- sulted, and a feeling akin to despair took possession of me, as I thought how superficial must ever be my knowledge compared to his. But then a wiser mood would come to me, and I would remember how much pleasure and profit such men as Thoreau had obtained from the study of nature without being expert botanists or geologists; and the thought of my own purpose in reading history, not to get a minute knowledge of any one particular period or country, but a general conspectus of the course of civilization, would come to com- fort me, as I could see that, after all, I could get what I wanted and what suited me. 33 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Another source of discouragement has been the interruption from time tt> time of my interest in and love for reading. There have been times when I no longer felt the charm of books and I would fear I had lost forever my love for them. But such moods have lasted only a short time; for soon, after my tired mind and spirit had time to rest, the old love would come back. So that as I look back over the whole course of my life I can see how steady and, in general, how unchanging has been the comfort and help that books and reading have brought to me; and I can say with truth that they have been an angel to me, coming not In fitful visions, but beside me ever. And never failing me. It was very early that a love for languages became developed. When I was thirteen years old I obtained a copy of Perrault's Fables in French, with an interlinear translation, and from that time down to the present, the study of languages has been a favorite with me. Much of this study, as I see it now, was pain- fully futile. I picked up an old copy of Bopp's Comparative Grammar, and although I knew nothing of Sanskrit, Persian, and other lan- guages quoted there, a feeling of thoroughness, 34 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE what the Germans call dieses verfluchte Griindlichkeits Gefuhl^ made me flounder through it from beginning to end. As I look back it seems to me that the weeks and months I spent on that book were absolutely wasted, except, perhaps, for the dogged determination I developed to go on to the end. Brighter memories are connected with the study of Italian. Here, again, my method was unconventional. I had learned from Nathan- iel Bowditch and Lord Macaulay the idea of beginning the study of a language by reading the New Testament in the language in ques^j^ tion. By this means I soon learned the more common words and forms. After this I pro- cured a copy of Dante's Divina Commedia, a translation of the same, and a grammar and dictionary. I plowed my way through this so successfully that in a few months I could read practically anything in Italian without a dictionary. Rarely in my life have I been so exalted in spirit as I was then through the noble words of Dante, even though, at that time, much of the meaning escaped me. One experience espe- cially stands out in my memory. It was mid- night, "in the silence of the sleep-time," when I finished the Vita Nuova and w^ent to bed 35 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY filled with the last words of that strangely beautiful book ringing in my ears like ^^the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic/' words which were a prophecy of the Divina Commedia: "After this sonnet there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things which made me purpose to say no more of this blessed lady until I might more worthily speak of her. And to come to that, I study as much as I can, as she knows well. So that if it be the pleasure of Him by whom all things live, that my life be spared yet a few years, I hope to say of her that which has never yet been said of any mortal woman. And then may it please Him, who is Lord of all courtesy, that my soul shall go to see the glory of its Lady, who gloriously gazes into the face of Him qui est per omnia saecula benedictus/^ Longfellow, Tennyson, Swinburne, Keats, and Byron were my favorite poets then. Browning, Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold came later. One summer I spent almost en- tirely in Shakespeare. I procured his works in the Tauchnitz edition of single plays, and carried them in my pocket. I went over them three times that summer, once to get the plot and the swing; then to look up meanings of 36 MY EAELY BOOK LIFE obscure expressions; and, thirdly, to commit to memory the great passages. Many of the lines I then learned still linger in my memory, a blessing in many an hour since then, when, In the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of past years. As I look over these early years of my read- ing life, desultory and without any guiding hand to lead me, two things stand out above the rest. One is the intense joy and pleasure that came to me when buried in the pages of some favorite book. I can literally apply to myself the words of Wordsworth, Bliss was it in that time to be alive, To be young was very heaven. A sort of mystic fervor would come over me, the hours would pass away unperceived, and, as most of my reading had to be done at night, there have been times when the light of the breaking dawn would find me still bending over my book. Time never hung heavy on my hands; a book could carry me at once away from the weary and cheerless present to the magic land of poetry and romance. Instead of scolding myself for reading so much light trash, as many of the books I read at that time might be called, I almost envy 37 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY myself the deep delight, the glory of those days, when a book could dull pain and sorrow, make me forget my own narrow surroundings, care and toil; when a poem could carry me into the land of romance and call up visions of Beauty making beautiful old rime In praise of ladies dead and lively knights; when history became a living stage on which moved before me the heroes of the past ; when the hours would fly aw^ay on the wings of fancy, and my soul would be cradled into for- getfulness of all the weary kingdom of time, by that soft and soothing voice which is "lyrical and sweet and universal as the rising of the wind,'' and which, like the thought of God himself, could "people the lonely places and efface the scars of my mistakes and dis- appointments/' I can never forget the impressions made on my mind in those early days when reading, snatched from hours of toil, carried far on into the midnight and early morning hours, had all the charm of secret love; and to this day there are certain pictures in my mind which are fairer than all the deeper and broader benefits brought by later years of study and research, pictures "All halo-girt with fancies of my own/' There is that won- 38 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE derful ode of Keats to a Grecian Urn, with its description of the shepherd, piping forever his unending song ; there is bonnie Kilmeny as she went up the glen, and fell asleep and was carried by angels to the heavenly country ; there is the scene in Pilgrim's Progress where Christian and Faithful enter the pearly gates of the heavenly city; there is the picture of Sir Galahad seeking and finding the Holy Grail; and Elaine, lying on her bed in the black boat, steered by the dumb old servitor, so sweet and fresh and lovely that She did not seem as dead. But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled; and finally, there is that scene, taken from some unknown book, a Sunday school book, whose very title I have forgotten, teaching some religious symbolism, which told of a group of young men going to a far-off country, which could be reached over the mountains, or by fighting their way through the camp of the enemy in the plains below. I remember how all but one of the young men went over the mountains; how one by one they fell and were lost; how one youth put on his armor and fought his way till he reached the heav- enly city ; how one night, before the final con- flict^ he lay in his tent, and had a dream of a 39 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY heavenly messenger sent to encourage him in the morrow's combat. The book, I suppose, was simple, and probably I should find it crude if I read it to-day; but to my youthful fancy then it brought all the charm of poetry and romance in the service of religious teach- ing, and the impression was so strong and lasting, that years afterward when I visited the National Gallery in London and saw the beautiful painting of RaphaePs Knight, it seemed as if the picture in my memory had suddenly taken form to itself before me. Another thing I remember about my early reading is the impulse I felt to learn poetry by heart. One of the chief effects such men as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Byron, and others had upon me was a deep delight in the outer form of their works — the words, lines, pas- sages, which contained wise and subtle thoughts and beautiful descriptions enshrined in musical verse. It is natural to remember the words of those whom we love, and the last words of dying friends, the counsel given by parents, linger in the ear and heart with power oftentimes to cheer the lonely hours of solitude, strengthen us in discouragement, or fill our hearts with joy and peace. Something of the same subtle power exists in the verse 40 MY EAKLY BOOK LIFE of the poets we love. As Euripides says m his Hippolytus, For songs There are with magic virtues fraught, and words Which soothe the soul. Then, again, there is an innate love for a fine phrase in us all. From time to time we find thoughts and imaginations that are old and yet ever new, clothed in language which, somehow or other, gives to them the gift of immortality; words which long ago were ut- tered in idle or in thoughtful mood, in glad- ness or in pain, and to-day have the power of giving pleasure and uplift of spirit to those who hear them; words which the soul of the poet detaches and sends away "a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, clad with wings which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men." I count it as one of the blessings of my life that, in these early days, in my heart too were fixed irrecoverably many quotations of all kinds. It was altogether unconsciously done at first, just as a young man rejoices to run a race, or some one with a natural fondness for music learns the popular songs. I seemed to receive a kind of physical pleasure in repeat- ing lines of poetry, in the mere exercise of the 41 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY vocal cords and in the training of the mem- ory. I had a certain satisfaction in feeling the power of memory increasing, a certain sense of confidence in the conquering of the natural difficulties that stood in the way. This physi- cal pleasure is akin to that which those who speak a foreign language experience, after overcoming the awkAvardness of tongue and lips called upon to perform unwonted tasks. There was also an intellectual pleasure in the feeling that I had in my mind and at my tongue's end some of the best and noblest thoughts that have been written, thoughts that have power to touch the imagination, stir the heart, and bring up to memory the sub- stance of great books read in the past. I have already mentioned how I learned many passages of Shakespeare by heart, but he was only one among many. I learned the whole of Gray's Elegy, Longfellow's sonnets on Dante, parts of Hiawatha, lines and short poems of Tennyson, Byron, Brow^ning, Goethe, Schiller, Tasso, Dante, and others, most of which still linger in my memory. A great change came over my habits of reading when I went to college. During the early years of my life I had been drawn along by an irresistible impulse toward books, I 42 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE knew not why. I had no method or object. Nothing was further from my thoughts than a college education. Not that I did not want it, but I could not see the way to it. Finally, however, my friends became interested; the pastor of my church, later president of a col- lege himself, George E. Reed, of Dickinson College, urged me to make a determined effort to find a way. My brother, now gone, with noble unselfishness undertook the burden of managing the financial side of the venture, and so, almost before I realized it, I found myself established as a student of Wesleyan University. As far as college preparation goes, I was self-made, to use the title of a book by Samuel Smiles, which was of great help to me in those days, in overcoming off-recurring attacks of discouragement. My mathematics, Greek, and Latin were all studied without a teacher, in the intervals of work, and I am still unable to understand how I ever came to be admitted, with a few conditions only, into a college that has always stood for high standards in schol- arship. At any rate, I was admitted, and a new era in my life began. College is not the best place to cultivate a pure love for reading. There are so many 43 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY elements mixed in. For me the four years in college were largely spent in the rectification of my haphazard preparation. I studied all I could of the classics, history, English, and modern languages. I made a final separation from the study of science, although to this day I feel a keen interest in the results of scientific investigations, the processes of which are too technical for me to follow. Yet I do not think I enjoyed the pure de- light of reading in college so much as I did before going there. The course of studies I took was in perfect harmony with my general taste. It was the old classical course for B.A., and included required mathematics, Greek and Latin, while leaving some room for elec- tives in the later years of the course. These electives on my part were largely in the line of languages, history, and literature. There was in college at that time, and is still, a sys- tem of special honors. Impelled by the ad- vantage of having regular courses of reading laid out for me in the things I liked most, I applied for and did the work for special honors in the departments of Greek, Latin, modem languages, English literature, and history. My reading since then has been very largely along these same lines. 44 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE Immediately after graduation from college I went abroad to pursue my studies in foreign universities. The first of these I visited was the University of Berlin, where I spent three semesters. I was fortunate here in being able to follow the courses of some of the great men in German and Romance philology. Much of tjie lecture work seemed to me perfunctory, consisting largely in the dry recital of facts. I remember one course of lectures under Pro- fessor Roediger on ^^Old High German Gram- mar.'' Only a few of those who started in persisted to the end. On the last day of the course Professor Roediger announced the ap- pearance of Braune's Althochdeutsche Gram- matik, which he warmly praised. I at once procured the book and found the same facts that I had been laboriously taking down orally, two or three times a week for a whole semester. Professor Roediger was far more interesting in his course on Walther von der Vogelweide. Other men whom I heard were Zupitza in Middle High German, and Tobler in Provengal. In general I cannot say that I found the lectures in Berlin twenty-five years ago very stimulating or interesting. Before the end of the semester the number of attendants would drop down almost to noth- 45 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY ing. The bare rooms, the cold, dark mornings of winter, the monotonous delivery of many of the lectures, the listless attitude of the stu- dents, all was far from inspiring enthusiasm. That other students felt this is evident from the following couplet which I found scratched on a desk in one of the lecture rooms, where the celebated theologian Dillmann gave his lectures : Wenn schlafen wm man. So hore man Dillmann. Two men were especially attractive to me at that time: Dr. Edward Schwann, whom I heard on Old French Phonetik and the Epopee Frangaise. He was exceedingly bright, intel- ligent, and interesting. His lectures on pho- netics formed the basis of the Altfranzosische Grammatik, which is the chief monument to the lamented scholar, who died a premature death. The most inspiring of all, however, was Professor Wilhelm Scherer, whom I heard on the Nibelungenlied. His lectures were a genuine treat to the large numbers of studious youth who crowded his lecture room. As it was said of Kenan, I believe, we came to hear a lecture and il nous donnait une fete, I remember very distinctly the last lecture I heard from Scherer before his death. He must 46 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE have felt then the presentiment of what was so soon to come. He was much quieter than usual, and from time to time went toward the window and looked out, with something of sadness in his face. He was the most brilliant man I heard in Berlin, and one whose influ- ence has lingered with me most, ,-xrtrv. o-vi^-ij^is^ Outside the work in the University, my stay in Berlin was useful in the development of my love for reading in various ways. I read and learned to love the German poets, espe- cially Goethe and Schiller. I strove to ac- quire a clear and connected view of the history of German literature, from the Hildebrands- lied down to Emmanuel Geibel and Victor von Scheffel, whose Tromi>eter von Sackingen at that time was in the heyday of its glory. The visits to the museums and art galleries supplied other elements in the general out- look over life and art which the love of books already had begun to implant in my mind. From Berlin I went to Paris, where I heard more or less such men as Darmstetter, Gaston Paris, Guizot, Renan. All these men were interesting, especially Gaston Paris, whose profound knowledge of Romance philology, joined to a true French talent for clear and interesting exposition, made him the foremost 47 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY scholar in his department up to his death a few years ago. One of the interesting events connected with my stay in Paris was the in- auguration of Leconte de Lisle into the French Academy. He was elected to the fau- teuil of Victor Hugo, and at his reception, which I was fortunate enough to be able to attend, Alexandre Dumas gave the address of welcome. Leconte de Lisle's ow^n elegant address was, according to the custom, a eulogy on the genius, so different from his own, of Victor Hugo. Later and in after years I have heard some of the great men at the Universi- ties of Geneva, Lausanne, Rome, and Florence. In all this work I gradually acquired a feeling for and spent much of my time in the study of so-called German scholarships, as exemplified in the field of modern philology. I have since then pored over the Grundrisse of Koerting, Grober, and Paul. I have tried to penetrate myself with the spirit of original research. In my own case the phase of this research that attracted me most has been that of sources, parallels, motifs, etc. The mere collation of texts, study of manuscripts, or investigation of historical grammar and syntax has not ap- pealed to me so much. But the very impulse that I had early acquired toward a love for 48 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE quotations, and which led me to learn them by heart, or write them in my notebooks, led me very materially to a liking for sources. It seemed like meeting an old friend to come across the same plot, or incident, or figure, or even verbal expression in writers of different times and different lands. I am well aware that German methods of scholarship, and especially their importation into America, have been made the butt of ridi- cule and contempt by many critics. This is especially true of the field of German and Romance philology. It was against the stu- dents of mediaeval literature that Brunetiere wrote his famous article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and it is of them that Lemaitre has said that ^^ces recherches sont le refuge des honnetes gens^ a qui la grande ciiriosite, le sentiment du heaUj et le don de Vexpres- sion ont ete refuses/^ And yet my own per- sonal experience has led me to have a high opinion of the value of such studies, especially for young men. A knowledge of the linguistic and other phases of mediaeval literature is of the utmost value as a proper background for the study of modern literature. Even the investigation of the dialect of some mediaeval author, the comparison of the language and 49 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY style, may develop certain habits of accuracy, industry, patience that may be used in work of a more apparent usefulness later. And there is likewise a certain charm in getting a glimpse at first hand of the thoughts, feelings, and imaginations of the Middle Ages^ out of which have come all modern civilization. And yet while all this is true, while strict philo- logical methods applied to some unknown writer of the Middle Ages may develop valu- able habits of study, yet, if they always re- main restricted to such subjects, they are likely to leave a man narrow, uninspiring, and with a false perspective of literature and learning. I have come to feel, however, that this method may be applied to larger themes, to the great poets and writers themselves, to the investigation of the chances and changes of the great subjects of nature, love, and death, and the elemental passions that make up the subject-matter of all great literature, that, with Hegel, it can help us to see how the eternal idea of the Beautiful has haunted the human race; that it can help us to penetrate into the local, temporal, and soul-condition in which any work of literature was produced, and regard all literature as "the expression 50 MY EARLY BOOK LIFE of living national forces, the reflex of the whole of the national civilization"; that, with Eucken, it can teach us to "trace the way in which the great writers have systematically developed themselves and entered as living forces into the culture of the thinker of his own age and of the ages that follow it" ; above all, that it may teach us, with Herder, "to penetrate ourselves with the most character- istic, deepest, and noblest life of all nations, to open lovingly our own inner life to the for- eign elements, to seize them and take them up in our own blood and life." And if phi- lology can teach us this, it surely has a place in the scheme of higher literary study. 51 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS %3 Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. — Sir John Herschel. 54 CHAPTER III Intellectual Ideals As I look back over the various kinds of books I have read, and try to analyze the pur- pose that led me to read them, and especially their effect upon my mind, I come to see clearly that my reading, as a whole, can be divided into three general classes: first, that reading which has been done without any thought of benefit, but simply as a mat- ter of pure enjoyment; secondly, that which has been undertaken mainly with the scholar's ideal of seeing and understanding the truth as it manifests itself in literature, history, and civilization; thirdly, reading for the purpose of getting deeper lessons of life, moral and spiritual uplift, light amid the darkness of this painful kingdom of time, and peradven- ture that peace of the soul that comes from communion with those great minds who have themselves caught a glimpse of the eternal, and have taught others to see the same. These three general divisions of reading may be 55 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY called the sesthetic, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The first I felt chiefly in youth, the third more deeply in these later years. The second, or more intellectual form of read- ing, coincided largely with my years of study and preparation. In my early days I read a book, for the most part, without any thought of what it might bring me. I read it simply because it was a book, and I was fond of reading. I did not care much who the author was, or when he wrote, or what manner of man he was. If the book itself gave pleasure, that was enough for me. In my student days, however, in college, and especially in the University, I was not long in seeing that this, in itself, w^as not the scholar's ideal. I came to see that to understand a book of importance I must not only know the contents thereof, but likewise the man who wrote it; where and when he lived and died; what his family and racial heredity was, and how it molded his mind and character; whence he drew the sources of his book, and what influence he himself exerted on others of his own and after times. And I further came to see that what was true of one man was true of a whole group of literature of any time or nation ; that I must not only know the names 56 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS of books and authors, but also what were the characteristic features of the period as a whole, what influences of other lands and other times affected the period in question, and how it affected other lands and later times. And thus I came to see that literature in general was not a mere agglomeration of books, written by chance and without any interrelation, the flotsam and jetsam of thq stream of time, but an ever-deepening and widening stream itself, flowing down the centuries; and that it was my duty as a teacher, my pleasure as an individual, to trace the course of this stream of literature, striv- ing to understand the various influences that broaden and deepen it, and change its direc- tion from time to time. This method, which I have alluded to above, is the direct result of the scientific theory of evolution, which was to the nineteenth century what the law of gravitation was to the days of Sir Isaac Newton ; a theory which, beginning with Lamarck, brought to completion in bi- ology by Darwin, was applied to all depart- ments of knowledge by Herbert Spencer. This constant process of change, which goes on in the formation of the amoeba as well as 57 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY in the construction of a solar system, has been applied to history by Hegel and in our own time by Eucken; and, last of all, has been applied to literature itself by Brunetiere, who, under the influence of Darwin, has endeavored to apply the same principles of growth and development to the field of literature as the scientists now apply to all fields of biology. For some reason or other the application of this principle to literature long ago appealed to me, and increased greatly the pleasure of reading. I felt that I could enjoy a book in itself, and at the same time have a larger feel- ing of pleasure in the thought that the book, if a worthy one, was adding its own contribu- tion to the field of knowledge of which it formed a part. And so I came to see that the history of all literature was made up of the constant interplay of a multitude of influ- ences, which were themselves but the expres- sion of the inner and outer life of all times and all nations. Sometimes this influence shows itself in a single book, and who can overestimate such an influence in the case of Homer and Vergil, or even of such books as Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, or the Amadis de Gaula, which, in the French trans- lation of Herbart des Essarts, was practically 58 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS the origin of the modern novel? Again this influence shows itself not so much in one single book, but, rather, in the whole life and character of an author. And here, again, who can overestimate the influence of such a man as Petrarch in the early Renaissance, or of Voltaire in the eighteenth century? And, broadening our theme, we find the same thing true not only of individual books and authors, but of whole periods of literature. This influence may be local or general, may last for a short time or be permanent, appar- ently dying out, yet reappearing again like some subterranean river, issuing from the ground and flowing once more through green fields and beside the habitations of men. Again, this infiuence may be harmful, as in the case of the Alexandrian school, in ancient times, or the widespread movement known as Euphuism, Preciosity, or Marinism in the seventeenth century. Or it may be partly harmful and partly wholesome, as in the case of modem Romanticism, which, with all its extravagances and lack of moderation, has quickened and vivified not only literature, but all forms of modern art. Such is the broader intellectual view of reading that gradually grew up in my mind, and which has not only 59 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY increased the pleasure of reading, but the benefits thereof as well. If there is one thing that has struck me more than anything else in my reading life, it is the immortal youth and the never-fail- ing influence of the great writers of Greece and Rome. It was the ever-deepening convic- tion of the influence of the classic writers down to the present, their power to inspire new life in others, that led me to begin a sys- tematic study of the essential elements of both Greek and Latin literature, and to trace their influence down through the Dark Ages, where it existed largely in subterranean form, to the Renaissance, when a wild enthusiasm took possession of the Western world, and recre- ated European literature, adding new impetus to the Teutonic and Christian elements, which united with the Grseco-Roman element to form the basis of modern literature as well as civilization. It was while striving to solve the strange phenomenon of that sudden outburst of new life and thought known as the Renaissance, and especially the sudden resuscitation of an- cient literature and art known as the "Revival of Learning,'^ that I was led to make a system- atic study of the main features of that strange 60 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS period of history known as the Dark Ages. At first it seemed to me an inexplicable con- fusion, a chaos in which no order could be found. But as I folloiwed the various steps of the gradual decadence of classic Latin lit- erature, and traced the change to the ruder form known as mediaeval Latin, the reading of the crude monuments of this little-known form of literature threw light on the inner life of the people from the downfall of Rome to the first dawn of the Renaissance. And gradu- ally a picture was formed in my mind of the Dark Ages, as necessary to a complete view of literature and history as the more bril- liant periods that preceded and followed them. I saw the coming together of a number of powerful and yet incompatible forces — the Roman empire, mighty still, even in its de- cline, the incursion of the Northern Bar- barians, the introduction of Christianity, with its doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value and the immortality of the human soul. I saw then that the Dark Ages was the caldron in which these disparate elements must adjust themselves until they formed the very ele- ments of all modern civilization. I saw how this confusion produced terrible and world- 61 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY shaking events, bloodshed, rapine, the un- chaining of all the brute forces of humanity. And I found a glimpse of all this in the early monuments of mediseval Latin literature, in which the crudeness, superstition, lack of re- finement and ignorance of art which mark the Dark Ages are reflected in chronicles, legends, scholastic discussions, lives of the saints, fabulous zoologies, and poetic paraphrases of biblical history. And so, the clear appre- hension of the great principle of evolution applied to literature became a lantern which I could turn, to use Emerson's figure, on the multitude of apparently unconnected facts that made up the history of the early Chris- tian centuries, and ^^behold all the mats and rubbish that had littered the garret became precious," and the apparently incomprehen- sible and unattractive Dark Ages, acquired new meaning and new interest for me. But this method of reading in my case be- came most fruitful when applied to the study of modern literature. Early in life I had tried to read most of the English writers, to get a general view of the history of the litera- ture, chiefly, however, from tl;e standpoint of dates and names, without penetrating into the spiritual element that bound them to- 62 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS gether. Later I had tried to get the same somewhat external view of the history of German and Italian literature. It was not, however, until a clear conception of the over- whelming influence of French literature — its hegemony, we may very well call it^ — came to me that I received at last a satisfactory, connected view of the oneness of all modern European literature and its close connection with its own indigenous past, as well as with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. More and more as the years have gone by have I been impressed with a deeper and deeper feel- ing of the extraordinary role played by France in the development of modern literature. The longer I have read and studied, the deeper this impression has become. And I have come to see that, just as in the kindred field of history, according to Duruy, nothing of im- portance, no great social or political experi- ence, has been attempted without first having been accomplished by France, so in European literature practically every great movement has had its start and development in that country. As this thought grew clear in my mind, my study of French became invested with a double charm. It was no longer the thrilling 63 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY interest of her noyelists that I sought for now, no longer the wonderful charm of her prose writers, or the classic form of her poets and dramatists, but the inspiring vision of the great stream of European literature, with all its changes in direction and breadth down to the present. It was here that the study of Old French took on a peculiar pleasure. It became a delight to me to see how, in the older period of the Middle Ages, the Chansons de Gestes and the Arthurian romances furnished the material of a large part of the literature of Germany, England, and Italy; to trace the influence of Chretien de Troyes in the Parsifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach and, later, of Wagner; to see how Sir Thomas Malory's translation of the French prose version of the Morte d'Arthur furnished the sources of Tennyson's Idyls of the King; how the Franco-Italian versions of the Old French romances were worked over into poetry by Pulci and Boiardo, and found at last their highest literary development in the fasci- nating stanzas of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which the elements of the mediaeval epic and the newly discovered treasures of clas- sical learning were fused into one harmonious whole. 64 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS It was with an interest still deeper that I came to see how universal was the influence of southern France in the development of the lyrical poetry of modern Europe. Added to the aesthetic pleasure of reading the poetry of the Troubadours themselves, was the intellec- tual pleasure that came to me as I strove to trace their influence on the Trouveres of Northern France, the Minnesingers of Ger- many — Walther von der Vogelweide and the rest — and especially on the early Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, where the poetry of Provence began the glorious history of Italian literature. For though, at first, this Sicilian poetry was only a slavish imita- tion of the conventional commonplaces of spring and love that characterized the Pro- vencal poets, yet, spreading to Bologna, it received a philosophical content from Guido Guinicelli ; and thence, spreading to Tuscany, was changed into the dolce stil nuovo of Dante, with whom the worn-out symbols of the Trou- badours became inspired with genuine life, and love became the inspiration to the noblest religious aspiration; until, taking new form in the songs and sonnets of Petrarch, the poetry of the Troubadours was transmitted to every part of Europe, even down to the present 65 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY day, when its influence can be traced in every song that sings of love and the charms of spring. And what is true of the Old French litera- ture, I found to be also true of the classic French literature of the seventeenth century. For though the center of gravity of literary influence in Europe shifted during the Renais- sance from France to Italy, yet it soon settled back again in the latter country, where the classic form, elegant language, moderation, and sense of proportion which characterize the work of Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine for two hundred years were regarded as the ne plus ultra of literary art, not only in France, but in Germany, England, and Italy. I have dwelt somewhat long on this sub- ject of what I may call the hegemony of France in the literature of western Europe, because it was the evergrowing conviction of its importance that led me to a clearer con- ception of the oneness of modern literature, a conception which, as Matthew Arnold says, is absolutely necessary before any just or valuable criticism can be made. While this development of a new ideal in my reading of literature in generaLwas taking place, another closely related conviction also 66 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS took hold of my mind, and that is the close connection that exists between literature and history. I soon came to see that without a knofwledge of the expansion and greatness of Eome I could have no true understanding of Vergil, whose poetry sums up the ideals of the empire in all its forms; that without a knowledge of the Middle Ages and the Ken- aissance I could not know Dante, on the one hand, or Petrarch, Montaigne, and Shake- speare, on the other ; that a knowledge of Puri- tanism alone could enable me to understand Milton ; and the agonies of doubt and despair shown in the works of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold could be explained only by some knowledge of the effect upon the mind of men made by the extraordinary expansion of science in the nineteenth century. This thought added neiw zest and pleasure to the reading of history, which from my boyhood years had been a favorite one for me. Some of the earliest books I remember to have read are the historical series by Jacob Abbott, which made a lasting impression on my child- ish mind. Since then I have read with deep in- terest the works of Green, Macaulay, and Fiske on English and American history; Motley on Dutch history; Robertson, Prescott, on Span- 67 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY ish, Mtiller, Von Ranke, on German, and Guizot, Michelet, and Duruy on French his- tory. Most of these books were read at first as individuals, without much plan or thought of grouping the facts together. They were fraught with deep pleasure, but a still deeper pleasure became mine when I began to read with the definite purpose of getting a con- nected view of the development of history from ancient Greece down to the present. Herodo- tus and Thucydides and Livy were read in college or in preparation for the same ; but my chief knowledge of Greek history wa^ obtained from Grote and Thirl wall; and the same is true, for Roman history, of Mommsen, Nie- buhr, and especially Gibbon. As a boy I read Milman's History of Latin Christianity, and thus got my first glimpse of the fascinating, though complicated, field of mediaeval history. I have tried since then, by reading the chief authorities, to get a clear and satisfactory view of this tangled subject. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gave me not only pleasure and admiration for its style and mar- velously clear arrangement of the immense mass of facts, but also gave me a more or less clear knowledge of the movements that at- tended the downfall of Rome and laid the 68 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS foundation of a new series of nations in Europe. The rise of the modern nations be- came especially clear to me after reading the monumental work of Dahn, Die Geschichte der Komanischen und Germanischen Volker, in which I saw the various branches of the Teutonic race grouping themselves together, forming larger and larger groups till they be- came veritable nations, and, pushed onward by other hordes of people from the North, over- flowing the fertile fields of the Southland, the Franks mingling with the Romanized Gauls and forming the French nation, the Burgun- dians in similar manner forming French Switzerland, the Suevi and Visigoths settling in Spain, the Lombards in North Italy, while the Angles and Saxons formed the English nation, the Saxons, Bavarians, Rhine Franks, and Alemanni formed the various ethnical ele- ments of Germany and German Switzerland. Equal in interest to this forming of the nations has been for me the history of the Renaissance. Here, again, I was attracted by the charm of brilliant writing before the definite purpose was excited in me to work out for myself a complete understanding of the period. J. Addington Symonds's books on the Renaissance opened up to me the charm 69 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY of this period. Then came the fundamental work of Burckhardt; and later the vivid pic- ture of the various phases of life in Italy of the Renaissance given by Monnier in his vol- ume entitled Le Quattrocento. Other books that helped me in this were the solid German works of Geiger and Voigt. But it was espe- cially the study of the life and works of Pe- trarch which showed me what an all-impor- tant role was played by the Renaissance in modern civilization. It was while tracing out the various elements of the movement found in Petrarch, and later developed by humanist, poet, scholar, artist, of the following centuries, that the conviction of the oneness of the stream of human civilization dawned upon me; and I caught a glimpse of this great stream rising in Greece, modified in Alex- andria, perfected in Rome, sinking to a sub- terranean stream during the Dark Ages, to rise again, clear and sparkling in the sunlight of the Renaissance, and flowing down to our days in an ever-broadening river. Above all, I caught from Herder "and Hegel the inspiring thought of hisstory, not merely as a series of meaningless events, of the rise and fall of states and kings, of bloody battles, conquest and ruins, but the gradual development in 70 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS the collective mind of mankind of the sense of freedom, manifesting itself at first in the realm of politics and then in religious life, then in social life, and, finally, in the spiritual world, all tending toward that far-off event "To which the whole creation moves.'' It is not the place here to speak of the books I have read on the history of individual na- tions. A word or two may be said of the way in which I was led to study, in general outline, church history. Here too I began early, and I found in Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History my first glimpse of this fascinating subject. Later studies in literature, -especially Dante, led to the desire on my part to understand something of the history of the mediaeval church, while the study of the Renaissance led to that of the Reformation, which is the form the movement took when it crossed the mountains and went to Germany, where, changed by the nature of the Teutonic spirit, and by the application of critical scholarship to the original tongues of the Bible, it brought about a new birth of religion. Here, of course, the standard book is D'Aubigne, but I was soon led by other studies to go more into detail in the origin of the Reformation. I was inter- ested in the early settlement of Pennsylvania, 71 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY and was preparing to write the book after- ward published under the title of the German and Swiss Settlements of Colonial Pennsyl- vania. This led me to the study of the reli- gious condition in Germany and Switzerland, and especially the Thirty Years' War. In Freytag's Bilder aus der Deutschen Vergan- genheit I found many valuable glimpses into the life of the people. Special studies on the origin of the Waldensians and Anabaptists completed this view, while the invitation from The Methodist Book Concern to write a life of John Huss, and the necessary reading there- for, opened up a clear view of the preliminary movements which led to Luther's Eeformation. Of a different origin was the development of my view of the spiritual development of reli- gion in modern times. The study of Dante, visits to Assisi, and the pictures of Giotto had led me to the writing of a short life of Saint Francis. It was in studying his life, and the various fortunes of his order, especially in Germany, that I came to know and love Tauler, Suso, and the Theologia Germanica, which had such a mighty influence on Luther's inner life. The natural desire to know something of the history and origin of the Methodist Church led to a general view of 72 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS the early Moravians, the Pietists of Germany, Wesley's acquaintance with Spangenberg and Boehler, his visit to Herrnhut, and his found- ing of emotional religion in the bosom of the English Church, with its branch in Ireland, its transplantation to the United States by Barbara Heck and Philip Embury, and its influence in founding the United Brethren and Evangelical Alliance denominations. This, then, is a brief sketch of the bird's- eye view over historj^ which my reading has given me, and which it is a constant pleasure for me to dwell on from time to time. A dif- ferent general view over the centuries is one that came to me later than the above. Of course I had some knowledge of philosophy in general, but it w^as but fragmentary and without any connection. I think it was my interest in Dante that first led me to endeavor to get a satisfactory view of the development of philosophy from the beginning down to the present. The Divina Commedia is so com- pletely soaked in Scholasticism that no one can hope to understand it without some knowl- edge of that strange system of thought. It was in consequence of these studies that the desire arose to obtain a satisfactory view of philosophy as a whole, and from time to time 73 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY I read various manuals on that subject, but especially for ancient philosophy, the fasci- nating volumes of Zeller. This, in connection with the parallel reading of Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, and Cicero, gave me the necessary basis on which to build the knowledge of mediaeval and modern philosophy. The works of such a man as Saint Augustine, an Epitome of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and general or par- ticular histories of philosophy and dogma, especially Harnack, led me to a view of the strange development of philosophy in the Middle Ages mentioned above, in the form of Scholasticism, its marvelous influence for the ne:xt half dozen centuries, the supremacy of Aristotle and the efforts of the schoolmen to harmonize his philosophy with the dogmas of the church, the unending discussions between Nominalists and Realists, the contest between Saint Bernard and Abelard, the gradual rise of the modern spirit, Bacon, Bruno, Campa- nella, the fall of Scholasticism, the birth of modern philosophy in Descartes's cogito ergo sum^ the enlightenment philosophy in France, the sensation philosophy in England, modern idealism as seen in Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schel- ling, and finally, out of all these elements, the contemporary systems of Herbert Spencer, 74 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS Fechner, Bergson, Eucken, and the pragmatic philosophy of William James. Perhaps all this sounds a little larger than it actually is. I do not mean to say that I have made a careful and thorough study of all these sys- tems of philosophy, or that I could pass an examination off hand on Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant. But I have tried to get a general conspectus of the development of philosophy from ancient times down to the present, and however superficial this may seem to specialists, to me it is a precious possession forever. It was while I was endeavoring to get the above general conception of the development of history, literature, and philosophy that I became more and more aware of another inner, spiritual life, flowing down the centuries in the universal heart of mankind. For humanity as a whole, as well as the individual man, has an inner as well as an outer life; and to me this inner life, as revealed in the various forms of literature, is far more interesting than the merely outward form of nature and humanity, as seen in the annals of science and history, which I have tried to describe above. And as I reflect over the various phases of this inner life, the chances and changes of the human 75 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY heart, the different way in which men have viewed the great spectacle of life and nature about them, I seem to see man in the early times, with emotions and aspirations rude and undeveloped ; then I see the gradual expansion of his soul, the refining of his passions, the en- largement of his spiritual life, the growth of a feeling of brotherhood, of sympathy for the poor and suffering, a deeper and more per- sonal appreciation of the charm of nature, art, and, above all, the spiritualizing of that love of man for woman which is stronger than death and which many waters cannot drown. I see how nature, the external world in the midst of which men live and die, which was once to them something to fear and struggle against, fraught with mysterious spirits whom it was necessary to placate by sacrifice and ritual, has now become a thing of beauty, full of mystic influences, uplifting the soul, com- forting man in sorrow, until, with Words- worth, it becomes an inlet into the spiritual world. I see the development of sexual love from a mere thing of the senses to an uplifting experience that leads men to their highest powers, that love which transforms all nature and life, and sits enthroned beside the eternal 76 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS laws. I see the innumerable symbols of the various phases of this universal passion: Helen, the type of the purely physical charm of woman; Penelope, the faithful wife and mother; Nausicaa, girlish and sweet in the in- nocence of her youthful charm; Tristan and Iseult, Francesca da Eimini, Komeo and Juliet, in all of whom the "dusky strand of death inwoven here With dear Love's tie makes love himself more dear" ; Beatrice, in whom the earthly and divine are mingled ; and Laura, pure woman, yet a spirit too, and, after her death, an ever-abiding in- fluence that draws the soul of her lover from the transient things of earth to the eternal beauty of the heavenly life; and so on down to the present age, when Browning makes love the great element which raises man to Grod himself. I see the development of the love of man for man, the noble ideal of true friendship, ex- emplified in the stories of Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, of all of whom it can be said, as it w^as said of Saul and Jonathan, ^^They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death were not divided.'^ I see the development of that spirit of pity and compassion for the lowly and the down- 77 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY trodden of life, that pity which, practically unknown to the nations of antiquity, was first preached by the Son of man, was largely lost in the chaos of the Middle Ages, but which in our own times has come to new life, and which seems to be the one thing in the teaching of Christ which is becoming more and more widely spread, which multiplies hospitals and asylums, sets men to studying the means of preventing crime and suffering, poverty and disease, and extends a veil of compassion over even the vilest of mankind. And, finally, I see the development of that deepest of all phases of the inner life of man- kind, the solemn questions of the why, whence, and whither of life. I see the beginnings of a belief in the immortality of the soul, away back in the mysteries of Greece, and in the deep and never-failing influence of Plato, with his noble thoughts of the ideal world, of which the present is only a dim shadow, of that spirit land which is the true home of the soul. I see the mingling of Platonism and the teaching of Christ, ever developing down the centuries, spiritualizing and elevating the thoughts of saints, poets, and philosophers; and, lastly, I see the influence of the Son of God himself, whose resurrection was the 78 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS pledge of eternal life for all those who believe in him. I see the indescribable change made in the thoughts, feelings, hopes of mankind; the countless triumphant deaths; men and women who have crossed the dark stream that flows between this life and the next, trust- ing in Him who has said, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end''; and beyond the river I catch a glimpse of that beautiful dream of the heavenly life, sung by countless poets, that Happy harbor of the saints, That sweet and blessed soil, • Wherein no sorrow may be found. No grief, no care, no toil. And as I think over all these things I have a new and deeper conviction of the greatness and beauty of life, nature, man himself; and if reading has done nothing else, it has given my mind the inspiring picture of a world full of beauty, created and guided by divine love, a picture ever developing and growing into clearer shape as the years roll by. 79 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT AND PLEASURE 81 This volume in my hand, I hold a charm Which lifts me out of reach of wrong or harm. I sail away from trouble; and most blest Of every blessing, can myself forget. — The Spectator, 82 CHAPTER IV Reading for Entertainment and Pleasure For a number of years I have come more and more to feel that knowledge consisting of scattered unrelated facts is not very valuable or satisfactory, that in all our study we should be guided by some general principle ; for then, and then only, will facts, to use a figure of William James, group themselves together as grapes about the stem. And what is true of acquiring knowledge is also true of any at- tempt to impart information. Not only the book itself should have a unity in its whole plan, but each individual chapter should have some general plan of its own. To carry out this principle, however, in such a book as the present is fraught with difficulty ; for it largely consists of reminiscences and reflections on a large number of books, read during a period of many years. I have tried in the preceding chapter to show how all books of information I have read gradually com- bined to give me a general conspectus of the 83 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY world as a whole. Later I shall speak of the works of the various poets which are naturally related one to the other by the nature of their subject-matter. As I look over the past, how- ever, I find that I have read more or less des- ultorily a large number of books which can with difficulty be included under any one con- venient head; books read at hazard, without any thought of seeking profit, information, lessons of life (although, of course, many of them contain more or less of these things), but chiefly from a desire to read what has been interesting and to pass away a pleasant hour or two. I have tried in the preceding chapter to give a brief outline of the intellectual side of my reading, as it applied to the general develop- ment of literature, history, and civilization. Many of the books thus read were read merely for pleasure at first, and only later did I per- ceive how they fitted into the general scheme of study which I had proposed for myself. On the other hand, many of the books were read for one purpose only — the light they cast upon the development of civilization I was seeking to comprehend. Of these books some were dry and uninteresting in themselves, some were pamphlets and theses, collections of 84 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT minor writers, philological discussions, lin- guistic and literary dissertations. The pleas- ure I received from such reading was not in the style, or even the thought itself, but in the consciousness that these things were neces- sary for the view of the world and man which little by little had become the intellectual goal of all my reading. Hence it often happened that a dry compilation of facts became vivi- fied by a genuine feeling of pleasure, because I found in it some principle, some ray of light, which illuminated what before had been only a mass of disconnected facts. There is a whole group of books, however, which I have read, not with any particular purpose of obtaining information or intellec- tual benefit, but from a natural inclination, for the sake of entertainment, diversion, pass- ing away of time. When I speak of entertain- ment or amusement I do not necessiarily rele- gate the books referred to under this head to a lower sphere of reading, for oftentimes the highest forms of art are only a higher form of entertainment, and the pleasure received by many people from a cheap novel, a melo- drama at the theater, is the same, in principle, though not in quality and degree, as that experienced by those who have felt the charm 85 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY of the dialogues of Plato, the paintings of Raphael, or the plays of Shakespeare. When we speak of books whose chief func- tion it is to amuse us, however, the first thing we think of, of course, is the novel, which has come to-day to be the most universally popular means of spending an idle hour, sur- passing, in this respect, even the theater, with which it has so much in common. As I look back over the reading of my life one of the things that strike me most is the large num- ber of works of fiction — ^many people would call them "trash" — that I have read. I sup- pose I ought to feel ashamed of having read so much that is useless, of having wasted so much precious time that might have been used better otherwise. But, somehow, that is not the feel- ing I have. It is true that in more recent years I have found a decided change in my taste in regard to fiction, as well as other things. Many a book that fascinated me in youth, over which I would spend half the night, seems to me flat and tasteless now. Far back in the early boyhood days I see rise before me the cheap dime novels; the stories in such periodicals as the Boys and Girls' Weekly Magazine; then the series of Oliver Optic, Horatio Alger, and in later years Mrs. 86 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT Evans, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, and scores of the so-called best-sellers of to-day, for I have read them all more or less. In college and in later days the study of languages and literature brought with it the reading of foreign novels, for whatever may be said of novels as a whole, they serve a most useful purpose in acquiring a vocabulary in a foreign tongue. The first book I ever read in Spanish was a translation of Dumas' San Felice, and the compelling interest of that master of fascinating narrative carried me along, so that, before I knew it, I acquired the power to read the language without difficulty. The field of fiction which has presented an- other phase of interest, not merely pastime, or the acquiring more rapidly another tongue, but as forming part of the great stream of European literature, I have spoken of in the preceding chapter. Here, as elsewhere, France has had a leading part in the develop- ment of the modern novel, and it is in tracing the gradual change of mediaeval romances from poetic to prose versions, the introduction of new ideals and views of life, the enormous infiuence of Amadis de Gaule, D'Urfe's As- tree. Mile, de Lafayette, Le Sage, Rousseau, and others down to Balzac — who, as Henry; 87 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY James once said, is not only tha founder of the modern novel, he is the modern novel^ — that we see the cause of the universal popu- larity of fiction to-day, and understand how the old inborn "lust zw fabulieren,^^ which mankind has drawn from Mother Nature, and which once found expression in epic poetry, mythology, and fairy tales, now finds expres- sion in the novel and short story. As for the French novels, I read Balzac with admiration for his genius, power of cre- ating characters, and influence, but always with a feeling of depression at the end. Zola has always left a feeling of disgust, not only because of the book itself, but because of the theory behind it, the assumption that man is a gorilla, a wild beast, foul, cruel, devilish, that woman is baleful, leading men to their destruction, the very gate to hell, janua di- abolic as Saint Jerome once said. Maupassant I can admire for his perfect style, but I am repelled by the unworthy subject-matter. Daudet alone has won my genuine respect and admiration for his pathos, humor, kindly sympathy, and oftentimes tenderness, though he too, at times, falls into the lower manner of the realistic novels. The vast majority of the novels I have read mean but little to me 88 BEADING FOR ENTERTAINMENT now ; most of them I have forgotten ; even the plots are gone. The sum total of lasting bene- fit seems to me comparatively small; a pas- time, pleasant in many cases, very unpleasant in the case of Zola, Flaubert, and Maupas- sant — that is about all. As for increased knowledge of life, I hardly knoiw what to say. In the case of poets and the great prose writers, essayists, historians, and phi- losophers I cannot feel grateful enough for what they have done for me. When it comes to novels the case is very different. I have never been able to make up my mind as to whether, on the whole, they are beneficial or not. It may be said that the historical novel adds to our knowledge of history; yet, while history has always been my favorite reading, I have never felt any satisfaction in the in- formation gained from novels. I have always had a feeling that it might be true to fact or might not, and if I wished to be sure of its correctness, I should have to study the period myself. As for giving a final opinion on the value of the novel as a whole, I confess that I do not feel at all confident in my ability to do so. Some critics have looked upon it as greater than the drama itself. To me such judgment 89 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY seems strangely exaggerated; and yet, owing to the vastness of the field, I feel that I have not had the time or inclination to make a systematic study of the subject, for the pur- pose of acquiring a final opinion. To give an adequate criticism of a play of Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy, Tennyson's In Me- moriam, we must read them a number of times, must study the sources, and especially knoiw something about the times in which they were written. Then after long thought we may be able to express the judgment that has gradually formed itself in our minds. Can any one do this with the novel? Take the French novel — what a vast ocean it is ! Who would dare to venture on it with the purpose of charting accurately all its gulfs and bays? What a task for a man to undertake the pro- found study of Balzac alone, with his scores of volumes, or the enormous mass of Zola, Daudet, Bourget, Flaubert, to say nothing of the German novelists — Sudermann, Ebner- Eschenbach, Spielhagen, Freytag; or the Span- iards Galdos and Valdes, the Italians Manzoni, D'Annunzio, Fogazzjaro, and the whole vast number of English novelists of former times and to-day. And this repeated reading is not enough. 90 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT If we are to estimate the accuracy of the pic- ture of French life in Balzac and Zola, for instance, we must spend a vast amount of time in verifying all sorts of facts, travel, science, medicine. As the novel is universal, so the critic must be a universal genius of cyclopedic knowledge. For my part, I withdraw baffled and discouraged from the effort to form an adequate judgment as to the true value of the novel, in comparison with the other forms of literature, the drama, the epic, and the lyric. This feeling on my part applies especially to the so-called problem novels, in which the morbid side of human personality is discussed. In reading these books I have been aware of a constantly repeated experience. At first I would be caught by the grip of a well-told story and would read, at times, almost fever- ishly to the end, and then almost invariably would come a reaction, a feeling of half-dis- gust at myself, for being led to what has seemed to me mental dissipation. This feel- ing has been aroused especially by that wide- spread group of novels in which social, mental, and other problems are analyzed ad nauseam. We all have our troubles; yet the best thing we can do is to forget them, at least not to brood over our past mistakes nor an- 91 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY alyze our motives too much. Why should we linger over the same things in the case "of others? I often feel when finishing one of these depressing novels as Ulysses must have felt when, after spending some time at the mouth of Hades, the spirit of his mother said to him, "And now, haste thee back with all thy heart to the sunlight/' Of course this does not apply to all the novels I have read: many of them have been light, pleasant companions for an idle hour; many have given me pleasant memories of in- teresting characters, noble thoughts and les- sons in life. Chief among these exceptions I may mention Cervantes, Thackeray, and especially Dickens. In the Don Quixote, the immortal characters of the hero and Sancho Panza have been dear to me as the symbols of that ideal and the commonplace, that strange phenomenon of the two sides to all things, the sordid and the base on one side, the lofty and the romantic on the other. It is because we all of us have our moods, dark and bright, that the Don Quixote has become a precious possession for all mapkind. But a deeper and more personal affection unites me to Thackeray and Dickens. From boyhood I have loved them both, and this love 92 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT has lasted until to-day. Hearing so many people discuss the question as to which of these two writers was the greater, I was un- decided for a long time. Finally I concluded that I need not make a decision, that it was better to take both for what they were to me. Thackeray has always appealed to me espe- cially for the finish of his style, for his good- humored irony, for his love for what is gentle, and tender, and pure, especially in woman, for his unforgettable characters, and especially his habit of chatting with the reader, his wise and shrewd reflections on life, the world and men. In spite of the fact that Henry Esmond is generally regarded as his masterpiece. Vanity Fair is my favorite, and I can read it over and over, every word with unflagging interest; this too notwithstanding the many disagreeable characters, for under- neath it all I feel the kind heart of the author. My feeling for Dickens is different from that I have for Thackeray. I feel the lack of elegance in his style, of true art in the con- struction of the plot, the often inexcusable exaggeration of character, humorous as well as pathetic, the dreadful lack of taste in the last words of Dora in David Copperfleld. Yet, for some reason or other, Dickens has touched 93 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY my heart so deeply that I must place him with the few books that I love the most. I never tire of reading him ; I can take him up at any time, dip into any of his books for a few min- utes, and he interests me and touches me at once. I have often tried to analyze the hold he has had upon me. It is not style, or plot, or any of the ordinary qualities of talent or genius, for to me Dickens is a genius. It is not the great gallery of immortal figures — Micawber, Pickwick, David Copperfield. It is something deeper, more pervading than all this. It is the kindly humor, the deep pity for the unhappj^ among men, that feeling of the brotherhood of mankind, that makes the atmosphere of all his works. As I grow older it has seemed to me that the one thing that makes life worth living is the spirit of kind- ness which men show each other. Even those whose philosophy of life has become saddened, who are without God and without hope in the world, cling to this thought of the supremacy of pity and mutual help. "Let us live, and comfort and help one another,'' says Leopardi, "in order to bear as well as we can this fatigue which men call life.'' The chief cause of the universal love of men for Lincoln is this very element in his nature, that element of pity 94 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT and compassion for the poor and weak and oppressed. The literature of the nineteenth century was deeply impressed by three things: a new feel- ing for and worship of nature; an apparently irreconcilable conflict between faith and doubt in religious matters, brought on by the won- derful revelations of science, especially ge- ology and astronomy; and, thirdly, a new interest in man as man, however lowly his estate. This latter phase of the thought of the nineteenth century is perhaps more profound than we are likely to appreciate at first. It shows itself in the constant development of a sense of equality among men, political, social, and industrial; in the extraordinary expan- sion of philanthropy, the care for the home- less, poor, and sick, the fatherless, and even the criminal in our prisons. And with this external change in the care of the submerged classes has come a corresponding change in the hearts of men toward the suffering and unhappy. Amid the changing standards that mark our religious life one thing stands out above all others — the ever-increasing spread of that tenderest of all elements of the character and teaching of Christ : infinite pity and love for the lowly and the unhappy. 95 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY And it is just here that Dickens becomes significant to me, that I can understand why he has so won the hearts of countless thou- sands, in spite of his manifest faults of style and thought. Just as the significance of Words- worth lies in the fact that he sums up the whole spirit of modern nature-love, is a "priest to us all, of the wonder and beauty of the world" ; just as Tennyson and Browning sum up the religious doubts and struggles that mark the spirit of the mid-nineteenth century, finally coming out into the clear light of op- timistic faith, Tennyson only half-heartedly, it seems to me, but Browning with a robust op- timism and unconquerable faith in God and the endless life of the soul ; so the significance of Dickens, to me, lies in the fact that he sums up the sense of kindly and loving pity, of the brotherhood of all men, the beauty of those "little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which not only make up the best part of every good man's life, as Wordsworth says, but also are the truest means of happiness for the individual, and the very atmosphere of true social life. The belief in the essential goodness of man, respect and pity for the lowly and the suffering, is essential to true relations among men. It is this ele- READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT ment that I have found and admired and loved in Dickens as in scarcely any other writer; and it is this that has made me feel the deep- est debt of gratitude to him. And in hours of depression, of a sense of the sordidness and meanness of mankind, I have always found in him a wholesome influence, an antidote for the blackest of moods. Another class of books I have read largely for entertainment and pastime, although, of course, not without desire for information and general culture, are books of travel. Early in life I became fascinated with the travels of Bavard Ta vlor, who for thp first timf^ opened my eyes to the charm of travel in foreign lands. Especially fascinating in my boyhood days have been the stories of arctic discovery, the adventures of Dr. Kane, Sir John Franklin, and later Nordenskiold and Nansen. Of travel in the more familiar lands of western Europe, there is no need of mentioning par- ticular names of books, many of which I read just before starting abroad myself, or while on the journey. Mark T^v^ain's genial descrip- tions of familiar scenes, with their touch of kindly satire, have always been a refreshing contrast to more pretentious and oftentimes dull books of travel. 97 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY I cannot refrain from making particular mention, however, of one country books con- cerning which have furnished me with some of the most delightful pastimes. Ancestral inter- est, in the first place, made me study the his- tory and legends of Switzerland. Study at the University of Geneva, farm life on the hills above Lausanne, and a sojourn in a primitive Alpine village in the Haslithal, frequent and long visits in Bern, Chamonix, and Zermatt, all have deeply impressed on my mind a charm and love for that land that can never grow less. And so I know of no deeper pleasure or more fascinating entertainment in the line of read- ing than to take up again and again the chap- ters of Ruskin treating of Switzerland, espe- cially the Mountain Glory and the Mountain Gloom, such classic volumes as TyndalFs Glaciers of the Alps, Stephen's Playground of Europe; and especially Whymper's fascinat- ing Rambles Among the Alps, and Guido Rey's Matterhorn. In Whymper's volume I have read, I know not how many times, that wonder- ful description of the first ascent of the Mat- terhorn, the strange combination of circum- stances which led to the final assault in July, 1865, the easy ascent, the glorious hour spent on the summit, and then the tragedy in the 98 EEADING FOR ENTERTAINMENT descent over the slippery crags of the East Face. When I read this story, told by Whym- per in such simple yet thrilling language, 1 always have the same feeling as when I read the GEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles — the sense of an inexorable fate against which no human struggle can avail. Equally fascinating I have found the more recent volume of Guido Rey. In this book the whole poetry of mountain-climbing is brought before us — the majesty of the Matterhorn, its crags and snow-peaks rising sheer up to the mid-sky, sharply outlined at noonday, softly roseate at sunset, silvery white and strangely mystic beneath the light of the stars, or echo- ing with the crash of thunder and shrouded with clouds torn by the flash of lightning, when the storms rage about the summit. To this day, when I am tired of daily rou- tine, nervous, worried, depressed, I can get new strength and calm by taking up these books on Switzerland, and seeing rise before my mind's eye the green valleys, the upland pastures, with the clear streams running through them, with their many flowers and tinkling groups of cattle, the white summits of the mountains, the rivers of ice and the vast fields of snow, 99 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Where the white mists forever Are spread and uphurled. In the stir of the forces Whence issued the world. Another group of books which comes tinder the head of this chapter rather than any other is that vague class known under the general title of essays. While, of course, they all con- tain more or less information, or exert moral or spiritual influence, yet I think, in my case, at least, it has been the sense of entertainment and pleasure rather than desire for knowledge which has led me to them. This entertain- ment in the case of many writers of this class — Addison, Steele, Lamb, Wilson, Holmes, Stevenson — has been produced by the light, gentle, humorous, satirical spirit animating the essay, the charm and perfection of style, a light touch of pathos, followed by a flash of humor, a whimsical thought, good-natured ridicule, description of interesting customs and odd and unusual characters, and above all, the sense of conversing with a wise and witty, kindly and cultivated reader of books, observer of the follies of mankind. All this has made the reading of such writers a genuine rest, recreation, and pastime. Of similar effect are the essays of a specifl- 100 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT cally literary or biographical nature, such as those of Macaulay, Carlyle, Lowell in Eng- lish, and Fagiiet, Brunetiere, and especially Sainte-Beuve, in French. Of course here in- struction plays a large part; but this instruc- tion is given in the form of entertainment, and many of these essays were given at first in form of lectures. Allied to the literary essay I may place here the various volumes of biography I have read. These too were not read for mere information except when I have been engaged in some spe- cial study of my own. But to take up an interesting volume of biography such as Mor- ley's Life of Gladstone, for example, or Lord Tennyson's Life by his son, the Life and Let- ters of Browning, Bielschowsky's Goethe, Klihnemann's Schiller, Brander Matthews's Moliere, is to insure oneself an hour's genuine enjoyment and entertainment. Especially do I remember the fascination I found as a boy in that greatest of all biographies, BoswelPs Life of Johnson. I devoured it whole, reading every word, even the letters and notes at the bottom of the page. Early in life I found the same charm in Plutarch's Lives, and Samuel Smiles's Self-Help. I have never forgotten the effect produced upon my mind in my senti- 101 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY mental da^^s by Frances E. Willard's account of her sister, who died early, entitled Nineteen Beautiful Years. The portrait in that book haunted my mind for years, and even to-day a poetic interest is attached to the face of one I never saw or knew, except in the memoir above mentioned. 'Tis a face that can never grow older. That never can part with its gleam. 'Tis a gracious possession forever; For is it not all a dream? Even more entertaining to me were the vari- ous autobiographies which fell into my hand and which I eagerly read. What the world would have been without Saint Augustine's Confessions only those who know of his influ- ence on such men as Petrarch and Luther can tell. I have found deep enjoyment in the auto- biographies of Benvenuto Cellini, Gibbon, Alfteri, and Benjamin Franklin. Autobio- graphical in their nature are the Essays of Montaigne, although the autobiographical ele- ment here is chiefly applied to the author's inner^ life, his thoughts on all things, the books he has read, the men and customs he has seen at home and abroad, his reflections on the life, conduct, foibles, and follies of those about him and of his own self. I know 102 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT of no greater pleasure than to pick up a volume of Montaigne and see him, in his kindly yet shrewd and incisive way, penetrate to the heart of men and things; to see his wisdom, his common sense, his hatred of sham, and espe- cially his broad tolerance of all men's opinions, as expressed in the motto he had carved on a beam in the ceiling of his tower-study, ^^Que SgaiS'jef^^ And all this is couched in language typically French, remarkable for clearness, simplicity, naturalness, free from mere rhetoric, pomposity, affectation — a lan- guage such as he himself loved: ^^un parler simple et naif^ tel stir le papier qu^d la houehe; un parler succulent et nerveux^ court ^ serre; esloigne d'affectation^ desregle, desconsu, et hardy.^^^ And back of all this gossip, this talk of glory, death, education, we see the clear-headed, sensible man, courteous, witty, logical, frank, tolerant, not deeply re- ligious or metaphysical, whose philosophy is of the practical sort of everyday life — a man who with Moliere sums up the essence of French character. My more thorough acquaintance with Mon- taigne came some eight or ten years ago, when 1 A language simple and naive, the same on paper as in the mouth ; a language juicy and forceful, short and pithy; far from afifectation, without rules, bold and free. 103 K ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY for some months I was suffering from a nervous breakdown, brought on by overwork. I had lost the proper perspective of life, and in my eagerness for study and literary work had come to such a pass that I could not read anything for some time. It was just as I was recovering from this trouble that I read Mon- taigne thoroughly, slowly, thoughtfully, un- derlining and making notes of passages that pleased me, and starring the margins. It was just the book I needed at that time, with its short, unconnected chapters on all sorts of subjects, its clear-headed common sense on the very thing that had broken me down. Above all, his theory of life, though not the highest, was just what I needed then — the folly of ambition, desire of glory, even of learning, sought for at the expense of health. I have never forgotten such passages as that in which he, the lover of books if there ever was one, declares that books are pleasant things indeed, but if from poring over them he should be in danger of losing his health and cheerfulness, ^^nos meilleures pieces/^ he would have none of them. For, he adds, ^^je sitis de ceux qui pensent leur fruict ne pouvoir contre- poiser cette perte,^^^ From that time I date 1 Our best possessions. I am one of those who think that their fruit cannot make up for this loss. 104 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT a more rational use of books and study myself. Yet while I feel grateful to Montaigne for all he has meant to me, I do not feel the same intense affection as in the ease of some other writers, not only of poetry, but of prose also. While I admired him for his amiable charac- ter, for the intellectual and other qualities which make him, together with Moliere, the type of the French genius, yet his selfish, though sensible theory of life, his Epicurean manner of living, his stoical and pagan view of death, his lack of all transcendental and metaphysical qualities, his formal acceptance of the dogmas of the church, side by side with the utter absence in his Essays of any mention of God and the immortality of the soul, could not fail to leave unsatisfied that phase of my own nature which is perhaps the deepest of all, a sense of the divine and the spiritual in and over and beyond all things material in life. This spirit has been fed by many books of different lands and ages ; by Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; by Cicero's classic expositions of the lofty speculations of Greek philoso- phers — Stoic, Epicurean and Neo-Platonism — as seen in his De Natura Deorum, Tusculan Disputations, and, above all, the Somnium 105 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Scipionis; it has been fed by Boethius's Con- solation of Philosophy, by Saint Augustine^s Confessions, by the great German mystics— Tauler, Eckhardt, and Suso; by Thomas h Kempis's Imitation of Christ, and by the more modern writers, such as John Bunyan, Henry Vaughn, Novalis, William Blake, and Maurice Maeterlinck. All these writers have helped to develop within me that inborn instinct toward the mystical or transcendental side in all things. Two men, however, have had especial influ- ence on me in this respect, and have come in recent years to share with the great poets my unfailing love and admiration. The spirit of both, however, is practically one and the same; for Emerson, after all, seems to me to be only a reincarnation of the great founder of Platon- ism and the transcendental mode of look- ing at all things. In reading Emerson, of course, I am conscious of the fact that he has no well-rounded system of philosophy, that his poetry lacks a certain kind of finish and melody, that his essays are loosely formed, made up of scattered thoughts, deep prophetic statements, and reasoning not carried out in connected manner. But I can never open his essays on "Nature,'' "Love,'' the "Poets," and 106 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT others, without leaving at once the noise and bustle, the smallness and meanness of everyday life, and, after passing a step or two of dubious twilight, coming out at last on the other side, ^^the novel, silent, silver lights, and darks un- dreamed of, where I hush and bless myself with silence.'' The strange spirit that always accompanies my reading of Emerson has al- ready been expressed by Hermann Grimm, and I too can say with him, that ^'whenever I take up his volume I feel the pure air"; that "for me was the breath of life, for me was the rapture of spring, for me love and desire; for me the secret of wisdom and power; me too he fills with courage and confidence." Similar to this feeling of intense delight which I have found in Emerson is my experi- ence with Plato, only in a far deeper sense; for the faults of Emerson — loose connection, staccato style, lack of philosophical system — are absent from the Greek, whose dialogues are as marvelous in regard to form, wit, gentle humor, and dramatic and poetic power as they are true, deep, far-reaching, and fraught, on every page, with a sense of the abiding and eternal. I have come in recent years to have as deep a love and admiration for Plato as for Dante, Homer, Shakespeare, or any of the 107 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY great world poets. In recent years I say, for my love is of comparatively recent date, a late, or, perhaps, a belated love. I had read some of the Dialogues of Plato in college, had caught a glimpse only, however, of his essen- tial qualities. Of course in my reading in succeeding years I came across his traces con- tinually. But it is only when I came into possession of Jowett's translation, and sat down to read through practically all his works, that I first felt my soul strangely warmed within me. The first year I went through the dialogues carefully, reading, marking the margins, and taking notes on the most important passages, not only of Plato himself, but of Jowett's introductions to the various dialogues. The next year I went over the same work, reading especially the numer- ous marked passages, and at times taking notes, for the second time, of the passages which appealed to me most. These notes I would often carry with me, or look over in my study at college; learning many of them by heart. The mere repetition of these passages I have found to have a calming and soothing effect in hours of discontent and anxiety. Ever since, I have gone over the works of Plato once a year, not necessarily thoroughly, but 108 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT enough to keep fresh in my mind the general tenor of the several dialogues and the general spirit of his teaching. It is enough for me to steep myself in the Platonic atmosphere at least once a year. In reading Plato I have not been led pri- marily to seek for information, or even to work out whatever system of philosophy Plato may have had. I have simply been irresistibly drawn to him ever since I first became really acquainted with him. What this charm and fascination is I cannot adequately describe. It consists in his extraordinary modernness, the constant delight I find in the light he throws upon all questions that have occupied the attention of the wiser part of mankind, and which are still before the world to-day. It consists likewise in the pleasure that comes from beautiful thoughts enshrined in beauti- ful language — Die schone Seele in der schonen Form^ — for the English translation of Jowett is as beautiful as the Greek of Plato. Then, again, there is the pleasure that comes from being able to trace a mighty infiuence on life, literature, philosophy, and religion down through the centuries ; to see how without that famous reading of Cicero's Platonic treatise ^ The beautiful soul in the beautiful form. 109 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Hortensius Saint Augustine perhaps would never have been able to mold Christian theology as he did; how Platonism gave the highest note to the literature of the Een- aissance, to Castiglione, Michael Angelo, Spenser, and Shakespeare; how it pervades the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, as well a^ the poetry of Words- worth and Shelley and the prose of Emerson. But the deepest enjoyment I have found in Plato is in his supreme power of making real the Ideal, the constant sense of the One and the Infinite, that comes from his pages, his never- failing method of looking at everything against the background of eternity. Many are the pictures that rise before me as I write these words: the figure of the philosopher standing in the corner of a wall, sheltered from the storm of sleet and dust driven along by the wind; the lofty and inspiring myths such as that of the cave, which represents things seen from the standpoint of earth alone ; the vision of Er ; and the double nature of the soul, represented by the chariot drawn by a white and black horse, struggling now upward, now downward, under the guiding hand of Reason, the charioteer. These are some of the elements of the charm which Plato 110 READING FOR ENTERTAINMENT exerts on me. However it may be analyzed, the charm exists and grows in strength as the years go on. In taking up the Dialogues, and opening them at almost any place, I feel some- thing as Emerson did when, telling how his house stood on a low land, with limited out- look, and how when he would go with his friend to the shore of the little river near by, and take the boat, ^Vith one stroke of the paddle he left the village politics and person- alities behind, and passed into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.'^ So I, too, when, in the early hours of the morning, I open the pages of the Symposium, Apology, Phsedrus, Gorgias, or the Republic, and read only a few pages, am carried, in an instant, into a different world, away from the belittling life of the present, into a serener and larger atmosphere. I catch a glimpse of the beautiful life of ancient Greece, and especially Athens, with its temples and groves and pa- laestra, its young men at their games, the elder ones conversing gravely on themes of the high- est interest to the soul. Above all, I see that noblest figure in the history of the human race, after the Saviour 111 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY himself, Socrates, the deep, original thinker, the kindly, unassuming teacher of all m^en who cared to listen to him, "uttering words of beauty and freedom, the friend of man, holding communion with the EternaP'; not troubled with ambition for wealth or fame or political and social rank; exemplifying in his own life his own ideal of the philosopher, the lover of truth and hater of falsehood ; with all his desires absorbed in the interests of knowl- edge; having no meanness in him, for he is the spectator of all time and all existences, and in the magnificence of this contemplation regarding the life of man as nothing to him, and without fear of death; of a social, gra- cious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance; one who learns easily, who repaembers and does not forget, who is a har- monious, well-regulated mind, and to whom truth flows sweetly by nature. Who can fail to be uplifted when he comes into contact with such a character as this? And like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic, I hear his voice saying: "O Cal- licles, I am persuaded of the truth of these things, and I consider how I shall present my soul whole and undefiled before the Judge in that day. Eenouncing the honors at which 112 BEADING FOR ENTERTAINMENT the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and when the time comes, to die. And to the utmost of my power I exhort all other men to do the same. And I exhort you also to take a part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict" ; and again, I hear him uttering that most beautiful of all ancient prayers with which he ends his discourse with Phsedrus: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods, who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. Anything more? That prayer is enough for me.'' And, finally, I see him in the little prison at Athens discoursing of the immor- tality of the soul, gently refusing to make his escape from the unjust death imposed upon him by the laws of Athens, going to his last sleep with such calmness and tranquillity and peace that I too have felt as Phaedo did, when he said of Socrates, "His mien and his lan- guage were so noble and fearless in the hour of death that to me he appeared blessed." 113 POETRY AND POETS 116; Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares — The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! — Wordsworth. 116 CHAPTER V Poetry and Poets I HAVE already spoken of my love for read- ing, a love going back to my childhood. This fondness for reading has been universal, has extended to all -sorts and conditions of books, has been closely connected with an intellec- tual curiosity and a certain thirst for knowl- edge for its own sake; it has at times taken the form of a pastime, desire for entertain- ment, and in this way has found satisfaction in history, science, biography, travel, novels, and books of general literature. There is one phase of it, however, which has been deeper than all the rest, which sums up, so to speak, and which has imparted, above all other kinds of reading, a certain feeling of personal love. This is poetry. I cannot tell when I began to feel this love for poetry. Away back in the mist of childhood years I can see that it existed, and amid all the vicissitudes of life it has continued to broaden and deepen, until to-day it seems to include in itself all 117 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the charm I have found in music^ or the plastic arts, in nature, the joys of home and friends, the beauty of woman, the charm of innocent childhood, and the deeper aspirations of the soul toward the spiritual world. There is an irresistible fascination for me in all poetry. I can read certain poems over and over again and never get tired. Scores of times, literally, I have read, in whole or in part, such poems as Gray's Elegy, Words- worth's Tintern Abbey, Spenser's Epithala- mium, the sonnets of Shakespeare, Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, certain odes of Horace, and the songs of Heine and Goethe, and ever with increased pleasure and a deeper appreciation of their beauty. Often a few lines of poetry will have a re- freshing and strengthening influence on my tired mind and soul. Just a^ after a day's toil, tired and nervous, troubled in spirit, it may be, discouraged and unhappy, I have found rest, peace, and uplift in walking to- ward the setting sun, or lying on some sunny slope overlooking a wide landscape; just as music often has relaxed the tension of soul and spirit, so, in the same or a similar way, a few lines of poetry can rest, calm, cheer, strengthen my mind, giving it a touch of some- 118 POETEY AND POETS thing higher than the little round of daily tasks, a sense of eternal beauty in the world around me. Later came the more intellectual element in my reading of poetry. It was no longer a care- free wandering through the flowery fields of song. The new ideals of scholarship which I learned in college and university study, the de- sire to obtain an adequate general conception of the world's best literature, the spirit, in short, I have tried to describe in Chapter III brought about a new element in my feeling for poetry. I now began to read the poets as a whole, the lesser as well as the greater, not only the good but the bad and mediocre pas- sages, that can be found in the works of even the greatest; striving to get a true conception of the position the poet in question occupied in the literature of his own land as well as in the world's literature; the development of the poet's genius, the influences that shaped his work, and the influence he himself exerted on others ; the way in which he reflected and in- terpreted the thoughts, fancies, aspirations of his own time and civilization. Yet this intellectual system of studying poetry did not destroy my old feeling of per- sonal love; and the long hours of study, the 119 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY search for sources and parallels, historical and other influences, were brightened and cheered by a sense of elevated thoughts, up- lifting ideals, noble views of life, and unfor- getable figures of gallant men and gentle women, making beautiful the rime in which they are enshrined. Why do I read the poets, then? Surely, not merely for the sake of cul- ture, or to be able to talk more or less intelli- gently about them, but, rather, because of the deep and thrilling experiences I have had in communing with them. Does a man who has climbed the snowy peak of some Alpine moun- tain, with its memories of blue sky above, green valleys below, snow-fields and glaciers all around, the sense of rest and peace that comes after every power of mind and body has been exerted to the utmost, and the peace of the mountains has entered his soul — does such a man, I say, ever forget that experience? Does a man ever forget the golden days of youth when for the first time he meets the one being in all the world who is all and all to him ; when all nature about him took on a new and strange beauty and meaning; when the stars seemed to look down on him with kindly interest; when the birds sang more sweetly than ever before; when the flowers seemed to 120 POETRY AND POETS be brighter and the whole world full of some- thing he had never known before? It is be- cause poetry keeps fresh these feelings through- out the years ; because it gives us glimpses of ennobling experiences of others; because it hangs a vaporous mist of beauty over all things ; because it makes us see that beside the petty and sordid side of humanity there is a heroic, kindly, sympathetic side; because it shows us back of the cosmic terror of nature the nameless charm of sunrise and sunset, of hill and valley ; because it shows us the beauty of family life, and elevates the humble house- hold duties till they shine aloft like stars ; and, finally, because it joins hands with philosophy and religion and points the way to a higher spiritual life, where "all broken fragments shall be made whole, all enigmas solved, all legitimate desires shall be satisfied" — it is, I say, because poetry does this, that I have loved it all my life. In speaking of the poets as above, of course, I have in mind chiefly those whom I have learned to love, and whom I read over more or less regularly every year. There are some of the poets of various times and tongues whom I have read primarily from an intellectual motive, a desire to complete my knowledge of 121 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY a period, a phase of literature, to trace an in- fluence, or round out my general view of litera- ture. Yet invariably afterward comes the deeper, more uplifting pleasure that is the peculiar function of all true poetry to give. This has been especially true of my experi- ence with the classic poets of Greece and Eome. Early in life I began the study of Greek and Latin by myself; and I read practically all of Livy and Herodotus, thinking at that time that I ought to finish one book before beginning another ; for reading by extracts was unknown to me. I did this at night, after the day's work, and the pleasure must have been great, or I should not have been able to keep it up so long. But it was a purely intellectual pleasure, the sense of learning a new lan- guage, of acquiring a vocabulary, of overcom- ing difficulties, solving problems of syntax, of knowing something of two such famous lan- guages as Greek and Latin. For in those early, boyish days I felt as much admiration for a man who knew Greek as the Feinmes Savantes of Moliere felt for the pedantic Vadius. Afterward, in college, I went over most of the classic poets, doing work for spe- cial honors in the Greek dramatists, all this with pleasure and profit. Yet, after all, ex- 122 POETRY AND POETS cept in the case of some of the Latin poets, my real enthusiastic and abiding love for the ancient poets has flowered late, long after a similar love for the modern poets, and has formed, as it were, the crowning point of the development of my love for poetry in general. Of the Greek poets I have never been able to penetrate deeply into Pindar, for I have never had the opportunity to study him as he ought to be studied. Something of ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides I had read in col- lege, but it has only been in later years that I have had time and opportunity to go over them so often and thoroughly as to form some adequate personal estimate of their real quality. I have done this, for the most part, in translations; for, though the Greek of Homer has become easy to me, that of the dramatists is not so, and, like Montaigne, I am not able to seize it a la volee. In this way much of the greatness of the Greek tragic writers has escaped me, but even so I have found delight in reading over their works so often as to have the plots and general theme of their dramas fiixed in my mind; to have gained at first-hand a clear conception of the essential features of the classic drama, and thus possess the 123 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGKAPHY absolutely necessary basis for tracing the development of the drama down through the ages, through Seneca among the Latins, through the adaptations and translations of the Kenaissance, to Corneille and Kacine in France and their imitators in Germany, Italy, and England. Nay, it is only by tracing this classic influence of the Greek dramatists in the sixteenth century in England, and follow- ing out the contest between it and the indige- nous mediaeval liturgical drama, the mys- teries and miracle plays, based on the religious services in the Eoman Church, that I have been able to see the cause for the different development of the drama in France and Eng- land; hoAV in the former country the classic influence drove back the mediaeval influence and reigned supreme for two hundred years; how, on the other hand, Shakespeare turned chiefly to the Romantic, mediaeval elements, and by his mighty genius caused them to pre- vail over the classic influence. But far more valuable than all this has been the deeper pleasure that I have had in reading over these old Greek plays, the pleasure that comes from the contemplation of a great genius, from the sight of the majesty of JEschylus, his lofty grandeur of conception, his profound piety 124 POETRY AND POETS and noble morality, his stern manliness of thought, his unfaltering faith in a universe watched over by an unseen power, in an ever- lasting law of righteousness and justice, which is sure at last to punish crime and reward virtue. An equal though different pleasure has also come to me from the study of Euripides, less sublime than JEschylus, less harmonious than Sophocles, yet perhaps more akin to the mod- ern mind, by the larger share he gives to the purely human elements in his drama; the changing of the tragic outcome from the out- side Fate to the inner causes due to the con- flict of warring passions; and especially the introduction of sexual love as the cause of the tragedy, as in Hippolyte and Phaedra, begin- ning that long line of famous tragedies in all ages and lands, from Tristan and Iseult of the Middle Ages to the Francesca da Rimini of Dante, the Romeo and Juliet of Shake- speare, and the Marguerite of Faust. Of all the Greek dramatists, however, Sophocles has most appealed to me, not only because of the noble characters, such as CEdipus, blindly suffering, yet purified by suffering; Antigone, one of the fairest figures of ancient literature, more ready to join in lov- 125 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY ing than in hating, and preferring death to the neglect of duty; Neoptolemus, the ingenuous youth, ready to fight and die in honoraible warfare, yet rebelling against victory won by deceit and falsehood ; but also because of the spirit of the plays — the large, serene person- ality of the poet himself, whose heart was stirred by all noble things, and hated all that was base and low, who prized the beauty of noble womanhood, who loved with lofty patriotism his own Athens, the charm of which has never been more beautifully expressed than in the CEdipus Colonus ; his sense of the infinite pathos and pity of the sadness of the human race, with all its boasted power, where even the path of glory leads but to the grave ; above all, his belief in a higher spiritual and moral power, which watcher over the affairs of men, apportioning out rewards to the wicked and righteous alike, and which it is better to obey even to the death, when the laws of men and God come in conflict. A closer appreciation, one based on direct contact with the poet in his own tongue, has come to me in the case of the Latin poets. Of Vergil and Lucretius I shall speak later. Here I may say a few brief words about my expe- rience with the minor poets. For some years 126 POETRY AND POETS now I have made it a practice to go over the poems of most of the Latin poets contained in the well-known Teubner's school edition, which, with their excellent introductions and notes, give me just what I want for my pur- pose, that is, a general conception of the es- sential qualities of the poets. In this way I have come to have a better idea of the ex- traordinary virtuosity of Ovid, his brilliant fancy and powers of invention, though his lack of sincerity and of genuine feeling pre- vents him from touching my heart or imagina- tion. The reading of the Metamorphoses has, moreover, made me familiar with a multitude of fables, stories, and motifs which reappear countless time in European literature since then — such well-known episodes as those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Hero and Leander, Nar- cissus and Echo, Proserpina and Pluto, and many others. It has thus been brought home to me how necessary Ovid is, not only to the student of Latin literature, but to the student of European literature as a whole. A peculiar charm has invested for me the reading of the great elegiac writers, and I never tire of going over the most famous ele- gies of such men as Tibullus, with his deep power of feeling, his gentle nature, his love for 127 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Celia, and his almost modern sentimental love for country life, for the rural scenes arid idyllic surroundings amid which he had been brought up; or Propertius, the greatest of all Roman elegiac poets, with his perfection of form, his consummate skill in adapting to the Latin language the finest elements of the Alexandrian school, especially Callimachus; and, in spite of the conventionality of all these means of expression, the sincerity of his emotions, which go straight to the heart of the reader, emotions shown especially in his love for Cynthia, that beautiful example of the highborn Roman lady, full of Greek cul- ture herself, a poetess and singer, whom Pro- pertius declares he loves more than all the riches of the world, and who is to him at the same time home, father and mother. Per- haps one of the noblest elegies in any language is that famous one on the death of Cornelia, the regina elegiarum^ as Scaliger called it, where the poet shows us the faithful and lov- ing wife of Paulus gently beseeching her hus- band not to mourn over her death. But I have experienced a still deeper per- "sonal interest in Catullus, "tenderest of Roman poets,'' whose sad life, sincere feel- ings, and genuine power somehow remind me 128 POETRY AND POETS of Frangois Villon in the fifteenth century, and Alfred de Musset in the nineteenth cen- tury. My first real acquaintance with him was acquired through Rohde's edition, a num- ber of years ago. Since then I have read him, at least in part, nearly every year, and I have found an unequaled fascination and charm in the few brief poems where he tells of his love for a bad yet beautiful woman, his re- peated efforts to shake off the chains of a shameful passion, his piteous appeals to the gods, not, indeed, to make her love him in return, or — what is impossible — to make her pure, but to give him strength to break away himself. I know of no more touching poetry in any language than the two lines of what has been called the shortest, saddest, and most beautiful poem in the Latin language, Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and love; wherefore do I that? perchance you ask: I know not; but I feel 'tis so, and torment fills my soul. Equally beautiful with these lines are those in which time and again the deep, undying love for his brother breaks forth, whose death in a distant land drew from Catullus lines of incomparable pathos and beauty, especially in the little poem of only ten lines, which be- 129 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY gins with the words, ^^Multas per gentes/^ and ends with the wailing tenderness of the far-e- well words, "Atque in perpetuum^ frater^ ave atqiie vale^^ — "Farewell forever, brother mine; once more farewell."^ It has become fashionable in later years to depreciate the genius of Horace, one well- known English critic, for instance, declaring that the Odes are not poetry, but vers de socieUy "bright, scentless flowers," a shallow stream flowing through a "runnel exquisitely smooth"; that Horace had really no love for nature, or anything else that forms the subject of his poetry. Yet it seems to me that this destructive criticism goes too far. Men have not loved for naught this poet of ancient Rome two thousand years ago; there must be some- thing more than mere superficial technical skill that has won for Horace the love of so many of the world^s distinguished men; that has stamped his influence on a whole category of lyrical poetry from the days of the Renais- sance down to our own times. As for my own 1 A thousand years later we find the same passionate cry over the death of a beloved brother in Saint Bernard: " We loved each other in life; why by death are we divided ? From this time on to survive thee is labor and grief, I shall but live only in bitterness and sorrow. Flow out, flow out ye eager tears! since he who would have hindered you, himself has passed away." Similar lines have been written in our own times by Carducci and Matthew Arnold. 130 POETRY AND POETS personal experience, I am well aware of his failings, his lack of deep feeling, whether he treats of love or nature, or the more serious side of life. I know^ that, although a reflective poet, one who has never been equaled in the art of weaving poetry and philosophy together in unforgettable lines, yet his view of life is one-sided; that his philosophy deals al- together with the life that now is, and as for the life beyond the grave, like Autolycus, he "sleeps out the thought of it." His mind is full of the shortness of life, a thought that he repeats countless times. Time flies, we are not sure of the coming day; then why should we waste the present in useless cares? Let us enjoy life while it is here — "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.'' Yet this is not all. There is genuine profit to be found in the doctrine, repeated many times in the Odes and Satires, that wealth and power and social rank cannot keep out trouble and unhappiness; that peace and inner har- mony can come alone from that spirit of con- tent which takes, without complaint, what- ever fortune may please to give. Such are some of the things in Horace that I have found and taken pleasure in. He does not appeal to the mystical, dreamy, sentimental part of 131 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY me, but, rather, to the sense of form, and the rather envious admiration I have always had of the cool-headed, logical common sense man of the world. He shares in this respect the feelings I have had for Montaigne and Moliere. I can take up the Odes and Satires at any time, and read over and over the favorite lines and poems, and receive every time a new pleasure and profit. For, after all, for a man of my temperament, apt to think too much over the mysteries of life, it is a good thing to come out into the broad light of everyday life, to see men as they are, with their foibles and shortcomings, worthy of our pity, if not respect; to learn the lesson of content with what we have, of indifference to wealth, po- sition, and power, to cultivate the spirit of moderation in all things, to enjoy the present moment, not to worry about the future, to be faithful to our friends, and, finally, to see the approach of the inevitable step we all must take, not with fear and trembling, but calmly and peacefully, thankful for the life that has been ours so long. My fuller knowledge and chief reading of the French and Italian poets has been closely connected with my teaching and writing. Every year it has been my pleasure, as well 132 POETRY AND POETS as duty, to go over with my classes the writers of these two great nations, to point out their role played in the development of modem literature, as well as the characteristic feature of the writers themselves. For some reason or other, the Italian poets, taken as a whole, have won my affection most after the English. Of course professional interest may have something to do with this; but the musical genius of the language, that instinct of beauty innate in all Italians, the leading role played in the development of modem civilization, all have added their charm to the personal talent or genius of the individual poet. One of the elements of my interest in Italian poetry has been more or less intellectual, the effort to trace its development, from the first introduction of the poetry of the Troubadours into Sicily and central Italy, where it laid the foundation of Italian poetry, to see how the conventional traits of the Provengal poets became spiritualized in Dante, and how later Petrarch made known to all Europe the true love-lyric of modern times. I found a similar pleasure in seeing how the old French Ro- mances were transformed into the Orlando Furioso and how they were harmonized by the A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY extraordinary skill of Ariosto with all the fonns of classic literature and art of the Renaissance. Ariosto himself I have enjoyed for his won- derful gift of style, for his inimitahle power of story-telling, his wise and shrewd reflec- tions on life, which mark the beginning of each canto, his quiet, ironical smile while re- lating some prodigious feat of arms; his immortal figure of Angelica, type of the Ren- aissance woman, and the brilliant combination of beauty, luxury, and joy in nature and all forms of art that make the Orlando Furioso the consummate type of the Renaissance in Italy, as Spenser's Faery Queen and Shake- speare's plays are in England. Tasso's charm for me has consisted in the Vergilian spirit of his epic, in the Romantic episodes of Clorinda and Tancred, Sophronia and Orlando, the spirit of melancholy that hovers over the whole poem, behind which I see the strange, pathetic figure of the poet himself, that child of genius, morbid, super- stitious, half insane, too delicate and sensitive for the rough struggle of this world, yet win- ning the love of all true hearts by his amiable disposition, and, above all, the type of the modern sentimental poet. 134 POETRY AND POETS Very different is the picture that rises in my mind as I think of Petrarch. Here the interest is, more than in the case with most poets, a double one, a literary and a personal one. On the former side I have found in him the continuation of the Troubadours and the early poets of Sicily and Tuscany, the unat- tainable master in the art of love-song, the highest example of the perfect harmony of subject-matter and form in modern times ; the founder of modern lyrical poetry, the fore- runner and model of Spenser and Shakespeare^ Eonsard and Du Bellay, the singer of the newly discovered beauty of the world of nature and art, the worshiper of woman as the expression of the Ehvig Weibliche^ not now de- scribed in the conventional figures of the Courts of Love, or the mystic symbols of Dante and Michael Angelo, but woman as she is in herself, lovely, bewitching, exerting an unconquerable fascination as she moves in and out of the brilliant life of the early Ren- aissance — A woman not too fair or good For human nature's daily food. But, more than all this, Petrarch has been to me the first modern man, the one who gi ve the most powerful impulse to the Renaissance, 135 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the Columbus of modem civilization, as he has been called, whose multiform interest in nature, science, geography, classic literature, archaeology, and criticism opened the way for all the various elements of modem civiliza- tion; who combined in one the humanist, scholar, archaeologist, lover of nature, patriot, traveler, the glory of his own country and of all the world. Beneath all this I have found a still deeper interest in the inner life of the man, the first individual as compared with the composite life of the Middle Ages; with his tendency to melancholy and pessimism, the forerunner of that brooding, self-analyzing, overwhelming and paralyzing Welt-schmerz so character- istic of the Romantic poets of later times; with that strange contrast in his nature, his complex, ever self-contradictory, subjective state of mind. As I read his group of Sonnets and Songs to Laura, I see his mind constantly tossed back and forth between his love for an earthly woman and his conviction that he should love God alone. In his letters I see him, Avhen at rest, desiring to be on the move ; at Vaucluse longing to travel; when travel- ing, yearning for the rest of his quiet home. In all his works I see him filled with a sense 136 POETRY AND POETS of the vanity of all human things, yet con- sumed with a desire for earthly glory; simple in his tastes, yet spending much of his time in the courts of princes; everywhere and in every period of his life buffeted by the vary- ing moods of his spiritual combat. And, finally, I see him in that last hour, dying, as he had wished, while engaged in reading his beloved books, with a volume of Homer clasped to his bosom : Dead he lay among his books; The peace of God was in his looks. Of the modern Italian poets two have espe- cially won my admiration — Leopardi and Car- ducci. My attention was attracted to the former when a boy, by an article in the Edin- burgh Review by W. E. Gladstone. Since then I have read him again and again, full of compassion for the utter depression and sadness of his life, admiration for his ex- traordinary knowledge of classic literature, his gift of expression in prose and especially in poetry. His pessimism was not superficial and literary, as appears to be the case often in Byron, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, but is sincerely profound, crushing, applied not only to himself, but to all men, a spirit summed up in the words of Amiel : ^^Noiis sommes tous des 137 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY condamnes a mortJ^ The higkest poetic ex- pression of the sadness of life, the lachrymae rerum^ is found in the Night Chant of a No- madic Asiatic Shepherd, especially in the figure of an old man stumbling along, tattered and torn, only at last Into that vast abhorr'd abyss to faU Headlong, and find therein Oblivion of all. Giosue Carducci, scholar, professor, patriot, student of classic and Renaissance literature, despiser of modern sentimental Romanticism, anti-clerical and religious neo-pagan, loyal upholder of the Unity of Italy, has often seemed to me the greatest poet in Europe, since the death of Tennyson and Browning. Beautiful is the poem Ruit Rora, the Jieure exquise of the twilight; beautiful, yet full of cosmic sadness the Monte Mario; still more beautiful and sadder are the lines on the Certosa at Bologna, when he thinks of the dead, not as at rest after life's fitful fever, not as among the innumerable company of just men made perfect in the presence of God and the angels, but lying in the cold and darkness of the moldering earth, shut out for- ever from the beauty and sweetness of human life, giving voice to their envy of those happy 138 POETRY AND POETS mortals still living in the world of sunlight above : Blessed are ye who walk along the hillsides Flooded with the warm rays of the golden sun. Down here it is cold. We are alone. 0, love ye the sun! Shine, constant star of Love, on the life which passes away. I do not think I can speak with the same personal love of the French poets, except MolierCj and a few others, whom I shall dis- cuss later. And yet French literature has been my favorite study, chiefly, however, as I have already said, because of its predomi- nating role in the development of ; European literature. Prom the purely aesthetic side, I have admired the classic form, psychology, and tenderness of Eacine; the lofty senti- ment of Corneille; the perfect form, logic, common sense, and dignity of Boileau; the wit, sprightly humor, perfect mastery of form, and the savoir vivre of La Fontaine. In the field of French poetry much of my read- ing has been intellectual, but what I have especially enjoyed in the poetry of other na- tions, the harmony of rhythm, the music of verse, I find more or less wanting to them. There are some exceptions to this, however, such as Frangois Villon, in the fifteenth 139 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY century — student, drunkard, debauchee, thief, with the stain of blood upon his hands, and yet whose utter sincerity, poignant pity for himself and others, his sense of the evanescence of all earthly things, are summed up in the famous line, ^^Mais ou sont les neiges d^antanf^^ All this has drawn me, with the triple cord of pity, admiration, and love, to this "Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire." Something of the same feeling I have had for Alfred de Musset and Paul Verlaine, four hundred years later; they too were sinful and weak, yet likewise with a strange yearning af- ter the spiritual life, a deep remorse, an utter sincerity in all they wrote. Other French poets whom I have read with feelings of genu- ine enjoyment are the melodious, sad, and deeply religious Lamartine, the titanic Victor Hugo, at times piling Pelion upon Ossa, in the attempt to scale Olympus, and then writ- ing lines and passages of ineffable poetry ; the Parnassian Le Conte de Lisle, w^ith his im- personal and impeccable Poemes Antiques; the philosopher Sully Prudhomme, atheist, yet in love with the ideal ; aghast, as Tennyson was, at the thought of infinite space and time, at the hopeless outcome of the cosmic drama, 1 But where are the snows of yester-year? 140 POETRY AND POETS and expressing his fears in the same mood that Matthew Arnold had when writing his ^^Dover Beach/' In general I have felt a deeper heart-love in the case of the German poets, and naturally so. For poetry is the peculiar province of German literature. French prose is unap- proached. Neither German nor English has anything to compare with it. But in poetry the very genius of the French language, as well as the fundamental lack of the metaphysical, transcendental element in French character, prevents it from producing poetry such as we find in German and English. The German nature is deep and dark and tender ; it is more inclined to sentimental and romantic love, and especially to the deeper, more mystical ele- ments of religion. Hence it comes to pass that the chief glory of German literature is in its poetry. No sweeter songs in the world can be found than those of Heine and Goethe. But even in the naive songs of the people we find the element of poetry deeper than in almost any other race, containing as they do deep re- flections on the pathos as well as the joy and beauty of life; such is the well-known song, ^'Freut euch des Lebens/^ Annchen von Thau- rau, and especially that most beautiful of all 141 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY Germaii songs — "Das MailUfterl/^ with its un- forgettable refrain, ^^Der Mensch hat rtur einen einzigen Mai/^ My experience with the German poets began many years ago, but my fuller knowledge of them was acquired during my student days at the University of Berlin. The famous Reclam Universal'Bibliothek furnished me with easily acquired editions not only of the great poets but of the secondary ones as well. It was thus that I read such poets as Holty, Holderlin, Lenau, as well as Uhland, Leasing, Heine, Goethe, and Schiller. My university studies brought me especially in contact with the older wi*iters of German literature, from the Hildebrand's Lied down to Sebastian Brant and Hans Sachs. The study of such books a*s the Low Saxon Heliand, Otfrid's Evangelien- buch, and others, was largely philological and historical. Genuine pleasure I found in the Nibelungenlied, under the guidance of Wil- helm Scherer, as well as in Gottfried von Strasburg's Tristan und Iseult; Hartmann von Aue's Arme Heinrich, and Wolfram von Eschenbach's noble version of Chretien de Troyes' Parsifal, in which the French tale of chivalrous romance is metamorphosed into a lofty symbol of the final triumph in man of 142 POETRY AND POETS the spiritual aspiration over mere desire for earthly honor and glory. Of especial charm were and have ever been to me the lyrical poems of Walther von der Vogelweide. As a boy I had read of him in Longfellow's poem; and when, many years afterward, I sat in the dark and dingy lecture room at the University of Berlin, listening to the interpretation of Pro- fessor Roediger, the poetic charm of the old mediaeval poet shone above the musty sur- roundings and the learned philological and historical explanation of the Herr Professor. I have read these poems, many of them again and again since then, with ever-increasing pleasure, a pleasure strangely enough far greater than I have had in the poetry of the Troubadours, whom the German poet followed so closely in theme and form. But the conven- tional motif of the Provencal poets became in the hands of their German followers what the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes became in the hands of Wolfram von Eschenbach; and in reading Walther von der Vogelweide I have been conscious of a personality full of genuine love for nature and virtuous womanhood, of high political and religious ideals, and, as the creeping steps of age approach him, touched with a sense of the unreality of life, as genuine 143 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY and deep as that of Prospero in The Tempest and crying out in his last poem, "Ow^ war sint verswunden alliu mlniu jar! 1st mir min leben getroumet, oder ist ez war?"^ While studying these older writers at the university I did not neglect the modern poets, steeped myself in Lessing's plays, Heine's wonderful lyrics, and read Goethe and Schil- ler. Poets are like ordinary men in the variety of their character and personality. Some we admire but cannot love, while others inspire in us not only feelings of admiration, but an almost personal affection as well. The study of those whose view of life is cynical or pes- simistic leaves us saddened and dejected, while others lift us above the cares and sor- rows of the everyday world to a higher, se- rener atmosphere. Among the latter Schiller especially appeals to me; and ^Vhen in the sessions of sweet, silent thought'^ I meditate on the great writers it has been my good for- tune to know, this is the picture that rises in my mind of the outer and the inner life of this lovable man and inspiring poet. I see his early life in the little village of 1 Alas! where have all my years disappeared? Is my life a dream or is it true? 144 POETRY AND POETS Marbach, where he was born in 1759; I see him surrounded by the various members of his family — his father, strong, upright, religious, full of ambition for himself and his son; his sister Christophine, who became his constant companion through all the daj^s of his youth ; but especially his mother, a poet by nature if not in actual words, full of deep religion, climbing with her children on Easter Day a near-by hill and there telling them the story of the resurrection of Christ, the journey to Emmaus, with such power to touch their child- ish hearts that all fell to their knees, praying with tears in their eyes to the risen Saviour. I see him in the military school at Stuttgart, ruled as with a rod of iron by the Duke, his master, the petty tyrant of the little German principality. I see his unhappiness, his ef- forts to express himself in poetry, the pro- hibition of the Duke, the representation of his first drama, the Robbers, that famous cry of revolt against the trammels of formal society ; I see the reprimand he received, and, finally, his fiight from his native land. I see the long years that follow, his beautiful friendship with Goethe, his professorship at Jena, surrounded by envious colleagues, yet winning the ad- miration, respect, and love of the best minds 145 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY among the students by the high plane on which he gave his lectures on universal history, drawing them to him by his inspiring ideas, infusing life into the dry facts of history, and, above all, in the words of his recent biog- rapher, giving ^^his young friends to take out into life with them what is more influential than any learned instruction, and what experi- ence shows is alone remembered with grati- tude — the memory of a great, pure-minded personality, a man indeed.'' And, finally, I see him suddenly stricken with that illness which left him an invalid for life, with the shadow of the unknown hov- ering above him, until that beautiful death scene, when, being asked how he felt, he an- swered, "Better and better, happier and hap- pier!'' and, asking to have his bed moved to the window, gazed long and deeply at the setting sun, and so bade farewell to this world. I see the gradual development of his inner life, surely one of the most beautiful in the an- nals of literature: the deep religious instinct inherited and fostered by his mother; his belief that joy is the end of all things, the creative power of nature, and the goal toward which the whole universe is moving; that God isi infinite love, and the more we love the 146 POETRY AND POETS nearer we come to him. I see his passionate love for study, for philosophy and history, and especially for the works of the great poets, whether in ancient or modem times. I see his own creations, the Robbers of his days of "storm and stress," the calmer dramas of Don Carlos, Maria Stuart, William Tell, his his- torical and philosophical essays. But above all I see the varied forms of his lyrical poetry, wherein is reflected the personality of one "to whom life was an unending opportunity for penetrating into the essence of things, for find- ing unity back of contrast," and who ever sought to realize the prayer of Socrates, "Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outer and the inner man be at one." I see him illustrating in his own life the doctrine he teaches himself, that "the man who wants to be himself, who strives for inner harmony, must be a stranger to his surroundings, a stranger to his time; he must remove himself from the belittling ambitions of the multi- tude, must scorn all participation in the quest for outward success, must fill himself with what the best and finest of all ages have dreamed and accomplished ; he must dwell in the idea of the beautiful." It is this worship of the beautiful and the 147 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY ideal that has made Schiller so beloved by his fellow countrymen, and the type of that aspi- ration of man to>ward something far removed from the shreds and patches, the sorrows and crimes of the actual world in which we live. All these things have been summed up in that most wonderful of all poems of modern times, The Ideal and Life, a poem in which phi- losophy and poetry are one, a poem which has taken possession forever of the human heart, and which illustrates more than any other the words of Emerson : ^^So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she de- taches and sends away from it poems or songs, a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious off- spring, clad with wings, which carry them fast and far and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul." In this poem we see the double realm of the material and the spiritual worlds. In the former is the body, subject to discord, sin, suffering and final death. In the latter is the homeland of the soul and the dwelling-place of God himself, full of all beauty and perfection, whose desire to express his own infinite love 148 POETRY AND POETS shows itself in the universe at large. And man, though banished for a time in the king- dom of this world, has a soul immortal, which may share the perfection of God himself. Above the flux and flow of the material uni- verse is the infinite unity of the Divina Time and space are mere states of the mind; the only real things are God and the soul. In the beautiful words of Hegel, who did so much to form the inner life of Schiller: "All that awakens doubt and perplexity, all sorrow and care, all limited interests of flnitude, we leave behind us on the banks and the shoals of time. And as on the summit of a mountain, removed from all the hard distinctions of detail, w^e calmly overlook the landscape, so by religion we are lifted above all obstructions of flnitude. It is in this native land of the spirit that the waters of oblivion flow, from which it is given to Psyche to drink and forget her sorrows; for here the darkness of life becomes a trans- parent dream-image through which the light of eternity shines in upon us.'' And this is the great service that Schiller has bestowed on mankind — to turn their eyes from the real to the ideal, from the ma- terial to the spiritual, from time to eternity. We are all of us surrounded by sadness, sor- 149 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY row, and affliction; on all sides we see men and women afflicted in body, sick in mind, and troubled in spirit. Wlien these things oppress me more than they ought, I turn to Schiller, and read the lines of his wonderful poem, and listen as he speaks to me: "O cast away the fret and worry of this earthly life, rise on the wings of beauty to the realm of the ideal. And when you have issued forth from the trammels of time and sense into the freedom of the kingdom of thought, lo! the fear and doubt will pass away'' ; For within those fair, celestial regions. Guarded by the bright, angelic legions. Felt no more is sorrow's bitter blast. There the soul from joy no pain shall sever. There all tears shall pass away forever, There the spirit finds its home at last. Lovely as the rainbow iridescent. On the dark cloud's dewy breast. Gleam through veil of sorrow evanescent Azure skies of endless rest. Of all the poets, however, my acquaintance with those of England and America has been earlier, more spontaneous, and more continu- ous. It is from them that I have stored my mind with the largest number of quotations, lines, and passages, which have given me pleas- ure through all the years that have passed 150 POETRY AND POETS since then. I do not know when I first began to read them. Some came to me in the days of early youth, others only later. It was largely a matter of chance. A volume of poetry would fall into my hands; I would come across one in the library. Many com- paratively unread poets to-day became thus the companions of my youth, such, for in- stance, as Akenside, Bloomfield, Collins, Beattie, Young, Thomson's Seasons and Pol- lok's Course of Time. I remember still the vivid impression that the description of "The Last Judgment" in Pollok made on my youth- ful mind, and the dreams it produced the night I finished it. These were the days when I read more eagerly, when mere narration had power over my mind more than it has now; hence the poetic tales of Byron and Sir Walter Scott were eagerly devoured. Byron particularly appealed to my favorite pastime of learning lines, especially his Childe Harold. Among these favorites of my early years were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, especially The Knight's Tale, and even at that early period I was impressed with the kindly spirit, gentle humor, love for books, nature, and men of the poet whose works have been called a 151 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY well of English undefiled. Spenser's Faery Queen I read somewhat laboriously, it must be confessed, for it was only later that my studies in comparative literature, and my desire to get a rounded-out view of all English litera- ture, led me to re-read him in order to trace the influence of mediseval French romances and Ariosto and Tasso in the Faery Queen, the Eoman de Reynard, Mother Hubbard's Tales, and the classic eclogues in the Shepherd's Calendar. To-day I find pleasure in Spenser's richness of rime and melody, beautiful scenes, poetic language. Yet, in general, he is too far away from actual life to draw me to him often. This is not true, however, of what has seemed to me one of the most beautiful poems in English literature, the Epithalamium, nearly all of which I learned by heart years ago, and remember to this day. Form, clearness, epigrammatic statement, extraordinary command over the decasyllabic rimed couplet, early led me to admire — not love — Pope's Essay on Man, Rape of the Lock, Abelard and Heloise, all of which offered exercise to my memory and love for quotable lines. Something of the same may be said for Dryden, and Cowper, whose sad life lends pathetic interest to his poetry, while 152 POETRY AND POETS Johnson's famous paraphrase of Juvenal's Ninth Satire, on the Vanity of Human Wishes, was largely learned by heart. Especial favorites in my boyhood days were Longfellow, Tennyson, and, strangely enough, Swinburne. I read practically all the works of these poets through. The last-mentioned has ceased to attract me very much of late years, and even Longfellow and Tennyson do not occupy the first place in my heart's affec- tion as they did onca But in those early days of my sentimental youth I never tired of read- ing them. Perhaps of all the poets none took posses- sion so completely of my heart and fancy in early youth as Tennyson. I read practically every poem he had written up to that time. I steeped myself in the atmosphere of The Princess, Locksley Hall, Maud, Lady of Shal- ott. Sir Galahad, and all the rest that are en- shrined in the inner chamber of my memory. Especially was I drawn to the Idylls of the King, long before my study of comparative literature and Old French gave them a new meaning. In those early days it was not scholarship that I sought ; I was simply buried in the poetic spirit, carried away to the land of romance, where I seemed 153 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY to hear The great bell tolling far and near; The odd, unknown enchanted gong. That on the road hales men along; That lures the vessel from a star; That from the mountain calls afar; And with a still aerial sound, Makes all the earth enchanted ground. I almost envy myself the pleasure of those days in the reading of Tennyson, with the knightly figures that stalked through the pages — Sir Galahad, whose strength was as the strength of ten; Sir Launcelot of the Lake, with the beautiful symbol of the Holy Grail, and, above all, the tender, loving, unhappy Elaine, as she lay on the boat, sailing slowly up the river, to the palace of the king. Yet as I have grown older the supremacy of Tennyson has given way somewhat to other poets — Shakespeare, Dante, even Browning. To-day he means to me the maker of musical verse, the writer of exquisite language, the most finished of modern authors, resembling in this respect Vergil, whom he so much loved. His works are full of beautiful descriptions, unsurpassed music of verse, language of a consummate artist; they are full of the glam- our of chivalry, the vague, ineffable charm which hovers over The Holy Grail and The 154 POETRY AND POETS Round Table. His songs are exquisite, for his real genius is rather lyrical than epic or dramatic, and even the In Memoriam is only one long series of lyrical expressions, express- ing various states of mind, in the presence of suffering and death, and stirred by the fears and doubts aroused by the wonderful dis- coveries of science in the early nineteenth century. Another one of my youthful idols was Keats, with his wonderful magic of style and haunt- ing sense of beauty, and whose pathetic and tragic story added a deeper and a darker strain to the charm of his poetry. I learned by heart most of the Ode to a Grecian Urn, Sonnet on the First Opening of Chapman's Homer, parts of the Eve of St. Agnes, and that in- comparable last sonnet of his, beginning, ^^Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art." Other favorites of my youth were Gold- smith, whose Traveler and Deserted Vil- lage I read over and over again ; Shelley, with his ethereal lyrics, which attracted me more than his more philosophical longer poems; and certain poems of Coleridge, Bums, and Moore. In later times came the philosophical poets, 155 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGKAPHY such as Clough, Arnold, and Wordsworth. The element of melancholy, religious ques- tioning, passionate love for and communion with nature seen in Matthew Arnold has given him a strong hold upon my later life. The more sober reflections that come with middle age, the interest in the great questions of the whence and whither and why of life, have lent to Arnold's poetry a charm quite different from that spoken of above. It is not in felicity of language or music of form, nor in romantic fancies or touches of love, but, rather, in the deep questions which men had to face in the middle of the nineteenth century, when science had destroyed forever the framework of the universe which lay be- hind the old theology, and shotwed the vast spaces of the new universe, inhabited by countless worlds, moving down the ages to- ward — what? — annihilation or perfection ? This thought, which haunted Tennyson all his life, and which is fought out, in the In Me- moriam, to a more or less confident faith, left Matthew Arnold without God and without hope in the world. There is nothing sadder in modern literature than the elegiac spirit of his poetry, a spirit which, nevertheless, makes up its chief charm ; for they are really 156 POETRY AND POETS elegies lamenting not only the loss of a be- loved friend, or the disappearance of love, but the passing away forever of faith in God, Christ, and the immortality of the soul. Not perfection, but degeneracy, is the fate of man- kind, as he shows in his Future, where we read that The tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us is the plain. Age is not the time of calm or hope, of peace- fully awaiting the entrance to a larger life through the gate of death, but something from which the glory has departed never to return. The whole world itself, nature in all its won- derful beauty, is nothing but an illusion. I sometimes think that the saddest poem in the English language is Dover Beach with its despairing last lines. Fortunately, the last word in English litera- ture has not been spoken by Matthew Arnold. Inclined, it may be, myself too much to the melancholy phase of life, I read, perhaps more than was good for me, such poets as Leopardi and Matthew Arnold. I found an antidote in the most robust, cheerful, and deepest thinker of modern poets, Robert Browning. Brown- ing was not one of my boyhood poets, nor did he share with Longfellow and Tennyson that 157 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY romantic, sentimental worship of my boyish heart. It was not until I went to college that I really began to know him. Two things es- pecially stand out in my memory in regard to him : one was reading the essay by Edward Dowden on Tennyson and Browning, which made a deep impression on me and sent me to the study of Browning in a serious way ; the other was my first reading of the Blot in the 'Scutcheon. This I read, sitting up nearly all night, and finishing it in a deep spirit of poetic ecstasy. It was the same experi- ence as I had had with Dante, when only sixteen years old, reading at midnight the last paragraph of the Vita Nuova; or with Shakespeare, reading Othello, Julius Csesar, or Hamlet. From that time I date my real appreciation of Browning. Not that I have read with unmixed pleasure all that he wrote. Sensitive to form as I have always been, to music of verse, and clear expression, the peculiarities of Browning's genius as seen in many of his poems have produced a sense of discord in the admiration I have felt for him. What I have felt in the highest degree is the spirit of all he wrote: his philosophy of life, his spiritual aspiration, his tenderness for all men and women — even the fallen — his 158 POETRY AND POETS insistence on love as the one thing that alone can ennoble character, can clothe the dark mysteries of fate and the universe with a garment of hope and trust; above all, his vir- ility, his unbounded faith in God, and the ultimate goal of the soul; his contempt for those who fear death, meeting himself the in- evitable step with the spirit of a hero on the field of battle. All this has drawn me very strongly to Browning. I have felt as strongly as any others his well-known failings: his harsh lines, lack of melody and grace in verse, his strange, outlandish words, his oftentimes obscurity of thought and phrase. Yet in later years he has grown more and more in my af- fection ; and more and more I feel his creative power, his deeper and broader reflections on the essential elements of human life, his man- liness of thought, and, above all, his spiritual power. But more than all else, I have found in his poetry a help and comfort, an antidote to the moods of sadness that come upon all men at times, especially at the apparent outcome of the cosmic process as revealed by modern science. This cosmic fear, or terror, brought about by modern science, shows itself in va- rious poets of the nineteenth century, espe- 159 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY cially in Tennyson. The latter^ as Mr. Lyall says, shows "in his earlier writings the shadow of despondency and gloom, a sense of incom- pleteness and failure of life, darkened by meditation on the condition and prospects of the human race. The tremendous expansion of scientific record seems to have affected him like a sentence of inflexible predestination, oyershadowing his delight in the glamour of the world by the foreknowledge of inevitable doom. The vision of the world, dark with grief and graves, of human energy squandered on a planet passing from fire to frost, evi- dently fascinated his mind and filled it with dismay." To me it seems that the mind of Tennyson never fully shook itself loose from the dismal fear; the In Memoriam is a long- drawn-out version of Hamlet's doubt, "To be, or not to be.'' His faith was not robust, and even in his last poem still echoes a dim fear lest his hopes may not be true. It is the one great thing for me to find in Browning an antidote for all these dismal fears, these specters of the cosmic death and desolation. He has cheered and braced me with his unconquerable spiritual optimism, his robust faith in the ultimate welfare of the world, his contempt for despondency and 160 POETRY AND POETS cowardice, his conviction that God is in heaven, and hence "alPs right with the world" ; that there is a witness to God's presence in the soul of man, that "assurance and illumina- tion come to those w^ho follow their noblest instincts and never look back.'' This optimism of his shows itself in his view of love, which is not an evil, or the mere exaggeration of sex-instinct, but the highest thing in life, which is "incompatible with false- hood and purifies and assimilates all other passions to itself"; which leads a man to all that is noble and true and good, and finally; to God himself. His optimism shows itself especially in his belief in a life beyond the grave, where all broken "fragments shall be made whole, all problems solved." It is a brave and inspiring world that we see as we read Browning's works. He seems to say to us all: Don't be afraid of it; there it is lying before you, full of hard work, of long waiting for success, oftentimes of failure and defeat. Yet also full of many beautiful things — autumn's sun shining on the ripened sheaves ; love who "keepeth his vigil on the soft cheeks of the maiden"; high-hearted hopes, sympathy, kindness, heroic deeds, and a thou- 161 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY sand other things that make this life of ours, not a place to crawl through with whining, but to go through like a man, taking fortune's favors or her buffets with equal thanks — Life that dares send A challenge to its end And when it comes, say, "Welcome, friend." And as Browning wrote so he lived and died — bravely fighting his w^ay through all the obstacles and troubles that beset his path, and when assailed by discouragement, crying out, with Paracelsus, "I go to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud. It is but for a time; I press God's lamp Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late. Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." And, finally, as he himself was about to pass from this life to the next, writing that last poem of his, which, as Stopford Brooke says, is like "the last look of the Phoenix to the sun, before the sun lights the odorous pyre from which the new-created bird will spring." Another poet whose real acquaintance I made only in college is Wordsworth. Of course I had known already some of the com- 163 POETRY AND POETS monest of those poems which, to many people, sum up Wordsworth's poetic work. But when I began to study him in all the varieties of his work, not excluding the Excursion and the biographical poems; when I caught a glimpse of his spiritual power, his deep love for hu- manity, and, above all, his wonderful insight into nature, then he took hold upon my heart with a power that has only grown in all these later years. Not that, for me, Wordsworth can be placed beside the three or four great world writers. I can recognize his limita- tions, his commonplaceness in many parts of his poetry, and yet in certain moods of mine, in certain metaphysical experiences, Words- worth affects me as scarcely any other poet ever has done. Shakespeare, Dante, Homer are greater in their universal power and genius, in their influence on the world of lit- erature at large. I find in them unfailing subjects for thought, varied kinds of literary and intellectual enjoyment, uplift in spirit; but the sense of universal beauty, of a spirit pervading all the world of nature, the subtle feeling that comes to me at times as if all inanimate things had a deep meaning, that I can almost understand — this phase of my per- sonal experience finds delight in Wordsworth, 163 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGKAPHY and has largely been developed by him. There are certain poems which at times have seemed to me, each by itself, the most beautiful poems in the English language. Among these I have already mentioned Spenser's Epithalamium and Gray's Elegy. Equal to them in my heart's affection, perhaps superior at times, are the Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, and certain parts of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. Espe- cially the former has been a precious posses- sion to me for years. Long ago I learned it by heart, practically all of it; and countless times throughout the years that have passed since then I may say in Wordsworth's own words, that I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind. With tranquil restoration. What nature would have meant to me with- out Wordsworth I do not know ; but I do know that now she means all in all to me — a refuge, a tranquillizing power, something that lifts my anxious thought out of itself and lays the hand of peace upon my troubled heart; a spirit that answers to mine, an opening into 164 POETRY AND POETS the infinite; the most real of all those experi- ences which make me feel that I am not living in a blind complex of material forces, crush- ing and destroying, with impartial hand, bird and beast, flower and star, body, mind, and soul of man, but, rather, the outward expres- sion of that divine spirit which is in all things. For I too, in my sallies toward nature, after a day's work in classroom or study, when I walk westward on a winter afternoon when the sun is setting, or beside the sea or in the forest in summer time, I too have felt my heart strangely warmed within me; I too have felt That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened; I too have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. And the round ocean and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. As I write these lines I feel welling up in my heart a deep feeling of gratitude to the poet who has meant so much for the spiritual 165 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY* development of my life. I care not what technical faults may be found in his work, what commonplaceness at times, what trivi- ality, what lack of humor, or any other thing which may be charged against him, to me he has been the prophet and teacher of a new spiritual life. I cannot close this chapter without saying a word or two about the lesser known poets of more recent times. It is hard to do justice to one's own contemporaries. Yet there have been a few modern poets some of whose verses have singularly touched my heart and imagi- nation. Such was Sidney Lanier, writing in the last feverish hours of his life the finishing lines of his beautiful poem of The Sun. Such too the whole group of modern vaga- bond poets, representing in strange proximity the lower vices of drinking and debauch with poetic and even spiritual genius of a high de- gree; as in the case of Paul Verlaine, drunk- ard and criminal, a modern Villon, spending his time alternating between prison, cafe, and hospital, yet writing his Bonne Chan- son, and especially that exquisite song in the series called Sagesse, where the poet, lying ill in the hospital, sees out of the window a bit of blue sky, the waving branches of a tree, 166 POETKY AND POETS hears the bells sweetly chiming, and a bird on the tree singing his song, and comprehends that this is true life, simple and tranquil, and yet for him forever lost, and crying out with heart-breaking pathos, *'Qu'as-tu fait, 6 toi que voil§L, Pleurant sans cesse, Dis, qu*as-tu fait, toi que voil^, De ta jeunesse?"^ Equally pathetic are the similar figures in English literature: Francis Thompson, with his strangely beautiful Hound of Heaven, and Ernest Dowson, with his lines. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate. I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream. Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. But most fascinating of all these figures of our own time, the man of genius and poet un- able to bear up his part in the struggle of modern life, succumbing at last in despair, is John Davidson, whose poem, written just before his disappearance from the eyes of men, 1 What have you done, you who are lying here, weeping unceasingly, say, what have you done with your youth? 167 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY has sung itself into my memory ; that poem in which he tells how at last he felt the time had come to find a grave; how he took his staff in hand and wandered forth to find his last abode ; how, in spite of his heavy feet and the steepness of the dusty way, he went on "be- neath the tragic years," climbing alone the rocky path that led him out of time and out of all; and how he bids farewell to all things earthly : FareweU the hope that mocked, fareweU despair, That went before me still and made the pace; The earth is full of graves, and mine was there Before my life began, my resting place. And I shall find it out, and with the dead. Lie dead forever, all my sayings said. Deeds all done, songs all sung, While others chant in sun and rain — "Heel and toe from dawn to dusk. Round the world and home again." Somehow or other this poem, which is the expression of the fate and lot of vast multi- tudes of men and women, marching along the dusty highway of life, seems to me to contain the element of high seriousness that Matthew Arnold finds in all the greatest poetry. 168 THE WORLD-POETS 169 Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise. Silent, upon a peak in Darien. — John Keats, 170 CHAPTER VI The World-Poets I HAVE left for a special chapter those poets who for some reason or other have been classed by the consensus of the best authorities as world-poets; that is, who are not primarily thought of as belonging to any one nation or period, but who are regarded by all nations and all times as peculiarly their own. What- ever may be the merit of Racine or Chaucer or Tasso or Shelley, they certainly do not belong to the same category as Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, or Dante. It is a very diffi- cult thing to give to oneself a clear judgment as to what constitutes greatness in poetry. As Emerson says, there is no luck in literary reputation. If a poet is universally hailed as great by the common verdict of mankind, there must be some reason for it. I have tried sincerely to realize this truth in the case of the poets discussed in this chapter. I know that such a judgment can be gained only after 171 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY long and loving study, that linguistic and historical research is not enough, that their real meaning must sing itself into the reader's mind year after year, must be taken lovingly and sympathetically into one's very heart. Then, too, all men have their different moods, moods when poetry seems cold and tasteless, and, again, moods when it stirs the heart to its inmost depths. We differ in youth and age, in respect to our impressionableness to the power of poetry ; what pleased us once may not please us in later times. We are affected differently in spring and fall, summer and winter, at morning, noon, and night, in crowded city streets or at the seashore or on mountain top, in society or caught in the whirl of business, in time of physical weari- ness, worry, or sickness or gloom; all these things affect our appreciation of poetry. And so when I speak of the great poets in this chap- ter, I take all these things into consideration. I shall endeavor to give the resultant of them and the sum total of what the poets herein discussed have meant to me. There are various explanations of this uni- versal admiration for certain poets of the world's literature. In the case of Homer, for instance, there is the utter simplicity of 172 THE WORLD-POETS thought and style, the perfect power of story- telling, the nobility of the whole and the view it gives of the early life of Greece, fresh with the youth of the world. With Moliere it is his supreme common sense, his sane philos- ophy of life, and his clear vision of what is right in life, his never-fading characters and the form of comedy which he first founded and brought to perfection, and which no one has succeeded in reaching since. It may seem to many somewhat peculiar to class Moliere among the poets discussed in this chapter ; and that not only because many of his plays are written in prose, but because they seem so far away from the spirit that pervades Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and Goethe, that spirit that lifts the thought and action up out of the little things of everyday life into a larger, serener atmosphere, whence life and the world of nature and man are seen more or less against the background of eternity. Even in those plays of Shakespeare which are natu- rally to be compared with Moliere's comedies, we see how different the atmosphere is, the lack in the French writer of that ineffable poetry which permeates the As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, the absence of the element of Romantic love 173 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY and the sentimental features as seen in the English poet's Olivias, Rosalinds, and Bea- trices, as well as the deeper and more touching phases of womanly love and tenderness, all the pathos of "beauty walking hand in hand with anguish the downward slopes that lead to death/^ It is altogether lil^ely that Moli^re suffers more injustice on the part of the world in re- gard to his true genius than any other poet. Yet to me he is, after all, a world-poet, even though the qualities are among those seen mostly in the common walks of life, in the so- cial, business, and practical world. Although he discusses no deep problems of philosophy or religion, is not tormented by the question of the whence and whither and why, is not meta- physical or transcendental, but remains in the everyday life of man, he has seemed to me none the less a deep thinker on the follies and foibles of mankind, a philosopher of the practical sort, who seeks to know the humbler rules that make a harmonious society possible, a teacher whose influence has been sadly underrated by all except those who have seen how deeply he has impressed his views of life on modern so- ciety. For the constant representation on the stage of such masterpieces of sane lehens-phi- 174 THE WORLD-POETS losophie as Les Femmes Savantes, Le Misan- thrope, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme cannot fail to have an abiding influence on those who see them. What I have found to admire in Moliere, and what I have never tired of see- ing, is his unequaled wit, his genuine yet never bitter satire and humor, his perfect dia- logue, his gallery of characters good and bad, the pedant Vadius, the silly blue-stockings Belise and Armande, the moody misanthropic Ariste, the hypocritical Tartuffe, the miserly Harpagon, and the attractive figures of the gay, sensible, frank, and sincere women such as Henrietta and Elise. Above all, I have admired the triumphant common sense that permeates all Moli^re wrote; the absolute justice of his observation of human nature, his love of the sincere and true in all the relations of life, his sense of the fitness of things, his interest in society, in the necessity of acquiring the art of living, his grace and his spirit of analysis, his logical thought, his gift of representing a whole type of characters in one luminous figure, his genius for psychological invention, and power of logical construction, his absolute perfec- tion of adapting form and language to sub- ject — all those qualities that make him, to- 175 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY gether with Montaigne, the consummate type of the French national genius. Also I have found in Moli^re a charm of personality, without which even the greatest genius loses half of its greatness. It is the lack of this that has spoiled for me much of the work of such men as Voltaire, with his vanity and sneers, Victor Hugo, with his im- mense vanity, always quetant Vadmiration of the world, always concerned for the effect, ^^capable de toiitcs les petitesses pour se grandir^' ; or Chateaubriand, with his insuffer- able literary insincerity. In the case of Moli^re I can see behind this kindly satire of his on human follies the man of honor, modest and sincere, amiable, upright, charitable, hat- ing all that is false, untrue, affected, low, or mean and hypocritical ; teaching to all modern civilization the doctrine that sincerity and truth is the basis of personal integrity and the sine qua non of genuine social and political life. I see all this, and I say, "Amen'^ when I hear Goethe call him ^^ein reiner MenscW^ — a genuine man. But, after all, the chief element which dis- tinguishes the world-poets from the others is that subtle something which defies analysis, yet which every fond reader of Homer, Shake- 176 THE WORLD-POETS speare, or Dante feels, what Matthew Arnold has called ^'high-seriousness." Arnold's deep- searching essay on poetry has expressed pro- foundly the feeling I have had for the poets since my earliest childhood. To me this has been the deepest note that I have found in all I have read. It is essentially the same thing I have felt in the presence of the noblest monuments of art, a great statue, or painting, or cathedral. It is the same feeling I have had in certain aspects of nature, the sea at night beneath the stars, the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc at sunset; the same experiences which have come to me in the deeper things of life, which pierce the mysteries of life and death, those feelings which form what we call the personal religious experiences. Nor is it surprising that it should be so, for literature is only the outward expression of inward ex- perience; and as the lesser departments of literature express the more superficial experi- ences of life, so the deep books express the deeper experiences of the soul. Whatever arouses within us the feeling of Infinity, the great Unknown around us, touches us in our deepest essence : the starry firmament, the great ocean, the snowy Alps, the death of Socrates, the crucifixion of the Saviour, the 177 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY famous scene between Saint Augustine and Monica at Ostia, a sunrise or sunset, the fashion of a beautiful face — all these, and many more, reach silently down to the yery sources of our being and produce feelings that are substantially the same. Opposed to these deep experiences, which are but few and far between, rare at most, in some cases never occurring, are the countless ambitions, interests, amusements, trifles of our everyday consciousness — the detail of business, social life, eating and drinking, sports, and recreations. Literature, dealing with all life, deals likewise with these. But just as the number of men is small who are capable of "high-seriousness'' in thinking in actual life, so the number of books of "high- seriousness" is small. There are some books which occupy an hon- orable place in the history of literature which yet have none of this quality. In others there are only short passages which attain unto it, yet these short passages are enough to give immortality to those who wrote them. Here the flashes of high-seriousness are few and far between. Others, like Lucretius and Words- worth, have lived in constant communion with the Infinite, and produced many passages of 178 THE WORLD-POETS "high-seriousness/' followed often, in the case of the latter, by a sudden descent into com- monplace and bathos. This same impression of "high-seriousness" is often produced not only in poetry, but in prose, and is especially the characteristic of the works of men like Plato and Emerson. There are three great poets who maintain a constant level of "high-seriousness," which is not characteristic of passages here and there, but produced by their works as a whole, by conception, by details, by the outer form and inner spirit. At times, in a certain fear of being led away by perfunctory admiration, I have wondered if Homer's fame were not largely conventional; whether he was indeed admired because he was three thousand years old, or whether, as some one has put it, he is three thousand years old because the world has loved him. It is only in recent years that I have come to know by genuine experience his real greatness. In college I had read the Iliad, but I never felt the "pull" of him. After graduation I was engaged in special studies, and had no time to read over my classics. Gradually the desire to know ^^the best that has been thought and said" led me to renew my acquaintance with all great poets. I was 179 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY met by the shadow of Homer on all sides. It was largely by accident, however, that I ma*de him my own. I had spent a year in Italy, and having been asked to write a short history of Italian literature for the Chautauqua read- ing course, found it my duty, as well as pleas- ure, to read all of its literature. Among other books I read the famous translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Monti and by Pinde- monte. Through the medium of an Italian translation I caught for the first time the glamour and beauty of these poems, and the experience of Keats was in every sense my own, for I too felt like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Silent, upon a peak in Darien. I then read the same books in English trans- lations, and felt something of the same charm. And then, all of a sudden, the thought flashed through my mind, "AVhy not try it in Greek?" I did so, and after a good deal of preliminary hard w^ork, I turned a corner in the dark cor- ridor which seems to be the beginning of the study of every language, and saw the fair prospects that lay beyond. Since that time 180 THE WORLD-POETS I have made it an invariable custom to read the Iliad or the Odyssey, on alternate years. A few minutes in the morning, before the day's work begins, have been sufficient to ac- complish this at first difficult but now easy and always delightful task. After reading them many times the language of Homer has become almost as easy as English. I say this for the encouragement of those who, as I my- self did once, think it impossible to keep up their Greek, ^schylus, Sophocles, and Eu- ripides are perhaps too difficult to keep up in the same way, for a busy man ; and with the translations of Jowett and others it is not necessary to read Plato and Thucydides in the original ; but for Homer, anyone with the necessary college training, and the desire and a little hard work, can conquer him. It is not easy to describe the pleasure thus gained. Almost every word is a source of pleasure, and in the words of Lord Macaulay, when he after many years re-read his classics, it seems as if one never really knew before what intellectual pleasure was. I have often wondered if the satisfaction of reading the Greek has not something to do with this pleas- ure; if the reputation of Homer does not af- fect the feelings of the modern reader, just as 181 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the historic, legendary, and poetic associa- tions of the Rhine make many travelers ad- mire it more than our own Hudson. However that may be, the pleasure I have in reading him over and over again is always the same. Fifty or a hundred lines are enough to give tone to the whole day, arouse thoughts that never grow stale, call up pictures that become more beautiful as the years go on. As I pen these lines what a galaxy of beautiful char- acters, scenes, and pictures rise in my memory ! — the memorable dialogue between Glaucus and Diomedes on the field of battle, with the famous words of the former, "The race of men is like the leaves of a tree"; the silent pur- suit, capture, and death of Dolon, the scout, by Ulysses and Diomedes in the dead of the night; the chase of Hector around the walls of Troy, and his death at the hands of Achilles ; the scene in the tent of Achilles, and Priam's prayer for the body of his son ; Andromache's farewell to Hector, and the tender family scene w hen Astyanax is frightened by the wav- ing plumes on his father's helmet; the last words of farewell by Helen to the dead Hector, telling how never an unkind or ungentle word escaped his lips ; the escape of Ulysses from the island of Calypso, Circe, "burning her fragrant 182 THE WORLD-POETS fire and singing her magic song as she weaves at the immortal loom"; Nausicaa, tender, sweet, girlish, pure, and innocent, with her sudden love for the noble stranger cast upon her father's coast ; the banquet in the palace of the king of the Phseacians, Ulysses covering his face with his mantle as the minstrel sings about Troy and the Greeks ; the return of the weary wanderer after twenty years to Ithaca, lying peacefully asleep in the boat of the Phseacians, as it goes cleaving the wine-dark waters of the sea, and lands him on his native isle, as the dawn breaks in the east ; Penelope, the faithful wife; the slaughter of the suitors, down to the little touch of the old dog lying on the doorstep, recognizing his master after twenty years, wagging his tail and dying. All this has power to touch my heart with un- dying interest. Then the scenes of nature in which all this action is enshrined : "the winter landscapes, the lifting of a cloud, the head- land buffeted by the billows, the fields of corn bending beneath the wind, the storm-cloud coming over the sea, the earth black behind the plow''; the garden of the Phseacians, "where the fruit never perishes or fails, winter or summer, where the vineyard is planted in a sunny plot of land, where there are all 183 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY manner of garden beds, and two fountains flowing perpetually fresh and clear." But the greatest charm of all has been the atmosphere of the whole poem, the dewy fresh- ness and beauty of the morning of the world, the utter simplicity of thought and language, the absolute perfection of the art of narration, interrupted only from time to time by some short reflections on the shortness of life and the limitations of human endeavor; above all, the nobility of spirit that pervades the whole, the ^^high-seriousness" which never suffers eclipse, from beginning to the end. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to move in the same high, clear atmosphere, and in them both we see human life against the back- ground of eternity. No wonder that those who have learned to know the compellant charm, the calming influence of those old-world poems, love to turn to them from time to time, that Gladly, from the songs of modern speech Men turn and see the stars, and feel the free. Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, And through the music of the languid hours. They hear like ocean on a western beach. The surge and thunder of the Odyssey. In all the above remarks I do not speak as a Homeric scholar. I have not had the time, 184 THE WORLD-POETS even had I felt the impulse, to study Greek archaeology or philosophy, or to follow the intricacies of Homeric learning. At times this thought comes over me with a sense of dis- couragement, as I see the vast number of books written about the Iliad and the Odyssey, the multitude of critical discussions about every phase of language, meter, text, and antiquities. Yet when I turn again to some well-known and well-loved passage, and feel the sense of peace and calm that comes to me in reading it, I feel that however much I do not know of Homer, what I do know brings to me pleasure and profit. Of the two ancient poets who share with Homer the glory of epic fame, one is entirely different from him and the other in a certain sense a close imitation. My love for Lucretius is something like his own fame — it flowered late. It has only been in recent years, since science has made such marvelous discoveries, and since a new appreciation of nature has come, that men have seen the true greatness of the poet-philosopher. Although I had read Lu- cretius in college, in extracts, I never fully ap- preciated him till these maturer years I was fortunate enough to come across an edition by Henri Bergson, whose works on creative evolu- 185 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY tion have recently made him so famous. His edition of Lucretius is a model one, accord- ing to my way of feeling. The introduction, notes, and extracts all work harmoniously toward giving a complete view of the genius of that strange poet of the atomistic phi- losophy. I hardly know why I have been so attracted to Lucretius, but so it is. It is a constant source of delight to see how he has antici- pated the discoveries of modern science, not only in the general subject of the consti- tution of all things out of primordial atoms, but even in the modern science of anthropol- ogy. But these are not the chief things that have charmed me. It is, rather, the majestic ring of his language and meter, his high plane of intellectual power, his love for nature, especially in her grander, sublimer moments, resembling thus the modern feeling; his in- finite pity for mankind, doomed to inevitable destruction in the inexorable processes of the universe; his deep spirit of sadness, that finds especially expression in Book III, where he sums up all the fears and cares and anxieties of this mortal life of ours in language more beautiful than that of any of our modern pessimists — Schopenhauer, Leopardi, or Mat- 186 THE WORLD-POETS thew Arnold. Above all, I have been fas- cinated by that spirit of "high-seriousness^' which pervades all those parts of his poem which are not mere abstracts of the philosophy of Empedocles and Democritus; his power of touching the heart and making it feel the eternal and spiritual all about us. For all these reasons the somber beauty of Lucretius has come to exert a peculiar fascina- tion on me. And in reading him I feel some- thing of the lofty calm and serenity of the poet himself, finding his pleasure, not in things themselves, but in knowing their nature, and, like the ship-wrecked mariner, gazing out over the waste of water he has escaped — a figure which, especially in Lord Bacon's translation, contains what Lord Tennyson calls the noblest passage of prose in the Eng- lish language : "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see the ships tost upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below. But no pleasure is comparable to the standing on the vantage ground of truth; and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below, so always that this prospect be with pity and not with swelling and pride. Certainly it is 187 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY heaven upon earth to have a maa's mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of Truth/^ I have already shown in the case of Horace how the fame of the great poets may vary, not only from man to man, but from age to age. This is true especially in the world's estimate of the greatness of Homer and Vergil. All through the Dark and Middle Ages the latter was regarded as the supreme type of the great epic poet, while Homer was but little more than a name. This, of course, was due largely to the fact that Greek itself was unknown and the story of Troy and its fall was known only from brief Latin prose versions of Darys Phry- gius and Dictys Cretensis. It was only after the Renaissance that Homer came once more to his own high place in the world's love and admiration. Something of the same sort happened to me. My knowledge of and love for Vergil dates from a far earlier day than is the case with Homer. As in the case of all the poets I read then, I was attracted, not by the spirit of literary criticism, but entirely by delight in beautiful form and beautiful thoughts, by harmony of rhythm, lovely descriptions, and romantic episodes. And so I knew Vergil 188 THE WORLD-POETS well, long years before I obtained anything like an adequate appreciation of Homer. When this occurred I could not help making a com- parison between them. I could not help feel- ing that the characters were less true to life than those of Homer, and that the funda- mental idea of the poem was, as Mr. Sellar points out, "more adapted to a great historical work like Livy or Gibbon than to a great poem," that he lacks Homer's rapidity of ac- tion, lingering, as he often does, over details, digressions, episodes, not closely connected with the main theme; that his characters are not real flesh and blood as those of Homer are. Even ^neas makes the impression on me of a lay figure, the instrument of fate, never acting on his own initiative, and excusing his heart- less treatment of Dido on the ground that Zeus had higher and other plans for him. When we compare him with the crafty Ulysses, the violent Achilles, the heroic and gentle Hector, we see the difference at once. So the character of Dido, affecting as it is, is not so full of girl- ish charm as that of Nausicaa, nor of womanly dignity and strength as that of Andromache. So too the freshness of poetry of the early morning of the world is wanting in Vergil; and while in subject-matter he imitates 189 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY Homer, yet in all the elements of outward form he follows more closely the Alexandrians. And yet, in spite of all this, Vergil still re- tains for me his compelling charm; and I never tire of turning over the pages of his great poem; never tire of reading over again the famous scenes and episodes — the arrival of -^neas in Carthage, the visit to Hades, the pathetic death of Pallas, the story of the friendship of Nisus and Euryalus ; and, above all, the world-famous story of Dido, told with infinite tenderness, that eternal symbol of the deserted woman, which reappears countless times in the literature of after times, a story told with such pathos and charm that it has touched the heart of humanity, and has made the name of Dido as famous in its way, as the type of those unfortunate ones more sinned against than sinning, as the name of Helen has been as the type of the baleful effect of womanly beauty. Back of the poetry of Vergil is the man him- self, the lover of righteousness, purity, holi- ness, hater of fraud, sin, dishonor, full of lofty patriotism, passionate love for Italy, simple in his tastes, rejoicing in the charms of rural life. And over all he wrote he has spread an atmosphere of poetry, the poetry of love, home, 190 THE WORLD-POETS country, friends, and the sadness of human kind, which found expression in the one im- mortal line, ^^Sunt lachrymae rerum et men- tern mortalia tangunt/^ All these combine to attract me to his poem. Later years have given an additional charm, as my studies in literature have shown me the immense influence of Vergil over all succeed- ing centuries, an influence greater than that of any other poet. This influence I can no more separate from my thought of Vergil than I can forget, in sailing up the Rhine, the at- mosphere made up of history, legend, and poetry that a thousand years have hung about that historic stream. And so in thinking of Vergil it is not only the man, tender and gentle, the poet and patriot and deeply reli- gious singer of righteousness, that I see, but the long centuries of worship and love that have made him the most influential and best loved of all poets of ancient time ; loved by such men as Saint Jerome, in spite of his sense of sin in being thus devoted to a pagan; by Dante, who made him his guide through the Inferno and Purgatory, and calls him his light, his comfort, his more than father ; or by Tennyson, whose poem on Vergil not only penetrates to the essence of his genius, but reveals his own 191 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY deep, personal love as well for this ^Vhite- souled'' poet of ancient Eome. In discussing the great poets I am not try- ing to assign each one a place in the world's literature, or to judge them from the stand- point of a professional critic. I am simply trying to give an account, as frankly and sin- cerely as I can, of my own attitude toward them, my own feeling of reverence and of love. I have tried to find the good in all, believing that reverence is the only way to get a just view of them. And yet when any phase of even the greatest poets produces in me a sense of discord, I cannot do otherwise than give expression to it. Again, in writing my im- pressions I do not always seek to propound original theories, or to emphasize what I have found out independently of others. My read- ing of the great poets has always included the best-known commentators and critics there- upon. What my ideas of Homer would be without the light shed on him by such men as Jebb and Lang, or my thought of Plato without the writings of Jowett and Emerson, I do not know. All these things -have mingled with my own thoughts, reflections, judgments in such a way as to produce a sort of composite picture, in which I should find it difficult to 192 THE WOELD-POETS separate what I might call my own opinion from those of others. I have tried to get a harmonious picture of them in my brain, and to give expression to this in clear and simple manner. The picture of Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, and Dante is mine now, "a dear possession ever ripening to clearer shape''; and if some or many of the lineaments in the picture have been suggested by others, the pic- ture as a whole is still mine, nevertheless. What I have just said applies especially to the case of Goethe. I have found more diffi- culty in obtaining a harmonious conceptiou of him than of almost any other poet I have read ; and. I have consulted conscientiously the works of the best Goethe commentators, in order to get a satisfactory solution to what was for me an enigma. For years I have loved and read the works of Goethe. Many of his lyrics and parts of Faust I have taken pleasure in learning by heart. I remember one ocean voyage in which I did nothing practically but go over the first part of Faust, committing to memory the famous passages. In no poet have I found more breadth and depth of scholarship, more wise views of life and con- duct, more exquisite pathos and surpassing poetry. And yet there is an instinct in all 193 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY men to find some principle of unity, some law of order and harmony ; and this instinct works not in the world of nature and metaphysics alone, but in the field of art as well. There must be one great coordinating principle in all things; and it is this principle, the power to give a sense of harmony and unity in a great work of art, that forms the basis of what we may call the architectonic genius. This ele- ment forms the most important part of Michael Angelo's genius, in the field of painting, and is illustrated in the skillful way in which he adorned the unpromising shape of the Sistine Chapel; this element is likewise characteristic of Homer's Iliad and Odys- sey. It is not prominent in VergiPs ^neid, where the first and last six books are con- tiguous parts of the poem, rather than the constituents of one organic whole. The architectonic genius, likewise, is not the chief characteristic of Shakespeare, whose greatness is shown in an infinite yariety of great qualities rather than in one work of clas- sic proportion. It is the chief glory of Dante's Diyina Commedia, where all things move from the first canto to the last, where the thousand details are all arranged in proper proportion to the whole. It is not in vain that 194 THE WORLD-POETS Scherer and Longfellow have compared it to a cathedral, with crypts below, the long aisles and transepts, the stained-glass windows, fiends and gargoyles and statues of all sorts, and the melodious bells among the spires, pro- claiming the elevation of the Host. This is the quality I have found most miss- ing in Goethe, especially in his Faust. In this, his masterpiece, we find many and great beauties — the exquisite poetry of the Gretchen scenes, the immortal figures of Faust and Mephistopheles, symbols of the double side of human nature, symbols, as true as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, of the eternal contrast of the ideal and the real, the soaring and the crawling element in man; but the architectonic genius is not there. A still deeper lack in Goethe I have found in the ab- sence of tenderness, of spiritual aspiration. Faust, in spite of all his changes, remains from beginning to end of the earth earthy, the symbol of man, working out his own sal- vation, not with fear and trembling, but with energy, with all the forces of manhood, intel- lect, and courage at their highest. It is the epic of the active life of man who errs so Jang er streht and yet must do nothing else, whose very failures, as in Browning's phi- 195 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY losophy, are prophecies of triumph in the future world. The metaphysical, ethereal, spiritual element a>s we find it in Plato, Schil- ler, Browning, and the specifically religious element of Dante and Milton, are not here. These are the chief elements of the German poet that I find lacking. And yet it would be foolish to linger over them in the case of one whose genius has shown itself in so many ways, whose infiuence on his own and follow- ing generations cannot he overestimated, in whom I myself have found constant pleasure for many years, and from whom I have derived many new views of life — for all which things I am profoundly grateful. I am thankful to him for the broader vision of living that he has brought me, for the example he has given the world of ein ganzer Mensch^ for his wise reflec- tions on human existence, for his unequaled lyrical poetry, for the characters of Faust and Mephistopheles, Tasso, Clarchen, and Wilhelm Meister, for deep and suggestive reflections on art, his wise sayings, his many-sided intellectual and scientific inter- ests, his rare combination of a practical man of the world with the sensitive nature of the poet, his fascinating personality, his god- like physique, his practical philosophy of life, 196 THE WORLD-POETS which he strove to bring out in Faust, which ' is to the nineteenth century what Dante's Divina Commedia is to the thirteenth, and which, although his architectonic genius was not sufficient to make it perfect, yet is the most important literary monument of modern times. This great poem, with the profound teaching of its theme — ^^the redemption of a self- centered and self-tormenting pessimist through the enlarged experiences of life, culminating in self-forgetful activity" — cannot be studied too often, on the one hand by those who are apt to dissipate their intellectual and moral life in tenuous theories and mystical vagaries, and, on the other, by those whose chief object in life is that search after pleasure whose only outcome is sure to be disappointment and pes- simism. From all that we have said above it is ap- parent that Goethe is in no sense a religious poet. The key to his philosophy lies this side of the grave. His poem is full of practical affairs from beginning to end; it is the nine- teenth century in all its complexity, its science, commerce, philanthropy, its advance along all lines of material progress that we are led to see. In all this respect he is dia- metrically opposite to Milton, whose poem, 197 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY like himself, "was like a star and dwelt apart'^ from the struggle and ways of men. Milton too is one of the poets of my early years, and I remember yet what deep pleasure I found in the magic rhythm of his verse, the eloquent roll of his language, and the perfect charm of his lyric and elegiac poetry L' Alle- gro, II Penseroso, and especially Lycidas. Yet with Milton, as with Goethe, I do not find such a sense of perfect assent as I feel when reading Shakespeare, Homer, or Dante. I cannot help feeling the great empty spaces and dreary wastes along which I have had to drag myself, by sheer force of will : those pas- sages which contain theological controversy, biblical commentary, anthropomorphism, long orations, the grotesque allegory of sin and death, and the absurdity of angels fighting with cannons, or tearing up whole mountains with all their rocks, waters, woods, and "by their shaggy tops uplifting,'^ bearing "them in their hands." Yet all this is couched in language of unequaled power and beauty, and in majestic verse unknown before or since in English literature. It seems ungrateful to say all these things about a poet who has done so much for the cause of religion and civil liberty, who has 198 THE WORLD-POETS influenced so profoundly, not only the lan- guage and poetry of England, but has in- creased the moral life of the whole English- speaking race more than words can tell. To him I owe many a delightful hour in my younger days when reading over the wonder- ful passages in which he gives his invocation to light, the description of the Earthly Para- dise, the character of Eve and her love for Adam, the fresh charm of the momingtide of the world. In these later years I have come more or less, however, to find increased pleasure in the works of a writer when I love and admire his personality. A large amount of the pleas- ure I get in reading Dante, Vergil, Plato, Browning comes from the knowledge I have that their works are but the expression of the man behind them. Especially in the case of Milton does this pleasure mate up for many of the defects of his poetical work, for, in spite of those parts of his life which seem unlovely, in spite of the passion and violence which mar many of his prose works, Milton's life was a noble one, and he has contributed this quality to his poetry. For it is the unique merit of Milton to raise his readers far above the petty details of life and to unroll before their eyes 199 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the great tragedy of sin, suffering, and salva- tion. Whate\^er criticism we may make "of Paradise Lost, we cannot deny that if it has not three of Homer's characteristics, as given by Matthew Arnold — rapidity, plainness of thought, plainness of speech — it does have to a supreme degree the fourth — nobility. And so when I take up the works of Milton I see the man behind them — that spirit dedi- cated to a life of high endeavor in art, in literature, in religion; I see him at college, earnest and studious, seeking knowledge, not for the sake of pedantry, but to form his life and character; I see him at Horton, prepar- ing himself by study, solitude, forest walks, for his future work; I hear him saying, ^^An inward prompting which grows daily upon me, that I by labor and intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after- times as they shall not willingly let die"; and again: ^^I was confirmed in this opinion that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem, . . , not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the 200 THE WORLD-POETS experience and practice of all that is praise- worthy''; and again I hear him declaring: "Not only will he have knowledge, but wisdom and moral development. He will cherish con- tinually a pure mind in a pure body. He will have religion, for it is from God that the poet's thoughts come. To this must be added in- dustry and select reading, study and observa- tion and insight into all seemly and generous action and affairs." I see him in his blind- ness, brave, unyielding in his great purpose; then I see him writing his three great poems. Paradise Lost, Paradise Eegained, and Samson Agonistes, blind, destitute, friend- less, yet not cast down, seeking to justify the ways of God to men, preaching righteousness, and judgment to come, enriching the worfd with the majesty of his thought, imagination, heart, and his own lofty character. What though certain parts of his poem are dreary and grotesque, what though Puritanism is no longer the religion of England, if the neglect of the Bible to-day tends to lessen the number of those who read the Paradise Lost? No one can contemplate this high dedicated spirit without admiration; no one can read his poetry or the study of his life without being uplifted. 201 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY I come now to a poet who, with Homer and Dante, has come to occupy the chief place" in my reverence and love. From early youth I have felt the fascination of that mighty mind. There is a great deal of conventional admira- tion in the world, and one can hardly be sure how much his own respect for a world-poet may be influenced by that WeltgescMchte which Schiller declares to be das Weltgericht. There is a natural hesitation to say anything adverse to a great writer, or even to any part of his work. As Socrates says, there seems to be a sort of conspiracy in speaking of a great man to praise him, not to criticize him. And yet there are few indeed of the world's greatest poets who have not their faults, and whose works we need to read or admire in their entirety. A special student of Words- worth, or Shelley, or Goethe, or Victor Hugo must read all their works to form an accurate judgment; but the general reader, who seeks only what is best in the world's literature, can omit one half, or even two thirds, of the works of many of the poets. Those who teach youth to appreciate literature should emphasize this fact, and when writing of such men should not speak as if all their works were of uniform value and interest. All critics and all teach- 202 THE WORLD-POETS ers are tempted, "after they have disinterred from a heap of rubbish some solitary frag- ments of pure gold, to exhibit these treasures only, rather than to display all the refuse from which they had to extract them/' I have been led to make these reflections in discussing my own experience with Shake- speare. In Homer I have felt, rightly or wrongly, that nearly every word seems per- fect, and, as I shall show later, the same is largely true for me of Dante's Divina Com- niedia. In regard to Shakespeare, early hav- ing felt his power, having no one to point out his inequalities, I felt it incumbent on me to admire equally all he wrote, looking on it as my fault, and not the poet's, if I could not enjoy the quips and puns of the eternal clowns. This was for a long time a trouble to me, and even now I have a half feeling that I may exjyose myself to ridicule or contempt for venturing to say a word derogatory to the great poet. "I remember," says Ben Jonson, "the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatever he penned, he nev^er blotted out a line. My answer hath been. Would he had blotted a thousand — which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity 203 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted, and to justify mine own candor; for I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side of idolatry, as much as any." In another respect Shakespeare is not so well adapted to become one's body-poet, so to speak, and that is his works are not so con- venient to handle as those of Homer and Dante. These two men in having, each, one great work of supreme genius, which can be contained in one volume of moderate com- pass have no little advantage in the race for immortality. Shakespeare's greatness, equal to theirs, is scattered over thirty volumes, not all of equal greatness; for what consti- tutes the highest quality in Homer and- Dante — the architectonic genius — is not ex- hibited completely in all of Shakespeare's plays. Yet, in spite of all this, there are times when to me the vast genius of Shakespeare, his deep insight into the human heart, his un- rivaled power of eloquent expression, his tragedy and comedy, his pathos and tender- ness, the air of ineffable poetry which hovers over his works — all the various elements of his cosmic power — seem to lift him above all 204 THE WORLD-POETS others. How fresh and new his plays seem, never growing old! No matter how often 1 read it, I cannot help being touched, for in stance, by the noble scene in Brutus's tent at Philippi, the quarrel with Cassius, the news of Portia's death, the generous remorse of Cassius, Lucius falling asleep, and Brutus cov- ering him with his cloak. So too, only a short time ago, in an idle ten minutes I took up Othello, a play I had read a dozen times, and tears came to my eje^ as I read the last scenes, especially Desdemona's tender and pathetic w^ords. The faults of Shake- speare are almost entirely those of detail, and of such a nature as to make it almost ridiculous to mention them, in view of the supreme greatness of his universal genius. For, equally with Homer and Dante, the abid- ing atmosphere of Shakespeare is one of "high -seriousness." As I read him the great walls of eternity, the moenia flainmantia mundiy seem to swing back, and I see the eternal pathos and beauty of those elemental passions which forever make up the story of human life — hate, ambition, jealousy, and, above all, love, the infinite variety of which age cannot wither nor use stale. Maeterlinck says that no man really pos- 205 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY sesses a truth until it has softened and changed something within him. This is true of my experience with Shakespeare. As a boy I read him with intense delight, learned hun- dreds of lines by heart, and, though my read- ing was entirely uncritical, I was dazzled by the splendor of his language and charmed by the delicacy of his fancy, touched by his pathos, solemnized by his tragedy, melted by the charm of his poetry. But only in later years did he really enter my life. This was done through the gradual vision of a deeper meaning in his plays, a sense of the mystery of life, the strange contrast between the ap- parent greatness of man and his actual little- ness, between the brightness of joy and beauty and the baffling problems of life, and the all-encompassing darkness beyond. These thoughts have grown upon me in later life, with a sense of the evanescence of all things ; and Shakespeare has come to have a mean- ing I never saw before in the heyday of youth- ful life. And so he seems to me to be the epitome of all mankind, nay, of all nature. In reading him I catch a glimpse of the wonderful spec- tacle of the world — singing bird and perfumed flower, heaven-kissing hill and green valley, 206 THE WORLD-POETS river and sea, and over them all the spangled canopy of heaven. I see the England of the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, her lordly cities, green fields, and sylvan forests; the brilliant life of the Renaissance, the eager adventures of her vigorous sons on land and sea, the wars with France for the supremacy of Europe, the innumerable men and women passing in and out upon this stage, kings and peasants, knightly men and lovely women, all standing in the bright light of the world, yet against the darker background of the great unknown mystery of that life which seems as unreal as the unsubstantial pageant of the very clouds themselves. Above all, I have gradually come to see the wonderful person- ality of the great man back of the plays: a man tossed by doubt, stirred by passion, see- ing deeply into the problems of life, mingling with the world, yet keeping the independence of the solitude of his own mind with perfect sweetness, taking life as it is, seeing good even in a Falstaff, sensitive to the beauty of the world, and especially to the unconquerable charm of noble womanhood, whether the ten- der naive grace of a Perdita or Miranda, the pathos of Desdemona or Ophelia, or the ma- turer charm of Katherine and Hermione. 207 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY I have conscientiously read all the plays of Shakespeare^ — rather studied them mor6 or less. Yet, after all, the number of plays to which I turn frequently is not large. The As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, Julius C^sar, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Othello, Winter's Tale, Cleopatra, Tempest — these are the plays in which I never cease to find deep pleasure and profit. It was only after I had gone to college that I first learned the additional charm that comes from the scholarly method of studying a great poet, that I learned to group his plays chrono- logically, to trace evidence of progress in views of life, in literary workmanship. This has brought much more pleasure than mere desultory reading — something of the same benefit that comes to a man walking in beauti- ful landscape, whose trained eye recognizes the various kinds of plants or the evidence of the world's physical development in the geo- logical strata before him, for, after all, there is an unquenchable instinct to synthesize all things, to find the meaning of them. This is not only true of science but of history and literature in general. It is also true of Shake- speare in particular. As I read his plays at 208 THE WORLD-POETS random I was conscious of different impres- sions — of ups and downs of genius, of strange inequalities in plot and structure, of a widely different atmosphere in his plays: pessimism and optimism, bitterness and gentleness, pas- sionate outcry and tranquillity. What does it all mean? What is the true inner life of Shakespeare which reflects itself in so many and in such various — nay, contradictory — ways? Of course the same thing is true of all poets. With some we have plenty of material at hand to answer the question, such as in the case of Dante, Goethe, Petrarch, and Milton. In others we have practically nothing, as in the. case of Lucretius and Homer, and can only deduce the inner life from their works and a few other details. Strangely enough, this is the case with Shakespeare, and the conse- quence is that men have had diametrical views as to his personality and genius. In my own case, after reading the plays carefully myself, after reading the criticisms of such men as Dowden, Schlegel, Boas, Coleridge, and Brad- ley, I have preferred to accept the larger view of Shakespeare's personality. And so to me Shakespeare means the man who passed through many vicissitudes of mental life. I see him in his early plays full of the charm of 209 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY life and poetry; then yielding, for some un- known reason, to a deep pessimism, in wMch he wrote those terrible dramas of passion, sin, and death, full of the unsolvable prob- lems of life; and, finally issuing out upon the more serene uplands of his later life, feel- ing the infinite beauty of all things, yet, some- how, aloof from the world, which seems as unreal to him as it did to Prospero when he uttered those unforgettable lines, which tell hO'W The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces. The solemn temples, the great globe itself — Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Yet one lack I have found in Shakespeare, as I have read him over and over. He always stops at the edge of the tomb. He has no ray of light to cast across the dark chasm ; no song of hope and courage such as Browning has; no yearning expression of faith, as in Ten- nyson's Sunset and Evening Star. Ortho- dox religion is not his, nor the philosophic confidence of Plato. Instead we see doubt, hesitation, fear of something beyond the grave, as in Hamlet's "To be or not to be,'' and 210 THE WORLD-POETS Claudius's "Ah, but to die, and go we know not where/' And it is just here that the great, supreme quality of Dante comes in, with his wonderful epitome of all life, past, present, and to come, and especially his confident be- lief that God is in his heaven, and, some time or other, will bring order and beauty out of the apparent chaos of the world. For some reason or other the one great pas- sion of my life has been the Divina Com- media. What the reason is I cannot tell ; and can only explain it in the words of Montaigne on his friendship for La Boetie, ^^parceque &etait luiy parceque c'etait moi/^ From my earliest youth I have been fascinated by its pages. Long before I could understand most of the poem I would read it with ever-increas- ing delight. I was only thirteen years old when I first saw or heard of the book. It was in the library of the Young Men's Christian Association, and was in Longfellow's trans- lation, three volumes, with brown-paper cov- ers outside the binding. I remember the feel- ing of curiosity suggested by the words Di- vine Comedy, but went no further than that, Three years later, when I was about sixteen years old, I procured a copy of the poem in Italian, as well as in Cary's translation, and a 211 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY grammar and dictionary. With this equip- ment I went through the whole of the Divlna Commedia and of the Vita Nuova. For some reason or other I was gripped by the power of the great Florentine, and my reading, which of necessity had to be at night after a day's work, afforded me the highest intellectual pleasure I have ever known. I remember especially one night, about midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time, finishing the Vita Nuova, and the strange feeling of uplift as I retired to bed with the last words ringing in my mind. As the years have gone by I have read, re-read, studied, and taught Dante; I have gathered a little Dante library of my own, have consulted all the best commentators, and ever more and more the wonder has grown, aroused by what seems to me a miracle of human greatness. There is no better test of the greatness of supreme genius than its inexhaustibility; and no one stands this test better than Dante. The more one studies him, the vaster seems his genius, the deeper his insight, the tenderer his sympathies for what is good, his hate for what is wrong. In the ability to arouse the cosmic feeling, the sense of the Infinite, the "high- seriousness" of Matthew Arnold, he is second to none, if not above all. It is not the place 212 THE WORLD-POETS here to discuss in detail the greatness of Dante, to dwell on his wonderful architectonic genius, the unequaled beauty, fitness, and many-sided application of his metaphors, his extraordinary power over language and music of verse, the prodigious learning his poem contains, enshrined in perfect poetry. Yet it is the man himself behind the book that gives to me its perennial interest. In the Divine Comedy not only does the form attain the highest degTee of art, but the subject-mat- ter is the deepest, most profound of all themes — the religious life of the human soul before and after death. None but a poet of the highest genius could even have thought of such a stupendous plan. What an impressive picture it is! — the dark forest, the nine cir- cles of Hell with their varied landscapes, vivid, picturesque, often horrible: the licentious blown about like chaff before the wind, the violent plunged in the river of blood, the gnarled and knotted trees in the wood of the suicides, the traitors in the frozen lake of Cocytus, and Lucifer, with his three heads, six wings, and hairy sides. And then the slow ascent up the steep sides of Purgatory, the lovely scene in the Valley of the Princes and the Earthly Paradise ; and, finally, the celestial 213 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY flight from star to star, up to the supreme vision of the Empyrean. Thus the framework of the Divina Commedia comprises the whole universe, as understood by Dante and his con- temporaries. Not only must we admire the breadth of his imagination in the vast outline of his work, but also the wonderful symmetry of it all, the way in which part answers to part, from beginning to end. But not only is Dante's power shown in the general scheme, but likewise in the details thereof. In it we find practically the whole of the Middle Ages, its history, its philosophy, its theology, its science, architecture, literature ; the lives, habits, customs of the people of all classes. No other poem has so much learning woven into it, and with such consummate skill; the whole of the scholastic philosophy, as seen in Saint Thomas Aquinas, finds expression here, with its explanation of the origin of the uni- verse, the existence of God, the embryology, birth, growth, and death of man, the im- mortality of the soul, the life after death. The mythology of the ancients, as understood by the medisevals, is constantly referred to. The history of Greece and Rome furnishes their contingent of great men seen on this stage, while almost every man of prominence of the 214 THE WORLD-POETS Middle Ages passes in and out from time to time — Pope, emperor, Guelf and Ghibelline, citizen and peasant; Gregory the Great and Frederick the Second ; the great doctors of the church, Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Mag- nus, the founders of the Franciscan and Do- minican Orders; the first Italian painters, Cimabue and Giotto — all are seen here. It has been well said that no poem was ever written which has so many references as the Divina Commedia. To read it carefully, to look up the many points of reference, is a lib- eral education in itself. This, then, is the material — a vast mass of knowledge, facts, thoughts, emotions, personal experiences, hopes and fears, hate and love, joy and sor- row. Out of it came the most marvelous literary product in the world's literature: a poem of consummate symmetry, harmony, and beauty, in which every minutest detail occu- pies its true place and proportions; a poem containing lyric, dramatic, epic, and didactic elements, passages of lovely nature-scenes, episodes of tragic pathos and idyllic beauty, profound discussions of great questions of life and death, all couched in perfect style, mar- velously appropriate figures and metaphors — the whole marching with unfaltering step 215 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY from the first canto to the last, forming an unequaled example of lofty climax. As I have read the Divina Commedia a mar- velous picture has unrolled itself before my eyes, for it is the reflection of the universe in one of the most wonderful minds that ever lived. In it I see the Platonic system of astronomy, the creation of the world by God in his triune form of Power, Love, and Wis- dom; the angels, the celestial spheres, the earth and man himself, with all his sins and virtues, his material body, wide-ranging in- tellect, and immortal soul. I see how man fell, how he must repent, and by what long and painful steps he must rise again. I see the different kinds of sins, public and private, how they are punished in Hell, and how the tendency to sin is purged in Purgatory. I see the nobility of the righteous life, the beauty of holiness, and the ineffable joy and reward of the spirits of just men made perfect in the world to come. I see the topography of earth, Hell, and sky; the nature of the triune God. the human and divine in Christ, the undying essence of the angels, the influence of the stars, the music of the spheres, the outflowing streams of God's light and love. Then I see what God has designed for earth itself: the 216 THE WORLD-POETS separation of church and state as exemplified in emperor and Pope; how the pride, avarice, and envy of men have frustrated God's will, produced discord in Italy and in the world, and what its remedy must be. I see the church with all its hierarchy, its foundation, function, saving power, degeneracy, its reforms. I see the psychology of man, his mixed earthly and celestial origin, his innate reaching out for pleasure, temptation and yielding to sin; his fate on earth and after death. But I not only see all this ; I see how Dante sums up his own life: his thoughts, feelings, knowledge, and power; his reflections on the drama of mankind around him, with all its sin and vice and pride; the contumely that patient merit of the unworthy takes; the pangs of despised love; the law's delays, in- justice, tyranny, foul and unnatural vice, graft, and hypocrisy — all the hydra-headed monster of sin and wickedness. I see his own life: the innocent and happy youth spent in the bella cittd on the banks of the Arno ; his love for the child Beatrice ; her death and his going astray from the life of pure and innocent service of God, to seek after false gods ; how his purity and ideal love was lost; how he became entangled himself, per- 217 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGKAPHY haps, in sensual sins; at any rate, sought earthly learning, wisdom, and glory, neglect- ing the things of religion and heavenly wisdom. I see him caught in the political whirlpool, striving against the lower elements of partisan life, incurring the enmity of Boniface VIII and Charles of Valois, exiled and forbidden under pain of death ever to return to his native city. I see him in the long years of exile, wandering from city to city, tasting how salt is the bread of others, how hard to climb their stairs. I see him at the gate of Saint Ilario, with the roll of manuscript under his arm, travel- stained and dusty, and when asked what he wished, answering, ^^Peace, peace.'' I see him at Verona, walking abstractedly through the streets, while women pointed him out to each other as one "who had been in HelP'; I see him nobly refusing to accept unworthy am- nesty, crying out with noble scorn : "If Flor- ence is entered by no other path, then never will I enter Florence. What ! Can I not look upon the face of the sun and the stars every- where? Can I not meditate anywhere under the heavens upon most sweet truths, unless I first render myself inglorious, nay, ignomini- ous, to the people and state of Florence?" I see him with new hope for himself and Italy, 218 THE WORLD-POETS when Henry of Luxemburg crossed the Alps to restore order to the distracted empire; his exultation, his letters to the city of Flor- ence and the emperor; and then, with the latter's death, the shipwreck of all his earthly hopes, turning to thoughts of God and the other world, striving to find his way, amid the bewildering chaos that filled his own fortunes and the world around him ; the final light that came, the writing of his poem of the earth and air, and at last his death at Ravenna. I catch a glimpse of his inner life, his vast learning, his unbending will where right is at stake, his tenderness and pity even for the damned, his love for nature, his tenderness for even fallen womanhood, his triumph and optimism. I see his infiuence on the thought and spiritual life not only of Italy but of the world; his share in bringing about a United Italy, so that his name has be- come the symbol of patriotism for all Italy to-day. Above all, I love him for what he has been to me; from my sixteenth year on to the pres- ent time, my interest and passion for him has never faltered ; it is the strangest thing about my inner life, and I have never been able to explain the unconquerable fascination that 219 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY has chained me to his pages. I have read him through practically every year ; I have taught him to hundreds of students, and have tried to interpret him in various forms of books and articles. He has, in a certain sense, di- rected my studies by arousing my interest in the history of mediaeval life and institutions, church history, scholasticism. He has colored my whole view of life; through his eyes I have looked out upon the world of sin and crime, seeing its awful consequences, the hopeless- ness of certain deeds, symbolized in the In- ferno; I have seen how we may, by purging ourselves of pride, envy, avarice, passion, alone insure ourselves of a happy life here and salvation to come. With him I climb the higher plane of the spirit, see God's way with men, and learn how we may approach him. It has been said that no one can study reverently a great work without being affected by it more or less. What may be the state of my own moral and spiritual life at present I do not know, but there is no doubt in my own mind that it is largely the result of my love for Dante. I too can say, with Dean Church, that the seriousness of the Divine Comedy "has put to shame my trifling; its magnanimity, my f aint-heartedness ; its living 220 THE WORLD-POETS energy, my indolence; its stern and sad gran- deur rebuked low thoughts, its thrilling ten- derness overcome sullenness and assuaged distress, its strong faith quelled despair and soothed perplexity, its vast grasp imparted the sense of harmony to the view of clashing truths.'' I too have found in time of trouble, "if not light, at least the deep sense of reality, permanent though unseen, which is more than light can always give, in the view which it has suggested to them of the judgment and the love of God." But, above all, I owe to Dante a glimpse into his own lofty view of the ultimate goal of the intellectual life; the true object and the reward of all seeking after truth. The Divine Comedy is not only a marvel of architectonic genius as to its outer form, in which every part, however small, is perfectly fitted into the whole, but it is suffused through and through with one ever-present, all-pervading ideal. Knowledge is the one thing for which the mind and soul of men are created ; and he best fulfills his mission in this world who spends his life in the high pursuit of truth. And this pursuit will lead him ever onward and upward, from the lower to the higher, from the corruptible things of this earth to 221 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the eternal beauty of the heayenly mansion, through which he is led to the highest knowl- edge of all, that of the power, light, and love of God. And this knowledge is not to be for ourselves alone; it is inextricably mingled with love — love of nature which is God's cre- ation ; love of all men who are God's children ; love of God himself. And from this union of knowledge and love springs the third ele- ment of the sublime trinity of Dante's ideal — joy unspeakable, far beyond all joys of sense or mere intellect; joy in the life that now is, joy that will be eternal in the life to come. I have found and loved many beautiful lines of poetry in my lifetime, but for music and rhythm and all the other outward forms of art, and especially in the wonderful leading out into the realm of the ideal, to me — and I say it with due deliberation — to me, the most beautiful lines in all literature are those in which Dante sums up the essence, not only of the Divine Comedy, not only of his own life, or the collective life of humanity itself, but of the whole universe : Luce inteUetual plena d'Amore — Amor del vero ben pien di Letizia, Letizia che trascende ogni Dolzore. Intellectual life full of Love — love of the true good, full of joy, joy that transcends all other sweetness. 222 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOR ME 223 Nor can I not believe but that hereby- Great gains are mine; for thus I live remote From evil-speaking; rancor, never sought. Comes to me not; malignant truth, or lie. Hence have I genial seasons, hence have I Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought; And thus from day to day my little boat Rocks in its harbor, lodging peaceably. — Wordsworth, 224 CHAPTER VII What Books Have Done for Me As I look back over the years of my book life I see them brightened by many happy experiences; but the greatest intellectual pleasures have come in these later years, when I have been going over again the whole field of my reading and studies, with the pur- pose of broadening and deepening whatever knowledge I may have obtained. I have been reading over again the same books, many of which delighted me when young, but which have gradually acquired a deeper and fuller meaning for me, for they are read now with a definite purpose, a purpose which I cannot describe better than in the words of Schopen- hauer, who was wont to say that he visited the picture gallery of Dresden, not to study art, but to learn the lessons they had to give of the meaning of life and the value of things. And with this change of purpose has come another change, that is, in the time of day when I can do my best work. For many years 225 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGEAPHY I had made it my practice to read far into the night. This was necessary in my younger years, especially before I went to college, for the night was about the only leisure time I had to devote to books. It was often difficult for me to keep awake after a hard day's work, and I had to resort to such well-known devices as wrapping a wet towel about my head. But after nine o'clock all this drowsiness would pass away. My mind would take on an al- most abnormal freshness and clearness, and I suppose I have never had such pure, unal- loyed intellectual pleasure as when, in the quiet of the midnight hour, I would see unroll before my delighted eyes the great spectacle of the world, as it was reflected in the books of history, philosophy, and poetry I read. But this kind of work resulted, more or less often, in a nervous strain, so that in these later years, when night work is no longer necessary, I have changed all this, and have adopted the habit of retiring and rising early, in order to get in some reading before the duties of the day really begin. And the ex- perience of these early morning hours is at least as inspiring and, I think, more whole- some than that described above. The books I read then are those which I have gone over 226 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOR ME so often that the general drift of them is familiar to me, and the pages of which are underscored and starred and double-starred. So that as I turn page after page, and read especially the marked passages, I can catch in a moment the context. Above all, my mind is kindled by the deep thoughts, high aspirations, and beautiful language of poet and philosopher. Every year I have succeeded in thus going over the great poets from Homer to Tennyson, as well as my favorites among the great prose writers from Plato to Emerson. It is wonderful how much ground one can cover in this way. Half an hour a day with a book, in which the great passages are under- lined, will carry a man fast and far through the world's literature. And the pleasure that comes, who can describe it? To rise on a winter morning, just before the dawn; to see the sky brightening in the east; to feel the hush and quiet of the world all about, a world in which, for the time being, all sin and vice, all envy, hate, passion, and bitter strife are laid asleep ; and then to penetrate with Homer into the beautiful life of early Greece and the youth of the world; to mount with Plato to the serene regions of the world of the Ideal ; or with Shakespeare to look out over the won- 227 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY \ derful spectacle of this human life of ours, which, though at times it seems so sad and tragic, is yet full of the beautiful and the strange. And so reading has come to mean to me not merely amusement, curiosity, a means of cul- ture or investigation, but a vision of the wonderful history of the world of nature and man. It is this larger kind of reading which has brought to my maturer life its best com- fort and deepest peace. Far from the busy scenes of life, without any of the so-called prizes of life, in my study high above the banks of the Connecticut River, whence I can see on its breast the boats that make their way to the great metropolis, I sit as in some lofty tower, gazing quietly out upon the great world- spectacle. Every clear morning in winter time I see the ever-wonderful spectacle of the dawn of a new day. Looking up from time to time from the book, I gaze at the brightening east, only for a few moments, however, for my work calls me back. But these few minutes are like a bath to my soul; they give a tone to the whole day, a, glimpse of the Infinite to bear me through the petty details of life. Then at the end of the day I sit in that large upper chamber of mine, whose windows look 228 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOR ME out toward the setting sun, and watch through them the infinite variety of sunlight and shadow and cloud effect, seen through the bare branches of the elm trees over the college buildings beyond, where the crimson flood ebbs away. I watch the colors grow dim — darker and darker — till twilight comes on. Sometimes I sit for an hour in the semidark- ness, surrounded by the spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and as the deep rest and peace come over me, I sit and hush and bless myself in silence. And so many a day of hard work — of study, teaching, investi- gation, Avriting — is ushered in and out by the flow and ebb of the light of the sun. Many times, as I sit in this evening twilight on a winter afternoon, I look back over my life and number up the things I have to be grateful for. I must confess that among them all, none occupies a higher place than books. And Avliy should I not be grateful to them? To them I owe many and many an hour of intellectual and spiritual pleasure in the days that are gone. I have had my struggles and hardships, hours of gloom and discourage- ment, yet through them all my heart has been lightened and cheered by the books I have read. They too have furnished my mind with 229 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY the noblest pictures of life and the universe, and in my own humble way I can say, as it was said of the English Platonist Henry More, that my heart was uplifted by the no- blest themes in the morning of my days. To my love for reading I have owed many an hour of "happy thinking," as Hazlitt puts it, even when far from books and all things pertaining to them. To them I owe my lot in life, a lot that I can with grateful sincerity call a happy one, whatever elements of suc- cess or failure may have attended it. When a man has work in which he finds delightful occupation, which of itself implies as a duty an ever-increasing effort to obtain a knowledge and a true outlook on life, which gives him the opportunity to help others, and the chance, whether he embraces it or not, of winning the kindly regard of young men, ought he not to be happy, even though from the financial point of view he may be classed among those whom the world calls unsuccessful men? An editorial in a New York paper said the other day, speaking of the question of equal pay to male and female teachers, "Let the women teach and the men go to work.'' Well, if teaching is not a man's job, then I'm not a man. For it's the only thing I care for, and 230 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOE ME I suppose about the only thing I'm fit for. And yet I am foolish enough to think that the work I love so well, and to which I have been led by what seems to me at times almost special providence, does not merit the contempt so often poured upon it by the so-called practical men of the world. At any rate I would not exchange my lot for that of any of them all. Many a time, when I have passed through the crowded streets of the great metropolis and have taken my seat in the train that brings me home again, has my heart cried out with Emerson : Good-by, proud world, I'm going home! Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine. I'm going to my own hearth-stone. Bosomed in yon green fields alone; A secret nook in a pleasant land. Oh, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome. And when I am stretched beneath the pines. Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the love and the pride of man. For what are they all in their high conceit. When man in the bush with God may meet? Again, to books too I owe a contented mind. I suppose it may seem to many that I may lack ambition. At any rate, I have never felt an overwhelming desire either to be wealthy or famous or prominent in the social, political, 231 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY or even professional world. I. prize far more that love for nature which makes a walk in the country on a winter's afternoon, or beside the sea, or among the snowy Alps, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Nay, which brings the same experience to my very door, for I no longer need to travel to distant scenes and strange landscapes to receive the blessing that nature has to give. How many a time have I walked of an afternoon out toward the west, with a strange going-out of my soul beneath the mysterious influence of the setting sun! How many times have I caught a sudden vision of all this wonderful world of ours, when I felt almost physically the earth "a spinning on its nave,'' and sheer- ing blindly round the sun, with its snow- capped mountains, lordly rivers, sylvan groves, and grassy lawns; its countless towns and cities, inhabited by generation after genera- tion of men and women, living, suffering, lov- ing, and dying under the same silent heavens; diiferent in speech and fashion of dress, yet all with the same hopes and fears, the same love and hate, the same clinging to life and shrinking from death, the same passionate yearning for the life that never ends ! To books I owe likewise the intellectual 232 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOR ME possessions that are stored in my mind; such dear pictures, as Goethe calls them, constantly renewed in my imagination as they keep ever transforming themselves and ripening toward a clearer shape. We are all of us creatures of moods, and I suppose that my own state of nervous insta- bility is at least equal to that of others. From boyhood As high, as I have mounted in delight, In my dejection have I sunk as low. I too have had my disappointments and sad- ness, hopes deceived, ^^greetings where no kindness is," loss of friends and the thought of the all-encompassing darkness beyond. I too have felt with Euskin that double side to all things connected with life and the world ; that strange antithesis in nature, at times soft and beautiful, full of charm and solace for the weary soul; again stern and pitiless with its awful catastrophes, involving the destruction of whole cities and multitudes of men, women, and children; the equally strange antithesis in that love of man for woman, at times so infinitely beautiful, turning "life's tasteless waters into wine,'' and yet with its darker side of lust, bloodshed, cruelty, and vice; so too the antithe'Sis which makes mankind appear at 233 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY times an inspiring spectacle, with its constant advance toward freedom, its philanthropy, Its sacrifice of life itself for the good of one's fellow men ; and yet with the sordidness of pov- erty, the arrogance of wealth, the nameless crimes that stain the annals of rich and poor alike — so much envy, so much vanity, so much meanness and hardness of heart ! Which of these moods is the true one? Which shall I take as the guide of my life? And here it is that I owe to books, perhaps, the greatest blessings of all they have given me, the development of whatever religious and spiritual life I may possess. Naturally in- clined to religion, perhaps even to mysticism, as an inheritance from Quaker ancestors; brought up by a mother whose one thing in life was her Bible and her prayers, trained from early childhood in the class meeting and prayer meeting of the Methodist Church, in the days when these things were real and vital ; as the years have gone on, I have found my religious life deepened, although possibly the limits of mere denominationalism have been widened. The reading of such books as the Bible, Plato, Emerson, Wordsworth, Brown- ing has had a certain definite effect upon my inner life. I have come at times to have an 234 WHAT BOOKS HAVE DONE FOR ME almost physical sense of the great abstract ideas: love, as it shows itself in the relation of mother and child, husband and wife, friend and friend ; nay, which looks on the hills with tenderness, and flows out to all living and innanimate things; beauty spread over all things, that shines in the eyes of the little child gazing at life with dimly felt surprise, that sits enthroned on the soft cheeks of the maiden, that breathes forth from flower and grass, hovers in the light of sunrise and sun- set, envelops the whole world of snowy moun- tains, restless sea, and starry universe as with a mantle. As I have seen how the great poets and thinkers have invariably turned aside from the tragic side of life, seeing even on ^^death's cloud the rainbow of the soul," how they have allowed their imagination to linger over the inspiring forms that people the realm of the ideal, where alone is "immortal hilarity, the rose of joy, around which all the muses sing,'' I have come to believe that this attitude is not only the true one in all the highest forms of art, but is the part of wisdom in the conduct of life itself ; that the optimist is more rational than the pessimist ; that only by looking on the bright side can we live and develop our highest powers ; that it is not our duty to brood over 235 A ONE-SIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY sickness and poverty and crime and death ; but, rather, to think constantly over the joys" of loving friends, of nature, and of the intellec- tual life; and, finally, to rise with all the en- ergy of our souls to a belief in God and a hap- pier life beyond. All philosophy, all art, all religion is based on this turning of the eye of the soul toward the sunlight of the ideal, where the unifying principle of the spiritual world takes the multitudinous fragments of the many and forms them into one perfect whole : The One remains, the many change and pass. Heaven's light endures, earth's shadows flee; Time, like a dome of many-colored glass. Stains the white radiancy of eternity. 236 CATTFORA^T* Return .o desk from «hid. bonrowed. TBi,.^risI.«Eo>.a.eUs.aa«»».pedWo». 27Dec' 27Dec'48P3 JUL 3 ffcro orc C^JPt J^^ iO'16 LD21 .-100m-9,'48(B399sl6)476 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDSM7flflmb UNIVERSITY OF CAIvlFORNIA IvIBRARY