LIBRARY 
 
 HiV-n-rrf of 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 A BOOK OF 
 
 PREFERENCES IN 
 LITERATURE
 
 A BOOK OF 
 
 PREFERENCES 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 EUGENE MASON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE 
 1015
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE BALL ANT YNE PRESS 
 LONDON
 
 TO 
 
 M. A. M. 
 
 ALL SAINTS' DAY 1913 
 
 jEtvrnafac cum Sanetii 
 Tuit in gloria, numerari
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE, AND THE COMPLETE 
 
 SCEPTIC 18 
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY, AND Two MODERN 
 EXEMPLARS (MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 
 AND GUY DE MAUPASSANT) 41 
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST (JOSE-MARIA DE 
 
 HEREDIA) WITH SOME TRANSLATIONS 07 
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC (MR. W. B. YEATS) 89 
 Two CHRISTIAN POETS (CHRISTINA G. 
 
 ROSSETTI AND PAUL VERLAINE) 115 
 
 A CATHOLIC POET (FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
 AND HIS LEGEND) 139 
 
 WALTER PATER, AND SOME PHASES OF 
 
 DEVELOPMENT 167 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO WAGE'S " ROMAN 
 
 DE BRUT " 195 
 
 IX
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 rHE scope of this little volume is sug- 
 gested sufficiently, I think, by ite 
 title " A Book of Preferences in 
 Literature" The essays included here deal with 
 subjects which, for one reason or another, are 
 dear to the mind of their writer, and represent 
 a personal choice amongst many valued books. 
 Exclusion from these pages does not necessarily 
 mean that such absent authors are less congenial 
 to his taste. It implies simply that M. Anatole 
 France and Mr. Rudyard Kipling amongst 
 novelists, Walter Pater amongst essayists, and 
 Christina Rossetti, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Heredia, 
 and Francis Thompson amongst poets, are 
 peculiarly grateful to his temperament and 
 thought. The writers named, however eminent, 
 are not perhaps of the supremest genius. It 
 matters little. In literature, as in prayer, the 
 devotion at times will be addressed to the saint 
 rather than to the Deity, and yet the homage 
 and petition may gain their reward. In the 
 11
 
 12 FOREWORD 
 
 following chapters I have offered my duty to 
 Literature through the persons of the acolytes 
 about her shrine. I trust with fearfulness 
 that I shall be forgiven. Amongst all the 
 characters of fiction I have coveted greatly the 
 role of Interpreter in the House Beautiful. Where 
 I have failed in my aspiration, it is the com- 
 mentator and not his text that is uninspired. 
 
 E. M.
 
 M. ANATOLE FRANCE, AND 
 THE COMPLETE SCEPTIC 
 
 THAT Flemish monk who stated he had 
 spent his most uncheckered hours in 
 a nook with a little book, obviously 
 could not have referred to the yellow-covered 
 volumes of M. Anatole France. Even had he 
 lived four or five hundred years later he would 
 have considered those books as more suitable 
 for the Abbey of Thelema than to the library 
 of the Brothers of the Common Life. I am 
 not concerned to deny that they do contain 
 matter rendering them inconvenient for inclu- 
 sion amongst writings of a devotional character. 
 If, however, they are not meant " to make 
 man at peace with death," as was the " Imita- 
 tion " of & Kempis, perhaps they may perform 
 the yet useful function of keeping him at peace 
 with life. The series of novels and essays 
 for which M. Anatole France is responsible 
 presents a well-considered criticism of life 
 under a style which is a perpetual joy and 
 13
 
 14 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 astonishment to the reader. But the author 
 of these books is greater and more interesting 
 than his works. To use the compliment of 
 the poet, " What, madam, we most admire 
 in you is yourself." He is greater and more 
 interesting than they because at a critical 
 moment of his life he dared to rise above 
 their teaching, and, like St. Paul, to dispose 
 of the strict and formal laws of logic with a 
 " God forbid." The apostle is an odd and 
 unexpected exemplar for Anatole France to take 
 pattern by, and the circumstance is one of 
 those little ironies which should be dear to 
 his sardonic humour. The appearance of the 
 smiling epicurean in the role of the moralist ; 
 the dogmatism manifested by the preacher of 
 the uncertainty of private judgment ; the 
 fervid political sympathies proclaimed on 
 platform and in pamphlet by the excursionist 
 from ivory towers such contrasts as these 
 are a very rejoicing spectacle, and add salt 
 and savour to the consideration of his character 
 and work. 
 
 M. Anatole France was born on April 16, 1844, 
 and has just completed his seventieth year. He 
 was born, appropriately enough, in Paris, the 
 city which has told so many excellent stories
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 15 
 
 and has mocked so gaily at such excellent 
 creeds. It is not without significance that 
 his place of birth is the arena where so great 
 a number of the intellectual battles of Christen- 
 dom have been waged and decided, and where 
 the cross is continually rising and falling above 
 the dome of the Pantheon. Rcnan whom 
 Anatole France would own as master was 
 born in Brittany. Christianity, therefore, was 
 in the fibres of his heart, although he could 
 not accept its theology. Its memories echoed 
 in his soul like the bells of the city of Ys, 
 ringing beneath the waters of the sea. The 
 distance between Brittany and Paris is not so 
 great as the difference between Renan and 
 France in the fashion they look back upon 
 the religion they felt constrained to abjure. 
 Anatole France was the only child of a poor 
 bookseller, whose shop was on the Quai 
 Malaquais, near by the Seine, within sight of 
 the Louvre, the Pont Neuf, the towers of Notre 
 Dame, the lourelles of the Conciergerie, and 
 the high-pitched roof of the Sainte Chapelle. 
 His father was Noel Thibault, nicknamed 
 " Pere France " by the comrades of his regi- 
 ment The son, in turn, took the jest as his 
 pseudonym, and has made it a glory of modern
 
 16 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 French literature. Noel Thibault derived from 
 La Vendee, and as was meet was both 
 Catholic and Royalist. His wife came from 
 Bruges-la-morte, and was Catholic too. There 
 never was an author more personal than 
 Anatole France, nor one who recurred more 
 willingly to the scenes of his childhood. In the 
 loving intimacy of his treatment of such 
 subjects he reminds us irresistibly of Lamb. 
 The memories of these early days are branded 
 into his recollection. They occur again and again 
 with the regularity of motives throughout his 
 work. He recalls with delight those quays 
 on the Seine where the bookstalls form an 
 essential part of the landscape. He lingers 
 gladly near the river which by day mirrored 
 the sky, and by night (like a woman) decked 
 itself with jewels and gleaming flowers. In 
 how many novels does his father's bookshop 
 recur, with its circle of writers and artists and 
 amateurs discussing everything in heaven 
 and earth, and in other places less reputable 
 as well ! Noticeable above all are the content 
 and gladness with which M. France speaks 
 of his parents. With such frequency and in such 
 touching terms does the great writer dwell upon 
 the theme, that the most casual reader seems
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 17 
 
 privileged with their acquaintance. Le Pere 
 France, to his son's remembrance, was an old 
 man, older in weariness than in years. The 
 retired soldier was gentle, and a little sad, and 
 loved to talk his son to sleep by telling over 
 the folk-tales of his country. But, like a true 
 Frenchman, the lad's most fragrant recollections 
 cling about the memory of his mother. She 
 appears in his pages active and gay, singing 
 cheerfully as she busied herself upon the 
 duties of her house. She had the soul of an 
 artist, though the opportunity to express her- 
 self was denied, and, like her husband, de- 
 lighted to relate stories to her boy ; but the 
 stories he learned from her lips were the beauti- 
 ful Christian legends opening to a sensitive 
 child the very gate of dreams. Near her side 
 he turned over the Flemish pictures in the 
 great family Bible. At her knee he read in a 
 beautifully illustrated edition of the Lives of the 
 Saints. Doubtless it was owing to his mother's 
 influence that M. France's first childish am- 
 bition was to become a saint, just as the normal 
 lad desires the career of a sailor or a mighty 
 hunter. Of his efforts to reproduce in a modern 
 household the life of an early ascetic we have 
 a very entertaining description. Discourage-
 
 18 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 ment has been ever the lot of those of whom 
 the world is not worthy. A spirited attempt 
 to revive the peculiar mortification of St. 
 Simeon Stylites on the top of the kitchen 
 pump ended abruptly, owing to the active 
 measures adopted by an unsympathetic 
 maid. The aspirant to sanctity was whipped 
 and put to bed for cutting open the seat of a 
 hair to make himself a hair shirt. When he 
 threw his playthings into the street, his father, 
 not so perfected by counsels of perfection, 
 merely shut the window, exclaiming that the 
 child obviously was an idiot. " I felt both 
 anger and shame to hear such an opinion 
 of my character. But I consoled myself with 
 the thought that since my father was not so 
 advanced in holiness as myself, he would not 
 share with me in the glories of the blessed, and in 
 this reflection I found a rich source of conso- 
 lation." Piety, in the classical sense, is an 
 essential feature both of M. France and of 
 Charles Lamb. Piety, in the Christian meaning 
 of the word, is scarcely a note of their mature 
 characters, but each alike asserts almost pas- 
 sionately the fundamental goodness of the 
 child. The dream of sanctity died away early 
 in the case of M. France. One scarcely knows
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 19 
 
 whether to laugh or cry at the thought. The 
 dream was succeeded by other ambitions, and 
 the first to plant the seeds of such imaginings 
 were members of his family. Intellectually 
 Anatole France proceeds neither from father 
 nor mother, but from his grandparents. The 
 former may have endowed him with his instinct 
 for the conte, but from the latter he derives the 
 habit and texture of his mind. His grand- 
 father was a veteran of Waterloo, a little 
 jaunty in carriage, and a diligent student of the 
 Oriental scholar Volney, whose famous book, 
 " Les Ruines," expounds the history of 
 humanity in a pompous narrative, exhibiting 
 a touching faith in the progress of the human 
 race. The grandson shares the same historical 
 interests, but with a less naive confidence in the 
 ultimate perfection of our species. The in- 
 fluence of his grandmother was even more 
 pronounced. This lady was neither Catholic 
 nor Royalist, but frivolous and sceptical ac- 
 cording to the traditions of the eighteenth 
 century. She was innocent of religion as a 
 bird ; her mind was moulded in the school of 
 Voltaire, and she made no secret of her pre- 
 dilections. She mocked gaily at the seriousness 
 and sobriety of her daughter-in-law, and,
 
 20 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 undeceived by the child's precocious piety, 
 remarked, with assurance, that her grandson 
 would grow a very different man to his father. 
 The uncanny insight of her prophecy, and its 
 uncanny measure of fulfilment, almost entitle her 
 to a place amongst the major prophets. Anatole 
 France is the child not of his father but of 
 his grandmother. If the hands of the dead 
 shape our characters and fashion our destinies, 
 then the career of the greatest of living authors 
 amongst all its conflicting currents was 
 influenced fundamentally by the sceptical old 
 lady who sat at the feet of Voltaire. 
 
 The poor bookseller determined, at any cost, 
 to give his son the advantages denied to him- 
 self. To ensure that the lad should not be 
 defrauded in his young years of the sweet 
 food of academic institution, he was sent to 
 the College Stanislas, there to make his 
 " humanities." The College Stanislas was an 
 ecclesiastical school. This had its advantages, 
 for, as Lemaitre points out, the offices of 
 religion help to keep the soul tender and pure ; 
 and should faith unfortunately leave you later 
 in life, you are better able to appreciate its 
 influence on others, and are more intelligent 
 and equitable in your judgments. It was a
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 21 
 
 long walk to class, and the way led through 
 the picturesque Latin Quarter, the quiet pro- 
 vincial streets about St. Sulpice, and so 
 through the Luxembourg Gardens to college. 
 Many and many a picture of Parisian life was 
 fastened in the lad's retentive memory during 
 that daily journey. The schoolboy made no 
 mark in his studies. Then, as always, he was 
 the artist of the beautiful, rather than the 
 exact and painful scholar. In one or two of his 
 books he has described himself before his desk, 
 upon the bench, his eyes filled with the theory 
 of nymphs. He was haunted by faultless 
 faces, arms of ivory, and white tunics, and 
 his ears were ravished by voices sweeter and 
 more tunable than the most enchanting music. 
 The masters of the College Stanislas grounded 
 their pupils in Christianity and the classics. In 
 the case of Anatole France Christianity passed, 
 but his love of the classics remained. He is essen- 
 tially Latin, even now the fine flower of the 
 Latin genius. The German culture, so close to 
 the intellect of Ernest Renan, has nothing to 
 say to his disciple. The classics he loves because 
 they taught him the art to order and express 
 his thought. They gave him his canons of judg- 
 ment and taste, and were the very apocalypse
 
 22 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 of beauty. He became an excellent though 
 not impeccable scholar in four literatures, but, 
 excluding Greek, all these literatures are Latin. 
 "I have," he says somewhere, "a desperate 
 attachment to Latin studies. Without them 
 the grace of the French genius would be gone. 
 We are Latins, and the milk of the she-wolf is 
 the best part of our blood." 
 
 The ambition of M. France was to be a writer, 
 and he embarked on his chosen career im- 
 mediately on leaving college. His efforts were 
 interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco - 
 Prussian War. He joined the regiment with 
 a copy of Virgil in his knapsack, and continued 
 his studies throughout the disastrous cam- 
 paign. It is told that he and a comrade sat 
 absorbed over their book to the accompani- 
 ment of cannon-balls falling in the Marne. 
 It will not be forgotten how Brotteaux peruses 
 his pocket Lucretius, however inconvenient the 
 situation, in that romance of the Revolution 
 entitled " Les Dieux ont Soif." The whole 
 of Anatole France's work is a web of memories 
 and personal confidences. The war ended, 
 M. France resumed his profession of literature. 
 He published two volumes of verse, and 
 attached himself to the Parnassians, a school of
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 23 
 
 which Leconte de Lisle was the acknowledged 
 prince. It is obvious that so personal a writer 
 could not remain permanently devoted to a 
 faith whose cardinal dogma was the repression 
 of any display of emotion. It is difficult to 
 conceive Anatole France in the impassive atti- 
 tude of a Sioux brave at the stake. Preoccu- 
 pation with beauty, concern with form, led him 
 to imitate the rigorous perfection of his model. 
 Personal differences with the master quickened 
 his departure from the camp. Verlaine, for 
 a period, adorned the same gallery, with a 
 similar incongruity. 
 
 M. France, however, is not essentially a poet. 
 Few poets are. His true gift is the more 
 flexible and pedestrian gift of prose. This 
 he was quick to discover, in the first instance 
 because he is an excellent and discerning critic, 
 and secondly by reason of being under the 
 painful necessity to live. The distinguished 
 editor of Le Temps persuaded the diffident 
 scholar to contribute articles to his journal, 
 articles dealing mainly with literary and 
 philosophical subjects, pleasantly illuminated 
 by anecdotes and autobiographical excursions. 
 These articles have been collected in the four 
 volumes of the " Vie Litteraire," and to the
 
 24 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 true Anatolian are amongst the most delightful 
 portions of his work, to be read and re-read. 
 " The kissed mouth never loses its freshness." 
 In the light of his future development these 
 little essays are of the deepest interest. They 
 express the views of a philosophical monk, 
 belonging by heart (it is M. France's own 
 phrase) to some Abbey of Thelema, where the 
 rule is easy and the obedience light. Possibly 
 faith may not overflow the measure, but 
 charity certainly abounds. Indulgence and 
 tolerance are the cardinal virtues of the Order. 
 Its professed monks are excellent citizens, 
 because they are profoundly attached to the 
 use and custom of their times. Since the wont 
 of the majority constitutes human morality, 
 a sceptic is your perfect citizen, for why should 
 he agitate against a law he has no hope to 
 improve ? The sceptic must leave martyrdom 
 to those who, unable to doubt, have in their 
 very simplicity the only excuse of their ob- 
 stinacy. There is even some impertinence in 
 piling the faggots about yourself for the sake of 
 an opinion. Martyrs have no sense of irony, 
 and this is their unpardonable sin, for without 
 irony the world is but a wood without birds. 
 Irony is the gaiety of thought and the wit of
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 25 
 
 wisdom. Such are some of the precepts and 
 counsels bestrewn with a liberal hand through 
 the pages of these four books of essays. Their 
 sweetness would be positively cloying were 
 not the writer human, and his theory of indul- 
 gence liable to reach its limit, sometimes an 
 unexpected limit. The novels of Zola, for 
 instance, are treated with an extreme severity. 
 It is declared there is none to envy his dis- 
 gusting notoriety, and with an unwonted 
 burst of Scriptural fervour the critic adds it 
 were good for that man if he had never been 
 born. Somewhat of the same unforeseen 
 lyricism is displayed by the essayist when a 
 copy of an anti-militarist novel was burnt 
 publicly by a chauvinist colonel before his 
 regiment of cavalry. He was a sage indeed 
 who pleaded that your enemy should be en- 
 treated as if one day he may become your 
 dearest friend. 
 
 M. France did not confine himself to 
 journalism. It was but one phase of the 
 activity of a man whose humour it is to pre- 
 tend to idleness. He pressed steadily forward 
 with that wonderful x series of short stories and 
 novels constituting one of the glories of modern 
 France. These books were very fragrant and
 
 26 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 tender at first, but as time went on and their 
 author dared more and more to be frankly 
 himself, they developed other qualities which 
 proved somewhat disconcerting to his early 
 admirers. In a day when artists are too 
 frequently but faded replicas of great originals, 
 this desperate insistence on individuality 
 should be counted to him for righteousness. 
 The novels are not impeccable, on the contrary 
 they are a mine of faults, but these defects 
 are so engaging that if you failed to appre- 
 ciate the books for their excellences the chance 
 is you would do so for their failings. Critics 
 tell us that they are but poorly constructed ; 
 and when we find one -seventh of a whole 
 volume given over to the mere description of 
 a banquet, we must agree, however ruefully. 
 But who would wish the talk in that 
 Alexandrian banqueting-hall, with its bril- 
 liance of dialogue and its confusion of philo- 
 sophies, to be shortened by a single page ! 
 Again, it may be urged that the sensuous is bui 
 one step removed from the sensual, and in 
 the case of M. France the one step which exists 
 does not always need to be taken. Neither can 
 it be denied that the characters informing these 
 romances lack somewhat of the relief and sub-
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 27 
 
 tlety given by the mightiest creators to the off- 
 spring of their imagination. It matters little. 
 One character, and that the most entrancing, is 
 common to all these narratives, and it is Anatole 
 France himself. Sometimes his is the function of 
 the Greek chorus. More often he appears beneath 
 the most trivial disguise, and dissembles under 
 the names of Nicias, of the Abbe Jerome 
 Coignard, of Bergeret, of Brotteaux des Ilettes. 
 The reader recognizes him by his silken speech. 
 The hands may be the hands of Esau, but the 
 voice in every case is the voice of Jacob. The 
 views enunciated by such characters as these 
 are not austere. The philosophy they expound 
 is an undiluted epicureanism. Their scepti- 
 cism is the scepticism we are familiar with 
 in the essays of their original and prototype. 
 They share even in his personal feelings and 
 distastes. One or two are bookmen who are 
 perilously near to becoming bookworms. This 
 loves cats, and this other has an imperfect sym- 
 pathy with Jews. 
 
 Then to the smiling Epicurean in his ivory 
 tower came the angel with the test. A certain 
 captain, of Jewish blood, was tried for treason, 
 and found guilty. The great majority of the 
 French nation, including most of Anatole
 
 28 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 France's personal friends, approved of the 
 finding and the consequent sentence. A 
 minority, contemptible in numbers, contended 
 that an awful wrong had been done to an 
 innocent man, and moved heaven and earth 
 to annul the judgment. This minority in- 
 cluded as its most prominent champion that 
 novelist on whom M. France had published so 
 caustic a criticism. Neither was it possible 
 to consider the captain himself as exactly a 
 sympathetic personage. The issues were very 
 confused, and the storm raged with astounding 
 violence. If ever there was a case in which 
 the complete sceptic and convinced Epicurean 
 was bound by principle and interest alike to 
 remain aloof from the din and dust of the battle 
 it surely was here. Logically he was com- 
 pelled to do so, for how should he attain that 
 truth he had always proclaimed as past finding 
 out ! M. France was nobler than his creed, and 
 adopted a distasteful task in the company of 
 distasteful comrades, with enthusiasm. Man 
 does not live by denial but by affirmation, and 
 he realizes himself more completely through 
 self-sacrifice than by indulgence. Though 
 any opinion you may hold is probably mis- 
 taken, yet you must act upon it whatever be
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 29 
 
 the cost. Better to affirm and be wrong, than 
 deny and be in the right. 
 
 Probably M. France, as a personal matter, was 
 not wildly interested in the fortunes and 
 misfortunes of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He 
 paid a great price to obtain the victim's freedom, 
 a price to be counted over in popular disfavour, 
 in loss of friends and of that leisure so dear to 
 a scholar's heart. But not one of his books 
 shines with so pure a lustre as the conviction 
 which induced him, despite all logic, to range 
 himself upon a side and do battle for an idea, 
 whether that idea were right or wrong. 
 
 The complete sceptic, once having failed, 
 progressed rapidly along the road of imper- 
 fection. His ivory tower was abandoned 
 for political platforms. The comrades of that 
 first crusade were men of advanced political 
 opinions. Politics being a state of mind 
 rather than a creed, it was natural M. France 
 should regard their views with sympathy. 
 He presently made them his own, and is now 
 a convinced Socialist. It would be an im- 
 pertinence to criticize the doctrines of so dis- 
 tinguished an advocate, and I have no in- 
 tention to make myself ridiculous by BO doing. 
 Very possibly, indeed, he is quite in the right.
 
 30 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 One may be permitted, however, to smile at the 
 incongruity of M. France's appearance in the 
 part of the hot gospeller, walking beneath the 
 red flag and chanting the International as 
 lustily as he may. But to the fervour of the 
 proselyte we who are Londoners are indebted 
 for the privilege of hearing the great author 
 speak on that memorable evening when he 
 occupied the platform of the Fabian Society 
 with other orators only less eloquent than 
 himself; and the audience gathered together 
 on that occasion will not easily forget the 
 moment when M. France in his fraternal 
 ardour embraced Mr. Bernard Shaw upon the 
 cheek. 
 
 The illustrious evening of M. France is a very 
 strenuous period. It is associated with battle- 
 cries, and devoted to causes and an ideal. 
 It seems odd to remember that for the greater 
 part of his life the author of the phrase " Society 
 is founded on the patience of the poor " was 
 regarded as a mere dilettante. Indeed, the 
 reproach is levelled yet by critics who feel little 
 enthusiasm for his views. We must admit 
 there is much in these writings to give colour 
 to the suggestion. They are composed and 
 put together so loosely as almost to require
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 31 
 
 the indulgence that is the privilege of the 
 amateur. They repeat themselves continually. 
 They are concerned with art and thought, less 
 as a passion than as an agreeable pastime to 
 occupy our little day. The interest in ideas 
 manifested in every book of the long series, 
 nevertheless, is genuine and sincere. They may 
 be treated with too much display, as though 
 they were only a handful of brightly coloured 
 beads, but behind the parade M. France sits 
 absorbed as Mr. Wells himself. The learning, 
 moreover, informing these books is very real. 
 It is worn lightly as a flower too lightly, indeed. 
 It is the scholarship of a poet rather than that 
 of the student, and seems wide rather than 
 deep or exact. This matters nothing if the 
 book be a work of fiction. More is not required. 
 The case is only serious when the book purports 
 to be a considered study of history, involving 
 questions of grave import. An imperfect proof- 
 reading, and an apparent indifference to 
 accuracy of reference, then become unpardon- 
 able levity. At least they seemed so to Andrew 
 Lang. M. Anatole France took a less austere 
 view of the moral aspect than could be expected 
 of a Scotsman. Perhaps he was biased. He 
 pleaded for indulgence in advance by telling in
 
 32 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 his preface to the " Vie de Jeanne d'Arc " of the 
 fate awaiting the inaccurate writer. " During 
 that very fifteenth century which I have striven 
 to reclothe in flesh in these pages, a certain 
 demon flourished, named Titivillus. It was 
 his pleasure to collect the omitted letters 
 and misplaced words of negligent clerks at 
 their daily task, and to carry them to hell in his 
 wallet every evening. When the day of the 
 death of each careless scribe was come, and 
 St. Michael weighed his soul in the balance, 
 then Titivillus hastened forward and placed 
 the heavy burden of his sins in the scale of his 
 iniquities." Such eloquent special pleading 
 would have touched the heart of any reader 
 except that of a brother humorist, carried 
 beyond his usual courtesy by an uncontrollable 
 indignation. 
 
 The omnivorous reading and wide learning 
 of M. France find a congenial vehicle for em- 
 ployment in the novel. In a vivid metaphor 
 he once compared the scholar with an Oriental 
 eater of hashish. Both live in a fume of 
 dreams, and he declared printed matter is 
 the opium of the West. As we turn the pages 
 of his books, and think for a little of what we 
 have read, the truth of the figure comes home
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 33 
 
 to us. They possess the supreme gift of 
 suggestiveness, of evocation, and the dreams 
 of the past steal from their chapters like wreaths 
 of smoke from the opium pipe. History, and 
 the pleasant byways of history, seem to be 
 his favourite study. The obsession of what 
 is gone lies upon him, and no period of the 
 world's history is alien to his curiosity. The 
 century he regards with the deepest intellectual 
 interest is that in which Christ was born in 
 Syria. The dawning of Christianity, and the 
 relations of its Founder with the characters 
 He met upon His road, are approached with 
 the most alert concern. Pilate, who had 
 forgotten the Man he crucified; Mary Magdalene, 
 who loved her Master with a fervour deemed 
 barely respectable by the Roman matron ; 
 St. Paul, the destined conduit through which 
 the new religion was to flow these form 
 material for some of Anatole France's most 
 arresting and characteristic narratives. Chris- 
 tianity absorbs him despite his repulsion. It is 
 Christianity, again, that takes him to Egypt, 
 and we assist at that strange and bewildering 
 kaleidoscope where the hermit and the desert 
 are brought into troubling contact with the 
 learned and beautiful courtesan, and the 
 
 c
 
 34 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 libraries and philosophies of Alexandria make 
 " Thai's " half museum and half pandemonium. 
 Whatever be the defects of its planning, the 
 present writer must consider " Thai's " to be its 
 author's masterpiece, if only because his 
 essential gift of irony finds there its most 
 complete expression. M. Faguet, however, 
 gives pride of place to the eighteenth-century 
 novel of modish manners and pagan wisdom 
 entitled " La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque " 
 a queen with webbed fingers to her hand 
 like some aquatic bird. Other critics, equally 
 distinguished, allot the palm to the Benjamin 
 of his age, that fine romance of the Revolution, 
 " Les Dieux ont Soif." Should a referendum 
 be taken, the popular vote doubtless would 
 fall on his modern evocation of Florence, 
 " Le Lys Rouge," with its new Decameron 
 set amongst the formal gardens of the city of the 
 red lilies a Decameron of criticism rather 
 than of story-telling, and of visits to holy places, 
 where the neurotic heart sets itself to devise 
 perverse things. All these novels are remark- 
 able in their various ways. The master falters 
 only when he emulates the dismal foreseeings of 
 Mr. Wells. His speculations on the future 
 seem largely derivative from the English writer,
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 35 
 
 and the medievalist in him is distinctly to be 
 preferred to the prophet. 
 
 The lover of beauty is driven by necessity 
 to take refuge from the banalities of to-day in 
 some dream of the past. Time has winnowed 
 the vulgarities of yesterday from the threshing- 
 floor with his fan. The residue is pure wheat. 
 The poetry of distance softens the harsher 
 features of the landscape with a purple haze. 
 Anatole France, by temperament and by 
 philosophy, was born to experience its siren 
 seductions. He had ever taught that in the 
 flux of things memory alone is lasting, and 
 that our life turns inevitably to what is gone. 
 His novels are but doors of escape opening 
 on cities of brighter colour and on fresher 
 streams. With an insatiable curiosity, M. 
 France laboured to acquire any knowledge that 
 would bring this fairer world more closely to 
 his eyes. He is a tireless student of history 
 and biography perhaps even more of those 
 memoirs and diaries which show humanity in 
 its dressing-gown. Pictures and prints help to 
 visualize and re-create his scenes, and certain 
 chapters in his books are but transcriptions 
 in prose of the colour-print upon his desk. 
 The illusion of reality is made more vivid by
 
 36 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 M. France's pleasant habit of telling over again 
 many half -forgotten legends of the past. These 
 stories come to us with an added richness by 
 passing through the successive strata of so 
 manifold a culture. That irony, which is his 
 most personal quality, transforms the naivett 
 of the original narrative. Such stories as these 
 are usually drawn from mediaeval sources. 
 " Our Lady's Tumbler," for example surely 
 one of the most appealing and suggestive 
 of the legends of the Middle Ages is preserved 
 to us by the piety of Gaston Paris and of 
 another scholar in a volume of " Romania." 
 " The Surety," again, is derived from a great 
 collection of the Miracles of Our Lady, trans- 
 lated from the Latin into fluent French verse 
 by Gautier de Coinci, a monk of Soissons, in 
 the thirteenth century. " The Boast of 
 Oliver " comes from the cycle of the Charle- 
 magne romances, with pleasing additions by 
 a little master of the seventeenth century. But, 
 indeed, nearly the whole of the exquisite 
 " Puits de Sainte Claire " may be considered 
 as taken, in substance or essence, from French 
 and Italian sources of the Renaissance or the 
 Moyen-Age. Even when the precise original of 
 some of these narratives is unknown to the
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 37 
 
 present writer in consequence, perhaps, of 
 limited leisure it is possible to identify a 
 variant. I am unacquainted with the source 
 of that delectable anecdote (enlivening the 
 pages of a book of essays in no need of relief 
 or illustration) telling the reason which in- 
 duced a Roman lady to pray daily in public 
 to the gods for the life of the vilest of the 
 emperors . Some reader may be more fortunate . 
 But a variant is to hand, taken from a collec- 
 tion of Latin stories extracted from preachers' 
 manuals of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries to be used as illustrations in sermons, 
 and quoted by Mr. G. G. Coulton in his wonder- 
 ful volume, " A Medieval Garner." " A certain 
 abbot gave his monks three dishes to their 
 dinner, wherefore they said : ' This man giveth 
 us but sparingly ; let us pray God that he may 
 soon die.' And so it was ; for within a brief 
 while, for that or some other cause, he died. 
 Then came another abbot who gave them but 
 two dishes ; whereat they were sore wroth and 
 grieved, saying : ' Now must we pray all the 
 more (since one dish hath been taken from us) 
 that the Lord take away this man's life.' 
 At length he died ; and the third gave them 
 but one. Then were the monks moved to in-
 
 38 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 dignation, and said : ' This fellow is worst of all, 
 for he will slay us with hunger ; let us pray 
 God for his speedy death.' Then said one 
 monk : ' Nay, but I pray God He may give him 
 a long life and keep him among us.' The 
 others, marvelling, asked him why he spake 
 thus ; and he : ' The first (I see) was evil, the 
 second worse, and this man worst of all. Yet 
 I fear that, when he is dead, another may come 
 who will famish us outright.' For as the pro- 
 verb hath it : ' Selde cometh the latter the 
 better.' " Certainly M. France like other 
 great writers takes his goods where he may 
 find them. 
 
 The work we have examined in this paper 
 is supple and various. It deals with many 
 matters in divers ways. It is interested in 
 ideas. It observes modern life closely and 
 curiously, but is equally at ease in the cities of 
 refuge of the past. This work, moreover, 
 despite its variety, is no mere collection of 
 separate publications, but is held together 
 by a central unity of its own. The cover 
 and stitching, binding many detached chapters 
 into one organic whole, are provided partly by 
 the interest excited by their author's per- 
 sonality, partly by a beauty of writing amount-
 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 39 
 
 ing almost to a miracle, and above all by a 
 criticism of life, represented in different books 
 by varying facets, but always consistent with 
 a central conception of things. In a sense 
 all M. Anatole France's work might be in- 
 cluded under the common title of Books of 
 Pity and of Irony. There is no text from 
 which he preaches more willingly than from 
 these two words, which run almost like a 
 refrain through his pages. It occurs in 
 " Crainquebille, et plusieurs autres Reeits 
 Profitables " : " He felt much pity for men, 
 scarcely counting them as reasonable beings ; 
 their blunders, when not cruel, seemed amusing, 
 and caused him to smile." It recurs in his 
 Florentine novel : " Let us give to men for 
 witnesses and as judges, Irony and Pity." 
 The theme is developed and explained in his 
 volume of opinions, " Le Jardin d'Epicure " : 
 " Irony and Pity are two excellent counsellors ; 
 the smiling face of one makes life a pleasant 
 thing ; the tearful eyes of the other make it 
 sacred also. The Irony I invoke is not cruel, 
 and rails neither at love nor beauty. She is 
 gentle and well-disposed to all ; anger fades 
 before her smile, and in her school we learn 
 to laugh at folly, which, without her teaching,
 
 40 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 we might have the weakness to hate." The 
 text is expounded through a long and brilliant 
 series of books, and these illustrations may 
 almost be considered the coie of their writer's 
 genius. It is probable M. France has no 
 exalted views of man's destiny, and knows very 
 little of whence he derives, or the bourne to 
 which he goes. With a poet of his own country 
 he sees we are " all under sentence of death, 
 with a sort of indefinite reprieve," and watches 
 our strange gyrations on-this sleeping volcano 
 with humour and with pity. Consequently he 
 attaches much importance to the lesser virtues 
 to cheerfulness, to courtesy, and fair dealing 
 between men and, just as the complete 
 sceptic was forced by circumstances to believe 
 in his own infallibility, so, by one of those 
 little ironies dear to him, the smiling Epicurean 
 becomes a moralist in his own despite.
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY, AND 
 TWO MODERN EXEMPLARS 
 
 IN one of those volumes of opinions which 
 are more entrancing than most romances, 
 Monsieur Anatole France narrates an 
 anecdote somewhat in the following fashion. 
 Many, many years ago an Eastern satrap 
 came to the throne, possessed by a most un- 
 usual and conscientious desire for the welfare 
 of his subjects. In pursuance of this laudable 
 object he called before him the wise men and 
 scholars of his kingdom, and desired them 
 to furnish him with a History of Mankind. 
 These gentlemen formed themselves into an 
 Academy, appointed a permanent secretary, 
 and embarked zealously upon their task. 
 At the end of twenty-five years they appeared 
 before their Sultan, bearing with them upon 
 a train of camels the precious history, in five 
 hundred forbidding volumes. Daunted by 
 this formidable array of books, the king ex- 
 plained to the deputation the importance of 
 41
 
 42 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 his duties and the brevity of life, and desired 
 the scholars to reduce their wisdom into a 
 more reasonable compass. Fifteen years later 
 the academicians yet remaining alive returned, 
 bringing their sheaves with them in fifty 
 stout volumes. The monarch burst into tears, 
 exclaiming that evidently it was written he 
 should never digest the history of mankind. 
 The Academy therefore resumed its labours, 
 and at the close of another five years the sole 
 survivor a permanent secretary on crutches 
 brought the result to the palace, upon an ass, 
 in one thick octavo volume. But the king 
 was at the last gasp, and turned his face to 
 the wall as the student entered the room. 
 Then an inspiration seized the permanent 
 secretary. Throwing his leather-bound history 
 to the floor, he hobbled to the bed, and cried, 
 " Sire, the history of men may be resumed in 
 three words. They are born ; they suffer ; 
 and they die." 
 
 No one, I presume, will dispute that the 
 moral of this delectable apologue has the 
 additional merit of being absolutely true. 
 The length of the road and the agreeableness 
 of the prospect may vary for each one of us, 
 but the journey's end inevitably is the same.
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 48 
 
 One may be carried to his long rest in a pauper's 
 hearse, whilst his neighbour goes in a pompous 
 procession, with weeping relatives ; but to 
 the same home they both go, and to the like 
 complexion they come at last. All the more 
 honour, then, to our pathetic and transitory 
 race since it has set itself with a sort of desperate 
 and indomitable cheerfulness to make the 
 best of an " indefinite reprieve." The line of 
 its march may be traced by the ruins of the 
 temples builded to enshrine its dreams. On 
 either side of the path the wilderness has been 
 husbanded to blossom like a rose. The chambers 
 where man could but lodge for a night, he has 
 ceiled with cedar and painted with vermilion ; 
 and at evening, after the hard day's toilsome 
 march, he has gathered round the camp fire 
 and cheated his weariness with tales and 
 laughter surely two of the best gifts of the 
 grudging gods. In the warmth of that pleasant 
 blaze, listening to the saga men of his tribe, 
 he forgot the dark sky above him, and enjoyed 
 the illusion of happiness, till the caravan was 
 struck again with the dawn. 
 
 The stories told at twilight about these 
 blazing fires were, at the beginning, mere 
 flimsy anecdotes. The narrator did not know
 
 44 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 himself for an artist. He related the ad- 
 ventures of a day, the fear lurking in the night, 
 the way in which an unit was added to the 
 number of his women. These anecdotes he 
 told in as straightforward a fashion as was 
 consonant with his desire to impress the 
 listeners around him. The braggart was the 
 first story-teller, and in a sense the liar may 
 be considered as the earliest artist. The 
 boaster was not content with the mean baldness 
 of the literal truth. Probably it added nothing 
 to his glory. He touched it up, and proving 
 the inferiority of fact to fiction, became the 
 first self-conscious artist. " Gab," discovered 
 thus about a wandering camp fire, remained for 
 long the amiable weakness of our race. Readers 
 of mediaeval literature will remember how 
 Charlemagne and his Paladins spent the hour 
 after supper in the chamber allotted them 
 by the Emperor of Constantinople. They 
 must recall with what strange " gabs " the 
 Paladins bragged one against the other, and 
 the dire results which befell through their 
 betrayal by the hidden spy. Frequenters 
 assure us that at times they may be heard 
 even yet in the smoking-rooms of to-day. 
 The artist, having learned to select and to
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 45 
 
 arrange his material, having freed himself 
 from the bondage of fact, speedily realized 
 the advantage of imputing his noble deeds 
 to some fictitious character. Such a hero 
 aroused less jealousy, and was not exposed 
 to the risk of being found out. Prowess in 
 hunting and in tribal war, good fortune in 
 love, and personal relation with the gods accord- 
 ingly were ascribed to dead heroes, or to some 
 others who never had an actual existence. 
 Presently it would happen that one such hero, 
 for this reason or that, aroused more interest 
 and obtained greater favour in the hearts of 
 the auditors than his fellows. About this 
 favoured personality was formed an accretion 
 of tales. He stood draped in a web of legend. 
 These legends grew gradually to an organic 
 whole, and the romance superseded the anec- 
 dote. Ballads crystallized into the epic, and 
 old blind Homer was born. 
 
 It must seem strange that man who went 
 forth to his labour from sunrise to evening, 
 whose years were so few and swift, was not 
 content with stories appropriate to his leisure. 
 He might sit at his ease, hearkening to the 
 minstrel, for but one quick hour between 
 twilight and darkness. One short story, a
 
 46 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 single ballad, would fill his scanty leisure to 
 the brim, and then to sleep. Yet the history 
 of the imaginative literature of the world is 
 the preference of our race for the serial as against 
 the anecdote. Man chose deliberately to 
 take the memory of some hero to bed, and 
 to resume his adventures about the camp 
 fire just where they were interrupted the evening 
 before. It mattered little to the listener that 
 the chances were great he would never live to 
 hear the conclusion of the tale. That was 
 but one adventure the more. Obedient to 
 the imperious demand, minstrel and saga man 
 did wonderful feats of memory. The skald 
 held the viking from weariness on the swan's 
 path by recital of the sombre and dramatic 
 epics of the North. The scarlet-clad minstrel 
 stood before a gay company of lords and ladies, 
 seated on the steps of the perron, telling 
 over the interminable romances of chivalry ; 
 whilst above him the olives whispered, and 
 near by the broad stretches of the Rhone 
 flowed swiftly to the sea. In Eastern bazaars 
 the professional story-teller, stick in hand, 
 related with ceaseless and emphatic gesture 
 some marvellous invention concerning afrit and 
 djinn. Writing eased the strain for a time,
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 47 
 
 and made an abnormal memory less a necessity 
 of the craft than a helpful talent. But with 
 the discovery of the printing-press Othello's 
 occupation was gone. Glee man, minstrel, 
 and story-teller became rogues and vagabonds 
 by Act of Parliament, instead of honoured 
 guests in the halls of the great and the meeting 
 places of the mean. The short story sunk 
 deeper in the general discredit. It was aware 
 of the disfavour in which it was held, and tried 
 hard to hide its identity. It banded itself 
 together, masking under the guise of a long, 
 connected narrative. The slu'fts it was driven to 
 are amusing. Consider the " Arabian Nights," 
 and the framework laboriously provided to 
 give the illusion of an organic whole. Can 
 the frail wicker-work be held worthy of so 
 resourceful a little baggage as Scheherazade, 
 the princess of fiction-mongers ! Boccaccio 
 found a somewhat more convenient door of 
 escape for his " Decameron." The pressure of 
 the outside world, the horror of the plague, 
 the imminence of death, indeed, does something 
 to knit these stories together. That garden 
 is certainly more sunny, those lips are certainly 
 more instant in love and laughter, because 
 of the horror waiting just without the gate.
 
 48 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 If we put the " Morte D'Arthur " aside, Chaucer 
 is the one instance of an approximately success- 
 ful solution of an insoluble problem. The 
 architectural device adopted by the writer 
 of the " Canterbury Tales " does much to in- 
 corporate into a single mansion a series of 
 absolutely unconnected chambers. This con- 
 vention provides a group of character-studies 
 of such humanity, engaged in an occupation 
 so typical of its age, that the stories put with 
 more or less propriety into the mouths of the 
 pilgrims are sufficiently in unity with them- 
 selves to be considered by the indulgent as 
 one narrative. But the tide ran strongly in 
 the direction of the novel all the same. To 
 the interminable romances of chivalry succeeded 
 the interminable sentimentalities of a later 
 century. These lachrymose excursions into 
 the province of the heart and the sensibilities 
 were followed in turn by novels of picaresque 
 adventure. The heels of vagabondage were 
 kibed by a grim and grimy realism. Realism 
 gave way to psychological studies of a singular 
 dullness all in many volumes of closely 
 printed type. The hour of the short story 
 which went so lightly and laughed so gaily 
 was over indeed.
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 49 
 
 It is but fair to admit that the short story 
 in France has never been treated so shabbily 
 as across the Channel. It fell upon evil days, 
 but not into the indigence and dishonour it 
 suffered in England. The gift of narrative, 
 like the gift of sculpture, is a French tradition. 
 The Middle Ages in France were a riot of short 
 stories. The land was as thick with them 
 as a country hedge with roses. The taste for 
 such narratives endured there side by side 
 with the tyranny of the novel. Any failure of 
 interest was but a comparative failure, and 
 not in the superlative degree as here. It is 
 curious to speculate on the causes of our dis- 
 taste. Perhaps it is an indication of the lack 
 of a certain alertness of mind. Possibly such 
 mental lethargy may be less pronounced in 
 our neighbours. It certainly seems that the 
 average English reader finds no continuity of 
 interest in a volume of tales. Such a " mis- 
 cellany of inventions " is a succession of 
 mental jolts and jars. He seems to be changing 
 his carriage at every local station, instead of 
 settling down cosily for the length of his 
 journey, and he grows weary of the discom- 
 fort. Since we have no natural instinct for 
 the conte, it is the more creditable that we 
 
 D
 
 50 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 shared with France in the revival making 
 the last quarter of the nineteenth century so 
 good and stimulating a period for the writer 
 of the short story. The French artist, for 
 his part, was born free ; but with a great sum 
 we obtained this freedom. And here it may be 
 desirable to state precisely what is meant in 
 this paper by the term " short story." A 
 great deal of critical energy has been wasted 
 in seeking out a definition. It was sought to 
 provide a formula that would define the boun- 
 daries of the short story with the mathematical 
 strictness of a sonnet. It must not be an 
 anecdote ; it should not be a little novel. 
 Walls were built about it, and beyond certain 
 limits it was dared to stray. For my part 
 creeds are peculiar to theology, and I am not 
 anxious to impose them elsewhere. Wiser 
 words have not been written on the subject than 
 some by Mr. Wells, whose special authority 
 will be appreciated by all. Not only has he 
 spelt w-i-n-d-e-r, but he has given a personal 
 application to the object-lesson by cleaning 
 it better than was possible for anyone else. 
 " I refuse altogether to recognize any hard-and- 
 fast type for the short story, any more than 
 I admit any limitation upon the liberties of the
 
 51 
 
 small picture. The short story is a fiction 
 that may be read in something under an hour, 
 and so that it is moving and delightful it does 
 not matter whether it is as ' trivial ' as a 
 Japanese print of insects seen closely between 
 grass stems, or as spacious as the prospect of 
 the plain of Italy from Monte Mottarone. It 
 does not matter whether it is human or in- 
 human, or whether it leaves you thinking 
 deeply or radiantly but superficially pleased. 
 Some things are more easily done as short 
 stories than others and more abundantly 
 done, but one of the many pleasures of short 
 story writing is to achieve the impossible." 
 
 The excursion in fiction which could be read 
 aloud in something under an hour flourished 
 exceedingly towards the end of the last century, 
 both in England and France. A group of 
 writers of the highest brilliance redeemed 
 the reproach into which the art had fallen, 
 and worked marvels with their material. 
 The entertainment provided by these artists 
 was of a very various order. They were all 
 things to all men. Not possessing a scrupulous 
 conscience, they perpetrated the anecdote 
 and the minor novel with gaiety. They were 
 trivial, or grandiose, or squalid as they pleased.
 
 52 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Sometimes their readers laughed with them ; 
 at others they were impertinent enough to 
 laugh at their readers. Their narratives ranged 
 from the familiar prospect without our windows 
 to the landscape separated from us by the 
 terrifying thickness of the world. The 
 characters moving through these tales would 
 be trite as our neighbour, or exotic as tropical 
 fauna. But whether these writers broke 
 the ten commandments of the critics, or paid 
 tithe of mint and anise and cummin to their 
 injunctions, at least they produced works of 
 art. Their tales must have been as pleasant 
 to write as we find them to read. It seems 
 impossible that much of their work will not 
 remain as a permanent contribution to the 
 treasure-house of fiction. Some are gone to 
 their well-earned rest ; others, happily, are 
 with us to-day. Since it is more convenient to 
 speak of the general character of such work 
 under particular instances, I may be permitted 
 to dwell for a while on some of its prominent 
 features, as exemplified in the stories of two 
 of its greatest masters, Guy de Maupassant 
 and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 Guy de Maupassant had two great advantages 
 as a novelist. He derived from that old
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 53 
 
 France which has told so many stories, and 
 told them so well, and he was the literary 
 apprentice of Gustave Flaubert. Counsels of 
 perfection urged by Flaubert were put into 
 painful practice by his disciple. For ten years 
 Maupassant laboured to acquire a style and to 
 develop his originality mainly in office hours 
 and on Government paper under the severe 
 tuition of his mentor. He was taught to see 
 with his eyes, and not, as most people do, with 
 their ears, as their fathers have told them. 
 The result of the training became apparent when 
 his first story was printed, for " Boule de Suif " 
 was admittedly a triumph. From that period 
 Maupassant published three masterpieces a 
 year with regularity. Above all, it was from 
 the older writer Maupassant obtained that 
 fatal theory of impersonal literature which 
 has proved so fond a delusion to so many 
 authors. The creed was one peculiarly grateful 
 to Maupassant. He embarked, with cheerful- 
 ness, on lawsuits to prevent his portrait adorn- 
 ing his books, and removed all literary merit 
 from his private correspondence lest it should 
 be published. He loved to think he gave 
 nothing of himself to the public. He pathe- 
 tically believed that his works were a mirror
 
 54 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 reflecting all the world, with the sole exception 
 of their author. It is amazing that so observant 
 a man could prove so apt in self-deception. 
 Of course the exact opposite is true. Bits of 
 himself, his flesh and clothing, stick to every 
 one of Maupassant's novels. His stories are 
 set amidst his familiar Normandy landscape ; 
 their heroes are the peasants he knew, and their 
 very subjects are drawn largely from actual 
 happenings which once gave scandal to the 
 neighbourhood. The crude and bitter philo- 
 sophy of his characters is quickly recognized 
 as that of their creator. A contempt for 
 humanity overbrims the measure. An artist's 
 work is always a kind of signature, sometimes 
 with a flourish beneath. These stories shudder 
 with Maupassant's fear of death, and are 
 built on the very hallucinations which caused 
 him to spend the last eighteen months of his 
 life a lunatic in an asylum. For in spite of 
 the exuberant gaieties of his youth, and the 
 brilliant successes of his manhood, the shadow 
 of Maupassant's terrible end must always cling 
 about his memory like a pall. He will ever 
 remain a tragic warning against burning the 
 candle at not two, but half a dozen ends at 
 once. You may become a celebrated writer,
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 55 
 
 or an incessant traveller, or a popular athlete, 
 or a well-groomed man about town ; but if you 
 attempt to combine all these conflicting per- 
 sonalities in one single being, the result will 
 prove disastrous. Maupassant made the effort, 
 and died under restraint, not having completed 
 his forty-third year. 
 
 After all, that old France proved a better 
 friend to Maupassant than did the mentor 
 who, both by precept and example, urged 
 him with blows along the path of perfection. 
 It is impossible to exaggerate the value of the 
 assistance he derived from the little masters 
 of his country. Their many and excellent 
 short stories, written through the course of 
 centuries, are a manifestation of the national 
 character. They express the tradition of 
 the race. The dead hands of these writers 
 form and mould their successors, and to depart 
 from their path is to inflict a grievous wrong, 
 not only on them, but also on yourself. The 
 story writers of old France were of all sorts 
 and conditions of men. Gentle and simple, rich 
 and poor, monk and troubadour alike were 
 counted in their guild. But certain gifts 
 they had in common, by right of birth. They 
 had the gifts of clearness, of measure, and of
 
 56 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 sobriety. They were also gay. At times they 
 might be devout, or serious, or impassioned 
 in their contemplation of beauty, but as a rule 
 their feet were rooted in the earth the gross 
 and gracious earth of France. Maupassant, 
 of course, did not possess all these qualities. 
 If so he would have been a portent rather 
 than an artist. It would be affectation to 
 deny that in poetry and grace he was excelled 
 by Daudet. But with certain of their virtues 
 he was richly endowed. No modern novelist, 
 for instance, conducted his narrative with such 
 economy, or obtained his effects with more 
 clarity and simplicity. He also laughed 
 easily and loudly, and was not much perturbed 
 though the fastidious hesitated to join in his 
 ferocious merriment. " La Maison Tellier " and 
 " Les Sceurs Rondoli " are little masterpieces of 
 humour, but it is unfortunate the reader should 
 ask himself whether he does well to be amused, 
 even whilst the laughter is in his mouth. It 
 must be admitted there is some difficulty in 
 recommending Maupassant for general perusal, 
 without reservation. He had but one subject, 
 and that an improper one. In this he resembles 
 certain earlier writers of his country. They, 
 however, are considered in the bulk with other
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 57 
 
 novelists who bring cleaner qualities into their 
 narratives, and thus the whole mass is leavened. 
 Perhaps it is safer to deal with Maupassant 
 in a similar fashion. 
 
 In addition to those qualities which may be 
 regarded as his by heritage, Maupassant brought 
 to the short story certain characteristics of 
 his own. He could laugh in actual life and 
 in print, and did so heartily. He was equally 
 thorough and uncompromising in his pessimism, 
 and consequently his books are full of the 
 most violent effects of light and shade. I do not 
 call Maupassant a pessimist, particularly because 
 he considered life not worth living. Such a 
 philosophy is explicit in certain Scriptural 
 books the orthodox believe to be given by 
 inspiration of God. Neither do I reproach 
 him because he looked upon man as swayed 
 mainly by his desires and appetites, and saw 
 few of our species with an aureole. A man 
 who denies facts is not an optimist but a lunatic. 
 The bleak pessimism blowing through Mau- 
 passant's pages like an east wind is due to his 
 conception of man as a mere animal, without 
 soul or spirit. To him, as to another, man 
 is only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. 
 He studied the human animal altogether in
 
 58 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 his appetites, never in his aspirations, which 
 apparently he found some difficulty in recog- 
 nizing. The result of this reduction of man 
 to half a dozen mean passions, and of woman 
 to one, was an excessive simplification which 
 enabled Maupassant to achieve immediate 
 effects of a startling character, but which in the 
 long run may do harm to his reputation. As 
 works of art his narratives are flawless. Possibly 
 they will prove less rich and stimulating than 
 some others, technically not so perfect, but 
 written by men of wider culture and deeper 
 thought, and informed by a nobler philosophy. 
 Turn from the narratives of Guy de Mau- 
 passant to those of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, 
 and you recognize at once the advantages of 
 a tradition. The French master is a classic 
 largely because the way in which he walks 
 was made ready to his feet. Scores of short 
 story writers some with famous names, but 
 others whose obscurity is lighted only 
 by their work engineered and made easy 
 that road. Mr. Kipling had no such moral 
 support. English letters are surprisingly bare 
 of the short story. Most of our greater novelists 
 show no inclination to essay the adventure, 
 and their navy consists mainly of Dreadnoughts.
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 59 
 
 It is unreasonable, under such circumstances, 
 to expect Mr. Kipling to prove the perfect 
 artist. He is the pioneer, with a rough, un- 
 charted country to explore. Should he grope 
 a little, or fumble occasionally, it is just because 
 he has to find his way alone in the dark. If 
 he irritates at times by a mannerism that seems 
 crude and omniscient, we must remember there 
 is nothing to prune and restrain his excess of 
 individuality. We should not dwell lovingly 
 on the faults of his work, but rather appre- 
 ciate the essential and virile genius that 
 carried him far upon so difficult and perilous 
 a journey. 
 
 The note of Mr. Kipling's prose is romantic 
 rather than classical, and this may be necessi- 
 tated by the nature of his subjects. It is difficult 
 to be frigid and correct when dealing with 
 the East. Maupassant, the classic, never went 
 far afield. I recall but one story (" Chali ") in 
 which he adventures on ground Mr. Kipling 
 has made peculiarly his own. He might have 
 excused himself by quoting the author of the 
 " Imitation " : " Wherever thou mayest go canst 
 thou behold more than the elements, earth 
 and sky and water, for of these are all things 
 made ! " Maupassant's restraint has not been
 
 60 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 shared by his fellows. They seem, indeed, 
 to have parcelled out the world amongst them. 
 Sir Gilbert Parker has laid a hand on our Lady 
 of the Snows, and finds to his cost that she 
 permits no divided worship. Mr. Conrad, by 
 divine right, is the Rajah of the Malay Archi- 
 pelago. Pierre Loti, by his very business in 
 deep waters, is equally at home with the 
 mousmte, all sash and reverences, the Tahitian 
 maiden wreathed with flowers, and the hideous 
 negress with her shaven head. The province 
 of Mr. Kipling is India. It is so to-day, and 
 has been since he " made his astonishing advent 
 with a series of little blue-grey books, whose 
 covers opened like window shutters to reveal 
 the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the 
 East." Mr. Kipling's stories seem only to 
 move and have their being on the soil of India 
 India and the homeland he loves better still. 
 The virtue passes out of him when he steps 
 outside his chosen province and her peoples. 
 America especially is fatal to his talent, and 
 his allegorical talking horses and cumber- 
 some machinery of the railway yard inspire 
 the reader with consternation. His best and 
 most enduring pages are not clammy with the 
 fogs of the Newfoundland banks, nor elaborate
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 61 
 
 with descriptions of the evisceration of the 
 cod caught in those waters. The tinkle of 
 the Bengali dancing girl's sitar is infinitely 
 more pleasant to the ear than the whistling of 
 those engines in which he has taken, on occasion, 
 so overwhelming an interest. India restores 
 Mr. Kipling to himself. It is a matter to 
 marvel over how much of that country is 
 epitomized in his books. Indeed, these books 
 are rather a cinematograph before which we 
 sit, than novels we read, and a cinematograph 
 much more wonderful than the rather limited 
 machine with which we are all familiar, since 
 it reproduces not only the shape and move- 
 ment, but the very colours and odour and 
 speech of life. India is brought before us, 
 not perhaps with greater fullness of know- 
 ledge, but more vividly than by any other 
 writer the sights and the sounds and the 
 smells of her, her welter of creeds and castes, 
 her temples and cities, the Way of Buddha 
 and the Grand Trunk Road. These pages 
 are crowded with as picturesque and motley 
 a throng as any novelist can show Eurasians 
 and the governing classes, the three musketeers, 
 the yellow and wrinkled Buddhist lama, and 
 the burly Afghan horse dealer, his beard dyed
 
 62 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 scarlet with lime. Such scenes and characters 
 as these are to be found both in Mr. Kipling's 
 novels and in his " miscellanies of inventions." 
 It would seem that their writer is unlikely now to 
 produce that masterpiece of sustained narrative 
 we all hoped to receive from him, and must be 
 content to reign supreme in the more restricted 
 area of the short story. After all it is a suffi- 
 cient distinction for an overweening ambition. 
 When you have written such moving and vivid 
 narratives as " Without Benefit of Clergy," 
 " The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney," and 
 "The Man Who Would be King " to name 
 but three amongst many, almost at haphazard 
 it should be easy to hear little critics hint that 
 " Kim," although a very delightful performance, 
 lacks a central unity, and is less a novel than 
 a series of brilliant and disconnected episodes. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's love of England is greater 
 even than his passion for India. With Mau- 
 passant he has the genius of patriotism, and 
 like the gifted Frenchman sought to express 
 his devotion in the terms of his art. Maupassant, 
 a realist of his time and day, was driven to 
 write poignant tales of the great disaster of 
 modern France. Mr. Kipling is more fortunate. 
 A romantic writer, of wider imagination, he
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 63 
 
 derived his inspiration from the glorious past. 
 " Puck of Pook's Hill " and " Rewards and 
 Fairies " are not so much a sequence of stories, 
 set against a homely background of Pevensey 
 meadows, as a panorama of England, and of the 
 breeds which went to the making of the English. 
 To those who are in any degree possessed by 
 the passion of the past such a theme must be 
 of the highest interest. We look back at the 
 seething pot into which every component of 
 our race was flung, and watch the shaping 
 of a nation. Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, 
 Norman each contributed some quality or 
 defect of muscle and brain and character, 
 making the modern Englishman, for good or 
 evil, what he is. Our forefathers live again 
 in our sins and our virtues, as we in theirs, 
 for, as an illiterate lady of my acquaintance 
 once remarked, " I am as I am, and I can't be no 
 ammer." The very observances of our modern 
 Christianity would not be what they are were 
 it not for the gods who paled before a brighter 
 hope. We call our days even now after the 
 names of deities fallen upon evil times. Eng- 
 land is indeed a palimpsest of various writings 
 and surpassing interest. It is to be regretted 
 that Mr. Kipling expresses his appreciation
 
 64 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 of this fact so frequently by means of children. 
 Mr. Kipling is boy-rid, and some of his readers 
 are weary of perpetual boy. The boy is a 
 veritable obsession with his creator, and a very 
 fly in the precious ointment. But, boy-rid 
 or not, Mr. Kipling's books, at least, are an 
 enthusiastic recognition of the unity of the 
 race, and in this patriotic love of country he 
 treads common ground with a novelist with 
 whom he would seem to have little in common, 
 save a genius for the composition of the short 
 story. 
 
 Has the short story, of which we have wit- 
 nessed the glorious resurrection, come to stay ? 
 It flourished once before, but fell upon evil 
 days ; may it not be so again ! So far as France 
 is concerned, there seems every hope the conte 
 will endure with her literature. A country 
 which has produced so fertile and lusty a crop 
 is unlikely to become waste and barren at this 
 period of her history. We should as soon 
 expect the vine and wheat to fail from her yards 
 and barns. Her masters of imaginative litera- 
 ture are famous not only as writers of the 
 orthodox romance, but of the " minor novel " 
 as well. In England the position is different, 
 and the question cannot be answered to our
 
 ON THE SHORT STORY 65 
 
 wish with the same assurance. The tradition 
 of the short story has never taken a grip of 
 our literature. It has seemed alien to the 
 genius of the race. The great English novelists, 
 almost with one consent, ignore the Cinderella 
 of their art. Their short stories were brought 
 forth with a shamefaced air, as if apologizing 
 for the production of such frail and plaintive 
 bantlings. Of recent years there has been a 
 revival of interest in Cinderella. The most 
 famous authors of our time have written the 
 short story, and worn no air of condescension. 
 Stevenson, for example, composed specimens 
 considered by competent judges to be the finest 
 in the language Mr. Hardy, Mr. Kipling, 
 Mr. Wells and I pass by others publish in 
 our very day narratives of no great length 
 which exhibit to perfection the form and 
 pressure of their mind and genius. These 
 men have no tradition to follow. Never 
 was there such a lack of canon and article to 
 guide their steps. They, and such as they, 
 are painfully building the road the little masters 
 of to-morrow must tread. Perchance these 
 pioneers may find none coming after to put 
 spade in the pit they commenced to dig. Even 
 so their work will not be wasted. It must 
 
 E
 
 66 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 remain as a protest and as a call. But to 
 the wish and hope of every lover of the conte 
 other builders will follow, learning and selecting 
 from the example of those who went before, 
 so that the road may be carried on, and become 
 a witness to our national character, and an 
 expression of the traditions of the race.
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 
 JOSE-MARIA DE HEREDIA 
 
 THERE are certain persons who consider 
 the name of an artist to be an index 
 to his character and personality. They 
 deny, for instance, that anyone of the name of 
 Jones can be a painter of pictures. They affirm 
 that Miss Marie Corelli must necessarily be a 
 mistress of romantic fiction. Is it not sufficient 
 glory to possess either the sounding name or 
 the indubitable talent, and why should one 
 amongst the children of men be so favoured 
 as to be the proud possessor of both? It 
 would be equally reasonable to require of a 
 poet not only that he should write his verses, 
 but also that he should look his role which 
 is manifestly absurd. Occasionally, however, 
 the absurd actually happens. The most dis- 
 tinguished of living French critics tells that 
 when a lad at class the name of a minor lumi- 
 nary of the literary Pleiades Ponthus de 
 Thyard haunted his memory. He reasoned 
 67
 
 68 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 that an author endowed by Providence with 
 so musical a patronymic must in consequence 
 write verses of a beauty beyond the reach of 
 his fellows. M. Jules Lemaitre remarks that 
 when at last he lighted on the actual poems 
 of Ponthus de Thyard his deception was great 
 and his fall very grievous. Disillusioned, 
 he still cherished an affection for his old love, 
 only it was rather for the noble name than 
 for the tinkling verses. But what Ponthus 
 de Thyard was for the eminent critic in the 
 days of his youth, all that, and more, Jose- 
 Maria de Heredia became to the years of his 
 manhood. A name so noble that it streamed 
 like a flag and was blazoned as a banner, but 
 with the added lustre that the author's sonnets 
 were as coloured as his name, and were the 
 culmination in literature of a heroic and ad- 
 venturous ancestry. " Heredia," he cries, 
 in the words of the enthusiastic Gautier, " I 
 love thee because thou bearest a name exotic 
 and sonorous, and because thy verses are 
 wrought with all the pomps of heraldry." 
 The impossible, you see, had really happened. 
 By the irony of circumstance several of 
 the most distinguished poets of modern France 
 have not been French by birth. Leconte de
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 69 
 
 Lisle, for example the master at whose feet 
 Heredia sat, and at whose suggestion his fugitive 
 verses were collected was a Creole. Heredia 
 may be reproached with having robbed Spain 
 of a poet, for he was born at Cuba in 1842 
 of a Spanish father, and traced his ancestry 
 direct from one of those conquerors of the 
 New World whose epic deeds he commemorated 
 in such picturesque and sonorous lines. His 
 ancestors, indeed, were of those who sailed 
 with Cortez and assisted the second Columbus 
 in the founding of Carthagena in the Indies. 
 Students of modern French poetry will not 
 need to be reminded of the glowing sonnets 
 which he consecrated to their triumphs. The 
 poet's mother came of a Norman family, but 
 Heredia was really less French than Rossetti 
 (with whose work his own has so much in 
 common) was English ; for at least Rossetti, 
 if of alien blood, was born in England, whilst 
 Heredia was a Frenchman but by adoption 
 and grace. All the poet's childhood was 
 passed amidst the enchanted landscape of his 
 beautiful island ; and in early manhood, whilst 
 studying law and theology at Havana, it 
 was beneath orange-trees and near by a fountain 
 that he perused his favourite authors. His
 
 70 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 boyhood, however, was spent at Senlis in France; 
 and following upon the University of Havana, 
 his education was completed in Paris, where 
 he afterwards remained. In Paris, naturally 
 enough, he drifted towards literature, and 
 formed one of that group of young men, nick- 
 named Parnassians, whose ideal of poetry 
 was so severely impersonal that they crushed 
 down any expression of emotion with the 
 triumphant query, " Is the Venus of Milo 
 flesh or marble ? " Of this set M. Anatole 
 France, in the delightful causerie on Paul 
 Verlaine reprinted in the third series of "La 
 Vie Litt6raire," gives a vivid picture. I may 
 extract from that article the portion referring 
 to Heredia : " Alone, or almost alone, of our 
 group M. Jos-Maria de Heredia, although 
 cheated of a large portion of the treasures of 
 his ancestors, the Conquistadores, dressed 
 as the young gentleman, and smoked excellent 
 cigars. His ties were brilliant as his sonnets, 
 but it was of the sonnets only that we were 
 envious, for we held in sincere contempt the 
 gifts of fortune." But whilst the Parnassians, 
 one by one, appealed to the neglect of the 
 public, and to the flail of the critic, with modest 
 volumes of verse, Heredia alone, wrapt in the
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 71 
 
 pride of those dead Conquistadores, scorned 
 to appear in the booth, and was content to 
 remain unpublished and famous. For close 
 on thirty years his sonnets passed from hand to 
 hand in manuscript, were doled forth by units 
 in anthologies, or occasionally, by a gracious 
 concession, appeared in force in the lordly 
 columns of the Revue des Deux Mondes. In 
 fact the very process which piqued the curiosity 
 of the amateur in the work of Dante Rossetti 
 was exactly paralleled over an even more 
 extended period of time. In 1893, at the 
 mature age of fifty, M. de Heredia was pleased 
 to gather his neglected foundlings together. 
 He incorporated with the sonnets already 
 printed many others then in manuscript, and 
 under considerable pressure at last published 
 " Les Trophees," his single book of verse. The 
 success of " Les Trophees " was immediate and 
 miraculous, and some thirteen editions of a 
 volume consisting mainly of sonnets appeared, 
 I believe, in less than nine months. Certainly 
 my own copy, which bears the date 1893, is 
 marked as being of the tenth edition. I say 
 consisting mainly of sonnets because it should 
 be mentioned that three mediaeval Spanish 
 romances and a poem in heroic couplets are
 
 72 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 included in " Les Trophees," but these exercises 
 in an unfamiliar medium do not permit us to 
 believe that their author could cast a statue 
 as bravely as he carved cherry -stones. For, 
 as is made clear in a letter printed by Mr. 
 Edmund Gosse, in the mathematical strictness 
 of the sonnet Heredia saw the finest of fixed 
 poetic forms, one demanding by its very brevity 
 and difficulty a conscience in the execution 
 and a concentration of thought stimulating 
 in the highest degree to the artist ; and it was 
 on the sonnet's scanty plot that his muse found 
 her most congenial haunt. The sonnet repaid 
 his devotion. Rather more than one hundred 
 carried him to the Academy, 
 
 I believe the public considers the sonnet 
 a very hard boiled egg at best. Despite the 
 fact of Heredia's popular success its appeal 
 is mainly to the artist. There is scarcely a 
 poet of mark who has not put his fortune to 
 the touch ; but the nymph is capricious. 
 Some of the very greatest have wooed her 
 without success, " as an eunuch embraceth 
 a virgin, and sigheth." It is really surprising 
 why their sonnets should be so bad, and doubt- 
 less these eminent writers were more bewildered 
 than anybody else. On the other hand, men
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 78 
 
 of far less essential poetic quality have written 
 excellent sonnets. The strictness of the form 
 proved neither shackles nor hindrance to them. 
 It served rather the purpose of a woman's 
 corsets, and they wore it lightly for similar 
 reasons. When we recall the triumphs and 
 the variety of the sonnet in competent hands, 
 we should cease to marvel at the love artists 
 bear to the form. It has sounded bravely as 
 a trumpet, and breathed sweetly as the flute. 
 With that key Shakespeare unlocked his heart, 
 and the divinest poets have entrusted to it, 
 as to a magic argosy, their most intimate and 
 golden freight. It has been radiant or sombre, 
 alternately, with the hues of life and death. 
 Nevertheless the sonnet is a thoroughly dan- 
 gerous form. Once master its technique, and 
 there is no conceit so trivial, no fancy so thin 
 or far-fetched, but may be made a sort of 
 parable, " an earthly story with a heavenly 
 meaning " earthly story to be stated in the 
 octave, heavenly meaning duly expounded 
 in the sestet. Though form be all-important, 
 and any faltering of the hand goes before the 
 artist to judgment, the " fundamental brain- 
 work " of Rossetti's famous criticism remains 
 the true essential.
 
 74 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Heredia was of his day and school. He 
 purposed, therefore, to compose sonnets quite 
 other than those I have described. Flaubert 
 had written novels which aimed at an im- 
 personal reproduction of an altogether ob- 
 jective world. Gautier polished his " Emaux 
 et Camees " whilst the German guns thundered 
 without the walls of Paris. The poems of the 
 master of the Parnassians, Leconte de Lisle, were 
 impassive as the Sphinx, and all his disciples 
 aspired to write verses that should be equally 
 without bowels. The Venus of Milo, un- 
 doubtedly, was not flesh and blood, but marble. 
 Heredia's idea was to write a series of sonnets 
 which should deal with various phases of nature 
 and civilization in an absolutely external and 
 decorative fashion. There was to be no heavenly 
 meaning to his earthly stories, but a single 
 theme should overflow from octave to sestet, 
 the picture filling alike the canvas and the 
 predella. His ideal sonnet was to be as like 
 to a mediaeval miniature, and as unlike black 
 signs on white paper, as literary pigment could 
 make it. In addition, the personality of the 
 artist was to be banished remorselessly from 
 his work. Draped in his cloak of Spanish 
 pride, Heredia proposed that nothing of the
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 75 
 
 sonneteer should be seen, save only in choice 
 of subject and in workmanship. The subject 
 should be as arresting, the craftsmanship as 
 miraculous, as skill and care could compass, 
 but nothing of the character and the proper 
 emotion of the artist should show in his work. 
 It was a vain dream. A work of art is as much 
 the offspring of its parent as a child. The 
 child betrays his father in some trick of gesture, 
 some quality of mind, or disposition, or 
 character. Flaubert strove with might and 
 main to keep himself out of his novels. He 
 died of the effort, and his portrait is there for 
 all men to see. Gautier, who fiddled whilst 
 Paris was burning, died broken-hearted at 
 the ruin of his worshipped city. What thou 
 be-est, that thou see-est, as the Eastern proverb 
 has it. No man can jump off his shadow, and 
 the portrait of Jose-Maria de Heredia is painted 
 to the life in the imperishable colours of his 
 delectable book. 
 
 The hundred or so sonnets contributed by 
 Heredia to "Les Trophies," which form the really 
 permanent portion of his work, bear comparison 
 to any sequence of sonnets written in modern 
 times. They excel Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets 
 from the Portuguese " in brilliance of colour, if
 
 76 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 they are inferior in poignancy of emotion. 
 Though they be empty of the mysticism which in- 
 forms Rossetti's " House of Life " so throughly, 
 the air in which they move is fresher and less 
 stifling. In a sense I suppose that only the 
 expert can appreciate completely the amazing 
 cleverness of Heredia's performance. Not 
 content with the difficulties inherent to the 
 form, he delighted to elaborate unnecessary 
 difficulties. His very rhymes are chosen 
 because their sound is suggestive of the matter 
 with which at the moment he deals. " The 
 artist asks you to come and see, not perfect 
 works of art," said Manet, " but sincere works 
 of art." Heredia's work is both perfect and 
 sincere. Certainly he has the Nemesis of lus 
 qualities. A hundred sonnets, each standing 
 in glaring sunshine, every one sharp in outline 
 as if cut out of metal, scarcely one with any 
 repose or mystery of shadow, necessarily fatigue 
 the eye if read on end. There is no obligation 
 to do so The very choice of subject, the very 
 division into sections, is an invitation to read 
 leisurely, closing the page often, so that the 
 flavour may be retained on the palate. But 
 the fit reader, though he may read slowly, 
 undoubtedly will read to the close.
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 77 
 
 The theme of " Les Trophies," put shortly, 
 is a selection of such features of mythology, 
 history, incident, or natural beauty as may 
 be of particular personal interest to the writer. 
 What he included, therefore, is very significant. 
 But the man, equally with the artist, is known 
 by what he rejects. The subjects ignored by 
 Heredia are as informing as his preferences. 
 They are surprisingly great. Barbarism in 
 general he passes proudly by. He has little 
 to say of any civilization before that of Greece. 
 Not one of the great religions of the world, 
 by whose consolations and hopes mankind 
 has ennobled its destiny, touches his imagina- 
 tion except, perhaps, in two sonnets which 
 treat of the early life of Christ, and that in a 
 purely decorative fashion. These are large 
 omissions, but fortunately his sympathies 
 in other respects are rich and deep. Greece 
 and Rome, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 
 the Tropics, Nature and Brittany, these furnish 
 ample material to the most fastidious seeker 
 after beauty. Heredia begrudged no labour 
 to make each sonnet worthy of its matter. 
 Every poem presupposes a long preparation, 
 an elaborate study of the period, the country, 
 and the theme with which it is concerned.
 
 78 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Scholarship and imagination alike have gone 
 hand in hand to their shaping. I propose to 
 consider each of these sections separately, 
 although as shortly as possible. It is my 
 aim, moreover, to illustrate each group for 
 English readers by translating at least one 
 sonnet included in such section. In this way 
 it is hoped some slight indication of the value 
 of Heredia's performance may be furnished, 
 especially if " generously expanded to the 
 full measure of the writer's intention." At 
 least I shall have had the pleasure of looking 
 closely at beautiful objects. The bee passes 
 amongst the flowers, and a little of their gold 
 dust so she be fortunate clings, haply, 
 to her wings. 
 
 The first portion of Heredia's sonnet sequence 
 concerns itself with Greece and Rome. He 
 pays due homage to the lovely gods and god- 
 desses of that mythology, but it is curious to 
 notice that his real interest lies rather with the 
 strenuous and very human heroes of that 
 absorbing epoch. Hercules and the Centaurs, 
 Jason with the Golden Fleece, Perseus and the 
 rescue of Andromeda, these clearly stir his 
 pulse and exalt his imagination. He dreams 
 over these epic yesterdays, just as in a later
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 79 
 
 poem his forefathers, the Conquistadores, 
 brood over epic to-morrows. He tells of 
 Hannibal, and of the great adventure which 
 nearly changed the destiny of a world ; of 
 Antony and Cleopatra, and the mad love for 
 which an empire was counted a bauble. His 
 very treatment of pagan death is strenuous. 
 To think of such a subject is, for the average 
 man, to recall the sculptured stones of the lad 
 with the strigil, and the woman with her jewels. 
 We remember those " tombs of Greece, carved 
 over with images of beauty and regret, yet 
 without despair or anguish. They teach that 
 calm acceptance of the inevitable which is 
 more than resignation, which is serenity." 
 Serenity and resignation are absent from 
 Heredia's conception of pagan death. The 
 ghost wanders with anguish and indignant 
 tears in the Under-world, lamenting that his 
 slaying is unavenged. The widower turns 
 sleeplessly upon his gold and ivory bed, pluck- 
 ing at the purple coverlet, as he bewails her 
 who is gone, and calls upon the hearer to pity 
 her fate. With these sonnets there are others 
 at a less passionate pitch of tension poems 
 on a flute, on a book borrower, on a grass- 
 hopper, a runner, a charioteer. I have selected
 
 80 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 one of these quieter examples for translation, 
 merely premising that the original is excelled 
 by few of its fellows in brilliance of colour 
 and art. 
 
 THE TEPIDARIUM 
 
 Their languid members macerate with myrrh, 
 Luxurious about this heated room 
 Where brazen brasiers glow within the gloom 
 
 The women lie, and dream, and make no stir. 
 
 From piled red couches, sweet with lavender, 
 A body rises, that warm lamps illume, 
 Marble or amber, like a rose in bloom ; 
 
 Through thin lawn veilings burns the grace of her. 
 
 Feeling on naked flesh the ardent heat, 
 An Asian woman stands upon her feet 
 
 And yawns, to speed the long slow hours that 
 
 pass ; 
 Whilst white and wondering maids from other 
 
 zones 
 
 Grow raptured, o'er the rich barbaric tones 
 Of jet-black hair upon a bust of brass. 
 
 The only " heroes " included in the section 
 devoted to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 
 are the Conquistadores realizing their dream 
 of " epic to-morrows." It was not that " super-
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 81 
 
 men " were unknown to the period. On the 
 contrary, they positively luxuriated. Heredia 
 concerns himself with but one, and his sonnet 
 on Michael Angelo is, oddly enough, placed out 
 of its natural sequence. Neither is any re- 
 ference made to architecture, the charac- 
 teristic and stupendous art of the Middle Ages 
 to which all other arts were ancillary as hand- 
 maids. Those Gothic cathedrals which are 
 the glories of France are not even glanced 
 at. Clearly Heredia was more interested 
 in the delightful but minor craft of the gold- 
 smith, the bookbinder, the maker of that 
 incomparable stained glass which furnishes 
 the Sainte Chapelle and Chartres Cathedral 
 with such wonderful eyes. On these, and on 
 that charming craft of the toilette, enabling a 
 woman to be herself a work of art, he wrote 
 triumphantly ; and I select, from mere personal 
 whim, three of these sonnets to serve as 
 illustrations. 
 
 THE ROSE-WINDOW 
 
 Beneath this painted window, count and dame 
 Inplume andcasque and silken hood have prayed, 
 Whilst o'er tfteir lowly heads the rich cascade 
 
 Of riotous colour broke in pearl and flame.
 
 82 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Then passing hence, assailed and free from blame, 
 Falcon on wrist, perchance, or steel-arrayed, 
 They pricked to chace, or sought the far Crusade, 
 
 Struck down a heron, or advanced a name. 
 
 Now, side by side, are dame and baron found, 
 With feet soft-pillowed on a couchant hound, 
 
 Above a little dust, in carven stone. 
 Dumb, motionless and deaf, their ejfigies 
 Watch, without sight in blank, untroubled eyes, 
 
 The stained Rose-Window fadeless, freshly 
 blown. 
 
 THE OLD GOLDSMITH 
 
 I handled brush and graver with more ease, 
 More deftness, than all masters of the guild, 
 In jewelled work my cunning brain was 
 
 skilled, 
 I shaped the vase, and wrought its storied 
 
 frieze. 
 Now, silver and enamel fail to please, 
 
 For there I traced so my snared soul hath 
 
 willed 
 
 No sacred Rood, no Deacon Lawrence grilled 
 But vine-girt gods, or Danae's gold-clasped 
 knees.
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 83 
 
 To HelVs own service my red forge inlaid 
 With fair devices some rich ruffler's blade, 
 
 Till deep in pride my part of Life is lost. 
 Thus, seeing I grow fearful, and am old, 
 Ere death may come and falling dark enfold, 
 
 1 chase a golden monstrance for the Host. 
 
 THE CABINET-MAKER OF NAZARETH 
 
 From strenuous dawn the Carpenter hath bent 
 Above his bench, toiling that set of sun 
 May find the polished aumbry fitly done, 
 
 With cunning hand and tool subservient. 
 
 Blue shadows touch the threshold, day is spent ; 
 The goodman marks the palm tree, where anon 
 St. Anne, Our Lady, and the Prince, her Son, 
 
 Will rest awhile with folded hands, content. 
 
 Heat broods on branch and flower, no petals fall. 
 St. Joseph, long outwearied, drops the awl 
 
 And with his apron wipes his brow amain. 
 But the Divine Apprentice in the room 
 Works on, suffused with splendour 'gainst the 
 
 gloom, 
 
 Whilst golden shavings curl from 'neath His 
 plane. 
 
 The third section is devoted to the Near East 
 and the Tropics. It includes some beautiful
 
 84 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 work on the Egypt of the Sphinx colossal 
 and terrifying as well as work on that later 
 Egypt which might well be, and is, fittingly 
 dedicated to M. Genome. The Japanese 
 sonnets are especially interesting. They deal 
 with phases of life long since passed away, 
 and form an admirable foil to Loti's sentimental 
 excursions in that country. Heredia describes 
 the hero of old Japan, the Daimio, on the 
 battlefield, clad in armour of brass and lacquer- 
 work, sheltering his eyes from the glaring sun 
 with a fan of iron and white satin. How 
 piercing is the contrast with the officer and 
 accoutrements of to-day ! Again, how much 
 of ancient Japan, or at least of the Japanese 
 bibelot, is in the following toy : 
 
 LE S AMOUR AI 
 
 The loud strings thrill beneath her languid hand, 
 Whilst through interstices of latticed wall 
 She knows her destined lover's proud footfall 
 
 Upon th> unsheltered waste of quivering sand. 
 
 With eyes fan-shaded, girt with two-fold brand, 
 In sombre mail he comes, and bears withal 
 Hizen's device and crest armorial 
 
 Above the fringes of his crimson band.
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 85 
 
 This mighty swordsman, dight with plate and 
 
 blade, 
 In bronze and silk and lacquer-work arrayed, 
 
 Shows like some huge crustacean, black and red. 
 He sees, he smiles beneath his bearded mask, 
 
 And sunlit, gleaming with his quickened tread, 
 Twin gold antennas tremble at his casque. 
 
 The final section of this wonderful sequence 
 that devoted to Nature and to Dream con- 
 tains some of Heredia's most vivid and charac- 
 teristic work. Here is collected a group of 
 miscellaneous sonnets, dealing largely with 
 landscape and with such aspects of Nature 
 as are of peculiar import to the writer. It was 
 no wonder that Anatole France, in turning 
 over his memories of Heredia's youth, remarked 
 that " he always dressed as the young gentle- 
 man." He is the " gentleman " here. Other 
 poets had given Nature gods. Heredia tricks 
 her in a coat of arms, gay with paint, and 
 blazoned with all the devices of heraldry. 
 But he touches a more human note in the 
 beautiful sonnets concerned with Brittany. 
 The pathos of the lives of those simple and 
 hardy fisher-folk lifts him above himself. 
 Nearly for the first time he betrays the divine
 
 86 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 gift of sympathy with unpoetical griefs 
 when speaking, for instance, of the women 
 praying on the cliff for those who will never 
 come back from sea. Here, in this section, 
 may be found a little of that shadow, that 
 sense of mystery, needed to temper the hard 
 outlines, the almost cruel colour of his work. 
 Here he discovered a soul. Had he written 
 more often in the tone of " The Breton Bed " it 
 is possible his reputation as a poet would stand 
 wider and higher than it actually does. For 
 people live by bread and will not be fobbed 
 off with a stone, even though the stone be a 
 precious gem polished and set with all the 
 resources of the most consummate art. 
 
 THE BRETON BED 
 
 Curtained with sober serge, or stiff brocade, 
 Sad as a grave, or gay as Love's warm nest, 
 Here man is born, sleeps well, lies breast to 
 breast, 
 
 Babe, husband, ancient, grandam, wife, and maid. 
 
 Above this bed, where Love and Death are stayed, 
 In turn the Palm, the Crucifix is drest ; 
 Whence flowed the source, there sinks the stream 
 to rest, 
 
 From Life's first dawn to that last taper's shade.
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST 87 
 
 Whether the couch be shuttered, rustic, mean, 
 Prankt richly forth with scarlet, gold, and green, 
 Fashioned of rough-hewn oak or cypress wood ; 
 Happy the man who sleeps with quiet head, 
 With equal breath, with conscience clear and 
 
 good, 
 
 Where all his sib were born, where each lay 
 dead. 
 
 Perhaps I should add that certain of the 
 foregoing translations are taken from books 
 of verses which I have neither the right to 
 praise nor the desire to blame ; whilst others 
 are printed here for the first time. Certainly, 
 too, I owe an apology for the roughness of my 
 hand to the memory of one who, if not the 
 greatest poet, was probably the most accom- 
 plished artist of his time.
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 
 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 
 
 THE Irish literary movement of our time 
 is the most interesting artistic event 
 since the formation of the Pre- 
 Raphaelite Brotherhood. It exhibits the same 
 combination of diverse personalities and gifts 
 dominated by one common aim and directed 
 towards one single end. The group composing 
 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its literary 
 associates petered out partly because its 
 work was done, and partly because it was 
 wounded in the house of its friends. Beauty 
 and truth had kissed each other, but the 
 embrace severed with quarrels over money 
 matters, and in threats of writs and legal 
 proceedings. It is to be hoped that the coat 
 may never be trailed in Ireland. In a sense 
 the various phases of the Irish literary move- 
 ment are an outcome of the demand for Home 
 Rule, and the toast of Ireland a nation. 
 They aim to provide that purely political 
 89
 
 90 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 conception with a soul. A nation is not a 
 mere fortuitous assemblage of people on a 
 certain portion of the world's surface, but 
 a unity with a common language, a common 
 past, and a common tradition. The aim of 
 the Irish literary movement is to promote the 
 study of the old Gaelic tongue, to perpetuate 
 the memory of the ancient myths and myth- 
 ology, and to ensue a future fellowship by 
 means of a community of interests. The 
 men and women allied together for purposes 
 such as these may have very different political 
 and religious sympathies. Possibly they are 
 to be found even in opposite camps. Certainly 
 their individualities are very distinct, and at 
 a casual glance one might think not par- 
 ticularly sympathetic. Amongst the more 
 prominent of those connected with this Celtic 
 Renaissance may be mentioned Dr. Douglas 
 Hyde, author of " The Literary History of 
 Ireland," and translator of the exquisite 
 " Love Songs of Connacht." Dr. Hyde is the 
 scholar of the movement, a great authority on 
 the old Gaelic tongue. Not all of his colleagues 
 have a working knowledge of that language, 
 and it is a gratification to the Saxon that for his 
 delight they are constrained to write in English.
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 91 
 
 Lady Gregory is a student in a near field 
 with one foot, however, at the stage-door and 
 her volumes of translations from the various 
 cycles of Irish romance are as beautiful as her 
 excursions into modern farce are entertaining. 
 Mr. Yeats believes that in Lady Gregory's 
 renderings Ireland has found her " Mabinogion " 
 and " Morte D'Arthur." He thinks " Cuchu- 
 lain " the best book that has come out of 
 Ireland in his time perhaps the best book 
 that has ever come out of Ireland ; and cer- 
 tainly " Cuchulain " deserves much, if not 
 perhaps quite all, of his generous praise. 
 Associated with Lady Gregory in her labours 
 for the Irish National Theatre Society was 
 Synge, whose premature death is a loss not 
 merely to the parochial drama, but to the whole 
 English-speaking race. Written in a curiously 
 rhythmic and musical prose, Synge's bitter 
 comedies and undiluted tragedies are the 
 most memorable stage work from an Irish- 
 man (with the single exception of Bernard 
 Shaw) since the brilliant artificial comedies 
 of Oscar Wilde. But above all, to the on- 
 looker, the Irish literary movement is summed 
 up in one picturesque figure, the most arresting 
 personality of the whole group, Mr. W. B. Yeats.
 
 92 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Not only is he its most distinguished poet, 
 he even enters into the spirit of his role. His 
 enthusiasm provides the driving power and 
 the motive force from which the movement 
 derives its strength. His work is the flag 
 round which the central battle has been waged. 
 Mr. Yeats was described by Mr. George Moore, 
 in " Evelyn Innes," under the name of Ulick 
 Dean. In that novel he was pictured as a 
 hater of materialism, and as a believer in all 
 mythologies more particularly the Irish. This 
 is how he appeared to the novelist : " He had 
 one of those long Irish faces, all in a straight 
 line, with flat, slightly hollow cheeks, and a 
 long chin. It was clean shaven, and a heavy 
 lock of black hair was always falling over his 
 eyes. It was his eyes that gave the sombre 
 ecstatic character to his face. They were 
 large, dark, deeply set, singularly shaped, and 
 they seemed to smoulder like fires in caves, 
 leaping and sinking out of the darkness. He 
 was a tall, thin young man, and he wore a black 
 jacket and a large necktie, tied with the ends 
 hanging loose over his coat." Many further 
 references to Mr. Yeats' personal characteristics 
 are to be found by the curious, scattered 
 through the pages of the same writer's indis-
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 93 
 
 creet trinity of memories entitled " Hail and 
 Farewell." 
 
 William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin 
 in 1866, the son of a well-known Irish artist, 
 Mr. J. B. Yeats. He is therefore well under 
 fifty years of age, and we may hope has many 
 years yet to fill with the activities which have 
 made his career so distinguished. Mr. Yeats 
 was educated in his native city, and for a time 
 intended to follow his father's profession. In 
 1887, however, his family removed to London, 
 where he devoted himself to literary work, 
 and contributed to the magazines. Two 
 volumes of poems published by him attracted 
 considerable attention, and made clear to that 
 contemptible portion of the public which 
 cares for poetry, that a fresh singing voice, 
 with a novel accent, was abroad in the land. 
 The curious strain of mysticism running 
 through Mr. Yeats' character now became 
 more apparent, for it had been evidenced 
 already in his verse. He devoted himself 
 to an elaborate study of Blake the poet- 
 artist whom we consider sane or mad according 
 to the measure of our sympathy with his 
 philosophy. He spent some considerable time 
 in Paris, frequenting the company of Sar
 
 94 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Peladan, that famous novelist and spiritualist 
 mage or charlatan, as you will for the 
 study of the magical tradition, and in the hopes 
 of raising ghosts. The results of these experi- 
 ments and speculations he set forth in books of 
 essays which are not always certain of the 
 sympathy of those who are amongst the most 
 enthusiastic admirers of his genius. Mr. 
 Yeats returned to Ireland and threw himself 
 whole-heartedly into the daylight affairs of a 
 tangible world. He assisted in the foundation 
 of the National Literary Society and of the 
 Irish Literary Society of London. " We are 
 preparing likely enough," he said, "for a new 
 Irish literary movement that will show itself 
 in the first lull in politics." Awaiting that lull 
 he stood upon Nationalist platforms and 
 proved the courage of his political opinions. 
 In company with Lady Gregory he collected 
 folk-tales from the mouth of peasants, and 
 conned the legends she was to incorporate 
 later in books he loves so well. Then an interest 
 developed which was destined to prove a 
 veritable Aaron's rod amongst the wands of 
 the enchanters. The Irish National Theatre 
 Society was founded, and quickly swallowed 
 all the other pursuits he had engaged in so long.
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 95 
 
 Even poetry his real bride had to give way 
 to the imperious new mistress. The volumes 
 grew smaller, and the gap between them in- 
 creasingly wide. Doubtless a larger public is 
 interested in the drama than in poetry ; but the 
 minority are not comforted, and fear that Mr. 
 Yeats is bestowing silver where his gifts might 
 be gold. But he refuses to be turned from his 
 course. 
 
 The reasons for Mr. Yeats' interest in the 
 theatre are perfectly clear. A dislike of the 
 commercial drama, and a conviction that the 
 modern play is choked under idle trappings 
 and accessories, are not peculiar to Ireland, 
 and indeed are generally shared. His desire 
 to see the Irish stage reflect the legends and 
 daily life of its country is one, also, that every 
 patriot will receive with respect. The true 
 trouble is that Mr. Yeats' talent is not essen- 
 tially dramatic. I would suggest that his 
 discovery of Synge in a Paris attic near the 
 Luxembourg Gardens remains his most valu- 
 able contribution to the service of the drama. 
 Mr. Yeats has placed many of his own plays 
 upon the boards, and " The Countess Cathleen " 
 shares the distinction, in common with " The 
 Playboy of the Western World," of very nearly
 
 96 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 provoking a riot. I doubt whether any com- 
 petent critic would maintain that Mr. Yeats' 
 plays are completely successful as dramatic 
 experiments interesting certainly, but scarcely 
 successful. The one possible exception and 
 it is a significant exception is " Cathleen ni 
 Hoolihan." The Poor Old Woman's lamenta- 
 tion over the loss of her four beautiful green 
 fields, her great central speech, and the boy's 
 description of her as a young girl with the 
 walk of a queen, undoubtedly go to the heart ; 
 but how much of the effect is due to a political 
 conception is difficult to determine. It is 
 certain that could lovely poetry and musical 
 periods constitute a play, these efforts would 
 be the greatest dramas of our time. Neither 
 has Mr. Yeats been served amiss by the per- 
 formers who essayed his characters and spoke 
 his words. Actors of the highest distinction 
 have played these parts, and London has been 
 privileged to enjoy the consummate performance 
 of Miss Sara Allgood as The Poor Old Woman, 
 and of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Deirdre, in the 
 drama of that name. The fact seems to be 
 that the fairy tales and Celtic dreams beloved 
 of the poet are too remote and far from a 
 popular audience. It is indeed a dream-heavy
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 97 
 
 land in which we wander for a dream-heavy 
 hour. The lines are too lyrical for drama, and 
 do not really carry across the footlights. They 
 sound sweeter and sing more tunably in the 
 study. Above all, when the drama, which 
 depends upon an immediate appeal, is made 
 the vehicle of such a dim and paralysing 
 mysticism as informs, for instance, " The 
 Shadowy Waters," it is no wonder that the 
 average sensual man turns impatiently to a 
 simpler and a coarser fare. 
 
 The genius of Mr. Yeats moves more easily 
 through the narrative poems he has founded 
 on legends derived from Gaelic sources. Thanks 
 to the devoted labours of a band of modern 
 scholars, Celtic mythology and folk-tale are 
 opened up to English readers ; and whilst all 
 is interesting, much is even curiously beautiful. 
 The early legends of the Irish Celt are full 
 of a haunting charm, and of a melancholy 
 quite their own. He has embodied in Cuchu- 
 lain his conception of man as hero, akin in 
 spirit to the Greek idea of Hercules. He has pro- 
 duced in " Deirdre " one of the half-dozen great 
 love stories of the world. He hus created in 
 her person a heroine who very nearly realizes 
 the six graces of womanhood representing 
 
 o
 
 98 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 the Celtic ideal the gifts of beauty, of singing, 
 of sweet speech, and of needlework, the gift of 
 counsel, and the gift of chastity. At times, 
 indeed, a strange ironical merriment breaks 
 across his dreaminess ; such, for instance, as 
 the inextinguishable laughter of the. heroes at 
 Finn's return, with Crania that errant wife 
 leaning lovingly upon his neck It is odd 
 that William Morris cared less for the Irish 
 mythology than for any other with which 
 he was acquainted. Possibly the stories were 
 too lyrical, romantic, and dreamy for his mature 
 taste, which as he grew older turned more 
 and more to the sombre and dramatic temper 
 of the Norse. These very qualities endear 
 them to Yeats, who, far more than the poet 
 who applied the phrase to liimself, is a dreamer 
 of dreams. " We Irish should keep these per- 
 sonages much in our hearts, for they lived in 
 the places where we ride and go marketing, and 
 sometimes they have met one another on the 
 hills that cast their shadows upon our doors at 
 evening. If we will but tell these stories to our 
 children the land will begin again to be a Holy 
 Land, as it was before men gave their hearts 
 to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was 
 a child I had only to climb the hill behind the
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 99 
 
 house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing 
 along the southern horizon. What beauty 
 was lost to me, what depth of emotion is still 
 perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told 
 me, not even the merchant captains who knew 
 everything, that Cruachan of the Enchantments 
 lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills ! " 
 
 Amongst the most charming of these narra- 
 tives are the " Death of Cuhoollin " and 
 " Baile and Aillinn." These poems are told in 
 rhymed couplets, and in a fluent and coloured 
 verse very personal to their writer. The 
 first relates the story of the combat between 
 Cuhoollin and his unrecognized son Finmole, 
 in which the lad is slain. In death the boy 
 reveals his secret, and Cuhoollin, driven mad 
 by remorse, is drowned fighting the incoming 
 tide. It is a story that has blown like thistle- 
 down about the four winds. It is the Persian 
 legend of Sohrab and Rustum, and is to be met 
 with in the mediaeval romances of Marie de 
 France under the title of the " Lay of Milon." 
 The story of " Baile and Aillinn " is very 
 delicate, and is narrated with an elusive and 
 sidelong grace which adds to the charm. 
 The argument is simple. Baile and Aillinn 
 were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love,
 
 100 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 wishing them to be happy in his own land 
 among the dead, told to each a story of the 
 other's death, so that their hearts were broken, 
 and they died. These narratives, together 
 always with the memorable " Wanderings of 
 Usheen," represent Mr. Yeats' gift of story- 
 telling at its best. The " Wanderings of 
 Usheen " was published in 1889, but in the 
 revised version it remains yet its author's 
 most characteristic piece of story -telling. The 
 poem in its present form is undoubtedly a 
 finer work than the original sketch, and this 
 is saying much. Mr. Yeats is not always so 
 happy in emendation, and painful experience 
 has taught us to mistrust his zeal in gilding 
 gold and painting the lily. The " Wanderings 
 of Usheen " is founded upon the Irish dialogues 
 of St. Patrick and Usheen, and is related by the 
 Fenian hero to the Christian bishop in the first 
 person. It tells how he 
 
 Found on the dove-grey edge of the sea 
 A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode 
 On a horse with a bridle offindrinny ; 
 And like a sunset were her lips, 
 A stormy sunset on doomed ships ; 
 A citron colour gloomed in her hair,
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 101 
 
 But down to her feet white vesture flowed, 
 And with the glimmering crimson glowed 
 Of many a figured embroidery ; 
 And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell 
 That wavered like the summer streams, 
 As her soft bosom rose and fell. 
 
 This lady was Neave, a princess of faery. She 
 cast the spell of her beauty and her love upon 
 the hero, and carried him across the sea, to the 
 Kingdom of Aengus, the Land of Unfading 
 Youth. Here the Fenian spent a hundred 
 years in softness and delight. At the end of that 
 century which passed swiftly as a watch 
 Usheen came upon the broken staff of a warrior's 
 spear. The weapon brought back memories 
 of his comrades and their wars, and he grew 
 dissatisfied with his ease. To keep him at her 
 side Neave carried her mortal hero to the 
 Island of Victories, where for another hundred 
 years he fought and slew, again and again, an 
 unsubduable demon. In the pauses of the 
 ceaseless combat Usheen ate and drank, and so 
 maintained an endless feast, an endless war. 
 On this merry life broke in the disturbing 
 thought of Finn, his white-haired king. Finding 
 memory to be vital as the deathless demon,
 
 102 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Neave next lured her lover to the Island of 
 Forgetfulness. For another century he lived 
 content, till when the three hundred years 
 of his exile were accomplished he was possessed 
 by desire to see his home. " Remembrance, 
 lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of his 
 heart." Usheen returned to Ireland, a creeping 
 old man, full of sleep, with the spittle never 
 dry on his beard. The Ireland he left had 
 passed away. His comrades were long since 
 dead. The very ideals of the land had changed, 
 and Patrick the bishop, with his crozier, 
 assured him that the Fenian heroes were tossing 
 on the flaming pavement of Hell. Usheen, 
 broken with pain and with years, was too old 
 to change with the times. He threw away 
 the rosary of small stones the saint had given 
 him, and elected to join the Fenians, whether 
 in the flames or at feast. 
 
 This bald summary does not do justice 
 indeed is flagrantly unfair to a most charming 
 story. The " Wanderings of Usheen " is certainly 
 one of the finest narratives of our time. The 
 handling of the contrasted metres, the various 
 music, and the rich colouring are worthy of the 
 highest praise. The closing scene between the 
 cleric and the hero, too, is essentially dramatic
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 103 
 
 far more so indeed than Mr. Yeats' more formal 
 efforts. The story is worthy of a place amongst 
 the dreams composing the " Earthly Paradise," 
 to one of which the legend of Ogier the Dane 
 it bears some resemblance. But " Usheen " 
 has qualities of beauty that are absent even 
 from the perfect tales of William Morris. 
 
 It would seem unlikely that Mr. Yeats could 
 do better work than these narratives, were not 
 his lyrics in evidence. Undoubtedly these 
 lyrical writings are the fine flower of his gift. 
 Dr. Johnson, in his breezy fashion, once 
 described claret as the drink for boys, port for 
 men, and brandy for heroes. It is easy to 
 determine which are the claret, the port, and 
 the brandy respectively of Mr. Yeats' cellar. 
 I do not suggest that the " brandy " is of a very 
 ardent or fiery quality. The lyrics are as 
 Celtic as the dramas and the romances, and 
 to the full as dreamy. The love poetry, for 
 example, is beautiful, but vague and dim. 
 Had we not Mr. Moore's emphatic assurance 
 it would appear impossible to believe that the 
 poet wrote such poems under the ecstasy of love, 
 or that they were addressed to a woman of 
 warm flesh and running blood. Like Raphael's 
 Madonnas they seem rather to derive from
 
 104 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 a certain idea in the mind. There is more 
 passion in the verses that record his following 
 after " the red-rose-bordered hem " of Ireland's 
 robe, than in any rhyme he has dedicated to 
 a mortal maid. All that Mr. Yeats knows of 
 melody and music and colour he has put into 
 his lyrics. None but those who refuse to see 
 beauty except in precise and definite shape 
 can be indifferent to their vague loveliness of 
 outline, or to the mystery that informs these 
 songs. If at times the feet seem to halt, we 
 must not be deceived. It is the very artfulness 
 of simplicity, and the hesitation, the " stam- 
 mer," is contrived deliberately to increase the 
 total effect. Mr. Yeats like Mr. Robert 
 Bridges is a scholar, and indulges in learned 
 experiments. These are, or should be, the 
 joy of the amateur or the aspirant, on the one 
 condition that he admires, but refrains from 
 imitation. In another fashion, too, this 
 scholarly poet is a snare for the unwary. He 
 is a symbolist, which is to say, in his own words, 
 that he endeavours to catch some high im- 
 palpable mood in a net of obscure images. The 
 obscurity at which Yeats hints is very pro- 
 nounced, not to say Cimmerian. A gloss to 
 many poems is absolutely necessary. The
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 105 
 
 " Wind among the Reeds " is a volume of some 
 108 pages. Of these but 62 are poetry, and 
 the rest of the handful of a book is occupied 
 by a bewildering paraphernalia of notes ; an 
 intolerable deal of sack with but a ha'p'orth of 
 bread. There are passages in these poems 
 so crudely and aggressively symbolist as to 
 set the teeth on edge. No parochial patriotism 
 can succeed in making poetry of " the boar 
 without bristles " or " the valley of the black 
 pig " ; and as for the notes they simply darken 
 counsel with their fantastic talk of " the 
 magical tradition." Will any reader with an 
 instinct for commentary care to decipher the 
 following hieroglyphics ? They come from 
 " The Happy Townland," a poem included in 
 " The Seven Woods." 
 
 Michael will unhook his trumpet 
 
 From a bough overhead, 
 
 And blow a little noise 
 
 When the supper has been spread. 
 
 Gabriel ivill come from the water 
 
 With a fish tail, and talk 
 
 Of wonders that have happened 
 
 On wet roads where men walk, 
 
 And lift up an old horn
 
 106 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Of hammered silver, and drink 
 Till fie has fallen asleep 
 Upon the starry brink. 
 
 It is all very strange and perplexing ; but 
 perhaps as Lamb observed of Coleridge's 
 metaphysic it is only his fun. I do not 
 desire to conclude these remarks on Mr. Yeats' 
 lyrics in a tone of remonstrance, however 
 gentle. It is more pleasant and easy to praise. 
 For sheer love of the lovely words quotation may 
 be permitted of one of the happiest lyrics from 
 "The Wind among the Reeds." It is of the poet's 
 best, which means that it is excelled by no singer 
 of our time, save, possibly, by Mr. Yeats himself. 
 
 All things uncomely and broken, all things worn 
 
 out and old, 
 The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of 
 
 a lumbering cart, 
 The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the 
 
 wintry mould, 
 Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose 
 
 in the deeps of my heart. 
 
 The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too 
 
 great to be told ; 
 I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green 
 
 knoll apart,
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 107 
 
 With the earth and the sky and the water remade 
 
 like a casket of gold, 
 For my dreams of your image that blossoms a 
 
 rose in the deeps of my heart. 
 
 Mr. Yeats has essayed various forms 
 of poetry the dramatic, the narrative, the 
 lyrical. Running through play and story and 
 lyric alike is the golden cord of mysticism. 
 Mysticism furnishes the cement binding the 
 various phases of his talent together ; it is 
 almost the hall-mark proving the poem to be 
 genuinely of his workmanship. This mysticism 
 which is implicit in the poems becomes explicit 
 and definite in certain books of prose, but with 
 these we are not immediately concerned in 
 this paper. Mysticism is less a creed than 
 an attitude of mind, a state of the soul. It 
 is not peculiar to any religion, nor for the 
 matter of that is it incompatible, apparently, 
 with the very minimum of orthodox belief. 
 The Eastern ascetic, smeared with ashes and 
 clad in his saffron robe, seeks to attain Nirvana 
 by the path of mysticism. The modern 
 Christian mystic looks upon Nature, and recog- 
 nizes that all the natural phenomena about 
 him are really due to the office and ministry of
 
 108 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 angels. " Every beautiful prospect, every ray 
 of light and heat is, as it were, the skirts of 
 their garments, the waving of the robes of those 
 whose faces see God." The mediaeval mystic 
 gazed into her own soul, and found all Heaven 
 reflected there as in a pool of clear water. She 
 saw Majesty upon His throne, with the Holy 
 Mother standing with uncovered breasts on 
 God's left hand, and Christ on the right, 
 showing His still open wounds ; and she adds 
 that so long as sin endures on earth so long 
 will those wounds remain open and bleeding, 
 though painless ; but that after the Day of 
 Judgment they will heal, and it will be as though 
 there were rose leaves instead of wounds. Mr. 
 Yeats has no such orthodox creed to be a lantern 
 to his steps. He is the less fortunate, for 
 the believer, at the worst, has company in his 
 wanderings, which is better than being solitary 
 in error. The Christian mystic has a centre from 
 whence to proceed, and on which to rally ; 
 right or wrong we know where he stands ; he 
 is a figure with a background ; a soldier armed 
 on a system, and from a tested armoury. In 
 a word, he is logical and complete. Mr. Yeats' 
 faith according to " Evelyn Innes " is very 
 comprehensive. There he is introduced as
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 109 
 
 a hater of materialism, and as a believer in 
 nil mythologies. I remember reading a story of 
 a man who was anxious to know the precise 
 white truth of things. This dreamer had a 
 vision, in which he saw a great rose window, 
 gorgeous in colour, composed of many circles, 
 all filled with little figures representing the 
 philosophers, the teachers, the poets, and the 
 scientists of the world. A scroll issued from 
 every mouth, and on each scroll was in- 
 scribed " And this is Truth." Presently the 
 rose window began to turn like a wheel before 
 his eyes. It whirled faster and faster, till as 
 the inquirer gazed, the glorious colours became 
 merged in one pure disk of white. Truth is the 
 sum of all our human contradictions. I have 
 sometimes wondered if the name of this dreamer 
 was William Butler Yeats. 
 
 Mr. Yeats' mysticism is of a personal char- 
 acter, and I approach the subject with some 
 diffidence. He believes, apparently, in a 
 collective body of feeling, outside ourselves, 
 which may represent the total experience of 
 the race. Quietism will bring us into closer 
 relation with this nucleus of feeling and emotion, 
 and the poet speaks willingly of visions coming 
 from that source, and of dreams which he
 
 110 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 afterwards wrote down in verse. Vision and 
 dream, indeed, are short cuts and open doors 
 to the dim kingdom he loves. A deep-seated 
 tendency to quietism frequently enough has 
 the effect of discouraging action and also 
 speech. It may even admit no necessary 
 connexion between the inner life and the ac- 
 cepted moralities of the day. Mr. Yeats is no 
 exception. The activities of the body and 
 all human energies seem slight things in com- 
 parison to the vitality of the soul. He speaks 
 therefore with a certain contempt of " dusty 
 deeds " ; and in " The Blessed " proclaims 
 that " the blessedest soul in the world went 
 nodding a drunken head." The old sea rover 
 of " The Shadowy Waters," and Dectora the 
 captive woman who loved him, put both love 
 and life aside with a measure of scorn. " As 
 to living, our servants will do that for us." 
 Nature herself has to be re-created in the 
 heart before the stars can shine, the winds blow, 
 and the spices flow forth for this fastidious 
 visionary, as may be seen by reference to " The 
 Two Trees," one of the most mystical of his 
 poems. I do not think myself " The Two 
 Trees " to be amongst the most haunting and 
 perfect of Mr. Yeats' lyrics. Better judges
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 111 
 
 than the present writer appreciate it more 
 highly than he is able to do. There is no doubt, 
 however, that the substance and message of 
 the poem are vitalized by the sincerest con- 
 viction. It is of peculiar authority to those 
 who would learn something of the mystic's 
 creed. To its author, as to all visionaries, 
 the world is only a little dry dust, barren of 
 nourishment to the soul. The illusions about 
 us, which the unwary mistake for realities, are 
 but fatal images seen in a magic mirror. The 
 tree of life bears but blackened leaves, and its 
 roots are hidden deep in snow. Through its 
 broken branches fly the ravens of thought, 
 watching the disasters that befall the spirit of 
 man. The only way of escape is to avert the 
 eyes from all this ugly ruin. The kingdom of 
 God is within you. Make no effort to right 
 wrong, or to set the crooked straight. Look 
 into your own heart, and build the world 
 anew according to your conception and your 
 dream. 
 
 Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, 
 The holy tree is growing there ; 
 
 From joy the holy branches start, 
 
 And all the trembling flowers they bear.
 
 112 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The changing colours of its fruit 
 
 Have dowered the stars with merry light ; 
 The surety of its hidden root 
 
 Has planted quiet in the night ; 
 The shaking of its leafy head 
 
 Has given the waves their melody, 
 And made my lips and music wed, 
 
 Murmuring a wizard song for thee. 
 There, through bewildered branches go 
 
 Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife, 
 Tossing and tossing to and fro 
 
 The flaming circle of our life. 
 When looking on their shaken hair, 
 
 And dreaming how they dance and dart, 
 Thine eyes grow full of tender care : 
 
 Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. 
 
 Speculations such as some of those set out 
 in the preceding pages may be interesting 
 and harmless enough to the thinker who 
 holds his nature firmly on the curb, but to the 
 ignorant they are death. They end in sheer 
 nihilism, and in paralysis of the whole body, 
 political and social. It is fortunate that 
 speakers of the vulgar tongue are not likely 
 to be attracted by such doctrines. Mr. Yeats 
 himself, we are grateful to notice, does not
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC 118 
 
 illustrate his every precept. His life has been 
 one of ceaseless and beneficent activity, and 
 his speech overflows through quite a number 
 of books. But perhaps these are reproaches 
 which it is not fair to level at this one particular 
 phase of mysticism. Very possibly some such 
 dangers are common to all mysticisms, and 
 form the seamy side of Buddhist and Christian 
 mystic speculations as well as of the esoteric 
 imaginings of Mr. Yeats. 
 
 It is not likely that poems teaching such 
 a philosophy will ever be popular. Neither 
 is it probable that Mr. Yeats will rank amongst 
 the divinest poets of our speech. His gift is 
 not rich, nor deep, nor various enough for such 
 supreme honour as this. It is sufficient dis- 
 tinction that of all the writers of our day 
 he is the most essentially poetic, and best 
 illustrates modern verse at its farthest remove 
 from prose.
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 
 CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI 
 AND PAUL VERLAINE 
 
 I. 
 
 THE year 1894 should have been addressed 
 to this country in a black-edged enve- 
 lope, and it is a fortunate thing that it 
 came to an end on December 31. Had it lasted 
 much longer English letters would have become 
 blank as a sheet of fresh note-paper. That un- 
 lucky year must bear the heavy responsibility 
 of taking from amongst us a historian like 
 Froude, an essayist like Pater, a novelist such 
 as Robert Louis Stevenson, and a poetess 
 of the value of Christina Rossetti. It is idle 
 to pretend that literature did not reel under 
 their loss. In one of the most wonderful of 
 Victor Hugo's romances a very pretty girl 
 elects to lose certain of her teeth, and with 
 them loses all her attractiveness. The difference 
 between January, 1894, and January, 1895, 
 115
 
 116 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 was much the difference in Fantine's face before 
 and after her visit to the dentist. We must 
 take what consolation we may from the thought 
 that the supreme work of which most of these 
 writers were capable had been accomplished. 
 Christina Rossetti certainly would have pressed 
 this application to herself. She was sixty- 
 four years of age, and although she died with 
 her singing robes upon her, it was her unalter- 
 able conviction that song is the prerogative of 
 youth and passes with the spring. 
 
 Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in 
 December, 1830, the youngest child of an 
 Italian refugee and of a mother who was half 
 Italian and half English by blood. Four 
 children were born of this marriage, and all 
 four are honourably esteemed in connexion 
 with literature. The eldest, Maria Francesca, 
 was the author of " A Shadow of Dante " ; 
 she afterwards entered an Anglican sisterhood. 
 Dante Gabriel became the famous artist and 
 poet, a man of mystery, and one of the most 
 overwhelming personalities of his day. William 
 Michael, an excellent student and critic, devoted 
 his life to very valuable and informing studies 
 of the more prominent members of his family 
 and their friends. Christina, herself, was very
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 117 
 
 near to being the most charming lyric writer 
 of our time. The wind bloweth where it 
 listeth, and who can say from what source 
 this remarkable diversity of gifts and graces 
 derived ! Christina Rossetti, like all her 
 family, matured early. The atmosphere of 
 her home was something of an intellectual 
 and artistic forcing-house. At seventeen 
 she had written and privately printed a little 
 volume of poems. Just out of her teens she 
 was contributing to the Germ a haunting series 
 of lyrics, which exhibit her style absolutely 
 matured hi its fresh individuality ; and of these 
 early lyrics one or possibly two represents 
 her genius at its sweetest and best. However, 
 her successive volumes of poems, although 
 to the popular taste, did not succeed to the 
 full measure of their deserts. This was no 
 blame to Dante Rossetti, whose eminent 
 engineering talents were always at his sister's 
 service. Friends, influential and highly placed, 
 seemed to begrudge her gifts, and almost to 
 discourage their exercise, in case they might 
 distract attention from the work of her more 
 celebrated brother. Books pouring forth from 
 members of the same family suggest to a 
 haphazard public the methods of a factory,
 
 118 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 rather than those of the study. Troubles of 
 all sorts closed in upon her. She suffered 
 from private griefs and from bodily infirmities. 
 A disfiguring complaint of the eyes injured her 
 personal appearance. Miss Rossetti with- 
 drew more and more into herself. She spent 
 her days in loving service to an aged mother. 
 Absorbed in religious exercises and in the 
 composition of devotional books, she scarcely 
 left her house, except to attend the services 
 of the Church to which she so whole-heartedly 
 belonged. Her poems were written on her 
 dressing-table, or on the corner of her wash- 
 stand. At length an incurable internal 
 disease developed, and after a long illness, 
 patiently borne, this great poetess and Angli- 
 can saint attained her rest on December 29, 
 1894. 
 
 Poetess and saint these are the two key- 
 notes of Christina Rossetti's character. Saints 
 are not a particularly numerous body in this 
 rough work-a-day world of ours, and England 
 once upon a time called the Isle of Saints 
 is not more favoured than the rest of Christen- 
 dom. With whatever illusions we start our 
 life's journey, most of us soon give up any 
 thought of distinguishing ourselves upon the
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 119 
 
 paths of virtue. We are thankful if at the 
 end of the dusty road we have still some rags 
 of honour clinging about us, like tattered 
 flags. Christina Rossetti shone like a good 
 deed in this naughty world, and was one of 
 those devout women who are the adornments 
 of their Church. If, however, saints are few 
 and far between, poetesses have nearly reached 
 the vanishing point. For the purposes of 
 English literature they may be counted easily 
 upon the fingers of one hand, and not exhaust 
 the tale. No gift is more common to their 
 sex than the knack of facile rhyme ; no grace 
 seems more tantalizingly beyond its reach 
 than the incommunicable birthright of 
 poetry. I do not say that Miss Rossetti was 
 always equal to her best self, nor that her 
 garland consisted only of roses. But when every 
 deduction is made, and after hearing all the 
 devil's advocate may urge, she remains easily 
 one of the two most distinguished poetesses 
 of the Victorian era. Since, then, to be either 
 saint or poet is enough for glory, it is Christina 
 Rossetti's peculiar, and nearly unique, dis- 
 tinction to combine the double honour in a 
 single person. There is little doubt which of 
 these two graces she would most have coveted
 
 had it ever occurred to her humility that she 
 might be of the saints. Poetry was only an 
 incident a daily practice of her years, but 
 the religious life was her very breath. Devo- 
 tional works were her constant companions ; 
 the Bible (that Book of the Consolation of 
 Humanity), the " Imitation," St. Augustine's 
 " Confessions," and Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress " were, in particular, her intimate mainstay. 
 When to an overstrained conscience it seemed 
 possible that any of her poems might lead a 
 weaker brother to offend, that fantastic concep- 
 tion caused the deletion of the doubtful portion 
 from her books. Theatres she ceased to attend 
 because of their supposed effect on the charac- 
 ters of the performers, and chess she refused 
 to play because she was too keen upon winning. 
 During the course of her life two men asked 
 for the honour to be called her husband. Both 
 were suitable proposals, and each in turn 
 would have been accepted save for religious 
 scruples. The friend of her youth was a 
 Roman Catholic, and therefore believed too 
 much ; the friend of her womanhood had no 
 sufficiently definite creed, and so believed too 
 little. She contented herself with loving the 
 latter to her dying day. It is sad to gather
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 121 
 
 that this life of unrelaxing effort and worship 
 brought Miss Rossetti neither happiness in 
 this world nor confidence in her election for 
 the next. Whilst the average indifferent 
 man faces the future with a cheerful serenity, 
 this Anglican saint almost feared to pass to 
 that country where in truth she had always 
 dwelt. 
 
 Dante Rossetti once remarked that all 
 poetry should be " amusing," and this in the 
 obvious meaning of the word his sister's work 
 emphatically is not. Many of her poems are, 
 in fact, extremely dull, and you have to cross 
 weary stretches of sand to reach the oasis 
 with its fountain and its palms. Clearly she 
 did not know her good work from her bad, 
 and it is unlikely that posterity will read her 
 as a whole. Then, too, the reading public has 
 an incurable taste for cheerfulness, and cheer- 
 fulness does not break in very frequently here. 
 Without shutting our eyes to its brighter 
 portions such, for instance, as the triumphant 
 " Birthday " her poetry is the revelation 
 of one who saw habitually " gold tarnished 
 and the grey above the green." Probably 
 the tendency to melancholy was consti- 
 tutional, but many streams must have swelled
 
 122 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 the main current before she could have 
 written 
 
 JT hope, indeed, but hope itself is fear 
 Viewed on the sunny side. 
 
 Again, should a poet write stories in verse, 
 that portion is sure of the first attention of his 
 readers. The eternal child in all of us cries 
 out for a tale. Christina Rossetti incidentally 
 composed narratives in rhyme ; essentially 
 she was a lyric poet. The tales have both 
 imagination and movement, but they do not 
 deal quite frankly with us. Read as pure 
 fantasy they are delightful, but behind their 
 mufflers we seem to spy a beard. There is a 
 general impression, for example, that the 
 simple-seeming story of " Goblin Market '' 
 is really a parable of redemption through a 
 sister's love, and that " The Prince's Progress " 
 is not a love tale, as it pretends, but is rather 
 an allegory of one who was tempted, and who 
 served strange masters, and at last was utterly 
 overthrown. The impression doubtless is 
 inaccurate, for in a letter addressed to the 
 present writer Christina Rossetti said herself, 
 " I must own that ' Goblin Market ' and the 
 ' Prince's Progress ' were written withoul
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 123 
 
 any allegorical meaning, although I see that 
 such may be read into both ; nor are you the 
 first who has so interpreted ' Goblin Market.' " 
 But the mischief is done. As Keats remarked 
 long ago, poetry should not come to us ob- 
 trusively with its hand in its breeches' pocket, 
 and the public has no passion for allegories. 
 
 Christina Rossetti's fame must be based 
 ultimately upon her lyrics and sonnets ; her 
 true gift was the grace of song. Lyrical writing 
 is the revelation of a mood, or emotion, in one 
 pure jet of music. To be frankly oneself, to 
 reveal personality without false shame or 
 modesty, is difficult enough in a man. For 
 a woman it is more than difficult, it is next 
 door to impossible. To show in naked words 
 the naked heart, demands a courage that 
 verges on the heroic. That is why, when a 
 woman writes lyrics, she sings, frequently 
 enough, through the mask of a man. Christina 
 Rossetti made no such compromise. She 
 dared to be herself. She elected, in the main, 
 to make the lyric the expression of her spiritual 
 life. Since she was by conviction an adherent 
 of the Church of England, it follows that 
 these lyrics cannot be mistaken for the work 
 of a member of any other religious body
 
 124 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Anglicanism always has been a literary religion, 
 founded on the dignity and reserve of the 
 Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It is 
 therefore upon the more austere side of Christi- 
 anity that the poetess habitually dwells. Her 
 preference is for the fast rather than the festival. 
 Occasionally " A Christmas Carol " may rise 
 to her lips, but by choice she broods upon 
 " Advent," or " Good Friday," or " The Three 
 Enemies." The shadow of the grave, the 
 apostolic fear lest the singer herself should 
 be a castaway, rests broadly upon these poems, 
 and were a motto desired by way of summary 
 to her verse it might almost be found in the 
 words of the " Religio Medici " : " For the 
 world I count it not an Inn but an Hospital, 
 and a place not to live but to die in." How 
 often must the sentences inscribed on Akbar's 
 monument have risen in her mind : " Said 
 Jesus (on Whom be peace), this world is a bridge. 
 Pass over it, but do not build thereon. He 
 who asks for an hour asks for eternity." No 
 praise of mine can do justice to Miss Rossetti's 
 lyrics, to their fervent melody, to their lovely 
 phrasing, and to the passion of the emotion 
 they express. They rank with their peers, 
 immediately after the supreme masterpieces
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 125 
 
 of the century that is gone. These songs are 
 the revelation of a beautiful personality, both 
 in its spiritual and in a less degree its earthly 
 relationships. I do not say that each is a 
 perfect work of art. At times the central 
 fire has not burnt all the slag away. Swin- 
 burne, coming after her, took one or two of 
 her original melodies, just to show of what 
 they were capable in the hands of an unrivalled 
 virtuoso. Something of the same kind, one 
 day, will be done to the remarkable poems 
 with which Mr. Thomas Hardy occupies his 
 illustrious evening. Possibly it is the fact 
 that " Amor Mundi " was my first introduction 
 to all this gift of song which makes me regard 
 it with peculiar pleasure. At least its quota- 
 tion may be permitted me, in proof of the 
 inadequacy of any praise. 
 
 " O where are you going with your love-locks 
 
 flowing, 
 On the west wind blowing along this valley 
 
 track ? " 
 " The downhill path is easy, come with me an 
 
 it please ye, 
 
 We shall escape the uphill by never turning 
 back."
 
 126 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 So they two went together in glowing August 
 
 weather, 
 The honey-breathing heather lay to their left 
 
 and right ; 
 And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed 
 
 to float on 
 
 The air like soft twin pigeons, too sportive 
 to alight. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " Oh, what is that glides quickly where velvet 
 
 flowers grow thickly, 
 Their scent comes rich and sickly ? " " A 
 
 scaled and hooded worm." 
 " Oh, what's that in the hollow, so pale I quake 
 
 to follow?" 
 
 " Oh, that's a thin dead body which waits the 
 eternal term." 
 
 " Turn again, O my sweetest turn again, false 
 
 and fleetest : 
 This beaten way thou beatest, I fear is hell's 
 
 own track." 
 *' Nay, too steep for hill mounting ; nay, too 
 
 late for cost counting ; 
 
 This downhill path is easy, but there's no 
 turning back."
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 127 
 
 II. 
 
 At the very time Christina Rossetti was 
 writing the most beautiful devotional poetry 
 of her country, a voice could be heard across 
 the Channel equally urgent and true. The 
 religious poems of Paul Verlaine are as poignant 
 as the lyrics of the English poetess, and capable 
 judges assert that in their fashion they are 
 excelled by none in the French language. 
 Beyond their common faith and their gift of 
 devotional song, the two writers had abso- 
 lutely no meeting-ground. Indeed, had some 
 ironic dramatist desired to depict a merry 
 and tragic contrast of similar gifts, exhibited 
 through utterly dissimilar characters, he could 
 scarcely have gone beyond placing Christina 
 Rossetti and Paul Verlaine those two Christian 
 poets upon the stage at one and the same 
 moment. One was truly the life hidden with 
 Christ in God. Of the other life the less said 
 the better, were it not that the " legend " is 
 too picturesque to be easily forgotten. Ver- 
 laine's prototype is not Christina Rossetti, but 
 rather Francis Villon. The more lurid mis- 
 deeds of that mediaeval singer are largely 
 discounted by the latest criticism. The shock-
 
 128 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 ing confessions of the " Testaments " are 
 regarded somewhat as a playful exercise of 
 the imaginative faculty, and I, for one, am 
 anxious to agree, although with doubt and 
 mental reservation. Villon was a Bohemian, 
 a jail-bird, an associate of loose women, all that 
 was bad ; only it happened that this thoroughly 
 undesirable person chanced to be the greatest 
 poet of his day. Possibly, after an interval 
 of four hundred years, Fate, in playing her 
 game of hazard, dealt out much the same 
 combination of cards upon the table. 
 
 Paul Verlaine was born in Metz in 1844, 
 the son of a French army officer who died at 
 the time the poet came of age and of an over- 
 fond Flemish mother. On leaving school with 
 a degree, he obtained a clerkship in connexion 
 with the municipality of Paris, and devoted 
 all the time he could abstract from his duties 
 to the composition of verses. He was not 
 the only Frenchman to cultivate literature 
 whilst in public employment. Coppe"e, Mau- 
 passant, and Huysmans were all in Govern- 
 ment or municipal offices, and many a story and 
 many a novel were written on official paper 
 and in office hours. For some obscure reason 
 singing birds,^both in England and France,
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 129 
 
 are frequently caged in the various depart- 
 ments of the Civil Service. At intervals 
 Verlaine published slender volumes of verses, 
 of a singular music, which attracted some 
 attention. One of these, " La Bonne Chanson," 
 was the outcome of his marriage. This did not 
 prove permanently successful, for he did not 
 shine in the role of a married man. Then 
 Verlaine disappeared from Paris and his cus- 
 tomary haunts for years. During a portion 
 of that period he was in prison in Belgium 
 for attempted homicide. He also essayed 
 the moral instruction of youth in an English 
 school. When Verlaine returned to Paris 
 he was Bohemian through and through. His 
 associates were too frequently men of little 
 character and women of less. He lived in a 
 squalid lodging in a low district. How he lived 
 at all was a mystery, but I suppose it was 
 partly by the sale of his poems and partly on 
 charity. When sick he sought the hospital, 
 where his story and his gifts being known 
 he was allowed to remain until minded to 
 discharge himself as cured. At times, decently 
 clothed and in clean linen, he was taken by his 
 best friends to London or Brussels, there to 
 lecture before distinguished audiences ; but
 
 130 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 always he went back to the old dreary life. 
 Nothing could be done to raise him from his 
 surroundings ; and in the same manner as he 
 had chosen to live, so he died at the age of 
 fifty-two years. This, or something like this, 
 is the lamentable "legend" of one of the 
 truest poets of our time. 
 
 There was little enough in common between 
 Christina Rossetti and Paul Verlaine, between 
 the saintly recluse and the rolling stone of 
 dubious paths ; nothing, indeed, but their 
 faith and the divine gift of song. Their in- 
 spiration was never more manifest than when 
 exercised upon lyrics dealing with the spiritual 
 life. It mattered little then that the one wrote 
 upon her dressing-table, and the other upon 
 the marble slab of some crowded cafe. It 
 mattered less that to the undiscerning eye 
 one was a prim, silent lady, dressed in an 
 antiquated black gown, and the other a drunken 
 Socrates without philosophy and without 
 self-control. In each case the unpromising 
 exterior hid the same excellent gift. The 
 divine treasure surely was there, manifestly 
 shining through the earthen vessel. After all 
 it is of small concern whether the chalice from 
 which we drink the wine is of gold or clay.
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 131 
 
 If the gem be priceless, why give a thought 
 to the casket ! The religious poems of Christina 
 Rossetti and Paul Verlaine are gold thrice 
 refined. They derive all their sweetness from 
 their celestial vintage. In them will be found 
 the most beautiful religious poetry of the 
 nineteenth century, the most piercing and 
 poignant expression of the spiritual life in 
 modern verse. On that life they gladly dwelt, 
 for it is the essential and elemental note of 
 their work. " I sat down under His shadow 
 with great delight, and His fruit was sweet 
 to my taste. He brought me to the ban- 
 queting house, and His banner over me was 
 love." 
 
 Verlaine's poetry was not concerned ex- 
 clusively with devotional subjects. Indeed, 
 that devotional poetry is largely to be found 
 in two later volumes, entitled respectively 
 " Sagesse " and " Amour." His earlier verses 
 dealt with quite other material. They contain 
 realistic descriptions of English and Belgian 
 life and landscape. They are occupied with 
 gallant and Watteau-like scenes of an enig- 
 matic perversity ; there are love poems ad- 
 dressed to mistress and wife, and occasional 
 verses of an intimate character such, for
 
 132 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 instance, as that justly celebrated poem 
 (included in " Sagesse ") recording the remorse 
 of the prisoner as he considers his spoiled and 
 wasted youth. These writings doubtless have 
 many faults. They were not the work of a 
 scholar, even in his mother tongue. At times 
 they are difficult to construe, so difficult that 
 one is tempted to wish the task impossible. 
 But at least they are the songs of a reed through 
 which all winds blew to music, to use the 
 phrase Tennyson applied to Swinburne. Ver- 
 laine's poems are of a strange and haunting 
 melody, which till then had been unheard 
 in French verse. At times there is a catch 
 in the accent, very arresting to the ear. He 
 seems to sing false almost deliberately, with 
 something of the " stammer " the English 
 reader finds in Yeats. It was no wonder that 
 youthful symbolists grouped themselves about 
 his flag. They had found a leader whose 
 words suggested more than they actually 
 expressed, and whose music induced emotions 
 beyond the notes of which it was composed. 
 
 When we come to the volume entitled 
 " Sagesse," nothing of the old Verlaine 
 remains, except the music. The subjects are 
 altogether changed. " Sagesse " is a book
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 133 
 
 of religious verses, laying bare with the utmost 
 directness and simplicity the spiritual life 
 of its writer. It is essentially the work of a 
 Christian poet, who is also a Catholic. The 
 reasons which have induced men to become 
 converts to that venerable faith are various 
 and cogent. Newman approached it by way 
 of a series of propositions as logical as Euclid. 
 Huysmans, again, by way of a series of dis- 
 gusts. I doubt whether in the strict sense 
 of the word there was need for Verlaine to be 
 converted at all. He had never lost his faith. 
 It was simply mislaid. When the deplorable 
 circumstances of his life drove him in upon 
 himself, he sought refuge in the old consola- 
 tions which for the time he had neglected. 
 Verlaine was neither scholar nor philosopher ; 
 he was only a poet. He turned with proud 
 disdain from the anxious questionings of his 
 time. He desired to have been born in the 
 great days of Louis the Fourteenth, when France 
 was happy in the shadow of Madame de Main- 
 tenon's linen coif, when doctors served the 
 Mass and were content to assist in the offices of 
 the Church. But, no, the fastidious dreamer 
 recalls with horror that the seventeenth century 
 was Gallican and Jansenist. It was tainted
 
 134 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 with heresy, with Pascal, and with the dis- 
 senters of Port Royal. One only period sufficed 
 his needs the Middle Ages, monstrous and 
 delicate (to use his own inimitable phrase), 
 when a king walked barefoot through the 
 Paris streets, bearing the crown of thorns, 
 and the marvel of Chartres Cathedral rose, 
 not to music, but to prayer. Mysticism 
 the wonderful Christian mysticism is im- 
 plicit in every poem. All earth is a parable and 
 a miracle as well. The harvest is plenteous, 
 not only to provide bread for man, but also 
 the wafer for the Host. The vintage is red 
 to make merry men's hearts ; yes, but rather 
 to brim the chalice with His Wine. Surely 
 it is not for nothing that Chartres stands 
 amidst the granary of France, and Rheims rises 
 like a benediction above her vines. Equally 
 implicit is Verlaine's conception of " two only 
 absolute and luminously self-evident beings," 
 himself and his Creator, in the world. To that 
 Creator the stricken soul approaches in un- 
 rhymed verses of astonishing simplicity and 
 straightforwardness. Thoughts of such striking 
 beauty escape him, that they seem, it has been 
 suggested, as if strays from the " Imitation." 
 Penitential psalms, devout prayers, acts of
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 135 
 
 contrition, canticles to the Virgin, follow one 
 upon the other. Where all is beautiful, 
 perhaps may be singled out as especially beau- 
 tiful and affecting a series of sonnets composed 
 in the form of a dialogue between the soul and 
 God. It is a daring dramatic experiment, 
 completely successful. That, indeed, is its 
 only justification. The sequence commences 
 with an appeal by Christ for the love of Hie 
 " lamentable friend," and with a recapitulation 
 of how He had loved the sinner to the death. 
 It continues with the plea of the penitent that 
 because of his frailty he dare not love in return. 
 Then with the insistence of the "Hound of 
 Heaven," Christ develops the theme in sonnet 
 after sonnet the necessity of love, the path 
 by which it may be attained, through con- 
 fession, by means of Holy Communion, to peace 
 of heart and final redemption. And the whole 
 concludes with its acceptance by the penitent 
 in hysteria, and ecstasy and fear. It is im- 
 possible to doubt that the writer's emotion 
 is genuine. The metal rings absolutely true. 
 In Verlaine's religious poetry there is none 
 of the pose of neo-Catholicism, so common 
 in our day. There is nothing derived simply 
 from an aesthetic appreciation of incense and
 
 186 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 ritual and art needlework. The craftsman- 
 ship is that of a great poet, but the message is 
 that of the convinced and persuaded Christian. 
 
 III. 
 
 Two Christian poets. So far as Christina 
 Rossetti is concerned no one would dream of 
 denying her the ascription. Her life and her 
 life's work are absolutely of a piece. From 
 the tree you would prophesy with certainty 
 the fruit which, as a fact, hangs so thickly on 
 the branches. The case of Paul Verlaine is 
 different, and possibly may not be accepted 
 without hesitation. It is not very easy to 
 determine the species of a tree which, in its 
 season, put forth such various fruits. At 
 times the burthen was wholesome ; at others 
 Dead Sea apples. Occasionally by a curious 
 and deliberate perversity the good fruit and 
 the bad grew side by side upon the self-same 
 bough. By their fruit ye shall know them. 
 In this essay I have kept my attention fixed 
 upon the Christian aspect of Verlaine's work. 
 To doubt its sincerity would be to strike at 
 the root of criticism, and to destroy the very
 
 TWO CHRISTIAN POETS 187 
 
 canons of judgment. What Verlaine suffered 
 from was the evil of the divided mind. As 
 Anatole France remarked in the study of his 
 lamentable friend, entitled " Gestas " : " He 
 has faith, simple, firm, childlike faith. It is 
 works alone he is lacking in." But to discuss 
 the relations between faith and works is to 
 enter the thorniest path of religious contro- 
 versy. By intellectual conviction Verlaine 
 was a Christian, and the most permanent 
 portion of his poetry witnesses to his belief. 
 I consider him, therefore, a Christian poet. 
 If his practice did not always square with his 
 creed, which amongst us can cast the first stone ! 
 In an Eastern apologue it is related that a 
 crowd was once gathered about a dead dog lying 
 in the gutter. One drew attention to the 
 rope about his neck, concluding that he was a 
 thief ; another derided his torn and mangy 
 hide ; a third pointed out that he was only a 
 worthless mongrel. But a certain Teacher 
 in Whom, as it chanced, Paul Verlaine believed 
 passing that way, stopped for a moment, and 
 ere He proceeded, remarked softly, " Pearls 
 are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth."
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 AND HIS LEGEND 
 
 THERE are many advantages for an 
 artist in being the proprietor of a 
 " legend." It is the equivalent 
 and more than the equivalent of the romantic 
 appearance, to those who know by the ear 
 and not through the eye. It piques the curiosity 
 of the crowd, and gives a factitious interest 
 to things which otherwise would not attract 
 its attention. The idler in the market may 
 care nothing for the song, but he gapes readily 
 enough upon the singer, especially should 
 gossip be concerned with the privacies of the 
 singer's life. Frequently enough he recognizes 
 the performer to be a singer by reason of this 
 noble or grotesque attitude, rather than by the 
 thrilling voice. The " legend " may be lurid 
 or tragic or squalid, but it has come to be 
 demanded, and the poet frequently responds. 
 The role of the blameless ratepayer is not for 
 139
 
 140 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 him, however greatly he may yearn. The 
 poet has much of the feminine in his character, 
 and we all recognize how woman can flood 
 the street with living copies of Burne-Jones or 
 Beardsley, or whoever else may be the fashion- 
 able artist of the day. This predilection for 
 interesting details is responsible for odd en- 
 thusiasms. Villon, for instance, is doubtless 
 a great poet, very probably the typical French 
 poet of the Middle Age. His poems are largely 
 written in slang thieves' slang of the fifteenth 
 century, extremely difficult to read. But he 
 was a student of the Paris University, who 
 also stole ducks from the city moat. He 
 robbed, he joined the company of an interesting 
 guild of vagabonds, for whom archers looked 
 about carefully with lanterns, he committed 
 manslaughter, he rotted in prison, he sweated in 
 fear of death. As a consequence his standing 
 as a poet is well esteemed of many who, 
 without the picturesque legend, would have 
 been attracted but little by mediaeval French 
 verse. Again, take the singer who in modern 
 times reproduced Villon's life with an overmuch 
 fidelity. Doubtless Verlaine was a divine 
 poet, but the divinity showed less in his daily 
 life than in his songs. He is therefore a better
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 141 
 
 known figure in the market-place than certain 
 excellent contemporaries who presented a more 
 reputable and less disordered front. However, 
 it is not necessary that the legend should 
 be lurid to ensure attention. It is sufficient 
 so it be romantic or mysterious or even squalid. 
 Byron flaunted through Europe the pageant 
 of his bleeding heart. The chatter about 
 Harriet keeps Shelley's memory green. The 
 love letters of John Keats and Robert Browning 
 preserve their verses sweet. The romantic 
 story of the burial by Rossetti of his manu- 
 script poems in his wife's coffin, between her 
 cheek and hair, was responsible for much 
 of the public curiosity in that withdrawn and 
 strange personality. It did not occur to us 
 how deeply the exhumation of the body, and 
 the subsequent publication of the poems, 
 tarnished the beauty of the legend. We were 
 young, and our eyes were touched with romantic 
 illusion. And who can say what proportion of 
 the popular success of the book of poems which 
 most nearly approached, and perhaps actually 
 rivalled, the success of Rossetti's, was owed 
 to the story of the tragic and squalid life of 
 its author ? No concealment was made of the 
 matter. The material was used for bold
 
 142 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 advertisement, and for once poetry sold like 
 a sporting novel, and was reviewed in the daily 
 press at the length usually reserved for the 
 latest musical comedy. Let there be no 
 mistake. Francis Thompson's book was beauti- 
 ful, and deserved all the success and the praise 
 it received, and both were given in no grudging 
 measure, even if not to the author's opinion 
 of its value. But much of its popularity was 
 due to quite other causes than the intrinsic 
 merits of the contents. Poetry beautiful 
 poetry FitzGerald's " Omar Khayyam," for 
 example has fallen dead at publication, and 
 this simply because it elected to go without 
 the meretricious allurement of the romantic 
 egend. The British public God bless it 
 has no love for poetry, and cheerfully passes 
 it by, save for some purely adventitious attrac- 
 tion. 
 
 The true story of the life of Francis Thompson, 
 with certain obvious reticences, has recently 
 been given to the world by Mr. Everard 
 Meynell. It is very fitting that the poet's 
 biography should be written by a member 
 of that family which alone made Thompson's 
 life liveable, and whose generous and untiring 
 charities ensured the production of all this
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 143 
 
 wealth of song. The one objection to Mr. 
 Everard Meynell's book is that modesty would 
 not permit him to thank his father and mother 
 in the name of English letters for the treasure 
 they have added to its store. The title-page 
 of Francis Thompson's poems should really 
 bear not his name only, but those of Wilfrid and 
 Alice Meynell as well. 
 
 Francis Thompson was born at Preston hi 
 1859, the son of a homosopathic doctor, who 
 was a convert to Rome. This medical man 
 had the unprofessional habit of baptizing those 
 infants he assisted into the world. Later 
 his son was to be reproached for his inability 
 to keep theology out of the compass of his art. 
 A devout child, he was intended for the priest- 
 hood, and sent to St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw. 
 At that time the college was not considered 
 a particularly literary institution. Its motto 
 was action rather than words. Now the school 
 may boast Hearn and Thompson amongst its 
 scholars, though their destinies were separated 
 by wide seas, and still wider and deeper seas 
 of thought. Thompson made little mark 
 at class. He was observed for his comic 
 verses, and for a practice of reading and copying 
 poetry in the library when other boys were
 
 144 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 at games. His superiors reported reluctantly, 
 at the end of his course, that he had no vocation 
 for the Church, and this decision they based 
 on the grounds of indolence and nervousness. 
 The child is indeed father of the man. These 
 characteristics remained with Thompson to the 
 end of his days. In the trembling hand of his 
 last months he wrote out in big capitals on 
 pages torn from exercise books, such texts 
 as were calculated to frighten him into his 
 clothes. " Thou wilt not lie abed when the 
 last trump blows," " Thy sleep with the 
 worms will be long enough," and so on. These 
 he pinned to his wall, but they were ineffectual. 
 The dying poet remained the very lad accused 
 of unconquerable indolence at Ushaw thirty 
 years before. His education at Ushaw, how- 
 ever, left a deep impress on both thought and 
 poetry. Wise are those philosophers who 
 would sacrifice all, so they might shape the 
 child when his mind is malleable and enduring. 
 Eton would have given Thompson his Latin, but 
 his Liturgy was more important. His singing 
 gown was a vestment, and he learnt its fashion- 
 ing at college. One of the most liturgical and 
 definitely Catholic of his poems, the "Assumpta 
 Maria," was remembered from his schooldays
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 145 
 
 at St. Cuthbert's. " No Ushaw man need be 
 told how eagerly all, both young and old, 
 hailed the coming of May 1. For that day, 
 in the Seminary was erected a colossal altar 
 at the end of the ambulacrum nearest the 
 belfry, fitted and adorned by loving zeal . Before 
 this, after solemn procession from St. Aloysius' 
 with lighted tapers, all assembled, professors 
 and students, and sang a Marian hymn. In 
 the college no less solemnity was observed. 
 At a quarter past nine the whole house, 
 from President downwards, assembled in the 
 ante-chapel, before our favourite statue. A 
 hymn, selected and practised with great care, 
 was sung in alternate verses by the choir 
 in harmony, and the whole house in unison. 
 Singing Our Lady's Magnificat, we filed into 
 St. Cuthbert's, and then, as in the Seminary, 
 Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament followed. 
 For thirty-one days, excepting Sundays and 
 holy days, this inspiring ceremonial took 
 place its memory can never be effaced." 
 
 Returning home from Ushaw about the age 
 of eighteen years, for six more Thompson 
 attended as a medical student at Owens 
 College, Manchester. For a doctor he had 
 fewer qualifications than for a priest. Indolent,
 
 146 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 slovenly in dress " he would even leave his 
 father's reputable doorstep with untied laces 
 dragging their length on the pavement past 
 the windows of curious and critical neighbours " 
 indifferent to his profession, he neglected 
 classes, and devoted the time so made his own 
 to the reading of poetry in public libraries. 
 At this time, too, during his early courses at 
 Owens College, his mother, without any known 
 cause or purpose, gave him a copy of De 
 Quincey's " Confessions of an English Opium 
 Eater." A more deplorable present was never 
 made by mother to son, and had its issue 
 been foreseen she would have cut off her right 
 hand rather than proffered the gift. Hence- 
 forth Thompson was in the snare of the fowler, 
 and was destined to reproduce on earth the 
 very tragedy of the great master of elaborated 
 prose. So startling is the likeness, each to 
 each, that it is less resemblance than plagiarism. 
 Mr. Meynell's treatment of the results of the 
 laudanum habit upon Thompson is frank, but 
 scarcely frank enough. He deals simply and 
 straightforwardly with the physical conse- 
 quences of the indulgence : " On the one hand 
 it staved off the assaults of tuberculosis; it 
 gave him the wavering strength that made
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 147 
 
 life just possible for him, whether on the 
 streets or through all those other distresses 
 and discomforts that it was his character deeply 
 to resent but not to remove by any normal 
 courses ; if it could threaten physical degrada- 
 tion he was able by conquest to tower in moral 
 and mental glory. It made doctoring or any 
 sober course of life even more impractical 
 than it was already rendered by native in- 
 capacities, and to his failure in such careers 
 we owe his poetry. On the other hand, it dealt 
 with him remorselessly as it dealt with Coleridge 
 and all its consumers. It put him in such 
 constant strife with his own conscience, that 
 he had even to hide himself from himself. It 
 killed in him the capacity for acknowledging 
 those duties to his family and friends, which, 
 had his heart not been in shackles, he would 
 have owned with no ordinary ardour." But 
 of the stringent efforts made by Thompson to 
 break with the vice we learn little. Whether 
 his recurrent visits to religious houses in later 
 years, presumably for some such purpose, were 
 really struggles of reclamation we are left in 
 doubt. Above all the interaction of the 
 drug habit upon his genius, the question as to 
 whether it hindered or inspired, whether it
 
 148 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 was in any way responsible for the poet's 
 fear lest the divine gift of song had left him 
 and that he was forsaken indeed these are 
 subjects, fraught with interest, of which Mr. 
 Meynell must surely have much inner know- 
 ledge, and yet either deliberately passes by or 
 else deals with as shortly as possible. Repeated 
 failures made it clear to Thompson that any 
 thought of a medical career must be abandoned. 
 His knowledge of literature suggested to him 
 joining the army like Coleridge, but the odd 
 recruit failed in the business, just as he had 
 failed in some other unpromising professions. 
 In November 1885, at the age of twenty-six, 
 he set off to London, with no hope in his 
 heart, but with Blake and JSschylus in his 
 pockets ; not, like Whittington, to seek a 
 fortune, but merely for the right to exist. Then 
 for two years and six months was enacted 
 beneath the astonished stars a tragedy of the 
 London streets. A gentleman, a scholar, a 
 devout and shrinking soul, a poet of genius 
 was in turn a bookseller's collector, a boot- 
 black, a hawker of matches. His calling was 
 literally a calling of cabs. He endured days 
 and nights of human dereliction* He slept 
 in arches and in common lodging-houses ; he
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 149 
 
 haunted the Embankment, and in watches 
 of the night marked the traffic of Jacob's 
 ladder pitched between Heaven and Charing 
 Cross. In such places Thompson learned the 
 bitter knowledge he was later to put to such 
 striking use when reviewing General Booth's 
 " Darkest England." He knew at first hand, 
 and not by hearsay, of a " life which is not a 
 life ; to which food is as the fuel of hunger ; 
 sleep, our common sleep, precious, costly and 
 fallible, as water in a wilderness ; in which 
 men rob and women vend themselves for 
 fourpence." It was characteristic of the 
 reticence of the man that Thompson made 
 no effort to escape from his inferno. He 
 kept away from the relatives he had in London, 
 and did not trouble to collect the trifling allow- 
 ance sent to a post-office by his father. He 
 accepted kindness from but two persons during 
 those tragic years. The one was an evangelical 
 bootmaker, named McMaster, who embarked 
 on a venturous friendship in Wardour Street 
 with the inquiry the resented inquiry " Is 
 your soul saved ? " The other friend was a 
 girl of the town, who, when the oldest pro- 
 fession in the world permitted, " gave out of 
 her scant and pitiable opulence, consisting of a
 
 150 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 room, warmth and food and a cab thereto." 
 In that Chelsea shelter she was at once sister 
 and mother to the waif beneath her roof. 
 She protected him until he found help more 
 potent than hers, and then disappeared, saying 
 that she had always known him to be a genius, 
 but that their friendship would be misunder- 
 stood. Try as he might, Thompson never 
 succeeded in meeting that lady again. 
 
 Thompson's salvation was achieved, as it 
 were, in his own despite ; never was human 
 derelict less anxious to be piloted into harbour. 
 " His feet were in the gutter, but his thoughts 
 were with the stars." He had pushed through 
 the letter-box of Merry England a Roman 
 Catholic magazine, edited by Mr. Wilfrid 
 Meynell an essay on " Paganism Old and New," 
 and also a group of poems, including " Dream- 
 Tryst." The manuscript was exceedingly unin- 
 viting to eye and hand. Its crumpled and 
 dirty condition, indeed, caused it to be pigeon- 
 holed for some six months. Then Thompson's 
 good angel jogged the editor's elbow. The 
 contributions were appreciated at their value, 
 and the editor did his best to get into touch 
 with his elusive correspondent. For some 
 time he was unsuccessful, and the story of
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 151 
 
 the circumstances leading to their actual 
 meeting if not quite so romantic as that given 
 by a certain well-informed writer at the time 
 of the poet's death is sufficiently striking. 
 Possibly the account given in the official life is 
 a trifle expurgated. " My father, being in his 
 workroom, was told that Mr. Thompson wished 
 to see him. Then the door opened, and a strange 
 hand was thrust in. The door closed, but 
 Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, 
 again it shut. At the third attempt a waif 
 of a man came in. No such figure had been 
 looked for ; more ragged and unkempt than the 
 average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat 
 and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my 
 father at a loss for words." Of Mr. Meynell's 
 delicate consideration and infinite patience in 
 dealing with this forlorn and sensitive wretch, 
 " one can only, like Cordelia, speak by silence." 
 Thompson had no stomach for charity, and 
 no capacity for self-help. He would have sunk 
 stoically a yard from the shore, without a 
 struggle and without a cry. After prolonged 
 entreaties he consented to enter a private 
 hospital, where for the time being the laudanum 
 habit was broken off. Then he was put with the 
 monks of Storrington Priory, whilst the pangs of
 
 152 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 abstinence seemed to feed and quicken the springs 
 of poetry within. Song gushed from the rock 
 at the stroke of the rod, and much of his 
 finest work is of this period. Prose alternated 
 with poetry. The " Hound of Heaven " and the 
 elaborate " Essay on Shelley " are both of 
 the same date. These yet remain his master- 
 pieces in verse and prose. In his own wonderful 
 phrases they are indeed attar of poetry, and a 
 x-ery fuming brazier of imagery. 
 
 In 1893 the long-expected book of " Poems " 
 appeared, a handsome volume in brown boards, 
 with a frontispiece by Mr. Laurence Housman. 
 The way was well prepared to attract public 
 attention. The romantic story of this stricken 
 life was exploited in the press for some time 
 previous to publication, and the curiosity 
 of the market-place was studiously aroused. 
 The volume was reviewed widely, and was 
 received with a chorus of praise. It ran through 
 many editions. Thompson, however, was not 
 satisfied. More oddly, his friends do not 
 seem to be contented either. Mr. Everard 
 Meynell thinks it well, even at a distance of 
 twenty odd years, to recall that Lang and 
 Mr. Gosse had but a modified enthusiasm 
 for much of this poetry. These gentlemen
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 158 
 
 were certainly entitled to express their opinion, 
 even though it may not jump with Mr. Meynell's 
 or mine. Such criticism, after all, was but 
 a drop of gall in an ocean of eau sucree. Is it 
 permitted me to hint that Thompson appreciated 
 his own poetry to its utmost worth ! Personally 
 I rate that value very high indeed, as may appear 
 before the conclusion of this paper. But the 
 poet expressed his assurance of his genius per- 
 haps a trifle in excess of modesty and a little 
 too willingly. He emphasized it in poetry, in 
 letters and in conversation. " I absolutely think 
 that my poetry is greater than any work by a new 
 poet which has appeared since Rossetti, unless 
 indeed the greater work to which the critic 
 referred was Mrs. Meynell's." Or again, 
 
 Before mine own elect, stood 1, 
 
 And said to Death, " Not these shall die." 
 
 I issued mandate royally. 
 I bade Decay, " Avoid and fly ; 
 
 For I am fatal unto thee." 
 
 I sprinkled a few drops of verse, 
 
 And said to Ruin, " Quit thy hearse " : 
 
 To my loved, " Pale not, come with me ; 
 I will escort thee down the years, 
 
 With me thou walk'st immortally"
 
 154 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 In Mr. Wilfred Whitten's obituary notice of 
 Francis Thompson he tells : " Thompson knew 
 that above the grey London tumult, in which 
 he fared so ill, he had hung a golden bell whose 
 tones would one day possess men's ears. He 
 believed that his name would be symphonized 
 on their lips with Milton and Dryden and 
 Keats. This he told me himself in words too 
 quiet, obscure, and long ago for record." It 
 may be so ; and yet somehow or other, true or 
 not, how infinitely one prefers the modesty 
 of Keats' reticent phrase : "I think I shall 
 be among the English poets after my death." 
 
 Francis Thompson published two further 
 volumes of verse "Sister Songs" and "New 
 Poems." The former was composed previously 
 to much of the contents of the famous book 
 of 1893 ; the latter was of a subsequent date. 
 Neither of these volumes repeated the pheno- 
 menal success achieved at a first venture. Of 
 " Sister Songs " only 349 copies were sold in 
 twelve months, and the first edition was pro- 
 curable but the other day. The sale of " New 
 Poems " was infinitely worse. Five copies 
 only were disposed of during the first half of 
 1902, and the author gained exactly six shillings 
 in royalties during a period of six months.
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 155 
 
 Thompson's friends seem inclined to impute 
 this failure to the inability of Protestant 
 lungs to breathe the Catholic air of his poetry. 
 No incense-heavy atmosphere hindered the 
 sturdy Protestant from delighting in the 
 earliest chapel dedicated by the poet. The 
 fifty thousand copies sold of a cheap edition of 
 the " Hound of Heaven " were not all bought 
 by his co-religionists. The true cause is not 
 obscure. The poetry was not so fresh nor 
 so beautiful as of old ; whilst neither in matter 
 nor in manner had Thompson made any con- 
 cession to the weaker brother in the delivery 
 of his message of mysticism and his strange 
 gospel of stark renunciation. 
 
 Thompson was persuaded that his genius had 
 left him. He turned to journalism for daily 
 bread, and familiarized long-suffering editors 
 with those habits of procrastination and 
 delay which had procured him his reputation 
 at Ushaw. Their only consolation was the 
 knowledge that in the end they would receive 
 work none but he was competent to give. His 
 method of reviewing was unusual. The notice 
 would be written in pencil beneath a street 
 lamp, or near the flare of a second-hand book- 
 shop. The reviewer would then hasten in before
 
 156 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 the shop closed to sell the book. This was 
 done to procure money for the secret drug to 
 which he had long returned. Like Coleridge, 
 who, voluble on all else, kept absolute silence 
 on the subject of his vice, Thompson never 
 mentioned his practice to his dearest friend. 
 The habit was the ruin of friendship, and of 
 family ties. It rendered its victim more 
 helpless in the everyday affairs of life than even 
 nature intended him to be. It necessitated that 
 dreary round of second-rate lodging-houses 
 constituting his only home. It set the solitary, 
 not in families, but in an added solitude of 
 conscience and choice. Thompson went his 
 own way uncomplainingly. He practised as 
 well as preached his doctrine of renunciation. 
 He was always in light marching order to obey 
 the summons whenever it should come. Never 
 was man who carried fewer of the impedimenta 
 of life about him. Alone he lived, and in the 
 hospital characteristically enough alone he 
 died on November 13, 1907. When his effects 
 were gone through after his death they were 
 found to consist of a box which contained 
 sundry unopened letters and some worn-out 
 pipes, together with a copy of his first book 
 of " Poems " wherein was preserved the poppy
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 157 
 
 picked and given to him by Miss Monica 
 Meynell at Friston so many years before. 
 
 A " legend " such as the above may prove 
 a short cut to glory, but it has to be paid for 
 at a very great price. 
 
 There are few allusions in Thompson's poetry 
 to the painful circumstances of his life. These 
 circumstances darken the whole of his poetry, 
 as they saddened his outlook on man. They 
 are seldom specifically mentioned, but they 
 colour all he wrote. 
 
 For ever the songs I sing are sad with the songs 
 
 I never sing. 
 Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs 
 
 we dare not sing. 
 
 Occasionally, however, his rigid reticence 
 breaks down. " Sister Songs," for example, 
 dedicated to two innocent girls, happy as 
 spring flowers, suddenly tells, with piercing 
 poignancy, the story of that other flower, 
 fallen from spring's coronal and blown withering 
 through the city streets. It records how this 
 brave, sad, and loving girl gave of her scanty 
 pittance to him, a stranger, that he might 
 eat ; then fled, a trackless fugitive. The
 
 158 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 emotion of the wonderful passage is heightened 
 to an almost unbearable degree by the dramatic 
 contrast of the delicately nurtured child, to 
 whom the verses are spoken, with the girl 
 whose innocency only God can give again, 
 when He restores the years that the locusts 
 have eaten. But once more did Thompson 
 write of his experiences during those three 
 tragic years at this same passionate pitch. 
 Amongst the poems found with his papers after 
 death was that called " In No Strange Land," 
 and carrying the motto, by way of sub-title, 
 " The Kingdom of God is within you." The 
 editor of the book of " Selected Poems " 
 bearing appositely enough upon its cover the 
 crown of thorns intertwined with the poet's 
 laurel rightly says that had Francis Thompson 
 lived, he might yet have worked upon it to 
 remove here a defective rhyme, there an 
 unexpected elision. But no altered mind would 
 he have brought to the purport of it ; for 
 in these triumphing stanzas we hold in retro- 
 spect, as did he, those days and nights of 
 human dereliction he spent beside London's 
 river, and in the shadow but all radiance to 
 him of Charing Cross.
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 159 
 
 Not where the wheeling systems darken, 
 And our benumbed conceiving soars I 
 
 The drift of pinions, ivould we hearken, 
 Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. 
 
 The angels keep their ancient places ; 
 
 Turn but a stone, and start a wing ! 
 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, 
 
 That miss the many -splendour ed thing. 
 
 But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 
 Cry ; and upon thy so sore loss 
 
 Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
 
 Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross. 
 
 Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter, 
 Cry clinging Heaven by the hems ; 
 
 And lo, Christ walking on the water 
 Not of Genesareth, but Thames. 
 
 The Catholic imprint is stamped far more 
 deeply upon Thompson's work than the hall- 
 mark of " Darkest England." Ushaw was a 
 more enduring influence on his character than 
 the Thames Embankment. Coventry Patmore 
 described Thompson as the most naturally 
 Catholic of all men he had known. So far as
 
 160 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 we may tell he never knew what it was to 
 doubt. Even in his sorest straits it seems 
 unlikely that he found difficulties in the path 
 of faith. Unless, indeed, his theological position 
 is that described in the " Mistress of Vision," 
 " Know, for thou else couldst not believe." 
 Catholic ritual supplies the whole of his imagery 
 to a poet who is all imagery. In a sense his 
 most famous and possibly his finest poem is 
 not the most characteristic, for the " Hound 
 of Heaven " is devoid of any symbolism 
 definitely Catholic. It might have been 
 written by a member of any Christian denomi- 
 nation. For the rest, Thompson's poems are 
 saturated with the imagery of his creed, even 
 his love poetry. The prevalent idea that 
 Thompson could not write love poetry seems 
 to me radically false. On the contrary, his 
 praises of the woman he loved are more fragrant 
 than the roses of any other poet of his time. 
 
 God sets His poems in thy face. 
 
 Hers is the face whence all should copied be, 
 Did God make replicas of such as she. 
 
 God laid His fingers on the ivories 
 
 Of her pure members as on smoothed keys 
 
 And there out-breathed her spirit 's harmonies.
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 161 
 
 No woman worthy to receive such exquisite 
 praises as these but would remember them 
 proudly to her dying day. But Thompson 
 could not always keep the service of woman 
 apart from the offices of the sanctuary. " A 
 Carrier Song " is full of conceits and fancies 
 gathered from religion, and the very beads of 
 the rosary are strung like pearls for a lady's 
 adornment. 
 
 It is the same with his treatment of Nature. 
 He expresses her under similar symbols, and in 
 terms derived from the selfsame doctrine and 
 ritual. Thompson was no pantheist or Nature 
 worshipper. He complained that she has no 
 heart, and is only a cruel and obdurate abund- 
 ance of clay. One fancies he would have 
 been in sympathy with the words of a younger 
 writer : " Nature is not our mother. Nature 
 is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, 
 since we have the same Father, but she has no 
 authority over us ; we have to admire, but not 
 to imitate." When Thompson speaks of 
 Nature, however, he derives his similes from his 
 customary ecclesiastical sources. The sun is 
 likened to the Host, with sky for monstrance ; 
 to Christ, with the sombre line of the horizon 
 for Rood ; to the altar Wafer, and signed 
 
 L
 
 162 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 with the Cross. The twilight is violet- 
 cassocked. Day a dedicated priest in all 
 his robes pontifical exprest. Night 
 
 See how there 
 The cowled night 
 
 Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary-stair. 
 What is this feel of incense everywhere ? 
 Clings it round folds of the blanch- amiced clouds, 
 Vpwafted by the solemn thurifer, 
 
 The mighty Spirit unknown, 
 That swingeth the slow earth before the em- 
 bannered Throne? 
 
 Thompson's use of ecclesiastical material 
 reaches its extreme limit in poems such as 
 " Assumpta Maria." The images of this 
 poem are taken from the Office of the Assump- 
 tion and from the " Song of Songs." Thompson 
 made no secret of the matter, either in public 
 or in private. He prefixed the motto from 
 Cowley, " Thou needst not sing new songs, but 
 say the old," frankly to his lyric. He com- 
 mends the writer quite simply to the protection 
 of his Patroness as " poor Thief of Song." To 
 the ecclesiologist it is all very delightful, even 
 to the Greek phrases gathered from a Good
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 163 
 
 Friday Office, and laid like amber with his 
 rhymes, but to the average reader such re- 
 morseless ecclesiasticism is doubtless a little 
 disconcerting. 
 
 Those critics who dislike Thompson's 
 " sacerdotal " poetry, equally dislike the 
 " turgid " Latinisms of his speech. There is 
 no doubt he was in the habit of using very 
 long words, very strange words, and words 
 very difficult to be understanded of the people. 
 Just as Rossetti dug " stunning " words out 
 of old volumes of romance, so Thompson 
 revived obsolete words from his favourite 
 authors with equal pride. He was kindly 
 affectioned towards such findings as roseal, 
 labyrinthine, and fuliginous, and he rejoiced 
 greatly when he rediscovered them creeping 
 back into use after his initiative. He has 
 been suspected of inventing certain odd 
 phrases ; certainly he was guilty of some 
 strange experiments in speech. But so far 
 as his Latinism was concerned, much must be 
 forgiven to a poet who was saturated with the 
 Vulgate and the Missal, and whose chosen 
 companions were De Quincey and Sir Thomas 
 Browne. However, it is not fair to speak as 
 if Thompson were always Latin and obscure,
 
 164 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Even so, one day, he would afford scope for 
 another Browning Society to elucidate his 
 mysteries. As a fact he is often quite clear 
 and direct. His most beautiful effects are 
 sometimes reached by methods of the utmost 
 simplicity. But a strange personality must 
 be expected to declare itself in unaccustomed 
 fashions. A life such as Thompson's will find 
 expression through a unique revelation. 
 Literary admirations such as his will result 
 in magnificent plagiarisms. Beliefs and re- 
 nunciations, like those he was instant in, tend 
 to find forms stark and uncompromising as 
 themselves. The new wine it is an ancient 
 saying oft-times bursts the old bottles. 
 
 It would seem unlikely that Thompson is 
 destined to permanent popularity. He never 
 professed to offer sugar plums as substitutes for 
 poetry. His creed is anathema to a large section 
 of the public not concerned with spiritual 
 matters, and to a larger portion that is. His 
 mysticism was not the pallid moonshine masking 
 under that name, but rather " morality carried 
 to the n th power." His treatment of love and 
 of nature is not that to which his countrymen 
 are accustomed, or particularly congenial to 
 their character. Such fame as he has won
 
 A CATHOLIC POET 165 
 
 was derivative in the first instance from the 
 rumours of his lamentable legend. Gossip 
 attracted the attention of the market-place 
 to songs which otherwise would have fallen on 
 deaf ears. But supposing it were possible to 
 purge his audience of such unworthy hearers, 
 the residue remaining would be peculiarly 
 fitted to appreciate pure poetry at its worth. 
 These auditors inevitably would be thrilled 
 by poetry of the highest accomplishment and 
 of the most direct inspiration, poetry which 
 in its rarest moments rises to heights the most 
 exalted of its day.
 
 WALTER PATER, AND SOME 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 IT was stated recently in some weekly 
 review that no one reads Walter Pater 
 to-day, and that his fame is not so much 
 under eclipse as extinct. Certainly the present 
 generation give less thought and consideration 
 to these writings than did their fathers before 
 them. Each generation adores its own idols, 
 and sometimes, indeed, goes a-whoring after 
 its own inventions. The years immediately 
 following the death of a famous author are 
 frequently enough the period of his deepest 
 neglect. The young are occupied with their 
 own difficulties and their own ideals. They 
 are busily concerned in refashioning the world 
 after another pattern of beauty and righteous- 
 ness than sufficed their elders' needs. The 
 newly dead are buried, but as yet no memorial 
 has been raised above the freshly digged grave. 
 Pater died in July, 1894, and his reputation 
 is now in the withered ear. The reproach rests 
 167
 
 168 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 primarily upon the shoulders of the public, 
 but the publishers of his books are not free 
 from blame. A cheaper edition is needed 
 imperatively of these writings. Only one is 
 published in a popular edition, and that appa- 
 rently for reasons not unconnected with copy- 
 right. My own copy of " Marius the Epicurean " 
 is in Macmillan's well-known Eversley series ; 
 and Pater, when giving it to me some years 
 before his death, remarked that it was intended 
 for the American market. The same book 
 can be procured in England, two decades 
 later, only in two volumes and at a consider- 
 ably higher price. 
 
 Though I admit that Pater's reputation 
 is under eclipse, not for one moment do I 
 suspect it to be extinct. Prophecy is dan- 
 gerous, and I prophesy seldom and with diffi- 
 culty. The lean years will pass, I am per- 
 suaded, and Pater's reputation return, full 
 and good, seven ears in one stalk. We may 
 put aside the seriousness and distinction of 
 his thought, though these alone should suffice 
 to keep his writings sweet. But the mere 
 beauty of his books, considered simply as 
 literature a prose felicitous and suggestive 
 as the finest poetry will render them heirlooms,
 
 WALTER PATER 169 
 
 even in a treasure-house so rich and fortunate 
 as our own. We may place his goldsmith's 
 work side by side with the masterpieces of our 
 greatest artists with no sense of incongruity. 
 Can that writing be considered dead, without 
 resurrection, which endures comparison to the 
 living prose of the immortal masters ? Recall, by 
 way of illustration, one or two passages bearing 
 the hall-mark of fame. Age cannot wither 
 nor custom stale such extracts, even when torn 
 from their context, like a joint from the socket. 
 The first quotation shall be from " Hamlet." 
 
 " It goes so heavily with my disposition 
 that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to 
 me a sterile promontory ; this most excel- 
 lent canopy, the air, look you, this brave 
 o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof 
 fretted with golden fire, why it appears no 
 other thing to me than a foul and pestilent 
 congregation of vapours. What a piece of work 
 is a man ! How noble in reason ! How infinite 
 in faculty ! In form and moving, how express 
 and admirable ! In action how like an angel ! 
 In apprehension how like a god, the beauty of 
 the world, the paragon of animals ! And yet 
 to me what is this quintessence of dust ? Man 
 delights not me ; no, nor woman neither." 
 
 '
 
 170 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The next may be taken from a familiar 
 epistle contained in " Charles Lamb and the 
 Lloyds." 
 
 " One passage in your letter a little displeased 
 me. The rest was nothing but kindness, 
 which Robert's letters are ever brimful of. 
 You say that ' this world to you seems drain'd 
 of all its sweets ! ' At first I had hoped you 
 only meant to insinuate the high price of 
 sugar, but I am afraid you meant more. 
 
 Robert, I don't know what you call sweet. 
 Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, 
 are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet 
 reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up 
 their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, 
 sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, 
 spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quar- 
 rels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness 
 by turns. Good humour and good nature, 
 friends at home that love you, and friends 
 abroad that miss you, you possess all these 
 things, and more innumerable, and these are all 
 sweet things. You may extract honey from 
 everything ; do not go a-gathering after gall. 
 
 1 assure you I find this world a very pretty 
 place." 
 
 A third extract shall follow from the most
 
 WALTER PATER 171 
 
 piercing and poignant of all sermons, " The 
 Parting of Friends." 
 
 " O my mother, whence is this unto thee, 
 that thou hast good things poured upon thee 
 and canst not keep them, and bearest children, 
 yet darest not own them ? Why hast thou 
 not the skill to use their services, nor the heart 
 to rejoice in their love ? How is it that whatever 
 is generous in purpose, and tender or deep in 
 devotion, thy flower and thy promise falls from 
 thy bosom and finds no home within thine 
 arms ? Who hath put this note upon thee, 
 to have ' a miscarrying womb and dry breasts,' 
 to be strange to thine own flesh, and thine eye 
 cruel to thy little ones ? Thou makest them 
 4 stand all the day idle,' as the very condition 
 of thy bearing with them ; or thou biddest 
 them be gone where they will be more welcome ; 
 or thou sellest them for nought to the stranger 
 that passes by. And what wilt thou do in 
 the end thereof ! " 
 
 Now side by side with these justly famous 
 passages may be set an extract from Walter 
 Pater, which we of an older generation thought 
 vital and beautiful, until we were assured it was 
 dead beyond hope of resurrection. It is, of 
 course, the translation through an exotic tern-
 
 172 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 perament into imaginative prose of Leonardo 
 da Vinci's wonderful portrait of Monna Lisa, 
 the temporary disappearance of which from 
 the Louvre left, not merely Paris, but the 
 whole world for the time less rich. 
 
 " The presence that thus rose so strangely 
 beside the waters, is expressive of what in the 
 ways of a thousand years men had come to 
 desire. Hers is the head upon which all ' the 
 ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are 
 a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out 
 from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little 
 cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic 
 reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for 
 a moment beside one of these white Greek 
 goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and 
 how would they be troubled by this beauty, 
 into which the soul with all its maladies has 
 passed ! All the thoughts and experience 
 of the world have etched and moulded there, 
 in that which they have of power to refine and 
 make expressive the outward form, the animal- 
 ism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie 
 of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition 
 and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan 
 world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older 
 than the rocks among which she sits ; like
 
 WALTER PATER 173 
 
 the vampire she has been dead many times, 
 and learned the secrets of the grave, and has 
 been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their 
 fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange 
 webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, 
 was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as 
 Saint Anne, the mother of Mary ; and all this 
 has been to her but as the sound of lyres and 
 flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with 
 which it has moulded the changing lineaments 
 and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The 
 fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together 
 ten thousand experiences, is an old one ; and 
 modern thought has conceived the idea of 
 humanity as wrought upon by, and summing 
 up in itself, all modes of thought and life. 
 Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the em- 
 bodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the 
 modern idea." 
 
 I submit that the foregoing passage from 
 Pater's " Renaissance " stands side by side 
 with quotations from such crested and prevail- 
 ing names as Shakespeare, Lamb, and Newman, 
 without disaster. If that be so, his writings 
 are independent of the whim of the public, or 
 the fashion of an hour. Their author can lie 
 quiet in his grave, in the sure and certain hope
 
 174 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 of a glorious resurrection. He may rest content 
 in the knowledge that sooner or later he must 
 come to his kingdom. Possibly his subjects 
 may be few, but of their loyalty and devotion 
 there can be no question. 
 
 It is not without significance that the most 
 painstaking and laborious of English writers 
 believed himself to be of Dutch extraction. 
 An admiral of his name came over from the 
 Low Countries with William of Orange, and 
 settled permanently in this country. Certainly 
 Walter Pater's personal appearance did not 
 contradict such an origin, but the matter 
 was never more than a pleasant speculation. 
 It also pleased Pater to consider that the painter 
 Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau, 
 derived from the same source. However this 
 might be, the immediate ancestors of Walter 
 Pater were found living at Olney, and there 
 the family enjoyed the delightful relations 
 of friendship with William Cowper. Walter 
 Horatio Pater was born at Shad well in August, 
 1839. For some unapparent reason it was 
 the traditional custom of some generations of 
 Paters to educate the sons as Roman Catho- 
 lics, whilst the daughters were invariably 
 baptized as Anglicans. Pater and his brother
 
 WALTER PATER 175 
 
 were the fivst male Nonconformists of their 
 stock. A devout and serious boy, his early 
 religious aspirations received a great impetus 
 from some personal intercourse with Keble, 
 the saintly author of the " Christian Year." 
 The child was fond of playing at church func- 
 tions, and the lad, sensitive to Keble's in- 
 fluence, looked forward to taking Orders in 
 the Church of England. Never, at any time, 
 with all his love of colour and ceremonial in 
 ecclesiastical matters, did he experience any 
 peculiar inclination towards the ancient faith. 
 From first to last Pater's lines were cast in 
 pleasant places, and from school at Canterbury, 
 " that old ecclesiastical city with the rich 
 heraldries of blackened and mouldering cloister, 
 the ruined overgrown spaces where the old 
 monastery stood, the stones of which furnished 
 material for the rambling prebends' houses," 
 he passed to Oxford, the mediaeval town of 
 grey and green, with its crumbling pomp of 
 ancient buildings set against a background 
 of grassy lawns. Oxford, that sweet city 
 with the dreaming spires, was destined to be 
 Pater's lifelong home. For thirty-five years, 
 first as a scholar of Queen's, and afterwards as 
 Fellow of Brasenose he studied and taught
 
 176 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 in her schools. There the books were written 
 on which his fame depends ; there his influence 
 moulded the character of those young men who 
 came within his circle, and were worthy to 
 witness to his ideals. That early desire to take 
 Orders hi the Church passed from his mind, 
 or rather, shall I say, was postponed. For a 
 time the Unitarian Ministry seemed too definite 
 a committal. He did more than suspend 
 judgment with Montaigne ; he seemed even to 
 range himself upon a side. A casual holiday 
 in Italy had led to a prolonged study of the 
 arts and philosophy of antiquity and of the 
 Renaissance, and he early recognized that in 
 an interpretation of these his life's work was to 
 be found. These speculations and ideas were 
 to lead him by long and perilous paths 
 had he but foreseen the weariness of the way 
 towards a resting-place which he never perhaps 
 quite attained. Absorbed in such preoccupa- 
 tions and curiosities his simple and laborious 
 life came to an unexpected end. In the summer 
 of 1894 Pater had an attack of rheumatic 
 fever, and was confined to his bed. He made 
 an apparent recovery, and left his room. He 
 resumed work on the study of Pascal, which 
 occupied his attention at the time, but con-
 
 WALTER PATER 177 
 
 traded pleurisy from writing near to an open 
 window. Again he recovered, but on coming 
 downstairs the heart suddenly failed, and he 
 died in his sister's arms. He was but fifty-five, 
 and death struck him down in the midst of his 
 literary activities. " Sayest thou, I have not 
 played five acts ? True, but in human life 
 three acts only make sometimes an entire 
 play. That is the Composer's business, not 
 thine." 
 
 In 1873 Walter Pater collected a number 
 of essays contributed by him to the Fort- 
 nightly and Westminster Reviews on sub- 
 jects chiefly concerned with the arts of the 
 Renaissance. The book was published at a 
 time when a wonderful energy of beauty was 
 manifested in the sister arts of painting and 
 poetry. The romantic and literary pictures 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were accom- 
 panied and paralleled by the romantic and 
 coloured poetry of Dante Rossetti, Morris, 
 and Swinburne, and the printed page was 
 richer than the glowing canvas. Even now 
 some aftermath of this beauty remains. All 
 is not yet faded into the light of common day. 
 A belated stray, tricked in the tabard and 
 piping in the accents of a demoded fashion, 
 
 II
 
 178 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 occasionally recalls a loveliness that is a trifle 
 out of date. Pater's first book was repre- 
 sentative of his period. It was really the 
 complement in prose of the brilliant palette 
 affected by the artists and singers about him. 
 These enthusiasts were his personal friends, 
 and it would be strange indeed had he not felt 
 sympathy with their school. 
 
 A careful student of Pater whose long in- 
 disposition is a loss to English letters has 
 described " Studies in the History of the Re- 
 naissance " as the most beautiful book of prose 
 in our literature. It is a high claim, but one 
 which many will think to carry no excess of 
 praise. Here was to be found, as has been noted, 
 a modulated prose which made the splendour of 
 Ruskin seem gaudy, the neatness of Matthew 
 Arnold a mincing neatness, and the brass 
 sound strident in the orchestra of Carlyle. 
 Possibly the " Renaissance " may be said not 
 so much to suggest comparison to the prose of 
 other authors as to approximate to the more 
 delicate and considered art of poetry. The 
 mere words are placed with such judgment 
 that they catch fire one from another, and glow 
 like contrasted gems set by some skilful jeweller. 
 Of course the extreme deliberation necessitated
 
 WALTER PATER 179 
 
 by this sort of work makes for a certain heavi- 
 ness, a danger Pater did not always avoid. 
 His travail was not so apparent here, however, 
 as in some later books. He contrived to load 
 every rift of his subject with ore, and yet to 
 escape over-elaboration. In one of the most 
 finished of these essays that on the " School of 
 Giorgione " Pater speaks of all art as con- 
 stantly aspiring towards the condition of music, 
 that being the art in which the message is 
 practically indistinguishable from the form 
 Music is not the art one associates in the first 
 instance with these writings. Their quality 
 is rather a constant and cunning appeal to the 
 eye. Like children, they are to be seen in 
 preference to being heard. In his essay on 
 Aucassin and Nicolette Pater speaks of the 
 adventures of that exquisite mediaeval cante- 
 fable as chosen for the happy occasion they 
 afford of keeping the eye of the fancy, perhaps 
 the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects a 
 garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers 
 which Nicolette constructs in the forest whither 
 she has escaped from her enemies, as a token 
 to Aucassin that she has passed that way. 
 The subjects of these early essays are arresting 
 in themselves. Characters more outstanding
 
 and mightily hewn it is impossible to find 
 than some dealt with here. Characters sweeter 
 and more beautiful it is difficult to imagine 
 than others included amongst these studies. 
 Such subjects are obviously selected by the 
 essayist because of the striking personality 
 which differentiates them from their fellows. 
 They are the Sauls, a head and shoulders 
 taller than the average of the sons of men. 
 But noticeable as is Pater's attraction towards 
 the picturesque personality, equally apparent 
 is his choice of the picturesque incident to 
 illustrate his theme. The legend is invariably 
 selected to keep the eye of the reader fixed on 
 pleasant or coloured objects. Take, for instance, 
 the famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci from 
 which quotation has already been made. The 
 whole of the brilliant " legend " of Vasari is 
 transcribed with such vividness that it glows 
 with the inspiration of a gospel. Leonardo 
 constructed models in relief of women smiling ; 
 he bought the caged birds and set them free ; 
 his physical strength was* such that he bent a 
 horseshoe like a coil of lead ; he followed chance 
 passers-by, whose beauty of eyes or hair 
 attracted him, about the streets of Florence 
 until the sun went down. Some pages, even,
 
 WALTER PATER 181 
 
 are little more than a catalogue of exquisite 
 bric-a-brac. " Beautiful objects lay about 
 there reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for 
 the Pope's chapel at Rome, strange fancy- 
 work of the Middle Age, keeping odd company 
 with fragments of antiquity, then but lately 
 discovered." It reads almost like Balzac's 
 " Le Peau de Chagrin." And this is not all, 
 for but a few lines below the list is continued 
 with " pictures, drinking vessels, ambries, in- 
 struments of music, all fair to look upon, filling 
 the common ways of life with the reflection 
 of some far-off brightness." The subject might 
 possibly be illustrated more satisfactorily from 
 either the " Sandro Botticelli " or " The School 
 of Giorgione," included in the same volume. 
 If these essays contain no single passage quite 
 equal to the loveliest page of the " Leonardo 
 da Vinci," they cannot be reproached with 
 suggesting an auctioneer's catalogue. The 
 " legend " of the lives of the two Renaissance 
 artists is as dexterously selected as that of 
 their greater rival. The inspiration of the 
 studies is even more continuously sustained, 
 for the writer's imagination flies on a level 
 wing. Consider for a moment the beauty of 
 Pater's description of either the Venus or the
 
 182 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Madonna of the Magnificat by the Florentine 
 painter. No doubt it is purely a subjective 
 impression, a work of art seen through a tem- 
 perament ; but how rare is such a tempera- 
 ment, and how unique such felicity of speech ! 
 Botticelli's Madonna Pater tells us " though 
 she holds in her hand the ' Desire of all nations, ' 
 is one of those who are neither for Jehovah 
 nor for His enemies, and her choice is on her 
 face. Once indeed He guides her hand to 
 transcribe in a book the words of her exalta- 
 tion, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and the 
 Gaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to 
 rouse her for a moment from her dejection, 
 are eager to hold the inkhorn, and to support 
 the book ; but the pen almost drops from her 
 hand, and the high cold words have no meaning 
 for her, and her true children are those others 
 among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable 
 honour came to her, with that look of wistful 
 inquiry on their irregular faces which you see 
 in startled animals gipsy children, such as 
 those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out 
 their long brown arms to beg of you, but on 
 Sundays become enfants du chceur, with their 
 thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white 
 linen on their sunburnt throats."
 
 WALTER PATER 183 
 
 Truly, indeed, may the " Renaissance " be 
 described as " the golden book of beauty." 
 What relief to turn from the feverish rhetoric 
 of Ruskin, preoccupied with moral rather than 
 {esthetic values, to this simpler doctrine, this 
 almost literary quietism. I greatly fear that 
 its art criticism may be to the taste of neither 
 Mr. Berenson nor Mr. Roger Fry. It is not 
 concerned either with details of measurements, 
 or with the science of the number of cubes 
 contained in the human countenance. Very 
 possibly it is a criticism which may appear 
 old-fashioned to the young, but wisdom is 
 not necessarily the appanage of youth. Such 
 work is really creative rather than critical. 
 The theme becomes plastic in the hands of the 
 artist, and is fashioned and moulded anew in 
 accordance with the imperious claim of his 
 temperament. Instead of the object being 
 set before us in its naked reality, we see it 
 through the haze of a many-sided culture. 
 May this not add a glamour to the view ! 
 
 " The Renaissance " Pater's first book re- 
 presents his farthest removal from the doctrines 
 of revealed religion. Leonardo's ghostly head 
 of Christ had become for him " the image 
 of what the history it symbolizes has more and
 
 184 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 more become for the world, paler and paler 
 as it recedes into the distance " ; and Winckel- 
 mann, who shammed Catholicism that he 
 might live amongst the marbles of Rome, 
 " at the bar of the highest criticism perhaps 
 may be absolved." The most significant utter- 
 ance in the whole volume the " Conclusion "- 
 said, and says still, that " not the fruit of ex- 
 perience, but experience itself, is the end," 
 and doubtless Pater came to feel that some 
 danger lurked for the unwary in such a doctrine 
 as this. Danger there undoubtedly was 
 Certain young men pressed on Pater's teaching 
 a logical application, such as Ward applied to 
 Newman's, at an earlier day in the same uni- 
 versity. The application was equally dis- 
 tasteful. These young men let no flower of 
 the spring pass by ; they left tokens of their 
 voluptuousness in every place, making the 
 quiet groves of philosophy look like Hamp- 
 stead Heath after a Bank Holiday. The 
 unfortunate philosopher was deeply mortified. 
 He withdrew the epilogue from a second edition 
 of his book, only reprinting it after he had 
 dealt with the same subject more fully in 
 " Marius the Epicurean." Even then, with 
 an almost clerical sense of responsibility, he
 
 WALTER PATER 185 
 
 made certain changes wliich brought it closer 
 to his original meaning. For instance, in a 
 passage dealing with how we might make the 
 most of the interval that is ours before death, 
 he had remarked that " the wisest " spend 
 it in " art and song." In the revised version 
 the word " wisest " is qualified by the addition 
 of the phrase, " at least among the children 
 of this world." But the real measure of his 
 dismay was the expansion of these few pages 
 into the packed volume of " Marius the Epi- 
 curean." 
 
 " Marius the Epicurean : His Sensations 
 and Ideas," appeared some twelve years after 
 the " Renaissance " was published. In incep- 
 tion and execution it occupied six of the best 
 years of Pater's life. This was a long time 
 to spend upon the production of a single book ; 
 but Pater was a scholar, laborious and precise, 
 as well as a most painstaking artist in prose. 
 He dug deep his foundations that the building 
 he reared might endure. The wonder is not 
 that such a book as " Marius " took six years 
 in the making, but rather that it ever got 
 finished at all. Rossetti once described him- 
 self as the racked and tortured medium through 
 which his poetry passed. I doubt, however,
 
 186 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 if the pangs of Pater's labour were not longer 
 and more severe. There has been nothing 
 approaching the meticulous care of his method 
 since Flaubert killed himself in the effort to 
 produce a perfect prose. His innumerable 
 notes, his incessant emendations and recopy- 
 ings, were enough to weary the bravest heart ; 
 and this anxious and overstrained literary 
 conscience undoubtedly is responsible for the 
 tortuous sentences and heavy solemnities 
 which at times disfigure his style. " Marius 
 the Epicurean," it should be noticed, is not 
 described by its author as a romance. I fear 
 that if anyone were to try to read it for the 
 sake of the story he would to quote Dr. 
 Johnson hang himself. Pater was no novelist. 
 He wrote narratives which some excellent 
 critics have the singular good fortune to enjoy. 
 He, himself, preferred " Imaginary Portraits " 
 to any other of his books. Tastes luckily 
 differ, or we should all love the same woman. 
 The sensations and the ideas of Marius are the 
 subjects of the book, not his actions. Pater 
 was an essayist, and " Marius " is really a 
 volume of essays on many fascinating matters of 
 peculiar interest to its writer. In a sense it may 
 be considered an autobiography, for it records
 
 WALTER PATER 187 
 
 the progress of a soul whose Odyssey, after 
 all, is the only thing that matters from station 
 to station, till it stood face to face with the one 
 supreme question. It was a record of Pater's 
 spiritual experiences, and characteristically 
 enough he managed to evade giving a definite 
 answer at the close. It ends on a note of 
 interrogation. 
 
 Mr. A. C. Benson has described the motive 
 of " Marius " as the tracing of the history 
 of a highly intellectual nature, with a deep 
 religious bias, through various phases of philo- 
 sophy to the threshold of Christianity. The 
 scene of the story is laid in Italy at the time 
 when Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome. 
 The period was excellently chosen, for it enabled 
 Pater to bring together many interesting and 
 diverse personalities, and to present, quite 
 naturally, various contrasted systems of philo- 
 sophical and religious belief. The volume is 
 divided into four parts. The first book is 
 concerned with the pious upbringing of Marius 
 by his widowed mother in her delightful old 
 Roman villa, near by the sea. " A white bird," 
 she once told her son, looking at him gravely, 
 " a bird which he must carry hi his bosom 
 across a crowded public place his own soul was
 
 188 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 like that." It narrates his boyhood and his 
 schooldays ; above all his friendship with a 
 youth, greatly gifted, whose destiny was to 
 die young, whilst yet immature. It ends on 
 the desolate note of pagan death. The second 
 part traces the development of Marius into 
 an Epicurean of the nobler Cyrenaic school, 
 and incidentally explains those passages of the 
 conclusion to the " Renaissance " which had 
 been so grievously misunderstood by certain 
 young men. He journeys to Rome in the 
 company of Cornelius, a soldier of the Imperial 
 guard. This officer is a Christian, but for a 
 long time Marius fails to learn of his faith, 
 or to grasp the secret of his serenity. The post 
 of secretary to the Emperor brings Marius into 
 intimate relations with Marcus Aurelius him- 
 self, and enables the Stoic philosophy to be 
 presented in its highest and most enduring 
 form. The short but extremely important 
 third portion of the volume indicates the causes 
 of the dissatisfaction of Marius with both the 
 Epicurean and the Stoic philosophies, and is 
 followed by the chapter on the Will as Vision, 
 in which, during the course of a lonely ride, 
 it is borne in upon him that behind but 
 only just behind the veil of a mechanical
 
 WALTER PATER 189 
 
 and material order there may be a guide, 
 closer than any friend whom he had known. 
 The fourth section follows, with the unveiling of 
 the faith of Cornelius, and the gradual initiation 
 of Marius into the doctrines and the cere- 
 monies of Christianity. He is never formally 
 received by baptism into the Faith, but during 
 a minor persecution of the Church is arrested, 
 together with Cornelius, and sent for trial to 
 Rome. Marius bribes the guards to connive 
 at the escape of his friend, but is himself stricken 
 down by fever, and dies, fortified by the last 
 Sacraments of that Church of which he may 
 be considered a martyr, although to which he 
 never absolutely belonged. 
 
 " Marius " is a book of contrasts, the con- 
 trast of pagan death and Christian life, of 
 Epicurean and Stoic philosophies, of an old 
 despair with a great new hope. Its Epicu- 
 reanism is a very different thing from the instinct 
 of Dante's Ciacco, that accomplished glutton 
 in the mud of the Inferno, for " Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die ! is a proposal 
 the real import of which differs immensely 
 according to the natural taste and the acquired 
 judgment of the guests who sit at the table." 
 Not pleasure but fullness of life was Pater's
 
 190 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 interpretation of his new Cyrenaicism. In this 
 connexion it is very necessary to read the 
 8th and 9th chapters of " Marius," where the 
 author's position may be found very clearly 
 stated and very carefully safeguarded. Certain 
 sentences from one of these chapters have been 
 described as containing the central words of the 
 book. " Supposing our days are indeed but a 
 shadow, even so we may well adorn and beautify, 
 in scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and what- 
 ever our souls touch upon these wonderful 
 bodies, these material dwelling-places through 
 which the shadows pass together for a while, 
 the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes 
 and the intercourse of society." In the case 
 of Marius the holiness of beauty led him very 
 near to the beauty of holiness ; and should it 
 be urged that such a ceaseless introspection as 
 his must inevitably hinder any concentration 
 of energy upon the concerns of a rough work- 
 a-day world, surely it may be pleaded that the 
 contemplative life has its claims as well as 
 the active, and that to be is a virtue, as well as 
 to do 
 
 It is idle, I suppose, to speculate where 
 Pater's thought would have led him finally, 
 had not death intervened at what was obviously
 
 WALTER PATER 191 
 
 not a terminus, but a junction. The books 
 of his later years give indications whither he 
 was tending ; but such indications are so wanting 
 in precision, that different men find the sign- 
 posts to point in different directions. These 
 later books more especially " Appreciations " 
 and " Greek Studies " are of great interest 
 and value, but they forward only slightly 
 the main purpose of this paper. " The Re- 
 naissance " and " Marius the Epicurean " 
 remain Pater's two most important contribu- 
 tions to literature and thought. For sheer 
 felicity of verbal beauty he never quite re- 
 captured the charm of his earliest book 
 the dew of its birth was of the womb of the 
 morning and " Marius " is yet the most un- 
 flinching exposition of his central ideas. As 
 I have observed before, those ideas end 
 characteristically enough on a note of inter- 
 rogation. But his reverent and recollected 
 behaviour at Holy Communion ; his frequent 
 attendance at such churches as St. Alban's, 
 Holborn ; remarks like that recorded by Dr. 
 Creighton as to the dignity of the Reserved 
 Sacrament, which " gave churches the senti- 
 ment of a house where lay a dead friend " ; 
 the significant dedication of " Appreciations " ;
 
 192 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 his papers in the Guardian all these induced 
 his friends to believe that had he lived 
 for a few years longer he would have taken 
 Orders, and a small college living in the country. 
 His assistance at the services of such advanced 
 churches as St. Alban's need surprise none. 
 Ritual is the poetry of the eye. The ornate- 
 ness of ceremonial would possess its full attrac- 
 tion for one who valued the eye above all the 
 other senses, and to whom, if Christianity 
 ever came, it would certainly appeal in a precise 
 and lovely form. To know, however, whether 
 Father Stanton's preaching so dramatic, so 
 homely and humorsome, yet at times so over- 
 whelming counted for anything in his attend- 
 ance, would at least be of interest. This 
 probably we shall never learn. Its elements 
 would seem calculated to repel and to attract 
 a nature like Pater's in almost equal measure. 
 But the public testimony of his intimate friend, 
 Dr. Bussell, as to Pater's attitude towards 
 religion, deliberately uttered on the sad 
 occasion of his funeral sermon, at least cannot 
 be ignored. Perhaps it expresses the true 
 truth concerning Pater's secret and deepest 
 convictions, or as near thereto as we shall 
 ever arrive. " His whole life seemed to me to
 
 WALTER PATER 193 
 
 be the gradual consecration of an exquisite 
 sense of beauty to the highest ends ; an almost 
 literally exact advance through the stages of 
 admiration in the ' Symposium,' till at last 
 he reached the sure haven, the One Source 
 of all that is fair and good." 
 
 N
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO 
 WAGE'S "ROMAN DE BRUT"* 
 
 THE little book introduced by this pre- 
 face is a translation of that portion 
 of Wace's " Roman de Brut " con- 
 cerned with the story of King Arthur. I am 
 not aware that any considerable portion 
 of the old churchman's book has been turned 
 into English before. This is surprising, because 
 it is not only a curious document of the 
 Middle Ages, but is of peculiar interest to all 
 those and their name is legion who admire 
 " the noble acts and worthy achievements " 
 of the Christian King. As the advertisement 
 to the " Historic of King Arthur " declares, 
 " all the honour we can do him is to honour 
 ourselves in remembrance of him." The 
 principal merit of this volume, then, is that it 
 
 * This Introduction was written by way of preface 
 to my translation of the " Chronicles of King Arthur," 
 by Wace, in the Everyman's Library, but circum- 
 stances did not permit of its appearance there. 
 195
 
 196 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 contains one of the very earliest histories of 
 the British hero, and its appeal, in the main, 
 is to lovers of the Arthurian legend. 
 
 Master Wace was born in 1100, the year in 
 which the Red King was found dead by peasants 
 in a glade of the New Forest, with an arrow 
 in his breast. He died some time after 1174, 
 but the date of his death is unrecorded. The 
 names of his parents are unknown, though his 
 mother was a daughter of Toustein, chamber- 
 lain to Robert, Duke of Normandy. Wace's 
 name itself is not exactly unknown, but it 
 affords an excellent fighting ground for scholars. 
 Some contend that his first name was Robert, 
 and contrary to the custom of his period 
 his godparents bestowed on him two Christian 
 names at baptism. Others argue that he was 
 baptized Eustace, of which Wace is the 
 diminutive. When experts differ it seems 
 safer to observe with the character in Moliere, 
 " Some people say yes, others say no ; as 
 for myself I say neither the one nor the other." 
 In his works the poet refers to himself as 
 " Master Wace " ; so Master Wace let him be. 
 The facts of Wace's life we know somewhat 
 more fully than those of the average writer of 
 the Middle Ages. He was sufficiently desirous
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 197 
 
 of fame to put them down in black and white 
 in his books. He was born, he tells us, in the 
 Isle of Jersey, lying in the sea towards the 
 west, and belonging to the fief of Normandy. 
 When a child he was carried to Caen, and put 
 to letters. Afterwards he went to France, 
 studying in the schools for long. On his 
 return from France he lodged a great while in 
 Caen, and composed many narrative poems in 
 the Romance tongue. These poems are largely 
 lost, but those which remain deal with the 
 lives of the saints, and show that as a priest 
 Wace had not mistaken his vocation. About 
 this time in rather more than middle life he 
 compiled his historical poem, the " Story of 
 Brutus," from which the present book is 
 derived. This was completed in 1155, and 
 dedicated to " the noble lady, Eleanor, who 
 was the high King Henry's queen." Eleanor 
 came of a family in which the patronage of 
 literature was a tradition. Henry the Second 
 himself was a lover of letters, a virtue to be 
 counted to him as righteousness, for he had need 
 of every rag. Wace seems to have been 
 fortunate enough to attract the attention of 
 the great. He was " reader " under Henry, and 
 the King also appointed him to a prebend at
 
 198 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Bayeux. " I did not succeed in life to my 
 wish," wrote the poet plaintively, " by reason 
 that I was never fortunate enough to find 
 patrons. From this I except King Henry 
 the Second, who made me a prebendary, 
 and bestowed on me many another gift. God 
 return them to his bosom. He was nephew 
 of the first Henry, and father of the third. 
 I have seen and known all these princes." In 
 honour of his sole benefactor, and possibly at 
 Henry's suggestion, Wace composed his most 
 celebrated work, the history of the Dukes of 
 Normandy, known as the " Roman de Rou." 
 Then Fortune turned her wheel. Other singers 
 came to Court and gained the ear of the King. 
 Patrons are no more constant than lovers. 
 They also turn to the fresher face and the 
 younger smile. Wace was growing old, and 
 Henry commanded Benedict of St. Maur to 
 write the chronicles of his ancestors. Since his 
 voice had lost the gift to please, Wace ceased 
 to sing. " As the King has charged another 
 with the task he committed to me, there is 
 nothing to do but to stay my hand and keep 
 silence. In days gone by the King honoured 
 me greatly. He gave me much, and promised 
 me more. If he had granted me all that he
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 199 
 
 promised, I should be the luckier man. Here 
 endeth the book of Master Wace." 
 
 The " Roman de Brut " is the early history of 
 England related in rhyming octosyllables. As 
 poetry it has no very great distinction. Even 
 laureates are not always crowned with laurel ; 
 and Wace, obviously, is the historian first, and 
 the poet afterwards. His chronicles com- 
 mence with the appearance in Britain of 
 Brutus, whose forefathers fled from Troy. They 
 narrate the hero's triumph over those giants, 
 who were the original possessors of the land, 
 and in a leisurely fashion tell the legendary 
 history of the country until its ultimate 
 conquest by the Saxons. It is an excellent 
 and entertaining specimen of the mediaeval 
 manner of writing liistory. Facts and tradi- 
 tions are mixed up together in most admired 
 confusion. Real people rub shoulders and 
 jostle with those who never had an existence, 
 but who, somehow, are equally true. It 
 reminds one of the forecast Lamb gave of the 
 " Essays of Elia " : " You shall soon have 
 a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible to be 
 extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, 
 the partitions perfectly invisible." I know 
 Wace's method is not the modern way of
 
 200 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 considering history. It is all very sad and 
 bad and mad. To-day is the hour of the 
 expert and the fact. History has ceased to 
 be an art, and is by way of becoming a science. 
 Ours is a utilitarian age, and we have no use 
 for fairy tales. Well, as Montaigne observes, 
 we give ourselves many headaches to arrive 
 at a change of errors. If legends are not 
 always true, science is not infallible, and is 
 sometimes dull. For my part I consider 
 the mediaeval fashion an excellent way of 
 writing history. Legends and traditions are 
 often more real than facts. They testify to the 
 soul, the essence of a fact. If I am in error, 
 many favourite books of history support my 
 view, so that I go astray in good company. 
 Wace, at least, has the inestimable advantage 
 of unfailing interest. His history is indeed a 
 romance. It is full of entertainment, and of 
 stories which are excellent reading, if perad- 
 venture not quite true. The legends Wace 
 gathered together from such various sources 
 throw a curious and unexpected light on the 
 life and opinions of the Middle Ages. For 
 instance, all students of that period are familiar 
 with the belief of the French that every English- 
 man concealed a tail in his hosen. It was
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 201 
 
 among the most common insults of the period 
 and many a little French boy or girl has cried, 
 " Englishmen, hide your tails," and ran, when 
 the Islanders were abroad. Wace furnishes 
 the explanation. He tells us when Augustine 
 was sent by Pope Gregory to re-establish a 
 faith almost forgotten in the land, he was 
 received courteously by all. However, there 
 was one exception. When the saint on his 
 visitation came to Dorchester, the folk of 
 that city were either so attached to their gods, 
 or (as Wace suggests) so tainted with original 
 sin, that they fastened fishes' tails to the back 
 of the preacher's cassock. Augustine was 
 so occupied about his sermon, that he failed 
 to notice what had happened, until the con- 
 gregation broke into huge laughter. Being 
 human, the saint was deeply mortified. He 
 prayed to God to avenge the dishonour done 
 to His servant, and very speedily a tail hung 
 to each of his tormentors. Not only tlu's, 
 but their descendants were afflicted in a similar 
 fashion, the sins of the fathers being visited on 
 the children ; so that, as every Frenchman knew 
 there was an excellent chance of an Englishman 
 hiding a tail in his hose. 
 Wace's remarkable compromise between
 
 202 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 history and fiction was based upon the labours 
 of another ecclesiastic. In 1148 a Welsh Bene- 
 dictine concluded in its present form a 
 " History of the Kings of Britain," on which 
 for many years he had been engaged. This 
 writer, a Bishop of St. Asaph, more generally 
 known as Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote for 
 scholars in the Latin tongue. The sources 
 of his inspiration are very much in dispute, and 
 cannot be entered upon in this Introduction. 
 His success, however, was immediate and 
 unequivocal, for there is scarcely any mediaeval 
 book of which so many manuscript copies 
 remain. Wace perceived the possibilities of 
 the book, and proceeded promptly to turn 
 it into French verse. He finished his poem in 
 1155, and, so far as I am aware, expressed no 
 obligation to his fellow churchman. It is to 
 be feared that if he did the same sort of thing 
 to-day on a similar scale, stern critics would 
 describe him as a literary thief, and a plagiarist, 
 together with other hard names. Such an- 
 nexations were not considered very repre- 
 hensible in Wace's time. A writer took his own 
 where he found it. The " Roman de Brut," 
 moreover, is very far indeed from being a mere 
 slavish reproduction of the " History of the
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 203 
 
 Kings of Britain." Wace added to, rearranged, 
 and omitted freely from Geoffrey's work. Other 
 sources of information were obviously at his 
 disposal. Geoffrey's " History " had breathed 
 life into the dry bones of monastic chronicles, 
 but Wace induced them to move yet more freely. 
 It is true enough that Geoffrey and Wace 
 frequently relate the same incident ; but Wace 
 looks at the fact with the eye of a poet or a 
 painter, whereas Geoffrey is often contented 
 with its bare recital. As an illustration of my 
 meaning compare the respective versions of 
 Arthur's passage across the Channel. The 
 Welsh Benedictine simply gives us the scrap 
 of necessary information. Wace sees the sailing 
 of the fleet with his eye, and re-creates it in 
 his imagination. He considers not only the 
 sailors about their business, but also the 
 mystery and danger of the deep ; and brings 
 before his readers, in perhaps his sincerest 
 verses, the romance of the first forgotten 
 shipman who put to sea. If any should yet 
 regard Wace as but a servile copyist of his 
 model, I would suggest a further comparison 
 of the relation of the festivities following 
 upon Arthur's coronation. The whole de- 
 scription of this crowning at Caerleon-on-Usk
 
 204 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 is looked upon and with justice as one of 
 Geoffrey's purple passages. In Wace's pages, 
 however, the scene becomes a priceless and 
 detailed record of a feudal court in the twelfth 
 century. In a series of brilliantly coloured 
 pictures, there passes before the eye a sort of 
 cinematograph of the festival. We assist at 
 the banquet, served by its troop of fair and 
 youthful damoiseaux, clad in ermine. We 
 wonder over the dresses of the guests. We 
 watch the amusements of gentle and simple 
 alike. Our ears are deafened by the jongleur 
 the musician, and the teller of tales. Laughter 
 and quarrels fill the air. And that the personal 
 note may not be wanting, the priest and the 
 professional moralist peep out in the denun- 
 ciation of dicing introduced by Wace into his 
 description, like a sermon preached in a picture 
 theatre. " Those who sat to the dinner in furs, 
 rose from the tables naked." It is another 
 illustration of a previous remark that in taking 
 Orders Wace had not mistaken his vocation ; 
 and the scene is set so aptly on the stage, that 
 one does not know whether to admire the more 
 the zeal of the preacher, or the skill of the 
 artist. 
 The hero of Wace's " Roman de Brut " is
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 205 
 
 King Arthur of Britain. Certainly he is the 
 hero of that portion of the history now offered 
 to the public. There is scarcely any other 
 character in our rough island story so inti- 
 mately known to us all. We speak of Arthur 
 as we speak of Alfred or Elizabeth or Nelson. 
 Poets have sung of his life, and painters have 
 painted his passing. A whole circle of modern 
 writers and artists and musicians have devoted 
 themselves to his cult, and to the exploits of 
 his knights. Arthur has become to us an 
 allegory, and against the head of the British 
 chieftain is placed a nimbus of coloured 
 dreams. He is less an interest than an ob- 
 session to the makers and students of romance. 
 The generations of to-day take fire from the 
 artists of their time, and go back as these 
 went back in their turn to the great and 
 beautiful book which is the source of their 
 passion and inspiration. It would be im- 
 possible to over-praise the high name of Thomas 
 Malory, " the servant of Jesus, both day and 
 night," and the compiler of the immortal 
 " Morte Jy Arthur." He wrote " when English 
 prose was dewy with its dawn, of tales of 
 chivalry already coloured by the setting sun." 
 The Introduction to his book tells us that gold
 
 206 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 has its dross, and the wine its lees ; but his 
 is gold thrice refined, and wine of a perfect 
 vintage. In the whole range of our literature 
 there are possibly only two books, or three, 
 which stand higher than his. Probably it is 
 the finest book dealing with mediaeval matters 
 hi the language, and is to be preferred before 
 Chaucer Chaucer even. And yet when we 
 ask ourselves what we really know of the 
 hero of so many romances, we can only add 
 up the sum of our ignorance : " To-day, as of 
 old, Arthur remains but a shadowy apparition, 
 clothed in the mists of legend and stalking 
 athwart the path of history to distract and 
 mystify the sober chronicler. A Melchisedec 
 of profane history, he has neither beginning 
 of days nor end of life." 
 
 To satisfy our curiosity we turn to the older 
 books, which are the foundations of the 
 Arthurian legend, and of these one of the 
 earliest and most valuable is Wace's " Story of 
 Brutus." Wace, in the main, follows the lines 
 of Geoffrey, but adds very materially to our 
 knowledge of the growth of the legend. The 
 Prebendary of Bayeux is the first to tell us of 
 the famous Round Table ; and he gives the 
 reason of its unusual shape. Forgetful of
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 207 
 
 the modesty of the perfect knight, some of 
 Arthur's Court were disposed to exalt them- 
 selves above their companions ; and the 
 table was made round that none might boast 
 his seat was higher than that of his fellows. 
 Again, Wace enlarges the bishop's description 
 of Arthur's end. The King is not only mortally 
 wounded, and carried to Avalon to be healed of 
 his hurt, but he is yet there, and the Bretons 
 await him to this day. 
 
 But the differences between the Latin and 
 French versions of Arthur's life are small 
 indeed in comparison with the differences 
 between the early blossom they unfold and 
 the full-blown flower of Malory's book. In 
 the early chronicles the story ends before it has 
 well begun. The tragedy of the battle on the 
 Camel against Mordred follows immediately 
 after the long and grim struggle with the 
 Romans, and all is over. Lucius, the Roman 
 Emperor, is slain by Malory ere a third of his 
 romance is completed. The remainder of his 
 story is largely occupied by the loves and 
 adventures of Tristan and Lancelot, the greatest 
 of Arthur's knights, and by the high quest of 
 the Holy Grail. Of these knights errant, and of 
 the spiritual adventure of the Grail, there is in
 
 208 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Wace not one single word. Undoubtedly their 
 absence is a serious drawback, for it is pre- 
 cisely with these persons and matters, and 
 with those things of which they are the symbol, 
 that the modern imagination is concerned. 
 Since Tristan is not, and Lancelot is not, it 
 follows Isoude is absent also from this book, and 
 that Guenevere, Arthur's queen, has but the 
 shadow of her fatal beauty. " The romance 
 and danger zone of sex " are reduced in these 
 pages to a minimum. Yet these romances 
 were on the tongues of the singers at the very- 
 time Wace composed his poem. Twenty 
 years later the stories of Lancelot and Guene- 
 vere, and of Tristan and Isoude, were presented 
 in a literary form by Chrestien de Troyes and 
 Marie de France. However, although the 
 two most famous knights of Arthur's Round 
 Table are not to be met with in these pages, 
 other knights, scarcely less celebrated, remain. 
 Though much is taken, much abides. Gawain 
 Kay, Bedevere, and Bors play their parts in 
 the battles like men. They gain, even, by 
 detachment from their more arresting comrades, 
 for they serve no longer as foils and shadows 
 to the more marvellous deeds and shining 
 qualities of their fellows. Gawain is no longer
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 209 
 
 light, nor Kay grudging ; and the friendship 
 of steward and cupbearer, in life and death, 
 should be added to the long gallery of friend- 
 ships between man and man. Above all, Wace 
 retains for us the early days of Merlin, the 
 typical seer and enchanter together with 
 Virgil of the Middle Ages. In Malory, Merlin 
 is the ancient sage from his introduction to his 
 death. His story is begun at the end. Wace 
 relates the adventure of his birth and youth, 
 so that we understand why the wizard was 
 permitted to know so much that was hidden 
 from ordinary mortals. 
 
 Cleared from the later accretions of legend, 
 released from association with knights more 
 appealing than himself, Arthur stands out in 
 the " Roman de Brut " emphatically as its 
 hero, and every inch a man. His is the master 
 mind to organize the kingdom, and to conduct 
 campaigns. Gawain, Kay, and Bedevere are 
 excellent lieutenants and men of their hands, 
 but Arthur is the captain and the chief. It 
 is Arthur who breaks the power of Rome. It 
 is Arthur who drives the Saxon heathenry 
 from the land ; and it is very understandable 
 why a book intended for the delectation of 
 Norman nobles and gentlefolk should make 
 
 o
 
 210 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 such a feature of his deeds. Arthur's adven- 
 tures serve as the theme of these chronicles. 
 There are no other knights errant to detract 
 from his fame. He is the rescuer and avenger 
 of distressed damsels, and he the slayer of 
 giants. The stirring episode of the avenging 
 of Helen upon the body of Riton will be in 
 the memory of any reader of Wace. Giants, 
 indeed, occupy a considerable amount of his 
 attention. Does any reader marvel over 
 the wickedness and malice of that evil race ? 
 Let him consider their origin, and refrain. In 
 the rich land of Syria there was once a noble 
 king, and mighty, and a man of great renown, 
 called Diocletian. This king spoused a gentle 
 damsel, wonderfully fair, named Labana. 
 She loved him, as was but right ; so that he 
 gat upon her thirty-three daughters. These 
 maidens, when they were of nubile age, were 
 become so fair that it was a marvel. Diocletian 
 therefore made a royal feast, and bade that all 
 the kings who held of him should come to his 
 banquet, together with their admirals, princes, 
 dukes, and noble chivalry. He also married 
 his thirty-three daughters, right richly, unto 
 thirty-three kings, that were lords of great 
 honour, at that solemnity. It afterwards
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 211 
 
 befell that these ladies waxed so stout and 
 stern, that they held their lords of little price, 
 but had of them scorn and despite, and would 
 not do their will, but rather their own, in 
 divers manners. The kings chastised them 
 with fair speech and behests, warning them 
 in fair fashion, upon all love and friendship, to 
 amend their condition, but it was all for nought. 
 The thirty-three kings, therefore, upon a time 
 and oftentimes beat their wives ; but of such 
 condition were they that for fair speech and 
 warning they did the worse, and for beating 
 very much worse. Now on a day when all 
 these lords and ladies were on a visit to 
 Diocletian the king, he spake to his daughters 
 of their wickedness and cruelty, and reproved 
 them piteously. The ladies met together 
 in a chamber, and Albin, the eldest of them 
 all, said to her sisters, " My fair sisters, our 
 husbands have complained to our father upon 
 us, wherefore my counsel is, that this night, 
 when they are abed, all we with one consent 
 cut their throats, that we may be in peace 
 of them." The ladies consented and granted 
 unto her counsel, and when night was come, 
 and their lords were asleep, they cut their 
 husbands' throats, and slew them all. When
 
 212 PREFERENCES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Diocletian heard of this thing he was hugely 
 wroth. He put his daughters on a ship, and 
 delivered them victuals for half a year. He 
 set this ship adrift, and so long it sailed on the 
 sea that at the last it came to an isle that 
 was all wilderness. The sisters went from out 
 the ship, and found neither man nor woman nor 
 child,but only wild beasts of divers kinds. When 
 their store was spent they fed them with herbs 
 and fruits in their season, and lived as best they 
 might. After this they ate flesh of certain 
 animals, so that they became fat, and for 
 loneliness bewailed the husbands whom they 
 had slain. When the Devil, who wends through- 
 out all countries, perceived this thing, he came 
 into the land of Albion, and had to do with 
 these women, so that they conceived, and 
 brought forth monsters, who were named by 
 various names. In this manner horrible 
 giants were born. 
 
 Somewhat in this fashion an old chronicler 
 relates the coming of giants ; and with the 
 knowledge of their unfortunate parentage in 
 our minds, how can any be surprised at the 
 malice and wickedness of that dreadful race, 
 whether called Gogmagog, Dinabuc, or Riton. 
 Women should really be more careful in the
 
 WAGE'S " ROMAN DE BRUT " 213 
 
 choice of the father of their children ; then had 
 this favoured land of Albion been plagued 
 the less by their brood. 
 
 To all who love deeds of daring, ancient 
 history, or legends of Arthur and of his Table, 
 the portion here translated of Wace's " Roman 
 de Brut " should have its interest.
 
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 M. ANATOLE FRANCE AND THE COMPLETE 
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 ON THE SHORT STORY, AND Two MODERN 
 EXEMPLARS (MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 
 AND GUY DE MAUPASSANT) 
 
 THE POET AS ARTIST ([OSE-MARIA DE 
 HEREDIA) WITH SOME TRANSLATIONS 
 
 THE POET AS MYSTIC (MR. W. B. YEATS) 
 Two CHRISTIAN POETS (CHRISTINA G. 
 
 ROSSETTI AND PAUL VfiRLAINE) 
 
 A CATHOLIC POET (FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 AND HIS LEGEND) 
 
 WALTER PATER, AND SOME PHASES OF DE- 
 VELOPMENT 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO WAGE'S " ROMAN 
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