Shakespearean and Other Papers JOHN BELL HENNEMAN Shakespearean and Other Papers Shakespearean and Other Papers By JOHN BELL HENNEMAN Late Professor of English in the University of the South; Late Editor of The Scwanee Review The University Press of Sewanee Tennessee m c m x I Copyright, 191 i, By Mrs. J. B. Henneman. • • • . • •• **•}•♦ ♦£ 5 • « ■ Preface THIS Preface is at once a labor of love and the saddest liter- ary task I ever undertook. The writer of the papers here collected was one of my dearest friends, one of the most pure and loyal characters I ever knew, one of the most devoted schol- ars and sincere lovers of literature with whom it was ever my privilege to work. At the time of his unobtrusively tragical and heroic death our friendship had lasted for twenty-six years, and for fifteen of them had been peculiarly close. We were collegemates and then fellow-teachers in Tennessee; then he took the chair I had filled at Sewanee and carried on The Sewanee Review, to which he had been a sturdy prop from its inception. After that we were closely associated in editing Shakespeare and Thackeray, so that I think I may fairly say that it would be difficult for one man to know another better than I knew John Henneman. It would be more difficult to make me believe that a finer spirit than his ever animated a human body. Peace to his ashes! It is obvious that I cannot write of his essays in the capacity of an impartial critic. I write of them only as one of the friends that suggested the preparation of this volume. When he came back from Germany and went to Hampden-Sidney to teach, I found that his interest was quite as much engaged by the history of the South as it was by English philology and literature, the studies he had chiefly pursued abroad. Shortly afterwards I wrote a biography of the South Carolina novelist, William Gilmore Simms, which brought down on my head a storm of unexpected denunciation. One of my stoutest defenders was John Henneman, despite the fact that he was more conservative on many matters than I had been, and although he privately found fault with me for expressions, in which, doubtless, I had not been overtactful. He stood, how- 273356 iv PREFACE ever, for the two main things the book stood for, the right of free speech with regard to Southern affairs and the necessity for impartial, original research in Southern history. His support, when other professors of English were suggesting in the news- papers that I should be incontinently turned out of my chair, naturally brought us closer together, and, I may add, cemented our friendship with that other true Southerner and most loyal son of Sewanee, Benjamin Lawton Wiggins, late Vice-Chan- cellor of the University, who so soon followed Henneman to the grave, both of them drawing from my lips more than once what I have long thought to be the saddest and most pathetic of ejaculations, the Horatian "Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tam cari capitis?" But to return — lest I find myself launched into another of Horace's odes, the " Eheu fugaces " — when I founded with Wiggins The Sewanee Review, shortly after the appearance of the volume on Simms, it was to Henneman that I chiefly turned for articles on Southern history and literature, particularly for such as required that patient labor he was always so ready to give to every task he deemed worthy of it. Some of the papers in this volume date from the period of his interest in the Review as a contributor, others from the period of his editorship, and all his Southern studies, including his work upon a volume in the series known as "The South in the Building of the Nation," represent a patriotism which had no difficulty in being as loyal to the nation as it was to the section. In this particular I know of no better exemplar that our younger students of Southern history can set before themselves than Professor Henneman, de- spite the facts that he was primarily a teacher of literature and that he was probably best known for his admirable work in maintaining high academic standards in Southern colleges. From him students of our .Southern history can learn to be loyal without being in the least reactionary. PREFACE t But it is not alone the Southern papers in this volume that truly represent their author. He was Southern to the core, but I have never known a man more awake to the advantages of every sort of foreign contribution to culture. The paper on the novels of the Hungarian Jdkai represents this interest in for- eign literatures, but it represents to a very inadequate degree Henneman's extraordinary open-mindedness, his sympathy with the good and beautiful wherever he found it, his large humanity. He was as capable of wide imaginative sympathy as he was of minute, painstaking evaluation. More truly than most men he could say that nothing human was alien to him, and he displayed this catholicity of spirit abroad when on his travels and at home in his teaching and writing. In what is perhaps the most important group of these papers, the Shakespearean studies, I have no right to claim the sort of spiritual partnership I am proud to claim in the case of the Southern papers. Henneman was from the beginning a much more devoted Shakespearean than I have ever been, and, although we were for years associated in a revision of Grant White's edition of Shakespeare, which is soon to appear, I suppose there is no other subject discussed by us on which each re- mained so unaffected by the other as the work of the world's greatest dramatist. I always thought him a Shakespearolater ; he always thought me a little daft on Milton, and, perhaps, on Homer. So I left to him much of the work on the chronology and sources of the plays and a good deal of the minuter textual criticism, and he, on his part, relied on my general editorial judgment with regard to what to use and what to discard of the scholarly material he had gathered. It has long seemed to me that he was particularly strong in his comprehension of the problems underlying the early history plays, and that in his more general treatment of Shakespeare he displayed a loyal human appreciation of the wonderful human beings Shake- speare's genius gave to the world. His veneration for Shake- vi PREFACE speare was profound, and that was where we differed, I giving my veneration to the writer I deemed the loftier soul and the more perfect artist, Milton, and to the most serenely consummate and satisfying of all the works of art of which I have any know- ledge, the poems of Homer. Yet I think we loved each other all the more for this divergence of tastes; for each respected the other's choice, and respect is a necessary ingredient of the highest love. But ah! those golden days and nights of talk about the immortals are over. His is the "domus exilis Plu- tonia;" mine, a world made sad by his absence. Again, peace to his ashes; and sympathetic readers for these essays, products of the sincere labors of a noble man. W. P. Trent. Neuchatel, July 13, 1911. Biographical Sketch JOHN BELL HENNEMAN was born at Spartanburg, South Carolina, on January 2, 1864, in the midst of the great Civil War, at a time, however, when the tide of disaster was already running heavily against the Southern Confederacy. His father was a native of Bavaria, who had emigrated to America in his early manhood and after a few years' residence in New York had established himself in business in Spartanburg before the outbreak of hostilities. Shortly after settling in South Caro- lina he married Miss Louisa Rate, a native of Bourn in Lin- colnshire, England. In comparison with most Southern towns of the same size, Spartanburg was unusually well provided with educational facilities. It was the seat then, as now, of Wofford College, an excellent institution, which under the direction of the late Dr. James H. Carlisle exerted a wide and beneficial influence on the young men of South Carolina and the neighboring states. After passing through the local preparatory schools, where he already showed remarkable promise, Professor Henneman entered this college in the year 1876 and spent the next four years in diligent study. It was fortunate that his life as a student at Wofford fell in what is perhaps the most notable period in the history of the College. Apart from Dr. Carlisle, to whose lofty character and fine moral influence Professor Henneman was always ready to pay tribute, the faculty of the college embraced just at that time a number of men who were destined to careers of distinction in later life. Among them to be mentioned especially are three men, who not many years afterwards entered on a wider field of activity at Van- derbilt University, viz., Professor J. H. Kirkland, the present Chancellor of Vanderbilt, Professor Charles Forster Smith, now Professor of Greek in the University of Wisconsin, and the late Professor W. M. Baskervill of Vanderbilt. The present writer has often heard Professor Henneman speak of the inspiration viii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH which he received from these scholars and of the determining influence which they exercised on his life. In 1881 he left Wofford and the following autumn entered the University of Virginia. Throughout his career at the University he ex- hibited a characteristic energy, distinguishing himself in his classes and at the same time taking an active part in the debates of the literary societies and in the editorial management of the college magazine. It had always been his intention to practise law, and after receiving the degrees of B.A. and M.A. at the University of Virginia in 1883 and 1884 respectively, he took the summer law course there, but feeling himself drawn more strongly to a career of scholarship he accepted a call to Wofford College as Assistant Professor of the classical languages for the next two years. His experience during these two years at Wofford con- firmed him in the purpose of devoting his life to the teaching of literature and with the example of Professors Kirkland, Smith and Baskervill before him, all of whom had recently taken the Ph.D. degree in Germany — an achievement which in those days still savoured something of the marvellous — he sailed for that country in the summer of 1886 and the following October matriculated at the University of Berlin. There are few recol- lections more vivid in my mind than that of the chance meeting on the Unter den Linden which first brought Professor Henneman and myself together in the great foreign city. We had been fellow-students at the University of Virginia — had attended, in many instances, the same classes, but being members of different fraternities and living in different parts of the college we had not had an opportunity of cultivating such an intimacy as the similarity of our tastes and interests under the new conditions rendered easy. It was accordingly from this meeting on the Unter den Linden that our real friendship may be said to have dated. I was myself a new arrival in Berlin and the sight of a familiar face from the University of Virginia was as welcome to me as it was unexpected. Whilst in Berlin Professor Henne- man boarded in the family of a retired Gymnasium-Lehrer, Herr Biittmann, son of the famous Greek scholar of that name, and there in his lodgings on the Schoneberger Ufer and in the lecture BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ix rooms of the University our meetings were of almost daily occur- rence during the rest of my stay in Berlin. Needless to say that he applied himself to his professional studies with his accustomed vigour and enthusiasm. He entered, however, with equal ardour into the social life of the more serious students — was a regular attendant at the Germanistiche Kneipen, a participant in all students' Ausfliige — in short, exhibited already the quick hu- man sympathies which formed one of the most important sources of his influence in later life. The range of Professor Henneman's studies at Berlin was unusually wide. He attended lectures on the English, French, German and Old Norse languages and literatures and was an ordinarius for three semesters in the English and Germanic seminaries. He also took courses in General Phonetics and in Philosophy. Zupitza, Tobler, Weinhold, Hoffory — these were some of the eminent men under whose instruction he mastered the methods of philological science. His indefatigable industry and energy in those days often brought to my mind the phrase — Eiserner Fltiss — which was once applied to Jacob Grimm. His industry, indeed, was informed with something of the enthusiasm of the fifteenth century humanist, as was perhaps natural in the period when Americans were first beginning to take up in earnest the higher scientific studies. In the matter of lectures he showed little preference for English over German, but it had been his intention to devote his life to the former, so the dis- sertation which he wrote for the doctorate under the direction of Professor Zupitza was on the Middle English poem, "The Wars of Alexander," then only recently published by Prof. W. W. Skeat. It was the recognized difficulty which attended the taking of the degree at Berlin that determined him to remain there to the end instead of joining the flight of his countrymen to the various "doctor-mills" in other parts of Germany — uni- versities whose antiquity and fame often disguised a very low standard of requirement in the matter of degrees. It was the same motive, no doubt, that influenced him to compose his dissertation in German. Having received the coveted degree of Doctor of Philosophy x BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH from the University of Berlin in the summer of 1889, Professor Henneman returned to America and in the autumn of the same year entered on his duties as Professor of English and History at Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia — to which chair he had been recently elected. It was not long before he made himself felt as a force in the life of the place. His gifts as a lecturer no less than his learning won for him in a remarkably short time an enviable reputation in the educational life of the State, so that it was soon evident that his stay in an institution of such limited resources was not likely to be long. As a matter of fact four years later he accepted a call to the University of Tennessee — the State University at Knoxville — whose President at that time, Charles W. Dabney, was himself an old Hampden-Sidney man. During the first years of his life in Knoxville Professor Henneman was burdened with the instruction in German as well as in English, and it was not till 1898 that he was able to realize his long-cherished desire to dedicate his whole effort to English studies. Moreover his interests now set more steadily than ever in the direction of literature as opposed to philology, to which he had naturally been turned by his German training. Despite many complaints on the part of students in the begin- ning in regard to the excessive demands of the new professor he continued to develop the work of his department with remark- able industry and success until he had overcome the forces of indolence and established for himself a peculiar position of popularity and influence in the University. Educational con- ditions in Tennessee led him to concentrate his energies more and more on teaching, and it was at this time that the foundations were laid for the keen interest in pedagogical questions which was one of the distinguishing features of his activity during the remainder of his life. In recognition of this interest he was appointed a member of the National Committee on College Entrance Requirements and served in that capacity up to the time of his death. But even during these years at Knoxville, Professor Henneman was by no means idle in the field of scholar- ship. He was a frequent contributor to The Sewanee Review, BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xi of which Professor Trent was then the editor, and took an active part in the proceedings of the Modern Language Association, serving as a member of the Executive Council for many years and occasionally reading papers before the Association. The most noteworthy of his writings during this period, as during the subsequent years of his life, related to the early plays of Shake- speare and the contributions of the South to American schol- arship. Meagre as these contributions have been, Professor Henneman was wise enough to see the value of a historical sur- vey of the subject as a basis for the work of a more auspicious future and his various articles on these matters, not all of which are included in the present volume, afford striking proof of his judicious and accurate scholarship no less than of his patriotic feeling as a Southerner — which, though untinged by narrow sectionalism, was one of the passions of his life. Professor Henneman's connection with the University of Tennessee came to an end in 1900. In the autumn of that year he began the last and most fruitful period of his life as Professor of English in the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee — a position which carried with it the editorship of The Sewanee Review. Indeed, there was nothing in the call to Sewanee that attracted him more than the opportunities which it gave him, as editor of the Review, to keep in close and intimate touch with the intel- lectual forces of the South in general. Professor Henneman's life at Sewanee was one of the most varied activity. In the first place, he was not content with the r6le of a conscientious teacher and scholar, simply. There as elsewhere he endeavoured to impress himself more deeply on the lives of his pupils than would have been possible through the mere routine of professional teaching. Both as professor and as Dean — which office he filled during the last year of his life — he urged upon them, incessantly, the highest ideals of industry and conduct, and the unfeigned personal interest which he felt in each student, no less than his own example, caused his efforts in this direction to be rewarded with a success which would never have attended any merely abstract exhortations, however elo- quent. His sympathy with the students extended even to their xli BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH sports, and this was, no doubt, one of the sources of his influence with them. Be this as it may, few teachers of his generation have been remembered in later years with so much affection by the young men who have sat under their instruction. Apart, however, from his work as a teacher and editor, Pro- fessor Henneman found outlets for his energy also as a writer and lecturer. Already before leaving Knoxville, he had given courses in the University of Chicago during the summer of 1899. In the winter of 1907 he delivered a series of public lectures at the Johns Hopkins University on the Early Plays of Shake- speare, and in the summer of 1908 he conducted classes at the University of Virginia. He was the constant representative of his university at the annual meetings of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges and at the annual Conference on Southern Education. He was also a regular attendant at the meetings of the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association. As frequent personal contact with the leaders in American literature and scholarship as the circumstances of his situation permitted, was, indeed, one of the aims of his life. Moreover, he was not a silent participant in these various gather- ings. Especially in his own field, the South, no one was listened to with more attention in all matters that related to his profession. As regards his services to scholarship — apart from his teaching — his most valuable work was done as editor of The Sewanee Review. His own contributions to this Review included, among other things, most of the material which makes up the present volume. He was a contributor, moreover, to the Furnivall Mis- cellany (1901) and was joint-editor with Professor Trent (his immediate predecessor in the chair of English at Sewanee) in an edition of Thackeray's works for T. Y. Crowell & Company, and in an edition of Richard Grant White's Shakespeare for Little, Brown & Company, and was one of the editors of the encyclopaedic work, "The South in the Building of the Nation." These are only a few of his more noteworthy labours in the in- terests of scholarship. But at a time when his life seemed most full of usefulness and promise our dear friend received the summons of death. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xiii Three years before leaving Knoxville he had married Miss Marion Hubard of Buckingham County, Virginia, and her in- tellectual tastes and the ardent sympathy which she had brought into his life had been a source of strength to him in the re- mainder of his career. She was now called on to bear the heaviest of afflictions — the loss of one whose chivalrous nature and tenderness of heart no less than his distinguished attain- ments had made their life together one of joy and pride. His decline began in the late summer of 1907. After prolonged rest and a surgical operation in the following winter, however, he enjoyed several months more of apparently excellent health, and in the summer and autumn of 1908 he was as active as ever. Indeed, as late as October he read a paper before the meeting of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges at Chattanooga, and friends who saw him on that occasion were particularly struck with his cheerfulness and vigour. But the recover)* was only temporary. By the middle of the following month his condition was again grave and he was removed to St. Luke's Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. He reached Richmond on November 25. The following day — Thanksgiving Day — he breathed his last. The qualities which made my lamented friend a notable force in the sphere of his activities will, I hope, be manifest in the main from the above sketch of his life. Before closing, however, this brief and imperfect account of his career, I wish to bear testimony once more to his fine integrity, his loveableness of disposition, his loyalty as a friend — perhaps the most striking trait of his character — his universal human sympathies and his unwearied diligence in pursuit of things of the spirit. When death claims such a man, the whole South may well feel that it has lost in him one of its most valiant servants, but to those who walked for so long the same paths as he, his untimely end has come as the extinction of one of the joys of life. J. D. Bruce. July, 191 1. Contents PAGI I. Shakespeare in Recent Years : His Relation to His Predecessors 3 II. Shakespeare in Recent Years: The Themes of Tragedy 29 III. The Man Shakespeare: His Growth as an Artist. 51 IV. The Episodes in Shakespeare's / Henry VI . . . 83 V. James Lane Allen : A Study 115 VI. English Studies in the South 169 VII. Two Pioneers in the Historical Study of English : Thomas Jefferson and Louis F. Klipstein 189 VIII. The National Element in Southern Literature. . 199 IX. Historical Studies in the South since the War . . 223 X. The Nestor of Hungarian Letters 245 I. Shakespeare in Recent Years His Relation to His Predecessors From The Sewanee Review, January, 1908 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: I. HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS* WITH the revival of interest in a more distinctively literary study on a sound basis in our colleges and universities throughout the western world — a study necessarily profoundly affected by the broad principles now underlying the pursuits of philology, history, philosophy and science — it has been in- evitable that Shakespeare, the chief dramatic interpreter of the thoughts and emotions of this western world, should become the subject of renewed inquiry and discussion. Indeed, so great has been this output that it is with some temerity that one even announces a paper on Shakespeare. I shall merely plead as my excuse a genuine interest in the subject born of a study existing and increasing now consciously through twenty years; and simi- larly, I believe I may count on a degree of intimacy and interest in others. Paradoxical or not, this very familiarity contributes a chief reason for writing on these matters. But if Shakespeare has become more and more a subject of academic study, he is becoming less and less a tradition for the English and American stage and playworld. Mr. Sidney Lee's latest book on "Shakespeare and the Modern Stage" would imply that it is requiring serious effort in Great Britain to restore Shakespeare to what Mr. Lee considers his theoretically deserved place in popular esteem and to win general practical acceptance for the recognition of the poet's educational value. We hear from many sides, as from Mr. Bernard Shaw and the Russian novelist, Tolstoy, that Shakespeare is entirely overrated. A stay in New York for several weeks at the height of the theat- rical season usually reveals the fact that no Shakespearean play at all is regularly before the public in that city. Two houses of grand opera in full blast — in the belief that New York cansup- * The material for this and the paper to follow was used in lectures before the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in January, 1907. ■ 4 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: port what no other city on earth attempts — musical concerts without number, unlimited vaudeville, but in genuine theatrical work only a sprinkling of nondescript representations, seem to be what the American public, judged by the New York stan- dard, is demanding, or is at least paying for. The Ben Greet Company well nigh alone may be excepted. This company has been traveling among our universities and small cities in the South and West, presenting the morality of Everyman and sundry plays of Shakespeare with a simplicity and a naturalness suggestive of the Elizabethan spirit. Every age and generation has its own way of looking at things: demands its new and personal interpretation of a philosophy of literature and of life. Like the continued recurrence of spring- time and youth, the mystery is ever new and never ceases to surprise. Each one must interpret a piece of literature in his own modes of thought, must experience its enjoyment and derive its lesson for himself. The really great masters in literature — and they are necessarily very few — are great just in that they divined and expressed life in such large measure as to give some- thing, and never the same thing, to each age and generation, to every student of literature anywhere. Three such names the ancient Greeks undoubtedly furnished: Homer, if we may still unite under one name the racial genius that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey ; yEschylus, the author of the Agamemnon trilogy and the Prometheus ; and Sophocles, the portrayer of CEdipus's agony and Antigone's calm despair. Our modern age — and this is the glory of our Mother Country and the British race — furnished certainly one, and perhaps but one: the creator of Romeo and Juliet and Mercutio ; of Shylock and Portia; of Richard III and Henry V; of Bully Bottom and Falstaff aud Dogberry and Touchstone and the Fool in Lear ; of Beatrice and Rosalind and Viola; of Brutus, of Hamlet, and Othello, and Iago, of Lear and Edmund, of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, of Antony and Cleopatra, of Ophelia, Desdemona, and the Lady Cordelia, of Imogen, of Prospero — but where shall we end? The Prospero-Shakespeare has minted so many fresh coins from his brain to be current among mankind! HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 6 I have used advisedly the term 'creator.' For this act ap- proaches most nearly that of divinity itself. He made man in His own image: He created the living soul. We do not speak of Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, as types, generic of a class. We mean Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra themselves, por- trayed in all their complexity. Your lesser writers, even of as great magnitude as Charles Dickens, deal in types. But Divin- ity creates the individual, and can go no farther. From this point of view in our English literature, perhaps Chaucer alone approaches most nearly to the first great class of poets, makers or creators. The tragedy of Troilus and Cri- seyde stirred with profound pity through its story of unhappy love two hundred years before Romeo and Juliet. For I still must adhere rather to Professor Price's delicate interpretation printed ten years ago in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, than accept the attempt of Professor Cook, of Yale, at a recent meeting of this Association, at an extreme modifica- tion of this view, where Chaucer's Criseyde was reduced to a mere wanton. It seems to me that this latter conception leaves out the very thing in dispute — the literary quality — the deli- cacy of insight, the interpretative power of a master-poet I think we may accept, too, that the dramatic genius that created the Wife of Bath was not only of a high order, but not far below that which produced Falstaff himself In other literatures, whom shall we name? Some deny this first great position to Dante, the chief poet of mediaevalism, as too subjective and egoistic, despite all his populating of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Many likewise deny the first of all positions to Milton, the creator of Satan; although a very good friend of mine and a great lover of poetry, places him at the head of all English poetry. The answer depends not a little on our conception of what poetry is or should be, and the place of the made epic in its relation to the drama in literary art The lyric singers with their outbursts of the glorified Me are in still another class — except in the Hebrew Psalter, where the worship of Jehovah lifts the speaker and singer far beyond him- self into the heights of a glorified ecstasy. 6 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: Shall we include Moliere, who has best expressed the racial genius of the French people ? Shall we then name the German Goethe, who a hundred years before anticipated so much of the critical and scientific intellectual habit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Shall we name the lone figure of Don Quixote in Spanish literature, the contemporary of Falstaff, lingering between the eve of medievalism and the dawn of mo- dernity, which laughed Spain's chivalry away? Diverse answers may come from different sources. The great difference in the present approach to Shakespeare from that of former days is the contributory light which is thrown upon him. The poet is studied not only for and in him- self, but in the light of his predecessors and contemporaries, and these in view of a world movement This does not mean any the less intimate study of the poet's work in and for itself; but a wider knowledge, a greater intelligence, and larger sympathies have become associated with that closer study. We wonder no less at the intellectual power and poetic imagination which pro- duced the work; but we are able to trace better the normal processes by which that genius developed. Shakespeare be- comes removed from the position of a fetich, and is chiefly the constructive artist working in a dramatic medium. We do not expect to find a great mountain peak rising isolated out of a low-lying plain, but approached by a broken and undu- lating country. Shakespeare had his predecessors like Lyly, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe; contemporaries like Ben Jon- son, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Middleton, Heywood and Dekker ; followers like Massinger and Webster. The Eliza- bethan age was one of intense poetic and dramatic activity. Coming after the physical and mental unrest of the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary, it was one of rich, full, pulsating life. This corresponding movement in literature found its best ex- pression in dramatic form. Everybody seemed to be a dramatist, as in our degenerate days everybody has written fiction. And Shakespeare was the highest fulfillment of this best expression of the life and thought of his day. Or to state it differently in a sentence somewhat adapted : The greatest glory of England is HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 7 her literature, and the greatest glory of her literature is its poetry, and the greatest glory of her poetry is its dramatic rather than its epic and lyric triumphs ; and the greatest drama- tist — among this set of remarkable men who have been too little known to the general reader — is Shakespeare. But let us leave externals and come to a discussion of the plays themselves. We know well that Shakespeare did not invent new forms, any more than he usually invented his plots. He merely transcended other men's work by the power, glow, and vigor of his imagination. Before Shakespeare there were comedies like Lyly's, stilted and affected though they were; there were Chronicle or History Plays like Peele's Edward I, Marlowe's Edward II, and the anonymous Edward III ; Romantic Plays, like Greene's James IV; examples of bombast like Peele's Battle of Alcazar, Greene's Alphonsus of Arragon and Marlowe's Tamburlaint ; Tragedies of Blood like Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe' s/ew of Malta. Before Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis and Lucrece there were narrative poems like those of Spenser, Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla, Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Before Shake- speare's essays in the Sonnet, there had been not only Wyatt and Surrey, who introduced the form to English literature, but Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, long the model for a sonnet sequence on unhappy love, with its countless imitators. It is well, too, to remember the tremendous influence of the Continental literatures on the Elizabethan, for it is only by degrees that we have come to realize the importance of their study as bearing on this subject In an age of travel accompany- ing the Revival of Letters and the Renaissance, England knew French and Italian literatures fairly well, and not a little of the more remote Spanish and German. Latin — however carelessly learned and used — was still the universal tongue of the school and of all education ; and Greek had begun to exert its influence on the universities. Most of these influences met in greater or less degree, directly or indirectly, in Shakespeare, as the crea- ture of his age. So vividly Italian does the dramatist seem at times that some think he must have visited Italy — the Northern 8 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: Italy of Lombardy and Venetia, of Milan and Verona and Man- tua and Padua and Venice. He does not describe so closely the Italy further south — Tuscany, Rome, and the Two Sicilies. The French conversations in Henry V, and French phrases and sentences scattered through the plays, make it probable that their author knew a sort of Anglo-French, picked up in the streets and taverns of London which still held close relations with the neighboring French coast He did not know German. I recall now only one German expression in the plays: "Lus- tique, as the Dutchman says," in All's Well, II, iii, 37. He must have known of Lyly's Latin Accidence which he ridiculed in the Merry Wives, and have read some of the stories of Ovid and picturesque portions of Vergil — tale-tellers who were favorites during the Middle Age and far into the period of the Renaissance. Perhaps, too, he was acquainted somewhat with Livy, the popular Latin historian, and naturally had read a play or two of Plautus and of Seneca, in a day of classical imita- tive impulse. A Stratford Grammar School boy would at least know something of Latin, if he knew anything. There were then no courses to divert his attention like our present day Eng- lish, History, and Higher Mathematics in American Preparatory Schools, the examinations in which, for entrance to college, I am sure Shakespeare could not have passed. We can now better understand how Shakespeare entered upon his career of dramatist Becoming connected somehow with the theatre, he practised his 'prentice hand in working over old plays. He doubtless at first attempted no more than to make a play go better and be more actable — attract a bigger public, and bring more silver into the receipt-box. He must have turned instinctively to scenes which contained dramatic possibilities and have developed those, perhaps leaving many portions of the old play as it was. At length, while still making use of older material, whether in a crude play already existing or in a story- book, he seized upon the dramatic possibilities of a situation and of a character, and wrote the play from start to finish. Yet never did the dramatist give up his early habit of helping out an old play and making it more probable by touching up certain HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS I scenes or rewriting them entirely afresh, leaving the rest of the play to some colleague. It was a method perhaps inseparable from the theatrical exigencies of the day. This seems the best way to explain at later and very different stages of his work the inequalities and deficiencies in such a variety of plays as The Taming of tlie Shrew, Titnon of Athens, Pericles, and perhaps Henry VIII. It is extremely doubtful whether The Two Noble Kinsmen, the first act of which some have supposed to be Shakespeare's and the rest continued and completed by John Fletcher, is in any part Shakespeare's at all. Not enough has yet been investigated concerning this connec- tion of Shakespeare's plays with his predecessors and his con- temporaries, and with much of the older Elizabethan and Conti- nental material. The dramatist in the past has been studied too far by himself and for himself. A beginning, however, is being made and a better opportunity offered, by the new editions of Elizabethan dramatists and contemporary documents undertaken by the Oxford and Cambridge and other Presses. Nearly all the first plays of Shakespeare had prototypes : a ground plan that the dramatist worked upon. There was an old play on the victories of Talbot over the French, retold in / Henry VI. There were old plays on the bloodshedding in the Wars of the Roses, recounted in // and /// Henry VI; more than one old play, indeed, existed on the popular conception of the hump-backed, bloody Richard III. Plautus had an old play, the Mencechmi, on the confusion of two brothers ; on this seems to have been built an old Elizabethan play, The Historie of Error; and this in turn became tlie ground work for Shake- speare's The Comedy of Errors. An old double play, The Troublesome Raigne of King John, in ten acts, or two parts, was the basis of Shakespeare's single play of King John. There was possibly an older play on the subject of the deposed King Richard II, and a wretched piece, Tlie Famous Vic- tories of Henry V, suggested points to all three plays contain- ing Prince Hal: both parts of Henry IV and Henry V. Maybe there was an older play on Shylock, the Jew of Venice. Beyond question an older play explains much that is otherwise 10 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: inexplicable in the Tragedy of Blood, Titus Andronicus. There was an older Hamlet play with the ghost and all the other disturbing improbabilities, and it has been guessed, with some degree of assurance, that the writer of this old play was Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy. I emphasize this phase of Shakespeare's early work, because it is just here that the most insoluble problems occur in connec- tion with the history and development of Shakespeare's art. To me the periods of Shakespeare's work that have proved most re- warding, are two : that of the plays which mark the beginnings and growth of the dramatist's art, and that which displays his greatest achievement in comedy and tragedy. In this work of revamping old stuff and improving old themes, it seems natural to suppose that Shakespeare began with the older chronicle form of play and the traditions of classical comedy and tragedy. Such a theory best explains what is per- haps the greatest crux in Shakespeare — the relation of 77 and III Henry VI to the two older plays, their originals, viz. : The Contention Between the Two Houses of York and Laficaster, and the True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, and the relation of all four of these, still further, to I Henry VI and Richard III. The inextricable confusion can only be ex- plained, it seems to me, by a reference to this process of work- ing over old plays. While the theory may not be proved at every point, it is one of which I have become fairly convinced and upon which I have had the hardihood to write more than once. The problem is this. We have six plays. There has been some doubt that they are Shakespeare's at all — yet Shake- speare seems to have had a good deal to do with every one of the six The subject of the Wars of the Roses was an inter- esting and vital one historically, and from the point of view of the popular Tragedy of Blood was also essentially dramatic. There must have been originally an old play or plays on this subject — before Shakespeare engaged with the material at all. This original matter Shakespeare, most probably with others, worked over into the two plays existing in quarto form: The Contention Between the Two Houses of York and Lancaster HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 11 and the True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York. Note the expression, " True Tragedie," implying that there was another inferior version and perhaps a rival performance by a theatrical company on the next block. I believe, consequently, that in these two plays, The Contention and the True Tragedie, while not wholly, and possibly not largely, Shakespeare's, we have incorporated the oldest and first specimens of his work to be found. A very little later it dawned upon the dramatist that this material could be used to still further advantage. He could de- velop these two plays on the Wars of the Roses, prefix a play and affix a play — material for which already existed in previous plays — and connect all four, thus resulting in a tetralogy on the unfortunate reign of Henry VI, crowned by the figure of the wicked monster, whom these dissensions had generated, Rich- ard III. Whatever part of the original plays, The Contention and the True Tragedie, and even of the new plays thus produced, may have been by others — Peele, Lodge, or even Greene and Marlowe — the new conception of an historic tetralogy seems to have been that of one mind, and this one mind to have been Shakespeare's. The one name that emerges and certainly had a hand in them, though all four of the pieces were probably com- posite, as described, is Shakespeare's. All the changes, height- ening, developing, expanding, seem to have this one object in view. An old play existed on Talbot's victories over the French; it could be reduced and altered. The events were those of the early days of Henry VI. It is only necessary to heighten the parts dealing with Talbot's bravery, lengthen the pathetic business of the death of Talbot and his young son into a lyrical outburst, introduce Henry VI as an ineffective young king just coming of age, indicate the beginning of the Wars of the Roses in the delightful scene of the plucking of the white and red roses in the Temple Garden — for whose can such poetry be save Shakespeare's, even at the beginning of his art? Finally, add the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk for his king (and for himself) as a good curtain — and there you are! The play is done and you 12 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: may label it / Henry VI and let it precede the other two old quarto plays on the Wars of the Roses. ' The Margaret episode at the end of / Henry VI leads us to expect more — for it is unmistakably inserted at the close with this intention. It introduces a new element and serves as a transition to the following parts. The figure of Margaret is the one character that is in all four plays of the tetralogy — from first to last. By a fictitious device — undoubtedly, it seems to me, the work of Shakespeare — Margaret appears in all four plays, unhistorically, it is true, but, dramatically, very effective : in the first two as a lover; in the last two, Cassandra-like, heaping curses and prophesying doom. With the old Talbot play thus converted into a Henry VI play and this introduction now called / Henry VI completed, the dramatist returned to the old plays of The Contention and the True Tragedie, dealing with the Wars of the Roses, in which it is most probable Shakespeare already had a decisive share. What would he now do ? Why, naturally take these two plays with their excellent dramatic raw material, and in the light of I Henry VI, develop them, extend them, expand them, in- tensify their dramatic and lyrical notes, and thus expanded and intensified call them II and /// Henry VI, respectively. The two plays contain plenty of good stuff. Thus the dying words of the conscience-stricken Cardinal Beaufort : Comb down his hair : look, look ! it stands upright, Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul. Give me some drink. . . . And Warwick comments : See how the pangs of death do make him grin ! Already in III Henry VI the deformed, hump-backed Richard is characterized by his monologue form : I have no brother, I am like no brother, And this word ' love,' which grey beards call divine, Be resident in men like one another And not in me : I am myself alone. 1 My arguments for this were stated some years ago in a paper in the Pub- lications of the Modern Language Association entitled " The Episodes in / Henry VI." HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 13 The true conception is already there, and forthwith a final fourth play is appended : Richard III Richard had been the subject, seemingly, of more than one play before ; but this is the first indication of any consistent psychological conception of the character. Many hands may have dealt with the original dra- matic material in the four plays; but it seems that no one but Shakespeare — the same conscious artist, who developed later into the creator of Hamlet, Iago, Othello and Lear — planned putting these four plays together into a sequence and one consis- tent whole with their fitting culmination in the imperious Rich- ard. The characteristic psychology of the later plays may be already discerned in the earlier ones. Here are the definite marks of Shakespearean tragedy near its beginning. As in the later plays, there is the conflict between forces — a great waste of heroic qualities, courage, determination, great will — and some- how something that compels our sympathy. The tremendous will-power and the splendid audacity in courting Lady Anne is the justification of what would otherwise be an improbable and painful scene. The self-control in chasing away the visions of the night which are troubling a haunted conscience ; the dying a death grandly and bravely on the battlefield worthy of a better cause — these qualities call forth admiration, even with a natural detestation of Richard's character. Full of crudities, irrele- vances these four early history plays naturally are ; they reveal their mixed origin and complex nature, indicate that they rest on other plays and contain elements we may accept as un-Shake- spearean ; but they show, too, the process of beginning, growing, strengthening work; characteristics that are later developed in the creation of the masterpieces of modern dramatic literature. Another point anent the literary quality of Richard III may here be touched upon. It is in connection with the vexed relations of the quarto and the folio. The text of the English Globe and Cambridge editors, usually adopted without question, adheres in the main, as is known, to the quarto text, as an earlier version than that of the folio, and supposedly more nearly like Shakespeare's original manuscripts. Other editors like the American Richard Grant White, or the maker of the latest edi- 14 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: tion, Professor Ncilson, in the American Cambridge Poets series, accept the folio copy of 1623 as a later, better and cor- rected form. The differences between the two views have been great and the discussion has sometimes degenerated into violent controversy. One point which seems to have escaped the advo- cates of one text or the other, I am convinced of. After going through hundreds upon hundreds of these variations — for they are legion — to my mind and to any literary feeling I possess, the person who made many of these alterations from quarto to folio — often merely of a single word in a line — whether Shakespeare or not, was unquestionably a poet with distinctively subtle qual- ities. The Cambridge editors bluntly affirm that the quarto is probably from Shakespeare's copy. But may not the poet him- self (for certainly it was some poet) have altered his own copy in the course of time to the great improvement of scores, nay hun- dreds, of lines? It will be found that change after change has been made to escape awkward iterations of words and syllables, to introduce a concrete or specific word in place of a general term, as children for kindred or fathers for parents, or to bring in an entirely new poetic idea. But the editors of the Cam- bridge text, having started off on a certain path in obedience to a theory, insistently keep it and will have none of these things. It is, of course, beside the question, but I may frankly express the opinion for myself, that after working for some years over the variations between the quarto and folio copies of Shake- speare's plays and considering the number of misprints and errors in both, I am convinced that nothing like a perfect text of Shakespeare exists, nor in the nature of the case can very well exist. The elements that enter into the process are entirely too fanciful and subjective. None of the old copies is altogether trustworthy, and when we begin to alter, no two of us, for ex- ample, will agree as to the precise alteration to be made; nay, frequently, indeed, will be even consistent in the treatment in different places of apparently the same phenomena. This lack of consistency is the most grievous sin of all exist- ing texts. Editors are capable of doing on one page what they calmly ignore on another. The English Globe and Cambridge HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 16 text, generally accepted as the standard — and I shall not under- take to say any other is preferable — is open frequently to this charge of inconsistency from which all texts suffer; but to my feeling the Globe and Cambridge text is subject to the more damning fault of having been established by minds that, while remarkably accurate in details of textual criticism, seemingly had no adequate feeling for poetic distinction. But we can see the beginner Shakespeare practising in Comedy and Tragedy no less than in the History Play. In perhaps the latest edition of Shakespeare's plays, that of Professor Neilson in the American Cambridge Poets edition just mentioned, the editor has departed from the usual folio arrangement of the Comedies and the Tragedies, and has ventured to classify these according to content and to arrange them in their presumed chronological order. In doing so he follows the traditional opinion that Love's Labour's Lost is Shakespeare's earliest Comedy. It may be so; but for a long time I have not been able to escape the feeling that much may be said for the Comedy of Errors being the first in point of time. Professor Baker of Harvard in his new book on Shakespeare's Growth as a Dramatist places Love's Labour's Lost first and the Comedy of Errors later, on the ground of advance in dra- matic structure. But this may easily be accounted for by the fact that in the Errors he was following an older construc- tion, while Love's Labour s Lost is largely his own invention, and though later is structurally feebler, but in characterization is superior. In itself, it seems to me more natural that the dramatist in a first attempt should have followed older lines rather than have cut out for himself comparatively new paths. Two plays of Plautus suggested the central episodes — the confusion of the two brothers, and the wife's dining with a stranger while the real husband beats in vain at the door outside for admittance. Upon this material seems to have been built the old play, the Historie of Error, which Shakespeare used. Though this old play is known only by name and has long since disappeared, we can almost tell what it contained. It was probably originally downright crude and rough farce, some traits 16 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: of which have been still retained. What Shakespeare did, as usual, even in his earliest period, was to add new elements, heighten the dramatic appeal, smooth roughnesses, and tone down violations of taste and even of morals. The shrewish wife is probably softened from a vixen; the whole courtesan business, no doubt elaborated in the original, is very much condensed, even to the point of obscurity; a stroke of genius adds another pair of twin brothers — the servants Dromio — making the laughable confusion between the two pairs, even as to one another, intri- cate beyond belief. I am, too, inclined to think, as everything moves in pairs, that the charming sister, the first of Shake- speare's sensible, well-balanced women, was also created and added by the dramatist as a foil to the wife and mate for the brother. To distinguish the play further from its old form of absolute farce there is introduced the framework of the sepa- rated parents and children reunited in the end — a trait curi- ously enough revived and elaborated in all the latest plays of the dramatist's life : Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest For the other two beginning comedies — Love's Labour's Lost and the Two Gentlemen of Verona — no original play is known to have existed. This, however, does not preclude the possibility of such older form, following the general method of work, and I am not sure but that this was here also the case. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona there remains an echo of an older play, Felismena, on a related subject. On the other hand, it may be said that perhaps in both these cases the dramatist tried to invent his own plots. Both plays deal inci- dentally with theories of right education — a young man's the- ories — that you cannot educate away from Nature, but only in recognition and in restraint of Nature's forces. Each is founded upon methods of the predecessors of Shakespeare — John Lyly and Robert Greene, respectively. Love's Labour's Lost is the best example in Shakespeare of the influence of Euphuism at the same time that it ridicules the extremes of Euphuism and preciosities of speech in the verbal extravagances of the preacher, the teacher, and the fantastical Spaniard — extravagances caught HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 17 up and reflected ludicrously by the clown of the play. Allitera- tions, balanced forms of speech, word plays in great profusion, prose dialogue — all are in the manner of John Lyly — but the play echoes, too, other modes. The Spaniard is A man in all the world's new fashion planted, That hath a mint of phrases in his brain. But also the more serious and poetical portions of Biron and Rosaline, in the company of the King and Princess, are charac- terized by affectations : Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical. . . . Biron declares, I do forswear them. Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd In russet yeas and honest kersey noes. Such a comedy is evidently no comedy of character, but a comedy of a young man's brilliant quips and words. Controlled by the purists in speech, it has become the right sort of thing since Professor Clarence Child's admirable disser- tation on 'Euphuism,' to limit the term specifically to the qual- ities and appearances in Lyly's work. But while we may well restrict the word to this special and technical sense, this usage has brought with it a considerable loss. There is needed another term to express the movement in English speech at the time — a necessary and on the whole beneficial movement both in its added refinements and in its extravagances — a vogue which Shakespeare's play illustrates as well as condemns. In the broader and more generic sense, Shakespeare's play of Love's Labour's Lost is at once an excellent example of the traits of a very real movement in the history of English speech at its finest, and a ridiculing of the same thing at its worst The very con- sciousness of this, further inclines me to give a slightly later date to the play than is customary — and so to make it the second, or even more probably, the third, rather than the first of Shake- speare's comedies. The play is important as bearing upon the 3 18 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: future development of Shakespeare's art ; but especially so as illustrative of the dramatist's susceptibility to the influences of the times. No less does the Two Gentlemen of Verona show a similar following of a fashion. This play is Shakespeare's first charac- teristically romantic play, as the wretched, but sweetly lyrical, Robert Greene had developed it before him. The reviewer in The Nation, of Mr. Churton Collins' s new edition of Greene, has questioned Mr. Collins's statement of Shakespeare's indebted- ness to Greene on the ground that it was nowhere to be proved. Maybe not. And yet I have long entertained the opinion that I found Mr. Collins holds, and must beg to dissent from the re- viewers who demand mathematical demonstration. The roman- tic tangle of Love versus Friendship, the faithlessness and the reconciliation, the disguises of the lady as a boy page (already to be found in Lyly), the Robin Hood-like outlaws, the absurdly weak ending — not caring how the play closed and who married whom, so long as the characters stood in pairs and effective groups for the ringing down of the curtain — all these are traits which recall qualities of Greene's work and tell of a poetical Shakespeare near the beginning of his art Robert Greene was too positive a genius and prominent a figure for as skillful an adapter as William Shakespeare, beginner, wholly to pass by. The beginnings of Shakespearean tragedy contain an even more instructive example of these origins. The Tragedy of Blood, so offensive to our nostrils and feeling, was a favorite product of Elizabeth's time. It was the physical as well as the psychical outcome of long decades of internecine war and reli- gious persecution preceding Henry VIII's, Edward's, Mary's, and Elizabeth's reigns. Nor has the Anglo-Saxon mind ever wholly outgrown it. Our popular melodrama to-day — the-villain- still-pursued-her sort of plot — also the violent imaginings of child- ren, even the background of a play like the much-talked-of Great Divide, by Mr. Moody, are direct descendants and are of a kind. It is of pirates on the high seas and scalping Indians, bold banditti, they play. This sentence, already penned, has found delightful confirmation in the children's extravaganza, HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 19 Peter Pan, by Mr. Barrie, as played for two seasons in New York by Miss Maude Adams. Its appeal is essentially based upon fundamental and universal traits. A tub of water may be- come the ocean and a few chips and splinters rival navies afloat This is the explanation of the success of the penny-dreadful and the old-fashioned dime novel, now adulterated and, like many other food products, marked down to a nickel. Titus Andronicus is the first pure tragedy associated with Shakespeare's name. In details it is an unrelieved story of bloodshed and cruelty and horror, after the manner of the old tragedies of Seneca, so popular in the mind of the Renaissance and so abhorrent to us of to-day. There is murder, revenge, supernatural agency, and all the paraphernalia of the species. To an unprepared mind, which does not know the type, the play is simply awful — it reeks with blood, and strong tastes must those sixteenth century Englishmen have had to accept and digest such meat Many have doubted that Shakespeare, who later shows such rare delicacy in handling disagreeable subjects, could possibly, even in the crude periods of youth, have written Titus Andronicus. Like Falstaff, they argue, his 'instinct' would have preserved him. But contrary to former opinions, which compared the play only with Shakespeare's later work, in- dependent of its evolution and surroundings, it is now gen- erally believed that Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's in this sense: it is an old play worked over and given new form by him. Its very extravagances bear the hallmark of his early period. Do you wish a bloody tragedy? — and sporting Kyd and Kit Mar- lowe had made the species a fine thing of thrill and shudder, with suicide, murder, rape, and ghosts. Do you, too, want a bloody tragedy, he seems to say to his theatre manager, and break up the rival show across the street? I shall let the blood flow in gallons. There was more than one play on the subject You observe the Roman title — for Englishmen flattered themselves by locat- ing the scenes of horrible plays in other lands than their own. The dramatist subjects this material to the process already de- scribed. An old German version and a Dutch version have been 20 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: discovered — for the English actors were very popular on the Continent, in Holland and Germany and Austria, and carried these plays over with them. From these two Continental plays we can tell pretty well what the old play must have been like and what were Shakespeare's personal contributions. "The main features of the Shakespearean play which cannot be proved to have existed in the earlier dramas, are the rivalry between Sat- urninus and Bassianus for the throne ; the funeral of Titus's sons killed in war; the sacrifice of Alarbus; the kidnapping of Lavinia by Bassianus, with the death of Mutius; the sending of young Lucius with presents to the sons of Tamora; and the banquet scene in III, ii, which appears only in the first folio and is perhaps a later addition." — [Neilson]. Leave out, if you can, in imagination, the foundation of the horrible plot which is not Shakespeare's. Accepting that — and there is proof that it was popular with strong Elizabethan tastes — what would naturally a young poet make of it? You will observe at once the bountiful references to Nature and animal life, and the richness of poetic allusion. For instance : Fresh tears stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew Upon a gathered lily almost wither'd. Not the least good line is the one instanced by Burke in his Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful : When will this fearful slumber have an end ? Historically, Titus Andronicus is very important in Shake- spearean evolution. It is a link between the murders and hor- rors of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and the poet's own stupen- dous production of Hatnlet in the plenitude of his powers, when he never worked better. For Hamlet belongs in every point of its origin to the type of the Tragedy of Blood. It is based upon an older play, Hamlet, in the method described, and was due to a second revival of this species of bloody tragedy about 1600, midway in Shakespeare's career. Only the mature dramatist was prepared to make full use of his opportunity which he did not and could not before. This lost original Hamlet play is often referred to, and there can be no doubt HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS -1 of its existence. It seems very likely that it was one of Kyd's productions, and it became the laughing-stock and butt of actors who ridiculed its absurd ghost crying like a fish-wife, " Hamlet, Revenge!" This unpromising material Shakespeare seems to have taken hold of in the very wantonness of conscious mastery. We almost fancy him saying : See this fashion which is again current, observe this despised thing ; and look at the rival con- cern across the street, with the flaring tallow-dips and burning tapers, trying to attract custom from us with a sensational play. This thing you have laughed at, I shall make you pause over. I see in it, ghost and all, not a tissue of absurdities, but possible agonizings which even question existence. Here it is — this is a play — a Tragedy of Blood, as it can be. Here is your ghost — preserved, and a real live one — though so cloaked about that, when at last he enters, you may well doubt, even in the First Act, his actual existence to any but Hamlet's excited brain. Here are adultery, murder, madness, suicide, and deaths galore. I have let the curtain fall on a charnel house. All are dead and murdered at the close, a full house : a sorry knave, Polonius, and his son and daughter ; a King and a Queen, the father, "Hyperion to a Satyr," and Hamlet, "Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again." Horatio alone remains : Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. . . . begs the dying Hamlet And his friend replies with a prescience of a better world, rare in Shakespeare's lines, who, absorbed in portraying his characters, conceals any personal thoughts of his own: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest Mr. Bradley has happily remarked: "It is just what Hamlet never had and most needs — Rest!" Let a college freshman, as I experience almost every year, tell in his own words the unadorned plot and story of Hamlet — relieved of its magic of poetry and its depth of complex charac- 22 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: terization — and you would still ridicule its possibilities, as much as the playwrights of old. Read the play for yourself even despite this discouragement and distaste for literature your own students sometimes conspire to give you, and there is a feeling of awe — the purging pity and terror of Aristotle's definition. You have forgot the adultery, the blood-letting, the madness, and the suicide, the ghost and the deaths ; you are left pondering over a tragedy of human character and human will. This tragic woe is not of the fall of Thebes or Pelops line, caused from with- out ; but the action and emotions of character spring from with- in the man himself and determine destiny. This is the trans- formation that is wrought by this maker of modern tragedy. The two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, were just as imitative of a general manner and just as supe- rior to that manner in their special characteristics. They were both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton in very interest- ing prose dedications signed by Shakespeare and revealing an intimate personal touch. Into both the youthful poet threw himself with accustomed ardor. Both poems doubtless had their origin in the demand of the young dandies about town, to the company of whom the young Earl belonged. In the sixteenth century, when Venus and Adonis appeared, it was thought to be a very pretty poem, and was so popular, it is said, that men went to sleep with the volume under their heads. In the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, by a change in taste, the poem came to be thought immoral. Its latest editor, Mr. Sidney Lee, takes literally the statement "the first heire of my inven- tion," and assigns the composition back to the Stratford days of the young poet. Personally, I must think that the phrase refers to the first endeavor of this kind that the poet had attempted — a continued narrative poem, as distinguished from his miscel- laneous work and totally different dramatic performance based upon older material. The poem thus seems to me to belong to the period of early comedy and tragedy and to be blended with the spirit of both — a typical production of a luxuriant and youth- ful poetic imagination. In our own superior and analytical generation, instead of exu- HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 23 berant poems, we have portentous examples of fiction like "Jude the Obscure," written by middle-aged men, without illusions — this novel, indeed, appearing as a serial in a popular American family magazine designed for home consumption. Perhaps some day this, too, may not be thought the healthiest reading virgin- ibus puerisque. The early Sonnets were all equally imitative of a fashion. Mr. Sidney Lee has done yeoman's service in unearthing the history and showing the vogue of the sonnet in Italy, in France, and in England. Likewise I can refer to an admirable paper on the same subject, Foreign Influences on Shakespeare' s Sonnets, by Mr. David Klein, which was edited and published in The Sewanee Review a little more than two years ago. In these sonnets, Shakespeare unquestionably follows admitted conven- tions. Every one of the conceits and imagined situations may be duplicated. We need not be at all surprised, for we have already found the same thing in the Plays. But, as before, there is also something more to be said. The sonnet love sequence had its great prototype in England in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, and noble as some of Sidney's sonnets are, tested as a sequence and individually, they fall immeasurably below Shakespeare's. Again he dares the thing most in vogue and does it better. In neither Sidney's nor Shakespeare's case does it make much difference whether these poems were tran- scripts of actual personal experience and suffering or not Shakespeare was a poet and dramatist, and he was more intense in his imagination, more powerful in his intellectuality, more true in his emotions than others of his predecessors and contem- poraries. Rich imagination and ripe experience were needed for the full-blooded tragedies ; and while the Sonnets are notably unequal in merit, something of the same maturity rings out in the notes of the greatest of them. I merely illustrate the magic of some of these lines, familiar and always deserving of repetition. Take the one beginning: Full many a glorious morning have I seen. . . . Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. or, 24 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main Increasing store with loss and loss with store. Or take this splendid quatrain with its great fourth line: That time of year thou may'st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. As I go about the abundant woods ofourSewanee Mountain, after late October's and early November's turning of the foliage and the falling of leaves typical of the fall of all of us, and I look at the traceries of limbs and twigs, "with old December's bare- ness everywhere," as the Sonnet has it, suggesting in an aca- demic environment the Gothic architecture of adjoining choir stalls, the line recurs with a new meaning: Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Finally, take this splendid example: When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate ; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. To me Shakespeare's personality and art, while following ac- cepted forms, burst beyond the mere shell and husk of these forms. These poems may be exercises — and it is interesting to know historically what were the conventions and types which the HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS 25 poet followed — but also in such studies we must take heed to remember that on this same instrument it was a new and a very real poet piping. That I have entertained no reference to the Baconian and re- lated theories of Shakespearean authorship will be better under- stood at this juncture. The theory had its origin in America, and has always been extremely popular in this country, and lat- terly has become so in Germany. The latest book on the sub- ject, I believe, is one by Herr Professor Karl Bleibtreu, who seeks the authorship of the plays not in Bacon, but in the com- paratively unknown Earl of Rutland. The man who wrote these Sonnets, the early narrative poems, the plays — histories, comedies, and tragedies — was all of a piece. It is literally inconceivable, to my mind, that he should have written the Novum Organum and Magna Instauratio or the " Essays " or have been deprived of a justiceship for avarice — all of which seems, too, of quite another piece. If there be such a thing as personality of the author, surely the thoughts, emo- tions, and expressions of the greatest figure in modern literature must be such a psychological entity. Else all canons of literary criticism fail! In the present paper I have sought to reveal this personality at the beginning of each literary species and suggest how, work- ing in its special environment, it was evolved normally by the successful imitation of others' example and the gradual trans- cending of others' work. In a remaining paper I shall endeavor to ascertain some of the traits of this personality as revealed in its later work, and particularly at its fullest in The Themes of Tragedy. II. Shakespeare in Recent Years: The Themes of Tragedy From The Sewanee Review, April, 1908 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: II. THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY ANY discussion of Shakespearean tragedy that contained no ./V reference to the dramatist's humor would be blind, indeed, to the genius of the man. He is the one great master of Tragedy who at the same time is also a master of Humor and Comedy. He is the creator of Falstaff as well as of Hamlet; and what a difference in the two worlds ! In this I think no figure in liter- ature quite approaches him, unless, indeed, it be old Homer, who certainly has elements of both pity and laughter. But is it still believed generally, with Mr. Andrew Lang, that the Iliad and the Odyssey can be strictly contemporaneous and works by one and the same mind ? It is one reason why the name Homer stands alone in its lofty majesty as representa- tive of a great ancient civilization and art Good 'Maister Chaucer' united the same elements of humor and pathos in his dramatic Tales, and this is why Chaucer, in the annals of Eng- lish poetry, in breadth of vision and insight, comes nearest to Shakespeare. The great Goethe conceived the scene in Auer- bach's Keller, as well as the Temptation and Prison Scene in Faust \ he transmuted folksongs and wrote the idyllic Her- mann und Dorothea as well as the classic Iphigenia ; he produced the romantic Sorrows of Werther as well as the realistic Elective Affinities and the philosophical biography of Wilhelm Meister as well as the genial Autobiography. We may not call Milton humorous, but he gave us the idyllic grace and charm of L Allegro and // Penseroso, the lyric perfection of Lycidas, and the ringing moral enthusiasm of the Sonnets to set over against the larger epic flights of Paradise Lost. Byron, when he felt the immensity of nature, or pon- dered over "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," wrote a canto of Childe Harold ; when his errant mood altered to the flippant and cynical and farcical, he added another set of stanzas to Don Juan, the greatest burlesque poem in our literature. 30 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: But if we name other English poets, we are too apt to be re- minded of one dominant characteristic note alone, however res- onant and stirring. We name Spenser, and we think of the poet of the Faerie Queene and the Marriage Hymns. We name Herrick, and we mean the sweets of paganism — .... of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers Of April, May, of June and July flowers ; .... of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. We name Dryden, and we think of the heroic couplet in satire and of the Odes for Music — wherein "he raised a mortal to the skies" and which almost lifted "Honest John " into a higher class. We name Pope, we think of the same heroic couplet brought to an even finer polish in Satires and Epistles. We name Burns, we think of the most natural lyrical poet of the race. We name Wordsworth, it is of the joy in nature, of the simple in life, of an effluence shed down from above on common things, of a high reflectiveness and a deep moral earnestness- We name Coleridge, it is of the witchery of the supernatural. We name Shelley, it is of "the longing of the moth for the star." We name Keats, it is that Beauty is truth; truth, beauty — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. To paraphrase Mr. Watts-Dunton: These with their one voice can sing one tune or in fortunate cases with one voice can sing many tunes. But when we name names like Homer and Shake- speare, "having, like the nightingale of Gongora, many voices, [they] seem to be able to sing all tunes." The steady growth of Shakespeare's dramatic powers and poetic genius which lead up to the highest themes of tragedy is perhaps best seen just in the early plays, usually comedies. In structure you observe how the early plays portray their characters in groups and by their external situation, and not by inward traits as later. In the Comedy of Errors, for instance, there are two brothers and two Dromios, two sisters contrasted in disposition who mate with the two brothers, two parents sep- THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 31 arated and reunited. In Love's Labour's Lost the grouping goes by threei: there is a king and three gentlemen together with a princess and three ladies to fall in love with each other; three oddities — the fantastical Spaniard, the pedagogue and the preacher — and three lower representatives: Costard, Moth and Dull. In Two Gentlemen of Verona two gentlemen are con- trasted, two ladies are crossed, and two suitors rejected. Chief- est of all, two clowns are differentiated: humorous Launce with his dog, and witty Speed with his verbal quips — the fathers of all Shakespeare's later clowns and fools. And what clowns they are ! Launcelot Gobbo — a distant relation and namesake of Launce' s — the blundering Dogberry, the philosophical Touchstone, the merry Feste, to the dear fool in Lear who went to bed at noon and didn't wake up because there was no longer need for him in the play. English and American humor have developed very differently and each has its own special national flavor, but in any discussion as to the English sense of humor, towards which we Americans are apt to be unfair because very different from our own, we may remem- ber that English literature posesses Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Lamb, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray — and in these qualities, too, Shakespeare and Chaucer easily lead. In Midsummer Nights Dream three distinct threads are interwoven: those of the Court, the base and rude Mechanicals, and the Fairies. At Court there are again two pairs of lovers crossed and recrossed, which finds a contrasting echo in Titania's dream. The structure, with all its deftness, is still based upon balance and antithesis. The contemporary tragedy of youth, Romeo and Juliet, has two factions, two gentlemen in pursuit of the same lady, two principal adherents, and the so-called 'comic' figures, Mercutio and the Nurse — a companion each for the hero and the heroine. But in none of these earlier plays is there any specially deep insight or keen portrayal of character. There is what you ex- pect to find in the work of youth: sparkle, plays on words, witty repartee. However, in Midsummer Night's Dream a growing 32 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: change is apparent. While still lacking in dramatic character- ization, this play shows advance in the exercise of both poetic fancy and imagination. The three threads are skillfully inter- twined to make a perfect pattern. The play has a lyrical tone which produces an operatic effect. It is fanciful and is charm- ingly poetic in the interpretation of these fancies. It also con- tains Shakespeare's first conscious poetic creed : The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact .... The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Yet with all its poetry — indeed, in its very enthusiasm for poetry and its luxuriance of fancy — Midsummer Night's Dream is still the comedy of a young man. The folk- and fairy- lore is delightful and convincing. We may not easily believe in the transformations of a Comedy of Errors at Ephesus, but we can believe those in Midsummer Nights Dream caused by the family quarrels of Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of Fairyland. The author of Midsummer Nights Dream, even better than the playwright in Peter Pan, so happily pre- sented by Miss Maude Adams for two seasons in New York, might ask the audience: "Good people, do you believe in fairies?" Of course we do, imaginatively and poetically. Not only is this play conscious poetry, but in "the play within the play" — "the most lamentable comedy of Py ramus and This- by" — the poet has something to say of his art as playwright Pyramus and Thisbe, at the absurdities of which we laugh so heartily, could not have been very different from the crude plays then and still presented by the English house-servants. We know that within the sound of the whirring trolley-car London mummers still give presentations of St. George and the Turkish Champion. Mr. Thomas Hardy has a vivid portrayal of such a play in the pages of one of his strongest novels, "The Return of the Native." And what marvels may we not still see in the THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 33 amateur theatricals of small towns and schools ! As for Bully Bottom, whose "chief humour is for a tyrant — or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split," and who has the ambition to play every part at once, he anticipates in genuine humor the univer- sal genius of Falstaff, equal to all situations. In the Pyramus and Thisbe story itself, after making us laugh at its ludicrousness, Shakespeare seems to have said: "You laugh, do you? I shall take the same catastrophe of two lovers and make you thrill. The lover shall again think his lady dead, and shall do himself to death, and she, discovering this, shall die too at his side — and this play I shall call not Pyramus and Thisbe but Romeo and Juliet." In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare has freed himself from the powerful influence, hitherto so marked, of his great predecessor, Marlowe. The subject was suggested by Marlowe's Jew of Ma/ta, but the difference in the portrayal is that be- tween a monster and a human soul. The dramatist is getting away from the mere grouping of characters. He is growing both in poetic expression and in dramatic grasp, in insight and in interpretation of character. Shakespeare again took an old plot, perhaps an old play. He probably started out with the intention of making the Jew grotesque and ridiculous after the pattern of the cheater cheated, which was the common Eliza- bethan attitude toward one of the race. If so, the character out- grew the author's original intentions. Shakespeare's dramatic imagination is here at work, and far from remaining a comic figure, of which there are many suggestions, Shylock grows real under the dramatist's hands and is the psychological prototype of those stupendous later creations : Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, Macbeth and Cleopatra. All these are conceived as great figures of tragedy; and Shylock, too, is really a creature of tragedy. Tragedy is here, as later, a spiritual conception. The poet's imagination ran away with him and the play assumes tragic pro- portions in the fourth act We in turn have become wrought up and are not satisfied at Shylock's merely disappearing. We are only half-reconciled by the delicious music and moonlight of runaway Jessica in the fifth act of anticlimax. We are assured by Lorenzo : 4 34 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: The man that hath no music in himself Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; .... Let no such man be trusted. Yes ! yes ! that is all very well, we feel, but where all this time is the father-in-law, Shylock? Not all the world is on a honeymoon. This very lack of inner symmetry declares the Merchant of Venice to be a great play of a comparative beginner. In Shakespeare's one tragedy of this period, Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, who approaches a merry figure in a sad recital and whose description of Queen Mab is the very ecstasy of folk- lore madness, is stabbed in a duel. He becomes serious only in the last moment: "Why the devil came you between us?" he cries to Romeo, "I was hurt under your arm." And then comes one of ill-starred Romeo's characteristic replies: "I thought all for the best." But Mercutio was no longer needed in the plot and his removal was in accord with dramatic laws. Such a gal- lant was bound to die that way sooner or later — by an accident ! Shakespeare dramatically makes use of such accidents, for they occur in real life. It is such an accident that Desdemona drops the handkerchief at the one moment Iago can pick it up and do her harm. There is consequently nothing inherently improba- ble in the circumstance of Mercutio's fate. It is characteristic and necessary. The jester is out of the way for the more seri- ous business of the tragedy of the lovers. Mercutio's death by Tybalt is the direct cause of Tybalt's death by Romeo, and that of Romeo's banishment, and that of the ultimate tragedy in the tomb. It is another accident, but again nowise inherently im- probable, that Juliet wakes a few moments too late and finds her lover dead beside her. But in the Merchant of Venice we were simply asked to forget that Shylock, the hateful old thing, exists, and we betake ourselves at once to moonlight and music and bussing bridal pairs. No wonder Shylock has found sym- pathizers at being stuck away in a dark closet to say Ave Marias. In the intermediate plays, for our purpose here, but one point need be emphasized. It is in Henry IV. The growing hu- manity, already displayed in Shylock and to be fully realized THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 36 in the later conceptions of tragedy, is also displayed, though very differently, in Falstaff. Falstaff is thoroughly a creature of the senses, portrayed with an irresistibility of audacity. In every encounter as to truth and honor, who can gainsay him ? Who but Falstaff may be a coward upon 'instinct,' conclude by force of syllogism that honor is but air and a mere 'scutch- eon, and moralize upon all others : " Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!" Yet how fond the dramatist is of his crea- tion and how great-hearted and tender in his dealings with him ! Prince Hal, now become King at the close of the play, may ban- ish him not to come near his person on pain of death. But the poet does not stop there. In Henry V he tells of Falstaff's fate with the large sympathy and humanity only the masters possess : " 'A made a finer end, and went away and it had been any Chris- tome child : 'a parted ev'n just between Twelve and One, ev'n at the turning o' th' Tyde ; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his Angers end, I knew there was but one way ; for his Nose was as sharpe as a pen and 'a babbled of green fields.'' As you know, the reading of the last clause is due to Pope's " Poor piddling Tibbald," the story of which Professor Louns- bury has told at length in his third volume of "Shakespearean Wars." The original had "a table of green fields," and with the change of one letter and the addition of another, it became "a babied of green fields." It is possibly the happiest single conjecture in all Shakespearean emendation, and one which no later editor has had the courage to reject Was the old sinner, as some have conjectured, going over in his mind the Twenty-third Psalm? — The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. I cannot think so. It takes away somehow from the magna- nimity of the conception. Surely it was rather the scenes of his childhood, as yet innocent and unspotted, the green fields and lanes of a boy's dreams, that hovered in the broken man's dis- 36 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: ordered mind ; though we may remember that Falstaffis author- ity for the statement that he was once a choir boy and cracked his voice singing Psalms. It is by such touches of tenderness in dealing with the clowns and villains, the overthrown and weak ones of his plays, that we realize a psychological unity in the Shakespearean mind — from Henry VI and Richard III to Ham- let, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and the Caliban of The Tempest. One thing is clear: the poet's art had outgrown the restric- tions of the history play. The spirit and genius of comedy which had preserved him while working upon Henry IV carries him on for a short while longer. He achieves his triumphs in Romantic Comedy in the banter and repartee of Much Ado, in the forest scenes and moralizings of As You Like It, in the dainty melancholy of Twelfth Night — and suddenly there comes a great change and the spirit of Comedy, too, ceases. Singularly enough, up to this time no pure tragedy had been attempted since Romeo and Juliet, and no one at all dealing with the profounder problems of life in its fateful relations. One approaches the subject of Shakespeare's tragic themes with a good deal of trepidation. In saying these are the highest themes Shakespeare touched, we are simply repeating that tragedy is the highest dramatic mode, that drama is the supreme form of poetry, and that poetry is the greatest of all literary pro- ductions. Among the countless books on Shakespeare that have appeared in recent years, a very remarkable one entitled "Shakespearean Tragedy" was written by Mr. A. C. Bradley, then Professor of Poetry in Oxford. The volume consisted of ten lectures delivered at Oxford chiefly on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Since vacating that chair, Mr. Bradley seems to be extending his method in the study of other plays, and we find a paper on Antony and Cleopatra in a late number of the Quarterly Review. This work is a return to the methods of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, and it seems to me frankly, amid the moun- tains of miscellaneous matter produced, to be one of the most notable English contributions to Shakespearean criticism since those early nineteenth century giants. The method is more in- THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 37 tensive, but otherwise the attitude is the same as that of a cen- tury ago — that of treating the great plays as realities and seeing in them the interpretation of living souls. I am well aware that some object to the method, and often it may seem futile to con- sider every action and every word as if the character were actually alive and to build a great system thereupon. But the aim of the dramatist is to realize a fragment of life, and it seems just for actor and critic, both interpreters, to treat a great character and conception, for their purposes, as existing and real. It is not singular, then, that among the philosophers — students of the essence of character and motive and being — we have found the keenest interpreters of Shakespeare's work. It is no acci- dent that the greatest interpreter of the theoretical laws of the drama among the ancients was Aristotle, and in modern days was the man who has stuck his finger into most pies — Hegel. Mr. Bradley admits frankly that he takes his point of departure from Hegel's Aisthetik — in an article in the Hibbert Journal Tor July, 1904 — but he adds that the development of many details (where Hegel is silent) is his own. Very briefly stated, Mr. Bradley's point of view and approach is something like the following. "What is tragedy?" he asks. Following the general mediaeval conception, he would describe it as a great person meeting with an awe-inspiring calamity. Such a great person may be of high rank and great estate, or it may be it is only his passion that makes him great, as is the case with Romeo and with Othello — although, too, the latter has "done the State some service." In all tragedy there is some sort of collision or conflict — whether of feelings, wills, thoughts, purposes, or by persons with circumstance. About the central theme there are many minor themes. To heighten the effect abnormality of mind is often introduced, as with Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth. Also the supernatural is thus made use of, as in Richard III, Julius Ccesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Chance or accident comes in to disarrange plans : Romeo doesn't get the friar's message and thinks Juliet is really dead, Juliet wakes a few 38 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: moments too late, etc. On the principle of contrast, humor also finds a place even in Tragedy, with telling effect by one who is master of both forms. Mr. Bradley, therefore, arrives at this definition or descrip- tion of Shakespearean tragedy: "The story is one of human actions producing an exceptional calamity and ending in the death of a man in high estate." It is not the suffering itself which constitutes tragedy, but the human action whereby suffer- ing is produced. It will be perceived at once that many current conceptions borrowed from Greek tragedy can remain no longer true of Shakespeare's work, and that Shakespeare has many character- istics in no way applicable to the drama of the great Norwegian, Ibsen, who has lately died, the next greatest departure in tragedy, since Shakespeare, from traditional paths. The essence of Shakespearean tragedy is the understanding and portrayal of the spiritual powers of man. This is the approach of the modern world. It is no external fate or destiny that seems to cause the tragedy: destiny is the logical working out of traits in a man's own nature. Character is destiny. Romeo is precipitate; he goes to the Capulet ball uninvited, he jumps over the garden wall to speak with the girl he has just met, he marries Juliet off-hand, he comes between Tybalt and Mercutio, he slays the bloody Tybalt and later he slays himself at the tomb of his lover — it is all of a piece. The tragedy comes from the qualities of Romeo's character and not from an unfavorable star or frowning Providence. The ambition of Richard III, shrinking at no cruelty and at no murder that advances him the crown, is true to the splendid will-power that brushes away the dreams and visions of con- science and dies gallantly on Bosworth Field. Here is a mon- ster, if you will, but no coward. We need not admire all quali- ties, but we do admire many qualities. This sympathy with the dramatist's own villains, this humanness, this sweetness of hu- manity, already noted in Falstaff's case, is a distinct Shake- spearean trait We admire Richard Ill's imperious will — this alone makes the wooing of Anne tolerable — we must admire THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 39 even the perfection of Iago's cruelty and the greatness of Shy- lock's passion for revenge. The "exceptional calamity" comes from the characters them- selves being exceptional in the mind of the poet and in the view of the audience; and because this is so, there results tragedy. It happens to that one person just so, when it would not happen to another. Coleridge acutely observed that Othello, being just what he is, is deceived by a trick that Hamlet would have seen through in an instant Put Othello, the man of action, in Hamlet, and Hamlet, the melancholy brooder, in Othello, and the plot would not have dragged through five acts. Othello kills the woman he loves for his very love's sake and not for any lesser motive. Discovering his terrible mistake, the same sense of honor and duty forbids him to live, and the knife is plunged into his own bosom. The particular character of the man ex- plains all. Brutus is sure that he is doing right in murdering Caesar — he is consciously moved only by dictates of honor — and because "he is an honourable man," which Antony knows full well, he falls an easy victim. It is the high sense of honor and of self that involves himself and the State in disaster, and this is the pity of it ! Henry VI is a poet and philosopher, Richard II is personally lovable, "that fair rose of York;" but each of these and none other in his day had to be King of England, and as neither in his own nature and temperament was able to be King, evil must result The limitations in Henry IV's nature do not permit him to understand his own son, and he wishes for an heir a Hotspur in place of the future hero of Agincourt It is by reason of this attitude, in their study of the psycho- logical qualities of the subject, that students like Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Mr. Bradley are so illuminating in their interpre- tation. They believe, and I think rightly, that Shakespeare did more, consciously more, than write mere stage plays : he was writing for a wider literary audience, too. Tragedy — Shake- spearean tragedy — is the great thing it is, because it displays a great soul in its elemental passions, strained and riven. In such presence we cease to be flippant — the suffering, the waste of 40 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: human powers, and the destruction of human life, of the good and beautiful, or what ought to have been true and lovely, closes the mouth of the cynic. And this higher conception, this wide sympathy, underlies every great drama of Shakespeare's. The tragedy rests not in the mere death, for with Hamlet we feel death to be a release ; it lies in the needless waste of good or possible good. And this constitutes in itself a moral idea ! We feel pity, terror, awe ; but we do not feel crushed down, over- whelmed, hopeless. Herein Shakespeare differs from — one may not say, is superior to, for there are very different opinions on this point — other great dramatists, very ancient and very modern. There is thus in Shakespeare's plays a moral order, a moral necessity, in a wider sense; and the brilliant Professor Santayana in his recently published philosophical series is surely unsympathetic and wrong in denying this to the dramatist. There are ultimate lessons, though there should be no particular creed and specialized narrow faith. Brutus is honorable and "Honest Iago" dishonorable; but both alike are caught in the mesh of their own actions passing by a higher moral necessity far beyond them. Lear's poor judg- ment and mistake overwhelms himself and others, all that he loves and holds dear in this life. Othello is meaning to do right and murders innocence. Coriolanus's feelings are reached by his family where he did not foresee weakness, and he succumbs. Lady Macbeth can cry to her husband, "We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, And we'll not fail!" and yet she is tormented out of reason by the thought and smell of a single spot of blood: "Out, damned spot, out, I say! . . . All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh ! oh ! oh ! " What an echo of her husband's greater saying : " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand ? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarna- dine, Making the green one red." Macbeth wishes the crown and plays falsely to get it, but the crown brings to him all hor- rors in its train. Methought I heard a voice cry, * Sleep no more ! Macbeth doth murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 41 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, [etc.] Why, this man who is a murderer is a poet too, and he has not taken into account his own sensibilities — the acting of his imagination and the workings of his conscience. One reason why many see in the Sonnets an autobiographical experience, telling of love and devotion for a young man from whom there is estrangement and of a woman "colored ill" in both appearance and character is, that it seems to help explain the later great tragedies wherein the sex relation suddenly be- comes singularly prominent None of the plays written before 1600 needs have had the experience of the Sonnets : all the plays written after 1600 point to some change in the poet's intellectual and spiritual attitude. Yet it may be merely a coincidence. Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy of youth ; now first are pro- duced themes which only a mature mind could handle, a mind that seemingly had suffered the disappointment of disil- lusion and ingratitude. Hamlet learns that "something is rotten in the State of Den- mark" and it suddenly comes upon him with overwhelming force that 'something' is his mother. The sensitive, melancholy, brooding young man returns from the German university to Elsinore to find his father dead, his mother newly married, and his most sickening suspicions seemingly confirmed. O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew ! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! God ! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world ! Fie on't ! ah, fie ! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed : things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely ! That it should come to this I But two months dead : nay, not so much, not two, [etc.] This explains Hamlet's seeming harsh treatment of Ophelia — "Get thee to a nunnery, Go ! go !" — and poor Ophelia, who has oftentimes been shockingly misunderstood, always lonely and 42 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: with none to unburden herself to, when her father to whom she owes obedience is killed by the man she loves, goes mad. Was it this situation that suggested to Tennyson his Maud? The height of the play is reached in the interview between the spoiled Queen and the for once, determined and outraged son: "Why, how now, Hamlet Have you forgot me?" the woman asks. And the son replies : No, by the rood, not so ! You are the Queen, your husband's brother's wife, And — would it were not so ! — you are my mother. Othello is so modern that we might expect to find an account of it any morning in the special editions of our New York sensational daily newspapers. You may almost see the red and green headlines as they might have been printed the other day in their account of the murder. The black-a-moor that ran off with and married the lovely white girl ! How at the time society wagged its tongue and how her father carried on and disowned her! And what was the result? Murder and suicide. But what may not be thus told is the proportion and symmetry of structure, the poetry of the play, and the marvellous charac- terization of Othello, of Iago, of Desdemona. I once had a girl pupil — but only one — who admired Othello and understood how Desdemona could have acted as she did. All the rest in seven years' experience at a state coeducational university thought Othello generally 'horrid.' The nobility in the Moor — and, as revealed, it is a distinct Shakespearean trait — tran- scends race, and this is the inspiration of Desdemona's love. The spiritual conflict and waste is the tragedy in Shakespeare's view. With all its beautiful poetry and wonderful structure, the play is terrible because it is the terrible tragedy of race and sex — the most elemental instincts imaginatively portrayed. Some one has said, if Desdemona could be impersonated by as great an actress as Salvini is actor, portraying Othello, the spec- tacle would be unbearable, it would be so painful. Could we, too, actually realize the sufferings and the pain of Lear and Cordelia, our human natures could no more endure THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 43 that play. In King Lear the mad passion of the two sisters for Edmund chiefly contributes to the catastrophe. The exter- nal terrors of the storm, to which the King and his attendant Fool are subjected, but feebly suggest the horrible tempest within the King's breast "Oh, fool, I shall go mad!" And Lear does go mad. Late Action writers have attempted for the dramatic effect to produce this situation of external storm in sympathy with inner passion, for instance, George Eliot in "Silas Marner" and George Meredith in "The Ordeal of Rich- ard Feverel." Lear's instincts rescue Cordelia from the wretch who has hanged her, and he bears her in his arms : Howl ! Howl! Howl ! Howl! O, you are men of stone! Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so That Heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever! . . . Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little .... Her voice was ever soft. Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. There is a nobleness and atonement in Lear's sad end that glorifies him and which could not be found in his prosperity. In Macbeth the married pair are united not by a common joy but by a common guilt In Antony and Cleopatra we al- most hold our breath at the audacity and success of the poet — a Romeo and Juliet with the passion transferred from youth to middle life ! It is far more destructive, and empires, as well as lives, are thrown away. Helen of Troy may be a myth, although when in Greece two winters ago I met in Sparta a loyal Greek who was convinced that the lady had lived quietly among the olive groves of Eurotas valley beneath the snows of Taygetus, until wearying of the monotony she welcomed a trip across the seas in company of Paris. But Cleopatra is in history — the most famous and fascinating woman in history — and the por- trayal of the dramatist had to be limited by the claims of his- tory. Yet Shakespeare makes her equally famous in drama. She is his most difficult and so most successful woman portrait- ure. Here is no fourteen-year-old Juliet no Portia of Belmont and no Rosalind in a Forest of Arden. It is "the blown rose," as she describes herself, but the petals are not yet fallen. I never was able to learn precisely what was Dr. Osier's opinion 44 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: of a man become forty ; but at forty a woman is just becoming dangerous. And Cleopatra is such a woman — the "serpent of old Nile." Antony passes away near the end of the fourth act, and the closing act is reserved for Majesty itself, and she dies worthy of her queenship and her charms : Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have Immortal longings in me. The strength and magic and poetry of this art in the six plays — Julius C&sar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra — seem only half-guessed as we read them and re-read them in the light of new thoughts. In all of them Shakespeare knew the evil that was in the world, strong, vital, terrible, but never wholly destructive of good. There is faith and belief in goodness left. Of the 'Big Four,' Hamlet is the most subtly developed, Othello the most perfect in structure and form, Lear the grandest and most elemental, and Macbeth the most vehement. But I am deal- ing with superlatives and must fear, for each has some merit not possessed by the others. These were the culminating years of a busy life in London. After this, for the last period of his life, the dramatist retired to his native town, Stratford, buying himself a comfortable home, and living there. Successful men are fond of retiring in age to the places of their birth. It was so with Shakespeare, and thus he is buried in a prominent position beneath the chancel of the church where he was baptized. His few latest plays all bear the note of this removal from the world of strife. The whole mental attitude has again become changed. The plays are no longer tragical. The heroines are beautiful, attractive figures — Imogen, Katharine, Mariana, Per- dita, Miranda. They suffer, but all ends happily as a tale told to a child by an elder near a winter fireside. The men are not great and heroic enough, not sufficiently endowed with elemen- tal strength and passion, for tragedy. In A Winter's Tale, Leontes is unjust to his wife and lives twenty years mourning: Othello upon discoveriug his mistake stabbed himself forthwith. THE THEMES OF TRAGEDY 46 In Cymbeline, Posthumus listens to Iachimo — a little Iago, his name almost seems to imply — and later the villain is brought to repentance: Iago could never have repented and Othello would never have lowered himself to enter into a conspiracy against his wife, although he could slay her. A very ingenious theory has been advanced by Professor A. H. Thorndike of Columbia University: that Shakespeare, even to the last, as often before, is merely following a new fashion in these latest plays. Here Beaumont and Fletcher are his models, and The Maid's Tragedy is the prototype of this lyrical oper- atic form of dramatic romance. If this be so, Shakespeare again shows his genius by surpassing his competitors in the new type. While it is uncertain as to which is Shakespeare's last play, I always think of The Tempest as being the dramatist's fare- well to his art. The supernatural and fairy-lore are present as in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream and in Mercutio's speech. In the early play the poet had paid the well-known tribute to the poet's art; here he takes formal leave of his dramatist's occupa- tion. As in all the plays of his later life, evil is not absent, nor is its meaning and destructiveness, so prominent in the trage- dies, wholly cast aside. But the change in this last group of plays is this : the evil does not seem so black and has not so great sway. The poet-dramatist exercises control and patience in its presence and will not annoy innocence with this knowl- edge. Caliban is the symbol of evil : it exists even in the happy isle, and though bound and restrained, it is ever ready to break loose again. To the last, the poet, now grown grave and thoughtful and self-contained, thinks of this evil and all the problems which it has entailed. But his labors are now over, and the poet-magician, like Prospero, breaks his wand and gives over his art : Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 46 SHAKESPEARE IN RECENT YEARS: Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd. Bear with my weakness ; my old brain is troubled — a turn or two I'll walk To still my beating mind. Can it be, as Mr. Bradley happily suggests, that it is the old memories rushing back? The old memories ! — to the author of these plays and to us the students of them. It may be a fancy, and one fears to push it too far, but it haunts one. I would close, as I began, with a special plea for the great things in literature, meaning in all literatures. I have heard good men call Dante foolishness, Milton uninteresting, the Iliad and the Odyssey a superstition and a fetich — and they forthwith turn to the latest periodical and current popular work of fiction. There is no law about these things with individuals. Also at a late meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, two eminent speakers, in welcoming the members of the Asso- ciation, emphasized on successive occasions that any general study of the ancient classics was doomed and that it rested with the teachers of the Modern Languages to determine the literary training and inspiration which men of the future would possess. 1 Perhaps it must be so. But what I could not at the time help wondering was this : What sort of literary training and literary insight will be obtained and imparted by those who should not know the best wherever it may be found, who would willingly restrict themselves to one literature or even to several literatures of but one age? Knowing the best must include acquaintance with Homer, yfLschylus and Sophocles, as well as with Dante and Cervantes and Moliere and Goethe, with Chaucer, Shake- speare and Milton. I need make no plea for the ancients and for the classics generally, but it may be safely affirmed that a liter- ary study of the moderns, early and late, not based upon some 1 Professor Henneman would have rejoiced to hear Mr. Edward M. Shep- ard, at the meeting of this Association in 1910, assure its members that their cause was inextricably bound up with that of the classics. — Edd. THETHEMESOFTRAGEDY 47 knowledge of ancient classical literature would very soon tend to become eccentric and volatile. Nothing has ever taken, or will take, the place of the great things of all times, particularly of great poetry. As long as we must have the best, the study of no real classic in any literature is doomed to extinction or can possibly be wholly neglected. If I may quote from myself elsewhere : "The Tragedy of Orestes, the curse of CEdipus, the horror of Hamlet's doubt, the awful- ness of Othello's and Lear's mistakes, the problems of Faust's self-struggles, are immortal, because we cannot think of an age when these questions and their expression in artistic form will not appeal to mankind. They must live. It is left to no hap- hazard vote-taking and change of public opinion. It is the ever longing, suffering, aspiring soul of man that proclaims it." III. The Man Shakespeare: His Growth as an Artist From The Sewanee Revuw, January, 1897 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST IT WAS De Quinccy who said, in his Britannica article on Shakespeare, " That he lived, and that he died, and that he was 'a little lower than the angels;' these make up pretty nearly the amount of our undisputed report" It must be added that there have arisen some of late who are disposed to reject even these few elementary propositions. It is worth while, therefore, occasionally to emphasize the personal relation of Shakespeare's work to his life and growth in art We need not wonder that we possess so few records of Shakespeare's outward life' in an age when biographical material was very scanty about all the world's great men — something so different from the spirit of our nineteenth cen- tury with its insatiable and often impertinent curiosity. What do we really know, apart from the works, of that other great poet at the fountain head of our English letters, genial Dan Chaucer, who is rated next to Shakespeare in his sense of humor and his acquaintance with the wide gamut of the feelings of humanity? How much is lacking and is purely traditional in the personal life of Marlowe, of Massinger, of Webster, and of the other great Elizabethans? One thing at least we do possess, viz.: the works of Shakespeare — a collection of thirty-seven plays more or less authentic; two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrccc ; and the series of Sonnets. These are the docu- ments to be examined and classified and interpreted. These are the witnessess which tell us that in the man Shakespeare and in his work and art all the great forces of the Eliza- bethan Era were summed up and concentrated. In any other age the production of this man and these works would 1 Since this article was written, Professor C. W. Wallace has made some important additions to our knowledge of Shakespeare's life. — [Ed. 52 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: have been impossible ; in this era Shakespeare becomes the epitome, as it were, of all the historic and economic and so- cial and intellectual vivifying impulses which moved and pro- duced their effect "in the spacious times of great Elizabeth." The youth Shakespeare came fittingly into this world for this era. Elizabeth had been on the throne six years when he was born; at the time of her death, near forty years later, he was producing, or was preparing to produce, his master tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth. His birth- place was "in the heart of England," as a contemporary poet called his native county, Warwickshire. The name of the town Stratford-on-Avon is so compounded to distin- guish it from other Stratfords in England, as, for instance, Chaucer's "Stratford atte Bowe," near London. It lies in an ideal poet's land. There are refreshing walks through green meadows and along free-flowing streams. To the north is the Forest of Arden — recalling the idyllic scenes of As You Like It, even if there the play says France. Henley street, upon which the poet was born, ex- tended toward a village near this forest, Henley-in-Arden. We may remember, too, that Arden was the family name of Shakespeare's mother. About ten miles towards the centre of the county was Warwick Castle, renowned in both his- tory and legend. Warwick had lent its name, at least, to the mythical hero of the Middle Age, Guy of Warwick, the redoubtable slayer of the giant Colbrand. Not much farther away lay Kenilworth, where the Earl of Leicester en- tertained Queen Elizabeth in festivities described in Scott's novel — festivities and pageants, as is generally received, which allow an interesting interpretation to certain otherwise obscure passages in A Midsummer Nights Dream. The lad Shakespeare may have witnessed these preparations when about eleven years of age, certainly must have known of them through the wondrous reports spreading through the neighboring country. Still farther north in the same county, Warwickshire, was Coventry, whence one of the four great collections of mystery and miracle plays, display- HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 63 ing the early forms of the religious drama in England, took its name. And it was about Coventry and Nuneaton — in the opposite end of the county from Shakespeare's home — that the nineteenth century produced that remarkably gifted woman, George Eliot, whose genius ran not towards dra- matic poetry as the vehicle for her "criticism of life," but to psychologic fiction, and thus prepared the way for the powerful analytic and realistic school of modem novelists that now hold such determined sway. This, too, is the part of the country, at Newdigate Hall, Nuneaton, where are still portraits of Mistress Mary Fitton, who, Mr. Thomas Tyler is persuaded, is the mysterious dark lady of Shake- speare's Sonnets. It was country life and Nature's heart which became Shakespeare's earliest and best teachers ; then followed the graduate courses in the great university of life in London, in the heart of the scenes of men's activity and passions. We must not imagine the London of that day of the enor- mous size of the present And yet, perhaps, it was fully as cosmopolitan. There all the nations of the world would meet through the avenues of trade and of statecraft Many a strange type would be found there, moved by the spirit of adventure or of commerce. In this comparatively small compass elbows touched closely, passions arose mightily, life grew intenser. It was the life of Elizabeth's day com- ing after generations of restless strife, of civil disorder and of religious horror. It was the life based upon a riper cul- ture and a grander freedom of thought prepared by the twin movements of the New Learning and the Reformation. The Renaissance of letters had to follow. At what time Shakespeare went up to London is not known. There are traditions of a poaching episode: how he hunted on lands or reservations belonging to others and was arrested therefor. It is likely enough true, from what we know of his active nature and impulsive character. Most boys have chased game on private domains without paying much attention to the sign: "No trespassing al- 54 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: lowed." How he was led to the theatre by some happy in- stinct, after getting to London, we must again leave to con- jecture. We are only on safe ground when we examine the work he has left, viz.: the plays themselves. A collected edition of these did not appear until after the poet's death — in fact, not until seven years after, when they were collected and edited by two of his former fellows at the Globe Theatre, John Heming and Henry Condell. Both Heming and Condell had been remembered in Shake- speare's will, when together with Richard Burbage, the greatest actor of his time, they were left " twenty-six shil- lings and eight pence a-piece to buy them ringes." Heming and Condell repaid thus the debt of friendship by bringing together and editing the poet's "literary remains" as soon after his death as the slow processes then in vogue permit- ted. The volume contained, besides the dedication and ad- dress to the public, tributes in verse from Ben Jonson and other contemporaries. The dedication was directed to two noble patrons and friends of the poet, the Earls of Pem- broke and Montgomery. This Earl of Pembroke was Wil- liam Herbert, the son of the Countess of Pembroke — her- self the "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," of Ben Jon- son's rare epitaph, 1 and the lady for whom the Arcadia had been written and to whom dedicated. This same Wil- liam Herbert, the friend of Shakespeare, is by many sup- posed to be the "Mr. W. H." mentioned in the dedication of the Sonnets as their "onlie begetter." These same Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery also exhibited their public spirit in being prominently connected with other great enterprises of the day : they were members of the well- known "Virginia Company in London," which sent out the early colony which planted Jamestown and first es- tablished the English possessions in Virginia and in America. Another name on the list of the incorporators of this Vir- ginia Company was that of the Earl of Southampton, Henry 1 Or, with more probability, William Browne's. HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 65 Wriothesley, to whom had been addressed Shakespeare's early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, as "the first heir(s) of his invention." There is thus every presumption of Shakespeare's interest in the stirring move- ments of his day. It is no wonder, therefore, that towards the very close of his active career, the reported shipwreck of an expedition sent to the relief of Jamestown, off the dangerous coast of the Bermudas, should have suggested both certain features and the title of his contemplative spir- itual masterpiece, The Tempest. By some odd chance this was placed first in the folio edition, and so serves both as guard and as stumbling-block to many an immature reader. In studying the plays themselves the point of view is determined not only by all outside helps and references ob- tainable, but by the examination of differences and qualities in style and metre and character. One can observe differ- ences of treatment, of conception, of strength, of growth in art and structure, of delicacy in handling, of the use of m*tres an d rhymes and blank verse and endings — of any and all characteristics which indicate the growth of an artist in thought and expression, just as truly as one can see the skilled mechanic or the skilled musician or any skilled lit- erary craftsman advance from crudities and imperfections, even though marked by genius, towards conscious and per- fect mastery. It is by such an analysis that the student of letters feels that in these plays, however diverse, a clear, strong mind and hand is present and unmistakable — so clear and unmistakable that it is reasonable even to dissect doubtful plays and to declare them to be only in part from this hand, or to contain old material worked over and readapted to the advancing demands of the theatre of the day. It is from this point of view, therefore, that scholars trace the character of the work and the growth of the art of the poet from stage to stage and from kind to kind, in order to get nearer to the personality and mind and soul of the man Shake- speare. In this way there is revealed in the poet's work a per- sistent individuality, and we can distinguish periods wherein 56 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: work of quite different sorts appealed to the heart and brain of the worker. In this way there seems to be a steady growth from immaturity to conscious mastery; from beginnings of remarkable talent and undoubted genius, but unequal and crude, to a period seemingly of perfect workmanship, and later to something like a standstill and possibly even a de- cline, if not in power and wealth, yet certainly in variety and spontaneity and energy. Not that we may say that the precise date and order and relations of each play are always absolutely fixed ; yet the criteria are numerous and the con- clusions reached are based both upon all the evidence attain- able and upon the truest psychological grounds and relations in thought. There were three dramatic forms popular and conven- tional when Shakespeare came to town, entered the theat- rical world and began to try his hand at dramatic writing. There was, first, the essentially bloody tragedy, often power- ful, but always crude and full of horrors. Second, there was the history play, peculiarly English in its origin, but more archaic than the other kinds, and very much circumscribed in its effort to reproduce past history for didactic purpose and to translate chronicle into suitable dialogue and dra- matic form. The third kind, the romantic comedy, which had been the least successful of all up to this time, was rather operatic than dramatic in nature, was mythologic in subject, allegoric in treatment, and frequently effusively complimentary in its personal application to some nobleman or special event The great master of the first two forms in tragedy and history was Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of all Shakespeare's predecessors. He had the wit to dis- cern the wonderful powers and possibilities of blank verse for dramatic intensity, and rejecting the vehicle of rhyme had introduced this new metrical form in his tragedies of Tamburlaine> The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus, and also in the historical masterpiece up to that period, Edward II. The leader of the fashion of allegorical comedy, which was a comedy characterized largely by turns upon words and wit HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 67 combats, was John Lyly, the redoubtable author of that quilt- patch story, Euphues, and the founder of a new order of prose writing, Euphuism. Besides work in dramatic pieces, Lodge and Greene had written stories and had interspersed them with lyrics of rare beauty and grace and had thus added to narrative statement the charm of song. It was natural that the young man Shakespeare, in his first attempts should imitate existing models in each kind : Marlowe in the tragic and the historic ; Lyly in the word-play of the comic ; and Lodge and Greene in the sense of the beauty of lyric measures. Moreover, it was just as natural that the art and genius of the young man had slowly to liberate him from palpable crudities inherited from these models. The earliest of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are beyond peradventure Titus Andronicus and / Henry VI. (Parts II and III of this latter play belong to a later and slightly more advanced stage of dramatic structure). These first plays have an interest disproportionate to their literary value. They are plays not written in the later Shakespearean spirit, but are told in the manner of his fore- runners, and as is the case with imitations, with their most marked faults exaggerated. Titus Andronicus is an unrelieved story of bloodshed and cruelty and horror. To an unprepared mind it is sim- ply awful — it reeks with blood — and strong tastes must those sixteenth century Englishmen have had to tolerate and accept such pictures. They were the physical as well as the psychical outcome of the long decades of internecine war and religious persecution preceding Elizabeth's reign. Many even doubt that Shakespeare who later shows such rare delicacy in handling disagreeable subjects, could possi- bly, even in the crude period of youth, have written Titus Andronicus. Like Falstaff, they argue, his "instinct" would have preserved him. Indeed, opinion is very nearly evenly divided on this point, with a possible preponderance in favor of the view that the beginner's early effort would necessarily indicate much lack of taste and judgment, and 58 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: particularly would follow along lines already accepted by current fashions. The excess of stock classical mythology is a definite trait of the conventional play of the time. Besides, there are to be found in the play one or two sensi- tive descriptions of country scenery and a knowledge of an- imals and of natural history, which remind sufficiently of later work as, with other evidence, to incline the critics to ascribe at least something in the play to our poet. Enough for our purpose that it represents clearly the pre -Shake- spearean spirit in contradistinction to the poet's later artistic development which is yet to take its first distinct step. Similarly, / Henry VI is merely the conventional type of the early history play that preceded Shakespeare, with all its crudity. The play is formed by stringing to- gether episodes not belonging together through any neces- sity and not governed by any controlling movement. For instance, the Countess of Auvergne's message and intrigue is a clear insertion falling into the commonplace. It belongs nowhere to the movement and is a motif similarly used in the Alexander legend and doubtless elsewhere in mediaeval letters. No less clear is another insertion: the lyric inter- view between young John Talbot and his father, where each desires to spare the life of the other and to aid the other to escape — so much like the numerous Damon and Pythias types of legend. Sir John Fastolfe's cowardice in running away from the field of battle was repeated later in Sir John Falstaff — but with what different effect! Joan of Arc (though suggesting many points to Schiller) is wretchedly and infamously represented — she, who has since been por- trayed so sympathetically in English literature by a writer of the Romantic age, Thomas De Quincey. The earlier English traditions on the subject are evidently followed: Joan is in league with the infernal powers of darkness to whom she has surrendered both body and soul. The figure of bold Talbot is drawn out in special length, after Mar- lowe's manner of making an heroic central figure the pro- tagonist of the action. Marlowe is clearly the model, if not HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 50 the co-worker, as some suppose. Can it be that this was an old play, which, according to a frequent custom, the begin- ner Shakespeare essayed to work over for better representa- tion by his theatrical company? If so, it is agreed that there are two scenes superior to the rest, which reveal the future poet. The highly poetic scene of the plucking of the red and white roses in the Temple Garden on the banks of the Thames, as signs of the contending houses of Lancaster and York, and the wooing scene between Margaret and Suffolk — for who can so portray the speech of love between man and woman as our dramatist? — are the ones thus singled out This wooing scene is not derived from history, but is a fiction of the poet, and upon this a large part of Part II turns. It is as if the scene were purposely inserted into an older form of the play where Talbot's glory was the chief subject, and the undue saintliness of the young king was sufficiently touched so as to adapt the play to the following parts in a new and special spirit This is accordingly done. Parts II and III of Henry VI are very differently con- ceived from Part I. But here again how much is Shake- speare's and how much parts of old plays worked over, the critics have found it hard to agree, and every one assumes the right of an opinion. No poet, at least approaches Shakespeare in his humor and clownish parts, as well as in the distinction of his poetic passages. The death scene of the intriguing and wicked Cardinal Beaufort seems to reveal the latter of these qualities; and the scenes of Jack Cade's rebellion suggest the future rollicking Shakespearean spirit which culminates in the Falstaffian parts of Henry IV. The spirit of tragedy, too, has grown more pronounced. The weak character of Henry brings its own disasters : the guilty love of Margaret and Suffolk, intimated at the close of Part I, bears as fruit its own terrible revenge ; and the long reign of Henry goes out in darkness. The second part of the preceding group is clearly the most carefully constructed of the three. In the third part the Titanic figure of the hump-backed Richard already ap- 60 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: pears, pointing to yet another consummation. The play of Richard III is really but the fourth and concluding part of the story of the disasters begun in Henry VI. The three parts of Henry VI and Richard III constitute a sort of tetralogy after the manner of Greek playwrights and are brought together as parts of one concerted move- ment very much as Wagner joined together his four operas of the Nibelungen Ring. The distorted figure of Richard III becomes the fitting deformed product of the decades of fratricidal strife. He dominates every other character, and his evil mind and unbounded will-power are irresistible. Even the courting scene of Lady Anne, in the presence of the body of her dead husband whom the wooer has mur- dered, would be unbearable, did we not ourselves feel for the moment that we yield to the strange fascination of this more than humanly imperious will. The destructive Wars of the Roses will end, Richard will perish at Bosworth Field, but he remains true to his conception to the last There is a cer- tain admiration we must feel for him as he determinedly brushes away from his vision all the illusory cobwebs of his wretched dreams and the ghostly apparitions of the night, is prepared to stake his kingdom upon a horse, and con- tinues fighting against the odds of fate and of heaven after he has killed already five "Richmonds in the field." In Richard III there is felt to be a distinct advance. The play no longer consists of scenes loosely strung to- gether, but the parts are welded into a whole. The one dominating figure carries us safely through to the end. Through its powerful portrayal of this demon of cruelty, it is a one-man's play, and hence a favorite with a certain class of actors of the ranting tendency. This feature of the play in letting one figure in its intensity and cruelty domi- nate all others, is altogether after Marlowe's manner. It is Shakespeare's one " Marlowesque" play, as Mr. Dowden has said, and we see the young author was not yet emanci- pated from the methods set by his model. Shakespeare was still working in the manner of his contemporary, who HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 61 though of the same age, enjoying earlier advantages, had, up to that time, achieved greater distinction. Mr. Lowell refused to believe that the play of Richard III is Shake- speare's on the ground that Shakespeare never wrote deliberate nonsense, and there is undoubtedly much of that in the play. But even if this be admitted, it is a standard applicable solely to later work. It seems much more reasonable to accept the explanation already given of the tutorship and apprenticeship of the poet's waking powers. Nothing is more apparent than the wide gulf which separates the early attempts of history and tragedy from the later sense of Shakespearean mastery. In this process of reasoning and investigation, the normality of the laws underlying and revealing the unfolding of the poet's genius be- come all the more apparent What is at first a stumbling block can be made a means for the better measurement of standards and for the establishment of truer comparisons. If Titus Andronicus was the crude beginning or working over of the conventional tragic form, and the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III constitute a great historic tetralogy, what was Shakespeare meanwhile doing in the lighter and the more playful and graceful vein of comedy and of song? As Marlowe was his master and model in the former species, so in this sort the influence of Lyly is perceptible, and perhaps that of Lodge and Greene. It is in comedy, best of all, in this early period, that Shakespeare's peculiar genius blossoms. Of all the other great poets of English literature, Chaucer alone approaches Shakespeare in possessing the broad sense of humor, that faculty of seeing things through the medium of genial good- natured fun and of playful and even mocking sport In the spirit of comedy, even at the beginning, Shakespeare was indebted to no teacher other than his own intuitive gifts ; it is only in the form that we see him following at first a certain fashion. The wit of early youth is apt to consist of the play on words, of puns and smart sayings and verbal antitheses, and to lie in the situation rather than in the character and the essential humorous atmosphere of the plot and piece. 62 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: It is instructive to apply these considerations to Shake- speare. Love' s Labour" s Lost is often considered to be his earliest attempt in the plays which for their non-tragic ending (to state it negatively) are termed comedies. It is at once the best example of the Euphuistic style of Lyly's fashion adopted in court circles, even while it gently ridi- cules the excesses of that style in the highly wrought fan- tastical speech of Don Adriano the Spaniard, Holofernes the pedant, and Sir Nathaniel the curate. We have the two types of characters opposed in groups : the intentionally broadly comic and the more dignified and graceful and ro- mantic. Among the latter — there is the king and the three gentlemen attendants, and over against these is the princess with her three maids in waiting. Of the figures in these groups Rosaline and Biron are decidedly the most clever in their ver- bal retorts and answers, and later when the poet's genius was richer, he reproduced them in deeper lines in Beatrice and Ben- edick in Much Ado About Nothing. But as yet we have merely types, and there is not the genius which can get beyond the type and produce the distinct indi- vidual figure. No plot has been discovered for the source of Shakespeare's clever attempt, but it is such as would suggest itself with approval to a young man's fancy. There is a conven- tional ideal of life attempted by the king and his co-mates, and the falsity of the convention is soon discovered when brought face to face with the truth of nature and of their own hearts. There is, besides, in this play a feeling for the open air, calling up reminiscences of green fields and country lanes, and the spirit of sweet lyric song, perhaps caught from Lodge and Greene, breathes back its "daisies pied and violets blue." Later in the poet's career, where his characters begin to live as persons and no longer move in groups and serve as types, we are not forced as here to any probable or improbable interpre- tation of the poet's purpose. The Comedy of Errors is just as bright in a very different way, though purely tentative in the history of the poet's art. It follows a very common fashion at the time of imitating foreign HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 63 models: Seneca for ranting tragedy and Plautus and Terence for comedy. In the Comedy of Errors it is a play of Plautus which is taken as the source of the plot It is the story of twin brothers so much alike that they are constantly mistaken one for the other. But Shakespeare goes further and by a simple de- vice increases the improbability and confusion. He gives as servants to the two brothers the two Dromios, who are likewise twins and who are confused as to their respective masters as these confuse them. With two pairs each constantly mistaking the other and being mistaken, the relations soon become so inextricable and laughable that the mind is fairly bewildered. No true character is portrayed as yet, though we have the begin- nings in the more sombre tones of ALgeon and the abbess. All the fun and jest of this play lies solely in the comicalities of the situation, just as in the popular play given so frequently in our theatres a year or two ago, Cluxrley s Aunt. It is an instance of comedy, relying so far on sheer situation for its support, as to border on the farce. It is about the same time that foreign influences and models, transformed, however, perfectly by romantic tendencies, become manifest in a slightly different direction. A story in Ovid's love tales, an author fashionable for generations in court circles and frequently adapted and translated, is used by Shakespeare for a narrative poem on Venus and Adonis ; and immediately after the same source furnishes the subject for the story of Lucrece. But of all the early plays the Two Gentlemen of Verona best gives us a peep into Shakespeare's workshop, and lets us see the growth of his art by comparing first crude ideas with later achievements in similar lines. In this play we have numberless suggestions of plot and characterization that Shakespeare is going to use again and again with added effect. We still have the two "Gentlemen" contrasted; the two ladies, Silvia and Julia; and the two clowns. The characters still move in pairs and groups. We are dealing still with types and not with persons. But the evolution is getting a genuine start. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona we have the woman assume male attire, a feature that was to be used with charming effect in the 64 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cym- beline. Thus disguised she acts as page to her lover and carries his messages to her rival, a situation repeated in Twelfth Night. Julia is the first of Shakespeare's maidens who pursue the men of their affections and avow their love. In this play we have the first genuine clowns (of which there may be found a faint suspicion even in Titus Andronicus and Henry VI), and Launce with his dog is not only the father of Launcelot Gobbo, who inherits the name, in the Merchant of Venice, but is godparent of the whole series of later jesters and fools. The friar is brought in to solve difficulties as in Romeo and Juliet, and in Much Ado. The lovers are named and described between mistress and maid and criticised adversely as in the Merchant of Venice — only with the parts of maid and mistress more naturally reversed in the later play. The rejected and persecuted lover takes the lead of a band of outlaws in the forest — a scene bor- rowed from the Robin Hood ballads and repeated in As You Like It. The sudden and unnatural pairing off of lovers in the fifth act contrasts sharply with the later delightful wooing in almost every play. Most of all, the plot of this play is the first of many taken from the legends and tales of Southern Europe; for Shake- speare seldom or never cared to invent the mere story ; — it was enough for his art to use this as ready material, to add new figures and inspire those already existing with the breath of life. And last, the genius of the romantic spirit hovers everywhere. But although the Two Gentlemen of Verona contains germs, they remain germs, and the buds have not unfolded into blossoms nor does the flower give forth its rich perfume. This we first reach, standing alone of its kind, in the fourth and last play portraying the gentle human spirit of this early comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is not that the poet's genius has now grown ready for deep characterization. This will not be found there. But there is the greatest charm and delight in the deft union of the varied threads into the woof of the fabric. And these threads are highly and yet differently colored. There are figures at the court of the duke, for Shakespeare has a partiality for dukes and follows HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 86 Chaucer in placing one even at Athens. The crew of Bottom the weaver, Quince the carpenter, Snout the tinker, Snug the joiner, Flute the bellows-mender, and Starveling the tailor, have their genuine English folk-accent rendered even more pronounced by the incongruities of their representation of the gentle romantic lover's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. Last, taken from the world of folk-lore, are the figures of Oberon and Titania, king and queen of fariy-land, having as attendants Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, and good- fellow Puck who boasts to "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes," and upon acquaintance with the creatures of this world is forced to soliloquize, "Lord, what fools these mortals be !" Mr. Barrett Wendell has suggested that A Midsummer Night's Dream is "a deliberate working over" of the two plots of The Comedy of Errors and the Two Gentlemen of Verona. The poetic touch has become more skilled and deft, and has given us, by the playful fall of fancy's fingers, a perfect gem of its kind. When the supernatural is used again, as in Ariel and Caliban, in The Tempest, at the close of the poet's career, it is with graver and more serious hand. While more preg- nant with thought and meaning, there is lacking the freshness and vital charm and beauty of the mere fancy's play. The advance in the Midsummer Night's Dream is thus really more in its poetic than in its dramatic qualities. The delightful phases of fairy-lore and of midsummer madness, when even Bottom, the weaver with an ass's head on his shoulders, is an object for caressing, would nowadays, as Mr. Wendell has very justly observed, be thought more fit for an opera than for representation in a play. It is the art of the young poet that has gained strength and consciousness in its exercise. At the same time that we have this exuberance of poetic fancy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, so perfect in its nice daintiness, Shakespeare essays tragedy. This new effort is essentially a tragedy of youth, — of the young unfulfilled passionate love of Romeo and Juliet. This is his first tragedy, apart from the history plays which stand by themselves, for 6 66 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: Titus Andronicus, it will be recalled, belongs to the pre- Shakespearean group certainly in spirit, and many doubt whether it be by Shakespeare even in the remotest degree. The passionate glow of Romeo and Juliet is too intense for this world. It cannot last. It must meet obstacles of one sort or another and turn to a tragic ending. Happy pair, perchance, that could stake their bliss thus and not have it rudely snapped by domestic infelicity, easily possible to two natures strung in so high a key! This high stringing vibrates through every note of Romeo and Juliet — that of a strong, intense passionate young nature endowed with the imagination for the time to feel like Romeo and to live with Juliet. The poet is each of his characters in turn; for now he is getting beyond mere types and is creating character and giving the individual. The happiest are his own conception, not given, or at best faintly so, in the original. The garrulous nurse, humorously talkative in her inaccuracy and untrustworthiness, and the courtier Mercutio, endowed with pungent wit and the ripest fancy, and dying with a pun on his lips, are figures indicating growth of power in specific portraiture. We feel, too, that Romeo, from being the mere type of forlorn melancholy lover that he plays in the first act, longing for some nondescript Rosaline, is transformed before us into the passionate nature stirred to its depth at last by the knowledge of what a true love really is. And the young girl Juliet is capable of descending into the maw of Death itself by strength of the revelation of love to her budding womanhood. With this success in the lighter comedy as seen in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the success in tragedy as figured in Romeo and Juliet we might anticipate that from now on our poet would pass from success to success. But this is only partly true. Certain prescribed forms still lend them- selves more readily to his genius. Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy of youth and unfulfilled love, but for the greater tragedy of life and of the human soul, even a Shakespeare needed yet other training and a severer schooling in life's experience. Some years elapse before this interest leads him HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 67 again upon the paths of tragedy. Instead he returns to the history play. But the history play is consciously conventional in spirit and archaic in form, and while doing better work than before in this kind, the poet does not yet attain the same brilliant success of his best contemporary comedy and tragedy. His expression in the latter two forms has clearly outgrown that in the former. Having treated in the three parts of Henry VI and in Richard III the civil strife in the Wars of the Roses which culminated in the engendering of the wretched disfigured Richard and his downfall at Bosworth Field, a return is made to an earlier period of history. A second tetralogy (Richard II, I and // Henry /Fand Henry V) is added to the former group of four plays (/, // and /// Henry VI and Richard III). The cause of all the trouble between Lancaster and York is sought in the wrongful deposition of Richard II and the usurpation of the throne (even though by act of Parliament) on the part of Henry Bolingbroke, crowned Henry IV. Richard is unworthy of the rule of men in that he knows not how to rule himself. He is the poet and the philosopher and the dreamer, when his position demands that he shall be the sovereign and the warrior and the man of action. This in- herent weakness brings about his downfall; Richard is de- posed; and the star of Bolingbroke triumphs. Marlowe had depicted the evil reign of the other of England's kings who had been not unlike Richard in his fate, Edward II; and thus in the history play we still find Shakespeare ac- knowledging Marlowe as his guide, if not his master. The miserable reign of one king suggests that of another, and the play of King John is to be connected with Richard II. But that which interests us to-day so greatly, Magna Charta and the struggle for liberty, finds no place in the play. And this is not strange. Shakespeare was not writing a philosophic historical treatise to please our modern nineteenth century historians ; he was writing a play to be acted and to please the public. There- fore, it is the romantic traditions of the reign, and the reputed murder of the boy Arthur, and Constance's grief for her son, and 68 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: the pity of Hubert, and the humanity of the Bastard Faulcon- bridge that of a right seize and hold the poet's pen and power. But the historic play is by this time confessedly felt to be old-fashioned in its principles. The more genial spirit of comedy is again invoked. But the comedy is now strengthened and intensified by tragic elements so as to bring out intensity in character; yet these tragic elements are in the end turned aside so that all the apparently deserving are happy. The Merchant of Venice is now produced. This play must be compared most closely with A Midsummer Night's Dream. Just as there three different strata were united, so here two entirely different stories, the pound of flesh story and the casket story (not to speak of minor motives, as the spiriting away of the Jew's daughter, and the moonlight operatic serenade at the close), are intertwined and made to serve as the basis of a new movement. The plot is old, but the figures are made new and real and vital. Shylock is a Jew demanding a Christian's life; but Shakespeare has transformed him from the monster into a human creature with the same humanity as ourselves: " Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? If we are like you in the rest, we will re- semble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example ? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." Small wonder there has arisen a coterie who believe that Shylock was badly treated and proceed to write a plea on his behalf. It is the highest tribute to the growth in the poet's art. He has taken a conventional figure away from the category of the traditional inhuman monster as seen in Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Jew has become a man — suffering, and because he has suffered, wishing, too, to inflict suffering. At last Shakespeare can be brought into comparison in tragic elements with his original inspirer, Marlowe, and be declared HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST M emancipated. The instincts of his own genius are bearing him aloft. The figures of the clowns reappear in strengthened lines. We have had women before, but their figures have been hazy. The women in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and in A Mid- summer Night's Dream were persons merely and left no definite impression. Even the passion]and experience of the unfortunate Juliet was restricted to a single phase of life. But Portia has true womanliness ringing in every word and act, and heads the list of splendid portraitures of the glorious women in Shake- speare's gallery. Whether there ever was such a perfect woman as Portia actually in existence, is beside the question. She is a noble ideal of the poet's brain and heart in an age not altogether given to idealizing woman. Here we have portrayed at last, in a later poet's words: " A perfect woman nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command." But there is a bit of English history to tell still left incomplete. The downfall of Richard II brought with it the success of Boling- broke, who became Henry IV. Richard was unworthy and he fell — poetic justice teaches. But Henry conspired against his lawful king and sovereign, and the same poetic justice decrees that his days shall be full of trouble and his reign's end clouded. He dies not in the Holy Land on a Crusade as he had vowed in order to appease the wrath of Heaven, but in Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster under the conviction and fear that his son for whom he had wrested an unlawful crown was unworthy. This is the tragedy of the history of Henry IV. But even in this history play the genius of the poet was more concerned with the realities of the present than with the tragedy of the past. Henry IV lives for us not so much because of its history as by reason of the fiction in the play. It is the unparalleled creation of Falstaff among the scenes in Eastcheap at the Boar's- Head tavern with its rollicking companions, prominent among whom is Prince Hal, the heir apparent, that we think of when we name Henry I V. So far has the muse of comedy overshadowed that of history. Here is drastic realism enough! Falstaff is thoroughly a creature of the senses, but with an irresistibility of 70 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: audacity. In every encounter as to honor and truth who can gainsay him? We throw down all moral standards at the ap- proach of this ton of sack only to laugh immoderately at him and with him. Who but Falstaff may be a coward upon "instinct" and conclude by force of syllogism that "honor" is but "air" and "a mere scutcheon" and moralize upon all others: "Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! " There are two parts of Henry IV, but they are not enough for Falstaff and Prince Hal. We are promised that we shall have both again. With the heroic presentation of Henry V the history plays, already antiquated and archaic in form for Shakespeare's strengthening genius, come to a definite end. This is Shakespeare's only panegyric, and he was but following the usual trend of English thought in glorifying the hero of the Battle of Agincourt. His fellow-countryman, Drayton, had sung lustily of Henry. But may there not, too, have been something personal in Shakespeare's attitude? Prince Hal had spent a wild and careless youth, but, Shakespeare intimates, he was always sure of himself and knew that this phase of his life was only temporary and that the time would come when with growth and with increased responsibilities the world would finally learn what sort of man he really was. Was there any intimation that once the youth Shakespeare had been rather a harum-scarum lad in Stratford ; that he had hastened under circumstances possibly not altogether to his credit into an early marriage; that he had been brought before the mag- istrate for poaching on the hunting preserves of this choleric gentleman, upon whom he perhaps obtained his revenge in using him as prototype for Justice Shallow in Henry IV and the Merry Wives \ that he had left his native town very possibly under a cloud, but conscious, in some measure, of his high destiny? The reward had surely come with the achievement ! We shall not be too sure. At any rate it is in Henry V alone of all the plays that the man Shakespeare seems to enter personally and to speak with an individual enthusiasm. Herewith ended all the work in history — with the exception HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 71 of the fragment of Henry VIII attributed to Shakespeare near the close of his career. One thing is clear, the poet's art has outgrown the restrictions of the history play. The spirit and genius of comedy which had possessed him while working upon Henry IV carries him on for a while longer. No pure tragedy has been attempted since the completion of Romeo and Juliet, and no one at all dealing with the profounder problems of life in its fateful relations. Falstaff, however, had been promised to us as well as the Prince. Yet Shakespeare knew that it was impossible to make an ideal figure of Henry V and retain the old sinner as his boon companion. He is banished from the court at the close of Henry IV, and very early in Henry V we hear of Falstaff's death. "His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields" and "a* made a finer end and went away as it had been any Christom child," reports the hostess of the tavern with almost tenderness and a touch of genuine pathos. But there was another reason for dropping Falstaff. Falstaff had for the second time been the hero of a special play. The original creation is said to have pleased the Queen and her Court so much that the request was made that the author should represent Falstaff in love. Whatever the tradition be worth, the result was The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play is said to have been put together in two weeks. It bears every mark of crudity and haste. It is not in blank verse, but written almost altogether in prose form throughout. The scene is nominally laid at Windsor, the seat of the Queen, but the whole situation is essentially continental and southern, as if adapted to for- eign manners to suit the merriment of a court circle. Fal- staff's genius has clearly deserted him, and he is no longer the same creature. His fatuity is pitiful and he suffers dis- astrously and deservedly for being so egregious an old fool. The second part of Henry IV is hardly the equal of the first part in the Falstaffian vitality, but the Merry Wives is dis- tinctly unprofitable compared with the earlier work. It is but another striking illustration of poorer later endings to former good things, and shows that works, made to order at command 72 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: of the Sovereign who sits on the throne and not at the order of the Muse who rules the heart and soul of poesy and directs the reins of the imagination, are often in vain. We may be sure that Shakespeare was not genuinely interested in this work. It is his left hand achievement, as it were, while his right hand is otherwise and better engaged. Even so little does another play at this period, The Taming of the Shrew, show Shakespeare at his best. It belongs to the boisterous conception of the Falstaffian period and is probably an absolute contemporary of Henry 1 V. But while rich blood is put into the veins of Henry IV, only the cloaking over was done on the skeleton of the Shrew. The play is based upon a yet older play with a very similar title, The Taming of a Shrew, and as we have it, the play is only in part, in every probability, Shakespeare's work. The intrigue of Bianca and her suitors is the part ascribed to the other worker. The part believed to be Shakespeare's is the noisiness and high spirits of the Katherine and Petruchio episodes. But The Taming of the Shrew is not so gross when Shakespeare leaves it as it first seems. Shakes- peare inspires new life into everything that he touches. Katherine is not a mere shrewish vixen ; she is a woman who knows her superiority in character to her universally more admired sister, and she has a real woman's heart if the right man can come to discern it and to bring out the womanly parts. This is probably the seeming miracle that Petruchio performs amid all his bluster. The true man and the true woman, each has met his mate; both are at last matched; and the woman is quick to recognize this truth and is all the more womanly and true in her yielding. As for Christopher Sly, in the Arabian Nights transformation of the Induction, he remains, even in a lord's house, "Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton Heath," not so far away from Shakespeare's Warwickshire home, and upon waking calls, "For God's sake, a pot of small ale." Shakespeare's realistic sense had come in contact with the Slys in frequenting other taverns than the Boar's-Head in Eastcheap in Falstaff's company. But if these two plays were lightly thrown off at busied HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 78 intervals, because the poet was more deeply engaged upon other matters, there follow three comedies upon the close of the history series which received his full attention and indi- cate the highest achievement in Shakespearean romantic color and grace and charm. These three plays are Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. They con- stitute the height of the sympathy and tenderness of the creations in the bright romantic spirit, as they close abruptly the series of joyous comedy. Much Ado is akin in some respects to the Taming of the Shrew, as the noisiest and most boisterous of the three. Like that play, moreover, it consists of a union of a comedy of intrigue and one of character. There is much witty dialogue and hu- morous situation. The intrigue of the Hero and Claudio part suggests in certain features the future Winter s Tale, and this part of the plot is borrowed in its origins. The passages where Beatrice and Benedick flout at one another, like the gifted pair already described in Love's Labour s Lost, are the genuinely Shakespearean parts, and this pair find each other in the end with more reason than Katherine and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. Benedick marks Beatrice and she chooses him as the object of attention from the start. They are clearly the best and brightest of the whole company and are accordingly best fitted for each other's aim. The climax is simply the mating of the best of their kind, the union as well as the survival of the fittest. And the blundering officials, Dogberry and Verges, are princes of all official stupidity, proud of their small place and even more fearful for their still smaller dignity. The atmosphere in As You Like It is entirely different. Everything is out in the open air, as in the merry days of good Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. The Forest of Arden can harbor such figures as Rosalind and Orlando. Touchstone, the most sentimental of clowns, Jaques, the most melancholy of men, and the Duke who moralizes : M Sweet are the uses of Adversity Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head ; 74 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." Twelfth Night recalls once again the confusions of the Comedy of Errors and of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On Twelfth Night, just as on Midsummer Night, such disguises and con- fusions are most likely. Do not gates drop from gate posts and walk away on those evenings, and are not the spirits abroad ? In both these plays, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, there persists a romantic setting of dainty melancholy. The charming lyrics and the quaint moralizings and bright jestings merely in- tensify this spirit. " Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress let me be laid ; Fly away, fly away, breath ; I am slain by a fair cruel maid." The pure charm of poetry and the mastery of setting are perfect in their assumptions and proportions. The poetic artist is working consciously and he arrives at what he intended, and produces surely and unmistakably his effects. He has aban- doned the drastic portrayal of Eastcheap low life of the Fal- staffian scenes and has passed beyond into the borders of romantic spirit land. But it is a land of poetry and of music, as well as of romance, and our ears linger to catch the sweet refrains. Thus the crowning point of Shakespeare's genius in comedy was reached at the turning of the century, about 1600. Did he himself suspect at this time the new provinces that were still lying prepared for him to enter? With the exception of one play, Romeo and Juliet, all his work had hitherto been in history and comedy. What deep experience in his life now turned all his instincts to tragic thought, where he was to find the crowning expression of his life and art? Here we are brought face to face, in our speculations, with the mystery of the Sonnets. We do not know the secret history of Shakespeare's life, nor is it necessary for a prurient curiosity to know. But we can guess from the Sonnets — which were ap- HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 75 pearing at any time in the four or five years before 1600 and in the five or six years after 1600 — if they are to be taken at all in their natural sense, that Shakespeare had two friends, the one "fair," a man, and the other "coloured ill," a woman, and his relations with these and through these taxed the endurance of his higher and spiritual forces to the utmost. He drank the cup of bitterness and almost of shame to the dregs, and yet main- tained somehow his manhood and struggled through to recon- ciliation and to light. Whether this friend, supposed to be the "Mr. W. H." of the dedication, was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the son of Sidney's sister Countess, and whether the dark lady was Mrs. Mary Fitton, a lady in waiting upon the Queen who afterwards became disgraced and lost her place at Court — we may not tell. But certain it seems that in these Sonnets are revealed the sufferings and living experiences of the man who was feeling all the tragicness sustained by the characters in the six great plays, so quickly following one upon the other in the coming years, as tragedy had never before been attempted : Julius Casar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. All the plays before 1600 might have been written by one without any such spiritual history as the Sonnets reveal. The plays written after 1600 could have been produced only by a man with the deep and true and unerring sounding of the depths of human knowledge and experience. The strange thing is, apparently, that the poet cannot longer write comedy at all. All's Well that Ends Well is comedy in title, but in reading seems a hollow mockery. Measure for Measure is saved from a tragic ending by the presiding genius of the disguised duke as befits an Arabian Nights story; but the utter pathos of situation and the noble sustained character of poor betrayed Isabella, coupled with the absolute unnaturalness of her natural protector, a brother, gives the impression of the keenest pain. Logically, the play ought to have been made a tragedy, we feel. A few years later, perhaps, in one more attempt, Troilus and Cressida, not only are the Homeric heroes belittled and rendered pitiful, but the poor, green 76 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: goose, Troilus, seems hardly worthy of a better fate than infatuation with the fickle and false Greek maiden. What a change has come over the spirit of the poet's dreams since the august fooling of Touchstone and the dainty melan- choly of Rosalind and her companions in the Forest of Arden, and since the happy confusion and frolics of the Twelfth Night revels! The soul of the poet has grown grim and dark and serious and earnest, and overcast with the gloomy pall of awe. The first two of the six named tragedies, Julius Gzsar and Hamlet, display a reflective, dreamy, poetic, high-minded nature, seeking in vain to find its right place in the con- stitution of things, and through its very nobility and moral strength sinking back hurt and wronged and wrecked and ruined. That the good and the true may become dedicated to utter destruction with no apparent fault of its own; that the origin of evil and of sin in the world is mysterious and inexplicable and awful in its fateful consequence, this is the great truth enunciated by the greatest of the Shakespearean tragedies as it was by the Greek drama of .^Eschylus and Sophocles, where the law and will of man seem overruled and overawed by the will of the gods, and that of the gods even sub- ject to a mysterious and inscrutable Fate. In Julius Ccesar, Brutus seeks to act solely for the good of his country and is open only to calls of honor, yet becomes overwhelmed in the meshes of the snarers' net, and his noble help-mate, Portia, devotes her blessed head to self-destruction. The tragedy of the play is not the downfall of Caesar, as the name might imply, but the desolation, caused thereby, of the very men and the seeming principles of right and truth Caesar's fall was intended to protect. Brutus too late sees clear : " There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune : Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries." In Hamlet, the soul of the young prince, reflective rather than active, steeped in intellect but lacking in will to execute, HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST 77 must realize in the untimely death of his father the frailty and inconstancy of woman, and that woman of all — his mother. And poor Ophelia, innocent of this knowledge, becomes crazed that her lover finds it no longer time to dawdle now. 44 O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! O God 1 How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world ! Fie on'tl O fie! 'tis an un weeded garden, That grows to seed ; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely." The man of arms, Othello, is played on by the treachery of his trusted friend, the arch fiend, "Honest Iago," in a trick that the brooding Hamlet might have seen into in an instant, and pure innocent Desdemona's candle is smothered out. "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!" Othello's own words tell the rest: " Speak of me as I am — Of one that loved not wisely but too well ; Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, Perplex'd in the extreme." King Lear makes the mistake of casting off the one daughter who can love her father and is thrust forth himself into the howling blasting storm by the pelicans to whom he gave up crown and all. In a little lifting of the cloud he recognizes at last the faithfulness of Cordelia, but only to know her dead in his arms, hanged, and his own heart break- ing in two. " Howl, howl, howl, howl ! O, you are men of stones! Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever! " Macbeth's ambition, which acts upon, and is reacted upon in turn by his own restless dreams and those of his wife, causes the murder of his sovereign and kinsman, who should have been protected by his own hospitality and loyalty, while asleep in his house, and henceforth the damned spot will not out! 78 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE: Antony and Cleopatra, at the height of the dominion of power and beauty, give up kingdom andjaction and duty for the embrace of love, and the Battle of Actium decides a new turn of Fortune's wheel in the world's history. The self-pride of Coriolanus yields to the entreaties of a mother; but these can prevail only at the price of the son. Finally, in Timon of Athens the world of bitterness and scorn and the darkness of oblivion settles down in impenetrable gloom of misanthropy, disgust at life, and hatred of the race itself. Is this the time when Sonnet LXVI indicated the prevailing temper of mind ? " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill." The gloom is almost but not quite impenetrable. As suddenly as the cloud came, it lifted, just as in the later Sonnets there is reconciliation and forgiveness and self-for- getfulness: " Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken." Thus the storm ceases and the lurid sky becomes lighted up. There follows a spirit of self-abnegation, and instead of suffering and pain and disaster there is emphasized joy after trouble, happiness after trial, and reunion after sep- aration. Does this phase again mark a new chapter in the poet's spiritual history? At least the conclusions are based upon profound psychological reasons. ntly I •fej HIS GROWTH AS AN ARTIST M There are but five remaining plays, and all reveal the^^ closest kinship in this new spirit. The Shakespearean pa"rt / of Pericles, discarding the older setting of a disagreeable ' story, is the final happiness and restoration to father and family of tempest-born and tempest-tossed Marina. In Cymbeline the pure figure of suffering Imogen, after shameful persecution and casting forth, is declared triumphantly innocent amid the recovery of her long lost brothers. The Winter s Tale, Perdita, the lost one and cast-away, comes back to a court to greet a sorrowing father and to affirm the vindication of a cruelly wronged mother long believed to be dead. In The Tempest, the storm and shipwreck is the means whereby two long estranged brothers are reunited: "Admired Miranda," through her union with Ferdinand, helps to promote the bond of reconciliation; Ariel and Caliban, the beings of spiritual light and carnal grossness, return to the elements that gave them ; and the magic island, a nowhere, a Utopian dream, becomes dissolved as mere fancy's figment. Last, the Shakespearean portion of Henry VIII— lor nearly all agree that it is a composite play — displays the master's touch and the spirit of this period in the tender portrayal of the sufferings of the unhappy and beautiful Katharine of Aragon, who dies loving her lord and forgiving her enemies. As Shakespeare himself, at the beginning of his career, had worked in others' footsteps and had acknowledged Marlowe as his model, so the master spirit finds an apt pupil in the brightest and most poetically gifted of his immediate suc- cessors, John Fletcher. It is to his hand that the draught of Henry VIII begun was probably entrusted for completion. Marina, Perdita, Miranda,— the sea-born, the lost, the lovely — all Latin names indicating their origin and classification in the same spirit, together with Imogen, are heroines imaginatively akin in these last plays. These plays are genuine romances, written as ideal fairy tales for the delight and pleasure of the children of the poet's old age. One final word ! If we may regard Loves Labour's Lost, a young man's fancy, as the earliest of the romantic plays in which 80 THE MAN SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare's originality and independence gave any evidence, it would be interesting to place The Tempest, certainly one of the latest, as the culmination in thought of a busy and active career. If The Tempest may be thus regarded as the last, it connects, in its episode of the wreck off "the still-vexed Ber- moothes," the new world of America, governed infancy by some happy Prospero having under control the powers beneficent and malevolent, — the Ariels and the Calibans of our spiritual nature — and making of this land the happy ideal State. Plato gave such a conception to the world; Sir Thomas More gave one; Bacon and others gave theirs; and here, gentle fancy's child, Shakespeare, gives a suggestion of his. Let it be ominous of completed work! Like Milton's Comus, it may have been written to grace some festal occasion. The poet magician has held his wand over these many creations of his brain and art; and he takes leave in this most thoughtful and gravely poetical of plays, which by some peculiar circumstance became the first in order in the folio and remains so in other editions. There let it stand, in sharp conjunction with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as an admirable preface — usually the last thing in a book to be written — and as an exposition of the poet's growth and evolution in artistic form, in power of thought, and in strength of characterization. IV. The Episodes in Shakespeare's / Henry VI From The Publications of the Modern Language Association^ Vol. XV, No. 3, 1900 THE EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI THE present paper is drawn from a number of notes gradu- ally collected and is intended to be one of a series of studies upon those plays of Shakespeare belonging to his earliest dramatic period. It is a period of vital interest in Shakespeare's work, because artistically it is his formative one and historically it connects our greatest dramatist with his predecessors and with characteristic contemporary fashions and productions. Whatever may be the exact date on which Shakespeare came to town or began his dramatic career, as is well known, there were three sorts of plays current and fashionable at the time. There was the English history or chronicle play; the Senecan tragedy of blood; and the Plautean comedy of dialogue and situation, — both of these last formed upon classic models. Shakespeare is at first no innovator, but in his beginning work is connected with all these and other modes. / Henry VI is an illustration of the history or chronicle play, closely followed by the Second and Third Parts and by Richard III. The ex- ample of the tragedy of blood based on Senecan models is Titus Andronicus, which, from certain points of view, is a necessary link in the chain of structural and character develop- ment from the crude Senecan imitation, through Marlowe's vehement creations and Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, to the masterly Hamlet and Lear. And thirdly, the Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of the bustle and wit of the Plautean comedy of sparkling dialogue and equivocal situation. But comedy was very close to the native English genius. It had perked itself up long before in the face of the sacred background in the Noah's Wife and the Shepherds of the Miracle Plays ; and it could not be expected now that a made-to-order pseudo-classic type should prescribe a stiff jacket for constant wearing. Lore's Labour's Lost may derive ultimately from classic comedy, but is more immediately the product of artificial court life and manners 84 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI and speech best associated with the name of John Lyly. Of a phase suggesting the manner of Robert Greene, The Two Gentlemen of Verona adopted the formal and exaggerated love versus friendship romance from some one of its many appli- cations in Southern Europe. Indeed, if anything seems to be true of the beginner Shake- speare, he is very precocious at trying conclusions with com- petitors of every sort and catching up any contemporary literary fashion that may be in favor. As he became better acquainted with courtiers and court life, he wrote for the young nobles, and surely ladies, too, of London and Elizabeth's court two love narratives derived from Ovid: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. And it was probably not far from the same time that the young and now successful poet was led, after well-known imitations of Italian models, to indulge in the first of "his sugred sonnets among his private friends." Such was the spirit of the young Shakespeare in his early work. It is the first natural step in his development into his later individual mastery. The play of / Henry VI shows Shakespeare under the influence of one of the earliest of these contemporary literary fashions: he is at work upon the materials for a history drama. A good plea can be made, as it is made by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps and Pro- fessor Sarrazin, 1 even if the matter cannot be definitely de- termined, on behalf of I Henry VI as the earliest of all the early works ascribed to Shakespeare. Certainly the history play is the form in which Shakespeare's genius first fruited and soonest became exhausted. It cannot have been far from the historic year of the Spanish Armada that Shakespeare began his literary work in London. While in isolated existence and in a crude form before, the vogue of the history play, its great tem- porary popularity and as sudden dying down after ten years of life (i 589-1 599), can be traced directly to the national feeling evoked by the victories of the English over the Spanish in the eventful year of 1588. The new victories over Spain would X J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps: "Outlines of the Life of Shakspere," 9th ed., Vol. I, p. 97. G. Sarrazin: "William Shakespeare's Lehrjahre," 1897. EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 86 naturally recall the ancient glory of the victories of brave Talbot over the French; or the accounts in the chronicles may have been brought afresh to mind by existing disturbances in France. An older play may or may not have existed on the subject It may be that it is an older play that is referred to by Nash in Pierce Penniless, or it may be that it is / Henry VI. In any case, it was a subject that could now be presented and could be counted upon to arouse national spirit and popular enthusiasm. / Henry VI breathes at every pore this patriotic atmosphere. Omitting Henry VIII, which was written near the close of the dramatist's career and which occupies a peculiar place in his work, there are nine history plays connected with Shakespeare's name. These fall into two groups closely related in subject, each group consisting of four plays and thus forming a sort of tetralogy. The two tetralogies may be regarded as connected by the remaining play as intermediate in point of development and structure and power of characterization. The first group or tetralogy contains /, //, and /// Henry VI and Richard HI. This group deals with the troublous times of the Wars of the Roses which culminate in the cruel and monstrous Richard. One wicked king may suggest another, particularly if a play already exists on the subject and can be readily worked over, compressed into shape, and the characters, instead of being pulled about on strings, be made to live. King John, there- fore falls between the two groups; and in method of con- struction and character development is to be compared with the two Richards, one on each hand and both showing the very different influence of Marlowe's two manners. The second tetralogy goes back in subject to take up the original cause of these fateful quarrels; and this is treated in a freer, broader, and maturer spirit in Richard II, I and // Henry IV, and Henry V. A little offshoot from the Falstaff scenes of Henry IV is the Merry Wives of Windsor. The one group ends where the other begins : Henry V closes with the crown- ing of the king in Paris ; / Henry VI opens with the burial of Henry V in Westminster Abbey and the woes ensuing from his coronation. The closing words of the Chorus as 86 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI Epilogue to Henry V seem to lay particular emphasis upon this connection and to take evident pleasure in the thought of work complete, and of a series brought at length to a termination. Thus considered / Henry VI becomes a part of an apparently larger and more completely developed whole, and constitutes possibly the first play in Shakespeare's 'bending' to prevail- ing fashions. But the play not only rewards examination in this larger spirit ; looked at for itself in structure and form it is no less interesting. An analysis of / Henry VI shows not the close fusion of parts into a spiritual whole as in a later play like Much Ado or King Lear, or even in a comparatively early play like the Merchant of Venice or A Midsummer Night's Dream. There are not a few passages of no mean rhetorical power, more, indeed, than is generally supposed, but the play as a whole is structurally weak. There is little elaboration of character or development of plot. The play is characterized by the loose putting together of parts; each part being but the result of a succession or stringing together of scenes or episodes. Briefly and generally stated, just as in the outward form of The Shrew, of A Midsummer Night's Dream, of the Merchant of Venice, of Henry IV, of Much Ado about Nothing, of King Lear, of Cymbeline — plays taken from very different periods of Shakespeare's work — so in the structure of / Henry VI there are two leading parts into which the play falls. These two parts may be generally designated as the Talbot or French portion and the Henry or English portion. As the Folio edition gives the play there are twenty-seven scenes. By separating the episode of the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk from the Joan episode that immediately precedes, as independent by its very content, there will be twenty-eight. Of these twenty-eight scenes at least sixteen belong to the Talbot part, eight to the Henry part, and the remaining four serve to connect and weld these together. Of these four one is about, and two others intimately concerned with, the Talbot wars; the fourth is the scene of the wooing of Margaret. EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 87 Also two of the eight Henry scenes transfer the English king to France, and may be treated as connecting scenes; certainly, as will be shown, they bear a peculiar relation one to the other. The French War or Talbot portion, into which the Joan of Arc scenes naturally fall, is thus apparently the original basis of the play. It is more closely related to the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, and apart from specific exceptions presently to be noted, is the more archaic in manner and principle. Upon this Talbot part as ground stock is grafted the Henry part — the scenes comprising the quarrels of the nobles. The general jealousy between Gloucester and Win- chester — at the Abbey, at the Tower, in the Parliament and in the Palace of the King — passes over into the specific enmity between Plantagenet and Somerset in the Temple Garden, followed at once by the death of Mortimer and bringing in its train all the horrors the factions of the Red and White Roses entail. These are hardly one-half so many as the Talbot scenes, but they are among the longest and most independently developed scenes in the play. Also the four connecting or welding scenes, which bring the Talbot episodes into connection with the others, are largely independent and free in development For instance, the long opening scene of the First Act is an introduction to the general situation. The accounts of the three Messen- gers arriving in succession interrupt the quarrels of the nobles and tell of Talbot's distress. By the simple device of the messengers, taken from the old Senecan tragedy to serve as chorus, the English and the French parts are brought together at the opening of the play. Again, into the midst of the Fourth Act, where the death of Talbot is developed out of all due proportion, but in a distinctly elevated strain, by a poet who shows at once both lyric and dramatic power, two other connecting scenes are thrust Scenes iii and iv of this Act are absolutely parallel in construction : Sir William Lucy appeals to both York and Somerset for succor in vain, and the death of Talbot is ascribed not to the French and to Joan, 88 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI but to the jealousies and quarrels of the parties of the Red and White Rose. And in the last Act occurs the final con- necting scene : the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk. It is an episode of the battlefield ; yet it is at the same time but another element of discord among the nobles : Suffolk becomes an influence in moving the King's choice in opposition to Gloucester. But this episode has a deeper significance than helping to connect the Talbot and Henry portions of the drama : it prepares intimately for Parts II and III of Henry VI, wherein Margaret and her guilty love fill so large a part. Suffolk's speech : Thus Suffolk hath prevailed ; and thus he goes, .... Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the king : But I will rule both her, the king and realm — are the last words of Part I, and a sombre note is struck as the curtain falls. If ever there was intentional preparation for matter to come, it is surely here. So close is the connection that a recent editor (Donovan) ends the first play prematurely and places the concluding portion of the last scene as the beginning of the Second Part. It is the figure of Margaret, amid the jarring contentions of parties, that moves sombrely through the four plays and binds the first tetralogy into a single whole — one ultimate consistent conception, though of unequal execution. Unhistorically, but poetically enough, the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk is placed near the close of the First Part of Henry VI and prepares for Parts II and III. Unhistorically again, the figure of Margaret appears in the fourth play, in Richard III, like a weird figure of Fate, proclaiming curses and vengeance. Not that the whole plan was seen from the beginning. It gradually grew out of the material at hand. Part I pre- pared for Parts II and III; Parts II and III are intimately connected; and Richard III completed Part III. Or there may have been a different order of writing. So specifically does I prepare for II and III in certain particulars that it is conceivable that I was written after II and that III had EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 89 been already planned. 1 Without entering here upon the diffi- cult question of the relation of the Quartos to the Folio version of // and /// Henry VI, Parts II and III may have existed in an incomplete shape before / Henry VI assumed its present form. The author saw the dramatic possibilities in these Wars of Roses in the reign of Henry VI. Part I, therefore, could be made to serve as introduction. The Talbot material already well known and existing in chronicle form, even if not, as is probable, as an old play, could be compressed, altered, and added to, and other non-chronicle parts introduced. The Henry, and particularly the Margaret, episodes become em- phasized to accord with the two plays, the early forms of // and /// Henry VI, already existing. Finally, Richard III served as conclusion, after II and III had been put into final form. Such would be a conceivable hypothesis as to the relation of Part I to Parts II and III. At any rate, whatever may be the precise order and dates of these several plays brought in question, the method and spirit of the writing of / Henry VI hardly admits of doubt. To work up or rewrite the Talbot portions of the Chronicles, probably, though not necessarily, already crystallized into an old play on the triumph of "brave Talbot" over the French, which possessed the hated Joan of Arc scenes and all; to intensify the figure and character of Talbot; to work over or add scenes like those touching Talbot's death; to connect him with the deplorable struggles of the nobles; to invent, by a happy poetical thought, the origin of the factions of the Red and White Roses in the Temple Garden; to sound at once the note of weakness in the king continued in the succeeding parts, and thus convert the old Talbot material effectually into a Henry VI drama; and to close with the wooing of Margaret as specific introduction to Part II, — something like this seems the task that the dramatist set himself to perform. 1 Richard Grant White has a suggestion akin to this in his Essay on the authorship of King Henry the Sixth. 90 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI Such a process as this mingling of themes in / Henry VI best accounts for obvious difficulties: the confusion of dates, chronological disorders, and more than one bewildering repe- tition of the same event. The portrayal of the death of Talbot before the marriage of the king to Margaret is historically an anomaly, but dramatically easily understood. Also the return of the Duke of Burgundy to the French occurred historically after the death of Joan and was in no wise caused by her; but there seems to have been some traditional or chronicle authority for the episode, apart from the freshness and spirit of the dramatic conception of the passage. Certain obscurities of reference may likewise be the result of the condensation of the old Talbot parts, just as in King John some of the deeds and words of the Bastard Faulconbridge are to be referred to the older play for proper understanding. Such may be a possible explanation of a vagueness in the presentation of the figures of the Master Gunner and his Boy, and of certain peculiarities in the structure of the Joan episodes as well as in the conception of the character of Joan herself. There is a seeming con- tradiction or anomaly in two references to Winchester as Cardinal in the First and Fifth Acts respectively. In the quarrel at the Tower in Act I, when Gloucester wishes to stamp the Cardinal's hat under his feet, Winchester is addressed as Cardinal. In Act V Exeter is surprised to know that Winchester is become Cardinal and to see the habiliments of office: What ! is my Lord of Winchester install'd And call'd unto a cardinal's degree ? There is suggested at once that some of the contradictions and repetitions in the play can hardly be due to anything else than to writing over existing dramatic material in new forms and keeping some parts of the old side by side. The strongest internal evidence of the probable existence of an older Talbot play seems to rest here; although one must be careful in drawing too rigid conclusions from the structure of a play that admittedly EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI 91 belongs to a formative period and nowhere applies very closely the laws of sequence and consistency. As explained, the opening scene of the play seems to serve for connecting the two main parts or plots of the drama. The narrative of the Messengers jumbles together events wide apart in order to set forth the sum total of results. The captures of cities at various stages of the war and in different years are dramatically brought together in one breath. The method is not that of narrative or chronicle, but chronicle transformed into drama. So far good ; for this is the usual procedure of the chronicle play. But the content of the third Messenger's speech touches material that is later specifically enacted in Acts II and III: he relates the circumstances of Talbot's valor and, in sharp contrast therewith, the story of Fastolfe's cowardice: . . . valiant Talbot above human thought Enacted wonders with his sword and lance : Hundreds he sent to hell, and none durst stand him ; Here, there, and everywhere, enraged he flew : The French exclaim'd, the devil was in arms ; All the whole army stood agazed on him : His soldiers spying his undaunted spirit A Talbot! a Talbot I cried out amain And rush'd into the bowels of the battle. Here had the conquest fully been seal'd up, If Sir John Fastolfe had not played the coward : He, being in the vaward, placed behind With purpose to relieve and follow them, Cowardly fled, not having struck one stroke. (I, i, 121-134.) This is reported as having occurred upon "Retiring from the siege of Orleans." Now Scene i of the following Act is laid "before Orleans." In close agreement with Holinshed and Hall, the stage directions read: "Cry: 'St. George,' *A Talbot' The French leap over the walls in their shirts;" and the Bastard of Orleans comments : " I think this Talbot be a fiend of hell" (II, i, 38-46). The same episode is once more re- peated a few lines further: "Alarum. Enter an English soldier, crying 'A Talbot! a Talbot!' They fly, leaving their clothes behind;" while one of the English soldiers declares, "The cry of Talbot serves me for a sword" (II, i, 77-81). 92 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI The scene in Act II seems to be the older, upon which is based the Messenger episode. The account of the Messenger is written for the special purpose of introducing the play, and the two versions are allowed to stand side by side in succeeding Acts. Indeed, all the accounts of Talbot's deeds of valor, multiplied, as if to gain force by iteration, bear a general resemblance. But the four mystifying repetitions of Fastolfe's cowardice attest even more pointedly this working-over process. The several incidents seem to have been drawn from an episode in an old play based upon the Chronicles, and perhaps still need the old play to be perfectly explained. As related, the Messenger recounts the Fastolfe episode in the opening scene, as happening when the English were "retiring from the siege of Orleans." There it is narrative. Upon release as prisoner, Talbot himself expresses the same feelings about Fastolfe crying out in utter indignation : But, Oh ! the treacherous Fastolfe wounds my heart, Whom with my bare fists I would execute, If I now had him brought into my power. (I, iv, 35-37) This is in perfect accord with the narration of the Messenger and is evidently connected with the latter. It is one of Talbot's first utterances after appearing on the stage. It occurs in the scene with the obscure Master Gunner and his Boy. It interrupts the sequence like a passionate outburst, and stands isolated. Taking this remark with the spirited second speech containing the extravagant description 1 of Talbot's treatment In open market-place produced they me, To be a public spectacle to all : Here, said they, is the terror of the French, The scarecrow that affrights our children so. Then broke I from the officers that led me, And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground, To hurl at the beholders of my shame : My grisly countenance made others fly ; None durst come near for fear of sudden death. In iron walls they deem'd me not secure ; So great fear of my name 'mongst them was spread EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI 83 among the French there is the feeling that both speeches have been worked over and intensified, consistently with what the Messenger has told, to gain a stronger impression of Talbot's character. In this aspect the second reference to Fastolfe is directly de- pendent upon the first This cannot be said of the third, how- ever. Act III enacts before our eyes the scene already told of and once again referred to in Act I. It is incorporated in the second scene and is supposed to occur this time before Rouen. [An a/arum : excursions. Enter Sir John Fastolfe and a Captain.'] Cap. Whither away, Sir John Fastolfe, in such haste ? Fast. Whither away ! to save myself by flight : We are like to have the overthrow again. Cap. What! will you fly, and leave Lord Talbot? Fast. Ay, All the Talbots in the world to save my life. [Exit. Cap. Cowardly knight ! ill fortune follow thee ! [Exit. (Ill, ii, 104-108.) Fourth and last, in the first scene of Act IV, which, as we shall see later, shows other signs of having been developed from the scene immediately preceding (III, iv), by the addition of new material and a fresh spirit, there is still another account of the Fastolfe incident It is this last account that follows the de- tails of the Chronicle most closely. As Fastolfe bears a letter from the recreant Duke of Burgundy to the young English king, Talbot tears the garter from Fastolfe's leg and bursts forth : Shame to the Duke of Burgundy and thee! I vow'd, base knight, when I did meet thee next, To tear the garter from thy craven's leg, .... This dastard, at the battle of Patay, .... Like to a trusty squire did run away. ... (IV, i, 13-26.) The Chronicle supports Talbot in placing the occurrence at the battle of Patay. True, the Folio has "Poitiers," but this That they supposed I could rend bars of steel And spurn in pieces posts of adamant : Wherefore a guard of chosen shot I had That walked about me every minute while ; And if I did but stir out of my bed, Ready they were to shoot me to the heart. (I, iv, 40-56.) 94 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI is an obvious slip. But in the play the episode is given not once but thrice and as occurring at different places. Clearly all instances grew from one. The tribute to the Knights of the Garter, which, it is needless to say, has no parallel in the Chronicle and presumably also not in the older play, and which Shakespeare again touches upon in the Merry Wives of Windsor, seems to have been the particular occasion for this last special mention of the Fastolfe episode. In it Talbot reaches a patriotic strain as distinct, if not yet so noble, as the spirit of Faulconbridge in King John and of the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II It was this Fastolfe episode that Shakespeare seems still to have had in mind, when, later, in Henry IV, his creative power, no longer shackled by the mechanical necessity of piling scene on scene, made apparently out of this germ certain of the Falstaff scenes. From Sir John Fastolfe to Sir John Falstaff is a slight change in letters — a change actually made by the Folio spelling, which has "Falstaffe" — and at least one of the spellings in the Chronicles also trans- poses the / and the s. After "Oldcastle" had been given up, and another name looked for, here was one at hand. And the running away at Shrewsbury is not very unlike the running away at Patay ; yet what a difference in the genius of the two ! Another point of contact may be mentioned. Henry VI dis- misses Fastolfe in these words : Be packing, therefore, thou that wast a knight : Henceforth we banish thee, on pain of death. (IV, i, 46, 47.) There was a fat, white-haired old knight to whom another royal speech was made : I know thee not, old man : fall to thy prayers ; . . . and with the very words : I banish thee, on pain of death. (// Henry IV, V, v.) As intimated, the freely developed Scene i of Act IV bears a curious relation to the fina4 short scene of Act III. The two scenes must be reckoned together. In the tabular state- ment above they were counted as belonging to the Henry and EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI 96 English portion ; but with perhaps better reason they would be treated as welding and connecting parts. Both have the King in Paris; both have identically the same actors; both have the same two situations, viz., Talbot's interview with the King, and the quarrel of Vernon and Basset, the followers respectively of York and Somerset But the second scene is developed far beyond the former, and the spirit of the two is equally different One is condensed and compressed ; the other elaborated and heightened by fresh details. In place of the former bareness, in the new scene the King is ready for coronation, and a fictitious Governor of Paris, who, however, does not appear, is addressed. Gloucester takes a prominent part in directing ; Talbot throws the insult upon Fastolfe, for the fourth time repeated, and pays the tribute to the Knights of the Garter; the disaffection of the Duke of Burgundy is discussed in council and a plan of action determined upon ; Vernon and Basset the respective champions of York and Somerset lay their quarrel in detail before the King, where- upon even fiery, immoderate Gloucester becomes for the nonce peacemaker : Confounded be your strife ! And perish ye, with your audacious prate! (IV, i, 123, 124.) The King has his chance to "play the orator," not unlike the later opening scene of Richard //, seeking to quiet the strife of subjects ; and Exeter's prophetic notes close the epi- sode. A well-packed and strong scene it is, unquestionably. The newer scene seems to have been suggested by and worked out of the former ; but even after this had been done the former crude and undeveloped one was still left side by side as intro- ductory. There are other indications that point to the existence of an older Talbot play. The Talbot portion of the play stands generally much lower in spirit and in average excellence. Some part of this impression comes from its necessary character. The bustle and confusion of battle, the passing in and out of English and French soldiers, the scraps of French, the cheap references to classic mythology and tradition — all combine 96 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI to give an archaic impression to the style. The many re- ferences to 'Hunger' are an almost necessary implication from the scenes of war and are touches possibly derived from an older Talbot play. They can hardly be, as Professor Sarrazin seems almost to intimate, a reflex of Shakespeare's own starving condition in his early London years. Likewise, the religious expressions that fall from Talbot's lips, natural as they are for intensifying one who was the chief hero of an old play, have an archaic sound and are apparently stray notes from older material. Luther-like, Talbot exclaims (II, i, 26), "God is our fortress;" and in his report to the King in the clearly older of the two scenes discussed (III, iv, 11, 12), he — Ascribes the glory of his conquest got First to my God and next unto your grace. Quite out of the same intense spirit of narrow patriotism would come the crude, disdainful and insulting references to the enemy, all belonging to the French war episodes. In this way is best understood the conception of the Joan of Arc scenes. All of the few touches added here and there to her characteri- zation seem fresher and more modern. Many of the barer references to the simple home and country life of the day could also possibly be traced back to older material. It is not the reference in itself to the country and to Nature, but the aptness and freshness and spirit that we feel is the mark of the young Shakespeare. The illustrations may be seen in the quotations collected by Professor Sarrazin in his excellent mono- graph on / Henry VI in "William Shakespeare's Lehrjahre," although the author is not inclined to make any such distinc- tions. But a difference in treatment in different parts is very evident, which shows at least tendencies and influences. The scenes of the Talbot portions are usually derived from the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, the epitaph of Talbot, and probably one or two other isolated sources ; 1 and the frequent compressions and omissions, and occasional expan- 1 See " Shakespeare's Holinshed," by W. G. Boswell-Stone, 1896, which gives in detail the treatment of the sources in the play as we now have it. EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI 97 sions, may best be explained, as in King John, by the interven- tion of an intermediate play. Such an expansion is the episode of the Countess of Auvergne. The episode is not found in Holinshed and Hall, and as the play stands, it is both clumsily and unnecessarily introduced. It is prominent in position, but unsatisfactory in effect It is designed to emphasize Talbot's valor and resource, as would befit a play specifically on Talbot's bravery, but it seems too crude to have been developed of itself from the context and by the creator of the two scenes that immediately follow : the plucking of the roses in the Temple Garden and the death of Mortimer. The episode seems based on an old motif and recalls similar traditions from the Robin Hood and Alexander 1 legends, and the Samson and Delilah story in the Bible. It concludes Scene ii and fills all of Scene iii in Act II. The obsequies of Salisbury over, the usual Senecan figure of the Messenger enters and inquires for "the warlike Talbot" The Queen of Sheba desired to see Solomon in all his glory, and "The virtuous lady, Countess of Auvergne," craves the presence of Talbot in her castle. This close of Scene ii is the introduction to the scene that follows. The Countess gives her porter instructions : The plot is laid : if all things fall out right, I shall as famous be by this exploit As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus' death. (II, iii, 4-6.) Talbot securely within doors, she calls him her prisoner ; but the hero "winds his horn," his soldiers break in, and the Coun- tess and her plotters are confounded. Not however, before the Countess and Talbot have indulged in a quibble on the conceit of "the shadow" and "the substance :" Countess. Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me. . . . But now the substance shall endure the like. . . . Talbot. No, no, I am but shadow of myself: You are deceived, my substance is not here ; . . . [etc.] (II, iii, 3603.) 1 In the " Wars of Alexander," edited by W. W. Skeat, E.E.T.S., Extra Series, xlvii, pp. 264-265, Alexander is taken prisoner by Candace and quails before her. As in the story of Delilah, the episode shows the woman's wit rather than the hero's resource. 8 98 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI It is a quibble that Hamlet engages in with his Wittenberg university friends, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, though not at such intolerable length, and Schmidt's Lexicon will show many others. We are almost on the ground of the verbal quibbles in Love' s Labour* s Lost, Comedy of Errors, and other early comedies ; only, bad as many of these latter are, they are fresher and more concise in treatment It may be that the young Shakespeare found this episode in the old play, and with the inveterate love for word-punning in his early work, sounded the many changes on these words. In a later scene in the play the same figure is again employed — this time more happily and poetically — in connection with the terms of peace offered to the French King : Must he be then as shadow of himself ? Adorn his temple with a coronet, And yet in substance and authority, Retain but privilege of a private man? (V, iv, 133-136.) In one or two places in the Joan episodes expansions and ad- ditions beyond the chronicle narrative can be observed. In Joan's first appearance at the French Court there are one or two lines of freshness, of which distinctly the best are those of the concluding speech, I, ii : Expect Saint Martin's summer, halcyon days, Since I have entered into these wars. Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. ( I, ii, 133-136.) But it is in the interview with the Duke of Burgundy (III, iii) that Joan is at her best She breathes a patriotic spirit in appealing to his love of country, his pride, his self-interest to return to the bosom of his bleeding land. The patriotism is as marked, albeit in a greater lyric strain befitting the woman's voice, as the martial tone of Talbot in the Garter scene before the Knights of England. The episode has something of the spirit of the best scenes, but its effect is immediately destroyed by the exclamation: "Done like a Frenchman: turn, and turn again !" Here we are back at the old commonplace again ! The interview between Joan and her father (V, iv, 11. 2-33) EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI 99 is also not in the Chronicle. The thirty lines undoubtedly display something of the same pathos between parent and child that the death scene of Talbot shows. It is a development, but just as the Countess of Auvergne episode is a development Compared with the enthusiasm of Talbot's feelings in the corresponding scene, it seems archaic in spirit and method, and apparently with the other Joan episodes must be based upon the older Talbot material : Joan's soliloquy (V, iii), calling upon "ye charming spells and periapts," is in the same category. It falls far below the very little later Shakespeare, as it falls below Schiller's lyric monologue in the Jungfrau, which was yet evi- dently inspired by it. The death of Talbot and the tenderness and love of the hero for his son gave the poet — creator or reviser — opportunity for extended idyllic treatment Scenes ii to vii inclusive, of the Fourth Act, fall together for this purpose. They are developed out of the Talbot parts, and in contrast with the compression and obscurity at other points have been worked out in the fullest detail. The work is done, too, in a way to effect a closer union between the Talbot and the Henry portions. The first of the six scenes strikes the note of those to follow: it consists of three solemn speeches, by Talbot by the opposing General who is not named, and again by Talbot The thought is a repetition, a summary of the ideas as to Talbot's character, already often ex- pressed, but here more highly figurative and poetic. There is a softer and more flexible spirit brought out than in the stern Talbot we have had before, and it finds fitting lyric expression. Talbot's comparison of his position with A little herd of England's timorous deer, Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs! (IV, ii, 46, 47.) stirs a sympathetic note. The next two scenes are mere pendants, each necessary for the other, but in themselves serving only to develop the episode of the death and draw out the closing scenes to greater length so as to become more effective. In each Sir William Lucy enters ; he urges York in the one and Somerset in the 100 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI other to haste to the aid of Talbot ; but mutual jealousy keeps them still. Thus Talbot's fate is dramatically determined by the quarrel of the roses in the Temple Garden : The fraud of England, not the force of France, Hath now entrapp'd the noble-minded Talbot. (IV, iv, 36, 37.) It is one of the first blights of the struggle between the Red and the White Rose. Again, Scene v and Scene vi are parallel. The two scenes portray at length the love of father and son, and prepare for the climax reserved for the last scene. It seems as if the poet wished to dwell upon the circumstance and to repeat himself again and again. The dialogue between father and son reveals this elaboration. It begins in blank verse, but quickly turns into rhyme, and into rhyme for a purpose : to bring out the lyrical accent of the lament. It is as if after the first speech between the two in blank verse, the idea must be iterated and reiterated, and rhyme is necessary for this. It is at this point in Scene v that the feeling seems to reach a climax. It is a Damon and Pythias or David and Jonathan sort of friendship, almost more than the tie that binds father and son, which finds lyrical expression. In its repetition of various phases and elaboration of the sentiment it recalls the strong scene between father and son in the rugged, early Brome play of Abraham and Isaac. The expression of the mutual love and devotion of father and son is strengthened by the conscious form employed : the stichomythia or rapid succession of speech and reply united to rhyme. The intensifying effect is evident : Tal. If we both stay, we both are sure to die. John. Then let me stay ; and, father, do you fly. . . . Tal. Shall all thy mother's hopes lie in one tomb ? John. Ay, rather than I'll shame my mother's womb. Tal. Upon my blessing, I command thee go. John. To fight I will, but not to fly the foe. Tal. Part of thy father may be saved in thee. John. No part of him but will be shame in me. (IV, v, io-39.) The two scenes have the same situation ; except that one is before battle and the other in the midst of it The very EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 101 repetition strikes a deeper note and emphasizes the desperate- ness of the situation. Last scene of all is the death of both son and father. The comparison with Icarus is repeated, and Talbot's last words over his fallen son are full of the conceits of metaphysical poetry, characteristic of passages in this play, in many of the early undoubted Shakespeare plays, as well as in other pro- ductions of the time : Brave death by speaking, whether he will or no ; Imagine him a Frenchman and thy foe. Poor boy ! he smiles, methinks, as who should say, Had death been French, then death had died to-day. . . . Soldiers, adieu ! I have what I would have, Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave. (IV, vii, 25-32.) All the critics have pointed out the similarity of this last line to a passage in Part III, and of both to a line in Marlowe's Jew of Malta: "These arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre" (1. 1 1 60). In the divisions into scenes, this scene might have ended here, and a new one have begun. The reference to the quarrels of York and Somerset gives the connection. The cry of the father's love for his child, however overwrought and extravagant, is the clearest single note struck in the whole play amid the jar of quarrels and the rush of battle. Yet how far away we are from Lear's cry over Cordelia dead in his arms: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so That Heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever I (V, iii, 257-259.) Repetitions of episodes and situations become so frequent in the play that they are a characteristic feature of the structure and style. The repetition is often avowed and of purpose ; sometimes it is derived from old forms of the Senecan tragedy and designed as a mere accumulation of horror or intensifying of effect Take the device of the three messengers in Act I, Scene i, coming in one after another recounting disasters. Mis- fortunes never come single. This is repeated in Richard III 102 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI where there are four Messengers instead of three. Also in Richard HI there are two wooing scenes under similar revolting conditions ; three women sitting in a row lamenting the taking off of their dear ones ; and the long array of ghosts that passes Richard's tent in solemn pageant In this sort of tragedy mere number counts. In / Henry VI there are numerous examples of both avowed and unconscious repetition. In Act I, Scene iv, Talbot solilo- quizes over "Old Salisbury," "mirror of all martial men," with the usual conceits of style : One eye thou hast, to look to heaven for grace : The sun with one eye vieweth all the world. (I, ii, 83, 84.) In Act II, Scene ii, Talbot performs the obsequies of Salisbury in Orleans. In the corresponding scene of the next Act (III, ii) he orders the obsequies of Bedford in Rouen : A braver soldier never couched lance, A gentler heart did never sway in court. (HI, ii, 134, 135.) Act III, Scene i, closes with a didactic soliloquy of Exeter's, who, like a Chorus for the play, comments on the dissensions among the nobles : As fester'd members rot but by degree, Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away, So will this base and envious discord breed. (Ill, i, 192-194.) Precisely one act later the first scene of Act IV closes in the the same way: Exeter is again alone and soliloquizes on division and discord. Nearly all the scenes have the same construction and end in formal monologues, or summarizing or anticipatory speeches. The first scene of the First Act closes formally as it was intro- duced : with a speech parallel in structure from each of the four Dukes who introduce the scene as mourners about Henry's funeral, aptiy characterized by Mr. Wendell as an "operatic quartette." 1 In Act I the French King Charles closes ii and iv ; Talbot iv and v, the latter a monologue ; the Mayor of Lon- 1 Barrett Wendell: "William Shakspere," 1894, p. 78. EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI l<> don, who is made a comical figure, iiL In Act II, Scenes iv and v are both closed by Plantagenet, the latter in formal monologue form. In Act III, Scene i ends with Exeter's soliloquy; ii with Talbot's tribute to Bedford. In Act IV, i ends with Exeter's soliloquy again ; iii and iv with Sir William Lucy ; and ii, v, vi, and the death scene in vii with Talbot In Act V, iii and v end with Suffolk and iv with York. Exeter's genius at presaging evil is apparent, and he recalls a prophecy of ill on Henry : Which in the time of Henry named the Fifth Was in the mouth of every tucking babe. (Ill, i, 196, 197.) In a later act he recalls another prophecy on Cardinal Winchester : Henry the Fifth did sometime prophesy, "If once he come to be a cardinal, Hell make his cap co-equal with the crown." (V, i, 31-33.) There are other prophecies in the play. King Henry re- members a speech of his father, dramatically justified in the tenor of the play, but actually incongruous, as the young king was but "an infant nine months old" at Henry V's death. The greatest prophecy is that of Warwick in the Temple Garden (II, iv, 124-127); and this is answered in York's spirited outburst of rhetoric in the last Act addressed to Warwick and anticipating other tragedies to come : Is all our travail turn'd to this effect? O, Warwick ! Warwick ! I foresee with grief The utter loss of all the realm of France. (V, iv, 102-112.) The most poetical instance of this distinct monologue form is in the scene freely invented, where the dying Mortimer is brought in on a chair by his gaolers at the Tower. Every- thing in these words seems frankly Shakespearean : Kind keepers of my weak decaying age, Let dying Mortimer here rest himself. Even like* man new haled from the rack, So fare my limbs with long imprisonment ; 104 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI And these grey locks, the pursuivants of death, Nestor-like aged in an age of care, Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer. . . . Just death, kind umpire of men's miseries, With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence. (II, v, 1-16; 28-30.) The scene closes with the same soliloquy form, this time by Richard Plantagenet : And peace, no war, befall thy parting soul ! In prison hast thou spent a pilgrimage And like a hermit overpass'd thy days. . . . Here dies the dusky torch of Mortimer, Choked with ambition of the meaner sort. (II, v, 115-117; 122, 123.) Tenderness between parent and child is a thought reiterated : strongest between Talbot and young John, it is expressed by the father of Joan towards his child, and intimated in the slightly developed figures of the Master Gunner and his Boy. Quarrels break out everywhere. Those between Gloucester and Winchester sound above the laments over the dead king at his funeral in the Abbey. They break out afresh at the Tower, in the Paraliament House at the coronation, even at the end in the King's Palace, and continue into Part II. It is only a reflection and intensifying of this first quarrel to introduce the later quarrels of the Red and White Roses; and after the chief scene in the Temple Garden between Somerset and Plantagenet, it is the veritablest echo to have the entirely superfluous quarrel of their followers, Vernon and Basset, unnecessarily, repeated. The two scenes between Gloucester and Winchester at the Tower and at the Parliament are closely alike in their structural development. The same situation with Gloucester and Win- chester and their followers is repeated, but in the second in- stance the hurly-burly is only a part of a larger and more com- plex situation. One prepared for the other and suggested merely certain features. The hurly-burly between the followers of Gloucester and Winchester is as noisy as the quarrels of the Montagu and Capulet factions in the streets of Verona, and the EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 105 Mayor, drawn as a comical figure and as clownish as the Serving Men he chides, rushes in in both scenes to put an end to the uproar : Good God, these nobles should such stomachs bear ! I myself fight not once in forty year. (I, iii, 89, 90.) Again he complains : Our windows are broke down in every street And we for fear compell'd to shut our shops. ( 1 1 1 , i, 84, 85. ) Probably enough the Mayor and the corporation, in deserving this portraiture, were not altogether favorable to the theatre companies. The attitude of the play towards the mob, "the many-headed multitude," is the same as that in the Jack Cade scenes in Part II, the same attitude as in Henry IV, in Julius Ceesar, and in Coriolanus. The Temple Garden scene is a new and specific development of the old quarrel among the nobles. For the rest of the play the double quarrels exist side by side, those of Gloucester and Winchester yielding in interest to those between Somerset and Plantagenet The poetical happiness of the episode of the plucking of the Red and White Roses has been often admired. Analyzed, it contains the usual stylistic and metrical character- istics of the undoubted early Shakespeare plays. It is full of plays on words, uses of conceits, epithets, comparisons, antitheses, repartee, stichomythia, and various figures of speech and rhe- torical tricks — the characteristics 1 generally of the Henry and English portions of the play. Warwick's speech in his indisposi- tion to commit himself, is characteristic of this freshness of spirit:* 1 Illustrations of the metrical and rhetorical peculiarities of the play are abundantly given in the pages of Professor Sarrazin : " William Shakespeare's Lehrjahre," 1897; Goswin Konig : "Der Vers in Shakspere's Dramen," 1888; Leopold Wurth: " Das Wortspiel bei Shakspere," 1895; M. Basse: " Stijlaffectatie bij Shakespeare," 1895; G. Kramer: "Die Anwendung der Stichomythie neben Gleichklang bei Shakespeare." 1 This speech of Warwick and Talbot's comparison of his position with M a little herd of England's timorous deer," on page 99, are the two passages cited at the meeting of the Modern Language Association by Prof. Hulme from Madden's " Diary of Master William Silence." See Modern Language Notes, Feb., 1900. Both passages occur in the parts clearly added and worked into the older play, according to the foregoing analysis. 106 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI Between two hawks, which flies the higher pitch ; Between two dogs, which hath the deeper mouth ; Between two blades, which bears the better temper ; Between two horses, which doth bear him best ; Between two girls, which hath the merriest eye ; I have perhaps some shallow spirit of judgement ; But in these nice, sharp quillets of the law, Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw. (II, iv, ii-iS.) An apt illustration of the elaboration of a conceit may be found in the retort of Somerset and Vernon the (plucking of the red and white roses is referred to) : Som. Prick not your finger as you pluck it off, Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red And fall on my side so, against your will. Ver. If I, my lord, for my opinion bleed, Opinion shall be surgeon to my hurt And keep me on the side where still I am. (II, iv, 49-54.) And this spirited manner of speech continues through many- lines. Most of the critics ordinarily speak of the rose scene as poetical and worthy of Shakespeare, but give less thought to the following one of the dying Mortimer and hardly any to the Parliament scene that comes hard upon this in opening a new Act. Yet, from an investigation by one of my students, all three scenes, which belong to the Henry portion of the play, seem to agree very nearly in uniformity of mere mechanical and metrical execution. The real difference lies in the poetic oppor- tunity that a certain scene by virtue of its inherent poetical character must possess — an opportunity which, amid the wel- tering material of the play, the playwright made for himself. The fifth and last scene of Act II, portraying the death of Mortimer, belongs intimately to its predecessor, the Temple Garden scene, as further explanatory. It is unhistoric in setting, and like its forerunner, its creation is purely for a dramatic purpose. After the exciting scene in the Temple Garden Plantagenet hastens to the Tower to greet his im- prisoned uncle, Mortimer, and to receive his dying benedic- tions. In a weak and dying state Mortimer is brought on EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 107 the stage like the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II and the persecuted Queen Katharine in Henry VIII. The insertion of the genealogy, as reason for the contention in the Garden and for future struggles, is a method repeated in later history plays, notably in Henry V t under similar compunction. It is a union of dramatic and epic offices like the part of the Chorus, and follows older Senecan tradition. The figure of Richard Plantagenet, as does that of Warwick, connects the First Part intimately with Part III, as the two pairs of characters, Gloucester and Winchester, Suffolk and Margaret, connect it closely with Part II. Something like Hamlet, Plantagenet affirms near the close of this scene: Well, I will lock his counsel in my breast ; And what I do imagine let that rest. (II, v, 11S-119.) It is a fitting inheritance; for it is Plantagenet's son who is the terrible Gloucester of Part III and the monstrous Richard III. In the Parliament scene both sets of quarrels are dramat- ically brought together. A seeming reconciliation is patched up between Gloucester and Winchester; and the ideal villainy of Shakespeare is represented, that of dissimulation: Glou. So help me God, as I dissemble not ! Win. [aside]. So help me God, as I intend it not! (Ill, i, 140, 141.) It is the method of Aaron the Moor and Tamora in Titus Andronicus, of Richard III, of Don John in Much Ado, of Iago, and of the latter's diminutive in devilishness, Iachimo. In the general aversion shown towards Cardinal Winchester, a feeling that reaches its height in the death scene in Part II, we are reminded of the disinclination portrayed towards a greater Cardinal in Henry VIII. ' One quarrel thus seemingly 'Were Shakespeare not the most objective and least personal of all writers, we could imagine we might almost trace the Reformer in this por- trayal, strengthened as it is by the religious individualism left standing in Talbot's religious exclamations cited above (p. 96). But as much or more could be brought on the other side, and it is always safest in principle to consider the dramatic effectiveness of scenes, and not fancy any possible personal or symbolical interpretation. 108 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI sealed, by a clever dramatic touch the other, smouldering, breaks out at the same moment. It is determined by the King and an apparently united council on Plantagenet's behalf: That Richard be restored to his blood. . . . And rise created princely Duke of York. (HI, i, 159, 173.) All shout in seeming unison, but precisely like the Cardinal before, Somerset, remembering the Temple Garden scene, mutters a dissent: All. Welcome, high prince, the mighty Duke of York ! Som. [aside]. Perish, base prince, ignoble Duke of York! (Ill.i, 177, 178) The evident use of stichomythia, together with word and sound repetition in both instances, heightens the intended antithesis. But, as in others of Shakespeare's early plays, it is an effect of opera rather than of pure drama. The young King is not introduced until the Parliament scene in Act III, although his name is given to the play in its present form. And justly so, as in the title role of the Mer- chant of Venice and of Julius Ccesar, All the dissensions among the nobles, those of Gloucester and Winchester, and of Plantagenet and Somerset, cluster about Henry. The Talbot portion has become subordinated to him, as it becomes associated with him and his history. The spirit of the King's weakness, of his scrupulous religiousness, of his oratorical, poetic, and philosophic gifts, emphasized in Parts II and III, are all intimated in Part I. As the struggles of the Parliament scene rage about him, his first speech, chiding Gloucester and Winchester, reveals his delicate and susceptible nature, finding expression in moralizings and dissertations : O, what a scandal is it to our crown, That two such noble peers as ye should jar! (Ill, i, 69, 70.) And again: O, how this discord doth afflict my soul ! (Ill, i, 106.) But he is both too young and too weak to effect a conclu- sion. One act later (IV, i), when the Plantagenet and Somer- EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 109 set quarrel is repeated in miniature by their followers, Vernon and Basset, the King, fearful for all differences of opinion, again strives for quiet, but as a poet : Let me be umpire in this doubtful strife. I see no reason, if I wear this rose [Putting on a red rose]. That any one should therefore be suspicious, I more incline to Somerset than York : Both are my kinsmen, and I love them both. (IV, i, 151-155.) This is the fatal action that determines York's hostility to the King — an opposition that ends only with the death of Richard on Bosworth Field. Small wonder there is the comment of Warwick : My Lord of York, I promise you, the king Prettily, methought, did play the orator. To which York replies : And so he did ; but yet I like it not, In that he wears the badge of Somerset War. Tush, that was but his fancy, blame him not; I dare presume, sweet prince, he thought no harm. York. An if I wist he did,— but let it re»t; . . . (IV, i, 174-180.) It is the same "sweet prince," who "thought no harm," that in Part III, in another 'fancy' could sit on a hillside, and wish himself, not with poor brain-troubled Lear, "every inch a king," but a silly swain: Ah, what a life were this I how sweet! how lovely! (II, v, 41.) Do we ask about the authorship of the play ? We cannot.be too sure. There are too many difficulties on all sides to be too dogmatic in any conclusion. It seems folly to suppose with Mr. Fleay ' that individual lines and scenes can with any degree of certainty be awarded to A and B and C and D and E. Mr. Richard Grant White,* like others, became absorbed in the many delicate questions involved in Parts II and III and found little space to devote to Part I, but adhered in a general way to A, »F. G. Fleay: "A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare," 1S86. * R. G. White: Essay on the authorship of the three parts of King Henry the Sixth; Vol. VII of "Works of William Shakespeare," 1859. 110 EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S I HENRY VI B, C, and D. Mr. Swinburne's 1 eloquent denunciation is the feeling of a poet, but is clearly susceptible of limitations. As Professor Sarrazin' has pointed out, the Talbot figure in the play seems to have derived an impulse from Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and the tenderness of father and son recalls episodes in the Spanish Tragedy of Kyd. Also there is a wooing of another Margaret by proxy in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ; and the sentiment of the couplet, — She's beautiful and therefore to be woo'd ; She is a woman, therefore to be won — (V, iii, 77, 78.) again repeated in both Titus Andronicus and Richard III, has been traced to Greene's Planetomachia. But we are not bound to conclude joint authorship of all these and others, but only in- fluence, as Prof. Sarrazin wisely suggests. But he, it seems, returning to the view of Charles Knight, 3 wishes to accept every word, every line and every circumstance, as traceable to Shake- speare. This, in turn, may go too far; for certain parts of the French and Joan scenes at least may have been left virtually unchanged, if we accept the intervention of an older Talbot play. Mr. Dowden 4 believes it "is almost certainly an old play, by one or more authors, which .... had received touches from the hand of Shakespeare," but enters upon no details. Other recent commentators follow in the paths of the older ones, get 1 A. C. Swinburne : "A Study of Shakespeare," 3d edition, 1895. ' G. Sarrazin: "William Shakespeare's Lehrjahre," 1897. •Charles Knight: "Pictorial Edition of Shakespeare, Supplement to Histories," Vol. II. * Edward Dowden: "Shakspere Primer," 1877, P- 62. In the "Intro - troduction to Shakspere, 1895," Mr. Dowden expresses the same opinion : " The authorship of the first part of Henry VI is not ascertained ; it probably received additions from Shakspere's hand ; ... it is essentially pre-Shak- sperean." Mr. Sidney Lee, in his " Life of William Shakespeare," 1898, p. 59, helps us but little further: "In 'The First Part of Henry VI,' the scene in the Temple Gardens, where white and red roses are plucked as emblems by the rival political parties (Act II, sc. iv), the dying speech of Mortimer, and perhaps the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk, alone bear the impress of his style." This is in substantial agreement with what Mr. Dowden had already said in his "Primer." It is unfortunate that neither Mr. Dowden's nor Mr. Lee's plan permitted the critic to enter upon a detailed discussion of the play. EPISODES IN SHAKESPEARE'S / HENRY VI 111 around the obstructions they see ahead as best they can, and by ignoring the difficulties, have little or nothing to say. My own endeavor has been to see what can be found, by an analysis, in the play itself. If the apparent results, gained by a study of the structure, can be accepted; if there be an original Talbot portion, based either on an older play or directly upon the chronicles, adapted and strengthened by dramatic emphasis upon Talbot's character and Talbot's death, and expanded into a Henry VI drama, and thus given a place in a larger tetralogy; — the person ordering this material and effecting these changes, in other words, the real creator of the play as it stands, could well be Shakespeare near the beginning of his art. At least one principle is clear. By a study of the earliest plays attributed to Shakespeare, for themselves and in their historic and comparative relations, there will be found to be more and more points in common with the Shakespeare of the later plays; — not yet in the fulness of his power, but at any rate with suggestions of the method, structure, habit of thought, characterization, and art of the master to be. V. James Lane Allen: A Study From Baskervill's " Southern Writers : Biographical and Critical Studies," Volume II. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South. Smith & Lamar, Agents. 1903. JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY I. MR. James Lane Allen is an interesting case of evolution in literature. He himself, who has become in his latest story, "The Reign of Law," an acknowledged student of the influ- ence of the doctrine of evolution upon the thought of the age, represents in the changes and development of his work these same principles. He derives from Southern literature, and began as a portrayer of simple Kentucky landscape and local life; he has attained to the point of view of world literature in the signifi- cance of his themes. He has dealt only with the native Kentucky soil, a soil and race from which he sprang and which he knows well ; but his treatment and his art instinct have carried him from the particular to the universal. Thus it comes that no two of his volumes are alike or represent the same ideas and grade of development. Each has been an added experiment in a new field, a new effort in a different sphere of thought, a new success with fresh material. In this variety and growth and in his close touch with the literary and intellectual move- ments and achievements of his day, Mr Allen's position among Southern writers, so called by accident of birth and environment, is unique. No doubt the qualities derived from his birth and environment determined his career. In the heart of the rich limestone soil and beautiful blue grass region of Kentucky lay the scenes of his early life. There came the blight of war, which befell his youth somewhat like the description of Gabriella's volume of life in "The Reign of Law" — the struggle with poverty, and then the still bitterer heart struggles for a literary career. There lie the scenes of all his tales and stories. It is, therefore, what he has lived and was bred in and what he knows that he has written about; and in describing the phases of his life there is no faltering and no uncertainty. It is a country worthy of the noble expression it has found in Mr. Allen's writings, and the 116 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY final biography and criticism of Mr. Allen and his works will possibly come some day from one born and nurtured in the same meadows and fields, along the same white turnpikes and lanes and stones and hedgerows. For the present, perhaps, one nearer home may fail to get the proper perspective ; and so one not a Kentuckian may be permitted to express an opinion. Some four or five divisions of Mr. Allen's work in fiction — omitting his earliest contributions and letters to various papers and an occasional poem or criticism — may be distinguished. First is that of the "Flute and Violin" volume and his sketches and descriptive pieces of Kentucky and Kentucky life. A second series begins with "A Kentucky Cardinal" and its conclusion, "Aftermath," revealing his intimacy with the most secret moods of nature. This was followed by ' ' Summer in Arcady, " in which the workings of nature profoundly affect the destinies of life. A fourth may be made of the remodeling of "John Gray" into "The Choir Invisible," where the historical background, in part an- ticipatory of a current fashion, was freely used for the human problem also brought out. And latest of all, so far as his writings have been published, and catching something of the freer use of the moods and modes of nature revealed in "Summer in Arcady," is the aggressively insistent "Reign of Law." Yet what is this but saying that each of Mr. Allen's volumes is to be treated by itself ? A strong and sincere love for man and nature— "human life in relation to nature, " as he himself has phrased it in a review of another's writings — is his most characteristic mark. A sympathetic portraiture of one and a lover's description of the other we always expect, but we may not know what is to be the especial phase of study and type development. Here, most of all, it seems to me, Mr. Allen's peculiar strength lies. He has a romantic background to deal with, one that is historic as well as romantic, which he always observes with the clear eye and feels with the true heart ; but he is also profoundly and intimately interested in human life — the life about him, life under many complex conditions, life as wrought through the workings of elemental nature within us and controlled by the spiritual beyond us. It is a natural and rapid step from history JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 117 to the problems of contemporary life; therefore romantic and naturalistic tendencies alike combine in him. He sees nature with the eye of the poet and the love of the artist, yet scrutinizes her appearances and examines her laws with the apprehension and insight of the student of science. Indeed, this growth of the scientific interest within him best accounts for obvious qualities in works of quite different spirit, as "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Summer in Arcady" or "The Reign of Law," re- garded by many as contradictory. To the poet part of his nature, the delicacy and pathos of a situation appeal keenly. To the mind familiar with scientific modes of thought comes the conscious- ness of those changes in conceptions of philosophy, theology, and cosmology going on about it, into relation with which the particular conditions must be brought. Every man truly living and thinking at the close of the nineteenth century has been conscious of these changes, has felt the throbbings of nature, has questioned the mystery of life, has experienced the power of an intellectual and spiritual stimulus. These themes run through every one of Mr. Allen's writings. Each is the evo- lution or development of a thesis or idea. Even in the ' ' Flute and Violin' ' stories there is an awakening to broader and higher conceptions and ideals. In "Flute and Violin" itself it takes the form of a more unselfish thought of duty. In the "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky" and "King Solomon" it is broader charity and deeper human sympathies. In "The White Cowl" and "Sister Dolorosa" there is the contradiction between the free, natural life of Kentucky and the cramping of the cloistered abbey and convent having lodg- ment in its soil, until there comes, through the seed of love sown, the arousing from a restricted and artificial life and world to one more extended and more natural. In "A Kentucky Cardi- nal" and its sequel the changes wrought on both heart and mind belong to love and nature together. In "Summer in Arcady" the forces of nature are struggling with the human and spiritual ele- ments, and both poet and scientist are there noting cause and effect, yet amid the warring of passions guiding to beneficent issues. No wonder there came a cry from the sentimentalists. 118 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY Emotions were all ; they could not think; they did not understand how things as sacred and holy as love and marriage should have their underlying conditions subjected to analysis, and by one who at the same time was supremely conscious of spiritual beauty in nature and life. "The Choir Invisible," based on a former story by the same author, is somewhat of a return to an earlier method ; but while its setting is drawn from pioneer conditions in Kentucky history, its interest centres in the development of human character and destiny. It was a temporary aberration to the historical and romantic type of story then winning in popular favor, yet it was ever psychological in spirit and descriptive of nature's appeals. It was of the play of spiritual forces in that early Western land that saved and gained a nation ; but it did not go to the extrav- agant lengths of Mr. Churchill and Miss Johnston, and, as if dreading the infection, Mr. Allen returned at once to other paths. We can now see that the study and analysis steadily obtruding in "Aftermath" and in "Summer in Arcady" merely foretold the tendencies leading to far deeper issues in thought and life as undertaken in "The Reign of Law." These are movements of which we are forced to take heed. Many readers prefer Mr. Allen's earlier vein, just as many prefer Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" to his "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis," and some the marvelous adventures of "Richard Carvel" and "To Have and to Hold" to studies of character and destiny. There is no quarrel here, for there is room and to spare for both ; but the novel is bound to become more and not less subtle and delicate in its portrayal of motive and character. And it is this direction of manifest destiny that Mr. Allen has taken. Not only so, but he is a careful artist in style, and his speech, though prose, is often the utterance of a poet. His chief defect is that of his qualities: he takes his art consciously and seriously, and so is sometimes even too earnest in it. And yet, in a day when the lack of seriousness in the domain of literature is as overwhelming as it is, this constitutes high praise. It is not of so much moment whether Mr. Allen be- lieves this or that, or is or is not right in all his conclusions — if, indeed, he dogmatizes at all, though there seem to be traces of JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 119 this in his latest work. Mr. Allen is the consciously working artist, and the great fundamental facts of human nature attract him in his study of life and its conditions, and of the profound changes in attitude and thought. The awakening of the soul to life, sometimes to its own hurt, and to eternal heartache, but always to fuller liberty, is his constant interest. Would he be so true if he ended his stories just as we would have them — ideally ? Though some may object from quite another point of view that with given conditions he ends often too ideally. Certainly he prefers a spiritual outcome to every struggle. Apparently a realist by conviction, he is an idealist by nature. The one lesson of both nature and life is that they are inexorable. Many dear to us we may love, and they may disappoint our love; and the poetical nature, catching a part of divine love, treats with greater charity the failures and misunder- standings of mankind, and sees in them all only the noble promise. The great-hearted Shakespeare sympathizes with Falstaff's death ; his villains are always dealt with gently at the close; he is great enough to understand and feel pity. Some of Mr. Allen's problems may be greater than he can answer — perhaps than anyone can answer. But at least the sincerity of facing them, the attempt to give them an artistic background, is worth a good deal. The artist cannot be dic- tated to even by himself. He cannot always please his own ideals, let alone those of others. He must deal with images and convictions that haunt the brain, and deliver them and take his chance as to their being true. And the note of utter sincerity in his art, I think, can be claimed as a special dis- tinction of Mr. Allen's work. His tendencies have thus followed logical directions, and both his personal and his historical position in American letters is already an interesting one. What the ultimate judgment may be must be left to fuller accomplishment — and to time. We can well believe Mr. Allen reads, thinks, studies, ob- serves, imagines. He has evidently studied Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the thinkers of an inexorably scientific age. He has read, too, Balzac and the moderns in fiction. His shrinking, 120 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY even in his earliest sketches, from the extreme romantic, an obvious tendency in most Southern writers, shows the in- fluence of other authors and of other forces than mere sugges- tions from Kentucky surroundings. His has been an inevitable development. The problems of the universe have allured him, and he sees them reflected in the landscape and history of his own state and in the contemporary life about him. Thus he transcends other Southern writers in the planning of his work. No longer does he belong to a locality, even though all his scenes may be laid there; he becomes cosmopolitan in his appeal. And so he is read in England as in America, in the East as in the South — indeed, more so. He is a product of the soil, but his branches tower into the air and welcome all the winds of the heavens, the rain, and the sunshine. Mr. Page is Virginian; Mr. Harris is Southern; Mr. Allen, whether he attains it or not, is striving toward the universal. Mr. Allen has been compared to Mr. Thomas Hardy, whom in nature and art he is not wholly unlike. Kentucky is his Wessex. Some of his problems are likewise tremendous, although they are not yet, and are not apt to be, of the severity and temper of the themes of his English compeer. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" appeared a year or two before "Summer in Arca- dy." Mr. Allen's is also a case of development not unlike Mr. Hardy's — from the idyllic to the tragic. "The Reign of Law" has its points of contact with "The Return of the Native." Yet in the midst of the tragic Mr. Allen cannot shut out the idyllic and the ideal. His conclusions and his endings are chastened and softened by this spirit. They represent his phase of mind, and so, happily, must remain. He has not always fought out the matter to the utmost with himself. "The Reign of Law" is a tragedy — in the hands of a realist must remain a tragedy. Mr. Allen might have been logically and artistically justified in shattering the life of David rather than in conserving it. But there stepped in the saving faith of the evolutionist, the evangel of a new creed. The man who is thus honest and so believes must be saved. Spiritually, yes — with Goethe and Browning. But actually, in this world's ways and JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 121 conventions, more probably, no. A second structure is super- added to the first. The future of David must be assured, and the story must end. The steady enlargement of the sphere of Mr. Allen's art and change in attitude is to be welcomed. Even those who prefer his earlier vein do so mainly because it was sweet and tender. But sweetness and tenderness may prove to lack qualities of strength ; they alone cannot be great. In his development has lain his only chance of continued distinction, preserving, as he does, the saving and helping qualities of sweetness and tender- ness. I believe, then, that Mr. Allen is a deliberate worker. At the time he has naturally not always been fully aware of the instincts struggling within him, but he has carefully proved himself at every step. He is no doubt conscious of the changes that have asserted themselves in his work; he has been true to them, to himself, and to his art, it seems to me; and right or wrong, we may feel that any other process was impossible and would have meant decline and the destruction of silence. The mere tale of adventure we may not look for — for him that would be to retrace steps and march backward. But a tale with an historic background, possessing all the elements of heredity and influences of surrounding environment, we can expect — a bold and strong conception and combination of the romantic spirit with the natural and real. There may be, too, other studies of the day — ideals of tragedy commingled through the poet's nature with the great pity of one who knows sorrow and can see beauty. Of this we may guess. But Mr. Allen has surprised the writer of these lines more than once. No one is in his confidence, and we may await with interest further work, assured only that in the high seriousness of his con- ceptions he will never be false to himself or his art, and that the distinction of his literary style alone will rescue him from the commonplace and entitle him to a hearing. II. The James Lane Allen of our sketch — for that there is another of the same name, "Who's Who" informs us, who lives in 122 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY Chicago, who also writes books, and to whom full apologies are made by our author in the Preface to "Flute and Violin" for all unintentional confusion — was born in 1849 in the heart of the beautiful blue grass region of Kentucky, of which Lexington is the captial city. The spirit of this country has entered into and pervades all his writings. His descent is that characteristic of the best in Kentucky — the two streams of English from Virginia and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania. He was born at a time for the Civil War to make a deep impression upon him, and par- ticularly for the change in social and economic conditions to affect him both materially and spiritually. Of the age of sixteen at its close, a new social life had to be faced under quite different aspects from what he might have anticipated. Of the physical and spiritual strugglings that must have been endured at that period, we have no record — from him, most of all, not a word. And yet the imagination can picture some of it. The volume of Gabriella's life, inserted as a retrospect in the second part of "The Reign of Law," though not needed for the story, is a glowing piece of portraiture, calling up with changes of sex and circumstances what he himself doubtless had passed through and numbers of gentle folk must have suffered. Fortunately, of whatever else economic and social changes might rob him, they could not take from the growing youth the wonderful gifts Nature had strewn profusely about him. In ab- sence of other teachers, his mother could always point out lessons from outdoor life, and perhaps in proportion to the meagreness of other schooling the lessons from Nature's teachings appealed more and more subtly to the boy's heart, how deeply he himself could not be conscious of at the moment. The effects were to come later and later in life, as he matured and gained the power of giving expression to these phenomena, understanding them with the poet's heart and explaining them with the student's mind. We may believe, too, the early love of reading books — old romances, poetry, history — was soon implanted. Once more, in the want of schoolmasters, his mother was his best teacher in directing him to books and showing him how to love them. She could also tell him many of the old stories of what, under changed JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 128 conditions, now seemed long, long ago. Of such is said to be the germ of "King Solomon of Kentucky," a reminiscence handed down from the cholera ravages in Kentucky and the Mississippi Valley in the early thirties. Nature and books! His own mother and other mother, Blue Grass Kentucky! What better sources of nurture, if rightly used, spiritual, edu- cational, and literary, could a young boy have? The very re- verses which threw these stout hearts back upon themselves made every experience all the deeper. It was not until the ap- pearance of "A Kentucky Cardinal" that there was revealed the rich inner spiritual life of an extremely sensitive nature. One year after the close of the War, with the reopening of the old Transylvania University of Kentucky under favorable auspices, James Lane Allen entered college as a student in the academic department. It was contemporary with David's en- trance into the theological department of the University, the Bible College, as told in "The Reign of Law." The location of the University was in Lexington, the leading town of Central Kentucky, a few miles from the Aliens' country home. Under whatever hardships, the best Southern traditions were then and still are to make the son of the family at least an educated man and gentleman. At that time, and still an excellent article of faith in all Church or denominational colleges, the classics of Latin and Greek formed the chief diet for study. What knowledge of English was obtained was chiefly through the medium of the translation and syntax of the ancient classics. The reading of good literature was rather a tradition than an exaction, generally followed and left to the leisure hours and inclinations of the student himself. In the hands of a capable teacher, every bright student has the ambition to become equally as good a scholar as his teacher and himself teach that subject. And the study of the Latin and Greek authors as pre- paratory to the study of English or a love of literature has been the basis built upon by many of our best workers. The young student furthermore soon pushed his way into an acquaintance at least with the modern languages and got some glimpses of the significance of their literatures. 124 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY Having completed the college course and further pursued his studies so far into wider fields as to obtain the degree of Master of Arts — doubtless at great pains and cost of both self and home — there was nothing for the Southern young man without means and under some obligations to do but teach and help pay expenses. Mr. Allen first taught a country school in the neighborhood of Lexington, like John Gray in "The Choir In- visible," yet with what a difference! Twelve miles a day he walked, six there and six back to his mother's home. Then there was a school in Missouri, later another in a neighboring Kentucky county, next came recognition from his Alma Mater in a tutorship, and at length advancement to the chair of Latin and Greek in Bethany College, West Virginia, the leading in- stitution of learning of the "Christian Church," founded by the apostle of the order, the Rev. Alexander Campbell. In these years he doubtless had the opportunity of a wider survey of language and literature study, of the moderns as well as the ancients, and began to test and put into practice many theories of composition. Particularly his study, readings, and practice in the field of English literature and composition must have become developed. Much of the care and thought and happy appre- ciation and nice distinctions of his written style reveal such knowledge and training. With his work seemingly mapped out before him, his earliest ambitions were in exact and ripe scholarship. He had planned a trip abroad for a stay at the German universities ; and after the Johns Hopkins University was opened as the first dis- tinctively for advanced graduate work in America, he was in correspondence with its officials, and there seemed all pro- bability that the doctor's hood was destined for him. But the call of literature upon him became more and more urgent, and the restrictions of its exercise when hampered by the daily routine work of the class room weighted him down. Perhaps, too, the conditions of his professorship in a comparatively small denominational college were not entirely congenial. There is a report that a minister of the denomination was an applicant for his chair, and that such a one succeeded him — which may JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 125 or may not be true, although the case has often happened else- where. At any rate, it was inevitable that he should find out the paths of his own genius, and, though late, have had the determination to enter upon them. This last demanded not a little courage. A professorship, even if poorly paid, was at least something fairly definite, though often with varying value. Many must have been the misgivings and dishearten ings of friends, and possibly even of his immediate family. Literature as a profession then in the South and in Kentucky was worse than doubtful. And it is doubtful anywhere now, until success comes. It was about 1884 that this determination to devote him- self henceforth to literary work was put into effect. It was naturally to New York that he looked, the publishing centre not only of the American magazines but of newspapers that had standards and paid something for work. In a "tribute of one who was once his pupil," Mr. John Fox, Jr. (himself a literary worker of no mean power), to be found in The Writer, Boston, July, 1891, is given briefly the most definite statement of Mr. Allen's first work: "Letters, chiefly on Southern subjects, were coming out in the New York Evening Post, and occa- sionally a poem appeared in Harper 's, the At/antic, or Lippin- cott's, or an essay, critical or humorous, in the CW/*Vorthe Forum. So that Mr. Allen was widely known as a critic and essayist be- fore the first of his striking tales." From the same hand he is at this time thus enthusiastically described: "I believe I know no man whom nature has made quite so near what a man should be in mind, character, and physique. Physically, Lane Allen, as he is intimately known, is not much unlike Gordon Helm, the hero of 'Sister Dolorosa:' Saxon in type, tall, splendidly pro- portioned, with a magnificent head and a strong, kindly face. I know not whether I admire him most for his brain or for his heart, his exquisite cultivation or his greatness of soul. His manner is what all Southerners like to believe was the manner of typical Southern gentlemen of the old school." The articles, in the New York Post concerned the Cumberland Mountains, and an order came for sketches of the blue grass 128 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY section of Kentucky for Harper s Magazine. These two series of writings formed the basis of the first distinctive piece of work from Mr. Allen's pen, and these descriptive sketches were afterwards gathered into a volume under the title "The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," interestingly enough now followed, ten years later, by Mr. John Fox's own series of portrayals, in a somewhat different vein, less formal and more adventurous, as indicated by the title "Blue Grassand Rhododendron." These sketches of Mr. Allen's were mere training work, and were felt as such. But yet, while they are "mere training work," as compared with the richness and spiritual value of the interpre- tations of Kentucky life and landscape which followed, it would be wrong to give the impression that they constitute nothing better than 'hack-work.' Already the poet and lover is there, who has grown up amid these scenes and sees these sights out- wardly, yet in a degree spiritually, too, and tells of them sympa- thetically to others. But this applies only to the descriptions of his blue grass section. Of Cumberland Gap and Eastern Ken- tucky there is a difference in style, as there is a difference in subject-matter. Everywhere is the loyal Kentuckian, but with these parts he is acquainted only externally by visiting them. But however much the moods and words of a lover, even the best descriptions do not as yet reveal the rarely spiritual qualities into which the author was to grow. These first came with the "Cardinal" and "Butterflies, "and are seen, after a summer's visit to England, in such a contribution as that in the Southern Maga- zine (Louisville, February, 1896) on English Wood Notes with Kentucky Echoes. With the acceptance and publication of these sketches Mr. Allen may be regarded as fairly launched upon his literary life. For a time he made his home in Cincinnati, in order to be near his material and to be able at least to see the physical outlines of Kentucky soil, yet so as to be within access of a centre of life and of books. Finding at length this too limited, he ventures for a short space to Washington as the national capital and possible future home of literature and art in America. Social and official distractions interfere, and soon he is drawn to the JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 127 publishing and bookmaking and working centre of the United States, as the best environment for the steady employment of his powers. Thus it is in the heart of New York City that Mr. Allen at present lives and finds he can most easily lose himself in his work. III. Mr. Allen's work belongs to the last fifteen years, and the ap- pearance of his collected work in volumes essentially to the last ten. His first volume was made up of six pieces which had pre- viously appeared in the magazines — one from Harpers and the remaining five from the Century. He had, therefore, been be- fore the public some years when the Messrs. Harper published this volume in 1891. The exact title was "Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances," and the volume was dedicated to his mother. The contents were: "Flute and Violin" ("The Parson's Magic Flute" and "A Boy's Violin"), "King Solomon of Kentucky," "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky," "The White Cowl," "Sister Dolorosa," and "Posthumous Fame." The story of the "Flute and Violin" had announced a master of very delicately humorous and pathetic effect; "The White Cowl" and "Sister Dolorosa" had wonderfully popularized him. Particularly the last made little less than a sensation among more emotional readers when it first came out in the Century Magazine The sub-title reveals the romantic character of the volume, and the author's interest in and consciousness of the past. The process of his development, as has been said, has been that of the romanticist in nature, changing to the realist in method. As the realities of life press about him and he gains in experi- ence, he turns from the past to the present — from the past with its romance to the present full of its questionings. It is Ken- tucky's history that holds him, the past of his own State, filled with rich traditions and associations. The early history of Lexington and the beginnings of Transylvania University furnish the material for the first story in the figure of the Rev. James Moore, who had been brought up a Presbyterian but had 128 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY become the first Episcopal minister in the western settlements, with his weakness for flute-playing and his attractiveness for the female portion of his congregation. Both the Rev. James Moore, and a phase of the history of this institution of learning reappear in Mr. Allen's later work. The wise and gentle counselor and friend of John Gray in "The Choir Invisible" is this same flute-loving parson at an earlier and more vigorous stage of his career; and it is in a department of Transylvania University, just after the war, that the scene of the major part of "The Reign of Law" is laid. A characteristic description of the past appears after three or four pages: "the two-story log house; . . . his supper of coffee sweetened with brown sugar, hot johnnycake, with perhaps a cold joint of venison and cabbage pickle; . . . the solitary tallow dip in its little brass candlestick; . . . the rude, steep stairs; . . . the leathern string that lifted the latch; ... a little deal table covered with text-books and sermons ; a rush- bottomed chair." These bits are a sample of the picturesque element that Mr. Allen has gathered from many quarters. The powers of description of nature are beginning in the "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky," as it opens with the picture: "The Woods Are Hushed." Yet the excess of rhetoric is dis- cernible, and it is 'finer' writing than the author permits him- self in maturer pieces like "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "The Reign of Law," redolent with the feeling for nature and its inner spiritual forces. It is one of the author's earliest compositions, and we may therefore contrast it with some profit with his latest work. Both are pictures of the season of autumn. "The Eter- nal Power seemed to have quitted the universe and left all nature folded in the calm of the Eternal Peace. Around the pale-blue dome of the heavens a few pearl-colored clouds hung motion- less, as though the wind had been withdrawn to other skies. Not a crimson leaf floated downward through the soft, silvery light that filled the atmosphere and created the sense of lonely, un- imaginable spaces. This light overhung the far-rolling landscape of field and meadow and wood, crowning with faint radiance the remoter, low-swelling hilltops and deepening into dreamy half- JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 129 shadows on their eastern slopes. Nearer, it fell in a white flake on an unstirred sheet of water which lay along the edge of a mass of sombre-hued woodland, and nearer still it touched to spring-like brilliancy a level, green meadow on the hither edge of the water, where a group of Durham cattle stood with reversed flanks near the gleaming trunks of some leafless sycamores. Still nearer, it caught the top of the brown foliage of a little bent oak tree and burned it into a silvery flame. It lit on the back and the wings of a crow flying heavily in the path of its rays, and made his blackness as white as the breast of a swan. In the immediate foreground it sparkled in minute gleams along the stalks of the coarse, dead weeds that fell away from the legs and the flanks of a white horse, and slanted across the face of the rider and through the ends of his gray hair, which straggled from beneath his soft black hat." In the following from the opening chapter of "The Reign of Law" observe how more concrete and restrained, yet passionate and vital, is the description. "One day something is gone from earth and sky: autumn has come, season of scales and balances, when the earth, brought to judgment for its fruits, says, 'I have done what I could. — Now let me rest! ' "Fall! — and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool, silvery air, the leaves, so indispen- sable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep grass. The fall of the hickorynut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook below. The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and tbe odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time, when they shall 10 130 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY arise again as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land. "In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the corn knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling heaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards, the fall of sugaring grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the wine press in the cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet pomace." There are other significant points of development between early and later work. Mr. Allen's search for the elusive word is from the first a characteristic, though in this earlier work we can meet words we need not expect to find later. For instance, we know he has got beyond, "James kicked against such rigor in his brethren." The same adjective is often repeated — particularly 'shy' is a favorite epithet in dealing with the parson. Conscious gleams of fancy are 'wool -gathered' — the past participle for the usual present; or an expression like, "One might say that he was playing the cradle song of his mind. ' ' Humor and pathos lie close together — the gently amusing by the side of the tragic — in these early pieces. There are many deft touches. The Rev. James Moore's chair of philosophy was "a large chair to sit in with ill-matched legs and most un- certain bottom" — a note now reminding singularly of the later condition of that chair in "The Reign of Law." The prophecy of delicacy of humor was fulfilled, too, although the seriousness of Mr. Allen's views of art and of life overshadow it. Here is a small portion of the description of the bachelor parson: "A bachelor — being a logician; therefore sweet-tempered, never having sipped the sour cup of experience; gazing covertly at JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 131 womankind from behind the delicate veil of unfamiliarity that lends enchantment; being a bachelor and a bookworm, therefore already old at forty, and a little run down in his toilets, a little frayed out at the elbows and the knees, a little seamy along the back, a little deficient at the heels ; in pocket poor always, and always the poorer because of a spendthrift habit in the matter of secret charities; . . . gentle, lovable; timid, resolute; for- getful, remorseful; eccentric, impulsive, thinking too well of every human creature but himself; an illogical logician, an erring moralist, a wool-gathered philosopher, but, humanly speaking, almost a perfect man." Compare with this the affectionate portrayal of another bachelor in the "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky:" "It was a sub- tle evidence of deterioration in manliness that he had taken to dress. . . . Usually he wore a derby hat, a black diagonal coat, gray trousers, and a white necktie. But the article of attire in which he took chief pleasure was hose; and, the better to show the gay colors of these, he wore low-cut shoes of the finest calfskin, turned up at the toes. Thus his feet kept pace with the present, however far his head may have lagged in the past; and it may be that this stream of fresh fashions, flowing perennially over his lower extremities like water about the roots of a tree, kept him from drying up altogether. "Peter always polished his shoes with too much blacking, perhaps thinking that the more the blacking the greater the proof of love. He wore his clothes about a season and a half — having several suits — and then passed them on to Peter. . . . '. To have seen the Colonel walking about his grounds and garden, followed by Peter, just a year and a half behind in dress and a yard and a half behind in space, one might well have taken the rear figure for the Colonel's double, slightly the worse for wear, somewhat shrunken, and cast into a heavy shadow." There could also be added the description of Peter's preacher's garb — the blue jeans dress coat with the long and spacious tails, having a border of biblical texts. The same spirit prevails in the tenderness of the portrayal of the Colonel's death, and then Peter's; "It was perhaps fitting that his 132 JAMES LANE ALLEN: ASTUDY [Peter's] winding sheet should be the vestment in which, years agone, he had preached to his fellow-slaves in bondage ; for if it so be that the dead of this planet shall come forth from their graves clad in the trappings of mortality, then Peter should arise on the Resurrection Day wearing his old jeans coat." In the bachelors of these two pieces is the genius of the later, though younger, one in "A Kentucky Cardinal." Here is the sense of the picturesque too: "Never before had the stub of the little crutch been plied so nimbly among the stones of the rough sidewalk. Never before had he made a prettier picture, with the blue cap pushed far back from his forehead, his yellow hair blowing about his face, the old black satin waistcoat flopping like a pair of disjointed wings against his sides, the open newspaper streaming backward from his hand, and his face alive with hope." The exquisiteness of the picture of the little lame child and the sacrificing love of the parson for him show the author's broad, gentle humanity. An- other picture in the court room at the close of "King Solomon of Kentucky" almost chokes a sob in the simple telling. Yet with all the high praise they command, the descriptive passages are almost unimportant when compared with the ex- treme felicity and happiness of those of later pieces. Thus it happened that the spirit of the "Cardinal" came with such sur- prise to a number of the readers of these sketches. The art of description is employed more freely in both "The White Cowl" and "Sister Dolorosa," but it is used merely as setting and background; not yet, as in the later pieces, is it the heart and soul of the movement. There is a casual reference to hemp in "King Solomon;" in "The Reign of Law" the stages of the hemp in the fields not only illustrate the story but constitute an image of all life. The order of composition of the stories in the "Flute and Violin" volume is really fortuitous. It seems to begin chrono- logically with the "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky," written in exemplification of the author's theory that the glory of the new Southern fiction after the war was that it helped in uniting North and South by revealing to the world the tender relations JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 183 which had existed between master and man. This is a story, with a blending of both humor and pathos, of the decay of a gentleman of the old school and his devoted negro attendant, another gentleman of the same school. Both, stranded on the shores of a new sort of world, pass down the slope of life together until at last they lie side by side in their graves. Mr. Allen is in this story in closest touch with Mr. Page of Virginia, and Mr. Harris of Georgia. But if he follows them in general theme, the treatment is still individual, and he soon passes away into definite paths of his own. A darker picture of relations between white and black is touched on in "King Solomon of Kentucky." The basis of the story is historic, a reminiscence from the cholera devastation in Kentucky in the thirties. The shiftless, run-down white man is sold at public outcry for service, and is bought in by a freed negro woman, who saves him and serves him and leaves him free. The terrible cholera epidemic overwhelms the town — it is a page out of the life of Lexington that is por- trayed — and King Solomon's redemption comes at last in his bravery in resolutely digging graves for the scores of dead, when all others had fled. The picture becomes more than pathetic ; it grows grimly tragical and heroic, in the relation of slave and free, black and white, and in the dawning of spiritual possibilities in the wreck of a human soul. That there was in the heart of Kentucky since the pioneer days a colony of Trappist Monks and a Convent of the Stricken Heart came with a surprise to many unacquainted with these special facts of local history. Mr. Allen had already called attention to the seeming incongruity of their presence in his "Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," and in them he lays the scene of the next two stories. In the light of his later work, both have melodramatic elements and are too highly colored. But this very use of the imagination seized hold of the popular fancy. Both have fundamentally the same subject: the revolt of the human heart when once stirred against unnatural re- straint. A 'brother' of the order overhears a conversation which he cannot get out of his head — he meets the woman — he 134 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY is haunted with her memory — the inherited Kentucky ancestral strain asserts itself — he breaks his vows — he woos and wins her — losing all, he returns to die. A 'sister' of the convent meets a stranger — her heart is moved and ensnares her — and there remains the unhappiness of her fate. The speech of the cripple to the young woman under the walls of the convent in "The White Cowl," which Father Palemon overhears, and which starts the vague unrest in his nature, shows too much the machinery of obtaining a situation. Mr. Allen's personal note and thought, emphasized fully in all three of his latest works, is the conflict and self-struggles in life. Here and later the strength of the forces of Inheritance and Nature, which must fight against Circumstance, is the real subject. And so the confession to the brotherhood is merely the first note of alarm and danger — the symbol of the appalling conflict to ensue within a man's heart and soul. Father Palemon was sprung from a violent and passionate parentage, and latent fires in his nature had never been supplied with oxygen from the air beyond the daily routine of his life. At last comes the startling, one-sided self-revelation as the result of a one-sided training and mental perception — just as in David's case in "The Reign of Law" — "the fathers have lied to me! " The storm gathers in the man's soul and, as everywhere when Mr. Allen feels deeply, Nature takes control, and his comparisons and figures are drawn from her phenomena and processes. The conflict comes to a crisis — the same sort of a conflict as was later in the hemp fields. And after a storm, Nature seems very sweet: "Another June came quickly into the lonely valley of the Abbey of Geth- semane. Again the same sweet monastery bells in the purple twilights, and the same midnight masses. Monks again at work in the gardens, their cowls well tied up with hempen cords. Monks once more teaching the pious pupils in the school across the lane." There is something forced in the situation — too imaginative, possibly, for actual conditions ; and yet the cen- tral thought of struggle of forces and natures must be true — to one of Mr. Allen's character and temperament is true. Hence an inner growth and warring is the breath of his later pieces. JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 116 "The White Cowl" has more vehemence and passion; "Sister Dolorosa" more tenderness and sympathy. The success and popularity of "Sister Dolorosa" upon its appearance were instan- taneous and unmistakable. Looking at the story more calmly in the light of later work, it is less probable, is farther away from actual life, but is more appealing because it is so imagined. This produces some excess of 'fine' writing and an abundance of conceits. It is not so simple, not so natural in point of mere style. The physical ears may not be closed, but convey a message to spiritual ears. It is again from a conversation that the conflict ensues between narrower and wider conceptions — life without love and life with a knowledge of what love means. This grows evident in the portents, the signs, the symbols, the seed of inheritance ever consciously present, the conversa- tion, the allegorizing, the communion with nature, the addresses to the white violet, the English sparrow, and the butterfly. The normal Kentucky ideal of manhood is expressed by Gordon Helm. The chill felt upon entering the convent is one from personal experience : the lack of sympathy strengthening into a distinct protest for the young life crushed out. The accidental shooting was not inevitable, but is an obtrusion of machinery into the piece. And so with the end. The tale is screwed to too high a pitch ; it is elaborated in its rhetorical effects ; it works on the emotions of those who lend themselves to it ; and the ending is not true. And yet, despite all this, one must bear witness to the strong impression left by the delicacy and intensity of the story upon its first reading, and many pictures in it, worthy of the painter, remain fixed in memory. The last tale of the series is of much less interest : "Posthumous Fame; or, a Legend of the Beautiful." It is like the method of Hawthorne — whom Mr. Allen elsewhere suggests — in "The Ambitious Guest" or "The Great Stone Face." However, "Posthumous Fame" cannot take rank with the marvelous purity and simplicity of these. The allegory is slight : an artist erects a beautiful monument to make his love famous — and instead, so misleading become reports, she is held as infamous, and in rage he breaks his masterpiece into splinters. It is the least satis- 136 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY factory of the sketches, because it is farthest removed from life. The gem of the collection, viewed from its growing insight into life and the portrayal of human nature, is unquestionably the one which gives its name to the series, "Flute and Violin." It was suggested by a slab of marble to the memory of the Rev. James Moore, in Christ Church, Lexington, and is a very real page from the romance of the past, delicately, naturally, and humorously drawn. Its sympathy and interest, the humor and pathos of its situations, the reaction of circumstance on life, and the stiffening of the moral qualities, are its traits : the dear flute- playing bachelor parson ; the widow Spurlock and dame Furnace spying through the keyhole and the window, both of which have been made more spacious in order "to provide the parson una- wares with a sufficiency of air and light; " the widow Babcock silently weeping behind her veil as she hears the parson's solemn warning on "The Kiss that Betrayeth;" the temptation of the crippled boy; the union of both flute and violin hung solemnly in memory on the wall, unconscious instruments, symbolic of the tragedy that resulted. It is a piece which takes hold of the heart — the reader both smiles and is touched, and he remembers. One chief trait of the writer is already apparent — the serious view Mr. Allen has of his art. He may sometimes obtrude this, but we are none the less grateful. He is already an avowed and conscious artist, which means primarily he is an artist. And this first consciousness has passed into careful workman- ship with due regard to effect. We may see the worker, but we like the work. That he is even now a close critic of his own work is seen in his working over what he has done — strengthen- ing and refining. "The White Cowl," it is said, he worked over at least four times. Witness the later conversion of "John Gray" into "The Choir Invisible" and the changes in the ending of "Butterflies." He holds a manuscript a long time before he lets it go to the printer, and I fancy more than one proof with ad- ditions and alterations go back and forth to the composing room. But this strong conception of his art, this polishing over again and again, has produced a form that the reader may de- JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 137 light in and which will last longer than mere stories told for a day. It is his distinction that he is a master of a pure literary English style. When the chief defect of the literature of the Southern States is that it lacks the highest culture and is, too, largely in dialect, it is surely to Mr. Allen's credit that he works with the King's English as material for finely artistic results. In this spirit he next produces both his most popular book and his masterpiece in the delicate perfection of its literary form — "A Kentucky Cardinal." IV. Up to this time in Mr. Allen's work, as before remarked, we had had Nature as a background, always visible, but largely external; we had not been let into her secrets. This Mr. Allen suddenly does in "A Kentucky Cardinal," which appeared first in Harper s Magazine in 1893-94. It denotes a new epoch in his artistic work and growth. To those of us reading each sketch of his as it had come out, it gave a thrill we had not dared anticipate. It is a pastoral poem in prose, noting the procession of the seasons. Here was the heart of Nature laid bare; here wrote a novelist who at the same time was a disciple of Thoreau and Audubon. Indeed, the spirit of Audubon hovers through the book, as his person had traversed these scenes in earlier days, and veneration of the master is the first bond of union between Adam and Georgiana. Sylvia, as her pastoral name suggests, is a little creature of the sun and earth, and fits naturally into the landscape. As we turn the pages, everything speaks of one intimately present at Nature's processes; the freezing and the thawing, the depths of winter's cold and the glistening in the sunlight. We feel Nature in her moods. The very similes are taken from Nature's laws and appearances, which continues true of all Mr. Allen's work henceforth. And this love and close observation of Nature leads him into the study of the laws underlying the physical universe. Nature and humanity become united. There is the poetry of the country in the prodigal gifts and appearances of Nature; there is the prose of town in the communion with men. "The longer I live here, the better 138 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp fire, gypsy- like, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each in turn is to me as a magnet to a needle. At times the needle of my nature points toward the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town — to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose." The old bachelor, "the rain crow", and the widow, "the mocking bird", are neighbors. Strawberries and "Lalla Rookh"; grapes and "The Seasons"; the arbor and Sir Walter's novels; the schoolgirl and apples and salt — all are commingled in profusion, the brightness of the humorist uniting with the tender and intimate knowledge of the world not made with hands. The evergreens are "Nature's hostelries for the homeless ones." "Death, lover of the peerless, strikes at him [the Cardinal] from afar." "Is it this flight from the inescapable just behind that makes the singing of the redbird thoughtful and plaintive, and indeed all the wild sounds of nature so like the outcry of the doomed ? " "This set flowing toward me for days a stream of people, like a line of ants passing to and from the scene of a terrific false alarm. I had nothing to do but sit perfectly still and let each ant, as it ran up, touch me with its antennae, get the countersign, and turn back to the village ant-hill." "Mrs. Walters does not get into our best society; so that the town is to her like a pond to a crane; she wades round it, going in as far as she can, and snatches up such fry as come shoreward from the middle. In this way lately I have gotten hints of what is stirring in the vasty deeps of village opinion." "The scent of spring, is it not the first lyric of the nose — that despised poet of the senses? " — which reminds one curiously of Du Maurier's scenting of old Paris. There is this dwelling on the sights and sounds of Nature, yet as one restrained and checked with a sense of delicacy in speaking of his intimates and friends — an effect heightened by the use of the first person in autobiographic and reminiscential manner. JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 139 Take a further sample of this intimately playful mood: "But most I love to see Nature do her spring house-cleaning in Kentucky, with the rain clouds for her water buckets and the winds for her brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a day! How she dashes pailful and pailful into every corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor! Another day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you, joyfully: 'Now, then, we are all right again!' This done, she begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms could ever have woven. And then, at last, she sends out invitations through the South, and even to some tropical lands, for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May, and by June her house is full of visitors." The comparisons often run to epigrammatic point. "Her few ideas are like three or four marbles on a level floor; they have no power to move themselves, but roll equally well in any direction you push them." "Women who tell everything are like finger-bowls of clear water." "Adam Moss — such a green, cool, soft name!" There is humor and human nature, along with other nature, a plenty: "But there are certain ladies who bow sweetly to me when my roses and honeysuckles burst into bloom ; a fat old cavalier of the South begins to shake hands with me when my asparagus bed begins to send up its tender stalks ; I am in high favor with two or three young ladies at the season of lilies and sweet-pea; there is one old soul who especially loves rhubarb pies, which she makes to look like little latticed porches in front of little green skies, and it is she who remembers me and my row of pie-plant; and still another, who knows better than catbirds 140 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY when currants are ripe. Above all, there is a preacher, who thinks my sins are as scarlet so long as my strawberries are, and plants himself in my bed at that time to reason with me of judgment to come; and a doctor, who gets despondent about my constitution in pear time — after which my health seems to re- turn, but never my pears." It is again the 'other nature' which persists in this enthusi- asm of a sense of appropriation: "They are all mine — these Ken- tucky wheat fields. After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf, I come in and gather my harvest also — one that he did not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me — the harvest of beauty. Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores of softly foaming emerald seas; or past the rank and file of fields of Indian corn, which stand like armies that had gotten ready to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down at their sides. There the white and the purple morning-glories hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their elfin trumpets." Here is the Kentucky beau's dress in 1850, the time of our story: "Late this afternoon I dressed up in my high gray wool hat, my fine long-tailed blue cloth coat with brass buttons, my pink waistcoat, frilled shirt, white cravat, and yellow nankeen trousers. ' ' Not till halfway through the book are Audubon and Thoreau specifically mentioned, although their shades have wandered from the first in this congenial atmosphere. Of Thoreau: "Everything that I can find of his is as pure and cold and lonely as a wild cedar of the mountain rocks, standing far above its smokeless valley and hushed white river." But Audubon is "the great, the very great Audubon," "that rare spirit whom I have so wished to see and for one week in the woods with whom I would give any year of my life. ' ' With the descriptions of nature there grows a tendency toward moralizing and comment, but it is in a vein the Anglo- Saxon has never objected to. It is Thackeray's manner of being JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 141 confidential with his readers. One paragraph beginning, "The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also," recalls the latter's "Roundabout" on De finibus. In character portrayal a contrast is necessarily suggested be- tween the two sisters, intended rather as symbols of widely differing types. Sylvia is a "little half-fledged spirit, to whom the yard is the earth and June eternity, but who peeps over the edge of the nest at the chivalry of the ages, and fancies that she knows the world." But the chief characterization, wherever the first person is used, lies in the revelation of the gentleness, firmness, sensitiveness, and unconscious selfishness — all com- bined — in the creation, Adam Moss. Georgiana is pale beside him, though we catch here and there sincere glimpses of her, too, as in the merry twinkle and good humor of her words when she is growing stronger — words which playfully repeat the first ever passed between her and Adam: "Old man, are you the gardener? " The "Cardinal" naturally demanded a sequel, though there have been some to wish one had never been written. In the "Cardinal" the winter of bachelordom, thawed by the springtide of love and a consequent new life, was blossoming into the summer of joy. The conclusion is "Aftermath," the autumn and winter of life come again, the fall of the leaves and of hopes, and the funeral dirge. The idyllic sweetness has passed away with the flowers. It tells of the dread winter of 1851-52, when all animals unprepared for the season's unwonted severity suffered intensely. The fate of the Cardinal but preceded their end and Georgiana's death. The sympathy with the suffering dumb ones of God's creation, fellow-beings, even if not human, pre- figures the snow-storm and David's care for the cattle in "The Reign of Law." In a book dedicated to Nature there is the struggle between Nature and Love, and in the loss of the be- loved comes the overpowering sense of the eternity of Nature. In "The Reign of Law" almost the converse is suggested: the cruelty and severity of Nature softened through Love. Like its predecessor, "Aftermath" is a story commingled with Nature's moods and seasons. It is also in the first person, and 142 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY is again of Adam Moss. His own bereaved home and that of the birds furnish "the universal tragedy of the nests." Tender- ness and delicacy of expression are occasionally crossed with boldness of utterance — the saying of things that are thought and are true, but are usually left unspoken. Where this is necessary and vital, our author may be applauded for his frank- ness. That it is not always so is the ground upon which the severest attacks upon Mr. Allen have been made. Chief among Nature's mysteries sex questions manifestly interest him, poetically and scientifically. The Sylvia episode is a fore- shadowing of what can easily become butterflies fluttering in "Summer in Arcady." There is still the influence of Audubon and Thoreau, as well as of Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, that of Audubon always being transcendent. A characteristic fling at the ancestors of Kentuckians, the Virginians, is not missing. There is a hint at the Bourbon pride in a particularly favored section of Ken- tucky at the expense of others, emphasized with a difference in John Fox's "The Kentuckians" and by the civil disorders of 1899 and 1900. There is Kentucky's boast of both Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. There was a happy reference to Mr. Clay in "King Solomon," and in the stress of this winter in the early fifties is recalled the death of the great Commoner. More than one touch of local history is brought in, not always to the comfort of the non-Kentucky reader. One of these more or less obscure references is the shooting of a Kentucky justice by Miss Delia Webster. The Kentucky feuds and quarrels are frankly laughed at in a paragraph of humorous satire, which closes with truer and more exalted ideals of chivalry and honor. True to the early fifties, the spirit of the Mexican War is used as the historical setting. Georgiana's father was killed in that struggle. There are present, too, the consciousness of Ken- tucky's part in developing national life, in the "Winning of the West, "as the phrase is here, and the Kentucky ideals of morals and physical bravery — ideals to receive an added meaning later in "The Choir Invisible." JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 143 "Summer in Arcady" is the later and more poetical name for what appeared in the numbers of the Cosmopolitan in the winter of 1895-96 as "Butterflies: A Tale of Nature." This story marks the most distinct turning point in Mr. Allen's work. In its new objective method of treatment, that of detachment of the object for purposes of study and reflection, it is the logical fore- runner of his latest tale, which, by a similar chance, has had two titles, one in America and the second in England: "The Reign of Law" and "The Increasing Purpose." As the title indicates, "Butterflies," or "Summer in Arcady," is the more idyllic of the two productions, and besides possesses a sense of the satirical that connects it with "Aftermath." "Summer in Arcady" is a story of inheritance, of Nature's gifts and Nature's mysterious workings. "The Reign of Law" is more that of environment, the influence of a new era of thought awakening every mind at the close of the nineteenth century and calling a challenge to old forms of belief. Both show Mr. Allen's paths leading him along the ways of scientific thought. Both heroes are in rebellion to old and worn-out phases of thought and attitudes in life; both are "expelled from Church;" both suffer and gain control and mastery in some measure over self. With both it is the struggle of spiritual with material forces. In the two tales immediately preceding Mr. Allen worshiped Nature subjectively, more like a poet of Wordsworth's school. In his later work, beginning with "Summer in Arcady," the poet still feels Nature, but the reasoning mind is now objective and holds calmly aloof as it studies the workings of Nature, where man is but one of its creatures and often its cruel sport. The great difference, though, with traces before, is at once discernible. It is the turning of the romanticist into scientific and realistic habits of thought. For this reason the older title of "Butterflies," with its sub- title, "A Tale of Nature," is more indicative of the author's attitude than the later one. As "a tale of Nature" it is the 144 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY reign of Nature's universal and all-powerful law in ourselves as in all animal and physical creation, carefully noted and studied. This work deals more with the physical forces of Nature. In the author's latest book, where the consciousness of this reign is asserted in the title, the subject is almost entirely transported to the intellectual and spiritual spheres. In "Summer in Arcady" man is again and again compared with the butter- flies, and, as with butterflies, Nature is strong and the creature seems weak, whirled about by elemental forces, all powerful alike for beneficence and harm. The hot summer's day is typical of the setting, the burning passion of Nature on all sides. "Nature is lashing everything — grass, fruit, insects, cattle, human creatures — more fiercely onward to the fulfillment of her ends. She is the great, heartless haymaker, wasting not a ray of sunshine on a clod, but caring naught for the light that beats upon a throne, and holding man and woman, with their longing for immortality and their ca- pacities for joy and pain, as of no more account than a couple of fertilizing nasturtiums. ' ' And the story is of the full summer tide also in its climax. "A pair of butterflies out of their own countless kind had met on the meadows of life and, forgetting all others, were beginning to cling. The time was not far off when Nature would demand her crisis — that ever-old, ever-new miracle of the dust through which the perishable becomes the enduring and the individual of a moment renews itself into a type for ages. "The crisis came on in beauty. The noon of summer now was nigh. Each day the great, tawny sun became a more fierce and maddening lover of the earth, and flushed her more deeply, and awoke in her throes of responsive energy until the whole land seemed to burn with color and to faint in its own sweetness. "And this high aerial miracle of two floating spheres that swept all life along in the flow of its tide caught the boy as a running sea catches a weed." But added to this underlying note of the study of the elemental forces in Nature is an emphasis on heredity — what each of this pair of human butterflies inherited from several generations past JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 146 in the same environment of Nature's warmth and color. It is emphasized with almost unnecessary recurrence that neither is the highest type of manhood and of womanhood, but a frequent and an ordinary type, a natural species. For her: "If Daphne had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [filed as records of the runaway marriages] were the names of her own father and mother." For him: "Nature had never made him of the highest, or for the highest and he had already fallen a good deal lower than he was made: but of late the linking of his life to a pure one, in duty and in desire, had helped him in his struggle to do what was right. The recollection of the scene of to-day touched him most deeply, and perhaps during these moments he realized as far as was possible to him now that the happiness of a man's life lies and must always lie where a woman's lies. "But on the shifting sands of a false past, and with hands little fitted for the work, he was making his first sincere but blunder- ing effort to rear a barrier of a moral resistance as the safeguard of two lives. And far out on the deeps of life Nature, like a great burying wave, was rolling shoreward toward him." "Summer in Arcady" is thus a story of the eternal mystery of sex attraction — of the primary forces and passions stirring in man, but becoming controlled and guided nevertheless by some physical restraint toward higher purposes. This, therefore, ought to be the complete answer to those who find in the book only frank revelations of 'natural,' and therefore depraved, tendencies, and hold up their hands in consternation and horror. Such an attitude seems a perversion and a blindness to artistic and real truth. There may be a question how far the results of such study and dissection should be given to the public generally in novel form; but that the author is doing so in a sincere and candid spirit, as a scientific mind would become interested in any phenomenon of the natural world, is also undoubted. He is presenting a portrait, because it can be true, in the name of Truth. Nature's world lies before him, and her laws he is scrutinizing closely. He seems to say, "Here is a phase worth noting — observe. ' ' To declare that such a case has qot occurred 146 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY and cannot easily occur in Kentucky and elsewhere would be to declare that Kentuckians and others escape the force of Nature's compelling laws. Here are two of Nature's creatures, two of Nature's children, with ancestors rooted in a past amid in- fluences identical with the present, and thus they act. But the author does not forget the spiritual, as also true of life. "Nature had been having her way with him as an animal during these days of waiting; but something else had begun to have its way also — something that we satisfy ourselves by calling not earthly and of the body, but unearthly and of the soul — something that is not pursuit and enjoyment of another, but self-sacrifice for another's sake, that does not bring satiety but ever-growing dearness onward through youth, and joy into old age and sorrow — that remains faithful when one of two sits warm in the sun and the other lies cold in the shadow — that burns on and on as a faithful, lonely flame in a wornout broken lamp, and that asks, as its utmost desire, for a life throughout eternity, spirit with spirit." The story, in its unconventionality and its essential truth, is the "Romeo and Juliet" of Kentucky and Southern life. Like Juliet, a child, a girl of but seventeen, Daphne is transformed into the woman; and in the process there are the same forbidden meetings and doubt and agonizing and rapture, and there might have been death and tragedy too. But Mr. Allen follows Ken- tucky and Southern life. These unconventional dramas, if they run on, usually end in runaway matches,— the fierce, consuming forces of Nature are conserved and inherited again in the children, as they received the same impulses from their parents. Like Romeo, Hilary, the youth of twenty, from following random loves at will, is taught the truth of his own heart by the growing assertion of a better self. She was doing just what her mother did before her; he was the product of a long line of careless English, Virginian, and Kentuckian inheritance in a final special environment. And Nature holds her course, while at the same time there must be struggling with the spiritual self. These natural passions are terrible matters in actual life, and to most people to speak of them at all and to dwell upon JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 147 them is to encourage them. It is touching the unclean thing, and this is their judgment. And thus the book is not under- stood, and is necessarily distorted. One must, perhaps, have attained to the scientific habit and philosophical attitude of practical observation correctly to understand and sympathize with the perfect intensity and realism of the picture. To say it is not Kentuckian or American, or of the world, is just as impossible. We see the same picture about us every recurring summer, as youth is attracted to youth. The romanticist and the poet have their way of putting it; the frankly intellectual mind sees in it the working of fundamental forces of Nature, which are yet directed by the novelist to provident purposes. That which perhaps gave the greatest shock of displeasure was the intense naturalness of the concluding chapter as it orginally appeared, the subtle suggestion of the complexity of a woman's feelings who is trusting herself in a new relation to a man of this nature and is stepping fearfully and timidly, yet resolvedly, into the great unknown which the future contains. It is the very truth that offends, if it offends at all. For this reason the Preface written for the edition in book form, after the storm which greeted the first appearance, was unnecessary. It was in the nature of an apology for an art which needed no apology. The book must speak for itself, and must ultimately carry its own fate, and no apology or inter- pretation can help it or explain it away. The purpose of the story is an artistic one, the truthful representation in literary form of a page from life. The Preface was too far moralizing, the note was too far explanatory, and art must never become didactic and bend to explain, but stand self-confessed. To- gether with the Preface, there are certain shadings and soften- ings discoverable in the later form, springing from the same sensitiveness, that are not always gains. In the conclusion two pages are inserted, repeating explicitly and didactically what has already been suggested delicately, and thereby weakening the effect. It was known before that Hilary was not the highest type of man, and the changes in him had been subtly presented. The tale was conceived as a story of Nature and n?tMra] f°rces, 148 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY and should have been left so, after once being written, even in the face of a shocked public sentiment and opposing criticism. The slight changes have obscured the original heightened im- pression, an impression bolder, more clearly defined, and more vital in its first conception as "Butterflies." It is a story of what has happened and is happening in our American life. That it may contain a moral, a lesson, follows from itself as all occurrences in life have lessons; but the lesson need not too obviously obtrude. The Preface and con- sequent changes were a yielding to demands for an explanation, a result of a certain sensitiveness to criticism. The story will stand as essentially, if not generally, true long after the necessity for the Preface has disappeared. 1 VI. "The Choir Invisible," which follows, is in one sense out of its natural order in this thought evolution. But not so in art. It can be better understood if it be remembered that it is an old story of Mr. Allen's, "John Gray," which had appeared originally in Lippincotfs Magazine in 1893, built upon and altered and enlarged. It is, therefore, not so much the fundamental con- ception of the story, which admittedly belongs to an earlier period, as the alterations and changes in attitude that indicate Mr. Allen's growth in artistic power. Here it is Colonial and Revolutionary Kentucky which has hold of him. The love story itself, the chief thing which the original "John Gray" bequeathed to the new form, has been made more delicate and more human, though there again are those who complain of a departure from its original sweetness. Such a departure was necessary in the growing strength of the concep- tion. The gain in subtlety is a sign of this change. But par- ticularly pervading is the consciousness of historic evolution which has made Kentucky what she has been and is at her best. There are the feelings of more than a century's past and growth ; 1 Mr. Allen has omitted the Preface in his latest (Macmillan) edition, the writer has learned. JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 149 the thought of Kentucky's lonely stand on the borderland of the great Western wilderness; the recognition that after the original thirteen colonies the first new territory and new State to be added to the westward was Kentucky, admitted to the Union in 1792; the emphasis that the Anglo-Saxon pioneer had pushed his way through the mountain fastnesses of the Alleghanies and was destined to occupy the great Mississippi basin, and thence pass from ocean to ocean ; and that this was the beginning of the movement for expansion and for nationality. The additions to "John Gray" are chiefly in expression of this historical spirit and in subtilizing the characters of the story. Mr. Allen's growing strength is seen by another circumstance. It is the author's first long story or complete novel. The con- trast can be seen from the Table of Contents, where the ten chapters of "John Gray" with titles have grown in "The Choir Invisible' ' into twenty-three without. The volume also appeared in the year 1897, the year of Dr. Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne," and at the beginning of the revival of the novel with historic setting in American fiction. Thus in a sense it might be considered as an anticipation. But Mr. Allen's work was far more than a mere historical novel, and was not at all a tale of adventure. There is not an adventure in it except the newly inserted struggle with the panther, "a clean contest between will and will, courage and courage, strength and strength, the love of prey and the love of life." But this is brought in not merely for itself, but to portray more faithfully the actual dangers of pioneer days and to help forward the development of the story, the gradual revelation of character and self-knowledge. It is a soul study and conflict, or rather that of two souls, in a faith- fully presented historical environment. It is as if the author would say: 'There were high and noble souls then in the laying of Kentucky's foundations, and high and noble generations have sprung from them.' From a local picture the story passes into general significance. There are corresponding changes in art form that make the new volume more subdued or heightened in color effect as is required, more delicate and precise in expression. Let one or 150 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY two instances, taken from the very first page, suffice. "The warming bosom of the earth" was before warm; "the gleaming, wandering Alps of the blue ether" stood originally "those dear Alps of the blue air." Adjectives abounding in "John Gray" are omitted altogether or altered, for the sake of strengthen- ing, as in "the hope of [vast] maternity," or better still as seen in the changes indicated in the following: "The [pure heavenly] spirit of scentless spring, left by [born of] melting snows and the [pure earthy] spirit of scented [odorous] summer, born with the earliest buds [of the heart of flowers]." To con- tinue the comparison is unnecessary. But while there are softenings in tone and in the shadows and lights of style, the real changes are spiritual, alterations and additions for a more subtly psychological presentation. In the first form we already had the nobly eloquent tribute to the backwoods "schoolhouse," though the later version has added to even as fine a piece of rhetoric as this : "Poor old schoolhouse, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward dusk! Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against ! Poor little bare feet that could never reach the floor! Poor little droop- headed figures, so sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep! Long, long since, little children of the past, your backs have become straight enough measured on the same [a] cool bed ; sooner or later your [bare] feet, wherever wandering, have found their resting places in [come to rest on] the soft earth ; and all your drooping heads have gone to sleep on [found] the same dreamless pillow [to sleep on] and there [still] are sleeping." Here in the new version the phrase "the choir invisible" is first inserted, taken from George Eliot's poem of aspiration : O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again ! The paragraph originally ended with the next sentence: "And the imperious schoolmaster, too, who seemed exempt from physical frailty, the young scholar who guarded as a stern JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 161 sentinel that lonely outpost of the imperiled alphabet — even he long ago laid himself down on the same mortal level with you as a common brother." This has been chastened into: "And the young schoolmaster, who seemed exempt from frailty while he guarded like a sentinel that lone outpost of the alphabet — he too has long since joined the choir invisible of the immortal dead." All the rest is added: "But there is something left of him though more than a century has passed away: something that has wandered far down the course of time to us like the faint summer fragrance of a young tree long since fallen dead in its wintered forest— like a dim radiance yet traveling onward into space from an orb turned black and cold — like an old melody surviving on and on in the air without any instrument, without any strings." So great hold upon the writer have these mem- ories of the past ! There are effective condensations as well as expansions: "He failed to urge his way through the throng as speedily as he may have expected, being withheld at moments by passing acquaint- ances, and at others pausing of his own choice to watch some spectacle of the street." This is a concise summary of a much looser statement of numberless details in an enumeration of persons who were typical characters : a parent, some ladies, the shoemaker, the bookseller. Instead of these slight, gossipy matters, the more earnest spirit of the new story demands a long description in many pages of the feelings and conditions of Revolutionary Kentucky. This setting of the past obtains the emphasis befitting a tale placed on a vaster staging, a portrayal of the rugged earnestness and continual danger of the lives cast in that wilderness. Slight local touches disappear, like "where the Federal fort stood during the Civil War." The significance of the later struggle to a later generation is lost in the epic isolation of the Revolutionary theme. So in other places the descriptions of the wilderness, the Indians, the schoolhouse, the hunting of game, the fight with the panther, are all new and added as necessary to the atmosphere of the later work, though some have objected to these additions as extraneous. The descriptions grow under the author's pen. On the first 162 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY pages is one of the Kentucky woodland. Also the seriously re- flective and moralizing vein grows too — reflections on the history of the State and nation and its significance — all evoked imaginatively. Sensitiveness to Nature and her appearances and interest in all animal life still predominate: "The sun had set. Night was rushing on over the awful land. The wolf-dog, in his kennel behind the house, rose, shook himself at his chain, and uttered a long howl that reached away to the dark woods — the darker for the vast pulsing yellow light that waved behind them in the west like a gorgeous soft aerial fan. As the echoes died out from the peach orchard came the song of a robin, calling for love and rest." Many are the pictures of pioneer days in Kentucky, all tending to idyllic effects, as nearness to nature is always idyllic : the pioneer girl, the school children and their sports, the barring out at the schoolhouse like a miniature Indian attack, the celebration of the anniversary of the battle of the Blue Licks. The transmitted Kentuckian's ideals of personal courage and honor again become the theme as in "Aftermath," and the episode of the printing office is altered and enlarged to accord with the higher tragic pitch. There are many other matters touched upon besides : the ownership of lands and land titles, the early printing press and bookbinding establishment of Mr. John Bradford, the dress of the beau of that period, the cir- cumstances of the wedding with its distant ride to the church, the patriotism and plans and anxieties for the youthful national government, the Jacobin clubs, the personal influence of Washington, and the general spirit of revolution and inde- pendence. There is the tribute to the beauty of Kentucky women — but the whole story is that — and a forecast of the beauty of the breed of Kentucky horses ! The sympathetic parson, the Rev. James Moore, is the same personage as in "Flute and Violin," only with the vitality of twenty years younger. His is one of the best minor figures in the new book with his playing on his flute — "perhaps it was a way he had of calling in the divided flock of his faculties" — his regard for Paley's "Evidences," his love of music and the JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 168 ancient classics which went together, and his satirizing of women. That the Widow Babcock should even be mentioned at this time is unkind to her age and many amiable qualities in the former story. Even the history of the Rev. James himself is wrapped in some haziness, for it is hinted that he afterwards was married to one who revenged her sex fully for his many un- gallant remarks. Yet in "Flute and Violin" he is advanced distinctly into the fate of bachelordom. His own description of an old maid, in his frank talk with John Gray, might in the other portrayal have stood for him: "I even know another old maid now who is nothing but an old music book — long ago sung through, learned by heart, and laid aside: in a faded, wrinkled binding — yellowed paper stained by tears — and haunted by an odor of rose petals, crushed between the leaves of memory : a genuine very thin and stiff collection of the rarest original songs — not songs without words, but songs without sounds — the ballads of an undiscovered heart, the hymns of an unanswered spirit." Often the conversation between the two men grows so warm that it partakes of the nature of stichomythia, the give and take in quick reply, to indicate the dramatic interest. There are many suggestions of spiritual kinship between Mr. Allen's own nature and John Gray's, as there were unconscious points of likeness to himself, through the ideals expressed, in Gordon Helm in "Sister Dolorosa" and Adam Moss in the "Cardinal." This analogy extends even to some externals: Mr. Allen had on one side the same Scotch-Irish ancestry, had taught school in the Kentucky countryside before his removal East, had known the pressure of indebtedness here hinted at and the work- ing under high resolves. In its original the story was merely one of unrequited love, a true man's love for a lighter nature incapable of fully entering into and being made happy by the depths of his character, and the man's battle with self until he rose on the stepping-stones of his disappointment to better things. In the early volume Amy was all, and Mrs. Falconer, her aunt, only a lay figure. But the contrast between the two women is the central thought of the new volume, and the plot of the old story serves merely as an 154 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY introduction to the new. In the deeper psychological spirit of the new setting the heart and soul of the movement centre around Mrs. Falconer. The direct influence of her personality and the direct influence of the great book she lends to John Gray (Sir Thomas Malory's narrative of the conquest of others and of self by King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table) become the great motive powers in building up his character and life. It is thus an entirely new work that we have, a book entering upon a wider world and passing into larger reaches of art and life. There is a nicer and finer sense of delicacy. Amy announces to Mrs. Falconer in the garden her engagement, and tells of John's struggle with the panther. The wound from the panther both conceals and emphasizes the infliction of the deeper spiritual wound. The parson's visit to John is refined and the historical undertone deepened and strengthened. Mrs. Falconer brings the patient the Book, and henceforth the principles of the Book take the place of the hitherto omnipresent historic feeling. The pastor's sermon and the teacher's address on the last day at school grow more earnest. Even more significant are the changes at the end. In "John Gray" there is feeling, but no love. John is married before Major Falconer's death, and the youth comes as a joy to a woman's old age. In the new version Major Falconer dies, Mrs. Falconer waits, and John writes — her feelings are not given, but it is the tragedy of life! The characteristic change of note is felt in the dedication. It was "To Her and Her Memory;" it is now "To My Mother," whose gentle, inspiring personality could well have been the prototype of Mrs. Falconer. The two women change gradually and imperceptibly, but decidedly, with every bringing together. "The one was nine- teen — the tulip : with springlike charm but perfectly hollow and ready to be filled by east wind or west wind, north wind or south wind, according as each blew last and hardest ; the other thirty-six — the rose: in its midsummer splendor with fold upon fold of delicate symmetric structures, making a masterpiece. " After Mrs. Falconer's visit to John, wounded both in body and in spirit, the first ray of difference dawns: "What a mother JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 166 she would have been!" and later, "What a wife she is!" and after she has gone, "What a woman!" Then enters the Book of Ideals into the story: "She had said he should have read this book long before, but that henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found; characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding comrades; that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated, scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to the end." These ideals were: "Men who were men, . . . men who were gentle- men, and . . . gentlemen who served the unfallen life of the spirit." Their conversation, always rather prone to become too serious with Mr. Allen, is of the Greeks, Romans, and Jews. There is not a word of Amy. John's mind is imperceptibly led into and rests in other channels. But the wound breaks out afresh in Amy's mischievous interview with them after John is well enough to come again to the garden, which, rather than the house, seems the natural out-of-door home for both tulip and rose. The tulip has already lost one of its petals: "Some women begin to let themselves go after marriage; some after the promise of marriage." The knowledge of her engagement to Joseph, only now learned by John from her own lips, reveals to him all the shallowness of her nature. In John's farewell with Mrs. Falconer the woman's un- consciousness saves her ; she still supposes the wound is fresh for Amy. "Ah, you don't begin to realize how much you are to me!" is his cry. "Oh!" comes the response, and later, "I don't understand." Not all is plain in the delicacy of these portrayals — perhaps not all can be made plain, and words and motives must affect different readers differently — but in the main the portrayal of the woman is clear. The parson well says of her: "She holds in quietness her land of the spirit; but there are battlefields in her nature that fill me with awe by their silence." In some ways she reminds unconsciously of Lady Esmond in Thackeray's historical masterpiece. Her relations to her 156 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY husband are suggested in the slightest hints; they are in little that is actual, but lie in the spiritual sphere. But the in- timation is plain as to the wearing of the gentlewoman's life in the wilderness. As with Gabriella in "The Reign of Law," the book of her life with its changing phases is introduced. It is the story of the gentlewoman of that day. There is the old Virginia home, for which she always longs; the memory of bright girlhood days in Colonial Virginia before the separation from the mother country; the coming on of war; the political divisions which also divide family; the Revolution itself; the peace; the marriage to an army officer; the removal West for the sake of lands bestowed by a generous government upon its soldiers; hardships in the Kentucky forest. Such were the race and schooling that had shaped this character, a character that had ripened and beautified with the years. In her parting from John Gray she had held out to him all the ideals of manhood, for in having put into his hands the Book "out of her own purity she had judged him." Thus "it is the woman who bursts the whole grape of sorrow against the irrepressible palate at such a moment; to a man like him the same grape distills a vintage of yearning that will brim the cup of memory many a time beside his lamp in the final years." As time passed, changes came into her life, and with those changes her final confession to herself of "her love of him, the belief that he had loved her," which "she, until this night, had never acknowledged to herself." "I shall understand every- thing when he comes," her first thought, shadowed into "I shall go softly all my years." "It was into the company of these quieter pilgrims that she had passed: she had missed happiness twice." "It was about this time also that there fell upon her hair the earliest rays of that light which is the dawn of the Eternal Morning." At last with the receding years came young John, and came the letter, and with it the revelation she had known was hers: "If I have kept unbroken faith with any of mine, thank you and thank God!" The situation and the action have been objected to. Some have found them even immoral. The test of a book is its final JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 167 impression. Are the ideals ennobling or debasing? Do they lift up or drag down? A right-minded man cannot but be awed into reverence as he feels the strugglings of human nature carried through tenderly and yet triumphantly, with truth of circumstance to the highest in self. It is the humanness and the humanity of the story which make the strongest appeal. Mr. Allen is striving to come nearer to the divination of the human soul, to apprehending man with his conflicts and con- tradictions and his truth. Much of the book is a poem in prose, pulsating with the sense of a nation's destiny and the spiritual testing of individual lives. "Men and women could love together seven years — and then was love truth and faithfulness." "In the country of the Spirit there is a certain high table- land that lies far on among the outposts toward eternity. . . . But no man can write a description of this place for those who have never trodden it ; by those who have, no description is desired; their fullest speech is Silence." VII. The two opening chapters of "The Reign of Law," Mr. Allen's latest work, possess the same historic consciousness displayed in "The Choir Invisible." There is the underlying recognition of the part the settlement of Kentucky has played in the develop- ment of the country and the part that hemp has had in Ken- tucky's history. There is also the keenest sense of Nature and the expression of her attributes as if in a tumultuous rush — in point of style, a profusion of epithets cast down often without the necessary predicate — the more benignant law of the seasons and their changes portrayed preparatory to a story wherein man obedient with Nature succumbs to the Reign of Law. For "a round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the hemp." Far from being unnecessary, the opening prelude on hemp is but the overture to the wells of passion following like the processes of the tides and suns, the strains of which are constantly heard through the entire piece. And there is the same apparent contradiction, yet two-fold aspect, of Nature in 168 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY the book — the poet's combined with the scientist's, the feminine correlated with the masculine, Gabriella's at last united with David's. Nature and Life, their union and their relation — these are typified by the hemp. "Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted; which must struggle upward, be cut down, rotted and broken, ere the separation take place between our dross and our worth — poor perishable shard and immortal fiber. O the mystery, the mystery of that growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it is borne from the fields of its nativity for the long service ! " We are not done with heredity any more than in "Summer in Arcady. ' ' The opening chapter, catching a note from its pre- decessor, is on religious toleration, wideness of appeal, and openness to new thought; and this note is held continuously throughout. The hero is the descendant of the pioneer who built a church on the edge of a farm that there might be therein freedom of worship forever. Sixty-five years later, when the scientific and philosophical conceptions of the latter half of the nineteenth century furthered by Darwin and his followers had burst upon the world, he, too, with his stubborn honesty and pride, would have acted much the same as David. The in- dignant turning of this progenitor of David's upon the early congregation is of the same spirit as, in "Summer in Arcady," the turning of Hilary upon Daphne's father, the elder who had "expelled him from the Church." It must be remembered that Middle Kentucky has always been the scene of peculiarly fervent and often violent religious excitement and altercations. With the two preludes, one of Nature and the other of History, the story opens with the big, raw-boned boy of eighteen cutting hemp in 1865. The date was the end of old and the beginning of new things in Kentucky and everywhere in the Southern States, among many signs being the opening of the university at Lexington the following autumn. It was the day of rev- olutions, of new expansions and undertakings, new directions of activity and thought in the South specifically and in the world JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 159 generally. These two movements, the local and the world-wide, Mr. Allen seeks to bring together. "For some years this particular lad, this obscure item in Nature's plan which always passes understanding, had been growing more unhappy in his place in creation." A certain birth, a farm and its tasks, a country neighborhood and its narrowness — what more are these often than the starting point for a young life groping for the world beyond, of which it is as yet ignorant ? The introduction of the university and the Bible College is again as the outcome of a century of tradition. It is unfortunate that the time and place are both so near; but they are as neces- sary for the author's story as the breath for life. The educational ideals expressed and hoped for many have held and none has been able wholly to achieve ; a position halfway between North and South, an institution oflearning with no politics, based upon broad ideas and at the same time religious. Ideals far ahead of what has ever actually been realized ! It seems this must be the case, and cannot be escaped. The sensitiveness to the criticism is, there- fore, natural, but the failure has been unquestionable. Heredity plays a part in a second way. The inexorable father never understands the son so much like him. "If I had only had a son to have been proud of ! " he cries. "It isn't in him to take an education." This misunderstanding while still on the same level of life and plane of thought must become emphasized when the boy's enthusiasms and studies have carried him quite beyond his father's point of view. The decision to go to college and to become a preacher was the result of the lad's first awakening, a habit of resolution and change already begun. That change and the innate honesty of his character with the habit of thinking for himself and reaching his own conclusions, meant that other changes were to follow in after years. Stress is laid on the fact that he "was nearer the first century and yet earlier ages than the nineteenth. He knew more of prophets and apostles than modern doctors of divinity." With such premises there cannot escape being a case of evolution. Between old life and antiquated conceptions and new life and living ideas there must grow a schism. 160 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY If in "The White Cowl" and "Sister Dolorosa" Mr. Allen felt that a rigid religious brotherhood and a secluded sisterhood could trample on the springs of human nature, in David's case it is the excesses and bigotry of an extreme Protestantism without intelligent sympathy for the boy's nature and the human nature he represents that provoke the rupture. His inherited traits are shown in his going to the courthouse in Lexington and reading the deed of his great-grandfather granting a church as free to Romanist as to Protestant. A youth with such a man's blood surging in his veins could not shut out new experiences and new truths. He was curious to see and hear a Catholic priest; he wished to visit a Jewish synagogue; he wanted to get the point of view of Churches of every creed. The nature of his mind was one of enlargement; he could not limit himself to one idea without futher inquiry. This tendency must have its natural results according as directed or misdirected. The pastor of his own church preached "a series of sermons on errors in the faith and practice of the different Protestant sects," treading on very delicate ground for delicate souls. The result for one of David's temper could have been foreseen. The night after the first sermon this particular young man had a seat at that other church which had been riddled. It was a rift in the life of the human soul which ultimately had to widen with his nature into a great breach. The case of the Churches may be exaggerated for the purposes of the story; there were many wiser men than these preachers ; and yet it will readily be admitted that not so many years ago sermons of the sort were rehearsed and sought after, one body of Christians arraying itself sternly against another. This could not fail to bewilder impressionable hearts and repel thinking minds. Naturally David's religious peace was disturbed. "The con- stant discussion of some dogma and disproof of some dogma inevitably begets in a certain order of mind the temper to dis- cuss and distrust all dogma." The division into Northern and Southern Churches within the same denomination, each intoler- ant of the other, while apparently slowly disappearing in a new century, was directly after the War more than usually acrimo- JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 161 nious. The methods, too, of analyzing the Bible hurt David. "The mysterious, untouched Christ-feeling was in him so strong that he shrank from these critical analyses as he would from dissecting the body of the crucified Redeemer." In David's interview the pastor seems rough, unsympathetic, and blind ; yet it could have occurred, for there are such men in the Churches, although we know all are by no means so. The catechism scene is a strong one, and with the growing knowledge and wider toleration of to-day it almost seems that it could hardly be possible. But we know such experiences were common with the recreant in the days of the Church militant, if not so still. The heartiest sympathies go out to the agonizing soul of an honest man doubting. " 'I am in trouble! ' he cried, sitting down again. *I don't know what to believe. I don't know what I do believe. My God! ' he cried again, burying his face in his hands. 'I believe I am beginning to doubt the Bible. Great God, what am I coming to? What is my life coming to? Me doubt the Bible! ' " Denominational ism run mad! is what Mr. Allen sees, although it be possibly in his own denomination and college. But this has kept Kentucky and many another state and section from achieving their due educationally. For it must be essentially true. "True learning always stands for peace. Letters always stand for peace." This man could have been saved. It was a worn-out form of belief and practice that he had fallen upon; and if he could have been saved, then he still may be saved and is worth the saving. This is suggested clearly, and is the central thought of the second part of the volume, as much as Faust's redemption is the subject of Part II of Goethe's great poem. Fault may be found in the structure of the book that the true story rests in the first half with the catastrophe. There the book could have ended, and would have ended, did Mr. Allen belong exclusively to the realists. But there was the spiritual awakening of Hilary in "Summer in A ready " ; there was the moral strengthening of John Gray in "The Choir Invisible," where also a new element enters and a new story begins; and there is the struggling for any light in David, An. old creed 162 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY was outworn; a new one to suit the age and the man, it is surely intimated, will be found for the struggler by means of the eternal feminine — Goethe's das ewig weibliche. And yet, while all this seems true as to purpose, it is just as true, like Goethe's "Faust" again, that in point of construction of plot the human interest is the awful struggle of the human soul. The real book to most readers will still end with the climax and catastrophe, as the boy leaves college and goes to his father and mother and the home left two years ago. As he approaches, the remembrance of each familiar spot and scene wells up in him. "Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-ridered fence, there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and their heads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting their breasts, seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them — that thin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-gray twig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of field larks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys out rabbit hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and gay woolen comforts around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanish needles, one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game bag, one eating an apple; a pack of dogs, and no rabbit. The winter brooks, trickling through banks of frozen grass and broken reeds, their clear brown water sometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice. Red cattle in one distant wood, moving tender-footed around the edge of a pond. The fall of a forest tree sounding distinct amid the reigning stillness, felled for cord wood. And in one field — right there before him ! — sound of busy hemp brakes and the sight of negroes, one singing a hymn. O the memories, the memories!" And then comes the blow! "Father, I have been put out of college and expelled from the Church." "For What?" "I do not believe the Bible any longer. I do not believe in Christi- anity." "Why have you come back here? .... O, I always knew there was nothing in you! " It was a blow given and a blow returned ! The presence of Nature is still everywhere. The storm ap- JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 163 proaching at the beginning gives the figure carried out into the farthest detail. It is Nature that awakens David to new conceptions of law like the sap stirring in spring. He beholds "familiar objects as with eyes more clearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive, when the sermon is found in the stone." The scrubby locust bush covered with the wash beneath his window is "one of those uncomplaining asses of the vegetable kingdom whose mission in life is to carry whatever man imposes." "These two simple things — the locust leaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelion shining in the grass — awoke in him the whole vision of the spring now rising anew out of the earth, all over the land : great Nature!" The author's special favorites, the birds, are again prominent — not the cardinal, but the crow, blackbird, quail, dove, and pigeon. David's mental struggles have their counter-type in the pro- cesses of Nature. "There is a sort of land which receives in autumn, year by year, the deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above, for every seed above to reach the ground below; soon again the barren will be the fertile, the desert blossom as the rose. It is so with the human mind." David's trial before the college faculty is pictured with an eloquence worthy of De Quincey summoning the Bishop of Beauvais before the tribunal where Joan of Arc shall be witness for him: "Old, old scene in the history of man, the trial of his Doubt by his Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spirit arraigns and condemns the other half." The author again breaks beyond the narrow bounds of the local and passes into the realms of the universal. What though the scene be laid in an inland college town of Kentucky, the questions are those which thrill and challenge mankind, 164 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY But Mr. Allen cannot be content with negation or destruction. He feels there is something positive beyond, more to be ex- perienced and more to learn in the essay after truth. With the dramatic end of one story another immediately begins. Put upon the stage, the action would end here. But while dramatic- ally the climax has been passed, yet for the removal of the sense of incompleteness a conclusion must be added. Out of the ashes of the old life and the old faith a new structure is to rise — a dwelling spot for love, which must bring forth ultimately the best sort of life and the highest, because rational, ideals of faith. The story fills three hundred and eighty- five pages, and the first reference to the second important character who thenceforth dominates the book, is on page 225 : "David's college experience had effected the first great change in him as he passed from youth to manhood ; Gabriella had wrought the second. ' ' Absorbed with the soul struggle, not a word of Gabriella hitherto ! And who is Gabriella ? The author must go back, and, un- necessarily almost, tell of a first meeting, or at least seeing, at the time of the college days in Lexington. The volume of Gabriella's life must be unrolled. It was a life such as many another had suffered, and it had brought spiritual exaltation. Gabriella was fourteen when the war broke out. There were the changes in the social life in the South and in Kentucky wrought by the war, the decay of the old fabric, and the wrecking of families and lives, and then the spiritual as well as the physical building up and adjustment to the new order. The description forms a detached idyl in the book. "O ye who have young children, if possible give them happy memories! Fill their earliest years with bright pictures! A great historian many centuries ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in battle are the eyes: the soldier flees from what he sees before him. But so often in the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back upon ; we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in the beginning of life. The time arrived for Gabriella when the gorgeous fairy tale of her childhood was all that she had to sustain her, when it meant consolation, courage, forti- tude, victory." JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY 166 Only one false note is struck, in the specific mention of New England, "as respects the original traffic in human souls." The shadow of controversy has no place here. The bringing together of the lives of this man and this woman is effected : the mutual influences of the elements of strength and weakness that have gone to make up both, the support each can offer, the demands each must make. The contrast is wrought between their different sorts of faith and their different natures and needs, and the conquering of neither one wholly, but a strengthening union of both, will be Nature's outcome. There are many fine passages in this latter portion: the sleet and snow storm, the care for the cattle, the life on the farm, the inborn sympathy between man and other animal creatures, a newer and wider interpretation of Nature's aspects and pro- cesses, not as of some direct intention toward man, but as "small incidents in the long history of the planet's atmosphere and changing surface." The love-making is inclined to become too didactic, a discussion of dogmas and of new beliefs and theories in place of old ones, and Gabriella is in some danger of being a "patient Griselda" to the demands of this unconscious but natural egotist. Many a weary hour she will have to pass before he tortuously works himself to an understanding with her. It is a pity that the exigencies of the development of the changes in belief must give space thus far to the discussion of many theories. Artistically it is a blemish, and is to be defended only on the ground that otherwise the actions of David might seem obscure or illogical. Like "Aftermath," this part is an epilogue to a previous story, and will have its fine points, but cannot sustain the same interest. And yet the everlasting truth is gradually unrolled that it is the patience and tenderness and faith of woman whereby man at length finds spiritual regenera- tion and salvation. If Mr. Allen's change of title in his English edition, "The Increasing Purpose," did not indicate this, it would be revealed in the last bit of conversation vouchsafed in the book. Surely the meaning is clear: "Ah, Gabriella, it is love that makes man believe in a God of Love!" "David! Davidl" — A way to a 166 JAMES LANE ALLEN: A STUDY higher and purer faith and conduct of life is implied. Only a description and a reflection are added — of the hemp, the real pervasive element in the whole book, and the emblem of man's life directed toward beneficent ends: "The south wind, warm with the first thrill of summer, blew from across the valley, from across the mighty rushing sea of the young hemp. "O Mystery Immortal! which is in the hemp and in our souls, in its bloom and in our passions ; by which our poor, brief lives are led upward out of the earth for a season, then cut down, rotted and broken — for Thy long service! " Note. — A new work by Mr. Allen, "The Mettle of the Pasture," or, as it was at first called, " Crypts of the Heart" — for Mr. Allen ponders long over, and is easily dissatisfied with, his titles — has been announced by the publishers since the above was written, but has not appeared in time to be included in this discussion. It will be interesting to the writer of these pages to know how far this new volume of Mr. Allen's bears out or controverts some of the judgments here expressed. VI. English Studies in the South Reprinted from " The South in the Building of the Nation," Volume VII, by permission of the Southern Historical Publication Society, Richmond. 1909 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH BEFORE the War between the States — that great dividing line which separates every current of thought, historical, political, social, and necessarily, too, educational, — the special study of English, in any systematic way, was neglected in most Southern schools, as, in fact, pretty nearly everywhere in our country. Not that composition and the critical study ol English style were altogether wanting; but what little training in English was given, was more in the line of a seeming digression, and was classified in most college catalogues — when, indeed, catalogues were published — as "rhetoric and belles-lettres." What gram- mar was learned was acquired through the medium of Latin, by no means a bad, but sometimes a misleading, expedient A course of rhetoric was associated in some way with logic (the latter being treated very much as a form of grammar), and in favored localities the professor of metaphysics was detailed to take charge of this division in the educational forces. The first two years of a college course were devoted wholly to the three studies, Latin, Greek and Mathematics. This was so far modified in the third, or junior year that a place was made for a class in the physical (or natural) sciences. Finally, in the senior year, the principal feature was the lectures on metaphysics by the college president Sometimes, as in old Washington College, Virginia, this last year was formally called the 'English' or 'rhetorical' year, as special attention was given to what were then termed the 'English' branches. These were crowned with the course in 'belles-lettres,' which was evidently intended as a finishing off or rubbing down process, and under this foreign appellation, always a little vague and mystifying as to its exact meaning, was supposed to lurk the idea of the formal study of rhetoric (Blair's or Campbell's "Rhetoric" and Karnes's "Ele- ments of Criticism" were long favorite text-books), and of litera- ture, especially in its flowery phases. The old-time orations and 170 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH methods in essay writing — all traces of which have not yet dis- appeared in the South — give perhaps the best evidence as to the nature of this work. In most institutions — and these were by no means the least conspicuous — the chair of metaphysics was tendered to the gentlemen of the clergy (' moral philosophy' par excellence, they naturally called it), and the conduct of the classes in 'rhetoric and belles-lettres' of course went with it. It seemed to be a prevailing notion that the man who could preach to the community on Sundays was peculiarly fitted for expounding the laws of thought and extracting the beauties of literature on week days. Once upon a time, indeed, this was true. The system was a relic, in part, of the pioneer days, when the preacher was missionary in a manifold sense — the one repre- sentative of letters, culture and higher aspirations in the vicinity. He was preacher and teacher both, perhaps even more of the latter than of the former. But, naturally, in a later period of development, under such a system, not only the study of philosophy, but especially that of English, suffered, being not even secondary, but entirely minor in consideration. The letters and style emphasized were primarily the highly ornamental or what is known technically as the 'rhetorical' — those which suited best the graces of the Southern orator, whether he chose to imitate his teacher and become a pulpit speaker, or preferred to follow the profession of the law, and develop in due time, as was his natural ambition, into a noble statesman of the republic. I would not appear to speak slightingly of older methods of education, when we are still so much at sea as to what is soundest and best and most expedient. The minds trained under older systems were of undoubted and uncommon vigor, serving well the needs of their particular day and sphere. But those needs were then fewer, the conditions of life seem- ingly less complex. This or that system may not meet the demands of our day; that is one thing. But that it did not produce strong men, cultivated men, literary men (as the times allowed), perhaps as efficiently as our more boasted ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 171 methods, is still to be determined by the measurement of actual results. Perhaps, at the time this fashion of thus disposing of the English classes came into vogue, it was the best possible; and many of those teachers of the old regime were men endowed with a love for good reading, moved by the study of the best models, and easily capable of stirring the fresh minds of the crude youths in their classes. I look back with peculiar pleasure upon my own experience with one of these — the late Rev. Dr. Whitefoord Smith, a noted Charleston divine in former days, who was for a number of years a professor in Wofford College. I became a member of one of the last classes this aged and worthy gentlemen ever had the strength to instruct and his enthusiasm and the glowing eulogies he bestowed upon his favorite authors and passages inspired not a few among his pupils with a love for reading, and gave them many practical hints where to go for good books and what books were good. The president of the same institution, Dr. Carlisle, used to give up a portion of his time with his Freshman Class regularly every Friday afternoon, in order to ask each one of us what he had been reading and had become interested in. Probably we may have acquired less formal mathematics in actual amount as the result, and should not now be able to demonstrate any of those geometrical propositions we were sent to the blackboard to work on. But the habit had the rare merit of broadening the narrow limits and interests of a rigid college curriculum ; many of the suggestive thoughts let drop have been treasured up and have constantly borne fruit, and I am sure that we went to the meeting of our debating societies on the same evening better prepared to get and make more out of them. I mention these details, apparently trivial, because they show fairly well the extent and nature of the English courses in our colleges up to a very few years ago — and it was not every college that was so fortunate as to have chairs filled by marked personalities like Dr. James H. Carlisle and Dr. Whitefoord Smith. I suspect, too, that the students of the smaller colleges often fared better even than those of the more formal state universities, where 172 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH there was not the same free, personal contact, which is the greatest factor in college formative influence. A good deal may be said in support of the claim that English studies received at first more distinct recognition and emphasis in Virginia than elsewhere in the South. Virginia, as the oldest of colonies and mother of states, has been the leader in education, and her English affinities and traditions, com- paratively unchanged by mixture with foreign elements, seem to have emphasized not a little the love for English classical literature specifically, and the more exact study and use of the parent tongue. Her three oldest colleges (and they are likewise the oldest in the Southern States) give evidence of this spirit. The College of William and Mary was founded under the patronage of the Bishop of London, and, in direct imitation of English models, emphasized the study of the 'humanities' — borrowing the term from English nomenclature — and her linguistic studies, mainly classical, were always directed to this end. Later, Hampden-Sidney and Washington colleges (the latter now Washington and Lee University) were established almost simultaneously under Presbyterian influence, and patterned, naturally, after the Princeton model of those days. In the prospectus of the former, dated September I, 1775, the debt was frankly acknowledged, with the explicit proviso only, that more attention should be given to English studies. The first interest in historical English work in America was the offspring of the fertile brain of Thomas Jefferson, constantly active, always investigating, and making some experiment or other. He acquired as a law student an enthusiasm for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and continued its advocacy as a definite part of the college curriculum from 1779, when he was a member of the board for William and Mary, until 1825, when the wishes of a lifetime were at last realized by the opening of his pet creation, the University of Virginia. Jefferson had actually written out, seven years before, what is now a curious synopsis of an Anglo-Saxon grammar with specimen extracts, for his new institution; and this was the first formal incorporation of a course in historical English in an Ameriean university, how- ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 178 ever meagre and defective a course of one or two hours a week in itself was. It was likewise another Virginian, Louis P. Klipstein, a graduate of Hampden-Sidney College, who, somehow or other, got over to a German university, and, in order to show his interest in the subject, as early as the forties began the publi- cation of the first Anglo-Saxon texts in America — the Gospels, and two volumes of selections, besides a grammar; but it must be added that scholars in our day pronounce them uncritical, and those of his own left them to lie cold on his hands to be disposed of in presentation copies to his friends. The truth is, it was too early for text-books in Anglo-Saxon in America, whether good or bad. Jefferson made it a condition that the occupant of the chair of modern languages in the University of Virginia should be an expert in the study of the early forms of English. Two scholars, both secured from abroad, filled this chair during virtually the first seventy years of its existence : George Blattermann, from 1825 to 1840, and M. Scheie De Vere after 1844. There was a slight interregnum between the two, and the gap of one or two years was filled by Charles Kraitsir, a curious, all-knowing gentleman, who (at least so states the catalogue) boldly offered instruction not only in the whole realm of the Teutonic and Romance languages, but also in the Slavic and even Magyar tongues. During the long career (1844- 1895) of Professor Scheie De Vere as professor in the University of Virginia he certainly touched more teachers of language and literature than any one man in the South, and perhaps in the whole country. A very incomplete list would contain the names of Edward S. Joynes, Henry E. Shepherd, Crawford H. Toy, Thomas R. Price, James M. Garnett, Rhodes Massie, Thomas Hume, James A. Harrison, Richard H. Willis, Edward A. Allen, Henry C. Brock, Alcee Fortier, John R. Ficklen, Walter D. Toy, F. M. Page, C. W. Kent, W. H. Perkinson, J. D. Bruce and W. P. Trent As regards general instruction in English, however, the Uni- versity of Virginia fared no better than any other institution. Such formal instruction as could be given was left to the tender 174 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH mercies of the professor of moral philosophy. It was not till after 1857 that this much-abused servant of letters was relieved, and the subjects of rhetoric and literature were transferred to the department of history, just established. This marked the period of McGuffey's "Readers" and Holmes's "Histories" conceived for school purposes by the occupants of these two chairs, books which have not yet totally disappeared from our public schools. A distinct chair of English language and literature was first created in 1882, and was filled until 1896 by James M. Garnett, the translator of Beowulf, then principal of St. John's College, Maryland. The logical development was still further extended in 1893, when through private munificence the sub- jects of rhetoric and English literature were definitely awarded a separate foundation of their own, and Charles W. Kent was called for this purpose from the University of Tennessee. In 1896 the English language and German were combined in one chair, whose incumbent was known as professor of the Teutonic languages. This new chair has been filled ever since its for- mation by James A. Harrison, 1 the well-known editor and bi- ographer of Poe, and professor of Romance languages in the university from 1895 to 1898. It should be remarked, how- ever, that in 1896 — on Garnett's leaving the university — Har- rison had taken charge of the instruction in English language. Such has been the history of the development of the study of English at the one institution commonly recognized as the most prominent of all Southern state universities. She in- fluenced those of other states by her principle of election in studies, by her peculiar system of distinct schools of study in place of the old curriculum, by her rigid and severe standards of examination, by constantly distributing a large and influential number of teachers throughout the South. On the other hand, it is also very possibly due to the same influence that many of these graduates, using their alma mater too rigidly as a model, while they undoubtedly raised the standard of education in other directions, also helped to delay for so long the recognition of English studies as of equal importance with Latin and Greek. 1 Professor Harrison has recently died. ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 175 But the need and the feeling were receiving constant utterance. The Southern Literary Messenger is the most characteristic product and faithful exponent of Virginia and the Old South. The first editor, Edgar Allan Poe, emphasized the lack of criticism in America, and forthwith fell to executing a good deal of reckless, but, it must be admitted, wholesome slashing. Later, the ardent John R. Thompson frequently pleaded for a school of letters at the state university, and possibly this had something to do with the changes of 1857. Nor were there wanting attempts on the linguistic side. In the columns of the same magazine appeared two or three articles displaying interest in the origins and development of the language. The number for September, 1848, contained an Historical Sketch of the Languages of Europe, with a Particular Reference to the Rise and Progress of the English Language; and in that for March, 1856, was a discussion of English Dictionaries, with Remarks on the English Language, signed A. Roane. Continuous evidence of similar interest may be found; for the educated Virginian and Southern mind has always been peculiarly sensitive to the proper understanding and use of the mother tongue. But while something had undoubtedly been accomplished, the dawn of a fuller hope was to rise immediately from another quarter. It was an institution other than the State University of Vir- ginia, though it was the work of one of her graduates, that was to have the distinction of creating a School of English in the South which should send forth apostles with all the fervor of converts and enthusiasts. Randolph-Macon College de- serves notice for devoting a separate chair to English litera- ture as early as 1836, almost from its inception; and Edward Dromgoole Sims (a Master of Arts of the University of North Carolina) gave a course on historical English in the year 1839. He was installed in that year as professor of English, after a stay in Europe where he heard lectures on Anglo-Saxon. Tradition tells how, having no text-book, he used the blackboard for his philological work. At the end of three years he removed to the University of Alabama in consequence of having contracted a mar- riage not then allowed under the laws of Virginia. He was pre- 176 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH paring a series of text-books in Old English, tradition again says, when he died in 1845. Had he accomplished his purpose these works would have preceded Klipstein's in point of time. 1 It was again at Randolph- Macon College (though now removed from Mecklenburg to Hanover county) that immediately after the war there was founded a distinct school of English, based on historic and scientific principles, and productive of far-reaching results. I believe that I am but paying a worthy tribute to one whom all his pupils have found a helpful guide and inspiring instructor, in making the statement that this movement was mainly due to the inspiration and effort of one man — Thomas R. Price. I know perfectly well that one or two institutions assert prior dates for their courses in English. Perhaps it is the case. Within the two or three years immediately following the War — I cannot help repeating the phrase as a constant land- mark — the Virginian and Southern institutions were demanding instinctively and almost simultaneously a training course in English, which should have regard to a knowledge both of the tongue and of the literature, the former in order to secure a more thorough appreciation of the value and spirit of the latter. It was all in the air, as we say, and two or three institutions were actively responsive. Gen. Robert E. Lee was called al- most from the surrender at Appomattox to the presidency of Washington College, at Lexington, and his sympathy with the study of English was one of the chief marks of his administration of five years. As a result, Professor Edward S. Joynes was giving instruction in historical English in connection with the study of German and French ; and Col. William Preston John- ston, afterward president of the Tulane University, was called to occupy a newly established Kentucky Chair of History and English Literature. Dr. J. L. M. Curry, later minister to Spain, patron of letters and life-long devotee to educational interests, opened a course in English at Richmond College, expressly de- clared to be of equal importance with the classics, almost before 1 Other occupants of the chair of English at Randolph-Macon were William M. Wightman and David S. Doggett, both afterwards bishops in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 177 the smoke of battle about the Confederate capital had fairly cleared away. Thomas Hume, not long after graduating at the University of Virginia, had been giving definite instruction in English in a more modest female college. And I have no doubt there were others still. Everywhere it was a movement essentially of native growth, and nowhere of foreign importation or imitation. It was a product answering to local needs, as those needs had become intensified through the interruptions and derangements of the War. The suggestion of the course of English at Randolph-Macon College sprang from the study of the ancient languages. The feeling existed that it was impossible to expect appreciation of idioms in a foreign language, when students knew nothing about those in their own tongue. To quote from Professor Price's own words at the time : " It was irrational, absurd, almost criminal, for example, to expect a young man whose knowledge of English words and constructions was scant and inexact, to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period of Cicero." The course pursued in consequence was entirely original in its premises, and endeavored to meet these diffi- culties. Both the disease and remedy were brought out by the condition present; and to this, I think, may be ascribed in large measure the success of the movement and its value as a stimulus. The end set was to place in the ordinary college course the study of English on an equal footing with that of Latin or Greek, giving it the same time and attention, aiming at the same thoroughness and enforcing the same strictness of method. A knowledge of the early forms of English was demanded not as philology pure and simple, constituting an end in itself, but as a means for acquiring a true, appreciative knowledge of the mother tongue, and thereby for understanding its literature and other literatures all the more. It now seems almost incredible that it required so great an effort at the time to take this step or that old traditions could become so firmly crystallized. Professor Price's efforts succeeded all the more easily in that they were seconded by his presiding officer, the Rev. Dr. James A. Duncan, a man of singular breadth &nd sympathy of »3 178 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH mind, who had grouped about him, irrespective of church and denominational ties, a band of worthy associates. Price, as professor of Greek and Latin, gave up the latter to his colleague, James A. Harrison, who had charge of the modern languages, and taking control of the English, developed it side by side with his Greek, so as to cover a course through four continuous years. This was the result of the work of two sessions, 1868-70. The movement soon spread far and wide. Other institutions, impelled by the same needs, either imitated it outright — some of them actually going so far as always to unite the English department with the Greek, as if there were some subtle virtue in the connection (building possibly even wiser than they knew) — or developed out of their own necessities similar arrangements. Indeed, with the courses at the State University under Pro- fessors Scheie De Vere, McGuffey and Holmes ; at Washington College under Professors Joynes and W. P. Johnston, and later James A. Harrison ; at Richmond College, under Dr. Curry, and at Randolph- Macon, under Professor Price, it almost seems that the colleges in Virginia were paying at this time far more attention to the study of English than many of their sisters of like and even more advanced standing in the North and West After the men at Randolph-Macon had been drilled in the rudiments and given their primary inspiration, many of them were dispatched to Europe for further training, and returned Doctors of Leipzig and fired with a new zeal. In mere ap- pearances, it would seem as if this Randolph-Macon migration to Leipzig was the beginning of the attraction exerted by that university on young Southern scholars, an attraction which has been rivaled in recent years only by that of the Johns Hop- kins University. The land lay open before these young men and they proceeded to occupy it. Robert Sharp returned Doctor from Leipzig and was soon called to Tulane; the late William M. Baskervill returned Doctor from Leipzig and started an impulse at Wofford College, in South Carolina, which he broadened and deepened after his transfer, in 1881, to Vander- bilt; Robert Emory Blackwell returned from Leipzig and sue- ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 179 ceeded Professor Price in his work at Randolph-Macon; Frank C. Woodward succeeded Baskervill at Wofford, in 1881, and removed to South Carolina College, in 1887; W. A. Frantz has built up a following in Central College, Missouri ; the late John R. Ficklen, having followed Dr. Price to the State Uni- versity, became associated with Sharp at Tulane. The English fever at Randolph-Macon became epidemic. Dr. James A. Harrison accepted a call, in 1876, to Washington and Lee as professor of modern languages, and formed a new Virginia centre for specialists. Even Price's successor in the Greek chair at Randolph-Macon, Charles Morris, soon resigned to go to the University of Georgia as professor of English. Nor has the manufacture of Randolph-Macon professors of English ever entirely ceased. Howard Edwards, formerly of the University of Kansas; John L Armstrong, late of Trinity College (N. C.) and now of the Randolph-Macon Woman's College; John D. Epes, subsequently of St John's College (Md.); John Lesslie Hall, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins), of William and Mary — are later accessions to a list by no means complete. At the same time that Price left Randolph-Macon to succeed Dr. Gildersleeve in Greek in the University of Virginia (1876), his colleague, James A. Harrison, as we have seen, became suc- cessor of Joynes, who had gone to the new Vanderbilt There has always been something in the quaint, picturesque town of Lexington, high among the mountains at the head of the Valley of Virginia, that has fostered education and letters. For more than a century it has been the intellectual centre of the Scotch- Irish population of the Valley, just as Williamsburg, the seat of William and Mary, was the corresponding pole for the pure English stock in the East Rich memories cluster about the historic town. There are the graves of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and there died Commodore Maury. The presence of General Lee for the five years of his life after Appomattox, made it for the nonce typical as a Southern insti- tution. The college, first called Liberty Hall in the throes of the Revolution, was named for Washington, who tendered it its first considerable donation, and the name of Lee was added after the 180 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH latter's death — the two names that appealed most to Southern youths with a sentiment for history. This was the natural atmosphere for the academic career of Thomas Nelson Page. There were others, too, inspired with kindred tastes. Of six graduates in the school of literature in 1869, all ultimately M.A.'s of the institution, five became pro- fessors — William Taylor Thorn, Duncan C. Lyle, Charles A. Graves, professor of law, Dr. John P. Strider, professor of moral science and belles-lettres — the last two at their alma mater — and Milton W. Humphreys, now professor of Greek in the Uni- versity of Virginia. The Southern Collegian, the student periodical, took at once a creditable place among the best of similar productions, and ranked with the Virginia University Magazine in volume, and perhaps excelled it now and then in grace and form. Col. John T. L. Preston had been professor of belles-lettres at the adjoining Virginia Military Institute since its foundation, and his wife, Mrs. Margaret Junkin Preston, was the characteristic woman singer of the South. Dr. Harrison must have found his new atmosphere congenial, as he set to work to build up a definite English course. He was handicapped, however, by the fact that he was teaching French and German, too, and only English philology; but he was gifted with the literary feeling, and it came to expression in his class-room. A course looking to the Ph.D. was offered, and nearly all the candidates for 'Doctor' could choose English. Many of them did so, and their influence has extended itself in all directions. It is very curious to trace these various ramifications of mutual influences, and to see them acting and interacting, crossing and recrossing. Three main lines may be detected. Just as the University of Virginia, through its graduates, became the pattern for many, especially state institutions, and Hampden- Sidney, Davidson, Central, and particularly Presbyterian colleges felt the influence of the course at Washington and Lee, so Randolph-Macon affected among others, Wofford, and then Vanderbilt, which, in turn, has become a new centre of activity. ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 181 The transmission of this spirit to Wofford College and thence to Vanderbilt University at Nashville, is peculiarly instructive. W. M. Baskervill, trained under Price and Harrison and in Leipzig, came to Wofford in 1876, where he met with a sym- pathetic circle. The president, Dr. James H. Carlisle, had always been interested in English work, and was a close student of the history and meaning of words. Charles Forster Smith, since called to Wisconsin, was for many years fellow-professor with Baskervill, and James H. Kirkland, first an appreciative pupil, was afterwards colleague as Smith's successor. All three of these young scholars took their degrees in Leipzig and were ultimately called to Vanderbilt University, of which Dr. Kirkland is now Chancellor. The English language and letters were steadily emphasized by the close sympathies uniting these three men in their common work in the department of languages. Kirkland's Leipzig dissertation was on an English subject, though he afterwards became professor of Latin; Smith, the pro- fessor of Greek, was a constant contributor on English points; and Baskervill was specifically professor in charge. Through the standard which their fortunate circumstances allowed them to set, a new centre ot influence was formed in Nashville. It was this Wofford influence, if I may be personal for a space, that had much to do with sending me to the University of Vir- ginia to hear Price in Greek, and I but echo the feeling of many in Professor Price's class-room, that it was hard to know to which of the two languages his class leaned the more, Greek or English, so intimately upon one another, especially in the work of translating, did the two depend. At any rate, it is singular that his pupils, stirred by the Greek just as at Randolph-Macon, have used this classical impulse to enter upon the keener study of their native language and literature. I was privileged to be in the last Greek class which Professor Price taught at the Uni- versity of Virginia; and contemporaneous with me at the Uni- versity were other pupils: Charles W. Kent, Ph.D. of Leipzig (now Linden Kent professor of English literature in his alma mater); James Douglas Bruce, of the University of Tennessee; and Professor W. P. Trent, of Columbia University, New York. 182 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH Eventually Professor Price's strong predilections for English, and the memories of the work wrought while at Randolph-Macon, led in 1882 to his acceptance of a call to the chair of English in Columbia University, New York, which he filled until his death. The interest in the early forms of English, strengthened by further study at German universities, led to a revival of interest in the Old English texts themselves. I have already adverted to the unfulfilled project of Sims and to Klipstein's early per- formances. Nothing more of importance appeared in America, until 1870, when Professor March, of Lafayette, Pennsylvania, published a grammar and specimens, which remained in gen- eral use until Sweet's "Reader" appeared. Before this, Professor Scheie De Vere had written his "Studies in English," followed a year or two later by his "Americanisms." Professor James M. Garnett produced in 1882, a line-for-line rhythmic translation of Beowulf, the first American rendering of the ancient epic, an achievement based upon his class-work in St John's College ; the book has since passed through a fourth edition. In 1889, he added a version of the "Elene," the "Judith," "Athelstan," the "Fight at Maldon," in the same form. The "Library of Anglo- Saxon Poetry" was undertaken in 1882, by a Boston publishing house, with the general editorship in the hands of Professor James A. Harrison then of Washington and Lee. The first volume to appear was the text of Beowulf, with an English glossary, edited by Dr. Harrison himself in conjunction with a former Randolph- Macon pupil, Dr. Robert Sharp of Tulane. Pro- fessor Hunt of Princeton furnished the second volume, Dr. Baskervill of Vanderbilt added the "Andreas" as third, and Dr. Kent, then of the University of Tennessee, edited the "Elene" as the fourth in the series. Old English poetry has exercised further fascination for Virginians, and one of the latest books is another translation of Beowulf, in a free-flowing metrical form, by Professor Hall of William and Mary, making the second version of this stirring Germanic epic by an American scholar. It has been seen that the necessity for a complete course in English was felt and received full development in Virginia and the South before the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH 183 affected the movement We cannot too strongly emphasize the fact of this native growth, this development from the needs of the country just after the interruptions and distractions oc- casioned by the War. Nor should we forget that it was an off- shoot from the study of the classic tongues, especially Greek — the love of the grandest of ancient literatures naturally giving birth to a desire for a closer knowledge of the spirit of our own, a literature which so many of us would place in the forefront of all modern expressions of life. The English course at the Johns Hopkins was developed later than some others, and is still partial and incomplete on the side of literary history and criticism. Since, however, under Dr. James W. Bright, the philological course has attained its high degree of scientific accuracy, the tide, which formerly swept across the seas to Leipzig, has been steadily flowing thitherward. Many of Dr. Bright* s best pupils, it seems, come from Southern colleges with a love for their special study already implanted in their hearts. Morgan Callaway, Jr., in Texas ; the late Charles H. Ross in Alabama; St. James Cummings in South Carolina; C. A. Smith, formerly of Chapel Hill, now of the University of Virginia, and T. P. Harrison in North Carolina ; Lesslie Hall in Virginia; and many others — are Hopkins men. Some have preferred the more distant Harvard for the sake of the literary atmosphere, as in the case of John M. Manly of South Carolina, now the distinguished head of the English depart- ment in Chicago University, and W. P. Few, dean 1 of Trinity College, North Carolina. Among Cornell graduates, the most distinguished student in the South is Edwin Mims, also of Trinity but later of the University of North Carolina. I have made no attempt to furnish a full account of all the workers in the South and the work done. I am simply marking out a few distinct lines along which, it seems to me, the move- ment has progressed. Of course this body of teachers, most of them comparatively young men, have to confront peculiar con- ditions in every case, and the work of each must be adapted to 'Now President. 184 ENGLISH STUDIES IN THE SOUTH these accordingly. Every kind of method must be used, every kind of predilection may find its scope. I am not sure that this is in itself to be deplored. I cannot believe that any iron-clad method, however approved, may suit all times and stages of development, every class of students, and (a very important matter, too) the different temperaments of individual teachers. Nor do I mantain that the output of professors and teachers in a special department is the sole or even main test of a man's work. It might, on the contrary, be the evidence of narrowing influences and a cramped environment, the mere reflection of academic dexterity. I believe that the broadest and most help- ful work is often that which inspires with a profound love for culture and letters, and informs the soul with the instinct and the passion forjtruth. Everything depends so much upon the ends in view aAd the character of the work. Looking over dif- ferent college catalogues, I see some lean to aesthetics, some to historical methods; some show enthusiasm for Shakespeare (what- ever else may suffer), some treat specifically of prose style, and some of verse as a science of forms; some instruct by periods and topics, and some lay stress on philology and etymologies. I observe the greatest diversity, and I confess with a certain equanimity there is no opportunity for dogmatizing too rigidly anywhere. No one is altogether right, we may be sure — the study of a language and its literature has so many facets. Let us also trust that no one is altogether wrong. The work is diverse, but, it is believed, not chaotic. I am satisfied that there is turned out each year a body of students from these colleges with appreciation of the spirit of their mother tongue and its native literature. And may not the several enthusiasms and interests each awaken its own peculiar discipleship ? I believe so intensely in the personality of both teacher and pupil and in the sympathy existing between the two at certain stages in this development, that I trust that by all of these ways the spirit of inquiry, of study, of creation, is awakened. For, after all, it is this spirit, the instinct for creative work, which will lead to that future of education, of scholarship, of literary excel- lence toward which, to judge from expression, we are all striving. ENGLISH STUDIES IN TH'E SOUTH 186 There are those who believe always in new possibilities in educational and literary movements, who delight in tracing con- ditions to effects, and in forecasting events and portraying the tendencies of the future. What is to be the result in the course of time of all this instruction in English, this endeavor, this straining to get and give an exacter knowledge of the native tongue and literature? It is just as characteristic, too, of Eng- land as it is of America. It seems to mean, at least, that the literature of the past will be studied, annotated, edited — no name being too poor for reverence. But will it result in broader views of life, in a conscious criticism, in strengthening the per- sonal attitude, so that it may produce an era of its own, with new sources, new aims, and a new fulfillment? It would almost be a pity to close with a query. VII. Two Pioneers in the Historical Study of English: Thomas Jefferson and Louis F. Klipstein A Contribution to the History of the Study of English in America. From The Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America for 1892. TWO PIONEERS IN THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH: THOMAS JEFFERSON AND LOUIS F. KLIPSTEIN THE historical study of English —as nearly every point in the educational history of Virginia — is closely associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. 1 As early as 1779 there is found an expression of Jefferson's interest in connection with the College of William and Mary, of which he was then a Visitor, when he proposed the addition of two new Professorships, one of which should undertake the study of the ancient languages, including both the Oriental and the Northern tongues (Mceso- Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Icelandic), and the other be de- voted to that of the Modern Languages. But while the bill with these features could not pass and only the latter chair was established, Jefferson by no means abandoned his ideas but soon afterwards gave expression to the following opinion: "To the Professorships usually established in the universities of Europe it would seem proper to add one for the ancient languages and literature of the North, on account of their connection with our own language, laws, customs, and history" ("Notes on Vir- ginia," 3d ed., 1801, p. 224) — this being the earliest advocacy in America of the idea of Germanic institutional and linguistic studies. Jefferson expresses himself with even greater freedom in the letter to Herbert Croft, LL.B., of London, dated from Monti- cello, October 30, 1798. It forms the introductory part of the work, An Essay towards facilitating instruction in the Anglo- Saxon and modern dialects of the English Language, printed in 185 1 by order of the Board for the University of Virginia, and mentioned on page 75 of Walker's "Grundriss" under an im- 1 Jefferson's interest in the Historical Study of English has been com- mented on by H. E. Shepherd: American Journal of Philology, III, 211 £. ; Edward A. Allen: Thomas Jefferson and the Study of English, The Academy (Syracuse, N. Y.) for February, 1888; H. B. Adams: Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, U. S. Bureau of Education, 1888. 190 PIONEERS IN HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH: perfect title and with a misleading remark. This letter to Croft was written in acknowledgment of the receipt of the latter's Letter from Germany to the Princess Royal of England: on the English and German Languages (Hamburg, 1797), the dedi- cation of which evidences the influence of the English residence of the House of Hanover upon the closer relationship of the English and German peoples and the beginnings of a movement of intellectual intercourse which has so deeply affected modern English and American scholarship and thought. Croft, as he himself informs us, had republished Dr. Johnson's Dictionary with many corrections and additions, and after editing King Alfred's Will, made a pilgrimage to Germany, following up his philological investigations, with a view to pub- lishing an "English and American Dictionary." To us — and probably to Jefferson — the most interesting part of the letter are the remarks on the English language as influenced by America. "The future history of the other three quarters of the world will, probably, be much affected by America's speaking the language of England. Its natives write the language par- ticularly well, considering they have no dictionary yet, and how insufficient Johnson's is! Washington's speeches seldom ex- hibited more than a word or two, liable to the least objection ; and, from the style of his publications, as much or more accu- racy may be expected from his successor, Adams. [A note at the end of the pamphlet adds, "Mr. Jefferson should have been men- tioned."] Perhaps we are, just now, not very far distant from the precise moment, for making some grand attempt with regard to fixing the standard of our language (no language can be fixed) in America. Such an attempt would, I think, succeed in America, for the same reasons that would make it fail in England, whither, however, it would communicate its good effects. De- servedly immortal would be that patriot, on either side of the Atlantick, who should succeed in such an attempt" (p. 2, note 1). It is in acknowledgment of this publication of Croft's that Jefferson is led to disclose how he came to turn his attention to Anglo-Saxon and to give his own views on the methods of its study. As a student of the law, he was obliged to recur to that THOMAS JEFFERSON AND LOUIS F. KLIPSTEIN 191 source for explanation of a multitude of law terms, and, he tells us, he was especially influenced by a Preface to Fortescue on Monarchies, written by Fortescue- Aland, and afterwards pre- fixed to the latter's volume of Reports. In this Preface to Fortescue, which was published in 1714, the editor devotes fully half his space (pp. xli-lxxxii) to a discussion of the nature of Anglo-Saxon, gives a number of glosses, evidences individual words illustrating its compounds and forcible terms and ex- pressions in place of Latin and Greek ones, and argues that an acquaintance therewith is of especial value to lawyers. Finally, he coats the pill with these sugared words: "The Difficulty of attaining the Language is nothing. It is in Practice so useful, and in Theory so delightful, that I am persuaded no Young Gentleman, who has Time and Leisure, will ever repent the Labour in attaining to some Degree of Knowledge in it" (p. Ixxxi). Jefferson's citation of "the names of Lambard, Parker, Spelman, Wheeloc, Wilkins, Gibson, Hickes, Thwaites, Somner, Benson, Mareschal, Elstob," on page 8 of his Essay, where all save Parker and Wilkins are taken from the "Catalogue of the most considerable Authors," appended to Fortescue- Aland's Preface and giving upwards of thirty standard works of the time, shows that this incitation had its due effect on at least one Young Gentleman. That Jefferson made also other than a mere academic use of his knowledge is gathered from a judgment expressed by R. G. H. Kean, Esq., in the Virginia Law Journal for December, 1877: The "portion of Jefferson's work as a legis- lator is remarkable for his citations from the original Anglo- Saxon laws." Jefferson mentions, besides, in his letter to Croft, his use of Elstob's Grammar — a work written by a woman and based upon Hickes, and the first Anglo-Saxon Grammar written in English, and intended for others of her sex who knew no Latin — and he adds that the ideas which he noted at the time on its blank leaves, he sends as a sequel to his letter for examination. Now there seems every probability that Jefferson's Essay is nothing but these notes later expanded. The contents of the Essay are: first, the Letter to Croft, written in 1797 (pp. 3-5); then, the 192 PIONEERS IN HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH: formal Essay, written in 1818 (pp. 7-20); the Postscript to the letter, written in 1825 (pp. 20-24); Observations on Anglo- Saxon Grammar (pp. 25-33); an d a Specimen (pp. 35-43) — the last two having no date assigned. Indeed, as there is much repetition to be observed, probably enough the "Observations" were taken more directly from the notes in Elstob's Grammar, left comparatively unchanged, while the formal Essay (pp. 7-20), though preceding in the printed form, was clearly written later and was based upon these "Observations," or upon like material. For instance, in the "Observations," there are only two headings — Pronunciation and Declension of Nouns — instead of the later and better developed division into four; again, the number of Hickes's declensions has been reduced in the "Ob- servations" from six to four, but in the formal essay three sim- ple canons suffice to embrace all forms. This last illustration indicates sufficiently well the character of Jefferson's Essay and the nature of his argument. His chief error lies in too great simplification for the sake of unity. Of course, he was mistaken in many of his views according to latter- day standards; but he is to be judged rather from the spirit of his utterance than from its details. He speaks, himself, in all modesty of his slight opportunity for the pursuits in a life busied with varied cares. But he sees clearly and insists upon the great truth underlying modern scientific study, that Old English is nothing but the English current at that time; and this unity and the consequent development he refuses to let be obscured. True, this very persistency led him again into error, as when, be- cause Modern English was but slightly inflected, he was inclined to treat every period of English in the same spirit and to consider the minute divisions into declensions and in accordance with all inflections, useless lumber. Yet how temperate he was, even in this discussion between the methods of the ancients and the moderns — the new phase in the Battle of the Books — may be easily discerned from a comparison of his views with the utter pretentiousness of Henshall's "English and Saxon Languages," issued in the same year with Jefferson's letter to Croft. Also, Jefferson did not clearly enough distinguish the early periods of THOMAS JEFFERSON AND LOUIS F. KLIPSTEIN 193 the language, and was prone to bundle Old and Middle English forms indiscriminately together. All these are serious errors in details; but Jefferson's practical vision, common sense, and historic instinct, comprehended thoroughly the Teutonic origin and the essential unity of all periods of the English tongue, and so far insisted on the necessity of a knowledge of the earlier forms — language, literature, laws, customs — in order rightly to interpret and to appreciate those of to-day, that in fathering his State University he introduced into its curriculum the first course of Anglo-Saxon found in an American institution of learning. The University of Virginia, chartered in 1819, was thrown open to students in 1825; the chair of Modern Languages in- cluded French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Anglo-Saxon; and from that day to this Jefferson's wish has been carried out con- tinuously, and a course in Anglo-Saxon has been constantly given, however meagre and inadequate at times, through the exi- gency of circumstances, it may have become. Of this chair there have been thus far [1892] but three occupants. The first (im- ported, as most of Jefferson's original faculty were, from Europe) was George Blattermann, LL.D., a German by birth, resident in London, who held the position from 1825 to 1840. One who was both his pupil and his colleague has left this tribute: "He gave proof of extensive acquirements and of a mind of uncommon natural vigor and penetration. In connection more especially with the lessons in German and Anglo-Saxon he gave his stu- dents much that was interesting and valuable in comparative philology also, a subject in which he found peculiar pleasure" (Duyckinck's Cycl., II, p. 730, ed. of 1856). Together with his colleague in the chair of ancient languages, Professor George Long, he furnished contributions to a "Comparative Grammar." His successor was Charles Kraitsir, M.D., who published, among other works, a "Glossology: being a treatise on the nature of language and on the language of nature" (N. Y., 1852). In 1844 was chosen M. Scheie De Vere, Ph.D., J.U.D., the pres- ent honored incumbent and senior member of the Faculty, well-known as the author of "Outlines of Comparative Philology" 14 194 PIONEERS IN HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH: (1853); "Grammar of the Spanish Language" (1857); "Grammar of the French Language" (1867); "Studies in English" (1867); "Americanisms" (1872), etc. Although a course of English Literature had been instituted in 1857, in connection with the chair of History, it was not until 1882 that a separate chair for English Language and Literature was established ; and in the present session (1892-3) an additional chair has been added, separating this study permanently into its two component parts, philology and literature, thus carrying out logically to its full development, the principles advocated so early by the illustrious founder. Indeed, the whole subject of the study of English in Virginia, bringing in the perfectly independent work done at other institutions (Randolph-Macon, Richmond, Washington and Lee, etc.), and all at a time when little or no attention was given to this study in more accredited institutions of other States, is so marked in its individuality in the history of education in our country, that its consideration constitutes an important chapter in the history of American intellectual development. Entirely independent of Jefferson's efforts were the labors of Louis F. Klipstein. He is mentioned in Wiilker's "Grundriss," but with even greater inaccuracy than in Jefferson's case. Wiilker asserts with seeming satisfaction that the first efforts in the study of Anglo-Saxon in America were on the part of a Ger- man ("und zwar war es ein Deutscher, welcher zuerst fur Angel- sachsisch wirkte"); but Klipstein was a Virginian by birth, from Winchester, became a student at Hampden-Sidney College, received the degree of A.B. in 1832, and immediately after took the prescribed three years' course in the neighboring Union Theological Seminary. He entered upon the duties of a Presby- terian minister of the gospel in 1835, being licensed by the Winchester Presbytery, but seceded shortly to the New School division in the Presbyterian Church, and must soon have given up preaching altogether, as his license was revoked in 1840. About this time he went to Germany in order to prosecute his studies, and on the title-page of his published works he always signs himself "A. A., LL.M., and Ph.D., of the University of THOMAS JEFFERSON AND LOUIS F. KLIPSTEIN 196 Giessen." Besides, his most ambitious work, the "Analecta," is dedicated to "Augustus Von Klipstein, Ph.D., Professor of Mineralogy and the Art of Mining in the University of Giessen," and it was probably these circumstances, together with his German name, that misled Wulker. Upon his return to Amer- ica, he went southwards to Charleston, South Carolina, for the sake of his health, and engaged as tutor in a family in the neigh- boring country, at St. James, Santee. We learn from the South- ern Literary Messenger for April, 1844, that he began editing about this time a monthly periodical of 24 pages, devoted to the French, German, Spanish, and Italian languages, published in Charleston, and called The Polyglott, which was contemporary with another equally as short-lived Charleston journal, a semi- monthly rival, The Interpreter, directed to the same ends. It was the material thus collected that formed the basis of his "Study of Modern Languages." Two years later (1846) he announced through the Putnam publishing house in New York a series of books on Anglo-Saxon, choosing, in two instances at least, April 1, as an anniversary upon which to write a Preface. Within the next two or three years four of these works appeared : "Tha Hal- gan Godspel on Englisc;" "A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language;" "Analecta Anglo-Saxonica — Selections in Prose and Verse, from the Anglo-Saxon Literature," in two volumes; and "Natale Sancti Gregorii Papae"— jElfric's Homily on the Birthday of Saint Gregory, with miscellaneous extracts. All these books, even though one or two passed beyond the first edi- tion, proved heavy financial losses, and it seems much of the prop- erty of his wife — for he had meanwhile married a daughter of the house where he had been installed as tutor — was lost in pay- ment. 1 This was probably the chief reason why other works which he announced never saw the light of day; as, "A Glossary to the Analecta Anglo-Saxonica;" "The Anglo-Saxon Para- phrase of the Book of Psalms;" "Anglo-Saxon Metrical Legends;" "The Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf;" "The Rites, Ceremonies, and Polity of the Anglican Church;" "A Philo- sophical Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language," etc. 1 A fact gathered from material kindly furnished by Dr, T. P. Harrison. 196 PIONEERS IN HISTORICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH His "Grammar," which appeared in 1848, was dedicated to Orville Horwitz, Esq., of Baltimore, in appreciation of "a friendship which a close intimacy of years has tended only to strengthen;" and the latter reciprocated this interest by writing an Introduction on the Study of the Anglo-Saxon Language — filling 22 pages. It is noteworthy that despite Klipstein's German degree, he fashions himself on the English models of the day. He re- produced the work of English scholars in a special form for American students. It is Thorpe's "Gospels" without change, a "Grammar" akin to Thorpe's translation of Rask, two books of "Selections" suggested by Thorpe's similar volume, that he gives to American readers. But with all their sad defects and errors and uncritical editing, his interest in the subject and the spirit and purpose of his work, demand a certain recognition ; and the actual performance ranks fairly well in point of origi- nality, if one considers the advance in the scholarship of to- day, with similar performances by latter-day American students, who have reproduced in special American editions work already performed by European scholars, with more or less changes both for better and for worse. Klipstein is said to have been very unfortunate in his later life, which he ended under a cloud. He died in 1879. VIII. The National Element in Southern Literature From The Sewanee Review, July, 1903 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE IT is well understood that in any proper acceptance of the term, American literature ought to reflect the progress and processes of American thought and life. What seems a truism in uttering it, was long hidden from the practice of American writers. At first American letters represented almost anything but American life, and, in consequence, no life anywhere. The American inherited English law and English custom; these he made his own and modified them to suit his convenience. He also inherited the English language and English literature com- plete at his command ; but not so happy always were the uses to which he subjected the language, and his direction in literary work was frequently obtuse. There could not here be the same mastery over matter as in the laws; there was not the same independence of conditions nor the same self-reliance. In this case isolation wrought a harm that in the other had stimulated development. In thought, in literature, or in the attempts that passed under the name of literature, English traditions, English models, English pro- ductions, were long dominant ; English culture in education and letters was merely transferred, and too often, after tradition became weakened, there was current what purported to be the genuine article under borrowed forms that were but shoddy. Nor in the nature of the case has this influence ever been entirely removed. The War of Independence was waged, and the two countries were severed as States politically, but the thought of the new nation was still largely moulded in forms of the old. The whole course of literature in America may be described as a continual struggle: first, for existence; then, for recognition; and, at length, as many of us believe in certain departments for rivalry. How far this last has gone might lead to interesting and serious questioning. If we take the history of American literary achievement, 200 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN and run over the names and select that portion of the work of each which has secured permanence, there will always be found in what has survived, the native and local, united with the national and spiritual, character as opposed to the imitative. Franklin was the first American in his sturdy manhood as revealed in his Autobiography. Irving lives to us of to-day in what he made his possession: the beginnings of a Greater New York, the haunts of the Hudson Valley, and the Catskill Moun- tains. Cooper treated interior New York, which was then border land for white man, Indian, and beast. Hawthorne portrayed the spirit of early New England Puritanism — its sternness and severity, as well as its faithfulness and strength. Poe saw visions of the artist, and depicted vividly what was to his active fantasy a very real dream-land. Bryant caught the poetry lurking in American woods and streams. Longfellow lived and spoke the sweetness of the simple dignity of American home life. Whittier sang of the New England farmer boy in the attitude, though he could not attain the voice, of Burns. Emerson was a clarifying voice delivering to the growing material conditions of a new world a message of humanity and of fuller and richer spiritual life. Whitman was a sound from the same new world, so acute and in phases so novel that he is not yet satisfactorily placed. Holmes was the genial poet of occa- sion; Lowell, the first distinctive American critic; and Curtis, the man of letters in public and political life. Timrod's lyric pipe rejoiced with the coming of spring in his Carolina home, and Lanier found music in the cornfields and marshes and streams of Georgia. The historians began with the settlement of their own country, and were thus led to related Spanish and French worlds and to kindred Germanic institutions. The point is, that the rule and degree of success has been that what a man found nearest his heart and into which he had most closely and spiritually lived — what was his own and could not be taken away — is that which a later generation has accepted and received from him as individual and is not willing to let die. When the local and national and racial flavor has been caught, together with insight into elemental truth of character, and SOUTHERN LITERATURE 201 artistic form has fused these qualities, then a masterpiece of literature results. When this large insight has failed or is limited, there has necessarily arisen the tinge of provinciality. Now it is just this touch of provinciality that has continually been urged against the literature of the South. But it is true not only of the South. It is in the South as elsewhere in America. It is the sad, admitted truth of American literature generally. The new nation as a whole must confess that there has been and is much truth in the charge of provinciality. And so it may be repeated. Much said of Southern literary con- ditions is not simply Southern, but a common American charac- teristic, with special modifications and limitations springing from local causes. To be rigidly scientific in this mode of investigation, one ought first to find out what is generally American, and then determine what is specifically Southern by special deviation from the type. It is evidently unfair to charge a section with what is frequent enough and, indeed, common elsewhere. This is constantly to be kept in mind. The greatest mistake made in judging Southern literature, even by its friends, is that we are apt to speak of it by itself as if it were a thing apart and of a country apart. "There is so little that is permanent in Southern letters," one will cry; another will explain that the conditions were unfavorable; and so forth and so forth. But one feels very much like answering: true — and it has been largely true of the entire country. There is little that has been permanent in American letters; the con- ditions have been unfavorable to literature. It is a half-truth everywhere in our country. It is true also of the South, but it is not of the South alone. Another point of difference must not be overlooked: the immense disparity in population and wealth created for the last generation by the four years of war. In New England the literary men largely remained at home, and were still writing and singing at its close. Nor Bryant, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes, nor Emerson, nor Whittier, nor Lowell engaged in active warfare. True, they were engaged strenuously with their pens, a happy circumstance not permitted to others. There 202 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN was necessarily much loss throughout the country, but the physical and spiritual resources of the losing section were prostrated and reduced to exhaustion. Theodore Winthrop and Fitz James O'Brien met death in service, and doubtless other gallant youth died in the glow of a splendid promise. But the loss of the South was peculiarly from her heart and of the best, and many a young man with literary aspiration did not live to see twenty-five. Such losses cannot be esti- mated, but they are to be felt and measured, nevertheless, for a succeeding generation. Then following upon this struggle came a second and more bitter struggle — a fearful blight. It was not merely that of poverty; it was the demands of entirely changed conditions of living upon the survivors, struggling at the same time for bare existence even. For, in a pathetic sentence, attributed to Sidney Lanier, concerning the decade immediately after the War: "With us in the South it has been for the past ten years a question simply of not dying." Out of these conditions in a whole section of country a new literature was to spring. The wonder of it all is that when it came it was so spontaneous, so rich, so full of life and hope! There can be no doubt of the great change wrought by the War between the States everywhere in America. This conse- quently finds its purest expression in American literature. This war makes a true line of demarcation between the old and the new. Its close introduced a period of great expansion and de- velopment and change everywhere. In literature it was a for- mative period. Run over the files of the current magazines and periodicals of the time, and you can read between the lines and discern the high color, the unsettled condition, the ex- aggerations, and the alarms everywhere. But just as in the turmoil of the Middle Ages the roots of the Renaissance struck deep, so on a less scale the disturbances of the War contributed to the soil nourishment for the rejuvenating, creative epoch to follow. Historic consciousness was bound to grow: there was history from whatever side one viewed it. The Nation was shaken to its centre, and the people stirred to the quick. The soil and atmosphere were formed. The national sense was de- SOUTHERN LITERATURE 208 veloped, and literature was the gainer. National feeling exulted on one side ; on the other the love of old traits and affection for their characteristic types. Both necessarily aided in inducing the romantic cast of mind. Hope and self-reliance were present to the youth everywhere. The spirit of expansion naturally ushered in an epoch of travel, and we consequently find de- scriptions in abundance, telling of spots and corners unvisited and unknown before. The sense of isolation was being done away with; the connection with the rest of the world becoming closer. The spirit of provincialism was gradually passing. The American tourist began traveling over the globe and revealing new phases of civilization ; the American engineer penetrated to the heart of the wilderness in his own country, and left no waste places. A romantic revival in American literature was most natural and inevitable. Side by side with this, and apparently very contradictory, in that part of the country most settled in its economic and social conditions and least affected by these movements of expansion as was the great West, and least influenced by the changes in social and physical being as was the South, there arose at the same time in New England the beginnings of a school of analy- sis and dissection in fiction. But even in New England at first, as in other parts of the country, the native romance in localities was finding utterance. The early effects of the War were seen. There had sprung up a general interest in the varied phases of American manhood thrown together at haphazard in the camps. Old types in odd corners were studied anew, and fresh types were revealed. Thus after 1865 and before 1870, appeared Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Folks," descriptive of New England village life, Mr. Aldrich's "The Story of a Bad Boy," Whittier's "Snow Bound," an idyl of New England, and his "Ballads of New England," and Longfellow's "New England Tragedies." All were roman- tic and sprang from their soil and section. The same note echoes over the land. Even Mr. Howells begins his literary career poetically enough in describing his "Venetian Days" and "Italian Journeys." Parkman is portraying with pic- 204 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN turesque vividness the history of French possession in the new world. A voice from the far West, in California, finding a new material, striking full upon this native note, and recognizing an essentially fitting form in the short story, is obtaining recogni- tion in Bret Harte. Of writings in the South, Sidney Lanier's "Tiger Lilies," imperfect as it is, was perhaps the only signifi- cant publication in those first five years after the War. How silent is the voice of a whole section of people! They were struggling for bare existence even, as Lanier had put it. Not until after 1870 does the new Southern literature begin — the year in which the two recognized leaders of the past, John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms, both died. It was also the year of the death of Judge A. B. Longstreet, the author of "Georgia Scenes," those frank expressions of home growth. That too was the year of the death of Gen. Robert E. Lee, at the head of Washington College, Virginia. Nothing emphasizes more the fact that the old was over. The new was looked forward to, half fearfully almost. The half decade of years before the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, rounds out the Nation's century of existence. With this sense of fullness literature in America takes firmer hold. The contrast is growing between the warm, full-blooded romantic spirit and the more cold, though scientific and subtle, analysis of realism. The strife becomes at times even acrimonious. The sway of the analytic school of fiction in New England shows that the domination of the past singers and prophets, the generation of Longfellow and Whittier and Emerson, is over. Other ideas have taken their place, and new writers have supplanted them in controlling taste. A de- parting note, though a full one, is struck in Emerson's "Society and Solitude" in this same year, 1870. The new method is seen in Mr. Howells, who for both art and conscience's sake entered upon a career of novel-writing and propagandism. With Mr. James he announced for American fiction the more philo- sophic doctrine of naturalism and realism — a means obtained by analysis of motive and character and study of environment, as apart from more imaginative story-telling. It is interesting SOUTHERN LITERATURE Mi to note that neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, at this time so closely identified with Boston and the Atlantic Monthly in their work, was of New England birth, and the spirits these conjured had little kinship with Hawthorne's Salem witches; they were not of American raising, but were the results of wider ac- quaintance with the schools and systems: they were foreign, but were meant to be world-wide; they were not native, but sought to escape the local and provincial. In sharp contrast, beyond the Hudson, the newly discovered types through the slowly evolving South and over the rapidly developing West take on a local and native and more romantic setting. This spirit becomes particularly strong in the South, and ultimately receives there perhaps its finest and freest ex- pression. This movement in American letters — a momentous one for the development of our national life and spirit in the twenty critical years from 1870 to 1890 — cannot be understood without the clear recognition of the importance of the Southern writers and some little study of the significance of the Southern romantic spirit. There had been hardly an issue of a typical magazine like the Century for ten or fifteen years without a native romantic story, and that usually a Southern one. So completely did this movement dominate the American thought and output of the time! This is the true significance and glory of the new Southern literature. Its weakness was the prevalence of dialect and a seeming aversion from characters who spoke even the ele- ments of the King's English. But even in this particular the dialect was at first used not as an end in itself, but as a means of interpreting more directly both native character and actual life. As a frank revelation of fresh modes of national life and thought, even dialect could find its justification. Here was something admittedly spontaneous and rich, racy of the soil and filled with warmth and color — for, if one may be permitted the reference, there is plenty of both in the South — and in how- ever narrow and restricted a sphere, it represented an American spirit at last. And thus by an apparent paradox the spirit of this literature in the South became for a time in certain aspects the least sectional and the most representative and national. 206 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN This native spirit became exemplified in many places and in many ways, for it is not intended to assert that it was not else- where too; the meaning is solely to emphasize this literary movement in the South in its relation to the national movement going on. From California came Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." In Indiana appeared Edward Eggleston's "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and "The End of the World." Mark Twain gave experiences of the far West in "Roughing It." Charles Dudley Warner re- vealed a new and delightful vein in "My Summer in a Garden" and in "Backlog Studies." John Burroughs was poetically alive to Nature, whether in birds or in poets, both songsters. Mr. Aldrich continued in "Marjorie Daw;" Miss Alcott presented to childhood "Little Men" and "Little Women;" Mr. Stedman stimulated American criticism of American poets in a frankly sympathetic and graceful vein. The new era was first fully announced with the spirit of the centennial year of 1876. Literature in the South, showing feeble signs here and there, grew bolder and more conscious. It was well for our common country and for the fostering of the national sentiment that so closely upon Appomattox, the tragic close of one war, followed at Yorktown the celebration of the close of another. Between 1865, the close of the Civil War, and 1875, the year of the first centennial celebration of the Revolu- tion, there was but a brief decade. At the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, written by a Virginian, who could deny a Virginian and any Southerner a welcome to the centennial city? There followed the era of good feeling; then it was made possible that in a short time after division a closely contested national election could be held ; then all sections be- came represented once more in the President's Cabinet by the selection of a Tennesseean. The feelings of the War had mellowed and fallen into retro- spect, and one could write tenderly and with full pathos of its romance and its tragedy. The beginnings of a new national life and literature and of Southern literature in national aspects had become possible. A Virginian writer, John Esten Cooke, could SOUTHERN LITERATURE 207 drop awhile stories of war time and go back to the colonial days held in common by all. A new writer, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, could become introduced to literature and draw inspiration by describing Yorktown and Old Virginia at the time of the Revolution. Societies of the Revolution soon sprang up, ce- menting national life over the country, looking away from the struggle of State against State to the previous common struggle side by side. A new era had arrived for the whole country, and gloriously did Southern letters appropriate its spirit. New names were to become known, older ones were to gain fresh lustre. It was a time when a new generation was preparing for college, and those who had just entered the University of Virginia — so long representative of the best in the South — when the surrender at Yorktown was celebrated will recall how with a thrill the Southern young manhood at Alma Mater rejoiced that this was their inheritance too, not to be taken away. The centennial year, 1876, saw also the beginnings of a new educational movement and of higher ideals of scholarship and culture. It was the year of the opening of Johns Hopkins Uni- versity, in Baltimore, halfway between North and South, the first instance of German university methods fully applied to American conditions, destined to revolutionize the attitude of education in America and particularly to exert a deep influence upon the training of young Southern scholars. The most notable member of its literary faculty, Dr. Gildersleeve, was brought from the University of Virginia as professor of Greek. It was also the year of the opening of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, near the centre of the Southern Mississippi Valley. The University of the South, at Sewanee, theTulane University, in New Orleans, as well as the new development of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, were all growths mainly of this later period; and most of the Southern State universities and private colleges gradually mapped out new and more modern lines of development. Particularly the new movement of the study of English in the South, first distinctly promulgated in 1 868 by the late Prof. Thomas R. Price— who was then at Ran- dolph-Macon College, Virginia, and who died the oldest member 208 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN of the Department of English in Columbia University, New York — spread and vitalized continually in the hands of his pupils new centres over the Southern country. Keenest of all, the national centennial year, 1876, strengthened the voice of the new Southern literature. It was the year of Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," his most characteristic sketch of Mississippi River reminiscence. "The Centennial Cantata" was written by the Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, whose sym- phony of "Corn," uniting intense local color with a classical spirit, had appeared but a year before. This centennial year was also the year of the publication of Lanier's poems, the chiefest expression of poetic feeling in the South, and one of the most original and intense the entire country could claim apart from Poe. That it was not permitted Lanier to enter upon the land he confidently hoped and battled for, made his position all the more notable. To him was decreed not the victor's wreath, but the martyr's crown. Like some Moses, he was permitted only to view afar off from the mountain top the glories of hopes he felt some day must be realized. His early end was prophetic. In the pathos of his struggling life, checked by untoward conditions and thwarted by ill health, in spite of which he still achieved, there was revealed all the more clearly the symphony utterance of the emotions that passed delicately yet deeply across his soul. The influence spread rapidly. Before 1881, the year both of the celebration at Yorktown and of Lanier's death, Cable had finished his early and best-known works: "Old Creole Days," "The Grandissimes," and "Madame Delphine." Richard Mal- colm Johnston's stories were characterizing Middle Georgia cracker life — the Middle Georgia of the former "Georgia Scenes" and "Major Jones's Courtship. " From the same Middle Georgia section came "Uncle Remus," and the grown-up boys of the South of all ages smiled tenderly once more at the recol- lection of negro 'mammies' and 'uncles' and the sunshiny and rainy days of youth, which they too had passed in the company of Brer Rabbit. The East Tennessee mountaineer was brought out as picturesquely as his surrounding landscape in the pages of SOUTHERN LITERATURE 209 Charles Egbert Craddock. Virginia contributed the spiritual record of the war fought on her soil, and the tender relationship that existed between man and master in Mr. Page's "Marse Chan" and "Meh Lady." And not long after the Kentucky blue grass land was to take up the note in Mr. James Lane Allen. Those were the first glorious summer days of Southern letters. Other sections moved in the spirit, using a native and ro- mantic background for the portrayal of the varied phases of American life and experience. There were the verses of James Whitcomb Riley and H. C. Bunner, and later came Brander Matthews's "Vignettes of Manhattan" and Hamlin Garland's "Main Traveled Roads" and Eugene Field's lyrics with America writ large in varied characters. Stockton sometimes went deliberately southward to Virginia for his setting; and Maurice Thompson, from his Georgia and Confederate ex- periences, told some of the best of all negro dialect tales. A little later in the South were the stories of H. S. Edwards from the same Middle Georgia section of watermelon, peaches, darky, and mule; the scenes of John Fox, Jr., in the mountains of Kentucky ("On Hell-for-Sartain Creek" admits an epic breadth in four pages); the character sketches of Miss Grace King, Mrs. Stuart, and Mrs. Davis in New Orleans; new pictures of Old Virginia by Mrs. Burton Harrison; stories of Tennessee mountain life by Miss Sarah Barnwell Elliott, of Sewanee; Mr. Harben's stories of Northern Georgia; the society verse of Samuel Minturn Peck; the dainty stanzas of Father Tabb; and the more thrilling and dramatic notes of Madison Cawein. The style of romantic fiction steadily — perhaps too steadily — persisted ; but the people, like those of England before them in the case of Dickens's London creations, recognized it as their own and did not tire. They insistently refused to learn from the critics and the fashions on the Continent. Then was ushered in the wave of romance over the country. No American novel much talked about but was romantic and historical. Taking a time but five or six years back, the leaders of 1897 were Dr. Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" and Mr. Allen's "The Choir In- «5 210 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN visible." Both had the native, historic, romantic setting, and went back whether in Philadelphia or in Kentucky to the days of the fathers of the republic. For the next year, 1898, Mr. Page's "Red Rock" was a story of the South under Re- construction. And then in 1899 and 1900 the novel-reading public saw the phenomenal advertising and sale of "David Harum," "Richard Carvel," "Janice Meredith," and "To Have and to Hold." The secret of "David Harum's" hold upon the people was the same native flavor, the portrayal of an elemental and universal character — a character that smacked not of Cen- tral New York alone, but could have come from anywhere in any of our states. Such a conception was closely akin in method to many of the characters and oddities portrayed in Southern life, and in its very defects and limitations was intensely American. "Richard Carvel" was of colonial Maryland amid all the largeness of outline and careless ease of a Southern colony. "Janice Meredith" might have gained her name farther South — for both were good Virginian, and pace the dedication, some of the sunlight from the terraces of Mr. Vanderbilt's estate of Biltmore, in the Western Carolina mountains, may have been caught and become confined within its pages. "To Have and to Hold" was a full-length picture of a colony of cavaliers. Maurice Thompson's story of the original Virginian Territory Northwest of the Ohio, "Alice of Old Vincennes," was of the same general class. So far did the movement take hold that the Century Magazine denominated its leading feature for 1901 "a year of romance." The strength of the same movement appeared in works like Mr. Churchill's "The Crisis," por- traying St. Louis, and Mr. Stephenson's "They That Took the Sword," picturing Cincinnati, both border cities in border states, in war time. Mr. Cable's "The Cavalier" was a tale of war and love with a New Orleans regiment doing service in Mississippi. And at the present Kentucky emphasizes its happy central position as a promise for a centre of literary endeavor, both for the South and the country, not only in the more serious workers already named, Mr. Cawein in verse and Mr. Allen in prose, but also in instances like Mrs. Nancy Huston Banks's SOUTHERN LITERATURE 211 "Oldfield," the Kentucky "Cranford," and in the authors of those uneuphonious feminine, but very characteristic Dick- ensy sketches, "Juletty," "Mrs. Wiggs," "Lovey Mary," and "Emmy Lou." Despite the fickleness of popular impulse, and apart from the question whether the supply both of the dialect story and the historical novel be already exhausted, this eagerness and enthusiasm of the American public disclose a craving in the popular heart. The inherent weakness is that this order of work is not necessarily in the line of development toward some- thing else, something better and greater, but it constitutes a species and end in itself and yields itself too obviously to imita- tion. Nevertheless the paths mapped out in historical romance are as old as Scott and Dumas and as modern as Robert Louis Stevenson, and herein lies one of the roads toward creating a national literature. To become national, a literature must draw succulence from the roots of past achievement and the spirit of former generations. And readers of the late Mr. Fiske's volumes know that no history is more romantic in setting and more rich in literary possibility, more distinctly national in elements and character, than the early heroic living of "Virginia and Her Neighbors," and the history of the planting and form- ing of the various English, Spanish, French, Indian, and Negro Southern and Southwestern colonies in America. In this school of rich color and imagination Southern intensity and depth and emotion and Western unconventional ity and largeness have played a leading part. Less artistic, beyond doubt, than the calmer perfection of the New England school of objective analysis — a very important source of influence and one more in consonance with contemporary world thought and in advance telling of the morrow — yet it possessed at least the personal appeal. Looking at the history of the actual move- ments and the obvious feelings of the American people, apart from any theory as to what might or ought to be, there has been an essential difference in the appeal of the two schools. The principle may be illustrated with a comparison. Before Shakespeare's day there was a struggle between the classic 212 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN imitators and the native romantic, albeit crude and exaggerated, English spirit; and with all its excesses, nature won! So the intensely analytic school in America, however painstaking and studious in art, has seemed to the people too impersonal, has borrowed its impulse from foreign sources — from George Eliot in England, from Tolstoy in Russia, from Zola in France, and from Ibsen in Norway. While less significant in meaning and in power, the more romantic school was yet native in the hearts of the American people, sprang spontaneous from American soil, and struck roots deep down into American life. It was following the example of its early masters : of Irving and Cooper and Hawthorne and Poe. And it was geographically located everywhere: in New England and in New York, in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia and Louisiana, in Indiana and in California. It was the buoyancy of American manhood finding utterance; it was the expression of reflections passing over the soul of American life. It has not been the full accomplishment, it has not become formulated into a system in its great variety of utterance; but it has shown at least the rich world of native and national material. It has been a new world entered upon in the new century of national existence. The American centennial of 1876 opened the gates of the Nation wide; the heart of the people responded. American life was obtaining a distinctive expression in its literature. Could it only continue in its advance to something higher! Has that something higher come ? Has the advance been a steady one ? Is it that the soil is not yet deep enough ? Is it that we are a new country ? Is our material poorer ? Is in- spiration crushed by untoward circumstances and want of nourishment? Are the moods so compelling? Are culture and interest in the problems of life deep, genuine, unmistakable, true? Is education faulty? Are our universities devoted to over-specialization, and while the practical knowledge of doing things and matters of technical investigation are unquestionably advanced, the higher creative work and the literary spirit oft- times restrained ? While we seem to have better training than ever, is true culture a matter of such slow growth that another SOUTHERN LITERATURE 213 half dozen and more generations are needed to nurture it ? Is it that the paths followed permit of a certain development, but forbid greater reaches? An undiscovered country had been revealed and roamed through, but there did not always follow more careful draughting and added power of characterization. The same types were too often repeated and the sense of fresh- ness and novelty was gone. Is it that the romantic tendency must be restrained by the laws of growth in thought, experience, and art, by more highly intellectual powers and thus by an approach to more analytical and realistic work ? Is it that the intense sociological and spiritual ideas characteristic of the new century are forcing themselves also into a New South and an expanding West and casting out romantic dreams and ideals, as is seen conspicuously and curiously in the evolution of the stories of Mr. James Lane Allen ? In any case, the decade after 1886 must be confessed as a whole to have been one of rebound. The promise was not alto- gether kept up. Our American writing, like our American life, did not develop in all directions, but had to confess its limita- tions. It could often produce the successful short story, but not the long novel; it would inspire a quatrain and a sonnet in verse, but not sustain a long narrative or complete dramatic poem. But the outward flow of the tide was again American and not merely Southern. The South shared in a common de- pression and weakening with other parts of the country. The two cannot be looked at except as closely conjoined ; for the law of development and influence and evolution is also traceable in literary life. The decade from 1876 to 1886, as described, was the period of American discovery in new fields. The old Scribners Monthly could change its name to The Century, and boldly de- clare an advanced patriotism. It raised the standards of belief in a native literature, and for a time promulgated the principle that the writing in its pages should not be borrowed, but should be our own — it should henceforth be only American and not, as hitherto, largely British. This was in 1880. Verily, the experiment had its reward. Mrs. Burnett's earliest and best 214 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN writing; Mr. Cable's artistic "Grandissimes" and "Madame Delphine;" Mr. Howells's strong pieces, "A Modern Instance" and "Silas Lapham;" Mr. James's "Bostonians;" work of Mr. Harris, Mr. Allen, Harry S. Edwards, John Fox, Mrs. Stuart — all appeared in rapid succession in that one publication. Also, American criticism by Stoddard and Stedman. Edward Eggle- ston's colonial sketches, the War Series, the Life of Lincoln, Joe Jefferson's Autobiography, numerous history sketches and character portrayals, attempting to bring out national life and spirit, appeared rapidly in its pages and gave the new magazine the character its name hoped to illustrate. However, whether unfortunately or not for the promise of this national movement then so earnestly advocated, this magazine, too, later receded from its first strenuous position in its early note for a purely native and possibly national school of letters. Yet perhaps its very change of front was derived from a greater sense of security and a stronger consciousness of what literature had to be. But if the first surprise of newness and originality was gone, yet in certain directions of literary and intellectual life in the Southern States there has been steady effort crowned with the strength of growth and accomplishment. True, this has not always been with an even advance in art, but certainly with advance in energy and outlook and power and vitality. Among instances the development of a school of literary criticism in the South is discernible. Passing over Sidney Lanier's lectures about 1880 at the Johns Hopkins University on "The Science of English Verse," "The English Novel," and "Shakespeare," important in the history of American criticism, but isolated phenomena in their section, there have been recent appearances which promise in their influence to be the source of a conscious movement. In 1892 appeared the " Life of William Gilmore Simms" in the American Men of Letters series, which became a study of former general Southern literary conditions. Its author was Professor Trent, then of the University of the South, at Sewanee. Whatever the objections raised to the Simms volume, it was a brilliant production as a young man's first effort, and declared that a school of criticism was forming in the South. SOUTHERN LITERATURE 216 It was the same year, 1892, that The Sewanee Review was started under Professor Trent's eye, and through him became the chief, and for a time the only critical literary mouthpiece of its section. Five years later appeared the first serious critical con- tribution on the contemporary literary movement in the South in the volume on "Southern Writers" by Professor Baskervill, of Vanderbilt University, a piece of work unfortunately left in- complete by the author's untimely death, but carried on by a number of his pupils. It is interesting to note that this critical movement thus begun has been associated with two pupils of Professor Price and two chairs of English literature in neighbor- ing institutions, representative of the entire Southern country in their spirit and in the national consciousness of their work. In its educational activity the South has contributed some of the brightest scholars to the splendid list of Johns Hopkins alumni during its first quarter of a century, one of whom, Dr. Woodrow Wilson, as the new President of Princeton, has con- ceived his opportunities and duties in a national sense. As representative of a thought movement, Mr. Walter H. Page has filled the editor's chair successively of the Forum, Atlantic Monthly, and The World's Work, a worker in the broadest and sincerest national feeling. As a literary and historical interest, chairs of English Literature and of History are receiving the greatest emphasis in nearly every Southern college and uni- versity, and their work is usually conceived beyond the sec- tional on behalf of the national ideal and the widest appeal. The emphasis of truth and principle, the production of men of culture, and the conquering of provinciality, are objects of their untiring effort Indeed, this intense literary and historical interest now manifest at a number of points in the Southern States, and particularly the number of historical publications, ought to prove, despite all deficiencies and limitations of sphere, an important means whereby a true development may ultimately be assured. Similar signs are discernible in the more special field of creative literature. It is hardly six years ago, in 1897, that both Mr. Allen and Mr. Harris, and a year later Mr. Page — all of 216 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN whom are still actively engaged in writing — published their first long stories. Two years later, in 1899, Miss Johnston's first courageous bid for recognition was a complete novel, followed at once by a serial in the Atlantic Monthly, "To Have and To Hold," with the promise of its splendidly audacious opening chapters hardly fulfilled. Hitherto the new movement in Southern letters, apart from Mr. Cable's noble "Grandissimes," had been too far restricted to the limits of the short story. These writers now wished to show their added strength — that their flights could be sustained through an entire volume. In the steady growth and increase in strength of two writers like Mr. Harris and Mr. Allen through a number of years lies the greatest promise for the future. Literature is made the serious business of life. No more unwearying student of local color and of elemental human nature can be found in America to-day than Mr. Joel Chandler Harris. The best-known of his early works, "Uncle Remus," as I had occasion to say in another paper, was a contribution to the folk-lore of the world. It was the happy intuition of genius to record and invent these sayings and doings of Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit, and such finds are not of every day. But Mr. Harris is also portraying other life about him which he sees and knows as no other. His later work, such as "The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann" and other pieces, places him as a portrayer of character and observer of human nature, as well as reproducer of setting in an interesting phase and period of Southern and American life, among the leaders of our contemporary fiction. The case of Mr. Allen is, in many ways, even more significant. It is not simply that his boyhood suffered from the effects of war, and that by a severe moral struggle he has made his literary life his own. It is not that he has been a teacher and a college professor, though perhaps there can be traced the care and self- criticism that this experience has likewise taught. He possesses natural gifts, and he has conserved them and trained them. He belongs almost wholly to the period after 1886, and atones for much else lacking in Southern letters in it. Distinct stages may be traced in his development, so marked has been the evolution SOUTHERN LITERATURE 217 in himself, as in his work. There was the early period, the "Flute and Violin" stories, the expression of the romance in early Kentucky life. This was also the period of " The White Cowl" and "Sister Dolorosa," tender in their romantic setting. Then "A Kentucky Cardinal," with its sequel "Aftermath," overwhelmed us with surprise to find that the author knew and loved his trees and birds as closely as a sympathetic lover and follower of Audubon, who had roamed these same woods before, and furthermore that he was a true poet in his interpretation of them. The notes of a deepening change are already upon him in this work. He is leaving romance and is putting himself in closer spiritual union with Nature and her phases, which will lead him ultimately to Science and her laws. "Summer in Arcady" was therefore an obvious experiment, struggling to escape past conventions and to enter upon newer and wider reaches of art. It was in this expanding effort that Mr. Allen completed his first long novel, "The Choir Invisible," based upon an earlier love story, "John Gray," but now heightened and filled with an added historical background and local color, as national in its impor- tance for the beginnings of Kentucky and the West as Haw- thorne's work for early New England. It is Mr. Allen's one leaning toward the prevailing fashion of the historical romance, which, indeed, writing before 1897, he in a measure anticipates. But Mr. Allen could not be confined to the local and his- torical. The growing impelling forces of universal thought seize him, with a power implied in the very title of his latest published work, "The Reign of Law," a tale of the Kentucky hemp fields. Whether it is successful in all it undertakes to portray or not — and perhaps the problems are too deep to be fully answered in any work of fiction — the volume is significant as a study in the unfolding and conflict of principles and beliefs in an expanding life. It is the evolution and play of forces continually going on in Kentucky and Southern and American thought and life that Mr. Allen is seeking to present It is this spirit of constant change and growth all about us that has taken hold upon him, and no two books of his can be said to be formed quite in the same mould. 218 THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN The same significance of a deeper psychology, a questioning of certain phases that life presents, is discerned in the works of Miss Ellen Glasgow, of Virginia. Crude perhaps in the beginning, they yet reveal growing intellectual power in grappling with problems that press upon her. She is alive to the thought of the world and is attempting to give it expression as suggested in her own environment. Other recent volumes of fiction give evidence of the same deepening change, and I venture to name two. "Mistress Joy," a tale of the early Mississippi and the Southwest, by two Tennessee women, resi- dents of neighboring towns, promised at first to be the common run of novel with the usual historic and romantic ingredients ; but its strength rests in the growing character, the fidelity to psychologic truth, the spiritual unfolding of the womanhood of Mistress Joy herself. Miss Elliott's "The Making of Jane" is a distinct appeal in the case of both Janes to reality of pre- sentation, and from this point of view, the strongest work, though not the most popular, of our Sewanee novelist. It was in this spirit of greater truth to the life about us that in a personal letter written now more than ten years ago by another woman of the South (Miss Marie Whiting, of Virginia), there was uttered a prophetic sentiment which at the time I had occasion to quote. I quote it again in this connection be- cause it forecast this movement and maps out, as it seems to me, the paths of future development. "There is a splendid opening for somebody in Southern liter- ature — a field untouched so far as I know. I speak of the want of any adequate representation of typical Southern life of to-day. We have stories of society-folk who live in the South — they live there, that is all, for 'society' is pretty much the same the world over; the very rich kill time in much the same way in all large cities or in all summer resorts or winter hotels or palatial country residences. Then we have the dialect stories in every form and shape — they represent the very poor or the very ignorant. But who has told of the great middle class, the blood and fiber and heart and brain of the body corporate? Who has written of the life of small and large towns, of the countryside, of the people SOUTHERN LITERATURE 219 who are distinctive and individual, yet who speak the King's English and read some more or less — who are neither marvels of wealth and culture, nor monstrosities of poverty and ignorance ? If such people exist, have they not their life, and shall not some one arise to see its pathos and its beauty?" In this spirit Southern literature, a term which has too often in the past implied provinciality and narrowness, passes before our eyes into the stream of universal literature — into an American literature invested with a world interest And what is typically American? Perhaps the type has not yet found definite repre- sentation and expression. A true American literature will be of the real life of the American people, localized, true, but catching profound, universal, elemental traits in its actuality. The key- note is the effort at true and faithful representation of that about us and within us. American literature has been largely provin- cial in the past It has echoed the voice of New York, or of New England, or of some other section. But when the day of our national literature fully comes, it will not be altogether of any one section or of any one place, but rather will it derive elements of all. So far as we can see it to-day, in its entirety, even if in no single work, it will have something of the earnestness and pre- ciseness of New England, something of the warmth and chivalry of Southern life, something of the large freedom and expansive- ness of the great West It will tell of the hope and the joy, the bereavement and the sadness, the high pulsation of heart beats, and the awful trag- edy of souls in the life about us ! Could we only portray these as they are ! They have become commonplaces, even as sin and suffering and truth and honor are commonplaces. These are ele- mental, and as old as Homer and jEschylus aud Sophocles and Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare. And they will remain as old as the human race, and the human race will read of them in languages yet undeveloped possibly, if an artist only arises to de- clare in them a home truth to the soul of man. The tragedy of Prometheus, the curse of CEdipus, the horror of Hamlet's doubt, and the awfulness of Lear's mistake, the problems of Faust's struggles with self are immortal, because we cannot think of an 220 NATIONAL ELEMENT IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE age when these questions and their artistic expression will not appeal to mankind. They must live ; it is left to no haphazard vote-taking and fickle populace. It is the soul of man that pro- claims it There are many phases in our life, many truths about us yet unnoted and unexpressed. The complete representation of Southern as of all American life is still wanting. But it will inevitably come if our people be true to themselves and to their destinies. For is not the great limitless future ours? and of the heritage of the American spirit, if we can only come to re- alize it, is not the particular work of each of us, East and West, North and South, also a part? IX. Historical Studies in the South Since the War From The Sewanee Review, May, 1893 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE SOUTH SINCE THE WAR NO study has become more popular in America within the past few years than that of History. And in in- dicating a change in the conditions, there is no more fitting time than the Civil War to take as the point of departure from the past to the present This division not only marks the modern period of development, it indicates a self-conscious- ness in the Nation never before so alert In the South, the momentous years, i860- 1865, are even in greater measure the dividing line between the old and the new — with different civilizations, new objects, and new ideals. But before entering upon the consideration of what the South has been recently doing in this province of thought upon what conditions the work has been based, along what lines developed, and what are the tendencies and the promise, it is interesting to note, in order to get relative bearings firmly established, that the growth of this historic instinct throughout the country seems one of the main results of the War itself — a consciousness born of new feelings and ideas and conceptions, and derived from a closer discernment of the events and the de- velopment of the past In an address before the American Historical Association, President Charles Kendall Adams has emphasized the recent- ness of the application of modern methods of historic study even in our foremost institutions. Harvard developed beyond the merest academic training since 1870, the time of the advent of Henry Adams as Professor of History. Dr. George P. Fisher was at Yale as early as 1861, but there was no second Professorship until 1868, and the restrictions may be readily imagined as long as one man alone carried, Sinbad like, the burden of all ages and epochs upon his shoulders. The call which Professor John W. Burgess followed from Amherst to Columbia, in 1877, marks the new era in the course of history 224 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE in the metropolitan institution, and in 1880 its justly dis- tinguished School of Political Science entered upon its brilliant course. Cornell opened its classes in 1868 under President Andrew D. White, and in 1881 it endowed the first distinctive chair of American History in the United States, with Professor Moses Coit Tyler as incumbent Coming fresh from German universities, Andrew D. White had begun an advanced course at the University of Michigan in 1857, which was continued later by Charles Kendall Adams, and the widely extended interest in historical and political science, which had long characterized this Northwestern institution, thus early received its natural impulse. President Gilman opened the Johns Hop- kins University in 1876, and six years later the machinery of Professor Herbert B. Adams's Historical Seminar was in working order. More recently, the University of Pennsylvania, Prince- ton, and Brown, have displayed increased activity in these branches, still newer institutions have been opened, while others have extended their courses and added to the number of their chairs. But, perhaps, it is making no invidious distinctions if we accept those mentioned above as being, within the past decade, especially active in their zeal for historical investigation and most influential in creating a school of followers and disciples. If we looked solely at the latest manifestations of this historical spirit, we might hesitate to place the dividing line at the War, and could bring it forward to the more recent date of 1876, when was celebrated the centennial year of our independence from England. But while admitting the marked increase in the spheres of this later activity, we conceive it to be but the natural development of a spirit which preceded and first im- planted the seed in a new generation, to whom the past meant not so much participation as history. Two great causes, therefore, seem to lie at the bottom of our awakening, to have brought us to a national and individual consciousness. First, there were the influences and the results of the War. There was the universal conviction, whether North or South, that after four years of the direst conflict and after SOUTH SINCE THE WAR ±tt the settlement of great issues, however much men might differ as to the policy and as to the principles, yet our country at least had a past There was now plenty of material for writing a history, whether, on the one hand, it looked forward to higher developments along new lines, or on the other, it gave a sigh of regret for the glories of the past. The eye of the historian was no longer naturally directed to the study of the Middle Ages or to the annals of England, France, Spain, or other European countries, but it turned inwards and addressed American con- ditions. And thus ten or fifteen years after the close of this great struggle, schools of history and historians began to arise almost simultaneously in every intellectual centre of the country. This new interest was not the discovery of any one man nor the work alone of one institution, however much it was furthered by individual efforts. It lay in the air, it was the outgrowth of the spirit of the times — the people had become awakened and were self-conscious. But just as in England the manifestations of the intellectual and spiritual awakening of the sixteenth century were intensified by the Revival of Letters and the Reformation falling together, so the close of the War, followed by a short period of recupera- tive power, almost coincided with the end of our first century of national existence. Ten years after the surrender at Appomattox occurred the first of a series of centennial celebrations, from the commemoration of the Battle of Concord to that of the Evac- uation of New York. Another decade thus passed, intensify- ing with each month and year the national spirit ; sending abroad the feeling of harmony and union in common rejoicings about boards where both sections could unite in the applause of the same sentiments of patriotism and liberty; and nourishing at every stage of its progress the historic sense and consciousness. Not only national and historical, also personal and local pride was increased. Each part wished to show its own birthright, as it were, to this great national inheritance, and at once began to demonstrate what each section and state and party and race and family had contributed to the magnificent structure. Series of books and pamphlets were issued, whole schools of 16 226 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE history were set to work, there arose cooperation and joint stock companies in this, as in other things. The passion for biography, always regarded as one of the eyes of history, which clearly distinguishes the present era the world over, added fervor to the tendency. Series of American Commonwealths, American Statesmen, American Men of Letters, American Religious Leaders, Makers of America, Great Commanders, evidenced the intensity of the spirit and the wide-spread interest The American self-consciousness once called into being, no detail affecting the past was too slight for investigation. His- torical associations and various societies of related character were organized, national, state, and local ; there sprang up Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, Camps of Veterans and Sons of Veterans ; fiction chose to pursue the same line ; even fashions and advertisements displayed the influence of the coloring ; and while in the daily newspapers much of the intensity may have been gradually dropped and something else have taken its place as the latest interest of the day, yet our schools and colleges and universities and library associations and literary circles had permanently accepted the impulse as a part of their inner being, their heritage from the past, ineradicable in the very nature of things from their constitution. Turning more directly to the South in these considerations and examining the manifestations of these features as there distinguished, it was but natural that the fact of the War, the result and circumstances connected therewith, should have de- manded attention first of all. There was not always strict regard to details, for of these men were at first heartily sick, and often tried to forget them ; so it came about that much that was especially valuable was consciously destroyed. But a dis- cussion of old principles by the participants, a delivery of senti- ment over the dead and suffering — this was but the assertion of nature, and assuredly to their lasting credit Leaders seemed to have the prevision that a statement from them would be welcomed and attended to by posterity, who might need information as to their motives and measures in the great struggle; what was at first controversial, as the amenities of SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 227 time poured in their balm, became more reminiscent; and to- day, a little late to be sure, when so much has been destroyed wilfully and from sheer neglect, complete muster-rolls are being reconstructed, histories of regiments and companies and com- mands are written, and every fact, every circumstance, is painfully unravelled. It is easy enough to-day to understand the significance of such books as those by Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis. General Joseph E. Johnston left a "Narrative" of his campaigns ; General Beauregard and others published numberless papers and magazine articles. Officers and privates have found opportunity to discuss measures and men and deeds, and how- ever incomplete, fragmentary, and necessarily one-sided and un- scientific the form of much of this has been — not even directed with the precision a fixed bureau and editorship might have given — yet the effect has been gradually to amass material of which every detail has its importance. Numerous biographies of the great participants have appeared from time to time — of Lee, of Jackson, of A. S. Johnston, of Davis, of Stephens, of Toombs, of Memminger — each striving to add fresh material and to show the character of the man in a clearer light Sur- vival meetings are held, reunions occur, though fewer each year answer to the drum-tap, monuments to the illustrious dead are unveiled — to Calhoun, Lee, Jackson, Hill — orations are delivered, and with every demonstration through all its wear and intense enthusiasm fresh details are gathered, the gleanings are both numerous and often precious, and the cause of history is subserved. The historic sense has grown in proportion as the personal feeling has become blunted. It was for collecting details connected with this past, the events of the four years of the War, that the Southern Historical Society was organized twenty years ago at the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs. Scraps and clippings from all sorts of papers, direct and special contributions, marginalia and fugi- tiva have been brought together in the twenty annual volumes, which have thus far appeared, and preserved in permanent and easily accessible form. Other channels still are our monthly 228 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE magazines, the Sunday editions of newspapers in our leading cities, North and South. Sometimes these constitute a loosely connected series, and are afterwards collected in one volume and reduced to book form. An instance is the Century "War Papers," and one, more modest but hardly less important, is the small volume issued a few years ago by the Charleston News and Courier, bearing the title "Our Women in the War." Looking at the list of Historical Societies in the Southern States, we may single out those in Virginia for number, promi- nence, and activity. Seven are named in the list published by the American Historical Association as belonging to Virginia, but it must be confessed that some of these exist for the most part on paper, or merely in a nominal way in connection with some library, and for any work they produce or active organi- zation they possess, must be considered as really non-existent, a fear which may be entertained for the majority of the two hundred and eighteen accredited to the United States. There are, too, more Virginian members of the American Historical Association than representatives from any other Southern State, constituting, as they do, almost half the entire Southern con- stituency, even though this number be exceedingly small, some thirty to forty, hardly more than six per cent of the full mem- bership. The reason for this exceptional interest on the part of Virginia is not hard to discover. She was the first colony founded, she played a notably conspicuous part in the further settlement and development of the country, in securing liberty aud independence, and in furnishing leaders both in war and in council. The Virginia Historical Society, which was organized in 1 83 1, is the oldest in the South. True, it died after a few years, and upon reorganization led for a while a precarious existence ; but it has always had its heroic supporters. In the period since the War, from 1879 through to 1892, it was virtually embodied in its Corresponding Secretary, Mr. R. A. Brock, one of the most zealous workers in the historic field of his State. Under his editorship, beginning with 1882, eleven annual voiumes of valuable documents, chiefly relating to the colonial period, have been published — one of the few instances of per- SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 229 sistent activity on the part of an historical society in the South. Equally to Virginia — which furnished so many leaders and lent her soil for the constant battle-ground — may be credited the Southern Historical Society, with headquarters in Richmond the old Confederate capital, and under the secretaryship of Mr. Brock. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, organized by the ladies of Virginia, is particularly active, both practically and in social gatherings. The Sons and Daughters of the Revolution strike peculiarly strong root in Vir- ginia soil. The historic colleges in Virginia lend themselves readily to the same spirit The Historical and Geographical Society of Richmond College has for several years done inspiring work with its students, and produced even more permanent results, in frequent public addresses on some point of original in- vestigation by distinguished citizens and visitors. Other col- leges are endeavoring to be no whit behind. Roanoke College has its local society, and that at Hampden-Sidney, while perhaps younger than some in years, is deficient neither in number nor in working interest William and Mary, under the direction of her President is publishing a quarterly periodical filled with data taken from the rich sources of the past of the college and its section. For three years past the Board of Washington and Lee University has been issuing records pertaining to her early history. Likewise many of the Commencement addresses at these and others Virginia institutions are filled with historic interest the occasion constantly alluring the speaker to special investigation and research. But perhaps the best evidence of this interest and activity in the South in historic matters may be obtained by a glance over the list of membership of the American Historical Association. Here are many names calling up noble pieces of work and much praiseworthy effort even though there be marked the absence of some of our most enthusiastic workers. First of all, Professor Herbert B. Adams, of the Johns Hopkins, deserves mention, both for his own researches in Southern edu- cational history, and for the inspiring and suggestive influence he has exerted on so many Southern scholars. The late Colonel 230 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE William Allan's "Army of Northern Virginia" has just been published by the Boston firm, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., who have always heartily encouraged and supported historical in- vestigation. Ex-President Kemp P. Battle, of the University of North Carolina, has fanned the flame of historic interest in his State, aided by his official position. Professor E. W. Bemis, late of Vanderbilt University, has prepared, under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins publications, a monograph on local government in the South and Southwest Dr. Jeffrey R. Brackett, of Bal- timore, has written of the negro, as have also Mr. Edward Ingle, of Washington, and Mr. Philip A. Bruce, of Richmond. William T. Brantly, of the Baltimore bar, contributed to Justin Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," and among other collaborators of the same work were Messrs. William Wirt Henry and R. A. Brock, of Richmond, William J. Rivers of South Carolina, and Charles C. Jones, Jr., of Georgia. The activity of Mr. R. A. Brock, in connection with the Vir- ginia and Southern Historical Societies, has already been men- tioned. Alexander Brown's two volumes on the "Genesis of the United States" have laid bare the details of the struggle between the English and the Spanish governments for the settlement and possession of Northern America, and have re- opened the controversy concerning Captain John Smith. The late Colonel John Mason Brown, of Louisville, wrote for the Filson Club "The Political Beginnings of Kentucky." The Hon. Wm. A. Courtenay, of Charleston, issued, while mayor, a series of year- books for the city, and has lately engaged in efforts to obtain for the South Carolina Historical Society transcripts of colonial records from London. Dr. J. L. M. Curry, general agent for the Peabody Fund, besides contributing numerous reminiscences of his own historic life, has delivered addresses not only on the history of education in the South, but especially on the relations between Church and State and on Baptist origins and develop- ment. Professor Heath Dabney, of the University of Virginia, has, for the most part devoted attention, in accordance with the nature of the duties of his chair, to the scientific aspects of history, the causes of the French Revolution and kindred SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 281 subjects. The published papers of Professor Means Davis, of the South Carolina College, appeal more to the economical and political reader. Edward Eggleston, not himself a Virginian, but of Virginian family and descent, has written much of Southern colonial life, portrayed Bacon's Rebellion, and besides, in romance-writing, used Western Virginia and the early North- west as historic background. Mr. William Wirt Henry's three volumes, comprising the "Life and Letters of Patrick Henry," are not merely a monument of devotion to the memory of a grandsire, but deserve special recognition for the arduous and painstaking labor of love which produced them, considering how scattered and lost is so much of the material for Southern history and biography. Another filial work is the biography of General Albert Sidney Johnston, by his son, Colonel William Preston John- ston, the President of the Tulane University. Colonel Charles C. Jones, Jr., has long been the source of an enthusiastic interest in Georgia history, whether colonial, state or city. His numerous addresses and monographs are but pendants to his fuller "His- tory of Georgia." The late Dr. James F. Latimer, of the Theo- logical Seminary at Hampden-Sidney, specialized in Church history, and left addresses on Early Presbyterianism in Virginia and the South. Thomas Nelson Page has, perhaps, best told of the history of Virginia through his stories. It is the romance of the Old South which breathes in the sketches "In Ole Virginia" and "On Newfound River," while his many addresses have direct reference either to the history of the past, or to the incitation of the historical spirit. Approaching nearer still to the more scientific aspects of historic investigation is the announced Life of Thomas Nelson, for the Makers of America series, which it is proposed, will be a study of colonial conditions. The late unhappy death of the Tennessee Congressman James Phelan, cut off the bright promise of a scholarship and training received at Leipsic, but not before the "History of Tennessee" had been written, and the incorporation by the national govern- ment of the American Historical Association had been secured by his services. Another civic officer, the Hon. William L. Saunders, North Carolina's Secretary of State, edited several 232 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE volumes of invaluable records pertaining to the state's colonial history — in itself a monumental work, and a noble example for sister commonwealths. Professor Charles Lee Smith, now of Wil- liam Jewell College, wrote North Carolina's educational history in the series edited by his instructor, Dr. Adams, of the Johns Hopkins, and published by the National Bureau of Education. The labors on the English Constitution, by Hannis Taylor, Esq., of Mobile, have received the highest commendation for learning, acumen, and scholarship. Professor William P. Trent, of Sewanee, has edited the Gilmer Letters relating to the history of the University of Virginia, has published numerous notes on the growth of historic spirit in the South, and has more recently written the Life of Simms, for the American Men of Letters series, in which he gives a study of ante-bellum Southern literary conditions. President Lyon G. Tyler, of William and Mary, has not only proved one in the number of filial writers of biography in his "Letters and Times of the Tylers," but, in addition to a smaller work on " Parties and Patronage in the United States," has begun issuing the William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine. Professor Stephen B. Weeks, of Trinity College, North Carolina, has inspired local research, and worthily set the example for his pupils by his own periodic contributions. The Rev. Dr. William H. Whitsitt, of Louisville, has written the "Life and Times of Judge Caleb Wallace," another Filson Club publication. Professor Woodrow Wilson, belonging originally to North Carolina, but in the historic training which he has received, and in the professorships he has filled, hardly longer to be credited to the South, has been especially active in publication. His analysis of Con- gressional Government, and his study of the State — the origins, development, and forms of government — have just been followed by the third volume of the Epochs of American History, "Division and Reunion, 1829- 1889." President George T. Winston, of the University of North Carolina, is following the example of his predecessor in lending all the weight of his office to the inspiration of local historic zeal, a late evidence of which was the series of lectures at Chapel Hill from Professor Hart, of SOUTH SINCE THE WAR HI Harvard, on the principles and methods of scientific historical investigation. The above are but representative names taken from the American Association's list, and they serve merely for illustra- tion. Many others still have done notable work. There are the volumes of Colonel J. Thomas Scharf — founder of the collec- tion of Southern History of the Johns Hopkins University, and of Dr. William Hand Browne, on Maryland. There are, too, the noteworthy efforts of Professor Virgil A. Lewis, in West Virginia, whose monthly Southern Historical Magazine must, after a valuable career of two years, suspend publication for the nonce, to be resumed as a quarterly periodical. There are, besides, the achievements of the Filson Club, of Louisville, under its founder and leader, Colonel Reuben T. Durrett ; the valuable labors of Dr. William P. Palmer and others, in editing the Calendar of Vir- ginia State Papers; the zeal and active interest of General Gates P. Thruston, of Nashville; of Dr. James H. Carlisle, of Wofford College, South Carolina; of Fay Hempstead, Esq., of Little Rock, and others. The historic interest associated with and gathering about large public libraries, as in Baltimore, Rich- mond, Charleston, New Orleans, deserves especial notice. Even some of the smaller towns are forming their nucleus of books; and the first results are always seen in an outburst of historic zeal, and the spirit of research. While most of the states in the South have nominally Historical Societies, yet their activity as media of Publication has been virtually nil. As intimated, the Virginia Society has long held an exceptional place in this regard, it having issued an annual volume for the past eleven years; and in addition to this, a new quarterly journal has been projected by its executive committee. After Virginia, Kentucky seems especially promi- nent in having a society which furnishes regular publications. This is the Filson Club, of Louisville. From a membership of ten, it has grown in eight years to one of more than five hundred, representing all parts of the State, and has published successively seven annual quarto volumes. The pioneer history of the West and Southwest is attracting 234 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE especial attention now that we are celebrating the Discovery and the Making of America. In this recital the most striking episodes are connected with the founding of Western Virginia, and the beginnings of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory, when the first heroic vanguard ventured across the Appalachian range, following up the course of the rivers into the then great unknown. It is the story of a country settled by native resources and individual energy independent of English charters, a story which counted for much in emphasizing the idea of national union in American history. It is a narrative that tells how the Englishmen along the coast won the Missis- sippi Valley and the vast interior from France and from Spain, each of which seemed at one time to hold the key to the future, and might have changed our whole destiny. This idea has attracted other than Southern pens. It is the central thought permeating the series of Parkman's histories just completed by the "Half-Century of Conflict." More directly still, Theodore Roosevelt's "Winning of the West," deals with this movement. The material of the latter was in large measure obtained from papers in the hands of citizens and societies of Kentucky and Tennessee, evincing the rich sources which it still remains a privileged duty to publish. Indeed, where may the investigation of Southern material end? The great Southwest and Texas are still comparatively unexplored ; Louisiana has always yielded a rich harvest, which seems never failing; South Carolina, Florida, and all the Gulf States are replete with material yet to be worked up. The study of the elements in our composition is in itself a phase. We have already Scotch-Irish and French Huguenot societies, but there are still other constituents. The de- scendants of these races are endeavoring to trace back to its origin each thread, and to appreciate its value ; and if at re- unions and at festive dinners native enthusiasm tends to lose sight of proportion and relative importance, still the need of the work may not be disputed. The oration of the Hon. John S. Wise, in last December, before the Congregational Club of New York, on Virginia's lineage, was an especially clear analysis of SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 285 the original elements entering into the constituency of the Old Dominion. A paper of the writer before the Virginia His- torical Society a year ago, was an attempt from a somewhat similar point of view, making use of statistics in support of theories; and he cannot refrain from expressing the belief that along similar lines a great deal may still be done; only all the threads of the woof must be carefully examined, as it seems reasonable to maintain that not one alone, but all contribute towards making up the whole cloth. The essays in Southern fiction since the War throw no faint light on the interest in Southern History. This fiction has been chiefly historical, or at least based on historic elements. John Esten Cooke, who lived in and through the War, found in the emotions to which it gave rise the natural expression of his art No less did Cable find his opportunity in the race condi- tions present in the variegated life — French, Spanish, and Creole — near the mouth of the Mississippi ; and it is little wonder that in his desire to trace these manifestations to their past, he should pry into hidden history, and not only glean strange true stories of Louisiana, tracing survivals of dialect and letters, but add contributions to the history of the city and state itself — even if it be a history tinged with the color of romance. It is not strange that Miss Grace King, working with the same colored pigments, should become interested in the career of Sieur de Bienville. James Lane Allen could not describe Kentucky life in the past and present without feeling the sense of its historic background. Thomas Nelson Page took but a slight step in passing from the pictures of colonial dames and times to his genre portraits "befo' de war," and thence from the poetic treatment of the romance of history to the serious discussion of history in detail. Indeed, everywhere it is the historic consciousness which has seized upon and con- trols our life and its manifestations — our letters and the ex- pression of our thought. We shall not go out of our way to compare it with the French consciousness wrought by the great Revolution, or with the ripening of German thought and the intensifying of German unity which sprang from the Napoleonic 236 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE wars. Certainly for those of us who are teachers of literature and of history, and are making the attempt to incite among our youth an enthusiasm for writing and for investigation, there is hardly a more promising field. The opportunity lies in eliciting interest in local concerns and surroundings. The literary and historic sense is aroused and its spirit encouraged and vivified solely by the powers of observation and inves- tigation. To one gifted with imagination, artistic insight, and the poet's soul, it affords the basis of future romance and fiction ; in others endowed with a more strenuously logical cast of mind and a keen scent for tracing effect to cause and con- ditions to origins, it assumes the philosopher's garb and the historian's methods. In all cases it has lifted the mind beyond mere text-book pages and academic lecturing — it has given bread instead of a stone. Of the universities which have especially influenced historic investigation in the South, the Johns Hopkins stands easily first. Many causes may have contributed to this. Harvard and other colleges have been too far north, while Baltimore was centrally located, and had always been recognized as essentially a Southern city. Special privileges to Virginia and North Carolina, as well as proximity, attracted students from those states. Its convenience to the District of Columbia tended to give it at the outset a national significance and to inculcate a catholic spirit. Indeed the incitements to post-graduate work which other institutions, thus thrown on their mettle, have since received, and the recent organization of Clark, Chicago, and Stanford Universities in the eastern, central, and extreme western divisions of our country, to meet especial needs, simply attest the fact that the pioneer American university has success- fully created a soil from which such plants may derive an invigorating growth. Especially in American historical, politi- cal, and economical science has this institution been prominent, and not a few of its students and graduates in this department have been scattered over the South, teaching in Southern institutions, and extending in turn to others the inspiration which they themselves have received. Even much of the work SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 287 and investigation in local matters thus effected received its direct impulse and suggestion from the parent institution. In other cases, however, the inspiration to historic zeal came not from without but from within, where native environment and a notable past have developed an interest in history. Such has been preeminently the case with the three oldest institu- tions in Virginia and the South : through the colonial beginnings of William and Mary, the Scotch-Irish origins of Washington and Lee, and the fervor of religious liberty and national in dependence manifested in founding Hampden-Sidney. The remark has already been made that the publication of historical works has been frequently in the form of series, the system of cooperation being applied even to this field of work, as a characteristic symptom of the times. The American Commonwealths have included thus far the histories of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, in the South, and the history of these may hardly be said to exceed that of other States in interest or in value. The South has been especially well- equipped for furnishing subjects to the American Statesmen series — and, most of all, Virginia, which had the largest white population of any State at the period just before and after the Revolution. Two volumes on George Washington, two on Henry Clay, others on Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, John Randolph, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas H. Benton have been the South's quota. True, hardly one of these biographies has been written by a Southern scholar, but by some one from a thoroughly objective point of view, not always in sympathy with the subject Still the series has called forth pronounced attention to the subject of American History as affected by the South and Southern men, has incited the spirit of investigation in the South, and if even sharp criticism has been heard, it has made other students and scholars who have differed, feel more keenly their own responsibilities. The American Men of Letters series has included but two Southern names — Poe and Simms. None of the American Religious Leaders has been taken from the South, although she has had 238 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE likewise her famous theologians and divines. The Makers of America has gone Southward fully as much as the American Statesmen. The history of the lives of the Calverts, Ogle- thorpe, Sieur de Bienville, La Salle, Jefferson, Thomas Nelson, and Samuel Houston, each tells the tale of the expansion of Southern territory. The South has also her Great Com- manders in the new series just announced: Washington, Jack- son, Taylor, Scott, Lee, and Joseph E. Johnston. Three of these are to be written by Southern men: the biography of Washington by General Bradley T. Johnson, the one of Lee by his nephew, General Fitzhugh Lee, and that of Johnston by Mr. Robert M. Hughes. Other biographies have been numerous — some written from personal love and devotion, as Mrs. Davis's, Mrs. Perry's, Mrs. Jackson's and some dictated by reverence and piety, among which, besides Johnston's, Tyler's and Henry's, we may include Mrs. Corbin's Maury, Miss Rowland's Mason, and Mrs. Lee's Pendleton. This increase in female authorship is striking. Especially interesting has been the unfolding of the intel- lectual life in the Old South, the analysis of the systems of education formerly in vogue. The series of monographs pub- lished by the National Bureau of Education under the editor- ship and supervision of Professor Herbert B. Adams, of the Johns Hopkins, has opened a mine of information, and presented a fair knowledge of the ideals in education and the breadth of intellectual training and culture in the earlier days. The revelations in many cases have been matter of universal surprise and congratulation. The editor of the series has him- self written of education in Virginia, having become fascinated by the early history of the College of William and Mary, and the circumstances attendant upon the founding of the State Uni- versity. The history of education in all the South Atlantic States — in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and also Alabama — followed soon afterwards, for the most part the work of pupils from those states who had caught something of their preceptor's enthusiasm and fire. Abundant material, and that most valuable for the portrayal of the life of the SOUTH SINCE THEWAR 23« country, is still to be worked up here — the history of individual colleges and seminaries, and the lives of great educators — often the story of pathetic struggles and gigantic efforts against over- whelming forces — in short the complete narrative of the in- tellectual and literary life of the several states. Professor Trent's Simms, which was a review of the former literary con- ditions of the South, has awakened both interest and discussion in this line. An announced lecture by President Charles W. Dabney, of the University of Tennessee, on " Intellectual Life in the Old South," is merely additional evidence of the interest the discussion excites. The writer himself has been collecting material looking forward to some contributions on the history of the institution [Hampden-Sidney College] with which he is connected and of the State in which he is laboring. Social life has been hitherto described more in the novel than in our histories, but as Macaulay, himself a master in color, urged, there is no reason why this fair province should be taken from the possession of the serious historian. Sooth to say, Southern history has been too prone to neglect such a picturing of the times and has had a tendency to lapse into an explication of genealogies and family trees rather than to apprehend conditions. Not that this has not also its use ; and it is to be hoped that the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution will bring to this phase of history the science it demands, basing conclusions on the best evidence, in wills and deeds filed in county clerks' offices, and in other records, and not solely upon the fond memory of maiden aunts and worse founded traditions. Side by side with history, the study of economics is taught and is occupying the attention of present thinkers, and history is being written in its economical, commercial, and industrial aspects. None is more curious than Southern life in this regard — its systems of agriculture, land tenure, labor, crops, prices, taxation, transportation, travel, navigation, commerce, manufactures, banking, fiscal laws. It suffices merely to sug- gest the vast field here to be occupied. Is it too soon to discuss these questions in the light of history and not as a matter of politics, as so many of the questions pertaining to the 240 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE South may alone be treated? Herein lies the greatest foe to the free expression of historic thought, to untrammelled historic research, in our section. Much has been said about the negro — when will be written the first complete and authentic history of this race in America? Contributions have been already made, and it will be an interesting volume, whenever it appears. In the realm of political and constitutional history more has been done, yet there is room still for systematic development Statistics are hard and dry reading, but often eloquent in the very facts they present. The one desire is to trace all the threads of our life and to reproduce the entire past. General- izations are difficult; data and elements are apt to be over- looked ; but the aim should be to show forth the real life of the people as a whole, and not merely the transactions of the few — what they were and thought and did — life in the broadest sense, material, social, intellectual, moral, spiritual. Many crude pieces of work evidence not so much incapacity as lack of training and discernment as to the best ways to con- duct an investigation. The responsibility herein involved rests upon the institutions of learning. They need not expect to rival the foremost universities of Germany, England, or the more wealthy North. Their scope and sphere of instruction must necessarily be far different on account of the limitations imposed by present conditions. But as so many of our youth naturally interested in this work may never get beyond the college or the state university, if no inspiration and direction be offered there, where else may it be given? An enthusiastic professor, a special chair, a fairly equipped and catalogued library, a few practical directions and pointed criticisms, and the ground work could be laid, and at least the stimulus to a movement begun and a number of bright young men enlisted. All over the South, in every state institution at least, in addition to the instructor in general history, one is needed especially for American and state and local interests ; and it ought to prove a patriotic duty to provide this, and where possible even to subdivide the work among several ardent in- vestigators. Enlarged library facilities will be needed, together SOUTH SINCE THE WAR 241 with the chair, as the apparatus and tools to be handled in the workshop ; and last, publication funds, too, so that everything collected and worked up by instructor and pupil, if of sufficient value, may be preserved and given to the world. Indeed, publication is becoming so fully recognized as one of the leading functions of the university, that in future endowments it will be felt that without this provision a chair and institution are in so far lamed. We wish and need history to be written on broader and deeper foundations. It will not do to regard ourselves as cut off from the rest of the universe in thought — as having a peculiar world all to ourselves and a history of our own. This is true only to the limited extent that a peculiar economic system and isolated geographical position may have imposed it upon us. We must look beyond these narrow confines and, so far as possible, observe the trend of the age and our own share of history within it. We have had recently addresses from two great English historians, Mr. Froude and Mr. Lecky, on the province of history, and both have interested, while one has charmed us. But Mr. Froude to the contrary, who believes neither in evolution nor in devolution, in progress, science, nor aught else in the historic sphere, and sees only a stage crowded with innumerable figures, ideas do control men and minds and are stronger in a century than any one man or government ; and he becomes the transcendent leader to posterity, who seems to have best expressed the primary idea of his day. We do want sympathetic history, but let it be pervaded by a sympathy that is not narrow, but universal, and guided by a true phi- losophy. The advocate's plea is a distinct contribution and goes to make up history; but it is not history itself. The judge of last resort still suspends sentence. Perhaps in some things we are still but the advocate, possibly in others the judge. At any rate, our activity should be apparent, and we may at least submit arguments to be weighed in the discussion, if we may not on all questions award the final word of judgment. 17 X. The Nestor of Hungarian Letters From The Sewanee Review, February, 1896 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS ANY sincere self-revelation of a man in his older years is J~\_ worthy the reading. There is a rich coloring borrowed from the mellow ripeness of his mature vision; the asperities of time seem to become softened, and memories cluster with a holier nimbus surrounding them. Particularly are the records of such a life interesting, when it has formed a directing thread in the complexity of that weaving, which we designate a nation's history. Others, and they are no less, but even more, interesting, far from telling of outward stir and the confused bustle of action, convey deeper lessons of spiritual experience and aspiring effort If there be still added the grace and charm of literary expression, the rare occasion is attained when the man of letters is writing of that which con- cerns himself most and which is closest to his thought and heart It is a happy coalition, indeed, when we find, in anyone, some- thing like a union of all three; and it is just this something of all these impressions combined that we derive from a perusal of Maurus Jdkai's autobiographic novel, "Eyes Like the Sea." Nor is it an isolated case that fiction serves as a loosefitting garb for autobiographic details. Dickens and Thackeray both have read much of their own life experience into their books; and this is especially true of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister." Truth and poetry are frequently indistinguishable, nor do we care to separate them strictly in turning the leaves in any relation of spiritual truth. We know that the pages are true — contain the truth of thought and of feeling, if not of detail and of incident There is the higher poetic truth, the creatively inspiring imagi- native truth, which tells us, without the need of any vouchers, that all is true, if we may quote Balzac, though in a different sense, in his opening pages to "Le Pere Goriot" Hungary and Hungarian letters are comparatively little known to us far-away Americans; besides, the Hungarian is almost the one language in Europe that Aryans are in close touch with, and yet which belongs to the Asiatic group. Trans- 246 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS lations are the best that most of us can hope for, and it is, alas ! too infrequent that a translation of any foreign book is really good, and that the book itself possesses a genuine interest. Let us thank, then, Mr. Nisbet Bain, the translator, for giving us a most readable book in point of style, possessing a brightness and a vivacity which must have caught much of its charm from the rich qualities of the original. It will probably excite no surprise that we may find the most conflicting statements respecting the author published in our Sunday newspapers, our highly respectable weeklies, and our monthly magazines by would-be-well-informed ones who ap- parently (as is befitting the modern journalistic spirit) know everything about everybody. In nearly all — and with a little search, one can find a deluge of material in random columns — there is a delightful contradiction among these self-constituted authorities, and the most heterodox opinions expressed as to almost every question of fact At length, in the pages of the August Forum, the author himself was invited to set at rest many vagaries by frankly fixing some necessary points, and reducing a few dates from movable feasts to an appointed calendar. But the fault here again is that there is too much matter of fact; and the author, in being pilloried before the public gaze and forced to give an account of himself in open court, after our American forensic manner, is so much less entertaining and de- lightful than in his bit of historic fiction, that we ask no excuse in ignoring this supplementary evidence, and in remanding the case to the lower court, where he may speak for himself and tell just what he pleases and how, in the pages of his own story. We shall not be greatly bothered about ignorance of details, for no perusal can leave any doubt of truthfulness as to the spirit. It is in the pages of the book before us, crowned in 1890 by the Hungarian Academy as the best book of the year in the Magyar tongue, that we can best read the story of the author's life and the contemporary struggles of the Hungarian nation. Maurus Jdkai is Hungarian above everything, and while near to the councils of his country and loyal to his Emperor and THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 247 Empress, he is national, but not Austrian in any other sense. Buda-Pest — dear Buda, as their capital on the lower Danube is known — and not the imperial city Vienna, has been his residence and is always his love. That Hungary had produced musicians, we knew already. There was Franz Liszt, a king of the pianoforte and the leader of a school. The Hungarian Rhapsody constitutes a specific musical genus. Joachim, the violinist, in point of birth at least, is Hungarian; as was Remenyi. Hungarian dances, Hungarian music, Hungarian orchestras, are a common enough form of advertisement in foreign and in cis-atlantic capitals. Hungarian letters are less known, and in the person of Jdkai we are told that we get acquainted with the best in Hungarian literature. And literature is here taken in no narrow sense ; for he has excelled in nearly all its branches — in poetry, history, drama, and the novel, not to speak of years spent in actively inspiring journalistic work. But Jokai is even more than a writer ; he is the type of a newly great and aspiring nation. He was one of the patriots of the Revolution of 1848, that gave Hungary position as an integral part of the Austro- Hungarian empire, and although now an old man, he is yet a virile figure. He participated in the Kossuth struggles, and has outlived the martyr-patriot Indeed, his impress on the Hungarian mind has been, in some respects, doubtless, even greater than that of the famous Dictator, for, in the number and continuity and varied character of his works, he has been called the voice of Modern Hungary. It is chiefly through his writings, political, satirical, humorous, historic, poetic, dramatic, and romantic, that the aspirations of the Magyar folk have found expression and thus become promulgated to the world. No achievement, no disaster, no hope, no sorrow, in the life of Hungary since its new birth, that has not been voiced some- where in his varied production. Thousands who could not read his books, it is claimed, have learned by heart his songs, and have thus come to feel their country's hopes and pos- sibilites. It is not strange, then, that his literary position has been compared to that of Victor Hugo and Dumas pere in 248 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS France, and to the place long kept in British hearts and in the development of the English novel by good Sir Walter. And, again, like another poet-patriot of another nation, Schiller, Jdkai's youth was characterized by storm and stress, and he exposed zealously, and even foolishly, a life for those three words that have often proved the touchstone of both the rarest nobility and the direst madness, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Two years ago, on January 6, 1894, his country celebrated his literary jubilee — the fiftieth anniversary of his first scarcely recognized poetic drama — making the turn of a half-century in his career as peculiarly the national voice of Hungary and the Magyar folk. They hold more account of anniversaries, generally, everywhere in Europe than we do, and a jubilee is particularly sacred. The jubilee of a great writer, a great figure in any sphere, is a splendid occasion. It is his public and professional Golden Wedding, celebrating the life-long union with his mistress, muse, or goddess, as the case may be, Scien- tia, Politic a, or Lit tern. Some of the circumstances attending Jdkai's jubilee were touching in the extreme, and well sufficed to make the old man feel it is enough of life to live. For it was a jubilee of the nation, a celebration of their national greatness, and every class in society, from the throne to the peasant, had some part in it. There were processions and floral emblems, orations and odes, dinners and drinkings ; but the special literary feature was an edition de luxe of Jdkai's collected works. Something like a hundred dollars a set was the price fixed, and the average Hungarian is not rich, yet the demand reached easily, it is said, a thousand copies. The profits were to go to Jdkai himself, and it is estimated that he received $50,000 as his share, a noble tribute and a splendid gift to the writer, who is by no means wealthy. To subscribe became a matter of national dig- nity. The list was headed by Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary and Empress of Austria (who is claimed as a life-long friend and admirer of the poet), and by the widow of the late Crown Prince Rudolph. There were numerous Archdukes and Archduchesses (for these are very plentiful in Austria-Hungary) on the list, also THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 249 ministers of state and quondam dignitaries, among others Cardi- nal Vaszary and Count Kalnoky. And the blessed school children and the poorer people combined and together made up the requisite sums to receive sets as their joint property. Far more, herein lies the undying and divine voice of the national heart, and the writer's real vindication for future fame. "Illustrious personages pass away and vanish," he is reported as having declared, "but the people never die." From various sources we glean that he was born in 1825. He himself says, in his story, that he was twenty-four when the Revolution of 1848 broke out His birth-place was Komorn or Komarom. His father was a lawyer ("advocate" is the common European term for this species) and he was of a good and ancient family, the final "i" in the name having some- what the same value as de in French and von in German. The family were strict Calvinists, and it surprises one at first to know of so intense a Calvinistic population in the heart of the natural territory of the Roman Church. These two forms of religious creed and dogma — Calvinist and Romanist — the author is perfectly familiar with and equally tolerant of, in the present volume. For himself he is apparently too national in spirit to be illiberal. Literary genius usually buds early, especially when planted and watered, as Jdkai's ever fruitful tree has been. His first poem, we are gravely told, was composed at the age of six. It is hardly in the collected works ; however, it actually got pub- lished somehow, filling a corner, conveniently, of an Hungarian weekly newspaper; and, we believe, some one in a fit of questionable zeal, has recently fished it out for exposure. His first novel was certainly written at seventeen while at school, and its very title, "Ordeal," indicated the influences the youthful imagination was working under. This was, naturally, not only more mature, but more ambitious, than the poem, and was given a prize by the students and professors of the Lyceum. After es- saying lyric poetry and the novel, the next flight of fluttering liter- ary genius, if it thrives in a continental country, is with the drama. This our author attempts in poetic dress, producing the dramatic 260 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS poem, "The Hebrew Boy," or "The Jew Son," or "The Infant Jew," as one may find it variously referred to in translation. It seems to have been the date of this production, January 6, 1 844 (for one must begin somewhere), that was celebrated in the author's jubilee. Since he had won a prize at school, the drama was placed in competition for more worthy laurels, the prize offered by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (for thus they stimulate original production abroad in "effete monar- chies") for the best dramatic work of real literary merit. Jcikai's effort failed to secure the prize, but he received at least an "honorable mention," and thus stimulated, began the long career in letters which, with all diversions, was to prove his real profession. These early days — the days of his youth — are told de- lightfully in reminiscence in the first pages of "Eyes Like the Sea." As a true poet, he was susceptible, of course, to the charms of young women, and it is scarcely necessary to explain that it was one of these who possessed the " Eyes Like the Sea;" nor is it further necessary to say that it is not of the lady he afterwards married that he speaks thus. The young man enjoyed the very process of living; it was a pleasure to him, as were all life's little amenities. Fresh, bright glimpses of Hungarian customs and manners are common enough in his pages. We all know of the Hungarian waltzes and the Hungarian dances, even if some of us have not made a failure at one time or another in attempting them. Jdkai would have us believe that the good old days were far better than the present. We catch his very enthusiasm ! "Now, the waltzes of those days were very different from the waltzes we dance now. The waltz of today is a mere joke; but waltzing then was a serious business. Both partners kept the upper parts of their bodies as far apart as possible, whilst their feet were planted close together. Then the upper parts went moving off to the same time, and the legs were obliged to slide as quickly as they could after the flying bodies. It was a dance worthy of will-o'-the-wisps." It is in one of these whiskings away that he falls under the THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 261 spell of the "Eyes Like the Sea." To save his partner from tumbling, he falls on his knees. The rest of the episode can be told only in quotation. "I split my pantaloons just above the knee. I was an- nihilated. A greater blow than that can befall no man. "Bessy laughed at my desperate situation, but the next moment she had compassion upon me. "'Wait a bit,' said she, 'and I'll sew it up with my darning needle.' ... In her great haste she pricked me to the very quick with the beneficent but dangerous implement '"I didn't prick you, did I?' she asked, looking at me with those large eyes of hers which seemed to speak of such goodness of heart "'No,' I said, yet I felt the prick of that needle even then. "Then we went on dancing. I distinguished myself marvel- ously. With a needle prick in my knee, and another who knows where, I whirled Bessy three times round the room, so that when I brought her back to the garde des dames, it seemed to me as if three and thirty mothers, aunts, and companions were revolving around me." This is the spirit throughout the book that stirs our blood and makes us live and love with him. He was pretending to study law meanwhile, and had de- termined to follow the profession of his father; but it was very evident that he had at this time another mistress far more jealous than either law or the pursuit of letters. Even his dramatic success ranked only second after an opportunity to be dancing with some charmer like this young lady with the wonderful eyes. The incident already related occurred at the dancing school of M. Galifard. "I am really most grateful to Monsieur Galifard. I have to thank him for the first distinction I ever enjoyed in my life. This was the never-to-be-forgotten circumstance that when my colleagues, the young hopefuls of the Academy of Jurisprudence at Kecskemet, gave a lawyers' ball, they unanimously chose me to be the elotdnczos [leader]. To this day I am proud of that distinction; what must I have been then? On the heels of this 252 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS honor speedily came a second. The very same year the Hun- garian Academy of Sciences, on the occasion of the competition for the Teleki prize, honorably mentioned my tragedy, 'The Jew Boy,' and there were even two competent judges, Voros- marty and Bajza [they were the names of two of the best known contemporary Hungarian writers and poets], who con- sidered it worthy of the prize. . . . When, therefore, I returned to my native town, after an absence of three years, I found that a certain renommee had preceded me. I had also very good reasons for returning home. The legal curriculum in my time embraced four years. The third year was given to the patveria, the fourth year to the jurateria [terms denoting different branches of the Hungarian law]. Every respectable man goes through the patveria in his own country but the jurateria at Buda-Pest." From this we see, and, indeed, from his later journalistic and legislative performances, that it was a very respectable training in legal principles which he must have had, nevertheless. He tells further of himself with a somewhat charming air of egotism: "And I had something else to boast of, too. In my leisure hours I painted portraits, miniatures in oil. So well did I hit off the judge of Osziny (and he did not give me a sitting either) that everyone recognized him ; but a still greater sensation was caused by my portrait of the wife of the Procurator Fiscal, who passed for one of the prettiest women in the town." Of course, this last touch had to be added. Appreciation of the truest principles of one art lies very close to that of another, and many in our day and of our own tongue have pursued both, not to disadvantage. Had not law and letters and life and love — the four great l's alliterating so allusively to the imagination of the average college-bred young man — so deeply absorbed his attention it seems possible that he might have gained some note, too, as an artist. The high animal spirits proceed : "And yet, despite all this, when in the following Shrovetide, the Lord Lieutenant gave a ball to the county (they were THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 263 something like Lord Lieutenants in those days), I was not called upon to open the ball! Ungrateful Fatherland!" And then comes the passion of still another Hungarian dance: "Ah! that kormagyar. That is something like a dance. It requires enthusiasm to dance that." These pictures of light-hearted youth — and they give a fair example of the easy and allusive style so well adapted for reminiscence — are not without their charm and fascination. The same darning needle played chief role in another episode equally dramatic. The "Eyes Like the Sea" had detected a wart on his right hand just below the thumb, and above the artery, which she promised to rid him of. "•It will smart dreadfully. But if a girl can stand it, you can,'" she said, and then proceeded to torture him by calcining it with the needle red hot "It is thus that the demons of hell must look upon those whom they are roasting! 'Does it hurt?' she hissed between her teeth. She appeared to be in a state of ecstatic delight 'It hurts, but it is not the needle.'" It is not often that an author gives glimpses into the privacy of his workshop and shows us, so far as it can be shown, the secret of his art Jdkai is as confiding at times as Thackeray, though with a difference, and makes a friend of his readers, for he has come to know they are his friends and he doesn't mind telling them things in confidence. Incidentally an almost ex- aggerated wealth in figure and color is disclosed. "'Working and walking at the same time?'" the Eyes ask. " ' Such is my habit I work out the whole scene in my head first of all, down to the smallest details, so that when I sit down it is a mere mechanical a-b-c sort of business.' "'Then, according to that, when you are marching with rapid strides up and down that long path, you neither hear nor see anything? ' "'Pardon me, I see grass, trees, flowers, birds, stumps of trees, and huts of reeds overgrown with brambles. Amongst all these I weave my thoughts like the meshes of a spider's web. And I hear, too. I hear the piping of the yellow- hammer, the twittering of the titmouse, the notes of the horn 254 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS from distant ships, the humming of the gnats, and they all have something to whisper to me, something to tell me. A buzzing wasp lends wings to my imagination ; but if I meet a human face, the whole thing flies out of my thoughts, and a single 'your humble servant' will dissolve utterly my fata Morgana, until I turn back and reconstruct the ends of my spider's web among the freshly-discovered reed-built huts, tree-trunks, and trailing flowers, when the well-known voices of the dwellers in the wilderness bring back to me again my scattered ideas; then I retreat into the little wooden summer-house in our garden, and there, disturbed by nobody, I transfer to paper the images which stand before my mind.' " It was in this little summer-house that the first romance was written, which he confesses he loved "just as much as a man loves his first born, though it may be deformed by all sorts of physical and spiritual defects." Where is the young bird that does not like to feel its wings and soar ? and where is the newly-fledged author who does not delight in reading aloud his own creations? Great aspirations were those flaming in the heart of the youth, aspiring to pull down some of the leaves of Apollo's laurels for his own brow. The young mind, in full belief of future entrance upon its kingdom, despises ordinary values. Only images of pure gold flit before the eyes, and the jewels of the imagination are all pearls of great price. The young man might have remained fascinated and absorbed and made incapable of all serious effort had it not been for an opportune bit of ridicule. The extreme sensitiveness to shame and laughter occupies a prominent place in others of Jdkai's works — can it be a special Hungarian mark? It was only by a break with all the attractions of this delightful and alluring provincial society, a break effected by his sweet, gentle, sensible mother, that he resolved within twenty-four hours to take the first boat to Buda-Pest, and was on his way. Jokai speaks of his mother very feelingly and tenderly — of her love, her care, above all of her wisdom. It was chiefly to her, as we have just said, that this sudden tearing away from the seductive influences of his native town occurred and that he THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 265 passed out to the capital city and into the great world. It is very often the little things that affect human lives most deeply. It was a small thing for a bit of pride to strive with mocking laughter, but it removed him from the atmosphere of a provin- cial town and introduced him to the large city which was to be the future theatre of his literary work. His promise and career were no longer to be locked up in a retired corner, but were to become national. Yet he was not destined to a legal career. He was licensed to practise law, it is true, but he turned at once with unerring instinct to journalism, and has written industriously, in one form or another (probably even too much, sometimes) ever since. This was before his twentieth year, and the jubilee was before his seventieth. How industrious a man can be and how much work one can do in fifty years is seen by his output. "Three hundred and fifty volumes, bound, according to the caprice of the publisher, in a variety of sizes, constitute the first complete edition of my works," he says in his Forum article, thus making an average of seven volumes a year, not to count a good deal of more or less journalistic hack-work. And yet he had time, be- sides, to be a lawyer, nominally, to become editor of numerous papers, to be a parliamentarian, to engage in a Revolution, to be banished, to be condemned to death, and to indulge in a number of similar passetemps. Of Jokai's large number of works (most of which are novel- ettes and novels, besides a half-dozen dramas) comparatively few have been done into English. German is the one western lan- guage into which nearly all have been rendered, naturally from the relations of Hungary to the Austrian empire and its capital Vienna; though the author has been honored by translation in part into at least a dozen tongues. The translator of the present volume modestly confesses that he has read only twenty-five out of Jokai's one hundred and fifty novels. Incidentally, it may be said that perhaps the best known in English, apart from the present volume, is "Timar's Two Worlds," recently published by Messrs. Appleton & Co. — a strong story of a double life, of strength and of weakness, of honor and of crime. "In Love with 266 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS the Czarina" is a collection of short sketches, mainly historical, gotten out by an English house. Finally the Cassell's Sunshine Series of novels contains several; as, for instance, "There Is No Devil;" but these are in such a form that the reader cannot be quite sure as to the accuracy and aptness of the translation, or to the extent to which excision has been applied and a height- ening of effect introduced for the sake of sheer sensationalism, and to satisfy a flagrantly lurid imagination. For Jdkai is not averse here and there to startling his readers by a picture or an idea or a suggestion ; it is one of his frequent effects. He can expose with a few words some conventionality and tear away, upon occasion, the flimsy covering of propriety, and now and then it takes a strong pair of eyes to stand the bright light without blinking. It was in Buda-Pest that Jdkai had full bent for his literary genius. He was already considered worthy of notice by some of the most prominent Hungarian writers of the time ; he claimed, in fact, an intimacy with more than one. The poet, Alexander Petofi, author of "Talpra Magyar" (To arms! ye men of Hungary) and beloved everywhere in the kingdom as the Hungarian Robert Burns, ' was a former schoolmate of Jdkai's. The two friends fostered kindred sentiments and aspi- rations, both for the freedom of their native land and for the high purposes of art, and their conversations on these subjects became long and earnest. Petofi was the older, in the season of his renown, and lent encouragement to Jdkai's efforts, giving him what he needed so much, the practical common-sense ad- vice of a man of the world. On one visit, which our author describes, Petofi took out of his host's hands the manuscript of "Every-Day Days" (one of Jdkai's earlier works which its author was in doubt how to dispose of) turned over the leaves and read the headings of the chapters. "That was an original idea of yours, I must say, to choose mottoes from popular ballads for your chapter headings. I'll take this with me to Pest and get it published," was the friend's final comment. At the same time 1 So designated, as well as translated, by Sir John Bowring. THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 257 he counted out twenty-seven silver florins as the price of early attempts he had succeeded in selling for his friend to the pub- lishers. It was Jokai's first literary return, and he tells us that he felt he was a Rothschild. And thus the fateful compact with the muse of letters was subscribed to and sealed. It was Petofi's advice, too, that led him to give up competing for the Academy prize for which he had once been defeated, and to write pieces directly for acceptance by the theatre, and most of all, to get to Buda-Pest as soon as possible. This was the advice he had now followed, and Petofi's was the society to which he naturally gravitated. His drifting towards journalism was equally inevitable, and in his vain strivings, at first, to get something to do, he admits, jocularly enough now, that he even came perilously near being a critic. From the company he kept in Buda-Pest, and by his natural inclinations, the gifted, im- petuous, young man was plunged into politics, and with politics there insinuated themselves gradually dreams of freedom for his beloved country. He had previously been a member of a philan- thropic society, indulging in schemes for the amelioration and freedom of those condemned for life to penal servitude. An enthusiastic band of young literary men are most susceptible to just these influences, and can very easily sacrifice themselves on the altars kindled with such fires. It was the year 1848, the age of revolutions, and the flames breaking out in the streets of Paris, spread themselves into every European state. It was in 1848 that Prussia received the basis of her present constitution. It was in 1848 that Hungary took steps which later led to her recognition as a separate kingdom and an integral part of an empire formed on new lines. Also 1848 was the real date of the awakening and the recognition of the Hungarian masses. It was the 'storm and stress' period of the youth as he entered into the broad arena of life. How revolutionary and bitter many of his early writings were, and how he has lived to laugh over a good deal that was in them himself! "The paroxysms of a crushed spirit, the dreamy phantoms of a diseased imagination, self-contempt, a moon-sick view of the world in general, charac- terize all my tales belonging to that period," he declares. It 18 258 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS was a time for mental disquiet and distortion, and a period of weltschmerz for his youth, as well as for Hungary as a nation, and all his feelings bore this color. The warning voice was not missing, but came to him declaring "the path along which you are now rushing so impetuously leads straight to the gallows — or else to suicide." In Jokai's case it came near to both; his friend, Alexander Petofi, the national lyrist, was happy in losing his life on a battlefield for Independence. It is the vivid picture of the Revolution of 1848 and his own share and experience therein which forms, historically, the most valuable part of the volume "Eyes Like the Sea." The mere facts are that he was at first editor of a notorious weekly news- paper in 1846, and when, in 1848-9, the flames of the Revolution burst forth in their intensity, he was a prominent figure in all. It was he who proclaimed in 1848 "The Twelve Articles of Pest," the Hungarian pronunciamentoof civil rights and liberty. It was in the midst of this scene, both animated by a common purpose, that he and the woman of his fate met. Rosa Labor- falvi 1 was the greatest of Hungarian tragediennes, and was present in the crowd and exhibited a like enthusiasm and even madness. The scene of their meeting is a fine one. The rain was falling and was almost threatening to quench the sparks of revolution in the kindling. The circumstances are given in Jdkai's own words : I noticed that there were not only gentlemen around me, but ladies also. A pair of them had insinuated themselves close to my side. In one of them I recognized " Queen Gertrude " [as the actress was known who excelled in that part] . On her head she wore a plumed cap, and was wrapped up in a Persian shawl embroidered with palm- tree flowers. Both cap and shawl were dripping with rain. I had met the lady once or twice at the Szigligetis'. I exhorted the ladies to go home; here they would get dripping wet, I said, and some other accident might befall them. " We are no worse off here than you are," was the reply. They were determined to wait till the printed broadsides were ready. *She was not the wife of Jokai's friend, the poet Petofi, as one of the many biographical sketches loosely states. THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 259 The insurgents next proceeded to the Town Hall, there to ratify the "Articles" and then scatter them abroad. In the evening the whole town was illuminated in honor, and a free performance was determined upon at the theatre. Here pande- monium reigned: the performance was too tame a procedure and had come to a stop; the revolution had begun in earnest; for a moment everything seemed lost. The author continues: Then a thought occurred to me. I could get on the stage from Nyiry's box ; I rushed in through the side wings. I cut a pretty figure I must say. I was splashed up to the knees with mud from scouring the streets all day. I wore huge, dirty, over- shoes, my tall hat was drenched, so that I could easily have made a crush hat of it and carried it under my arm. I looked around me and perceived Egressy. I told him to draw up the curtain, I wanted to harangue the people from the stage. Then "Queen Gertrude" came towards me. She smiled upon me with truly majestic grace, greeted me, and pressed my hand. No sign of fear was to be seen in her face. She was wearing the tri-colored cockade on her bosom, and, of her own accord, she took it off and pinned it on my breast Then the curtain was raised. The bit of ribbon rosette, in the Hungarian colors — red, white, and green — proved the salvation of the hour. To wear the cockade himself, everyone had first to hurry home; the theatre was soon emptied and peace was preserved. I hastened after Rosa Laborfalvi as soon as this scene was over, and pressed her hand. With that pressure of our hands our engagement began. In 1849 Jdkai joined with the fortunes of the Hungarian government at Debreczin, began editing another newspaper, and was present at the capitulation of Vilagos on August 29. Death stared him in the face as a rebel. Many of the Hun- garian leaders fell on their swords like King Saul and his armor bearer to escape worse than death at the hands of the Philistines; and J6kai, too, had resolved himself upon a like fate. In this hour of need, he was saved both from the enemy and from him- self by the woman of his life. His heroic wife, who had shared every anxiety as well as hope, who seemed to use her role at the theatre as mere preparation for taking part in more real and 260 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS living tragedies of the human soul, followed him up and came to him in the hour of despondency, and by her woman's wit and tact and love saved a star to Hungary and to the world. In one point at least like Milton, his gifts were to unfold still further in time of peace. The wife had shrewdly converted all her jewels and finery into gold, she helped her husband disguise himself, and cheating the hostile government of its prey, in the character of peasants they made their way on foot through the heart of the Russian army, in search of a secure hiding-place in the obscure depths of the vast forests. As the author himself portrays it in the pages of his own book, it seems providential. Jdkai was to remain hidden in the deep beech forests while his wife returned to Pest to resume her engagement at the National Theatre. If they could win back Jdkai's patrimony, they intended purchasing a little property in the heart of the beeches, close to his father-in-law, and plough and sow the rest of thier days. He plaintively asks: "What else could we do? Our country, our nation, our liberty were now no more. Our souls had no wings. We stuck fast in the mire." Meanwhile, his wife encountered many difficulties at the capital. The National Theatre had fallen into the hands of the opposing element, the Germans. Her husband could only write to her by most indirect methods. From August till the middle of October he remained in the dark forest, his impatient soul knowing absolutely nothing of what was going on in the world around him. Shut in by such scenes and occupied alone by his thoughts, he abandons himself to his inborn love of nature, turns the inner eye of memory back over the past, and gives vent in glowing burning words to his feelings and impressions, as they surge within his breast or pass in review before him. A certain impatience seizes hold upon him, and a spirit of bitterness and intense hatred towards all his surroundings and conditions creeps over him — the existent conditions of his country and her people. "Alas! thou white-antlered hind of our ancient leader Almos, whither hast thou led us ? Would that thou hadst left us in Asia! There, at any rate, we would not have been obliged to learn German! " THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 281 In the power of description, disclosing the vast depths of forest stretching far into the unknown, and the high boulders piled up in their immensity, and in the feeling for beauty, commingled with the intensity of dramatic interest nowhere let go, the book has rich charms. But these passages must be left to the reader, and it is obviously unfair to deal too liberally with extracts. Vivid descriptions, however, are even better fitted to revo- lutionary scenes of burning and pillage and horror than to idyllic landscape. His native village falls a prey to the flames of war and of rapine. The recital is set forth, adroitly enough, in the words of the woman with the Eyes like the Sea — and all the vivid glories of the fatal scene are portrayed, in language hurry- ing us on tumultously, and recalling, not a little, the highly colored horror and rapid movement of the brilliant narrative of another Revolution in Carlyle's pages. These are not the only passages which give full opportunity to his rich descriptive faculty and dramatic talent in story telling. The terrible death of two gypsies, tracked and treed by the wolves of the endless forests, is peculiarly drastic; it is so livid that we close our eyes with a shudder to avoid viewing the tear- ing of the flesh and the crunching of the bones in our presence. In the sore hour of need, and almost of despair, outcast and fugitive as he was, he was tempted to turn his back on his country and betake himself to Paris, that home and place of refuge for so many infected with the germs of Revolution. Even should he come out with his life, if he continued to write in Hungary, it could be only under an assumed name; and, indeed, for years his novels and articles following this period were all signed by different noms de plume. Still his spirit re- mained undaunted: If I live, I will build a tower out of the ruins of my country's glory ; if I die, my grave will become an altar. Vainly does this coward flesh of mine tremble in every nerve. I am neither a hero nor a giant. The report of a gun makes me tremble ; I grow pale in the presence of death; grief draws tears from me — but I will not depart from my set path. If I cannot write under my own name, I will write under the name of my landlord's dog. I will be "Saj6" [a name actually employed]. We'll bark if we can't speak, but well not be silent. 262 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS Truly, a noble eloquence arising from a tortured spirit seeking utterance! But the thought of Paris was very alluring and came back to his fancy again and again, and he could not readily shake it off: To become a great French writer! To be raised aloft on the shoulders of the most glorious of nations ! What here at home was but the crack of a whip in my hands, would there be a thunderbolt ! And he continues: Ah! what a different man I should have become. Had I fled, I should now be the grand master of the Realists, for there is as much erotic flame, satiric vein, and luxurious fancy in me as in them; but I have not used these qualities because I write for a Hungarian public. Had I flown, millions would have read my works, and fathers and mothers would have cursed me as the corruptor of their children. And I should have laughed at them, and tapped the fat paunch, which as an idealistic writer I have never been able to acquire. It was by his wife's intervention and by a fiction, as told here, that Jdkai was at last enabled to escape and to return to Pest. She succeeded in securing for him a passport; for, when the Komorn garrison capitulated and the officers were guaran- teed life and liberty, a friend wrote Jdkai's name in the list of capitulating lieutenants, and handed the passport bearing his name to his wife. His life was at first very quiet and naturally so, since he was still under police supervision. His work was that of the journa- list and editor, but only possible under various assumed names. One of these, for a while, was "Kakas Martin" (Martin Cock). "Eh! what a popular man I was then! There were Kakas Martin clays, with bowls in the shape of cock-headed men. I really was in the mouth of the nation in those days. O tempi passati." When one political sheet would come to grief, immediately another would spring up to take its place. There might be a nominal publicly advertised and responsible editor, but Jdkai was really the mouthpiece and ruling genius. And it was not play besides, not to speak of its dangers, for it was a life of incessant unsparing work, with little rest and recreation. This sort of thing was more than he could stand, and he broke down, THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 288 seized with a hemorrhage. This was in the year 1858, and the ill symptoms were only cured by five or six hours' daily exercise in the saddle in a bold expediton of some weeks' duration to the Western Carpathian Alps. Owing to journalistic indiscretion, our author also was to experience the confinement of a prison. It was the story of Leigh Hunt's imprisonment repeated. His stay indoors was one of the brightest and most restful episodes in his life. He made a cosy home for himself inside the walls, and worked away steadily except when interrupted by the pretty steady flow of visitors. Indeed, he was forced to beg his jailor for solitary confinement from them. He became further and further engrossed in the questions and movements of the day. The cause of letters suffered ; he even intimates that his home suffered before this all-demanding goddess, Politica. But we have portrayed enough of the man as drawn in his own pages, and there is no candid expression of a man's past feelings and purposes that has not a peculiar charm, all its own. We have seen him a man of letters, a journalist, a political leader, and later he became a member of Parliament for the National-Liberals; among more recent honors, he is fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Hungary, and President of the Petofi Society, and has of late been elected an honorary member of the International Literary Congress at a session held in London. Despite his fifty years' service, he is still working, in his desire to complete, while he yet lives, what may prove to be the Hungarian national songs of the Niebelungen. Here we will leave him, still dreaming of his country and seeking to put into expression, as best he may, the essence of the thought and aspiration and character of his native tongue and land. Perhaps we ought to have spoken more of the wonderful vigor of his work and the inimitable charm and lightness of his narrative — particularly, of the alluring attractiveness of his heroine, Bessy. She is the leading figure in the volume con- sidered as a novel, and it was a happy and genuine artistic touch to tell much of the story in her words. In any other way, our 264 THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS minds would possibly have dwelt more upon the improbabilities of the recital and not so much upon its intense delightfulness. In this, as in other points of narrative style, Jdkai actively recalls the charm of our late ill-fated prince of narrators, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose "New Arabian Nights" are hardly more fantastic and fascinating than many of Jdkai's fancies. The author's personality hovers over all. That he writes rap- idly, we feel from the glow; that he never blots his own pages is, perhaps, also in evidence — possibly unfortunately so — for he has unquestionably often written unwisely and too much. And what of Bessy? incomparable, high-spirited Bessy, who had five husbands, and was surely so delightful and irresistible she could have found no difficulty in obtaining as many more, had not the fifth, as in the case of the Wife of Bath (and the fifth one too, in both instances, smacking somewhat of clerical- ism) proved fatal. A certain resemblance Mr. Bain, the trans- lator, has already found between her and "that other delightful and original rogue in romance," the lady who becomes Mrs. Desborough in Mr. Stevenson's "Dynamiter." They both can tell such enchanting and thrilling adventures and apparently, too, love so warmly and devotedly! And someone else — a friend in reading — has suggested what English heroine is there so like Bessy in her fascination, and who wrought such havoc and ended even so miserably, as Beatrix Esmond? The lively heroine animates so vividly and intensely the pages of this book, that we almost resent having our picture disarranged and our fancies mentally dissected by the matter-of-fact information hinted at in the closing chapter, that the author happened upon her in visiting a house of correction for women trespassers, and there the original stood before him, and thus the tale became told! We can now better understand how Jdkai has been called the Dumas of Hungary. As an exception to all other con- temporaneous literatures — French, Italian, and Spanish ; Ger- man, Hollandish, and Scandinavian; Slavonic, and English and American, too, in their latest developments — the novel of adventure and humor is still popular in Hungary, and rich THE NESTOR OF HUNGARIAN LETTERS 28fi exuberance of fancy and of language is still permitted. With an historic past close behind her people, the spirit engendered therefrom has fostered their romantic temperament. This spirit is clearest seen in Maurus Jdkai. He is virtually the creator of the Hungarian novel, and as has been intimated, has written near a library full. His translator, the biographer and trans- lator, too, of Hans Christian Andersen, thus characterizes him : "He possesses a gorgeous fancy, an all-embracing imagination, and a constructive skill unsurpassed in modern fiction; but his most delightful quality is his humor, a humor of the cheeriest, heartiest sort, without a single soufton of ill-nature about it, a quality precious in any age, and doubly so in an overwrought, supercivilized age like our own." For ten years after the Revolution Hungarian literature was nearly extinct; all the old forces had become scattered and annihilated. Almost alone Jdkai created a new literature. He betook himself to fiction when political journalism failed. Here was the great misfortune from the point of view of literary art. When a man does so much and such varied work, a good deal of it is bound to be inferior. But his wealth, as has been sug- gested, springs from sheer exuberance, and it is not a mark of exhaustion. And should we ask, in the end, what are the author's own thoughts as to the spirit which has animated this work, the answer comes clear: It is the re-dedication of self to a life of letters ! And now, too, when I stand before the big, silly bookcase, which is filled with nothing but my own works, I often think, would it not have been better if they had none of them been ever thought out? And instead of writing so much for the whole world, would it not have been better if I had written for my own private use, just so much as would go within the inside cover of a family Bible? Nowadays, a whole street in my native town is called after my name : would it not have been better if all I had there were a simple hut ? But nol I willed it so, and if it were possible for me to go back to the diverging cross-roads of my opening life, I would tread once more in the self-same footprints that I have left so long behind me. DAY AND TO $, om J* ° N ™ E FOURTH OVERDUE. "- 00 ° N ™E SEVENTH dI? 156 \ LIBRA!