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 VARIOUS -VIEWS 
 
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 ^ILLIAM-NOKTON-PAYNE 


 
 VARIOUS VIEWS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 A. C. McCLURG & CO. 
 1902
 
 Copyright 
 
 A. C. McCLURG & Co. 
 1902 
 
 Published October. 1901 
 
 Composition by The Dial Press. Chicago. U.S.A. 
 Presswork by The University Press. Cambridge. U. S. A.
 
 TO 
 PAUL SHOREY 
 
 WITH 
 THIRTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP 
 
 2018832
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THIS book is a companion volume to Little Leaders' and 
 ' Editorial Echoes.' Like its predecessors, it is made up 
 of thirty leading articles written for The Dial ' during 
 recent years. A few inconsiderable changes in the orig- 
 inal text have been made, but the papers remain substan- 
 tially what they were when first printed, and even the 
 conventional editorial style has been retained. The mis- 
 cellaneous character of the papers here brought together 
 has made impossible the threefold classification of the 
 earlier volumes, although a rough grouping according to 
 subject-matter has been attempted. It will be found, 
 however, that, as before, the writer has been chiefly pre- 
 occupied with themes suggested by the broader aspects 
 of literary history and criticism. 
 CHICAGO, October i, 1902.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE HUGO CENTENARY n 
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT ^^ 
 
 SHAKESPEARE IN FRANCE 32. 
 
 THE TIE THAT BINDS 4- 
 
 INTERNATIONAL AMITY 50 
 
 HERO-WORSHIP 57 
 
 A PHILISTINE WATCHWORD 67 
 
 A QUESTION OF LITERARY CONSCIENCE ... 75 
 
 THE ARTIST AND THE MAN -83 
 
 THE DUTIES OF AUTHORS 93 
 
 TENDENCIES IN LITERATURE 102 
 
 ENERGY AND ART 109 
 
 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MIND . . . .119 
 
 IDIOM AND IDEAL 128 
 
 THE REVALUATION OF LITERATURE . . . .136 
 
 THE GENTLE READER 145 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVELIST 153 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE 161 
 
 THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL 169 
 
 THE NOVEL AND THE LIBRARY 178 
 
 THE DRAMA AS ART 189 
 
 THE ENDOWED THEATRE 198
 
 x. CONTENTS Continued. 
 
 PACK 
 
 M. BRUNETIERE'S PEDAGOGICAL PRESCRIPTION . 207 
 THE CRITIC AS PICKER AND STEALER , . . 215 
 
 A WORD FOR MINOR POETRY 223 
 
 NEWSPAPER SCIENCE 231 
 
 THE DECAY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM . . . 241 
 THE STAR SYSTEM IN PUBLISHING . . . .251 
 
 THE YOUNG PERSON 260 
 
 THE NEW PATRIOTIC IMPULSE 269
 
 THE HUGO CENTENARY. 
 
 SEVENTEEN years ago, the death of Victor Hugo, 
 at the age of eighty-three, plunged into mourn- 
 ing the whole civilized world. At Goethe's age, 
 and Voltaire's, within a few months, he entered 
 into rest, and of all the great men of European 
 letters since Shakespeare, those two alone seemed 
 worthy to be named with him. For more than 
 half a century, his rank had been preeminent, not 
 among French writers alone, but among those 
 of the whole world, and his venerable declining 
 years had been crowned with such glory as is 
 won by few indeed among the sons of men. 
 His genius had so dominated the century which 
 it illustrated that it seemed as if history must 
 henceforth remember the period by his name, 
 and speak of the Age of Hugo as it speaks of the 
 Age of Dante or the Age of Shakespeare. 
 
 Now that the years of Victor Hugo's life, 
 added to the years that have elapsed since his 
 death, have made up the full sum of one hun-
 
 12 Various Views 
 
 dred, and men touched with his spirit and in- 
 spired by his message are engaged not alone 
 in the country that has the first claim upon his 
 memory in recalling his splendid services to 
 humanity and his priceless contributions to the 
 treasury of that literature which has the breath 
 of life everlasting, now that the centennial 
 year of his birth has been reached, it becomes 
 pertinent to ask how time has dealt with his 
 reputation, and how strong is still the hold of his 
 works upon the artistic sense and the conscience 
 of the generation that has come after him. The 
 final appraisal is not yet possible, nor will it be 
 for perhaps a hundred years to come, but some 
 things may now be said that our posterity will 
 not be likely to repudiate. For it must be re- 
 membered that Hugo's work has been tested by 
 the apparatus of the critic during a much longer 
 period than the term of years that he has been 
 in his grave. It is now three-quarters of a cen- 
 tury since the famous pronunciamento of l Crom- 
 well' was delivered, and it is nearly as long since 
 the pitched battle between the romanticists and 
 classicists that was occasioned by the premiere of 
 1 Hernani.' During all that time, the genius of
 
 The Hugo Centenary 13 
 
 Hugo has been hotly championed by some, and 
 bitterly assailed by others. When he died, de- 
 traction had already done its worst upon him, 
 and his fame had emerged well-nigh untarnished 
 from the smoke of the critical conflict. Since 
 1885, his assailants have found nothing to say of 
 him so severe as what was said long before that 
 date, and the recognition of his finer qualities 
 always admitted by those who dealt with him the 
 most roughly has been less grudgingly admitted 
 even by those who have felt bound to enter their 
 caveat against his acceptance as one of the great 
 figures in the history of literature. 
 
 We have observed with close attention the 
 currents and counter-currents of recent opinion 
 concerning Hugo's work, and it seems to us that 
 there has gradually shaped itself, in the conscious- 
 ness of his own compatriots as well as in the 
 consciousness of the cosmopolitan tribunal of 
 letters, an image of the poet that looms larger 
 and larger as the age recedes from him, an image 
 so colossal that it dwarfs all others of his world- 
 contemporaries in the retrospective vision. Can 
 we as Englishmen, great as must be our rever- 
 ence for the memories of Shelley and Words-
 
 14 Various Views 
 
 worth and Tennyson, of Carlyle and Ruskin 
 and Emerson, can we in fairness claim that any 
 of these men matches Hugo in artistic and moral 
 stature ? Can a German make the claim for 
 Heine, can an Italian make it for Signer Carducci, 
 can a Russian make it for Tourguenieff, can a 
 Norwegian make it for Dr. Ibsen ? Can a 
 Frenchman fairly make it for Musset or Balzac 
 or Renan ? To ask these questions, it seems to 
 us, is to make it clear that negative answers are 
 the only possible ones. Certain aspects of the 
 genius of these other men may appeal to us more 
 deeply, or strike more responsive chords in our 
 consciousness, but the noblest personality of 
 them all, with the sum total of its achievement, 
 set beside the personality and the achievement of 
 Hugo, must suffer in the comparison. 4 The 
 spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century,' 
 Mr. Swinburne calls him, and, whatever critical 
 reservations we may make upon this point or 
 upon that, it seems that the ascription is still the 
 just due of the great poet, novelist, and dramatist 
 whose writings have now been steadily pouring 
 from the press for a period of nearly eighty years. 
 Against this secular canonization of the poet
 
 The Hugo Centenary 15 
 
 the devil's advocate has advanced three main 
 charges. The first is that, while parading om- 
 niscience, he is guilty of gross inaccuracies of 
 scholarship and grotesque perversions of the 
 truth. This charge may fairly be allowed. 
 4 L'Homme Qui Rit,' for example, is a ro- 
 mance pour rire as far as its background of his- 
 torical fact is concerned. ' Notre Dame de 
 Paris,' with its ' deux tours de granit faites par 
 Charlemagne,' is not in much better case, 
 although its subject is the history of the poet's 
 own country. In short, the story of Hugo's 
 blunders is as lengthy as it is amusing. The 
 second charge is that he is a rhetorician, who 
 cultivated a turgid, bombastic, and sensational 
 manner of composition, instead of following in 
 the footsteps of the great masters of style. This 
 charge has a qualified truth, although it reduces 
 for the most part to the complaint which the 
 classicist always makes of the romanticist, and 
 begs the deeper question which is really at issue. 
 And if 4 Hernani,' for example, is rhetoric rather 
 than poetry, as perhaps it is, what splendid rhet- 
 oric it offers its readers ! When before in the 
 French drama were 4 points ' ever made with
 
 16 Various Views 
 
 such telling effect as in this melodramatic inven- 
 tion ! t Vous n'allez pas au fond,' 4 Couvrons 
 nous, grands d'Espagne,' 4 Dieu ! je suis ex- 
 aucee,' c j'en passe, et des meilleurs,' how 
 the examples crowd upon the memory ! It may 
 be rhetoric, but the emotions which it arouses are 
 not readily to be distinguished from those which 
 we experience from the purest tragic poetry. 
 
 Concerning the third charge, which makes the 
 poet out as a person of unbounded egotism and 
 colossal self-esteem, it may be admitted that 
 Hugo frequently spoke of himself in terms that 
 his truest friends might wish had been left to 
 others to formulate. Yet modesty and self- 
 effacement are virtues that may be carried too far, 
 and in Hugo's case their assumption would have 
 been a hypocritical affectation. The prophet 
 must be self-conscious, else he is no prophet ; he 
 must have an exalted sense of his mission, and a 
 fervent belief in the truth of his message. And 
 if any nineteenth century utterance may be called 
 prophetic, it was surely that of the man who 
 proclaimed that 
 
 4 Le poete, en des jours impies, 
 Vient preparer des jours meilleurs,'
 
 The Hugo Centenary 17 
 
 and whose faith in the sacredness of his calling 
 did not waver to the end. Posterity never con- 
 demns a man for taking the true measure of him- 
 self, even if that measure be a large one; it is 
 only to his contemporaries, and during the period 
 when his true dimensions are the subject of con- 
 troversy, that such self-appraisal seems an act of 
 questionable taste. When we read of Shake- 
 speare declaring that his rhyme shall outlive 4 the 
 gilded monuments of princes/ or of Dante say- 
 ing, with magnificent arrogance, the question 
 being of an important embassy, c S'io vo, chi 
 sta ; s'io sto, chi va?' we applaud rather than 
 condemn, we admire rather than deride, the abso- 
 lute conviction of the phrase. Posterity has 
 accepted these men at their own estimates ; it is 
 more than possible that posterity may accept 
 Hugo at his own estimate. 
 
 There are spots upon the sun this is about 
 the substance of what unsympathetic criticism 
 discovers in its examination of the work of Victor 
 Hugo. But those who all their lives have bathed 
 in the sunlight, and felt its vivifying warmth, are 
 content to be simply grateful, and will not, for 
 knowledge of the sun-spots, declare the moon
 
 i8 Various Views 
 
 to be a more satisfactory orb. The positive 
 achievement of Hugo is so immense that a vol- 
 ume would be needed for the barest summary. 
 Leaving aside his miscellaneous prose, descrip- 
 tive, fanciful, speculative, critical, and political, 
 there remain the three great categories of strictly 
 creative work, poetry, romance, and drama. 
 This seems to be the order in which they will 
 eventually stand, the order in which serious 
 criticism has already placed them. To the 
 creator of l Hernani,' c Ruy Bias,' and 4 Marion 
 Delorme,' we must give the credit of accom- 
 plishing the romantic revolution in French dra- 
 matic art. To the creator of 4 Notre Dame de 
 Paris,' c Les Miserables,' and * Quatre-vingt- 
 treize,' we must give the credit of promulgating 
 a new conception of the teachings of history and 
 a new gospel of social solidarity. To the creator 
 of < Les Contemplations,' l Les Chatiments,' 
 and l La Legende des Siecles ' we must give the 
 credit of first revealing the full singing possibilities 
 of the French language, of rising to such a height 
 of lyric expression as had been attained by no 
 French poet before, of crowning the splendid 
 edifice of French literature with its supreme
 
 The Hugo Centenary 19 
 
 revelation of pinnacled beauty. In this lyrical 
 domain Hugo out-sang all the other poets of his 
 age, and most of the poets of all ages ; he rose 
 as upon the pinions of the eagle, and matched 
 the richness of Pindar ; he soared as with the 
 skylark's wings, and matched the pure note of 
 Shelley. When at the height of his inspiration, 
 he poured forth strains of everlasting melody, 
 which were yet linked in thought with the noblest 
 aspirations of the human spirit ; for his genius, 
 while ever striving after the beautiful, never for- 
 got its allegiance to the true and the good to 
 the other aspects of what must ever remain the 
 triune ideal of the soul of man. 
 
 One thing more must be said to round out 
 this commemorative tribute to the poet whose 
 centenary is now at hand. Of another great 
 poet it has been written : 
 
 ' It is indeed 
 
 Forever well our singers should 
 Utter good words and know them good 
 Not through song only; with close heed 
 Lest, having spent for the work's sake 
 Six days, the man be left to make.' 
 
 It is c not through song only ' that we love and 
 cherish the memory of Victor Hugo. To the
 
 20 Various Views 
 
 man also our tribute is due the man who spoke 
 brave words for freedom when such words were 
 most needed, the man who, at the sacrifice of all 
 that was dear to him, translated into action the 
 faith that was his, and made his protest against 
 tyranny doubly eloquent by his example. One 
 of the most grudging of his English critics is 
 inspired to enthusiasm by the contemplation of 
 the chief act in Hugo's life, and writes of it 
 in terms of such admiration that we can sug- 
 gest nothing to add. l The great fact remains. 
 M. Hugo, in scorn of amnesties and invitations, 
 lived out nineteen years of exile ; his voice did 
 not fail nor his heart falter ; he stood on his rock 
 in the free British seas, like Elijah on Carmel, 
 spokesman and champion of all those who had 
 not bowed the knee to Baal.' The example is 
 one for all time and for all men. Only one man 
 in a century may embody his protest against 
 wrong in a volume of c Chatiments,' but every 
 man may have the strength of purpose to stand 
 for what he believes to be the right, whatever 
 the forces that are leagued against him. In 
 these lax days of service to the spirit of com- 
 promise, there is no lesson more needed than
 
 The Hugo Centenary 21 
 
 that of Victor Hugo's l Ultima Verba ' those 
 words which seemed futile enough at the time of 
 their deliverance, but which, in the light of sub- 
 sequent history, are seen to have been the very 
 sign and seal of the poet's prophetic function.
 
 22 Various Views 
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
 
 4 1 WAS born,' says Alexandra Dumas, l at Villers- 
 Cotterets, a little town in the department of 
 the Aisne, on the Paris road, about two hun- 
 dred paces from the Rue de la Noue, where 
 Demoustiers died, two leagues from La Ferte- 
 Milon, where Racine was born, and seven 
 leagues from Chateau-Thierry, where La Fon- 
 taine first saw the light. I was born on July 24, 
 1802, at half-past five in the morning, in the 
 Rue de Lormet, in a house which now belongs 
 to my friend Cartier, who would gladly sell it to 
 me any day, so that I may be able to die in the 
 very room where I was born.' As a matter of 
 fact, he never did buy the house, but died, De- 
 cember 5, 1870, in a little town near Dieppe, 
 whither he had been carried from Paris by his 
 devoted son, on the eve of the German invest- 
 ment of the Capital, in order that his last days 
 might be spared the privations of the siege. 
 Something more than a year later, when his
 
 Alexander the Great 23 
 
 country was again at peace, his remains received 
 final interment in his native town, in the pres- 
 ence of a famous following of authors, artists, 
 and actors. 
 
 The bit of autobiography above quoted is 
 characteristic at once of the geniality and the 
 egotism of the man who wrote it. It quite takes 
 for granted the reader's interest in every slightest 
 personal particular that the writer may see fit to 
 impart j it takes also for granted the reader's 
 acceptance of the fact that neither Racine nor 
 La Fontaine could possibly shed any greater 
 lustre upon the region of their common birth 
 than was shed by the author of c Monte Cristo' 
 and 4 Les Trois Mousquetaires.' Of his own 
 greatness, indeed, Alexandre Dumas retained an 
 unshaken conviction throughout his long career. 
 At the height of that career, he could assert 
 with perfect self-assurance that for a quarter of 
 a century past three men, Hugo, Lamartine, and 
 himself, had remained at the head of contempo- 
 rary French literature ; our only marvel is that he 
 should not have set his own name first in that 
 trinity of literary fame. We are not of those to 
 whom such assertions are always and necessarily
 
 24 Various Views 
 
 amusing. They may express the proud self- 
 consciousness of genius, or they may merely in- 
 dicate a remarkable capacity for self-deception. 
 When Dante and Shakespeare state what we 
 know to be the simple truth concerning their 
 own work, we applaud rather than rebuke, hold- 
 ing such frank utterance in higher esteem than 
 any exhibition of mock modesty. But in the 
 case of Dumas the effect of such self-assertion 
 is on the whole, an entertaining illustration of 
 the delusion of the egotist. That he was a great 
 writer in the sense in which Hugo was a great 
 writer is, of course, a preposterous notion ; and 
 that he should honestly have ranked himself with 
 his most illustrious contemporary shows only the 
 fact that his critical faculty, weak in any case, was 
 absolutely incapable of taking the measure of his 
 own work. 
 
 Although a writer of only the second rank, 
 Dumas looms up astonishingly in the French 
 literature of the last century, and he still holds 
 his own surprisingly well. In some respects his 
 position is better to-day than it was at any time 
 during his life. His enemies did their worst to 
 break down his reputation while he was still
 
 Alexander the Great 25 
 
 alive ; after his death, there was nothing more 
 to be urged against him than had already been 
 urged, and his fame did not suffer the reaction 
 that commonly follows upon the death of a great 
 writer. Dumas was never set upon such a 
 pinnacle as Hugo in the esteem of his admiring 
 fellow-countrymen, and hence was never in so 
 perilous a position. He was immensely popular, 
 but he was not revered as a prophet and a sage. 
 He has preserved his popularity at home for a 
 full generation after his death, while abroad he is 
 both better known and better appreciated than he 
 was at any time while alive. 
 
 But as far as the English-speaking world is 
 concerned, the vogue, if not the fame, of Dumas 
 seems to have been mainly posthumous. The 
 last generation was inclined to regard with dark 
 suspicion the works of all French novelists, and 
 the romances of Alexandre Dumas were held, 
 mostly by persons who had never read them, to 
 be typically c French ' in their wicked levity, and 
 consequently to be shunned by all righteous- 
 minded readers. When translated into English, 
 the romances were published in such a way as 
 to repel persons of taste, and attract only those
 
 26 Various Views 
 
 classes of readers to whom literature proper 
 makes no appeal whatever. \Vell do we re- 
 member the big and ugly volumes, badly printed 
 and bound in depressing black, in which form 
 alone the American readers of twenty or thirty 
 years ago might make the acquaintance of 
 d'Artagnan and Monte Cristo. Things are 
 very different now, when tasteful editions abound, 
 when the old-fashioned prejudices have disap- 
 peared, and when we have all of us become more 
 or less denizens of the joyous realm of romantic 
 invention which is still ruled by the spirit of 
 Alexandre Dumas. 
 
 It was along in the eighties, we should say, 
 that English and American readers of the more 
 discriminating sort came to be attracted in con- 
 siderable numbers to the romances of Dumas. 
 Before that time, his following had been large but 
 uncritical, it had been a following made up for 
 the most part of seekers for the sensational in 
 literature, of readers who were satisfied with 
 highly-spiced invention, and who recked little of 
 constructive art. But Dumas really deserved a 
 better fate than the applause of this class of read- 
 ers, and he received his deserts in due course of
 
 Alexander the Great 27 
 
 time. It was about twenty years ago that two 
 English critics of undeniable authority gave as- 
 surance to timid souls that their enjoyment of the 
 French romancer was quite legitimate, and that 
 the adventures of the three musketeers really be- 
 longed to literature. It is, we think, chiefly to 
 Mr. Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson 
 that the literary rehabilitation of Dumas with 
 the English-speaking public is to be credited, for 
 these men boldly proclaimed what many readers 
 of taste had felt without quite daring to assert. 
 They had coupled in thought the names of 
 Dumas and Scott, but Mr. Lang ventured to 
 make the conjunction on the printed page. Ad- 
 dressing the spirit of the Frenchman, he said : 
 
 'Than yours there has been no greater nor more 
 kindly and beneficent force in modern letters. To Scott, 
 indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius; but, 
 once set in motion, what miracles could it not accom- 
 plish ? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a 
 superhuman burden; but your imaginative strength never 
 found a task too great for it. It is good, in a day of 
 small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of 
 your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas' s men 
 so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, 
 and such trenchermen.' 
 
 This frank and generous praise is echoed by
 
 28 Various Views 
 
 Stevenson, who, closing his c Vicomte de Bra- 
 gelonne ' after the fifth perusal, expresses his en- 
 thusiastic admiration in a series of queries which 
 are in fact challenges to all disputants. 
 
 What other novel has such epic variety and nobility 
 of incident? Often, if you will, impossible; often of the 
 order of an Arabian story; and yet all based on human 
 nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more 
 human nature? Not studied with the microscope, but 
 seen largely in plain daylight, with the natural eye? 
 What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, 
 and unflagging, admirable literary skill ? . . . And, once 
 more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is 
 inspired with a more unstrained or a more wholesome 
 morality ? * 
 
 These words take us far indeed from the stand- 
 point of middle-class propriety and narrow puri- 
 tanical outlook. They mark the larger and saner 
 critical light in which our own generation has 
 come to view the famous literature of the past. 
 In the presence of such tributes as these, the 
 unlovely aspects of the character of Dumas, and 
 the dubious aspects of his literary methods, sink 
 into relative insignificance. Granted that he was 
 a swaggerer and vainglorious, that petty jealousies 
 and hypocrisies marked many stages of his career, 
 that in his financial relations he held his personal
 
 Alexander the Great 29 
 
 honor too lightly; granted also that his literary 
 supercheries were of unexampled audacity, that 
 he pillaged ideas and situations from all sorts of 
 sources, that he lent his name to books that 
 others had written, granted all these things, 
 with many others of like tenor, the fact remains 
 that he possessed an astonishingly original and 
 prolific genius, that besides much slipshod writing 
 that has long since been forgotten he produced 
 a series of masterpieces that the world will not 
 willingly let die, and that his higher ideals were 
 on the whole ideals of manliness and clean living 
 and devotion to admirable artistic aims. 
 
 Long before Dumas had become popular with 
 English readers, at a time when they thought of 
 him, so far as they thought at all, as of a writer 
 whose stock in trade was a shallow sensationalism 
 and a picturesque perversion of historical hap- 
 penings, he was known and loved by no less a 
 man than Thackeray, who found no difficulty in 
 rising above English prejudice and contracting a 
 very genuine sympathy for the most gasconading 
 of Frenchmen. This is the language in which 
 Thackeray deals with the vexed matter of col- 
 laboration :
 
 30 Various Views 
 
 'They say that all the works bearing Dumas' s name 
 are not written by him. Well ? does not the chief cook 
 have aides under him ? Did not Rubens' s pupils paint 
 on his canvases ? Had not Lawrence assistants for his 
 backgrounds ? For myself, being also du metier, I con- 
 fess I would often like to have a competent, respectable, 
 and rapid clerk for the business part of my novels, and 
 on his arrival at eleven o'clock, would say, " Mr. Jones, 
 if you please, the archbishop must die this morning in 
 about five pages. Turn to article 'Dropsy' (or what 
 you will ) in Encyclopaedia. Take care there are no 
 medical blunders in his death. Group his daughters, 
 physicians, and chaplains round him. In Wales' s 'Lon- 
 don,' letter B, third shelf, you will find an account of 
 Lambeth, and some prints of the place. Colour in with 
 local colouring. The daughter will come down and speak 
 to her lover in his wherry at Lambeth Stairs," etc., etc. 
 Jones (an intelligent young man) examines the medical, 
 historical, topographical books necessary, his chief points 
 out to him in Jeremy Taylor (fol. London, MDCLV.) 
 a few remarks such as might befit a dear old archbishop 
 departing this life. When I come back to dress for 
 dinner the archbishop is dead on my table, in five pages, 
 medicine, topography, theology, all right, and Jones has 
 gone home to his family some hours.' 
 
 According to some such fashion as this, no 
 doubt, much of the work of Alexandre Dumas 
 was done, but we know as well as Thackeray 
 did that by no such method is a trio of mus- 
 keteers to be created. It is to the creative genius
 
 Alexander the Great 31 
 
 that gave life to the work, however the details 
 might be executed, that Thackeray's tribute is 
 paid. 
 
 Of your heroic heroes, I think our friend Monseig- 
 neur Athos, Count de la Fere, is my favorite. I have 
 read about him from sunrise to sunset with the utmost 
 contentment of mind. He has passed through how many 
 volumes ? Forty ? Fifty ? I wish, for my part, there were 
 a hundred more, and would never tire of his rescuing 
 prisoners, punishing ruffians, and running scoundrels 
 through the midriff with his most graceful rapier.'
 
 32 Various Views 
 
 SHAKESPEARE IN FRANCE. 
 
 THE learned M. Jusserand, who is as entertain- 
 ing as he is learned, and who has done almost as 
 much as Taine did (although in a very different 
 way) to give a new interest to the history of 
 English literature, has published a book upon 
 the fortunes of Shakespeare among the French- 
 men. The subject of this investigation is so 
 novel, as well as so interesting inherently, that 
 it seems worth while to tell M. Jusserand's story 
 in condensed form, although it has been made 
 fully accessible to English readers. Of course, 
 we all know in its general outline the history 
 of Shakespearian study in France, but few even 
 among students know the interesting details of 
 the narrative which M. Jusserand has illustrated 
 from the wealth of his rich and curious reading, 
 which he has adorned with his piquant style and 
 warmed with his sympathetic c appreciation ' of 
 the greatest poet of the modern world. 
 
 M. Jusserand introduces his narrative by setting
 
 Shakespeare in France 33 
 
 side by side two passages, published respectively 
 in 1645 and 1765, and roughly indicating the 
 limits of the period to which the chief interest 
 of the story attaches, the period during which 
 Shakespeare won his way to the French con- 
 sciousness. The first extract is from Blaeu's 
 4 Theatre du Monde,' a sort of glorified gaz- 
 eteer, and informs the reader that Stratford is a 
 pleasant little town which owes its entire glory 
 to c Jehan de Stratford, archeveque de Cantor- 
 bery' and 'Hugues de Clopton, juge a Londres.' 
 One of these worthies, it seems, built a church 
 in Stratford, and the ether spanned the Avon 
 with a bridge. To this writer, Shakespeare was 
 less than a name ; Stratford had enough of glory 
 in its claim upon the primate and the judge. 
 The other extract is from the c Encyclopaedia/ 
 and speaks of Stratford in this fashion : ' It was 
 not long ago that the house in which Shake- 
 speare (William) died in 1616 was still pointed 
 out in this town; it was even regarded as a curi- 
 osity of the country and the inhabitants regretted 
 its destruction, so jealous are they of the glory of 
 having given birth to this sublime genius, the 
 greatest in all dramatic poetry.' The article fills
 
 34 Various Views 
 
 five columns, and although its title is * Stratford,' 
 its exclusive subject is Shakespeare. To trace 
 the history of the change in French opinion thus 
 brought about by a century has been the task of 
 M. Jusserand, and the subject is one richly de- 
 serving of attention. 
 
 The first judgment upon Shakespeare to find 
 expression in the French language occurs in a 
 catalogue of the Royal Library (1675-1684). A 
 copy of the second folio had found its way into 
 the collection, and the entry of the cataloguer 
 included, besides a Latinized form of the title, 
 the following note : * This English poet has a 
 rather fine imagination, he thinks naturally, he 
 expresses himself with delicacy, but these fine 
 qualities are darkened by the filth that he mingles 
 with his comedies.' An inventory of Fouquet's 
 library shows that it also contained a volume of 
 Shakespeare * valued at one livre.' The first 
 printed mention of Shakespeare in France occurs 
 in Baillet's * Jugements des Savants' (16856). 
 Here the name is given, without comment, in a 
 list of English poets. Two or three other fugitive 
 allusions to a poet variously named l Shakspear ' 
 and c Shakees Pear ' may be found during the
 
 Shakespeare in France 35 
 
 closing years of the reign of the Roi-Soleil, but 
 the great age of French literature was over, and 
 Corneille, Racine, and Moliere had long been in 
 their graves, before even a Frenchman here and 
 there had so much as dreamed that the English 
 poet who had died when Corneille was a boy of 
 ten was destined to enjoy a heritage of fame so 
 world-wide and so enduring that even the genius 
 of Moliere would come to seem pale in the com- 
 parison. 
 
 The first half of the eighteenth century 
 changed all this. Not only did Shakespeare be- 
 come widely known in France, through criticism 
 and even through translation, but his plays be- 
 gan to influence the French stage, and to awaken 
 an uneasy feeling that possibly the rules of the 
 classic drama might not have said the final word 
 upon the subject of dramatic composition. Dur- 
 ing the period in question a great many writers 
 found occasion to speak of Shakespeare in ap- 
 preciative terms, and some of these writers were 
 men whose opinions carried much weight. The 
 Abbe Prevost, who made a long stay in England, 
 and began to publish his 'Memoires' in 1728, 
 became a genuine anglomaniac, the first in date
 
 36 Various Views 
 
 of a numerous tribe. The beauty of Mrs. 
 Oldfield inspired him to learn her language, and, 
 having learned it, he read Shakespeare and waxed 
 enthusiastic. c For beauty of sentiment,' he 
 says, c whether tender or sublime, for the tragic 
 form which stirs the depths of the heart and 
 infallibly arouses passion in the dullest souls, 
 for energy of expression and for the art of con- 
 triving situations and carrying on an action, I 
 have read nothing, either in Greek or in French, 
 which takes the palm from the English drama.' 
 Even Montesquieu felt compelled to have an 
 opinion concerning Shakespeare, although, as 
 M. Jusserand remarks, it does him less honor 
 than his opinions upon government. In 1830, 
 he had an audience with the queen, who began to 
 talk about the drama. She asked Lord Ches- 
 terfield, who was also present, how it happened 
 that Shakespeare, who lived in the age Elizabeth, 
 had made his women speak so badly and act so 
 foolishly. c Milord Chesterfield answered the 
 question very well by saying that women did not 
 appear upon the stage, and that their parts were 
 taken by poor actors, for which reason Shakes- 
 peare did not take any great pains to make them
 
 Shakespeare in France 37 
 
 speak well. I should give the other reason that, 
 to make women speak well, one must know 
 the ways and the conventions of society. To 
 make heroes speak, book knowledge is all that 
 is necessary.' These explanations, observes the 
 commentator, 'enabled Queen Caroline (to whom 
 Voltaire had just dedicated his u Henriade") 
 to understand why Beatrice, Rosalind, Portia, 
 and Juliet speak so badly and are so foolish.' 
 Meanwhile, Voltaire, who had the precious gift 
 of writing with c blacker ink ' than other men, 
 and of compelling attention to whatever he might 
 choose to say, had lived for three years in Lon- 
 don, and published his c Lettres Philosophiques ' 
 in 1734. Henceforth, there was no escaping 
 Shakespeare for the cultivated Frenchman, for 
 Voltaire said things about him that could not 
 possibly be ignored. His appreciation was qual- 
 ified, but for that perhaps all the more forcible, 
 and it is quite evident that he was more deeply 
 impressed than he was willing to let appear. 
 In the c Lettres ' he said : ' Shakespeare had 
 a genius full of force and fertility, of what 
 is natural and what is sublime, with not the 
 least spark of good taste, and without the least
 
 38 Various Views 
 
 knowledge of the rules.' In the introduction to 
 'Semiramis' (1748), where the famous epithet 
 of the c drunken savage ' occurs, he said that 
 1 Hamlet ' contains c sublime strokes worthy of 
 the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had 
 taken delight in collecting within the brain of 
 Shakespeare all that we can imagine of what is 
 greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness 
 without wit can contain of what is lowest and 
 most detestable.' Testimonies to Shakespeare 
 were now rapidly multiplying. Riccoboni(iy38) 
 wrote a history of the English stage, saying of 
 Shakespeare that l having used up his patrimony, 
 he took up the trade of robber. He wrote san- 
 guinary dramas, "Hamlet" among others, and 
 " Othello," in which we witness the incredible 
 strangling of Desdemona.' Le Blanc (1745) 
 found fairly fitting words in which to express the 
 magic of Shakespeare's style. Finally, La Place 
 (1746) made a French translation of many of the 
 plays, and prepared analyses of the others. 
 
 In the latter half of the eighteenth century, we 
 come face to face with the c Shakespeare ques- 
 tion,' which fills the last and most interesting 
 chapter in all this curious history. Speaking of
 
 Shakespeare in France 39 
 
 the translation of c Torn Jones' made in 1750, 
 d'Argenson remarked : 4 Anglicism is gaining 
 upon us,' while Boissy, in a comedy dated 1753, 
 made sport of the fickle tastes of the French 
 public, which sought after strange gods, now in 
 Italy, now in England. 
 
 'Son transport Tautre jour etait Tanglomanie; 
 Rien sans Thabit anglais ne pouvait reussir ; 
 Au-dessus de Corneillc il mettait Shakespir.' 
 
 Something clearly had to be done, and Voltaire, 
 who felt that both his critical precept and his 
 practice as a dramatic poet had been largely 
 responsible for this exaltation of the ' sauvage 
 ivre,' stepped into the breach. It was all very 
 well to praise Shakespeare in measured terms, 
 as he had himself done, but when it came to a 
 complete and sumptuous translation, dedicated to 
 the king, and prefaced by the judgment that 
 * never had man of genius penetrated deeper into 
 the abyss of the human heart or given better and 
 more natural speech to the passions,' it was really 
 going too far. c Had not he [Voltaire] granted 
 enough to the monster ? Had not he introduced 
 certain liberties to the French stage ? Had not 
 he cleared, and pruned, and given regular shape
 
 40 Various Views 
 
 to this lofty thicket ? ' But now there was noth- 
 ing less in question than a revolution of taste. 
 Even Diderot was calling Shakespeare 'a Gothic 
 colossus between whose legs we might all pass.' 
 * All ? ' exclaimed Voltaire, and his indignation 
 waxed. Nothing less than a formal protest to 
 the Academy could suffice for such a critical sit- 
 uation. 4 There are not in France enough buf- 
 fets, enough foolscaps, enough pillories for such 
 a fellow ' as the audacious Le Tourneur, who 
 was responsible for the translation that was so 
 heralded. l The frightful thing about it is that 
 the monster has a party in France, and to cap 
 the climax of calamity, it was I who formerly 
 first spoke of this Shakespeare, it was I who first 
 showed the French a few pearls that I had found 
 in his enormous manure-heap.' Thus wrote the 
 recluse of Ferney to a friend, and in this spirit 
 was prepared his communication to the Academy. 
 The protest was read at the session of August 25, 
 1776, and its success, for the hour at least, was 
 complete. A year or two later, and only a few 
 weeks before his death, Voltaire inscribed his last 
 tragedy to the Academy, and took occasion to re- 
 new the attack. The letter ended with these
 
 Shakespeare in France 41 
 
 words : l Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of 
 genius that shine in a horrible night.' Thus 
 closes this interesting and characteristic episode 
 in Voltaire's life, and with it what is most signi- 
 ficant about the history of the fortunes of Shake- 
 speare in France under the old regime.
 
 Various Views 
 
 THE TIE THAT BINDS. 
 
 THE beautiful story of the Athenian captives at 
 Syracuse, set free and restored with all honors to 
 their fatherland because they could recite verses 
 from the poet best beloved of their captors, has 
 been made familiar to us all by two among the 
 noblest works of Robert Browning. * Any such 
 happy man had prompt reward,' our poet tells us, 
 'If he lay bleeding on the battle-field 
 They stanched his wounds, and gave him drink and food ; 
 If he were slave i' the house, for reverence 
 They rose up, bowed to who proved master now, 
 And bade him go free, thank Euripides ! 
 Ay, and such did so : many such, he said, 
 Returning home to Athens, sought him out, 
 The old bard in the solitary house, 
 And thanked him ere they went to sacrifice.' 
 
 This story has much more than the virtue of an 
 anecdote ; it has rather the significance of an eter- 
 nal truth, of the everlasting power of literature 
 to reconcile differences, to soften the asperities 
 of intercourse between nations, to strengthen the 
 bonds of sympathy between human beings, and to
 
 The Tie That Binds 43 
 
 offer promise of that ' Parliament of man, the Fed- 
 eration of the world/ which the poet still insists 
 upon foreseeing, however idle his dream be held 
 by the reluctant and short-sighted multitude. 
 
 While the vision of the seer halts at nothing 
 short of this ideal of the brotherhood of man finally 
 accomplished, he whose faith is less firm and 
 whose gaze cannot descry things hidden so deep 
 in the mists of the future may still find in the 
 possession of a common speech some earnest of 
 a harmonious union for all to whom that speech 
 is native. Particularly true is this of us born to 
 the use of the English language, 
 
 ' Who speak the tongue 
 
 That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold 
 Which Milton held.' 
 
 A common language is the tie that binds men 
 together almost in spite of themselves. This is 
 true even if the language be one that has never 
 risen to supreme excellence of expression upon 
 the lips of the literary artist. A striking illustra- 
 tion of this fact is offered by Miss Olive Schrei- 
 ner, in her account of the uncouth Taal of the 
 Boer. The Boer himself is of mixed Dutch and 
 Huguenot strain, and his speech is an almost in-
 
 44 
 
 Various Views 
 
 conceivably degraded dialect of the Dutch tongue. 
 It is absolutely without a literature, and is prob- 
 ably incapable of originating one. Yet it has fused 
 into a compact nationality the heterogeneous ele- 
 ments that went to the making of the Boer, and 
 its unifying influence compels our admiration and 
 our respect. If this be the power of a rough and 
 poverty-stricken dialect, what limits may be set to 
 the potency of so rich and refined an instrument 
 of intercourse as the English language ? It is not 
 from mere pride of race that the philosophical 
 observer rejoices in the amazing spread of the 
 English language over the face of the earth. It is 
 rather that he feels the immense significance to 
 the future of mankind that must attach to an ever- 
 widening use of the tongue in whose literature are 
 embodied the noblest civic and ethical ideals of 
 the modern world. 
 
 Ten generations have now followed one an- 
 other since the man who in English speech gave 
 supreme expression to these ideals was with us in 
 the flesh. It is three centuries since the gentlest, 
 and wisest, and deepest of modern souls was 
 building the monument of song that none knew 
 better than himself l would outlive the perishing
 
 The Tie That Binds 45 
 
 body of men and things till the Resurrection of 
 the Dead.' And who will dare say that the work 
 of Shakespeare is more than barely begun ? Year 
 after year we commemorate the anniversary of 
 his birth, and each year we look back with rever- 
 ence to the past because of the promise that it 
 gives us for the future. The words spoken a 
 few years ago at the Stratford celebration by the 
 man who so worthily represented among the 
 English people the best elements of American 
 culture, and the message of good-will sent to the 
 Birmingham gathering by the Chief Magistrate 
 of our Republic, were both expressions of the 
 feeling that a common claim to Shakespeare con- 
 stitutes between England and the United States 
 a bond of union too strong to be broken by dif- 
 ferences that might cause other nations to fly at 
 one another's throats, too sacred to be made the 
 sport of political passion or weakened by petty 
 international jealousies. 
 
 The Philistine, we suppose, smiled at Mr. 
 Cleveland's message, deeming it a bit of inef- 
 fectual but harmless sentimentality, yet the mes- 
 sage embodied a deeper truth than ever entered 
 into the self-satisfied Philistine consciousness.
 
 46 Various Views 
 
 Doubtless, also, he smiled at Mr. Bayard's asser- 
 tion that America claimed Shakespeare no less 
 than England, yet that too is the deepest kind of 
 a truth. There is much reason to believe that 
 the teaching of American history in our public 
 schools leaves dominant in the child's mind an 
 impression that England is our hereditary enemy. 
 How much better it would be, and how much 
 more essentially just, to emphasize the fact that, 
 although temporary differences have now and 
 then arisen between the two nations, yet these 
 are as nothing in comparison with the glory of 
 their common inheritance; that English history, 
 from Alfred to Cromwell, belongs to us as right- 
 fully as to our kinsmen over-sea, and should be 
 to us a source of no less pride than that we justly 
 take in the continuation of the history through 
 Washington down to Lincoln. That this is the 
 view ultimately to obtain among the English- 
 speaking peoples seems to us certain. The very 
 stars in their courses are working to bring it 
 about, and the quiet, irresistible influence of a 
 common intellectual tradition will some day ac- 
 complish a closer and more vital union between 
 the scattered sections of the English family than
 
 The Tie That Binds 47 
 
 was ever cemented by bond of dynasty or political 
 organization in the history of the world. There 
 is a larger patriotism than that of the state, a wider 
 fellowship than that of the geographical area ; it 
 is in community of achievement and aspiration 
 that men are in truth brothers, and it is in litera- 
 ture that they find their real relationship. 
 
 The mutterings of war between the two great 
 English-speaking peoples not long ago called 
 forth by a reckless play in the politico-diplomatic 
 game have not been wholly evil in their effect. 
 If they were accompanied by a melancholy dis- 
 play of truculence on the part of time-serving 
 politicians and journalists, they also served to 
 make clear the almost absolute unanimity of the 
 better elements of English-speaking society in 
 rejecting the thought of such a war as a horror 
 unspeakable and unthinkable. That it would be 
 essentially civil war was the general verdict of 
 sober-minded observers, for the essential charac- 
 teristic of civil war is that the opposing forces 
 should be sharers of the same sympathies and 
 ideals, whether sharing or not the same govern- 
 mental machinery. If all civilized nations knew 
 each other as well as the sections of the English
 
 48 Various Views 
 
 race know each other, all war would be civil war, 
 and burdened with the awful responsibilities of 
 such strife. The jingoes and the fomenters of 
 international ill-feeling are poor prophets. We 
 prefer to pin our faith to the prophecy of the dis- 
 tinguished Englishman who once spoke to the 
 members of the Harvard Law School. Upon 
 that occasion, Sir Frederick Pollock, discussing 
 4 The Vocation of the Common Law,' brought 
 his remarks to a close with a peroration so sig- 
 nificant and so eloquent that we cannot resist 
 the temptation to borrow it for the adornment of 
 our own discussion of so nearly allied a theme. 
 1 Dreams are not versed in issuable matter, and 
 have no dates. Only I feel that this one looks 
 forward, and will be seen as waking light some 
 day. If anyone, being of little faith or over- 
 curious, must needs ask in what day, I can an- 
 swer only in the same fashion. We may know 
 the signs, though we know not when they will 
 come. These things will be when we look back 
 on our dissensions in the past as brethren grown 
 up to man's estate and dwelling in unity look 
 back upon the bickerings of the nursery and the 
 jealousies of the class-room ; when there is no use
 
 The Tie That Binds 49 
 
 for the word " foreigner " between Cape Wrath 
 and the Rio Grande, and the federated navies of 
 the English-speaking nations keep the peace of 
 the ocean under the Northern Lights and under 
 the Southern Cross, from Vancouver to Sydney, 
 and from the Channel to the Gulf of Mexico ; 
 when an indestructible union of even wider grasp 
 and higher potency than the federal bond of these 
 States has knit our descendants into an invincible 
 and indestructible concord.'
 
 50 Various Views 
 
 INTERNATIONAL AMITY. 
 
 A FULL generation has now passed since the 
 publication of 4 The Coming Race/ by the 
 versatile novelist who had given us books as 
 various as c Pelham,' c A Strange Story,' 4 Harold/ 
 4 The Caxtons,' and c Kenelm Chillingly.' This 
 forecast was impressive in many ways, but in 
 no way more impressive than in its assertion 
 that war would eventually be made impossible 
 through improvements in the means of destruc- 
 tion. Weapons would become so deadly that war 
 would practically mean annihilation of the con- 
 tending forces, and the good sense of the nations 
 would prevail in the abandonment of this barbaric 
 way of settling disputes. The past thirty years 
 have witnessed, not exactly the literal fulfillment 
 of this prediction, but marked progress in the 
 direction of its fulfillment, and, as a natural con- 
 sequence of the increased effectiveness of fighting 
 instruments, a marked reluctance to resort to the 
 arbitrament of war.
 
 International Amity 51 
 
 Within much more recent years, a great Rus- 
 sian authority upon the art of war, as well as a 
 man of the widest experience in practical affairs, 
 has argued with convincing logic that war is fast 
 becoming a practical impossibility. This be- 
 neficent result of scientific progress is due, not 
 simply, as in Bulwer's argument, because of the 
 increasing deadliness of weapons, but rather be- 
 cause, with this increasing deadliness, the advan- 
 tage to the defense becomes so much greater than 
 the advantage to the attack that all wars of the 
 ordinary type, in which an invading army seeks 
 to conquer a foreign country, must henceforth be 
 so hopelessly one-sided as to be entirely futile. 
 The position of the late M. de Bloch has received 
 ample confirmation during the course of the dis- 
 tressing struggles of late years, in South Africa 
 and the Philippine Islands, and the lesson of these 
 conflicts is not likely to be missed. Entirely aside 
 from the moral issues involved, both of these wars 
 have borne out the essential assertion of M. de 
 Bloch that a small body of men, armed with the 
 modern means of defense, can resist, for an in- 
 definite period, an invading body of overwhelm- 
 ingly superior strength. In making this principle
 
 52 Various Views 
 
 clear, it may well happen that these wars will 
 prove to have been blessings in disguise, and that 
 the last turning-point in the centuries may prove 
 to have been a real turning-point in the history 
 of mankind. 
 
 A glance at the European situation seems to 
 us also to offer reassuring signs. A few years ago 
 a general conflict of the powers seemed inevitable, 
 and it was doubtful whether the century would 
 end without the precipitation of hostilities. To- 
 day the danger seems far less imminent, and it 
 looks as if the great international rivalries and 
 jealousies might somehow be settled by peaceful 
 means. There is the Hague Conference, for 
 example. It is customary to speak slightingly of 
 that remarkable gathering, but it was nevertheless 
 symptomatic of the growing strength of cosmo- 
 politan opinion. This is a factor in warfare which 
 must henceforth be recognized, and, while it has 
 not averted the deplorable wars of the last few 
 years, it has made those responsible for them feel 
 very uncomfortable. We have little doubt that 
 the historian of the future will look back to the 
 Tsar's eirenicon as to the beginning of a new era 
 in international relations, and that the permanent
 
 International Amity 53 
 
 tribunal which remains as the substantial result of 
 the Hague Conference will be invoked more than 
 once. 
 
 The growing conviction of the impossibility of 
 accomplishing by means of warfare what has been 
 easily accomplished by the stronger force in past 
 years is already acting as a quiet deterrent upon 
 the minds of generals and statesmen. Cooperat- 
 ing with this influence is the other influence which 
 comes from the growth of international sympathies 
 and the cementing of the bonds of friendship in 
 many obtrusive and unobtrusive ways. There is 
 a story afloat that Prince Henry of Prussia, our 
 recent national guest, in an expansive moment said 
 that he was having the time of his life in America, 
 adding that when at home they only used him to 
 send to funerals. Certainly a better use has been 
 found for him than that, when his few days' stay 
 in this country has been productive of so much 
 good-will and mutual esteem between the two 
 great nations concerned in the exchange of cour- 
 tesies. When the surface-character of the visit, 
 its pomp and its parade, shall have been forgotten, 
 when the tumult and the shouting shall have died 
 away, its symbolical character will remain as the
 
 54 Various Views 
 
 one memorable thing about it, and will be likely 
 to influence the relations between Germany and 
 America for many years to come. The visit will 
 remain a gracious memory long after the glitter of 
 the event shall have grown dim in our recollection. 
 Another recent event of similar significance 
 was the visit of the Baron d'Estournelles de Con- 
 stant, bearing the greetings of the great European 
 Republic to its sister Republic in the West. This 
 distinguished statesman, journeying from Paris to 
 Chicago for the express purpose of paying a 
 Frenchman's tribute to the memory of the greatest 
 of Americans, pleaded in eloquent terms for the 
 cause of international good-will, for the sinking of 
 political jealousies and commercial rivalries in the 
 larger interests of the common humanity of the 
 race, and wherever he spoke his noble idealism 
 which is nevertheless that of a practical man of 
 the world aroused echoes of responsive sym- 
 pathy in the breasts of his hearers. Now the 
 influence which is represented by such visits as 
 these, and supplemented by the many other 
 modern agencies which tend to the creation of a 
 mutual understanding between our own people 
 and those of a foreign country, amounts in the
 
 International Amity 55 
 
 total sum to an incalculably great force exerted 
 in the interests of civilization and for the removal 
 of ancient prejudice. Whenever men are brought 
 together on the basis of a common interest, 
 whether intellectual or social, the racial barriers 
 first raised between them are at once cast down, 
 and are as if they had never existed. Every inter- 
 national gathering of men of politics, of science, 
 or of literature, offers a silent but effective protest 
 against the passions which set nations at war with 
 one another. 
 
 We do not expect that the world will be 
 swayed by reason alone for many generations yet. 
 Nevertheless, the ascendancy of reason is by slow 
 degrees making itself felt. In spite of all dis- 
 couragements, c man is being made,' in Tenny- 
 son's phrase, and 
 
 Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the 
 shade.' 
 
 To the logical mind the outcome of the evolu- 
 tionary process, however long-delayed, is sure. 
 Such a mind must admit that even patriotism is 
 selfishness, although at several removes from what 
 we commonly call by that name. There is the 
 selfishness of the individual, first of all, which has
 
 56 Various Views 
 
 no redeeming quality. Then there is the selfish- 
 nessof the family, in which the element of altruism 
 first appears. Then there is the selfishness of the 
 clan, the nation, and the race, and in each of these 
 stages of the sentiment the altruistic character 
 becomes more and more marked, until the clear 
 thinker finds it impossible to believe that even 
 race should set an absolute barrier to his sympa- 
 thies, or that anything less than the whole of man- 
 kind should be held in his affection. To take 
 this final step to a complete altruism is, no doubt, 
 to overcome the 'last infirmity of noble mind,' 
 no easy task, yet was it not taken by a Roman 
 freedman over two thousand years ago, and did 
 not the audience in the Roman theatre greet 
 with thunders of applause the famous line which 
 declared that no man may remain unconcerned 
 by aught that touches the interests of humanity 
 at large ?
 
 Hero-Worship 57 
 
 HERO-WORSHIP. 
 
 SEVERAL years ago, Professor John W. Burgess 
 made some suggestive remarks, which we are 
 about to quote, upon the ethics of hero-worship. 
 Their immediate application was to the American 
 anti-slavery agitation and the John Brown cult, 
 but they convey a lesson and a warning that 
 should be taken to heart in connection with 
 many other subjects, not only in the department 
 of political history, but in all the fields of human 
 endeavor. i I consider,' he said, ' that the highest 
 responsibility resting upon an historian is the 
 right selection of those personalities which he 
 holds up for the worship of after generations. 
 The morals of the age are determined most 
 largely by the character of its heroes. No 
 amount of precept, religious or ethical, will have 
 one tithe of the influence in forming the ideals 
 of our youth that hero-worship possesses. If 
 there is, then, one moment more solemn than 
 another in the life of the historian, one when he
 
 58 Various Views 
 
 should seek more earnestly than at another to be 
 delivered from all prejudice, error, and weakness, 
 it is when he essays the role of the hero-maker. 
 If he fails in this, he may well question if all the 
 other good he may have accomplished has not 
 been over-balanced. There is a mawkish notion 
 prevalent among the members of a certain very 
 advanced class of people in almost all parts of the 
 world, that if you add cant to crime you lessen the 
 crime. Some of them think that the outcome of 
 such a combination is the most heroic virtue. All 
 of us judge crime more leniently when committed 
 by persons who have views in common with us 
 upon some important subject, and against persons 
 whom we regard with feelings of hostility. But 
 the moralist, the historian, and the inventor of 
 epics are under bonds to civilization to rise above 
 such weakness.' 
 
 The false kind of sentiment that is here con- 
 demned in such impressive terms has done much 
 mischief in perverting the ethical judgments 
 passed by mankind upon the conspicuous figures 
 of history. In ancient times, it deified Alexander 
 the Great and Julius Caesar, to say nothing of a 
 long line of lesser conquerors and leaders of vie-
 
 Hero-Worship 59 
 
 torious hosts. In our own century, it has made 
 of Napoleon a subject for eulogy rather than for 
 execration, it has in a measure justified the career 
 of the man of c blood and iron ' who looms so 
 large in the history of modern Germany, and it 
 has recently been engaged in glossing over the 
 unscrupulous methods of the ambitious adven- 
 turer who came to regard South Africa as his 
 own personal appanage. It would seem, indeed, 
 when we consider these and the many similar 
 cases which history presents to our view, that 
 success, by whatever means achieved, is too often 
 taken by the public as the adequate test of great- 
 ness, and that a man's career passes for heroic if 
 only it be sufficiently brilliant to attract wide- 
 spread attention, and sufficiently daring to im- 
 pose upon the imagination of men. The ethical 
 philosopher, of course, bases his judgment upon 
 other criteria than these, for he knows that failure 
 is often more heroic than success, and that many 
 a mute inglorious career, with which only the few 
 are acquainted, may offer a finer example for the 
 emulation of mankind than is offered by the lives 
 of those who shine in the fierce light that beats 
 upon the seats of the mighty.
 
 60 Various Views 
 
 Carlyle has done much to glorify the type of 
 man who succeeds by sheer strength of will, and 
 the gospel of brute force has collected a singular 
 company in his gallery of heroic figures. Yet it 
 is from Carlyle himself that we have chosen a 
 passage which emphasizes, better than it has often 
 been emphasized, the eternal distinction between 
 the strength that should command our admiration 
 and the strength that is perversely employed. * A 
 certain strong man, of former time, fought stoutly 
 at Lepanto ; worked stoutly as Algerine slave ; 
 stoutly delivered himself from . such working; 
 with stout cheerfulness endured famine and na- 
 kedness and the world's ingratitude ; and sitting 
 in jail, with the one arm left him, wrote our joy- 
 fullest, and all but our deepest, modern book, and 
 named it u Don Quijote ": this was a genuine 
 strong man. A strong man, of recent time, fights 
 little for any good cause anywhere ; works weakly 
 as an English lord ; weakly delivers himself from 
 such working; with weak despondency endures 
 the cackling of plucked geese at St. James ; and, 
 sitting in sunny Italy, in his coach-and-four, at a 
 distance of two thousand miles from them, writes, 
 over many reams of paper, the following sentence,
 
 Hero-Worship 61 
 
 with variations : " Saw ever the world one greater 
 or unhappier ? " This was a sham strong man. 
 Choose ye.' While this comparison, in its strain- 
 ing for antithetical effects, is not altogether fair 
 to Byron, whose life was at least closed by a 
 piece of genuine heroism, yet in the main it en- 
 forces a lesson that should be taken to heart. 
 The Byronic cult was undoubtedly in its day re- 
 sponsible for a great deal of sickly sentimentalism, 
 and its influence still lingers in English literature. 
 As contrasted with Shelley's ardent and high- 
 souled devotion to great causes and fine ideals, 
 the passion of Byron at its best seems theatrical 
 and insincere, and the gospel of c Childe Harold' 
 is but a poor thing when viewed in the glowing 
 light of the l Prometheus Unbound.' 
 
 In literature, as in other departments of human 
 activity, there are sham heroes as well as genuine 
 ones. This statement is not meant to imply that a 
 writer whose private life will not bear the closest 
 scrutiny is for that reason unheroic as a literary 
 figure, for the weakness of will by which per- 
 sonal conduct is so often misshapen may coexist 
 with an intellectual life of the rarest distinction. 
 And since the essential thing about a writer is
 
 62 Various Views 
 
 his work, he has a right to be judged by that 
 work, almost irrespective of the life that lies be- 
 hind it. The figure of Schopenhauer, for example, 
 is one of the most heroic in literature, although 
 the character of the man, as apart from the writer, 
 left much to be desired. But the noble sincerity 
 of his work, and its exaltation of fine ideals in 
 both thought and conduct, are qualities so marked 
 that we are quite justified in ignoring the unlovely 
 aspects of the personal biography. On the other 
 hand, the most conspicuous of literary figures may 
 fail to assume heroic proportions if the work for 
 which it stands have any suggestion of pose or 
 insincerity. We may be very indulgent to the 
 infirmities of the flesh, provided only they do not 
 fetter or drag down the spirit. There is a false 
 ring, which no sounding rhetoric can altogether 
 deaden to the discerning ear, in the work of many 
 masterful writers, and when that ring is once 
 detected, the power of the voice to shape our in- 
 tellectual ideals becomes sadly weakened. This 
 false note may be caught over and over again in 
 Byron ; it makes the Whitman cult seem a strange 
 phenomenon to minds entirely well-balanced and
 
 Hero-Worship 63 
 
 sane, and it lessens the effective appeal of even 
 such giants as Hugo and Carlyle. 
 
 When we think of certain figures in literature 
 as peculiarly heroic, we do not usually stop for 
 analysis, but are content to rest the judgment 
 upon a mixture of impressions, in part derived 
 from the life, and in part from the work. Scott 
 and Balzac are good examples of this, for both 
 are heroic figures in a very genuine sense, and 
 we hardly know whether to admire them the 
 more for their courageous struggle against adverse 
 material conditions or for their resolute pursuit 
 of a great creative purpose. Instead of taking 
 these men for our illustration, let us take instead 
 a man who was a hero of literature pure and 
 simple, a man whose career has for the literary 
 worker the same sort of lessons that the career 
 of Spinoza has for the philosopher, of Gordon 
 for the soldier, or of Mazzini for the statesman. 
 The man is Gustave Flaubert, and our task is 
 made easy by borrowing from an eloquent address 
 made at Oxford by M. Paul Bourget. c No man 
 was ever more richly endowed with the higher 
 virtues of a great literary artist,' says M. Bourget.
 
 64 Various Views 
 
 c His whole existence was one long struggle 
 against circumstances and against himself, to live 
 up to that ideal standard as a writer which he 
 had set before himself from his earliest years. 
 . . . He remains ever present among us, in spite 
 of the new developments assumed by contempo- 
 rary French literature, for he gave to all writers 
 the most splendid example of passionate, exclusive 
 love of literature. With his long years of patient 
 and scrupulous toil, his noble contempt of wealth, 
 honours, and popularity, with his courage in pur- 
 suing to the end the realization of his dream, he 
 looms upon us an intellectual hero.' 
 
 And yet with all his passion for the impersonal, 
 with all his striving to view life from the outside, 
 holding, or at least expressing, ' no form of creed, 
 but contemplating all,' the final lesson of Flau- 
 bert's life is, as his eulogist admits, that no man 
 may wholly exclude himself from his writings. 
 Had the author of 1 Madame Bovary ' really done 
 so, c they would not have reached us all imbued 
 with that melancholy savour, that subdued pathos 
 which makes them so dear to us. ... This 
 gift of expressing in their writings more than 
 they themselves suspect, and of achieving results
 
 Hero-Worship 65 
 
 exceeding their ambition, is only granted to those 
 courageous and sincere geniuses whose past trials 
 have gained for them the priceless treasure of wide 
 experience. Thus did Cervantes write " Don 
 Quijote," and Defoe " Robinson Crusoe," little 
 dreaming that they infused into their writings, the 
 former all the glowing heroism of Spain, the latter 
 the dogged self-reliance of the Anglo-Saxon. If 
 they had not themselves for many years practised 
 these virtues of chivalrous enterprise in the one 
 case, of indomitable endurance in the other, their 
 books would have been what they intended them 
 to be mere tales of adventure. But their souls 
 were greater than their art, and imbued it through- 
 out with that symbolic power which is the efficient 
 vitality of books. In the same way Flaubert's 
 soul was greater than his art, and it is that soul 
 which, in spite of his own will, he breathed into 
 his writings, gaining for them a place apart in the 
 history of the contemporary French novel.' Thus 
 we come back, after all, to the position that 
 heroism in literary production is somehow the 
 outcome or reflex of something heroic in the 
 character and the temper of the writer. It may 
 be only a streak, so blended with others as to be
 
 66 Various Views 
 
 almost undiscernible to observers of the man apart 
 from his books, yet it is the deepest and truest 
 part of him, and a noble book of any sort may 
 well give pause to the judgment that too hastily 
 condemns a man's life because it is visibly flawed. 
 But those men are the fittest subjects for hero- 
 worship in whom the life and the word are the 
 most fully consonant, whose lives are poems, and 
 whose words are acts. Such a hero was Goethe, 
 with his lifelong devotion to the ideal that held 
 the whole of life to be even more important than 
 its separate elements of the good and the beau- 
 tiful ; such was Milton, whose l soul was like a 
 star, and dwelt apart,' and yet whose heart c the 
 lowliest duties on herself did lay '; such was 
 Dante, whose exiled soul still 4 possessed the sun 
 and stars,' and whose divine poem was wrought 
 not as a poem merely, but 
 
 With close heed 
 
 Lest, having spent for the work's sake 
 Six days, the man be left to make.'
 
 A Philistine Watchword 67 
 
 A PHILISTINE WATCHWORD. 
 
 READERS of c The International Journal of Eth- 
 ics ' must have rubbed their eyes when they 
 received a certain number of that earnest and 
 valuable review, and found its first score of pages 
 devoted to the great achievement of Dr. Nansen 
 in Arctic exploration. What has such a matter 
 to do with ethics ? they may well have asked, and 
 why should our attention be diverted to the deeds 
 of this hardy Norseman when all our intellectual 
 energies are needed for the examination of such 
 engaging subjects as ' the relation of pessimism 
 to ultimate philosophy,' and 'our social and ethical 
 solidarity,' and l the history and spirit of Chinese 
 ethics,' to instance a few of the themes discussed 
 within the same covers. The fact that Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen was responsible for this diversion gave 
 promise, indeed, of a high degree of intellectual 
 entertainment ; but one had to get well along into 
 the essay before discovering what Dr. Nansen 
 was really doing in this galley. The name of the
 
 68 Various Views 
 
 writer was, of course, sufficient to warrant the 
 conclusion that the choice of subject would prove 
 to be justified, even for the purposes of a 'jour- 
 nal of ethics'; and the event showed that some 
 of the deepest matters underlying the general 
 problem of conduct might be involved in the story 
 of the explorer and the stanch ship that drifted 
 with the northern ice-cap across the circumpolar 
 seas. 
 
 There is, to put it bluntly, no ethical problem 
 of greater importance than that which emerges 
 from the consideration of just such activities as 
 were so magnificently displayed by the expedition 
 of Dr. Nansen. It is the fundamental problem 
 of utilitarianism, and the most searching analysis 
 is needed before we can hope to straighten it out. 
 Into all discussions of this problem the philistine 
 shibboleth of the 4 practical ' forces its way, and 
 puts such questions as these: c ls it not wrong to 
 admire men whose fine qualities run more or less 
 to waste ; or, if that cannot be said, that might 
 have been applied to some purpose of more im- 
 portance to the welfare of mankind ? To admire 
 simplicity, daring, vigor, and good comradeship, 
 is of course right ; but ought we not, it may be
 
 A Philistine Watchword 69 
 
 asked, to regret all the more their devotion of 
 these virtues to inadequate ends ? ' 
 
 Mr. Stephen finds no difficulty in answering 
 these questions to the confutation of their Philis- 
 tine proponent. ' You admit,' he says to the 
 short-sighted utilitarian who can see nothing 
 beyond the immediate consequences of a given 
 display of effort, ' you admit in some sense that 
 the main end of conduct should be to promote 
 the greatest happiness of the greatest number; 
 and yet the precepts which you deduce from your 
 principles seem to imply a colorless monotony 
 and a life uncheered by any pursuits enjoyable in 
 themselves.' Grouping the work of Arctic ex- 
 peditions with other scientific work, and with art 
 and literature, as constituting all together a sort 
 of c play,' he says : ' The justification for play, 
 if we may call that play which involves most 
 strenuous labor, must take a different ground. 
 One ground is that the energy which has had 
 no directly utilitarian aim has been of most essen- 
 tial service to mankind ; that, if the world has im- 
 proved even in the sense of being able to support 
 a larger population in moderate comfort, the im- 
 provement has been owing not simply nor perhaps
 
 70 Various Views 
 
 chiefly to those who have consciously labored to 
 redress grievances and remove causes of misery, 
 but to men who have pursued intellectual aims, 
 scientific or artistic, for the pure love of art or 
 science.' And he concludes by saying that 4 the 
 true doctrine seems to be that it is an imperative 
 duty for a man to devote his intellect to those 
 purposes, whatever they may be, to which it is 
 most fitted.' 
 
 The spokesmen of the c practical ' have done 
 so much in all ages, and are still doing so much, 
 to chill enthusiasms and to narrow the scope of 
 life, that we make no apology for recurring to this 
 well-worn theme, and pointing out once more the 
 essential misconception of those well-intentioned 
 but purblind persons. 4 Why was this waste of 
 the ointment made ? ' is a question that we hear 
 repeated, in various disguises, every day of our 
 lives. Now there are two satisfactory answers 
 to the question in all of its forms : one of them 
 faces the utilitarian critic upon his own plane 
 and leaves him no ground upon which to stand, 
 while the other makes the radical demand that he 
 broaden his conception of utility and rearrange 
 his notions of conduct in accordance with a far
 
 A Philistine Watchword 71 
 
 finer envisagement of the purpose of human life. 
 The first answer is the one more commonly 
 made. Mr. Stephen, for example, makes it in 
 these words : c Knowledge can scarcely be ad- 
 vanced in any direction without throwing light 
 upon knowledge in general ; and the devotion of 
 some men of great powers to minute and appar- 
 ently remote interests is really to be admired 
 because it constantly leads to unforeseen and 
 important results.' The history of science is 
 so filled with illustrations of this truth that we 
 hardly know where to begin in making a selec- 
 tion. Take almost any of the achievements of 
 applied science and trace the underlying ideas 
 back to their genesis in the brain of some devoted 
 investigator, or, reversing the process, take from 
 the annals of the history of science any idea that 
 has proved fertile and show what extremely prac- 
 tical results have grown out of it, and, in which- 
 ever way we construct the genealogy of our 
 chosen idea, we shall be filled with wonder at its 
 consequences, and made to realize that such c^n- 
 sequences must, in the very nature of things, be 
 largely or wholly unforeseen when the idea first 
 springs to birth. How useless, to all seeming,
 
 72 Various Views 
 
 were the early studies of micro-organisms, 
 and yet these studies laid the foundation for the 
 vast benefactions of Pasteur and made a reality 
 of the long-cherished dream of a rational theory 
 of disease. Or how could Oersted, or the most 
 keen-sighted of his contemporaries, have foreseen 
 that his discovery of the deflection of the mag- 
 netic needle by the galvanic current was to make 
 possible all the countless applications of electric- 
 ity to our modern life ? In view of such facts as 
 these, how childish it is to ask of every new con- 
 tribution to knowledge that it at once justify its 
 existence by doing something for man's material 
 comfort, and how benighted must be his mental 
 condition who scorns every new scientific truth 
 that may not at once be put to some practical 
 use. And, to return to the immediate theme of 
 this discourse, the man stands intellectually self- 
 condemned who is rash enough to assert that the 
 deep-sea soundings or the magnetic and meteor- 
 ological observations made by the Nansen expe- 
 dition may not in the future prove to have fur- 
 nished a necessary link in the chain of reasoning 
 whereby some vast new gift shall be bestowed by 
 science upon human life.
 
 A Philistine Watchword 73 
 
 Strong as appears, however, the argument 
 above outlined, and amply sufficient as it is to 
 answer the cut bono? of the Philistine critic, we 
 are not content to rest upon it the case for science. 
 For there always underlies the discussion of this 
 subject a source of misunderstanding that is rarely 
 probed. The respective champions of science 
 and of utilitarianism may be using the same 
 words, but they are not speaking the same lan- 
 guage. In employing the terms which they 
 bandy about so freely such terms, for example, 
 as 4 use,' 4 benefit,' and 'practical value' they 
 are nearly always playing at cross-purposes, and 
 the one seldom understands what the other really 
 means. Why is one thing more practical than 
 another? The only possible answer is that it 
 contributes more directly to the satisfaction of 
 some desire. But how great is the arrogance 
 of those who single out certain desires of a sort 
 relating almost wholly to matters of material 
 comfort, and assume that those desires alone are 
 worthy of being gratified at the cost of any effort. 
 Is a desire to be scorned because it does not 
 happen to be entertained by the majority of un- 
 thinking people, and is the quality of a desire to
 
 74 Various Views 
 
 count for nothing in this calculus of ethical val- 
 ues? And if we take quality into the reckoning, 
 does not the advancement of knowledge minister 
 to the best of all desires ? The search after truth 
 is an end in itself, and nothing can be more 
 practical, in any sense of the term worth consid- 
 ering, than the prosecution of that high quest. 
 To think God's thoughts seemed to Kepler a 
 worthy employment for his best intellectual en- 
 ergies, and 
 
 ' To follow knowledge like a sinking star 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought,' 
 
 seemed to the master-singer of our own age the 
 noblest of all aims. It is by just the extent to 
 which man is capable of entertaining such ideal 
 ambitions that he is lifted above the beast of the 
 fields, and the humanity is in pitiable case that 
 can scorn any sincere effort to strengthen the 
 foundations of the temple of human knowledge 
 or bear its dome still further skyward.
 
 A Question of Conscience 75 
 
 A QUESTION OF LITERARY 
 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 THERE are few chapters of literary criticism that 
 surpass, in display of subtle insight and essential 
 justice of conclusion, the well-known essay of 
 Charles Lamb upon the artificial comedy of the 
 Restoration. This essay has always been a 
 stumbling-block to the Philistine, and will always 
 appear paradoxical to the reader whose intellect- 
 ual perceptions do not nicely balance his moral 
 prepossessions. Macaulay, as we know, found 
 it both a paradox and a stumbling-block, and as- 
 sailed it with the weaver's beam that he wielded 
 with such redoubtable energy. But in spite of 
 the attack of Macaulay, and of other persons 
 defective in their literary sympathies, the ideas 
 advanced by Lamb in this essay have held their 
 own, and criticism has accepted their funda- 
 mental validity. It will be remembered that 
 Lamb's argument runs, in substance, to the effect 
 that the writers whom he defends created a con-
 
 76 Various Views 
 
 ventional world of their own, in which the rules 
 that ordinarily govern, and properly should gov- 
 ern, human conduct, have no more application 
 than the rules of ordinary probability to the inci- 
 dents of a Grimm Mahrchen or an Arabian tale. 
 Lamb declared himself c glad for a season to take 
 an airing beyond the diocese of the strict con- 
 science,' and now and then c for a dream-while 
 or so, to imagine a world with no meddling re- 
 strictions.' The world of Congreve and Wych- 
 erley 4 is altogether a speculative scene of things, 
 which has no reference whatever to the world 
 that is. ... The whole is a passing pageant, 
 where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, 
 for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and 
 mice.' His complaint is that people no longer 
 take delight in the pageant, because they have 
 grown too strenuous in their literal-minded inter- 
 pretation of the show. 'Like Don Quixote, we 
 take part against the puppets, and quite as im- 
 pertinently.' We are too self-conscious to give 
 ourselves up to mere distraction, and go to the 
 theatre not l to escape from the pressure of reality 
 so much as to confirm our experience of it; to 
 make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.'
 
 A Question of Conscience 77 
 
 The fashion of the Restoration comedy is one 
 that has now passed away from popular interest, 
 but another fashion has taken its place, concern- 
 ing which Lamb's argument is equally to the 
 point. This is the fashion of romantic fiction, 
 toward which our strenuous moralists are apt to 
 assume a deprecatory attitude, upon much the 
 same grounds that served as a basis for the 
 condemnation of the earlier fashion. Romantic 
 fiction is essentially unreal, we are told ; it does 
 not reflect the conditions of actual life, it en- 
 courages us to dream instead of setting us face 
 to face with the problems of human existence, 
 it dissipates our energies instead of enlisting them 
 in behalf of worthy social and intellectual causes. 
 The charge is doubtless true, but is there no 
 place for dreams in the economy of the spiritual 
 life? Are we to reject the ministry of every 
 form of literature that takes us away from our 
 surroundings, or is not closely related to our im- 
 mediate pursuits and interests ? Entertainment 
 may not be the highest mission of literature, but 
 it is surely a legitimate object for a writer to set 
 before himself, and those writers who offer en- 
 tertainment, in whatever fashion the hour may
 
 78 Various Views 
 
 approve, are not undeserving of the public and 
 will not find their efforts unrewarded. To say 
 that romantic fiction moves in an unreal world 
 of its own making should not be held a matter for 
 reproach; it should rather be recognized as the 
 necessary condition of this form of art, and should 
 make us grateful for the refuge which it offers 
 to the mind oppressed by the burden, at times so 
 intolerable, of the actual world. The art of fic- 
 tion depends upon conventions quite as fully as 
 does the dramatic art. The action must be com- 
 pressed far beyond the limits of probability, and 
 worked out with small regard for the many dis- 
 turbing influences by which it would certainly 
 be complicated in real life. The villain must 
 be foiled, the hero must triumph, and the lovers 
 must be united, even if there are only a score of 
 pages in which to accomplish all these things. 
 Whatever the length of the story, these are its 
 fundamental requirements ; and to such ends all 
 the means employed by the writer must be bent. 
 Each separate scene, moreover, must be height- 
 ened in effect far beyond anything that is likely 
 to occur in everyday life ; two people seated side 
 by side at a dinner-table must make their con-
 
 A Question of Conscience 79 
 
 versation more brilliant than any that was ever 
 actually heard upon such an occasion ; the mem- 
 bers of every group of persons brought into con- 
 tact for the purposes of the narrative must say 
 and do just the right things at the right moments, 
 instead of floundering about in act and speech 
 as they doubtless would in the haphazard actual 
 world. In that world, as the poet reminds us, 
 we get 4 never the time and the place and the 
 loved one all together '; but in the world which 
 the romantic imagination creates we have a right 
 to expect this conjunction, and a reason for jus- 
 tifiable disappointment if it is missed. 
 
 The romance of pure adventure appeals to 
 some of our healthiest instincts. Both as boys 
 and as men, we like to follow the fortunes of 
 pirates, to read about shipwrecks and all other 
 sorts of forlorn hopes, and to applaud the deeds 
 of heroes who slay their enemies right and left, 
 and escape from the most desperate dangers by 
 feats of improbable prowess and display of in- 
 domitable if not superhuman valor. The gen- 
 tlest spirits as well as the most fiery delight in 
 these things,and delight in them precisely because 
 they are so far removed from ordinary human
 
 8o Various Views 
 
 experience. They are the happenings of a world 
 which, at least when we have outgrown boyhood, 
 we have no desire to make our own, a world 
 which could not be our own if we wished it, a 
 world which we frankly recognize as imagined 
 for our diversion. We should ill requite those 
 who purvey for us all this innocent entertainment 
 were we to arraign them before the bar of con- 
 science, to make stern inquiry into the probability 
 of their imaginings, and to pronounce upon the 
 conduct of their characters such severe judg- 
 ments as would doubtless await such conduct in 
 the courts of justice of our prosaic world. 
 
 Nevertheless, although we are fully persuaded 
 of the right of romantic fiction to exist and of its 
 heroes to perform acts which would not bear the 
 test of a prosaic and conventional morality, we 
 are not without certain searchings of soul when 
 we contemplate the enormous vogue enjoyed by 
 this species of literature at the present day. Of 
 that vogue there can be no question. It would 
 be difficult to point to any earlier period in which 
 popular fiction was so largely made up of tales 
 of adventure, tales whose interest centres upon 
 exploits rather than principles, upon the triumph
 
 A Question of Conscience 81 
 
 of the individual will rather than of the abstract 
 ideal. There is an appalling amount of blood- 
 shed in our popular romance, and an almost un- 
 exampled degree of recklessness in the choice of 
 means for the desired end. One need not be a 
 professional moralist to correlate this illustration 
 of popular taste with the wave of brutality which 
 seems to be sweeping over our civilization, and 
 which threatens to submerge the moral territory 
 that has been reclaimed at so great a cost of in- 
 dividual and collective effort. For some reason 
 or other, the finer instincts of civilization seem 
 of late years to have become dulled, and both 
 individuals and nations are suffered without effect- 
 ive protest to commit acts which should arouse 
 the fiercest indignation for their contravention of 
 all the principles by which nations achieve true 
 greatness and individuals bequeath to their de- 
 scendants a heritage of honorable fame. We 
 should hardly include our popular literature 
 among the active causes of this degenerative 
 process, but it may not be unfair to regard it as 
 symptomatic. We may read with zest the pop- 
 ular literature which glories in brute force, and 
 we may get no harm from it as individuals ; but
 
 82 Various Views 
 
 we* must ' view with alarm,' as the political plat- 
 forms say, the ever-increasing hold which this 
 species of literature is gaining upon the popular 
 mind. If such literature does not directly shape 
 the actions of men, it certainly does to some 
 extent reflect their ideals, and its present prom- 
 inence is such as to confront the literary con- 
 science with a serious question. Should we, 
 because they afford us such admirable enter- 
 tainment, give our unqualified approval to these 
 writings that glorify all the brutal passions, that 
 move in a world unswayed by the moral law, 
 and that substitute for the Christian precepts a 
 gospel whereof Carlyle and Nietzsche are the 
 evangelists? It is a serious question, whether 
 the ideals of public and private morality, as re- 
 flected in the popular literature of the day, which 
 the century has just passed on to the present, 
 will bear a favorable comparison with those which 
 were bequeathed to the last century by its pre- 
 decessor.
 
 The Artist and the Man 83 
 
 THE ARTIST AND THE MAN. 
 
 AMONG the many principles for which the late 
 John Ruskin contended with all the force of 
 his impassioned and vehement eloquence, there 
 is one which occupies a peculiarly significant 
 position. It is the principle that a man's art 
 and a man's character are so mutually dependent 
 that the latter is implicit in the former. This 
 principle is central in the great critic's doctrine, 
 for it supplies the nexus whereby his ethics and 
 his aesthetics become united into a single body 
 of teaching. It affords the justification for his 
 constant injection of moral questions into his 
 discussions of art, and for his persistent employ- 
 ment of artistic illustrative material in his treat- 
 ment of the problems that relate to the conduct 
 of life. The principle in question finds its typi- 
 cal expression in such sentences as these : 'The 
 faults of a work of art are the faults of its work- 
 man, and its virtues his virtues.' l Great art is 
 the expression of the mind of a great man, and
 
 84 Various Views 
 
 mean art, that of the want* of mind of a weak 
 man.' c And always, from the least to the great- 
 est, as the made thing is good or bad, so is the 
 maker of it.' l When once you have learned 
 how to spell those most precious of all legends, 
 pictures and buildings, you may read the 
 characters of men, and of nations, in their art, 
 as in a mirror ; nay, as in a microscope, 
 and magnified a hundredfold ; for the character 
 becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies 
 itself in all its noblest or meanest delights.' Fi- 
 nally, the doctrine of these pronouncements 
 receives summing-up in the following impressive 
 fashion : " Of all facts concerning art, this is 
 the one most necessary to be known, that, while 
 manufacture is the work of hands only, art is 
 the work of the whole spirit of man ; and as that 
 spirit is, so is the deed of it ; and by whatever 
 power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the 
 same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches.' 
 
 There are many impulsive sayings to be found 
 in the forty or fifty volumes of Ruskin, many 
 opinions too clearly born of a moment's intellect- 
 ual caprice to be deserving of more than a mo- 
 ment's attention, but these which we have quoted
 
 The Artist and the Man 85 
 
 do not belong to that category. They are rather 
 the deliberate records of a lifelong belief, time 
 and time again solemnly reaffirmed, and funda- 
 mental to a comprehension of the whole structure 
 of their author's thought. That the proposition 
 which they embody has been vigorously denied 
 is matter of common intelligence among those 
 familiar with the currents of critical discussion 
 during the past half-century or more. The doc- 
 trine of 4 art for art's sake ' falls to pieces unless 
 we reject the notion that the character of the 
 artist is reflected in his work. That doctrine 
 has exerted a strong influence upon criticism, 
 and there was a time, not so many years ago, 
 when it seemed to hold the field against its op- 
 ponents. If we consider the case of literary art 
 alone, there were two excellent reasons for the 
 apparent ascendancy of this opinion in the forum 
 of aesthetical controversy. The first was offered 
 by the fact that didacticism in literature had 
 been greatly overdone. When we think of the 
 long and dreary annals of allegorical composition 
 and sermonizing in verse, we naturally revolt 
 from the assumption that this sort of activity 
 has anything to do with literature proper, and
 
 86 Various Views 
 
 it gives us a sense of satisfaction to take refuge 
 in even the extreme opinion that poetry has 
 no business to teach anything, that its message 
 is one of pure beauty, and that, by just so much 
 as it departs from this aim, its purpose becomes 
 weakened, and its spiritual power impaired. 
 The second reason which seemed to justify the 
 principle of l art for art's sake ' was offered by 
 those over-zealous critics of literature who were 
 constantly dragging petty personalities into their 
 work, raising a great pother over the superficial 
 aspects of a poet's private life, and making out 
 of some carelessness of habit or fault of temper a 
 structural defect in character which must always 
 be kept in the foreground of thought when the 
 poet's work was under consideration. It was 
 no wonder that these two influences combined 
 drove many sensitive intelligences to the ex- 
 treme of revolt. The fact that, on the one hand, 
 such didacticism as Young's 'Night Thoughts' 
 and Pollok's 4 Course of Time ' could pass for 
 poetry at all, and that, on the other, whole sec- 
 tions of the reading public should be warned 
 against the poetry of Byron and Shelley because 
 their lives did not square with the social conven-
 
 The Artist and the Man 87 
 
 tions of their time this twofold fact, we say, 
 based upon a false perspective and a complete 
 misunderstanding of the poetic art, was amply 
 sufficient to account for the success of a form 
 of teaching whose fundamental object was to 
 restore to poetry the dignity which it seemed to 
 be in danger of losing. 
 
 When, however, we come to take a broader 
 view of the whole question, it must be admitted 
 that the doctrine of c art for art's sake,' the doc- 
 trine that the artist must deliberately eschew the 
 intention of teaching, that, if he have the divine 
 fire within him, the purity of its glow will remain 
 undimmed whatever the life he may lead, is 
 almost as narrow as the doctrine against which 
 it was raised in protest. Because certain dull 
 poets have been offensively didactic we have no 
 right to say that poets of genius may not engage 
 their powers in the furtherance of worthy ideals. 
 That some great poets have had personal failings, 
 about which their critics have been more curious 
 than was necessary, is no reason why we should 
 deny that, other things being equal, the blameless 
 life will in the long run express itself in nobler 
 forms than the life that has not escaped 'the
 
 88 Various Views 
 
 contagion of the world's slow stain.' As far as 
 the latter of these two propositions is concerned, 
 we take a just pride in the thought that Milton 
 and Tennyson were no less great as men than as 
 poets, and, while giving full acceptance as poetry 
 to the work of men whose character we may not 
 call unblemished, it would distinctly add to our 
 satisfaction could we know them to have lived 
 lives in stricter consonance with their ideals. As 
 for the former proposition, we need only point to 
 the long line of great poets who have allied their 
 work with the practical human causes of reli-' 
 gious and ethical teaching, of political and social 
 progress. From the defence of the Areopagus 
 and the old conservative order by ^Eschylus to 
 the denunciation by Hugo of the saturnalia of 
 a bastard French imperialism, the most famous 
 of poets have ever been ready have found 
 themselves irresistibly impelled to make their 
 work tell in the never-ending struggle between 
 truth and error, between right and wrong, be- 
 tween the conservative and the destructive 
 agencies in the life of the social organism. 
 
 How does our star-like Milton serve to illu- 
 minate the doctrine of l art for art's sake ' ? It is
 
 The Artist and the Man 89 
 
 true that he turned from serene verse to stormy 
 prose in his championship of the struggling 
 Puritan Commonwealth, but it is also true that 
 when he turned again to verse his thought took 
 on a new majesty, and that the deepest feelings 
 of puritanism are to be found rather in his epics 
 than in his polemics. Surely, our literature has 
 no nobler art than that of the l Paradise Lost,' 
 but was the poem written for 'art's sake 'alone? 
 Not unless we take ' art's sake ' and ' life's sake' 
 to be synonymous, which they probably are, if 
 our definitions be made sufficiently liberal. In 
 the final synthesis, beauty and truth and virtue 
 are one and the same thing, and the 'art's sake' 
 shibboleth appears but a question-begging phrase. 
 We cannot judge the artist without in large 
 measure judging the man as well, for as Pro- 
 fessor Corson says, speaking of such poets as 
 Milton, 'their personalities and their works are 
 consubstantial.' But we may easily make the 
 mistake and often do make it of basing our 
 estimate of a poet's character too much upon the 
 trivial outward aspects of his life, and too little 
 upon the writings in which his inmost self stands 
 clearly revealed. If his actions and his books
 
 go Various Views 
 
 give each other the lie, why should we jump to 
 the conclusion that the written expression of 
 character must be insincere ; why not take the 
 more reasonable view that the true personality 
 is to be sought in the books ? They, at least, 
 if read aright, offer a form of self-expression 
 that is deliberate and clear ; while a man's daily 
 actions are impulsive and open to a hundred 
 misinterpretations. 
 
 Again writing of Milton, Professor Corson 
 says : * His personality is felt in his every pro- 
 duction, poetical and prose, and felt almost as 
 much in the earliest as in the latest period of his 
 authorship. And there is no epithet more ap- 
 plicable to his own personality than the epithet 
 august. He is therefore one of the most edu- 
 cating of authors, in the highest sense of the 
 word, that is, educating in the direction of sanc- 
 tified character.' What is here said of Milton 
 we believe to be equally true of Shakespeare. 
 We all know what Wordsworth said of the 
 sonnet, that 4 with this key Shakespeare unlocked 
 his heart,' how Browning replied to this dictum 
 with an indignant, l If so, the less Shakespeare
 
 The Artist and the Man 91 
 
 he,' and how Matthew Arnold, in a vein similar 
 to that of Browning, wrote these lines : 
 
 'Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
 We ask and ask Thou smilest and art still, 
 Out-topping knowledge.' 
 
 In this conflict of opinion, it seems to us that 
 Wordsworth has expressed the deeper truth. It 
 is true that the closest scrutiny of Shakespeare's 
 work will not give us the facts about his boyish 
 poaching upon Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, or 
 explain the mystery of that 'second-best bed' 
 bequeathed to his wife. But the knowledge of 
 a man's personality does not depend upon such 
 trivialities as these. We know his qualities of 
 heart and mind better than we know those of 
 our closest friends. We know what he thought 
 upon most serious subjects, and how he felt 
 about human life in its most significant aspects. 
 The superstition which would have us believe 
 that, as a dramatist, he exhibited the personali- 
 ties of his created characters and concealed his 
 own beyond any possibility of surmise has been 
 tenacious, but is at last losing its hold upon 
 intelligent students. The little book of Mr.
 
 92 Various Views 
 
 Frank Harris upon the man Shakespeare, and 
 the still more recent book of Professor Goldwin 
 Smith upon the same subject, are interesting 
 records of the change of opinion upon this sub- 
 ject. Still more interesting is the closing para- 
 graph of the important work of Shakespearian 
 criticism which we owe to Dr. Brandes : 
 
 * The William Shakespeare who was born at Stratford- 
 on-Avon in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived and 
 wrote in London in her reign and that of James, who 
 ascended into heaven in his comedies and descended into 
 hell in his tragedies, and died at the age of fifty-two in 
 his native town, rises a wonderful personality in grand 
 and distinct outlines, with all the vivid coloring of life 
 from the pages of his books, before the eyes of all who 
 read them with an open, receptive mind, with sanity of 
 judgment, and simple susceptibility to the power of 
 genius.'
 
 The Duties of Authors 93 
 
 THE DUTIES OF AUTHORS. 
 
 THAT every right implies a correlated duty, and 
 that the assertion of the one should be con- 
 ditioned upon the acceptance of the other, is a 
 principle in which theoretical is more common 
 than practical acquiescence. The burden of 
 Mazzini's criticism of the French Revolution 
 was that it gave undue prominence to the Rights 
 of A4an, and had little to say about the corre- 
 sponding Duties of Man. It was the funda- 
 mental aim of that patient, heroic soul to mor- 
 alize the European revolutionary movement by 
 insisting upon the claim of duty as a necessary 
 accompaniment of the claim of right. 
 
 Transferring the discussion from the political 
 to the literary plane, we are inclined to think 
 that too much has lately been heard about the 
 rights of authors in comparison with what is 
 said about their duties. It is then with peculiar 
 satisfaction that we call attention to the chapter 
 on l The Duties of Authors' included in Mr.
 
 94 Various Views 
 
 Leslie Stephen's collection of addresses to eth- 
 ical societies. While Sir Walter Besant and his 
 associates in the Society of Authors are engaged 
 in the praiseworthy work of exposing the wily 
 ways of the dishonest publisher, it is well that a 
 strong voice should now and then discourse upon 
 the responsibilities of authorship, and sound a note 
 of warning against the temptations which beset 
 the man of letters under the modern commercial 
 literary regime. The ethics of literature is a large 
 subject with many ramifications, and neither Mr. 
 Stephen nor any other man could hope to treat 
 of it exhaustively within the limits of a single 
 essay ; but the address to which reference is 
 now made touches upon the more salient fea- 
 tures of the subject, and is characterized in 
 unusual measure by good sense, sound logic, and 
 fine ethical tone. 
 
 So large a proportion of literary energy now- 
 adays is absorbed by journalism that no discus- 
 sion of the duties of authors can ignore the work 
 of those who write for the newspaper press. It 
 is in journalism, also, that writers are most 
 strongly assailed by the temptations peculiar to 
 their craft. The question of anonymity, for
 
 The Duties of Authors 95 
 
 example, is one that must be considered in its 
 ethical relations, and it takes the keenest self- 
 searching for a man to be sure that under the 
 impersonal shelter of the plural pronoun he is 
 not saying things to which he would blush to 
 attach his signature. Nothing is more con- 
 temptible than the work of the writer who 
 makes himself a hireling of some party organ, 
 and earns his daily bread by the advocacy of 
 doctrines to which he does not personally sub- 
 scribe; doctrines that are abhorrent to him as 
 an individual. Such a prostitution of literary 
 talent may be defended, is defended, in many 
 ingenious ways, but the cobwebs of sophistry 
 woven about the discussion by defenders of this 
 practice are easily swept away by anyone who is 
 determined to see things as they are and regulate 
 his conduct in accordance with the fundamental 
 principles of morality. The stock argument by 
 which lawyers justify their defence of the crimi- 
 nal of whose guilt they are convinced the plea 
 that such a person is entitled to the most favor- 
 able interpretation of which the law admits, and 
 that someone must secure it for him is not 
 valid in the discussion of questions of public
 
 g6 Various Views 
 
 interest. No matter of governmental policy is 
 entitled to any other defence than may be made 
 for it by those who honestly believe in its advis- 
 ability ; for those who disbelieve in it, yet enlist 
 their powers in its behalf, no condemnation can 
 be too strong. The first duty of the citizen is 
 to further what he honestly believes to be the 
 real interests of the state, and, if his activity take 
 the special form of argument through the medium 
 of the press, to be sure that his public utterances 
 tally with his private opinions. To repudiate 
 this obligation is to act the part of traitor, and 
 in a more dangerous, because a more insidious, 
 way than that of the leader of an armed revolt. 
 1 To thine own self be true ' is a precept that 
 journalists, more than most other people, need 
 to keep in mind. 
 
 Anonymity doubtless serves as a shelter for 
 much of the baseness that we are reprobating ; 
 yet historically, Mr. Stephen tells us, it is rather 
 the effect than the cause. 
 
 ' According to a well-known anecdote, two writers 
 of the eighteenth century decided by the toss of a half- 
 penny which should write for Walpole and which should 
 write for his adversary Pulteney ; but the choice was 
 generally decided by less reputable motives. Now, so
 
 The Duties of Authors 97 
 
 long as the press meant such a class it was of course 
 natural that the trade should be regarded as discredit- 
 able, and should be carried on by men who had less 
 care for their character than for their pockets. In En- 
 gland, where our development has been continuous and 
 traditions linger long, the sentiment long survived ; and 
 the practice which corresponded to it the practice, 
 that is, of anonymity has itself survived the sentiment 
 which gave it birth. ' 
 
 Mr. Stephen then goes on to say : 
 
 The mask was formerly worn by men who were 
 ashamed of their employment, and who had the same 
 reasons for anonymity as a thief or an anarchist may 
 have for a disguise. It may now be worn even by men 
 who are proud of their profession, because the mask has 
 a different significance.' 
 
 This latter statement is to a considerable extent 
 true, but we are far from sure that the senti- 
 ment is dead that gave birth to anonymity, or 
 that great numbers of journalists to-day do not 
 write what they are told to write, and paid for 
 writing, irrespective of their own convictions. 
 
 Anonymity has other dangers than the major 
 one of making men false to themselves. It 
 affords, for example, c obvious conveniences to 
 a superficial omniscience.' Mr. Stephen remarks 
 with genial humor: 
 
 ' The young gentleman who dogmatizes so early might
 
 98 Various Views 
 
 blush if he had to sign his name to his audacious utter- 
 ances. His tone of infallibility would be absurd if we 
 knew who was the pope that was promulgating dogmas. 
 The man in a mask professes to detect at a glance the 
 absurd sophistries which impose upon the keenest con- 
 temporary intellects ; but if he doffed the mask and 
 appeared as young Mr. Smith, or Jones, who took his 
 degree last year, we might doubt whether he had a 
 right to assume so calmly that the sophistry is all on the 
 other side.' 
 
 The one safe rule seems to be that the anony- 
 mous writer l should say nothing when he speaks 
 in the plural which would make him look silly 
 if he used the first person singular.' The man 
 who should follow this rule, and who should 
 refrain from allowing any personal feeling to 
 invade his judgments of other men and their 
 works, might safely be trusted to write unsigned 
 articles by the score, and, if he remained all the 
 while true to his convictions, could not fairly be 
 charged with falling short of the whole duty of 
 authorship. 
 
 Another temptation that besets the author 
 is that of being content to follow current opin- 
 ion, instead of doing his best to aid in its forma- 
 tion. l There is an old story,' says Mr. Stephen, 
 4 which tells how a certain newspaper used to
 
 The Duties of Authors 99 
 
 send out an emissary to discover what was the 
 common remark that everyone was making in 
 omnibuses and club smoking-rooms, and to 
 fashion it into next morning's article for the 
 instruction of mankind. The echo affected to set 
 the tune which it really repeated.' One of the 
 most obvious duties of authorship is that of hav- 
 ing something of your own to say, and of pre- 
 paring yourself by strenuous effort to say it in 
 the most direct and forcible manner. There is 
 a great deal more of 'facile writing' than there 
 was half a century ago, but it is doubtful if 
 there is any more writing of the first-rate sort, 
 4 which speaks of a full mind and strong convic- 
 tions, which is clear because it is thorough.' 
 This phase of the question of duty as it relates 
 to authors could not be better put than in the 
 following passage: 
 
 ' I have been struck in reading newspaper articles, 
 even my own, by the curious loss of individuality which 
 a man seems to suffer as a writer. Unconsciously the 
 author takes the color of his organ ; he adopts not only 
 its sentiment but its style, and seems to become a mere 
 transmitter of messages, with whose substance he has no 
 more to do than the wires of the electric telegraph which 
 carries them. But now and then we suddenly come 
 across something fresh and original ; we know by instinct
 
 ioo Various Views 
 
 that we are being addressed by another man, and are in 
 a living relation to a separate human being, not to a mere 
 drilled characterless unit of a disciplined army ; we find 
 actually thoughts, convictions, arguments, which, though 
 all arguments are old, have evidently struck the writer's 
 mind, and not merely been transmitted into his pen ; 
 and then we may know that we are in the presence of a 
 real force, and meeting with a man who is doing his 
 duty.' 
 
 Mr. Stephen's exposition of his theme is so 
 attractive that we are loath to dismiss with a few 
 words, as must however, be done, the remain- 
 ing features of the discussion. There is the 
 fruitful subject of writing for money, upon which 
 we read : 
 
 * I do not doubt that authors ought to be paid ; but 
 I certainly agree that a money reward ought never to be 
 the chief aim of their writing. And I confess that some 
 utterances about copyrights in these days have jarred 
 upon me, because they seem to imply that the doctrine 
 is not disavowed so unequivocally as it should be by our 
 leaders.' 
 
 Then there is the subject of writing too much 
 to write anything well, concerning which the 
 author discourses feelingly, and of which mel- 
 ancholy examples are about us on every hand. 
 Then there is the suggestive disquisition upon 
 literary preaching, which deserves an article by
 
 The Duties of Authors 101 
 
 itself. Finally, there is the deeply interesting 
 discussion of duty as it applies to the imaginative 
 worker, the duty of eschewing false realism and 
 false sentimentalism alike, of avoiding like the 
 plague the promptings of the familiar spirit that 
 confuses notoriety with fame, and, pointing out 
 how easily the one may be secured, deludes the 
 writer into thinking that it is much the same 
 thing as the other. All these matters must be 
 passed over with a word, and space found only 
 for the conclusion that ' the enduring power of 
 every great writer depends not merely on his 
 intellectual forces, but upon the charm of his 
 character the clear recognition of what it really 
 is that makes life beautiful and desirable, and of 
 what are the baser elements that fight against 
 the elevating forces.'
 
 102 Various Views 
 
 TENDENCIES IN LITERATURE. 
 
 To THE seasoned critic, there are few things so 
 amusing as the habit the amateur observer has 
 of indulging in broad generalizations concerning 
 contemporary literature. Some book proves to 
 be the fashion of the hour, and straightway it is 
 made the subject of philosophizing. What is 
 merely a ripple upon the surface of popular taste 
 is viewed as a fresh and deep current of human 
 thought, and this supposedly new departure of 
 the spirit serves as a starting-point for many a 
 solemn disquisition upon types and schools and 
 movements. These grave inductions from a 
 single instance, or a few instances, however 
 philosophical the parade of the terms in which 
 they are presented, betray their essentially un- 
 philosophical character by the obvious inade- 
 quacy of their basis of fact. They are made 
 only to be forgotton, as, in the majority of cases, 
 the books that occasioned them are forgotten, 
 after the lapse of a few years. It is not so very
 
 Tendencies in Literature 103 
 
 long ago that the American public was reading 
 and talking 4 Trilby ' with such frantic enthusi- 
 asm that one would have thought a new literary 
 era had dawned. Many were the seeming-wise 
 reflections of which this entertaining story was 
 the innocent provoking cause, many were the 
 hopes, or the fears, for our literary development 
 that took their starting point from the vogue of 
 this particular piece of fiction. All this discus- 
 sion was the work of the amateur, and we now 
 realize how absurd it all was. The novel in 
 question is clean forgotten to-day, and with it 
 the whole argument based upon its success. 
 Anyone can see now what the practiced critic 
 saw all the time, that there was no more signifi- 
 cance in the astonishing vogue of 4 Trilby' than 
 there had been a score of years earlier in the 
 equally astonishing vogue of l Helen's Babies.' 
 In point of fact, when the philosophical stu- 
 dent of literature confronts the question of liter- 
 ary tendencies, he sees two things with absolute 
 distinctness. One of them is that the study of 
 tendencies, of movements, of the transformations 
 of a nation's idealisms, is the most important 
 thing about the history of any literature, the only
 
 104 Various Views 
 
 thing, indeed, that invests a literature with real 
 significance for the history of culture. If he 
 cannot discern the evolutionary process at work, 
 he misses all the salt and savor of his subject, 
 and his conclusions are empirical or merely sub- 
 jective. The other thing is that this process of 
 development, this history of movements and 
 transformations, requires for its proper obser- 
 vation a considerable period to be taken into 
 survey, and a considerable detachment, in point 
 of time, from that period. The one well-nigh 
 impossible task is to trace the direction of the 
 evolutionary process in one's immediate sur- 
 roundings, or to make any prophecies for the 
 future save those that are the logical outcome of 
 some tendency that has been in operation long 
 enough to become clearly discerned. 
 
 Suppose one were to take some representative 
 collection of contemporary literature, such, for 
 example, as the closing section of either of Mr. 
 Stedman's great anthologies, and read it through 
 intent only upon the detection of tendencies, or 
 of unifying principles, he would find it an 
 extremely difficult matter to reduce to order his 
 confused and varied impressions. In such a case,
 
 Tendencies in Literature 105 
 
 it is impossible to see the woods for the trees. 
 To discern the tendencies at work in such a 
 mass of literary production, to find the pattern 
 in so complex a web of intellectual activity, to 
 distinguish the currents from the eddies in so 
 wide an expanse of waters, would be a task well 
 worth attempting, indeed, but one likely to 
 baffle the most persistent effort. Of course the 
 problem might to a certain extent be simplified 
 by discarding the great mass of the work as 
 merely reflecting the hues caught from the 
 greater poems, as merely echoing the significant 
 ideas of the age put forth by the few writers 
 who set the pitch for the symphony. The lesser 
 writers contribute to the harmony (or the dis- 
 cord) and the tone-coloring of the composition, 
 but they do not modify the fundamental char- 
 acter of the movement. Nevertheless, the diffi- 
 culty is not really removed by this process of 
 elimination ; it is somewhat lessened, and that 
 is all. 
 
 A few generalizations, however, concerning 
 the tendencies and characteristics of our contem- 
 porary English literature it seems reasonably safe 
 to make, and one of them is that we are living
 
 io6 Various Views 
 
 in a critical rather than a creative period. As 
 the few great survivors of the earlier age one by 
 one pass away, we feel acutely conscious that 
 the places are left unfilled. The season of 
 analysis and introspection is clearly upon us. In 
 such a period as ours, versatility, good taste, and 
 excellent workmanship abound, and the number 
 of good writers, as distinguished from the great 
 masters, is astonishingly large. Sometimes they 
 spring up in the most unexpected quarters, and 
 anticipation flutters at the thought of a possible 
 resurgence of the creative impulse. But we must 
 not deceive ourselves into thinking that our bust- 
 ling literary activity is swelling to any appreci- 
 able or noticeable extent the stock of the world's 
 masterpieces. Our literature of to-day is vari- 
 ous and entertaining, it has taste and even dis- 
 tinction, but it is not a literature adorned by the 
 opulent blossoming of genius. 
 
 If we may venture, after the preceding dis- 
 claimer, to indicate any distinct tendencies in the 
 English and American literature of the past few 
 years, we would say that it has moved, and is 
 still moving, in the direction of artistic freedom, 
 of cosmopolitan interest, and of broadened social
 
 Tendencies in Literature 107 
 
 sympathy. It no longer suffers, for example, 
 under the reproach of being produced with an 
 exaggerated deference to the Young Person. 
 To place under the ban whole tracts of human 
 life, to refrain from dealing with whole groups of 
 the most important of human relations because 
 their treatment gives offense to immature minds, 
 is a procedure not justified by the larger view of 
 what literature means. This lesson we have 
 learned of recent years. If we take into ac- 
 count the newest of new women and the young- 
 est of emancipated young men, it may seem that 
 the lesson has been too well learned, but, on the 
 whole, out literary art has gained strength with 
 its newly acquired freedom. Our literature is 
 also measurably freed from its old-time provin- 
 cialism of outlook. We have seen established 
 for the mintage of the mind a broader compact 
 than any Latin Union; if an idea have but intrin- 
 sic value, its currency does not now need to be 
 forced in other countries than that of its origin. 
 This, too, is a great gain, and will make the next 
 creative period all the easier of approach. But 
 the greatest gain of all, to our thinking, is the 
 awakening of the new social sympathy that char-
 
 io8 Various Views 
 
 acterizes our recent literature. We hear a good 
 deal of 'democratic art,' and much of what we 
 have thus far got is distressingly crude and dull 
 with didacticism. But the future of our race 
 belongs to democracy, and literature must make 
 the best of this inevitable movement. That it 
 will eventually learn how to shape the idealism 
 of democracy into forms of convincing beauty 
 we make no doubt, and the signs are not want- 
 ing that such an issue is near at hand. An illus- 
 tration of resounding significance may be found 
 in the work of the greatest of living Russians. 
 The writings of Count Tolstoy, or to be more 
 exact, the earnest attention which they have 
 received during the past few years, offer an impres- 
 sive example of the power of the social motive, 
 as embodied in the forms of Active art, to make 
 itself felt as a force in literature. Here is a 
 writer whose whole genius is spent in an impas- 
 sioned appeal to purely democratic sympathies, 
 and, as the years go on, his figure assumes 
 grander and grander proportions, and his utter- 
 ance seems to become more and more invested 
 with the attributes of prophecy.
 
 Energy and Art 109 
 
 ENERGY AND ART. 
 
 MR. SWINBURNE speaks somewhere of the dis- 
 tinction, which yet amounts to 'no mutually 
 exclusive division,' between the gods and the 
 giants of literature. Practically the same dis- 
 tinction is made by his friend, Mr. Theodore 
 Watts-Dunton, in the statement, which recurs 
 frequently in the writings of the latter critic, to 
 the effect that poetic energy and poetic art are 
 'the two forces that move in the production 
 of all poetry.' The distinction is illuminating 
 for the understanding of poetry, for these two 
 forces are the fundamental elements of the effec- 
 tive appeal of literature, as, indeed, of all the 
 forms of artistic endeavor. In the greatest of 
 poets, to be sure, we find the two forces to 
 coexist in such supreme degree and perfect bal- 
 ance that they become, as it were, merely the 
 two aspects of the phenomenon which we call 
 genius, and we understand that for the highest 
 achievements of literature the one is but the
 
 no Various Views 
 
 necessary complement of the other. This is 
 what we find in Shakespeare and Dante and 
 Pindar, possibly also in Goethe and Milton. 
 But when we view the work of the poets who 
 just escape inclusion in the small company of 
 the supreme singers of the world, we nearly 
 always discover some preponderance of energy 
 over art or of art over energy. As coming 
 under the latter category, for example, we think 
 of Sophocles and Virgil and Tennyson ; while 
 the former category embraces ./Eschylus , and 
 Lucretius and Victor Hugo. Taking a step still 
 further away from the great masters, we meet 
 with such fairly antipodal contrasts as are 
 offered by Horace and Juvenal, by Spenser 
 and Jonson, or by Keats and Byron. In these 
 cases we have either art so finished that the 
 energy has become potential, or energy so unre- 
 strained that the art has been well-nigh ignored. 
 This thought may profitably be pursued into 
 the domain of prose literature, and even, as was 
 above suggested, into the field of the fine arts in 
 general. The noblest prose that of Plato, for 
 example has the same balance of energy and 
 art that is displayed by tbe noblest poetry. On
 
 Energy and Art in 
 
 the other hand, we have tremendous energy with 
 but scant art in such a writer as Carlyle, well- 
 nigh perfect art with but little energy in such a 
 writer as Landor. In architecture, the Gothic 
 style astonishes us with its energy, the classic 
 style entrances us with its art. In sculpture, the 
 one type is represented by Michel Angelo, the 
 other by Thorwaldsen. In painting, the pre- 
 dominance of energy in Tintoretto is as unques- 
 tionable as the predominance of art in Raphael. 
 And in music, while Bach and Beethoven stand 
 for the Shakespearian harmony of both forces in 
 their highest development, we may easily discern 
 the overplus of energy in Liszt and Tschaikow- 
 sky, of art in Gluck and Mozart. The broad 
 distinction between the classic and the romantic 
 styles, which runs through all the arts, is, more- 
 over, to a considerable extent, the distinction 
 between these two primary forces under other 
 names. 
 
 In a recent number of * The Athenaeum ' 
 there are some interesting remarks upon this 
 subject as it is related to literary criticism, 
 remarks in which it would be an affectation 
 to pretend not to recognize the hand of Mr.
 
 ii2 Various Views 
 
 \Vatts-Dunton. 4 It would be unseemlv here to 
 criticize contemporary criticism, but it may, 
 without intending offense, be said that while the 
 appreciation of poetry as an energy is as strong 
 as ever in the criticism of the present day, the 
 appreciation of poetry as an art is non-existent, 
 except in one or two quarters which we need 
 not indicate. . . . To go no further back than 
 the time when Rossetti's poems were published, 
 compare the critical canons then in vogue with 
 the' critical canons of the present day. On 
 account of a single cockney rhyme, the critics 
 of that period would damn a set of verses in 
 which perhaps a measure of poetic energy was 
 not wanting. The critics of to-day fall for the 
 most part into two classes : those who do not 
 know what is meant by a cockney rhyme, and 
 those who love a cockney rhyme.' If this is 
 true, it is a serious matter, for we are not con- 
 tent to share the non-committal position of the 
 writer, who confines himself to saying: 4 We 
 merely record an interesting and suggestive fact 
 of literary history. If in poetical criticism the 
 wisdom of one generation is the folly of the 
 next, it is the same in everything man says and
 
 Energy and Art 113 
 
 in everything he does, so whimsical a creature 
 has the arch-humorist Nature set at the top of 
 the animal kingdom/ 
 
 For our part, we believe that the appreciation 
 of poetry as an art is essential to the very exist- 
 ence of criticism, and are far from willing to 
 admit that it is non-existent at the present day. 
 It is true enough that a great deal of verbiage 
 about poetry issues from the c blind mouths ' of 
 self-constituted critics who know not whereof 
 they speak ; but that has always been the case. 
 Our writer himself makes the saving admission 
 that the art of poetry still finds appreciation c in 
 one or two quarters which we need not indicate,' 
 and that is probably all that might be said of the 
 criticism of Rossetti's time, or of a still earlier 
 generation. When we are well along into the 
 twentieth century, it is precisely the criticism 
 from these unindicated quarters that will alone 
 survive, and will urge the writers of that period 
 in turn to say things about the decay of criticism 
 in their own time. The ineptitudes of the criti- 
 cism that greeted the early work of Keats and 
 Shelley, of \Vordsworth and Tennyson, were 
 surely as unfortunate as any utterances of the 
 
 8
 
 ii4 Various Views 
 
 present day, and, what is particularly to the 
 point, they were lacking in precisely that appre- 
 ciation of poetry as art for which Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton seeks almost in vain in our current crit- 
 ical literature. 
 
 Having entered this protest against a state- 
 ment that seems altogether too sweeping, we 
 are now prepared to admit that a good many 
 present-day facts lend countenance to the con- 
 tention. Popular opinion naturally cares more 
 for energy than for art in literature, for the 
 obvious reason that it is stirred by the one and 
 not easily susceptible to the appeal of the other. 
 It feels the power of Browning, for example, 
 and, although by long familiarity made dimly 
 conscious of the exquisite art of Tennyson, is 
 disposed to allow the one quality to offset the 
 other, and consider the two as equally great 
 poets. It is the same rough-and-ready sort of 
 judgment that for a long time held Byron to be a 
 greater poet than Wordsworth, that in our own 
 time thinks of Tolstoi as a greater master of 
 fiction than Tourguenieff, or that made Juvenal 
 seem a greater poet than Virgil to the individual 
 idiosyncrasy of Hugo, or Wordsworth and even
 
 Energy and Art 115 
 
 Byron greater poets than Shelley to the individ- 
 ual idiosyncrasy of Matthew Arnold. It is the 
 sort of judgment that reaches the culmination 
 of extravagance in the things that are sometimes 
 said about Walt Whitman by the injudicious 
 among his admirers. When we consider that 
 Whitman's verses are not even what the worst 
 of Browning's are c verses from the typo- 
 graphical point of view' we may realize to 
 what an extent criticism gone mad is capable of 
 ignoring poetic art and resting its case upon 
 poetic energy alone. 
 
 The reference to Arnold suggests reflections 
 of a deeper sort. That the writer who was on 
 the whole the truest and finest English critic of 
 our generation occasionally went wrong, is well 
 enough understood ; and it is generally admitted 
 that his dicta about Shelley constitute the most 
 wrong-headed of all his utterances. Now the 
 substance of his criticism was that Shelley's 
 poetry is 4 beautiful but ineffectual ' the pas- 
 sage is too familiar to need quotation in full, 
 and the implication clearly is that it is more 
 important for poetry to be effectual charged 
 with energy, that is than beautiful. This is
 
 n6 Various Views 
 
 mainly interesting as going to show how a critic 
 of the best type may be deluded by a formula, 
 since this condemnation of poetry for being inef- 
 fectual is merely an application of the 4 criticism 
 of life ' formula which gave a doctrinaire tinge 
 to so much of Arnold's writing. We do not for 
 a moment admit that Shelley's poetry is inef- 
 fectual we have known too many young and 
 generous souls to be moved by it as by a trumpet 
 call but we understand that its energy is so 
 bound up with the loveliness of its art that the 
 critic who is looking chiefly for the bearings of 
 poetry upon conduct might easily be led as 
 Arnold was to underestimate the energy in 
 the presence of so dazzling an art. All of which 
 goes simply to show that the critic who is bent 
 upon finding the effectual in poetry may miss it 
 for the very reason of an unworthy distrust in 
 the beautiful. 4 Beauty is truth,' but this does 
 not mean that the truth need stick out at all 
 sorts of angles from the beautiful structure. 
 
 On the whole, while there are some signs 
 that energy gets more attention than art from 
 critics nowadays, and while popular judgments
 
 Energy and Art 117 
 
 are based, as was always the case, upon little 
 save energy in poetry, we are inclined to say 
 that the only criticism that counts seriously does 
 not notably disregard the claims of art. There 
 are still men like Mr. Watts-Dunton and Mr. 
 Stedman and M. Brunetiere to expound poetry 
 to an incredulous public, and we do not recall 
 that earlier periods have been much better 
 served. And the same incredulous public re- 
 mains, as it always did remain, mostly imper- 
 vious to the doctrine of the critic, and continues 
 to worship its false gods occasionally blunder- 
 ing into worship of a true one, comfortably 
 thinks that it is enjoying poetry when it is only 
 dazzled by rhetorical fireworks or dazed by 
 sledge-hammer blows upon the brain, and gets 
 a great deal of philistine satisfaction out of life 
 generally, and regards critics as daft persons of 
 most unaccountable tastes. And the beautiful 
 remains the beautiful in all ages, its laws immu- 
 table and its strength sure, while some there be 
 who find it out, and, not content to know it for 
 their own enjoyment alone, bid others to the 
 feast and help them to understand how, although
 
 n8 Various Views 
 
 poetic energy by itself may accomplish much, 
 conjoined with poetic art it may accomplish 
 more, and that the abiding power of literature 
 resides in its form more than in its force, or 
 rather that the form alone can preserve the force 
 from becoming spent in the hour of its birth.
 
 Architecture of the Mind 119 
 
 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE 
 MIND. 
 
 IN the history of architecture there have been 
 two predominant types, the Greek and the 
 Gothic. Each of them has undergone historical 
 modifications, in accordance with the changing 
 needs of mankind, but each has nevertheless 
 remained true to its fundamental ideal. In the 
 case of Greek architecture, that ideal has com- 
 prised unity of design, symmetry of construction, 
 and simple definite relations between the several 
 parts. In the case of Gothic architecture, it has 
 meant more attention to detail than to the gen- 
 eral plan, a disregard of severely proportioned 
 lines, and a certain degree of confusion of aim. 
 The difference between the Parthenon and 'the 
 Bible of Amiens,' for example, illustrates a fun- 
 damental divergence of method and of aspira- 
 tion j the two ideal types are here exhibited in 
 the strongest of possible contrasts. 
 
 Transferring now our attention from the sin-
 
 120 Various Views 
 
 gle field of architecture to the broader domain 
 of art in general, we find the same contrast of 
 type exhibited wherever we look, although we 
 broaden our terms to correspond with the wider 
 view, and now say classical and romantic, in- 
 stead of simply saying Greek and Gothic. The 
 Parthenon is classical art, but so also are the 
 4 Antigone' and the Hermes of Olympia and 
 the Pompeian frescoes. So also are the fugues 
 of Bach and the canvases of David, and the 
 4 Hellenics ' of Landor. On the other hand, 
 Amiens cathedral is romantic art, but so also are 
 the sculptures of Michelangelo and the plays of 
 Shakespeare and the paintings of Rossetti. In 
 some sense even, as a foreshadowing of the 
 romanticism of the modern Christian world, the 
 measures of Pindar and of Virgil escape from 
 the restraints of the classical spirit, and take the 
 freer range which we attribute primarily to the 
 form of art which it was the province of the 
 Middle Ages and the Renaissance to develop in 
 all its fulness of creative splendor. 
 
 It does not seem to us an altogether fanciful 
 analogy to find in the domain of the intellectual
 
 Architecture of the Mind 121 
 
 life, as distinguished from the creative, a similar 
 divergence of fundamental types. We find the 
 intellect whose characteristics are unity and 
 symmetry and definite relationship of activities ; 
 and we find the intellect with whose character- 
 istics these are strongly contrasted, to which 
 they are often diametrically opposed. In the 
 first category we have the makers of systems, 
 the men whose works exhibit an architectonic 
 character so evident that our attention is directed 
 to the coherent whole rather than to the separate 
 details. That is, each detail, however significant 
 in itself, becomes much more significant when 
 considered in relation to the entire logical struc- 
 ture. Such an intellect keeps itself well in 
 hand, restrains the tendency to capricious ex- 
 pression, is firmly based upon certain funda- 
 mental ideas, and brings every vagrant fancy 
 wherewith it is beset to the primary test of this 
 essential conformity. We recognize this type 
 of mind in Euclid, in Aquinas, in Spinoza, in 
 Kant, and in Mr. Herbert Spencer. In each 
 individual case, we realize that the work must 
 stand or fall as a whole, that, given a logical
 
 122 Various Views 
 
 method of procedure, it will stand if the founda- 
 tions are sound, and that if they are shaky the 
 entire structure must totter to its fall. 
 
 In the second of our categories we find those 
 discursive intellects that are content to exhibit the 
 separate facets of truth as it is revealed to them, 
 that take sufficient satisfaction in its sparkling 
 gleam, and make no effort to bring the light to a 
 single focus. They feel instinctively that truth 
 as a whole must be self-consistent, and leave to 
 more sympathetic minds the task of reconciling 
 seeming contradictions and of elucidating what- 
 ever appears paradoxical. Such minds, when 
 actively at work, live intensely in the present 
 moment, leaving the past and the future to care 
 for themselves, and giving slight heed to the 
 accusation of inconsistency. To this intel- 
 lectual type we accredit Cicero (the epistolary 
 and philosophical Cicero), Montaigne, Samuel 
 Johnson (with all his crabbed prejudices), Vol- 
 taire, Hume, Ruskin, and Emerson. Probably 
 the traditional classification which makes of all 
 men by nature either Aristotelians or Platonists 
 is not very different from that which we have 
 here sought to indicate.
 
 Architecture of the Mind 123 
 
 Each of these contrasted modes of the intel- 
 lectual life has its own particular attendant dan- 
 gers, and each needs the corrective influence of 
 the other. In the former case, there is always 
 the danger of doctrinaireism, of twisting the truth 
 to fit the preconceived scheme, of seeking to 
 demand acceptance by the sheer force of logical 
 coherency. Reverting to our architectural figure, 
 there is always the danger of magnifying the 
 importance of the structure qua structure, and of 
 the consequent failure to adapt it to human needs. 
 In the latter case, there is always the danger of 
 encouraging a lax mental habit, of holding the 
 requirements of logic too cheap, of allowing the 
 impulse or the emotion of the moment to usurp 
 the sway of the sovereign reason. The resulting 
 structure is apt to be comparable to one of these 
 composite buildings in which the eye is engaged 
 by many fascinating details, but in which it can 
 take no satisfaction as a whole. 
 
 The natural bent of each individual who 
 leads the intellectual life in any sort will fix the 
 essential type to be aimed at. Each type has its 
 peculiar satisfactions no less than its peculiar 
 dangers. There are some who can conceive of
 
 124 Various Views 
 
 no other ambition than that which seeks to 
 make life of one piece, to shape its intellectual 
 activities into a consistent whole. Every new 
 idea must be brought to the test of those already 
 accepted, must be examined and reexamined in 
 the light of the principles that have been adopted 
 as fundamentally important. This attitude to- 
 ward truth is maintained at the cost of much 
 strenuous endeavor, the severe repression of 
 many a natural impulse, and the stern rejection 
 of many a pleasing fancy. Viewed in retro- 
 spect, the reward seems sufficient ; but it is hard 
 to keep the chords of the mind strung to the 
 requisite pitch, and the temptation at times be- 
 comes great to break loose from the stiffening 
 bonds of prescription, and give unimpeded play 
 to the faculties. Minds of the other type and 
 this is no doubt the prevailing one are consid- 
 erably freer in their activities, and thereby more 
 receptive of new impressions. The hobgoblin 
 inconsistency has no terrors for them ; they are 
 prepared at any time to take a new intellectual 
 start, to ignore past conclusions, and to formu- 
 late fresh ones in accordance with the new light
 
 Architecture of the Mind 125 
 
 in which some truth seems to stand revealed. 
 The pure reason is no longer the sole dictator of 
 thought, but shares its empire in some measure 
 with the forces that control the emotional life. 
 This, attitude finds its satisfactions in the intense 
 realizations of the moment which it permits, in 
 the part which it allows to the sense of wonder, 
 and in the ever-alluring prospect of coming upon 
 new gateways of truth. To declare for one or 
 the other of these attitudes is probably futile; 
 each thinking mind finds its choice already made 
 by the time the instinctive and unconscious period 
 of thought is past. And whether the philosophy 
 of conduct be built up by the logical method of a 
 Spinoza or by the haphazard method of a Mon- 
 taigne, the practical outcome is apt to be much 
 the same with minds of normal endowment. 
 
 We have discussed these contrasting mental 
 attitudes with reference to the individuals whom 
 they primarily concern; let us in conclusion dis- 
 cuss them with reference to their influence upon 
 the stream of human thought. In the long run, 
 do the systematic thinkers determine the intel- 
 lectual currents of history, leaving only its eddies
 
 126 Various Views 
 
 and surface-ripples to be shaped by the discur- 
 sive thinkers ? Our first thought is that they do. 
 When we think of the immense authority, ex- 
 ercised for century after century, of an Aristotle 
 or an Aquinas, it seems as if such were the only 
 intellectual forces that have counted. But a lit- 
 tle reflection will bring the counter-opinion into 
 view, and make us doubt our hasty initial assump- 
 tion. Systems have their day and become stripped 
 of their authority, whereas no sincere expression 
 of the human spirit, struck out in the glow of 
 some moment of intense vision, ever wholly loses 
 its validity. This is why the poets, on the whole, 
 have influenced the thoughts of men more than 
 the philosophers. We may take leave to doubt 
 whether the c Summa Theologicae ' has, all things 
 considered, proved so potent and penetrating an 
 influence upon religious thought as the l De Imi- 
 tatione Christi,' and we may confidently assert 
 that, in the total reckoning, philosophical thought 
 owes a greater debt to Plato than it does to 
 Aristotle. The influence of the unsystematic 
 writers is less imposing, but it seems to be farther- 
 reaching than that of the architectonic thinkers.
 
 Architecture of the Mind 127 
 
 It is, after all, the open mind that makes possible 
 all intellectual progress, and the mind of the 
 systematic philosopher has too often but a single 
 outlook, which may be in the wrong direction, 
 turned toward the fading past rather than toward 
 the glowing future of human thought.
 
 128 Various Views 
 
 IDIOM AND IDEAL. 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT, in one of her letters to 
 Robert Browning, asks him whether he con- 
 siders l the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry/ 
 adding that, for her part, she does not. The 
 reply runs as follows : l The Sailor Language is 
 good in its way ; but as wrongly used in Art 
 as real clay and mud would be, if one plastered 
 them in the foreground of a landscape in order 
 to attain to so much truth.' To all of this Miss 
 Barrett assents, remarking further that 4 art with- 
 out an ideal is neither nature nor art. The 
 question involves the whole difference between 
 Madame Tussaud and Phidias.' 
 
 The question of aesthetics thus raised is one 
 of peculiar interest to the present period, and 
 has become far more burning than it could have 
 been when the above correspondence was ex- 
 changed. There are few features of the recent 
 literary situation as noteworthy as the large 
 production and wide vogue of writings which
 
 Idiom and Ideal 129 
 
 exploit some special form of idiom and rely for 
 their main interest upon the appeal to curiosity 
 thus made. The idiom of the sailor and the 
 soldier, the rustic and the mechanic, have el- 
 bowed their way into literature, and demand 
 their share of the attention hitherto accorded 
 chiefly to educated speech. The normal type 
 of English expression has to jostle for recognition 
 with the local and abnormal types of the Scotch- 
 man and the Irishman, the negro and the baboo, 
 and, in our own country particularly, with such 
 uncouth mixtures as those of the German- 
 American and Scandinavian-American. Exam- 
 ples lie upon every hand. We think at once 
 of the c kailyard ' group of story-tellers, of c Mr. 
 Dooley ' and Mr. Seumas McManus, of Mr. 
 J. W. Riley and 'Charles Egbert Craddock,' 
 and, foremost among all these phenomena, of 
 the writings of Mr. Kipling. 
 
 An observer who looks beyond the momen- 
 tary caprices of literary fashion is compelled to 
 ask, in the contemplation of so great a volume 
 of dialect and specialized jargon, whether this 
 sort of work can claim to be literature in any 
 high sense of the term. Does the speech of
 
 iso Various Views 
 
 Tommy Atkins and Marse Chan, the dialect of 
 Drumtochty and Donegal, the locution of the 
 Hoosier farmer and the Bowery tough, have 
 anything of the antiseptic quality that preserves 
 a story or a poem and enables it to delight suc- 
 cessive generations of readers. The history of 
 our literature is fairly instructive upon this point. 
 With few exceptions, the writings of the past 
 that have relied mainly upon their use of an 
 abnormal idiom have passed completely out of 
 the memory of men. It is true that such a novel 
 as 'The Antiquary ' and such a poem as 'The 
 Northern Farmer ' have assured places among 
 the works that live, but how easy it is to see that 
 their idiom is merely an accident of their pro- 
 duction, and not the determining motive. They 
 survive in spite of their departure from accepted 
 modes of expression, and not in consequence 
 thereof. But nine -tenths of our latter-day 
 jargon-mongers have for their whole stock-in- 
 trade some grotesque form of English speech ; 
 strip them of this, and the revelation of their 
 poverty would be indeed pitiful. They offer 
 novelty, and they amuse for an hour the novelty- 
 seeking section of the public. A little later,
 
 Idiom and Ideal 131 
 
 their books collect dust upon the library shelves, 
 and the counter of the dry-goods store sees them 
 no more. 
 
 The case of Mr. Kipling offers so typical an 
 illustration of the proposition with which we are 
 now concerned that it deserves close examina- 
 tion. We should be the last to deny the noble 
 qualities of Mr. Kipling's art in its finer mani- 
 festations. While it almost never gives evidence 
 of that labor llmce of which the really great mas- 
 ters are so lavish, its prlmesautier quality, its 
 downright energy and superb emotional appeal, 
 compel our admiration, and almost make us wish 
 that the praise bestowed might be ungrudging. 
 If we judge Mr. Kipling by his good work alone, 
 as every poet has a right to be judged, he must 
 be given a place among the dozen or so of living 
 English singers who approach most closely the 
 height now occupied in solitary eminence by 
 Mr. Swinburne. As a writer of prose narrative 
 he has taken a lesson from Bret Harte, and 
 bettered the instruction. He is not one of the 
 great novelists, but the best of his stories have a 
 fair chance of being read well along in the twen- 
 tieth century. So much, and possibly more,
 
 132 Various Views 
 
 must be accorded him by every sober-minded 
 critic. 
 
 But between this measured and deserved praise 
 on the one hand, and the wild acclaim of Mr. 
 Kipling's present vogue on the other, there is a 
 great gulf fixed. And when we come to inquire 
 into the causes of the vogue, we find that it has 
 little to do with his best work. It is the l Danny 
 Deever ' sort of poem, and not l The English 
 Flag ' sort of poem, which nine out of ten of 
 his vociferous admirers have in mind when they 
 proclaim him a poet after their own heart ; and it 
 is the Mulvaney sort of story, rather than 4 The 
 Finest Story in the World,' that they are really 
 thinking of when they assert that he is first 
 and the rest nowhere among story-tellers. A 
 vogue that is based upon such judgments as 
 these has a precarious vitality, and the reasons 
 for which Mr. Kipling will be held in honorable 
 literary remembrance are very different from 
 those that determine his present popularity. It 
 may be said that c The Recessional ' affords 
 common ground upon which the man of taste 
 and the groundling may stand in voicing the
 
 Idiom and Ideal 133 
 
 praises of its author. This is, no doubt, a fine 
 poem, although not without obvious faults, and 
 it is greatly to the credit of the uncritical public 
 that the poem found so responsive an echo in so 
 many hearts. But when we find many of the 
 same voices raised in praise of l The White 
 Man's Burden,' apparently not knowing the dif- 
 ference between the two, the situation c gives to 
 think,' as the French say. And when we hear 
 4 The Recessional ' recited approvingly by men 
 who deny that their own nation should ever, 
 no matter how greatly it has sinned, make the 
 4 ancient sacrifice' of 4 an humble and a contrite 
 heart,' by men, in short, upon whose lips such 
 words are blasphemy, we may see the differ- 
 ence between lip-service and sympathetic appre- 
 ciation of a poem, and take at something like its 
 true value the popular estimate of this particular 
 poem and its author. 
 
 4 The sailor language is good in its way,' as 
 Browning said ; but it is not the way of great 
 literature. And the same observation holds true 
 of the soldier language, and the locomotive-driver 
 language, and the Anglo-Indian language.
 
 134 Various Views 
 
 'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck 
 
 him out, the brute!" 
 But it 's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin 
 
 to shoot; 
 An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything 
 
 you please; 
 An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool you bet that 
 
 Tommy sees!' 
 
 This sort of thing is amusing, and vigorous, and 
 even ethically sound ; but it is not literature, for 
 it does not square with the sober definitions. 
 What, for example, has it to do with Mr. 
 Morley's 4 Literature consists of all the books 
 . . . where moral truth and human passion are 
 touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and 
 attractiveness of form ' ? And what remotest 
 point of contact does it have with this statement 
 of Pater's abstract aestheticism : l All art con- 
 stantly aspires toward the condition of music 
 music, then, and not poetry, as is so often sup- 
 posed, is the true type or measure of perfected 
 art '? Not merely does the bulk of Mr. Kip- 
 ling's work and of the work of those count- 
 less lesser writers among whom he occupies a 
 typical position fail to become art in anything 
 like this transcendental sense, but it does not
 
 Idiom and Ideal 135 
 
 even seek to be art in the narrow sense that 
 takes literature to be a self-contained process, 
 with its own exclusive ideals. It does not aim 
 to be ideal at all, but tries to outdo the rudest 
 realism hitherto known. Reverting once more 
 to Browning's trenchant comment, it plasters its 
 clay and mud in the foreground of the landscape, 
 and wins a cheap popular applause for its deft- 
 ness, while the judicious stand apart and grieve 
 at so violent a renunciation of idealism. For 
 art, to be art at all, must be ideal. While it is 
 
 true that 
 
 ' Beyond that art 
 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes,' 
 
 it nevertheless remains the duty of the artist to 
 add to nature in the measure permitted by his 
 imagination ; failing in this task, or deliberately 
 eschewing it, he is recreant to his calling, and 
 his work has no excuse for existence.
 
 136 Various Views 
 
 THE REVALUATION OF 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 Two recent numbers of 'The Atlantic Monthly' 
 have included in their contents an essay well cal- 
 culated to startle the readers, especially the older 
 readers, of that conservative magazine. The 
 essay in question is from the pen of a new 
 writer, and is nothing less than a frank revalu- 
 ation of the work of Emerson. Discarding, as 
 far as possible, all traditional judgments, the 
 attempt is made to estimate, from the broader 
 because more cosmopolitan standpoint of these 
 latter days, and in the light of a fuller knowl- 
 edge than was in the possession of an earlier 
 generation, the value of Emerson's contribution 
 to American thought and American literature. 
 Some of the conclusions reached by the critic are 
 so far at variance with those that have long been 
 seemingly crystallized in the histories of our 
 literature that one rubs his eyes at the iconoclas- 
 tic utterances, and wonders if anything is sacred
 
 Revaluation of Literature 137 
 
 to these daring young men who are so busily 
 engaged in bringing us new lamps to exchange 
 for our old ones. It is not that the essay betrays 
 animus, or is in any offensive sense an attack 
 upon a great and cherished reputation, but rather 
 that its writer has set about a de novo exposition, 
 and has freed himself from the trammels of 
 the conventional phrase and the conventional 
 attitude. When we remember the indignation 
 aroused in certain quarters less than fifteen years 
 ago by the very qualified and cautious strictures 
 of Matthew Arnold upon our beloved philoso- 
 pher of the transcendental, it is a noteworthy 
 sign of the times that the indigenous l Atlantic ' 
 should open its pages to an estimate of Emerson 
 compared with which the Arnold essay marks 
 almost the extreme of laudatory and reverent 
 handling. 
 
 It is not our present intention to examine this 
 newest interpretation of Emerson, or even to 
 express any very decided opinion upon its fair- 
 ness, either in detail or as a whole. We doubt, 
 indeed, if Emerson's warmest devotees in the 
 past have ever given full expression to their real 
 thought, or at least to the whole of their thought,
 
 138 Various Views 
 
 upon the subject. Their panegyric must have 
 been accompanied by some mental reservations, 
 for upon certain sides Emerson's mind was curi- 
 ously limited, and in very obvious ways. But 
 we may profitably seize the occasion for the 
 purpose of a few reflections upon the provisional 
 character of all contemporaneous literary judg- 
 ments, and upon the necessity of such revalu- 
 ations as the one now in question, before any- 
 thing like finality can be hoped for. Can we 
 never know, one is apt to cry somewhat despair- 
 ingly, can we never really know whether the 
 men of our own time, who so tower above the 
 crowd, and to whom we bring the incense of our 
 hero worship, are in fact men of stature fit to 
 stand among the chosen of history ? We can 
 see that they are taller than the men about 
 them, and can we not get their figures in such 
 perspective with the figures of other generations 
 that we may know how they will stand in the 
 retrospective view of our descendants ? Such 
 questions as these are constantly arising in crit- 
 ical minds strenuous after absolute truth, and 
 the attempt to answer them in the affirmative is 
 as constantly baffled.
 
 Revaluation of Literature 139 
 
 Yet there are ways, if one will but seek them, 
 in which our judgment of the men living in our 
 midst may be in a measure purified and brought 
 into rough conformity with the judgments that 
 will be recorded by posterity. If we would 
 escape from the error of the personal equation, 
 we may do so in part by cultivating a tolerance 
 of opinions not our own ; if the national or racial 
 equation be (as it nearly always is) a source of 
 error, we may largely eliminate it by consulting 
 the judgment of intelligent men of other nations 
 and races. But if we adopt the chauvinistic 
 attitude in such matters, our case is quite hope- 
 less. If we call all rational and balanced 
 criticism that comes from abroad mere 'conde- 
 scension in foreigners,' if, what is worse still, 
 we reply to every adverse English or Continental 
 comment with a childish tu quoque, we simply 
 wrap ourselves up, head and all, in the mantle 
 of provincialism, and barter our critical birth- 
 right for a little applause from the meaner spirits 
 of our own day and our own Little Pedlington. 
 There is more truth than is commonly realized 
 in the saying that we may find a sort of contem- 
 poraneous posterity in foreign opinion. Then,
 
 140 Various Views 
 
 to approach the problem from another point of 
 view, we find that in nearly all the cases in 
 which some great writer has been ignored by 
 contemporary opinion, there have not been lack- 
 ing in his own time a few clear-sighted critics 
 who have discerned the true quality of the neg- 
 lected genius. Preaching to deaf ears in their 
 own generation, these critics have found honor 
 in the next, and shared in the posthumous praise 
 that has come to the poets who got scant praise 
 while they were alive. It may usually be found 
 that in such unheeded utterances there is a note 
 of conviction, a sense of absolute certainty that 
 time will prove them to have been right. When 
 we come upon such judgments, and realize, with 
 our better light, how well-founded they were, we 
 find it almost impossible to understand how they 
 could have spent their force unechoed. We also 
 learn that a genuine critical idea, however long 
 may be the period of its gestation, emerges into 
 active life in the end. Nothing could be more 
 instructive for us, if we would escape the tyr- 
 anny of the c subjective criticism ' that so colors 
 and distorts the popular judgments of every 
 period, than a careful study of the thought of
 
 Revaluation of Literature 141 
 
 those men of the past whose intellectual habit 
 has enabled them to anticipate the verdict of 
 posterity ; nothing could be more helpful than 
 the endeavor to acquire something of their tem- 
 per, and to transfer our standards to their objec- 
 tive plane. 
 
 In our age, however, the question which con- 
 fronts us is the question of deciding upon relative 
 values rather than that of discovering neglected 
 genius. There are so many voices to-day, and 
 so many organs of opinion, so strong a determi- 
 nation to let no new talent bud undetected, and 
 so intricate a critical apparatus for the exploita- 
 tion of every new literary development, that the 
 world is far less likely than formerly to pass the 
 strong man by, and the real critical danger lies in 
 what has been wittily described as the c cygnifica- 
 tion of geese.' But time may be trusted to set 
 these false classifications right, and that very 
 speedily ; while we may with equal confidence 
 depend upon the same potent agency for the re- 
 adjustments and the regroupings that determine 
 for the reputations of the hour their final stations 
 in the pantheon of fame. 
 
 The day seems to have come to attempt some
 
 142 Various Views 
 
 such readjustment of the positions of our older 
 American writers, a-nd the essay which has fur- 
 nished us with our text is in this respect timely. 
 Its very title reminds us that it is now sixty years 
 since the traditional estimate of Emerson was 
 given shape, and sixty years means two gener- 
 ations. One who follows the deeper currents 
 of opinion can hardly fail to have observed that 
 recent years have placed us in a more critical 
 attitude toward the great men of our literary 
 past, and that the old unquestioning acceptance 
 has given place to a more searching and object- 
 ive examination of their quality. As a result of 
 this development of our critical temper, some 
 men have gained and others have lost. Lowell 
 and Whittier have, we should say, gained dis- 
 tinctly ; and Hawthorne (considering his finest 
 work) has still better stood the test of time. 
 On the other hand, Emerson, considering the 
 fetichism of which he was long made the sub- 
 ject in certain quarters, could hardly fail to lose, 
 just as Longfellow and Bryant have lost. The 
 friends of Lanier have almost made good his 
 title to a place among our major poets, while
 
 Revaluation of Literature 143 
 
 the friends of Parkman have been quite success- 
 ful in securing for him the highest rank among 
 our historians. As for the two men of genius at 
 whose names American opinion has long looked 
 askance, while European opinion has been lec- 
 turing us in clamorous fashion upon their great- 
 ness, we must say that the critical issue is still 
 uncertain, with the odds rather in favor of Poe 
 and rather against Whitman. But in these two 
 cases, feeling is probably even yet too strong for 
 judgment, and we shall have to wait until we get 
 into some future generation c where beyond these 
 voices there is peace ' before we shall know the 
 definite status of either our enfant terrible or our 
 4 good gray poet.' For one feature of the crit- 
 ical reconstruction now in full swing we may 
 all be devoutly thankful, and that is the growing 
 tendency to break down the artificial barrier 
 between American and c British ' literature, the 
 growing realization of the fact that, as men of 
 essentially one blood and one speech, English- 
 men and Americans are at work in the produc- 
 tion of a common literature. Despite the occa- 
 sional mouthings of literary jingoes upon both
 
 144 Various Views 
 
 sides of the Atlantic, the lesson is now fairly 
 well learned that the standards by which we 
 judge a Tennyson and a Wordsworth must be 
 the same as the standards by which we estimate 
 the worth of a Lowell or an Emerson.
 
 The Gentle Reader 145 
 
 THE GENTLE READER. 
 
 AMONG the many agreeable features of the holi- 
 day season, there is none more pleasant than the 
 making of gifts. The truly human being, who 
 feels himself no isolated unit in the total of con- 
 scious existence, but rather a creature linked to 
 his fellows by the countless ties of sympathetic 
 association, takes a greater delight in preparing 
 holiday surprises for those who are dear to him 
 than he does in the anticipation of the satisfac- 
 tions that may reasonably be expected to accrue 
 to his own existence. It is pleasant to dwell 
 in thought upon the coming days of relaxation, 
 with their good cheer for mind and body alike, 
 but it is even more pleasant to make little plans 
 for the happiness of others, and to select for 
 them those small mementoes which mean so 
 much for the tastes and the affections, however 
 slight may be the estimate set upon them in the 
 market-place. Among these remembrances, the 
 
 tokens by which we express ourselves far more 
 10
 
 146 Various Views 
 
 effectively than by means of any words, there 
 are none more important than books, for there 
 are none that are possessed of so much of the 
 spiritual or symbolic value that we should always 
 seek to embody in our gifts. However limited 
 may be our resources, they are sufficient to com- 
 pass the procuring of the richest treasures of the 
 spirit as it is revealed in literary art. Nor is 
 there need to be ashamed of the setting provided 
 for these jewels, for the arts that belong to 
 bookmaking, as distinguished from the art of 
 the writer of books, have grown increasingly 
 worthy of their task, and so cunningly fit the 
 page to the margin, so tastefully fit the cover to 
 the pages, so harmoniously fit the decoration to 
 the covers, that all the aesthetic sensibilities are 
 gratified at once, and we marvel that it should 
 be possible to offer so much of the product of 
 refined taste at so absurdly a small price. 
 
 The majority of books, of course, do not meet 
 these conditions, being strictly commercial pro- 
 ducts for the consumption of philistines ; but the 
 wonder remains that so many books should meet 
 them so successfully; for to the book-lover of 
 nice discrimination, after putting aside the count-
 
 The Gentle Reader 147 
 
 less impossible objects in the guise of books that 
 are everywhere thrust upon his attention, there 
 still remains the embarrassment of choice among 
 the really desirable editions that offer him so much 
 more than mere muslin and paper and print. 
 Would he purchase a Shakespeare or a Dickens, 
 a Walton or a Boswell, or even so modern a 
 classic as a c Marius ' or an ' Omar,' he is fairly 
 bewildered by the charms of at least three or 
 four editions, each of which seems at the moment 
 of examination more wholly desirable than any 
 other. And when the choice is reluctantly made, 
 his memory lingers regretfully over the claims of 
 the rejected rivals for his favor, leaving him not 
 quite sure that he has chosen wisely after all. 
 
 In making these remarks, we have had in 
 mind, as chiefly deserving of consideration, the 
 type of book-lover whom it was once the cus- 
 tom to designate as c the gentle reader.' The type 
 is an old-fashioned one, but it happily remains per- 
 sistent, although seemingly crowded aside by the 
 enormous recent expansion of the reading public 
 as a whole. The gentle reader is essentially a 
 reader of good old books rather than of ephem- 
 eral new ones. He is apt to look with suspic-
 
 148 Various Views 
 
 ion upon the celebrities that are exploited by 
 publishers and newspapers day after day, and to 
 give thanks that he has learned to eschew the 
 counsel of these ' blind mouths,' that he has long 
 since found his way to the perennial sources of lit- 
 erary enjoyment. He is still with us, for his tastes 
 are still consulted by our purveyors of books, and 
 the very publishers who strive eagerly with one 
 another for the acquisition of the latest novels 
 by the latest notorieties take also good heed to 
 provide their lists with reprints of the old estab- 
 lished favorites. The many libraries of standard 
 literature which are so characteristic a feature of 
 publishing at the present time surely answer to 
 a genuine demand, and that demand as surely 
 testifies to the fact that the gentle reader is insist- 
 ing that his interests shall not be neglected. 
 
 We had just got fairly started upon this train 
 of reflection when we came across an analysis of 
 the tastes and the temper of the gentle reader so 
 genial and so sympathetic that we were tempted 
 to make a forced loan for the relief of our own 
 poverty of expression. This temptation over- 
 come, we must at least make a reference to 
 the article by the Rev. Mr. Crothers in c The
 
 The Gentle Reader 149 
 
 Atlantic Monthly,' which reveals to the gentle 
 reader his own true self, and explains the work- 
 ings of his mind so delightfully that even the 
 reader of another sort may come to understand 
 something of it, and experience yearnings to be 
 himself numbered among the gentle. But if we 
 may not borrow from Mr. Crothers, we will at 
 least borrow from the Rev. Henry Van Dyke, 
 who has also paid his compliments to the gentle 
 reader. After dismissing the l simple reader ' and 
 the 4 intelligent reader ' as obviously hopeless, this 
 writer sets forth the characteristics of the gentle 
 reader so charmingly and with such insight that 
 we at once feel sure that he knows whereof he 
 speaks. 
 
 'The gentle reader,' he says, 'is the person who 
 wants to grow, and who turns to books as a means of 
 purifying his tastes, deepening his feelings, broadening 
 his sympathies, and enhancing his joy in life. Litera- 
 ture he loves because it is the most humane of the arts. 
 Its forms and processes interest him as expressions of the 
 human striving towards clearness of thought, purity of 
 emotion, and harmony of action with the ideal.' 
 
 But better than any characterization of the 
 gentle reader better even than Dr. Van Dyke's 
 analysis, is the concrete example offered by many
 
 150 Various Views 
 
 a man of letters who has taken the public into his 
 intimacy, and helped us to feel and to share his 
 delight in good literature. Emerson and Lowell, 
 Lamb and FitzGerald, were gentle readers of the 
 most typical sort, and their success in the voca- 
 tion was complete. W hen Mr. James Lane Allen 
 interrupts the course of a novel to bring in whole 
 pages of Malory, we instantly know him for a 
 gentle reader. Others, again, seem to have the 
 desire to be gentle readers, but the true vocation 
 is lacking. Mr. Ruskin was too intolerant of 
 opinions not his own to become one, and Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison, try as hard as he may to get 
 in, is kept outside the sanctuary by what may be 
 called the strenuosity of his positivism. He makes 
 a valiant plea for all good books, but we feel while 
 he is making it that they have appealed to his intel- 
 ligence, and indirectly, by virtue of their signifi- 
 cance for the history of culture, and not directly 
 by virtue of their quality of deep human sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 On the other hand, we know FitzGerald as a 
 genuine member of the guild from almost any ran- 
 dom page of his familiar correspondence. By way 
 of bonnes bouches, and as the best possible illustra-
 
 The Gentle Reader 151 
 
 tion of our text, let us close by extracting a pas- 
 sage or two from the letters in which his quality 
 as a bookman is most clearly exhibited. 
 
 ' I am now a good deal about in a new Boat I have 
 built, and thought (as Johnson took Cocker's Arithmetic 
 with him on travel, because he shouldn't exhaust it) 
 so I would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of 
 Mudie's Books, which I read through directly. I took 
 Dante by way of slow Digestion : not having looked at 
 him for some years : but I am glad to find I relish him 
 as much as ever : he atones with the Sea ; as you know 
 does the Odyssey these are the Men ! * 
 
 ' I wonder whether old Seneca was indeed such a hum- 
 bug as people now say he was : he is really a fine writer. 
 About three hundred years ago, or less, our divines and 
 writers called him the Divine Seneca ; and old Bacon is 
 full of him. One sees in him the upshot of all the Greek 
 philosophy, how it stood in Nero's time, when the Gods 
 had worn out a good deal. I don't think old Seneca 
 believed he should live again. Death is his great resource. 
 Think of the rococosity of a gentleman studying Seneca 
 in the middle of February 1844 in a remarkably damp 
 cottage.' 
 
 I cannot get on with Books about the Daily Life 
 which I find rather insufferable in practice about me. I 
 never could read Miss Austen, nor (later) the famous 
 George Eliot. Give me People, Places, and Things, 
 which I don't and can't see ; Antiquaries, Jeanie Deans, 
 Dalgettys, &c. As to Thackeray's, they are terrible ; 
 I really look at them on the shelf, and am half afraid to 
 touch them. He, you know, could go deeper into the
 
 152 Various Views 
 
 Springs of Common Action than these Ladies : won- 
 derful he is, but not Delightful, which one thirsts for as 
 one gets old and dry.* 
 
 ' Of course the Man must be a Man of Genius to take 
 his Ease, but, if he be, let him take it. I suppose that 
 such as Dante, and Milton, and my Daddy, took it far 
 from easy : well, they dwell apart in the Empyrean ; 
 but for Human Delight, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Boc- 
 caccio, and Scott.* 
 
 It is worth while to be able to read books in 
 the spirit of the writer of these passages, worth 
 while even at the expense of a few crotchets 
 and a certain amount of irrationality. And it 
 is also worth while to learn the lesson of 
 FitzGerald's absolute sincerity in stating his 
 likes and dislikes. If our personal judgments 
 are in line _ with the established verdict of 
 criticism, well and good ; but if they are not, 
 there is no virtue in pretending to the contrary. 
 The gentle reader, at least, whatever his faults, 
 knows the things he likes, and they are pretty 
 apt to be the things that the world has agreed 
 with him in liking.
 
 Triumph of the Novelist 153 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVELIST. 
 
 DURING the greater part of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury the novel has been the most distinctive of 
 literary forms. Historians of literature have so 
 amply recognized the fact and critics have so 
 copiously moralized over it that the subject has 
 become almost as hackneyed as that of the 
 weather. The Puritan prejudice against novel- 
 reading, once almost as potent as the Moham- 
 medan injunction against graphic portrayal of the 
 human form, has so completely vanished from 
 the general consciousness of the public that we 
 look with curious wonder at the belated preacher 
 who still here and there voices a protest that 
 would have found much support a generation 
 or two ago, and that now falls upon absolutely 
 unheeding ears. We read novels nowadays as 
 a matter of course, just as we go to the theatre 
 and eat mince pies, although all of these prac- 
 tices were condemned by the sterner morality 
 of our forefathers. And not only do we read
 
 154 Various Views 
 
 novels without compunctions of conscience, but 
 we are actually encouraged to read them by 
 those to whom we look for intellectual and 
 spiritual guidance. Our high schools and col- 
 leges prescribe courses in novel-reading, and our 
 clergymen take them as texts for their sermons 
 in a sense very different from that in which 
 they used to be taken by gentlemen of the cloth 
 trained in the traditions of an older school. 
 
 \Vhile nineteenth-century readers have been, 
 as a class, almost universally addicted to the 
 fiction-habit, there is no reason for thinking that 
 the readers of the twentieth century will be any 
 the less so addicted. Philosophical critics some- 
 times tell us that the novel will run its course and 
 be replaced by something else, just as the drama 
 and the poem and the essay have at other times 
 and in other lands run their respective courses, 
 and lapsed from favor. But these critics do not 
 give us any very definite forecast of what the 
 coming literary fashion is to be, and the novelist 
 meanwhile snaps his fingers at all such icono- 
 clasts. He simply keeps on producing what the 
 public wants, with small regard for the opinions 
 of those who tell us what the public ought to
 
 Triumph of the Novelist 155 
 
 want. He has ridden upon the top wave of 
 prosperity to the very verge of a new century, 
 and it is his evident intention to carry into that 
 century the practice of the arts whereby his con- 
 spicuous fortunes have heretofore been achieved. 
 Nearly all the prizes of the literary life come to 
 him, and he finds it very pleasant to have them. 
 Yachts and villas and other expensive luxuries 
 are within his reach, and he looks down with 
 patrician pride upon the poor poet in his garret, 
 or upon the mere thinker whose intellectual 
 work is done in the hours that can be spared 
 from the uncongenial toil upon which he must 
 depend for subsistence. 
 
 A reflective person, contrasting the position 
 of the popular novelist with that occupied by 
 the scholar whose strenuous pursuit of truth 
 receives but slight recognition from his gener- 
 ation, can hardly refrain from a certain indig- 
 nation at so unequal a distribution of the gifts 
 of fortune. The fiction-writer who succeeds in 
 catching the popular ear finds his path made 
 easy ever thereafter. Intellectually he may be 
 one of the feeblest of mortals, yet the halo of 
 fame encircles his head for the time, and he
 
 156 Various Views 
 
 may with comparative impunity wax oracular 
 even upon subjects of which he is most densely 
 ignorant. On the other hand the quiet thinker 
 must struggle to get an audience, even for ideas 
 which he is perhaps the best-qualified man in 
 the world to express, and may count himself 
 fortunate if his laborious days earn for him an 
 existence of the most precarious and exiguous 
 sort. He does, indeed, take comfort in the 
 assurance that his work is done for a posterity 
 that will have forgotten the very name of the 
 writer who now basks in the sun of popular 
 favor, and in this faith may find strength to 
 scorn the delights of the present day, but his 
 task is none the less a thankless one, and the 
 age is none the less dishonored that makes it 
 such. Think, for example, of what the world 
 has done for Mr. Rider Haggard and Mr. Her- 
 bert Spencer. A few novels, considered as lit- 
 erature almost beneath contempt, have earned 
 for the one many times over what has been 
 earned for the other by the forty years that have 
 gone to the building up of one of the most 
 imposing and substantial edifices of thought ever 
 added to the possessions of mankind. Doubtless,
 
 Triumph of the Novelist 157 
 
 this material view of the reward of effort is not 
 the only view that should be taken, but the lives 
 of most men are so hedged about by material 
 limitations and conditioned by material necessities 
 that it must be reckoned with in determining the 
 balance of justice between every man and his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 If the triumph of the novelist were a condition 
 that concerned only the best producers, there 
 would not be so much cause to rail at the degen- 
 eracy of an age that exalts the writer of fiction 
 over literary workers of other classes. Fiction, 
 at its highest, is one of the noblest of the arts, 
 and it would be difficult to bestow recognition 
 too generous upon a Scott or a Thackeray, a 
 Balzac or a Tourguenieff, a George Eliot or a 
 George Sand. Bnt the deserved triumph of such 
 writers is attended by an absurdly exaggerated 
 estimate of the hosts of the undeserving. The 
 whole mass of contemporary fiction benefits by 
 the lift given the art by its masters, few in num- 
 ber as they are. And the best writers are by no 
 means the most successful. Mr. Hardy and Mr. 
 Meredith are far less popular than Mr. Hall Caine 
 and Mr. Rider Haggard, although the latter are
 
 158 Various Views 
 
 mere bunglers, while the former, for all their 
 perversities, are artists of distinctive genius. 
 The attitude of our present-day public towards 
 fiction-writers as a class encourages the notion 
 that anybody knows enough to write a novel, and 
 this notion, which might otherwise be harmless 
 enough, is made perniciously effective by the 
 publishers, who make it possible for almost any- 
 body to get a novel printed. And so we have 
 every year new novels by the hundreds, by the 
 thousands, novels that have not the slightest 
 claim upon any genuine intellectual interest, pre- 
 posterous inventions that can only blunt the 
 artistic sense of those who are foolish enough to 
 read them, exploitations of every variety of dis- 
 eased fancy and perverted imagination, guides to 
 the conduct of life by young persons who know 
 nothing of life themselves, books written with 
 no higher aim than amusement that are too dull 
 even to achieve that aim, productions of incom- 
 petent scribblers who might have found honest 
 employment in farming or in housekeeping, and 
 made their activities of some real use to society. 
 Professor Brander Matthews, in an entertain- 
 ing essay, draws an ingenious parallel between
 
 Triumph of the Novelist 159 
 
 the art of novel-writing and the game of whist. 
 Dr. Pole recognizes four stages in the evolution 
 of whist, the Primitive Game, the Game of 
 Hoyle, the Philosophical Game, and the Latter- 
 day Improvements. Four stages, not dissimilar 
 to these, may be recognized in the evolution of 
 the novel. Professor Matthews dubs them the 
 Impossible, the Improbable, the Probable, and 
 the Inevitable stages. The c Arabian Nights,' 
 ' Les Trois Mousquetaires,' ' Vanity Fair,' and 
 'The Scarlet Letter' are given as examples of the 
 four kinds of fiction. But, just as all four forms 
 of the game are still practiced by different sets of 
 players, the later having failed to displace the 
 earlier ones, so all the four forms of fiction are 
 still produced by different sets of writers, and 
 each still finds its own public. The parallel is 
 interesting, and reasonably justified by the facts, 
 but its formulator should have added that there 
 is, and always has been, a fifth kind of fiction, 
 corresponding to the variety of whist known as 
 bumblepuppy. And our pride in the develop- 
 ments that the art of fiction has unquestionably 
 made during the last half-century must be con- 
 siderably tempered when we reflect that the great
 
 160 Various Views 
 
 mass of modern novels comes from writers who 
 do not play the game in accordance with the 
 rules of any system, primitive or philosophical. 
 In a word, the ascendancy of fiction in our 
 latter-day literary production is not altogether the 
 mark of a heightened appreciation of art. The 
 triumph of the novelist is, to a considerable 
 degree, a triumph of ineptitude over ability, of 
 lower over higher ideals, of slovenly over pains- 
 taking workmanship, of incoherence and dispro- 
 portion over measured and organic art.
 
 The Revival of Romance 161 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE. 
 
 AN attentive reader of a certain issue of c The 
 Dial ' must have noticed the fact that no less 
 than three of the chief contributions to that issue 
 frankly espoused the cause of romance as against 
 the claims that have been put forward so stren- 
 uously of recent years in behalf of realism. This 
 conjunction of opinion was purely fortuitous and 
 unpremeditated, and may for that reason be taken 
 as a really significant sign of the times. When the 
 critic wrote of Cyrano de Bergerac as a heroic 
 figure presented c to a world which is all ready to 
 enjoy romance once more '; when the essayist 
 sought to analyze c the ordinary and the com- 
 monplace to see why they fail to afford materials 
 for great art,' and concluded by saying that he 
 could not ' conceive of anything more useless 
 than a literature which reproduces life without a 
 background of thought and imagination '; when 
 the poet personified triumphant Romance return- 
 ing to her own, and saying :
 
 162 Various Views 
 
 ' Since of the oldest dynasty am I, 
 Delight of life within my gift doth lie ; 
 The heart of man, of woman, and of child, 
 Without me were to fate unreconciled. 
 A space hath Human Fashion banished me; 
 But Human Fashion will soon weaned be! 
 I only wait the unfed heart's recall, 
 To take my place my place supreme in all,' 
 
 All three, critic, essayist, and poet alike, were 
 expressing, each in his own language, essentially 
 the same truth, the truth that Art must better 
 Nature and transcend it unless it is prepared to 
 abdicate its ancient empire. 
 
 The new romanticism, as was also pointed 
 out by at least one of these writers, is not quite 
 the same thing as the old, for it has learned 
 something from the rival by which it has been 
 for a time supplanted. What it has learned is 
 the Shakespearian lesson that 
 Nature is made better by no mean, 
 But Nature makes that mean: so, o'er that art, 
 Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art 
 That Nature makes. . . . This is an art 
 Which does mend Nature change it rather: but 
 The art itself is Nature.' 
 
 When we speak of the prospective or accom- 
 plished revival of romance, we do not mean the 
 sort of the thing that satisfied the eighteenth
 
 The Revival of Romance 163 
 
 century. l The Castle of Otranto,' and l Mel- 
 moth the Wanderer,' will hardly serve as proto- 
 types of the new product atavism cannot go 
 as far as that but the romanticism that is now 
 carrying literature before it is a form of art that, 
 like the giant of Greek fable, gains renewed 
 strength from contact with the earth. The 
 romancer is no longer privileged to live in the 
 clouds, or to dispense with the probabilities, but 
 he is nevertheless constrained to idealize and 
 ennoble those aspects of life with which he 
 is concerned, and to view them, not with the 
 scientist, through a microscope, but with the 
 philosopher, sub specie ceternitatis. 
 
 The terms realism and romanticism have been 
 so bandied about in critical discussion, have been 
 made so hackneyed by indiscriminate use, that 
 we hesitate to drag them forth once more from 
 their decent veteran retirement. And, as we 
 have frequently maintained, they almost wholly 
 lose their special signification when we seek to 
 apply them to literature of the first order. It is 
 the shallowest sort of criticism that will be 
 content to label the c Inferno ' as realistic and 
 4 Hamlet ' as romantic. Where, as in the case
 
 164 Various Views 
 
 of the world-masterpieces, we are in the presence 
 of the sheerest Vision, the tint of the glasses ^nd 
 the index of their refraction become matters of 
 small importance. It is only upon a lower plane 
 of literature that the distinction between realism 
 and romanticism actually exists ; it is a distinc- 
 tion hardly to be made, for example, between 
 Scott and Balzac, or between TourgueniefF and 
 Hawthorne ; but it may properly be drawn in a 
 discussion of Stevenson and Mr. Gissing, or of 
 Black and Mr. Howells. It is a distinction that 
 exists only because of a one-sided development 
 or a defective artistic endowment. 
 
 It seems to us that the signs are multiplying 
 upon every hand to show that the star of this 
 narrower realism is waning, and that the world 
 is once more coming to its own in the ideal realms 
 of the imagination. Indeed, when we think of 
 the other arts, of painting and music for example, 
 the sort of thing that we are accustomed to call 
 realism appears as a belated parallel of the work 
 that found favor in those arts a generation or 
 more ago. It illustrates merely an iibemuundener 
 Standpunkt. When we think how far painting 
 has got beyond Frith and the l Derby Day,' when
 
 The Revival of Romance 165 
 
 we reflect upon the full meaning of the Wagnerian 
 triumph, we may with small difficulty, if we are 
 anything of a prophet, foresee the time when men 
 shall look back upon the petty realism of the past 
 score of years with mild wonder at the thought 
 that it should ever have been taken so seriously, 
 with no other feeling than the curious interest 
 that we bring to the contemplation of such pass- 
 ing vagaries of thought and taste as the history 
 of civilization reveals by the score. The aim of 
 art always has been, and always must be, to get 
 away from the details of life and to c overhear ' 
 its essential expression, to arrange ideal catego- 
 ries for familiar facts, to make them symmetrical, 
 to classify, and, beyond all else, to exclude. 
 
 What are some of the signs that realism has 
 not ' come to stay ' in our imaginative literature ? 
 It may seem as if M. Zola had the c cry ' just 
 now in France, but this is the most superficial 
 view imaginable. He has notoriety enough, no 
 doubt, but the sources whence it springs will be 
 dried up in a few years, and then the bulk of his 
 work will sink out of sight by its own specific 
 gravity. Who ever wanted to read c L'Assom- 
 moir ' or c La Debacle ' a second time, except from
 
 166 Various Views 
 
 some motive secondary to that of the satisfaction 
 that their first reading gave ? But we recur with 
 delight to Hugo and Dumas and George Sand, 
 and no custom can stale their infinite variety. 
 Why have Mr. Sienkiewicz and Signer d'An- 
 nunzio achieved lasting reputations in their re- 
 spective countries ? The former has done it by 
 the pure romanticism of his genius, and the latter 
 in spite, not because, of his over-insistence upon 
 sordid facts. Why are 'Johannes ' and c Hannele ' 
 and 4 Die Versunkene Glocke' the most strik- 
 ing things in recent German literature ? Simply 
 because they strike the note of idealism once 
 more. Why are the careers of Herr Bjornson 
 and Dr. Ibsen so illuminative for our thesis ? 
 Because each of these great men presents in 
 epitome the artistic experience of the generation. 
 That is, because each of them began his work in 
 the purest romantic spirit, was for a time led 
 astray into the morass of realism, and is now 
 groping his way back to the sunlit meadows of 
 idealism. And because the former of these men 
 never got so far from the true path as did the 
 other, the totality of his work will, in the final 
 estimate, be held the greater and more enduring.
 
 The Revival of Romance 167 
 
 In England and America the swing of the 
 pendulum toward romanticism is equally evi- 
 dent. The exceptional delicacy and charm of 
 their workmanship is all that keeps us reading 
 the successive productions of Mr. Howells and 
 Mr. James. They no longer produce any kind 
 of a thrill ; the force by which they once pro- 
 duced it is spent. In the work of Mr. Mere- 
 dith and Mr. Hardy the elements are so mixed 
 that a definite classification is difficult, yet when 
 we reflect upon what we best remember in such 
 books as l Richard Feverel ' and c Jude the Ob- 
 scure,' it is easy to conclude that their authors 
 are most effective when least realistic. In our 
 more popular fiction, every form of romance is 
 illustrated. There is the emotional romance of 
 4 The Christian,' the fantastic romance of the 
 1 Zenda ' books, the mystical romance of 4 Ayl- 
 win,' and the historical romance of c The Seats 
 of the Mighty.' Other examples, equally typ- 
 ical, might be adduced by the score. Such are 
 the books that the public delights to read, and 
 their production is coming to outnumber over- 
 whelmingly all the other kinds of story-books. 
 The romantic revival is at full tide, and contem-
 
 i68 Various Views 
 
 porary literature bids fair to offer us once more 
 the solace that it brought us of old. We have 
 learned that it is extremely foolish to insist of a 
 writer that he give us all the facts connected with 
 his theme. We have learned the limitations of 
 literary photography, we have learned that it is 
 unwise to approach literature burdened with a 
 sense of responsibility for the preservation of the 
 literal truth and the obtrusion of the ethical 
 meaning.
 
 The Great American Novel 169 
 
 THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. 
 
 IN one of the most exquisite symbolical tales to 
 be found among American writings, Hawthorne 
 has dealt with the entertainment of angels un- 
 awares, emphasizing a situation as old as liter- 
 ature, as old perhaps as the mythology that lies 
 back of literature in the childhood of the world. 
 Readers of ' The Great Stone Face ' will re- 
 member how it was prophesied that the features 
 carved in the granite of the mountains should 
 one day find their counterpart in warm flesh 
 among the inhabitants of the Franconian valley, 
 and how the hero of the story, looking forward 
 to the fulfilment of this prophecy, suffered re- 
 peated and bitter disappointment as one famous 
 man after another failed to meet the test, him- 
 self all unconscious that a life of helpful toil and 
 noble aspiration was gradually shaping his own 
 features into the desired likeness, and his neigh- 
 bors all unwitting of the fact that the long- 
 heralded incarnation of the Great Stone Face had
 
 170 Various Views 
 
 dwelt in their midst from his birth. It has ever 
 been the fashion of prophecy, from the days of 
 the Delphian oracle down to our own, to get 
 fulfilment in unexpected ways ; and it is possible 
 that the Great American Novel, of which the 
 appearance has so long been prophesied, may 
 already have come into existence. Many an 
 American critic, jealous for his country's literary 
 repute, and eager to assert the final emancipation 
 of l these States ' from all old-world tyrannies of 
 the ideal, has sought to discern in the works of 
 one American novelist or another the typical 
 expression of a distinctly American civilization. 
 But, unless all preconceptions based upon a 
 broad survey of literature are misleading, we are 
 forced to disallow the pleas of these over-zealous 
 advocates, and to admit that we have not yet 
 produced any novelist really representative of 
 American society in the sense in which Balzac 
 is representative of French, Thackeray of En- 
 glish, and Tourguenieff of Russian society. 
 Original and charming novelists we have, in- 
 deed, in considerable numbers, and they have 
 filled our literary picture-gallery with successful 
 studies of genre , and fragments of romance, and
 
 The Great American Novel 171 
 
 bits of quite praiseworthy realism, and fictions 
 of character and manners in the greatest variety. 
 We have also the full flower of Hawthorne's 
 genius, and may rest assured that neither the art 
 nor the depth of l The Scarlet Letter ' will be 
 far surpassed by the best of those who may rise 
 up in the future. But the Great American Novel 
 must be broader in scope, if it cannot be truer 
 in art, than this tragic idyll of Puritan New 
 Englajid, and so the title still seems to await its 
 properly authenticated claimant. 
 
 Assuming, then, that the Great American 
 Novel has not yet appeared, and that prophecy 
 about it is still admissible, let us venture a few 
 suggestions concerning its coming and its char- 
 acter. We may safely say that it will not come 
 with observation. It will not be heralded by the 
 puff preliminary, nor will hosts of rival publishers 
 struggle for possession of the manuscript. When 
 it is given to the public, we shall not be regaled 
 with columns of ingenuous gossip about the per- 
 sonality and habits of the author, nor will advance 
 extracts be scattered far and wide to whet the 
 appetite for the whole magnum opus. It will be 
 the book of neither the day nor the month. Its
 
 172 Various Views 
 
 originality will puzzle reviewers, and, unable to 
 fit it into any of their neat pigeon-holes, they will, 
 for the most part, damn it with faint praise, or 
 treat it with flippant contempt. We call to mind 
 a novel published in this country a few years 
 ago, which was accorded very much the sort of 
 reception just outlined. If it did not exactly 'fall 
 flat ' from the press, it at least aroused slight en- 
 thusiasm, and soon seemed to have run its course. 
 Yet the position of the book in question has 
 grown stronger from that day to this. With little 
 help from the organs of publicity, it has steadily 
 enlarged its circle of readers, and ten years from 
 now will probably be reckoned among the note- 
 worthy books of the quarter century. We shall 
 not name it, for it is not the Great American 
 Novel, although it has some of the qualities 
 which we expect will characterize that work 
 when it appears ; but its history will help us to 
 understand the manner in which that eagerly- 
 anticipated production is likely to make its way. 
 The Great American Novel will be borne to fame 
 by no surface ripple of fancy, but by a strong 
 undercurrent of intelligent appreciation ; it will 
 not win its readers by wholesale, but one at a
 
 The Great American Novel 173 
 
 time, and each new reader will act as a new 
 centre of propagation. When it has at last really 
 found and won its fit audience, it will probably 
 become the fashion also, and its name will be 
 upon the lips of fools, for this penalty of genius 
 is always exacted sooner or later. 
 
 So much for the manner of its coming : let us 
 now ask what the Great American Novel will 
 be like. Since it is to be American, it must needs 
 reflect the democratic principle upon which Amer- 
 ican society is organized. It cannot rely upon the 
 artificial distinctions of the older civilizations to 
 give variety to its characters, but must fall back 
 upon the distinctions of mind and heart that are 
 inherent in human nature. In other words, it 
 must command a deeper psychology than the 
 European novelist needs to give interest to his 
 book. Without being in any way polemical, it 
 must be imbued with the passion of democracy, 
 based throughout upon the stout-hearted convic- 
 tion that democracy is the only rational form of 
 government, the only system of social organiza- 
 tion that has hogical finality. But this implicit 
 democracy which informs the book must be puri- 
 fied from the faults and the excesses of the demo-
 
 174 Various Views 
 
 cratic spirit as now manifested in our national life. 
 It must be a democracy that is freed from arro- 
 gance, that has substituted idealism for its pres- 
 ent dull materialism, and that has learned the 
 lesson of reverence. 
 
 We should say that the political motive must 
 figure among the leading motives of the Great 
 American Novel. Without beinga political novel 
 pure and simple, it must give adequate expression 
 to an instinct in the possession of which even the 
 Greeks did not surpass us, an instinct which is 
 in the very marrow of our bones. It may be to 
 superficial seeming a novel of domestic concerns, 
 yet it must receive color and strength from the 
 political motive, and thereby touch one of the 
 most responsive chords of our national conscious- 
 ness. Its ethical motives must be worthy of a 
 nation whose civilization is based upon Puritan- 
 ism, and whose history is a standing testimony to 
 the assimilative force of Puritan ideals. It must 
 give to social phenomena their true ethical rating, 
 and exalt to use Schopenhauer's classification 
 4 that which one is ' above that \vhich he pos- 
 sesses, or that which he appears in the popular
 
 The Great American Novel 175 
 
 estimation. It must make the reader feel how 
 far the true aristocracy of heart and intellect over- 
 shadows all the sham aristocracies of wealth and 
 of social position won by c smartness,' that dis- 
 tinctively American vice. It must enforce but 
 always by implication rather than precept the 
 Goethean lesson that he alone deserves life and 
 freedom who wins them day by day ; and the 
 other Goethean lesson so peculiarly applicable 
 to a country where degenerate sons so often take 
 the place of sturdy ancestors that we must earn 
 anew the inheritance left us by our fathers, if we 
 would really possess it. 
 
 That some such ideas as these should inform 
 the novel that shall be a reflection of what is best 
 and deepest in American life seems an almost 
 inevitable deduction from our national history and 
 circumstances. But the Great American Novel 
 must be no mere setting of philosophical abstrac- 
 tions. It must, it is true, strike deep root in the 
 soil that the centuries have prepared for our 
 civilization, but it must at the same time be a 
 concrete and vital presentation of certain indi- 
 vidual lives as they are lived, or conceivably
 
 1 76 Various Views 
 
 might be lived, at the present day. Such a novel 
 is under bonds to be an epic of individualism, for 
 democracy, if it means anything, means la car- 
 riere ouverte aux talents, means the fullest oppor- 
 tunity for the development of the individual. 
 Our imagined work must have a hero and a 
 heroine, each a typical figure ; and it would be a 
 fascinating task to attempt their characterization 
 in outline. But this task would savor of creation, 
 and is not for the critic to assume. Yet we will 
 go so far as to borrow from the poets two sugges- 
 tions, one for the man, the other for the woman. 
 Is it too much to say that Emerson adumbrated the 
 hero of our search when he wrote the simple lines 
 that stand as a motto for the essay on c Culture ' 
 * Can rules or tutors educate 
 
 The semigod whom we await ? 
 
 He must be musical, 
 
 Tremulous, impressional, 
 
 Alive to gentle influence 
 
 Of landscape and of sky, 
 
 And tender to the spirit touch 
 
 Of man's or maiden's eye : 
 
 But, to his native centre fast, 
 
 Shall into Future fuse the Past, 
 
 And the world's flowing fates in his own mould 
 recast.'
 
 The Great American Novel 177 
 
 And may we not fancy our heroine to be the 
 realization of such a type as is foreshadowed in 
 the closing pages of Tennyson's ' Princess,' such 
 a woman as shall set herself to the hero c like 
 perfect music unto noble words,' yet remain as 
 distinctly woman as he is distinctly man ?
 
 178 Various Views 
 
 THE NOVEL AND THE LIBRARY. 
 
 THE great preponderance of works of fiction 
 among the books drawn from public libraries 
 has always been a suoject of much concern to 
 librarians and other men engaged in the business 
 of public education. It comes up for discussion 
 perennially, and various are the suggestions made 
 for the correction of what is generally recognized 
 as an evil. While there is nothing to say against 
 the practice of reading fiction, abstractly con- 
 sidered, there is much to say against the novel- 
 reading habit which seems to be fastened upon 
 the majority of those who use our public libra- 
 ries. When the statistics of circulation show that 
 works of fiction constitute from fifty to eighty per 
 cent of the books that are taken for home read- 
 ing, there is certainly some reason to think that 
 the library is regarded as a source of entertain- 
 ment rather than of public education, and some 
 reason to question the wisdom of taxing the peo- 
 ple at large for such a purpose. Even if careful
 
 The Novel and the Library 179 
 
 consideration of the whole subject convinces us 
 that a library, put chiefly to such uses, is better 
 than no library at all, and still on the whole a 
 worthy object of public support, it is certainly 
 obligatory upon those who control the supply of 
 free books to use all possible vigilance in min- 
 imizing the evil of thoughtless reading, and in 
 encouraging the literary and studious tastes of 
 readers. 
 
 Very often the statistics themselves disguise 
 the evil which they connot wholly conceal. A 
 library which reports sixty per cent of fiction 
 among the books circulated will very likely re- 
 port also from ten to fifteen per cent of juvenile 
 literature (most of which is fiction), and from five 
 to ten per cent of books in foreign languages, 
 of which novels form the larger fraction. Some 
 librarians regard this condition of affairs with 
 complacency, and, while seizing every opportu- 
 tunity that is offered to encourage the reading of 
 serious books, still hold to the view which was 
 advocated by the late W. F. Poole the view 
 that most of these novel-readers would read 
 nothing at all unless they could get what they 
 wanted, and that it is well for them to acquire
 
 i8o Various Views 
 
 the reading habit even if a wiser judgment dis- 
 approves of their habitual selection of books. 
 There is much to be said for this view, and for 
 its corollary that the exercise of the reading habit 
 in any form tends to bring about a gradual ele- 
 vation of literary taste, especially if the reader 
 be supplied all along with gentle and unobtrusive 
 incitements to the acquisition of better standards 
 and broader interests. This sort of stimulus has 
 to be applied tactfully, and it is a distinctive 
 characteristic of the good librarian that he knows 
 how to apply it with judgment and without ruf- 
 fling the reader's temper. The natural man, who 
 has outgrown the years of tutelage, resents being 
 practised upon by others for his own good, and, 
 although he may be led to the water, he must be 
 left to believe that he is drinking it of his own 
 volition. 
 
 The subject of fiction in the public library 
 has recently come up for renewed discussion in 
 connection with a report from Springfield, Massa- 
 chusetts, according to which the librarian, during 
 four years, has reduced the circulation of fiction 
 by about one-fourth. This may not seem strange 
 news to the general reader, but to those who know
 
 The Novel and the Library 181 
 
 anything of library work from its professional side, 
 the report is so startling that it seems almost sen- 
 sational. One librarian says it is what Lord 
 Dundreary would have called a c staggerer.' Ex- 
 perience shows the percentage of fiction to be so 
 nearly uniform from year to year that a change of 
 as little as five per cent would excite comment. 
 Naturally, then, a change (and for the better) of 
 something like five times that percentage is a 
 cause for both surprise and curious interest. By 
 just what means so great a reduction of novel- 
 reading has been brought about we do not know, 
 but so gratifying a result is sure to excite the 
 spirits of both inquiry and emulation in the breasts 
 of librarians all over the country. 
 
 There are many devices of the obvious sort 
 for the lowering of the percentage of fiction and 
 the raising of the percentage of serious reading, 
 and these have been used by all good librarians in 
 the United States during the quarter-century that 
 librarianship has been recognized as one of the 
 professions. They include such things as the lim- 
 ited supplying of novels and the liberal supplying 
 of better books, the publication of annotated and 
 descriptive lists upon special subjects, the cooper-
 
 182 Various Views 
 
 ation of librarians with teachers in the work of 
 the schools, the opening of the library shelves to 
 easy access on the part of the public, and the 
 judicious use of personal counsel on the subject 
 of reading. But there seems to be a rather 
 narrow limit to the efficacy of any of these de- 
 vices, or of all of them together ; if they have 
 proved adequate to effect the reduction reported 
 from Springfield, the case is as surprising as it is 
 exceptional, and few librarians will be hopeful of 
 accomplishing similar results by such means. 
 What we wish now to consider are certain 
 methods of a farther-reaching and more radical 
 sort that have either been put into operation of late 
 years here and there, or that have been suggested 
 by the recent revival of interest in the discussion. 
 \ Mr. Herbert Putnam, who by virtue of his 
 official position is the leader of the profession of 
 librarianship in America, makes a suggestion that 
 may be pronounced radical, but that commends 
 itself to the sober intelligence after the first shock 
 of surprise is over. It is, simply, that no works 
 of fiction be purchased by public libraries for at 
 least a year after publication. Nothing could be 
 more sensible than the following words :
 
 The Novel and the Library 183 
 
 ' There is, however, a demand for fiction which I do 
 not believe can legitimately be met by the public library. 
 That is the demand for the latest new novel merely be- 
 cause it is the latest new novel. We all read current 
 novels also and enjoy and profit by them. But the de- 
 mand for them is largely artificial, for a purpose merely 
 social, and it is apt to be transitory No free library can 
 meet it adequately, and the attempt to meet it is an 
 expense and annoyance to the reader and expense and 
 burden to itself.' 
 
 The exclusion of the newest fiction from the 
 library shelves would doubtless occasion a great 
 outcry, but the loss to the public would be more 
 imaginary than real. Every librarian knows how 
 hollow is the pretence of meeting the popular de- 
 mand for the novels of the day. To supply that 
 demand would entail an expenditure that no 
 librarian could sanction. Take such a novel, 
 for example, as 4 The Crisis,' and such a library, 
 for example, as that of Chicago. Probably five 
 hundred people were daily clamoring for that 
 particular novel during the weeks that immedi- 
 ately followed its publication. To satisfy them, 
 it would have been necessary to purchase several 
 thousands of copies, with the absolute certainty 
 that next year they would be collecting dust upon 
 the shelves, if not actually consigned to the
 
 184 Various Views 
 
 lumber-room. The satisfaction of an ephemeral 
 fancy of this sort is an absolutely illegitimate de- 
 mand to make upon any public library. The 
 only library that has a right to spend money in 
 this reckless fashion is the private enterprise of 
 the Mudie type, which exists for the special 
 purpose of catering to the taste of the moment. 
 What such a library as the Chicago institution 
 actually does in the case of a novel like 4 The 
 Crisis ' is to purchase forty or fifty copies of the 
 work, and supply one applicant out of every two 
 or three hundred. c In proposing to supply such 
 a novel,' says Mr. Putnam, c the library deludes 
 the public and reduces its capacity for service 
 really serviceable.' It does not really supply 
 the demand, and succeeds only in gratifying an 
 occasional applicant at the cost of creating ex- 
 asperation in the breasts of the thousands who, 
 knowing that the book is in the library, ask for 
 it from day to day until they desist from sheer 
 weariness. 
 
 We are inclined to think, on the whole, that 
 every public library would be well-advised in 
 adopting Mr. Putnam's suggestion, thus forcing 
 its patrons to take, as far as the library is con-
 
 The Novel and the Library 185 
 
 cerned, Emerson's well-known advice against 
 reading books that have not kept alive for at 
 least a year. Using ' The Crisis' once more for 
 our illustration, it is safe to say that in a few years 
 the demand for that excellent story will have 
 fallen to normal proportions. It will still be asked 
 for by a few people, and it will be as proper to pro- 
 vide copies to be read as it is proper to provide 
 copies of ' The Spy.' This, of course, presents 
 an extreme case, for, besides the two or three 
 novels that a capricious public marks for its favor 
 every season, there are two or three hundred 
 others of merit sufficient to entitle their claims 
 to be recognized. But the reasoning to be em- 
 ployed is similar in all the cases ; the demand 
 for current fiction is essentially temporary and 
 artificial, and it is doubtful if it be the policy of 
 wisdom to put into a public library any books 
 for which there may not be some reasonable de- 
 mand year after year. 
 
 The librarian who is unwilling to make him- 
 self disliked by refusing to supply the public 
 with current novels may find a sort of way out 
 of the difficulty by adopting a plan which has 
 already been successfully operated in a few
 
 i86 Various Views 
 
 places. This is the plan of opening a special 
 department of new fiction, buying enough books 
 to meet the demand, and making a small charge 
 for their use. The doctrinaire objection that all 
 the services of a public library must be free may 
 be met by stating the obvious fact that this par- 
 ticular service is impossible unless it be made 
 self-supporting. The fee might be a very small 
 one much less than that charged by private 
 libraries and yet sufficient to make the books 
 thus circulated pay for themselves. The aver- 
 age novel costs the library rather less than one 
 dollar ; it may be in constant use for a year or 
 more before it is worn out ; if it is made to bring 
 in two cents a week during that year, the trans- 
 action will be fair to all parties no appreciable 
 burden, certainly, upon the reader, and no burden 
 upon the budget except on the score of library 
 service. At the end of the book's career, it will 
 have provided entertainment for possibly fifty 
 families, at practically no cost to the library; it 
 will have paid for itself, and may be thrown 
 away with a good conscience. If the public 
 library is, in any real sense, to provide its patrons 
 with the latest novels, we believe that this is the
 
 The Novel and the Library 187 
 
 only legitimate way of doing it. But we are 
 sufficiently tainted with the educational theory 
 of the library to think Mr. Putnam's plan, after 
 all, the one better deserving to be pursued. 
 
 The two suggestions thus considered are the 
 only ones that go to the root of the matter. 
 Other suggestions are of the nature of ingenious 
 devices or persuasive methods. One of the 
 best of them is the two-card system which gives 
 every card-holder the right to draw two books 
 at the same time, only one of which may be a 
 work of fiction. This encourages collateral 
 reading of the serious kind, and is said to secure 
 good results. Practical librarians are now gen- 
 erally learning how much good may be done by 
 such things as open shelves, special bibliographies 
 of timely interest, talks with teachers and school 
 children, object-lessons in model collections of 
 standard literature, the encouragement of clubs 
 and study-classes, and the judicious selection 
 of the fiction that is provided for circulation. 
 These means are all praiseworthy, and are, 
 in their aggregate employment, productive of 
 marked benefit. And, in all this discussion, it 
 must not be forgotten that the reading of good
 
 i88 Various Views 
 
 fiction is something more than entertainment, 
 that it is a study of one of the great forms of 
 creative literature, and one of the most potent 
 agencies whereby the sympathies may be quick- 
 ened, the horizon enlarged, the higher interests 
 aroused, and culture attained. We have forever 
 passed the day when thoughtful people could 
 condemn the reading of fiction as such ; we 
 have come to understand for good that the best 
 novels are among the best books there are, how- 
 ever much we may deprecate the reading of the 
 shallow and sensational sorts of fiction.
 
 The Drama as Art 189 
 
 THE DRAMA AS ART. 
 
 EVERY now and then, the consciousness of that 
 section of the public which is provided with such 
 uncomfortable things as ideals becomes stirred to 
 the pitch of indignation in contemplation of the 
 degradation to which some form of artistic en- 
 deavor is subjected by the hard conditions that a 
 commercial age ever seeks to impose, and usually 
 succeeds in imposing, upon the production of the 
 art in question. At one time it is literature, at 
 another music, at still another painting that comes 
 up for discussion ; again, thanks to the stimulus 
 of a lecture by Mr. Israel Zangwill, it is dramatic 
 art upon which the fierce light of criticism beats. 
 That the art of the playwright will be bettered 
 by this light or, to vary the metaphor, by the 
 destructive distillation of the accompanying heat 
 is more than doubtful ; but it is well that some 
 one should from time to time call public atten- 
 tion sharply to the low estate into which the stage 
 has fallen, for if the ideal find no spokesman
 
 igo Various Views 
 
 when hardest pressed, its condition is indeed 
 hopeless. Mr. Zangwill, who has thrown him- 
 self bravely into the breach, deserves warm grati- 
 tude for what he has been saying, and we trust 
 will keep on saying, for the substance of his con- 
 tention is of demonstrable nature, and the eternal 
 years of God belong to the truths that are being 
 given so pointed an expression. 
 
 Like all speakers of the unvarnished truth, 
 Mr. Zangwill finds that his message is anything 
 but acceptable in many quarters. To say noth- 
 ing of the wounded susceptibilities of dramatic 
 managers, and of the men who fabricate the kind 
 of play that the managers want, the journeymen 
 who write 'dramatic criticism' for the newspaper 
 press are quite comically outraged by his out- 
 spoken remarks. Many of them have been saying 
 much the same thing, in a more guarded way, all 
 along ; but they profess themselves outraged by 
 the antics of this bull in the china-shop of modern 
 vaudeville, and cheap farce, and tawdry melo- 
 drama. They would roar you as gently as any 
 sucking-dove, but they would not for the world 
 speak the plain truth in plain words; and as for 
 the scintillating words and keen thrusts that flash
 
 The Drama as Art 191 
 
 from Mr. Zangwill's armory, they are wholly 
 incapable of forging and wielding the needed 
 weapons. Indeed, the lot of these gentlemen 
 who write about the nightly happenings of the 
 stage is no pleasant one. They have to deaden 
 whatever artistic conscience they may possess, to 
 invent euphemistic phrases for the characterization 
 of bad plays, to pretend that the contemporary 
 English stage is interesting when they know in 
 their heart of hearts that it is not, and, above all, 
 to simulate a virtuous and fiery indignation when 
 some dramatist of genius traverses the petty con- 
 ventions of an artificial seemliness and probes 
 human life to its depths. The treatment accorded 
 to Dr. Ibsen during the past ten years by nearly 
 all newspaper critics stands in everlasting and 
 shameful evidence of their shallow incompetence 
 as a tribe. 
 
 We are glad, then, that Mr. Zangwill has 
 stirred the waters in which these criticasters dis- 
 port themselves, and has called widespread public 
 attention to a few home truths concerning plays 
 and playgoers. He has said nothing new about 
 the subject there is nothing new to say but 
 he has placed a pretty wit at the service of a few
 
 ig2 Various Views 
 
 of the old ideas, and some of his observations are 
 pointed enough to pierce the utmost thickness of 
 the Philistine hide. There is penetrative energy 
 in such phrases as the following: 'The modern 
 receipt for a successful play is a paying compound 
 of snivel, drivel, and devil.' 4 The old actors are 
 dead and buried, but the plays are dead and 
 printed. You can buy them at the price of eggs, 
 twenty-five cents a dozen, and they are mostly 
 bad.' 4 The critic no more represents the simple 
 and occasional playgoer than a congressman rep- 
 resents the baby he kisses.' The taste of these 
 sayings is dubious, but an exhibition of bad taste 
 is no new thing to Mr. ZangwilPs readers. Free^ 
 from this reproach are such acute sayings as 
 these : 4 Irving's respect for Tennyson is unique 
 in the history of the stage and of Irving.' 
 4 Ibsen's ink often runs in the veins of his char- 
 acters.' l The French stage has never lost its 
 literary tradition. We have legitimatized its chil- 
 dren, we have turned its intrigues into flirtations ; 
 but such virtue has its own reward.' The lec- 
 ture from which these excerpts are made is a sort 
 of Catling gun of epigrams, and its deadly fire is
 
 The Drama as Art 193 
 
 sustained for more than an hour with but brief 
 pretermissions. 
 
 The essential contention of this censor of a 
 degraded art is that our playmongers are apt to 
 forget that it is a form of art with which they 
 are concerned. When we think what the drama 
 has been as a factor in civilization, when we re- 
 call the noble uses to which the stage has been 
 put in other times and lands, when we reflect 
 upon the possibilities, for instruction and edifica- 
 tion, of the play which is conceived as something 
 finer than a means of amusement, we cannot but 
 view with contempt the English play which we 
 get from the theatrical syndicate and the c bad 
 shopkeepers ' of Mr. Zangwill's invective. And 
 when we realize that the drama is still treated as 
 a fine art in France and Germany, in Spain and 
 Italy, in Russia and Scandinavia, while in the 
 English-speaking countries alone it has fallen to 
 a level which makes meaningless any mention of 
 art in its discussion, we may well bow our heads 
 with shame. This is a general truth of which 
 there is no effective denying, for the occasional 
 manager of high ideals and the occasional play
 
 194 Various Views 
 
 of literary quality serve only to emphasize the 
 pass to which the majority of plays and managers 
 have come. It is no more than the simple truth 
 to say that our audiences do not want ideas in 
 their plays; they want costumes, and tricks of 
 stage-carpentry, and farcical situations ; they are 
 hugely delighted by a catchy song or an utterly 
 irrelevant dance ; they will tolerate sentiment if 
 not too delicate, and even passion if its origin be 
 not too deep within the soul ; but ideas they will 
 not have on any terms. 
 
 Is our popular artistic standard lower in mat- 
 ters pertaining to the stage than it is in matters 
 that concern the other forms of art endeavor ? 
 Mr. Zangwill thinks that it is ; but we are not 
 so sure. It is popular taste in c literature ' that 
 makes possible the existence of the class of news- 
 papers that so disgrace American civilization. 
 Surely the stage, at its basest, can do no worse 
 than that. If we seem to set up a higher stand- 
 ard for books than we do for plays, it must be 
 remembered that the bad play forces itself more 
 obtrusively upon public attention than the bad 
 book. People view the former in public, as it
 
 The Drama as Art 195 
 
 were, and it is discussed in the public press ; 
 whereas the latter is read in private, and the 
 critic usually ignores it altogether. Beneath the 
 lowest stratum of books that are thought deserv- 
 ing of mention by newspaper reviewers, there is 
 a still lower stratum that makes up the chief 
 reading of countless thousands of people, as far 
 as they read books at all. But the theatres that 
 provide the corresponding forms of cheap senti- 
 ment and vulgarity are conspicuous in the public 
 eye, and have their place in the daily or weekly 
 theatrical summaries. We doubt, then, very 
 much if the taste of the real public be any better 
 in its reading than in its acting. When we con- 
 sider music, painting, and sculpture, much the 
 same principles hold true. As in literature, so in 
 the case of these arts, we can never learn what 
 the masses really like, because we cannot readily 
 catch them (as we can at a theatre) in the act of 
 what stands to them for aesthetic contemplation. 
 But from the popularity of certain forms of 
 music, and of certain forms of the graphic arts, 
 forms in which imbecility and vulgarity seek to 
 outrival each other we may at least shrewdly
 
 196 Various Views 
 
 surmise that the taste of the dear public is here, 
 as with books and plays, in almost equally evil 
 case. 
 
 Yet when all is said, one important consider- 
 ation remains. In literature, the finest forms of 
 art are accessible to everybody. This statement 
 is also measureably true of music, and painting, 
 and sculpture. One can to a considerable ex- 
 tent come to understand the ideals of these arts 
 by the study of photographs and scores. At all 
 events, the large cities afford actual examples of 
 the highest achievements of these arts. But even 
 the large cities rarely, if ever, afford to the spec- 
 tator examples of what the art dramatic at its 
 highest can do. They may show us marvellous 
 stage-effects, but they do not show us sincerity 
 of purpose and unity of artistic endeavor. In 
 this respect, it is true that in England and Amer- 
 ica the drama stands upon a lower level than the 
 other arts. We can all read the greatest liter- 
 ature at home ; we can often hear the greatest 
 music perfectly performed ; we can view some 
 of the greatest works of painting and sculpture 
 in the originals and all of them in trustworthy
 
 The Drama as Art 197 
 
 reproduction ; but we cannot witness such pro- 
 ductions of the great plays as are to be witnessed 
 in the theatres of the European Continent. Our 
 productions may cost a great deal more, and be 
 more dazzling to most of the senses, but they 
 do not make art their foremost consideration, 
 and they justify the reproach that in our time 
 has fallen upon the English-speaking stage.
 
 ig8 Various Views 
 
 THE ENDOWED THEATRE. 
 
 THE recent visit of Mr. William Archer to this 
 country, for the purpose of making a close study 
 of theatrical conditions on our side of the Atlan- 
 tic, has resulted in a highly instructive series of 
 papers for the English periodical which commis- 
 sioned him to make the investigation, and has 
 also called fresh attention to, and evoked fresh 
 discussion of, a number of old questions con- 
 nected with the art of the dramatist and theatrical 
 manager. Mr. Archer is himself peculiarly well- 
 equipped for such a task as he has undertaken. 
 Among English dramatic critics he occupies a 
 high place. He has both knowledge and sober- 
 ness, and these qualities combined make him a 
 far more significant writer of dramatic criticism 
 than the effeminately whimsical Mr. Beerbohm, 
 the sensationally sentimental Mr. Scott, and the 
 audaciously paradoxical Mr. Shaw. Even the 
 writing of Mr. Walkley, brilliant and fascinating 
 as it is, lacks the solidity of Mr. Archer's criti-
 
 The Endowed Theatre 199 
 
 cism, because it does not seem to be as firmly 
 based upon the fundamental principles of dramatic 
 art, or as widely conversant with the modern 
 literature of the play. 
 
 Among the many evils connected with the 
 English-speaking stage of our own time, Mr. 
 Archer marks out the l actor-manager,' the 'star 
 system,' and the 4 long run '. for his most em- 
 phatic denunciation. In the address which he 
 gave in this country before the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury Club of Chicago and Columbia University 
 of New York, he sought to answer the question, 
 4 What can be done for the drama ? ' and bore 
 down upon these three evils with much weight. 
 We imagine, however, that for his audiences 
 upon these two occasions he was slaying the 
 slain, for our cultivated public hardly needs to be 
 persuaded that stars and long runs and actor- 
 managers are directly inimical to all artistic 
 endeavor for the betterment of our theatrical 
 conditions. We are as familiar as Englishmen 
 are with the bad influence of these things, or, 
 if we have not suffered as much from the actor- 
 manager, we have for our very own the additional 
 evil of the ' theatrical syndicate,' which more
 
 200 Various Views 
 
 than tips the scale (this to be taken ironically) in 
 our favor. 
 
 We must, however, hasten to dislodge from 
 the minds of our readers the notion that Mr. 
 Archer was merely destructive in his criticism. 
 Nothing could be farther than this from the truth. 
 Unlike Mr. Zangwill, our English visitor of a 
 little earlier date, who dealt with the same gen- 
 eral subject of the low theatrical estate of England 
 and America, Mr. Archer had definite things to 
 propose. And if his address was without the 
 pointed epigrams and the flashes of humor that 
 made Mr. Zangwill so entertaining a speaker, it 
 provided ample compensation for the lack of 
 those superficialities in its rational suggestions, 
 enforced as these were by examples of what other 
 countries have actually * done for the drama.' 
 In a general way, Mr. Archer was for the estab- 
 lishment of an endowed theatre, but with a dif- 
 ference from the usual speculations upon this 
 subject, in that the suggested endowment was to 
 be private rather than municipal, a matter for the 
 voluntary enterprise of subscribers rather than for 
 the forced enterprise of tax-payers. Considered 
 from the point of view of probability, we agree
 
 The Endowed Theatre 201 
 
 with Mr. Archer in looking forward to a private 
 rather than a public endowment, although we 
 think it would be entirely proper for the munici- 
 pality to act in such a matter. And we need 
 hardly remind our readers that we have always 
 advocated the endowed theatre, as we have always 
 urged the desirability of the endowed newspaper. 
 One of these days, moreover, the idea is going 
 to take practical shape in the mind of some phil- 
 anthropist, who will prefer to make his gift to 
 the public in this way rather than to establish a 
 new hospital or art gallery or public library. 
 
 Mr. Archer spoke at considerable length of 
 the successful way in which certain German 
 theatres notably the Deutsches Theater of 
 Berlin and the Volkstheater of Vienna have 
 dealt with this problem of supplying the 'inner 
 public ' the public which wants good art, which 
 demands that ideas shall be set above accessories 
 in its plays with its dramatic entertainment. 
 There is no reason why such theatres, the product 
 of endowment and subscription, should not be 
 duplicated in our own country, and even prove 
 successful as commercial enterprises, no reason, 
 that is, unless it be that our own c inner public '
 
 2O2 Various Views 
 
 is not large enough. There is the rub, no doubt. 
 The German public, the French public, the 
 Italian public, the Scandinavian public, all con- 
 trive, in any city of considerable or even moderate 
 size, to support a stage in healthful activity, and 
 this is just what the English public has hitherto 
 failed to do. They have a good inherited tradi- 
 tion ; we have cared so little for ours that we 
 have lost it altogether. Mr. Henry Fuller, who 
 has said some unpalatable things about our lack 
 of artistic aptitudes, would probably observe (in 
 his not too serious way) that it is not in us, 
 racially or temperamentally, really to care for 
 dramatic art, or to foster it in the fashion of the 
 Continental peoples. Perhaps it is not ; but the 
 experiment is worth trying, and as long as it re- 
 mains untried, we shall have hopes. The sav- 
 ing element of the situation may not impossibly 
 come from the fact that we are not as English 
 a people as our name implies; that we have so 
 much admixture of other strains as to make the 
 case a new one, not to be judged by the analo- 
 gies of the past. Our immigrants often practice 
 segregation themselves, but their children be- 
 come pretty well blended into the common
 
 The Endowed Theatre 203 
 
 American nationality, and who can tell a priori 
 just what aptitudes and potentialities will char- 
 acterize the resulting race. 
 
 What we want of our stage, and what we be- 
 lieve will be given us at no distant day, at least 
 in our largest cities, by endowment or otherwise, 
 is, in a word, this : We want a playhouse with 
 no stars, no popular successes, no waste in the 
 form of expensive unessentials. We want upon 
 the boards of this playhouse a body of trained 
 and conscientious actors, capable of playing 
 many parts every year, bound to the institution 
 both by loyalty to its fundamental idea and by 
 such material inducements as shall insure an 
 honorable career and a comfortable retirement. 
 We want this playhouse to have a repertory of 
 the most varied sort, catholic enough to include 
 every genre of meritorious dramatic writing, but 
 rigorously excluding what is sensational, childish, 
 or merely vulgar. We want it to present the 
 classical drama of English and foreign literatures 
 frequently enough to give those who wish it an 
 opportunity to become acquainted with the mas- 
 terpieces of ancient and modern dramatic art. 
 We want it to be constantly on the lookout for
 
 204 Various Views 
 
 promising works by new writers, extending to 
 them the frankest recognition, yet never making 
 a fad of any one of them, or any school of them. 
 We want it to be both grave and gay, a place to 
 which we may resort for diversion and for edifi- 
 cation alike. We want it to be a place in which 
 young persons may learn something about life, 
 and acquire standards of taste, yet a place from 
 which young persons should sometimes be ex- 
 cluded, not by administrative prescription but 
 rather by the judgment and discrimination of 
 their elders. Finally, we want it to be a place 
 in which, while nothing is neglected that will 
 heighten the legitimate interest of the drama, 
 ideas shall be paramount to all other considera- 
 tions in the selection and the mounting of the 
 pieces to be produced. 
 
 It does not seem to us that the plan thus out- 
 lined is beyond the range of the immediately 
 practicable. In New York and Chicago cer- 
 tainly, in Boston and Philadelphia possibly, the 
 public that desires such a theatre is large enough 
 to justify its establishment. There must be 
 thousands of people in those cities who would 
 support such a theatre to the extent of from ten
 
 The Endowed Theatre 205 
 
 to one hundred dollars each, every year. What 
 is needed is the organizing power necessary to 
 bring these people into cooperation, with possi- 
 bly the stimulus of the provisional gift of a site 
 and a building. We notice that Mr. Howells, 
 while commenting on the whole favorably upon 
 this suggestion, seems to think that the well-to-do 
 class of people who would control the manage- 
 ment of such a theatre might impose a censorship 
 inimicable to the free development of the drama. 
 ' In a theatre founded or controlled by them, no 
 play criticising or satirizing society could be 
 favored,' he says, and instances c An Enemy of 
 the People,' 'Arms and the Man,' 'Die Weber,' 
 and ' Die Ehre,' as plays that could not hope for 
 presentation. This seems to us the merest bug- 
 bear, and the force of the criticism is certainly 
 not increased by the reference to ' what has 
 happened in some of our higher institutions of 
 learning.' Mr. Howells make a much happier 
 suggestion when he finds an analogy between 
 the subscription theatre and the subscription 
 lecture organizations which exist in many parts 
 of the country, and which, for a moderate fee, 
 give themselves 'the pleasure of seven or eight
 
 206 Various Views 
 
 lectures during the season, from men who are 
 allowed to speak their minds. With a subscrip- 
 tion of twenty-five dollars they could have as 
 many plays, from dramatists who also spoke 
 their minds ; and if the experiment were tried 
 in ten or twenty places, we should have at once 
 a free theatre, where good work could make that 
 appeal to the public which it can now do only on 
 almost impossible terms.'
 
 A Pedagogical Prescription 207 
 
 M. BRUNETlfcRE'S PEDAGOGICAL 
 
 PRESCRIPTION. 
 
 THE visit to this country of M. Ferdinand 
 Brunetiere is one of the most important 'literary' 
 events of recent years. In significance and in- 
 fluence, it may be compared only with Matthew 
 Arnold's visit of fifteen years earlier; for M. 
 Brunetiere is as distinctly the first of living French 
 critics as Arnold was of English critics then 
 living. This does not in either case mean it 
 never means that any one man can be an ab- 
 solute ruler in the critical domain, or that all of his 
 judgments must be taken as finally authoritative. 
 But it does mean, with both the Englishman and 
 the Frenchman, that an unusually successful 
 effort to eliminate the personal equation, and to 
 see things as they absolutely are, has invested the 
 judgments of these two men with a degree of 
 authority hardly to be claimed for any others of 
 their generation. 
 
 In one of his New York lectures, M. Brune-
 
 208 Various Views 
 
 tiere said that no one had followed more anx- 
 iously or more disinterestedly than himself the 
 French literary movement of the past score of 
 years. He then added, in a passage which may 
 be taken as the keynote of his entire critical 
 career : 
 
 ' The first condition of disinterestedness is never to 
 follow one's tastes, and to begin by distrusting the things 
 which give us pleasure. The most delicious dishes are 
 not the most wholesome; we never fail to distinguish be- 
 tween our cooks and our doctors. In the moral world 
 the beginning of virtue is to distrust what is most natural 
 to us, and the same is true in the intellectual world. To 
 distrust what we like is the beginning of wisdom in art 
 and literature.' 
 
 These words represent so accurately what has 
 always been our attitude toward the fundamental 
 doctrine of criticism that we hardly need, in so 
 many words, to express our concurrence with 
 M. Brunetiere in this all-important matter. That 
 the value of literary work must be determined 
 with reference to law and not to caprice, that 
 the only valid critical judgments are those which 
 are free from the taint of subjectivity, and that 
 personal opinion represents only a rudimentary 
 stage in the development of criticism, are propo- 
 sitions that mean substantially the same thing,
 
 A Pedagogical Prescription 209 
 
 and that it is the first duty of the critic to recog- 
 nize and to justify. What is commonly called 
 4 subjective criticism ' may be, and frequently is, 
 reading of the most delightful sort, but it is not 
 criticism in any real sense, for its aim is the 
 illumination of the recesses of the writer's own 
 mind, rather than of the work held up for ex- 
 amination. It is always pleasant to follow the 
 play of a finely sensitive intellect about some 
 production of literary art, but it does not help 
 us, except in a very roundabout way, to under- 
 stand that production in its essence. 
 
 The function of opinion in criticism is pre- 
 cisely" what it is in any other branch of science. 
 It assists in the framing of hypotheses, which 
 may, in their turn, lead us by tentative paths to 
 the truth. But to make of opinion an end in 
 itself is a procedure as grotesquely inadequate in 
 aesthetics as it would be in physics. What would 
 be the present position of natural science if its 
 masters had remained content with their neat hy- 
 potheses, and had spared themselves the arduous 
 tasks of modification by experiment and of ulti- 
 mate verification ? Gravitation and evolution 
 and the conservation of energy were once matters 
 
 14
 
 2io Various Views 
 
 of opinion, with no binding force whatever. If 
 Newton and Darwin and Helmholtz had been 
 content to put these things forward as opinions, 
 the world would soon have forgotten their names. 
 But the opinions became unquestionable truths 
 when they were enforced by the application of a 
 rigorous scientific method, and we honor the men 
 who established them for the very reason that 
 those men knew the assertion of opinion to be 
 but the beginning of knowledge. 
 
 It is doubtless true that the science of aes- 
 thetics offers a peculiarly difficult field for inves- 
 tigation, and that critical opinion often requires 
 a long time to ripen into knowledge. But we 
 must not for that reason imagine that there is 
 any finality of opinion, that its character is other 
 than transitory or provisional. The subject may 
 be illustrated by the history of the reputation of 
 every great writer who has been long enough 
 before the public to acquire recognition among 
 the fixed stars of literature. M. Brunetiere took 
 Racine for the special illustration of this thesis. 
 
 ' M. France said: " We know only ourselves. What- 
 ever you are trying to explain, you are only expounding 
 yourself. Shakespeare alone has known Shakespeare."
 
 A Pedagogical Prescription 211 
 
 I answered M. France that his argument that we cannot 
 go outside of ourselves proves too much, as it applies to 
 our knowledge of the physical world as well as to our 
 knowledge of other minds, and I added that one of the 
 men who knew Victor Hugo least was Victor Hugo. 
 M. Lemaitre says: "I have an opinion of Racine. You 
 have another. Good, that makes two. Perhaps there 
 is another; that makes three. There may be an infinity 
 of them. Why should one submit to another? It is 
 much more amusing to have three opinions of Racine 
 than one, still more amusing to have an infinite num- 
 ber." I answered M. Lemaitre that no doubt there were 
 several opinions about Racine, but that he, the master, 
 with his elegant, "malicious," and subtle spirit, exag- 
 gerated the differences of human opinions. It is certainly 
 agreed that Racine is a great man, that he is a higher 
 dramatic genius than Voltaire, for instance, and a lower 
 one than Corneille, and such general agreements are all 
 we need for our kind of criticism." 
 
 Here the discussion ends, as far as Racine is 
 concerned j but the speaker might easily have 
 gone on to show that the position of Racine is 
 not thus fixed merely because of a practically 
 unanimous consensus of opinion, but that this 
 consensus itself is the resultant of forces by 
 which the judgment of every serious critic is 
 more or less consciously determined, that it fol- 
 lows from the very laws of literary art. 
 
 A writer in the New York 'Nation' has
 
 212 Various Views 
 
 undertaken to traverse this fundamental doctrine 
 of M. Brunetiere's creed. Taking for his text the 
 very paragraph that we quoted at the beginning 
 of the present article, he says that the 'analogy 
 of the delicious but unwholesome dishes is a little 
 misleading.' He then goes on as follows: 
 
 The primary object of eating is to nourish the body, 
 not to please the palate. . . . With the work of art, on 
 the other hand, pleasingness, in the broad sense of the 
 word, is the final test of excellence. Its usefulness is to 
 please. There is no higher court of appeal, no doctor 
 with exact scientific tests who has a right to pronounce 
 it good though disagreeable, or bad though acceptable 
 to the taste. It is true that the moralist often arrogates 
 to himself this right, but he is only a fallible brother 
 expressing an opinion. One is a moralist one's self.' 
 
 The shallowness of this reasoning is so apparent 
 that it need not be taken very seriously. It is 
 the old plea for hedonism transferred to the plane 
 of aesthetics, and is defended by the old familiar 
 logomachies. We are quite content to admit 
 that aesthetic law can have no higher claim to 
 authority than moral law, and should even have 
 been willing to allow that the moral law was the 
 better defined and the more firmly grounded of 
 the two. 'One' may be l a moralist one's self,' 
 if he please, but the consequences of this sort of
 
 A Pedagogical Prescription 213 
 
 individualism, if put into practice, are likely to 
 be distressing. So, in assthetical matters, one 
 may be a critic one's self, to his heart's content, 
 but his position, if he set up his private judgment 
 against the collective judgment of the best in- 
 formed in a succession of generations, will not 
 prove exactly comfortable. 
 
 But our individualist critic practically abandons 
 his own position in a passage that soon follows : 
 
 ' Of course this reasoning does not apply to the young, 
 whose tastes are in the formative stage, or to the men- 
 tally indolent who have never reflected on their own 
 tastes. In the interest of education such persons may 
 very well take to heart the maxim to distrust their own 
 taste. But it is hardly to be supposed that M. Brune- 
 tiere meant to offer a pedagogical prescription." 
 
 Is it not ? In our opinion, that is precisely what 
 M. Brunetiere did mean to offer. Most people 
 are either young or mentally indolent as far as 
 the appreciation of literature is concerned. To 
 like a book is one thing, and to know whether 
 or not it is a good book, and why, is quite 
 another thing. It is the natural man whom M. 
 Brunetiere seeks to warn, not the man of trained 
 perceptions and sympathies. We presume that 
 M. Brunetiere has a great deal of confidence in
 
 214 Various Views 
 
 his own likes and dislikes, the reason being that 
 a strenuous process of analysis has transferred 
 them from the plane of prejudice to the plane of 
 deliberate and reasoned judgment. And it is 
 just because he knows so amply from his own 
 experience how great is the difference between 
 a prejudice and a judgment, between the likes 
 and dislikes of the natural man and those of the 
 critic whose historical sense has been developed 
 by the widest reading and who has learned to 
 substitute scientific method for empiricism, it is 
 just because of these facts that he offers us the 
 'pedagogical prescription' so much needed in 
 this country, which has as yet produced but little 
 critical writing in the high and true sense of that 
 term.
 
 Critic as Picker and Stealer 215 
 
 THE CRITIC AS PICKER AND 
 STEALER. 
 
 CERTAIN of the abuses of contemporary period- 
 ical criticism are energetically set forth by Mr. 
 William Knight in ' The Nineteenth Century.' 
 Mr. Knight's paper is entitled 4 Criticism as 
 Theft,' and discusses the various forms of filch- 
 ing, more or less disguised, by which the jour- 
 nalistic hack gets the attention of the public, 
 and profits at the expense of those upon whom 
 he preys. The author sometimes strains a point 
 to bring the abuse with which he is at the 
 moment occupied under the category of robbery, 
 as when he says that the author who makes a 
 valuable contribution to literature is entitled to a 
 reward, and adds : l If the return of that reward 
 is prevented by capricious, or ignorant, or reck- 
 less criticism, the critic has stolen from the 
 author, quite as truly as if he had robbed him of 
 his purse.' But if this practice is not theft, it is 
 something quite as bad, and deserves all the cen-
 
 216 Various Views 
 
 sure bestowed upon it. * The robbery of a just 
 reputation is much more serious than is the theft 
 of money, or of material property ; and the unjust 
 praise and the false dispraise of the critic is one 
 of the worst kinds of theft that this world has 
 had to endure.' Coleridge took much the same 
 view of this matter when he thus characterized 
 critics of the wantonly malignant type : 
 
 'No private grudge they need, no personal spite: 
 The viva sectio is its own delight ! 
 All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, 
 Disinterested thieves of our good name: 
 Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor's fame.' 
 
 The abuse becomes even more serious when 
 not merely ignorance or reckless flippancy, but 
 partisanship or personal bias inspires the review 
 of some book. This is what Mr. Knight says 
 about it: 'Many a review philosophical, po- 
 litical, scientific, theological, and literary has 
 hitherto been tainted with this bias. An a priori 
 judgment has been passed on the merits of a 
 book which the critic had not read. It has been 
 judged by its title, its contents, its preface, or its 
 author's name. Every literary man must have 
 seen scores of such notices, pert, opinionative, 
 shallow, useless; or, on the other hand, fulsome,
 
 Critic as Picker and Stealer 217 
 
 and therefore worse than useless.' We may 
 once more back Mr. Knight's opinion with a 
 passage from Coleridge this time a prose selec- 
 tion, but for that none the less vigorous in its 
 impeachment. 'As soon as the critic betrays 
 that he knows more of his author than the 
 author's publications could have told him ; as 
 soon as from this more intimate knowledge, 
 elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the 
 slightest trait against the author ; his censure 
 instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms 
 personal insults. He ceases to be a critic and 
 takes on him the most contemptible character to 
 which a rational creature can be degraded, that 
 of a gossip, backbiter, and pasquillant : but with 
 this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, 
 the deforming passions of the world into the 
 museum ; into the very place which, next to the 
 chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary and 
 secure place of refuge ; offers abominations on 
 the altar of the Muses, and makes its sacred 
 paling the very circle in which he conjures up 
 the lying and profane spirit.' Anyone who has 
 occasion to do much reading in contemporary 
 criticism may often discern between the lines of
 
 2i8 Various Views 
 
 a review some such syllogism as the following : 
 No person holding certain opinions upon politics, 
 or art, or religion, can possibly say anything 
 worth heeding upon any subject whatsoever. 
 N. N. is a person holding such opinions. This 
 book of his upon, let us say, hydraulic engineer- 
 ing, must therefore receive short shrift and no 
 mercy. This illustrates, it is true, an exaggerated 
 form of the evil under discussion; a more com- 
 mon form is that in which some unimportant 
 passages in the book, obnoxious to the critic, are 
 singled out for attack, while the substance of the 
 work is utterly ignored. 
 
 Another form of current 4 criticism,' which 
 comes nearer than those as yet mentioned to 
 being theft in the literal sense, is thus described 
 by Mr. Knight : c A critical " notice," written 
 to display mere deftness or nimbleness of wit, 
 ingenious repartee, power of sarcasm or rejoinder, 
 is not criticism at all. Suppose a nimble-witted 
 person skims a book ; turning its pages in a list- 
 less mood, he finds some information that is new 
 to him. He notes this, and goes on to read 
 more. He finds some errors, and then proceeds 
 to use the information, which he has received
 
 Critic as Picker and Stealer 219 
 
 from the book itself, against its author ; just as a 
 clever surface society-talker, wholly ignorant of 
 a subject, can often " pick the brains " of one 
 who knows it, while he is speaking, and give him 
 back in a torrent of verbosity the very ideas he 
 was slowly and modestly expressing.' There is 
 a good deal of this sort of fraudulent criticism 
 afloat, and some writers acquire a critical reputa- 
 tion based almost wholly upon the cleverness 
 with which they succeed in ' showing off' with 
 the subject of some book for a text. The pas- 
 sage just quoted reminds us of an incident re- 
 cently related. A journalist who had seen a good 
 many varieties of life at close quarters spent an 
 evening with an eminent novelist. After a while, 
 the novelist said to his guest : c I want your opinion 
 of a story I have just written.' The story was 
 read, and approval duly expressed. c But,' said 
 the journalist, 'the substance of your story seems 
 strangely familiar to me.' ' Yes,' replied the 
 novelist, 4 you told me the story yourself.' 
 
 Perhaps the only sort of ' criticism ' that may 
 in the strictest sense be accounted theft is that 
 in which the reviewer relies mainly upon the 
 reviews already published by others of his craft.
 
 220 Various Views 
 
 To parade as one's own the opinions of others, 
 to catch the drift of criticism as expounded in 
 the more authoritative journals, reproducing its 
 leading ideas in slightly altered form, is a practice 
 for which no defence is possible. The critic who 
 takes his profession seriously will, of course, 
 carefully refrain from reading what others have 
 said of a book until he has framed his own inde- 
 pendent judgment of the work in question, and 
 even then will have to be constantly on his guard 
 to resist the natural impulse to make his dicta 
 conform to those which he cannot keep from 
 filtering into his consciousness in a hundred in- 
 sidious ways. Even the shifting currents of public 
 opinion upon the larger aspects of literary art are 
 a constant source of danger to the critic, however 
 conscientious he may be. When current literature 
 shows a distinct trend toward realism, or roman- 
 ticism, or didacticism, or sexualism, it is difficult 
 to avoid being swayed by the movement, however 
 fixed may be the critic's canons, and however 
 stoutly he may be prepared to do battle for the 
 lasting as against the ephemeral. We still get a 
 good deal of bell-wether guidance, even from the 
 best-intentioned, for critics are as gregarious as
 
 Critic as Picker and Stealer 221 
 
 other people, and find it quite as hard to run 
 counter to the prevailing literary fashions. 
 
 With one part of Mr. Knight's argument we 
 are unable to agree. He condemns the review 
 which is frankly descriptive and extractive on the 
 ground that it is a theft from both author and 
 public ; from the former because it injures his 
 sales, from the latter because it deprives of the 
 opportunity of knowing, 4 in its integrity,' what 
 the author has to say. It is a curious logical 
 twist that can find robbery in the act of summar- 
 izing a book for readers many of whom are too 
 busy to get at it in any other way. As far as 
 our observation goes, such />n?m- writing stimu- 
 lates rather than retards the sale of the books 
 selected for treatment; the persons who are con- 
 tent to accept the part for the whole are mostly 
 those who would never dream of purchasing the 
 book concerned, while, on the other hand, the 
 number of those who are by a skilful summary 
 made curious to know the book, and actually 
 purchase it, make up many times over for the 
 few who might have become purchasers had it 
 not been for the friendly offices of the reviewer 
 in selecting for them enough of its contents to
 
 222 Various Views 
 
 satisfy their curiosity. So far are we from dep- 
 recating this form of review, that we wish there 
 might be a great deal more of it. More, perhaps, 
 than from any other cause, popular criticism 
 suffers from the feeling of the critic that, however 
 lacking in knowledge, he is bound to take the 
 judicial attitude, and, instead of giving his readers 
 an idea of what the book is really like, he must 
 express a decided opinion upon its merits. As it 
 is obviously impossible for the newspaper re- 
 viewer, called upon to deal with books upon all 
 sorts of subjects, to have an opinion of any value 
 concerning most of them, it would be a decided 
 improvement for him to remain content with the 
 descriptive summary that almost any fairly intel- 
 ligent person can make. In other words, the 
 work of judical and authoritative criticism should 
 be left to the reviews that can command the 
 services of hundreds of specialists, and are known 
 to entrust to competent hands the books sent to 
 such reviews for examination.
 
 A Word for Minor Poetry 223 
 
 A WORD FOR MINOR POETRY 
 
 THE flood of verse that is produced in these 
 latter days, and that somehow finds its way into 
 print, offers a subject for serious reflection to 
 the student of literary phenomena. Nothing like 
 it was ever known before, since there never 
 before was a period in which mastery of the ele- 
 mentary technique of verse was so common a 
 possession among workers with the pen. Every 
 now and then we learn with surprise that some 
 famous scholar, whose reputation rests upon 
 strictly prosaic achievements, has often had re- 
 course to the composition of poetry as a recrea- 
 tion, and has long been dabbling in the art of 
 rhyme and metre unknown to any but his most 
 intimate associates. A few years ago, Mr. 
 Lecky published a volume of verse that de- 
 lighted all of its readers except those who based 
 their sapient judgment upon the a priori grounds 
 that so great a historian could not possibly have 
 the poetical gift ; and it was still more recently
 
 224 Various Views 
 
 that a posthumous volume by the late Professor 
 Romanes showed us that the scientific habit of 
 thought by no means precludes possession of the 
 sympathies and the sensibilities that are requisite 
 for the production of very acceptable verse. 
 Even the dry light in which the world appeared 
 to a man of Huxley's temperament did not pre- 
 vent him from penning one of the most striking 
 of the many poetical tributes evoked by the 
 death of Tennyson. Then, besides the occa- 
 sional men of eminence in other intellectual 
 fields who from time to time surprise us in this 
 agreeable way, there are the writers a very 
 numerous host who have no other distinction 
 at all, but who every year swell the list of those 
 who must be reckoned with when we estimate 
 the choral forces of English song, far removed 
 as they may be in both aim and achievement 
 from the select ranks of the soloists. 
 
 The existence of this choir invisible that is, 
 invisible to the gaze of the general public is a 
 fact persistently borne in upon the consciousness 
 of the closer student of contemporary literature. 
 The reviewer of books, in particular, whose 
 task it is to make some sort of assessment of
 
 A Word for Minor Poetry 225 
 
 from one to two hundred volumes of new verse 
 every year, is acutely aware of this multitude of 
 singing voices, and, unless he be hopelessly com- 
 mitted to a standard of judgment impossible to 
 apply in such cases, is bound, in simple fairness, 
 to recognize the sweet and sincere quality of 
 many of the notes sounded, although he knows 
 well enough that these notes will never penetrate 
 very far into the popular consciousness. If he 
 be honest, his attitude toward these bards strug- 
 gling to make themselves heard will not be in- 
 spired by a fine Horatian scorn of poetical 
 mediocrity so much as by the feeling that a good 
 deal may be said in behalf of poetry that is not 
 too bright and good for human nature's daily 
 food. There are hours and many of them 
 in our lives when we are content to browse upon 
 the meadowlands of song, and leave the peaks 
 unsealed. Even the poets that dwell upon the 
 lowest slopes of Parnassus may offer some food 
 for our spiritual sustenance. 
 
 The term 'minor poetry' is of comparatively 
 recent origin, and indicates a definite realization 
 of the fact that there is a difference, not of degree 
 merely, but of kind, between the singer of the
 
 226 Various Views 
 
 age or the race and the warbler of the hour or 
 the coterie. The distinction between the two is 
 reasonably well marked, although in the nature 
 of the case no hard and fast line of demarcation 
 can be drawn. There are always some poets 
 'on promotion,' as it were, poets whose place 
 we cannot quite determine because of the heated 
 controversies occasioned by their work. Whit- 
 man, for example, was for many years in this 
 condition of suspense, and now, long after his 
 death, it is quite impossible to say whether he is 
 a minor or a major poet. Mr. Kipling may be 
 taken as a living illustration of this uncertainty 
 of classification. Then there are occasionally 
 mute inglorious Miltons, as far as the larger pub- 
 lic is concerned, who nevertheless are both vocal 
 and glorious in the estimation of the cultured 
 few. But the distinction between major and 
 minor poets is worth making, in spite of the 
 difficulty of dealing with a few exceptional repu- 
 tations, and it is coming to be seen more and 
 more clearly that the minor poet has a mission 
 and an utterance of his own ; or, to supply a con- 
 crete illustration, that Mr. Dobson is in no sense
 
 A Word for Minor Poetry 227 
 
 a rival of Mr. Swinburne, but rather a worker 
 in different materials, shaping them to different, 
 and, in a way, to equally successful ends. 
 
 If this position be well taken, it will follow 
 that there is no reproach in the title of minor 
 poet. We do not think slightingly of the blue- 
 bird because it is not an eagle, nor do we wrong 
 the singer of simple lyrics because he has been 
 denied the power to fashion epics or dramatic 
 tragedies. When we 
 
 1 Read from some humbler poet, 
 
 Whose songs gushed from his heart, 
 As showers from the clouds of summer, 
 Or tears from the eyelids start,' 
 
 we are not justified in measuring him by the 
 standard of Milton and Shakespeare, but should 
 rather ask : Does he accomplish what he has 
 sought to accomplish; is there a natural balance 
 between gift and utterance ; has he power to 
 stir the springs of emotion at his own spiritual 
 level and upon his own terms ? Some years 
 ago, Mr. Slason Thompson published a collec- 
 tion of the minor poetry that, in newspaper and 
 magazine, had appealed to him for a score of
 
 228 Various Views 
 
 years past. He styled his collection 4 The 
 Humbler Poets,' and was in consequence, we 
 believe, the recipient of more than one indignant 
 remonstrance from versifiers who thought them- 
 selves anything but humble. But the very fact 
 that a ' humble ' or minor poet should be too 
 proud to accept the ascription, proves, as far as 
 it proves anything, that the remonstrant does not 
 deserve the title of poet in any sense, that his 
 aim has been so far mistaken as to make his 
 work relatively a failure. 
 
 Speaking of the l hedgerow poems ' of his col- 
 lection, Mr. Thompson said fittingly : c There 
 come hours to every lover of poetry when he 
 wishes for "some simple and heartfelt lay," some- 
 thing that shall speak from out a mind feeling 
 the everyday cares of life amid the multitude, 
 and not from the heights to which the masters 
 41 proudly stooped."' Something of this feeling, 
 expressed with more of elaboration, and based 
 upon more broadly philosophical grounds, may 
 be found in the preface to l A Treasury of Minor 
 British Poetry ' edited by Mr. J. Churton Collins. 
 Here we are told that :
 
 A Word for Minor Poetry 229 
 
 ' It is in the minor poetry of an age that contempo- 
 rary life impresses itself most deeply, and finds perhaps 
 its most faithful mirror. In the great masterpieces of 
 poetry that life is presented in an ideal light, and in 
 relation to ideal truth. What belongs to a time is sub- 
 ordinated to what belongs to all time, what is actual to 
 what is typical, what is local to what is universal. 
 There is, moreover, in genius of the higher order a 
 dominant, a despotic individuality which tempers and 
 assimilates the material on which it works to its own 
 potent idiosyncracy.' 
 
 The author then goes on more specifically to 
 say that in Langland, not Chaucer, ' the England 
 of Edward III. becomes fully articulate,' and 
 that neither Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, 
 completely reflects the England of the period in 
 which he lived. 
 
 1 It is otherwise with the minor poetry of any particu- 
 lar era. Here for the eclecticism, if we may so express 
 it, of the great masters the age itself finds a tongue. 
 For the voice which speaks in these poets is the voice of 
 the nation, of the courtier, of the statesman and man 
 of affairs, of the scholar and litterateur, of the Church- 
 man, of the man of pleasure, of the busy citizen, of 
 the recluse, of the soldier and sailor, of the peasant, of 
 the mechanic, and of women of all classes and of all 
 callings. What is moulding, what is coloring, what is 
 in any way affecting the life of the time has its record 
 here. Is the pulse of the nation quickened or depressed;
 
 230 Various Views 
 
 are imagination and passion, or fancy and sentiment, or 
 reason and reflection in. the ascendant, is the prevailing 
 tendency in the direction of simplicity and nature, or 
 towards ingenuity and art, is the moral tone in society 
 high or low, is the period a period of progress, or of 
 decadence, or of transition, the answer to all this may 
 be found, and found in detail, in our collections of minor 
 poetry.'
 
 Newspaper Science 231 
 
 NEWSPAPER SCIENCE. 
 
 WALTER BAGEHOT", in one of his letters, speaks 
 of somebody's books as containing c a pale 
 whitey-brown substance, which people who don't 
 think take for thought, but it isn't.' All of us 
 who do much miscellaneous reading in current 
 literature must come to be painfully familiar with 
 the substance thus described, and to wonder, on 
 the one hand, how it can be evolved from minds 
 that seem to work normally in the everyday 
 relations of life, and, on the other, how it can 
 prove acceptable to the mental palate of so 
 many readers, for many readers there must be 
 to account for its voluminous and continued 
 production. Such an account of the vagaries of 
 intellection as is given by John Fiske, in his essay 
 upon various kinds of c cranks,' is an amusing 
 thing to read, of course, but in another aspect 
 an aspect that persists in the field of vision after 
 the humorous one has faded its effect is sad- 
 dening, almost disheartening. Cling as tena-
 
 232 Various Views 
 
 ciously as we may to a belief in the essential 
 rationality of the human intellect, our faith suf- 
 fers many a rude shock when we see one form 
 after another of irrationalism sweeping over the 
 public mind, threatening almost to its founda- 
 tions the empire of logic. Illustrations of this 
 power of the irrational to set intellects awry 
 abound on every hand, and may be drawn alike 
 from great things and from small. The irra- 
 tionality of imagining that our conduct as a 
 nation toward the people of the Philippine 
 Islands can be made to square with the prin- 
 ciples upon which we have hitherto shaped our 
 national life and carved out our success is of a 
 piece with the irrationality that claimed the year 
 1900 for the first of a new century instead of the 
 last of an old one. The former is a matter of 
 grave import to countless millions of people ; the 
 latter is a belated bit of scholasticism ; both to 
 the psychologist are interesting examples of the 
 way in which pure reason gets flouted when it 
 runs counter either to a passion or a whim. 
 
 There was a time, not very long ago, when 
 we hoped great things from our rapidly expand- 
 ing schemes of education, which were to make
 
 Newspaper Science 233 
 
 for rationality in so many ways. The teaching 
 of science, particularly, was to raise up a new 
 generation with a new mental habit. The 
 preachers of this gospel said that all our intel- 
 lectual ailments proceeded from the fatal defect 
 in educational methods that made words rather 
 than things the chief object of attention. Some- 
 thing analogous to the degeneracy of inbreeding 
 was the consequence of the manner in which 
 each new generation was content to deal mainly 
 with the merely verbal inheritance of the past, 
 instead of benefitting by a vivifying contact with 
 the concrete facts of nature. Science was to 
 change all this, to keep men in constant touch 
 with life, leaving the dead past to bury its dead, 
 and henceforth to base all our convictions upon 
 the solid foundations of observation instead of 
 the uncertain indications of authority. Well, 
 science has had pretty much its own way in 
 education for the past quarter-century, yet the 
 generation that it has helped to train seems 
 hardly less prone to superstition than were those 
 that preceded. Such mockeries of the scientific 
 spirit as parade under the names of palmistry and 
 psychical research and 4 Christian ' science, and
 
 234 Various Views 
 
 countless other manifestations of the unregulated 
 intellect, rear their heads unabashed, and bear 
 witness to the persistence of the irrational even 
 under conditions that would seem the most ad- 
 verse to the prosperity of such aberrations of the 
 intelligence. 
 
 This flourishing of the unscientific in what is 
 commonly supposed to be peculiarly the age of 
 science is doubtless the result of instincts too 
 deeply seated in the human consciousness to be 
 readily accessible to the appeal of educational 
 and other rationalizing influences. Yet we can- 
 not wholly acquit these influences themselves of 
 all responsibility for a state of things so discred- 
 itable to human intelligence. Our educational 
 methods must somehow be defective, must fail 
 in seriousness of application if not in grasp of 
 the problem to be coped with, while those ancil- 
 lary agencies upon which education has a right 
 to count seem to be far removed indeed from 
 any adequate realization of their high mission. 
 While the church, and the political party, and 
 the industrial organization, and the publisher of 
 books, and the various kinds of purveyors of 
 entertainment to the community, are all in part
 
 Newspaper Science 235 
 
 answerable for this failure to realize the oppor- 
 tunities offered them to contribute to intellectual 
 advancement, the most conspicuous offender in 
 this respect is that type of the modern newspaper, 
 far too frequently met with, which panders to the 
 lower intellectual instincts quite as noticeably as 
 to the lower social and moral instincts of its 
 readers. We wish to emphasize this distinction 
 just at present because, although many voices 
 have been raised to protest against the low moral 
 tone of the greater part of contemporary journal- 
 ism, the fact that its intellectual tone is equally 
 low has failed to attract the attention due it as a 
 commentary upon our boasted success in carrying 
 on the work of popular education. 
 
 Mr. J. L. Larned, speaking before the libra- 
 rians at Cleveland a few years ago, made use of 
 these impressive and well-weighed words : 
 
 ' The common school, making possible readers, and 
 the newspaper inviting them to read, arrived together at 
 a conjunction which might have seemed to be a happy 
 miracle for the universalizing of culture in the western 
 world. The opportunity which came then into the 
 hands of the conductors of the news press, with the new 
 powers that had been given them, has never been paral- 
 leled in human history. They might have been gar- 
 deners of Eden and planters of A new paradise on the
 
 236 Various Views 
 
 earth, for its civilization was put into their hands to be 
 made what they would have it to be. If it could have 
 been possible then to deal with newspapers as other 
 educational agencies are dealt with ; to invest them with 
 definite moral responsibilities to the public ; to take 
 away from them their commercial origin and their mer- 
 cenary motive ; to inspire them with disinterested aims ; 
 to endow them as colleges are endowed ; to man them 
 for their work as colleges are manned, with learning and 
 tried capacity in the editorial chairs if that could have 
 been possible, what imaginable degree of common culture 
 might not Europe and America by this time be approach- 
 ing ? As it is, we are to-day disputing and striving to 
 explain to one another a condition of society which 
 shames all who think of it.' 
 
 We know now that these things were not pos- 
 sible, although we believe that they may yet 
 become possible, and it is just because we hold 
 this belief that it seems important to emphasize 
 as frequently and as sharply as we may the con- 
 trast between what our newspapers are doing for 
 education in the true sense and what they might 
 so easily take it upon themselves to do. And 
 in saying these hard truths of a perverted news- 
 paper press, we wish to give the frankest recog- 
 nition to those journals, found here and"" there, 
 whose aims, both intellectual and moral, are en- 
 tirely creditable to their publishers, and which
 
 Newspaper Science 237 
 
 are particularly instructive because they indicate 
 the course that others might take to the immense 
 benefit of their prestige, and not impossibly also 
 to the benefit of their subscription and adver- 
 tising accounts. While it is true that some of 
 the greatest commercial successes in American 
 journalism have been gained by newspapers of 
 the most debased and ruffianly description, it is 
 also true that the most dignified examples of our 
 journalism have proved, if not the most success- 
 ful, at least successful enough to gratify any 
 reasonable 'ambition. The choice by no means 
 lies between success at the price of decency and 
 failure with the preservation of self-respect. 
 
 In order to provide some sort of justification 
 for the title given to these remarks, we must 
 turn from the foregoing abstract considerations 
 to something in the nature of concrete illustra- 
 tion. We all know that 'newspaper science' is 
 a term of reproach, and the reason is not far to 
 seek. The same spirit of sensationalism that 
 leads to the detailed chronicling of a prize fight 
 or a criminal trial leads also to the exploitation 
 of every sort of mental vagary that cloaks itself 
 with the -respectable name of science. Whether
 
 238 Various Views 
 
 it be a belated alchemist who claims to have dis- 
 covered the stone of the philosophers, or an 
 exponent of the newest and most extravagant 
 occultism, whether it be a palmist or a * mind- 
 reader ' or a ' faith-healer/ whether it be a 
 Shaconian or a circle-squarer, or a pyramid en- 
 thusiast or a direful prophet with a tale of the 
 coming destruction of the world, there is no per- 
 son so scientifically impossible that he cannot 
 get into the newspapers, and enlist their services 
 in the propaganda of his pet eccentricity or insane 
 delusion. He can get himself taken seriously, or 
 at least semi-seriously, and that is what he wants. 
 For all such persons notoriety is the very breath 
 of life, and the newspapers provide it without 
 scruple, because in so doing they can at the 
 same time provide the weak-minded section of 
 their readers with a new variety of mental dissi- 
 pation. The most incredible inanities, the most 
 preposterous notions, the most meaningless 
 pseudo-science are thus given a currency that is 
 denied even to the genuine achievements of 
 investigation. 
 
 This work is done, moreover, in so blundering 
 and hap-hazard a way that the spirit of sensa-
 
 Newspaper Science 239 
 
 tionalism is not enough completely to account 
 for it. There is usually in addition some admix- 
 ture of an ignorance so dense that one can only 
 marvel at the number of essentially uneducated 
 people who by some mysterious dispensation get 
 their lucubrations into print. We recall a news- 
 paper article published in Chicago some years 
 ago which undertook to instruct a confiding 
 public upon the subject of ozone. The account 
 was a brief one, but it contrived to include state- 
 ments to the effect that the true nature of ozone 
 was not fully understood, that it got its name 
 4 from the peculiar odor, which resembles that 
 produced when a succession of electric sparks 
 are passed through the air,' that Faraday consid- 
 ered it l identical with the medicinal quality in 
 electricity,' that the effect of inhaling it was very 
 c exhiliatory,' and that M. Jules Verne had once 
 told an interesting c story of the wild doings in a 
 village which became accidentally permeated ' 
 with ozone. This illustration is trivial enough, 
 no doubt, but it is so extremely typical of the 
 sort of c newspaper science ' we are concerned 
 with that it will serve as well as another. The 
 wonder of it is, of course, that any person so
 
 240 Various Views 
 
 absolutely ignorant of elementary chemistry 
 should write, and that any newspaper should 
 print, so astonishing a farrago of misinformation. 
 One more illustration must suffice us. An 
 improved method for the liquefaction of air has 
 recently attracted much attention, and the news- 
 papers have naturally taken it up. The same 
 newspaper which was responsible for the remark- 
 able statements about ozone to which reference 
 was just made quotes the inventor as l stating 
 that with three gallons of the liquid he had re- 
 peatedly made ten gallons, and that he could go 
 on doing so for any length of time.' c There is 
 no reason to doubt this assertion ' is the astonish- 
 ing editorial comment upon this astonishing state- 
 ment. Now if this means that the energy liberated 
 from the aerification of a certain quantity of the 
 liquefied air is sufficient, without any auxiliary 
 energy, to reduce a still larger quantity to the 
 liquid form, it is the flattest of impossibilities, for 
 it denies the principle of the conservation of 
 energy, which is the fundamental principle upon 
 which all physical science rests. A schoolboy 
 less omniscient than Macaulay's should know 
 such a statement to be impossible, and he should
 
 Newspaper Science 241 
 
 know it with a firmness of conviction that 
 should make him willing to stake his life upon 
 it. If a schoolboy can get through a common 
 high school education without knowing this and 
 other universal principles of the same order there 
 must have been something radically wrong about 
 his instruction. And it is because we are inclined 
 to think that there often is something radically 
 wrong about the teaching of elementary science, 
 that such teaching is too apt to make informa- 
 tion rather than intellectual discipline its chief 
 aim, that we have wished to provide this moral 
 with the sharpest possible of points.
 
 242 Various Views 
 
 THE DECAY OF AMERICAN 
 JOURNALISM. 
 
 THERE is something touching in a ' Letter to 
 Editors and Journalists' put forth by the l Balti- 
 more Yearly Meeting of Friends.' It is an appeal 
 for the purification of the newspaper press, and 
 the faith must indeed be abundant that imagines 
 a few soft words sufficient to arouse in the breast 
 of that hardened offender against decency the 
 remorseful twinges of conscience. If the aver- 
 age American journalist ever had such a thing as 
 a conscience, it was killed long ago, and its place 
 taken by a simulacrum of hypocritical accent 
 and leering mien. This effective modern sub- 
 stitute for a conscience in journalism has discov- 
 ered the secret of preaching virtue in such a 
 manner that it nowise interferes with the practice 
 of vice. It will, for example, devote one edito- 
 rial column to deploring the brutal tendencies of 
 the age, and fill twenty columns of the same 
 issue with a highly-colored account, frorn all
 
 American Journalism 243 
 
 possible points of view, of the latest event in 
 the annals of the prize-ring. It will take high 
 moral ground upon the evils of partisanship, and 
 at the same time gloss over the corruption of 
 the party in whose interests its own are wrapped 
 up. It will profess to regret oh, so deeply 
 that the dear public has developed so insatiate 
 an appetite for scandalous sensations and vulgar 
 personalities, and will at the same time furnish a 
 large staff of young men with muck-rakes of 
 the most approved pattern, and direct them to 
 gather in as many sensations and personalities as 
 they can discover or invent, in order that the 
 aforesaid dear public may not be deprived of its 
 customary diet, and the sales of its favorite family 
 newspaper show no symptoms of a decline. 
 
 Revolutions in taste and in the standards of 
 public decency are no more to be made with 
 rose-water than are revolutions in sterner fields 
 thus to be accomplished. Nothing short of the 
 energetic measures of a Hercules will suffice to 
 cleanse the Augean stables of the 4 new journal- 
 ism,' and we can fancy something of the derision 
 with which the rose-water phrases of the Balti- 
 more friends will be received by the men who
 
 244 Various Views 
 
 have been chiefly instrumental in making the 
 American newspaper so great a national calamity. 
 4 We appeal to you, as Editors,' so runs the 
 'Letter' from the good women of the Baltimore 
 Meeting, * for a reticence in the detail of crime 
 and scandal, that the purely sensational shall 
 be excluded, that pictures and advertisements, 
 both personal and medical, which so insidiously 
 lead the innocent and unsuspecting from the path 
 of virtue, shall find no place in your columns. 
 We especially ask your influence in raising the 
 moral tone of the edition issued as the " Sunday 
 paper," till it becomes a power for good among 
 the people.' This appeal is reiterated, with some 
 variation of phrase, in a l Report ' which accom- 
 panies the 4 Letter,' and the pleasant hope is ex- 
 pressed that in our journalism henceforth c fairer, 
 lovelier paths be traced, leading to virtue and to 
 hope.' 
 
 We fear that all the ears that such an appeal 
 as this seeks to reach will be found deaf to its 
 gentle pleadings. The foul sheets at which it 
 aims will continue to do lip-service to whatsoever 
 things are good and pure, while disregarding in 
 practice every consideration of decency. The
 
 American Journalism 245 
 
 effective arguments for purified journalism will 
 be of a very different sort, and indications are not 
 wanting that such arguments are about to be 
 employed. The ringing words of the late Gov- 
 ernor Altgeld, setting forth the imperative demand 
 for legislation that will really protect men from 
 wanton assaults upon their character by practi- 
 cally irresponsible editors, found an echo in many 
 minds, and the bills recently introduced into the 
 law-making bodies of Illinois and New York, 
 making it an offence to publish portraits without 
 the consent of the persons portrayed, have taken 
 a step in the right direction. Even the recent New 
 York bill proposing a press-censorship, while 
 unwise in principle, has made a good many peo- 
 ple seriously ask themselves whether an excessive 
 measure of restriction might not be preferable to 
 the excess of license which now characterizes 
 the conduct of our newspapers. c Freedom of 
 the press ' has always been, and ought always to 
 remain, a watchword of much meaning to any 
 liberty-loving people, but its force may be greatly 
 weakened by such abuses of that freedom as are 
 daily illustrated by the newspapers of our chief 
 cities. Still more significant than the attempts
 
 246 Various Views 
 
 at legislation to which reference has been made 
 is the recent action or a number of public libraries 
 and clubs in Eastern cities, excluding from their 
 reading-rooms the most conspicuously objection- 
 able newspapers that are published anywhere in 
 the country. Sometimes a movement like this, 
 once started, grows far more rapidly than might 
 be anticipated, just as crystallization takes place 
 in an over-saturated solution when some rallying- 
 point is offered for the aggregation of the ready 
 molecules. That some such crystallization of 
 sentiment on the subject of American journalism, 
 its duties and its responsibilities, may soon take 
 place is the deep desire of every thinking person 
 who has the interests of this country at heart. 
 
 Just as every people has, on the whole, the 
 government that it deserves, so it must be ad- 
 mitted that every city is responsible for the 
 newspapers that it supports, and deserves noth- 
 ing better until it is prepared actively to re- 
 pudiate the sheets by which it is represented. 
 It will not do merely to claim that it is mis- 
 represented by them, deploring their dishonesty, 
 their vulgarity of tone, and their pernicious 
 sensationalism, while at the same time giving
 
 American Journalism 247 
 
 them the encouragement of subscriptions and 
 advertising contracts. Nor are any protests 
 likely to avail so long as the man who has ac- 
 quired wealth in the pursuit of disreputable 
 journalism is permitted to associate with gen- 
 tlemen, to figure as a leading citizen at public 
 gatherings, to enjoy the freedom of the club 
 and the communion of the church. When the 
 public conscience is sufficiently quickened to 
 recognize the fact that such a man is a moral 
 outcast, that his newspaper pollutes the home, 
 that to purchase it upon the street-corner is a 
 direct encouragement of its vicious practices, 
 and that to use its columns for advertising pur- 
 poses is to pay too great a price for commercial 
 gain, when these things come to be recognized 
 not as counsels of perfection but as working 
 maxims for the conduct of daily life we may 
 hope for a return to the more dignified and 
 decent journalistic methods of the past genera- 
 tion, and for the assimilation of our press to the 
 ethical standards that are upheld as a matter of 
 course in most other parts of the civilized world. 
 If the time ever comes when those standards 
 shall obtain in American journalism, our news-
 
 248 Various Views 
 
 paper press will have found its real mission, and 
 may become, what it certainly is not now, a 
 potent agency of enlightenment and a pillar for 
 the support of republican institutions. Intelli- 
 gent citizens everywhere would be only too glad 
 to look to the newspaper for both light and 
 leading ; at present, instead of shedding light, 
 it darkens counsel by words without knowledge, 
 and instead of leading opinion, it is prone to 
 follow the uncertain guidance of every blind 
 popular prejudice and every brutal fanaticism 
 that sways the masses of its readers. Its once 
 considerable influence has so waned that its 
 boasts of power excite only the derision of the 
 well-informed ; its pretended statements of fact 
 are so untrustworthy that few people place any 
 confidence in them ; its opinions are not taken 
 seriously because nobody supposes that they are 
 reached by a process of serious reasoning. If a 
 newspaper of the typical sort perchance cham- 
 pion a good cause, few will be found to believe 
 in the sincerity of its attitude, for its champion- 
 ship of bad causes has long since made it an 
 object of suspicion, if not of contempt. 
 
 The darkest hour is that which just precedes
 
 American Journalism 249 
 
 the dawn, and perhaps the dawn of a purified 
 journalism is nearer at hand than we suppose. 
 The legal maxim that wherever there is a griev- 
 ance there is a remedy may prove valid in the 
 wider ethical field wherein this foe must be grap- 
 pled with. Whether the remedy come from 
 within or without, whether it be an organic 
 process of regeneration or a surgical operation 
 does not matter so much ; what does matter is 
 the undeniable fact that many of the newspapers 
 published in our large cities are so devoid of 
 principle that they constitute a perpetual menace 
 to every genuine interest of our civilization. 
 We need not single out those journals that stand 
 as honorable exceptions to this general statement, 
 nor those other journals that are kept from the 
 state of grace by weakness rather than by will ; 
 their editors and their friends will know that these 
 remarks are not meant for them. But no words 
 of condemnation can be too strong for the news- 
 papers that subordinate all other aims to the aim 
 of enlarging their circulation and their adver- 
 tising patronage, that care nothing for the truth 
 and only enough for decency to keep out ot the 
 clutches of the criminal law. There is no more
 
 250 Various Views 
 
 important work to be done for our civilization 
 to-day than that of shaming such newspapers 
 either out of existence or into amended lives, 
 and the responsibility for that work is shared by 
 all alike.
 
 Star System in Publishing 251 
 
 THE STAR SYSTEM IN PUBLISHING. 
 
 A FEW years ago complaint was made, in accents 
 more or less querulous, of the fact that the books 
 which had the largest sale and enjoyed the widest 
 popularity in this country were novels by English 
 writers. The American novelist seemed to have 
 no chance at all in the competition with his trans- 
 atlantic rival. One of the chief arguments by 
 which the campaign for international copyright 
 had been brought to a successful issue was that 
 the American novelist occupied a disadvantageous 
 position in his own country, because publishers 
 would naturally give preference over his work to 
 that of the English novelist who was not in the 
 position to exact a royalty. The plea was a 
 sound one, and there is no doubt that for many 
 years American novelists, as well as American 
 writers in other departments of letters, were put 
 at a considerable disadvantage by the fact that 
 publishers of predatory instincts (and such were 
 not lacking) might seize upon whatever English
 
 252 Various Views 
 
 books they wished, and reproduce them without 
 the leave of either authors or proprietors. As be- 
 tween an already successful English novel upon 
 which no royalty need be paid, and an American 
 manuscript which might or might not make a 
 successful book and for which the author would 
 certainly demand compensation, the balance of 
 probable profit turned toward the side of piracy, 
 and the American writer who had not already 
 conquered his public found it difficult to obtain 
 a hearing. At last, however, the law was passed 
 which accorded the bare measure of justice (or 
 something less than that) to the English author, 
 and placed the American author in a position to 
 compete with him without being handicapped 
 from the start. 
 
 In some respects the working of the law 
 proved disappointing. The cheap l libraries,' it 
 is true, found their opportunities restricted, and 
 many of them disappeared altogether from the 
 market. But the anticipated c boom ' in Ameri- 
 can literature was slow in appearing. English 
 books that were worth reading, as well as those 
 that were not, seemed to find their way into our 
 houses almost as readily as before, although it
 
 Star System in Publishing 253 
 
 was no longer possible to purchase the latest pro- 
 duction of Mr. Black or Air. Hardy for a small 
 fraction of a dollar. Such books now came to 
 us in respectable garb, and were sold at a fair 
 price. The point is that they continued to come 
 and to be sold in large numbers. Even our 
 popular magazines continued their practice of 
 contracting for the serial rights in works of En- 
 glish fiction, instead of offering that encourage- 
 ment to home industry about which American 
 novelists had raised such a clamor. There con- 
 tinued to be years in which nearly every one of 
 our story magazines had for its principal feature 
 the novel of some English writer, offered to 
 readers upon the instalment plan. There were 
 the stories of Mr. Kipling, for example, and the 
 romances of Robert Louis Stevenson, with which 
 no American writer of fiction could hope to 
 compete. Then there was the series of highly suc- 
 cessful individual books, beginning with 'Robert 
 Elsmere' and coming down in rapid succession 
 to c Trilby ' and l The Christian.' The dear 
 public wanted these books, even if it had to pay 
 roundly for them ; and those who had expected 
 international copyright to effect a revolution in
 
 254 Various Views 
 
 popular taste found that conditions remained very 
 much as they had been before. These selfish 
 grounds were not, of course, those upon which 
 the serious advocates of that act of plain interna- 
 tional duty rested their case, but they no doubt 
 had considerable influence in securing its adop- 
 tion. 
 
 The conditions of a few years ago seem, how- 
 ever, to have become completely changed of late, 
 and American fiction seems at last to have come 
 to its own. The most striking fact in the pub- 
 lishing business of a certain recent year is that 
 of the extraordinary success of a few novels by 
 American writers. Five such novels have won 
 the public favor to such an extent that their sale 
 has broken nearly all recent records, that to find 
 its match, in the case of American fiction at 
 least, we must go back to the history of c Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin.' That this success has been in 
 all cases deserved, we are by no means willing 
 to admit. Of the five novels in question, one is 
 a homely character-study having for its passport 
 to favor a plentiful supply of mother-wit rather 
 than an effective plot. The other four are his- 
 torical romances. One of these four, the work
 
 Star System in Publishing 255 
 
 of a woman, deserves very high praise as repre- 
 senting the best type of historical fiction. Two 
 of the others are at least admirable narratives, 
 and present interesting phases of our colonial 
 history with remarkable sympathy, industrious 
 grasp of detail, and vivid dramatic force. The 
 fourth is an extremely mediocre example of the 
 class of work to which it belongs, common in 
 both style and treatment, not noticeably better 
 or worse than a score of other books of its sort 
 published during the twelvemonth, and chiefly 
 interesting as an illustration of what can be done 
 for a poor book by shrewd and persistent adver- 
 tising. On the whole, our cause for satisfaction 
 in the success of these five novels is not so great 
 as those who are interested in them would have 
 us believe, and the record of their sales is a brill- 
 iant episode in the history of American book- 
 selling rather than in the history of American 
 literature. 
 
 Whether the publishing trade is really to be 
 congratulated upon such a series of popular suc- 
 cesses as this, is open to serious doubt. In one 
 case, at least, the profits accruing from a sale of 
 hundreds of thousands of copies could not avail
 
 256 Various Views 
 
 to save a great and long-established house from 
 serious business embarrassments. Such enor- 
 mous sales of single books, of which the merit, 
 even if great, is not likely to be fairly propor- 
 tional to the sales, does not seem to us to betoken 
 an altogether healthy condition of the publishing 
 trade. Publishers themselves know well enough 
 that their success in the long run depends, not 
 upon the fortunate acquisition of an occasional 
 book that enjoys a sky-rocket career, but upon 
 the possession of a substantial list of works of 
 permanent value, works that occupy a standard 
 place in literature and may be depended upon to 
 provide a steady income for many years. The 
 publisher who has a list of this sort is, of course, 
 glad enough to get hold of an exceptionally suc- 
 cessful novel from time to time ; such a book 
 represents to him so much clear gain, and he 
 would not be human did he fail to keep an intel- 
 ligent watch for productions of this sort. But 
 if he allows his head to be turned by visions of 
 this kind of luck, if he despises the more modest 
 but safer ventures, if he bends his energies toward 
 achieving an abnormal sale for a few books in- 
 stead of a normal sale for many, he is likely to
 
 Star System in Publishing 257 
 
 come to grief. His real interests lie in the pos- 
 session of many claims to public esteem rather 
 than in the making of a few successful appeals to 
 popular caprice. 
 
 It seems to us that there is an evident analogy 
 between the ideal of publishing that aims to push 
 a few books into successful acceptance and the 
 ideal of theatrical or operatic management which 
 depends almost exclusively upon the popularity 
 of a few artists. The star system in stage affairs 
 has long been understood by all competent ob- 
 servers as being extremely demoralizing to the 
 true interests of art. The recent history of our 
 grand opera has brought this principle home to 
 many who had not realized it before. A few 
 singers and a few operas become established in 
 public favor, and the short-sighted policy of the 
 management, relying upon this fact, gathers for 
 the time a rich harvest. But presently the public 
 wearies of its favorites, and, never having been 
 educated to the point of healthy musical culture 
 which can find interest and inspiration in a great 
 variety of works, never having been made to feel 
 that the works themselves and not the manner 
 of their performance should be its chief concern, 
 
 17
 
 258 Various Views 
 
 now deserts the opera-house, in spite of all the 
 allurements of new voices and new productions. 
 The management then complains that audiences 
 have no taste for a varied repertoire, that the 
 production of untried compositions spells finan- 
 cial disaster. Of course it does : the public 
 should have been prepared for these composi- 
 tions long before ; they should have been pro- 
 duced repeatedly, even at some temporary loss, 
 at the time when the public was most clamor- 
 ous for the sensations of the hour. The star 
 system in publishing brings about very similar 
 results. Many worthy books are neglected in 
 order that a few may be kept well to the front. 
 When the caprice is past, when the serried 
 ranks of worn copies of c Trilby ' gather dust 
 upon the shelves of the public library, when the 
 unsold copies in the hands of the publisher and 
 bookseller become l plugs,' the publisher should 
 then know better than to complain because his 
 other books do not sell. The fact often is that 
 he has not tried to sell them, that he has left 
 them unadvertised and uncared-for, that they 
 have now lost their chance because his 4 enter- 
 prise ' has seen fit to promote the sale of a few
 
 Star System in Publishing 259 
 
 books at the expense of all the rest. The well- 
 advised publisher, in our opinion, is the one who 
 recognizes the evils of the star system, and is not 
 misled by its promise of present temporary gain. 
 He is the publisher who secures for his list as 
 many books of lasting value as he can. And he 
 is the publisher who cares for the interest of all 
 of his books, because he understands that the 
 permanent success of his business depends upon 
 the acceptability of his total output rather than 
 upon the vogue of a few books taken here and 
 there from his catalogue.
 
 26o Various Views 
 
 THE YOUNG PERSON. 
 
 IT is a well-known principle of pathology that 
 interference with the normal activity of an organ 
 results in functional perversion. The atrophy 
 that follows upon the disuse of one organ may 
 have for a concomitant the excessive develop- 
 ment of others, with some form of degeneration 
 as a consequence; or the over-stimulation of one 
 may be accompanied by a weakening of all the 
 others, leading in the end to dissolution. In 
 either case, whether the disturbing physiological 
 factor take the shape of a forced activity here or 
 a suppressed activity there, the result is some 
 development of distinctly morbid type. Now 
 the analogies between the organism of the indi- 
 vidual and the larger social organism are always 
 instructive, if philosophically dealt with, and the 
 thought of the past thirty or forty years has been 
 particularly fruitful in applications of this method 
 of comparison. The whole modern science of 
 sociology, for example, may be described as an
 
 The Young Person 261 
 
 expansion of this fundamental idea, and gets its 
 most trustworthy results from the intelligent dis- 
 cussion of these analogies. It is our purpose 
 just now to apply to one aspect of literary activity 
 the method in question, and to ask if it may not 
 have some instruction for the critic of contem- 
 porary literature. 
 
 That reverence is due to the young is one of 
 the most venerable of critical maxims. It has 
 been knocking about in literature ever since it be- 
 came embalmed in one of the satires of Juvenal, 
 and perhaps for longer than that. It has very 
 noticeably influenced the literary production of 
 the present century, but it has not always been 
 wisely apprehended and applied. Let us take a 
 moment to see what has been done with this 
 precept in the case of the two greatest literatures 
 of our time the French and the English. In 
 both instances there has been at work a sub- 
 conscious instinct that has sought to keep from 
 the contemplation of youthful minds certain 
 parts of human life and certain phases of human 
 emotion. But the instinct has worked itself out 
 in curiously different ways. French books have 
 become sharply differentiated into books for the
 
 262 Various Views 
 
 Young Person and books for the full-grown man 
 or woman. English books, on the other hand, 
 have nearly all been written, until very lately, 
 with the Young Person carefully in view, and, 
 it would often seem, without any consideration 
 for any other class of readers. These two theo- 
 ries, carried to extremes, have been productive 
 of the most ludicrous results, exemplified, in the 
 one case, by the school-girl editions of c Tele- 
 maque ' which carefully substitute amiti'e for 
 amour ; in the other, by such an anecdote as has 
 recently gone the rounds of the newspapers, re- 
 vealing the fact that a popular magazine of wide 
 circulation in this country does not permit any 
 mention of wine to be made in its pages. And 
 both of these theories, even when kept within 
 bounds, seem to us to have led to an abnormal 
 condition of things in the literatures that have 
 respectively practised them. 
 
 We all know Matthew Arnold's hard saying 
 about the French people that they have de- 
 voted themselves to the worship of the great 
 goddess of lubricity. This remark was never 
 meant to be taken without qualification, as many 
 passages of Arnold's critical works show plainly
 
 The Young Person 263 
 
 enough. It may be sufficient to instance his 
 judgment of George Sand, pronounced upon 
 hearing of her death. l She was the greatest 
 spirit in our European world from the time that 
 Goethe departed. With all her faults and 
 Frenchisms, she was this.' The warmest ad- 
 mirers of that woman of genius will feel that 
 something more than justice is done her by this 
 bit of eulogy, but they will also feel that the 
 man who uttered it must have had strong 
 grounds for what harsh things he at times felt 
 bound to say about modern French literature. 
 That literature doubtless gives undue promi- 
 nence to one particular form of passion, and 
 doubtless sins against the proprieties more fre- 
 quently and more conspicuously than any litera- 
 ture ought to do. To revert to the pathological 
 figure of our introductory paragraph, French 
 literature seems, in its treatment of the relations 
 of the sexes, to have suffered a sort of fatty de- 
 generation, and erotic pates de foie have entered 
 too largely into the daily diet of its consumers. 
 It seems to us quite clear that one of the causes 
 of this abnormal development must be sought 
 for in an unnatural separation of books for the
 
 264 Various Views 
 
 Young Person from books for the Gallic adult. 
 Since (in theory, at least) the Young Person is 
 never supposed to see the books written for his 
 elders, there is no need of writing them virgin- 
 ibus puerisque, and all restraint and all reticence 
 are thrown to the winds. 
 
 The English theory, of course, has been as 
 far removed from the French theory as possible. 
 Taking for granted that the Young Person is 
 quite as likely as anybody else to read a book of 
 any sort, all books (broadly speaking) have been 
 written with his needs and limitations in view, 
 and the result has been an emasculated literature, 
 from which discussion of certain subjects has 
 been excluded by as effective a taboo as was ever 
 practised among the South Sea islanders. News- 
 paper cant and the censorship of the circulating 
 libraries have so narrowed the scope of nineteenth- 
 century English literature that the future student 
 of Victorian manners and morals will have to go 
 outside of literature to get the facts in proper 
 perspective. These remarks apply with equal 
 force to the English literature produced upon 
 our own side of the Atlantic. The suppression 
 of natural literary activity thus indicated has been
 
 The Young Person 265 
 
 correcting itself of late, and in the usual violent 
 way. Unless atrophy has gone so far as to prove 
 fatal, nature usually contrives to reassert herself, 
 and throws the whole organism into disorder by 
 so doing. The last few years have brought real- 
 ism and plain-speaking back into English litera- 
 ture, and with a vengeance. The dovecotes of 
 hypocrisy have been fluttered by ominous birds 
 of prey, and the sober-minded, who have all 
 along viewed with apprehension the attempt to 
 keep English literature in a straight-jacket, have 
 stood alternately amused and aghast at the antics 
 with which it has celebrated its newly-acquired 
 liberty. 
 
 The problem is certainly a vexatious one. 
 The example of one nation shows us the bad 
 effects of ignoring the Young Person ; the ex- 
 ample of another furnishes an instructive lesson 
 in the consequences of deferring to him over- 
 much. Unbounded license is an unquestionable 
 evil ; the cramping of ideals, on the other hand, 
 leads to a reaction almost equally evil. Whether 
 the one course be pursued or the other, freedom 
 of literary expression will find its stout champions, 
 as it has already found them in both countries,
 
 266 Various Views 
 
 from Moliere to Mr. Swinburne. We do not 
 want a revival of eighteenth century grossness. 
 Mr. Gosse says, in a recent critique, that with 
 Mr. Hardy's latest novel c we have traced the 
 full circle of propriety. A hundred and fifty years 
 ago, Fielding and Smollett brought up before us 
 pictures, used expressions, described conduct, 
 which appeared to their immediate successors a 
 little more crude than general reading warranted. 
 In Miss Burney's hands, and in Miss Austen's 
 the morals were still further hedged about. Scott 
 was even more daintily reserved. We came at 
 last to Dickens, where the clamorous passions of 
 mankind, the coarser accidents of life, were ab- 
 solutely ignored, and the whole question of pop- 
 ulation seemed reduced to the theory of the 
 gooseberry bush. This was the ne plus ultra of 
 decency ; Thackeray and George Eliot relaxed 
 this intensity of prudishness ; once on the turn, 
 the tide flowed rapidly, and here is Mr. Hardy 
 ready to say any mortal thing that Fielding said, 
 and a great deal more too.' 
 
 Fortunately, we are not yet forced to take 
 c Jude the Obscure' as typical of our century and 
 literature, although the atrocious faults of taste
 
 The Young Person 267 
 
 displayed by that book do not stand alone to 
 represent their class. And we cannot agree with 
 Mr. Gosse in saying that to censure such out- 
 spokenness ' is the duty of the moralist and not 
 the critic.' If criticism has any most imperative 
 duty, it is precisely the one so airily disclaimed 
 by this self-constituted spokesman for the craft. 
 And there is not much palliation for such an 
 offence as Mr. Hardy's in the prefatory danger- 
 signal which describes the book as c a novel ad- 
 dressed by a man to men and women of full age.' 
 This is the French theory over again, and might 
 be used to cloak all of the French excesses. It 
 seems to us that the real solution of the problem 
 presented by the Young Person must take the 
 form of a compromise, and that a compromise is 
 possible that shall mean neither a loss of virility 
 in literature nor the exposure of the immature to 
 corrupting influences. We need, first of all, to 
 clear our minds of cant on the subject of the 
 supposed ignorance of the Young Person. The 
 Frenchman knows perfectly well that his theory 
 does not work, and that boys and girls read the 
 books they are not supposed to read. The En- 
 glishman knows equally well that his theory
 
 268 Various Views 
 
 works no better, and that boys and girls who do 
 not get a knowledge of life from literature get it 
 in other and usually worse ways. Why should 
 we not admit right away that our education is not 
 as frank as it ought to be ? With this admission 
 we might couple the plea, on the one hand, for 
 less prudishness than we have been accustomed 
 to put into books likely to fall into the hands of 
 the Young Person ; while sternly insisting, on the 
 other hand, that all literature should be clean, 
 that grossness is a thing unpardonable in itself, 
 and not merely for its degrading influence upon 
 a certain possible class of readers. Some such 
 middle ground as this should be found safe for 
 all the interests concerned ; it should result in a 
 literature both strengthened and purified, not 
 losing from view the needs of the Young Person, 
 but rather according them a more rational con- 
 sideration than they have had hitherto.
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 269 
 
 THE NEW PATRIOTIC IMPULSE. 
 
 A GREAT deal has been said, during the past few 
 years, about the rekindling of American patriot- 
 ism that has resulted from the war with Spain 
 and its sequela. We are once more a united 
 people, and we stand together in the defence of 
 the national honor, and new glories have been 
 won for the American flag, and we have taken 
 our proper place among the great powers, and 
 our manifest destiny has again declared itself in 
 the impressive deeds by which the triumph of 
 our arms has been accomplished. The changes 
 have been rung upon all the familiar phrases of 
 political oratory, gold and pinchbeck alike, and 
 flamboyant boastings from every quarter of the 
 land have convinced men only too willing to be 
 persuaded that our feet were indeed planted upon 
 ' glory-crowned heights.' The emotions to which 
 explosive vent has been given are, no doubt, sin- 
 cere enough to deserve a certain measure of 
 respect, even from those who know how hollow
 
 270 Various Views 
 
 in reality the most resonant phrases may be, and 
 how recklessly the political rhetorician will indulge 
 in sentiments to which the whole tenor of his 
 career gives the lie. But thinking men have 
 never been content, in America or elsewhere, to 
 accept at their face value the counters of the 
 politician. As was recently said in l The Na- 
 tion,' 4 in the case of such men, the proposed 
 sentiments of humanity and morality really count 
 for nothing at all. They regard them merely as 
 mouth-filling phrases, which sound well and 
 please their constituents; and never dream that 
 they will one day return to plague them, or that 
 anybody will think of holding them to their own 
 professions.' And whether such sentiments come 
 from some high official like the war-lord of 
 Washington, or from the most servile henchman 
 of a political party having at bottom no nobler 
 motive than party advantage and no higher aim 
 than plunder, their ring is false, and will deceive 
 only those who wish to be deceived. 
 
 The new patriotic impulse to which we here 
 wish to call attention finds no illustrations in the 
 noisy plaudits of those who din daily into our 
 ears the catchwords of duty and destiny the
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 271 
 
 duty of advancing civilization by fire and sword, 
 the destiny which may only be asserted by deny- 
 ing to alien peoples the fundamental rights of 
 man. Rather do we hear through all this din 
 the accents of a still small voice recalling to us 
 that our true duties lie close at hand, and that 
 the national destinies wrought out for us by 
 Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln are abso- 
 lutely incompatible with our new-fangled dreams 
 of empire. And because this voice, which is no 
 other than the voice of the national conscience, 
 has not breathed out its protest unheeded, but 
 has found so many fearless spokesmen, filled 
 with passion for the ideals that all true Ameri- 
 cans have cherished hitherto, and thrilling with 
 indignation at the present desecration of those 
 ideals, it has seemed to us that this new mani- 
 festation of the spirit of the finer patriotism is a 
 most noteworthy phenomenon, not to be paral- 
 elled more than two or three times in the whole 
 course of our history. In behalf of this protest 
 against the abandonment of the principles by 
 which our moral stature as a nation has hitherto 
 been determined, there has been enlisted, in the 
 words of ex-Governor George S. Boutwell, c an
 
 272 Various Views 
 
 array of names such as has not been brought to- 
 gether in support of a common cause since the 
 signing of the Declaration of independence.' So 
 many are these names, and so great is their influ- 
 ence as leaders of both thought and action, that 
 we shall not attempt the invidious task of sing- 
 ling out a few for special mention. A score or 
 more of them will occur at once to the mind of 
 any well-informed reader, and every fair critic 
 must admit that they represent an overwhelming 
 preponderance of the intelligence and morality of 
 our fellow-citizens. 
 
 The attempt of a time-serving press to attach 
 to these names the stigma of treason is one that 
 falls with the weight of its own absurdity. Their 
 position is exactly that of Chatham and Burke 
 in opposing another war of subjugation over a 
 hundred years ago. It is for the courage of their 
 attitude in resisting a perverse and short-sighted 
 colonial policy that those men are held in the 
 highest honor by Englishmen and Americans 
 alike. The verdict of history metes out even 
 justice to the men who in any age withstand the 
 outbursts of popular folly ; and who can doubt 
 that, in our own present case, when 'the tumult
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 273 
 
 and the shouting dies/ the leaders who now, at 
 no small cost of temporary popularity, stand for 
 the principles of the Fathers of our Government, 
 and speak for c the mighty hopes that make us 
 men ' in a sense unknown to European history, 
 will be adjudged by no remote posterity to have 
 won for themselves a crown of exceeding great 
 glory. Whatever may be the outcome of the 
 struggle to preserve for this nation the ideals upon 
 which its true grandeur has been based whether 
 our ship of state reach its haven or suffer ship- 
 wreck the honor of these men is secure. 
 They have fought the good fight, and history 
 will set them high among the heroes of our race. 
 In a certain sense, the judgment of history is 
 already pronounced. What history says of any 
 age is determined largely by what the most force- 
 ful minds of that age have said of its issues. 
 The men who are to-day speaking to us with 
 the authority of experience and ripened political 
 wisdom are the men to whom the historian of 
 the future will turn for light, just as we now 
 turn for light upon the history of our Revolu- 
 tionary struggle to the living words of Burke 
 and Chatham, of Washington and Jefferson.
 
 274 Various Views 
 
 These considerations bring us to the more 
 special subject of the present discussion. We 
 Americans have a great wealth of political lit- 
 erature, for our bent toward the discussion of 
 problems of statecraft is as marked as was that 
 of the Athenians. Much of this literature is mere 
 volubility, and whatever heat it once had has 
 long since become dissipated. But the best of this 
 literature is still a living force, for it deals with the 
 most vital features of our polity, and its interest 
 remains perennial. When we survey the cher- 
 ished masterpieces of our political writing its 
 eloquent oratory and its calm intellectual appeal 
 we find that they centre about two great themes 
 the struggle for independence and a national 
 union, and the struggle to preserve that union and 
 make it stand for freedom in the largest meaning, 
 for the equality of all men in the sight of the law. 
 It is this latter aspect of the secular conflict 
 which now again confronts us, and the cause at 
 issue makes upon us a demand no less imperious 
 than the demand that was made upon an earlier 
 generation by the harsh pretensions of the En- 
 glish crown, and upon a later one by the arrogant 
 pretensions of the slave-owning oligarchy. He
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 275 
 
 must be blind indeed who does not see that the 
 same essential principles are now again at stake, 
 and that the outcome of the present deplorable 
 situation is fraught with the same enormous pos- 
 sibilities for good or for evil. 
 
 In this serious condition of affairs, our writers 
 have not been found wanting, and it is with the 
 deepest satisfaction that we call attention to the 
 way in which they have risen to the high occasion 
 offered them. There is growing up about the 
 present subject of contention a mass of literature 
 which is conceived in accordance with the noblest 
 traditions of American thought. Even in mere 
 bulk it is already almost comparable with the lit- 
 erature inspired by opposition to the institution 
 of slavery, and in quality it is no whit inferior, 
 either in its impassioned earnestness or in its 
 deep resolve to maintain to the death those stand- 
 ards of justice and human right that so many 
 seem now to be weakly forsaking. The thought 
 which infuses all this writing is indeed that which 
 
 ' Helped our fathers' souls to live, 
 And bids the waning century bloom anew.' 
 
 It is the thought of men too sturdy in their 
 Americanism to be swept away from their moor-
 
 276 Various Views 
 
 ings by the gusts of partisan folly, and too sure 
 that they are right to be influenced by any array 
 of hostile numbers. It is the thought of men 
 each one of whom would be content to stand 
 with serene conscience an Athanasius contra 
 mundum, each one of whom would reecho the 
 4 Ultima Verba ' of Victor Hugo, 
 
 ' Sans chercher a savoir et sans considerer 
 Si quelqu'un a plie qif on aurait cru plus ferme, 
 Et si plusieurs s'en vont qui devraient demeurer.' 
 
 The defenders of our latter-day imperialism have 
 not yet come to understand the temper of this 
 opposition to their reckless course. They treat 
 it as a difference of opinion, but it is nothing of 
 the sort. Men may have opinions about such 
 matters as the tariff and the currency, but the 
 proposition to cast aside the doctrines of the Con- 
 stitution and the Declaration, the counsels of 
 Washington and Lincoln, the sanctions of free 
 government that have been inculcated upon 
 Americans from their earliest childhood this 
 proposition runs counter to the most sacred con- 
 victions of all men to whom Americanism is 
 more than an empty name. 
 
 Let us enumerate a few a very few of
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 277 
 
 the writings that have responded to this wild on- 
 slaught upon the principles that make the Amer- 
 ican name dear to us. There are the lectures 
 and addresses contained in President Jordan's 
 1 Imperial Democracy,' a volume which is a 
 complete arsenal of fact and argument. There 
 are such papers as ' The Present Crisis,' by Ed- 
 win D. Mead ; ' Our Nation's Peril,' by Dr. 
 Lewis G. Janes; 'Imperialism, and the Tracks 
 of Our Forefathers,' by Mr. Charles Francis 
 Adams; 'England in 1776: America in 1899,' 
 by Mr. William M. Salter; and 'The Conquest 
 of the United States by Spain,' by Professor 
 William G. Sumner. There are such speeches 
 as those of Senator Hoar in Congress, of Mr. 
 Carl Schurz in Chicago and elsewhere, of Pro- 
 fessor Charles Eliot Norton at the Ashfield 
 Dinner. There are such fugitive writings as the 
 'Open Letter' from ex-Senator Henderson, and 
 'The Philippine Piracy,' by Professor William 
 James. There are innumerable other contribu- 
 tions to this literature of protest and warning, 
 offered by such men as President Eliot, Professor 
 von Hoist, Bishop Henry C. Potter, Bishop John 
 L. Spaulding, Professor Felix Adler, and the Rev.
 
 278 Various Views 
 
 Henry Van Dyke. Now, of all this literature it 
 is not enough to say that it cannot be ignored. 
 Much of it is so admirable in form, besides being 
 suffused with the lasting qualities of fine intelli- 
 gence and exalted emotion, that it is sure of 
 preservation among the most noteworthy exam- 
 ples of American patriotic eloqence. The future 
 student and compiler of such literature will be 
 justified in placing Senator Hoar's great speech 
 beside Webster's reply to Hayne, and Professor 
 Sumner's Phi Beta Kappa address beside the 
 finest efforts of his great namesake. One reads 
 these masterly productions with the same glow 
 of feeling that is inspired by the traditional mod- 
 els of our eloquence, and the youth of the future 
 will take from them the same contagion of en- 
 thusiasm which our generation has caught from 
 their old-time prototypes. Their present value 
 is that they strengthen our faith in the potency 
 of our cherished ideals, and bid us take heart for 
 our country however dark the present outlook. 
 What to the faint-hearted may seem one sweep- 
 ing d'egringolade of principles and institutions can- 
 not, after all, be a reality as long as such voices 
 as these are raised to recall us to the old paths of
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 279 
 
 national virtue and sobriety. 'This spasm of folly 
 and delusion also, in my judgment, will surely 
 pass by,' are among the closing words of Senator 
 Hoar's memorable speech. And what true Amer- 
 ican should not be proud to echo the words that 
 follow : c Whether it passes by or not, I thank 
 God I have done my duty, and that I have ad- 
 hered to the great doctrines of righteousness and 
 freedom, which I learned from my fathers, and 
 in whose service my life has been spent.' 
 
 Such a literature as this makes us almost glad 
 that the occasion for it has arisen. The awaken- 
 ing from our fancied security has been rude, and 
 the perils to which we are exposed have become 
 imminent; but we now know, at least, that the 
 voices that were raised in past crises of our na- 
 tional life have found worthy successors, and 
 that the torch has been handed on still aflame. 
 The poets, indeed, we sadly miss, although Mr. 
 William Vaughn Aioody, with his ' Ode in 
 Time of Hesitation,' has risen nobly to the 
 occasion. We know well with what prophetic 
 fire our Whittier, were he now alive, would 
 arouse our sluggish conscience, and our Lowell 
 scourge with the scorpion whip of his indigna-
 
 28o Various Views 
 
 tion the traducers of our national character. But 
 the words of the poets have this advantage over 
 all common words, that they apply t other times 
 and places than those by which they are imme- 
 diately occasioned, and neither ' Ichabod ' nor 
 the 'Biglow Papers" could in reality be bettered 
 for our present needs. What, in fact, could a 
 Lowell now say that would be more exactly to 
 the point than these familiar stanzas, and the 
 note by which they are supplemented : 
 
 ' "We were gittin' on nicely up here to our village, 
 
 With good old idees o' wut's right an' wut aint, 
 We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage, 
 An' thet eppyletts worn't the bestm ark of a saint; 
 But John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez this kind o' thing's an exploded idee. 
 
 ' The side of our country must oilers be took, 
 
 An' President Polk, you know, he is our country. 
 An' the angel that writes all our sins in a book 
 Puts the debit to him, and to us the per contry ; 
 And John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T.' 
 
 ' Our country is bounded on the north and the south, on 
 the east and the west, by Justice, and when she oversteps 
 that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's-breadth,
 
 The New Patriotic Impulse 281 
 
 she ceases to be our mother, and chooses to be looked 
 upon quasi no<verca. That is a hard choice when our 
 earthly love of country calls upon us to tread one path 
 and our duty points us to another. We must make as 
 noble and becoming an election as did Penelope between 
 Icarius and Ulysses. Veiling our faces, we must take 
 silently the hand of Duty to follow her. 1