LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Class 
 
 Presented by a number of those who enjoyed tl 
 elightful talks of Br, Burton in the SuRBter Sessit 
 f 1910, these books are placed in the University 3 
 ary for the stimulation of those who were unable 1 
 ear him then, and for the further pleasure of thos 
 o privileged. 
 
LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
Richard Burton's Books 
 
 Message and Melody 
 
 $i 
 
 .00, net 
 
 Literary Likings 
 
 
 A Book of Essays 
 
 $1-50 
 
 Memorial Day 
 
 
 
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 Lyrics of Brotherhood 
 
 
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 Dumb in June 
 
 
 
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 Lothrop Publishing Company 
 Boston 
 
LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 RICHARD BURTON 
 
 
 
 
 
 El 
 
 RIENDSHIPS 
 BEGIN WITH 
 LIKING . . . 
 
 
 
 George Eliot 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 ■SALjFORH^ 
 
 LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 BOSTON 
 
NEW EDITION 
 
 Copyright, 1898, 
 By COPELAND 
 AND DAY. 
 
 Copyright, 1902, 
 By LOTHROP 
 PUBLISHING 
 COMPANY. 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 
 1020 
 
NOTE 
 
 The papers making up this volume have 
 with one or two exceptions appeared pre- 
 viously in the columns of The Forum, The 
 Atlantic, The North American Review, The 
 New England Magazine, The Dial, Poet 
 Lore, and other publications. The writer 
 herewith acknowledges the courtesy of 
 the editors in allowing him to reprint the 
 essays. 
 
Contents 
 
 Page 
 Robert Louis Stevenson 3 
 
 The Democratic and Aristocratic in Liter- 
 ature 35 
 Phases of Fiction 59 
 I. The Predominance of the Novel 61 
 II. The Persistence of the Romance 70 
 
 III. Novels and Novel-readers 77 
 
 IV. Permanent Types in Modern Fic- 
 
 tion 91 
 Bjornson, Daudet, James : A Study in the 
 
 Literary Time-spirit 107 
 
 Ideals in American Literature 131 
 
 Renaissance Pictures in Browning's Poetry 150 
 
 Old English Poetry 173 
 
 I. Old English Poetry 175 
 
 II. Nature in Old English Poetry 183 
 
 III. Woman in Old English Poetry 222 
 
 Washington Irving's Services to American 
 
 History 247 
 
 A Battle Laureate 279 
 
 The Renaissance in English 313 
 
 American English 341 
 
 Literature for Children 363 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 ¥ 
 
 i 
 
 THE day has not yet come perhaps 
 for an impartial judiciary on Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. Contemporary criticism 
 proverbially walks in Blind Man's Alley. 
 But it is difficult not to speak of Steven- 
 son, because, aside from his being a dis- 
 tinctive writer of his day and generation, 
 he was the best-loved personality among 
 current English writers. It is as impos- 
 sible not to enter into intimate, affectionate 
 relations with him as it is in the case of 
 Charles Lamb. Hence the chorus of 
 praise, the many confessions of faith, that 
 have followed upon his lamentable taking- 
 off in the prime of his literary powers. 
 Great makers of literature — men who 
 mean much to us and do much for us — 
 are by no means of necessity loved in 
 proper person. Wordsworth or Goethe 
 may have long been my literary idols: it 
 
4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 does not imply that I would have given 
 a shilling to meet them in the flesh; 
 whereas I would have paid blood and 
 treasure for a half hour's chat with Steven- 
 son. But love for the man and his work 
 may not justify another attempt at appre- 
 ciation. Some Frenchman has told us 
 that one needs not only to love, but to 
 love gracefully. Yet affection should be 
 a sort of lamp for guidance in the dis- 
 covery of quality ; moreover, the sympa- 
 thetic author seems to say some special 
 thing to one's self alone, and the admirer 
 can but feel that certain phases of a writer's 
 gift have not been indicated in true pro- 
 portion or significance. 
 
 II 
 
 The story of Stevenson's life will have 
 a steadfast fascination. There was in it 
 enough of variety and picturesqueness to 
 catch the eye ; while, deeper down, one 
 feels the pulse of the hero, the pathos of 
 the struggle of a man bodily frail, intrepid 
 of spirit, indomitably set upon brave ac- 
 complishment. This has all the more of 
 pathetic appeal because of the fine, high- 
 bred reserve practised by Stevenson in his 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 5 
 
 literary work, concerning his physical ail- 
 ments. The only reference I recall in the 
 whole range of his writings intended for 
 publication (even in the Vailima Letters 
 such allusions are curiously absent) is that 
 in the charming paper called The Manse, 
 where, speaking of a clergyman-ancestor 
 who was of a sickly habit of body, the 
 essayist remarks : " Now I often wonder 
 what I have inherited from this old min- 
 ister. I must suppose indeed that he was 
 fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, 
 though I never heard it maintained that 
 either of us loved to hear them. He 
 sought health in his youth in the Isle of 
 Wight, and I have sought it in two hem- 
 ispheres ; but whereas he found and 
 kept it, I am still on the quest." The 
 delicacy and simplicity of this make it 
 very beautiful. Stevenson had no trace 
 of that unpleasant egoism which makes a 
 man whine over himself. The typical 
 mood, private or public, is that expressed 
 in the meeting with a friend, who, after a 
 long separation, inquired of him what he 
 had been about. " Well, my dear fellow," j 
 quoth Louis gayly, — it was at Bourne- 
 mouth at a time when, in a phrase of his 
 
6 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 own, he was " far through," — "I have 
 been principally engaged in the business 
 of dying, and you see I have made a 
 failure of it." The pluck and gallantry 
 of the answer are representative. 
 
 Stevenson, a Scot of distinguished 
 family, was a Bohemian, a world wan- 
 derer ; one of the main denotements of 
 his individuality is the way in which, 
 through it all, despite the enforced cos- 
 mopolitanism of his life, he remained a son 
 of Scotland in blood and bone. He was 
 a native of Scbtia not so much in insular 
 prejudices as in his cast of mind and play 
 of emotion. An essay like The Foreigner 
 at Home, the Scotch fictions led by that 
 * incomparable fragment Weir of Hermiston, 
 are documents in the case. They stand 
 for what was ingrain. Under the alien 
 brilliancy of his dress and far below the 
 facile adaptation to the customs of various 
 climes, deep called unto deep in his nature, 
 and steadily, faithfully he found his orien- 
 tation in Edinburgh, city of his kinsmen 
 and love. He was, after all, a clannish 
 man to the last. Read 'The Tropics Vanish 
 to realize it. Once set him 
 
 "In the highlands, in the country places," 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 7 
 
 and " the spate of style " came, with the 
 vision and the creative gust. With a 
 nature less strong, this abiding quality 
 would not have been. Examples among 
 living writers lack not where cultured cos- 
 mopolitanism has pretty much effaced race 
 lines. It is only the sturdy men, the true 
 independents of literature, who can resist 
 the influence. Turgenef and Sienkiewicz 
 are such individualities ; Stevenson is of 
 their company. The lovableness of the 
 man has somewhat obscured our sense of 
 his strength in this regard. 
 
 His death was commensurate with his 
 life ; in accord with his wish, it had a rare 
 and exquisite fitness : a sudden brave fin- 
 ish, the pen still wet from an unfinished 
 masterpiece. The stale tedium of the 
 sick-room — against which in more than 
 one essay he eloquently harangues — was 
 spared him. He fell in mid-manhood in 
 a creative flush of accomplishment, secure 
 in the admiration of the world of readers, 
 cherished in loving and loyal memory by 
 those privileged to come into contact with 
 him in the body. The afFection of the 
 Samoan natives, to whom in those few 
 final years he became law-giver, counsellor, 
 
8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 friend, and Teller of Tales, is a black-letter 
 index of his magnetism, his great gift of 
 heart. From boyhood there was about 
 him an atmosphere of refinement, an air of 
 romantic grace: to be noted in his very 
 clothes, in the eye-sparkle, the mobile 
 play of the mouth, and the odd, whimsical, 
 capricious elegance of his speech. His 
 talk with his familiars, I am credibly in- 
 formed, had the same quality as that of 
 his choicest essays. It has been often re- 
 marked, truly enough, that in an almost 
 unique degree we note in Stevenson the 
 survival of youthfulness. Deep in his soul 
 the imperishable boy abided to the end. 
 Child Play, The Lantern Bearers, A Child's 
 Garden, and most of the volume Virginibus 
 Puerisque are in evidence. But to regard 
 this quality as striking the keynote of his 
 personality is wofully to err, to substitute 
 the part for the whole. The assumption 
 overlooks the complexity of the man, the 
 many-sidedness of his nature — best sug- 
 gested in his friend Henley's sonnet char- 
 acterization : 
 
 APPARITION. 
 
 Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
 Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 9 
 
 Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with 
 
 race, 
 Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
 The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 
 There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
 A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
 Of passion and impudence and energy. 
 Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
 Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
 Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 
 A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
 Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, 
 And something of the Shorter- Catechist. 
 
 It is this very manifoldness of Steven- 
 son which has thrown critics off the 
 scent. Most writers of saliency take a 
 position with the Left or Right in litera- 
 ture. Stevenson possessed sympathies 
 which drew him both ways. He was in 
 some particulars a daring radical : in others 
 an aristocrat, sitting with the extreme con- 
 servatives. He is a literary force not at all 
 
 •asy to catalogue or keep under a rubric. 
 
 This becomes apparent only when the full 
 content of his work has been surveyed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The public knows him most familiarly 
 through his fiction, nor should his con- 
 tributions in this sort be minimized, espe- 
 
io LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 daily since here one gets his romanticism 
 in process of demonstration. The whole- 
 some reactionary influence of Stevenson's 
 novels must be emphasized : in them his 
 romantic theory is implicit, as it is explicit 
 in some of his essays. From the morbid 
 analysis, the petty detail, and the porno- 
 graphic filth of that miscalled thing 
 realism, his view hallo called us back to 
 the happy hunting-grounds of the older 
 story of incident, adventure, heroic per- 
 sonages. He looked upon life (for the 
 purposes of fiction) not only as a stage 
 for high-hearted action, but as a sort of 
 Continuous Performance full of change, 
 bustle, and indefinite opportunities of 
 amusement. While the novelist Steven- 
 son is not all of Stevenson nor Stevenson 
 at his deepest, the result is always wel- 
 come, not seldom superb. With the in- 
 creeping of the more subjective — as in 
 the characteristic and too little known 
 Prince Otto — comes a feeling on the part 
 of the public that this is not in the typical 
 vein ; hence the tale is not so garishly 
 popular. The public has insisted indeed 
 on regarding Stevenson as, par excellence , a 
 romanticist only in the sense of one who 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON n 
 
 tells an objective tale with little care for 
 character as such ; which is all wrong, since 
 in works like the Master of Ballantrae and 
 Weir characterization is the prime motive; 
 as it is, moreover, in such a creation as 
 his Ebb Tide. This affixion of the ro- 
 mantic tag to Stevenson's coat has given 
 color to the idea of him as one who held 
 his art as a means of pleasure-giving, 
 nothing more. It may be observed in 
 passing that this is by no means necessa- 
 rily a low ideal ; it all depends upon your 
 definition of the Protean word pleasure. 
 But one who stops here with Stevenson is 
 again off the scent. Even if we do not 
 overstep the bounds of the novel, to read 
 the stories ruminatingly and in their full 
 content is to realize that the author is no 
 more romantic than realistic ; that he is 
 both objective and subjective ; Stevenson, 
 in truth, sums up in his own person the 
 proper relation of ideal to actual. His 
 interest in life as fact and detail was 
 immense, constant ; his inferences (in his 
 fiction) were blithely romantic. His own 
 sprightly genius formed the connecting 
 link between those erroneously reckoned 
 contradictions. 
 
12 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Stevenson's tales offer a kind of com- 
 mon meeting-ground for readers of op- 
 posing minds and creeds. The lovers of 
 romance — a sight of folks is here ! — 
 hail them gleefully, as a matter of course ; 
 believers in " realism " yield such fiction 
 at least a grudging approval — since, after 
 all, they belong to humankind and enjoy 
 what is enjoyable; while they who stickle 
 for style are fed so high that they do 
 willingly overlook so vulgar a thing as a 
 rattling good plot. He who gets no satis- 
 faction from Treasure Island or Kidnapped 
 is a rarer bird than the Dodo. It is one 
 of Stevenson's merits in such books that 
 he administers ether to the critic who, 
 boy-like, loses sight of technique in pleas- 
 ure and, coming later out of the swoon, 
 finds his proper joy in tasting quality and 
 detecting the fine art of the performance. 
 The. sense of literature is forgotten for 
 the nonce in the sense of the joy of life — 
 the joy which Oswald in Ghosts longs for 
 so piteously, — and which every son of 
 woman who is in health and antecedent to 
 his dotage demands at Fate's hands. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 13 
 
 IV 
 
 It is no belittlement of the fiction, 
 however, to find the realest Stevenson, 
 the most intimate exposure of himself, I 
 in the essays and poetry. It is hardly 
 too much to say that one knows him not 
 until he is known here. As an essayist 
 Stevenson has the preserving qualities : 
 charm, rich suggestiveness, wisdom lightly 
 carried, distinction of manner. In the 
 essay an author stands self-revealed; he 
 may mask behind other literary forms, 
 in some measure ; but commonplaceness, 
 vulgarity, thinness of nature, are in this 
 kind instantly uncovered. The essay is 
 for this reason a severe test. Character 
 speaks in and through it ; the deepest and 
 most winsome of a man comes out often 
 in an essay ; he invites you into a confi- 
 dential, quiet-furnished corner of his soul, 
 there to listen to a conversation that is at 
 once colloquial and confessional. And 
 style, manner, is to the essay what water 
 is to the fish : an element native to its 
 progress. When talking of the essay it 
 is inevitable to consider an author's way 
 of saying things. Lowell once declared 
 
1 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 of Sidney Lanier that he had a genius for 
 the happy word ; to few could the remark 
 have been applied more fitly than to Ste- 
 venson. His diction is not seldom spoken 
 of as if its main feature were co-ordination 
 or general harmony. It is true that it 
 was admirably of a piece : he learned to 
 find and keep the " essential note." Yet 
 this is not his most noticeable hall- 
 mark on the side of style. He was start- 
 lingly felicitous as a coiner of word and 
 phrase. Swift's narrow definition of style 
 as the right words in the right places 
 leaves untold the more important half of 
 the story. The " right " word is well ; 
 the correct writer acceptable. But there 
 is something besides right and wrong in 
 the selection and marshalling of words for 
 literary purposes : there is good, better, 
 best ; we must reckon with the unexpected 
 and the delightsome. To use the right 
 word is a sort of negative virtue : to use 
 the creative word, — unlooked-for, a glad 
 surprise to reader and writer alike, — that 
 is quite another and higher thing. The 
 difference between the two is a measure 
 between talent and genius. Certain critics 
 harp upon what they call the " inevitable " 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 15 
 
 in diction. Pace Flaubert ! there is no 
 such thing ; if there were, literature would 
 be mathematics. Stevenson's pages have 
 these frequent windfalls for us ; we mark 
 the passages, and, returning on the pagej 
 smack our lips over the more leisurely- 
 second tasting. After all, it will not do 
 to forget that to the truly elect of literature 
 expression, if not all, is much ; the right 
 turning of a phrase gives such an one a 
 rapture greater than would the taking of 
 a city. To some the joy will seem dis- 
 proportionate, nugatory ; which is but 
 additional proof of the exquisiteness of 
 the experience. 
 
 Now, one feels in reading Robert Louis 
 Stevenson's finest papers — careless, in- 
 imitable causeries on books, men, life, the 
 moral verities — the theme is naught, 
 handling everything — that here is the 
 manner of a master; a man with infinite 
 good temper, perfect breeding, and char- 
 acter. Not to recognize the character, 
 along with and over and above the style, 
 is, in a way, to announce one's limitations. 
 Follow the essays along the line of Steven- 
 son's artistic and spiritual development; 
 from the slightly self-conscious cloth-of- 
 
1 6 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 gold beauty of Ordered South, written at 
 twenty-two, the marvel of a stripling, to the 
 Christmas Sermon and Puhis et Umbra, 
 mellow, majestic deliverances, nobly reflec- 
 tive and surcharged with the ethic temper ; 
 and what you notice equally with the gain 
 in aesthetic command is the broadening and 
 deepening of the man's soul. Here is 
 high thought solvent in emotion ; emotion 
 held in check by art that has acquired a 
 law-abiding freedom. And between these 
 chronologic extremes lie what winsome 
 and alluring things ! What exceptional 
 gift, charm, distinction ! A side of the 
 man's nature here blooms forth, hidden, 
 or at least barely hinted, in the novels. 
 His essential seriousness, his strong moral 
 predilection, his hang for spiritual things, 
 his poetry, his sublimated common-sense, 
 — all of these qualities pervade the essay 
 work, blending in the total effect as the 
 juices of the new wine to make the subtle 
 bouquet of the mellow vintage. With 
 the exception of a very few of the latest 
 poems, the intellectual maturity of Steven- 
 son can nowhere else be seen so well. 
 
 " Of Hamlet most of all " — how admir- 
 able is Henley's stroke in its delicate 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVEN80N 17 
 
 felicity of characterization ! In depth and 
 suggestion, in gentle melancholy that runs 
 not into whining nor stagnant pessimism, 
 that in no wise contradicts the sturdy 
 courage of his more objective and imper- 
 sonal writing, Stevenson is, in sooth, a 
 Hamlet; but the tricksy touch of Ariel 
 and the whimsey of Puck are there, too, 
 imparting tonic and lightness to his work. 
 That the texture is slight, the subject 
 matter by election light or discursive, 
 none but the Philistine would speak for 
 a reproach ; the fantasticality is a rich 
 embroidery upon the enduring stuff of 
 the thought. To call his themes far- 
 fetched or trivial were to impugn Charles 
 Lamb himself, or past masters in other 
 tongues, like Montaigne or Richter, — 
 the only possible excuse for discoursing 
 of roast pig is the paper thereupon. No 
 essayist ever got more out of nothing than 
 did this frail son of Edinburgh. What a 
 world of reminiscent tenderness, of shy 
 ideality, of heart-piercing pathos, and of 
 canny wisdom as well, is evoked, for 
 example, by such a thing as 'The Lantern 
 Bearers ! How the reader is led to realize 
 the common childlikeness of us all ! Or 
 
1 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 in Beggars, with its picturesque flavor yet 
 moral sanity, do we not feel behind the 
 raillery an impassioned belief in the uni- 
 versal brotherhood? No more delightful 
 bit of egoism can be named than the 
 Chapter on Dreams, a fairy tale, yet in full 
 accord with modern psychology. One 
 almost wonders that Stevenson did not 
 anticipate Du Maurier and create Peter 
 Ibbetson. In another vein, Ordered South, 
 for its sane philosophy and pensive, 
 dreamy loveliness of line and image can- 
 not be fellowed in its particular genre ; one 
 cries, in gloating over it, " Here indeed 
 is your cloth-of-gold style ! " His, again, 
 was the special gift for esoteric, desultory 
 character limning, as in a slight paper like 
 'The Manse, as well as in more avowed at- 
 tempts at full-length portraiture. Steven- 
 son may not have had the historian's full 
 equipment, but certainly his was a genius 
 for biography ; and biography is only his- 
 tory on its intimate and informal side. He 
 had a rare relish for character-presentation, 
 whether the subject were an unknown 
 Samoan native or a Robert Burns. His 
 personages, imagined in fiction or trans- 
 ferred from life, stood out saliently, in 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 19 
 
 high relief. How his admiration for main 
 men, his hero-worship, comes out in a 
 thing like The English Admirals, or how 
 gallantly he cries up the savor of life, and 
 frowns upon the craven fear of death, in 
 Aes Triplex! In that wonderful little paper 
 Pulvis et Umbra may be seen perhaps at 
 its most puissant our writer's picturesque 
 power, natural poetry, and unhackneyed 
 manner of thought in the face of the grave, 
 great things of Life and Death. The com- 
 monplace treatment of the theme of Evo- 
 lution, and of man as its last consum- 
 mate flower, is to drone along about the 
 privilege of our high estate and the result- 
 ant duties. Not so Stevenson ; contrari- 
 wise, with the pathos of imaginative poetry 
 he defines homo sapiens as " condemned to 
 some nobility," striving along with all lower 
 creation towards an "unattainable ideal." 
 And he deems it would declare man a 
 poltroon if he, "the reasoner, the wise in 
 his own eyes," should show the white 
 feather and not strive on with all other 
 sentient life. " Let it be enough for 
 faith that the whole creation groans in 
 mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable 
 constancy ; surely, not all in vain." It is 
 
zo LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 not skill or the revamping of the tradi- 
 tional that produces essays like these, albeit 
 the technique is elegant. A nature large, 
 serious, vital, begot them. The debt to 
 the past is but the debt any thinker or 
 writer owes to his intellectual forbears — 
 to dodge the debt is to announce one's self 
 a literary bankrupt. A common miscon- 
 ception in respect of Stevenson is that 
 which, observing his technical power, the 
 fine craftsmanship he displayed, stops 
 short there. The Philistine can never get 
 over or around Stevenson's indiscreetly 
 frank avowal of his own literary methods, 
 whence we hear now he "slogged at his 
 trade" and "played the sedulous ape" to 
 great writers during his novitiate. This is 
 the confession of him who assumes that the 
 untold half will not be forgotten, that the 
 difference between the lehrjahre and meis- 
 terjahre will be appreciated. Those who 
 insist that Robert Louis Stevenson was 
 an accomplished, graceful technician and 
 nothing more are wide of the mark. They 
 should be directed especially to certain 
 sentences in the paper which tells of his 
 obligation to chiefs of the craft — sentences 
 deserving the higher accent of italics : 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 21 
 
 ct Perhaps I hear some one cry out : But this is 
 not the way to be original ! It is not ; nor is there 
 any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are 
 born original, is there anything in this training 
 that shall clip the wings of your originality. There 
 can be none more original than Montaigne, neither 
 could any be more unlike Cicero ; yet no craftsman 
 can fail to see how much the one must have tried 
 in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very 
 type of a prime force in letters : he was of all 
 men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself the 
 imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is 
 only from a school that we can expect to have good 
 writers ; it is almost invariably from a school that 
 great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor 
 is there anything here that should astonish the 
 considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he 
 truly prefers, the student should have tried all that 
 are possible ; before he can choose and preserve a 
 fitting key for words, he should long have practised 
 the literary scales; and it is only after years of 
 such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions 
 of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of 
 phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he 
 himself knowing what he wants to do and (within 
 the narrow limit of a man's ability} able to do it." 
 
 Stevenson, then, had both the natal gift 
 and the necessary training ; a conjunction 
 evocative of superior results in literature. 
 The false and shallow dilemma suggested 
 
22 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 by the Horatian dictum is in his person 
 exposed in all its fallaciousness. The 
 ethic, in truth, might be called the dom- 
 inant note in his essays and verse; the 
 ethic atmosphere never heading up in 
 unpleasant didactic thunder-storms. To 
 miss this quality in him is not to know 
 the man in any saving sense. The uni- 
 versal ethic of comradery is what he 
 preached; loving-kindness was his relig- 
 ion. Above all he hated meanness, cru- 
 elty, and cant. Yet his tolerant, sunshiny 
 doctrine did not prevent a full recognition 
 of the sterner aspects of the moral order. 
 Else had he not been true to his Calvinist 
 ancestors. He felt the working of Law as 
 against Love, and there is an Old Testa- 
 ment flavor to both thought and diction 
 when he is upon such themes. The dic- 
 tion at the finest is saved from mere 
 rhetoric by this tendency. Take in illus- 
 tration one of the " purple patches " of 
 his style, that superb apostrophe at the 
 end of The Christmas Sermon : 
 
 " When the time comes that he should 
 go, there need be few illusions left about 
 himself. Here lies one who meant well, 
 tried a little, failed much : surely that may 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 23 
 
 be his epitaph, of which he need not be 
 ashamed. Nor will he complain at the 
 summons which calls a defeated soldier 
 from the field : defeated, ay, if he were 
 Paul or Marcus Aurelius — but if there 
 is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, 
 undishonored. The faith which sustained 
 him in his lifelong blindness and lifelong 
 disappointment will scarce even be required 
 in this last formality of laying down his 
 arms. Give him a march with his old 
 bones ! There, out of the glorious sun- 
 colored earth, out of the day and the dust 
 and the ecstasy, — there goes another 
 Faithful Failure!" 
 
 Compare this with a typical passage 
 from a master of prose eloquence like 
 Ruskin — whose spiritual fervor no one 
 disputes. I should maintain that there is 
 an equal moral fervor and lift, and less 
 suspicion of fine writing, in the later man ; 
 which could only be when earnestness and 
 honesty went hand in hand with talent. 
 Stevenson does not allow sentimentality to 
 emasculate his effect ; as Hazlitt said of 
 another, his style is " bottomed on the 
 vernacular." His feeling for idiom was 
 wonderful. In fine, while the novels are 
 
24 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 well worth a first reading, it is conceivable 
 that one might hesitate at a second — at 
 least in the case of the majority ; whereas 
 the first reading of the essays is but an 
 imperfect introduction to what shall be 
 re-read times out of number, until it be- 
 come a permanent possession. 
 
 The ascription of the title of poet to an 
 essayist and story-maker of such quality 
 might seem more debatable. In spite of 
 that unique achievement A Child's Garden 
 of Verses^ — at the time of its publication 
 the only collection of poems in the tongue 
 properly to be called child poetry in con- 
 tradistinction from poetry about children 
 for the delectation of older folk, — the 
 critic might well have hesitated to award 
 to Stevenson the proud names of singer 
 and maker. But with the appearance of 
 the final edition of his metrical work, per- 
 mitting for the first time an opinion based 
 upon a complete survey, such reserve be- 
 comes unnecessary. The forty additional 
 pieces of the final edition chiefly constitute 
 the ground for the consideration of Steven- 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 25 
 
 son as a verse-writer of individuality and 
 fine accomplishment. They show his gen- 
 ius at its ripest, and are as interesting 
 for their mastery of the art of verse as 
 they are moving in the imaginative reve- 
 lation of his deepest nature. For strength 
 and beauty we should, on the whole, point 
 to them as the Scotchman's most authentic 
 gift to poetry — this in spite of the charm 
 of the child-verse, or the blameless love- 
 liness of a lyric like the Requiem. Taken 
 as a group, the poems produced while 
 Stevenson was in the South Seas stand 
 for his maturest thought expressed in 
 forms most likely to give it permanence. 
 The verse referred to is embodied in the 
 division entitled Songs of 'Travel and Other 
 Verses. Certain things here, both in blank 
 verse and lyric forms, must awaken the 
 enthusiasm of any lover of fine poetry. 
 They are to his verse what Weir of Her- 
 miston is to his fiction — a noble culmina- 
 tion of his powers. A number of these 
 poems are to be associated because of a 
 common melancholy of sentiment. As if 
 prescient of the not far distant end, the 
 singer longs himself back to Scotland, 
 broods on old ways and days ; he an exile 
 
26 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 fain to return there, at least to die. As 
 strong a piece of blank verse as he has 
 ever written, and one of the stateliest yet 
 most touching in modern poetry, is an em- 
 bodiment of this feeling — that beginning 
 "The tropics vanish," 
 
 with its infinitely pathetic close : 
 
 •« The voice of generations dead 
 Summons me, sitting distant, to arise, 
 My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, 
 And, all mutation over, stretch me down 
 In that denoted city of the dead." 
 
 Akin to this is the apostrophe to Sidney 
 Colvin, where he begs his friend, entering 
 the British Museum to begin his daily 
 toil, to send a thought to the South Seas, 
 " so far, so foreign," and the beautifully 
 tender To my Old Familiars, in which the 
 poet asseverates his belief that, in the 
 very article of death, the scenes of home, 
 " the emptiness of youth," 
 
 " Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice 
 Of discontent and rapture and despair, 
 
 will seize on his mind and blot out all 
 else. 
 
 For sheer music-making, who has 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 27 
 
 wrought lyrics more infectious than Bright 
 is the Ring of Words and In the Highlands, 
 in the Country Places ? There is a con- 
 summate perfection in such work that 
 associates its writer with Poe and Swin- 
 burne ; the loveliness of it is not for the 
 moment's pleasure — it haunts and clings* 
 Stevenson's creed is as nobly expressed in 
 the following as is Kipling's in the Envoy, 
 which closes 'The Seven Seas: 
 
 YOUTH AND LOVE. 
 
 " Once only by the garden gate 
 Our lips we joined and parted. 
 I must fulfil an empty fate 
 And travel the uncharted. 
 
 '* Hail and farewell ! I must arise, 
 Leave here the fatted cattle, 
 And paint on foreign lands and skies 
 My Odyssey of battle. 
 
 " The untented Kosmos my abode, 
 I pass, a wilful stranger : 
 My mistress still the open road 
 And the bright eyes of danger. 
 
 " Come ill or well, the cross, the crown, 
 The rainbow or the thunder, 
 I fling my soul and body down 
 For God to plough them under." 
 
28 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Stevenson's blank verse, as seen in the 
 pieces mentioned and in other choice ex- 
 amples, had become a splendid and dis- 
 tinctive feature of his literary power. It 
 possesses a Shakespearean virility and 
 felicity of diction, and a varied music 
 through the skilful shifting of the caesura 
 and an inerrant gift for tone-color, which, 
 on the technical side, made it admirable. 
 Then, for thought-stuff, it embodies, as I 
 have said, the essential Stevenson, the 
 Stevenson seen in Puhis et Umbra ; a 
 brooding, analytic, modern mind, conscious 
 of the awful antinomies of existence, yet 
 hanging on to a shred of hope, courageous 
 in the face of an apparently heartless fate. 
 Intellectually, he was with J. A. Symonds, 
 Richard Jefferies, Leslie Stephen, W. E. 
 Henley, — an agnostic; temperamentally, 
 artistically, an optimist — or at least, like 
 George Eliot, a meliorist. 
 
 Then, still thinking of the poems which 
 outbreathe nostalgia, that addressed to 
 Crockett deserves a high place among 
 the rhymed pieces : 
 
 " Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain 
 
 are flying ; 
 Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now." 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 29 
 
 Again comes the deep desire, the refrain 
 recurrent in so much of the latest utter- 
 ance : 
 
 " Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, 
 Hills of home !" 
 
 till the sympathetic reader is chilled with 
 the thought that his heartfelt longing was 
 not gratified. That the minor note in 
 these poems was rooted in a radical feeling 
 that his end was fast drawing nigh, there 
 are many little signs, some in The Vailima 
 Letters, some in the verse. This brief 
 blank-verse poem plainly voices the pre- 
 sentiment : 
 
 "The morning drum-call on my eager ear 
 Thrills unforgotten yet ; the morning dew 
 Lies yet undried along my field of noon. 
 But now I pause at whiles in what I do 
 And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear 
 (My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon. ,, 
 
 Among the lyrics, what a noble poem is 
 Tropic Rain, with its leaping measures, its 
 onomatopoetic effects, and, more than all, 
 its brave resolution to see good in evil, 
 blenching at naught. That final stanza 
 surely is one of the most satisfying, most 
 uplifting in verse of our time : 
 
30 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 "And methought that beauty and terror are only one, 
 
 not two ; 
 And the world has room for love and death and 
 
 thunder and dew ; 
 And all the sinews of Hell slumber in summer air ; 
 And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the 
 
 rock is fair. 
 Beneficent streams of tears follow the finger of pain, 
 And out of the cloud that smites beneficent rivers of 
 
 Or look at Mater Triumphans, a superb 
 thing of a verity, destined to thrill 
 mothers many like a trumpet-blast. The 
 whole epic of maternity is expressed in 
 those two stanzas, and the resonance of 
 the words carries with it the mother-pride 
 in offspring conquering all weakness, pain, 
 and fear. In The Woodman Stevenson's 
 sense of the might of nature and the im- 
 pudent meddling of man, self-elected lord 
 of natural phenomena, — a sentiment also 
 finely expressed in prose in The Vailima 
 Letters, — is embodied in a poem contain- 
 ing much strong, picturesque description 
 and an underlying sermon on struggle as 
 the one great law of all existence. Every- 
 thing preys on everything else, he says, 
 and man must do likewise. This is the 
 sterner side of his appreciation of the 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 31 
 
 century's creed of the survival of the 
 fittest. The realization at times weighs 
 him down. Yet, following Huxley's sug- 
 gestion that man must combat, not imi- 
 tate, the cosmic process, Stevenson's 
 doctrine more often is that of gentleness 
 and love. In his most inspired moods 
 and utterances he yearns for a solution 
 leaving room for a belief in the good. 
 This comes out superbly in what is, to 
 my mind, the greatest poem of the group, 
 and one that Browning alone can rival. ] 
 If This were Faith is indeed Browning- 
 esque in its rugged power, its splendidly 
 nervous lilt, its intense ethical quality. 
 The pathos of it is piercing ; it reveals the 
 intellectual attitude and the spiritual state 
 of one of the thoughtfullest, bravest, hon- 
 es test of the chiefs of literature. In spite 
 of having seen God's 
 
 *' evil doom 
 In Golgotha and Khartoum," 
 
 he hopes that the resolve to play a 
 soldier's part, the will to cling on to 
 
 "The half of a broken hope for a pillow at night, 
 That somehow the right is the right 
 
 And the smooth shall bloom from the rough/ ' 
 
/ 
 
 3 z LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 is enough for justification, even if faith 
 can no farther go in the face of the seem- 
 ing triumph of anti-Christ. The irre- 
 sistible, vibrant sweep of the stirring cry- 
 shows it came hot from the heart, and 
 among spiritual registrations in verse it 
 must have a high place. There are other 
 notable things — The Lost Occasion, He 
 Hears with Gladdened Heart the Thunder, 
 and the final Evensong, instinct with a 
 tranquil resignation, a " twilight piece," — 
 among these late poems, with what may 
 be called the "essential Stevenson" in 
 them. Premonitions of the end come 
 frequently during the last year, but, in 
 spite of the wish, when the mood was on 
 him, to revisit friends and the homeland, 
 with the feeling that it were good to lie 
 there, once at least it came to him that his 
 Samoan isle was no ill abiding-place for 
 his body. In reading An End of Travel, 
 with its striking fifth line, one is comforted 
 that he had the journey-end herein imag- 
 ined and limned in lovely verse : 
 
 " Let now your soul in this substantial world 
 
 Some anchor strike. Be here the body moored ; 
 
 This spectacle immutably from now 
 
 The picture in your eye ; and when time strikes, 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 33 
 
 And the green scene goes on the instant blind, 
 The ultimate helpers, where your horse to-day- 
 Conveyed you, dreaming, bear your body dead." 
 
 It must be a solace to every true lover of 
 Stevenson that in his case the green scene 
 did, literally, go on the instant blind, so 
 that he and his were spared the droning 
 misery of a long sickness. 
 
 The world will not let die such imagina- 
 tive writing as is contained in this precious 
 addendum to the verse of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. Noble literature it is, and 
 very revelatory of the man, intensely auto- 
 biographic. The poems make clearer the 
 good fight he fought, the captain he was, 
 true to his own exhortation : 
 
 " bid me play 
 The hero in the coming day ! " 
 
 VI 
 
 Coelum non animum. To change one's 
 sky is not to change one's mind about 
 Stevenson or his work. This meditation 
 upon him was begun amidst the hustle 
 and roar of a great city. The tragic cries 
 of newsboys hawking war "extras" ruf- 
 fled the hours. As if in consonance with 
 
34 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 political events, the skies were sullen, the 
 weather had a bleak, untimely countenance. 
 All was unrest, struggle, dubiety. I finish 
 it in the divine promise of a soft, bright 
 May day far up in the New Hampshire 
 hill-country. The tender spring-green is 
 on bush and tree, the air odorous with 
 budding things. But, tested here or 
 there, Stevenson's power abides : he is 
 not for a certain mood or environment 
 alone. The full appreciation of him is 
 an esoteric matter : granted. One can 
 laud his technic and admit his gifts, yet 
 leave the choicest unsuspected. On the 
 other hand, if admiration errs it also testi- 
 fies to power. The use of superlatives in 
 critical appreciation has a sort of justifica- 
 tion ; for the superlative is but the posi- 
 tive degree of the emotions. Yet it would 
 seem to a contemporary that there is in 
 him something of the classic, by virtue of 
 which he is likely to persist as an author 
 of unfading attraction. For he has offered 
 two most acceptable hostages to Time : 
 an impeccable art and a character piquant, 
 wholesome, distinctive, and strong. 
 
The Democratic and Aristocratic in 
 Literature 
 
THE DEMOCRATIC AND ARIS- 
 TOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 
 
 ¥ 
 
 TT is one of Time's curious paradoxes 
 ■*■ that poetry, originally most popular and 
 democratic of literary products, should 
 come to be regarded as farthest removed 
 from common interest and apprehension. 
 In the history of all peoples the dawn of 
 the artistic expression gives us folk-made 
 epics ; and ballads, which are epics in 
 little, are sung by the untutored and the 
 illiterate of the race. Homer, Beowulf, 
 the Norse Sagas and Eddas, the German 
 Hildebrand, the Finnish Kalevala, are not 
 the work of the self-conscious litterateur 
 armed cap-a-pie with technique and appeal- 
 ing to an audience limited to those of 
 somewhere the same degree of culture. 
 Nay, rooting in the dance and the real 
 music of instruments, testifying to the 
 universal love of story-telling and for 
 
38 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 rhythmic intervals, these earlier monu- 
 ments are no more literary, in the modern 
 sense, than was Pippa when morning-glad 
 she carolled her dew-pearl of a lyric. 
 
 Many of these old poems, indeed, were 
 not for centuries written down, and so 
 were not literary in the derivational mean- 
 ing of the word. The idea of the written 
 song and story is a secondary one, and in 
 a way unfortunate, obscuring, as it does, 
 the thoroughly popular origin of these 
 people-births. Professor Jebb notes this 
 in respect of Greek poetry. " Writing," 
 he says, " was indeed the instrument by 
 which the poems were preserved and trans- 
 mitted. . . . But it belonged to the 
 very essence of all the great poetry that it 
 appealed to hearers rather than to readers. 
 The Greeks of the classical period were 
 eager listeners and talkers ; they delighted 
 in lively conversation and subtle discus- 
 sion, but they were not great students of 
 books. What they felt in regard to the 
 poet can be best understood by comparing 
 it with the feeling which not they alone, 
 but all people, have in regard to the orator 
 and the preacher." This will take some 
 superficial students of the noblest litera- 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 39 
 
 ture of antiquity with surprise ; yet it is 
 not only true of Greece, but of all early 
 literatures. 
 
 " Poetry is the mother-tongue of man," 
 said a great German critic ; and the remark 
 is far less figurative than at first appears. 
 Every child, with its fondness for Mother 
 Goose jingles and wonder-tales, reminds 
 the thoughtful man of the childhood of 
 the race, when ratiocination was not, and 
 song was more natural than syllogism. 
 Emotional speech (and poetry par excellence 
 comes under the rubric) antedates the more 
 intellectual, non-emotional speech of man 
 by centuries, each nation following a uni- 
 versal law of evolution and developing its 
 literature in accordance therewith. It is 
 with this in mind that Sir Philip Sidney 
 blames those who " inveigh against Poetry," 
 because they " seek to deface that which 
 in the noblest nations and languages that 
 are known hath been the first light-giver 
 to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk 
 little by little enabled them to feed after- 
 wards of tougher knowledges/' 
 
 Nobody would deny that our Anglo- 
 Saxon forefathers were in manner of life, 
 and because of their stage of development, 
 
4 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 a practical, utilitarian folk. Yet the Old 
 English bard who stood in the hall and, 
 harp at breast, chanted the hero-deeds of 
 the king was a personage hardly second in 
 importance to the chief himself. He was 
 not regarded by the men of the clan, the 
 retainers in their armor gathering about 
 the scald to hearken and hear his song, as 
 a moonstruck, effeminate individual, to be 
 tolerated at the best — patronized rather 
 than approved. Contrariwise, his place of 
 honor was assured, his position enviable 
 for its emoluments and distinction. The 
 direct and cogent effect of his appeal upon 
 those rough warriors, feasting after their 
 fight, was well understood; the bard stirred 
 them to prowess, and was the expres- 
 sion of their battle-field deeds and aspira- 
 tions. The most matter-of-fact weapon- 
 men would, we may suppose, never have 
 dreamed of questioning the poet's func- 
 tion in this sort, or of belittling his pro- 
 fession and place in their social life. His 
 relation thereto was as immediate as was 
 the blacksmith's ; while his rank was such 
 as to give him exceptional dignity and 
 prominence. 
 
 Poetry, as Vico declared, was the first 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 41 
 
 form of wisdom — the wisdom that was 
 felt and imagined, not thought and 
 reasoned ; hence the poet was not the 
 dreamer so much as the sage and inter- 
 preter of the people to the people — a 
 democratic function, and one to be com- 
 prehended by all. The modern attitude, 
 popular if not critical, toward verse — we 
 prefer to dub in this dubious fashion all 
 present-day product which has not through 
 fame been adjudicated the rank of poetry 
 — is to be explained, first by the fact that 
 reasoned thought, not emotional thought, 
 is generally regarded as the vehicle for the 
 conveyance of wisdom ; and second, by the 
 false distinction set up by the tyranny of 
 the written and later the printed word, 
 making rhythm and rhyme the business of 
 the cultured few, and adjuncts of thought 
 and feeling unrelated to the popular mind 
 and heart. It is not unnatural that as 
 society becomes civilized, with the birth of 
 institutions, the division of occupations, 
 and the rise of reflective differentia in all 
 directions, incidental to a more self-con- 
 scious and sophisticated age, intellectual 
 processes and results should come to be 
 regarded as of more authority and value 
 
42 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 than emotional states and the spontaneous 
 product of feeling. In truth, this slow 
 shift of ideal is always the condition and 
 the measure of natural evolution into 
 higher social life. Yet it may be that in 
 the course of time, when reflection 
 threatens to swamp creation, it is fitting to 
 call a halt — to remind a people blase with 
 the consciousness of the mechanism of all 
 things that the disestimation of man's 
 natural, emotive side is dangerous, and 
 can be carried too far; it may choke great 
 creative efforts, hush the divine sound of 
 song. Nay, it may further be said that 
 the modern world is now in a mood to 
 react in favor of spontaneity ; sick of the 
 fetish-worship of mere intellect, it gladly 
 welcomes the childlike qualities of the 
 unsophisticate heart. The present craze 
 for folk-poets, voicing in the language of 
 the commonalty the popular needs and 
 ideals, makes for this conclusion ; so too 
 does the diligent study of the people songs 
 and ballads of Europe and the East. 
 Modern psychological research leads the 
 same way, teaching that the emotions of 
 humanity play a larger part, and a more 
 fruitful, in our growth than the mere intel- 
 lectuals, and are of more ancient lineage. 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 43 
 
 One recalls Lecky's deep line, " We 
 owe more to our illusions than to our 
 knowledge.' ' It is the very man surfeited 
 with philosophy, science, and history who 
 flies to poetry for a breath of the glad, 
 young, irresponsible dawn of the world. 
 And so, mayhap, by learning the true 
 place and power of song and the true valid- 
 ity of instinct, all classes may be brought 
 back to a realization of its democratic 
 nature. It has been overlooked that the 
 true barrier which divides humble from 
 high, the illiterate from the literati, is not 
 such a naive child of feeling as Poetry, but 
 the stern, cold younger brother, Ratiocina- 
 tion. Thought is essentially aristocratic ; 
 emotion is democratic the globe over; 
 one touch of nature makes the whole 
 world kin. And song, above everything 
 else, is the direct and impulsive issue of 
 emotion. If the arbitrary and accidental 
 nature of literature — meaning thereby the 
 written word — once be securely lodged 
 in mind, the truth as to the royal yet 
 popular part played by the emotions in 
 instinctive creation will be more widely 
 apprehended. 
 
 Yet how surely is literature, as thus ex- 
 
44 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 plained, a people-product, still capable, 
 however much it may have been appro- 
 priated by the select and made to seem 
 almost a caste privilege, of being a joy to 
 all ; how surely is poetry, most plebeian 
 of literary divisions in birth and upbring- 
 ing, a form to-day for the most unreserved 
 and general acceptance, if the world but 
 will; the hard-and-fast line which marks 
 off the literary from common folk and 
 common interests is an artificial one. 
 
 This misconception of literature in gen- 
 eral, and of verse in particular, is to be 
 overcome mainly in two ways : by a broader 
 and more wholesome appeal to humanity 
 on the part of the makers of literature ; 
 and by the cultivation of their emotional 
 and imaginative natures by the so-called 
 practical community. The blame of the 
 present state of things certainly lies with 
 the litterateurs themselves in some meas- 
 ure. A movement like that of the French 
 Symbolist school of poets tends to beget 
 the impression that poetry is a vague, 
 unrelated maundering of sound, color, and 
 suggestion in language, utterly outside of 
 the realities of life. "Take a few ad- 
 verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, substan- 
 
Of THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 £ALjFOBj 
 
 DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 45 
 
 tives, and adjectives," says a distinguished 
 French singer of another and nobler school, 
 " shake them all up together, and you will 
 have symbolism ; " and this is hardly an 
 exaggeration of some of the recent work 
 done under that name. It has been a 
 fashion in more than one country to deem 
 literature meritorious in exact proportion 
 as it was recondite, obscure, precious, or 
 narrow. Let literature become exclusive 
 or technical, and the breath of life goes 
 out of it, whatever the temporary activity 
 into which it may be galvanized. No one 
 can wonder that plain people are given 
 pause before the meaningless rhythmic 
 rhapsodies of Swinburne or the occult 
 mysticism of a Mallarme'; it would be an 
 egregious mistake to fly to the conclusion 
 that such folk are atrophied on the side 
 of emotional literature. On the contrary, 
 they will be quick to respond to the poem 
 or story which has clear thought, true feel- 
 ing, and a sane atmosphere. The trouble 
 with much of current verse is, that it 
 substitutes empty art, or metaphysics, or 
 specialization, or the hyper-refinements 
 of a finicky, lop-sided culture for the 
 wholeness and heartiness of more natural 
 
46 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 conditions. It is safe to say that if our 
 writers cultivate a sound habit of body and 
 a pure habit of mind, these abuses and 
 effeminacies which bring their art into ill- 
 repute, and surely make misunderstand- 
 ings, will die from disuse. A sick man in 
 literature, who lets his sickness get into his 
 work, is not a boon, but a nuisance. Meet 
 the age half way, O man of letters ; realize 
 the dignity and breadth of your calling ; 
 reckon it as manly to be nothing less than 
 vital and vigorous in your work, eschewing 
 the night-side of your craft as too patho- 
 logical for humanity's profit or your own 
 well-being ! So will you have done your 
 part, and may rest from your labors satis- 
 fied that your talent has not been wasted, 
 and sure that your generation will not be 
 thankless. 
 
 But on the side of the public, too, there 
 is a duty. This may be expressed by say- 
 ing that common folk (and the world in 
 general makes no pretence to be outside 
 this category) must cultivate the higher- 
 practical ; the practical which ministers to 
 the heart and soul, and so to nobler liv- 
 ing, while it may be impractical so far as 
 material and immediate gain is concerned. 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 47 
 
 People at large favor appeals to their 
 psychical natures ; they enjoy stories, songs, 
 scenery, art which reproduces and idealizes 
 all that side of life. Scratch a Christian- 
 ized Turk, it is said, and you will find a 
 Mohammedan ; scratch a practical man, 
 and you will find a big boy responsive to 
 the things of the spirit, though maybe 
 ashamed to own it. Hence the men and 
 women for whom sound, pure-hearted 
 literature is written are, as a rule, quite 
 ready to meet it half way. They must 
 not be slow to encourage what is given 
 them of sweet and inspirational ; nor must 
 they be tricked into the fallacious modern 
 notion that emotion is puerile and waste 
 time, that intellectual wrestling is the most 
 glorious outcome of latter-day develop- 
 ment. So far is this last from being true 
 that all genuine culture (as contradistin- 
 guished from knowledge) is a thing of 
 the emotional and imaginative parts of 
 human consciousness. Some other modern 
 nations — the Germans, for example — 
 are nearer the right in their frank avow- 
 ment of the worth of sentiment and the 
 prominence in daily life they give to music 
 — above all other arts offspring of the 
 
48 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 feelings. A public, a people, which does 
 not count as ill spent an hour stolen 
 from the workaday world to listen to a 
 symphony concert or a reading from the 
 poets is the only fruitful environment for 
 the artist in all those arts which are indis- 
 solubly bound by the kin-tie of creative 
 emotion. Withdraw the audience, and 
 the makers of art and literature fatten on 
 their own idiosyncrasies, become decadent, 
 symbolic, or whatever be the descriptive 
 phrase naming the fad of the fleeting day. 
 With these inter-relations between poetry 
 and the public realized, with the demo- 
 cratic birth of the former set before the eyes 
 and brought home to the consciousness by 
 argument and illustration, it should not be 
 Utopian to hope for a reinvestiture of 
 verse in the suffrages, not of a class, but 
 of a people, the result being greater joy- 
 ance and a swifter progress in the ameliora- 
 tions and upliftings of our civilization. 
 
 II 
 
 There is always a reverse side to human 
 shields : we must touch this topic in another 
 aspect ere we leave it. While the fact of 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 
 
 49 
 
 democratic origin and the popular nature of 
 literature and of its highest division, verse, 
 is perfectly true and in need of reiteration, 
 it happens, nevertheless, that it is possible 
 to lay too much stress upon the naive 
 folk-element in letters, to the obscuration 
 of truth. At times, and especially in an 
 over-cultured and reflective age, a sort of 
 preciosity is thrown around a literary peo- 
 ple-product, and the suppressed premise 
 appears to be a belief that all virtue lies in 
 the haphazard outcome of non-literary and 
 careless workers in a primitive art. That 
 the breath of life is often in such work, 
 and absent from the polished efforts of self- 
 conscious poetasters and essay-mongers may 
 be readily conceded ; but it is not the less 
 a fact that art is long, a slow, tortuous evo- 
 lution moving from crude to perfect, and 
 from the childishly, monotonously simple 
 to the fascinatingly complex. Its latter 
 end is better than its first. 
 
 The earlier and more artless product of 
 a given nation, it must be borne in mind, 
 has a dual value, to be separated carefully 
 into its component parts in any fruitful 
 analysis. First, there is its historical sig- 
 nificance, calling for our appreciation as a 
 
50 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 link in a chain, or as a comparatively unim- 
 portant parent of a greater offspring. And 
 then, second, there is its value as literature 
 per se y aside from all question of evolu- 
 tional place and importance in a line of 
 causation. Too often these tests are con- 
 fused, and much cloudy or wild criticism 
 results. For example : the immense 
 amount of research and critical judgment 
 which have been expended upon the ballad 
 forms of their older native literatures, by 
 English and German scholars respectively, 
 is right and proper when the historic posi- 
 tion of the ballad is in view, but would be 
 almost absurd if the investigation were 
 for literary excellence alone ; and, in con- 
 sequence, one notices a fetish worship of 
 these rough, amorphous attempts at song 
 and narration, among people who ignore 
 the merits of modern work in the same 
 genre infinitely superior in all particulars 
 which go to make poetry. 
 
 The story of the modern attitude toward 
 the Elizabethan drama is again an illus- 
 tration. For a while it was neglected as 
 rude and contemptible; even the apprecia- 
 tion of a Dryden or a Pope being touched 
 with the condescension of one viewing the 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 51 
 
 product from a superior height. But with 
 the present century we get a truer aper$u, 
 and the play-making of Shakespeare and 
 his fellows is hailed as the Golden Age of 
 our native drama. In the superlatives of 
 praise now deemed proper for the latter- 
 day critic in treating of this product lurks 
 a peril for those who read as they run, and 
 perhaps for the critic-class itself. Those 
 who take their opinions at second-hand will 
 conclude that because the greatest poetry 
 of our tongue was written by the matchless 
 Shakespeare, by Marlowe of the mighty 
 line, sweet-toned Ford, mournful Webster, 
 and the rest of the seventeenth-century 
 immortals, — because their dramatic output 
 is constantly and critically referred to as 
 standing by itself, the chief glory of our 
 native literature, — therefore the best play- 
 making in our literary history was done 
 between the days of Elizabeth and the 
 second James. And this conclusion would 
 be an egregious mistake. As literature, 
 that virile and flamboyant product is doubt- 
 less above all else before and since; but 
 as drama regarded as a form distinct from 
 other forms, and having a technique of its 
 own, the later work of Sheridan and Gold- 
 
52 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 smith, say, or far more that of Ibsen, is 
 superior by an infinity of stage-craft and 
 technical art. Yet so loosely has the un- 
 bounded laudation of the Elizabethans 
 been construed that even this statement, 
 precise as to fact and mild in manner, may 
 seem to some whimsical or iconoclastic. 
 Great as imaginative literature, great indeed 
 as drama when compared with the prece- 
 dent miracles and mysteries, horse- farce 
 and stilted classicalities, out of which it 
 evolved, the plays of Shakespeare and his 
 mates are not good in the sense and to the 
 degree that those of Sardou, Ibsen, Pinero, 
 and Sudermann are good. In the evolu- 
 tion of the play as an organic form in 
 literature, these later men stand on a van- 
 tage-ground and are of the sort to make 
 use of it. We have here, in short, the 
 confusion arising from the subtle power 
 exercised by a mighty, but relatively inar- 
 tistic art-product, to which is imputed a 
 vicarious virtue by reason of youth and 
 unsophistication ; because it is more " spon- 
 taneous," less consciously articulated. 
 Had Shakespeare, it is said, weighed and 
 pruned and filed his figures, we should 
 have had fewer pleonasms and euphuisms 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 
 
 53 
 
 perchance, but less authentic raptures as 
 well. The fallacy of the folk-cult is here, 
 though in modified form. Shakespeare, 
 the Elizabethans at large, were great liter- 
 ary creators and at times great artists ; and 
 their most pronounced triumphs will be 
 found to be at one inevitably with their 
 truest art — a significant fact. It is un- 
 philosophic to deify the untutored side of 
 their power as if therein lay the secret of 
 all its potency and charm. 
 
 That there is a popular quality, a wild, 
 natural music, in much of the early effort 
 in the literary evolution of a race cannot 
 be gainsaid. At the same time, this 
 simple truth may be — nay, is — elevated 
 into a doctrine, with the result of blinding 
 us to relative excellencies, and putting a 
 more developed and finer art under a 
 cloud. Literature, one must be ever re- 
 peating, is an art primarily and chiefly ; it 
 is extremely doubtful if the songs and 
 ballads of the most unsophisticate age 
 which history records were the output of 
 pure inspiration, with no thought of manner 
 or form. Merely because we fall in with 
 a cruder product does not at all prove 
 spontaneity : it indicates only that the art 
 
54 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 is less defined and positive ; the inspira- 
 tion is a matter for subjective tests. Many 
 early literatures, once ranked as crude 
 and undeveloped, now are known to be 
 thoroughly artistic : thus, it used to be a 
 stock remark in text-books of English 
 literature to call the Anglo-Saxon poetry 
 rough and barbarous. To-day every 
 student of it is aware that it is highly 
 evolved and consciously artistic. A milk- 
 maid may labor more over a doggerel qua- 
 train bearing the smutted finger-marks of 
 folk-verse than a trained poet over his 
 sonnet, which by grace of long experience 
 he writes with no restricting sense of its 
 intricacies of construction. No sudden 
 gust of creative energy will overcome 
 ignorance in manipulating unfamiliar 
 material. An easy pitfall, this ; and, we 
 venture to think, one into which many 
 ballad-idolaters have fallen. 
 
 To begin with, then, crudeness and 
 spontaneity are not synonyms. Next, 
 since art is an organic evolution taking on 
 new beauties and decorations in its course 
 of development, it is fair to say that, even 
 conceding an increase in self-consciousness, 
 the gains far outweigh the losses, and are 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 55 
 
 to be rejoiced over, not neglected for 
 indulgence in a retrospective wail over a 
 more or less illusory primitive quality, 
 which when analyzed resolves itself into 
 two parts dross to one of true metal. The 
 permanently great art of the nations has 
 not been the rough-hewn, impulsive efforts 
 of demi-civilized creatures, but the wise 
 and splendid product — inspirational, yet 
 sternly law-abiding and artistic — of the 
 aristocrats of letters — those to the purple 
 born. Homer was not a lawless maker of 
 poems, but a consummate craftsman ; so 
 was Dante, so also Shakespeare ; Goethe 
 and Heine, Musset and Hugo, Keats and 
 Tennyson, — none of these lacked spon- 
 taneity, inspiration ; but they were artists 
 ad unguem. No fallacy is more irritating 
 to one familiar with the exigencies and 
 demands of art than that which fondly 
 fancies that inspiration spells a total lack 
 of training and a tyro's spurt of common- 
 place self-expression. Editors are aware, 
 to their daily sorrow, of the type of con- 
 tributor who sends his first attempt for 
 publication with the assurance that it was 
 " inspired," penned under compulsion in 
 the mid-watches of the night, a thing 
 
56 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 unique in the writer's experience. The 
 one sure and changeless family-trait of 
 all such writing is its worthlessness ; and 
 some at least of the poetic seizures of 
 the past, dubbed wonderful because so 
 delightfully free from self-conscious effort, 
 belong to this same category. 
 
 It is well, then, to have two denotements 
 in mind concerning art : that in its finest 
 and richest forms it implies training, tech- 
 nique, evolution, and must be, therefore, 
 in a sense, self-knowing and self-judging; 
 and again, that the moment of creation 
 is the moment of inspiration with Goethe 
 and Tennyson as with Master Ballad- 
 Monger. Moreover, inspiration for in- 
 spiration, that of the trained and rounded 
 artist will be to that of the uncultured 
 songman as gold to pinchbeck. The 
 worst feature, in sooth, of this pseudo- 
 worship of folk-literature is its affectation. 
 The refined critic, who goes into spasms 
 of admiration over the halting stanzas 
 and bizarre metaphors of some bygone 
 lyric, is more often than not keenly alive 
 to all that makes art precious and dis- 
 tinctive : he forces himself into enthu- 
 siasm here, rather than honestly feels it ; 
 
DEMOCRATIC IN LITERATURE 57 
 
 he has a tradition of eulogium on his neck, 
 like an Old Man of the Sea. And so he 
 praises out of all proportion, and ignores 
 the gracious gains and enrichments of 
 contemporaneous art. No one well read 
 in, and appreciative of, the best modern 
 English verse can have to do with the 
 early English ballads without frequent 
 irritation and a sense of manifold, some- 
 times of amazing, defects, and this de- 
 spite much pleasure and stimulation. 
 And since honesty is the beginning of 
 all wisdom, in literary apperception as 
 elsewhere, it is well to make this point 
 pike-staff plain. 
 
 So the two sides of the matter emerge 
 from our to-and-fro of argument and 
 illustration. We see (it may be hoped) 
 the wrong in deeming literature aristo- 
 cratic in the sense that it is exclusive, 
 unsympathetic to common needs and 
 common moods, the trick of the spe- 
 cialist and nothing more, — this view 
 overlooking the unliterary, democratic 
 genesis of all literature, and especially of 
 poetry, its first and fairest child. But 
 we see too, in seeming though not es- 
 sential contradiction to this, that litera- 
 
58 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 ture is an art like any other; that the 
 people-made song or story is a simpler, 
 cruder, less artistic thing than the per- 
 fected lyric, novel, or play into which it 
 shall in the course of centuries be de- 
 veloped ; and that a false cult of the raw 
 for its rawness' sake may easily spring 
 up and work mischief. With both of 
 these truths understood and applied, the 
 student, the reader, the amateur, or the 
 literary worker is in a position to be 
 tolerant, yet keen — broadly appreciative, 
 yet genuinely critical. He will feel that 
 literature should be and can be a general 
 joy, not a privilege of the select few ; 
 and he will rejoice in good literature, 
 whether early or late, whether the ballad 
 made in the morning of history or the 
 psychologic marvel of a modern master. 
 Only he will graduate all literary pro- 
 duction according to its kind and degree 
 of excellence, and will ever discriminate 
 between faddish fashions and the eternal 
 verities of Art. 
 
Phases of Fiction 
 
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE 
 NOVEL 
 
 X. 
 
 TT^HEN a certain division of literature 
 * * is, for historical reasons, dominant 
 in current literary production, it is like a 
 drag-net which ensnares divers sorts of 
 fish. It attracts not only the natural 
 makers in that form, but others whose 
 gifts fit them better for some other work, 
 but who cannot resist the centripetal pull 
 of this most popular activity. Thus, in 
 the Elizabethan days the drama was the 
 type of literature which represented the 
 age, most interested the public, and con- 
 sequently engaged the main attention of 
 the begetters of literary masterpieces. 
 And hence it is that we meet with men 
 like Peele, Greene, and Lodge, and, later, 
 Cartwright and Shirley, whose call to play- 
 making was not imperative, whose work 
 was more or less imitative. Had the 
 
6z LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 mode of the day in letters demanded the 
 essay or the novel, they would as readily 
 have turned in those directions. Peele 
 was naturally a superior controversialist, 
 Lodge could write so exquisite a prose 
 pastoral as Rosalind, — whence Shake- 
 speare drew his lovely As Tou Like It> 
 — and Shirley had powers as a lyrist ex- 
 ampled in so dainty a song as that entitled 
 A Lullaby. 
 
 At present the novel is the all-engulf- 
 ing literary form. Alphonse Daudet has 
 asked of late : " What shall be the. novel, 
 the literature, of the future?" — as if the 
 two terms were co-terminous and inter- 
 changeable. Fiction has made sad inroads 
 upon the ancient and honorable champaign 
 of Poetry ; the essay is as naught to it in 
 popularity and applause ; while even the 
 stern historian tries to give his chronicle of 
 the past, of " old, unhappy far-off things," 
 a narrative interest, and some boldly throw 
 their history into the guise of an historical 
 romance, albeit their purpose is not artistic, 
 but didactic, — the imparting of knowledge 
 rather than the giving of pleasure. Fic- 
 tion, in short, is the modern magnet tow- 
 ard which all literary product and power 
 
PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 63 
 
 are drawn. That this predominance is in 
 some ways an evil (despite the indisputable 
 virtues of the novel), that it is possibly- 
 fraught with danger to general literary pro- 
 duction, is a thesis which will at least bear 
 further amplification. 
 
 The injury done to poetry has been 
 alluded to. When Walter Scott, after 
 triumphing in narrative and ballad verse, 
 took up the writing of romances and 
 charmed all Europe, he gave English 
 fiction an importance and dignity hardly 
 enjoyed by it before. Without over- 
 looking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 
 testimony that Richardson's Pamela wrung 
 tears from the chambermaids of all nations, 
 it is pretty safe to say that with the Wa- 
 verley Novels our fiction, as a distinct 
 form, gained a prestige which, in spite of 
 fluctuations and what at present some 
 incline to call a woful devolution, it has 
 never lost. And verse has suffered a pro- 
 portionate decay of authority. It has come 
 to pass that verse-men adopt a semi-apolo- 
 getic tone in putting forth their wares, and 
 the soi-disant scientific spirit of the age 
 tends to look askance at such activity. 
 To be sure, this indifference to poetry 
 
64 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 may easily be exaggerated. If the critic 
 go back to any earlier period of English 
 poetry, much the same influences may 
 be detected : the poets themselves timid 
 and knee-supple ; their carping judges 
 aghast at the dearth of good work, and 
 with their mouths full or praise of some 
 previous day. Walter Scott's accent in 
 speaking of The Lady of the Lake, be- 
 fore its publication, has, for us, a curi- 
 ously tentative and deprecatory sound. 
 And to read to-day such a critique as 
 Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry, wherein 
 not Scott alone, but Lord Byron, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and Southey are dis- 
 missed with contemptuous paragraphs, is 
 sufficiently amusing, while suggestive of 
 the irresistible tendency to belittle the fore- 
 ground in favor of the historical perspective 
 
 — a strange reversal of the ordinary laws 
 of composition. But aside from all this, it 
 is true enough that contemporaneous poetry 
 is, speaking broadly, tolerated rather than 
 appraised ; if the text of sales be applied, 
 the comparatively small editions of verse 
 
 — the regular edition being 500 volumes, 
 and limited editions of less size being a 
 fad of the time — show the same thing, 
 
PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 65 
 
 from the publisher's sober point of view. 
 Look, too, at the relative value set on 
 fiction and verse in the magazines, those 
 faithful registers of popular taste. The 
 story is the sine qud, non, the one literary 
 form which must be supplied ; the qua- 
 train or sonnet is tucked in to fill un- 
 seemly gaps between articles. Its func- 
 tion is that of a tail-piece. In the days 
 of good Queen Bess, poetry in play form 
 was the acceptable mode of literary ex- 
 pression : there was then a happy con- 
 junction of public demand and artistic 
 supply, though whether they stood in the 
 relation of cause and effect is matter for 
 parley. But so much may be roundly 
 affirmed : what the play was to that time, 
 the novel is to this. Those now writing 
 verse must expect and be content with 
 smaller sales, slower reputation, and, in 
 a sense, an uncongenial environment. 
 As a result, the fictional maelstrom sucks 
 in some who in another day would have 
 been poets, or who, having the name of 
 poets, would have done greater work in 
 verse than will ever come from them un- 
 der existing conditions. It is a curious 
 query, What might Kipling have achieved 
 
66 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 in poetry in an age which made the poetic 
 drama the recognized mode of expression ? 
 This, with two or three of his fine ballads 
 in mind, to say nothing of the dramatic 
 instinct in his fiction, is not so superficial 
 a suggestion as might at first appear. 
 But born into these latter-day conditions, 
 he is an Uhlan of story-telling, who only 
 now and then makes a side-charge into 
 the placid domains of Poesy. 1 
 
 Fiction, again, draws the natural essayist 
 away from his metier. Those heretical 
 enough to prefer the essay-work of Henry 
 James to his novels will think of him in 
 this connection ; a humorist like Mark 
 Twain, undoubtedly a teller of tales, but 
 hardly a novelist in the full modern con- 
 tent of the word, is another exemplar. 
 The cult of the analytic in fiction has led 
 many writers, whose forte lay in such 
 effects rather than in synthetic creation, 
 into novel-making; and, conversely, per- 
 haps the analytic tendency has been thus 
 exaggerated, until it has culminated in 
 The Story-That-Never-Ends. Interest- 
 ing questions and cross-questions arise 
 
 1 This was written, of course, before Kipling's full fame 
 as a poet had come. 
 
PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 67 
 
 here. But the main contention, that this 
 modern maelstrom, with its secret under- 
 tow, has drawn the essayists into its potent 
 circle, to the impoverishment of the essay 
 — delightsome form made luminous by 
 the names of Montaigne, Lamb, Heine, 
 and Arnold — and, as well, to the dubious 
 improvement of Fiction itself, is for easy 
 apprehension. Recently, and in large 
 part due to the brilliant critical papers of 
 such English and American writers as 
 Pater, Stevenson, Moore, Lang, and Rep- 
 plier, a reaction in favor of the essay is ob- 
 servable, and it may be that this will grow 
 into a veritable renaissance. So far, how- 
 ever, it is little more, than a beginning. 
 That the reading of the older and standard 
 essayists has been checked by the novel 
 and its half-breed ally, the newspaper, can- 
 not be gainsaid. 
 
 But regarding Fiction alone, what are 
 the effects of this autocracy which it main- 
 tains in the world of literature ? To our 
 thinking, we get bad novels, and too many 
 of them, because of it. The form has so 
 supreme a power, and the emoluments are 
 so glittering, that those who have it in 
 them to do good work lash themselves to 
 
68 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 unnatural exertions in order to answer the 
 demand, and sell their second best in lieu 
 of their best, which takes more time. 
 Very few of our modern novel-writers 
 exhibit the conscientious care and lei- 
 surely method of Mrs. Ward or Stevenson. 
 The temptation is great and the danger 
 extreme. And far worse than this, a horde 
 of hangers-on rush into the field, and by 
 their antics, utterly lacking coherence, 
 with no raison d'etre to justify their pres- 
 ence, bring what is a gift, an art, and a 
 consecrated labor, into misunderstanding 
 and disrepute. It is fast coming to the 
 point where a man who has not written a 
 novel gains thereby a certain distinction; 
 and this surely is ominous for the highest 
 interests of Fiction. But it is questiona- 
 ble if the novel will remain indefinitely the 
 dominant type, the maelstrom engulfing 
 the various kinds of literary power and 
 activity. All analogy points the other 
 way, begetting a presumption in favor of 
 some new form or the revival of an old. 
 It is not impossible that with a new im- 
 pulse in poetry of the narrative or dra- 
 matic order, Fiction will find its elder sister 
 occupying her sometime place as a coequal. 
 
PREDOMINANCE OF THE NOVEL 69 
 
 Indeed, the forecast for the drama, uniting 
 as it does the most splendid creative liter- 
 ary energy with action of the most direct 
 and universally appealing kind, is espe- 
 cially bright. And the literary movement 
 in this direction of late suggests an ultimate 
 shifting in the relative importance of those 
 forms of literary expression which in our 
 day engage the interest and affection of 
 men. 
 
7 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 II 
 
 THE PERSISTENCE OF THE 
 ROMANCE 
 
 ¥ 
 
 The now palpable reaction from the 
 realistic, so called, in English fiction to 
 the romantic, as a form and a method, 
 suggests an historical retrospect. The 
 fact is, the romance, in its several kinds, 
 has persisted for centuries in our native 
 novel, and its resurgence to-day is only a 
 demonstration to be prophesied from past 
 experiences in fictional evolution. Nor is 
 the explanation far to seek. All the 
 world loves a story, as it does a lover; 
 and psychologic interest, the analysis of 
 motive and character, will never take the 
 place of that objective interest which cen- 
 tres in action, situation, and denouement. 
 Our age takes more kindly to such methods 
 and motives than did its predecessors ; in- 
 deed, it has been taught to do so, and the 
 novel of subjective tendency may be styled 
 the chosen vehicle of expression. But 
 always those who read as they run, and 
 
PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 71 
 
 the more critical class which seeks in books 
 illusion from the workaday world, will 
 desire the adventure story and the heroic 
 presentment of human life. A host of 
 people agree with Balzac that the writer 
 of fiction should strive to portray society 
 not solely as it is, but as it is hoped it will 
 be in that " possibly better " state suggested 
 by present improvement. One is struck 
 by this in the simple inductive process of 
 inquiry among intelligent book-lovers ; 
 the present writer has found that a large 
 proportion go to novels for rest and recrea- 
 tion, rather than for a criticism of life or 
 aesthetic stimulation, least of all for spirit- 
 ual profit. If this last is to result, let it 
 be unobtrusive, by way of indirection, not 
 through the avowed tendenz fiction, seems 
 to be the cry. 
 
 Text-books are fond of emphasizing 
 the birth of the modern analytic novel 
 with Richardson and Fielding, as if there- 
 after the whole trend were toward the 
 subjective social study. It is true enough 
 that a new impulse and manner were in- 
 troduced by those worthies ; but twenty 
 odd years before Pamela, and Tom Jones, 
 De Foe's Robinson Crusoe was in the 
 
72 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 field to represent that undying creature, 
 the Romance; and if Mr. Kipling and 
 Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. 
 Doyle, and General Wallace hark back 
 to the seamy Daniel as prototype, he in 
 turn derives from the picaresque tales 
 that had gone before, and, to look to 
 origins, is justified by the Spanish Hedon- 
 ists from whom our romance sprang. An 
 early English example of the picaresque 
 is Nash's Jack Wilt on > which, clumsy as 
 it is, and naively childish to modern taste, 
 does nevertheless explain De Foe on the 
 one hand and the penny-dreadful on the 
 other. Jack, a page in the English army 
 in France at the siege of Tournay, and a 
 fellow of infinite gusto, much travel, and 
 many escapades, is perhaps the first pict- 
 uresque rascal in a genre to be afterwards 
 enriched by Dumas and broadened and 
 modified by Le Sage, Hugo, Scott, and 
 Dickens. He is the father of harum- 
 scarums, and he initiates for all time the 
 type of the picaresque story — that divi- 
 sion of the romance the essence of which 
 lies in brisk, breathless adventuring and a 
 lusty enjoyment of life as incident and 
 spectacle. Such later divisions, of course, 
 
/ 
 PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 73 
 
 as the pastoral romance — early exampled 
 in Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia^ 
 and finding its modern representation in 
 Mr. Black, Mr. Blackmore, and others 
 — and the bombastic pseudo-romance 
 borrowed from the French of Scarron 
 et Cie.y and — thank Heaven ! — pretty 
 much dead to-day, swell with contribu- 
 tory streams the now stately river of 
 romance. But the adventure-tale that 
 eventuates in Kidnapped and The Refugees 
 is to be tracked down to Jack Wilton^ 
 artless product of Elizabethan times. 
 
 Nor, if we overlook the mere matter of 
 prose-form, may we hesitate to go farther 
 back in looking for the genesis of the spirit 
 and purpose of the English romance. We 
 shall meet with it several centuries earlier, 
 in that sterling, sturdy literary form, the 
 ballad ; in certain of the verse narratives of 
 Chaucer; yes, in the Old English epics 
 themselves. Other times, other customs, 
 and saga, epic, apologue, ballad, or novel 
 may be the chosen vehicle ; but the liking 
 for story is a constant factor. The instinct 
 for romance is the instinct for illusion, a 
 request for pictures of a livelier and love- 
 lier world than that we live in ; it were fool- 
 
74 • LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 ish not to expect its gratification in art all 
 along in the development of our literature. 
 With this continual outcropping, this cyclic 
 persistence, of the romance in English fic- 
 tion, notable contributions in this kind 
 may be anticipated in the near future, as a 
 rebound from the deification of the psycho- 
 analytic. The public is eager for it (apply 
 the test of sales in the case of recent prom- 
 inent romantic novels) ; and the writers 
 of fiction take heart for the attempt, or 
 by a natural resilience are of the tribe of 
 Dan. But whether the movement pro- 
 duce marvels of romantic composition this 
 decade or the next century, it is safe to 
 say that the field will always be cultivated, 
 appealing as it does to a permanent taste 
 and satisfying an inevitable hunger. By 
 no means is it to be said that the school of 
 Messrs. Howells and James is in its de- 
 cadence ; fruitful and important work is 
 sure to come thence, and its possibilities, 
 especially in the domain of psychology, 
 are as yet but half realized. But it is well 
 to bear down on the fact that the pedigree 
 of this school is no better than, is indeed 
 not so old and honorable as, that which 
 has De Foe as past master in the last 
 
PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE 75 
 
 century, and is vigorously championed in 
 fin de siecle English letters by Messrs. 
 Kipling and Stevenson. 
 
 And it should be understood that this 
 reaction toward incident in fiction is a 
 phase of the wider protest against the abuse 
 of that misnamed realism for which partial- 
 ism is a fitter term. It is part of a ten- 
 dency which has produced in Paris, the 
 stronghold of the opposite influence, a 
 revival denominated neo-idealism, result- 
 ing in symbolism in poetry and M. 
 Wagner's noble trumpet-call to the young 
 generation. Romanticism is to idealism in 
 the novel what the garment is to the soul. 
 In this broader implication, the romance 
 includes Mrs. Ward's David Grieve and 
 Mrs. Hunt's Ramona, books treating life 
 in its more ideal aims and relations. The 
 romance of the future will present such 
 high interests, keeping pace with the evo- 
 lution of society; and its vantage-ground 
 over the romance of years agone will be 
 that it is firm-based on truth to the phenom- 
 ena of life, and is thus, in the only true 
 sense, realistic. Nobler in content and 
 persistent in type, the romance, broadly 
 
76 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 viewed, may be regarded as that form of 
 literature which more than any other shall 
 reflect the aspirations of the individual and 
 the social progress of the State. 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 77 
 
 III 
 NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 
 
 ¥ 
 
 Just as the term father implies the 
 correlative term child, so does a novel 
 imply a novel-reader. It were hard to 
 imagine a piece of fiction without an audi- 
 ence, even if the audience number but one 
 and be furnished by the author himself. 
 Readers, then, being necessary, it touches 
 the quick of the fictionist's interest to in- 
 quire : What is the attitude of the present- 
 day patrons of tales towards the different 
 kinds of fiction purveyed for their delecta- 
 tion? Is the purpose-novel preferred, or 
 the light and cynical analytic study, or the 
 frankly objective adventure-tale of your 
 true romanticist ? Would Mrs. Ward win 
 the popular plebiscite, or Mr. Benson, or 
 Messrs. Stevenson, Doyle, and Weyman? 
 
 Of course a categorical reply could only 
 be made on the basis of counting noses : 
 the pure mathematics of the problem will 
 always be out of reach. Still, what with 
 the test of sales, the talk of society, and 
 
78 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 the a posteriori analyses of the critics, an 
 opinion of some solidity may be attained. 
 The writer has made a point of conversing 
 with all sorts of folk who care for fic- 
 tion (and who, outside of the absolutely 
 illiterate class, does not care for it?), and 
 has been both interested and instructed by 
 the testimony thus derived. Blending the 
 illumination gained in this way with that 
 from other sources, he has concluded that 
 novel-readers may be divided, roughly, into 
 three classes : first, those who care for fic- 
 tion as art primarily, and get their main 
 pleasure from its truth to life, its character 
 analysis, and its construction ; second, 
 those whose interest centres in the thesis 
 of the book, and who care little or nothing 
 for form, style, and other distinctively lit- 
 erary features ; and third, those to whom 
 a novel is above all else a story — some- 
 thing to amuse and charm, an organism 
 with movement and zest of life. 
 
 That division of novel-readers which 
 looks for and relishes to the full the art of 
 a bit of fiction is comparatively small, and 
 for obvious reasons. Here belong the 
 critics, the connoisseurs of literature. To 
 such it matters not so much if a story be 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 
 
 79 
 
 pleasant, or whether or not it teaches 
 sound morality and superinduces a better 
 opinion of one's fellow-men. If it have 
 construction, vital character-drawing, and 
 verisimilitude, if it possesses stylistic dis- 
 tinction and dramatic power, they are satis- 
 fied. The analytic student of the novel 
 comes in the course of time to put his 
 attention on these things to the exclusion 
 of everything extraneous ; he reads more 
 as a scientist and less as a human being. 
 This is at once the privilege and the 
 penalty of the critical function. It is only 
 the very great books that can wrest him 
 from this self-conscious and dubious coign 
 of vantage and set him cheek by jowl with 
 ordinary humanity, breathless in watching 
 a piece of life and personally involved in the 
 fortunes of the dramatis persons — in the 
 grip of the sweetest and strongest of obses- 
 sions. Such, as a rule, is the critic's place 
 and state of mind. Not always, even in his 
 case, however. Mr. Andrew Lang, suf- 
 fering, one might almost say, from a sur- 
 feit of culture, likes nothing so well as the 
 novel with " go " and color and life, contra- 
 distinguished from that of analysis and the 
 mooting of problems. Conceiving the end 
 
80 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 of art to be "pleasure, not edification," he 
 makes a plea for " the Fijian canons of 
 fiction," meaning thereby that those naive 
 natives in their stories " tell of gods and 
 giants and canoes greater than mountains, 
 and of women fairer than the women of 
 these days, and of doings so strange that 
 the jaws of the listeners fall apart." Mr. 
 Lang, in short, is fond of beautiful impos- 
 sibilities in a novel. But it is none the 
 less fair to say that the critic-class, as such, 
 reads with " Art for art's sake " perpetually 
 engraven upon its censorious front. And 
 it is also plain that the audience thus fur- 
 nished the fictionist is so small as to be 
 numerically contemptible, and in the 
 vulgar matter of sales as unimportant as 
 the p in pneumonia. To these profes- 
 sionals of criticism may be added a fraction 
 of the reading public which uses their 
 method, or in amateurish fashion, albeit 
 honestly, follows in their wake. Very 
 young persons whose education has been 
 large and experience limited, and who for 
 these reasons take themselves au grand 
 serieux, and are more or kss self-conscious 
 in their psychological habitudes, belong 
 here ; here belong, too, older, hardier, and 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 81 
 
 more sensible people of a natural intellect- 
 ual keenness, the ab ovo analysts of life, 
 and of literature as its expression. These 
 swear by Mr. Howells' dicta, and, as to 
 quality, are of the aristoi among readers, 
 coveted by all genuine artists. But neither 
 of these subsidiary classes swells the critic- 
 class, caring for the art of a novel first of 
 all, to proportions invalidating our claim 
 that it is decidedly the smallest of the 
 three, and, so far as immediate influence 
 and the substantial return of figures is con- 
 cerned, the least important. 
 
 The second and larger class embraces 
 readers who object not to didactics in their 
 novels. To them a polemic in the guise 
 of literature is as acceptable as a pill, sugar- 
 coated to the taste, to the thorough-going 
 homoeopathist. Many falling into this 
 category enjoy literature per se y to be sure ; 
 but they like it also to convey some 
 thoughtful thesis, preferring, so to say, the 
 luxuriously cushioned barouche of fiction 
 to wrestling with the same problem in the 
 Irish jaunting-car of sociology or science. 
 Hence is derived a good part of the au- 
 dience rallying to the Heavenly 'Twins 
 and A Yellow Aster; or that which a 
 
82 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 few years ago took up arms for Robert 
 Elsmere. A part, not the whole, we must 
 repeat ; because these tendenzgeschicbten, 
 as the Germans call them, are far more 
 than mere preachments and special plead- 
 ings ; often containing the vivid character- 
 ization of flesh-and-blood creatures, the 
 one red drop of human life which is pre- 
 cious. But it is undeniable that the im- 
 mense amount of talk evoked by such 
 books had never been forthcoming, were 
 they not a stage upon which to display the 
 puppets of theory and argument. Right 
 here opinions violently clash, and schools 
 form as naturally as rocks crystallize. 
 Plenty of earnest and honest devotees of 
 the novel will have it that art and story 
 interest may be supplied in a book, plus 
 the presentation of some vital question of 
 the day, adding by so much to its impor- 
 tance and attraction, and lifting fiction, tra- 
 ditionally regarded as a " light " division 
 of literature, into a more legitimate place, 
 until it ranks with serious (too often a 
 synonym for dull) literature. It is, in 
 fact, a literary cult, at the present writing, 
 to be " serious " in the novel ; as it was a 
 social cult, during the recent panic, to be 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 83 
 
 poor. It was the book more painfully 
 and self-consciously didactic than any 
 other in English fiction within several 
 years which provoked the most discussion 
 — not critical controversy so much as the 
 more powerful, unpredicable popular inter- 
 est of society. The vogue and stimula- 
 tion of Madame Grand's strong if unequal 
 and inartistic essay in the field of social 
 analysis were little short of phenomenal, 
 although now, striking work in other sorts 
 of fiction having since obscured it, one 
 thinks of this study of the marital relation 
 with Villon's refrain rising to the mind : 
 " Where are the Snows of Yester-year ? " 
 For a season it is even likely that the 
 believers in purpose-fiction outnumbered 
 not only the critical minority already char- 
 acterized, but also the old-fashioned fol- 
 lowers of the healthier tale whom we are 
 to reckon with under our third division. 
 For a season only, however, we should 
 guess ; there is a sort of rabies of interest 
 which destroys by its own violence, and 
 already may be seen the after-effects 
 of what has been cleverly dubbed the 
 " woman revolt in fiction. " Still, this in- 
 terest, this excitement, if temporary, has its 
 
84 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 significance, and goes to show that a wider 
 and deeper appeal to humankind can be 
 made through the novel, and will be made, 
 — an appeal touching grave questions and 
 the most sacred relations, — as perhaps 
 through no other form of the written word. 
 It will not do to sneer at tendency in liter- 
 ature as lying outside of critical attention. 
 Terence's line applies to literature even as 
 to life, and nothing in fiction that broadly 
 stirs his fellow men and women can be 
 alien to the true critic's function. 
 
 Yet it is plain, and to be plainly stated, 
 that this popular furore over a dominant 
 piece of purpose-fiction tends to obscure 
 critical tests and canons. Those who read 
 uncritically incline, under such influence, 
 to judge a work by the amount of im- 
 mediate noise and intelligent comment it 
 begets, and as a consequence one hears 
 absurdly exaggerated encomium. The 
 Heavenly Twins, for example, is put on 
 a par with Marcella ; the truth being that 
 beside Mrs. Ward's finished and mas- 
 terful work of art, it is ill-constructed, 
 false to life, faulty in drawing, and terribly 
 diffuse — in fine, the journey-work of a 
 brilliant novice. The interest awakened 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 85 
 
 by such a production is largely adventi- 
 tious, because based on an appeal lying 
 beyond artistic tests. It is well to have 
 this clearly in mind here in the United 
 States, where comparative criticism is but 
 locally conceded, and where for this reason 
 a stern insistence upon the criteria of artis- 
 tic perfection is of all places most needed. 
 It is not cause for complaint that a host 
 of readers, the palpable majority of whom 
 are women, welcome novels handling with 
 more or less elan the relations of the sexes ; 
 the repression, by the Anglo-Saxon tradi- 
 tions of convenance in fiction, of all that 
 side of social phenomena, results, as might 
 be expected, in an excess of curiosity and 
 excitement which have their morbid mani- 
 festations ; but the residuum of all this fer- 
 ment will be a broader outlook and a freer 
 conception of motifs. If, however, we do 
 not learn to apply rigidly and with malice 
 prepense to any fiction whatsoever, man- 
 made or woman-begotten, the universal 
 rules of art, a parlous state is ours. That 
 section of society which elects the purpose- 
 novel as its special pet and pride may 
 gratify its taste under promise to exempt 
 none of this popular product from the 
 
86 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Rhadamanthian judgment by the which all 
 fiction must be judged ; and with the agree- 
 ment to keep clearly dissevered in their 
 own minds the appeal of art and the appeal 
 of thought. 
 
 The readers of a more genial habit and 
 a more traditional standard make up our 
 third and final class. They care for a story 
 for the story's sake, and, bothering not 
 overmuch if its likeness to life be dubious, 
 go so far as to open arms to a fine rep- 
 resentation of the improbable. They stand 
 by Balzac's phrase (rarely obeyed by the 
 master himself) that the novelist should 
 depict the world, not as it is, but as it 
 may possibly become. And it is this sort 
 of folk, we would contend, which on 
 the whole is the best-balanced, the most 
 humanistic, and, in the long run, the most 
 influential among novel-readers. Mr. 
 Howells inclines to contemn a species 
 which, to his view, still loves the rattle and 
 the woolly horse in literature. But if he, 
 or any other seeker after truth, will pursue 
 the Socratic method, conversing with 
 fellow-mortals in the chance jostle of the 
 social plexus, he will get evidence pushing 
 towards our conclusion. The fact is that, 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 87 
 
 despite all our rather self-conscious prating 
 about art, and notwithstanding our some- 
 what feverish enthusiasm over introspec- 
 tive social questions, the clear-headed and 
 sound-hearted folk, who — thank Heaven ! 
 — are the warp of our social fabric, do not 
 care to fret and fume for any such thing. 
 They go to the novel for rest, amusement, 
 illusion, as did the lovers of Thackeray 
 and Dickens, of Scott and Dumas ; as 
 thousands again did in the case of Trilby ', 
 as true a child of the elder romanticists as 
 was ever born. They have a deep-seated 
 prejudice against fiction with a bad ending ; 
 so far from wishing to have a great book 
 stamped indelibly on the mind at a first 
 contact, they are glad to possess, as a cul- 
 tivated reader expressed it to the writer, 
 " the pleasant habit of forgetting a novel," 
 assuring additional delight in the event of 
 re-perusal. " The world is two-thirds bad, 
 I know," says the Advocatus diaboli to the 
 stickler for high art and serious purpose. 
 " Your c realism * teaches me nothing, it 
 simply repeats unsavory and belittling 
 facts of life ; and I would have none of 
 it. Give me lies rather than literalities, 
 or, better yet, the half-truths of a scene 
 
88 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 where the light is accented and the 
 shadows put in corners — where they be- 
 long/' Now, this is unphilosophic per- 
 haps, but it is natural and {pace Mr. 
 Howells and those who jump with him) 
 it is healthy, very. The trouble with the 
 Howellsian view of fiction is that it is pro- 
 fessional, and so not generally applicable. 
 He is perfectly right — for himself. 
 
 But to argue pro and con as to this 
 attitude of the readers who clamor for 
 pleasant and incident-thronged novels, and 
 who are the operative cause of the Roman- 
 tic reaction we are now witnessing, is, 
 after all, aside from our main line of 
 argument. We are not justifying their 
 position or attacking it : we would sim- 
 ply register the fact of their existence, 
 and express the conviction that, while 
 equal in intelligence and possibly excel- 
 ling in common-sense either of the two 
 other classes, they are to-day, and will 
 be more surely to-morrow, the strongest 
 in numbers, and thus for practical rea- 
 sons are to be respectfully regarded by 
 the maker of tales. Mr. Crawford, in 
 his chapters on the Art of Fiction^ in- 
 sists that it is the novelist's primary 
 
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READERS 89 
 
 business to purvey amusement. The 
 believers in romances have a sneaking 
 sympathy with this position, though 
 many of them would claim, and rightly, 
 that along with the pleasure may go a 
 noble stimulation of ideals affording that 
 instruction, through the divine indirection 
 of art, which is as far removed from di- 
 dacticism as from the irresponsibility of 
 the thorough-going realist. The advan- 
 tage of those whose cry is all for illusion 
 lies in their being in the line of a whole- 
 some tradition, since men and women 
 have gone more steadily to fiction for 
 just that than for aught else ; and, again, 
 in their now perceptible and daily wax- 
 ing in strength, a phenomenon due to 
 the noticeable reaction, on the one side 
 from the strained probing of psychologic 
 problems, on the other from the art which 
 substitutes form for substance and a qui- 
 escent pessimism for the cheerful bustle 
 and vigor of red-blooded humankind. 
 It is an audience to depend on in any 
 age, this of the romance readers, and in 
 quality such that the writer of fiction may 
 well trust himself to deserve its plaudits ; 
 it is a constituency which he should hes- 
 
9 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 itate to lose, even if there appear to be a 
 temporary appetite for the morbid or the 
 naturalistic. It is a backing which, year 
 in and year out, will sell his books and 
 establish his fame and make his copyright 
 a valuable inheritance to his children. 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 91 
 
 IV 
 
 PERMANENT TYPES IN MOD- 
 ERN FICTION 
 
 ¥ 
 
 The distinction of the modern novel 
 — the novel of analysis deriving from 
 Richardson and Fielding — is its emphasis 
 of individual character. The fiction of in- 
 cident and plot is much older, and is still 
 lusty, showing, in fact, within the past few 
 years, an efflorescence in adventure stories, 
 the names of Stevenson, Kipling, Weyman, 
 Doyle, Crockett, and Hope coming to 
 mind. But since Richardson's Pamela 
 the development of the novel of character 
 has been rapid and rich in results, standing 
 for the main tendency ; even the so-called 
 novel of incident — exemplified by some 
 notable works of Stevenson — has had to 
 pay some attention to analysis. The 
 modern man is more subjective, and his 
 fiction reflects the fact. In a great story 
 that precedes by only a few years the 
 analytic stories of Richardson and Field- 
 ing, as we have noted, the method is very 
 
92 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 different. Robinson Crusoe is the advent- 
 ure tale pure and simple ; we are interested 
 in the main character, not so much for him- 
 self as because of his unique position. 
 
 To think of permanent types of fiction, 
 therefore, — with modern English litera- 
 ture mostly in view, — is, broadly speak- 
 ing, to consider character ; those men 
 and women in stories whom we accept as 
 alive, as real creations, and as typifying 
 humanity. 
 
 One would say, h priori, that the 
 creatures of fiction generally received as 
 veritable examples of human nature 
 must possess elemental qualities, and be 
 recognized as flesh and blood like unto 
 ourselves. I think that, as a generaliza- 
 tion, this is true. Yet some famous crea- 
 tions are against the theory ; Dickens' 
 characters, for example. His folk confess- 
 edly are often not so much individuals as 
 abstracts of some dominant trait or humor ; 
 they are not seldom caricature rather than 
 portraiture. Yet what novelist's people 
 are better known, have a more permanent 
 place in affectionate memory? 
 
 This remark about Dickens puts us on 
 the truth. We may be pretty sure of two 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 93 
 
 things about these permanent types — 
 they are in some way attractive, and they 
 are keenly realized by their begetter. Be- 
 ing actual to him, they are actual to us. 
 And this is only another way of saying 
 that they do, after all, set forth faithfully 
 the traits — the foibles, errors, aspirations, 
 sins, nobilities, ambitions, and sacrifices 
 — of human beings. They typify some- 
 thing, they represent life. This is pre- 
 eminently true of Dickens, with all his 
 exaggeration. This typification may be 
 of several kinds. First, the character 
 may stand for a class. Thackeray's Pen- 
 dennis is a type of the young English 
 gentleman in his salad days ; Dickens' 
 Micawber, of the impecunious optimist ; 
 Howells' Silas Lapham, of the self-made 
 American. Again, national as well as 
 class characteristics may be displayed. 
 This is true of Lapham, whom we recog- 
 nize as indigenous. Tolstoy's Oblonsky, 
 in Anna Karenina, is a typical Russian 
 of the pleasure-loving, princely class ; 
 the hero of Turgenef's Fathers and Sons 
 is Slav as well as Nihilist, while Newman, 
 in Henry James' The American (perhaps 
 his best novel) has the ear-marks of a 
 
94 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Westerner of the States, his salient fea- 
 tures in high relief against the European 
 background. Or, once more, besides in- 
 dicating class and nation in this way, 
 they may also represent those deep abid- 
 ing qualities of our common human na- 
 ture that are elemental — that, allowing 
 for all differences of time and country 
 and culture, are permanent, found alike 
 in Homer, in the Greek and the Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists, in Cervantes, or in the 
 modern social story. More than one of 
 the protagonists just mentioned partake 
 of this fundamental aspect. When a fic- 
 tion writer creates in this way, broadly, 
 humanly, with an unerring insight into the 
 springs of action, local, national, general, 
 he is great in his calling. I am inclined 
 to think that, of all the story-makers in 
 this century, Balzac comes nearest to do- 
 ing this thing. The range, variety, depth, 
 fineness, and strength of his performance 
 are amazing. He saw the human comedy 
 as a whole, and was acute enough to de- 
 pict it by crowding his mighty canvas with 
 French types, the types he knew best, 
 which become, nevertheless, representative 
 figures, aside from all racial limits. Were 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 95 
 
 not my special quarry American and 
 English fiction, it were well to illustrate 
 and expand as to Balzac. 
 
 A thoughtful English critic, himself a 
 novelist, has said, in a recent article, that 
 while the Gallic and Slavic fictionists deal 
 with the primary human passions, — love, 
 hate, revenge, ambition, and the like, — 
 the Anglo Saxons delineate secondary and 
 minor traits. This is a sweeping state- 
 ment, not, I fancy, to be substantiated by 
 a wide induction. But this much surely 
 may be asserted — the handling of motif 
 has been freer outside of English fiction, 
 and, on the whole, the English books 
 dealing with elemental humanity have 
 been fewer. Also, the books that are 
 great, in which the personages take the 
 firmest hold of us, are those which por- 
 tray these strongest, deepest interests and 
 passions. This is the trouble with a good 
 deal of the late work of James : he has 
 come to consider delicate psychologic nice- 
 ties more than primal instincts and desires. 
 The carbonic acid gas of drawing-rooms, 
 not the oxygen of the open, is breathed 
 in his attenuated tales — with some noble 
 exceptions. And it may well be that the 
 
96 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 wholesome moral restrictions that until 
 recently have bound, and in comparison 
 with the extreme French and Italian work 
 still do bind, our English-written fiction 
 have made its men and women less broadly- 
 human in the sense that they have not 
 been exhibited on all sides so consistently 
 as in the best foreign work. Ethically 
 viewed, however, the gain to fiction is 
 greater than the loss. This leads to the 
 interesting query, Has the realistic 
 school, which has now for some years had 
 its say, added permanent figures to the 
 historic canons of fictional creations? If 
 it has, its method is in some sense justified. 
 Were the characters in so-called realistic 
 novels affectionately conceived by their 
 makers, their chances for permanency 
 would be good. There is no lack of talent, 
 even of genius, in writers of this school. 
 I should not be inclined to deny the latter 
 highest quality to Thomas Hardy, to 
 name one leader; yet he has not been 
 prolific of these types, if, indeed, he has 
 created any. The realistic writers as a 
 class have not given us broad, living crea- 
 tions. The failure of realism to portray 
 permanent types cannot be set aside by the 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 97 
 
 easy explanation that they deal for the 
 most part with the seamy aspects of life. 
 There are lovable rascals in fiction. No, 
 the fault lies with the point of view, the 
 method. The realist tries to see his 
 characters objectively ; he detaches him- 
 self from them ; in a word, dissects them 
 coldly. He sees them lop-sided, too 
 much in the flesh. The realist does not 
 love his creations. Love will cover a mul- 
 titude of sins in the story-writer. When 
 the romanticist of fiction, with a big heart 
 and a catholic comprehension of human 
 kind, shows you a bad man or woman in 
 a sympathetic way, with the implication 
 that there is some good along with the 
 evil, and always the chance of better 
 things, you are broadened and made seri- 
 ous-minded, but not depressed or devital- 
 ized. Hawthorne's Hester is a sinner, 
 not a decadent. Stevenson's picturesque 
 rascals are of this wholesome sort. Gil- 
 bert Parker's Pierre, in those wonderful 
 tales of the far North, is of the same 
 family. He is not a saint, Master Pierre, 
 but a fellow one likes withal, and is helped, 
 not harmed, by knowing. With very few 
 exceptions, the strongest characters of 
 
98 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 realists are not sympathetic ; the author 
 has not yearned over them fondly, and 
 consequently the reader is not magnetized. 
 
 This reason why the realist fails in giv- 
 ing us permanent types — because, while 
 they may be realized as actual, they are 
 not truly loved — leads back to a re- 
 newed insistence on those two criteria : 
 characters, to live and appeal broadly, 
 must not only be vividly conceived by 
 their creator, but must be winsome, must 
 attract rather than repel. Dickens, on 
 finishing a story, was saddened that he 
 had to bid his imagined folk good-by. 
 In one preface he tells how he hated to 
 leave his dramatis person*, being moved 
 even to tears. Goethe used to set his 
 literary characters in a chair opposite him, 
 and talk to them literally. These inci- 
 dents illustrate what I mean by vivid, 
 loving conception in literature. 
 
 It is a fact which those who sneer at 
 the ethical in literary art must explain, 
 that the permanent fictional types are 
 prevailingly those which depict the nobler 
 and sweeter and more normal aspects of 
 humanity. Moreover, I believe there is 
 a deep psychologic reason for this, and 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 99 
 
 will speak of it anon. By no means will 
 it do to claim that invariably these types 
 are thus beautiful. Becky Sharp is as 
 permanent as Colonel Newcome. If 
 the drawing be sympathetic and masterly, 
 and the traits recognizable, it is enough. 
 But that the world of readers prefers 
 those creations which exemplify the bet- 
 ter, higher, purer, and sweeter side of 
 humanity seems to me as indubitable as 
 it is certain that the making of such calls 
 out the best powers of the writer. This 
 is an instinct of self-preservation in man- 
 kind : to wish the best they can show to 
 live. Most of us would rather see noble 
 folk than ignoble around us in real life : 
 it is the same in fiction. 
 
 By a sort of reflex action, the very ex- 
 istence of such heroes and heroines im- 
 plies potential heroics in ourselves, is a 
 compliment and tonic to our human 
 nature. And so it is that the permanent 
 types of fiction are made up largely of 
 those who in some way deserve the heroic 
 designation. They are heroes and hero- 
 ines, not in the conventional modern sense 
 of the realist, whose nominal hero is an 
 epitome of the vices or a walking congeries 
 
ioo LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 of commonplaces, but in the good roman- 
 tic sense, with the primitive Greek flavor 
 to it of large, fine, sweet action. Here 
 belong the main men and women of Scott, 
 Eliot, Reade, Dickens at his most inspired. 
 George Eliot is a stern realist, granted. 
 One of her central figures — Tito in 
 Romola — is a study of moral weakness 
 rather than of strength. But he is a foil 
 to Romola herself, and of Eliot's work 
 as a whole it may truthfully be said that 
 she draws real heroes and heroines — all 
 the realer in that they sin and suffer. On 
 a little reflection, it will appear that many 
 a character of fiction you would not think 
 at first of putting in the heroic category 
 is preserved to immortality by some touch 
 of nobility, a heroic strain, warped, hidden, 
 blurred, maybe, but there nevertheless. 
 Humanity will not readily give up the 
 heroic, and is lynx-eyed to detect its gleam, 
 even of the jewel in the dung-hill. 
 
 But in the hero-worship by novel- 
 readers, the false-heroic is excluded ; it 
 is men, not demi-gods, that are admired. 
 That which violates truth to real human- 
 ity is to-day foredoomed to fail. Such 
 types cannot be realized by their maker, 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 101 
 
 and are unnatural to us. As notable a 
 failure in this class as English fiction can 
 show is Sir Charles Grandison in Richard- 
 son's novel of that name. Grandison, in- 
 tended for a hero, is an insufferable prig, 
 not to be credited for a moment, and al- 
 ways a bore. The tendency of the mod- 
 ern novel has been to draw credible heroes 
 and heroines, or, at least, flawed characters 
 with noble elements in them. Many of 
 George Meredith's men and women fur- 
 nish good illustration. Roy Richmond 
 in Harry Richmond, Richard Feverel in 
 the book of that name, Diana in Diana 
 of the Crossways, — none of them saints, 
 the first a scapegrace, the second almost 
 morally wrecked, the woman in a strange 
 scene selling her lover for money, yet 
 all leaving the impression of natures capa- 
 ble of high love, courage, or self-sacrifice. 
 Kipling, in a virile, careless way, has shown 
 us the possibility of heroics in the rough 
 British private. Barrie and Maclaren 
 paint for an admiring host of readers the 
 virtues of Scotch rustics, not blinking the 
 faults and vices ; and their types are likely 
 to last, for the very reason that they are 
 seen in the whole, they are recognized as 
 
ioz LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 true, and as well beloved of their makers. 
 An American writer like Miss Jewett, 
 never abusing a fine realism, draws rural 
 New Englanders from an equal reservoir 
 of love and knowledge ; and exquisite lit- 
 erature, with types not to be forgotten, is 
 the outcome. 
 
 Thus, in many sections of our wonder- 
 ful land, devoted and skilful writers, who 
 are also sympathetic students of Man, are 
 portraying types in short story or full- 
 length novel in such wise that — although 
 it is too early even for prophecy — some 
 permanent figures must, it would seem, 
 remain. If they do not, it will be because 
 the study was too minute and fussy. 
 For when those two things, affection and 
 genuine acquaintance with the subject- 
 matter, are conjoined with literary expres- 
 sion, permanent types are pretty sure to 
 emerge — types the world will accept as 
 true to our western civilization. It were 
 easy to swell this paper beyond its limits 
 with examples of the good work already 
 done. The artist must know, must have 
 imagination and moral principle, seeing 
 the finer issues of our underlying human- 
 ity in whatever local conditions, however 
 
PERMANENT TYPES IN FICTION 103 
 
 humble his persons or scenes. Then the 
 fiction will have the abiding quality. 
 This quality one finds in the best work 
 of Parker with his Canadians, Garland 
 with his Westerners, Howells with his 
 urban folk, Page with his darkies, Cable 
 with his Creoles, Helen Hunt with her 
 Indians, — to run over a few representa- 
 tive names. 
 
 To return to the keynote. Permanent 
 types in fiction portray with truth and 
 power some phase of essential, broad 
 human nature, as well as of human nature 
 with the dress and accent and manner of a 
 given time and place. And these types 
 must spring creatively from one who loves 
 them much, and sees them as if bodied 
 forth in the flesh ; and they will be the 
 surer of permanency the more they imply 
 the God-in-man. This last will be fool- 
 ishness to those who would dissever art 
 from ethics. But I believe the appeal to 
 literary history proves it beyond perad- 
 venture. 
 
A Study in the Literary Time-spirit 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES: 
 
 A STUDY IN THE LITERARY TIME-SPIRIT. 
 
 i 
 
 IT is conventional criticism to say that 
 great writers make the Time-spirit. Now 
 and then, perhaps, in the course of the 
 centuries, it is true that dominant figures 
 stand out ahead of their day and seem to 
 shape its thought. Yet even some of the 
 world masters — Shakespeare, Dante, Cer- 
 vantes — are in many ways creatures of 
 their epoch, moulded by its ideals, ex- 
 pressing the intellectual and spiritual 
 standards of their land and period. 
 
 General propositions are dangerous ; 
 but I believe it will be found of the ma- 
 jority of leading literary figures of his- 
 tory that, rather than lead their day, they 
 have expressed it, and, moreover, have 
 changed with its change. Possibly it 
 would be more philosophic to say that 
 the age changes with them and because of 
 
io8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 them ; but analysis reveals the fact that, 
 as a rule, expansion of thought and broad- 
 ening of knowledge come from a field lying 
 outside of literature ; namely, from science. 
 It is the business of literature to reflect 
 this growth. The great creative writers 
 take over this knowledge into the imagi- 
 native domain, and make use of it in art. 
 In this sense they are the children of the 
 Time-spirit. This thesis is illustrated by 
 the literary work of three men, Bjornson, 
 Daudet, and James, all of whom occupy 
 commanding positions in the letters of 
 their respective lands. It is well to select 
 writers of ripe maturity, since otherwise 
 their careers would not extend through 
 years sufficient to bring them under the 
 altered ideals I have in mind. 
 
 The present literary standard and temper 
 are expressed by the convenient, though 
 hackneyed, word realism. Whatever its 
 origin, however justifiable as a revolt from 
 narrow and sentimental untruth in literary 
 art, realism has brought in its train the 
 cult of the grim, the low, the impure, and 
 the horrible. It has also resulted in much 
 that is admirable, and it registers an ad- 
 vance in technique. But the sins of real- 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 109 
 
 ism are heavy. This literary movement 
 is far more than aesthetic. Within its 
 wide boundaries are summed up and ex- 
 pressed the unrest, the doubt, and the 
 agony of a period which, within a half 
 century, has been compelled by the stern 
 teaching of science to reconstruct its atti- 
 tude towards the eternal, and to behold a 
 new heaven and a new earth. Literature 
 has had to assimilate these changes, and 
 literary workers have expressed it accord- 
 ing to individual bias and temperament. 
 The shallow it has not so much affected, 
 save as furnishing a pretext for the pessi- 
 mistic pose. The weak it has crushed or 
 driven into rebellion, license, and despair. 
 The strongest and deepest have been 
 changed and saddened by it. If our old- 
 est living writers of highest literary repute 
 in the civilized lands were studied for the 
 sole purpose of observing how they have 
 been spiritual barometers registering the 
 ethic weather, the great gulf which lies 
 between 1850 and 1890 would be realized. 
 A brief scrutiny of Bjornson, Daudet, and 
 James will make the point clear. 
 
no LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 II 
 
 Bjornson shares with Ibsen the literary 
 supremacy of Norway. The former is 
 its hero and prophet as the latter is its 
 judge. Through a long, strenuous, ath- 
 letic life of struggle with forces practical 
 and spiritual, Bjornson has shown an 
 intellectual development and a shift of 
 ethical and artistic creed which are remark- 
 able. He has well-nigh boxed the mental 
 compass of opinion. This change is as 
 obvious in his literary work as in his 
 relations to the politics of his native land. 
 He began his literary career by writing 
 simple, exquisite idyls of country life, 
 with little of plot or drama, but having 
 great charm of truthful, sympathetic char- 
 acterization and picturesque description. 
 Read Synnove Solbakken for a classical 
 example of this genre. The book is a 
 homely, beautiful prose poem in which 
 the Norwegian peasant is revealed in his 
 habit as he lives, by one who knows and 
 loves him. Nor do Arne and ^he Fisher 
 Maiden^ which followed, representing his 
 first decade of authorship, lie outside of 
 this idyllic group. Nor again do his 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES in 
 
 dramatic works up to 1870 indicate the 
 change that was coming. Tragedies he 
 wrote, of course, as in the great trilogy of 
 Sigurd Slembe, or in Maria Stuart. But 
 we have strong, healthy romanticism here, 
 as we have in Ibsen's splendid earlier 
 history-play, The Pretenders, between 
 which and the dreary sadness of his later 
 social dramas there is a world of differ- 
 ence. 
 
 It is only after 1870 that the present 
 Bjornson begins to emerge, that the 
 insistent fatalistic note is heard, bespeak- 
 ing the soul of one for whom the times 
 are out of joint. In both plays and 
 stories the gloom deepens rapidly, the 
 stress grows grimmer and grimmer. Dur- 
 ing the years from 1872 to 1874 Bjorn- 
 son, hitherto satisfied with Norway's 
 people and her political status, expressing 
 in literary forms this national eupepsia, — 
 satisfied, too, with the world and its 
 maker, — was undergoing more than a sea 
 change. His writings began to voice this 
 change of heart. He became the advo- 
 cate of extreme republicanism in politics 
 and free thought in religion. From this 
 inspiration have come, during the last 
 
ii2 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 twenty years, half a dozen or more novels 
 and as many plays. A practical result 
 has been that Bjornson is mistrusted or 
 hated of conservatives, adored by the 
 young blood. The common folk, though 
 looking askance at his heterodoxy, have 
 not displaced him from his niche, won by 
 his earlier portrayal of them, and by his 
 superb patriotism. In a word, this leader, 
 under the stimulus of late nineteenth-cen- 
 tury ideas, has turned iconoclast ; the in- 
 tellectual goad of our time has made him 
 a fighter ; " only combat," says a friend, 
 " arouses his Titantic energy and calls all 
 his splendid faculties into play." 
 
 The subjects of his realistic and search- 
 ing analytical dramas and novels are in 
 evidence. Looking forth upon modern 
 society, upon a world transfigured for 
 him by Darwin and Spencer, he shows 
 this trend in his literary product. Turn 
 to the plays for a moment. Bankruptcy 
 in 1874 was a study of the dubious morals 
 in the money world, suggesting the paral- 
 lel of Zola's L Argent. The Editor, of 
 the next year, is a savage satire on latter- 
 day journalism, with its lies, scandal, sub- 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 113 
 
 terfuges. The King (1877) exhibits roy- 
 alty as a curse because of the inevitable 
 injury to the ruler's character, and because 
 founded on a sham divinity, — this thesis 
 significant in a land well-nigh in the 
 throes of republican birth. Leonardo, 
 (1877) and The Glove (1883) deal boldly 
 with aspects of the woman question, the 
 former imagining the case of a spotted 
 creature and depicting society's attitude 
 towards her, while the latter shows a man 
 in the same dilemma, society being as soft 
 as before it was hard. The girl Leonarda 
 is a manifestation of the New Woman, 
 the sort of unconventional creature drawn 
 by Ibsen, Sudermann, and the English- 
 men, Jones and Pinero ; and Svava in 
 'The Glove is another girl to be differenti- 
 ated distinctly from the type obtaining of 
 old. She is as frank as a boy with her 
 lover, and insists that he be judged by as 
 severe a standard as she herself. Beyond 
 his Strength^ the same year, shows Bjorn- 
 son struggling with the great modern 
 question of monopoly. Labor is ranged 
 against capital, workmen strike, ask for 
 redress by arbitration, and finally lay a 
 train by which capitalists in session are 
 
1 1 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 blown up by dynamiters. Yet the master 
 is not conquered, the trouble remains 
 unsolved. The play states dramatically 
 the existing conditions, and implies some 
 right on both sides. A sombre, strenu- 
 ous play it is, displaying distraught nerves 
 and hysterical ambitions at war with peace 
 and happiness. These six plays suffice to 
 give an idea of the motifs used by Bjorn- 
 son since his emancipation. 
 
 A number of novels illustrate the same 
 tendency. It will be enough to look at 
 two leading fictions : Flags in City and 
 Harbor (1884) and In God's Ways (1889). 
 The former, which has appeared in English 
 translation as the Heritage of the Kurts, 
 grapples with the tremendous question of 
 heredity — a social factor that with mod- 
 ern literature is coming to play a lead- 
 ing role, like Fate in the Greek dramatists. 
 Zola's whole scheme in his Rougon-Mac- 
 quart series is based thereupon. So with 
 this great work of Bjornson's. Five gen- 
 erations of Kurts are analyzed ; there is 
 bad blood in them, a fierce, lustful heri- 
 tage from savage forbears. The hero's 
 father has married a noble specimen of 
 untainted peasant womanhood, and his 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 115 
 
 racial instinct breaks out in a quarrel with 
 his wife, whom he physically maltreats. 
 But it is Greek meet Greek, for she is 
 no white, weak, high-bred dame to be 
 cowed by his insolence, but gives blow 
 for blow, and before they are through the 
 room is full of wrecked furniture as well 
 as hopes. The husband, moreover, is 
 second-best, and dies of apoplexy. This 
 scene, coarse in fact, has such issues at 
 stake that its significance is awful, remov- 
 ing it to another sphere from such another 
 awful scene as that in 'Torn Jones, where 
 Squire Western strikes his daughter to 
 the floor. Now mark the sequel. The 
 widow looks forward to maternity, and 
 keenly aware of the probability that the 
 child will have the father's disposition — 
 be weighted by the terrible Kurt heritage 
 — she thinks of killing herself. The 
 strength and horror of this psychological 
 situation are manifest. Finally she de- 
 cides that if the child is dark, like the 
 Kurts, she and it shall die ; if blonde, like 
 her people, it shall live and be reared in 
 all right ways by its mother, so to purify 
 the paternal taint. The boy child proves, 
 very disobligingly, neither fish nor flesh : 
 
n6 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 he is red-haired and gray-eyed, both father 
 and mother appearing in him. So the 
 mother dubiously decides in his favor, 
 brings him up on a most scientific scheme 
 of education (the treatment here reminds 
 of Meredith's Richard Fever el), and lo ! the 
 result is that he turns out a prig — too 
 good, as his father was too bad. He is a 
 disagreeable ascetic, whom we grudgingly 
 respect. A gleam of light is thrown in at 
 the end, when he marries a wholesome girl 
 of sounder stock than his own. Behold 
 how impossible to fiction before the sec- 
 ond half of the century such a thing is ! 
 Though of absorbing interest, the story 
 hardly furnishes pleasant reading. The 
 other novel, In God's Ways^ is still more 
 daring and drastic. The situation handled is 
 somewhat like that in The Heavenly Twins. 
 A wife, discovering she is linked to a liber- 
 tine, leaves him and eventually unites her- 
 self to a young doctor who has revealed to 
 her her wrong. Society, which has ap- 
 plauded the act which leads her into the 
 shame of living with her husband, is 
 shocked when she marries the other ; and 
 by a series of delicate deadly slights and 
 innuendoes hounds her down to the grave. 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 117 
 
 There is a parson and his wife who, proper 
 folks socially as well as ethically, condemn 
 the woman, only waking up to her nobility 
 when she is dead. The story, as centring 
 around the New Woman again, is ad- 
 vanced, and is pessimistically sad in tone, 
 though there are alleviations in other char- 
 acters. That it is very Ibsenish may be 
 gathered even from this meagre sketch. 
 Some of the chapters are repulsively path- 
 ological — Zola has to look to his laurels 
 at times. It may be added that in the 
 later collection of short stories (1894) en- 
 titled New Tales, the uncompromising, 
 harsh realism is if anything more marked, 
 and the lime-light of the Romanticist is 
 never turned on. Contrasting all this 
 latest work with the Bjornson of the early 
 idyl, poem, and romantic history-play, 
 one realizes what a change is here, what a 
 moulding under the influence of the 
 Time-spirit. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Turn now to a very different maker of 
 literature, who yet has been sensitive to 
 the same subtle influences. Alphonse 
 Daudet, a supreme artist, naturally a 
 
n8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 poet and romanticist, drifted far from his 
 sometime tender and joyous sketches and 
 stories into the joyless waters of modern 
 realism. He began as a dreamer, a lover 
 of Nature, a sun-worshipping Provencal. 
 Think of his Letters from my Mill, the 
 work of a young man of twenty-six, a 
 delightsome thing compounded of delicate 
 humor and poetry and stingless satire. 
 And in the first of the Tartarin series, 
 coming a few years after, what a chef 
 d ceuvre of satiric fun surcharged with the 
 spirit of his natal south ! It was not until 
 1874, when Daudet was thirty-four, that 
 he came to see Life after the manner of 
 the modern psychological school. Real- 
 ism then got him in its grip. With Fro- 
 ment Jeune et Risler Aini comes a right- 
 about-face indeed. Here is a Parisian 
 novel minute in its descriptions of modern 
 types, searching in analysis, unpleasant 
 often in scene or character, and pursuing 
 relentlessly to the bitter end the inevitable 
 results bf bad acts. The plot is risky, 
 realistic in the extreme. A fine old fellow 
 betrayed by his business partner and by 
 the wife of his bosom is not an agreeable 
 spectacle. Here again is the light woman 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 119 
 
 and the drame a trots which have become 
 the stock properties of current French 
 fiction ; the three-cornered drama played 
 by husband, wife, and lover. 
 
 The next novel, Jack, is as poignantly 
 sad a thing as was ever writ. Like Suder- 
 mann's Dame Care, it is the autobiography 
 of a shy, sensitive lad, but the Gallic 
 touch makes it very different. Here we 
 get the light woman who is a mother — 
 a far more repulsive phenomenon than 
 Sidonie in the earlier book. The son, 
 driven from home, loses faith in all good, 
 and incontinently goes to the bad. With 
 all its pathos and power, Jack is a work 
 of heart-rending gloom and irony. At 
 the core of its intense moral earnestness 
 lies the dry-rot of despair. The evil is 
 presented for the sake of a comment upon 
 Life's mysteries — the pity of its mistakes, 
 the awfulness of its misdoings. The 
 Nabob, two years later, is by no means so 
 unpleasant, yet it could hardly be called 
 cheerful reading, ending as it does in the 
 social and financial downfall of its hero, 
 the wonderfully drawn Provencal money- 
 king. But the book contains much of 
 stern realism in the analysis of character ; 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
120 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and in that other study of the Provence 
 type, Numa Roumestan, whose protagonist 
 is a brilliantly mendacious creature full of 
 tergiversation and tricky finesse, certainly 
 the after-taste is not agreeable, though 
 few modern fictions can equal it for truth 
 and force. The very dramatic and fasci- 
 nating story Kings in Exile, with its picture 
 of royalty stripped of its pomp and cir- 
 cumstance, its poetic handling of the 
 romantic devotion which is inspired by 
 the king idea, has less of the sombre 
 quality we are drawing attention to in 
 Daudet's later works. But Sapho (1884) 
 shows the author's most extreme venture 
 into the Zolaesque, and is hardly to be 
 discussed. What a long road its author 
 has travelled since the days of the ex- 
 quisite short stories and the dreamy idyls 
 of his youth ! And what a savage, sweep- 
 ing satire of social hypocrisy is The Im- 
 mortal, which materially damaged Daudet's 
 chance of admission to the French Acad- 
 emy ! Whether or not personal rancor 
 at his non-election to that august body 
 underlay the animus of the book, its tone 
 is decidedly cynical, and the final case of 
 the Academician, laughed at by his col- 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 121 
 
 leagues, despised at home by his wife 
 and son, and finding refuge in suicide, 
 is sorry enough. Daudet' s last novel, 
 The Support of the Family ', which has ap- 
 peared in an English rendering since the 
 death of the author, is a full-length, 
 minute portraiture of a weak, corrupt 
 nature ; the romantic touch at the end is 
 out of key with the drift of the book. 
 But enough stories have been touched 
 upon to show that in his major work, his 
 full-length fiction, Daudet has moved 
 steadily away from pleasing romance and 
 poetry, and towards sombre portraiture 
 and the destructive criticism of life. I do 
 not forget charming idyllic studies like 
 Le Petit Chose in 1876, or La Belle Niver- 
 naise a decade later, little classics both ; 
 this writer has never lost utterly his early 
 mood and manner. But the most serious 
 and thorough-going work has been in the 
 other direction. Allowing for the per- 
 sonal equation, it seems a fair statement 
 to say that the Time-spirit has been as 
 efficacious in shaping the literature and in 
 changing the philosophy of Daudet as it 
 has been in the person of his Norwegian 
 brother-in-letters, Bjornson. 
 
122 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 IV 
 
 It remains to speak of the third author 
 in the trilogy, a man and writer so en- 
 tirely diverse from the other two that it 
 seems whimsical to bracket them together. 
 Yet Henry James also illustrates the 
 workings of this same law. The Time- 
 spirit has also had its way with him. To 
 say that Bjornson, Daudet, and James are 
 realists, each after his own manner, is one 
 way of illustrating how wide is the con- 
 tent, how loose the significance, of the 
 word realism. James is no more like 
 either of the others than chalk is like 
 cheese. An Anglo-Saxon, of excessive 
 refinement, the fleshly, as such, has no 
 lure for him at all. But intellectually, 
 and in the conductment of his tales, he 
 has shown himself progressively one 
 whose creed is summed up by the weari- 
 some catch-phrase, " Art for Art's 
 Sake." He applies agnostic analysis to 
 the psychological states of human beings 
 — psychology, character study, and de- 
 velopment constituting his supreme in- 
 terest. This taste, together with an 
 increasing culture of aestheticism which 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 123 
 
 has run into a sort of man-milliner fussi- 
 ness, has led him in his latest phase to 
 substitute " nice shades and fine feelings " 
 — in George Meredith's phrase — for the 
 elemental interests and passions of men 
 and women. Read The Spoils of Poynton, 
 a recent book, in proof. A subtle indi- 
 rection of style and tenuity of thought 
 have contributed to an effect which has 
 lost him the sympathy of many healthy- 
 minded and intelligent folk. Yet with all 
 subtractions, with a class narrowness cling- 
 ing to all he does, he remains uniquely an 
 artist in his peculiar field. But leave the 
 James of to-day, for once, and go back 
 twenty odd years to Watch and Ward, 
 The Passionate Pilgrim, and Roderick Hud- 
 son. The one word by which to charac- 
 terize this early work is Romanticism. 
 Watch and Ward, his first fiction of mo- 
 ment, has analysis, the psychologic in- 
 terest. But its pleasant ending is a con- 
 cession to the romantic. A young man 
 who adopts a little girl and rears her with 
 the hope of making her his wife would 
 not succeed always in life ; and certainly 
 would not succeed in James* later fiction. 
 The book is full of poetic beauty and ideal 
 
124 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 fitness. It shows us a James able to se- 
 lect from the raw material of life the 
 happier eventualities of art. The six 
 tales included in The Passionate Pil- 
 grim are the work of the romanticist. 
 Several of them are steeped in a gentle 
 melancholy, but all of them are poetic, 
 vital with human feeling that explains 
 their atmosphere and justifies their de- 
 nouement. 
 
 These half dozen stories put one in 
 thrall to a James one has to be reintro- 
 duced to if one has known him only in 
 his recent work. Then consider that 
 superb romance, Roderick Hudson^ a novel 
 which, for largeness, moving power, and 
 sense of impassioned life, as well as for 
 subject and atmosphere, it does not seem 
 whimsical to associate with Hawthorne's 
 Marble Faun. The conclusion is tragic, 
 granted ; but the tragedy is of that kind 
 that purges and purifies — it is radically 
 different from the ironic sadness of James* 
 later stories. Its author, practically iden- 
 tical with Roland, the patron of Hud- 
 son, the gifted young painter, is not 
 the detached observer of his characters 
 he afterwards becomes. And it is largely 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 125 
 
 the Time-spirit that has made him finally 
 an on-looker at Life's feast, watching with 
 satiric resignation the march of Fate. In 
 Roderick Hudson, in the earlier books in 
 general, the writer is, as it were, implicated 
 in the action, and grieves with the reader 
 if the end be untoward. Little by little 
 in James' development comes the sense 
 of the hopelessness of the personal 
 struggle. The romantic view of life, 
 interwoven of dark and light, is ex- 
 changed for a quiescent pessimism that, 
 because it is well-bred and not noisy, 
 is none the less sardonic. 
 
 In The American, almost contemporane- 
 ous with the great story just named, and 
 with it showing James in his heydey of 
 power, the transition to the maturer mood 
 is under way, but the balance between 
 romanticism and realism is not yet de- 
 stroyed and the result is a very rich, vital 
 piece of fiction. Daisy Miller, a year or 
 two later, being satiric in the lighter vein, 
 is not so instructive for our purposes, 
 although the romantic connotation is suffi- 
 ciently absent. Nor does The Portrait of 
 a Lady, in 1881, represent the altered 
 James in high relief. These two books 
 
126 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 are the successful work of a great artist 
 slowly moulded by his philosophy (only in 
 part by his temperament) into an unfriend- 
 liness with life. And his philosophy 
 means, as it does with any man, his per- 
 sonal assimilation of the philosophy of 
 his time. Recall the Bostonians, Princess 
 Cassamassimia, The Tragic Muse, The Other 
 House ', and The Spoils of Poynton, with the 
 many volumes of short tales of which 
 the recent 'Terminations is a fair example, 
 — fiction standing for the past dozen 
 years of labor, — and see if what may 
 be called inconclusiveness of plot or story 
 be not a striking element. And what 
 is this inconclusiveness but the agnostic 
 in literature, who limns character in the 
 clutch of Nemesis? Add to this charac- 
 teristic, indirection of manner, increasing 
 attention to subtleties of detail, and a 
 keener edge of cynicism, and you have 
 the main traits of the present James. 
 
 The change of this American novelist 
 under the influence of the Time-spirit, as 
 compared with his foreign fellows, Daudet 
 and Bjbrnson, is a more shadowy thing, 
 something to be felt subjectively rather 
 than analytically described. It would be 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 127 
 
 a crude statement to say that the latest 
 books end badly, are more unpleasant than 
 the earlier. It is not enough to say that 
 one hears a steady diminuendo of the 
 romantic note. But it is true that one 
 closes The Other House, or The Spoils of 
 Poynton, or any one of the several collec- 
 tions of tales recently written, with a sense 
 of despair — despair at the helplessness of 
 humanity in the hands of a law inexorable 
 as the law of gravitation and well-nigh as 
 impersonal. One might say that for the 
 romanticism which makes room for the 
 heroic and for the aspiration which shapes 
 character is substituted the romanticism 
 of a disappointed poet who cannot escape 
 his birthright, but who intellectually is out 
 of sympathy with it. Thus, as it seems 
 to me, the fiction of James, progressively 
 studied, is as instructive in illustrating 
 the influence of the Time-spirit as is the 
 work of the other two writers. His indi- 
 viduality being differentiated from theirs 
 in many ways, the result is distinct and 
 different. But it is the one force working 
 upon the three. With Bjornson, practical 
 social protest; with Daudet, a dramatic 
 statement of the modern social complex 
 
iz8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 in cities ; with James, more abstract, more 
 purely psychological, the dissonance be- 
 tween action and opportunity. 
 
 The influence, then, of the Time-spirit 
 upon these important modern writers, rep- 
 resenting different lands, can be traced 
 clearly enough in their progressive work. 
 It has pushed them in the direction of 
 what in literary parlance is called Realism, 
 and what, regarding their books as a 
 moral product, may be described as spirit- 
 ual discontent or despair. I repeat that 
 always the most earnest and thoughtful 
 of the makers of literature at a given time 
 are indicators of the soul-pressure. It is 
 no mere coincidence that the growth of 
 realism into a dominant literary creed has 
 been contemporaneous with the incoming 
 of scientific conceptions. 
 
 Literature inevitably reflects the intel- 
 lectual and moral problems of a period ; 
 ours is no exception. I do not go into 
 the question of whether the change that 
 has come over these literary masters 
 means more gain than loss. There has 
 
BJORNSON, DAUDET, JAMES 129 
 
 been both gain and loss. But it is inter- 
 esting to note how sensitive is literature, 
 as exemplified in the three men chosen 
 for illustration, to the moral and mental 
 growth of a given period. But what 
 next? It is likely that with the readjust- 
 ment of theological conceptions and the 
 resultant new ethic, literature, as one of 
 the things responsive to such change, will 
 react towards idealism, expressing itself in 
 work of a more optimistic temper and 
 romantic in spirit. Indeed, such reaction 
 has already begun in the young romantic 
 school of English fictionists, led by Stev- 
 enson and Kipling ; in the Scotch idyllists, 
 Barrie, Crockett, and Maclaren ; and in 
 scattered phenomena in other lands, as, 
 for example, the symbolist poets of France 
 and the French neo-idealism finding voice 
 in the clarion call of a writer like Wagner. 
 A substantial gain will result from the 
 wonderful realistic conquest. The com- 
 placent, shallow optimism of old in litera- 
 ture, its naive unnaturalness, are no longer 
 possible. But so long as youth is youth 
 romanticism cannot long remain absent 
 from literature. Schools, creeds, tenden- 
 cies, are temporary ; " they have their 
 
i 3 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 day and cease to be." The love of ad- 
 venture, the belief in the noble qualities 
 of human nature, the hope of a fairer to- 
 morrow making amends for a dark to-day, 
 must " spring eternal in the human 
 breast." These ideals must co-exist with 
 man, and literature must return to them 
 to have a vital existence. 
 
IDEALS IN AMERICAN LITER- 
 ATURE 
 
 ¥ 
 
 LOOKING to the future of American 
 literature, the questions to-day most 
 pertinent to its welfare are these : What 
 are its younger makers believing ? and, 
 What are they doing ? Before an answer 
 is attempted, it is well to remind ourselves 
 that America possesses a worthy and dig- 
 nified literary past. The fact that our first 
 great heptarchy of singers has lived and 
 left a rich legacy of creative production is 
 enough to justify the statement ; nor is 
 the native accomplishment by any means 
 limited to the work of Bryant, Whittier, 
 and Emerson, of Longfellow, Poe, Holmes 
 and Lowell. Time, which is as just in 
 allotting a due period for vigorous ef- 
 fort as it is inexorable in announcing the 
 arrival of the age of weakness and deca- 
 dence, is on the side of a land like ours, 
 
1 32 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 young in years, materially strong, with its 
 gaze by instinct forward and upward ; all 
 natural laws of development, personal or 
 national, declare in our favor. 
 
 And as to themes and motives, surely 
 no country offers more stimulus to literary 
 endeavor. With its vast panorama of 
 human types and diversified territories, its 
 dramatic shifts of fortune, and its pressing 
 problems and rapid changes in social con- 
 dition, the United States affords a field 
 not surpassed certainly by any one of the 
 European nations where letters obtain 
 recognition. The subject-matter is here, 
 for those who have eyes to see and the 
 forthright arm of performance. Never- 
 theless, that our makers of literature are in 
 some danger of becoming comparatively 
 insensitive to such robust and legitimate 
 stimuli is a conclusion forcing itself upon 
 the earnest student. This is the day of 
 the diffusion of culture and the spread of 
 the cosmopolitan spirit, touching literature 
 as they do all else : a fact which alone 
 could explain that denationalization of 
 themes and that adoption of transatlantic 
 methods and models to be noted in some, 
 though a minor part of, American work. 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 133 
 
 The very advance in the knowledge and 
 practice of literature as an art makes this 
 inevitable, indeed. Again, specialization, 
 the study of particular environments and 
 local types, obtains to the exclusion of 
 broader national motives — this being ob- 
 vious at a glance. 
 
 But if a better technique, cosmopolitan- 
 ism, and attention to the local rather than 
 to the national may go some little way tow- 
 ard explaining the indubitable change in 
 the current mood and mind of our literati, 
 the main cause is not here : it lies deeper 
 and is further to seek. The trouble 
 comes from what our literary producers 
 believe, or are in danger of believing ; it is 
 in what may be called the negative spirit 
 which broods over modern effort in letters 
 that the chief menace is to be found. And 
 since doing follows believing, the work 
 will suffer unless the creed be changed ; in 
 truth, already has suffered, though in a 
 less degree than is true of other lands 
 where this mephitic influence strikes at the 
 very vitals of all art. 
 
 The spirit that denies, as embodied in 
 Mephistopheles, eats like an acid into the 
 heart of endeavor ; it is cynical and con- 
 
i 3 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 templative as against the creative and opti- 
 mistic ; but in presentment is smug and 
 decent, a la mode in dress, and with the 
 devil's hoof well hidden. In literature 
 it is " artistic," in the jargon of the day. 
 The paramount temptation of the newer 
 generation of literary makers in this coun- 
 try is the acceptance, either by the con- 
 scious will or by the unwitting creative 
 soul, of the " art-for-art's sake " doctrine, 
 that legacy of the French naturalistic 
 school already, by the confession of its 
 great leader, Zola, waning away after thirty 
 years of dominance. In a sentence, this 
 creed would sharply dissever art from 
 ethics : it concedes no morality to litera- 
 ture save the morality of the fine phrase ; 
 it is the artist's business to reproduce 
 nature, and he is in no wise implicated in 
 the light-and-shade of his picture except 
 to see to it that the copy is faithful. Taken 
 over into fiction, poetry, and the drama 
 from the sister art of painting, this banner- 
 cry has resulted in a literary product 
 whose foulness and lack of taste (accom- 
 panied often by great ability) one must 
 hark back to the decadent classics to 
 parallel. 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 135 
 
 The originative cause of this significant 
 movement and manifestation has not, so 
 far as I have observed, been honestly set 
 down. To say that it is the result simply 
 of the increased perception of art, a nat- 
 ural evolution of the broader conception 
 of technique and the extension of the 
 metier of literature, is to trifle with non- 
 essentials, begging the whole question. 
 The plain truth is that the mood in art 
 and literature conveniently summarized by 
 the cant term " art for art's sake " is be- 
 gotten, in the last analysis, of spiritual 
 unrest and the shift or abandonment of 
 religious convictions and ethical ideals. 
 The interrelation between art and ethics 
 being intimate and indissoluble, any 
 change in the one is registered in the 
 other sooner or later, as certainly as a 
 humor of the blood tells tales on the 
 body's surface. Always in such a case the 
 ethic of the time is to the art-expression 
 as cause and effect. It is idle to pother 
 with secondary causes when here is the 
 native source. Our day is one of great 
 religious upheaval, of the broadening and 
 clarifying of ethical concepts, of personal 
 as well as corporate re-adjustment of 
 
136 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 creeds and canons. To ask all this seethe 
 of thought and emotion to leave no trace 
 upon art, which is the expression of man's 
 psychologic and spiritual life in terms of 
 power and beauty, were like expecting the 
 face of a maelstrom to be as calm and 
 motionless as a shady pool in a trout- 
 brook. Men and women of the time, 
 under the stress of giving up old beliefs 
 and the acceptance of new, are for the 
 moment shaken, confused ; some feel 
 themselves afloat in a rudderless boat on 
 a shoreless sea ; others, though at first 
 dazed, glimpse land ahead and keep a firm 
 hand on the helm. And the elect of 
 letters, especially those of the younger 
 generation, in proportion to their depth 
 and breadth, reflect these storm-signs, are 
 sensitive to this barometer of the ethic 
 weather. 
 
 Let us not dodge the fact : the morbid, 
 the cynical, the naturalistic, and the deca- 
 dent in our present-day literature, — all 
 of this is, more than aught else, a sure 
 emanation from the lack of faith and 
 courage following on the loss (or at least 
 change) of definite and canonical religious 
 conviction. That it cannot always be 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 137 
 
 traced to this efficient cause proves noth- 
 ing ; it is said that a mushroom will 
 appear above the earth an eighth of a 
 mile from the fungus wood whence it 
 springs ; yet dependent thereupon by a 
 filament many times too small for seeing 
 by the unaided human eye. 
 
 But it would be a false representation 
 of our age and country to bear down on 
 its intellectual struggle in this most im- 
 portant of thought-domains and omit to 
 speak of its affirmative and altruistic side 
 — the side of practical humanitarianism, 
 broader, more enlightened, more in the 
 spirit of Christ, in short, than the world 
 has before witnessed. The overthrow of 
 letter-perfect Bible-infallibility will do good 
 in the end, and has already liberated 
 people as well as dismayed them ; while 
 the great lesson that a life of good is far 
 more to be desired than a hard and fast 
 adherence to a conservative creed begins 
 to put forth lovely fruit in church and 
 society. This spirit, too, is finding its 
 strong expression in literature, and may 
 be relied upon as a foil to the protuberant 
 ugliness of the theory we are diagnosing. 
 But this should not put us at ease with 
 
138 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " art for art's sake.'' It is to literature 
 what materialism is to thought ; and no 
 robing in the splendors of Solomon can 
 conceal the awful truth that death, not 
 life, is in its person. Religion without 
 spiritual activity is pithless formalism ; art 
 without spirituality (or ethical beauty, 
 which I hold to be the same thing) 
 is again a whited sepulchre, full of stink- 
 ing bones. 
 
 It is not difficult to expose the fallacy 
 of the creed which cries up manner as the 
 be-all and end-all of art. A mere glance 
 at world-literature proves beyond perad- 
 venture that the moving and permanent 
 forces are those which are healthful, vital, 
 positive, optimistic. Homer, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and 
 Browning are not decadents ; men, all of 
 them, cognizant of life's depths as well as 
 heights, but never forgetting that accom- 
 plishment, aspiration, and peace are articu- 
 lated into our living quite as truly as 
 doubt, denial, and death. Hence these 
 masters are open-air influences and a tonic 
 to distraught humanity. The history of 
 any puissant nation teaches the same 
 thing ; its athletic evolution and crest of 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 139 
 
 power mean a literature which is bracing 
 and splendid, its devolution a product into 
 which the minor note has crept and 
 through which runs the self-questioning 
 of decay. All records yield an irresistible 
 Yea to the query, Does not the decadent 
 in literature (when sincere and not an 
 affectation) always square with a similar 
 state of social and intellectual life in the 
 nation? To accept the poems, stories, 
 and essays of the school in mind as legiti- 
 mate and natural is to self-doom the coun- 
 try's career and pronounce its noble work 
 done and its maturity past — a claim so 
 ridiculous as to be made only by a mad- 
 man. 
 
 One may be allowed the shrewd sus- 
 picion that some of the decadent work 
 of England in art and letters — for 
 which such men as Oscar Wilde, George 
 Moore, and Aubrey Beards! ey are respon- 
 sible — is the result of a self-conscious 
 pose, not of a reasoned conviction or an 
 impulse of the blood. The negative 
 spirit in England is bad enough and suf- 
 ficiently incongruous, but even if fit for 
 one of the leading lands of Europe would 
 be peculiarly out of place here in the 
 
i 4 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 United States, forelooking to a great 
 future. For American literature-makers 
 to adopt — either consciously or uncon- 
 sciously — the pessimism and dry-rot of 
 France, Spain, Norway, and England is 
 an anachronism analogous to that which 
 Greece might have furnished if, in the day 
 of Pericles, she had taken of a sudden to 
 the pensive idyls of Theocritus and the 
 erotic epigrams of Meleager. Our land, 
 entering into its young heyday of national 
 maturity, must develop a literature to 
 express and reflect its ideals, or we shall 
 display to the astonished world the spec- 
 tacle of a vigorous people, hardly out of 
 adolescence, whose voice is not the big, 
 manly instrument suiting its years, but the 
 thin piping treble of senility. Common 
 sense and patriotism alike forbid such an 
 absurdity. 
 
 Again, aesthetics and philosophy declare 
 art for art's sake to be a silly lie. The 
 confusion in the conceptions of a true 
 aesthetic arises from a too exclusive devo- 
 tion to the indubitable fact that art is pri- 
 marily a matter of manner, of form. It 
 were idle to deny that form is the impera- 
 tive condition of the acceptability of any 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 141 
 
 work of art ; and, not unnaturally, the 
 devotees of the current fallacy have 
 jumped from this to the conclusion that 
 form is everything, the only test of worth 
 and rank being technique, — which is a 
 palpable non sequitur. The so-called real- 
 ists ignore (often, though not always) two 
 potent elements in an art creation lying at 
 the base of any sound theory of aesthetics : 
 to wit, taste and selection. ./Esthetic taste 
 decides what subject-matter comes within 
 the purview of art, while the selective in- 
 stinct chooses out the typical, relatively 
 important phenomena which shall be re- 
 produced in the magic peep-show of the 
 artist. But taste is constantly and brutally 
 violated by those who pride themselves on 
 being veritists, on telling the truth at all 
 hazards and about all things. The fiction 
 of Guy de Maupassant, the poetry of 
 Verlaine, and the plays of Hauptmann 
 are in the way of spreading out before 
 reader or auditor a dead-level of common- 
 place, or favoring a deification of minutiae 
 or a faithfulness in the transcription of 
 vileness, as if art's crowning merit were 
 the merit of the catalogue. Needless to 
 say, this is not a characterization of their 
 
i 4 2 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 work at large ; but these are the pitfalls 
 into which their theory leads them betimes. 
 Taste is trampled upon in the creator's 
 lust for photographic re-statement; not 
 the moral nerves alone, but those that 
 resent disgustful associations as the senses 
 resent ill-odors and discordant sounds, are 
 outraged under the sacred name of Truth. 
 Even were all this educative, the fact 
 would remain that the aesthetic, which is 
 the atmosphere of all artistic effort, is by 
 this effort made impossible. 
 
 Moreover, there is no reason for believ- 
 ing that the dreary repetition of palpably 
 sorrowful and^ sickening data of life, too 
 well apprehended already by poor human- 
 ity, is of use for either time or eternity. 
 The greater need is an induction in a 
 mood which rises superior to these antino- 
 mies, bracing up men for hopeful, manly 
 work, and, if so may be, for loving wor- 
 ship. It should be the purpose "of all 
 good craftsmen," says J. A. Symonds, 
 " not to weaken, but to fortify, not to dis- 
 pirit and depress, but to exalt and animate. ,, 
 And Robert Louis Stevenson, with the 
 end-of-the-century literary product in mind, 
 remarks with his wonted perception that 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 143 
 
 " it would be a poor service to spread cult- 
 ure, if this be its result, among the com- 
 paratively innocent and cheerful ranks of 
 men." If, as he adds, it be necessary- 
 nowadays to have a great deal of puling 
 over the circumstances in which we are 
 placed/' in Heaven's name let it be done 
 off the scenes, not in the presence of the 
 audience. 
 
 In the inartistic indifference to selection, 
 too, these soi-disant realists are guilty of a 
 fatal mistake and overlook a fundamental 
 requisite. The numbing of the aesthetic 
 sensibilities so that offal is not recognized 
 as such can be understood as the slow 
 result of pseudo-education; but the ignor- 
 ing of proportion, of choice of subject, of 
 light and shade, of planes and values in 
 the very professions which must learn 
 these things as the A B C of their art, 
 may be set down as an exhibition of stu- 
 pidity. I use the hack-words of the 
 painter, but with literature in view. To 
 devote as much care and space and em- 
 phasis in a novel to the maunderings of 
 a drunkard or the coquetries of a harlot, 
 neither of whom represents cases of fallen 
 and still fitfully re-emergent nobility, but 
 
144 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 who belong to the rank and file of inef- 
 fective and bourgeois sin, — to give such 
 character-types more attention and accent 
 than is bestowed upon those of larger 
 bulk and more ideal significance is an 
 example of crass and vulgar misjudgment, 
 and this entirely aside from all considera- 
 tions of taste and morale. Du Maurier 
 in giving the world his Trilby gave it 
 also an example of the true artist's hand- 
 ling of such a theme, teaching the noble 
 lesson of ethical growth in the case of a 
 grisette, and so preserving moral balance 
 in the depiction of Bohemian scenes and 
 actions. Eliminate taste from art, and its 
 corollary, the selective act of the artist in 
 the midst of his raw material, and you 
 reduce it to the methods of science and to 
 the products of an unenlightened industry. 
 But philosophically, once more, the 
 theory does not hold ; if it is false aesthet- 
 ics, it is also false psychology. Beauty is 
 the one desideratum of all artistic creation ; 
 beauty in its broadest content, to include 
 grandeur and the solemn effects following 
 on the representation even of noble terror 
 and sorrow. And Beauty, be it observed, 
 is in all respectable philosophic analysis 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 145 
 
 since Plato, not a quality confined within 
 the domain of the aesthetic, but at root a 
 spiritual thing. Plato in declaring the 
 True, the Good, and the Beautiful to be 
 phases of the one great principle enun- 
 ciated, once and for all, what Philosophy 
 must but repeat ; left a dictum not accept- 
 able because it is the utterance of the great 
 Greek, but because his were the insight 
 and the imagination to grasp what is one 
 of the inexpugnable verities of Thought. 
 It was this enlarging theory which Em- 
 erson never tired of championing ; it was 
 with this in his soul that Ruskin — 
 prophet fallen upon evil days among 
 younger schools who sneer at him as " lit- 
 erary " — said that two things enter into the 
 greatness of a picture : first, the subject ; 
 second, the treatment; or, to rephrase 
 it, inspiration and technique — and not 
 technique alone. The beautiful in art, 
 then, can no more be separated from 
 ethics, from the spiritual, than can flesh 
 and blood in the vital organism. Being 
 the subtlest, most precious thing in art, 
 it is to be above all else desired, striven for, 
 and yearned after, and without it as an 
 incentive and an ideal, the detail of a 
 
146 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Meissonier or the metrical wonders of a 
 Verlaine are of small avail. It offers, 
 moreover, an infallible touchstone in the 
 grading of all art-work. If there be no 
 choice in the sort of life spread out by the 
 artist, if the instinct of lust dissected with 
 truth and power be as interesting, as in- 
 trinsically valuable and beautiful, as the 
 instinct of worship, then are all gradua- 
 tions destroyed, and it is idle for man to 
 struggle up out of his primeval apehood 
 toward kinship with the angels. Thus 
 stripped of ambiguity, few will refuse to 
 grant the idiocy of this attitude ; yet all 
 who contend for art for art's sake im- 
 plicitly put faith in the argument. To try 
 to turn ethics out of art is as foolish as 
 to sweep back the sea with a broomstick. 
 Nature, driven out by the Horatian pitch- 
 fork, will surely return again, and healthy- 
 minded humankind can never be cajoled 
 by the cant of the ateliers into believing 
 for a moment that deftness of flesh-tints 
 and truthfulness in character-drawing are 
 the equivalents of purity in artistic concep- 
 tion and the inspiration of the creative 
 imagination. 
 
 The younger literary folk of the United 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 147 
 
 States, then, are brought face to face with 
 certain hard facts, and are bidden choose. 
 They may follow older lands, letting the 
 popular theory of the day generate and 
 guide their work, thereby laying them- 
 selves open to the charge of imitation, un- 
 Americanism, false aesthetics, and false 
 psychology. Contrariwise, keeping a firm 
 grip on the essential truth that a sound 
 and efficient technique must bottom Amer- 
 ican literature as it must that of any and 
 all lands, they may nevertheless have clear 
 in sight the still broader and deeper verity 
 that " beauty is truth, truth beauty," that 
 in the ethic atmosphere only can the crea- 
 tive find its homeland and natural breath- 
 ing-place, beauty being, in the words of 
 Matthew Arnold, "truth seen from 
 another side." We are aware that some 
 critics, good men and true, having the 
 best interests of our native literary and 
 art production at heart, are fond of laying 
 chief stress on the need of an unprovincial 
 comparison of our work with other centres 
 of civilization, in order to avoid a fatal 
 self-sufficiency and the exclusive use of 
 local standards, — a kind of literary Chau- 
 vinism. And coincident with this they 
 
148 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 talk continually of technique, and deem it 
 our crying duty just now to ensure that, 
 lest talent and enthusiasm run to waste. 
 Their word has its share of truth, but in 
 view of this infinitely graver menace im- 
 plied in the acceptance of an illogical and 
 soulless principle and method, sure if gen- 
 erally received to result in malformation 
 in place of wholesome growth, it may well 
 be ranked as of secondary importance. I 
 believe heartily that our litterateurs are by 
 comparison scot-free from the worst phases 
 of the delusion ; the work being done on 
 all sides is vital and vigorous. 
 
 Indeed, the negative spirit, the cynic 
 mood, and the manner of the realist or the 
 pessimist belong, with us, rather to the 
 critics than to the creators, the latter being 
 as a class (though exceptions will occur 
 to all) sound at heart and only eager to do 
 work which shall be sane, broad, truthful, 
 and wholesome. The criticism which con- 
 tinually depresses a fine young extrava- 
 gance, which reiterates the sacerdotal func- 
 tion of art-minus-morals, and which sneers 
 down admiration for local impulses and 
 data, is not wanting in the United States. 
 Though perhaps not representative, it 
 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 149 
 
 exists, and so does a corresponding coterie 
 among the literary folk themselves. 
 
 An American literature such as is in 
 mind, and which if true to our literary 
 forbears we must make, shall be at once 
 practical and ideal ; practical, since it is the 
 honest expression of national life and 
 thought; ideal, for that it presents not 
 facts alone, but symbols — is not merely 
 photographic, but artistic, by reason of its 
 sensing the relative proportion of things 
 and the all-important role of imaginative 
 representation. Such a school of writers 
 will beget poets and novelists who are also 
 patriots, clasping clean and loyal hands, 
 and taking an inextinguishable joy in their 
 work, which they hope shall be for the 
 healing of the nation. And all the people 
 will say, Amen. 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES IN 
 ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY. 1 
 
 3 
 
 THERE are three ways of learning 
 about the culture life of a past people 
 or period. One may read formal history 
 concerning it : this way, the way most 
 common and easy, is least interesting and 
 least satisfactory. One may read contem- 
 porary documents : and this, the way of 
 scholarship, is more excellent, but often 
 full of difficulties not to be overborne by 
 the general. Or one may read some 
 writer who, having become saturated with 
 the spirit of his epoch, gives it out in the 
 way of literature — appeals not alone to 
 the knowledge, but to the emotion and 
 imagination. This method alone really 
 vitalizes the past for us. It makes by- 
 gone figures move and breathe, bygone 
 
 i Read before the Boston Browning Society, October 26, 
 1897. 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 151 
 
 events become credible because actual to 
 the mind's eye. 
 
 There is little danger, I fancy, in over- 
 estimating the debt we all owe to literature 
 in thus reconstructing historic life. Think 
 of the contributions to historic fiction : 
 Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Bulwer, Steven- 
 son, Sienkiewicz ! I read a number of 
 the authoritative histories of Rome, and 
 know more or less of Caesar and his city ; 
 I read Shakespeare's c Julius Caesar/ and 
 walk with that great man in the Forum, 
 or feel the dagger of Brutus in his breast, 
 and this in spite of anachronisms a-many 
 and naive indifference to archaeological 
 verisimilitude. The Iron Duke once 
 remarked that he had learned all his his- 
 tory from the master-poet. Some admir- 
 able words by Woodrow Wilson are worth 
 repeating here : 
 
 " How are you to enable men to know 
 the truth with regard to a period of revo- 
 lution? Will you give them simply a 
 calm statement of recorded events, simply 
 a quiet, unaccented narrative of what 
 actually happened, written in a monotone, 
 and verified by quotations from authentic 
 
152 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 documents of the time? You may save 
 yourself the trouble. As well make a 
 pencil sketch in outline of a raging confla- 
 gration; write upon one portion of it 
 * flame/ upon another c smoke ; ' here 
 1 town hall where the fire started/ and there 
 c spot where fireman was killed/ It is a 
 chart, not a picture. Even if you made a 
 veritable picture of it, you could give 
 only part of the truth so long as you 
 confined yourself to black and white. 
 Where would be all the wild and terrible 
 colors of the scene : the red and tawny 
 flame; the masses of smoke, carrying the 
 dull glare of the fire to the very skies like 
 a great signal banner thrown to the winds ; 
 the hot and frightened faces of the crowd ; 
 the crimsoned gables down the street, 
 with the faint light of a lamp here and 
 there gleaming white from some hastily 
 opened casement? Without the colors 
 your picture is not true. No inventory 
 of items will ever represent the truth : the 
 fuller and more minute you make your 
 inventory, the more will the truth be 
 obscured. The little details will take up 
 as much space in the statement as the 
 great totals into which they are summed 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 153 
 
 up ; and, the proportions being false, the 
 whole is false. Truth, fortunately, takes 
 its own revenge. No one is deceived. 
 The reader of the chronicle lays it aside. 
 It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot realize 
 how any of the things spoken of can have 
 happened. He goes elsewhere to find, 
 if he may, a real picture of the time, and 
 perhaps finds one that is wholly fictitious. 
 No wonder the grave and monk-like 
 chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to 
 be read, and not merely for the manual 
 exercise of it; and when he sees readers 
 turn away, his heart misgives him for his 
 fellow-men. Is it as it always was, that 
 they do not wish to know the truth ? 
 Alas ! good eremite, men do not seek the 
 truth as they should; but do you know 
 what the truth is ? It is a thing ideal, dis- 
 played by the just proportion of events, 
 revealed in form and color, dumb till 
 facts be set in syllables, articulated into 
 words, put together into sentences, swung 
 with proper tone and cadence. It is not 
 resolutions only that have color. Nothing 
 in human life is without it. In a mono- 
 chrome you can depict nothing but a 
 single incident: in a monotone you cannot 
 
154 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 often carry truth beyond a single sentence. 
 Only by art in all its variety can you 
 depict as it is the various face of life." 
 
 / Robert Browning has performed this 
 noble service for us with respect to Italy 
 and that intensely alluring phase of human 
 culture and progress known as the Renais- 
 sance. In familiar words he sang — 
 
 " Open my heart and you will see 
 Graven inside it, ' Italy.' M 
 
 And this was no rhetorical vaunt, but very 
 truth. The English poet assimilated with 
 a sympathy unique among his compeers 
 the past and present of that wonderful 
 land. And as a result, he, in a large frac- 
 tion of his work, reflected its life, the 
 body and soul of it, as no other literary 
 maker has begun to do. Its heart and 
 intellect, its passion, art, music, literature, 
 and scholar lore, are interpreted by him not 
 as the pundit or archaeologist or historic 
 reporter would do it, — not for the fact's 
 sake, — but after the manner of the poet, 
 — for the life's sake, as one part of the 
 mighty story of man's spiritual conflict 
 and growth. 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 
 
 55 
 
 The question is sometimes raised whether 
 the past can really be recalled and repict- 
 ured with even approximate accuracy. 
 
 Is it Rome or the playwright's more or 
 less ignorant idea of Rome that we are 
 given ? This is, after all, only a phase of 
 the old argument of the absolute idealist : 
 we know, not matter, but our notion 
 thereof. For practical purposes the way- 
 faring man has decided that matter exists ; 
 that if he butts with his head against a stone, 
 the stone will be there and will hurt him. 
 Likewise in this matter of reconstructing 
 vanished things, it can never be proven 
 that the literary presentation of historical 
 characters and scenes is correct or half cor- 
 rect. The dead must needs come back to 
 settle that for us. But this much may 
 safely be asserted; of two ideas of those 
 characters and scenes, that will do the most 
 for us, and hit nearest to the truth, which 
 seems vital and warm and veritable — 
 which enables us to realize that such scenes 
 have been, such characters have lived and 
 died. In the utter absence of conclusive 
 proof, we have quite as good a right to 
 claim that literature can make us ac- 
 quainted with the centuries foregone as 
 
156 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 our opponent has to claim that to be im- 
 possible. 
 
 Browning, then, has given a superb 
 gallery of Renaissance (as well as other) 
 historic pictures, re-creating with dynamic 
 force and virile imagination the evidence 
 of things not seen. His method in doing 
 this is all his own, and calls for a word of 
 comment. As it seems to me, Robert 
 Browning's tendency to the minutiae of 
 learning, to what may be called archaeolog- 
 ical detail, is bad in itself and injures his 
 work. Here at the start let me say that 
 while I yield to no one in honest admiration 
 and love of this puissant maker of litera- 
 ture, I do regard him as one of the most 
 unequal of poets, and a man successful in 
 spite of his faults, not because of them. 
 
 To come to a special illustration af- 
 forded by this Renaissance group of poems 
 (and the stricture applies equally to the 
 Browning historical poems in general) : 
 they do, indubitably, assume too much 
 knowledge on the student's part ; plunge 
 too much in medias res, as it were ; and by 
 a recondite multiplicity of particulars put 
 us in danger of not seeing the forest for 
 the trees. That the poet, maugre this 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 157 
 
 trait, does on the whole interest us in the 
 past, and stimulate us mightily by his pict- 
 ures of it, is a wonderful tribute to his 
 genius. His imagination seizes on all the 
 intellectual furnishment of the poems 
 until they become molten in that creative 
 heat, and plastic to his shaping. A lesser 
 man with Browning's method, in this field, 
 would be insufferably dull, hopelessly un- 
 poetical. At times even he succumbs to 
 it, and is — I say it with humility — both 
 unpoetic and dull. Let us take that crux 
 Sordello — first of the poems illuminating 
 my theme, — and see if the criticism ap- 
 plies in that case. The story of a poet's 
 inner life in an Italian thirteenth-century 
 setting, which is the theme, seems, for a 
 psychologic writer and fellow-bard like 
 Browning, eminently fitting : the develop- 
 ment of Sordello's life and character, during 
 which he loses himself only to find himself 
 in death, has a subtle fascination. But the 
 question presents itself: In order to make a 
 background for such a figure, was it neces- 
 sary or advisable to embroil the reader in 
 such an historical tangle of events ? Could 
 not the psychologic problem — the study of 
 a gifted, aspiring soul, suffering from self- 
 
158 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 consciousness and paralysis of the will — 
 have been put before the world with simpler 
 mise en scene? and does not the intricacy of 
 the stage setting constitute a main reason 
 why this production of a very young singer 
 and thinker is confessedly one of the most 
 difficult he has ever offered as a stumbling- 
 block for the simple man and a choice morsel 
 for Browning societies ? I think we must 
 say " Yes." It is this, together with the oc- 
 cult expression, the overplus of metaphys- 
 ics, and the lack of organic arrangement, 
 which brings about a result I for one can- 
 not but deprecate. The teaching, that 
 only in Love can life find its true key, and 
 that the Poet — in Browning's mind the 
 ideal leader and purveyor of the higher 
 knowledge — must think not of himself 
 nor even of his art primarily, but of the 
 welfare of brother-man, and that act and 
 ideal must walk in healthy union, is noble 
 surely, and typical of the mature Brown- 
 ing ; but the manner of conveying this — 
 there's the rub ! Can Sordello be under- 
 stood without a key ? Can it with that 
 aid, or at any rate without much vexation 
 and weariness of the flesh ? To judge by 
 my own experience, the reply is a negative. 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 159 
 
 Those to whom it truly is a lucid and 
 steadily inspiring creation are of a supe- 
 rior order of being — an order I admire 
 from afar, but may not fellow with. But 
 the whole poem is one thing, parts and 
 passages quite another. In our quest for 
 Renaissance pictures Sordello often re- 
 wards us ; Heaven forbid I should deny it. 
 The Guelph and Ghibelline feuds and the 
 Lombard League are interwoven with the 
 personal history of the protagonist ; and if 
 after a reading of the poem we do not un- 
 derstand those far-away and involved inter- sf 
 necine quarrels, we do have ideas or images 
 of mediaeval life — its hot gusts of passion, 
 its political ambitions, its fierce, coarse 
 brutalities, its lyric episodes of love, its 
 manifold picturesqueness — such as no 
 mere chronicle could have given us. And 
 this because a poet, saturating himself with 
 contemporaneous documents in the British 
 Museum, and thereafter visiting the scenes 
 he would depict, really was able to recon- 
 struct a long-done piece of human action 
 so that it had body and soul, heat and sub- 
 stance. As a single brief example, take 
 this passage from the third book, where 
 Sordello returns to Verona at the call of 
 his mistress, Palma: 
 
i6o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 '*, . . P the palace, each by each, 
 
 Sordello sat and Palma : little speech 
 
 At first in that dim closet, face with face 
 
 (Despite the tumult in the market-place) 
 
 Exchanging quick low laughters : now would rush 
 
 Word upon word to meet a sudden flush, 
 
 A look left off, a shifting lips' surmise — 
 
 But for the most part their two histories 
 
 Ran best thro* the locked fingers and linked arms. 
 
 And so the night flew on with its alarms 
 
 Till in burst one of Palma' s retinue ; 
 
 ' Now, Lady ! ' gasped he. Then arose the two 
 
 And leaned into Verona's air, dead-still. 
 
 A balcony lay black beneath until 
 
 Out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, gray-haired men 
 
 Came on it and harangued the people : then 
 
 Sea-like that people surging to and fro 
 
 Shouted, ' Hale forth the carroch — trumpets, ho, 
 
 A flourish ! Run it in the ancient grooves ! 
 
 Back from the bell ! Hammer — that whom behooves 
 
 May hear the League is up ! Peal — learn who list, 
 
 Verona means not first of towns break tryst 
 
 To-morrow with the League ! ' 
 
 Enough. Now turn — 
 Over the eastern cypresses : discern ! 
 Is any beacon set a-glimmer ? 
 
 Rang 
 The air with shouts that overpowered the clang 
 Of the incessant carroch, even : ' Haste — 
 The candle's at the gateway ! ere it waste, 
 Each soldier stand beside it, armed to march 
 With Tiso Sampler through the eastern arch IV* 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 161 
 
 As we read this and similar passages we 
 get a sense surely of that day of feudalism 
 and chivalry, of vari-colored splendor, 
 well-nigh barbaric personal conduct, and 
 dire cruelties, beauty and cruelty clashing 
 together like iron and gold, — a day of 
 crude, strong contrasts, of impressive chia- 
 roscuro. To run over a selected page of 
 Browning is to comprehend this more 
 vividly than by studying the whole of 
 Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, noble work 
 as that is. Such is the service of dynamic v 
 literature. Such is rendered only in flashes 
 by Sordello. This, and its psychologic v 
 suggestion, constitute the main value of 
 the poem. 
 
 If we turn to The Grammarian s Fu- 
 neral, we shall find a picture almost steadily 
 true poetry, that with rarest insight and 
 grasp portrays the scholar-side of the age, 
 as the other does its politico-religious 
 strife. It seems a parlous thing, a priori, 
 to make the figure of a philologist pathetic. 
 But Browning does it. The importance 
 of learning has never been more nobly 
 limned. To be sure, this grammarian is 
 no philologer in our modern sense : the 
 study of language was to him a means, not 
 
1 62 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 an end, — but that is true of all great 
 word-wizards mediaeval and modern ; men, 
 for example, like the brothers Grimm in 
 Germany. 
 
 I know of no lyric of the poet's more 
 representative of his peculiar and virile 
 strength than this, in that it makes vibrant 
 and thoroughly emotional an apparently 
 unpromising theme. In relation to the 
 Renaissance, to the age of the revival of 
 learning, the moral is the higher inspiration 
 derived from the new wine of the classics, 
 so that what in later times has cooled down 
 too often to a dry-as-dust study of the 
 husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the 
 start, a veritable revelling in the delights 
 of the fruit — the celestial fruit which for 
 its meet enjoyment called for more than a 
 life span, and looked forward, as Hutton 
 has it, to an " eternal career." Note that 
 the faith in a future life conditions and en- 
 larges the view ; as yet the scientific atti- 
 tude and mind had not come to the latter- 
 day agnosticism. And how picture-like 
 Browning makes it ! The solemn proces- 
 sion up the mountain, the master, " famous 
 calm, and dead," in the midst, loftily lying 
 in his aerial sepulchre among the clouds 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 163 
 
 (and intermittently the directions interpo- 
 lated to give dramatic reality), — here again 
 the traditions and ideals of the time are con- 
 veyed indirectly, and therefore with three- 
 fold force ; the poetry of it is the chief 
 thing, the one thing, in sooth, for the 
 general reader. For let us bear in mind 
 ever that any poet's first mission is to de- 
 light, not to instruct. The instructions 
 should be unawares, by indirection. The 
 poet who confounds the two is in danger 
 of the council, as a didactic philosopher, 
 or a metaphysician, or a scientist, — good 
 roles all, but not his. 
 
 The Grammarian s Funeral, then, is a 
 noble vindication of the possibilities rather 
 than the probabilities of that calling, hav- 
 ing its historic interest in the implied high 
 aims in scholarship of the time contrasted 
 with later periods. No one Renaissance 
 characteristic stands out in higher relief 
 than this of learning. It is amazing how 
 it cohabits with lust, cruelty, and what 
 seems to our modern sensibilities an 
 inconceivable lack of ethical development, 
 existing in a devotion and an attainment 
 that even now seem marvellous. The 
 middle-age humanists were wonderful in 
 
164 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 this respect. Scholarship is one of the 
 most brilliant facets flashed down to us 
 from that many-colored stone called the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 The art side of the re-birth, a phase 
 best loved by our poet, if one may judge 
 by the frequency with which he wrote of 
 it (to say nothing of his easy intimacy 
 with all its figures, principles, and scenes), 
 is illustrated in that very characteristic and 
 truly great dramatic monologue, Fra Lippo 
 Lippi. 
 
 The wayward child of genius is a fasci- 
 nating object of study always ; here is the 
 type in the ecclesiastico-art atmosphere, 
 with its dual blend of elements which did so 
 much for Italian painting, and the golden 
 period of creative picture-making. Sup- 
 pose some one to take up the poem and 
 to read it with no preparatory study of 
 the harum-scarum monk artist, and only 
 such knowledge of the stage-setting as 
 would be commanded by a person or fair 
 education. No doubt such an one would 
 lose much, especially in this most repre- 
 sentative genre of Browning's, the dramatic 
 monologue, which, by its very method, 
 assumes so much on our part and pro- 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 165 
 
 gresses by revealing character, not by narra- 
 tive in the usual sense. Yet I am much mis- 
 taken if a vivid sense of medievalism and , 
 of the Renaissance were not the result. 
 In the first place, Fra Lippo is visualized 
 and vitalized — no mere name he on the 
 left-hand lower corner of his canvases, 
 after reading the poem, but a very human 
 flesh and blood creature, with a Bohemian- 
 ish streak in him that makes serenades 
 and moonlight and luring girl-faces irre- 
 sistible to him, so that he must perforce 
 take French leave of his fine quarters in 
 the Medici palace and roam the streets in 
 quest of frolic adventure, to be brought 
 up with a sharp turn by the Florentine 
 officials. It is all delightfully disreputa- 
 ble and human. Fra Lippo, in Italy, 
 Villon, a not far from contemporaneous 
 son of genius in another art and land, we 
 come to know because whereas in their 
 work we think of them on the side of 
 gift and power — in their erring natural 
 lives we recognize the touch of nature that 
 makes the whole world kin. And then, 
 too, how dramatically we are presented 
 with the fact of the more or less unholi- 
 ness of those in holy orders at that time ! 
 
1 66 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 This we are aware of theoretically : in a 
 poem like Fra Lippo Lippi it is worked 
 out in a scene with an ex-monk as hero, 
 and what was assumed as history is 
 clothed on with life. And still further : 
 what a glimpse of mediaeval Florence is 
 given — beautiful lily of the Arno ! We 
 may cry with the poet, " It's as if I saw 
 it all ! " 
 
 " Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up 
 bands 
 To roam the town and sing out carnival." 
 
 We feel the street-life, and we visit the 
 convent, with its cluster of brothers agape 
 with admiration at this early realist who 
 paints people as they are, until the monk- 
 ish circle is instructed by the Prior that 
 that way is all wrong, — 
 
 " Your business is to paint the souls of men." 
 
 The description and criticism of the faults 
 and virtues of the art creed and art ac- 
 complishment of the time are wonderfully 
 acute. Lippi was wiser than his critics, 
 knowing " The value and significance of 
 flesh," and in spite of all his tomfoolery 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 167 
 
 and looseness is an idealist, and so hangs 
 on to the belief that the world " means 
 intensely and means good." 
 
 In dramatic pieces like this, and the 
 still greater Andrea del Sarto, we are let 
 into the very heart and get the blood-beat 
 of the blooming-time of creative painting. 
 If ever a phase of life were done from the 
 inside, as we say, it is here : for once we 
 are given "The time and the place and 
 the loved one all together.' ' 
 
 The range and variety of Browning in 
 his Renaissance picture-making is again 
 exemplified in the very different poem, 
 " The Bishop orders his Tomb." Here 
 we have limned for us the religious world 
 on its side of ecclesiastical form, pomp, 
 and show. It is revealed through the 
 person of a Roman prelate who is seamy 
 in his life, and worldly and worldly-wise on 
 his deathbed, in articulo mortis. It is a 
 terrible picture in its way ; another intense 
 monologue in form, and vibrant with 
 emotion — spite of its rough, interjacula- 
 tory manner. Art is illustrated from 
 another angle : this soiled, proud, passion- 
 ate, envious bishop, a good hater to the 
 last, would have his monument a master- 
 
168 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 piece, and how splendid his description of 
 it, particular on particular, until the mind's 
 eye sees the imposing, costly thing! He 
 has the age's scholarship, too, and would 
 have naught but good Latin inscribed on 
 the stone ; and in all his piteous request to 
 his equally worldly sons he knows, poor 
 worldling, that they will take his riches 
 and never grant his last prayer. A sense 
 of the selfish human animal, the same in all 
 centuries, is conveyed savagely, truthfully, 
 by this dramatic poem ; while the local 
 media are also brought before us in a 
 wonderful way. The historical setting is 
 not so much thought of here; the atmos- 
 pheric impression is everything. Yet at 
 what other period, in what other country, 
 would a bishop have the intimate knowl- 
 edge of and taste for architecture shown 
 in this man's talk — let alone his wish for 
 aesthetic propriety and fitness at a moment 
 when secondary things and things not 
 taking hold on the central core of being 
 pass out of mind ? How could the fact 
 that the bishop cared supremely for an 
 artistically beautiful sepulchre — cared for 
 it as much as he did to crow over a rival 
 in effigy — be more strikingly set before 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 169 
 
 us, and we be instructed at once in the 
 main passions and interests of universal 
 man and of Renaissance man ? Once 
 again we emerge from the poem, having 
 touched the body of the Renaissance and 
 felt it to be not a cold corpse, but warm 
 and moved by breath. 
 
 The poem, The Heretic's Tragedy, still 
 further illuminates our subject, and is one 
 of those grim sardonic pieces very illus- 
 trative of a certain phase of Browning's 
 genius — a genre in which he has done 
 some of his strongest work. This time it 
 is that darker side of the Renaissance* 
 social complex exploited by its theology. 
 It is right not to forget this reverse side 
 of the shield, in directing main attention 
 to its splendid face whereupon art has 
 carven deathless characters. I find a great 
 relish in such a setting forth of the intel- 
 lectualizing of a dark age — for in respect 
 of the substance of religion it was dark 
 compared with our own. How the poem 
 plunges us back into an all but inconceiv- 
 able atmosphere of hair-splitting dogma 
 and inhuman heartlessness ! Man delights 
 in the burning alive of his fellows : God is 
 the jealous God of the old dispensation ; 
 
i 7 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and how admirably this state of mind, 
 naively unconscious of its own atrocity and 
 crudity, is embalmed in this terrible dra- 
 matic lyric, with its shuddering realism, 
 whose effect is heightened tenfold by its 
 awful joviality of tone : 
 
 "Sling him fast like a hog to scorch, 
 
 Spit in his face, then leap back safe, 
 Sing * Laudes ' and bid clap-to the torch." 
 
 And, what is most pertinent to our pur- 
 pose, — how pictorial it all is ! The poor 
 wretch burning there can be seen as plainly 
 by us as by the Paris mob that jeered at 
 his contortions. Once more a far-away 
 scene is not so much put before us on a 
 flat surface as set about us atmospherically 
 and with perspective, so that we are in it 
 and of it. This is a wonderful thing to 
 do, especially in a case where all is alien to 
 our present notions. The poem is at once 
 objective and subjective, a canvas and an 
 emotional and moral experience. 
 
 These Renaissance poems, then, — aside 
 from their abstract virtue as intensely felt 
 and virilely wrought verse, — perform one 
 of the great and rare services possible to 
 literature. They make us to know past 
 
RENAISSANCE PICTURES 171 
 
 beliefs and feelings, people and actions, so 
 that all becomes veritable and explicable : 
 to know them not formally and by effort 
 and intention, but spontaneously, through 
 the dynamic communication of heat and 
 light. Instead of the statics of knowledge 
 we are given the dynamics of life. 
 
Old English Poetry 
 
?c 
 
 I 
 
 OLD ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 THE day is fast arriving when attention 
 will be paid to the treasures of our 
 older English poetry as such. It is natural 
 enough that the study of the language in 
 its philological aspects should be prece- 
 dent to an appreciation of the literary side 
 of the subject. This has, in fact, been the 
 case. But as special students of English 
 have been long familiarizing themselves 
 with the linguistic problems in connection 
 with Old English work, the ground has 
 been prepared for those whose chief inter- 
 est is in the humanities, and who would 
 use the acquired land as a field for the 
 cultivation of the flowers of song. Signs 
 are not lacking that what has been re- 
 garded as the private preserves of special- 
 ists will soon be the legitimate property of 
 all lovers of literature. It is significant 
 that an attempt to offer a literary transla- 
 
176 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 tion of Beowulf, our first great English 
 epic, by an American scholar, Professor 
 Hall, of William and Mary College, has 
 been followed hard on by another from 
 English hands — that of Professor Earle. 
 Dr. Gummere's recent admirable work on 
 Germanic Origins, with its copiou% and 
 spirited renderings from Beowulf and 
 other Old English poems, is again a book 
 pointing the same way. Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke's fine Early English Literature is 
 a later hopeful sign. 
 
 It is high time, then, to approach the 
 hoary remains of English song, not so 
 much in the spirit of comparative philol- 
 ogy as in that of aesthetic appreciation. 
 In this mood I write of two obvious and 
 representative aspects of this older litera- 
 ture, which richly repay sympathetic study 
 — a study which may be heartily bespoken 
 it. A foreword as to nomenclature. I use 
 the term Old English as synonymous with 
 Anglo-Saxon and as preferable thereto ; it is 
 the designation applied by progressive stu- 
 dents to all our literary remains in Eng- 
 land from the earliest monuments extant 
 to about the middle of the twelfth century ; 
 thence to the year 1500, say, we may 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 177 
 
 speak of Middle English ; the remaining 
 literature being denominated, of course, 
 Modern English. Perhaps the strongest 
 argument for thus naming our earlier 
 literature is the emphasis it puts on the 
 fact that we are dealing with but one 
 tongue3 seen in its varying stages of 
 growth. An idea of the vital connection 
 between Beowulf and Browning is thus 
 inculcated ; whereas, if we say Anglo Saxon 
 a feeling of something foreign in kind as 
 well as distant in time is begotten. It is 
 this oneness, this organic relation of the 
 English language and literature through 
 all sequences of its development, which is 
 now being accented by scholars, and hence 
 those terms are best which are in conform- 
 ity with that conception. 
 
 In spite of this assertion that our older 
 poetry should be regarded as of a piece 
 with what is more modern, it must be 
 confessed frankly that at the first ap- 
 proach to it the student is likely to be 
 repelled, or, at any rate, given pause. 
 On the threshold he is met with a rude 
 setting aside of verse canons and con- 
 ventions of to-day, while he is bidden to 
 breathe an atmosphere which substitutes 
 
178 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 a sharp and bracing keenness for the soft 
 languors and southland allurements to 
 which he may have been more accus- 
 tomed. This poetry, forsooth ! This is 
 barbaric, inchoate, an outrage on the 
 aesthetic, and unworthy even of the nether 
 slopes of Parnassus. Somewhat so runs 
 his thought. But persisting in the will to 
 get at one with this strange product, the 
 same student in due time begins to feel 
 the tonic of the air ; to habituate himself 
 to the rough, bold grandeur of the 
 scenery ; to enjoy the natural cadences of 
 the wind that harps in his ear. In other 
 words, what seemed irregularity of rhythm 
 is seen to be a looser-moving but law- 
 abiding metre; harshnesses of word-use 
 reveal their fitness and vigor ; and a deep, 
 rich music, a fuller-mouthed tone-color, is 
 heard, such as modern words and melodies 
 are more miserly in offering ; while uncouth 
 inversions and sentence-gyrations resolve 
 themselves into the fit and felicitous way 
 whereby those gleemen of long ago vented 
 the song and sentiment that was in them. 
 And so there comes a real delight in the 
 virile strength and grave sub-tones of 
 music germane to Old English verse. 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 179 
 
 As is now pretty well understood, allit- 
 eration, employed with regularity and 
 artistic consciousness, is to Old English 
 poetry what rhyme is to modern, the lat- 
 ter being unknown. In offering a trans- 
 lation, then, of such verse, its alliterative 
 character, as well as its rhythmic character, 
 may be reproduced when possible, or the 
 more familiar and pleasing form, blank 
 verse, be used. In the following papers 
 the Old English line is used in the one 
 case, blank verse in the other, that the two 
 may be compared. As to the law of the 
 use of alliteration, it is enough to say here 
 that every normal Old English line has 
 four accents, divided by a caesura, and that 
 three of these — the first, second, and 
 third — take the alliteration on the rhyth- 
 mically accented word. Add to this that 
 the lilt or measure is prevailingly trochaic 
 with such intermixture of dactyls as to 
 give a freer and less monotonous effect, 
 and an intelligent notion of the mechan- 
 ics of Old English poetry may be had. 
 Thus it will be seen that the oldest verse- 
 type in English is opposed in its move- 
 ment to what may be called the modern 
 verse-type, far excellence; namely, the 
 
180 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 iambic pentameter as seen in blank verse. 
 This fact suggests psychologic causes and 
 offers a fascinating line of inquiry. How 
 different the swing of the tripping trochees 
 or leaping dactyls from the stately march 
 of the line of Marlowe or Shakespeare ! 
 I subjoin a single Old English line with 
 the stresses marked, by way of illustra- 
 tion : 
 
 " Hale hilde-deor Hrothgar gretan." 
 (" The hale hero, Hrothgar to greet.") 
 
 Two other characteristics of Old Eng- 
 lish verse remain to be mentioned — the 
 metaphor and parallelism. The meta- 
 phor is to our primary poetry what the 
 simile is to its later development ; it is a 
 stylistic feature permeating all Old Eng- 
 lish writing, and it imparts an effect of 
 vividness and force that give the literary 
 product a distinct complexion of its own. 
 Readers of the Elizabethan dramatists are 
 aware what a leading role is there played 
 by the metaphor — or kenning, as it is 
 known in Old Norse poetry — when com- 
 pared with its modern use. But with 
 Shakespeare and his contemporaries the 
 simile (which is only the metaphor ex- 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 181 
 
 tended) is also made much of, sharing 
 the rhetorical honors with its older fel- 
 low-figure. But in the Old English days, 
 the simile was practically undeveloped ; it 
 was for a later and more self-conscious age 
 to cultivate it. Thus, in the epic of 
 Beowulf, a composition of about 3,200 
 lines, there is but one simile in the mod- 
 ern expanded sense, while metaphors star 
 every page. The gain in strength by this 
 close-packed, terse figuration is immense. 
 Again, Old English shares with Hebrew 
 poetry the characteristic of parallelism 
 or repetition of the thought in slightly 
 altered phrasing. The Hebrew Script- 
 ures offer hundreds of familiar and well- 
 loved illustrations : " For a thousand 
 years in thy sight are but as yesterday 
 when it is past, and as a watch in the 
 night." Similar constructions continually 
 meet the student of Old English verse, or 
 indeed of Germanic verse in general, 
 whether English, Low or High German, 
 or Scandinavian. At bottom this so- 
 called parallelism is, in all probability, 
 the creature of the emotional impulse 
 which by the law of its being demands 
 a wave-like repetend of the thought ex- 
 
1 82 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 pressed, by clauses of parallel formation. 
 The impulse, too, being emotional, is 
 also rhythmical, and here is another 
 reason for repetition. In Old English, 
 however, what was in its genesis impul- 
 sive and of the emotions became a 
 formal mark of verse, and a most effec- 
 tive rhetorical device, when skilfully 
 managed. 
 
 With these brief comments upon some 
 of the most obvious phenomena of Old 
 English poetry on its subjective and ob- 
 jective sides, let us come at our study 
 of two of its aspects. 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 183 
 
 II 
 
 NATURE IN OLD ENGLISH 
 POETRY 
 
 ¥ 
 
 IN the epic of Beowulf ] our first great 
 English epic, with almost countless ref- 
 erences to the winter season, the sweet, 
 antithetical season of summer is not once 
 mentioned. This fact is significant, and 
 stands for a good deal. At first it appears 
 sufficiently astonishing. England is fair 
 now in the season, and it was so at the 
 end of the fourteenth century when Monk 
 Langland began to sing : 
 
 " In a summer season 
 
 When soft was the sun, 
 
 I was weary of wandering, and went me to rest 
 
 Under a broad bank by a bourne side." 
 
 No winter rhyme this, of a truth. It was 
 so, too, a hundred years earlier, in 1300, 
 when a nameless poet warbled of spring in 
 this wise : 
 
 " Between the March and April, 
 When sprays begin to spring, 
 
1 84 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 The little fowls they have their will 
 In their own way to sing." 
 
 If this be the note of the bards in the 
 year of grace 1400 or 1300, why not in 
 the seventh or eighth century, five hun- 
 dred years before, which is the presuma- 
 ble date of the Beowulf? It is hardly a 
 satisfactory answer to say that the beauty 
 of nature was there, but not the eyes to 
 see it. Old English literature is rife with 
 passages testifying to appreciation of the 
 sterner moods of nature, a cognizance of 
 her wintry phenomena, her rigors of land 
 and sky and water. It is only on the side 
 of warmth and bloom and fragrance that 
 the poetry is so wofully lacking in expres- 
 sion, so insensitive to loveliness and joy- 
 ance. The explanation lies in large part 
 elsewhere. To give one reason : the first 
 poetry written down in England partakes 
 of the atmosphere of the physical condi- 
 tions of the country whence come the 
 original settlers, namely, that of the low- 
 lying lands of the Baltic, the North Sea, 
 and the more northerly Atlantic. Beowulf 
 itself, for example, is entirely un-English 
 and Continental in its locale, the scene 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 185 
 
 shifting from Denmark to Sweden. And 
 so with the lesser poetical product : it is 
 the climate of the lowlands, of Norwegian 
 fiords and Danish nesses, that is in the 
 English literature of the earliest period of 
 production ; hence it is the darker and 
 grimmer phases of nature which are voiced 
 and pictured in the poetry. A striking 
 illustration of this is to be seen in an Old 
 English idiom. It was not the Anglo- 
 Saxon's way to use the word "year" as a 
 denominator of time ; he spoke of " thirty 
 of winters " instead of thirty years, evi- 
 dently an unconscious tribute to the prom- 
 inence of that cold and nipping season in 
 his calendar. 
 
 Another explanation of this fondness of 
 our ancestors for winter landscape brings us 
 within the domain of psychology. The 
 first poetry of the race is pre-Christian, 
 heathen in warp and woof; and in the 
 literature which antedates Christianity — 
 which has Odin and Thor in the heavens 
 and fatalism as its ethical creed, instead of 
 the sunburst of hope and joy which comes 
 with the white Christ and his cheerier 
 promises of happiness and heaven — the 
 poetic spirit is distinctly, indubitably, more 
 
1 86 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 joyless, less perceptive of the bright side 
 of things. Nature, which to the modern 
 poet is but the garment of God, was to his 
 Old English forebears a chilling rather than 
 an inspiriting spectacle ; for back of the 
 myth-gods themselves stood Fate, Neces- 
 sity, with laws that no man may dodge, 
 and with an iron will in place of a tender 
 heart. Germanic mythology and literature 
 give a lively sense of all this. 
 
 These two causes, then (to mention no 
 more), blend to bring about a fact which, 
 at first blush, strikes the modern student 
 as curious and repellent. 
 
 As a result of this dominant note of 
 winter in Old English poetry an effect of 
 gloom and sternness is made on us, espe- 
 cially if we come to the study full of the 
 tropic exuberance and troubadour gayety 
 which run through the literary product of 
 the Romance peoples ; or if we are steeped 
 in the bland brightness of classic imagery ; 
 or, again, if we are conversant with the rich 
 color and sensuous languors of some of the 
 Oriental literatures. It is somewhat gray 
 business, this harping on the one string, 
 this chronicling of only such objective 
 phenomena as are characteristic of the 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 187 
 
 frozen earth and the ice-beaten sea. Yet 
 if sunny charm and color-play and soft 
 melody are wanting, there is great graphic 
 power and a sort of wild music in many 
 of the descriptions ; we get good etchings, 
 strong black-and-white work, if not the 
 landscapes of Claude and Turner ; and 
 there is stimulation for one who has been 
 bred in softer pleasures to turn for the 
 nonce from scented rose-gardens and lute 
 tinklings to the sound of storm-swept 
 pines, the smell of briny waters, and the 
 sight of blood-flecked battle shields shaken 
 in mortal combat. " Pretty " may not be 
 the adjective to apply to such a poetic 
 product, but " fine " and "strong" and 
 " virile " emphatically are. 
 
 Examples follow of the way in which 
 the manifold demonstrations of the ex- 
 ternal world wrought upon our forefathers, 
 as they feasted, hunted, fought, and prayed 
 in Saxon England more than a thousand 
 years ago, and how this found vent in 
 their song. In time, no doubt, we shall 
 have the whole body of Old English poe- 
 try in a form which will commend it to pop- 
 ular use and appreciation ; as yet, how- 
 ever, much remains to be done, and every 
 
1 88 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 worker may contribute his mite. In turning 
 the passage into modern English, I repeat, 
 the Anglo-Saxon verse-line, with its four 
 stresses, or accents, and its definite allitera- 
 tion taking the place of the later device of 
 rhyme, is reproduced as nearly as may be. 
 Inevitably, the result is a metre of so much 
 looser, less regular rhythm that an effect 
 of carelessness and comparative formless- 
 ness is produced on the reader familiar 
 with more modern verse-laws. The 
 rhymeless dithyrambs of Walt Whitman 
 are at times suggested. But although the 
 conception of metrical movement is freer, 
 the laws that govern it are as exact and the 
 artistic limitations as rigorously obeyed as 
 anything that more recent poetry can show. 
 It is a popular error to regard this early 
 verse-product as rude and deficient in art. 
 The long, striking, and beautiful lyric 
 known as The Wanderer^ a truly repre- 
 sentative poem in its sadness and full of 
 the lament of personal bereavement, con- 
 tains but two brief references to nature. 
 This is an indication of how laconic is the 
 early poet's use of this embellishment or 
 accessory, which in modern times threatens 
 to preempt the whole canvas at the expense 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 189 
 
 of motifs and animated foregrounds. Even 
 the most subjective of Old English poets 
 was not satisfied to paint a picture for the 
 mere picture's sake. The Wanderer, a 
 minstrel, is imagined at sea, having lost 
 all his friends, including the lord whose 
 vassal he once was, and is thinking over 
 his past with sick memory. Having 
 dreamed of better times, when his lord 
 clipped him and kissed him, while the 
 bard in turn affectionately laid his hand 
 and head on the kingly knee, he wakes to 
 a realization of his present misery : 
 
 "There awakeneth eft the woful man, 
 
 Seeth before him the fallow waves, 
 
 The sea fowls a-bathing, broadening their feathers, 
 
 The rime and snow falling, mingled with hail." 
 
 And the poem says that at the sight of 
 this welter of storm-smit waters instead of 
 the warm, feast-glad interior of the great 
 hall — the scald's heart is made the heavier. 
 It is a veritable etching, a- sea piece in 
 monochrome, and very typical. It may 
 be said here that perhaps no one phenom- 
 enon of nature plays so large a part in 
 Old English literature as the sea, because 
 it played so large a part in the life as well, 
 
i 9 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and again was a monster that spoke the 
 Saxon's sense of the change, the bigness, 
 and the mystery of human days. It were 
 interesting to trace its steady influence in 
 the great singers of the race. Think what 
 inspiration, what imagery, it has fur- 
 nished Shakespeare, and a long train of 
 successors down to Swinburne and Whit- 
 man ! The epithet " fallow M as applied 
 to the waves, in the lines just cited, is very 
 fine, and shows the true selective felicity 
 of poetry. In contrast with the gray 
 clouds and the snow-filled air, the water 
 would have taken on just that dusky yel- 
 low tinge described by the word. The 
 color scheme of the Anglo-Saxons, it may 
 be remarked, was far more restricted than 
 is ours to-day. Several of our commonest 
 colors appear not at all, and light and 
 shade seem to have made the strongest 
 impression upon them. This fact is a 
 curious commentary on a passage in one 
 of Ruskin's lectures on art, where he re- 
 marks that " the way by color is taken 
 by men of cheerful, natural, and entirely 
 sane disposition in body and mind, much 
 resembling, even at its strongest, the tem- 
 per of well-brought-up children ; " while, 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 191 
 
 contrariwise, " the way by light and shade 
 is taken by men of the highest power of 
 thought and most earnest desire for truth ; 
 they long for light, and for knowledge 
 of all that light can show. But seeking 
 for light, they perceive also darkness; 
 seeking for substance and truth, they find 
 vanity. They look for form in the earth, 
 for dawn in the sky, and, seeking these, 
 they find formlessness in the earth and 
 night in the sky." It hardly seems amiss 
 to name as exponents of the two types 
 here adumbrated the man of Romance 
 stock, sun-loving and insouciant, and the 
 Teuton, with his mood bred of northern 
 gloom and barrenness. 
 
 The second passage in The Wanderer 
 occurs near the close of the lyric. The 
 singer gives a gloomy picture of the earth 
 when the evil days come of loss and 
 change, of age and desolation : 
 
 "Storms shake the stony cliffs, 
 The snow falls and binds the earth, 
 The winter wails, wan dusk comes, 
 The night-shade nips, from the north sends 
 Rough hail, for harm to heroes.* ' 
 
 This is vivid description, and proves a 
 vigorous grasp of vocabulary and a happy 
 
192 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 power in seizing on typically representa- 
 tive features of a wintry landscape. It 
 is not cataloguing, but the movement of 
 the awakened imagination. 
 
 In the mysterious, ill-defined lyric 
 which Grein calls The Wife s Plaint^ and 
 which seems to tell of a woman exiled 
 in a sad, dim wood, far away from her 
 husband, there is a short description which 
 again has shadow and sorrow for its set- 
 ting, the woman's ill stead being echoed 
 and transcribed in the phase of the exter- 
 nal world which is presented. She is tell- 
 ing of her banishment and the place of 
 her abode : 
 
 " They bade me to dwell in the bushy woods, 
 Under the oak-trees down in the earth caves. 
 Old are the earth halls ; I am all-wretched ; 
 Dim are the dens, the dunes towering, 
 Dense the inclosures, with brambles engirt, 
 The dwellings lack joy.' ' 
 
 The reference to The Wife's Plaint turns 
 the mind instinctively to the longer and 
 remarkable lyric known as The Ruin; 
 only a fragment, but as precious in its 
 way as one of Sappho's, and full of Old 
 English feeling for the dark things of life, 
 fairly revelling in descriptions of physical 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 193 
 
 destruction. The subject is a city in 
 ruined decay and neglect, and the poem 
 deals scarcely at all with nature directly, 
 but rather with the effects of time upon 
 the work of men as seen in the fallen wall 
 and tower and rain-pierced roof. In the 
 tenth line, however, there is a touch 
 worth noting. The artisan who built all 
 this mighty structure, says the poet, is 
 long dead, and now his work after him 
 is crumbling to naught. But it was not 
 always so. 
 
 M Often yon wall 
 (Deer-gray, red-spotted) saw many a mighty one 
 Hiding from storms.' ' 
 
 The descriptive touch en parenthese is as 
 accurate and careful as it is laconic. It 
 implies real and fresh observation, and a 
 wish for truthful representation. 
 
 Another lyric which may well be placed 
 in evidence is that called The Seafarer; 
 it contains several descriptive passages 
 which make it interesting for our partic- 
 ular study. It pictures a lonely seafarer 
 afloat on the waters, with the usual un- 
 pleasant concomitants of bad weather and 
 bleak season : 
 
94 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 "I may of mine own might a sooth-song sing, 
 
 Say of my journeys how I through toilful days 
 
 Often endured arduous times, 
 
 Had to abide breast care full bitter, 
 
 Knew on the ship many a sad berth, 
 
 Fierce welter of waves, where oft they beat upon 
 
 me 
 In my narrow night-watch at the boat's bow, 
 When it hurtled on the cliffs, conquered by the 
 
 cold ; 
 Then were my feet by the frost bitten, 
 In fetters bleak. . . . No man may know it, 
 Who on the fair, firm land happily liveth, 
 How I, sore-sorry one, upon the ice-cold sea 
 Winter long dwelt midst evils of exile, 
 Lorn of all joys, robbed of my kinsmen, 
 Behung with icicles. Hail blew in showers ; 
 There heard I naught but the streaming sea, 
 The ice-cold wave ; whilom the swan's song 
 Had I to pleasure me, cry of the water-hen, 
 And, for men's laughter, the sea-beast's loud voice, 
 The singing of gulls instead of mead-drink. 
 Storms beat the stony cliffs, while the sea-swallow, 
 Icy-feathered, answered ; full oft the eagle, 
 Moist-feathered, shrieked." 
 
 Here we have a full-length portrait of 
 misery, with much vividness and partic- 
 ularity in putting before us the monody 
 of sea and sky and fate. A little farther 
 on, the scald seems to imagine himself on 
 land in the winter, and with the incon- 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 195 
 
 sistency of human nature, he gets up a 
 longing for the very terrors he has ex- 
 pended so much energy in bemoaning : 
 
 "The night-shades thicken, it snows from the north, 
 Rime binds the land, hail falls on the earth, 
 Coldest of corn. Wherefore surge now 
 The thoughts of my heart, that I the high streams, 
 The play of the salt waves, again might essay.' ' 
 
 Truth to tell, the Anglo-Saxons minded 
 stiff weather on the water far less than 
 we their degenerate descendants. They 
 knew the sea in all her moods ; they 
 lived and fought upon her, and their in- 
 trustment of the dead body to her at the 
 last, the death-boat pushing out into the 
 open brine to float at will of wind and 
 wave, is a touching proof of the magic and 
 magnetism she exercised upon their mind. 
 
 Another passage in the poem must be 
 given. This time it is a brief description 
 of spring, and a pleasing one : 
 
 The woods take on blossoms, the burgs grow fair, 
 The plains are a-glitter, the world waxes gay." 
 
 But now comes the typically Old English 
 melancholy, like a death's-head at the 
 feast : 
 
196 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " But all monisheth the heedful of death, 
 To fare on a journey, he who meditateth 
 Over the flood-ways far hence to go. 
 So broods the cuckoo with mournful words, 
 So sings the summer's ward, foretelling sorrow, 
 Bitter in soul." 
 
 It is suggestive, in the face of this 
 treatment of the cuckoo as a harbinger of 
 woe, to compare therewith Wordsworth's 
 exquisite poem to this bird : 
 
 " O blithe new-comer ! I have heard, 
 I hear thee and rejoice. 
 O cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
 Or but a wandering Voice ? " 
 
 And then the closing stanza: 
 
 tf O blessed Bird ! the earth we pace 
 Again appears to be 
 An unsubstantial, faery place, 
 That is fit home for thee." 
 
 Here is spiritualized cheerfulness instead 
 of sorry forecast, bearing out my assertion 
 of the more hopeful interpretation of 
 nature under the reign of Christ. 
 
 Mention must be made of the two fine 
 ballads, The Battle of Brunanburh and 
 The Battle of Maldon. The former, em- 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 197 
 
 bedded like a glowing ruby in the dull 
 gray prose of the Saxon Chronicles for 
 the year 937, contains a couple of bits of 
 nature description, and one of them may 
 be given. The theme of the ballad is 
 the victory won over the Scots and North- 
 men by King Athelstan and Eadmund 
 the Etheling, his brother ; and the chosen 
 extract' is characteristically sombre and 
 Old English. It deals with beast-kind, 
 with the three creatures, feathered or four- 
 footed, who are inevitable grim concomi- 
 tants of the battle-field in the unsavory 
 post-bellum capacity of scavengers. The 
 mention of birds and beasts like these, 
 instead of the innocent and lovesome 
 song-makers who warble and chirp in 
 modern verse, is another indication of the 
 gloomy mood of our heathen forefathers. 
 The victorious king and the Etheling, 
 says the poet, sought their own homes in 
 Wessex, turning their backs on the bloody 
 field with its harvest of dead bodies. 
 
 "Left they behind them, to rend the corpses, 
 The sallow-coated one, the swart raven, 
 The horny-nibbed and the gray-coated 
 Eagle white-breasted, carrion to enjoy ; 
 The greedy war hawk, and that gray beast 
 The wolf in the wood.'* 
 
198 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 That evil triumvirate, the raven, the hawk, 
 and the wolf, fairly haunt Old English 
 poetry ; and this is largely explained by 
 the predominance of the theme of war's 
 havoc, which naturally brings the creatures 
 of prey in its train. They give occasion 
 for some of the finest passages in this 
 drastic vein, and, however unpleasant to 
 modern aesthetics, it were foolish not to 
 feel how truthful and keenly observant 
 and vigorously sketched are such lines as 
 these just quoted. 
 
 The Battle of Maldon, although a much 
 longer poem, contains hardly a trace 
 of nature-painting, being sternly epic. 
 Brunanburh is a more triumphant song 
 than Chevy Chaee ; Maldon, contrariwise, 
 chronicles the dire defeat of the brave 
 Alderman Bryhtnoth, in Essex, in the year 
 991, by the Vikings. The single example, 
 again, of grim suggestion, is a brief two- 
 line stroke. The fight is fierce; the 
 doomed ones begin to fall, and the scav- 
 engers with unseemly haste to gather : 
 
 »« Then was a cry uplift, the ravens flew about, 
 The eagles, flesh-eager. " 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 199 
 
 It remains to speak of the literary mon- 
 ument which in importance, as well as in 
 length, overtops all else in poetry that 
 Old English days have bequeathed to us : 
 I mean the Beowulf. The reader is re- 
 minded that the theme of Beowulf is the 
 deeds and days of the great hero by that 
 name ; who visits the Danish King Hroth- 
 gar ; fights, and eventually kills, the fierce 
 dragon who is depopulating the great hall 
 of the latter ; returns to his native land of 
 Gotland, in Sweden, and rules there pros- 
 perously for fifty winters as king, until he 
 dies, heavy with years and honors, in a 
 conflict with another dragon, and is bur- 
 ied with due pomp by the seashore, and 
 mourned as a good lord, — a lofty death- 
 barrow being erected in his honor, with a 
 bright beacon thereon, that the distant 
 shipfarer may be cheered. So far as the 
 treatment of nature is concerned, this poem 
 is grim and gloomy in the main. We 
 hear much of dusk, stony cliffs, of weird 
 waterways (the supernatural comes much 
 into play in the poem), of wintry moors 
 and bleak earth-holes, but next to noth- 
 ing of the shine and the joyance of life, ei- 
 ther objective or subjective. What joyance 
 
zoo LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 there is comes of battle, or of beer-drink- 
 ing about the hearth-fire at night. So that 
 the greatest Old English poetical produc- 
 tion bears out the reiterated statement that 
 it is the night side of nature which is pre- 
 sented in the earliest literature. The first 
 passage cited brings up a scene in the great 
 hall of King Hrothgar, who is entertaining 
 Beowulf, just arrived from his sea journey 
 with his attendant troop. Ale and mead 
 have been circulated, and one of Hroth- 
 gar's thanes, who is well drunken, twits 
 Beowulf with being outdone in a famous 
 swimming match in the ocean by one 
 Breca. Beowulf indignantly denies this 
 insinuation, and straightway tells the true 
 tale of how he beat Breca. Never is the 
 Old English hero backward in coming 
 forward about his own deeds ; modesty, as 
 we reckon it, was not one of his promi- 
 nent traits. Siegfried in Wagner's operas, 
 another Germanic hero, furnishes a fur- 
 ther example. In the course of BeowulFs 
 story we get this description of the winter 
 sea. It is left to the hearer to imagine 
 the icy-cold of the water and its effects on 
 the hardy swimmers : 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 20 1 
 
 M Then were we twain there on the sea 
 Space of five nights, till the floods severed us, 
 The welling waves. Coldest of weathers, 
 Shadowy night, and the north wind 
 Battelous shocked on us ; wild were the waters, 
 And were the mere-fishes stirred up in mind. ,, 
 
 By mere-fishes here are meant whales, 
 and the powerful statement is therefore 
 made that the upheaval of the sea was 
 such as to disturb even leviathan. It will 
 be seen that, on the whole, this swimming 
 match is accompanied by rather more seri- 
 ous incidents and conducted under more 
 stringent conditions than the average wager 
 of its kind. Farther on in the poem, after 
 Beowulf has successfully met the monster 
 Grendel, and driven him, howling with 
 rage at the loss of an arm, back to his 
 native fen, his mother, the she-dragon, 
 comes by night to avenge her son, and 
 seizes one of Hrothgar's henchmen, bear- 
 ing him off to feed on his body. In the 
 morning the king is made aware of this 
 occurrence, and on meeting Beowulf tells 
 him of it, bewailing his loss. He enters 
 into a detailed description of Grendel and 
 his dam, his habitat, how dread the place 
 is ; and calls on Beowulf for help in his 
 
202 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 grievance and peril. During his mono- 
 logue comes this picture or the lair of 
 these uncanny pests : 
 
 " They guard a weird land, 
 Holes for the wolves and windy crags, 
 The fearful far ways where the mountain flood 
 Under the misty nesses netherward falls, 
 The flood 'neath the earth. 'Tis not far henceward 
 In measure of miles that the mere standeth ; 
 Thereover hang the clamorous holts, 
 The woods rooted firm, o'erwatching the water.' ' 
 
 The deep-mouthed, resonant tone-color 
 of the vernacular gives voice well to the 
 idea of the eerie aloofness and mystery of 
 the place. One thinks, in reading such a 
 description, of the palette of a Rembrandt 
 or the word power of a Dante. Only a 
 few lines farther on the picture receives a 
 few additional details : 
 
 ** That is no happy spot, 
 Thence the waves' mingle upward mounts ever 
 Wan to the welkin, when the wind rouseth 
 Storms full loath ; till the air darkens, 
 The heaven weeps." 
 
 In its elements of mournful mystery, 
 its touch of magic, and its imaginative 
 grouping of the terrors incident to the 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 203 
 
 stern aspect of sea and land in the north, 
 such writing may be marked as finely rep- 
 resentative not only of Old English, but 
 of early Germanic literature, which still 
 retained Aryan features of pre-Christian 
 cultus and folk-lore. 
 
 The examples given of Beowulf fairly 
 represent the prevailing manner and tone 
 of the epic in treating nature ; and, as will 
 have been seen from the other citations 
 made, it is also typical of the general body 
 of verse, whether epic or lyric, of this first 
 period. I remark here in passing that 
 there is not in the whole poem a reference 
 to the moon, that melancholy orb of night, 
 — when, a priori^ we might well expect a 
 poet so glum-minded to take advantage 
 of it as good material to hand. But the 
 sadness of the Germanic bard has not a 
 touch of sentimentalizing about it ; it is 
 not moon-struck moaning, but the recog- 
 nition of harsh fate by heroes and warriors. 
 
 The transition from the poetry of the 
 heroic period to the monkish writings of 
 such men as Caedmon and Cynewulf is 
 hardly an abrupt one. The earlier vigor, 
 raciness, and naivete are not wholly lost 
 when we come to the later verse-making ; 
 
2o 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 yet certain well-defined characteristics serve 
 to mark off the two products, and the 
 interpretation of nature in each case is 
 an earmark of the change. The most 
 primitive poetry is sung by unknown 
 scalds, working over and retouching the 
 original from generation to generation ; 
 modern criticism finds this to be true of 
 Beowulf as it does of Homer. But in the 
 transitional time we get a definite name 
 attached to the verse product, as the 
 poet-cowherd Caedmon, or Cynewulf, the 
 mysterious scald of Northumbria. The 
 subject-matter, too, changes ; Caedmon 
 making metrical paraphrases of the Old 
 Testament, and Cynewulf shaping into 
 narrative poems of epic dignity and scope 
 the mediaeval Christian legends. Where 
 before was the Germanic myth unadulter- 
 ated, we meet with themes borrowed from 
 the Latin ; and the older heathen fatalism, 
 with its attendant mood of pessimism and 
 affiliation with the darker things of the 
 external world, makes way for the milder 
 horoscope of the new religion, with a 
 cheerier reflection of nature. The signs 
 at first are somewhat chary, since the earl 
 who invokes Thor cannot be smoothed 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 205 
 
 over into the meek-hearted Christ-lover in 
 a trice, — and indeed the treatment of 
 religious things by these early poets often 
 reminds one of the fabled wolf in sheep's 
 clothing ; yet for this very reason a racy 
 originality is imparted to the handling of 
 themes traditionally dull and prosy, and 
 the verse of religious motives has a literary 
 value. 
 
 The names of Caedmon and Cynewulf, 
 the first Christian poets of the English 
 tongue, are to be associated with eccle- 
 siastic culture, and are of moment in the 
 evolution of the native poetry. The true 
 successors of the harpers whose names 
 and titles are lost in the archaic twilight 
 of time, they were English above all else, 
 poets before they were scholars. If their 
 subject-matter be largely religious, and if 
 the didactic note be struck again and 
 again, passage after passage can be quoted 
 which rivals the heathen song in its epic 
 lilt and predilection for the martial and 
 heroic. The verse of such singers may 
 not be overlooked by the critic in his per- 
 petual still-hunt for aesthetic pleasure. 
 
 Caedmon has been called the Saxon 
 Milton. The appellation is not inapt ; 
 
zo6 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 the Puritan poet's possible obligation to 
 his predecessor and the similarity of their 
 treatment making the nexus all the more 
 real ; but in regard of his origin and idio- 
 syncrasy Caedmon is rather the prototype 
 of a modern people-poet like Burns : the 
 one summoned from the oxstall, the other 
 from the plough, to tell of the things of 
 the spirit ; both humble in birth and occu- 
 pation, and with distinct folk-traits and 
 sympathies. The Whitby poet sings in 
 strong, sweet speech of the Israelitish 
 quest of the Promised Land, or of such 
 stirring happenings as those which centre 
 around Judith as protagonist. And 
 throughout his Bible-inspired epics it is 
 curious to see the moody earnestness of 
 the Saxon merged in the solemn, mystic- 
 dreamy, or jubilant joy of the neophyte; 
 this blend of character and influence 
 coloring the touches of nature as it does 
 other phases of the work. His verses are 
 paraphrase in the broadest, freest sense. 
 Whenso the singer wills, he expands, 
 interpolates, introduces so much of local 
 color that the composition comes to have 
 independent and creative worth. 
 
 In Caedmon' s Genesis, where God com- 
 
/^ OF TH€ * A 
 
 I UNIVERSITY | 
 
 OLD ENGLISH POETRY 207 
 
 forts Abram by telling him that his seed 
 shall be like the stars in heaven for num- 
 ber, the bard amplifies the statement in 
 this manner: 
 
 f* Behold the heavens ! Reckon their hosts, 
 The stars in Ether, which now in stately wise 
 Their lovesome beauty scatter afar, 
 Over the broad sea brightly ashine.' , 
 
 Here a distinct, new note is struck : the 
 heavenly lights are considered as ema- 
 nations from God, the Source of light. 
 When we hear in Beowulf of u God's 
 beautiful beacon," Christian interpolation 
 is at once suggested. We saw something 
 of the typical treatment of animals in the 
 epic : contrast therewith this tender de- 
 scription of the dove sent forth to find a 
 resting-place and bring tidings of terra 
 fir ma to the sea-weary folk. The Testa- 
 ment account is again laconic ; the ampli- 
 fication such as to imply artistic apprecia- 
 tion of opportunity : 
 
 *« Widely she flew, 
 Until a gladsome rest and a fair place 
 Haply she found, and set her foot upon 
 The gentle tree. Blithe-mooded, she 
 Joyed that, sore-weary, she now might settle 
 
208 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 On the branch bosky, on its bright mast. 
 Preening her feathers, forth she went flying 
 With a sweet gift, hastened to give 
 Straight in their hands a twig of olive, 
 A blade of grass." 
 
 We get here the initiative of the modern 
 treatment. And one notices this in an 
 Old English poet for the reason that both 
 Caedmon and Cynewulf can on occasion 
 paint in the sober pigments of the elder 
 bards. The following, for example, from 
 the Exodus, reminds the student forcibly 
 of the passage already given from the 
 ballad of Brunanburh, and is every whit 
 as savage and heathen ; it masses the 
 details of a fight between Moses leading 
 the Israelites and the hosts of Pharaoh : 
 
 " In the further sky shrieked the battle-fowls 
 
 Greedy of fight : the yellow raven, 
 
 She dewy -feathered, over the slain-in-war, 
 
 Wan Walkyrie. Wolves were a-howling 
 
 A hateful even-song, weening on food, 
 
 Pitiless beasts, full stark in murder, 
 
 In the rear heralding a meal of doomed men, 
 
 Shrieked these march-warders in the mid nights.* ' 
 
 Turning to the fragmentary Judith, the 
 irrepressible relish for a sanguinary en- 
 counter breaks out, and there is very little 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 209 
 
 of the cloistral student felt in the breath- 
 less lines which tell how the Hebrew 
 woman slew Holofernes. One harks back 
 to Brunanburhy to Beowulf, to such other 
 Germanic monuments as the Hildebrand, 
 or to some of the Eddie poems, in reading 
 it. Such literature suggests how Shake- 
 speare, child of his age for all his genius, 
 could heap up the murders in his plays, 
 and take so kindly to the belligerent and 
 the bloody. The Elizabethans were three 
 hundred years nearer the Old English than 
 ourselves, and the first epics of our race 
 are battle-pieces, the first motif is that of 
 war. But despite the redness of Judith 
 as a whole, it has a peaceful close, the 
 final passage celebrating nature as created 
 joyously by the Maker of men ; and it 
 could not have been written until after 
 Augustine in the south and the Irish in 
 the north had spoken of Christ to Eng- 
 lish folk: 
 
 " Be to the lief Lord 
 Glory forever, He who shaped wind and lift, 
 The heavens, the vast earthways, eke the wild seas 
 And the sun's joys, because of His mercy.' ' 
 
 The accent of the heathen invocation in 
 such a place would be very different. 
 
2io LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Shelley is hinted and foreshadowed in more 
 than one nature apostrophe of these early 
 Christian poets — Shelley minus his sub- 
 jectivity. The same cosmic sweep of the 
 imagination is noticeable. 
 
 The singers picture of the Garden of 
 Eden in all its primal and virgin loveliness 
 shows again an appreciation of new subject- 
 matter : 
 
 n The plain of Paradise 
 Stood good and gracious, filled full with gifts, 
 With fruits eternal. Lovely it glittered, 
 That land so mild, with waters flowing, 
 With bubbling springs. Never had clouds as yet 
 Over the roomy ways carried the rains 
 Wan with the winds ; but decked out with blossoms 
 The earth stretched away." 
 
 In reading this verse, one is often re- 
 minded of the solecisms, anachronisms, 
 and amusing artlessnesses of a later liter- 
 ary product which equals the younger in 
 virility, the Elizabethan drama. In the 
 strong, felicitous, and frequent use of the 
 metaphor, also, Shakespeare and his fellows 
 are leal descendants of the Old English, 
 while more modern poetry has developed 
 at the expense of the metaphor that ex- 
 panded and weakened form of it known 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 211 
 
 as the simile. Stopford Brooke has 
 pointed out that with a poet like Caedmon, 
 a Whitby man who looked forth upon the 
 stormy waters of the Northumbrian coast 
 while weaving his song, it was natural he 
 should tell of the sea with imaginative 
 vigor and felicity, as when he sang of 
 Noah and the flood. Mostly, as earlier, 
 it is the serious and sombre aspects which 
 are depicted ; but it is worth noting that 
 when we come to Cynewulf such new 
 compounds as " sea-bright " and " sea- 
 calm " are made to portray the more amia- 
 ble side of this moody monster. 
 
 Caedmon's subjects are essentially epic 
 and grandiosely religious ; in the case of 
 Cynewulf we enter into the atmosphere 
 of Middle-Age legend and worship, the 
 cycle of hagiography, with an occasional 
 excursus in the more primitive field, as in 
 the Riddles. But by no means do the 
 Old English qualities go by the board. 
 If such themes as those of the Andreas 
 and the Juliana suggest the studious clois- 
 ter, the speech of the bard smacks of the 
 soil, and there is enough of the epic and 
 the folk-touch to prevent them from be- 
 coming scholastic and unattractive. Ten 
 
212 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Brinck's remark that " the introduction of 
 Christianity was doubtless one of the 
 causes that destroyed the productive 
 power of epic poetry," while true in the 
 abstract, must not be applied with strict- 
 ness to Caedmon and Cynewulf; they 
 were near enough the heroic day still to 
 breathe its air. In the latter' s Christ, a 
 loosely constructed work of a choral-epic 
 nature, which celebrates the Nativity, 
 Ascension, and Day of Judgment, a single 
 line gives an example of the imaginative 
 touch in conceiving nature as a vassal, who 
 contributes her beauty to the glory of 
 heaven. The seraphim who sing about the 
 throne are described, and the poet chants : 
 
 " Forever and ever, adorned with the sky, 
 They worship the Wielder ; " 
 
 the Wielder being God, who wields power 
 over all. The italicized clause embodies 
 a conception which has a largeness re- 
 minding one of the work of a Michael 
 Angelo. One thinks instinctively of 
 Milton's scene : 
 
 " Where the bright seraphim in burning row 
 Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, 
 And the cherubic host in thousand quires 
 Touch their immortal harps of golden wires." 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 213 
 
 This brief passage from the Christ is 
 nobly epic and large-moving: 
 
 " Our food He gives us and joy of goods, 
 Weal o'er the wide ways and weather soft 
 Under the skyey roof. The sun and moon, 
 Best -born of stars, shine they for all of us, 
 Candles of heaven for heroes on earth. ,, 
 
 There is a sound of pantheism in this, 
 and again comes the naive stroke in the 
 epithet "heroes" where "sinners" would 
 be the conventional later word. It took 
 centuries of masses and missals to make 
 the old Englishman admire the saint 
 type more than the martial leader. Cyne- 
 wulFs Andreas (now by the latest theory 
 awarded to a follower rather than to 
 himself) is a narrative poem which de- 
 scribes the delivery of Matthew from a 
 Mermedonian prison by Andrew, who 
 dwells in Achaia, and who therefore has 
 to make a sea journey in faring on his 
 quest of rescue. It is full of sea pictures, 
 and the color is that of the northeast 
 coast of England, the singer's presumable 
 home. In the passage following, the saint 
 has been borne by angels to land, and left 
 asleep on a highway near the Mermedo- 
 nian city : 
 
2i 4 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 "Then flew the angels, forth again faring, 
 
 Glad on the up-way their Home to seek, 
 
 Leaving the holy one there on the highroad, 
 
 Sleeping right peacefully under the heaven's heed, 
 
 Nigh to his foemen, all the night through. 
 
 Till that the Prince suffered day's candle 
 
 Sheerly to shine : the shades slunk away 
 
 Wan 'neath the welkin ; then came the weather's torch, 
 
 The brilliant heaven-light o'er the homes beaming." 
 
 Here the thought is of light driving out 
 darkness ; it would have been more in the 
 way of the heathen poet to give us the 
 day swallowed up in the huge black maw 
 of night. In the second line translated is 
 an example of the constant perplexity of 
 one who essays to turn Old English into 
 more modern speech. I have retained 
 the word " up-way " (like the German 
 Aufgang) as it stands in the original, for it 
 is certainly an admirably descriptive sub- 
 stantive for the airy path followed by the 
 angelic messengers in flying back to 
 heaven. One runs the danger of making 
 either a bizarre effect or an obscure read- 
 ing in such a case, the result being a fre- 
 quent abandonment of the fine, strong, 
 fresh Old English diction. 
 
 But not always did Cynewulf elect re- 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 215 
 
 ligious subjects ; the series of remarkable 
 Riddles, which rank among his best pro- 
 ductions, are secular in subject, heathen in 
 spirit, and full of the flavor of folk-lore, 
 myth, and northern melancholy. Yet 
 there is a divergence from the oldest epic 
 type : the writer of these puzzle-poems 
 has, after all, felt the amelioration of the 
 new religion, and its influence may be 
 traced in the lyrico-subjective position of 
 the bard toward nature. Commingling 
 with the feeling for the savagery of beast- 
 kind is a certain spiritual good-fellowship 
 which foretokens Coleridge, Byron, and 
 Wordsworth. Beside the dark, battle- 
 ravenous raven we see the bright, high- 
 bred falcon associated with the aristocratic 
 chase and the stately king-hall. In Riddle 
 Eight the swan is thus done in rapid 
 crayon, for the reader's guessing : 
 
 " Silent my feather- robe when earth I tread, 
 Fly o'er the villages, venture the sea ; 
 Whilom, this coat of mine and the lift lofty 
 Heave me on high over the heroes' bight, 
 And the wide welkin's strength beareth me up 
 Over the folk ; my winged adornments 
 Go whirring and humming, keen is their song 
 When, freed of fetters, straightway I am 
 A spirit that fareth o'er flood and field." 
 
216 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Riddle Fifty-eight limns a somewhat 
 mysterious brown bird, the identification 
 of which may perhaps be left most safely 
 to Mr. Burroughs. Luckily, uncertainty 
 as to name does not interfere with enjoy- 
 ment of the brief, beautiful description : 
 
 "The lift upbeareth the little wights 
 
 Over the high hills : very black be they, 
 
 Swart, sallow-coated. Strong in their song, 
 
 Flockwise they fare, loud in their crying 
 
 Flit through the woody nesses, or, whiles, the stately halls 
 
 Of mortal men. Their own names they sound.' ' 
 
 The hint in the final line suggests whip- 
 poor-will, Bob White, and other songsters, 
 but the analogy is not carried out. In 
 Old English verse nothing of the lyric or 
 idyllic sort is more imaginative than the 
 subjoined sketch of the nightingale, in the 
 ninth Riddle ; it has the interpretative 
 quality removing it far from mere detail 
 work : 
 
 «* Many a tongue I speak by mine own mouth, 
 In descants sing, pour out my lofty notes, 
 Chanting so loud, hold fast my melody, 
 Stay not my word, old even-singer, 
 But bring to earls bliss in their towers, 
 When for the dwellers there passioned I sing ; 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 217 
 
 Hushed in the houses sit they and hark. 
 
 How am I hight now, who with such scenic tunes 
 
 Zealously strive, calling to hero-men 
 
 Many a welcome with my sweet voice ? ' ' 
 
 We must make some requisition upon a 
 long and remarkable passage from Cyne- 
 wulf's allegorical poem, The Phoenix^ a 
 piece based upon the Latin, but much 
 increased in volume and thoroughly Old 
 English. The Phcenix is also an inter- 
 esting example of the allegoric use of 
 nature (here exemplified in the strange 
 bird which names the composition) in 
 the service of religious laudation. The 
 bard uses a free hand in limning the 
 praises of Paradise ; and, on the whole, 
 the finest work of Cynewulf, and perhaps 
 of Christian poetry, in the broad style, is 
 embodied in the glowing and vibrant 
 words and cadences. Notice the Old 
 English conception of the Home of the 
 Blessed as an island. The sense of this 
 mid-earth as water-girdled, which is 
 common to the several Germanic litera- 
 tures, is blended in this case with that 
 thought of England's ocean-fretted isle 
 which made the greatest poet of the Ian- 
 
2i 8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 guage see it imaginatively as a " precious 
 stone set in the silver sea." 
 
 " Yon plain was shining, blessed with all sweets, 
 With fairest fragrance the earth may yield ; 
 The isle stands alone, its Artist was noble, 
 Proud, rich in might, who stablished the mould. 
 Oft to the Blessed Ones is bliss of songs 
 Borne, and the doors of heaven opened are. 
 That is a winsome wold, green are the woods, 
 Roomy 'neath skies. Neither the rain nor snow, 
 Nor breath of frost, nor blast of fire, 
 Not the hail's drumming nor the rime's coming, 
 Neither the sun's heat nor bitter cold, 
 Neither the weather warm nor wintry storm, 
 May harm the wights ; but the wold lasteth 
 Happy and hale ; 'tis a right noble land 
 Woxen with blooms. Nor fells nor mountains 
 Steeply arise there ; nor do the stony cliffs 
 Beetle on high, as here midst mortals. 
 
 Still is that victor-wold, the sun-groves glitter, 
 The blissful holt. Growths do not wane, 
 The blades so bright ; but the trees ever 
 Stand greenly forth, as God has bidden, 
 The woods alike in winter and summer 
 Are hung with frui tings; never may wither 
 A leaf in the lift." 
 
 The faults of such descriptive writing 
 are monotony, the repetition of stock 
 phrases, the working over of the same 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 219 
 
 thought. Nevertheless, it has a noble 
 manner, and a charm of diction that 
 makes for true poetry. 
 
 I hope the survey has now been wide 
 enough to make the reader willing to 
 believe that the treatment of nature in 
 Old English poetry, in this its first mani- 
 festation, is something distinct, original, 
 and of high poetic value. It affords a 
 welcome insight into the mind and the 
 imagination of our Saxon predecessors, 
 and both by what it says and leaves 
 unsaid yields interesting testimony with 
 regard to their attitude toward the exter- 
 nal world of terror, power, and beauty. 
 That attitude was vastly different from 
 our own, more limited in perception, less 
 enlightened, gloomier in mood, register- 
 ing a state of half-development. But it 
 had fine and characteristic points about 
 it : the Old English imaginative vigor 
 and grip, though largely sardonic ; the 
 creative impulse, though vibrant to coarser 
 passions and childish on the subjective 
 side ; a poetic sense of the shifting gloom 
 and glory of human life as voiced in 
 nature or flashed forth in the bravery and 
 loyalty of human kind ; a pathetic appre- 
 
220 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 ciation of the dreams and glories of relig- 
 ion ; and a power over the mother tongue 
 very impressive, making it to give forth 
 grave chords of harmony to grief, to echo 
 the wild joy of the elements, to shrill like 
 clarions in the onset of weapons, or to 
 soften in the mystic melodies of worship. 
 It is manly poetry, and one cannot read 
 it and fail to get a bracing of the mental 
 sinews, and a larger sense of the essential 
 qualities of one's race in their ideal aspects 
 and deeper workings. Although we may 
 declare without hesitation that English 
 literature is still to-day Germanic in its 
 backbone and vitals, nevertheless it has 
 been subjected to so much of outside and 
 disparate influence that, compared with the 
 literary product of the Old English time, 
 it is a composite thing. Hence, in getting 
 in touch with Beowulf or with some of 
 the other early lyrics and ballads, we are 
 going back to the originals, and are given 
 a glimpse at the substructure whereupon 
 is built the noble edifice of our many- 
 towered and multi-ornamented literature. 
 The Old English lyric (such a poem as 
 The Scald's Lament or The Seafarer) is the 
 corner-stone ; Tennyson and Browning, 
 
OLD ENGLISH POETRY 221 
 
 Carlyle and Ruskin, Hawthorne and Long- 
 fellow, Emerson and Lowell, are the lofty- 
 terraces and gracious spires which pierce 
 to heaven and catch the eye with rapture 
 from afar, seeming unearthly in their 
 aerial splendor, their proportioned and 
 thoughtful majesty. 
 
222 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 III 
 
 WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH 
 
 POETRY 
 
 ¥ 
 
 IN the literary history of the nations 
 certain stimuli have always evoked 
 imaginative expression in poetry. Cer- 
 tain ideals, though the times were rude, 
 and crude the degree of civilization, have 
 irresistibly inspired the makers of song 
 and story. Nature is one such : Nature, 
 with her elemental forces, her protean 
 moods, her lovely witnesses in flower, 
 tree, and bird, in field and sky, in moun- 
 tain height and limitless stretch of far- 
 resounding sea. Such, too, is man himself 
 on his heroic, his martial and mythic 
 side : blazoned in war by minstrel and 
 weaver of epic poem ; rich with the stories 
 showing forth the valor, faith, and patriot- 
 ism of humanity in a thousand perils and 
 shifts of fate. Yet another such, and per- 
 haps more alluring and fruitful as a motive 
 than any other in the cycle of themes meet 
 for the lyric and dramatic expression of all 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 223 
 
 times and peoples, is the subject of woman 
 in all the manifold and winsome connota- 
 tions of the word. The eternal feminine 
 has lured men on from Eden's day to our 
 own. Rob literature, rob verse of this, 
 and you leave them poor indeed. Col- 
 onel Higginson has said that the test of a 
 civilization is the estimate of women, sug- 
 gesting the thought that the apotheosis of 
 the sex in song is a registry of ethnic 
 culture as well as of ethnic imagination. 
 
 On the principle of beginning the story 
 at home, the most ancient English literary 
 product may be examined for its treatment 
 of woman. So may light be thrown back 
 upon the social life of the period prior to 
 the Norman Conquest, and a background 
 be furnished for the later and lovelier 
 idealizations of the female type. Nor 
 should the quest lack genuine aesthetic 
 value and pleasure. 
 
 The role of woman in Old English poe- 
 try is comparatively a scant one. This 
 is not to be wondered at when we con- 
 sider the conditions of its creation, the 
 life it represents. Feuds and internecine 
 strifes claimed the main strength and inter- 
 est of the Anglo-Saxons of the early Chris- 
 
224 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 tian centuries, and following hard on these 
 came the struggle to acquire a homestead 
 and wrest a living from the soil. In such 
 a rude and utilitarian day, sentiment, in 
 the modern sense, is conspicuous by its 
 absence. With the present in mind for 
 contrast, one is tempted to assert, in agree- 
 ment with Professor Gummere, that " there 
 was a total lack of sentiment in Germanic 
 life," a statement including, of course, the 
 English, although farther study and reflec- 
 tion suggest a modification of so sweeping 
 a remark. But be that as it may, the few 
 glimpses we get of woman are precious, 
 and doubly interesting for their very rarity. 
 At the outset we must realize that among 
 the Old English a marriageable maiden 
 was fought for rather than wooed, or bought 
 from her parents for cash down instead of 
 gracefully received of their hands. The 
 surviving folk-customs of Germany and 
 other European lands help to an under- 
 standing of the sternly business-like nature 
 of these early compacts, while the modern 
 dot still preserves in the centres of our 
 civilization a tang of the original unideal 
 practicality. The good American custom 
 of settling things with the girl herself first 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 2:25 
 
 and with her father afterwards would have 
 met with small favor in King Alfred's time 
 and before. And while the wife and 
 mother had a certain value as housekeeper, 
 weaver, and child-bearer, we must wait for 
 those twin humanizers, the church and 
 chivalry, to set a seal on woman and to 
 beget a notion of the mission of the eter- 
 nal feminine. Another German tribe, the 
 Franks, are said to have debated in a 
 church assembly whether or not a woman 
 was a human being. The ideal of the sex 
 as seen in the poetry, therefore, must be 
 taken in relation to what was her actual 
 position and character at the time, with 
 no hope of the modern refinement, the 
 apotheosis of the centuries. Yet here, if 
 anywhere, when treating that element in 
 society which in any age draws out the 
 finer deeds and aspirations of men, may 
 we look for a softening and sweetening of 
 the typical Old English mood and mind. 
 Nor, examining the literary remains, are 
 we disappointed. 
 
 Naturally it is to Beowulf, the one 
 supreme epic of the Anglo-Saxon period, 
 that one looks for the richest material in 
 our inquiry. Half a dozen women are 
 
226 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 mentioned in the poem, but, as is natural 
 in a narrative poem whose dramatis per- 
 sons are heroes, nobles, and kings, they 
 are all of the queenly class. One could 
 wish that other and more varied types 
 were depicted, and it is for this reason 
 that we shall value the too slight references 
 to the sex under less lofty conditions of 
 caste to be found scattered among a few 
 lyrics outside of Beowulf. By far the 
 most interesting of the Beowulf passages 
 is that which relates to Wealtheow, the 
 spouse of Hrothgar, whose hall the hero 
 of the song comes to guard. She is 
 painted with gusto by the bard as a stately 
 lady, graciously doing the courtesies of 
 her high station, at all points a pleasing 
 exemplar of the house-regent and hostess 
 for her royal thane. It will be well to 
 translate into English blank verse the lines 
 which tell of her and her service. The 
 scene is in the great hall Heorot (which 
 we may render as Stag Horn) wherein the 
 war heroes of the king and those of Beo- 
 wulf are feasting, drinking, singing, and 
 laughing, in the hope that with the advent 
 of the Danish Beowulf the dread of the 
 dragon Grendel shall pass away. To them, 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 227 
 
 in the midst of their heartsome revelry, 
 enter the queen : 
 
 " Forth came Queen Wealtheow, 
 Of Hrothgar wife, mindful of what was meet, 
 Greeting the gold-decked heroes in the hall ; 
 The high-born woman gave the banquet cup 
 First to the warder of the East-Dane homes, 
 Bade him be blithe at drinking, he so dear 
 Unto his folk ; right joyous he partook 
 Of plate and beaker, battle-famous king. 
 And then the Helmung's lady walked among 
 The veterans and the striplings, each and all, 
 Proffering the jewelled cups until it happed 
 The queen ring-wreathen unto Beowulf 
 Mannerly-mooded bore the mead-cup full, 
 Greeted the Geat's prince and gave thanks to God 
 (Wise in her words) because she had her will, 
 That she might pin her faith upon an earl 
 Who was an aid in evil. He, meanwhile, 
 The battle-brave, received it at her hands 
 And made a song, though in the weeds of war. 
 
 The woman liked the words he spake full well, 
 The boasting of the Geat ; the gold-decked one, 
 The folk-queen noble, by her lord sat down." 
 
 Certainly this is a pleasing free-hand 
 description of a woman on her social and 
 public side. We observe that mannerli- 
 ness, savoir vivre, a carriage and etiquette 
 befitting her station, were deemed goodly 
 
228 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 things for such a person to cultivate and 
 possess. Indeed, this glimpse of courtly 
 life reminds one more strongly of the late 
 Minnesinger period, of the chivalric fig- 
 ures who make festal and alive the Nibe- 
 lungen, than of a younger and compara- 
 tively barbaric day. This may be in part 
 explained by the inevitable idealization of 
 poetry. The picture here is selective, 
 heightened from the truth. Further along 
 in the epic occurs another scene in which 
 Wealtheow again bears the beaker to the 
 king, calls him " lord and protector," and 
 bids him be generous of his gifts to Beo- 
 wulf. A valuable passage for our purpose 
 is that which contrasts the characters of 
 the two queens, Hygd and Thrytho. The 
 former, Hygd, is the wife of the Geat 
 Higelac, Beowulf s king, and is drawn as 
 the pattern of what a good woman should 
 be in such a stead. Thrytho, contrari- 
 wise, is the epitome of bad qualities, as 
 seen through the lenses of the early poet, 
 a sort of Lady Macbeth of the early 
 Middle Ages. The passage may be 
 given : 
 
 " Right young was Hygd, 
 His wife, well-natured too^ despite that she 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 229 
 
 Full few of years had bided in the burgs, 
 Daughter of Hareth ; not familiar she, 
 Nor yet too close of gifts to Geatish folk, 
 Of costly trinkets." 
 
 So far the bright side. It is worth 
 noting that the bard commends Hygd for 
 her queenly dignity, not allowing herself 
 to be on too free-and-easy terms with 
 those whom she outranks. He hastens 
 to say, however, that she is all right in 
 the main thing; namely, prodigal in dis- 
 pensing her largesses of gold and gems. 
 Throughout Old English literature this 
 attribute is praised again and again by the 
 poets, whether true of lords or ladies. 
 Thus the stock phrase applied to free- 
 handed earls and kings is "ring-dispenser." 
 But now for the limning of the less ad- 
 mirable sister queen, Thrytho, a name, by 
 the way, that falls anything but trippingly 
 from the tongue and seems ill-adapted to 
 the music of poetry, to which the reply is 
 that the elder English verse-makers cared 
 little for consonantal difficulties — were 
 less sensitive to musical effects than is 
 the case with their modern commensals. 
 This lady, then, is spouse to the Angle 
 king, Offi, and appears to be lugged in 
 
2 3 o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 solely for a foil to the virtues of the 
 young Hygd : 
 
 "Thrytho's mood was wroth, 
 The haughty folk-queen, evil was her mind, 
 No bold one in the trusted retinue 
 Durst venture ( save her lawful lord alone ) 
 To look into her eyes on any day ; 
 For sorry death-chains she would lay on him 
 Hand -wrought ; and soon thereafter, hand-fights o'er, 
 Were weapons ready. So that hostile swords 
 Must be the arbiters and murders make. 
 Such is no queenly custom, nowise fit 
 For lady's doing, though she peerless be, 
 That she, peace-weaver, take the mortal life 
 Of some dear liegeman for a fancied slight." 
 
 How such a portrait makes us feel the 
 distance of this civilization from ours! 
 What a very termagant is here revealed 
 to us — a woman terrible to face, like a 
 blood-thirsty animal for quarrel and kill- 
 ing, ungovernable in her passions, a 
 stirrer-up of tribal troubles, and alto- 
 gether dreadful ! That such a wolfish dis- 
 position did not seem by any means so 
 awful to a contemporary as it does to us, 
 is pretty sure. Women's names in gen- 
 eral, from the fifth to the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, throw light on this, for they are 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 231 
 
 often grimly truculent; witness, Krimhild 
 (Battle-mask) and Brunhild (Battle-coat) 
 in the Nibelungen ; Sigrum (Battle-rime) 
 in the Norse Saga ; and Hildeburg (Battle- 
 town) and Beadohild (Battle-maid) in 
 different Old English songs. In the 
 lines just translated the beautiful epithet, 
 " peace-weaver," applied reproachfully to 
 Thrytho for her lack in the suggested 
 qualities, is an oft-recurring expression for 
 women, especially those of high or royal 
 rank. It might be inferred carelessly that 
 members of the sex were regarded typically 
 as white doves of gentleness in character. 
 It is believed by scholars, however, that 
 this sobriquet was not so subjective as 
 this, but rather had reference to the fre- 
 quent part played by woman when given 
 in marriage between hostile tribes, peace 
 being patched up thereby, to last for a 
 longer or shorter time. Even with this 
 explanation, a seemly part to play, even a 
 beautiful, whether in the bluff days of war 
 or in the piping times of peace ; the sense 
 of the innate feminine gentleness is present 
 plainly in the poet's remark that such-like 
 behavior was neither queenly nor womanly. 
 On the whole, though, we may feel assured 
 
23 2 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 that the hints of savagery in such a char- 
 acter as the Walkyrie Brunhild hit nearer 
 the mark than a milder type like Krim- 
 hild ; that Thrythos were quite as common 
 as Hygds. 
 
 The reference to Queen Hildeburg, 
 consort of King Finn, of the Jutes, is 
 interesting because it touches on that 
 always sweet thing, mother and brother 
 love. There is a feud between the Danes, 
 led by Hraef, and the Jutes, and Hilde- 
 burg has the misfortune to be a kins- 
 woman of Hraef, who is killed in the 
 conflict, Finn, too, being slain later him- 
 self. So the poor queen is in a hard case, 
 having her nearest and dearest on both 
 sides in the quarrel, — a situation some- 
 times duplicated in our American civil 
 war. The bard says of her: 
 
 " All blameless she, 
 Yet in the shield-play shorn of those most lief, 
 Of bairns and brothers ; wounded by the spears, 
 By fate they fell — a sorry woman she." 
 
 And a little later on is told how she 
 had child and brother burned together on 
 one funeral pyre, this disposition of the 
 dead recalling classic scenes: 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 233 
 
 '« Then bade them Hildeburg her own dear son 
 To fasten in the flames on Hraef, his pyre ; 
 Wretched she wept upon his shoulder there, 
 Bemoaned with wailing songs.* ' 
 
 That is a fine touch of mother love 
 again, when Higelac, in his praise of Beo- 
 wulf the deliverer, declares that it was a 
 lucky woman who begot such a man : 
 
 " Lo, whatsoever woman of the tribes 
 Among mankind begot the child, if so 
 She liveth yet, may soothly say, to her 
 The Ancient Measurer hath gracious been 
 Of son birth.' » 
 
 Another and a final sketch of the female 
 type in Beowulf is that of Freaware, the 
 winsome daughter of Hrothgar. Like to 
 her mother, she is represented as playing 
 Ganymede to the revellers in Stag Horn, 
 the lofty hall crowned with deer antlers, 
 and in her person the poet once more 
 exemplifies the function of the sex in allay- 
 ing bad blood and uniting warring tribes : 
 
 " Whilom did Hrothgar's daughter to the earls, 
 To all the soldiery in order due, 
 The ale-filled vessels bear. Freaware the name 
 I heard her called by some. And there she gave 
 The studded gems to heroes. She is plight 
 
234 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Young, gold-adorned, to Froda's happy son, 
 The scylding's lord hath said Amen to this, 
 The Kingdom's ward, and reckons it for rede 
 That he through her may soothe a deal of woe, 
 Of slaughterous feuds." 
 
 But we learn in the next canto that, as 
 not seldom happens, the intertribal trouble 
 thus appeased by the union of Freaware 
 and Ingild was renewed, when after a 
 season (alas ! the inconstancy of human 
 nature) the husband's wife-love had cooled 
 down in the face of overwhelming cares. 
 
 So much for woman as she gleams tran- 
 siently on the canvas in the greatest of 
 our Old English heroic poems. Pleasing, 
 on the whole, are these portraits, showing 
 her in the heartful relations of kin and 
 family ; as the tactful hostess, recalling 
 Chaucer's Nun, since 
 
 M In curtesie was set full moche her leste ; " 
 
 as one pouring oil upon the troublous 
 waters of war. Here is testimony that the 
 influence which has done so much for the 
 refinement and amelioration of society was 
 here at work, albeit under stern restric- 
 tions of time and place. We may now 
 supplement the Beowulfian material with 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 235 
 
 the shreds and patches of poetic hint and 
 statement to be found in minor poems of 
 the primary and heathen period. 
 
 In the earliest lyric, The Scales La- 
 ment^ one of the six strophes which com- 
 pose it tells of the sad plight of one 
 Beadhild, daughter of Nithad and Leman 
 of Weland, the mythic smith of Germanic 
 legend. Having loved not wisely but too 
 well, she is left lonely to bear the burden 
 of her misstep. The poet describes her 
 case in this wise : 
 
 U Her brother's death to Beadhild never sunk 
 So deep in mind as did her own sore stead, 
 That she perforce must know it for a truth 
 How she was eaning, and could nowise tell 
 What she might do.' , 
 
 From this passage it may be inferred 
 at least that unchastity was frowned upon 
 and purity among women set store by with 
 the English long before the Norman Con- 
 quest. The word of Tacitus as to the 
 Germans is in agreement with this idea, 
 the eulogy, of course, applying as well to a 
 sister tribe like the Anglo-Saxons, a later 
 offshoot from the Continent. The strong 
 clan and kin feeling of the Germanic 
 
236 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 peoples was all in favor of the feminine 
 virtue which in time has come to be re- 
 garded as the touchstone of female excel- 
 lence. A passage in the lyric Widsith 
 is similar to several cited in Beowulf, 
 in that it depicts a queen as gracious gold- 
 giver. The Wanderer (Widsith) is the 
 typical figure of the Old English scald 
 travelling from land to land, attaching him- 
 self to some king or over-lord, and making 
 his heroic songs of the chief's prowess, to 
 receive in return sure meed of gift and 
 food and a vassal's privilege in hall and 
 by hearthstone. But in the end the bard 
 feels that his princely patron will win im- 
 mortality by his lay and so get no mean 
 reward in his turn, just as Shakespeare in 
 his sonnet feels that he is bestowing 
 enduring fame upon the boy he lauds and 
 loves ; as Dante was sure he was embalm- 
 ing for after ages the stately beauty of 
 Beatrice. This strolling songrnan, now, 
 has been telling how on his wanderings 
 King Ermanaric, of the Goths, gave him of 
 rings and money which he, faithful liege- 
 man that he was, on his coming back put 
 into the hands of his patron and lord, 
 Eadgils, actuated by gratitude because that 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 237 
 
 ruler had bestowed an estate upon his 
 father before him, which the Wanderer in 
 due course inherited. But another land- 
 holding, he goes on, was given him by- 
 good Queen Ealdhild, the spouse of 
 Eadgils : 
 
 " Ealdhild herself to me another gave, 
 
 The stately queen unto the liegeman, she 
 
 Was Edwin's daughter; praise of her was borne 
 
 Through many lands whenso my songs were sung, 
 
 Of how I saw her fair beneath the sky, 
 
 The gold-adorned dispensing of her gifts." 
 
 This again is pleasing and implies an 
 attractive feudal relation. It does not 
 have the hollow ring of the perfunctory 
 court poetry of subsequent centuries, when 
 the vices of a royal personage were chanted 
 as virtues, and the pimples on his face 
 apostrophized as suitable subject-matter 
 for the Muse ! 
 
 A mysterious but very suggestive poem 
 is that called T'he Wifes Lament, a lyric 
 of fifty odd lines, in which a woman 
 who seems to be exiled from her hus- 
 band and is bewailing her fate pours out 
 her lonesome soul in an authentically 
 deep-hearted way. Grief, and the honest 
 
238 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 attempt at its expression, is the same the 
 world over and time on end. Even in 
 the part paraphrase herewith offered some- 
 what of this, I trust, may be felt : 
 
 u Lonesome, I make this song full sorrowfully 
 About my fate ; and I am fain to tell 
 How I have bided grief since I was born ; 
 Grief new and old, but never more than now. 
 
 Erstwhile, my lord fared hence from midst his kin 
 Over the strife of billows ; night-care then 
 Was mine, to know what country might be his. 
 
 My lord he bade me here make mine abode, 
 
 But in this landstead I had naught of bliss, 
 
 Of trusty friends. Wherefore my mood is sad. 
 
 Full oft we wagered in the days agone 
 That naught save death itself should sever us 
 From one another. Ah, how all is changed ! 
 It is as if it were not, friendship ours ! 
 
 Full oft am I 
 Grown bitter o'er the leaving of my love. 
 Somewhere on earth my friends are living lief, 
 They lie in beds — while I at dawn must go 
 Lonely beneath my oak-tree in the clove 
 And sit there all the summerlong day and weep 
 My wretched woes, my many miseries. 
 For that I may not rest me from my cares, 
 My homesick longings which begirt my life. 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 239 
 
 Woe to the wight that must abide her Dear 
 With sad desire.* * 
 
 There is little that is temporal in the 
 accent of this sorrow. It is what we hear 
 alike in the Song of Solomon, the Greek 
 dramatists, the Elizabethan lyrics, and the 
 Tennysonian Idyls of the King. It has 
 the dignity and directness of an elemental 
 emotion. The setting, the incidents, only 
 half revealed and shadowy, are of minor 
 importance. But we may notice the char- 
 acteristic Germanic flavor of the lay in the 
 manner in which the feeling for kin and 
 home is interblent with the love of hus- 
 band, furnishing a congruous background 
 to the closer, keener woe. The woman 
 is a " wretch " — the word signifies ety- 
 mologically one exiled from the native 
 land — and this thought and fact enters 
 into and intensifies her misery. 
 
 The poetry so far drawn upon has been 
 heathen, pre-Christian in both theme and 
 treatment. With the beginning of the 
 Christian verse one would expect, natur- 
 ally, a change in the depiction of woman 
 under idealized literary forms ; an approx- 
 imation to the modern view. The human- 
 izing influence of the more gentle religion 
 
240 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 would tend to effect this, especially in a 
 faith which elevates Mary to so lofty a 
 place as co-equal with her divine Son. 
 But the poetical remains are somewhat 
 disappointing in this respect during the 
 true Anglo-Saxon period, say up to the 
 twelfth century. This is in part explained 
 by the subject-matter of the epics and 
 lyrics, mostly monk-made and inspired 
 by biblical or hagiographical literature. 
 Caedmon and Cynewulf based their work 
 upon the Old Testament, or upon some 
 of the many legends of the church. Hence 
 either the female element is scant, or the 
 types are conventional and prescribed by 
 the material. Again, it needs time before 
 a new religion can take deep hold of the 
 imagination and display itself in literature. 
 The old heathen admiration for power 
 and bravery in woman rather than the 
 so-called womanly qualities of modern 
 civilization, breaks out now and then and 
 offers an amusing illustration of the cling- 
 ing to earlier, coarser ideals. The atti- 
 tude toward the Virgin expressed in the 
 popular line, 
 
 " Mary mother, meek and mild/' 
 
 so common in later mediaeval song, can- 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 241 
 
 not be found at this time, and a woman- 
 type of the Middle Ages, like Heloise, is 
 still centuries away. The treatment of 
 the sex still best relished by the singers is 
 exhibited in the way a vigorous and pict- 
 uresque poet seizes on the Apocryphal 
 story of Judith and Holofernes and makes 
 that belligerent maiden protagonist in 
 scenes he thoroughly appreciates and, be 
 it confessed, commends. At the same 
 time, the changes from the Hebrew nar- 
 rative are revelatory of the Germanic 
 ideals ; Judith is converted from a wealthy 
 widow into a virgin of glittering loveli- 
 ness ; very beautiful, if Walkyrish in her 
 battle mood. These naive transpositions 
 and adaptations constitute the most inter- 
 esting and subtle part of the story of the 
 Old English woman creation in the early 
 Christian literature. This one illustration 
 may serve for the whole class in indicating 
 the favorite type in this verse, although 
 the new religion nominally was accepted. 
 I take up the story where the heroine, 
 having beheaded the heathen ruler in the 
 tent scene, returns with her attendant to 
 her own city, Bethalia, wearing the grisly 
 trophy : 
 
242 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " And so had Judith speeded in the feud 
 
 Most gloriously, as God had given her ; 
 
 And now, wise maid, she quickly brought the head 
 
 All bloody of the warrior in a sack, 
 
 The which her damsel (fair-cheek girl was she 
 
 Of gentle breeding) to the mistress dear 
 
 Had thither fetched ; and gave it in her hand 
 
 Wound-sodden, for to bear it home : so did 
 
 Mistress to maid. Then swiftly sped away 
 
 The twain, both women valorous of mind, 
 
 Till they had left — these much enheartened ones 
 
 Now happy — far behind the hostile host, 
 
 And plainly saw Bethalia's winsome walls 
 
 Shine in the sun, fair city." 
 
 They reach the gates, are welcomed by 
 the warder, enter the town, and there is 
 general rejoicing at the good news which 
 Judith brings : 
 
 " And then the wise, the gold-bedecked one 
 Of mindful mood, did bid them straight unroll 
 The heathen war-man's head and show it for 
 A sign unto the burghers, how that she 
 Had prospered in the battle ; then she spoke, 
 The high-born maid, unto the people all : 
 ' O heroes victor-famed, behold ye here, 
 Ye leaders all, this loathliest of men, 
 Of heathen battle kings, his head a-stare ! 
 Unloving Holofernes, it is he. 
 Who of all men against us most has wrought 
 Of murders and sore sorrows and would eke 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 243 
 
 Them out yet further : but God granted him 
 No longer life, nor let him harass us 
 With harms ; for I have overborne the Prince 
 Through God, his might. Now would I call upon 
 Each man of you, each dweller in the burg, 
 Shield warriors, that ye, forth-soon as you may, 
 Do fit you for the fight ; so soon as God 
 The Maker, goodly King, doth from the east 
 Send leaping light, bear out the linden shields, 
 The battle-boards for bodies and for breasts, 
 Keen helmets, for to fell amongst the foe 
 Folk-leaders, with your gay ensanguined swords, 
 The fated chiefs. Those fiends are doomed to death, 
 And ye shall win the day, the glory, too, 
 As God the mighty has betokened you 
 Through this my hand." 
 
 This is a ringing virile exhortation to 
 arms, a cry that might have come from a 
 Joan of Arc of an earlier day. Judith's 
 fierce mood has in it the leaven of 
 righteousness, notice. She likes war, evi- 
 dently, but she loves God, and fights the 
 Assyrians to His glory. Herein she 
 differs from a type like Thrytho, and 
 marks the sublimation to a degree of a 
 primitive and strenuously earthly passion. 
 
 I wish I might in closing give one or 
 two representative selections in the lyric 
 and hence, perhaps, more pleasing vein, 
 but to remain within the Old English 
 
244 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 domain, and do so, is not easy. When we 
 pass into the Middle English period, lyric 
 song begins with full chorus and a morn- 
 ing freshness ; but that takes us beyond 
 the present quest. The passages already 
 adduced give a fair idea of the types and 
 ideals of woman in the first and oldest 
 English poetry, with its peculiar defects 
 and virtues. An indefiniteness of per- 
 sonal characterization or portraiture will 
 have been noticed in these examples of 
 the feminine role in our native song of the 
 remote past. Description, minute and 
 physical, of these old-time queens and 
 ladies fair we have found little of; outline 
 sketches they are ; pastelles, if you will, 
 and the figures are almost as vague as 
 those shades in Hades whom Virgil per- 
 ceived to cast no shadows. Yet so much 
 the more is left to the imagination, and 
 remembering how long they have been 
 " dust and ashes," what a vast evolution, 
 social, ethical, psychologic, lies between 
 them and us, and how verily alive and 
 picturesque they were indubitably in their 
 day and generation, one waxes sympathetic 
 toward them, after all, and drops into the 
 mood of Villon's " Mais^ou sont les neiges 
 
WOMAN IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY 245 
 
 d'antan ? " One quotes in dreamy remin- 
 iscence the lines wherein Browning broods 
 over and bids good-by to the vanished 
 ladies of another clime and time : 
 
 " Dear dead women, with such hair too : what's be- 
 come of all the gold 
 
 Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly 
 and grown old." 
 
Washington Irving' s Services to 
 American History 
 
* WASHINGTON IRVING'S SER- 
 VICES TO AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 WHEN a writer has won the title of 
 the Father of American Literature — 
 a name conventionally given to Washing- 
 ton Irving — it becomes plain that he is 
 very important as a figure in our native 
 development in letters. His contribution 
 was indeed great. With the century only 
 just begun and our republic less than 
 twenty years in working order, he did 
 work as essayist and story-teller challeng- 
 ing contrast with the best in the same 
 kinds in England, and became not only a 
 great American author, but a personage 
 admired, lauded, and loved in European 
 lands as a literary and social force of his 
 day. This seems all the more noteworthy 
 when we realize the adverse conditions 
 under which a man of letters had to 
 
 * Originally given as a lecture at the Old South Church, 
 Bostor, in one of the historical courses conducted yearly in 
 that place. 
 
250 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 struggle at that time. Here was a New 
 York lad of middle-class Scotch-English 
 parentage, reared to a business life and 
 harassed for years by mercantile failure, 
 lacking a classical or college education, 
 and living in a city of whose deficiency in 
 the amenities of art, literature, and society 
 we get a clear picture in Mr. Warner's 
 monograph on Irving. There was little 
 there to nurse genius like Irving's. Poli- 
 tics and law were the only apparent career 
 for the ambitious youth. It is estimated 
 that in 1822 there were not more than 
 ten men of letters of repute in this land. 
 Nevertheless, being of a gay, social nature 
 and having as the gift of the gods the 
 literary instinct and bias strongly marked 
 and perseveringly 'developed, he was able 
 to win a well-founded fame, and even at 
 that early day draw the attention of the 
 mother country to the United States as a 
 part of the English-speaking race hence- 
 forth to be reckoned with in literature. 
 
 Irving had fewer rivals then than he 
 would have had to-day — granted ; other- 
 wise the conditions were all against him. 
 Yet we have to skip to Emerson if we 
 would get a name at ^11 worthy to be set 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 251 
 
 along with his as a writer. It is worth 
 mentioning, in view of our special theme, 
 Irving' s part in American history, that at 
 the period when he began to write — in 
 1807, say, the date of the Salmagundi 
 papers — the impulse of the native author 
 to follow English traditions in letters was 
 well-nigh irresistible, infinitely stronger 
 than it is at the present time. Yet Irving, 
 while in works like Bracebridge Hall he is 
 essentially an English essayist, in his best, 
 most characteristic work used native mate- 
 rial and showed himself a very American, 
 and so made American literature. 
 
 We must realize the scanty encourage- 
 ment of his environment and the noble 
 way he used near-at-hand, familiar, and 
 hence despised material, in order to come 
 to an understanding of the man, the 
 writer, the historian. For it is as histo- 
 rian that I would deal with him here ; 
 which leads me to say that Washington 
 Irving stands somewhat apart from our 
 other native historians. We think of him 
 primarily as a literary man, an essayist, 
 story-maker, and humorist. The literary 
 quality was strong, of course, in men like 
 Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, but never- 
 
252 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 theless they were first and foremost writers 
 of history. Irving, despite the fact that 
 he wrote several books of importance in 
 that field, may almost be said to have 
 written history by the way, to have been 
 side-tracked into it ; or if that is putting 
 it too strong, there is no danger in the 
 statement that our writer will be longest 
 remembered by his non-historical works 
 — by genial sketches like Rip Van Winkle 
 and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , and by a 
 masterpiece of mock-heroic humor like 
 The History of New Tork y whose alleged 
 author was that mysterious little Dutch- 
 man, Diedrich Knickerbocker, a name so 
 rich in connotation, so firmly embedded 
 in the popular mind. And yet Washing- 
 ton Irving, for the very reason that he 
 was what he was, a man of letters, par 
 excellence, whose notable qualities are senti- 
 ment and humor, was able to leave some 
 valuable suggestions to all historians in his 
 methods, and to introduce into that kind 
 of writing certain characteristics that give 
 it salt and savor. It is not alone books 
 like his Life of Washington and his Life 
 of Columbus that constitute his contribution 
 to American history ; _nor is the whole 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 253 
 
 story told when we add the books on 
 exotic themes, like the Alhambra, Conquest 
 of Granada, and Legends of The Conquest of 
 Spain, where he set an example, in a day 
 when the native historian was a rara avis, 
 of the adequate treatment of large inspira- 
 tional themes from whatever source. No, 
 those Sketch Book stories and the Knicker- 
 bocker History — that sportive thing, a 
 confessed jeu d y esprit — must be counted 
 in as contributory and, to my mind, im- 
 portant. Let me show what I mean, by 
 going a little into the details of what I 
 deem to be Irving' s crowning virtues in 
 historical composition. 
 
 But first a preliminary remark, to the 
 effect that Washington Irving must be 
 judged, as indeed all men must be, in the 
 setting of his time. Viewed in relation to 
 current production in history or to what 
 had already been done, he is seen to have 
 possessed the instinct and habit of the 
 true historian, the modern workman. I 
 mean that he went to the sources and 
 spared neither time nor labor in getting 
 together his materials. Witness the years 
 spent in the libraries and other repositories 
 of Spain, when he was working on his 
 
254 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Columbus and other main books. The 
 result is that, in spite of the enormous 
 amount of research since expended upon 
 the Italian whose name is associated with 
 our country's discovery, the Irving biog- 
 raphy is confessedly a standard one to-day, 
 and this quite aside from its great literary 
 merits. The method of Irving, at the 
 beginning of this century, is essentially 
 that of the present — something quite 
 different, for example, from the method of 
 Jared Sparks, whose biographies were 
 later in time. This consideration — Irv- 
 ing's natural critical insight, as well as 
 his thorough-going habits in preparation 
 for historical writing — is no slight one, 
 and must be counted to his credit. His 
 apparent indolence in the intermittent 
 periods of idleness between his works 
 should mislead no one into thinking him 
 a careless workman. 
 
 But it is chiefly to the more literary 
 features of the work that I wish to call 
 attention, as marking Irving among our 
 historians. What are they ? In the first 
 place, his was a mind naturally retrospec- 
 tive, loving to brood upon the past of his 
 own and other countries, and sensitive to 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 255 
 
 the romance therein to be discovered. All 
 he wrote is explained in this way. He 
 brooded on the Hudson, and Rip Van 
 Winkle and Ichabod Crane are the result ; 
 on Old New York, and the comic Dutch- 
 man is evolved for all time ; on Old 
 English customs and types, and Brace- 
 bridge Hall springs into being ; on the 
 vanished dramas, glories, and heroics of 
 Spain, and the Spanish books follow in 
 train. In a word, he had imagination in 
 reconstructing by-gone scenes and events, 
 a faculty without which the historian is 
 likely to be a Dr. Dryasdust, necessary, 
 useful, but unlovely. 
 
 But right here we get into deep water 
 with Irving, for certain criticisms are inev- 
 itable. How can a work like the Knick- 
 erbocker History be praised as history ? 
 The full-length of the Dutchman therein 
 drawn is not portraiture, but caricature ; 
 the style is not serious, but serio-comic. 
 And the worst of it is, that figure, broad of 
 beam, slow of speech, surrounded with a 
 fog of tobacco and much given to sleep 
 and heavy eating, has been indelibly im- 
 pressed upon us by the author's genius, so 
 that to this day the word Dutchman, in 
 
256 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 spite of our better knowledge, is surcharged 
 with these humoristic associations. This 
 may be, and is, a triumph of art and a dis- 
 tinct addition to humor ; but is it not inju- 
 rious to history proper, and incidentally 
 hard on the Dutchman ? Professor Brander 
 Matthews, for one, regrets that Irving 
 should have " echoed the British scoffs at 
 the Dutch," though admitting that there 
 was " no malice in his satire/' Yet in 
 closing his sketch of this author he boldly 
 declares that his greatest work is the 
 Knickerbocker legend. This sounds like 
 a paradox, but it can be explained ; and, I 
 think, without going so far as Professor 
 Matthews, we may concede that the Knick- 
 erbocker History is, in a broad sense, a 
 contribution, if not to history, to the sym- 
 pathetic appreciation of America's historic 
 past — and if that be not history, it is 
 hard to name it. A book that vitalizes, 
 even in the way of fun, our earlier records 
 and doings, that draws attention to, and 
 makes interesting the types and scenes of, 
 pioneer days, indirectly does good. It 
 creates an atmosphere favorable to farther 
 investigation. It makes a tradition of de- 
 scent and keeps alive ^ sense of ancestry. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 257 
 
 Think how proudly a modern New York 
 family points to Knickerbocker forbears ; 
 and pride and interest in ancestry is one 
 of the safeguards of self-conscious historic 
 continuity. Approaching the subject with 
 the bias of a poor, simple-minded literary 
 man, despite the historical critics, Irving' s 
 chief work of humor seems to me to have 
 been most fruitful for histories yet to 
 come, to have fertilized the soil, making it 
 genial and rich. J 
 
 And then, again, he did a great service 
 in his use of native legend. What ! you 
 say ; can any claim of history-making be 
 awarded to stories of a village vagabond 
 like Rip or goblin-haunted Yankee like 
 Ichabod? Surely such-like tales have no 
 more historical foundation than the Con- 
 necticut Blue Laws or the snakes in Ire- 
 land. Ah, but softly ! The Hudson 
 river is one of the noble and beautiful 
 American streams ; but when you think of 
 it, do you suppose it is no more to you 
 than it was prior to the day when Irving 
 gave it atmosphere ? It is quite another 
 thing. Before, it was a majestic water- 
 lane, more than rivalling the Rhine in 
 natural beauty. Now it is that same river 
 
258 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 seen through the mellow light of romance 
 and legendry. It partakes of the glamour 
 which that famed German river has for us 
 by reason of its nixies, its castles, and its 
 vineyards, with a story in every grape. 
 Irving set the seal of the poetic imagina- 
 tion upon the Hudson ; and that is a great 
 thing to do for us. He gave it a back- 
 ground, perspective, human interest. 
 When I think of it, I see old Heinrich 
 Hudson blundering up stream and expect- 
 ing to find the passage to China ; Hudson, 
 that seaman of renown, who " laid in 
 abundance of gin and sauerkraut " and 
 allowed every man " to sleep quietly at his 
 post unless the wind blew;" Hudson, 
 whom it is impossible not to have an af- 
 fection for after you have met him with 
 Rip on the mountain. He is, thanks to 
 Irving, a good deal more than a mere two- 
 legged peg to hang a date on. And so 
 we, too, after Hudson, course up the 
 river of his name, and dream of it, while 
 sun or shower makes shifting lures of 
 light upon the Palisades and Highlands 
 and the summer storms reverberate among 
 the crags of the Catskills, as the river of 
 a day when wild beasts roamed the woods 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 259 
 
 and moccasined hunters camped beside the 
 waters. 
 
 It is much to be wished that the move- 
 ment which was talked of last year to 
 purchase Sunnyside, Irving's historic home 
 on the banks of the Hudson, and pre- 
 serve it as a literary landmark, might be 
 vigorously pushed to success. Nor is it 
 the river's panorama alone that we see 
 with the eye of imagination, optic revela- 
 tion more magical than all your kineto- 
 scopes and vitascopes. We behold New 
 York City in the days when the Bowery 
 — name that now conjures up unsavory 
 thoughts of second-hand clothing and the 
 unwashed of divers nations — was a green 
 lane dotted with pleasant suburban resi- 
 dences, each with its bower. We walk 
 the grass-grown ways of Albany, where 
 the cows sway home at evenfall and duti- 
 fully stop before the front door for milk- 
 ing, not, as the higher educated modern 
 cow might do, before the town pump, for 
 purposes of dilution. We get charming 
 interiors of prosperous, hospitable Dutch 
 country homes, which Irving drew with a fi- 
 delity to detail as if in emulation of the man- 
 ner of the old Dutch masters themselves; 
 
2 6o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 homesteads nestled in a valley among high 
 hills or perched upon some sightly eminence 
 commanding a wide aerial sweep of blue 
 water and bluer mountain — the homely, 
 hearty life that teemed there and is passed 
 away forever, yet not before our author 
 caught its spirit and embalmed it for us in 
 his books. We read with quickened 
 pulses of Captain Kidd and his buried 
 treasure, of the storm ship's dire warning 
 to river navigators; we ride with Tom 
 Walker and the Devil, and are made 
 familiar with many another legend born 
 of that unsophisticated age. And let us 
 not forget that the author in saturating 
 himself with all this folk-lore and these 
 legends did yeoman service to history, 
 since they are part of it, being the facts 
 about the imagination of a people, quite 
 as important as a register of their inner 
 lives as elections are of their outer actions. 
 Nor must we overlook, in thinking of the 
 study he gave native themes, that he 
 wrote a book called A 'Tour of the Prairies, 
 based on his own travels, and at the time 
 by far the best account of Western wild 
 life in existence, but less typically expres- 
 sive of the man, because others have done 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 261 
 
 so much since in exploiting that region; 
 to mention one work, Parkman's The 
 Oregon Trail, came not long after. But 
 this represents Irving's minor activity, 
 because his writings about old New York 
 life came not of knowledge gathered on a 
 tourist's trip, but from the affectionate 
 intimacy of a lifetime. He knew New 
 York through and through, loved it, 
 and so was at his happiest in telling 
 of it. 
 
 Nay, Irving not only in his works, but 
 in his own person and environment, adds 
 a richness to our history ; for does not his 
 own Sunnyside at Tarrytown, the house 
 and home he loved so dearly and came 
 back to so gladly from foreign wander- 
 ings, there to pass a tranquil and honored 
 old age, — does not that place lend a poetic 
 interest to the stream it overlooks and 
 helps to make illustrious ? Yes, by his 
 work and his life Washington Irving did 
 his share in a subtle, but very real and 
 deep sense in making America historic, in 
 giving its past days light, flavor, reality, 
 loveliness. This is the reason why one 
 has a right to claim that Irving performed 
 a service for our history in his work which 
 
262 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 is not technically and formally included in 
 his histories and biographies. 
 
 But looking now to his work as a whole 
 and inclusive of the more serious and sus- 
 tained labor he put upon the Columbus 
 and other like books, I remark that their 
 manner, their style or literary quality, has 
 an attraction not always found in even 
 great historians, but wheresoever found a 
 good thing. Here is the advantage of 
 having a man of letters do such work. 
 The result is he is readable, has interest, 
 charm ; and there is no harm in the 
 history writer giving pleasure — especially 
 if he have thoroughness and be consci- 
 entious. It may even be doubted if there 
 can be much fruitful stimulation from 
 history without this pleasurable interest. 
 Certainly it should be furnished to young 
 people beginning the study. And largely 
 for that reason Irving is a capital writer 
 for those who want to get a start, to 
 acquire an appetite for this sort of food, 
 which as set before you by some histo- 
 rians will stick in your throat, or if swal- 
 lowed give you an indigestion. It is a 
 puzzle where Irving got his literary touch 
 from. His folk were not of that sort, his 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 263 
 
 education was desultory ; yet he has it on 
 every page — an easy elegance, a flush 
 of color, a music of ordered sentences. 
 The style strikes us to-day as a bit old- 
 fashioned, perhaps as rather rhetorical ; 
 but then so will our style strike a critic 
 half a century or more hence in the same 
 way, as likely as not. Professor Beers, 
 of Yale, quotes this passage and remarks 
 that we read it with a " certain impatience ": 
 
 " As the vine, which has long twined 
 its graceful foliage about the oak and been 
 lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the 
 hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, 
 cling round it with its caressing tendrils 
 and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it 
 beautifully ordered by Providence that 
 woman, who is the mere dependent and 
 ornament of man in his happier hours, 
 should be his stay and solace when smitten 
 with sudden calamity, winding herself into 
 the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly 
 supporting the drooping head, and bind- 
 ing up the broken heart." 
 
 Well, that smacks of the Latin in con- 
 struction, is somewhat ponderous, be it 
 confessed, and deliciously antiquated in its 
 conception of the fair sex. Irving, a gen- 
 
264 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 tleman of the old school, a bachelor with 
 a soft spot under his waistcoat for pretty 
 and good and gracious ladies, knew noth- 
 ing about the New Woman — and we 
 must not blame him for that ; it was his 
 misfortune, not his fault. And, again, 
 this selection is not typical of him ; it 
 shows old-fashioned qualities in excess of 
 his habit. It were fairer to take a passage 
 like the following, which is normal in its 
 quiet felicity : 
 
 "About six miles from the renowned 
 city of the Manhattoes, in that sound or 
 arm of the sea which passes between the 
 mainland and Nassau, or Long Island, 
 there is a narrow strait, where the current 
 is violently compressed between shoulder- 
 ing promontories and horribly perplexed 
 by rocks and shoals. Being, at the best 
 of times, a very violent, impetuous cur- 
 rent, it takes these impediments in mighty 
 dudgeon, boiling in whirlpools, brawling 
 and fretting in ripples, raging and roaring 
 in rapids and breakers, and, in short, in- 
 dulging in all kinds of wrong-headed 
 paroxysms. At such times, woe to any 
 unlucky vessel that ventures within its 
 clutches. This termagant humor, how- 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 265 
 
 ever, prevails only at certain times of tide. 
 At low water, for instance, it is as pacific 
 a stream as you would wish to see ; but 
 as the tide rises, it begins to fret ; at half- 
 tide, it roars with might and main, like a 
 bull bellowing for more drink ; but when 
 the tide is full, it relapses into quiet and, 
 for a time, sleeps as soundly as an alder- 
 man after dinner. In fact, it may be com- 
 pared to a quarrelsome toper, who is a 
 peaceable fellow enough when he has no 
 liquor at all or when he has a skinfull, but 
 who when half seas over plays the very 
 devil. This mighty, blustering, bullying, 
 hard-drinking little strait was a place of 
 great danger and perplexity to the Dutch 
 navigators of ancient days — hectoring 
 their tub-built barks in a most unruly 
 style, whirling them about in a manner to 
 make any but a Dutchman giddy, and not 
 unfrequently stranding them upon rocks 
 and reefs, as it did the famous squadron of 
 OlofFe the Dreamer when seeking a place 
 to found the city of Manhattoes. Where- 
 upon, out of sheer spleen, they denomi- 
 nated it Helle-gat, and solemnly gave it 
 over to the devil. This appellation has 
 since been aptly rendered into English by 
 
266 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 the name of Hell-gate and into nonsense 
 by the name of Hurlgate, according to 
 certain foreign intruders, who neither 
 understood Dutch nor English — may St. 
 Nicholas confound them ! * 
 
 His manner of writing as a whole, in its 
 unobtrusive breeding and beauty, is admir- 
 able, and may well be put before us as 
 a model of the kind of effect it aims for. 
 It is especially valuable at the present 
 time for its lack of strain, its avoidance of 
 violence or bizarre effects, when our later 
 writers incline to hunt for startling words 
 and queer constructions ; anything to ex- 
 cite and seem " original. " Irving's style 
 impresses one as a whole, rather than in 
 particulars, — and that is the higher art. 
 
 For another thing — Irving makes his 
 work vivid by his realization of scene and 
 character, which is, I should suppose, a 
 literary characteristic. We have already 
 seen how he did this in handling native 
 material, old New York life, the Hudson 
 river, and so forth. All his work illus- 
 trates the quality. And with it goes 
 what may be called true idealism in the 
 treatment of events and men ; by which I 
 do not mean falsifying facts, but a broad 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 267 
 
 comprehension of the main idea in an 
 historical act or personage. Take Colum- 
 bus : The danger of conceiving him is that 
 he become to us a mere figurehead, a 
 fleshless embodiment of the abstract no- 
 tion of discovery. Every great man in 
 the past runs this risk. It is the same 
 with George Washington : he is a hack- 
 neyed pattern-plate to the school-boy, 
 or was until latter-day historians like 
 McMaster began to insist on turning our 
 attention away from the cherry-tree and 
 toward a flesh-and-blood Virginia gentle- 
 man, great, but having like passions with 
 ourselves. Compare the estimates of 
 Washington by Bancroft and McMaster, 
 if you would see the difference, and then 
 realize that it is only the latter portrait 
 (the one making the Father of his Country 
 alive) which you can warm up to and love. 
 Now, if you will read Irving's final chapter 
 in his Columbus, where he sums up the 
 Italian's character, you will find it impos- 
 sible not to be fired by the sketch ; it is 
 vital ; the explorer is revealed as a splen- 
 did figure, food for poetry, romance, 
 idealization, yet not faultless, not a pale, 
 mysterious piece of perfection. In a word, 
 
268 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Irving's method is that of sympathy, of 
 love, of the historic imagination. That is 
 why Mark Twain has in his Joan of Arc, 
 with whatever anachronisms and lapses 
 from the pattern, done something for the 
 historical study of the Maid — because he 
 is stimulated in imagination by her, sees 
 her, loves her, realizes her greatness, and 
 makes us feel it. Whoever does this per- 
 forms a high function for history ; and 
 beyond all peradventure Washington Irv- 
 ing had this virtue in his Columbus and 
 elsewhere. 
 
 In newspaper life we speak of the re- 
 porter's city article about a murder or a 
 fire or a Christian Endeavor meeting — 
 no matter what the subject — as a "story." 
 That is the technical word to describe his 
 work. It is significant. It implies the 
 feeling that his report must first of all 
 have graphic power, be picturesque, dra- 
 matic ; that is, story-like, showing life in 
 small, being an epitome of the human 
 play, in some phase of it. The news- 
 paper men know that the public wants 
 news in this shape — piquant, warm, sen- 
 sational ; and so the best reporter is he 
 who can tell the bestr story, without de- 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 269 
 
 parting from the facts. Sometimes and on 
 some papers, I regret to say, the journalist, 
 in the strain after this taking dramatic 
 interest, tells a story in a double sense, and 
 so journalism is brought into disrepute. 
 Now, Irving, among historians, has the 
 story-telling gift, in a good sense. Mr. 
 Warner has pointed out that Washington 
 Irving introduced the short story into Eng- 
 lish ; and this talent for narration in brief 
 he carries over into his long and serious 
 historical compositions. This comes from 
 his interest in personalities and his sense 
 of the picturesque and dramatic — that 
 talent which I hope I do not belittle in 
 calling journalistic, for in its purity it is 
 legitimate and valuable. I am willing to 
 grant that sometimes this tendency led 
 Irving into danger. For example, in his 
 Conquest of Granada^ a book where 
 his literary power is at its best, he puts 
 descriptions of bona fide events into the 
 mouth of a fictitious cavalier chronicler, 
 mingling fact and fancy in such a way as 
 to give the reader a sense of unsure foot- 
 ing. This certainly cannot be defended 
 as a method. Yet it is very sure that 
 this history gets its color and movement 
 
270 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and picture quality in large measure from 
 the authors ability to tell a story, for 
 history is full of stories to tell, if the 
 historian but sees them and can put them 
 before us. 
 
 Still another quality which goes to make 
 Irving pleasant as well as profitable read- 
 ing, and which we may call character- 
 istic of the literary man rather than of the 
 historian, is his humor. This is not con- 
 fined to the Knickerbocker History and 
 lightsome sketches like 'The Legend of 
 Sleepy Hollow, but plays like heat 
 lightning about the graver books, with a 
 gentle lambency which makes them dis- 
 tinctlier remembered and longer enjoyed. 
 Take the same Conquest of Granada, and 
 hear the closing paragraph : 
 
 " Thus terminated the war of Granada, 
 after ten years of incessant fighting, equal- 
 ling (says Fray Antonio Agapida) the far- 
 famed siege of Troy in duration, and 
 ending like that in the capture of the city. 
 Thus ended also the dominion of the 
 Moors in Spain, having endured 778 
 years, from the memorable defeat of 
 Roderick, the last of the Goths, on the 
 banks of the Guadalete. The authentic 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 271 
 
 Agapida is uncommonly particular in fixing 
 the epoch of this event. This great triumph 
 of our holy Catholic faith, according to his 
 computation, took place in the beginning 
 of January, in the year of our Lord 1492, 
 being 3,6 $$ years from the population or 
 Spain by the Patriarch Tubal, 3,797 from 
 the general deluge, 5,453 from the creation 
 of the world, according to Hebrew calcu- 
 lation, and in the month of Rabic, in the 
 897th year of the Hegira, or flight of 
 Mahomet, — whom may God confound ! 
 saith the pious Agapida ! " 
 
 With this facetious marshalling of du- 
 bious dates does Irving, in a mood of 
 cheer perhaps begotten of the fact that 
 his work was finished, take leave of the 
 reader; and the mood is not unique by 
 any means. The Muse of History is 
 represented as a grave maiden ; it would 
 be incongruous to fancy her sitting with 
 backward-gazing eye, cracking jokes on 
 by-gone worthies. Nevertheless, a judi- 
 cious admixture of humor in history books 
 now and then does have the effect of an 
 oasis in the desert and draws us in the way 
 of affection towards the author indulging in 
 it. It is this, along with other excellences, 
 
272 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 which makes Carlyle and Froude among 
 the most stimulating, if not the most re- 
 liable, of historians. 
 
 One other quality fairly to be called 
 literary I must mention — the sense of 
 proportion. Irving knows how to select 
 and to arrange his material, and this se- 
 lective instinct gives to the result artistic 
 proportion. This is one of the cardinal 
 virtues in all good literature, in poem, 
 story, drama, biography, history. It is 
 commonly said that it is as important to 
 know what to leave out as what to put in. 
 To tell all we know in literature is as 
 foolish as it is in life. That is just the 
 difference between art and raw facts as 
 presented to the artist; from a mass of 
 material he must choose, sift, arrange, and 
 " compose " his picture, in the painter's 
 term. It might seem that in history, 
 which deals primarily with facts, with 
 things that happened, there is not this 
 same need of selection and suppression. 
 But there is, because events are of very 
 unequal importance ; and to spread out 
 everything, without light and shade or 
 any indication of relative values, is unin- 
 spired, not to say asinine. 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 273 
 
 In a most discerning paper on the pres- 
 entation of truth in history, Prof. Wood- 
 row Wilson remarks that " the facts do not 
 of themselves constitute the truth. The 
 truth is abstract, not concrete. It is the 
 just idea, the right revelation of what 
 things mean. It is evoked only by such 
 arrangements and orderings of facts as 
 suggest interpretations.' ' 
 
 Here is a test of the good historian ; 
 and I think we may claim for Irving that, 
 being, as I said in the beginning, a liter- 
 ary man preeminently, an artist above all 
 else, he so disposes his subject-matter as to 
 make an harmonious picture, duly propor- 
 tioned and right in its perspective. Things 
 that belong in footnotes he puts in foot- 
 notes, and he does not load you down with 
 unnecessary details. I may add (confiden- 
 tially) that some books which you find 
 heavy, slow reading, and get discouraged 
 over, are not heavy because they are learned 
 (learning is right and necessary to them), 
 but just because they are stupid in this 
 particular, the writer unimaginatively pour- 
 ing out upon you an undigested mass of 
 items and particulars which, unless bound 
 into a symmetrical bundle and lightened 
 
274 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 by the throwing away of useless impedi- 
 menta^ would break the back of an Atlas. 
 Professor Wilson, in the same essay, more 
 than hints that this paralysis of the sense 
 of proportion is a characteristic of the 
 modern school of historians. There is no 
 gift more necessary to the historian than 
 this of selection, of proportion. Nobody 
 is likely to dispute the statement that 
 Irving had it. 
 
 The books, then, which one would natu- 
 rally read in order to appreciate Irving's 
 service to American history, and in which 
 these traits are to be found, are, first of 
 all, those dealing with what is called Knick- 
 erbocker history, the story of the Dutch 
 occupation of New York and sundry es- 
 says and legends in The Sketch Book, Tales 
 of a 'Traveller, and Bracebridge Hall, treat- 
 ing phases of this life. Then, having got 
 inoculated with the author, it would be 
 well to take the Columbus biography, fol- 
 lowing it with that of Washington. Next, 
 leaving the subject-matter having to do in 
 one way or the other with our own coun- 
 try, rich pleasure and stimulation will be 
 got out of the Spanish group : *The Alham- 
 bra, which will be found^an Arabian Nights 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 275 
 
 entertainment, the Conquest of Granada, 
 and Legends of the Conquest of Spain. And 
 of several biographies still unindicated, 
 nobody will ever regret reading the de- 
 lightfully sympathetic, happy life of Gold- 
 smith, a writer between whom and Irving 
 there are some marks of resemblance. 
 But if one never gets any further, one 
 should absorb the Knickerbocker books, 
 thus getting a clear notion of the unique 
 thing their maker did in creating them. 
 Glancing now at the points made, we may 
 claim for Washington Irving, in sundry not 
 unimportant matters, qualifications of value 
 to the writer in general, and to historians in 
 particular : a pleasing form, the story-tell- 
 ing power, historic imagination, humor, 
 and the sense of proportion. He brought 
 these literary gifts to the study and writing 
 of history, and furnished an object-lesson 
 in their use. Yet when the claim has 
 been made without fear of contradiction, we 
 must concede at once and frankly that our 
 author, judged purely as historian, is not 
 in the same class as others whose names 
 suggest preeminently the writing of for- 
 mal histories. His service to American 
 history, as I have tried to indicate, was 
 
276 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 distinct and large ; yet, to return to the 
 key-note of the theme, Irving was not pri- 
 marily the writer of history, but the man 
 of letters : he chose historical subjects not 
 so much because he felt the desire to por- 
 tray man's historic unfolding as because he 
 felt that here was picturesque material and 
 material affording opportunity for serious, 
 sustained work where hitherto, in sketch 
 and mock-history, he had been at play 
 rather than at work. But by the judgment 
 of posterity, those light things he did have 
 risen to the surface and continue to float ; 
 they represent that by which he will long- 
 est be known and loved. Hence his place 
 in our literature is as secure as that of 
 any writer; and especial honors are his 
 because he was a pioneer. Hence, too, 
 his contribution to history was indirect, 
 secondary to his contribution to belles 
 lettres. The very fact that his leading 
 qualities are sentiment and humor (as his 
 best critics decide) would make this inevi- 
 table ; for sentiment and humor, though 
 valuable, are not the first requisites of the 
 history writer. But these considerations 
 need not belittle Irving' s right to be stud- 
 ied and lauded in a review of the Ameri- 
 
WASHINGTON IRVING'S SERVICES 277 
 
 can historians. If not one of the great, 
 he is one of the most winning and sugges- 
 tive, figures in the group ; an artist, where 
 art is often lacking ; a genial lover of his 
 kind, where cold impersonality is a danger; 
 a weaver of romance and the magic of the 
 imagination over the early days and doings 
 of his own people, who have been not 
 seldom depicted in the rawness and harsh 
 realities of their actual conditions. Would 
 that all historians had, like him, illustrated 
 in their works the use and value of the 
 literary touch and the creative mind. 
 
A Battle Laureate : Henry Howard 
 Brownell 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE : HENRY 
 HOWARD BROWNELL 
 
 ¥ 
 
 i 
 
 HEINE has said in his beautiful way 
 that the lyric poet, like the nightin- 
 gale, never grows old, but sings as surely 
 as the spring returns. In a sense this is 
 true, yet it is also true that the note of 
 poetry, whether lyric or other, is heard with 
 peculiar sympathy at the occasion of its 
 birth, and sounds less sweet with the pass- 
 ing of the years, the incoming of other 
 interests and fashions. While great liter- 
 ature knows no time nor country, each 
 age needs and gets its representative songs 
 and stories, the new crowding out the old. 
 " The experience of each new age," says 
 Emerson, " requires a new confession, and 
 the world seems always waiting for its poet." 
 Especially is this so when the song is in- 
 spired by some event like our Civil War. 
 That great conflict begot some notable 
 
282 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 American literature, though less than so 
 gigantic a cataclysm, so legitimate and 
 home-made a motif > so high-principled a 
 cause, might be expected to bring forth. 
 Yet what was born of it falls to-day on 
 less responsive ears. Only the very 
 greatest poetry is independent of time- 
 values and of local justification. 
 
 Hence it happens that the verse of a 
 Connecticut singer, Henry Howard 
 Brownell, not yet a quarter century dead, 
 is seldom heard upon the mouths of men, 
 albeit more genuine song in its kind was 
 not written in the red years of 1861-65, 
 nor perhaps did any thrill the popular 
 heart more electrically at the moment. 
 His slender volume of War Lyrics in its 
 faded cover, taken down from the dim 
 shelf where it is gathering that dust which 
 alike for books and men chokes their most 
 resounding deeds, greets the eye half 
 reproachfully, as if in comment on the 
 changeful humors of the world. Yet is 
 this he whom Dr. Holmes called " our 
 battle laureate," and who at this later day, 
 and judged by his contribution to art, 
 surely deserves a place among the native 
 poets who hymned the shame, the pathos, 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 283 
 
 the terror and the glory of the Great 
 Conflict. 
 
 Brownell was born in Providence, 
 R.I., but moved at such an early age 
 to East Hartford, the village lying on 
 the eastern shore of the Connecticut op- 
 posite Hartford, that he may be claimed 
 fairly by the State which takes its name 
 from that beautiful and storied New Eng- 
 land stream. Hartford folk are wont to 
 regard him as their own, like New Yorkers 
 in the case of George William Curtis, 
 though he, too, first saw the light in Prov- 
 idence. Brownell's stock was of the best 
 New England can show. His father was 
 a most respected physician, his mother a 
 De Wolfe of Rhode Island, a woman of 
 culture and breeding, while the name 
 of his uncle, Bishop Brownell, is honor- 
 ably associated with Trinity College, the 
 poet's Alma Mater. After being graduated, 
 he taught school for a year in Mobile, 
 Ala., and then returned to Hartford and 
 engaged in the study of law. But he 
 belonged to that goodly company of men 
 who, having the instinct for letters, are 
 really unfaithful to the Green Bag — it was 
 a profession which he never followed with 
 
284 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 much steadiness or zest. Delicate of 
 health, possessed of means enough to make 
 him independent of the res angusta domi, his 
 life became chiefly one of quiet study and 
 leisurely travel. The verse he wrote prior 
 to the war is a reflex of such tastes and 
 environment. But with the firing on 
 Fort Sumter came an electric change in his 
 life and hence in his song. The poem 
 General Orders, a rhymed version of 
 Farragut's orders to the fleet, drew the 
 Admiral's attention, and put him in corre- 
 spondence with the writer. Mr. Brownell 
 confessing he should like to witness a sea 
 engagement, Farragut appointed him act- 
 ing ensign on his own ship, the Hartford, 
 and made him his private secretary. The 
 bard of battle was thus placed in an excep- 
 tional position for the truthful limning 
 of what he beheld. Here was a " sea 
 change " indeed ! — from the scholarly, 
 almost recluse life in the suburban hamlet 
 to the awful scenic tragedy of naval war- 
 fare. 
 
 He was in several of the notable later 
 encounters which made Farragut's a name 
 to conjure with — among others, that 
 Bay Fight which evoked one of his most 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 285 
 
 ringing and unforgetable fulminations. 
 Half a score of his finest things were 
 written on and dated from the Hartford^ 
 giving one a sharp sense of their reality 
 and urgence. Here was no student's echo 
 of the strife, but the clash and flash of 
 war itself, writ red in blood and booming 
 with big guns and the cry of victor or 
 vanquished ; while as a setting to the stern 
 picture, nay, interfused with the human 
 action, is the swash and swell of the mighty 
 and many-mooded ocean, her whims re- 
 spondent to the alternate calm and plan- 
 gent stress of civil strife. 
 
 Beholding Brownell at this juncture, 
 one thinks of Beranger, now in prison, 
 now on the Paris streets hobnobbing with 
 the republican leaders, while his fiery songs 
 stir up the insurgent mob ; or of Korner 
 pouring out " Vater, Ich rufe dich " and 
 those other lyrics which are watchwords to 
 the German heart, as he died upon a bat- 
 tle-field of the War of Liberation. The 
 song work of such men offers startling, 
 beautiful witness to the close comradeship 
 of life and literature. As Dr. Holmes 
 has it, the poems so written " are to draw- 
 ing-room battle poems as the torn flags of 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 Of 
 
286 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 our victorious fleets to the stately ensigns 
 that dressed those fleets while in harbor." 
 After the peace was won, the war- 
 knit friendship between the Admiral and 
 Brownell led to the latter's being recom- 
 missioned, and as a member of the staff 
 accompanying the great naval officer on 
 his European trip. He met in this way 
 the dignitaries of the earth, and had ex- 
 periences which, with some men, would 
 have found artistic expression in poetry 
 or other literary form. Not so with this 
 singer. His was the uncompromising 
 love of liberty, the shy New England 
 aloofness, and he carried his convictions 
 with him, refusing on one occasion, it is 
 said, an introduction to Louis Napoleon 
 and the Sultan of Turkey. His chief 
 inspiration, the real cause for singing, was 
 over ; and on his return to his native 
 shores, he was for the few remaining 
 years mostly silent — one or two poems 
 of occasion, notably that at the reunion of 
 Army and Navy at Newport in 1 87 1 , when 
 he eulogized Farragut in commemorative 
 verse, being the exception. His life there- 
 after was one of dignified, scholarly retire- 
 ment ; he was a much-respected, unob- 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 287 
 
 trusive figure, persona grata in Hartford's 
 social circles whensoever he saw fit to cross 
 the river and mingle among his friends and 
 kinsmen. A confirmed bachelor, he resided 
 with his mother at the family home. In 
 1 87 1 cancer of the cheek developed, and 
 after more than a year of intense suffer- 
 ing, borne as befitted one whose coolness 
 under fire had been commented upon by 
 his fellows aboard the Hartford, the final 
 release came, and in his fifty-third year 
 Henry Howard Brownell had fought his 
 last fight. He lies in the East Hartford 
 cemetery, and has the Connecticut in 
 sight, in times of freshet almost within 
 hearing. The Admiral could not be at 
 his funeral, having preceded him ; but 
 Mrs. Farragut and her son were there, 
 and their flowers sweetened the place and 
 ceremony. The Brownell homestead, by 
 one of those unpicturesque lapses of fate, is 
 at present the hotel of the village. 
 
 Among the portraits of worthies which 
 adorn the walls of the editorial rooms of 
 the Hartford C our ant is a half-length of 
 Brownell in uniform, an excellent like- 
 ness, and one seldom seen. It presents 
 the poet in middle age — a refined, strong, 
 
288 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 grave face, bearded to the lips, with fine 
 brow and a head whose thinning hair 
 brings out the clearer the marked devel- 
 opment in the region of the perceptive 
 faculties. Brownell was of middle stature 
 and spare habit, well built and of a digni- 
 fied, graceful carriage ; the whole personal 
 impression of him was, by all accounts, 
 one of quiet power, of courteous, self- 
 respecting manhood. Unconventional, 
 even careless in his dress, shunning public 
 occasions, he was not a showy man, but 
 was of the sort who stand well the test of 
 close acquaintance. 
 
 In spite of his retired and simple life 
 after the war, I find myself thinking of 
 him first of all as a naval officer, a chanter 
 of battles. In the picture gallery of the 
 Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford there 
 hangs a large and spirited canvas by 
 William H. Overend, the English ar- 
 tist, depicting the engagement at Mobile 
 between the Hartford and the Tennessee. 
 On the hurricane deck are grouped the 
 officers of the former ship, all of them 
 good portraits. Farragut, an heroic fig- 
 ure, is in the rigging hard by, and near 
 him stands Brownell, leaning eagerly for- 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 289 
 
 ward as he watches the fight, and fully- 
 exposed to the storm of shot and shell, 
 holding in one hand a piece of paper — 
 perhaps the notes for The Bay Fight, 
 some stanzas of which were actually writ- 
 ten on the spot. It is in such a setting 
 that this man is fitliest remembered. 
 
 II 
 
 Brownell's verse in the main originated 
 as " newspaper poetry " — a fact sug- 
 gesting the remark that not a little Am- 
 erican literature has had a like democratic 
 birth. In the columns of the Hartford 
 Courant and other Connecticut sheets ap- 
 peared some of his most brilliant work. 
 It was gathered into books, too ; for 
 Brownell published in all four volumes of 
 verse in the course of the twenty years 
 between 1847 an< ^ i$66 1 but his distinc- 
 tive work, that upon which his fame must 
 rest, is to be found in the War Lyrics, 
 which appeared one year after the close 
 of the Rebellion. This contains the best 
 of his earlier verse and that inspired 
 directly by the events of the war — the 
 lyrics and ode-like narratives written hot 
 from the heart, currente calamo, amidst the 
 
290 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 scenes they picture. Their very lack of 
 polish, their artistic imperfections, testify 
 not more to this genesis than does their 
 potency of inspiration. The previous 
 volumes, while denoting the culture of 
 their maker, his graceful gift of rhyme 
 and measure and his literary tastes, can- 
 not be called markedly individual. 
 Had Brownell done no more he would 
 have furnished some pleasant enough 
 reading for a day less critical than our 
 own, but made small claim upon one who 
 seeks to estimate American poetry of per- 
 manent interest. One feels in his ante- 
 bellum song the influence of Bryant and 
 Poe, of Whittier and Longfellow, and 
 finds little else ; his writing is imitative in 
 manner and slight in substance. But in 
 the War Lyrics (a few pieces from which 
 were to be found in the Lyrics of a Day, 
 dating two years before) are some twenty 
 poems which may be characterized as car- 
 mina bellorum, veritable children of the war, 
 presenting this singer's authentic contribu- 
 tion to his art and to his country. The 
 balance of this final book, although con- 
 taining several striking and artistic things, 
 can be overlooked in the far greater sig- 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 291 
 
 nificance and worth of the work born of 
 a deeper impulse. The characteristics 
 that mark the finest of it — such poems 
 as The Bay Fight, Annus Memorabilis, 
 Down, and ^he Battle Summers — are vivid 
 descriptions, a felicitous diction often 
 rising to genuine beauty, even grandeur, 
 and the born balladist's breathless rush of 
 incident. 
 
 In fact, to call Brownell a lyric poet 
 without qualification is misleading. He 
 was above all else a writer of ballads, who 
 believed in his theme, had a story to tell, 
 and sang because emotionally vibrant. 
 The ethical quality is strong, and the 
 poetry is frankly, bitterly partisan : he 
 saw no good in the foe, and such epithets 
 as " the black flag " and "traitor sword " 
 are hurled like hammers of Thor at his 
 devoted head. Yet he has a true soldier's 
 sense of bravery even in an evil cause. 
 
 "The sheen of its ill renown, 
 
 All tarnished with guilt and shame, 
 
 No poet indeed may crown, 
 No lay may laurel a name," 
 
 he sings, but adds : 
 
292 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " Yet never for thee, fair song, 
 The fallen brave to condemn ; 
 
 They died for a mighty wrong, 
 
 But their Demon died with them." 
 
 One hardly looks for the judicial tone, 
 eminently proper to the historian now, 
 in a man making poems on the flag-ship 
 before the blood of the beloved has been 
 washed from the decks. Brownell's bias 
 (to give it the word cool analysis suggests 
 to-day) helped rather than harmed the 
 quality of his verse. Poetry is of the 
 heart, not the head, and the singer, like 
 the reformer, must see but the side he 
 champions and hymns. 
 
 There is in Brownell's work, again, a 
 keen sense of the rough-and-ready camar- 
 aderie of the bivouac and the forecastle, 
 showing at times in a grim humor, but 
 oftener (since he was so dead in earnest) 
 in the realistic, homely phrase, the strong 
 Saxon speech of him, the unconventional 
 rhymes and irregular stanzas, the drastic 
 touches which a nicer, more self-conscious 
 muse had not allowed herself. Here 
 Brownell becomes unliterary in that he is 
 direct, careless, and natural, not reflective. 
 This is not to gainsay that his poetry 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 293 
 
 would have gained by condensation. It 
 is diffuse not seldom, just as Whittier's is ; 
 the critic can put finger on stanzas much 
 below the poet's standard, and occasionally 
 quite unworthy of him. Yet it may be 
 that the impression of vital reality would 
 have suffered had excision and trimming 
 taken place. 
 
 There are near to ninety stanzas in 
 "The Bay Fight, and the idea of unity and 
 force would have been better conserved 
 doubtless were the song-story briefer ; as 
 in the physical world, heat and light must 
 have followed compression. On the other 
 hand, in reading that production, the 
 thought is so organically related, and the 
 feeling so cumulatively strong and unin- 
 termittent, that it is puzzling to say just 
 where pruning were well. 
 
 We may look in detail at The Bay 
 Fight as one of the poet's representative 
 longer pieces ; it opens the volume, and is 
 deemed his most popular poem. Its 
 theme is Farragut's attack on the forts at 
 Mobile Harbor on Aug. 5, 1864. The 
 first stanza is a fine one : 
 
2 9 4- LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " Three days through sapphire seas we sailed ; 
 The steady Trade blew strong and free, 
 The Northern Light his banners paled, 
 The Ocean Stream our channels wet. 
 We rounded low Canaveral's lee 
 And passed the isles of emerald set 
 In Blue Bahama's turquoise sea " 
 
 — the dominant s alliteration furnishing 
 just the right tone-color for the scene. 
 Then follow ten stanzas in simpler four- 
 line ballad measure, telling with much 
 picturesqueness of phrase and heightening 
 of interest of the suspense before the 
 hidden batteries opened on the ships. 
 But the moment came : 
 
 "A weary time — but to the strong 
 The day at last, as ever, came ; 
 
 And the volcano, laid so long, 
 
 Leaped forth in thunder and in flame." 
 
 Then with startling suddenness, to mark 
 the change in situation, language, metre, 
 everything is transformed : 
 
 t€ * Man your starboard battery,' 
 Kimberly shouted. 
 The ship, with hearts of oak, 
 Was going, mid roar and smoke, 
 On to victory! 
 None of us doubted, 
 No, not our. dying — 
 Farragut's flag was^ flying ! " 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 295 
 
 And for many strophes the whole expres- 
 sion and movement is terse, rapid, intense, 
 the lilt being so cunningly made up of min- 
 gled trochees and dactyls as to convey 
 an idea of the rush and drama of the 
 action. The poet apostrophizes the ships 
 as personalities ; you feel he loves them 
 as live things a-quiver with the conflict: 
 
 "Sixty flags and three 
 
 As we floated up the bay ; 
 Every peak and mast-head flew 
 The brave Red, White, and Blue : 
 
 We were eighteen ships that day." 
 
 As he hears the shock of the rebel 
 guns, the lust of fight gets into his blood, 
 and this stirring stanza is thrown off by 
 way of retaliation : 
 
 "Ah, how poor the prate 
 Of statute and state 
 We once held with these fellows. 
 Here on the flood's pale green 
 Hark how he bellows, 
 Each bluff old sea-Lawyer ! 
 Talk to them, Dahlgren, 
 Parrot, and Sawyer !" 
 
 Down went Craven and his ships in the 
 drawing of a breath. 
 
296 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 "Then, in that deadly track, 
 
 A little the ships held back, 
 
 Closing up their stations. 
 
 There are minutes that fix the fate 
 
 Of battles and of nations 
 
 (Christening the generations), 
 
 When valor were all too late 
 
 If a moment's doubt were harbored. 
 
 From the main-top bold and brief 
 
 Came the word of our grand old Chief, 
 
 1 Go on! ' — 'twas all he said. 
 
 Our helm was put to starboard, 
 
 And the Hartfor d passed ahead.' ' 
 
 Through a hell of fire they pushed on ; 
 but the enemy's shell made havoc. 
 
 " But, ah, the pluck of the crew ! 
 Had you stood on that deck of ours, 
 You had seen what men may do." 
 
 Even the regiments on shore forgot to 
 fire as they looked on at the awful spec- 
 tacle. Describing the carnage, he gives an 
 example of his grim realism : 
 
 " Dreadful gobbet and shred 
 That a minute ago were men " 
 
 — which recalls to me a terrible touch of 
 Kipling's in The Light that Failed, where 
 the slain on that Soudan battle-field are 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 297 
 
 pictured, and the narrator says he had 
 never "seen men in bulk gone back to 
 their beginnings before." But bravery 
 matched destruction. 
 
 " And ever, with steady con, 
 
 The ships forged slowly by, 
 And ever the crew fought on, 
 
 And their cheers rang loud and high. 
 
 "Grand was the sight to see 
 How by their guns they stood, 
 Right in front of our dead, 
 Fighting square abreast, — 
 Each brawny arm and chest 
 All spotted with black and red 
 Chrism of fire and blood ! 
 
 "Fear ? A forgotten form ! 
 
 Death ? A dream of the eyes ! 
 We were atoms in God's great storm 
 
 That roared through the angry skies.* ' 
 
 And now the enemy turned and fled, 
 and then — 
 
 "So up the Bay we ran, 
 The flag to port and ahead ; 
 
 And a pitying rain began 
 
 To wash the lips of our dead ' ' 
 
 — this last image as impressive as anything 
 in The Ancient Mariner, 
 
298 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 But now, again, the deadly ram steamed 
 up the harbor, and the day is yet to win. 
 Farragut gave orders to run him down. 
 
 "We stood on the deck together, 
 Men that had looked on death 
 
 In battle and stormy weather, 
 Yet a little we held our breath, 
 When, with the hush of death, 
 
 The great ships drew together " 
 
 — a superlatively splendid strophe, stat- 
 ing with all the force of indirection the 
 fearsomeness of the collision. Then with 
 impetuous verve we hear of the mistake 
 whereby the Union vessels, the Hartford 
 and Lackawanna, collided, and — 
 
 ft The old ship is gone — ah, no, 
 But cut to the water's edge." 
 
 Gradually, however, the ram is ringed 
 in by the northern fleet and plied with 
 shot and shell, until — 
 
 "Down went the traitor Blue, 
 And up went the captive White," 
 
 and these noble, pathetic lines follow : 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 299 
 
 "Up went the White! Ah, then 
 The hurrahs that once and again 
 Rang from three thousand men 
 
 All flushed and savage with fight ! 
 Our dead lay cold and stark, 
 But our dying, down in the dark, 
 Answered as best they might, 
 
 Lifting their poor lost arms, 
 And cheering for God and Right.' ' 
 
 But the poet consoles his grief over the 
 slain by a consideration of what the victory- 
 means : 
 
 " One daring leap in the dark, 
 
 Three mortal hours at the most, — 
 
 And hell lies stiff and stark 
 
 On a hundred leagues of coast." 
 
 Then come some beautiful stanzas, a 
 dirge for the dead Craven, reminiscent of 
 Tennyson a little in spirit and rhythm ; 
 and the poem closes in a quieter lyric vein 
 prophetic of the time of peace after the 
 necessary strife, and surcharged with per- 
 sonal devotion to the cause: 
 
 "To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 
 Are dread Apostles of his Name ; 
 
 His Kingdom here can only come 
 By chrism of blood and flame. 
 
300 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 "Be strong: already slants the gold 
 Athwart these wild and stormy skies ; 
 
 From out this blackened waste, behold, 
 What happy homes shall rise ! 
 
 "Nor shalt thou want one willing breath, 
 Though, ever smiling round the brave, 
 
 The blue sea bear us on to death, 
 The green were one wide grave. " 
 
 It is quite impossible to read this pro- 
 duction without a quickened pulse ; it is 
 one of the most honest and inevitable 
 utterances ever put into ballad form or 
 ode-like measures. It is a picture, an 
 action, and the experience of a soul, all in 
 one ; and almost all of it is poetry of a 
 rare, difficult, and inspirational kind. 
 
 Taking it for all in all, — sustained 
 power, freedom yet artistic beauty of form, 
 glow of feeling, imaginative uplift and fre- 
 quent inspiration of word, phrase, and 
 passage, — The Bay Fight is Brownell's 
 most representative and memorable piece 
 of work, an epic performance. 
 
 But he did much else in different keys, 
 though all rounding out the one Song of 
 the Flag. There is Annus Memorabilis> 
 brief clarion call to arms, when Congress 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 301 
 
 in 1860-61 hesitated to take the step, and 
 the poet declares : 
 
 ** 'Tis coming, with the boom of Khamsin or 
 
 Simoom, ' ' 
 
 and with figures and in a spirit of Miltonic 
 austerity and grandeur foretold the down- 
 fall of the " Serpent and his Crew." This 
 is a lyric which, when Senator Hawley read 
 it in his Hartford editorial office, brought 
 him to his feet in a trice, all afire with its 
 power and passion, — Brownell as a poet 
 being to him at the time an unknown 
 quantity. There too is The Battle Summers 
 (dated 1863), a perfect lyric, pensively 
 reflective, quiet, noble in its musing upon 
 the past and future, a dream 
 
 "Of many a waning battle day 
 
 O'er many a field of loss or fame ; 
 How Shiloh's eve to ashes turned, 
 And how Manassas* sunset burned 
 Incarnadine of blood and flame." 
 
 In the same vein, a lovely example of 
 his more introspective mood, A War 
 Study is short enough to give in its 
 entirety : 
 
302 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " Methinks all idly and too well 
 
 We love this nature — little care 
 (Whate'er her children brave and bear) 
 Were hers, though any grief befell. 
 
 '* With gayer sunshine still she seeks 
 
 To gild our trouble, so 'twould seem ; 
 Through all this long tremendous dream 
 A tear hath never wet her cheeks. 
 
 " And such a scene I call to mind : 
 
 The third day's thunder (fort and fleet 
 And the great guns beneath our feet) 
 Was dying, and a warm gulf wind 
 
 tf Made monotone mid stays and shrouds. 
 O'er books and men in quiet chat 
 With the Great Admiral I sat, 
 Watching the lovely cannon-clouds. 
 
 ft For still, from mortar and from gun 
 Or short-fused shell that burst aloft, 
 Outsprung a rose-wreath, bright and soft, 
 Tinged with the redly setting sun. 
 
 " And I their beauty praised, but he, 
 
 The grand old Senior, strong and mild, 
 Of head a sage, in heart a child, 
 Sighed for the wreck that still must be." 
 
 Down is a thrilling, lurid thing, and 
 Suspiria Ensis is virile, fairly leonine in 
 some of its strophes. Sumter is again a 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 303 
 
 trumpet blast, with all the elan of a cavalry 
 charge in it : 
 
 '* Sight o'er the trunnion, 
 
 Send home the rammer, 
 
 Linstock and hammer ! 
 Speak for the Union 
 
 Tones that won't stammer ! 
 
 " Men of Columbia, 
 
 Leal hearts from Annan, 
 
 Brave lads of Shannon ! 
 We are all one to-day — 
 
 On with the cannon ! ' ' 
 
 For personal characterization, the long 
 poem, Abraham Lincoln, which appeared 
 originally in the Atlantic, and which in 
 some of its lines and its felicity of limning 
 the " first American '' is of the same stock 
 as Lowell's peerless ode, once read will 
 not be forgotten. Length for length, it is 
 fittest mate to 'The Bay Fight. My illus- 
 trative quotations may be brought to a 
 close with a few borrowings from it and 
 a brief comment upon its contents. It 
 begins with a description of the peace and 
 beauty of Nature, who, after her manner, 
 has covered up and smoothed over the 
 unsightly signs of war : 
 
304 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " The roar and ravage were vain ; 
 
 And Nature, that never yields, 
 Is busy with sun and rain 
 At her old sweet work again 
 
 On the lonely battle-fields. 
 
 ** How the tall white daisies grow 
 Where the grim artillery rolled ! 
 
 Was it only a moon ago ? 
 It seems a century old." 
 
 But the sad human minor strain creeps 
 in : 
 
 M And the bee hums in the clover, 
 As the pleasant June comes on ; 
 Ay, the wars are all over — 
 But our good Father is gone. 
 
 "There was thunder of mine and gun, 
 
 Cheering by mast and tent, 
 When, his dread work all done 
 And his high fame full-won, 
 
 Died the Good President.' ' 
 
 Then comes a succession of burning 
 stanzas in which the inexplicable dastard 
 deed and the doer are scored without 
 mercy ; and then follows one of the finest 
 selections in the whole hundred and odd 
 strophes — that in which Lincoln is char- 
 acterized : 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 305 
 
 u Kindly Spirit ! Ah, when did treason 
 Bid such a generous nature cease, 
 
 Mild by temper and strong by reason, 
 But ever leaning to love and peace ? 
 
 " How much he cared for the State, 
 
 How little for praise or pelf ! 
 A man too simply great 
 
 To scheme for his proper self. 
 
 *■* But in mirth that strong head rested 
 
 From its strife with the false and violent — 
 
 A jester ! So Henry jested ; 
 So jested William the Silent." 
 
 But he is well mourned, says the poet ; 
 since the world began, he declares in 
 noble hyperbole, none " ever was mourned 
 like thee." 
 
 •« Dost thou feel it, O noble Heart 
 (So grieved and so wronged below), 
 From the rest wherein thou art ? 
 Do they see it, those patient eyes ? 
 Is there heed in the happy skies 
 For tokens of world-wide woe ? ' * 
 
 This land and other lands join, he goes 
 on, in the lamentation, and stately are the 
 signs and tokens thereof; but there is 
 homely grief, thus pathetically set forth : 
 
306 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 (t Nor alone the State's Eclipse ; 
 
 But how tears in hard eyes gather, 
 And on rough and bearded lips 
 Of the regiments and the ships : 
 
 • Oh, our dear Father ! ' 
 
 " And methinks of all the million 
 
 That looked on the dark dead face 
 'Neath its sable-plumed pavilion, 
 
 The crone of a humbler race 
 Is saddest of all to think on, 
 
 And the old swart lips that said, 
 Sobbing, ' Abraham Lincoln ! 
 
 Oh, he is dead, he is dead! '" 
 
 The technician of verse will not fail to 
 notice here the daring use of a feminine 
 double rhyme, dedicate traditionally to 
 the comic mood, in a passage of tender- 
 est solemnity. 
 
 Next comes a fine, broadly sketched 
 picture of a review of the home-coming 
 soldiers : 
 
 '* And all day, mile on mile, 
 With cheer and waving and smile, 
 The war-worn legions defile 
 Where the nation's noblest stand." 
 
 For a few stanzas the tone is exultant ; 
 then the minor thought once more : 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 307 
 
 (C And our boys had fondly thought 
 
 To-day, in marching by, 
 From the ground so dearly bought 
 And the field so bravely fought, 
 
 To have met their Father's eye. 
 
 «« But they may not see him in place, 
 Nor their ranks be seen of him ; 
 
 We look for the well-known face, 
 And the splendor is strangely dim. ,, 
 
 But after all, chants the singer, he is in 
 a better country, with his comrades around 
 him. 
 
 " For the pleasant season found him 
 Guarded by faithful hands 
 In the fairest of summer lands ; 
 
 With his own brave staff around him, 
 There our President stands. 
 
 ** There they are all by his side, 
 
 The noble hearts and true 
 
 That did all men might do, 
 Then slept, with their swords, and died. ,, 
 
 Some twenty following stanzas name 
 and describe Lincoln's even-Christians — 
 Winthrop, Porter, Jackson, John Brown, 
 and the rest — with him on the thither 
 bank of the stream. And not the leaders 
 alone, but the led, the nameless heroes of 
 the rank. 
 
3 o8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 w And lo, from a thousand fields, 
 From all the old battle-haunts, 
 
 A greater Army than Sherman wields, 
 A grander Review than Grant's ! 
 
 " Gathered home from the grave, 
 
 Risen from sun and rain, 
 Rescued from wind and wave 
 
 Out of the stormy main, 
 The legions of our brave 
 
 Are all in their lines again !" 
 
 In the course of the succeeding stanzas 
 he rises to these superb lines : 
 
 " But the old wounds are all healed, 
 And the dungeoned limbs are free ; 
 
 The Blue Frocks rise from the field, 
 The Blue Jackets out of the sea. 
 
 "They've 'scaped from the torture-den, 
 They've broken the bloody sod, 
 
 They've all come to life again, 
 
 The third of a million men 
 
 That died for thee and for God ! " 
 
 The poem ends grandly with the final 
 touches to this apocalyptical vision of the 
 spirit review : 
 
 "The colors ripple o'erhead, 
 
 The drums roll up to the sky, 
 And with martial time and tread 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 309 
 
 The regiments all pass by, 
 The ranks of our faithful dead 
 Meeting their President's eye. 
 
 "With a soldier's quiet pride 
 
 They smile o'er the perished pain, 
 For their anguish was not in vain — 
 
 For thee, O Father, we died ! 
 And we did not die in vain. 
 
 " March on your last brave mile ! 
 
 Salute him, Star and Lace, 
 Form round him, rank and file, 
 
 And look on the kind, rough face. 
 But the quaint and homely smile 
 
 Has a glory and a grace 
 It never had known erewhile, 
 
 Never, in time and space. 
 
 " Close round him, hearts of pride ! 
 Press near him, side by side. 
 
 Our Father is not alone ! 
 For the Holy Right ye died, 
 And Christ, the Crucified, 
 
 Waits to welcome His own." 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the bead-roll of the makers of liter- 
 ature whom by birth or adoption the 
 State of Connecticut may claim as her 
 own, Henry Howard Brownell should 
 have a sure and honored place. The list 
 
3 io LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 is neither short nor insignificant: Mrs. 
 Sigourney, Percival, and Halleck, in the 
 earlier century, Stedman, Warner, Clem- 
 ens, Bushnell, and Mrs. Stowe, in later 
 days, are a few of the names that spring 
 to the mind. But in all the divisions of 
 letters naught is rarer than the true poet; 
 and such an one is to be recognized in 
 Brownell, recognized not only by the 
 partial eye of local pride, but also by 
 the colder scrutiny of critical opinion at 
 a time when the first magnetism of the 
 singer's theme begins to lose its magic. 
 His was not impeccable verse ; lines that 
 limp and figures that fail are by no means 
 absent from his writing. But he had a 
 great subject, it took hold on him, and he 
 was consecrate to it ; his were thought, 
 elevation, invention, imagination, and an 
 almost unique opportunity for realism, in 
 the right meaning of that poor, distorted 
 word. And, withal, he was a truth-loving, 
 high-minded, fearless gentleman. As a 
 result, he has left a slender sheath of 
 lyrics which so faithfully transcribe certain 
 aspects of the Civil War, and are so vital 
 with its atmosphere and feeling, that it is 
 hard to see how they jwill miss of a lodg- 
 
A BATTLE LAUREATE 311 
 
 ment in the native anthology. Certainly no 
 one else has so well performed just this ser- 
 vice. There rings through his song that 
 love of country which makes the Horatian 
 quotation, " Dulce et decorum est pro patria 
 mori" one of the hackneyed lines of Latin 
 poetry. In his most largely conceived 
 pieces one associates him instinctively (at 
 least in spirit and quality) with the very 
 few native singers — Emerson, Lowell, 
 Whitman, Lanier — who have chanted 
 national issues with elevation and adequate 
 voice. 
 
 Mr. Stedman, who calls Brownell " that 
 brave, free singer," points out with his 
 customary keen perception the " half- 
 likeness " of the poet to Ticknor, " sound- 
 ing the war-cry of the South." They are, 
 in sooth, kinsmen : each was born a poet ; 
 each saw his cause to be holy ; and each 
 grew impassioned and impressive with the 
 burden of his utterance. And we, a gen- 
 eration later (since there is no sectionalism 
 in genius), can love the song and the spirit 
 of them both, burying their difference of 
 belief under the tranquillizing years, while 
 we drop upon their far-separated graves the 
 memorial flowers of a united patriotism. 
 
The Renaissance in English 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN 
 ENGLISH 
 
 TO say that the English language, es- 
 pecially in its literary uses, has within 
 the second half of this century experienced 
 a veritable renaissance may seem to be 
 making a stiff claim. Yet there is much 
 to justify so strong a term and statement, 
 to explain and illustrate which is the busi- 
 ness of this paper. The original impulse 
 has come from the specialists, who have 
 devoted themselves to the study of Old 
 English, to the language and literature 
 lying back of the Norman Conquest. The 
 past thirty years have witnessed a wide 
 popularizing of the earlier native literary 
 treasures through their efforts ; the princi- 
 pal texts have been edited and translated 
 and lectured about, and their use in schools 
 and colleges encouraged, so that now the 
 graduate from one of our leading and lib- 
 erally endowed institutions may, if he 
 choose, know his Beowulf as his father did 
 
3 i6 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 his Horace. These elder classics of the 
 mother tongue have not only been taken 
 into the curricula of instruction, but have 
 been put forth for broader literary appre- 
 ciation, with the idea of literary stimula- 
 tion as well as linguistic drill. Then, too, 
 the comparative study of the allied litera- 
 tures — the output of the Germanic group 
 of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian peo- 
 ples, of which English is a kinsman — has 
 done its share in shedding light upon our 
 tongue as an organism governed by lin- 
 guistic laws and possessing powers long 
 unsuspected. 
 
 To this cultivation of Old English (at 
 first the province of the few, but rapidly 
 becoming the work and pleasure of the 
 many) may be added the closer study and 
 appreciation of later literary figures and 
 epochs, — Chaucer and the Elizabethans 
 and Spenser, to say nothing of Shakespeare 
 himself, — together with the marked at- 
 tention, reaching almost to the dignity of 
 a cult, directed toward the historical Eng- 
 lish ballad; and last, but by no means 
 least, the increased sensitiveness to the 
 literary quality of the Bible. To antici- 
 pate no effect, sooner or later, upon native 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 317 
 
 modern literature, from all the exploitation 
 of the older fields, — allowed, so many of 
 them, to lie fallow for a long period, — is 
 to overlook cause and effect in the devel- 
 opmental interrelations of speech and let- 
 ters. Nothing could be further from the 
 truth than to suppose this movement to 
 be a matter of mere literary fashion : it 
 goes far deeper than that. The return to 
 Old English expression (always, of course, 
 within limits of common sense and con- 
 trolled by custom and convenience) is 
 not a temporary fad, but will prove a per- 
 manent enrichment of the force and splen- 
 dor of the speech. The preference for 
 native words and idioms has grown so 
 marked that it can be recognized plainly 
 in some of our most effective and power- 
 ful writers, while signs of it crop out con- 
 stantly in current literature. One who for 
 the first time turns, for example, to the 
 poetry of William Morris will find it 
 something not only rich, but strange, 
 — and for this very reason. 
 
 One of the principal things taught by 
 this restoration of English to much of its 
 old-time valiancy is the tongue's Germanic 
 structure : that primitive ability in word- 
 
3 i8 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 forms and sentence-construction which the 
 German, its historic cousin, has retained in 
 larger measure. The student of English, 
 in tracing back its line of development, 
 becomes aware that it converges steadily 
 toward this other tongue ; so that when 
 the Old English period is reached the in- 
 vestigator is astonished to see how close, 
 compared with the present status of the 
 two languages, is the affiliation with Ger- 
 man, in words, forms, and idioms. So 
 true is this that the student is told that a 
 first requisite for any fruitful pursuance of 
 historic English is the learning of German. 
 But the latter, owing to its different his- 
 tory, has kept its native powers in relative 
 purity ; while English, subjected to more 
 disturbing influences in the Norman Con- 
 quest and the classic Renaissance, has di- 
 verged far wider from its normal physiog- 
 nomy and its original tendencies. As a 
 result of such divergence, where the Ger- 
 man uses a native compound like vorwort, 
 the English turns to the Latin and makes 
 preface; where English domesticates such 
 a repulsive foreign importation as massacre, 
 the German uses blutbad (blood-bath), a 
 native formation self-explanatory to the 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 319 
 
 most illiterate of the race ; and so on with 
 hundreds — even thousands — of other 
 words concerning which it is to be said that 
 had our own tongue encountered a happier 
 linguistic experience it would, quite as read- 
 ily as its sister-language, have clung to its 
 birthright and privilege in this respect — 
 word-forming from within, and so keeping 
 the speech pure. And even to-day much 
 (though not all) of this power can be re- 
 claimed, and a realization thereof is bring- 
 ing it about. Thus, it is not infrequent 
 now that a book by a scholar bears the 
 legend "foreword" instead of the custom- 
 ary " preface ;" here is plainly enough the 
 effort to reinstate, by analogy with the Ger- 
 man, what might have been very properly 
 the distinctive word from the beginning. 
 To those who have not looked into the 
 matter such a seeming neologism may ap- 
 pear a bit of pedantry, an affectation with 
 no significance ; but it is not so, for the 
 great principle of English renascent in ac- 
 cordance with its organic spirit lies behind 
 such a case. As these older words creep 
 into the diction of the scholar aware of the 
 historical facts we have indicated, or are 
 used by the literary worker keenly alive 
 
320 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 to the strength and fitness of these speech 
 heirlooms, we may be sure that the ten- 
 dency is wholesome and one to gather force 
 in the time to come. For it is a return to 
 the simple and the indigenous, an eschew- 
 ing of the foreign, which has been overlaid 
 like a lacquer upon the native material. 
 Of course many of our foreign-derived 
 words have become so thoroughly angli- 
 cized as to make it impossible, no less 
 than unadvisable, to eradicate them. But 
 the method proposed is not the rooting 
 up of what is firmly planted in the speech, 
 but a reintroduction, a calling back of the 
 germane, thereby ousting slowly, unvio- 
 lently, what is less suitable. It will be, 
 and should be, a case of the survival of 
 the fittest. 
 
 The movement once started by the 
 philologists and specialists in language has 
 been, it may be repeated, carried on with 
 vigor by those who make literature. It is 
 in their efforts that the popular rehabilita- 
 tion of the older and purer elements of 
 English especially may be found. And in 
 this welcome influence poetry rather than 
 prose will always be dominant. It is of 
 the nature and essence of poetical diction 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 321 
 
 to be archaic, to show a large proportion 
 of native words, and this because it is the 
 language of the emotions, which always 
 chooses the homespun and the familiar 
 terms and forms natal in the speech. 
 Words like home, mother, father, love, 
 heart, and hearth — the category of the 
 affections — will in all tongues be recog- 
 nized as born within its body. And this 
 contribution of poetry, the highest form 
 of literature, to our linguistic treasure- 
 trove will be supplemented inevitably by 
 the most imaginative prose-writing, since 
 the same law is there at work : the indig- 
 enous element strong when the feelings 
 are in considerable measure implicated, the 
 imagination widest awake. A great service 
 is being rendered by the present accepta- 
 bility of dialect literature : through the 
 attention in fiction to the local " speech- 
 islands," as philologians dub them, the 
 dialectical variations of the common stock 
 of language are brought into notice, and a 
 multitude of words, idioms, and phrases 
 reinstated in the parlance, or at least in 
 the cognizance, of the more sophisticated 
 centres of speech. And since the linguis- 
 tic survivals of the country-side are more 
 
322 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 often than not the local persistence of 
 what was once the best English for culti- 
 vated and literary usage, the result is a 
 constant enrichment of the modern word- 
 hoard. The counties or colonies of Great 
 Britain, the manifold sections of the 
 United States, have in this way yielded 
 up rich treasures to the skilful hands of 
 the poets and novelists. Never has the 
 local speech been transcribed with a like 
 faithfulness, skill, and attraction. From 
 this cause the tongue will in time become 
 an instrument of wider diapason, more 
 varied in its harmonies, and vibrant with 
 immemorial racial tones. The reader to- 
 day gets a new sense of its possibilities, 
 and is taught hospitably to throw open the 
 doors to fresh material representing local 
 survivals of the sturdy old speech which, 
 by the good graces of literature, then be- 
 come revivals of our current language. 
 
 With this outline sketch of principles, 
 some illustrations, drawn from the various 
 channels of contribution, will make the 
 contention plainer and should prove not 
 uninteresting. Let us take a passage from 
 Dr. Hall's metrical version of Beowulf as 
 an example of the sort^ of English used 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 323 
 
 by a student who essays to present such a 
 monument in a modern dress, yet preserves 
 as much as may be its primitive tang : 
 
 •? Fast the days fleeted ; the float was a-water, 
 The craft by the cliff*. Clomb to the prow then 
 Well-equipped warriors ; the wave-currents twisted 
 The sea on the sand ; soldiers then carried 
 On the breast of the vessel bright-shining jewels, 
 Handsome war-armor ; heroes out-shoved then, 
 Warmen the wood-ship, on its wished-for adventure. 
 The foamy-necked floater, fanned by the breeze, 
 Likest a bird, glided the waters."' 
 
 To bring such language into popular con- 
 sideration is educative and may be counted 
 upon for its influence ; the archaic words 
 or forms can readily be picked out ; found 
 in the vernacular, they are allowed to re- 
 main in the translation ; and it is the test 
 of the happy translator how close he clings 
 to the original without growing obscure or 
 offensively odd. 
 
 Dr. Furnival, the doughty president 
 of the English Shakespeare Society, is a 
 scholar whose studies might be expected 
 to affect his diction, as indeed they have. 
 In his introduction to an edition of Will- 
 iam Harrison's A Description of England, 
 this wielder of forthright English speaks 
 
324 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 of an "unthrift young gentleman/' and 
 his description of Harrison as a personal- 
 ity reads thus : 
 
 A business-like, God-fearing, truth-seeking, 
 learned, kind-hearted, and humorous fellow, he 
 seems to me ; a good gardener ; an antiquarian 
 and numismatist ; a true lover of his country ; a 
 hater of shams, lazy lubbers, and evil-doers ; a 
 man that one likes to shake hands with across 
 the rift of two hundred years that separates us. 
 
 The effect of this upon the reader is of 
 a style plain, familiar, and racy ; but the 
 more it be studied in extenso the clearer is 
 it seen that its quality is due to a bias for 
 the older words and constructions — a 
 characteristic of Dr. Furnival's manner of 
 writing in general. 
 
 Among modern historians none is so 
 remarkable for the Saxon simplicity of his 
 style as Freeman; he carries his prefer- 
 ence for the vernacular so far that at times 
 he will repeat the same native word again 
 and again within a few lines rather than 
 use its classic or romance equivalent — 
 with an effect of baldness and sameness in 
 his diction. It is not surprising that this 
 great historian's burrowing in the past of 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 325 
 
 England and English should have left its 
 mark on his prose ; the following passage, 
 from the first lecture in The English 
 People in its 'Three Homes, brings the point 
 home : 
 
 Here on your soil I am not indeed in mine 
 own home, but I am none the less among mine 
 own folk. I am among men of mine own 
 blood and mine own tongue, sharers in all that 
 a man of either England deems it his pride and 
 happiness to share in. How can we be strangers 
 and foreigners to one another, how can we be 
 other than kinsfolk and brethren of the same 
 hearth, when we think that your forefathers and 
 mine may have sailed together from the oldest 
 England of all in the keels of Hengest or of 
 Cerdic — that they may have lurked together 
 with iElfred in the marshes of Athelney — that 
 they may have stood side by side in the thick 
 shield-wall on the hill of Senlac — that they 
 may have marched together as brethren to live 
 and die for English freedom alike on the field 
 of overthrow at Evesham and on the field of 
 victory at Naseby? 
 
 Here, again, I am aware, the general 
 physiognomy of style is that of a homely, 
 strong simplicity, having, however, an 
 eloquence all its own ; here, it might be 
 
326 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 said, is no revamping of the tongue, but 
 only a straightforward manipulation of 
 English unadorned. Yet such a style is 
 an exceedingly rare phenomenon ; it may 
 be stated boldly that an example of it 
 thirty years ago cannot be found in Eng- 
 lish. Only from one who had drunk 
 deep draughts from the purest sources of 
 our speech could such felicitous handling 
 of its Germanic powers have come. Mr. 
 Freeman, in the book quoted from, bears 
 down on our close relationship to the 
 Germans and Dutch, respectively second 
 and first cousins. Speaking of the " tie " 
 which binds the English of the British 
 isles to that ancient England of the conti- 
 nent whence they came, he acknowledges 
 that it may not be at first evident, and 
 " does not force itself upon the mind by 
 the most obvious witness of language, of 
 history, of all that makes divided brethren 
 to be brethren still. But the tie is still 
 real ; it is still living." He is thinking 
 here of other things than language, but 
 his words apply thereto in full force. 
 
 Other modern historians, whose style is 
 strong on the native side, — men like 
 Green and Froude and Harrison, — fur- 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 327 
 
 nish examples, though not in so striking 
 a degree as Freeman, of the influence 
 upon personal diction of delvings in the 
 bygone life and language. A glance at 
 some modern poets may be taken, to 
 strengthen the impression ; and no man 
 may fitlier head the list than William 
 Morris, whose verse, as already hinted, is 
 notable in this matter of good old English. 
 I draw on his great story-cycle, The 
 Earthly Paradise, a stanza from The Man 
 born to be King: 
 
 "So long he rode he drew anigh 
 
 A mill upon the river's brim 
 
 That seemed a goodly place to him ; 
 
 For o'er the oily, smooth millhead 
 
 There hung the apples growing red, 
 
 And many an ancient apple-tree 
 
 Within the orchard could he see, 
 
 While the smooth millwalls white and black 
 
 Shook to the great wheel's measured clack 
 
 And grumble of the gear within ; 
 
 While o'er the roof that dulled that din 
 
 The doves sat crooning half the day, 
 
 And round the half-cut stack of hay 
 
 The sparrows fluttered twittering." 
 
 We have chosen this earlier unobtrusive 
 example of a happy use of the native 
 English elements in verse rather than one 
 
328 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 from the later, more pronouncedly archaic 
 — and to some artificially Germanic — work 
 of Morris, though this richly illustrates 
 the principle. This natural trouvere may 
 be called a pioneer of the linguistic renais- 
 sance when it is remembered that the 
 chief poem-group of his life dates from 
 1868-70. And with him may properly 
 be set Swinburne ; he too exhibits in his 
 verse, in his diction and metres as well, 
 the strong influence upon him of the root- 
 flavors of speech, though in his case a 
 softer, more voluptuous effect is gained 
 by the intermingling of classic elements. 
 Take these stanzas of his magnificent 
 paean, The Armada^ and see how well- 
 nigh every word of it is home-born and 
 monosyllabic — a fact making its rhythmic 
 flow all the more wonderful and its force 
 the more potent : 
 
 " Greed and fraud, unabashed, una wed, may strive to 
 
 sting thee at heel in vain ; 
 Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and 
 
 murmur and plead and plain : 
 Thou art thou ; and thy sunbright brow is hers that 
 
 blasted the strength of Spain. 
 
 ** Mother, mother beloved, none other could claim in 
 place of thee England's pjace ; 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 329 
 
 Earth bears none that beholds the sun so pure of 
 
 record, so clothed with grace ; 
 Dear our mother, nor son nor brother is thine as 
 
 strong or as fair of face. 
 
 " How shalt thou be abased ? or how shall fear take 
 
 hold of thy heart ? of thine, 
 England, maiden immortal, laden with charge of life 
 
 and with hopes divine ? 
 Earth shall wither, when eyes turned hither behold 
 
 not light in her darkness shine. 
 
 "England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by 
 
 grace of thy glory, free, 
 Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to 
 
 serve as he worships thee ; 
 None may sing thee : the sea- wind's wing beats down 
 
 our songs as it hails the sea. ' ' 
 
 Mr. Stedman speaks of Morris as showing 
 how well " our Saxon English is adapted 
 for the transmission of the Homeric 
 spirit; " a fair characterization also of 
 much of Swinburne's lyric and dramatic 
 writing. 
 
 Compared with these men in their typi- 
 cal manner, the poetry of the great earlier 
 men — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and 
 Shelley — shows a startling difference in 
 regard of the relative prominence of native 
 English words and formations. They had 
 
33© LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 not the advantage of the popularization 
 of younger literature which has since tran- 
 spired. And the latter-day bards, the 
 generation subsequent to the Morris-Swin- 
 burne time, reveal this influence more and 
 more, just in proportion as they are virile 
 and awake to larger possibilities for melody 
 and harmony now open to English. 
 
 Of American singers Sidney Lanier is 
 unique in his sensitiveness to Old English 
 language and literature, coloring all his 
 work and giving it a distinctive stamp. 
 The fine couplet — 
 
 "By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the 
 
 sod, 
 I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God " 
 
 — is representative of his style ; and this 
 stanza of the Ballad of Trees and the 
 Master stands, in its Saxon directness, for 
 much more : 
 
 " Into the woods my Master went, 
 
 Clean forespent, forespent. 
 
 Into the woods my Master came, 
 
 Forespent with love and shame. 
 
 But the olives they were not blind to Him, 
 
 The little gray leaves were kind to Him ; 
 
 The thorn-tree had a mind to Him 
 
 When into the woods He came." 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 331 
 
 Stevenson too, and Kipling, whether as 
 poets or prosers, are of this goodly com- 
 pany ; the very title of the former 's Under- 
 woods is eloquent of these older speech 
 memories, while in that lyric repository is 
 the perfect Requiem with its now renewed 
 pathos, each several word of which is Eng- 
 lish unadulterated, with the one exception 
 of the word verse: 
 
 "Requiem. 
 
 " Under the wide and starry sky, 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die, 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 
 " This be the verse you grave for me : 
 Here he lies where he longed to be ; 
 Home is the sailor, home from the sea. 
 And the hunter home from the hilh" 
 
 Kipling also, among those enchanting 
 provocative interludes of rhyme which are 
 to be found in his prose books, has this 
 bit which clings to the native side of the 
 mother-tongue in a fashion typical of this 
 virile young maker of measures and spin- 
 ner of yarns : 
 
332 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 " Oh, was I born of womankind, and did I play- 
 alone ? 
 
 For I have dreamed of playmates twain that bit me to 
 the bone. 
 
 And did I break the barley bread and steep it in the 
 tyre ? 
 
 For I have dreamed of a youngling kid new riven 
 from the byre, 
 
 An hour it lacks and an hour it lacks to the rising of 
 the moon ; 
 
 But I can see the black roof-beams as plain as it were 
 noon. ,, 
 
 Nor is this bent for pure English con- 
 fined to the " chiels " of the rising gener- 
 ation : it is symptomatic, and the open- 
 eyed reader meets with it on all sides. In 
 a poem by Graham R. Tomson occurs the 
 line — 
 
 "And all her talk was of some out land rare M 
 
 — a direct parallelism with the German 
 ausland. In Bliss Carman's fine Steven- 
 son threnody, A Sea-mark, there are half 
 a dozen signs of this desire or instinct — 
 which comes to the same thing — for 
 resuscitating latent powers to the freshen- 
 ing and beautifying of latter-day vocabu- 
 lary and construction. Thus : 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 333 
 
 " But I have wander-biddings now ; " 
 
 *■* You brethren of the light- heart guild, 
 The mystic fellow craft of joy ; " 
 
 *< A valiant earth ling stark and dumb 5 w 
 
 "The journey-wonder on his face ; M 
 
 M Heart-high, outbound for otherwhere ; ' ' 
 
 — the italics indicating phrasing which 
 shows this promising American verseman 
 to have learned the time's lesson in lin- 
 guistics. 
 
 And prose literature, notably fiction, 
 adds richly to the evidential material, dia- 
 lect (as explained) being a main source of 
 contribution. Again Stevenson and Kip- 
 ling are in the van. In Br. Jekyll and 
 Mr. Hyde, the story which first drew pop- 
 ular attention to one who had long before 
 revealed to the judicious an artist's hand, 
 may be found half a dozen places which 
 illustrate the tendency to fall back upon 
 the ancient privileges of a tongue of which 
 he was past-master : as where " a sharp 
 intake of the breath " is spoken of. Some 
 of the matchless descriptive writing in The 
 Ebb-tide affords occasion for more or less 
 in the same sort, as here : 
 
334 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 There was little or no morning bank. A 
 brightening came in the east; then a wash of 
 some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between 
 crimson and silver ; and then coals of fire. 
 These glimmered awhile on the sea-line and 
 seemed to brighten and darken and spread out ; 
 and still the night and the stars reigned undis- 
 turbed. It was as though a spark should catch 
 and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy 
 and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the 
 room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, 
 and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, 
 and the hollow of heaven was filled with the day- 
 light. 
 
 Here there is the magic blending of native 
 and imported elements to make a truly 
 admirable style; but ever and anon (as 
 in the italicized closing words) Stevenson 
 places before the ravished observer a com- 
 pound or turn of expression or sentence 
 which has a relish of old time and the 
 sanction of bygone generations. 
 
 Kipling, too, is cunning in the same 
 fashion, allowing, of course, for the per- 
 sonal equation. Take the following from 
 A Matter of Fact, one of his most grew- 
 somely imaginative tales : 
 
 As he spoke, the fog was blown into shreds, 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 335 
 
 and we saw the sea, gray with mud, rolling on 
 every side of us and empty of all life. Then in 
 one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of 
 ointment that the Bible speaks of. From that 
 wide-ringed trouble a Thing came up — a gray 
 and red Thing with a neck — a Thing that bel- 
 lowed and writhed in pain. 
 
 The illustrations from current fiction- 
 makers who have turned dialect to literary- 
 uses is legion, and an embarrassment of 
 riches the result ; examples are hardly 
 necessary, so obvious is this aspect of the 
 movement. In Raymond's delightful 
 Somersetshire idyl, Tryphena in Love, we 
 find, " And to-year she was meeting with 
 wonderful good luck " — the remark be- 
 ing the author's own, not a part of the 
 dialogue. 'To-year survives in dialectical 
 service (like countless other words), and is 
 common enough in the Elizabethan drama- 
 tists and further back ; it may be seen that, 
 by analogy with to-day and to-morrow, it is 
 a capital formation, a regrettable loss to 
 modern English. Mr. Raymond, in the 
 preface to his volume of short stories, 
 Love and Quiet Life, speaks of this locu- 
 tion, and adds : " And what is the dis- 
 tinguishing initial vowel of the past-partic- 
 
336 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 iple of the rustic but a heritage from our 
 Saxon [he means Old English] ancestors? " 
 — going on to point out the resemblance 
 between the countryman's prefix, a, in a- 
 want y and the Germany mgewandt. Ever 
 and again the German comparison forces 
 itself on the student. In Justin H. Mc- 
 Carthy's pleasing novel, A Woman of 
 Impulse (which may be read as the antidote 
 to Dodo)> I find him speaking of " a ballad 
 with the overword" — also a strictly Ger- 
 manic compound. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to illustrate from 
 the Scotch word-work of Barrie, Crockett, 
 and their commensals, since, of all the 
 dialect loosely grouped under the conven- 
 ient name " Scotch," it may be declared 
 that it is strongly conservative northern 
 English ; that is a fair description, histori- 
 cally, of the variations in English to the 
 north of the Firth. Scotch proper, it may 
 be added, is Celtic — quite another thing. 
 But the more conventional speech of these 
 two writers, as well as of others like Quiller 
 Couch and Hardy and Blackmore, fur- 
 nishes food for our thesis. Here, for ex- 
 ample, are the very opening sentences of 
 Barrie's A Window in Thrums : 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 337 
 
 On the bump of green round which the brae 
 twists, at the top of the brae and within cry of 
 T'nowhead Farm, still stands a one-story house, 
 whose whitewashed walls, streaked with the dis- 
 coloration that rain leaves, look yellow when the 
 snow comes. In the old days the stiff ascent 
 left Thrums behind, and where is now the mak- 
 ing of a suburb was only a poor row of dwell- 
 ings and a manse, with Hendry's cot to watch 
 the brae. 
 
 Quiet, unforced English, this ; but when 
 you come to compare it with that of an 
 immediate earlier generation, it is not hard 
 to notice the change. Or read this from 
 Nora Hopper's strangely poetic Ballads in 
 Prose, where the influence is Celtic of the 
 Irish order, and the stylistic model Mal- 
 ory's Morte a" Arthur : 
 
 And when next Cuchullin woke from his 
 dreams he found that Ineen still held him fast, 
 though she was dead and cold ; and with some 
 difficulty he loosed her hands from him, and 
 dug with his sword a grave for her in the sand, 
 and there he laid her sorrowfully, praying Angus, 
 the Master of Love, to keep her soul in his 
 Golden House, and Manannan MacLir to hold 
 his waves aloof from her sleeping-place. And 
 when he visited the place with Eimer, after a year 
 
338 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and a day, they found that the sea had fallen back 
 for half a league, and that the place where the sea- 
 girl slept was a broad space of grass, and in the 
 midst of the grass rose white spikes of meadow- 
 sweet, the flower which for the sake of a forgot- 
 ten love and a forgotten sacrifice is called of us 
 to-day Crios Chuchulainn (Cuchullin's Belt). 
 
 That in the movement here-above 
 sketched certain influences have been long 
 at work has been conceded frankly, and 
 those influences named. Nevertheless, 
 that a strong added impulsion has come 
 from the popularization of Old English 
 language and literature, signs of which are 
 easy to be seen, is a plain matter to the 
 student and lover of his native speech. 
 Sometimes it shows in the literary regen- 
 eration of a word which for centuries has 
 lain perdu ; sometimes through the intro- 
 duction of an idiom out of strict analogy 
 with the German ; again by the elevation 
 of dialect to a more urbane place in the 
 tongue ; most often by a widespread ten- 
 dency toward monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon. 
 But, whatever the manifestations, all hark 
 back to a common cause, stand for one 
 phenomenon ; and it may be affirmed of 
 the younger writers, whether using the 
 
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLISH 339 
 
 grand old mother-tongue in America, in 
 England, or in any one of the great colo- 
 nies where she is at home, those we are 
 coming to look upon as torch-bearers are 
 the best exemplars of this hopeful charac- 
 teristic, it being, in sooth, one reason of 
 their strength and place in the forefront. 
 A point to be borne down upon is the dif- 
 ference between this movement and sundry- 
 fashions in the language of literature and 
 life which have their little day from time 
 to time in various countries. Such was 
 the Elizabethan Euphuism, the Spanish 
 Gongorism, the Marianism of Italy, the 
 Schwulstigkeit of the Germans, the Parisian 
 preciosity ridiculed by Moliere. A com- 
 mon hall-mark of all these is affectation ; 
 they have a narrow aloofness, are super- 
 ficial and temporary, averse from what is 
 genuinely natural and national, whereas 
 the return to the older in English is — 
 allowing for the occasional posing and 
 strained effects of those whose province it 
 is to bring discredit on any tendency good 
 in itself — a going back to what is simple, 
 strong, direct, and vital to our speech 
 instincts. 
 
 This renaissance of English, then, silent 
 
34© LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 but steady, for the most part unsensa- 
 tional, but none the less potent, is to be 
 apperceived to-day, and in the twentieth 
 century will be more apparent. And the 
 very fact that our leading writers wish thus 
 to turn back to native uses and things is, 
 so far as it goes, proof of the race's health, 
 of its solidarity and esprit de corps. We 
 may take comfort in it when confronting 
 an alarmist like Nordau, for a general 
 degeneration of the speech would follow 
 any general degeneration of literature ; 
 and the testimony of language, just now, 
 directs us to opposite and more cheerful 
 conclusions. 
 
American English 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 
 
 THE thorough study of English, as 
 language and as literature, which, 
 during the last generation, has been pros- 
 ecuted with zeal in several countries, has 
 blown away the mists in various direc- 
 tions and let in the sunlight of truth upon 
 many questions historical, philological, 
 and aesthetic. One result of the work done 
 has been to put us in a position to esti- 
 mate at their true value ignorant or shal- 
 low criticisms on the particular form of 
 English spoken in this country — British 
 strictures often, but sometimes emanating 
 from native writers who aped the former, 
 and lacked all sound knowledge of the 
 subject. Thanks to the fact that both the 
 language and literature of our race are now 
 known in their genesis and their historic 
 development, the matter of the relation 
 and comparative importance of the vari- 
 ous forms of the English mother-tongue, 
 
344 
 
 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 spoken in the different countries where 
 that speech is at home, can be pronounced 
 upon to-day with intelligence and a good 
 degree of certitude. And it is high time 
 some general canons of criticism should be 
 made popular; for a woful amount of 
 misconception and nebulous thinking is 
 to be noted among people of brains and 
 culture. In truth, questions of language- 
 use in general appear to offer a premium 
 for guesswork and opinion without any 
 logic back of it. One man is as good as 
 another when it comes to philology, is too 
 often the assumption in society. The 
 two commonest methods of settling dis- 
 putes when the matter of words comes up 
 is by an appeal to a dictionary — and 
 more likely than not to one which should 
 not be taken as a final authority — or, 
 worse yet, by the complacent remark that 
 So-and-So is right in London ; ergo, it is 
 right for the United States of America. 
 There are, however, a few principles which 
 can be and ought to be set up as a guide 
 to save us from the thoughtlessness or the 
 ignorance implied in such attempts to get 
 at the truth. Sounder views, to be sure, 
 are not unique : Mr7 Brander Matthews, 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 345 
 
 for example, in his belligerently patriotic 
 paper on Americanisms and Briticisms, sets 
 forth with a lively wit the fact that honors 
 are easy in the matter of good speech here 
 and over seas, and so introduces the idea 
 of independence to the self-respecting 
 native. But Mr. Matthews makes no 
 effort to formulate the principles under- 
 lying his position, and based on literary 
 and linguistic history ; hence his paper, 
 stimulating and healthy in tone as it is, 
 can hardly be named as a court of appeal. 
 In the present essay a method of criticism 
 is suggested and a few tests applied which, 
 it is hoped, may prove helpful to others 
 who are interested in the subject, but not 
 sure of their footing. 
 
 In the past the typical British attitude 
 toward American English has been that of 
 patronizing superiority and shallow incom- 
 petence ; nor is this state of things su- 
 perseded altogether at the present time. 
 Plenty of Englishmen when they hear our 
 familiar use of the word guess smile at 
 it as a Yankee barbarism, blissfully uncon- 
 scious that it is in the highest literary 
 usage of the fourteenth century and com- 
 monly employed by both Wiclif and 
 
346 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 Chaucer. Thus, in the former's transla- 
 tion of the New Testament, Matthew vi., 
 7, we read : " But in praying, nyle ye 
 speke much, as hethen men doon, for the 
 gessen that they be herd in their myche 
 speche." And in the Prologue to the 
 Canterbury Tales, line 1182 runs as fol- 
 lows : " A forster was he soothly, as I 
 gesse." In the same way, we find even so 
 great a scholar as the late E. A. Free- 
 man, on hearing the word rare, as applied 
 to underdone beef, used over here, jump- 
 ing to the conclusion that this was an occi- 
 dental locution, and much surprised when 
 it was pointed out to him that Dryden has 
 the word in this sense a couple of hundred 
 years ago. Without further illustration, 
 these two examples suggest an axiom 
 which may be expressed, categorically, in 
 this wise : The great majority of alleged 
 Americanisms are survivals of older and 
 excellent English which the Britons have 
 allowed to fall into desuetude. It is very 
 easy to be tricked in this matter, and the 
 more study one makes of it the greater 
 caution one is likely to exercise in decid- 
 ing off-hand on a given word or idiom. 
 A personal experience may be in order. 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 
 
 347 
 
 When the writer first ran across the plural 
 noun humans in an American newspaper, 
 he shuddered with horror. The headline 
 A Heap of Humans , to describe the results 
 of a railway accident, seemed to smack of 
 the wild and woolly West so strongly, it 
 had an effect of such slangy newness, that 
 the simple act of consulting a good dic- 
 tionary was scorned ; and it was only after 
 meeting the word in Kipling, and later in 
 the Derbyshire dialect of a generation ago, 
 as written in David Grieve, that the word- 
 use was seen to be English. Thereupon 
 a reference to the Century Dictionary 
 disclosed humans as popular with the 
 Elizabethan dramatists. Bartlett, in his 
 Dictionary of Americanisms, gives the word, 
 thus slipping into a very easy error. 
 
 Having set up, then, this first great 
 principle, that a given Americanism in 
 speech may be simply a retention of good 
 English, the course of action of the seeker 
 after truth is obvious when a dispute 
 arises : find out if the word, phrase, idiom, 
 be not a legitimate survival, and if it turn 
 out to be (which it will, as stated, in a 
 surprisingly large number of cases), why, 
 then stick to it as defensible and quite 
 
348 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 right. Whether it happen to be in Lon- 
 don usage to-day or not matters not a 
 whit. Moreover, it is the testimony of 
 scholars, and of British scholars them- 
 selves, that, as a whole, American English 
 has preserved the archaisms of the parent 
 speech with more care and good faith than 
 the British English itself. This is a very 
 remarkable phenomenon at first sight, but 
 quite capable of explanation. A band of 
 colonists, say, comes over to these shores 
 in the early seventeenth century, and 
 settles, bringing the speech uses of their 
 time and whilom habitat ; inasmuch as the 
 region these colonists live in is an un- 
 peopled one, and they are, so to speak, a 
 close community, their words and idioms 
 will tend to persist, and, as a result, after 
 a hundred years or so their speech will 
 resemble that of their fatherland at the time 
 they left it more nearly than will the 
 speech of those left behind in England, who 
 have been subjected to far more of outside 
 and disparate influence. This is the reason 
 why the language of the countryside is 
 always more conservative, more flavorous 
 of the past speech-life, than is the tongue 
 of the town. Thus, New Englandisms 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 349 
 
 will not seldom turn out to be Old Eng- 
 landisms in disguise ; that is, with a clipped 
 nervous pronunciation or a nasal drawl. 
 
 But Americanisms in language do not 
 have to be survivals of older English ex- 
 pression in order to be impeccable. They 
 may be revivals also, and yet quite as legit- 
 imate. In the case of survivals, we have 
 words which, in use among the English at 
 the time the American colonists branched 
 off from the mother-tree, were kept alive 
 by the latter, while allowed to die by the 
 former. By revivals, on the other hand, 
 are meant those speech-uses once current, 
 but allowed by English-speaking folk to 
 be superseded by newer words, pushed into 
 forgotten corners, yet treasured in literary 
 monuments, and awaiting the perceptive 
 eye and the deft hand to bring them again 
 on the stage. These rehabilitations are 
 the peculiar province of literature and 
 scholarship ; and, owing to the renaissance 
 of older English already mentioned, they 
 are a marked feature of the present day. 
 A moment's reflection will show that in 
 this linguistic liberty the American has 
 naturally as large a part and as clear a 
 franchise as his British cousin. American 
 
350 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 writers and speech-users, in the course of 
 their commerce with the older English 
 authors, may very well adopt words and 
 phrases therefrom ; who shall gainsay 
 them ? It is common property the Amer- 
 ican has drawn upon, and he has simply 
 been more assimilative than his kinsman 
 across the water, in case the latter has not 
 revived the word or idiom. There are 
 men to-day in this country who read their 
 one hundred lines of Beowulf in the origi- 
 nal as a morning eye-opener ; Dr. Furness, 
 of Philadelphia, reads a play of Shake- 
 speare daily, it is said. With this sort of 
 thing going on, it is not only natural, but 
 inevitable, that the sturdy old resources of 
 our tongue should serve as a stimulus to 
 restore much that is fine and germane to 
 our national instincts in speech, and which 
 has been lying fallow, maybe, for centuries, 
 waiting for the resurrecting hand. The 
 tendency to fall back thus on native words 
 and idioms which have been disesteemed 
 in favor of Latin or romance substitutes 
 may be seen in the poetry of William 
 Morris, the prose of Freeman, the tales 
 of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard 
 Kipling ; or, with us, the poetry of Lanier 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 351 
 
 furnishes an example, verse, with its lean- 
 ing to the archaic, always preceding prose 
 in this respect. A single example will suf- 
 fice : For generations the word preface has 
 been in vogue to denote an introduction 
 to what follows ; but it is now no uncom- 
 mon thing to find scholars using in its 
 place the word forespeeck, the pure English 
 equivalent of the Latin preface. This is 
 one of the revivals we have in mind ; and, 
 obviously, it makes no difference whatever 
 if it chance to be an American or a Brit- 
 isher, an Anglo Indian or an Australian, 
 who revives the acceptable locution. Such 
 a one as the above commends itself at 
 once to every perceptive handler of the 
 tongue. The criticism that attacks such a 
 procedure and dubs the result an " Ameri- 
 canism," when it happens to originate on 
 our soil, is wide of the mark and suffi- 
 ciently amusing. One caution is, however, 
 necessary. Before deciding that a word, 
 phrase, or idiom is a revival in this way, 
 rather than a survival, dictionaries, schol- 
 ars, or the literature itself in all its mani- 
 fold forms of dialect, slang, and technical 
 usage, must be consulted ; only by a care- 
 ful, lynx-eyed survey of the field can one 
 
352 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 indulge in that perilous pleasure, a cock- 
 sure judgment. For, over and over again, 
 it will be found that what appears to be 
 new-coined or revamped has in reality a 
 steady local life somewhere within the 
 broad lands where the English language is 
 at home. 
 
 But supposing an Americanism is not a 
 survival of older and legitimate uses nor a 
 revival due to assimilation of the earlier 
 literature, even if it be a brand-new crea- 
 tion, something that never was on sea or 
 land, it will not be illegitimate or unac- 
 ceptable necessarily ; not at all. If it obey 
 the laws of the genius of our tongue, it 
 may be both without sin and acceptable. 
 But the occasion must demand it, and the 
 man on hand be large enough to furnish 
 it. With these conditions fulfilled, there 
 is no more against neologisms made on 
 American soil than there is against those 
 made on British soil. In either case it is 
 a question of need, taste, and knowledge. 
 It is safe to make the assertion that to-day, 
 what with the survivals, the revivals so 
 fast appearing, and the constant accessions 
 from all sides to the ranks of our English 
 word army, as the scientific nomenclature 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 353 
 
 is enriched by new discoveries, there is less 
 necessity than ever before for the minting 
 of fresh coins of expression. Yet times 
 and occasions there are which demand the 
 creative flat. 
 
 Such a movement as the temperance 
 cause gives us in this century the capital 
 word teetotaller, so good a formation that 
 it is fathered by both British and Amer- 
 ican, though the weight of evidence favors 
 our priority of use; while reconstruction 
 days produced the spirited word scalawag, 
 unquestionably originating here, even if it 
 be traced back to a connection with the 
 diminutive Shetland cattle known as scal- 
 lowag. Or for an absolute creation, our 
 socio-political life gives us come-outer, which 
 immediately commends itself for native 
 strength and fitness. And in the way of 
 idiom, the colloquial come off, the serious dis- 
 cussion of which may still provoke a smile, 
 will on analysis be seen to be a vigorous 
 formation entirely on the lines of historic 
 construction and finding its literary proto- 
 type in the Shakespearean go to, which 
 once, beyond peradventure, had a con- 
 notation as jocose as has the recent idiom 
 at present to our ears. A decade hence it 
 
354 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 will sound very different. How silly it 
 would be to deny to some of these Amer- 
 ican speech creations an equal right to 
 existence with sundry British formations 
 which also prove themselves legitimate off- 
 spring, not bastards ! Something in the 
 local conditions called for them and so they 
 were born, and others in like manner will 
 be, whether in the tight little isle or in the 
 broad free ways of this western hemisphere. 
 And notice of the new or low-born word 
 or phrase of yesterday, that you are not in 
 a position yet to say whether it will be 
 ephemeral or become historic. The Brit- 
 isher cannot pronounce ipse dixit upon it, 
 for the very good reason that we Amer- 
 icans cannot tell ourselves. The slang of 
 to-day is the idiom of to-morrow : slang, 
 indeed, being idiom in the making. It is 
 evident now that dude will be read in the 
 novels and essays of the better class by the 
 future student who puzzles over our native 
 speech traits ; it is duly recognized by the 
 International Webster and the Century 
 Dictionaries. But half a dozen years 
 ago it was still doubtful coin as a legal 
 tender. Under these circumstances, how 
 absurd for the British xensor to pass judg- 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 355 
 
 ment on some fin de Steele speech-use in 
 America on the ground that it is non-Brit- 
 ish and vulgar. What he cavils at may be 
 classic in the next generation ; or, although 
 he may hit upon some word or idiom that 
 is essentially canaille and never can be 
 received as part and parcel of good Amer- 
 ican usage, he is in no position to consti- 
 tute himself a judge, inasmuch as inadmis- 
 sible cockney slang is in evidence quite as 
 palpably as the Bowery argot which offends 
 his taste. The Londoner who calls his 
 fellow a " bloody fool " is just as far from 
 good English as the Yankee who playfully 
 characterizes his mate as a " son-of-a-gun." 
 In connection with this subject of slang, it 
 is worth mentioning that in the power of 
 making fit and forceful words on occasion 
 the American, as every fair-minded student 
 will admit, is remarkably happy. Prof. 
 John Earle, one of the first living author- 
 ities on English, and himself an English- 
 man, has said that " in the utilizing of 
 slang by giving it an artistic value, Amer- 
 ican literature seems to enjoy a peculiar 
 prerogative." Orthoepy makes a large 
 division of the general subject of English 
 speech, and with American English in 
 
356 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 mind, a remark or two must be made about 
 our pronunciation in relation to that of 
 the Briton. Here again historic phonetics 
 and the laws of linguistic development gov- 
 erning the evolution of the English tongue 
 as a whole must be consulted and answer 
 given accordingly. Owing to climatic and 
 resultant physiological reasons, owing per- 
 haps to the freer mingling of races on our 
 shores, English in the mouth of Americans 
 has a sound not always tallying with the 
 same words spoken on the other side of 
 the big pond. And on the whole, let it 
 be admitted frankly that the vowel qual- 
 ities heard from our cousins are richer and 
 more musical than our own. Therefore, 
 when the broad a sound is taught in the 
 schools or at home as a substitute for the 
 higher, thinner, intensely cacophonous 
 vowel heard in the noun calf on the lips 
 of the New England rustic, exactly the cor- 
 rect thing is being done ; for the broad a 
 not only makes for euphony, but is his- 
 torically right phonetics. It does not 
 smack of Briton worship to favor it, unless 
 it be favored for the sole reason that it has 
 the London hall-mark. But in some other 
 of his orthoepic characteristics, the Briton 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 357 
 
 is slovenly and reprehensive : as where he 
 slurs over a syllable in order to pronounce 
 conservatory as if he wrote it conservfry. 
 
 For an American to imitate him here 
 shows a beautiful commingling of the 
 dunce and the sycophant. The matter of 
 accent in English is one which most peo- 
 ple find bothersome, and are conscious of 
 insecurity about : a fact witnessed to by 
 the frequent appeals to those in authority 
 and the puzzlement following on dis- 
 agreement among the dictionary-makers. 
 There is, however, one great general law 
 of accent at work in English speech which, 
 once in the mind, will keep the American 
 from ever stretching out imploring hands 
 for help from England, as if the decision 
 must come thence to be of avail. The law 
 is this : Accent in English is recessive, it 
 tends to work back to the root syllable, 
 or even further, to the first syllable, when 
 the word happens to be foreign and the 
 root does not coincide with the first sylla- 
 ble, as it does with native English words. 
 This law of recessive accent in our tongue 
 — in sharp contrast with a tongue like the 
 Persian, for example, where the accent is 
 progressive, or tends to fall on the final 
 
358 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 syllable, as Istaphdn — will prove an ever- 
 present help in time of trouble if it is 
 applied in questions of accentuation, when 
 Webster and Worcester breed confusion 
 it may be, and British usage makes con- 
 fusion worse confounded. To illustrate : 
 If a pronunciation like decorative suddenly 
 appears, and makes an effort to force 
 itself into polite society in the phrase, 
 " The Decorative Art Society/' we may 
 promptly squelch it, without stopping to 
 ask by your leave, since it tries to force 
 forward by one syllable the accent of a 
 thoroughly anglicized word, where the 
 stress had already reached the first syl- 
 lable (^orative) and there rested. Just 
 in proportion as a word borrowed from 
 foreign sources has become true-blue Eng- 
 lish, so that we write it without italics, will 
 it be found conserving this irresistible ten- 
 dency ; in some few instances euphony 
 comes in to make exceptions (as in poly- 
 syllabic words), but the general principle 
 may be postulated without any fear of 
 contradiction. If American or Britisher, 
 then, violate this law, the sin must be laid 
 at the door of the sinner ; it is utterly illog- 
 ical and silly for the former to cry par- 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 359 
 
 don of the latter, it being the business of 
 each to obey the law, the law they are both 
 subject to. 
 
 These few principles, upon which Am- 
 erican English can be and should be de- 
 fended and is to be judged, will lead us, it 
 is to be hoped, to the conclusion that an 
 independence born of a scholarly and 
 broad-minded view of the case should be 
 cultivated by every patriotic and thought- 
 ful man and woman in these United States. 
 
 Neither Anglophobia nor Anglomania 
 need influence us here, but the facts should 
 be followed and our position reasoned out. 
 And in conclusion we may formulate ex- 
 plicitly what has been, all through our 
 argument, an implicit assumption ; namely, 
 good English has no meaning except in re- 
 lation to the country in which it is spoken. 
 There is no such thing as good English 
 in the abstract; in England the English 
 heard in the mouths of the most culti- 
 vated people, or written by the most reputa- 
 ble makers of literature, is the norm and 
 standard. In America exactly the same 
 holds true. To assume that we must look to 
 London for our model is to acknowledge 
 that the English speech has degenerated as 
 
360 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 wielded by the English colonists and their 
 descendants. And since degeneration of 
 speech can only come from degeneration of 
 character, the inference is that the English 
 stock is in a bad way in these parts. But 
 the quality of the original settlers, the stuff 
 that they showed to be in them in the 
 troublous colonial and revolutionary days 
 and in later days of war and peace, to- 
 gether with our present proud position 
 among the nations of civilization, suffice 
 to answer such a preposterous notion. Am- 
 erican English is to-day a distinct variation 
 of British English, and for the same rea- 
 son that French, Italian, Spanish, and the 
 other Romance tongues are variants of the 
 mother Latin tongue. Dialectical differen- 
 tiations always arise where a homogeneous 
 language sends out branches to other parts 
 of the earth ; and, logically, it is as absurd 
 to fault or depreciate the speech of the 
 United States for its divergences from 
 British uses as it would be to take excep- 
 tion to the language of Leopardi, Hugo, 
 and Valera, because it is not Ciceronian 
 Latin. The only difference is that in the 
 case of Romance peoples a much longer 
 time has elapsed since they split off from 
 
AMERICAN ENGLISH 361 
 
 Rome, and so the changes are more strik- 
 ing. In the case of American English, 
 too, the centripetal forces of modern social 
 life will forbid ours ever becoming a dis- 
 tinct tongue. But room there will always 
 be for individual freedom and national 
 independence in this matter of speech, and 
 that American who fears to exercise these 
 democratic privileges is not only laying 
 himself open to the charge of ignorance : 
 he is forfeiting his birthright as well. 
 
Literature for Children 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 
 
 THE key-note of modern education 
 is found in the right instruction of 
 children. The acceptance and spread of 
 the kindergarten idea may be said to have 
 revolutionized our notions in respect of 
 this problem, and from this as a central 
 principle and efficient cause all betterment 
 of pedagogic methods in the higher grades 
 of school and college and university life 
 has come. Touching these subsequent 
 periods, the most important and signifi- 
 cant change in the conception of the 
 proper grading and relative value of 
 studies is the recognition of English (in 
 the broad sense) as a natural centre of 
 culture for an English-speaking person. 
 It is coming to be felt that education in 
 the English language, literature, and life, 
 for purposes of vital broadening and en- 
 richment, is of pronounced importance 
 for those who speak the tongue. As a 
 
366 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 result, in our manifold institutions of 
 learning the English course is given more 
 time, more attention, and more dignity as 
 a branch of work. All who keep abreast 
 of modern pedagogic thought are aware of 
 this. 
 
 And along with the changed attitude 
 towards English goes a wiser apprecia- 
 tion of the use of literature in this study ; 
 a tendency to make literary instruction 
 more dominant and to introduce it at an 
 earlier period of the school life, postpon- 
 ing the purely analytic studies — of which 
 grammar is a type — to a later time. 
 The banner cry of those leaders who 
 have at heart the interests of the pri- 
 mary and intermediate grades now seems 
 to be : " Not facts — ideals ;" a phrase the 
 sentiment of which is revolutionary to the 
 older notions. Psychology has taught us 
 that the intuitive emotional impressions 
 can be received best at a comparatively 
 tender age ; and such are the very impres- 
 sions imparted by the early contact with 
 noble literature. The plastic sensibilities 
 are ready for the effect of poetry and im- 
 aginative prose ; all that stands for the 
 heart-side and the soul-side of literature 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 367 
 
 may to the best advantage be inculcated 
 during that receptive hour of childhood 
 when the good can be appreciated, though 
 mayhap it cannot be explained. It is a 
 splendid victory that has been won in the 
 grasping and engrossing of this idea : in- 
 stead of the three R's of the old-time 
 educational dispensation we have substi- 
 tuted the three H's, — the hand, the 
 head, and the heart, — each to be trained, 
 all to be interrelated ; the manual, men- 
 tal, and emotional evoked in the organic 
 unity which is properly theirs. 
 
 This shift and broadening of ideals is 
 a main cause for rejoicing. The thesis, 
 then, that the best literature is none too 
 good for young children in the school or 
 in the home, that to stimulate the imagi- 
 nation and awaken the soul through the 
 gracious ministries of song and story and 
 soul revelation is of more importance 
 than the memorizing of dates or the util- 
 ities of the multiplication-table, is pretty 
 well established. One who undertakes to 
 argue for the making of early instruction 
 in literature ethical and inspirational rather 
 than analytic and knowing, has his audi- 
 ence with him as it never would have been 
 
368 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 a generation ago. We now regard educa- 
 tion not so much as an attempt to fill up a 
 scholar with facts and figures, or to prepare 
 him for money-getting but rather as the 
 drawing forth of the powers in such sym- 
 metry that the moral and spiritual faculties 
 shall be given precedence of those intellect- 
 ual. Hence the emphasis put upon the 
 efficacy of early ideals and the fruitful influ- 
 ence of great literature which, by the very 
 condition of its greatness, is a power that 
 makes for spiritual quickening. 
 
 But what are the best methods in bring- 
 ing about this precious nurture of children 
 through contact with the word-work and 
 the soul-work of poets, orators, drama- 
 tists, and weavers of story ? What litera- 
 ture shall be given them, and how and 
 when ? 
 
 At the outset we must contradistinguish 
 between boys and girls. Boys like action, 
 adventure ; they run to the sensational, 
 even truculent, in reading ; girls, per contra, 
 like the domestic, that which centres about 
 the family affections and the sweet minis- 
 tries of home. This is a broad generaliza- 
 tion. Girls there may be who have a fond- 
 ness for Tom Browns School Days, boys 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 369 
 
 who admire Little Women. But the 
 distinction holds, and it suggests at once 
 the disadvantage of a public school where 
 sex in literary or other education must be 
 ignored more or less. Of course, there 
 are to-day those who see no sex in the 
 thought-processes and emotions of young 
 people of opposite sexes — who indeed go 
 further and regard mind-stuff as sexless 
 throughout life. Such will pooh-pooh at 
 my notion. But to the present writer the 
 willingness to overlook or the practical 
 inability to recognize such claims shows 
 shallow thinking. Great laws of nature 
 arraign themselves against puny man 
 here. 
 
 But, waiving this point, it may be re- 
 marked that the fast-growing inclination 
 to give children pieces of literature in 
 the whole, instead of by scraps in the ex- 
 cerpts of earlier days, is an excellent good 
 thing. A piece of literature is an organ- 
 ism and should therefore be put before the 
 scholar, no matter how young, with its 
 head on, and standing on both feet. This 
 idea is now generally acted upon ; witness 
 the enormous growth of text-books pre- 
 senting literary masterpieces in their en- 
 
37o LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 tirety — or if this is not done, at least in 
 substance keeping to the organic struct- 
 ure. Certain critics of the inner circle 
 affect to sneer at this tendency. Andrew 
 Lang, for example, laments what he deems 
 the Bowdlerization and cheapening of the 
 classics, an objection whimsical enough and 
 hardly becoming in one who has been 
 dubbed, facetiously, Editor-in-General to 
 the British public. Nor must the moral 
 aspect of the editing of literature be over- 
 looked — this, too, provocative of cult- 
 ured sneers. Mr. Howells has written 
 true and noble words on this : " I hope 
 the time will come," says he, " when the 
 beast-man will be so far subdued and 
 tamed in us that the memory of him in 
 literature shall be left to perish ; that what 
 is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall 
 be kept out of such editions as are meant 
 for general reading, and that the pedant- 
 pride which now perpetuates it as an es- 
 sential part of those poets shall no longer 
 have its way. At the end of the ends 
 such things do defile ; they do corrupt." 
 It is well to get such testimony from a 
 captain of letters. 
 
 In view of all this preparation of stand- 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 371 
 
 ard writings for the young, there is little 
 excuse for putting children off with the 
 second-best and the well-enough. The 
 choicest is none too good. The dominant 
 division, fiction, for instance, now includes 
 Mrs. Molesworth, Mrs. Gatty, Mrs. 
 Ewing, Mrs. Burnett, Mrs. Wiggin, 
 Harris and Page, Stevenson and Kipling, 
 and a score more, these names being set 
 down almost at random. The pabulum 
 furnished us children of a larger growth 
 by Optic and Alger and Mayne Reid 
 has been superseded by more heavenly 
 food. And the older aristocracy of child 
 literature still makes its appeal in books 
 like Robinson Crusoe and Kingsley's Water 
 Babies^ to mention two that stand for 
 many. Inasmuch as the spiritually beau- 
 tiful, as we have said, is the most de- 
 sirable of all, books of this sort should 
 come first in favor — beginning with the 
 Bible. Not the didactic, goody-goody 
 stuff which made the old-time Sunday- 
 school library too often a place of tears 
 and penance for healthy-minded young 
 folk. The day is clean gone by for the 
 tales wherein the bad boy who goes a-fish- 
 ing on the Sabbath gets not fish, but a 
 
372 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 flogging, to be triumphed over most un- 
 Christianly by the good little boy who 
 didn't go — probably because he daren't. 
 No, I mean that which is lovely, inspira- 
 tional literature, where the artistic and the 
 ethical are recognized for the kinsmen 
 they are, linked by the subtlest, sweetest, 
 strongest of ties. And at the very head 
 and forefront of such-like books the Bible 
 must be placed. The Bible, in judicious 
 selections, not gulped down whole, is pre- 
 eminently a book for literary and ethical 
 stimulation. We hear much of the Bible 
 as literature nowadays, and Professor 
 Moulton's most suggestive volume is 
 symptomatic, summarizing well a changed 
 attitude, a truer philosophy. A new 
 interest in, a deeper love towards, the 
 Scriptures are thus born. Once concede 
 this use of the Book, and the question of 
 its function in the school is settled. It 
 should have its place there, along with 
 other great literature, as a quickener of 
 the sense of beauty and the sense of right. 
 To make it a theological text-book is 
 monstrous, and if its daily presence among 
 the pupils meant denominational teaching 
 or propagandism we would have none of 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 373 
 
 it. But regard the Bible as a composite, a 
 wonderful repository of history, prophecy, 
 song, story, drama, and naive people- 
 science, matchless in expression and sur- 
 charged with the ethic temper, and its 
 exclusion were suicidal. Better for many 
 of us had we been made in the school, yes, 
 and in the nursery, to commit to memory 
 long passages and chosen parts of the Old 
 and New Testaments — as did the young 
 John Ruskin, it will be remembered ; that 
 great man's testimony to the potent influ- 
 ence upon him of the Book being worth 
 repeating always : " Walter Scott and 
 Pope's Homer were reading of my own 
 selection, but my mother forced me, by 
 steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of 
 the Bible by heart ; as well as to read every 
 syllable through aloud, hard names and 
 all, from Genesis to Apocalypse, about 
 once a year ; and to that discipline — 
 patient, accurate, and resolute — I owe 
 not only a knowledge of the Book which 
 I find occasionally serviceable, but much 
 of my general power of taking pains and 
 the best part of my taste in literature. 
 From Walter Scott's novels I might easily, 
 as I grew older, have fallen to other 
 
374 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 people's novels, and Pope might perhaps 
 have led me to take Johnson's English, 
 or Gibbon's, as types of language; but, 
 once knowing the 3 2d of Deuteronomy, 
 the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corin- 
 thians, the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by 
 heart, and having always a way of think- 
 ing with myself what words meant, it was 
 not possible for me, even in the foolishest 
 times of youth, to write entirely superficial 
 or formal English." And again he declares 
 of this experience that he counts it " very 
 confidently the most precious and, on the 
 whole, the one essential part of all my 
 education." 
 
 This mention of the memorizing of 
 Scripture by one of the masters of pure 
 style leads on to the remark that in bring- 
 ing children into contact with the great 
 literature of the world the habit of com- 
 mitting to memory is most fruitful. The 
 storing of the mind with choice passages 
 will prove a godsend in after years — will 
 yield good, I incline to think, even if it 
 be done parrot-like at the time. The 
 pedagogic tendency now is in all branches 
 to teach independence of speech rather 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 375 
 
 than the mechanically memorized lesson. 
 In the literature of knowledge (science) 
 no doubt the danger lies in the latter ; 
 but in the literature of power, which we 
 are here considering, the memory is a 
 trusty and valued servant who guards us 
 from the loss of veritable treasure. How 
 many of us in mature life can testify to 
 the comfort and help and uplift that has 
 come from stray fragments of poem or 
 essay or oration learned years before, 
 perhaps in childhood ! Often, when we 
 are separated from books, listless, distrait, 
 sick, they have been evangels bringing 
 pure, sweet, and noble images and a 
 quickened spirit. 
 
 But now, lumping boys and girls to- 
 gether — which, though bad psychology, 
 seems, so far as the school goes, to be 
 necessary — and admitting the major 
 premise that great literature should be 
 given them and given them early, a few 
 more specific remarks may be made. 
 There is considerable choice, within the 
 category of great literature, of what is 
 wisest to use. Divers kinds of fish come 
 into this drag-net. I apprehend that in 
 the intellectual and spiritual gradation 
 
376 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 from youth to maturity the objective lit- 
 erature, the literature of action and char- 
 acter and picturesqueness, rather than that 
 which is subjective, will be best adapted 
 to the purpose. Hence fiction of the 
 Walter Scott and Stevenson kind will be 
 given preference over that of Thackeray 
 and George Eliot. In poetry, the epic, 
 the ballad, and the lyric of simple song 
 will prove better than the reflective piece 
 or the purely descriptive. History on 
 the personal, graphic side — treating it as 
 Carlyle conceived it to be, the story of 
 great men — is good for the little ones 
 and most affected by them. Dickens' 
 Child's History of England, whatever its 
 faults, has the shining merit of grasping 
 this fact. So, of course, biography will 
 attract more than the essay proper, for 
 example (and still more the essay im- 
 proper), that form being food for the 
 adult digestion. I should conclude that 
 a child who liked Charles Lamb's papers 
 or, to mention a latter-day author, Agnes 
 Repplier's, needed to be sent out into the 
 open, with orders to ride a wheel or play 
 golf or tennis. Certainly the preference 
 would seem alarmingly priggish, though 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 377 
 
 such children exist, it may be, as do three- 
 headed pigs and other abnormalities. 
 Speaking broadly, it is amazing how 
 children of the healthy, normal, matter-of- 
 fact sort like literature that is alive, whole- 
 some, having sentiment, not sentimen- 
 tality, and some narrative human interest. 
 As a rule, they relish it. I once experi- 
 mented with a boy who hated the very 
 word " literature," and whose soul was 
 completely absorbed in football and track 
 athletics. I read to him, in course, 
 Homer's Odyssey, in Palmer's fine prose 
 translation, a canto a night. The result 
 was he imitated Oliver Twist, calling for 
 more in case I flagged. And yet this was 
 a lad of the unliterary age of fifteen, who 
 could not abide the mere mention of 
 poetry. But naturally enough he fell in 
 love with the wanderings of that fine old 
 buccaneer Ulysses ; naturally enough he 
 liked to hear about the Cyclops and the 
 Sirens, and all the rest of it. The smell 
 of the sea was in it all, and the smack of 
 adventure and the magic of marvel. Be 
 assured that the reader did not damage 
 his case by telling the boy beforehand 
 that here was a master poem. That had 
 
378 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 been a stupid letting the cat out of the 
 bag. Get the story going, and all is well : 
 the world of children loves a story as the 
 grown-up world is said to love a lover. 
 
 Then if we come to discriminate between 
 prose and poetry, the former must be given 
 the preference with young folk in mind, 
 and the latter administered only in homoe- 
 opathic doses. Here again the sexes dif- 
 ferentiate : girls, as a class, care more for 
 poetry than boys, as indeed do women 
 more than men. Poetry, broadly speak- 
 ing, is more subjective and elusive than 
 prose, hence it is less adapted to the im- 
 mature comprehension. Yet verse on its 
 musical side, with its alliteration and rhyme, 
 its rhythm and picture-making, has often 
 a great fascination for children, as mothers 
 many will testify ; and an acquaintance with 
 this, the highest form of literature, should 
 be inculcated at a tender age, as likely to 
 be of paramount service in creating ideals 
 and developing the sense of beauty. The 
 slow gradations by which this may be 
 effected is a test of the nicest skill of the 
 educator. The road from the Mother 
 Goose jingles to the dramatic monologues 
 of a Browning is a long, but not necessarily 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 379 
 
 a weary one. Prof. William J. Rolfe, in 
 his recent excellent little work The Ele- 
 mentary Study of English, advocates the 
 use of poetry in the grammar-school grade. 
 " Let me suggest," he says, " that the 
 critical study of some masterpiece of litera- 
 ture, especially poetry, is one of the best 
 possible exercises for the teacher in this 
 department. It may or may not be some- 
 thing that one has to teach in school, — it 
 is well, in my opinion, that it should be 
 something above the range of one's daily 
 work, — but the manner of study is of 
 more importance than the matter." The 
 work will prove, he thinks, for the pupil 
 of this age, " at once a delightful recreation 
 and valuable self-culture." 
 
 Some principle in choosing out of the 
 whole corpus liter aricum the literature which 
 can be grasped and enjoyed by the young 
 is important, in order to avoid a false sen- 
 timentality, which too often plays about 
 this subject. I refer to that misconcep- 
 tion which sees the child not as it really is, 
 but as it appears through the illusion of 
 our mature sentiment. Perhaps the finest 
 expression in poetry of this view is found in 
 Wordsworth's peerless ode on the Intima- 
 
380 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 tions of Immortality in Early Childhood, 
 That this is a superlative piece of English 
 poetry we all know ; fewer, I fear, have 
 realized that its psychology is very du- 
 bious. If the poet had presented the child 
 as caught up in and by his affection, trans- 
 muted into something which had all the 
 beauty and innocence of youth with the 
 high thought that comes with years, he 
 had been acceptable. But to impute to 
 the child 'per se a kind of angelhood is es- 
 sentially untrue. Boys and girls do not 
 have those shadowy intimations, nor do 
 they come trailing garments of glory from 
 on high. These little ones' helplessness 
 and loveliness and trusting lack of guile 
 constitute the most winsome appeal on 
 earth to older folk. It is right and seemly 
 to overflow with feeling about children. 
 But Wordsworth goes further : he says, 
 practically, that the child is nearer high, 
 pure, and wondrous things than the man, 
 which contradicts all science and common- 
 sense. The brutal fact is that your nor- 
 mal child, sound of mind and limb, is, 
 in comparison with what he may hopefully 
 come to be, a healthy little animal ; more 
 selfish in a naive way; more absorbed in 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 381 
 
 practical and carnal matters, and not a bit 
 interested in supernal affairs. Our child 
 literature, therefore, must be chosen with 
 this truth — palatable or otherwise — in 
 mind ; if it is not so chosen, we shall get 
 in a fog. We must, on the contrary, work 
 gradually from the concrete towards the 
 abstract ideal, always seeing to it that the 
 lesson in the most objective bit of litera- 
 ture be wholesome and holy. The ethic 
 quality may be as strong, be it remem- 
 bered, in the straightforward story of 
 narration as in the pious preachment ; the 
 sermon may be there, though hidden 
 in the envelopment of art, — the reader 
 being all unwillingly influenced by what 
 George Eliot calls the " slow contagion of 
 good." I knew a teacher in a Sunday- 
 school who was looked at askance by some 
 of the members because, after the more 
 serious matters were successfully dis- 
 patched, he read to his class of urchins 
 Aldrich's little masterpiece, "The Story of 
 a Bad Boy. But I am sure it did them 
 good (the attendance showed it interested 
 them) ; and equally sure that the Sunday- 
 school library is impoverished ethically 
 
382 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 and otherwise which does not include that 
 particular volume. 
 
 The difficulty of discrimination in schools 
 in the matter of literature for boys and 
 girls was spoken of: all other discrimina- 
 tions — that between backward and for- 
 ward pupils, for example — are also dif- 
 ficult wherever children are taught and 
 studied en masse. This suggests the noble 
 function, the superlative importance, of 
 the home in purveying literature to the 
 little ones. Thus the child can get that 
 individual attention, that loving study, as 
 a detached personal problem, which, from 
 its very nature, is beyond the province of 
 the school. Those schools which are fa- 
 mous the world over for their fruitful meth- 
 ods — one thinks of Froebel and Pesta- 
 lozzi — have taken their cue from the 
 home. The kindergarten, in sooth, is an 
 adaptation of the playground and nursery. 
 No wonder it is being emphasized that 
 mothers are the first teachers; that is, 
 teachers not by rule, but from the nature 
 of their inherent relation to the child; 
 amateurs, not in the sense of ignorance, 
 but lovers of the task. What may not 
 parents in the environment of the home 
 
LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 383 
 
 accomplish for the cause of higher educa- 
 tion ! " With the mothers, and fathers too, 
 aroused to the fact that they are teachers,' ' 
 says Prof. James P. Munroe, in his stim- 
 ulating work on The Educational Ideal, 
 "and that the home is a school-house; 
 with the study which they must increas- 
 ingly give, under this new light, to that 
 complex organism, the child ; with the 
 psychological and psychical sciences resting 
 upon data which shall be thus collected 
 — the day for a rapid growth in educa- 
 tional methods is not far distant. . . . 
 Having, after centuries of wandering, 
 brought the child back to his proper 
 atmosphere, the home, having determined 
 who shall be responsible for his teaching 
 and what shall be the final aim of that 
 teaching, we have, indeed, put the educa- 
 tional question upon a sound and healthy 
 basis. We have at last learned how to 
 follow nature, and we are beginning to 
 understand that the best education, in- 
 deed the only right education, is a natural 
 one." 
 
 So, in this matter of literature for the 
 young, the influence of the home teaching 
 is enormous; all the school can do pales 
 
384 LITERARY LIKINGS 
 
 before it. Let the mother add to the 
 poet's rhyme the music of her soft voice 
 and beloved tone; let great fiction be read 
 to the breathless group of curly heads 
 about the fire; and the wonders of sci- 
 ence be unrolled, the thrilling scenes and 
 splendid personalities of history displayed. 
 Children thus inspired may be trusted to 
 become sensitive to literature long before 
 they know what the word means or have 
 ratiocinated at all upon their mental experi- 
 ence. It is comforting to reflect that a 
 mother, a parent, wishing in our day to 
 do this for the nearest and dearest, is 
 helped as never before: by enlightened 
 librarians and libraries of generous habits ; 
 by child literature from the best authors 
 of our time ; by plenty of good criticism 
 furnishing a lamp to the seeker's feet. 
 Children are lucky to be children nowa- 
 days, for the idea is pretty well dissemi- 
 nated that the choicest from all the gar- 
 nered riches of the great world of liter- 
 ature should be given them, that they may 
 early be possessed of thoughts and feelings 
 that are true and large, sweet and beautiful. 
 
 
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