i :* a:)^.- m ^i LIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY LIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ^i^^^3v2^^^^ € A -.; the late sixteenth century to the present furnishes the answer. I shall try to point out a few of the significant changes, the substantial gains. To bring many particulars under a common denominator, it may be said that the improve- ment in dramatic method since the Elizabethans has all been in the direction of greater truth in the portrayal of life; almost all the changes have been in the interests of vraisemblance. Little by little, outworn devices, antiquated conventions, originally useful but eventually lacking life, clumsy attempts to depict what was not demanded by the dramatic necessity, and features which were in reality only admitted because of a confusion of dramatic form with such other forms as romance 72 FORGES IN 'Miction or epic were all dropped under a clearer apprehen- sion of the essential purpose of drama, — the tell- ing of a story by characters in action and within definitely circumscribed material bounds. Shakspere himself was a pioneer in this reform; he ridded the stage of many of the imperfections which were clogging the development of English drama. He greatly reduced the role of the rhym- ing couplet in tragedy, thereby freeing the spirit of poetry from a narrow and unnatural conven- tion. He breathed the breath of life under the stark ribs of blank verse by breaking up the full line into the irregular dialogue which imitated the very quiver of human nature. A glance at the pre-Shaksperean tragedy with its absurdly unnat- ural regularity of verse movement will make this plain. He excised the rambling episodic matter which made those earlier plays a lumber room of loose unrelated material. He went far towards eliminating the chorus, the masque, and dumb- show features that, however attractive in them- selves, were as millstones checking the free play of drama. He broke up the acts of the play into scenes, thereby showing a sense of the drama as tableau, something consisting of successive stage pictures that must compose even as a picture *^^composes.'' He destroyed the tyranny of the classic writers which up to his coming fairly choked dramatic action and motive. By introduc- ing comedy into drama whose ground plan was TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 73 tragic, he produced an effect of reality never be- fore secured, — a change iconoclastic to a degree now difficult to appreciate. He began to denote ^^Dusiness" and to insert stage directions, his work in this respect being but tentative, a step in the right path. Students having in hand one of the many modern editions of Shakspere with their full equipment in the way of change of scene, stage direction, and business, and all that goes to the explication of the text, would do well to look at a fac-simile reproduction of the First Folio of 1623 in order to realize how much has been added by the editorial supervision of well-nigh three centuries. But the main fact is, that Shakspere's contributions to the advancement, indeed the founding of dramatic technique, have been many and remarkable. iN'evertheless, the English drama as he left it and as it was handled by the late and post-Eliza- bethans was full of defects and even absurdities. It was loosely constructed, for one important thing. There was a lack of unity which strikes the pres- ent-day student with astonishment when he ex- amines even a masterpiece by Shakspere and finds that it is easy to shift the order of the scenes to the improvement of the action, a closer-knit and more sequential effect being produced. The loose ar- rangement of the scenes in an Elizabethan play can be explained in two ways; in the first place, in many dramas, especially the chronicle history plays of which "Richard IIP' and ''Henry V" are ex- 74 FORCES IN FICTION cellent illustrations, the principal aim was to offer a series of more or less loosely related spectacles, each effective in itself ; the author cared less about an organic story. The second and chief reason lies in the physical conditions of the stage of that time, the very lack of scenery making scenes pos- sible. For when such a scenic change does not call for new scenery, there is no managerial objection to it; whereas, if every change means a consider- able financial outlay, the ambitious playwright will find himself at loggerheads with the practical man of the theatre. It is in such material facts that the multiplicity of scenes in many Eliza- bethan dramas — as high as ten or a dozen to an act in some instances — has its origin, a crude sense of art also helping to bring about such a re- sult. Pass from such plays to a late modern example, and you will find an Ibsen rarely allow- ing more than two scenes to an act ; while Bernard Shaw, who is an extremist in the simplification and perfecting of stage technique, regularly makes the scene co-extensive with the act. The later Elizabethan drama was also notable for its monstrosities of plot. Shakspere, though avoiding the worst of them, did not hesitate to make use of the conventions which sacrificed the sense of realities, as in his treatment of sex dis- guises so common from the time of an early piece like "Two Gentlemen of Verona." In a genuinely strong play like "The Merchant of Venice" the veri- similitude is greatly injured by the assumption TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 75 that Portia in her charming lawyer's robes really hides her identity; as a matter of fact, her per- sonality is no more cloaked than is that of a girl college student who as Commencement draws near dons her Oxford gown and so lends a piquant touch to the June campus. This example may serve to stand for numerous concessions on Shaks- pere's part to stage traditions antagonistic to the truthful interpretation of life in the theater. It should be remembered, too, that the custom of boy actors for the woman parts introduced further complications and concessions. Shakspere's worst lapse in this matter or in other departures from truth were as nothing compared with such a con- geries of wild and fantastic horrors as is to be met with in Webster's "Duchess of Malfi/' — a play, which contains, notwithstanding, poetry as mag- nificent as can be found in the whole range of Elizabethan drama. The tendency of the post- Elizabethans in this matter of realism of incident and character and the skillful adjustment of action to end, was swiftly downhill. But with the drama of the Eestoration came an improvement. There was a loss of poetry, of the imaginative appeal to the abiding interests and passions. But in technique, and given their object, the plays of Congreve and his mates cer- tainly show an advance, — a dialogue notably bet- ter in lifelikeness and a far abler handling of the story, which often is so clearly articulated that effect flows from cause without hitch or violation 76 FORCES IN FICTION of truth. To explain the brilliant reflection of social manners seen in the best known dramas of Goldsmith and Sheridan, one must read the earlier plays of Congreve, Farquhar, Van Brugh and Wycherly. By the time the Eestoration period is reached, we have dispensed with much extraneous matter common with the Elizabethans : the inter- polated dumb show, the purely undramatic masque, the common use of long descriptive passages which, however beautiful, clogged action and the display of character; the clumsy introduction of the supernatural, as in the closing act of "Cymbe- line." Obviously, a part of this change is due to the very different nature of the later drama, which is a comedy of manners where before was romantic tragedy. We have left the world which labors and loves in the noble sense for the little corrupt world of town intrigue and pleasure. But beyond doubt a main reason is the increased sense of what the dramatic requirements are. Dryden's criticism of the stage and stage literature gives valuable tes- timony to this keener appreciation in his day of the methods of play-writing that is intended for stage representation. Furthermore, it were absurd to suppose that with the eighteenth century — including such de- lightful and familiar productions as "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The School for Scandals—the last word in the evolution of dramatic method was spoken. The aim in those dramas was the exposi- tion of social types and customs, — a satiric inten- TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA *t1 tion; hence brilliant dialogue and clearcut por- traiture within definitely prescribed limits. But the story invented to carry these characteristics is, compared with the ingenious inventions of later playwrights and the vital imaginings of a few, thin, slight and not seldom unconvincing enough. An impression of talk at the expense of action is conveyed, overcome partially, at least, in our day by casting the piece with such capable actors that their superb art makes us forget defects of com- position. Yet the Bancrofts in London, con- fronted by these facts, did not hesitate to edit '^The School for Scandal." In witnessing the fa- mous screen scene in that drama, it is impossible not to feel the conventionality and flimsiness of the situation, if one will but fix the mind on the play rather than upon the acting itself. All this comes out clearly in a performance of the play by ama- teurs; there is little in the piece to carry it of itself. It needs resourceful players; whereas, Pinero's "Sweet Lavender," or Grundy's "A Pair of Spectacles" are comedies which give pleasure if enacted by high school students. Indifferent or bad acting cannot kill them. The complete disappearance of the chorus, an- other classic tradition often used by Shakspere, is a mark of modern work that has its significance. It means that for strict dramatic purposes, com- ment, no matter if it be the beautiful Ijrric com- ment of the Attic drama, is an excrescence. The theory of dramatic art which admits of choragic 78 FORCES IN FICTION interpolation is entirely contrary to present-day ideas. If the aim be poetic justice in the interpre- tation of life, this custom may still be defended; the Japanese use it now in their drama. But with the stern insistence on action as the kernel of drama, it had to go, to the palpable advantage of dramatic effect. But the crowds in the background of melodramas and historical tragedies and some- times of romantic comedies, clusters of people who shout in unison or become vocal through a spokes- man, are plainly a survival of the Greek chorus. It is instructive, therefore, to notice how they are got rid of in the best constructed current drama. Of course in historical plays and all dramas of strong scenic possibilities the supernumerary is more likely to appear and has a sort of justifica- tion as picturesque accessory. But on the whole the most masterly drama of to-day handles this attenuated chorus gingerly if at all. Its free use even in the spectacular play-work of a Sardou now makes an impression of old-fashionedness. The cutting out of episodic material is an im- portant element in this bettering of technique. The so-called induction of the Elizabethans is ill tolerated at present ; only as the prologue in plays sensationally incident-full. The Christopher Sly episode in Shakspere's "Taming of the Shrew*^ is a case in point. In most modem representa- tions it is omitted; in that, for example, made familiar to Americans by the Daly company. In the staging of the piece by Miss Ada Kehan this TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 79 induction was restored, no doubt to the amuse- ment of the audiences which enjoyed the unctuous humor of the scene, but just as truly to the detri- ment of the main action ; for the purpose of a first act, — to begin the story, — is obscured when the mind is thus started on a wrong scent, however attractive the game. A sense of irritation is pro- duced on the realization that here is a play within a play without Hamlet's excuse. Spencer's law of. the economy of attention would explain the wrong to dramatic construction here done. The general adjustment of costume to imper- sonation during the development of the drama was but an outward and visible sign of that gen- eral approximation to life itself on the stage al- ready explained. With the Elizabethans, veri- similitude of dress, like verisimilitude of scenery, was little sought. Money was spent freely at times, especially on court masques and revels. More money was paid for a velvet cloak than for the copyright of a play. But the sense of his- torical accuracy or the desire to copy social exter- nals hardly existed. Wild absurdities of costume are to be noted in all stages of the English drama from the morality plays to the modern period ; so late as the eighteenth century the dresses of the ladies in a classical play were wholly of the age of powder and patches. There was likewise small demand at first for that truth of dialogue which means that each person of the play shall properly pronounce words suitable to his or her station, so FORCES IN FICTION dialectic variations from normal English being given with exquisite exactitude and great skill by the players. The rendering of the rustic speech of New England in a play like Heme's ^'^Shore Acres/' of that of the South in Mr. Thomas's ''Ala- bama" or of provincial England in ''Tess" is so far superior to the clumsy phonetics of the early drama as to take on the importance of a new art. Compare with the best examples of this care in the reproduction of speech on the stage, the at- tempt in Shakspere's "Henry Y" to give the dia- lects of the Welsh, Irish and Scotch soldiers, and a realization of the difference, the immense progress, will be gained. Truth of scene has gone hand in hand with truer costume and speech in the modern play. The illusion wrought by placing the dramatis personae in a congruous environment, is a very great aid in impressing the auditor with a sense of life. The objections so often urged against the elaborateness of modern scenery are all aimed at the abuse of a good thing, — ^the overwhelming of action by ornament. To argue, as some critics do, that there might have been more appeal to the imagination — and hence as a result more appre- ciation of dramatic poetry, — ^in the bare acces- sories of the Elizabethan stage, seems to be a scholar's fad rather than a reasonable objection to such stage-setting as shall make for illusion. The consideration of a play as, among other things, a pictorial appeal, has its psychological side. In a TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 81 recent paper, Mr. Thomas, a well known native playwright, dilated upon the modern dramatist's recognition of the necessity of carefully studied color schemes in the successive scenes of a play, relative to the nature of the drama itself : making the point that a play might be made or marred ac- cording as the dramatist kept this requirement in mind. Many such a finesse is given due weight in latter day dramatic technique. One of the most persistent of stage conventions is the "aside ;" its effect is always to destroy illu- sion, and in plays of our d^y whenever it is used the auditor simply concedes to the playwright a departure from realism for the sake of conven- ience. To speak lines nominally sotto voce in such tones as shall be heard from every seat of a large I theater and are yet ex hypothesi not overheard by I sundry persons on the stage, is an absurdity only tolerated for its supposed helpfulness in explain- ing the situation or explicating the plot. In the I best modern dramas the "aside" is coming to be used more and more charily; by Ibsen, for in- stance, in his social satires. In an occasional play —this is true of William Gillette's "Held By The Enemy," "Secret Service," and "Sherlock Holmes" — this time-honored device is entirely dispensed with. The additional demand on the author's ingenuity is apparent, but the gain in truthful- ness and so in strength of impression, well repays the effort. It is safe to say that modern technique will fast eliminate the "aside." 82 FORCES IN FICTION Much the same evolution may be traced in the matter of the soliloquy. But here a complete abandonment of a stage trick which is inimical to lifelikeness, is harder and slower, for there is a certain psychologic justification for it, not found at all in the case of the "aside." People think out their situations when alone, and to give those thoughts vocal utterance is a pardonable objectifying of a common subjective experience. Moreover, people actually do soliloquize when under mental or emotional strain; many of us know this from our own habit. Still, clever play- wrights to-day are reducing the role of the solil- oquy in a marked way, and now and then its total disappearance in a play is to be chronicled. Here again Mr. Gillette is in the van, his dramas al- ready mentioned being constructed without a con- cession to a convention which in Shakspere is in- wrought with the very texture of the dramaturgic effect. The reduction in the number of the persons of the play and the simplification of the act divisions are still other tendencies of modern technique. Glance at a typical Ibsen drama and see how pre- vailingly the piece is cast for six or eight parts. In "Ghosts" the number is but five ; which is also true of English playwrights like Pinero. Com- pare this restriction with the Elizabethan habit. The contrast is startling. The exceptions to this rule are found in historical dramas like Eostand^s 'Ti'Aiglon" with its fifty and more persons; or TECHNIQUE IN THE DRAMA 83 Sardou's "Eobespierre/' with hardly a less number. In these there is really a reversal to older methods, — a tendency in the last named plays ex- tending to the use of six acts. The evolution in the habit of division into acts has been steadily towards a reduction of the number. With the Greeks the play fell into episodes rather than into acts in the modern sense. Nowadays, while the old distribution into five acts allowing for the in- troduction, growth, height, fall and catastrophe is still found in heavy tragedy, comedy has shrunk to a customary three acts, and tragedy that deals with contemporary persons and scenes either to three or four, with a preference in romantic plays with heavily dramatic situations for four. Nor is this change arbitrary. It indicates a feeling for simplification which recognizes the tripartite life in a properly built play, it being a creature hav- ing a beginning, middle, and end, the additional act being in reality a subdivision of the second act. Since this scheme of construction is fundamental, it seems likely that technique will come to settle on three acts as the normal arrangement, a departure therefrom being due to special needs or restric- tions — as in the case of the historical play which, like the historical novel, has a method all its own. Even from this rapid coup d'oeil at the devel- opment of dramatic technique it can be under- stood that we have here a healthy growth which has now reached a high degree of perfected art. To turn the back on present-day play-making as 84 FORCES IN FICTION , if it had no interest, the dramatic glories of the past being alone worth while^, is a foolish phase of conservatism. It arises in part from the confusion of two separate things, drama and literature, which, however happy in their marriage, are inde- pendent organisms. It is one of the encouraging signs of current drama that along with an im- mense improvement in technique, is now to be noted such cultivation of the literary aspects of the play, as is giving the stage^dramas enjoyable not only in actual presentation but for private reading. If we may never again expect the creative genius of a Shakspere, surely we have some compensation in the truthful portrayal of human life on the stage and in the abler manipu- lation of stage artifice to bring about that very desirable result. THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FOEM It is odd that while the essay as a distinctive form in modern literature is so well cherished and enjoyable, it has received so little of expert atten- tion. Books upon the drama, upon poetry in its many phases, upon the novel even — a thing com- paratively of but yesterday— T-are as leaves on Vallombrosa for number; but books on the essay — where are they? It is high time the natural history of the essay was written, for_here is a fascin ating literary de velopm ent which has had a vigorous, distinguished, life of more than three hundred years in English and which counts among its cultivators some of the abiding names^ in our native literature. Here is a form, too, in- teresting because of its int er-filia tions with such other forms as fiction which is connected with it by the bridge of the character-sketch; drama, whose dialogue the essay not seldom uses; and such later practical offshoots as the newspaper editorial and the book review. This neglect of the essay is not altogether in- explicable. Scholars have been shy of it, I fancy, in part at least, because on the side of form (the natural and proper side to consider in studying the historical evolution of a literary genre) it has been thus fluent and expansive: a somewhat sub- 85 86 FORGES IN FICTION tie, elusive thing. We can say, obviously, that an essay is a prose composition, but can we be more expiicTFEEan this fatheiTgross mark of identifica- tion? The answer is not so easy. Moreover, the question has become further confused by a change in the use and meaning of the word within a century. A cursory glance at the history of the English essay will make this plain. Lord Bacon was, by his own statement, fond of that passed master of the essay in French, Mon- taigne. It is small wonder then that, when at the endo f the sixteenth cen fair.YJie-j).ut a na.me-tQ his '^dispersed meditations," _he^ called them essays, after the Frenchinan, using the word for the first time in our tongue. Not the name only but the thing was new. The form was slight, the ex- pression pregnant and epigrammatic; there was no attempt at completeness. ThQ, aim ..ojihis early prince of _essay.is±s„.w.as. to ^ -suggestive rather than exhaustive — the latter a term too often S3rnonymous with exhausting. Bacon's essays imply_expanded note-book jottings ; indeed, he so regarded them. In the matter of style, one has but to read contemporaries like Sidney, Lyly and Hooker, to see to what an extent Lord Bacon modernized the cumbersome, though often cloud- ily splendid, Elizabethan manner. He clarified and simplified the prevailing diction, using shorter words and_cri&per_ sentences with the re- sult of closer knit, more sententious effect. In a word, ~S^tyIeTecame more idiomatic, and the re- THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 87 lation of author and reader more intimate in the hands of this Elizabethan essay-maker. The point is full of significance for the history of this al- luring form; its development ever since has been from this initiative. SHght^ca^al^_^rambling, confidential in tone, the manner much, the lEEerae unimportant in itself, a mood to be vented rather than a thought to^add to the sum of human knowledge'l^iE eTrankj^evel ation of a personality — suchTiave been and are the head marks of the essay down to the present day. This fact is some- what obscured by our careless use of the word at present to denote the formal paper, the treatise: the current definition of the essay admits this ex- tension, and of course we bandy the word about in such meaning. But it is well to remember that the central idea of this form is what removes it forever from the treatise, from any piece of .writ- ing that is formal, impersonal and communicative of information. uLittle_was done for the develop- ment of the essay, after Bacon, during the seven- teenth century. But. with Addison, Steele and the Spectator in the early eighteenth, the idea is re- inforced and some of the essential features of this form'Frought the more clearly out. The social, chatty quality of the true essayist is emphasized; the writer ent^r^lnto mpre confidential relations with Jiis reader Jhan ever he did with the stately Verulam; and the style approaches more nearly to the careless, easy elegance of the talk of good, but not stiff society. The Spectator papers un- 88 FORCES IN FICTION questionably did more to shape the mold of essay writing in JEnglish than any other influence ; at the same time, to speak as if Mr. Bickerstaff originated the form (as some critics do), is to overlook its origin with Bacon. The essay idea — this colloquial, dramatic, esoteric, altogether charming sort of screed, was cultivated quite steadily through the eighteenth century. It be- came, as a rule, more ponderous in the hands of Johnson and was in danger of taking on a didac- tic, hortatory tone foreign to its nature ; yet occa- sionally in the ^^Eambler" papers, Johnson takes on a lightness of touch and tone that is surpris- ing and suggests that we have perhaps regarded the dictator as too exclusively a wielder of ses- quipedalian words. That this God of the Coffee House had a clear and correct idea of the essay is shown by his own description of it: "A loose sally of the mind," he says, "an irregular, indi- gested piece, not a regular and orderly perform- ance." Goldsmith, a light-horse soldier in contrast with Johnson, full panoplied and armed cap-a-pie, broadened the essay for literary and social discus- sion, although Grub Street necessity led him at times to become encyclopedic; and he was never happier than when, as in "The Ee very at the Boar's Head" he played upon some whimsical theme, pizzicato, surcharging it with his genial person- ality. Minor writers, too, in the late eighteenth century had a hand in the development; none THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 89 more so, to my mind, than the letter and fiction makers, Chesterfield and Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Fanny Burney — these and that inimitable fuss and chronicler, Boswell. If one would know how society talked in the second half of that Tea Cup century, one must read — ^not the dialogue of the novelists where the art is too new to have caught quite the accent of life, but these off-hand epistles dashed off without a thought of print — to print were half way vulgar then — and hence possessing all the freshness and naturalness of life itself, — ^the ideal essay note. We may be thankful that as yet the habit of pub- lishing everything, from one's thrills to one's table tastes, had not gained popularity, — those ladies and gentlemen could afford to be charmingly un- reserved in their private correspondence. To-day in the very act of penning a note, intrudes the horrid thought that it may be incorporated as an integral part of one's "works." The Letter, as a literary form, offers an inter- esting line of side inquiry in connection with the essay; it has influenced that form beyond doubt, is in a sense contributory to it. In the same way dialogue — a modern instance like Landor comes to mind — ^has had its share in shaping so protean a form. But it was reserved for the nineteenth century to contribute in the person of Charles Lamb the most brilliant exemplar of the essay, prince of this special literary mood; not primarily a 90 FORCES IN FICTION thinker, a knowledge-bringer, a critic, but just a unique personality expressing his ego in his own fascinating way, making the past pay rich toll, yet always himself; and finding the essay accom- modative of his whimsical vagaries, his delicious inconsistencies, his deep-toned, lovable nature. And that incomparable manner of his! ^Tis at once richly complex and tremulously simple; an instrument of wide range from out whose keys a soul vibrant to the full meaning of humanity might call spirits of earth and heaven in exquisite evocations and cadences at times almost too pierc- ing sweet. Turn to the Elia papers and see how perfectly this magic of Lamb's illustrates and supports the qualities of mood and form I am naming as typical of the essay as an historic growth. The themes, how desultory, audacious, trivial, even grotesque. The only possible justi- fication for a dissertation on roast pig is the paper itself. Note, too, how_brief some of the choicest essays are; half a dozen small pages, even less; and with whajt-^efiioing. carelessness they vary, stretching themselves at will to "four times their normal length. Study the construction of any famous essay to see if it can be called close-knit, organic, and you shall find a lovely disregard of any such intention. The immortal Mrs. Battle on whist gives a capital example. If you turn to the end of that inimitable deliverance, you will find it to contain one of the most charming digres- sions in all literature. Lamb leaves that deli- THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 91 cious old gentlewoman for a moment to speak of Cousin Bridget, Bridget Elia, the tragic sister Mary of his house, and playfully, tenderly, pictur- ing their game at cards, forgets all else and never returns to Mrs. Battle. But who cares? Is not lack of organic connection (to call it by so harsh a name) more than justified by that homely- heartful picture of Charles and Mary Lamb, bent over their ^^mere shade of play/^ — a game not for shillings but for fun — ^nay, for love. ^^Bridget and I should be ever playing,'^ says he, and the reader is charmed and stirred clean out of all thought of Mrs. Battle. It is ever so with your essayist to the manner born! to wander and digress is with him a natural right. He is never happier than when he is playing mad pranks with logic, respectability and the mother tongue. Yet should his temperament be sensitive, his nature I broad, deep and noble. The querulous-gentle Elia was surely of this race. To turn from Lamb to any contemporary is an effect of anticlimax. None other was like to him for quality. Yet Hazlitt and Hunt were his helpers, doing good work in extending the gamut of this esoteric mood in literature. DeQuincy, too, though losing the essay touch again and again be- cause of didacticism and a sort of formal, stately eloquence, wrote papers in the true tradition of the essayist. Passages in the ^^Opium Eater" are of this peculiar tone and that great writer's in- tehse subjectivity is always in his favor — since Ik 92 FORCES IN FICTION the genuine essay-maker must be frankly an egoist. Hunt is at times so charming, so light of touchy so atmospheric in quality that he deserves to be set high among essayists of the early century. A man who could produce such delicately graceful vignette work as his sketches of the Old Lady and the Old Gentleman, was a true commensal of Lamb. In such bits of writing the mood and manner are everything, the theme is naught; the man back of the theme is as important in the pro- duction of the essay as is the man back of the gun in warfare. Herein lies Hunt's chief claim on our grateful remembrance — ^here, and in cer- tain of his verses, rather than in the more elab- orate papers to be found in such a volume as "Fancy and Imagination.'' But already we must begin to recognize in writers like Hunt, Hazlitt and DeQuincy, and still more in latter men, a tendency distinctly modern and on the whole antagonistic to the pe- culiar virtues of the esoteric essay, the causerie of literature. It is moving fast toward the objec- tive, rounded out, formally arranged treatise. It becomes argumentative, critical, acquisitive, logical, expository, laden with thought. Hence when we reach masters like Euskin, Carlyle, Arnold, we see what is natural to them as essay- ists in one sense deflected into other (and no doubt quite as welcome) forms; one and all, they have messages, and missions. Now your bona fide essayist has nothing of the kind ; he would simply THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 93 button-hole you for a half hour while he talks garrulously, without a thought of purpose, about the world — and himself — especially the latter. Splendid blooms grow from out the soil which gives us our Ruskins and Carlyles; but when we are considering this sensitive plant of the literary garden, the essay, it were well to agree that it is another thing, and to save for its designation the word essay. Nor is this to deny essay touches, essay moments, essay qualities to Ruskin or Carlyle; it is only to make the point that their strenuous aim and habitual manner, so far as they went, were against the production of a very dif- ferent kind of literature. Earlier^ American literature has at least sup- plied one real essayist to, th^ general body of Eng- lish literature, — the genial Irving, who was nurtured on the best eighteenth century models and carried on the tradition of the Spectator and Goldsmith in papers which have just the desired tone of genteel talk, the air of good society. There are hints in Benjamin Franklin that had politics not engulfed him, as they afterward did Lowell, he might have shown himself to the essay born. Irving is sometimes spoken of as a fictionist, but all his stories have the essay mood and manner; and he had the good sense practically never to abandon that gentle genre. His work always possesses the essay touch both in description and in the hitting off of character, thus offering an illustration of the fact that the essay, by way of 94 FORCES IN FICTION the character sketch, debouches -apon the broad and beaten highway of the novel, — the main road of onr modern literature. There are plenty of Irv- ing's papers which it is rather puzzling to name as essay or fiction; ",The Fat Gentleman," for ex- ample. A later and very true American essayist, Dr. Holmes, furnishes the same puzzle in the Autocrat series: they have dialogue, dramatic characterization, even some slight story interest. Why not fiction then? Because the trail of the genuine essayist is everywhere ; the characters, the dramatic setting, are but devices for the freer ex- pression of Dr. Holmes's own delightful person- ality, which, as Mr. Howells testifies. Holmes liked to objectify. It is our intimate relation with him that we care about in converse with the essayist born; we sit down to enjoy his views. The fic- tionist's purpose, contrariwise, is to show life in a representative section of it and with dramatic in- terplay of personalities moving to a certain crescendo of interest called the climax. And so Dr. Holmes remains one of our most distinctive and acceptable essayists of the social sort — ^possessing, I mean, that gift, perhaps best seen with the French, of making vivid one's sense of one's relation to other men and women in the social organism. It is the triumph of this kind of essay to be at once individualistic and social; without eccentricity, on the one hand, or vulgarity, on the other. Vulgarity, by the way, is a quality impossible to the heaven-called essayist; it can be THE ESSAY AS MOOD A77D FORM 95 better tolerated in poetry even. For the intimacy between the essayist and his reader (I say reader rather than audience with a feeling that the re- lation is a sort of solitude a deux) is greater than in the case of any other form of literary expres- sion ; hence, when one enters, as it werC;, the inner rooms of a friend's honse, any hint of the home is the more quickly detected, the more snrely in- sufferable. The voice of a natural essayist like Thoreau is somewhat muffled by being forced now and then into the public pulpit manner. Yet an essay- writer by instinct he certainly is ; particularly in his journal, but often in the more formal chroniclings of his unique contact with nature. In Emerson, too, we encounter a writer with a vo- cation for the essay, but having other fish to fry, — doubtless a loftier aim but a different. No man, English or American, has a literary manner which makes the essay an inspired chat more than the Concord sage-singer ; and the inspired chat comes close to being the beau ideal of your true-blue essayist. With less strenuousness of purpose and just a bit more of human frailty — or at least sympathy with the frail, — ^here were indeed a prince in this kind ! How much of the allurement of the essay style did Lowell keep, however scholarlike his quest, in papers literary, historical, even philological! In a veritable essay-subject like ^^On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," he displays himself L 96 F0RCE8 IN FICTION as of the right line of descent from Montaigne; there is in him then all that unforced, winsome, intimate, yet ever restrained revelation of self which is the essayist's model, and despair. In the love letters of the Brownings may be found some strictures by both Eobert and Elizabeth upon an early book of this great American's which must pain the admirer of the Brownings as well as of Lowell. It displays a curious insensitiveness to just this power of the Cambridge man which made him of so much more value to the world than if he had been scholar and nothing more. One can hardly rise from anything like a complete examination of Lowell's prose without the regret that his fate did not lead him to cultivate more assiduously and single-eyed, this rare and precious gift for essay — a gift shared with very few fellow Americans. A glance among later "Victorian prose writers must convince the thoughtful that the essay in our special sense is gradually written less ; that as information comes in at the door, the happy giv- ing-forth of personality flies out at the window. It is in shy men like Alexander Smith or Eichard Jefferies that we come on what we are looking for, in such as they, rather than the more noisily famed. Plenty of charming prosists in these lat- ter days have been deflected by utility or emolu- ment away from the essay; into criticism, like Lang and Gosse and Dobson and Pater; into preaching and play-making, like Bernard Shaw; THE ESSAY AS MOOD AND FORM 97 into journalism like Barry Pain and Quiller- Couch; into a sort of forced union of poetry and fiction, as with Richard LeGallienne. All of these, too, and others still have been touched by fiction for better or worse. The younger Americans with potential essay ability are also for the most part swallowed up in more practical, '^useful" ways of composition. Her old-fashioned devotion to the elder idea of the essay makes a writer like Miss Eepplier stand out with a good deal of distinction, so few of her generation are willing or able to do likewise. There is no magazine in America to-day, with the honorable exception of "The Atlantic," which de- sires from contributors essays that look back to the finer tradition. Mr. Howells has reached a position of such authority in American letters that what he produces in the essay manner is wel- come — ^not because it is essay, but because it is he. His undeniable gift for the form is therefore all the better; often he strikes a gait happily remind- ful of what the essay in its traditions really is; the delightfully frank egoism of his manner covering genuine simplicity and modesty of na- ture. Since "Venetian Days" he has never ceased to be an essayist. The twin dangers with the younger essayists of both the United States and England are di- dacticism and preciosity. The former I believe most prevalent in this country ; and it is of course the death blow of the true essay. The danger of 98 FORCES IN FICTION being too precious may be overcome with years: Max Beerbohm, for example, began by thinking and talking of himself, not for the reader's sake, but for self-love's sake. But of late he seems better to comprehend the essayist's proper sub- jectivity. We should not despair of essayists : no type of writer is rarer; the planets must conspire to make him ; he must not be overwhelmed by life and drawn into other modes of expression. Our generation has been lucky to possess one English essayist who has maintained and handed on the great tradition. I mean Stevenson. Al- though, in view of the extent and vogue of his novels and tales, Stevenson's essay work may seem almost an aside, it really is most significant. He is in the line of Charles Lamb. Where a man like Pater writes with elegance and suggestion after the manner of the suave and thoroughly equipped critic, Stevenson does a vastly higher thing; he talks ruddily, with infinite grace, humor, pathos and happiness, about the largest of all themes, — ^human nature. From '^Ordered South" to "Pulvis et Umbra," through many a gay mood of smile and sunshine to the very deeps of life's weltering sea, Stevenson runs the gamut of fancy and emotion, the fantasticality of his themes being in itself the sign manual of a true essayist. In the Letters no man using English speech has chatted more unreservedly, and with more es- sential charm ; it is the undress of literature that always instinctively stops this side of etiquette. THE E88AY AS MOOD AND FORM 99 of decency. The Stevenson epistles drive ns on a still-hunt outside of the mother-tongue for their equal, with little prospect of quarry save within French borders. The essay is thus a literary creature to the mak- ing of which go mood and form — and the former would seem by far the paramount thing. Great and special gifts does it demand. ^Tis an Ariel among literary kinds, shy, airy, tricksy, elusive, vanishing in the garish light that beats down upon the arena where the big prizes of fiction are com- peted for amidst noise, confusion and eclat. But ever in its own slight, winsome way does it compel attention and gain hearts for its very own. 'Tis an aristocrat of letters; nowhere is it so hard to hide obvious antecedents. Many try, but few triumph in it. Therefore, when a real essayist arrives, let him be received with due acclaim and thanks special, since through him is handed on so ancient and honorable a form. THE MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE * In the childhood of nations the need for litera- ture was the need for knowledge. Long before literature received its name or was associated with the printed page, imaginative utterance in epic, lyric, play or Saga had its utilitarian value, be- cause through such forms history was handed down and popular wisdom embalmed. The minstrel chanted of battle almost before the warriors were breathed, their sinews relaxed; un- written law, which is traditional custom, was framed in gnomic rhymes for the better remem- bering of the people; early ballads spread the amatory news of the countryside ; later broadsides bruited the burning topics of the day in towns. Even the Philistine could appreciate literature which conserved these practical aims. Few men deny the necessity of information: if so-called poetry can convey it, they are willing to tolerate colorful speech and the lure of rhythmic move- ment, however insensitive they may be to such charm. Moreover, it is only fair to the way-faring man, now or in the dawn of time, to represent him as not quite indifferent to picture-making and music in language. Humanity in mass en- * An address for the Commencement Exercises at the Rush Medical College in Chicago, June 21st. 1901 100 MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 101 joys a figure (though not recognizing and naming it after the manner of the rhetorics) ; and stands at gaze before a singer, even if the accompaniment be on a barrel-organ. It may well be believed that in the elder days when literature was thus a vehicle for the preservation and transmission of knowledge, many folk liked literature for its own sake. But letters (as we now call them) certainly had a solider standing on change aforetime be- cause of this practical use, this close kinship with information. With the development of society, however, has come a change. As civilization became articulate ^^ and complex, literature slowly, surely differenti- ated itself from the practical and utilitarian : and knowledge — science, to give it a familiar and restrictive name — stood forth clearly over against the imaginative expression of life, whether in art or letters. And when this happened, the Philistine no longer needed literature, nor liked it. He had an instinctive feeling that it was sham, make-believe, a lying about life or a prettifying of life for the amusement of the idle rich. This view is of course of the Boeotian variety of thought; yet common enough of old, nor alto- gether departed this world even now. But as men waxed in civilization, in culture, they came gradu- ally to see that literature in any worthy sense was something higher ; that it could even be of better use than for the transmission of information or the killing of time; that it embraced within its 102 FORCES IN FICTION spacious domain all such records and accounts of human beings and their actions as should give us a sense of the power, beauty, grandeur and terror of life so that its true significance might be grasped. Literature in the enlightened modern view is an interpretation of life both as fact and as symbol ; not only in terms of number and space and time-sequence, but in terms of heart and soul as well — ^in terms of living. If this be true, we need not hold back from de- claring that literature is one of the world's great mouthpieces for the expression of ideals. To say this is not to ignore the pleasure-giving province of letters; the pleasure being, nevertheless, a means to an end rather than the end itself; just as Emerson shows how love between the young man and maiden, that divine prologue to the human drama which seems the play itself, is in reality but a step to lead those dear young creatures on to a final comprehension of the spiritual love in the universe — or, as the theo- logian would put it, to a knowledge of God. There is nothing, I say, in this conception of liter- ature hostile to the idea of amusement, pleasure, that inheres in it. Indeed that is literature's way of doing good; and the degree of joy that is got out of a book is a measure of its fruitfulness for us. Too often the province of instruction and the province of pleasure in literature are con- trasted as if they were antithetical, which is the veriest nonsense. Instruction in the noblest sense MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 103 can come only where there is antecedent pleasure. Witness the school-child beginning to stir within and to grow, simply because he or she suddenly, unexpectedly, finds a lesson interesting — ^because it seems in some way related to life as the boy or girl knows life ; or as it has been warmed by the magnetism of a real teacher — ^not a text-book with arms and legs. Literature and religion, along with the arts, are the chief sources for the supplying of ideals. And whereas religion has an immense advantage in authority and gravity of aim, it is hardly too much to say for literature that in its secularity as well as in its plastic power to embrace the human case in all conceivable varieties, there lies a certain leverage ; while in the fact that literature teaches not didactically but by the winsome indirection of art, there is an obvious added strength, — ^the soul of mankind being caught unawares, as it were, through sensitiveness to beauty, by the spirit of good which is in literature — and in life. Matthew Arnold, you will remember, went so far as to assert his belief that all that should be re- tained of the religion of the future would be its essential poetry, the husks of form, the shards of dogma, being dropped behind. In other words, he thought that literature would swallow up religion. Without acting upon so radical a prophecy, surely we may feel that great literature in its enlighten- ment and uplift is always a handmaid of true re- ligion, trying to do much the same for man in a 104 FORCES IN FICTION somewhat different way; approaching the one Temple by another avenue, the avenue of Beauty instead of by the avenue of the Good, both meet- ing in the avenue of the True, which runs straight on and into the Holy of Holies — for the Temple is one. Every age, then, needs its ideals, since they are magnets pointing the polar paths of conduct, of righteousness ; touchstones of character ; lamps to the feet of those who would walk upon the moun- tains. And literature, defined with any adequacy, can do a vast deal to create and hand on these ideals. In this sense, mankind's need for litera- ture is permanent. Perhaps some one thinks I do not allow suffi- ciently for the lower grades of what is called literature. We cannot always be on the heights. Moreover, *'Not always the air that is rarest Is fairest. And we long in the valley to follow Apollo," complains the poet. There is neutral ground where books furnish us pleasure or pastime but fail of the great things here claimed for them. Granted. There are foot-hills and intermediate slopes as well as shining peaks; in fact, the humbler altitudes are the condition of having mountains at all. Yet, when we say mountains, we mean, rightly enough, the aerial summits, the aeries of eagles, topped by virginal snows. MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 105 seeming inaccessible to common mortals. And likewise, when we speak of literature and would discover its true physiognomy, we very properly emphasize the lofty creations which are to be seen from afar and lift themselves nearest to God. But our day, it seems to me, has a special need for the inspiration from literature — from great essay, fiction, drama and poetry — and for particu- lar reasons. Ours is a complex and cosmopolitan time ; hence, literature can do not one but a num- ber of services for it, corresponding to the symptomatic phases of the age. The present era is called carelessly this or that: material, on the hunt for Yankee inventions; commercial, on the hunt for the dollar; scientific, on the hunt for the fact; spiritual, on the hunt for psychic phenomena and for strange new gods; agnostic, rejoicing in the cry, "There is no God and August Compte is His Prophet;^' decadent, out-heroding Herod in obscene rites; humanitarian, seeking to play the part of the good Samaritan as never be- fore. The truth is we are none of these exclu- sively, but all of them, and more too. It takes a wide vision to cover such a time as this; it is a narrow, anemic view which interprets 'the Zeitgeist as if it were a one-theory movement. Let us have a look at a few of these streams of tendency, to see how they offer literature her op- portunity. We are scientific, I say. We study objective phenomena as they have never been studied before. 106 FORCES IN FICTION How august the revealments of the nineteenth century in this vast field of research ! To read a book like Wallace's ''The Wonderful Century/' or John Fiske's ''A Century of Science" is as stimu- lating to the imagination as an Arabian Nights Entertainment. You, gentlemen of the graduating class, find it your privilege to enter on this noble quest of facts which shall effect the alleviation of Buffering mankind and bring earth nearer to heaven, — ^yea, which in the far reaches of time may, it would almost seem to the quickened fancy, solve the riddle of immortality by the prolonga- tion of human life, approximating ever to the limitless life of the Better Land. You are the prophets of Euthanasia, the bringers-in of hope. But this privilege of yours, this tireless hunt for cause and effect within the sphere of the psycho- physical, is also your penalty, or may be. From very devotion to the fact, the spirit may be neg- lected; and a sort of atrophy of the nature result towards the things of the heart and imagination. This is not inevitable, of course; but it is a pos- sible danger, especially to the scientist, pure and simple, who lacks the magnificent corrective which the good physician has in his daily practical ministrations to woful men and women. You re- member Darwin's testimony: how, loving Shaks- pere and the major poets and fictionists, but obliged to turn his back upon literature for years because of stress of work, he found, to his astonishment, upon returning to those once- MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 107 cherished friends, that a distaste for them had grown Tip in him — a remarkable example of the shrinking of a faculty through disuse. The scientific man, as perhaps no other, needs litera- ture; not only as a legitimate amusement, a form of recreation — and we forget at times when we despitefully regard recreation that it means re- creation — ^but also as an exercise of the soul, a stimulator of the emotive, intuitional, affectional and aspirational fibres of a person. The patronizing, half-contemptuous attitude of the so-called practical person towards literature is sometimes a little hard to bear. A novel is to him something to let down on after dinner, along with the post-prandial cigar, turning away from real and important matters. People drop into poetry, as did Silas Wegg of blessed memory — ^'tis a weak- ness at the best. The drama affords horse-play, slang, the ballet and dubious situations, to jaded nerves and drooping spirits.- There is in a single-eyed devotion to objective fact, to the realities of the senses, at least a possibility that an absurd under- valuation of literature may follow; its true dignity and significance being utterly lost sight of in such a topsy-turvy notion of the re- lations of things in life that the first may be last and soul be as nothing to flesh. Literature in the high sense is a wholesome antidote for that par- ticular form of Philistinism which harps tire- somely upon what is known as the practical, — utility and the like, meaning that which can be 108 F0RGE8 IN FICTION felt, touched, tasted and seen. To the philosopher, all is practical which advances the race, and that most practical which most helps the highest in man ; and all is useful which best considers man's highest uses. This wretchedly limited, purblind, market-place conception of life cannot be held by one who enters sjrtnpathetically into the privileges of literature. And, when fact in this special and narrow sense is emphasized (as it is in our new century), it is a blessed thing that a door still stands invitingly open upon a garden of de- lights, upon the pleasances of the imagination, fairer, richer than ever before, so notable have been the additions to the garden-growths during the past one hundred years — ^that wonderful nineteenth century literature, fruit of so many lands and kinds. Again, ours is a day when the dollar is believed to be mighty, if not almighty ! the multi-million- aire is a type of manhood emblazoned in news- paper and magazine, all but worshiped at the family altar. By no means is the American unique here; but viewing modern life broadly, is it not true that there is an increasing tendency to grade people by their bank-account, to give a new mean- ing to the word idolatry? Now, literature, when true to its mission, reflects and interprets life (its raw material) in such wise that no such dis- proportionate estimate of money is possible; simply because in a broad, sane outlook on life, money is shown to be but a means to an end, — MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 109 and that end the realization in each and all of us of our potentialities, so that a happier, richer and higher life shall ensue and society at large he permanently benefited. The voice of all literature is consentient in thus acclaiming the real mean- ing of life; to wit, character-formation, growth towards the ideal for ourselves and others. Its teaching is all that way, — ^just as truly when it exhibits vice, degradation and despair as when sailing majestically upon the winds of heaven high above human frailty. For in sounding the dissonance, literature makes us to yearn for the celestial harmonies; we would not recognize the discordant as such, in sooth, were it not for our instinct for the great concords beneath the sur- face jars. Literature is all the while telling us of life so that we read plain its obscure scroll, understand its true values, and so are safeguarded from the terribly shriveling idea of existence pos- sible to the mere money grabber. After all, there is something in the world, as Stevenson has it, besides "mud and old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears." George Eliot draws a Silas Marner, and we see that hideous thing a miser weaned from gold coin by the softer, tenderer gold of a lovely little maiden's hair. Moliere paints a Harpagon, and we shudder away from the possibility of that same soulless passion. Dickens puts before us in full length the elder Dombey that we may behold the final melting of that man of marble to whom business was a God, he being led by the potent 110 FORCES IN FICTION hand of his girl-ehild back to the real life he had so forgotten — the life of the simple affections and of household hearts. And Balzac's Grandet bites into our memory forever the awful consequences of that insatiable money-lust, with its demoniac power of warping man's nobler nature. Literature of the first order is always doing just this, I re- peat ; passing a healing hand across the eyes sealed by worldliness and making them to see, not through a glass darkly, but face to face. The need for literature is doubled whenever and wherever men and women are in bondage to these eidola of the world, the flesh and the devil. But we are practical in the United States and need literature, again, because we incline to laud use rather than beauty — as if beauty were aught but a higher usefulness. We are a practical folk, it is said — ^which is on the whole a misleading generalization. Still, it is not to be denied that we are only of late beginning to turn from a strenuous attention to material and immediate in- terests, giving heed to higher interests. The Prince of Peace and Prosperity is the proper per- son to arouse the Sleeping Beauty from her slum- ber. There is here no matter for reproach; our problems during the century of the Eepublic have been practical; problems of Government, Na- tional, State and Municipal; problems economic and political. Arts and letters must of necessity wait on such work; the wonder is (in view of the situation) that Americans can point to such MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 111 writers as distinguish and adorn the century just closed. Our literary art, our architecture, public and private, our endeavors in music and painting, have all testified in the past to this necessary de- votion to practical pursuits and services. But worthy accomplishment in these high activities is now common. The Exposition year of 1893 was a signal that we had in many ways stepped from our leading strings; and more and more with the growth of a leisured class shall we realize that immunity from wage-earning does not inevitably mean dissipation nor exclusive devotion to sports and society. While, with the establishment of a firm material basis for the cultivation of the higher faculties, literature, along with the other arts, should make its appeal to a constantly grow- ing audience. And I believe it is doing so, the popular magazine, unjustly sneered at by some, being a sort of middle member in a chain which begins with the newspaper and ends with standard literature. If, along with steadily waxing ma- terial prosperity, there come not a corresponding response to such an art and revealer of life as literature, sorry will be our case indeed. That way decadence lies. A cultivation of the sense of beauty and the sense of righteousness (which are not twain, but one, the holiness of beauty, in Lanier's phrase, being as precious as the beauty of holiness) must go with general prosperity; other- 112 FORCES IN FICTION wise, that land is doomed. All history is a sole trumpet-voice announcing these tidings. The commonest mistake about literature is the notion that it is merely an ornament to life. The reason that a nation in the more practical period of its development has less to do with the arts is not because the time for luxury has not come ; but because it is in a lower stage of evolution, and not altogether ready for the finer things, for a philosophic conception of the universe. Our best American literature, that made by the prophet sages and singers of New England, was produced under conditions giving the lie direct to the idea that only an environment of luxury begets creative works. The high thinking of an Emer- son comes out of plain living. But again, we need literature to idealize the conventional, the commonplace and the homely in life. I do not mean by idealize to falsify or senti- mentalize; but to show the idea inhering in the gross and seemingly meaningless mass, to detach the symbol from the fact, so that the fact takes on significance and loveliness. Eealism of the right sort should serve as a sort of gloss on the poet's text, "Flesh is as nothing to Spirit, And the essence of life is divine." It should make apparent that as there is nothing harder so there is nothing higher than the daily doing of little duties ; as Wordsworth calls them, "The little nameless unrememhered acts Of kindness and of love." MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 113 It should show that war, which often seems but a huddle of carnage, a blaze of savage passions. Is at least linked with the love of country, with the thought that "sweet and glorious it is to die for one's land ;" that religion is something more than an observance of forms, being the merging of all lesser loves in the love of the Eternal Maker and Father; that even machinery has poetry in it, as Kipling's McAndrews has demonstrated. It is thus that literature should make a glory out of the grey substance of our days. This handling of the homely so that it is seen to have a touch of the heavenly, is the mission of your true realist. The great makers of literature are always in this sense realists as much as idealists. It is the way of Homer, of Dante, of Shakspere, of Cervantes; of Moliere, Goethe, Tolstoy, Meredith and Steven- son. Let me give an example from Master Wil- liam Shakspere — ^master alike of human speech and human life; that inimitable scene in "Henry V," where from the mouths of his boon compan- ions, Dame Quickly, Pistol, ^"3^01, and Bardolph, we learn of the passing of Falstaff . Sir John's death being announced by Ancient Pistol, says Bardolph, eyes ashine for the nonce as well as nose: ^^ould I were with him, wheresoever he is, either in heaven or hell." What a world of good fellowship in that line! And then mine hostess goes on, with exquisite pathos, all unconscious and homely as it is : 114 FORCES IN FICTION ^^Nay, sure, he's not in hell; he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." She meant Abraham's bosom — ^but we are glad of the slip, for emotion is always making slips of that kind. "A' made a finer end and went away as it had been any Christom child; a' parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide." You remember that Barkis, too, went out with the tide in another great homely-life scene: ^Tor after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way," (you can hear the good dame snuffle by this time as she continues) ^^for his nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields." That sorry old worldling, Falstaff, that fellow of sack and women, thievery and braggadocio, being Christian reared, does when he comes to the mind-wandering which preludes death, revert to that most idyllic- ally beautiful of psalms and is led beside still waters, yea, lies down in green pastures, as if he were a care-free boy again untouched of sin. Per- haps even he can say, "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me." But hear Dame Quickly again: ^^ow now, Sir John ! quoth I ; what man, be o' good cheer. So a' cried out, God, God, God! three or four times. !N'ow I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of God ; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet; I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 115 they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to the knees, and they were as cold as any stone; and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone." How circumstantial it all is, like a doctor's re- port for detail and accuracy ; but how it is illumi- nated with a splendidly fraternal tolerancy to- wards all seamy humanity, living and dead. Of a sudden we realize that even the great confra- ternity of rogues — epitomized in this master-rogue of all literature — ^is united to us in a common bond of brotherhood; and that is a lesson worth while. Behold, I say again, the true and only realism. Is it too much to claim for literature that she has no mean mission in thus revealing a spirit of good in things counted evil, in suggest- ing that nothing is common and unclean past re- demption ? Such at least is the divine unwisdom of the pure in heart. And now a message of literature for our time which I would especially bear down on is its power to help the agnostic mood. Never before, I must think, has a more gracious or a grander oppor- tunity offered itself to literature than in this re- gard. Our generation has experienced a tremen- dous readjustment of ethical ideas, a veritable seismic upheaval, of which the tremors and rum- blings have scarcely died away. The agnostic state of mind has been the natural outcome of all this change — which in the end will be seen to stand for gain more than loss. Now the essence 116 FORCES IN FICTION of great literature, like that of true religion, is of a potency to furnish the doubting Thomases with sweetness and light; with hope, inspiration and a golden comfort: and it can do this with all the winning gentleness of love and with that strength of purity which is as the strength of ten. Agnosti- cism is a brain state ; literature appeals primarily to the heart and is the antidote needed, offering its warm-blooded, wholesome, imperative yea to the cold analytic nay of the intellect. A very im- portant function of literature in respect of modern life lies here. You are very well aware, however, that much of current literature, so far from counteracting this tendency to doubt and despair, abets it, and, in fact, issues out of it. This is to be expected, for literature (when honest) should always faith- fully reflect the spirit of the Time; it is its duty its privilege. Nor must we deny the benefit of literature which not only mirrors the compara- tively smooth surface waters of society but also drops a plummet line into its murky abysmal depths. The knife of the surgeon seeking to ex- tirpate the root trouble is kindly meant and wel- come. Particularly is the literature which reveals the predicaments of the weak, the wretched, the out- cast of the earth, a serviceable addition to the library table. There is a need of books that awaken our sympathies for the under dog in the social struggle, and make us to understand his MODERN NEED FOR LITERATURE 117 situation. The under dog will be dustier and per- haps bloodier than his conqueror and so is likely to be less pleasant to look upon ; but it were a sad mistake not to pay attention to him. Never has there been so much fiction and drama and poetry that has expressed the "StiU sad music of humanity," and one deadens one's sensibilities and makes shal- low one's nature in turning away from such books simply because they are not agreeable. This spirit extends even to animals. Nevertheless, I think we can say, and say with emphasis, that in considera- tion of the liberal doses of pessimism furnished for the past decade in the literature of civilized lands, in view of the fact (already adumbrated) that a more cheerful view of the world is becoming popular, and with the additional consideration that helpfulness and good cheer are prime merits always in literary creations, we can say, I repeat, that the paramount need just now is for books that incite to courageous action, to high heart and hope, to such a broad re-statement of the ever- lasting beautiful as shall make for happy living, for vigorous deeds, for an outdoor optimism. Of desiccated analytics, of dark psychic tortuosi- ties, of eloquent variations on the overworked theme, vanitas vanitatum, we have had enough and to spare. The gospel for an age of doubt (to borrow Dr. Van Dyke's name for it) should be of gladder tidings. Modern literature must be thera- peutic; it must carry healing in its wings. It 118 FORCES IN FICTION must not be a literature for and by mattoids. Nor is this to slight the work of writers like Tolstoy, Zola, Hardy, and Ibsen; we need them, too — and have had them. But in the light of the tendency for the past twenty years, and looking to the fu- ture, we need the literature of encouragement more. How are we going to get it ? It lies with the thoughtful reading public; it can be effected if that body of folk will show plainly in what they buy, what sort of literature they prefer. The test of sales is obvious and irresistible in its results. If the great majority of those who support litera- ture wish for the literature of encouragement rather than for the literature of despair, and will leave the one and cleave unto the other, the bat- tle is won. It is a pity we cannot consciously combine on this. Ours is an age of Trusts. I should like to see a Tiust of the Amalgamated Interests of Consumers of the Literature of Ozone and Sunlight, Unlimited. The title is rather cum- bersome ; but what a power-house that plant could command. In a word, and finally, literature is always needed to be a spokesman of those deep-lying, ever abiding instincts and affirmations of the soul of man which dominate his life and shape his end. And literature is of particular use to-day just in proportion as we forget that life is more in the spirit than in the flesh; that in order to any full living, we must feed not the body only but the mind and soul as well. PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE The Bishop of London is credited with advising some young women students to read three books written before the year 1800 for every one written later. He declared that, in accordance with a vow, he had followed this plan for ten years and that those years had been the happiest of his life. I hope his lordship said nothing of the sort; if he did, one is inclined to feel the more sympa- thetic toward Sydney Smith's remark — ^that fam- ous wit had in mind the exceeding difficulty of turning the classic of a literature into the tongue of another — ^that everything suffers by translation — except a bishop. For the imputed statement is foolish and mis- leading. It is an example of an often recurrent attitude toward the past and the present, the dei- fication of the one and the depreciation of the other, so that great injustice is done to modern things. Deep in the human heart is implanted the yearning back toward a Golden Age, forward, to the Millennium ; and the poor tarnished present pays the penalty of its humdrum nearness, its unideal reality. It would be much closer to the truth to say that three books to one in favor of the nineteenth century were advisable, especially 119 120 FORCES IN FICTION if the literature of the English-speaking race be in mind; and the bishop's words, as reported, would seem to have meant that. Think for a moment what such a dictum implies ! It belittles, or at least throws out of proportion, the poetry of Keats, Shelley and Byron, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, of Poe, Whitman and Kipling, the romances and novels of Scott, Hawthorne and Stevenson, of Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray, of later men and women like Meredith, Hardy, Ward and Barrie; it slights the essay work of Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Irving, of Carlyle and Euskin, of Emerson and Lowell. These and many others scarcely less worthy are set aside, by implication, as if in writing later than that arbitrary mark of 1800 they had committed the unpardonable sin. I am running over, be it observed, but a few stel- lar names, and am confined to authors using our own tongue. If continental literature were to be included, the bishop's offense becomes more hein- ous, for one's head fairly buzzes with the great creative writers whose labor has since been done. In short, taking the range, variety and quality of performance and the number of representatives into the consideration, the simple fact is that no century in the whole evolution of our magnificent English literature is so rich and worthy of laud as the one just closed, not even Shakspere's, on the principle that one swallow does not make a summer. It is the part of common-sense, justice PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 121 and patriotism to say this; the danger in twisting the truth into an undue exaltation of the by-gone — ^fine as that may be — ^is the neglect of the pres- ent-day literature by those who are likely to be led by what to them seems a final judgment, to wit, the opinion of a bishop. There is a special reason why the present in literature should be appreciated at its full worth. The very fact that it is the present, not the past, is in its favor. Even if nineteenth century litera- ture were distinctly inferior to the eighteenth, in- stead of being triumphantly greater, it would be ill-advised to undervalue the former ; nay, it would still have an interest for us beyond that of any other time. And this, simply because it represents our day. Literature always reflects life, and the best literature of a given age is a mirror in which we may see move the body of the age, and, listen- ing, catch the sound of its heart-beats. Its lan- guage is our own; it expresses our ideals, indus- trial, social, political, philosophical, spiritual; it involves a hundred questions pertinent to our own period and to no other, perhaps not yet born in 1800. This side of literature is, to be sure, in large measure its practical and intellectual side, its contribution to knowledge, having less to do with the aesthetic denotements of charm and beauty. But these aesthetic conceptions themselves also change. The ideal of beauty is by no means eternal. A representative piece of literature dur- ing the past fifty years, or thirty years, is a sure 12^ FORCES IN FICTION registration of this shift of both thought and feel- ing. To give an illustration : The rise and spread of the doctrine of evolution since 1850 is the cen- tury's mighty contribution to science; all litera- ture since 1850, beginning with such a master- piece as Tennyson's ^^In Memoriam," feels this change, reflects the revolution of thought that is involved. To read literature before 1800, to the neglect of that written in the second half of the century just closed, is to be hopelessly out of touch with all modern thinking, to show oneself an in- tellectual faineant. This is an illustration having in mind literature as intellectual pabulum, as mind-stuff. But take literature as art, too : Since realism so-called became the dominant creed, beauty, the aim of all art, has come to be regarded as something different from the older conception ; not as the antithesis to truth, not a prettification of fact or a falsification thereof, but a more forci- ble presentation of truth itself. Hence, in the books that do not flinch in setting down the dark and terrible in human life, we recognize a kind of beauty — "the still, sad music of humanity." Thus the notion of art itself has widened, I say; our idea of the province of the aesthetic has been stretched to admit more of life, of reality. And it is only in the literature of the last half-century that this fruitful lesson has been learned ; to turn away from its lesson is mentally to stunt one- self. PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 123 It is our first business to know and believe in the present, upon the firm basis of a thorough culture in all the past has to offer. But the past should be studied for the sake of the present, not vice versa; nor, worse yet, by a grudging conces- sion made to the Now in the reading of one book to the prescribed three of an earlier time. I am convinced that the temper of mind personified in the Bishop of London comes of a false worship of outgrown gods. An old man fondly idealizes the days of his own youth, whereas, when they were being lived in, he grumbled over them right heart- ily. In the same way, some people grow all but maudlin over a past age which, were it the present, they would be the first to satirize. If (which God forbid!) we could reverse Time's dial and be set down in the past, to wrestle with all its enormi- ties, we should then find (if we doubted it before) that the world is moving forward, not backward, and that literature has responded to this general law. It is this wholesome truth which Mark Twain inculcates in his "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," as serious a book as was ever writ. Nor is this view to disparage the literary past; to deny that it is rich in writers who can teach and delight us — spirits who still rule us from their urns: Chaucer's charm of musical narrative and homely delineation; Spenser's linked sweetness, as he cries up chivalric deeds; Shakspere and his fellows and soon-followers, forming the golden 124 FORCES IN FICTION time of letters; the seventeenth century with its great central figure of Dryden; the early eight- eenth, with Addison, Steele, and Swift; the mid- dle years, bringing that wonderful new birth, the novel, in the hands of Eichardson, Fielding, and Smollett; the second half, with Johnson, Gold- smith, and the rest. Even to run thus over the names of a few mountain peaks, where the foot- hills and valleys hide humbler scenes which yet yield us everlasting joy, is to kindle the enthu- siasm of the sincere lover of English literature. To read and know and love those earlier authors is not only to add to our stock of permanent pleas- ure; it is to be instructed in the development of the English race, since in its literature a race is best, because most spontaneously, reflected. The finest literature of a period is always the truest exponent of that time, since it is by his ideals that we properly judge the aspiring creature called man. The high-water mark on the beach alone registers the tide; all lower wave impulses are obliterated. Then, too, there is — and rightly — an illusion of the past which lends a fascination to older literature, and many are drawn to it for that rea- son. This attraction is in response to what may be called the human instinct for romance; seen just now in the general turning to historical fic- tion. The quaintness, unwonted color, and heroic proportions assumed by what is remote in time help to produce this well-nigh thaumaturgic effect. PAST AND PRESENT IN LITERATURE 125 an effect most enjoyable and, within proper limits, perfectly legitimate. But all possible concessions being made, it re- mains true that the disproportionate estimate of the literary past in contrast with the present — as exampled in the statement attributed, I hope er- roneously, to the Bishop of London — is a form of affectation or ignorance which should be met with candid hostility whencesoever it comes. The stu- dent should be reared to a reverential admiration for the literary riches of the last one hundred years, which it is his privilege to be born into ; the lover of books should, in the very light of his knowledge of the past, come to a fuller appreciation of the glories of a later day. And the critic should be constantly on guard against the insidious danger of an unbalanced admiration for some pet school or author or period, lest his sense of relative values ■ — so essential to any real criticism — ^be lost and he fall into the habit of belittling the larger and over- praising that which is of less moment. Young folk, as a rule, have a natural and healthy interest in the present — including the literary present. They are pretty likely to read current books rather than those which are older. Therefore, it is prob- able that the Bishop's sort of suggestion, made to college students, would be comparatively innocu- ous. But those same young folk, when they come to maturity, might act in accordance with the ad- vice; might even take to heart Charles Lamb's whimsical saying, that whenever a new volume 126 FORCES 12^ FICTION appeared he read an old one. And if the habit of regarding contemporaneous literature with sus- picion were thus formed, the result would be an unhappy one. A belief in the present, whether it be literature or life which makes literature pos- sible, is, when you come to think of it, a belief in the great laws and unfolding potentialities of the universe. Life greatens toward the light, and the nineteenth century is the heir of the ages. Let us rejoice in it. f UNIVERSfTY 1 THE USE OF ENGLISH If the study of the English language in its uses and abuses seem dry and repellent, it is, I must think, the fault of the pedant who handles it. Few things are of more general interest to those who use English speech — and what a vast army they make — than the manipulation of the mother tongue in its manifold meanings. We all use En- glish whether we will or no; alas, how many of us misuse it! To be sure, one may be born into English, grow up, love, pay taxes, and be buried in it, with the same unconsciousness of its privi- leges and demands as that displayed by M. Jour- dain with regard to the use of prose. Still, to all who enjoyed the advantages of some schooling, the right uses of this linguistic opportunity is not a matter of indifference. The great majority of English speakers and writers come to a conscious love of the language. It is a thing inwrought with their life and the life of others near and dear. No language is a dead thing, though the dry scientific analysis of scholars lead wrongly to that opinion. Rather, is each a mighty store-house of human treasures ; a musical instrument, listening to which one may hear an infinitude of melodies. Men have for centuries laughed and loved in it, sworn and been forsworn, hated and hoped, yea, lived 127 128 FORGES IN FICTION and died. No wonder if it be a symphonic crea- ture, full of crashing harmonies, of the caresses of poetry, of tumultuous discords, and of divine songs of peace. If this be true of any tongue, it is emphatically true of a dominant tongue like the English — native in so many lands, spoken under so many skies, so militant in its march, so plastic in its manifold adaptations to the needs of its children. It is a tongue made splendid by more than a thou- sand years of great literature. It is the home speech of more folk than those who make populous the shores of Kipling^s seven seas. The history of words and of the sentences into which they fall, is no dry record of bloodless facts, but as dramatic as the history of mankind; indeed, it is the history' of man as he has crystallized into a sound-symbol the thoughts, imaginings, faiths and aspirations of his life, from the cave dwellers to the Darwin of his century. Words, like men, have their "strange, eventful histories," and, again like men, one word in its time "plays many parts." To follow the ups and downs of a single proper noun — a stupid name since its career is as often as not improper and hence doubly fascinating — or of a common noun — named with equal stupidity, since its story is likely to be most uncommon — this pursuit, I say, is often as exciting as a novel or a foot-ball game. Thus it follows that the diction- ary (rightly used and comprehended) is the most interesting of all books, save perhaps the Bible. THE USE OF ENGLISH 139 Dr. Holmes knew this when he made the Auto- crat say: ^'^When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and luster have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more pro- found, a more accurate, and a more eloquent analogy." Emerson had the same feeling when he wrote : "It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem." As a matter of personal testimony, I may say that I never open a dictionary without a conscious quiver of excitement at the likelihood of a sensa- tional experience. It is almost a miracle that such a study has had the power of converting living men (scholars, in the ordinary parlance) into dry- asdusts. One would suppose it might have an ef- fect analogous to that of earth-contact upon Antaeus. I dare say it is because they have studied the bones, not the flesh and blood of language, making themselves scientists instead of amateurs of life. For language, in reality, is a manifesta- tion of life, and always that. The dead languages, we say, meaning the people are dead who spoke them ; which is no fault of the tongue itself, which lives lustily on in its literature. It will do no harm, now, to illustrate the state- ment as to the essential poetry, pathos and drama 130 FORGE 8 IN FICTION inherent in these vital word-symbols. And first, a striking example of the rise and fall of the same word. The nonn cwen in Old English had the generic significance of "woman/' with no reference to station or moral status. In the course of time, and with a modified spelling, it appeared tricked out as our modern English queen, a sovereign of the people — ^the highest earthly lot attainable by the sex. And yet, in another dress of letters — for spelling has played a part in the drama of words like to that played by clothes among human- ity — it paraded itself in Elizabethan times and still lives as quean, — a common drab, a painted woman of the town ! These two words from the selfsame ancestor, differentiated by a garb of let- ters, run the gamut of woman's social and moral possibilities. Surely nothing could be more im- pressive; a single noun, yet a whole sermon on sex! Think, too, how personal names lend themselves to picturesque effects. Duns Scotus was in the thirteenth century a great scholar, the last of the great schoolmen ; but, like other great men before and since, he had enemies, who called him unpleas- ant epithets and jeered at his philosophy, until his nick-name Duns became with them a term of reproach and ridicule. And behold! we say "dunce" to-day to the stupid schoolboy who wears the conical cap in the corner. The wisest man of his time gives the tongue its stock designation for a fool! It were well for dunces to realize how THE USE OF ENGLISH 131 honorable a pedigree they boast of. Let me illus- trate once more. Dickens in his ^^Tale of Two Cities" speaks of the "figure of that sharp female called La Guillotine." There is a popular notion abroad that Dr. Guillotin was the inventor of that terrible machine whose maw was fed with such dras- tic food during the red days of the Terror in France the unfortunate. But as a matter of fact, to one Dr. Louis belongs the dubious honor of the in- vention. Guillotin was a man of mercy who in the very year of the outbreak of the French Eevo- lution advocated the abolition of this grim method of capital punishment. And the people, forsooth, with tremendous irony, set his blameless name upon an instrument of extermination which bears in the minds of men a bad eminence, like Milton's Satan. The sardonic satire of history has few more striking examples. These instances of the weatherings of words typify a host more, and may serve to illuminate my thesis that all that man has thought and felt is registered in language, which therefore offers a study of widest scope and of thrilling interest. It seems an ironic comment upon the inutility of education that language, in proportion as it be- comes learned, grows colorless, abstract, formal, and unexciting. The speech of the philosopher is not only hard to be understood by the people, but seemingly stripped of all life and color, whereas the talk of the huckster on the street, the craftsman in the shop, or the sailor on the sea has a smack, an 132 FORGES IN FICTION idiosyncrasy, that makes it relishable. Their words are at once concrete and imaginative. Yet, since all language roots in metaphor, the abstruse lingo of a Kant was once of imagination all com- pact. The palest word-medium of to-day is the metaphor of by-gone years ; the most brilliant pic- ture-coin of the present will become the outworn counter of the future. Language when handled by children is instructive, for a child in this re- gard stands for the youth of the race. We com- monly speak of the little folk as unconscious poets and for this very reason : they talk in tropes, their fancies are expressed in figures. As the analytic processes of maturity gain on the intuitive, crea- tive acts of speech, this imaginative element slow- ly disappears, until it is only the grown-up poet (who in this respect preserves his childlike- ness) that dares to use language in an unconven- tional way, — in which use he is joined, however, 'by the unlettered all about, whose conversation, being offhand and instinctive, and being, more- over, vitally related to their interests and occupa- tions, has the savor of real things and a certain fresh felicity. It is also instructive to see how, with all of us, our speech is happy when we are most at ease and hence most natural ; the drawing- room garb and the drawing-room idiom are alike drearily limited. The same people who in the street or at their business will be racy of speech, wax Jejune and uninspiring under the social lamps. Evening dress seems to throttle idiom. THE USE OF ENGLISH 133 This leads us to a plain fact as to the origin of language: it is the birth of instinct^ of emotion, of imagination; not a reasoned-out process but a creative impulse; a blundering yet puissant effort of man's genius. Whatever our theory of the be- ginning of speech, this holds true. And it is a truth with a direct bearing upon all present-day questions of language-use — a veritable search- light in the fog. Granting, now, the attractions of this study, a remark must be made as to the certificate of au- thority in matters of language. Plain speaking is in place here. People discuss questions of speech-use with the same freedom with which they comment upon the weather ; this is the immemora- ble parade ground of cock-sure judgments. In- numerable little friendly battles are fought upon this or that moot-point and there is a general feel- ing that one man is as good as another in the con- test. This is all well enough for the innocuous tilts of society; but if the point at issue be taken seriously, it is well to remember that in this sub- ject, as in all others, the specialists must decide. No person of culture familiar with the present- day uses of English, but lacking knowledge of the tongue in its historical development, is in a posi- tion to lay down the law. This is why many popu- lar books upon words and their uses are often misleading and darken counsel. These authors may be intelligent, they may have considerable acquaintance with current linguistic habits; but 134 FORCES IN FICTION they are not philologists; and it is the language- student and he alone who is wise in the premises. In other spheres of human knowledge this prin- ciple is acted upon; it must be held to firmly here. Many so-called vulgarisms may be explained if not excused by an appeal to the history of English words. The wayfaring man says ^^six year ago" and ^^six head of cattle," omitting the plural sign ; the one expression would be called vulgar, the other vernacular, idiomatic. But both have his- torical ground ; they look back to a time when the plural significance was. indicated not by the addi- tion of s, as in the modern speech, but by the genitive case, "six year" being in reality, in its older form "six of years" (Old English, six geara). And the instinct of idiom has preserved even to our own day this thousand-year-old fact. Again, in the analogous phrase "a six foot cable," we see exactly the same principle at work. It is more idiomatic still to give the old form. Imagine calling it a "six feet cable !" Yet even the keenly intelligent who discuss language on the basis of merely current usage will be forced for consis- tency's sake to favor that form of the phrase, al- though puzzled to find that, somehow, it quite, lacks the right flavor. In the same way, a knowledge of word lineage sheds light upon pronunciation. An examination of English literature from earliest times down to the present, teaches the student that a general law THE U8E OF ENGLISH 135 of accent is at work in our language. It may be called the radical tendency of our tongue in this matter; the tendency to move the accent ba,ck to the root syllable. A tendency at variance to this is that of euphony, which in polysyllabic words demands such distribution of emphasis as shall satisfy the ear; and in all words requires some attention to musical values. But this is minor to the major law of the backward- working accent. Foreign words introduced into our tongue, are at first pronounced after their native laws : but just in proportion as they become anglicised, do they fall under this rule, their accent receding towards the root or (in case the root and first syllable do not agree) to the first syllable of the word. Thus, in Marlowe's play, "The Jew of Malta," occurs the line : And with extorting, cozening forfeifing, where the accent of the last word must, to the best results of music, fall upon the second syllable: while to-day it has reached the first syllable, for'- f citing. The word being French, this earlier pro- nunciation is just what one would expect. . Com- ing a hundred years nearer our own time, we find in Milton's "Paradise Lost" the line : Their planetary motions and aspects'. In this case, a Latin word is, in the seventeenth century, naturally, more conscious of its origin 136 FORCES IN FICTION than is the case now^, when, more thoroughly En- glish, it receives the native accent as'pects. Moving another hundred years toward the pres- ent time, in Thomas Grey's ^'^Sketch of His Own Character" the opening lines run as follows : Too poor for a hrihe and too proud to impor'tune. He had not the method for making a fortune. Here, obviously, the end of the first line is made to rhyme with fortune. The present pronuncia- tion of the word is, however, im'portune' ; that is to say, it has moved back to the first syllable, with a secondary accent on the third. Eobert Brown- ing, with the older accentuation in mind, has ven- tured in one of his poems to use impor'tune. The value of having this general principle clear- ly in mind is shown when it comes to be applied to certain words which at a given moment seem to be trembling in the balance between the older and the newer accent. Thus, acces'sory and ac'ces- sory; which? The latter, for the simple reason that that is the stress destined, by the law of reces- sive accent, to prevail. Likewise, of inqui'ry and in'quiry, the last is preferable, for the same reason. It would be mov- ing directly against a deep-lying linguistic law — a tendency inherent in the speech of the race — to try to make inqui'ry and acces'sory exclusive good use, at the expense of the later and better usage. As well might a child attempt to check a tidal wave. Current good usage must always be care- THE U8E OF ENGLISH lS7i fully observed; but without the corrective knowl- edge of facts lying behind the present show of things, it is a dangerous guide ; it is the flower of which the historic life is the hidden but potent root. Another and important service rendered by a thorough knowledge of English old and new, is that it develops a sensitiveness to the vernacular, and a liking for the native word, phrase, idiom. Simplicity, strength, and beauty in speech are ap- preciated above a quasi or questionable elegance. There is a deal of culture in that feeling for lan- guage which gives preference to the idiom go to hed over to retire. The former stands for a large class of plain, direct, homely expressions, too often avoided by the linguistically ill-educated. When one falls into conversation with a stranger, one may judge him infallibly by this test : a brief ex- change of small talk reveals his station and degree with awful certainty — far more surely than do his dress and carriage. The habit of shoddy expres- sion in speech when one is desirous of making a good impression is astonishingly prevalent. In sooth, it takes something of education to feel the full value of a vigorous simplicity of utterance. The taste for a sort of bastard Websterianism of speech for the purposes of ordinary conversation is, I fear, peculiarly American : a survival, too, of older conditions. Dickens satirizes this manner of talk in ^^Martin Chuzzlewit," unkindly, perhaps, but hardly untruly — for the year of grace 1842. It 138 FORGES IN FICTION is less fashionable now, just as the old-time oratory is less fashionable, being supplanted by the terse, pithy, plain-spoken style of public utterance. In this matter of vernacular directness our cousins English have always set us a good example, — one we are slowly but surely learning to follow. In the past, there may have lurked in our minds a conviction that the free use of euphuistic, absurdly showy words for very simple things was a sign of the possession of savoir faire: as confidence grows along with experience, the speech clarifies and takes on a seemly plainness. So inspiriting is it to hear truly idiomatic En- glish — ^English with grip to it as well as grace — • that the pleasure breeds leniency toward that abuse of idiom commonly called "slang." The relations of the two have scarcely been set forth to satisfaction. The kinship of slang and idiom is very close. They are blood-relations. Indeed, it might al- most be said that one is the other under a sobri- quet. Slang is often but idiom in the making. The idiom of to-day was slang in Shakspere's time; and the slang of this year may become ac- credited idiom a century hence. Nevertheless, the word slang, together with such other words as dia- lect, patois, argot, and their like, has something of a sinister implication; and it will be well to examine the case to see if the popular feeling about it be justified. Slang in the common meaning, is not only col- THE USE OF ENGLISH 139 loquial speech, but speech that is low, vulgar; any good dictionary definition supports this statement. Skeat, the authority in English etymology, derives the word, no doubt properly, from an ancient Scan- dinavian original which is seen in our verb to sling — so that when in our jocular American way we speak of ^^slinging language," we are going back to root flavors. Slang is language which is slung about recklessly, not to say profanely. It cannot be denied that some hard things are truth- fully to be spoken in its disfavor. Some of it is gutter-born and naturally dies the death of all disreputable outcasts. A good deal of it falls from the lips of thieves, gypsies, tramps and other such motley classes of society, regarded for the most part as outside the pale of decency. An ap- preciable amount of it, at least, is obscure, because of an inadmissible technicality; and, worse still, is unimaginatively narrow and unpicturesque — qualities that condemn it to a short life, and pre- clude its having any life that is more than local and uncertain. I have sometimes thought in noting the informal dialect of college students that they should have been able to show better invention in their creation of a fraternal jargon; it lacks variety, verve, inspiration. It is but justice to them to say that sometimes they live up to their opportunity and are racily original. But there is a reason for the fact that a good share of the slang so called — ^perhaps half of what is widely current at a given moment — ^perishes and perishes 140 FORCES IN FICTION deservedly. If one interested in this stimulating subject will take the trouble to register half a dozen of the prevalent slang expressions at a cer- tain date and will then refer to them a couple of years thereafter, he will be instructed to his satis- faction in the ephemerality of much of this un- conventional current idiom. Yet this is only half the story. I implied as much in speaking of the inter-relations. Not all slang is bad: some of it is good, nay, delightful. It is created just as all living language is created — impulsively, with a certain joy in the creation, and at the call of the genuine need. It is an at- tempt at picturesqueness, liveliness, reality, and when it is not brought forth for too narrowly spe- cial a use nor by a parent morally debased, the slang word or expression is quite often acceptable. If this seems over-praise, conversion to the view will follow an examination of the facts. People are often shocked by a felicitous but unconventional idiom (which they call slang) not so much because their feelings are really outraged as because they imagine it is their duty to be shocked. It is a case of mock modesty; in their hearts there is a guilty enjoyment of such language. The real question is that of actual vulgarity; because the idiom is new or, what is taken to be the same thing, unknown, is no condemnation. This deeper- going question lies behind it: is the expression coarse, offensive to good taste, or out-and-out immoral ? And to pronounce upon this is a very THE USE OP ENGLISH 141 delicate test of one's knowledge of language, litera- ture, even of life itself. 'Now it is just the language-wielder with a feel- ing for idiom based upon a generous knowledge of English past and present, who is at once bold yet careful in his relation to slang, so called. Aware of the fact that slang is often excellent new idiom, he uses it with little fear of results; while he has, in his sensitiveness to what is truly- good English, an all but infallible touchstone by which to detect the merely low and ephemeral. It follows that his language is delightfully free from pedantic stiffness or mawkish euphuism. It possesses the racy quality that is the very salt of speech, and a freedom that strikes prudes as audacious at times, yet has a felicity recognizable even by those who have neither the courage nor the education to go and do likewise. He prefers to handle the native vocabulary ^^After the use of the English in straight-flung words and few," as Kipling has it. He knows that the foreign ele- ments of a tongue are for ornamentation or special application; that the vernacular is the back-bone. It is in respect of such considerations that a study of English, an interest in the mother speech extending far beyond the days of formal school- ing, commend themselves to all. There is an ex- haustless attraction in it. Moreover, an assured comprehension of the subject is the best possible basis for all appreciation of our literature from Beowulf to Browning, — is, in fact, the only safe 142 FORGES IN FICTION and sure substracture for any literary apprecia- tion. One who begins the study of Chaucer, of Spenser or of Shakspere without this advantage, trips on the first page ; it is inevitable. Thus the study of language and the study of literature, though unfortunately too much treated as if they were utterly apart, the one a science, the other an art, are in reality so closely co-ordinate as to be but phases of the one great subject; language the instrument, literature the alluring, the inspiriting, the multitudinous airs that can be played upon it. A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM Literary criticism has always been of two main kinds: the objective, which applies rules and be- lieves in standards; the subjective, which, with less care for canons, gives freer play to personal impressions. Some of the later doyens of letters belong to the impressionistic school, but of old the weight of authority was with those who ap- pealed to tradition. And there was an authority in this method, a stability and dignity in the judg- ments thug reached, which made them imposing, even admirable. Nisard summed up the creed in saying : ''1 could not love without preferring, and I could not prefer without doing injustice." The personal equation is here reduced to the vanishing point. Jeffrey, with his famous critique of Words- worth, beginning, "This will never do," affords a fine example of the same thing. A nobler illustra- tion is Matthew Arnold, whose appeal to compari- sons and insistence on a standard are academic in the best eense. In the hands of such a man, objective criticism is discovered to be full of vir- tues. But with an older school — ^with Boileau in France, to name one leader — ^the danger was a stiffening into the mechanical, loss of breadth, and insensitiveness to an enlightened enjoyment as the ultimate test. U8 144 FORCES IN FICTION With Sainte-Beuve, however (still looking to France, the land of criticism, par excellence), came a change. Taine, Renan, younger men like Jules Lemaitre, with all their personal variations, admit more of the subjective, see the subject through the color of their temperament; and of Xmodem criticism as a whole it may be said that it has become autobiographical. The critic an- nounces : "Gentlemen, I propose to talk of myself in relation to Shakspere, Eacine, Pascal, Goethe." In some cases this is pushed to an absurd or of- fensive degree, until we get a parody on literary judgments. But Mr. William M. Payne, in his recent book, "Little Leaders," goes too far in his condemnation of the subjective test. Professor Trent, in a well-considered paper to be found in a still later volume of essays, views the matter more broadly when he points out the share of truth in both the objective and subjective methods. Many of our ablest and most charming writers favor it : Stevenson, for an Englishman (who isn't En- glish), Howells, for an American. The advan- tages of the latter are obvious: appreciating the truth in de gustihus, the critic gives his opinion for what it is worth, tolerant of dispute or dissent. He becomes intimate with us : we are more likely to love him. In addition to stimulation in litera- ture, we are having dealings with a strong, pleas- ing personality, perhaps. The gain here is all in the direction of life, savor, reality. On the other hand, a besetting sin of this method is lack of A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 145 culture. Any one can set up to write esoteric crit- icism. But when, as with M. Lemaitre, there is wide reading, an assimilation of the best models, the issue, be it confessed, is delightful. In all likelihood, the question will always be debatable. The modern tendency, no doubt, leans ; towards the subjective; individualism for the mo- ment is paramount in literature. The pendulum swings to that side of equilibrium. Personal pref- erence is the starting-point of all honest enjoy- ment and appreciation of literature. To praise a book because we think it ought to be praised, not because we find it praiseworthy, is intellectual sui- cide. Yet few of us wish to go so far as to deny that literary art has some permanent laws and standards. The slow consensus of the best opinion (with some erratic individual variations) rallies around the works which obey these laws and con- form to these standards. To listen to the still, small voice within, and yet to find a reason-for- being in the voice of time and authority, that is the delicate and difficult business of the serious- minded critic. The present-day tendency alluded to is an exaggeration, but, if an excess, it must be wholesomer, truer than the other, earlier excess, which stretched every literary creation upon the narrow Procrustean bed of convention and judged its size thereby. To justify the modern tendency it must be shown that the long-cherished dicta pronouncing art a thing of rule and standard, of well-defined 146 FORCES IN FICTION laws and unsurpassable boundaries, are not found- ed upon fact; or at least, have been given undue prominence. The latter hits near to the truth. There is more argument for this thesis than at first appears. An illustrative analogy may be drawn from the sister art of music. Our concep- tions of what is right and beautiful in the aesthetic tone- world are based upon the seven-note scale; but with the Chinese, for example, the five-note scale is the norm and starting point. Truly, it is a purely subjective process of reasoning to assert that good music necessarily derives from the seven- note scale. The ear of most modern peoples ac- cepts that scale, and rejects that of the Mongolians as displeasing; voila tout. The whole development of European music on its technical side rests thus upon an assumption it would take more than the subtlest metaphysics of a schoolman to show to be anything but unproved. At the best, an appeal to the history of music might force us to concede that the western scale has given to the world richer results; that the civilized folk have adopted the octave while those semi-civilized or worse have in- vented the five-note or other scales. But who dare say that some scale of the future shall not produce music as superior to that made upon the seven-note idea as the latter is superior to the five-note ? In other words, musical technique is bottomed upon an arbitrary standard and not upon eternal laws. It is relative, not absolute, in its nature. In the domain of ethics a similar substitution of relative A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 147 for absolute has been brought about. The con- science is still regarded as innate by conservative thinkers who accept the sense of right and wrong as directly God-given ; but in the Spencerian view it is explained as a matter of racial experience, utilitarian in its origin. Latter-day psychology inclines to this theory ; and, as a result, it may be found working in the philosophy of literature and of aesthetics. This thought tendency when transferred to literary criticism irresistibly leads towards a more personal and less hide-bound inter- pretation of the phenomena of literature. But this much may be said with certitude : The individual sense of moral right and wrong may be subject to a long historical evolution and may, during that process, show constantly higher ideals ; yet, whatever the ideal — ^grotesque, incomplete, immoral at a given time and place — once accepted, moral health depends upon eschewing what is deemed wrong and cleaving to what is deemed right. So in literary art, the aesthetic sense and the laws thereto conforming demand that the artist obey an ideal of the beautiful. Disobey it, and the art product becomes unaesthetic, lying be- yond the province of art. This aesthetic ideal may, however, shift or vary according to racial differ- ences and those of time. Yes, it may even differ (within limits) in the case of two cultured per- sons of the same race, place and day. But the concurrent critical opinion of the human intelli- gence directed upon the materials of literature 148 FORCES IN FICTION does insist upon some ideal, and in all periods and lands bases appreciation of the artistic prod- uct upon the sense of pleasure. What pleases — using pleasure in the broad sense to include that which emotionally arouses — ^is within the pale, what is not pleasing lies without. It is not enough that a person be pleased — the individual artist or amateur; there must be wide agreement in order that the variables incidental to the personal equa- tion be eliminated as far as possible. Subtracting all discrepancies and variances of ideal, a residuum is left which declares for the ever clarifying per- sistence of the beauty-sense. So much may with modesty, in the light of present psychology, be claimed for judgments upon literary art. And this position should be taken sturdily against those who would upset all canons and plead for the un- licensed expression of personality. A technique of the art — ^however it may have changed with the change of ideal — ^has always and must always exist. But to go further and argue for changeless laws entirely outside the human mind which makes and accepts them, is dangerous. Modern criticism, then, is aware of this general change of front towards canons hitherto held to be absolute and invariable ; and its increased sub- jectivity, with the substitution of the personal im- pression for the historical laws, is more than in- dividual whim, being in accord with a widespread and typical intellectual process. It is not wise. A NOTE ON MODERN CRITICISM 149 therefore, to regard this subjective tendency of criticism as egoistic in a bad sense. In its genesis, at bottom, such a habit is an instinct toward hon- esty. In the hands of the right sort of man the results of this manner of literary appreciation are both illuminating and stimulating. The reader catches the contagion of enthusiasm and receives a liberating sense of his own right to first-hand enjoyment. He makes bold to like a given piece of literature not because he must, but because it appeals to him, and here beginneth all truthful enjoyment in letters. LITEKATURE AS CRAFT The Love of the Fine Phrase The whole accomplishment, the whole desire of literature, may be resolved into the love for the fine phrase. Alfred de Musset once confessed, half-shamefacedly, his deep joy in phrasing; and always to the true maker in letters what is of supreme importance is the way one says things. To lavish infinite pains upon the manner of one's work is to be of the elect. We call Frenchmen like Flaubert and the De Goncourts men-of -letters, par excellence, just because this was with them a consuming ambition, — to seek the fittest, finest, most impeccable expression. More than is perhaps realized, the fine phrase makes the difference be- tween platitude and 'the play of genius. Lowell has discoursed wisely of this, pointing out that what seems a striking thought becomes, on analy- sis, a striking medium for the conveyance of a thought which, less richly, less graciously, less boldly dressed, would be catalogued as a common- place. Times innumerable, matter and manner are thus confused. The usual sneer at this love for the fine phrase imputes shallowness and a worship of the aesthetic 150 LITERATURE AS CRAFT 151 divorced from the intellectual and the ethical. The imputation is unfair and may, by a return thrust, itself be called shallow. For the fine phrase implies the fine personality behind it : an individ- uality of interest, a happy gift, a force not of earth's predicable creatures. Literary style, while it may be striven for and though it waits on wor- shipful toil, cannot be commanded ; its will is the wind's will, after all. "When style revisits me,^^ writes Eobert Louis Stevenson, in those precious "Vailima Letters,"' and he said it all in four words. A craftsman he was, if ever one wielded English speech; but he knew that diction would come with inspiration, not before. With all his cunning, he was not its master; style was his mistress, to be wooed and won, an eternal femi- nine. In the physical world motion generates heat and light; in the psychical world heat and light are generated by emotion. And heat and light are the wings of style. It may seem to some a poor quest, this of the fine phrase. The communication of ideas being the most obvious mission of language, is there not something puerile, even piddling, in an aspiration for the right marshalling of words ? Can this be a valid life-work for grown men and women? Verily, yes. For to make fine phrases is to create beauty ; and to create beauty is to have commerce with the Eternal, — ^mortality's highest privilege. Then, too, fine phrases inevitably are associated with fine ideas — those apian miracles which at the 152 FORCES IN FICTION chance clangor of a word swarm in the brain-hive and deposit their amber sweets for the writer's behoof — and for posterity's. Moreover, the power of the fine phrase is greater among men than they are aware, the fascination of style likely to be belittled. Even the Philistine, who would be first to pooh-pooh our glorification of diction, is moved, albeit unaware, by the apt turn, the smooth flow of the sentence, the sudden flash of metaphor, the musical cadence, the start- ling felicity of antithesis. He is subtly pleased, he reads on and on, and thinks, good easy man, it is little to do, that he is most concerned with mind-stuff. Ah, the agonies, the long trying, the failures innumerous, the despaired-of perfections that are back of and under that easy accomplish- ment. Mayhap our Philistine deems pleasure but a trifling thing to strive for, and hence puts the pleasuremaker on a par with the mountebank. Yet let him be honest with himself, and he shall find that pleasure — ^joy, happiness, the name mat- ters not — is life's one conceivable guerdon, the only key to the mystery of mortality. To give pleasure to the knowing few is to be an artist, and the fine phrase is one of the legitimate artistic methods of pleasure-giving. Since all men, ac- cording to their light and degree of culture, are a-search for pleasure, and many find it in that fit and beautiful expression of personality which we call style in literature, the function of the fine phrase is justified ; for it is seen to take its place LITERATURE A8 CRAFT 153 in the economy of nature, meeting a real demand. To the serious artist in words, it is little less than a religion, this cult of the fine phrase. Here he will not sin, whatever he do in his daily walks. This temple he will not profane, the spirit that presides over it being august, lovely, without stain. Such a place is meet, he must fain feel, for his choicest sacrifices. II What is Literary Merit? The things which in a deep sense we know and understand best are hardest to define. Love is the greatest motor-power on the earth, the com- mon experience and the common glory of man- kind. Yet who dares define it, to set a mete and a bound for humanity's master-passion? It is somewhat thus with such an intangible quality or characteristic as excellence in letters; we appre- hend it readily enough, we mourn its absence, we thrill under a consciousness of its charm, but we are dazed a little at first when the question is put, plump and direct: What, then, is literary merit? To come boldly at the difficulty, literary merit is that quality in writing which relates, not to the things said, but to the manner of saying things. It is, strictly speaking, a matter of form, and nothing else. Emerson is literature, not because he is a great thinker in ethics or philosophy, but because he 164 FORCES IN FICTION utters his thoughts in a certain beautiful and in- communicable fashion. The Bible, entirely apart from its value as a religious teacher, is a wonder- ful literary repository, simply because a set of men back in the early seventeenth century, when the diction of Marlowe and of Shakspere, of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher was in the air, were inspired to put its proverbs, its parables and its psalms into such language as has never been equaled in English before or since. If this defini- tion be correct, it becomes evident that books lying outside of what is called belles-lettres may have literary merit. When one who has a genius for expression writes, for example, upon science, he still makes literature ; as witness a Humboldt or a Huxley. Whenever or wherever a man sets down his thoughts in a way which attracts, moves and charms by its style, or its manner of saying things, that man has literary merit, and no man else can be said to possess it. Some may perhaps incline to take offense at this simple explanation of literary excellence. ^'What,^^ they will cry, "the great effects of literature, the brilliancy and beauty, the wit and pathos, which have so often held us thrall, all this to be resolved into a trick of the trade, a legerdemain of rhe- toric?" The answer to such an outbreak is not far to seek. Expression, at its best and in its normal function, is not a self-conscious act in which the writer stands off and strives to produce an im- LITERATURE AS CRAFT 165 pression, but iS;, rather^ in some degree, a revela- tion; so that each man who makes literature gives the world;, in his writings, a sort of simulacrum of his own personality, of that essence which is he, as against every other personality in existence. Nay, it is more than a simulacrum, for the whole creature is in it, brain and body, heart and soul. From his manner of saying things you gather an idea of what manner of man he is; not so much what he is in actual, every-day life as what he is potentially, in his possibilities, according as God made him. But in setting up this definition of literary merit, it may still be objected that no true touch- stone has been given to guide one in pronouncing for or against a man's claim to write literature. Granted that the manner of saying things is the test, how may this manner be distinguished ? what are its earmarks? the elements or characteristics which go to make it ? Perhaps the most common reply to this highly pertinent question is to cata- logue, as do the rhetoricians, those qualities which are admirable in and essential to good writing: as simplicity, fitness and beauty, perspicuity, force and elegance, and so forth. But the trouble here is, that opinions are apt to differ as to what is beauty, or elegance, or force. Perspicuity, clearness, common folk might agree pretty well on; but when we come to the other qualities, there is sure to be confusion worse con- founded. When a stump orator out West told a 156 FORCES IN FICTION friend of mine that he had read Bunyan's ^Til- grim's Progress" and found it interesting, but that it had no literary merit, he showed that his sense of the qualities that go to the making of such merit was erratic, half-developed. A housemaid the other day informed me that a missing article was in ^^the nurse's apartment." ISTow, the place she referred to was a small, plainly furnished room of perhaps ten by twelve feet. To call it ^^an apartment" was absurd, because that word gave a false idea of its fitting-up and of its size. The word ^^room" would have been bet- ter, because fitter and simpler; moreover, because it is a native Saxon word and hence preferable to the Eomance word, *^^apartment," which is used un- necessarily and wrongly in nine cases out of ten. These examples serve to illustrate my point, which is, that it is insufficient and dangerous to insist on a certain number of qualities as con- stituting the literary manner of saying things. Such categories are of avail in giving students a notion of what is to be aimed at in writing; but they are not satisfactory in defining what is style — ^that subtle and wonderful thing. That an ob- servance of the laws of grammar is at the basis of style hardly needs the saying; such observance leads to correct writing, but not necessarily to the producing of literature, any more than the founda- tion walls of a building settle the question of its subsequent architectural ugliness or beauty. I would choose a more subjective test than that of LITERATURE A8 CRAFT 157 the rhetorics, and would affirm that a perception of the manner of saying things which constitutes literary merit can only be reached by a constant and catholic reading of the best literature. By heredity one can have almost an intuition of what is good, so that the life's reading is begun with a great advantage over another who has no bookish ancestry ; -but even the latter can acquire this sixth sense by dint of wise and multifarious contact with books. The stump orator could not see the beauty of Bunyan simply for the reason that he had not got into his blood the rhythm of fine prose, nor a feeling for the virile strength of Saxon methods of expression. My maid thought "apartment" more high-sounding and aristocratic than "room," because she had not read enough and heard enough good speech to learn the great lesson that in both written and spoken words, other things being equal, the simplest is always the best. By constant and intelligent communion with the master spirits of English letters, and then, if possible, with those of foreign literature, the reader comes to recognize intuitively and with perfect ease the distinction and charm of manner which make literature. He learns, too, that the manner itself may vary almost as often as do the men who speak; that Addison and Carlyle both write literature, yet are at the antipodes of style; that the glory of Walt Whitman is one and the glory of Tennyson is another. Yet will he discover that 168 FORGES IN FICTION all have somewhat in common, though with infi- nite variations and manifold divergencies ; that all possess a common gift and a common distinction which lead us to declare them makers of literature and masters of the mighty art of letters. Coming back, then, to our starting point, liter- ary merit lies in the manner of saying things. Original thought, noble conception, poetic imag- ining, these are precious ; but unless they be poured into the transmuting mold of expression they are not of themselves enough to constitute literature. And the way to gain the power of knowing this great gift of expression is for the reader to ac- quaint himself or herself with the books pro- nounced by the calm, sure judgment of the cen- turies to be the best and most worthy to live — books that possess what Austin Dobson has called ^^Time's great antiseptic, style." And in the case of the writer, this same reading should be supple- mented by a steady, unwearying use of the pen, since only thus will it gradually acquire a power mightier than the sword, even as persuasion is mightier than violence and the shaping of souls more than the mutilation of the body. Ill Music and Emotion- in Poetry Alliteration, or the rhyming of initial letters, is a device which, used either in prose or poetry, is likely to be despised and misunderstood by those LITERATURE AS CRAFT 159 who incline to snap-judgments. This is due in part to ignorance, in part to the patent abuse of alliteration, as seen, for example, in the head- lines of sensational journalism, or, if literature be in evidence, in the verse of such a man as Swin- burne, whose alliterative tours de force are alone in modern poetry for self-consciousness and per- sistency. But the fact is — and it is well to em- phasize and illustrate it — that alliteration is a thing of historical dignity in English verse (and English prose as well), and is, moreover, in es- sence and primarily a psychic phenomenon. Let me show what is meant, first, as to the his- tory of this characteristic of the technique of po- etry, confining the discussion to verse, as the form of literature wherein alliteration is most plainly to be seen in its workings. As is well known to students of English verse, alliteration precedes rh3rine in the historical development of our native poetry. Rhyme (which is the sound-agreement of words at the end of a line in contradistinction from the initial-letter rhyming which we call allit- eration) came into English from the medieval Latin hymns through the French, and we do not find it used till long after the Norman Conquest. But for centuries before this, poetry was culti- vated as an art, and had its definite, artistic laws and formularies ; and the particular device which was the predecessor of rhyme as a means of music- making (which is, as we shall see in a moment, the object both of rhyme and alliteration) is allit- 160 FORCES IN FICTION eration. Let me illustrate from a famous Anglo- Saxon poem, the epic of "Beowulf/' our first great Jlnglish epic. The following is a typical line from the poem: "Oft Scyld Sceflng Sceathena threatum"— Often Scyld, son of Scef, with troops of warriors — . Here, be it observed, we find three alliterative words, and, noting the literal translation placed under the line, we see that those words are im- portant noun-words. Now, without going into the minutiae of the matter, it is sufficient to say that the normal Anglo-Saxon line of poetry is built in this way, showing two alliterations in the first half of the verse and one at least in the sec- ond half, and that the accents fall on the alliter- ative word, which is necessarily an important one in both grammar and meaning. There are sub- divisions and finesses of this main law, such as to make the construction of old English verse a highly wrought and intricate affair. And yet here is a poem whence the illustration is drawn, writ- ten presumably in the seventh or eighth century, hundreds of years before rhyme, as now under- stood, was dreamed of in English. How foolish and ignorant, in the face of such data, to speak of the earliest English poetry, and of art in this field, as rough and inartistic ! Nevertheless so it is treated in the majority of manuals on English literature. In a word, then, alliteration, instead of be- LITERATURE AS CRAFT 161 ing a more or less flimsy trick of the trade in poetry, is an art-law which reigned supreme for centuries in our older and noble poetic products, and which, moreover, I want to show is still a legitimate and even necessary device and aid to expression when rightly used. All the best mod- ern verse proves this, and I shall try to make this plain under my second thesis, namely, that alliter- ation is a psychic phenomenon, and hence is an inevitable accompaniment to true and inspired poetry. For consider for a moment that both rhyme and alliteration, as hinted above, are means of secur- ing music in the poem; this is their sole raison d'itre. Rhyme, by the consonance of vowels and consonants, and by more definitely marking the rhythm of the verse, adds to the musicalness there- of; and alliteration, by the repetition of identical letters rhythmically distributed in a line, produces likewise an effect of music and a desirable tone- color, less full and rich, however, than rhyme, but nevertheless a musical effect. IN'ow the next thing to notice is the interesting and perfectly demon- strable dictum that in poetry there is a direct rela- tion between emotion and music; that is, a poet makes music in so far as he is emotionally vibrant- and alive. But if alliteration be one way of gain- ing an effect of music, it follows logically that the singer emotionally creative will instinctively and of necessity make use of alliteration as one means of securing the desired result. 162 FORCES IN FICTION This explains what I mean in stating that allit- eration is a psychic phenomenon ; it is an outward and visible token of an inward (siibjective) and poetic state or condition on the part of the bard. If we accept this definition — and it seems to be a sound and philosophical one — we are in a posi- tion at once to understand the true function of this so often disesteemed characteristic of formal poetry, and, with this touchstone, to pronounce on what is good or bad in alliteration. Allitera- tion is, then, a mark of emotion, and its effect is to add music to the poet's work. If a spurt of lyric feeling tends to alliterative language this should be apparent in both prose and poetry. As a matter of fact it is apparent; and, confining myself still to verse, I will give an example or two. Once on a time Walter Savage Landor wrote a splendid piece of blank verse to Eobert Brown- ing, beginning: "Shakespeare la not our poet, but the world's. Therefore of him, no speech/* And the praise herein tendered by the golden- tongued classicist to the chief dramatic singer of our century, culminates with a marked sibilant ■alliteration in the lines: "Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where The siren waits thee, singing- song for song." The artistic climax calls for and produces an alliterative richness lacking, and rightly lacking. LITERATURE A8 CRAFT 163 in the preceding lines. Hence, this is an example of what may be called legitimate, organic allitera- tion; by which is meant, alliteration correspond- ing with the march and culmination of the poem. In the snperb little lyric, "Home Thoughts from Abroad," the bard here apostrophized by Landor furnishes another example: *'And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops— at the bent spray's edge— That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!" And in those two closing lines notice the double alliteration on / and c, so distributed as to pro- duce the finest effect. The climax, which is more emotional than in Lander's blank verse, is an impulsive leap of creative expression and lo ! allit- eration comes to enrich the language use and deepen the music. It is not "alliteration's artful aid" here, but something far more natural and significant. Indeed, that line, "alliteration's art- ful aid," has done harm no end in spreading this misconception that alliteration is always a self- conscious and technical affair, never psychic, per- sonal and spontaneous. It is worth noting that the four additional lines in this poem of Brown- ing's have almost an effect of anticlimax, after the splendid alliterative and emotional crest of feeling in the passage just quoted. 164 FORGES IN FICTION Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, for all literature is full of them. The principle which is evolved from such modern instances seems to be that the right kind of alliteration comes in spurts correspondent to emotive impulses, and will be, consequently, irregular and not regular in occur- rence. This is the reason why the alliteration of Swinburne strikes a false note so often and be- comes offensive at times. That great poet makes use of the device almost as systematically as did the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, with whom, as was shown, it was a definite, artistic law of poetics. In other words, alliteration with Swinburne is not inevitably conjoined with lyric intensity, but is used coldly, self-consciously. Hence, a sense in the reader that it is artificial. It ceases to have dynamic, psychic significancy, and becomes a purely formal and sensuous enrichment or orna- mentation of the verse. Let me give a single il- lustration. In "Anactoria,^' a certain passage ends with the line, "Memories shall mix and metaphors of me." Here it hardly needs saying that both thought and phraseology preclude the possibility of an emotional state ; yet the m alliteration is excessive. Thousands of examples of this tendency in the author of "Laus Veneris" could be cited. I do not for a moment mean to say that plenty of Swin- burne's poems might not be mentioned in which a masterful handling of alliteration is linked with LITERATURE AS CRAFT 165' the most fervent feeling and an irresistibly song- ful lilt. But, speaking by and large, an effect of artificiality is indubitably made by Swinburne's technique in this particular, and he offers the most striking modern instance of the abuse of one of the oldest art laws in English poetry, and deserves careful study with this single characteristic in mind. ^^Yes,'' objects the critic, ^^ut why is it worse for Swinburne to use alliteration thus consciously and steadily than for the Anglo-Saxons to do so, as you have confessed they did?" The answer is that to the Old English bard this method of music- making was what rhyme is now in English verse ; but Swinburne, in addition to a lavish and won- derful use of rh3rme music, superadds this music of alliteration, and the result is a cloying rich- ness, an over-lusciousness which is often dwelt upon in any analysis of his work. A man who has Swinburne's intense love of his art and a supreme gift for music in verse, and whose handling of alliteration is marked yet sharply divergent from the English poet's inas- much as it is natural and correspondent to emo- tion, not artificial and formal, is Sidney Lanier. The flush and fire of much of his lyric work is brought about, among other things, by his allitera- tive prodigality. But a study of him will reveal the distinction made between him and a Swin- burne in this regard. Take his perfect song 'The Dove" and let us look at the closing stanza : 166 FORCES IN FICTION "Nay, if ye three, O Morn! O Spring! O Heart! Should chant grave unisons of grief and love. Ye could not mourn with more melodious art Than daily doth yon dim sequestered dove." Here there is a strong alliterative effect, secured by the m and d rh3rm.es of the two verses that bring the lyric to a close. Here, also, is a dis- tinct rhetorical and lyrical climax of a subtly quiet but strong and lovely sort. This may be realized by any one who reads the three preceding stanzas which lead up to the comparison whose quintessence is expressed in these closing lines. Therefore, this is a classic example of fit and spon- taneous alliteration. The one law of right use is, as Lanier himself has said, that the poet be hon- est; by which he meant that he be not self-con- scious, nor his linguistics and metrics studied at the moment of composition. Sidney Lanier is alliterative to an extent without parallel among American poets (unless Poe be excepted), but only because his genius was intensely lyrical and he was a natural music-maker. Swinburne, contrari- wise, while also a true and exquisite lyrist, has made the mistake of riding alliteration to death, forcing it to become a set, formal law in his work ; and so we hear, too often, the creak of the ma- chinery coming in to disturb the God-given melody of his song. Our study of alliteration then, even thus in brief, leads to a very decided opinion and to firm ground of theory. It is, we see, a thing of legit- imacy and of great importance in the develop- LITERATURE AS CRAFT 167. ment of English poetry — ^indeed, of all poetry. It is not a pretty verbal trick to tickle our ears withal, but, rather, is inwrought with the being of man when he is creatively inspired to literary pro^ duction. It is, to be sure, capable of abuse, as is well exemplified in the case of Swinburne; but, in its purity and right use, it constitutes one of the chief beauties of the technique of poetry. Ex- actly the same line of argument can be applied to prose, and illustrations are legion from our best prose writers. It can also be shown that allitera- tion in maxims and proverbs has both a mnemonic and an artistic function. But this is a subject by itself. In our mighty prose authors it will be found that their places and periods of rhetorical climax and creative splendor are rich with alliter- ation at its finest and freest. However, the discussion has here been limited to verse, and I repeat as a summary : Alliteration in any serious study of English poetry must be re- garded as a mark of emotion, a psychic phenom- enon, having definite and close relations to the spirit of the man who seizes on it instinctively as an aid to and ornament of expression. INDOOES AND OUT: TWO REVERIES I Before the Fiee What a walk is in the early spring woods, with its chance of finding the trailing arbutus shy-hid beneath the dead brown leaves or of thrilling again at the sight of the stainless white bloom of the bloodroot, such to midwinter is the indoor open fire on the hearth. Twin delights these, each after its kind, growing with the years and fuller associations. To-day, returning from the city, I note the bleakness of the western sky and hear in the inter- mittent wind-gust a doleful presage of storm and a shut-in frozen world on the morrow. But my thoughts outfly me homeward, and I pluck up heart at the image that is evoked of a cheery blaze and a backlog that gravely drones a soothing bass to the vibrant, nervous treble of the flames aspir- ing, striving, and at last paling down to embers and eventual ashes. And even so the reality. That mundane matter, dinner, dispatched, and slippers donned, I am in front of the polished andirons that twinkle reflections of the facile lights. Cozy in my big Sleepy-Hollow armchair, I can listen in a very unction of creature comfort 168 INDOORS AND OUT 169 to the somber wail or leonine roar of the wind out- side,, enjoying vicariously for all less lucky mortals. What a long, weary journey has civilized man taken since the first fire of like kind was lighted for enheartenment against darkness, cold, hunger, loneliness ! And yet, with the vast deal that has been learned and sloughed oS and forgotten, back he comes to this primitive solace to find it all- sufficing and, in truth, the acme of nineteenth- century luxury. The thought has its reproof, its warning. But since the day our forefathers piled high the great rough-hewn branches in the hall and quaffed ale and mead from curiously chased cups as the flames licked lithely toward the smoke dark rafters, much has entered imaginatively in- to the wood fire as a fact in life, to broaden and enrich its content and suggestion. The literature of our own country has thrown on many a stick to yield a more ethereal glow. The wood fire has put on a mystic aspect since Poe wrote his "Eaven" before it: And each separate dying ember Wrought its ghost upon the floor. Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside Inn'' had never crept so warmly into our affections had it not been the emanation of the group about the back- log. Hawthorne, too, in his wonder-tales, needs to be read with this sibilant, colorful background. And what were the gentle imaginings of Ik Mar- 170 FORCES IN FICTION vel, without a fire to look deep into and to search for his source of inspiration. Nor can we unseat Mr. Warner from his ingle quarters, emitting wit and wisdom as the wood emits sparks and suffus- ing the atmosphere with the steadfast radiance of a kindly heart, even as the clear blue flame from the driftwood lights up the room, making it home- ly and habitable. These and other like mages of the pen have, with a potent species of wizardry, made every flame-spurtle emblematic and each stage in this conflict of the elements in petto a precious thing to see and to remember. When the fire is high and the crackle of the hickory as merry a sound as the gleam thereof is cheery, playing hide-and-seek in the uttermost comers of the study, a sense of housed satisfac- tion, of sensual warmth and lazy peace, unite to make a mood of serene though inexpressive pleas- ure. But as the logs give up inchwise their sturdy length, and are resolved into a charred and broken semblance of their sometime selves, the mood shifts into reminiscence, reverie, and so shades imperceptibly into melancholy. This pensive state, this role of "II Penseroso,^' is a sort of natural outflow of the precedent stage of quiescent delight. Wordsworth speaks of: That sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind; and this well describes what goes on in my soul before the fire. !N'ow, see, my eyes are fathoms INDOORS AND OUT 171 deep in the glowing coals, ruby red and scintillat- ing like the irises of a snake, while for a setting all around is the soft, harmonious, dreamy gray of the ashes. How at peace they are and how beautiful, after the brief fury and festal display of the fire ! Is it true, then, that this is the inev- itable issue of motion and color, warmth and fragrant odor and pleasances of song? In pur- suance of the somber thought I reach out to the bookcase, take down Schopenhauer from the shelf, and read a passage wherein the Apostle of Nega- tion eloquently apostrophizes that giving up of life and the lust of life which alone, he deems, offers a solution of the stress and agony of human things. If he be right, the quintessence of wis- dom has been exemplified in the burning of these branches from the forest which grows outside my window. They have had their moment of keen, vivid life, but, lest activity become torture and zest satiety, they have exchanged restlessness for sleep and an- nihilation. Purged in the fierce purgation of flame, theirs is the stainless lot and the Nirvana which is good. By irresistible analogy the mind takes up the mortal case and the age-old query, What of Life beyond? knocks at the door of con- sciousness with dreary insistence. More often than not when such questions come we blink at them, turning away with some ready excuse or so im- mersed in the hour's duties that such-like prob- lems are put aside for the nonce, to be taken up 172 FORCES IN FICTION at some pat opportunity. We are fully aware that the riddle for us is still unsolved ; we helieve hon- estly that some day it will be proved in grim earn- est. But alas ! the continual putting off acts like a narcotic, until indifference is begotten and we drift along with no clear notion where the path ends or whither it would lead us. We have put the question so carefully away for future refer- ence, that it is lost; even as o'er-careful house- wives, for safe keeping, hide something delectable or necessary, belonging to the male side of the house — ^hide it so successfully that it is not forth- coming in the hour of necessity. * * * The last red eye has winked itself into oblivion now and, Schopenhauer closed but still on my lap, I still sit and muse above the once ardent ashes. Musing thus, listening to the wind moan- ing about the house gables, is it not the forecast of old age, when the tension shall relax and the vision dim, while slowly the cold of stagnant blood creeps upward until the vital parts are reached and all is over? The air of the room chills, and my heart stirs with a vague loneliness, as of the forsaken. But such gray fancies, true mates of the ashes, are not my normal way of meditation, and finally I spring up as the clock below stairs strikes twelve with musical iteration. I build me in a trice another fire and marking what a goodly bed the former blaze has left for its successor, I say in dumb argument with my critical ego: ^^This has been no annihilation; here is substitu- INDOORS AND OUT 173 tion, not destruction ; nothing is lost in this trans- lation of the wood; the phenomenal aspect of the process is a mere eye-cheat and, dealt with by either reason or faith, there is no cause for me- grims or mooning." And, comforted at heart, I brood on until the first faint twitter of birds her- alds the coming of the hopeful dawn that shall bring a new day of work and growth and worship. II WheinT the Sap Runs Up in the Trees It seems somewhiles, at the turn of the year, as if the time of buds and birds would never come. New England is famous for this hesitant mood, this chariness in surrendering her wintry fortress to the winsome season for which man waits and yearns. Late in March I stand and look across the fields that lie as barren and bleak as ever they did in mid December. The left-over leaves of yesteryear hang in straggling bunches and splashes on beech boughs and elms, ghostly pale ; you would say they never could be shaken off by the wind, or pushed aside when the vital sprouts of the new year prick their way into sight. It is a time for faith, hope, and charity. The air is raw and harsh; the clouds lower gloomily, and as like as not a nor'easter settles down for several days on end, the fittest thing possible in this monochrome of 174 FORCES IN FICTION cold grays and ■iiiilustrous browns. After the storm, I stroll along the river bank; the face of nature still betokens a sombre mood, and the fields are as before, dreary-colored, the trees gaunt skel- etons creaking like gallows that dangle corpses in their air graves on high. But of a sudden, my eye catches the hue of the alders that grow be- side the stream, and my heart gives a great thump of joy; for lo! the branches are a flare of dull, strange, dusky yellow, a note of spring, so in- definite, so out of sympathy with the landscape round about, as to make almost an impression of the uncanny, the supernatural. And, next day, walking down the stately avenue, I am aware that the arching boughs of the soft maples have thrown a branched redness on the air, signet of the sprouting tide, and so welcome with their mass of rich bold color that one is tempted to idleness beneath their pleached pleasance. And these signs, mark you, are before the general carnival of sounds and sights, when every fool knows it is spring, and a song on the lips is the meet way of praise. As yet, bleakness, gray tints, and inhos- pitable suns. But a week later comes a change ; a really bland day, mild and soft with south winds, and filtered through and thorough-through with sunshine, — a miracle to answer the doubt and fear bred of ITature's sphinx-like manner of silence as to her intentions. It is too good to be verity, and I pinch myself to make sure I am all awake. The- INDOORS AND OUT 175 oretically, I knew spring would arrive, and that once come she would be companioned by beauty. But oh, treacherous memory, knowing is one thing, and feeling a magical other! I had for- gotten how sweet was the smell of the succulent new grass, how silver-blithe the robin at my morning window, how ineffably tender the green of the leafing trees. The shades, transitions, chromatic nuances of this spring foliage; who has ever expressed their charm and loveliness? They are as ethereal as colors seen in dreams, yet as fresh and splendidly vivid as the first flower of Eden's garden. Gaze at the willow, for ex- ample, until that delicate ravishment of budding life is part of you, and then let your vision feed on the dark emerald of the lawn uplit by yellow splashes of sun; what a contrast, what exhaust- less pleasure of shifting tints and tones, and all within the gamut of a single color, nature's sum- mer favorite ! And peach and cherry trees, too, are aburst with blossoms, pink, perfect, scattering odors as a wind-puff scatters leaves; the apple boughs will follow soon and add their virginal whiteness to the orchard symphony. Then how the birds respond to the lure of the sun ! It will be high tide with them before one is awake, for even to-day, listening, you shall hear bobolinks, grosbeaks, and orioles, in full chorus. A robin, fat and familiar in his gayety of livery, alights on the ground only a few feet off, and with head a-cock lets one admire his splendor of waistcoat 176 FORCES IN FICTION and the smug proportions of one who is the pride of his family. And in early evening, the thrush- note floats down from among the tree-tops like a voice from the other side of the year. The first twilights out-of-doors, how good they are, what mystic hours of revery and sweet illusion ! Once again the frogs are at it in the pond, and the vast, vocal night takes their croaking and blends it in with the other nocturnal noises, by some wonder- work making a many-voiced music. When the moon rolls up from the nether east to make fairyland of the wood, and shows us our dear ones sitting by our side draped in soft cling- ing white stuffs and with uncovered hair, upon which the dews fall harmless, and from which exhale the rich scents of some exotic of the south, how sense-enthralling yet spiritual is the hour! Hark, that you may pick out, in the orchestra of night, the pellucid obligato of the little stream yonder in the bottom glade. For now are the waters loosened, every brook overflows, and from sources innumerable, swollen by snows wherever pines make shade, and hoar and cavernous rocks elude the sun's touch, the rivulets turn torrents, and what was yesterday a barren place to-day promises fair pasturage for flocks and herds. That sweet-sounding phrase, ^^the sound of many waters," came to the singer on some such time and tide as this, when spring wrought marvels with the land, and Nature donned her festal robes after the sack-cloth and ashes of hibernation. If INDOORS AND OUT 177 one be a veritable worshipper of Pan, may not the murmur of the sap running up in the trees be heard distinctlier the more of love is in the soul ? A gentle, mellow sound it is, an overtone of joy to the graver doings of earth and sky. Some day now I shall uncover deep in the boscage the shy pink blooms and the spicy fragrance of the arbu- tus, firstling of April flowers. Ah, Spring, of a truth, thou art the Age of Gold come again; eternal youth is in thy buoyant paths, and mortal man must be enamoured of thee until the end of ends. A LIST of IMPORTANT FICTION THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY A ROMANCE OF AMERICAN CHIVALRY THE LAW OF THE LAND Of Miss Lady, whom it involved in mystery, and of John Eddring, gentleman of the South, who read its deeper meaning By EMERSON HOUGH, Author of The Mississippi Bubble Romantic, unhackneyed, imaginative, touched with humor, full c^f^ spirit and dash. Chicago Record Herald So virile, so strong, so full of the rare qualities of beauty and truth. New Tork Press A powerful novel, vividly presented. The action is rapid and dramatic, and the romance holds the reader with irresistible force. Detroit Tribune Pre-eminently superior to any literary creation of the day. Its naturalness places it on the plane of immortality. New Tork American Illustrated by Arthur I. Keller I zmo, cloth, price, ;^ i . 50 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis A THOROUGHBRED GIRL ZELDA DAMERON By MEREDITH NICHOLSON Author of The Main Chance Zelda Dameron is in all ways a splendid and successful story. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness and a sturdiness that will commend it to earnest, kindly and wholesome people. Boston Transcript The whole story is thoroughly American. It is lively and breezy throughout — a graphic description of a phase of life in the Middle West. Toledo Blade A love story of a peculiarly sweet and attractive sort, — the interpretation of a girl's life, the revelation of a human heart. New Orleans Picayune With portraits of the characters in color By John Cecil Clay izmo, cloth, price, %\,^o The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis LOVE IN LIVERY THE MAN ON THE BOX By HAROLD MacGRATH Author of The Puppet Crown and The Grey Cloak This is the brightest, most sparkling book of the season, crisp as a new greenback, telling a most absorbing story in the most delightful way. There never was a book whch held the reader more fascinated. Albany Times-Union The best novel of the year. Seattle Post-Intelligencer Satire that stops short of caricature, humor that never descends to burlesque, sentiment that is too wholesome and genuine to veige upon sentimentality, these are reasons enough for liking The Man on the Box, quite aside from the fact thas it is a refreshing novelty in fiction. New York Globe Illustrated by Harrison Fisher 1 2mo, cloth, price, ^ i . 50 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis HEARTS, GOLD AND SPECULATION BLACK FRIDAY By FREDERIC S. ISHAM Author of The Strollers and Under the Rose There is much energy, much spirit, in this romance of the gold comer. Distinctly an opulent and animated tale. New York Sun Black Friday fascinates by its compelling force and grips by its human intensity. No better or more absorbing novel has been published in a decade. Newark Advertiser The love story is handled vdth infinite skill. The pictures of "the street'* and its thrilling, pulsating life are given with rare power. Boston Herald Illustrated by Harrison Fisher l2mo, cloth, price, ;^l.50 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis A ROMANCE OF LOVE AND POLITICS THE PLUM TREE A New Novel By DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS Author of "The Cost," "Golden Fleece," Etc. In this new novel the author of '* The Cost " sounds a trumpet call to American patriotism and integrity. First and last "The Plum Tree *' is a love story of the highest order — interesting, ennobling, puri- fying. Senator Depew says: **Well written and dra- matic, as might be expected from the pen of Phillips." Senator Frye says; ** A wonderful story of American political life." Senator Beveridge Fiys: ** Plot, action, color, vitality, make ' The Plum Tree' thrilling." Drawings by E. M. Ashe Bound in Cloth, izmo, ^1.50 The Bobbs- Merrill Company, Indianapolis AN ADMIRABLE TALE.' THE MILLIONAIRE BABY By anna KATHARINE GREEN Author of "The Filigree Ball" "This Stirring, this absorbing, this admirable tale." New York Sun *« A thrillingly sensational piece of fiction — *The Millionaire Baby. " ' St. Paul Pioneer Press ** Certain to keep you up to the wee sma' hours. ' * Chicago Journal *« Handled with consummate dexterity, adroit- ness and fertility of invention." Brooklyn Times ** A detective story that is a detective story.'* Judge ** One reads fi-om page to page with breathless interest." New York Times ** The reader is kept in a state of tiptoe expec- tation from chapter to chapter." Boston Herald *'Anna Katharine Green shows, in 'The Mil- lionaire Baby,' a 'fertility of brain simply marvel- ous. ' * Philadelphia Item Beautifully Illustrated by A. I. Keller izmo, ^1.50 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis THE LIFE AND LOVES OF LORD BYRON THE CASTAWAY *• Three great men ruined in one year — a king, a cad and a castaway. ' ' — Byron. By HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES Author of Hearts Courageous Lord Byron's personal beauty, nis brilliancy, Hs genius, his possession of a title, his love affairs, his death in a noble cause, all make him the most mag- netic figure in English Hterature. In Miss Rives' s novel the incidents of his career stand out in ab- sorbing pov^er and enthralling force. The most profoundly sympathetic, yvnA and true portrait of Byron ever drawn. Calvin Dill Wilson, author of Byron — Man and Poet Dramatic scenes, thrilling incidents, strenuous events follow one another; pathos, revenge and passion ; a strong love ; and through all these, under all these, is the poet, the man, George Gordon. Grand Rapids Herald With eight illustrations in color by Howard Chandler Christy l2mo, cloth, price, ;^i.oo everywhere The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis A BOOK TO MAKE THE SPHINX LAUGH IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE By MIRIAM MICHELSON From the moment when, in another girl's chin- chilla coat, Nance Olden jumps into the unknown carriage, and, snuggling up to the solemn owner, calls him "Daddy,'* till she makes her final bow, a happy wife and a triumphant actress, she holds your fancy captive and your heart in thrall. If jaded novel readers want a new sensation, they will get it here. Chicago Tribune For genuine, unaffected enjoyment, read the ad- ventures of this dashing desperado in petticoats. Philadelphia Item It is beguiling, bewitching, bristling with origi- nality ; light enough for the laziest invalid to rest his brain over, profound enough to serve as a sermon to the humanitarian. San Francisco Bulletin Illustrated by Harrison Fisher 1 2mo, cloth, price, ^1.50 The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis .^/ \^^i^= UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. ^N* 5 1953111 28Mar'56jJf MAR I 4 1956 LO 3iM^'56GB MAYS 11956 REC'D Lp NOV U 195 i.u ISJart'COBSZ ^^C'O CO NOV 6 ^aoi REC'D LD FEB 21 1962 D 21-100m-7,'52(A25288l6)476 •3_XJan'62JE ,ei5'64-12M F^ JAN 2 5 1963 8Feb'63m ,. iW^ ^^^ REC'D LD t ^^CvC^^^i ^'^;^ VERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF' THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN ^^^^ffi IVERSITY OF CALIFORNU LIBRAIiy OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CUIFORH <>^^M yvi' 'Ji- '* 1-:^/. 1 ? •^i'f:-i-'jf: