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 PHINTEOINU-S A. 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 
 PN 511.P36 
 
 Studies in several literatures 
 
 3 1924 026 942 080 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026942080 
 
STUDIES IN SEVERAL 
 LITERATURES 
 
STUDIES IN SEVERAL 
 LITERATURES 
 
 HARRY THURSTON PECK, Litt. D. 
 
 AtrrHOB OF THE PEiSONAL EdtlXTlON, 
 "what is good ENGLISH," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1909 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 Published, April, 1906 
 
TO 
 ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE 
 
 IN GRATEFUL RECOLLECTION 
 OF A LONG AND UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP 
 
NOTE 
 
 Several of the essays contained in this book have ap- 
 peared in part elsewhere. For permission to reproduce so 
 much of the material as is here retained, acknowledgments 
 are due to the courtesy of Frank A. Munsey, Esq., Messrs. 
 Gebbie and Company of Philadelphia, and The Cosmo- 
 politan Magazine. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER ^^''^ 
 
 I The Odyssey ., . • S 
 
 II Alciphrox ^^ 
 
 III Milton *^ 
 
 IV The Lyrics of Tennyson 67 
 
 V Longfellow ^^ 
 
 VI PoE AS A Story-Writer 99 
 
 VII Hawthorne and " The Scarlet Letter" 117 
 
 VIII Emerson 133 
 
 IX Thackeray and " Vanity Fair " . . . 149 
 
 X Anthony Trollope 165 
 
 XI £mile Zola 201 
 
 XII Tolstoi's " Anna Karenina " ... 227 
 XIII Alphonse Daudet's Masterpiece . . 241 
 
 XIV The Detective Story 257 
 
 XV The Psychology op the Printed Page . 281 
 
THE ODYSSEY 
 
Studies in Several Literatures 
 
 THE ODYSSEY 
 
 It may be asserted as a general truth that no very 
 long poem can be read at a sitting with pleasure and 
 appreciation. However we may define poetry, it 
 is certainly a more elevated and impassioned form of 
 expression than prose. It demands a closer atten- 
 tion, a more alert attitude of apprehension on the 
 reader's part. Wordsworth has very well said that 
 the end of poetry is to produce excitement in co- 
 existence with an overbalance of pleasure. But this 
 excitement, this tension of the mind and of the emo- 
 tions, can not be very long supported before we grow 
 conscious of a certain strain. The air becomes too 
 rarefied for us to breathe quite naturally. As soon 
 as this occurs, there is no longer " an overbalance of 
 pleasure." We can not remain for a long time upon 
 the heights. Our feelings grow relaxed. We seek 
 the lower levels with a sensation of relief. We have 
 been stimulated and exalted; but in a comparatively 
 short time this stimulation and exaltation tax us too 
 severely. Poe, in one of his critical essays, declares 
 that a long poem does not exist, and he adds that 
 
4 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 the phrase " a long poem " is simply a flat contra- 
 diction in terms. There is perhaps just one poem in 
 the literature of all the world of which this is not 
 true; and therefore, to my mind, this poem is the 
 supreme poem, the noblest example of the poetic art. 
 
 Several years ago, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who is 
 always doing something interesting and unexpected, 
 gave to the public his opinion as to the literary and 
 ethical value of Homer. Not a few persons were in- 
 clined to mock at this deliverance and to recall the 
 old maxim that the cobbler should stick to his last. 
 Mr. Carnegie, they said, might know more about 
 iron and steel than any other living man; but why 
 should he put himself forward as an authority on 
 classical literature? He himself would certainly not 
 have listened with much respect to the views of 
 Professor Gildersleeve or the late Sir Richard Jebb 
 on the subject of iron tubing and steel rails. 
 
 To me, at least, such criticism seems decidedly un- 
 fair. It might well be not only interesting but in- 
 structive for specialists in any field to listen to the 
 comments of those whose interests have lain wholly 
 outside of that especial sphere, but who can bring 
 to, bear upon it a strong and highly trained intelli- 
 gence, together with an unbiassed mind, and who, 
 therefore, can look at it through fresh eyes and from 
 a standpoint that would be wholly new. I should, 
 for example, be intensely eager to hear what Mr. 
 John D. Rockefeller would have to say about Aris- 
 
THE ODYSSEY 5 
 
 totle's Nicomachean Ethics, if he were to read that 
 work in an adequate translation and ponder it with 
 all his remarkably acute intelligence. Again, who 
 would not like to hear just how Plato's Republic 
 would impress the mind of ex-Senator Clark, of Mon- 
 tana; whether Tasso's Gerusalemme Liherata would 
 appeal to the taste of Mr. John Wanamaker; or 
 how far Matthew Arnold's essays on Culture and 
 Anarchy would have any attraction for Mr. Charles 
 M. Schwab? 
 
 Therefore, what Mr. Carnegie said regarding 
 Homer is really to be considered with respect. And 
 Homer was an ideal choice for him, because the su- 
 preme glory of Homer is the imaginative quality of 
 his poetry, and Mr, Carnegie is himself a man of 
 imagination. He has shown this in the unusual and 
 striking objects to which he has devoted a large part 
 of his great fortune. Other multimillionaires have 
 been relatively as generous, but they have given in 
 conventional ways, and therefore will be forgotten 
 when Mr. Carnegie is remembered. Hence, his judg- 
 ment on Homer is to be regarded seriously and by no 
 means to be cast aside with a flippant jest. 
 
 Mr. Carnegie saw in Homer nothing to com- 
 mend or to admire. He found the Iliad tiresome. It 
 was almost all a tale of fighting, of bloodshed, and of 
 brutality — a poem that could teach no useful lesson 
 and that was monotonous and dull to read. In some 
 parts of his criticism Mr. Carnegie was in uncon- 
 
6 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 scious agreement with Socrates and Plato ; but class- 
 ical scholars would be likely to bristle with indigna- 
 tion on being told that the Iliad is dull. Neverthe- 
 less, let us look at the Homeric literature fairly, to 
 see whether there be not some basis for the censure ; 
 and then let us consider the topic with which we 
 are immediately concerned. 
 
 In the first place, it was unfortunate that Mr. 
 Carnegie chose to read the Iliad in Pope's metrical 
 translation. That translation was characterised for 
 all time by the great Hellenist, Richard Bentley, 
 when he said to the author, with his usual bluntness : 
 
 " A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you mustn't 
 call it Homer." 
 
 And, in truth, nothing could be more incongruous 
 than to take Pope's neat, trim, balanced, mincing 
 lines as representing the splendid, surging, billowy 
 hexameters of Homer. It is like stripping an ancient 
 Greek of his flowing robes and trussing him up in 
 doublet and hose and pointed shoes, with a periwig 
 upon his head, and a gilt snufF-box in his hand. If 
 one must read the Iliad in English, let him read it in 
 the simple, manly prose of Lang and Leaf. Then 
 the flavour of the original will not all be lost. 
 Matthew Arnold's lengthy essay on translating 
 Homer contains many admirable criticisms and sug- 
 gestions; yet he seems to take it for granted that 
 any version worthy of the name must be in poetry. 
 Just here is where he goes astray. There are many 
 
THE ODYSSEY 7 
 
 poetical renderings of Homer, from Chapman to 
 Clough and Way; yet whether these are in Eng- 
 lish ballad-metre or in hexameters, they fail to 
 satisfy the mind. If you translate the poetry of 
 Homer into English verse, it is certain to suffer 
 a sea-change and it becomes English not merely in 
 language but in spirit. There are two features of 
 the original Greek, for instance, one of which must 
 necessarily be sacrificed in the translation. First 
 there is the metrical effect, that peculiar, sinuous, 
 sweeping, rolling movement which no translation can 
 accurately give; and there is also what Mr. Arnold 
 rightly calls " out-of-doors freshness, life, natural- 
 ness, and buoyant rapidity." There is, besides, a 
 certain quaintness and simplicity which suggests a 
 period when the world was young. The first — that is, 
 the metrical effect — can to some extent be imitated 
 in English and in German ; but, after all, this is only 
 the setting, the shell, the part that is external. Is 
 it not better to sacrifice it, and by using prose, pre- 
 serve those other qualities which are most essentially 
 Homeric.'' Probably even a rude literal transla- 
 tion into prose, such as one hears in schools and in 
 college classes, does, after all, bring one nearer to 
 the primitiveness of the Homeric spirit than the finest 
 and most polished paraphrases which a verse-render- 
 ing affords. One loves the familiar and delightful 
 old friends which seek to convey the beautiful Greek 
 compound words — " the far-darting Apollo," " the 
 
8 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 shadow-casting spear," " the much-enduring Odys- 
 seus," " the well-greaved Greeks," " the much-roar- 
 ing sea," and all the rest of that schoolboy vocabu- 
 lary which we remember from our earlier years. For 
 the spirit of the schoolboy and of the young bar- 
 barian in college is, after all, in a large measure, 
 the spirit of Homer himself or of those rhapsodes 
 whom we collectively describe as Homer. Their 
 world was a world of fighting, of primitive emotions, 
 of elemental and perfectly transparent craft, of sun- 
 shine and starshine, and a sweet smell of the forests 
 and of the sea. And so, let us have our Homer not 
 in English verse, but in English prose, if we are not 
 to have it in Homeric Greek. In this way we shall 
 gain much more than we shall lose. 
 
 But, apart from the matter of translation, is the 
 Iliad world-literature in the sense that it has in it 
 some quality which will survive the process of trans- 
 lation — even of a poor translation — and appeal not 
 merely to classical scholars or to cultivated readers, 
 but to every human being who has a brain to under- 
 stand and a heart to feel.'' I should answer most 
 emphatically " No," although this answer involves 
 the rankest kind of heresy. I am willing to go even 
 further and to say that, in the true sense of the word, 
 there is but one epic poem in existence which meets 
 the test, and is world-literature, and not merely 
 class-literature, or race-literature. 
 
 The Iliad, for instance, is a splendid monument to 
 
THE ODYSSEY 9 
 
 the Greek genius. In parts, it is fit to thrill or melt 
 or awe the soul of any one. Yet this is true of parts 
 alone. As a whole, Mr. Carnegie was right in calling 
 it monotonous. It is tiresome even if you read it in 
 the Greek and with a scholar's knowledge of its mul- 
 tifarious allusions, of its characters, and of the 
 creative, restless people who at last read it as a sacred 
 book, the fountain-head of all their knowledge — a 
 book to be learned by heart in school, and quoted 
 as the Bible is now quoted. But the interminable 
 wrangle of the gods, the heroism of heroes who are 
 invulnerable, the endless battles — one feels at last 
 as if he had been listening to the banging of a brazen 
 kettle. In the twenty-four books of the Iliad there 
 are some twenty passages that deserve to be im- 
 mortal. The rest belong to the classicist, the anti- 
 quarian, the philologist. 
 
 Of Vergil's jEneid the very same thing may be 
 said. From Lucan's Pharsalia there may be chosen 
 bits of glowing declamation that stir the blood, with 
 here and there a biting epigram, or a line that lives 
 and glows. The Finnish Kalevala is race-literature, 
 and so is the Lusiad of Camoens. Who but a French- 
 man (and how many Frenchmen.'') ever read the 
 Henriade of Voltaire? And as for Paradise Lost, 
 it is an epic of Puritanism, clogged with seventeenth- 
 century theology, and made ludicrous at its climax 
 by that preposterous passage where the devils bowl 
 the angels over with huge cannon-balls. Now and 
 
10 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 then some German scholar will write an elaborate dis- 
 sertation on it ; but what foreigner could read it, and 
 • — ^to be frank — how many English or Americans have 
 ever read more than stray passages from its la- 
 boured pages? So far as these poems just men- 
 tioned have exercised a world-influence, they are lit- 
 tle more important than the gigantic Sanskrit epic 
 that is eight times as long as both the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey combined, and that contains a hundred thou- 
 sand stanzas. 
 
 The truth is that all these long poems survive 
 because they appeal either to the pride of some par- 
 ticular race or nation, or because they are made the 
 subject of special study by highly educated persons, 
 who master them, or at any rate mess in them, as a 
 part of language-training, or antiquities, or culture- 
 history. There is only one epic which, no matter how 
 badly it may be translated, can be read spontane- 
 ously, for the pure pleasure of it, and which has gone 
 beyond the limits of nation and of race, and down 
 below the stratum of the cultivated, and made its 
 way by a thousand channels into the knowledge of 
 men and women of ordinary intelligence, and even 
 into the prattle of children in the nursery. This is 
 the Odyssey ascribed to Homer ; and I am sure that 
 had Mr. Carnegie read it as a whole in the fine Eng- 
 lish prose of Professor Butcher and Mr. Andrew 
 Lang, he would have pronounced a very different 
 verdict upon Homer, 
 
THE ODYSSEY 11 
 
 The Odyssey is the one epic that has possessed 
 and still possesses a fascination for the peoples of 
 every age and every race since it was first completed. 
 It is the only epic poem of which this is true, and it 
 is, therefore, the greatest epic in all literature. I 
 would venture to go still further and to pronounce 
 it the most wonderful and beautiful single poem 
 of which mankind has any knowledge. If we disre- 
 gard the fact that it is in verse and not in prose, 
 we may say that it is the finest novel, the most 
 stirring romance, that ever has been written. Be- 
 cause it was essentially a novel, the Greeks were very 
 late in evolving prose fiction. They did not need it. 
 
 For our present purpose we need not consider when 
 or how it came into existence; whether it was the 
 work of a single brain or of many ; whether it repre- 
 sents a growth in which a multitude of legends slowly 
 grouped themselves about a central theme and be- 
 came blended into a seamless unity; or whether this 
 process was hastened and made perfect by the genius 
 of a great master of his art. Let us take the poem 
 as it is, and be content to see in it a rare combina- 
 tion of the most primitive fancy with the sure touch 
 and exquisite skill of the supreme artist. Embodied 
 in the Odyssey is every kind of legend and tradition 
 that floated down, detached and isolated, in the great 
 stream of folk-lore. These stories belong to the child- 
 hood of the human race, and are rich with that glori- 
 ous imagination whose warmth had not yet been 
 
12 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 chilled by the sophisticated knowledge of civilisa- 
 tion. The rainbow hues of fancy irradiate these 
 charming tales, which are not Greek alone, but the 
 inherited treasures of humanity over all the world. 
 
 Thus, the adventure with the Cyclops, when the 
 huge one-eyed giant is blinded by Odysseus, can be 
 found in the legends of the Basques and Celts. The 
 bag of ^olus, which held all the winds save one, is 
 familiar in the folk-tales of the Lapps and Finns. 
 The beautiful enchantress Circe, who changes the 
 sailors of Odysseus into swine, was known centuries 
 ago to the story-tellers of India. The descent into 
 hell, which Vergil borrowed from the Odyssey, and 
 which Dante, in turn, borrowed from Vergil, is a 
 theme of fiction so widespread as to occur among 
 the Finns and even among the savages of Polynesia. 
 The Sirens, who by their sweet songs could charm the 
 passing mariners and draw them on the rocks, were 
 invented by sailors perhaps a hundred centuries 
 ago. The towering cliffs which clashed together and 
 destroyed the ships that sailed between them made 
 a fearsome fable for the Aztecs, back in the mists of 
 time, while still the Greeks were but a young people. 
 In a word, the Odyssey contains a mass of curious, 
 primeval, universal myth. It is the wonder-book of 
 the whole world. 
 
 But all these myths and fables and traditions are 
 not thrown together loosely so that they are only a 
 string of episodes quite unrelated to each other, like 
 
THE ODYSSEY IS 
 
 the stories in the Arabian Nights, for instance. They 
 are strands which some one carefully selected and 
 with consummate ingenuity wove together into a 
 fabric that is artistically one. The plot of the 
 Odyssey Is a marvel of construction. It is worked out 
 in such a way that no part of the poem can be de- 
 tached. The bits of legend, whatever may have been 
 their origin, are closely linked with the one absorb- 
 ing theme of the return of Odysseus, and they are so 
 treated as to give infinite variety, while never for a 
 moment letting our attention wander from the plot. 
 Here, then, are at once diversity and unity and 
 artistry combined. Out of all the epics that we 
 know, the Odyssey alone compels attention from the 
 first line to the last. It appeals to curiosity, to im- 
 agination, to humour, to pity, and in some of its great 
 passages, to our sense of the sublime. The nature 
 of the Odyssey explains why Poe's dictum that " a 
 long poem does not exist " is untrue of this one 
 great epic. The strain, the mental elation, which 
 characterise other long poems fatigue the reader's 
 mind because the poet calls only one set of emo- 
 tions into play. Poe seems to think that only the 
 sublime and the passionate have place in poetry. 
 He does not remember that pity, curiosity, and even 
 humour may also enter in. The principle of variety 
 is a most important one; but no epic poet other 
 than Homer has made use of it to the very full. 
 Milton, for example, descends from his sublimities 
 
14 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 to indulge in platitudes. Homer passes from his 
 sublimities to different, but no less unfailing, sources 
 of emotion. The reader's mind, therefore, is rested 
 not by bathing itself in dulness nor by putting the 
 book aside altogether for a time. It passes by a 
 natural and easy transition from sublimity to beauty, 
 from beauty to pathos, from pathos to expectancy, 
 from expectancy to pleasurable entertainment, or 
 to some climax which again raises it to the heights. 
 Thus the Odyssey properly observes Wordsworth's 
 principle of " an overbalance of pleasure." 
 
 The ultimate reason why the Odyssey has achieved 
 the sort of immortality which no other epic poem 
 ever won is found, I think, in the great prominence 
 which it gives to the purely human element. The 
 gods, instead of being always thrust before us, are 
 seen only, as it were, hovering in the background ; 
 and it is the fate of men and women with which we 
 are first of all concerned. Odysseus himself, the hero 
 of the poem, though he is a great warrior and wise 
 above all other men, is not always void of fear, any 
 more than he is always free from folly. He has mo- 
 ments of weakness and unwisdom, like any man. He 
 dreads the perils of an unknown shore. He yields 
 to the fascination of Calypso. He rashly runs un- 
 necessary risks when he makes his visit to the Cyclops, 
 and thereby is forced to wander over sea and land 
 for two long years. But his courage and his wisdom 
 pull him through at last, and the climax of the poem 
 
THE ODYSSEY 15 
 
 makes us thrill at the triumph of manhood over every 
 obstacle. 
 
 And two women in the book are wonderfully true. 
 Penelope, the loyal wife of Odysseus, beset by wooers, 
 not knowing surely that her husband still survives — 
 she is the type for all time of constancy and truth, 
 of devotion to the man to whom her entire heart is 
 given. What shall we say of Nausicaa, the island 
 maiden? She was first drawn for us almost three 
 thousand years ago, yet she is as winsome and as 
 sweet as though we had just met her playing tennis. 
 This island princess, the daughter of a rich and 
 luxurious king, still goes with her companions to 
 wash her garments in a little stream, and to romp 
 with her attendant maidens. She blushes when she 
 comes upon the shipwrecked Odysseus, and will not 
 herself guide him to the palace through the city 
 streets, lest people should gossip and say, " Where 
 did she pick him up.?" (jtod ds fitv tups;) Nau- 
 sicaa is a genuine girl, with all a young girl's mod- 
 esty and sweetness and naivete. She and Chrysoth- 
 emls, in the Electra of Sophocles, are the only two 
 genuine girls in all Greek literature — Nausicaa, a 
 frank, lovable, and sensible young creature, and 
 Chrysothemis just the least bit pert. Chrysothemis, 
 in fact, is a good example of the shallow young girl 
 who likes gaiety and does not very much trouble 
 herself about the deeper things of life. In the play 
 of Sophocles, she can not understand why her sister 
 
16 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Electra should go moping about, creating an at- 
 mosphere of unhappiness and discontent. To be 
 sure, there was some sort of scandal back in the past 
 about her mother's marriage with her stepfather; 
 but why keep brooding over this forever? She 
 would like to have the palace done over and to re- 
 sume the usual festivities and entertainments. When 
 Electra rebukes her, Chrysothemis is just a little 
 bit cattish in her sharp replies. On the other hand, 
 Nausicaa has a deeper, more aiFectionate, and stead- 
 fast nature. Once I ha^ppened to speak of these two 
 dainty little Greeks to a very accomplished classical 
 scholar, and he remarked laughingly: 
 
 " Yes, I'm sure that Chrysothemis wore side- 
 combs." 
 
 He would scarcely have said this in a public lec- 
 ture on Greek literature, and yet it expresses abso- 
 lutely the feeling that one has on first reading the 
 few lines in which a master of psychology has given 
 us a bit of everlasting human nature. 
 
 About Nausicaa, Charles Dudley Warner wrote 
 that " nothing is more enduring in literature than 
 this girl." And he goes on to make some general re- 
 marks which seem to me peculiarly appropriate to the 
 Odyssey as a whole. " All the elements of the picture 
 are simple, human, natural, standing in as uncon- 
 fused relation as any events in common life." Here, 
 indeed, we find " the true realism that is touched with 
 the ideality of genius," and this is "the immortal 
 
THE ODYSSEY 17 
 
 element in literature." For the highest genius is 
 marked first of all by a beautiful simplicity, a quality 
 which appeals to the universal understanding, gener- 
 ation after generation, and age after age. This 
 realism touched with ideality, this natural and simple 
 and human element, are what make the Odyssey the 
 first of epics, inimitable and unapproachable. 
 
 It is in the climax of the book that the human in- 
 terest of the poem is most sharply and surely felt. 
 Odysseus has wandered for ten weary years, seeking 
 to reach his home in Ithaca, and always beaten back 
 by the curse of Poseidon, which leads him through a 
 strange and striking series of adventures. In his ab- 
 sence, and because he is thought to be long since 
 dead, a swarm of suitors throng the palace, where his 
 wife still hopes for his return. They are eager, lust- 
 ful, arrogant young nobles who browbeat the aged 
 father of Odysseus, quarter themselves upon the ab- 
 sent king's domain, eat and drink at his table, waste 
 his possessions, and make loose love to the maidens 
 who wait upon the queen, Penelope. 
 
 When, at last, Odysseus comes, it is in the guise 
 of a beggar, mean and squalid in appearance. His 
 anger blazes hotly in his heart at what he hears and 
 sees ; but he is wise, and he stays his hand until his 
 vengeance shall be the more tremendous. His aged 
 father does not recognise him, nor even his wife who 
 loves him. His old hound, Argos, alone remembers 
 the lord and king of Ithaca. Then comes the mo- 
 
18 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 ment when the suitors are lolling over the wine-cups, 
 and they mock the beggar-man. The great bow of 
 King Odysseus is brought forth, and one after an- 
 other the jeering youths essay to bend it, but their 
 strength is not sufficient. At last the beggar takes 
 it in his hands, and looks down upon the wanton 
 revellers who have robbed him and would have dis- 
 honoured him. And as he looks, the meanness of the 
 beggar gives way to the majesty of the monarch. 
 He towers above them with blazing eyes, and with 
 all the glory of triumphant and avenging power. 
 The doors of the great hall are barred, and a peal 
 of thunder shakes the heaven. Odysseus calls to his 
 son, Telemachus, and " Telemachus girt his sharp 
 sword about him, and took his spear in his grasp, 
 and stood fast by his father's side, all armed with 
 gleaming bronze, while Odysseus stripped himself of 
 his rags and leaped upon the threshold, and poured 
 out the swift arrows there before his feet." 
 
 It is superb — this vengeance of a king, who, re- 
 turning home, stands forth magnificent in his just 
 rage, and bends the mighty bow and slays with his 
 shafts those who have insulted him and who have 
 dared to treat his wife with less than honour. The 
 story stirs the blood, whether we read it in the splen- 
 did, rolling measure of the Greek or in one of the 
 many translations. It plays upon the elemental 
 primitive emotions, and therefore it is a poem written 
 for all time. 
 
THE ODYSSEY 19 
 
 Alone among epic poems, the Odyssey, as I have 
 said, has entered not merely into every form of later 
 romance, but into the common speech of man. We 
 find it largely drawn upon by Vergil in the greatest 
 Latin epic, just as we find fragments of its fine gold 
 scattered through the works of modem writers — the 
 poetry of Tennyson, for example, or the child-prose 
 of Hawthorne. So it Is that even those who never 
 read the Odyssey have come to possess at least a 
 little of its treasure ; for there are few who have not 
 heard of the Sirens and of " Cimmerian darkness," 
 and of Circe, of the Cyclops, of Penelope's web, and 
 of the lotus-eaters. 
 
 The Odyssey has for its very heart the home toward 
 which the hero is ever striving. It is a poem of the 
 sea — the wonderful sea in whose enchanted isles are 
 dreams of loveliness and also dangers that appal. 
 It has all the magic and the mystery of the ocean 
 — its endless fascination, the radiance of its sun- 
 lit waves, and the stern grandeur of its tempests. 
 Thus, unlike any other epic, its music is infinitely 
 varied ; yet underneath it are always — so that it may 
 be truly epic in its power — the " surge and thunder " 
 whose deep tones haunt the ear and reach at last the 
 very soul of him who reads. 
 
ALCIPHRON 
 
II 
 
 ALCIPHRON 
 
 In just what way do men and women look on life? 
 Year succeeds year, and decade follows after decade ; 
 and in this swiftly silent gliding on of time there is 
 wrought out for us the curious succession of events 
 which, when taken all together, make up our lives. 
 For it is by events and experiences, and not by years, 
 that we measure our existence and decide in retro- 
 spect whether we have been happy or unhappy. 
 The successes and the failures, the opportunities and 
 the limitations, the friendships and the enmities, the 
 periods of intellectual growth and those of intel- 
 lectual deterioration, the hours of contentment and 
 the moments of passionate revolt or exaltation — these 
 times, these episodes, are woven together into that 
 multicoloured, blurred, uneven fabric of personal ex- 
 perience which each of us calls life. Every human 
 being, indeed, is living a realistic novel whereof he is 
 himself in his own belief the central figure, the person 
 of supreme importance; and so he interprets every 
 incident according to its relation to his personal 
 concerns. 
 
 Naturally, then, he looks upon these incidents from 
 a special angle — the angle of self — and he seldom 
 
24 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 pauses to reflect that every other character in the 
 story is looking upon the same episodes from quite 
 a different angle, and that each one is equally con- 
 vinced that he or she is the true hero, or the heroine. 
 And as each views the whole with a vision and a 
 knowledge that are necessarily restricted, it follows 
 that the entire plot, the completed scheme, is actually 
 and fully known to none, but that each sees some- 
 thing which the rest do not, and that each must also 
 be quite ignorant of that which many of the others 
 know. 
 
 Such are the inevitable conditions of human life; 
 and therefore life is something to which no person 
 holds the key, not even the key to his own small 
 tour d'ivoire. In summing up the story of a life, the 
 only things of which we can be approximately sure 
 are the results, the concrete and plainly seen effects. 
 Of the causes which have brought all these results to 
 pass, we are infinitely and pitifully ignorant. We 
 only sometimes think we know. When we analyse 
 our basis of belief we find it always crumbling into 
 dust. Could we but read the minds and search the 
 hearts of others, we might perhaps approach the 
 truth ; yet even then we should often have to hesitate. 
 For who can be so absolutely sure concerning his own 
 secret soul as to single out in it the dominating influ- 
 ence which determines any action, amid the clash and 
 interplay of conflicting motives, each striving for 
 the mastery of will? An act, which to the world at 
 
ALCIPHEON 25 
 
 large seems noble, may have its hidden source in base- 
 ness. An apparent sacrifice of self may have been 
 prompted by an egoism of which the world knows 
 nothing and of which perhaps we are ourselves not 
 fully conscious. So, when it comes to judging others, 
 how utterly incapable is the very wisest, the most ex- 
 perienced and the most intuitive for such a task as 
 that! Only the limping devil of Lesage could give 
 the needed clue, or else some revelation such as that 
 which Maupassant's profoundly morbid mind con- 
 ceived in his strange fantasy, " La Morte." Each of 
 us, in fact, lives out his life in a curious and almost 
 dreadful isolation, a supreme and quite impenetrable 
 ignorance of every other human soul; since every 
 such soul is shut in by a prison-wall which nothing 
 can remove. Wisdom can not shatter it. Faith 
 can not surmount it. Immortal love itself, so radi- 
 ant and all-compelHng, finds here the limit of its 
 power, and beats against the bars in vain. 
 
 In what way, then, do we see life.'' Only in unre- 
 lated fragments ; never clearly and as a whole. Life 
 is a volume from which many leaves are lost and of 
 which many chapters are undecipherable. He who 
 attempts to read it, is like one who tries to read a 
 score of pages torn at random from a novel and seeks 
 to reconstruct the missing parts. He can obtain a 
 partial knowledge of the characters. He can get an 
 inkling of the plot. He can with patient ingenuity 
 make guesses at what happened in the part which he 
 
26 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 has lost, and can fancy why it happened. Yet these 
 are only guesses after all ; and amid them, how is he 
 to know which one is right and which are absolutely 
 wrong? And it is so in life — ^in the life of every day, 
 the decorous and apparently uneventful life which we 
 share with those about us. You sit beside some 
 woman at a dinner, and in her casual talk she per- 
 haps lets fall some phrase, some sentence, or some 
 opinion which seems to you a bit of quite unconscious 
 self -revelation. It interests you, and it makes you 
 curious to know her history. You form conjectures 
 and construct a plausible hypothesis. In time, per- 
 haps, you hear from some one else a scrap or two of 
 gossip which in part confirms your theory and in part 
 destroys it. You then construct another theory that 
 will harmonise with all that you have heard and 
 fancied. And then, most likely, you can learn no 
 more. You never see or hear of her again. You have 
 had a tantalising half glimpse of something hidden, 
 as it seems to you — and that is all. In fact, it may 
 be that there was no story and that you were alto- 
 gether wrong in your belief; or it may be that the 
 story was very different from that which you im- 
 agined, and one even more remarkable. Yet, what- 
 ever the truth may be, you will never know it. 
 
 And so it is with the whole complex structure of 
 the life we see about us. Often before your eyes there 
 are enacted comedies, the wit and fun of which escape 
 you. You are yourself an unconscious actor in 
 
ALCIPHRON 27 
 
 tragedies whose poignant agony you never feel or 
 dream of. That thing which in your behef seems 
 full of meaning is in reality quite meaningless ; that 
 which you view as wholly unimportant may hold the 
 key to all your future. For we all wear masks and 
 we all speak with the smooth mendacity which con- 
 vention teaches us; and as we move among our fel- 
 lows, urbane and smiling and apparently at ease, we 
 fail to perceive in one another the surging tide of 
 quivering hope and baffled despair, nor do we note the 
 scars which each of us conceals. Therefore, to every 
 one who lives it, life is replete with trivialities, with 
 coincidences which have no significance, and with epi- 
 sodes which may, indeed, be vital in their true relation 
 to the whole, but which to us are only casual occur- 
 rences, half noticed at the time and almost instantly 
 forgotten. 
 
 It is odd that the writers of modern fiction have 
 never fully understood the truth of what has just 
 been said, in its relation to the theory of literary 
 realism. Our so-called realists profess to give in what 
 they write an accurate transcript, a perfect repro- 
 duction, an untouched photograph of life, precisely 
 as it is. To attain this end they strive with eager- 
 ness. They observe minutely, they study each detail, 
 they spare you nothing in their desire that not even 
 the most minute particular shall escape your notice. 
 They insist that in all their pages you shall see every- 
 thing, feel everything, know everything. And this 
 
28 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 they say is realism — a truthful and convincing rep- 
 lica of life. But, as a matter of fact, it is wholly 
 false to life, and it is false precisely in proportion 
 as it shows us all and tells us all and leaves absolutely 
 nothing to be guessed or to be given up as quite in- 
 soluble. Everything they show us has a meaning, a 
 definite relation to the whole; and when we read the 
 book, we learn just what this meaning is and just 
 what is this relation. In life, however, we often miss 
 the meaning and do not even dream of correlating 
 half the facts which we have superficially observed. 
 
 You can see the falsity of the pseudo-realistic 
 method even in its minor phases. Zola, for instance, 
 will take us up some greasy staircase, and as he leads 
 us on, he will catalogue the odours that we encounter, 
 enumerating the source of each, the quality of each, 
 the effect of each upon the sense of smell, until we 
 have a perfect symphony of stenches. When we 
 reach the room above, he will again set forth each 
 article of furniture and every stain upon the wall. 
 He will call attention to the broken window-pane 
 with a soiled night-cap thrust into the jagged hole; 
 he will nudge us, as it were, to make us see just how 
 the battered washstand is propped against the wall ; 
 he will insist upon the condition of the towels, the ap- 
 pearance of the soapy water in the washbowl, and he 
 will not pause until each square inch of squalor has 
 been put beneath his microscope for us to gaze at. 
 Yet in life one does not see things in this way. If 
 
ALCIPHEON 29 
 
 we go up the staircase by ourselves, an unpleasant 
 odour may make us instinctively recoil, and then 
 hurry on ; but we never stop to analyse it or to con- 
 sider the source of every separate and component 
 stench. We simply get a swift impression of some- 
 thing which is repellent, and that is all. And when 
 we enter a room, we get in like manner an impres- 
 sion of the room and of its most conspicuous fea- 
 tures, but we do not notice every sordid, nauseous 
 detail. 
 
 And in more important things, the pseudo-realism 
 makes the same mistake in telling us too much and in 
 insisting that we shall see everything. Zola and 
 his school give us every external material detail reit- 
 erated over and over again. Bourget and his imi- 
 tators let us into the innermost secrets of the brain 
 so that we know their personages psychologically 
 down to the last quiver of emotion or the last elusive 
 turn of thought. And in the books which these 
 writers have produced, every incident fits into every 
 other incident just as the wheels of a machine fit into 
 the cogs on which they turn. Every episode has a 
 direct and definite relation to every other episode, 
 and we are allowed to know just what the relation is. 
 Nothing happens casually, or without a definite 
 meaning. It is all wrought out so cunningly and 
 with so perfect a balance, so logical a sequence, so 
 inevitable an issue! The whole is marvellous as a 
 work of art, yet it is preposterous as a bit of life; 
 
so STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 for from it the element of the fortuitous, the insig- 
 nificant, and the irrelevant is utterly excluded. We 
 admire the dexterity of the artist who has done so 
 neat a piece of literary joiner's work; but the very 
 perfection of his art removes it wholly from the 
 sphere of truth and nature. It lacks the largeness 
 and the looseness of the life we live. 
 
 This fact has not escaped at least one modern nov- 
 elist ; or, at any rate, there is one modern novelist 
 who has come far closer to reality. This is Count 
 Tolstoi, of whom Matthew Arnold observed with 
 great acuteness that he has not thought it necessary 
 to make the action in his novels represent a unity 
 towards which each episode and incident shall lead 
 the reader, and upon which they shall all inevitably 
 converge. Thus in Anna KarSnina there are two 
 distinct and separate " actions " (the word is Mr. 
 Arnold's), or rather plots, the one relating to the 
 connection of Anna and Vronsky and the other to 
 the affair of Katia and Levine. As the tale devel- 
 ops, we pass from one set of interests to another with 
 that freedom and actual inconsequence which be- 
 longs to the haphazard history of human lives. But 
 there is something more to be observed, and Mr. 
 Arnold has very clearly noted its significance. 
 
 " People appear in connection with these two main ac- 
 tions whose appearance and proceedings do not in the least 
 contribute to develop them; incidents are multiplied which 
 we expect are to lead to something important, but which do 
 
ALCIPHRON 31 
 
 not. What, for instance, does the episode of Katia's friend, 
 Varinka, and Levine's brother. Serge Ivanitch, their inclina- 
 tion for one another and its failure to come to anything, 
 contribute to the development of either the character or 
 the fortunes of Katia and Levine? What does the incident 
 of Levine's long delay in getting to church to be married, 
 a delay which as we read of it seems to have significance, 
 really import? It turns out to import absolutely nothing, 
 and to be introduced solely to give the author the pleasure 
 of telling us that all Levine's shirts had been packed up." 
 
 Objection has been made to this irrelevance as be- 
 ing an essential blemish on a work of art, and such, 
 in truth, it would be were this remarkable book of 
 Tolstoi's to be viewed as being just a work of art. 
 But, as Mr. Arnold afterwards observes, it is a mis- 
 take to speak of Anna Karenina as the creation 
 of an artist. We are rather to take it as a piece 
 of life. 
 
 " A piece of life it is. The author has not invented and 
 combined it, he has seen it; it has all happened before his 
 inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened. Le- 
 vine's shirts were packed up, and he was late for his wed- 
 ding in consequence; Varinka and Serge Ivanitch met at 
 Levine's country-house and went out walking together; Serge 
 was very near proposing, but did not. The author saw it all 
 happening — saw it, and therefore relates it; and what his 
 novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality." 
 
 Just one other modern novelist seems to have had 
 an inkling of what this method means and of its value 
 in giving an accurate impression of life. Anatole 
 France, with all his grotesque jumbling of mysti- 
 
S2 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 cism and materialism, has in two of his novels — 
 L'Orme du Mail and Le Mamiequin d'Osier — exhibited 
 the same appreciation of the inconsequent and the 
 irrelevant as factors of true realism. Mr. Howells 
 came very near doing the same thing in his book enti- 
 tled Letters Home; but apparently his courage 
 failed him and he felt that he must allow at least 
 the reader of the book to know the whole story in 
 its completeness. 
 
 Historically, however, neither Tolstoi nor Anatole 
 France is the first to show us an effective example 
 of this realism. To find the prototype we must go 
 back some seventeen hundred years and open the 
 pages of a Greek writer who lived in Athens two 
 centuries after Christ. This person is Alciphron, a 
 clever and amusing litterateur, who may be best de- 
 scribed as a sort of Hellenic Hugues Le Roux. Prac- 
 tically nothing is known about his life or about his 
 personality; but from the fiction which he has left 
 us, we may infer that he was an easy-going man of 
 the world, a keen observer, a student of human nature 
 in all its phases, and a very graceful, entertaining 
 writer. The task which he set before himself was 
 that of delineating in fiction the every-day life of 
 his own time, and in doing so to sketch character 
 with an accurate understanding of its psychology. 
 
 Yery few persons, very few classical scholars even, 
 concern themselves with the history of Athens after 
 it ceased to be a centre of political power. The 
 
ALCIPHEON 33 
 
 Athens which one most readily calls to mind is the 
 'Athens of the Golden Age of Greece — the Athens 
 which both in arts and in arms was the supreme glory 
 of the Hellenic world. This was the Athens of Peri- 
 cles and Plato, of the great dramatists and phi- 
 losophers and historians and poets, the Athens which 
 beat back the Persian hordes, and which, even in the 
 death-throes of its independence, gave to the world 
 Demosthenes. But the Athens of Alciphron was a 
 very different Athens. Its people under Roman 
 rule had half forgotten the grandeur of their past 
 and were content to lead a pleasure-loving life, em- 
 bellished by all the refined luxury of the later Em- 
 pire. The city was still a marvel of architectural 
 beauty, and its inhabitants were still, as always, mer- 
 curial, clever, and intellectually brilliant. But their 
 genius had ceased to be creative, so that culture and 
 a certain polite erudition took the place of boldly 
 original effort. Athens was the seat of a great uni- 
 versity to which young Romans and Gauls and 
 Spaniards, and even Asiatics, repaired in throngs 
 to receive a modicum of that learning with which the 
 name of Greece is forever associated. The town was 
 very largely given up to a sort of genial bohemian- 
 ism, so that it may be styled le petit Paris of ancient 
 times. The society of this Bohemia was a light- 
 hearted, merry, witty one, loose but not gross in 
 morals, and distinguished chiefly by its perfect 
 swvoir vivre, its easy tolerance, and its general ap- 
 
84 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 preciation of every one who showed himself to be a 
 bon enfant. 
 
 This was the society which Alciphron has drawn 
 for us in a series of fictitious letters supposed to be 
 written by all sorts of persons representing pretty 
 nearly every class — men-about-town, adventurers, 
 professional diners-out, gamblers, peasants, fisher- 
 men, ingenuous youths, philosophers, anxious par- 
 ents, and ladies of easy virtue. Taken together, 
 these letters afford a curious kaleidoscopic view of 
 Athenian life as it was known to the general run of 
 men and women who were not distinguished, who 
 were not " historical," but whom we see through the 
 eyes of Alciphron as going about their usual occu- 
 pations and amusements quite unconscious that any 
 one is studying them. In short, Alciphron has done 
 for the every-day world of Athens precisely what 
 Petronius did for the every-day world of Italy a cen- 
 tury before. Alciphron, however, unlike Petronius, 
 is not a cynic, and he sinks his own personality in 
 that of the individuals who are supposed to write 
 these letters. There are many glimpses in them of 
 the seamy side of life. The amusements of his Athe- 
 nians were not always harmless, and there is much 
 that decidedly does not tend to edification. Yet, on 
 the other hand, there is much that is humorous and 
 kindly, with here and there a very charming touch 
 of grace and innocence. 
 
 The peculiar feature of the letters is found in the 
 
ALCIPHEON 85 
 
 fact that they do not tell a story, but that they give 
 you hints of many stories. It is precisely as though 
 you had rifled the contents of a mail-bag and had 
 before you the stolen letters. From them you would 
 learn innumerable secrets ; you would find clues to 
 many a romance, to many a complication, to many a 
 scandal ; but the whole story in each case you would 
 not know and could only guess at it. There is some- 
 thing peculiarly piquant in all this half-revelation, 
 and it shows that Alciphron, almost two thousand 
 years ago, anticipated the truly realistic theory of 
 fiction which in modem times Is exemplified alone in 
 Tolstoi and in some of the writings of Anatole 
 France. 
 
 The letters of Alciphron have never been fully 
 translated into English. About a hundred years ago 
 a version of some of them was published anonymously 
 in London, the translators being two old-fashioned 
 scholars named William Beloe and Thomas Monro.* 
 But their version is a perfectly impossible one. The 
 easy, sinuous, rippling Greek of Alciphron, light as 
 the petal of a flower or the wing of a humming-bird, 
 is turned into stilted, pompous, eighteenth-century 
 British prose that moves along with the lumbering 
 gait of an elephant. It is as though the sprightly 
 Lettres de Femmes of Marcel Prevost were to be ren- 
 dered into the polysyllabic ponderosities of Dr. 
 Samuel Johnson. 
 
 * A privately published and limited edition of the Letters 
 of Alciphron was made a few years ago. 
 
36 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Such being the case, I may venture to translate 
 a few of these letters in a somewhat freer manner, 
 endeavouring above all to preserve the spirit of the 
 original. Some day the entire collection should be 
 so translated both for its own intrinsic interest and 
 also because of its importance in the history of fic- 
 tion. Here, for example, is the letter of a young girl 
 who lives in the suburbs of Athens, probably at the 
 Piraeus, which was the harbour town, in character 
 a sort of Sanct Pauli to an ancient Hamburg. The 
 girl's name is Glaucippe, the daughter of a fisher- 
 man. She is evidently a prototype of Little Em'ly, 
 and has been betrothed in her innocence to a Pirjean 
 Ham Peggotty. So long as she had seen no other 
 men, or, at any rate, none but men of her own class, 
 she had been happy and contented in the thought 
 of her coming marriage. But unfortunately for her, 
 she has gone to Athens for a holiday, and has there 
 made the casual acquaintance of a Grecian Steer- 
 forth — a man whose elegance and knowledge of good 
 form have dazzled the poor girl and played havoc 
 with her inexperienced young heart. Instantly the 
 thought of the uncouth bridegroom whom her par- 
 ents have provided for her becomes horrible. She 
 shudders at him and she adores wildly and passion- 
 ately the idle young Athenian who has made careless 
 love to her. So she sits down and writes this letter 
 to her mother : 
 
 "Dearest Mamma: I am quite distracted. I can't bear 
 
ALCIPHEON 37 
 
 the Idea of marrying that pilot's son as papa wants me to. I 
 have met Ephebus in the city where you . let me go for the 
 holidays at the time of the festival in which he took part. He 
 is, oh, so handsome, mamma, and more than that, he is per- 
 fectly fascinating! He has the most beautiful curly hair 
 and such a smile! His eyes are as blue as the ocean when 
 the sun first rises; and altogether his face makes you sure that 
 he is a favourite of the Graces. You ought to see his lips. 
 They are as red as roses. I have simply got to marry him. If 
 you don't let me, I'll throw myself into the sea like Sappho." 
 
 Naturally Glaucippe's mother takes a different 
 view of it. Her answer is brief and very much to the 
 point. 
 
 "Child, you certainly are distracted. You must have gone 
 crazy. You seem to have lost all your modesty and need good 
 sharp treatment. Stop your nonsense right away and hold 
 yourself in, until you get this crazy notion out of your head. 
 If your father finds it out he'll make fish-bait of you in half 
 a jiflFy." 
 
 This is all we know about the love affair of young 
 Glaucippe. Perhaps it turned out as Little Em'ly's 
 did ; or perhaps Glaucippe, being duly taken in hand, 
 became tractable, and married her young pilot. But 
 if so, it is pretty certain that she kept scornfully 
 comparing him with the fascinating Ephebus, until 
 middle age and many children stilled in her heart 
 the voice of sentiment. 
 
 Here is a letter from a mercenary young lady with 
 more wants than scruples. A sentimental youth 
 named Simalion is hopelessly in love with her. He is 
 
38 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 evidently very young and wholly under the control 
 of his parents, who allow him very little pocket- 
 money. Hence, the following letter to him from his 
 Petala. She certainly makes her meaning very clear. 
 She knows with the unfailing instinct of her kind 
 that he is so infatuated that even her contempt will 
 only stimulate his unreasoning love, and that sooner 
 than lose her he will stick at nothing. 
 
 "Well, if a girl could live on tears, what a wealthy girl I 
 should bel You're generous enough with them at any rate. 
 Tears are not quite enough for me, worse luck! Money is 
 what I want. I've got to have jewelry, clothes, servants, and 
 all that sort of thing. Nobody ever left me a fortune or a 
 block of stock, and that's why I have to depend on little 
 presents which gentlemen make me. I've known you a whole 
 year, and how much better off am I, I should like to know? 
 My hair is a perfect fright just because all that time I haven't 
 had anything to dress it with; and as for clothes — ^why, the 
 only dress I've got in the world is so ragged that I'm ashamed 
 to be seen with my friends. And yet you imagine, I suppose, 
 that I can keep on this way forever without any other means of 
 support. Yes, of course, you cry, but you won't cry forever. 
 I'm really surprised to see how many tears you can shed; but 
 if somebody doesn't give me something soon, I shall starve to 
 death. I know you pretend that you're just crazy for me, and 
 that you can't live without me. Very well, then, isn't there 
 any silver in your house? Can't you get hold of some of 
 your mother's jewelry? Hasn't your father got anything that 
 you can raise some money on? Other girls are luckier than 
 I am. They have lovers, but all that I seem to have is a 
 sort of mourner, who keeps sending me roses and wreaths and 
 garlands of flowers as if I were dead and going to be buried; 
 and he says he cries for me all night. Now, if you can manage 
 to rake up something for me, then you can come here without 
 
ALCIPHRON S9 
 
 having to cry and cry; but if not, just keep your tears to 
 yourself and let me alone." 
 
 Here is still another letter. It is written by an un- 
 sophisticated person, who was unfortunate enough 
 to try his luck in a gambling house in one of the 
 disreputable quarters of the city. 
 
 " Maybe you would like to know what's the matter with me 
 and how I got my head broken and my clothes all torn to 
 pieces. Well, the fact is, I broke the bank at a little game; 
 but I wish I hadn't. For what's the use of a man like me 
 running up against a lot of heelers? You see, after I had 
 raked in all the money in the place and they hadn't a red 
 cent left, they all jumped on my neck and punched me and 
 stoned me and ripped the clothes up my back. All the same, 
 I hung on to the money as tight as I could, because it nearly 
 killed me to give it up; and I did hold out quite a while. I 
 didn't give in when they hit me or even when they twisted 
 my fingers. 1 felt like a Spartan who lets himself be whipped 
 just to see how much he can stand without giving in. Un- 
 fortunately this isn't Sparta but Athens, and I was up against 
 the toughest kind of a gang; and so when I was pretty near 
 fainting I had to let them rob me. They went through my 
 pockets, and then after they had cleaned me out, they skipped. 
 Anyhow, it's better to live without money than to die with 
 your pockets full of it." 
 
 Finally, let me cite part of a beautiful love letter, 
 supposed to be written to Demetrius, the soldier and 
 statesman, by a girl named Lamia. It is touching 
 in its humility — the humility which genuine love 
 teaches, in making the reality seem too wonderful 
 to be true. 
 
40 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 " You will think it bold of me to write to you, my prince, 
 and you will care little for my letters now that you have won 
 my love. Indeed, when I see you among your guards and 
 surrounded by your soldiers and ambassadors, and crowned 
 with your diadem, I am wholly overcome and turn away from 
 you as I would turn my eyes away from the blinding sun; 
 for then I know that you are really Demetrius the great 
 soldier. How imposing, how like a conqueror you look! And 
 then I feel quite hopeless and say over to myself: ' Oh, Lamia, 
 is this really the man who spends his evenings with you, who 
 likes to hear you sing, who writes you letters, and who pre- 
 fers you to any other?' I can only keep silence and pray 
 that you will come to me again. But when you do come to 
 me and I kneel at your feet and you take me up into your 
 arms — then I wonder whether this is really the stormer of 
 cities. And with my lute I lay siege to the besieger and try 
 whether he who has conquered others will himself be con- 
 quered. 
 
 " I shall never attempt to win you by any arts. I shall 
 never lie to you as others do or be unfaithful. Since you 
 first loved me, no other men have even looked at me, much 
 less made love to me. Love comes quickly and it goes with- 
 out a warning. The man who still has something to receive 
 comes as it were on wings, while he to whom everything has 
 been given, grows tired and goes away. I know this, and 
 I know that many women seek to hold their lovers by always 
 keeping something back; and yet with you I can not do this 
 thing; for I trust you, and I do not fear that you will ever tire 
 of me. It might be different with others, but upon you who 
 are bound to me and who are so proud to have others see 
 you with me, I could not practise these small arts, or use 
 even the most insignificant deceit. I should be a fool to do 
 so, for I should think it a small sacrifice to give up every- 
 thing to please you, even life itself." 
 
 Only by quoting very many of these letters could 
 an accurate idea be given of the extremely vivid way 
 
ALCIPHRON 41 
 
 in which they reproduce for us the throbbing life of a 
 great and luxurious city. In the pages of Alciphron 
 we find ourselves actually in Athens, elbowing in its 
 crowded streets a hundred various types — the gilded 
 youth, the staid and cautious merchants, the barbers 
 standing at their shop doors and begging customers 
 to enter, the bunco men, the jugglers, the drunken 
 soldiers, the market women — all, in fact, who make 
 up a city's throng. We go with Alciphron into the 
 houses of the Bohemian set and take part in their 
 jolly dinners at which poets and artists eat and drink 
 and talk and sing ; and as we watch them, all the cen- 
 turies that lie between us melt away, and we see once 
 more that human life and human nature are essen- 
 tially the same in every age and every land, and that 
 the fascination of them is unalterable and eternal. 
 
MILTON 
 
Ill 
 
 MILTON 
 
 Shakespeake and Milton are the two great columns 
 that support the splendid structure of English let- 
 ters. Almost instinctively, when we name one of 
 them, the other comes to mind. And yet there are 
 few points of resemblance in the two. There are 
 many points of contrast. We know very little indeed 
 about the life of Shakespeare; but all that we do 
 know is consistent with a single character. It is pos- 
 sible to visualise a Shakespeare to ourselves — a bril- 
 liant, ready, versatile man of the world, a friend of 
 the great no less than of his own early associates, a 
 practical man of affairs, and withal one whose inner 
 soul was pregnant with sublimities and beauties. The 
 character is congruous in every part. 
 
 But when we come to Milton, of whom much is 
 known, the difficulty is infinitely greater, the con- 
 tradictions are far more numerous. According as 
 we view him from one angle or another, he seem;s 
 quite inconsistent with himself. Indeed, there are 
 several Miltons, each of them almost unrelated to the 
 others. What has the young Milton, expanding 
 under the blue skies of Italy, writing sonnets to 
 
 45 
 
46 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 pretty girls or singing in blithesome mood of " spicy 
 nut-brown ale " and " tipsy dance and jollity "^•- 
 what has he to do with the dour Latin secretary to 
 the Commonwealth, inditing grave despatches off 
 state, or hurling foul names at the Lord Protector's' 
 enemies ? And still another Milton is the Milton who 
 wrote Paradise Lost — dignified, austere, and yet be- 
 nignant. We are apt to think of Milton as the strict- 
 est of religionists, and it is hard to reconcile this 
 aspect of the man with his neglect of public worship 
 and with the fact that in his later years he had no 
 prayers at home. 'And then there is the harsh, stern, 
 tyrannical Milton who made even his children hate 
 him — the schoolmaster and writer on education, who, 
 nevertheless, would not have his eldest daughter even 
 learn to write. 
 
 Here we find what seems to be a paradox, or rather 
 a whole series of paradoxes embodied in one man. 
 How shall we analyse a character such as this ? How 
 shall we make him seem reasonable and consistent? 
 The problem has puzzled many students of English 
 literature. The late Dr. Richard Gamett made the 
 most lamentable failure in his treatment of it. James 
 Russell Lowell came nearest to the truth. It may 
 be well to review the traits of Milton as seen at dif- 
 ferent periods of his life, and then, perhaps, attempt 
 to find some link that will unite them all. 
 
 Dr. Garnett wrote : " The author and his books 
 are set at variance, and an attempt to conceive his 
 
MILTON 47 
 
 character as a whole, results in confusion and incon- 
 sistency." But he goes on to say, " Milton seems as 
 perfect a representation as any of his compeers of 
 the sensitive and impulsive passion of the poetical 
 temperament." So apparently, it is all a question of 
 temperament, a thing in whose name as many blun- 
 ders are committed as there were crimes committed 
 in the name of Kberty, according to Madame Roland. 
 Let us see. 
 
 It must be remembered that Milton, whose three 
 hundredth birthday fell on December 9, 1908, was 
 one who, from the first, enjoyed an unusual independ- 
 ence. His father was a man of what might be con- 
 sidered wealth and was, besides, a writer, an excellent 
 musician, and keenly alive to the nascent genius of 
 his son. Therefore, young Milton was free to follow 
 his own inclinations and to live the sort of life that 
 he preferred. It was a grave and sober life for a 
 young English boy — a life of much study and hard 
 reading and serious thinking, yet not the life of a 
 recluse or of one who has to think of a profession. 
 It was, on the other hand, the sort of life to " eman- 
 cipate the ego," to make the boy think well of him- 
 self, and to care very little for what others thought. 
 So, at Christ's College, Cambridge, he resented the 
 overbearing manner of his tutor, whereupon his tutor, 
 as it is recorded, " whipt him," this being the last 
 instance of corporal punishment inflicted at either 
 of the two great English universities. There is some- 
 
48 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 thing piquant in the thought of the poet of heaven 
 and hell being " whipt " by a self -sufficient tutor. 
 Milton was then rusticated, or perhaps withdrew to 
 recover from the indignity. He returned to take his 
 degree, but thereafter he had no love for Cambridge. 
 He had thought of taking orders in the Church of 
 England ; but he hated all authority, and would not 
 subscribe to a written creed. 
 
 Then came the period of his journey through 
 France into Italy, where he practised his Italian in 
 writing complimentary sonnets — now to scholars and 
 now to an anonymous lady at Bologna. It is unlikely 
 that she made any great impression on his heart, for 
 his sonnets to her are written with much more concern 
 for the correctness of the style than for the favour 
 of the lady. In Italy, Milton again showed his per- 
 sonal independence. Opposed to the Catholic Church, 
 he could at most be made to promise not to bring 
 theological topics into his talk. If others did so he 
 would speak out boldly what he thought. He also 
 paid a visit to the blind Galileo, who was out of fa- 
 vour with the Church ; and Milton must have remem- 
 bered this visit long afterward in the days of his own 
 blindness, which joined him to the list of sightless 
 great men: with the mythic CEdipus among kings, 
 with the mythic Homer among poets, with the mythic 
 Samson among warriors, with Galileo among men of 
 science, and, still later, with Bach and Handel among 
 musicians. 
 
MILTON 49 
 
 But as yet Milton was young, and he enjoyed the 
 life and the half-pagan lore of Italy, returning to 
 England at the early rumblings of the great civil 
 war. In London, he taught a very small private 
 school, living austerely on the simplest fare; yet, 
 oddly enough, breaking away from his sobriety to 
 visit sundry festive young friends of his at Gray's 
 Inn, with whom, as his nephew wrote, " he would so 
 far make bold with his body as now and then to keep 
 a gaudy-day." Just what this means is by no means 
 certain; but it was obviously a reaction against too 
 much theology and too little cheer. At this time, 
 when he was about thirty-five years of age, he mar- 
 ried his first wife, Mary Powell, the daughter of an 
 Oxfordshire Cavalier squire, accustomed to fun and 
 frolic, to hunting and to the jollity of house-parties. 
 Milton brought her to his home in London, and there 
 seem to have been for her few " gaudy-days " in that 
 ascetic habitation. .For Milton had now become 
 possessed of a fixed idea. He was no more plain 
 John Milton. He was a power in Church and State. 
 He was writing tractates on religion, and others on 
 education, and was making ready to share in the 
 strange misrule which Cromwell was to force on 
 England. 
 
 He had little thought to give a wife, and little 
 leisure; and so, after a single month, she left him 
 and returned to her father, as for a visit. But, as 
 time went on, she did not return to London, Milton 
 
60 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 wrote her again and again, but received no answer. 
 He sent a messenger, who was insulted. It is not 
 likely that Milton cared much for her, yet it made 
 him angry to be treated with contempt. No woman 
 ever received serious consideration from him. His 
 opinions of them were like those of Lafcadio Heam. 
 But they must take Mm seriously, and so he set forth 
 in several pamphlets the doctrine that a man, with- 
 out any legal process, may, of his own free will, 
 divorce a woman who has failed in her obedience to 
 him. Before long he had come to regard Mrs. Mil- 
 ton as non-existent, and had set himself briskly to 
 courting another girl. 
 
 But, by this time, the civil war was well under 
 way. The Royalists were shaken by the sledge-ham- 
 mer blows of Cromwell. Milton's father-in-law was 
 not unwilling to receive protection from his Round- 
 head son-in-law. The wife fell at Milton's feet and 
 wept and begged him to forgive her; and presently 
 both she and her immediate relatives were sheltered 
 safely in Milton's home. Her spirit had been broken, 
 and nothing more is told of her from this time until 
 her death a few years later. 
 
 The whole episode of Milton's domestic life is too 
 well known for repetition. His eldest daughter, 
 Anne, was a cripple and defective in her speech, yet 
 exceedingly attractive. His second daughter, Mary, 
 who never married, was plain and peevish, and it was 
 she most of all who was drilled and disciplined by her 
 
MILTON 51 
 
 father into learning to pronounce and read aloud to 
 him in seven languages without understanding a word 
 of what she read. The third daughter, Deborah, 
 had some share in this training. But she escaped at 
 last by marrying a weaver, and long afterward, 
 when ignorant and old, she was sought out by Addi- 
 son, and her father's mask of Comus was performed 
 for her benefit. But she herself knew nothing of 
 Comus, or of what a benefit meant ; though she was 
 glad to get the hundred and twenty pounds which it 
 brought to her. 
 
 There is something very sordid and unpleasant in 
 the thought of Milton's life at home after his blind- 
 ness came upon him. His daughters were his slaves, 
 and, like all slaves, they united against their master. 
 Thus, if Milton made them read to him for long hours 
 and rated them for their mistakes, they took their 
 revenge in petty pilfering, and they sold for their 
 private gain many of the books he loved. Four years 
 after the death of his first wife, he married one 
 Catharine Woodcock, who must have made him 
 happy, for he wrote a sonnet to her memory. But 
 she lived only a short while. When he was fifty-five he 
 married for the third time, a very pretty girl, Eliza- 
 beth MinshuU, thirty years younger than himself. 
 She seems to have been made his wife so that she 
 might care for him and keep him from " the unkind 
 children," whom he mentions so bitterly in his will. 
 It was understood that as a reward she was to be his 
 
52 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 sole heiress; and once, when she had prepared a 
 favourite dish for him, he said with pleasure, " Why, 
 God ha' mercy, Betty! I see thou wilt perform ac- 
 cording to thy promise ; and when I die, thou knowest 
 that I have left thee aU." In his will he did leave 
 her all, but the will was broken ; and out of fifteen 
 hundred pounds, three hundred were divided among 
 the daughters evenly. How Mary Milton, the reader 
 of seven languages, felt toward her father may be 
 gathered from what she said when it was told her 
 that he was to marry Mistress MinshuU. 
 
 " That is no news," she snapped out with a flirt 
 of her head ; " but if you were to tell me he was dead, 
 that would be something ! " 
 
 It is pleasanter to draw a veil over this chapter of 
 a great man's life. His public fame began after 
 Charles I. was executed by the leaders of the army. 
 All Europe stood aghast at such a deed. English- 
 men, even those who had fought against the armies 
 of the king, were for a moment hushed. Then, strong 
 and clear in sonorous Latin, came a justification of 
 the regicides. The voice was Milton's, and from 
 this time until the Restoration he was a man of mark. 
 His command of Latin — the diplomatic language of 
 that century — was notable. His periods were turned 
 with skill. He had a wonderful vocabulary of abuse. 
 Charles XL, in exile, commanded Salmasius (Claude 
 de Saumaise) to defend the late king's acts. Salma- 
 sius and Milton were pitted one against the other like 
 
MILTON 5 3 
 
 two gladiators. They hurled back and forth the 
 vilest epithets in Latin. " Swine," " dog," " eunuch," 
 were among the tamest of these compliments. Milton 
 twitted Salmasius with having a shrew for a wife, 
 and when Salmasius died soon after, it is said that 
 Milton was pleased to imagine that his opponent had 
 died of mortification. But Nemesis awaited Milton 
 also. When he began his controversy with Salma- 
 sius he was told that his eyesight would not stand 
 the strain of carrying it through. He did not hesi- 
 tate, but went on to the end, and he became blind. 
 Then the Royalists declared with a grin of joy that 
 Milton's blindness was the punishment which Heaven 
 had sent upon him for defending the slayers of the 
 king. To-day one may at least regret that it came 
 from his intense determination to outwit a brother 
 scholar in foul language, even though that language 
 had a classic form. 
 
 Indeed, when the facts are fully understood, it is 
 impossible to admire Milton for his share in this 
 rather famous controversy. It has been said that 
 his conduct was heroic ; that he felt so driven on by 
 what he thought to be his duty that he risked his 
 eyesight recklessly yet nobly; and that in conse- 
 quence, he affords a fine example of self-sacrifice 
 and of loyalty to a cause. But his polemic was 
 not inspired wholly by his hatred of King Charles or 
 by his devotion to the regicides. Salmasius was then 
 the most conspicuous Protestant scholar in Europe. 
 
54 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUBES 
 
 He held a high position in Leyden. Whoever should 
 attack him would run no risk, since defeat would be 
 generally expected, while success would be a dazzling 
 triumph. And so Milton hurled his invectives at 
 the man who was so conspicuous a mark, just as 
 that master of vitriolic language and shameful innu- 
 endo, Kaspar Scioppius, at Ingolstadt, had flung his 
 poisoned shafts at the great Scaliger. Scaliger died 
 soon after this polemic just as Salmasius died soon 
 after Milton had covered him with scorn. It was a 
 fierce, unsparing age in which no quarter was given 
 or expected, and where the weaker must go unpitied 
 to the wall. Milton loved controversy. He was 
 grim, pugnacious, and full of self-esteem. The sort 
 of glory which would come to him from meeting so 
 famous an adversary was the sort of glory that he 
 loved the most. And there is something else to be 
 observed. Milton received a reward more tangible 
 than praise. A thousand pounds were paid him, a 
 sum equivalent to several times that amount to-day, 
 and, in fact, constituting two-thirds of the estate 
 which he afterwards left behind him at his death. 
 Finally, he was made Latin secretary to the Council 
 of State, at an annual salary of two hundred pounds. 
 For England had now taken on a new form of 
 government. Cromwell, with his sable garments cov- 
 ering a steel corselet to turn aside the assassin's dag- 
 ger, had gone in state to take the oath as Lord Pro- 
 tector, with a single House of Parliament and a 
 
MILTON 55 
 
 subservient Council. Charles I., the lawful king, had 
 been tried and slain for ruling without Parliament, 
 and for raising taxes of his own imposing. The 
 Lord Protector now divided England into ten military 
 districts, with ten major-generals to govern them by 
 the strong hand; and he taxed the nation far more 
 heavily than the king had ever done. But Cromwell 
 never held that the majority should rule; he believed 
 in the right which comes from force of brain and 
 arm. When Milton was made Latin secretary to 
 the Council, it became his duty to turn into Latin all 
 diplomatic papers, and to answer all attacks which 
 were made upon the Lord Protector. He was, there- 
 fore, Cromwell's hterary bravo. Many have thought 
 that he was the personal secretary of the Lord Pro- 
 tector, and one would like to imagine the intercourse 
 of two such extraordinary men. But, as a matter 
 of fact, there is not even a scrap of historical evi- 
 dence to show that they ever met. The famous paint- 
 ing which depicts Cromwell as dictating to Milton a 
 despatch intended for the Duke of Savoy, on the 
 massacre of the Vaudois, is due only to the imagina- 
 tion of an artist. Milton speaks of himself as living 
 in retirement and as having no influence in the coun- 
 cils of the great. Still, in his second " Defence of the 
 English People," he inserts a noble apostrophe to 
 Cromwell; while in a sonnet addressed directly to 
 " the Lord General " occur two famous lines which 
 would make any man immortal. 
 
56 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITEEATUEES 
 
 Peace hath her victories 
 No less renowned than war. 
 
 To cite these lines is to suggest the question, Why 
 is Milton set side by side with Shakespeare? He is 
 much less widely read. The appeal which he mates 
 is less truly universal. His greatest poem is an epic, 
 and much of it belongs to an age of a now outworn 
 theology. Taine, with a touch of genuine French 
 malice, lets his wit play around the theological por- 
 tions of Paradise Lost. Thus, says Taine, " Adam 
 entered Paradise by way of England. . . Adam 
 is your true paterfamilias, with a vote, an M. P., an 
 old Oxford man, consulted at need by his wife, deal- 
 ing out to her with prudent measure the scientific ex- 
 planations which she required." An angel comes to 
 dine with them, and as the dishes are not cooked " no 
 fear lest dinner cool." The angel, says Taine, 
 *' though ethereal, eats like a Lincolnshire farmer, 
 ' with keen despatch, of real hunger, and concoctlve 
 heat to transsubstantiate.' " *' At table. Eve listens 
 to the angel's stories, and then discreetly rises at des- 
 sert when they are getting into politics." The Deity, 
 as conceived by Milton, is half theologian and half 
 despot. " Goethe's God, half abstraction, half legend, 
 source of calm oracles . . . greatly excels this 
 Miltonic God " who is only " a schoolmaster foresee- 
 ing the fault of his pupil and then telling him before- 
 hand the rule of grammar so as to have the pleasure 
 of scolding him without discussion." 
 
MILTON '67 
 
 Nevertheless, one ranks Milton witH Shakespeare 
 because, like Shakespeare, he had the rare, divine, 
 and unmistakable gift of fusing thought and lan- 
 guage in such a way, and with such fire of genius, as 
 to render the combination overwhelming, never-to- 
 be-forgotten, irresistible. It is not the trick of the 
 facile phrase. It is the supreme dominance of the 
 lure of language. Indeed, there are not a few of 
 Milton's passages which, if quoted ofFhand, would, 
 even by many intelligent people, be at once ascribed 
 to Shakespeare. Such are the two lines already 
 cited. Such, again, are the following: 
 
 That last infirmitT' of noble minds. 
 
 To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. 
 
 He touched the tender slops of various quills. 
 
 Of linked sweetness long drawn out. 
 
 Hell 
 Grew darker at their frown. 
 
 Myself am hell; 
 And in the lowest deep a lower deep. 
 
 Heaven opened wide 
 Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound. 
 On golden hinges moving. 
 
 There are lines and phrases from Paradise Lost 
 which many believe to be Biblical, rather than Mil- 
 tonic. They all have a quality of crag-like greatness. 
 
58 STUDIES- IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 as do some of the splendid passages of his prose. 
 It is not true, as Addison remarked, that " our lan- 
 guage sank under him," or, as others of later date 
 have written, that he is too uniformly majestic, so 
 that we hear only organ strains in Milton's music. 
 In his lovely poems, L'Allegro and 7Z Penseroso, 
 which were written at Horton, near Windsor, when 
 he was twenty-five, there is a whole fairy orchestra 
 of chiming bells, and flutes, and harps. There is 
 playfulness as well as the rarest poetic fancy. Who 
 will not recall : 
 
 Sport, that wrinkled Care derides. 
 And Laughter holding both his sides. 
 
 Come and trip it as ye go. 
 On the light fantastic toe? 
 
 And again, 
 
 Where glowing embers through the room 
 Teach light to counterfeit a gloom. 
 
 And wonderfully Shakespearean is that daring mix- 
 ture of metaphors in Lycidas: 
 
 Blind mouths, that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 A sheep-hook, 
 
 which can fairly be set beside that other expressive 
 paradox in Paradise Lost, 
 
 No light, but rather darkness visible. 
 
MILTON 59 
 
 Here, briefly, we may see why Milton, in the his- 
 tory of our language, stands second only to Shake- 
 speare, and how, though harsh and rough at times, 
 he can evoke the very soul of music. 
 
 Milton's Latinity was classical, though not pre- 
 cisely Ciceronian or Vergilian. Nor is it always 
 above criticism. In fact, Dr. Johnson rather neatly 
 pointed out that in one sentence which takes Salma- 
 sius to task for an alleged syntactical slip, Milton 
 himself makes a worse one. He tends to ignore the 
 subjunctive mood, thereby losing certain shades of 
 meaning just as Johnson himself did when he wrote 
 that famous but rather faulty line for Goldsmith's 
 
 epitaph : 
 
 Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. 
 
 Milton, like every writer of modern Latin whose 
 own personality is strong, broke through the tram- 
 mels of Ciceronianism and left a subtle impress of 
 his modes of thought upon the classic diction. One 
 feels a diff'erence which is often not easy to describe 
 but which is there. The words are the words of a 
 Roman, but the voice is the voice of an English- 
 man. Then, again, he admits of necessity to his 
 pages a great many modern proper names and other 
 barbarous expressions, such as hundreda, bombarda, 
 and the like. Perhaps, also, one is repelled by his 
 fondness for extremely physical and sometimes dis- 
 gusting imagery, which is a defect that mars his 
 English prose as well. Horatians ought never to 
 
60 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 forgive him for his woeful rendering of the pretty 
 Pyrrha ode into English " without rhyme, accord- 
 ing to the Latin measure, as near as the language 
 will permit." Obviously the language was obdurate 
 and permitted very little, for the Miltonic version 
 blunders and stumbles along with no approach what- 
 ever to the rhythm, not to say the ease and grace, of 
 the Latin. I suppose that every English or Ameri- 
 can scholar who has annotated the Odes of Horace, 
 has faithfully recorded Milton's abominable trans- 
 lation of simplex munditiis. " Plain in thy neat- 
 ness." — " Plain " ! forsooth, and " neatness " ! One 
 would suppose that Milton was describing some Eng- 
 lish dairy maid. You can almost see the cap and 
 apron and the red hands. How far removed from 
 this is the Pyrrha of Horace — a graceful, exquisite, 
 coquettish girl, simple in her daintiness, standing be- 
 fore the dark background of a cool grotto with a 
 great mass of vivid roses clustering above her head. 
 It is strange that he who wove together so many light 
 fancies in his youthful poetry should have failed so 
 utterly to reproduce the charm of Horace. Milton- 
 ists, therefore, call it merely " a metrical experi- 
 ment," yet this is hardly an excuse. It is the 
 inalienable right of every man to make an ass of 
 himself in the seclusion of his own library ; but when 
 he publishes his " experiments," he is fair game for 
 every critic. 
 
 The apparent contradictions of Milton's character 
 
MILTON 61 
 
 are apparent only. He is essentially the idealist who 
 associates his ideal too closely with himself. The 
 doctrine of the Independents of his time — a fierce 
 rough time — ^is not so far removed in essence from 
 that of the New England transcendentalists of two 
 hundred years later. Milton drifts from Episcopacy, 
 from Presbyterianism, into Free Thought and Unita- 
 rianism, very much as Emerson drifted when he 
 preached his last sermon and resigned his pulpit. 
 Milton was no exponent of a creed, though he studied 
 the Scriptures with deep care. His view of woman 
 was part of his indifference to what he thought 
 the minor things of life. Old Johnson said of him 
 rather grimly, " He thought woman fitted only for 
 obedience, as he thought man fitted only for rebel- 
 lion." Indeed, some lines spoken by Adam in Para- 
 dise Lost* no doubt convey Milton's own opinion of 
 the other sex: 
 
 Oh, why did God, 
 Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven 
 With spirits masculine, create at last 
 This novelty on Earth, this fair defect 
 Of Nature, and not fiU the World at once 
 With men as Angels, without feminine; 
 Or find some other way to generate 
 Mankind? 
 
 Milton's youth was one of purity and seriousness. 
 'At his college he was nicknamed " the Lady." The 
 brief Italian period of his life had the tempered 
 
62 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 brightness of a winter morning. After that he be- 
 came what circumstances made him. Scarcely any- 
 other author of such great renown has been so essen- 
 tially the result of his environment. On him the 
 fierceness of religious controversy and the grim scenes 
 of civil war set their mark deeply, until it was seared 
 into his very soul. Then his blindness came and left 
 him a brooding, introspective creature who saw sol- 
 emn and majestic images ; so that, shutting out this 
 world, his sightless eyes were turned, as it were, to the 
 world of which he had read in the majestic utterances 
 of the Hebrew prophets. A recent English writer has 
 observed that nowhere does Milton show any sym- 
 pathy with animals. It is an acute remark because 
 it extends much farther. He had little sympathy, 
 indeed, with anything which concerned the gentler 
 side of life. Before his fancy there loomed gigantic 
 shapes and the vast illimitable stretches of another 
 world. His daring imagination carried him not only 
 to the gloomy gulfs of hell, but upward to the very 
 throne of God. And so his greatest poem, over which 
 he brooded for more than twenty years, lacks soft- 
 ness and atones for it by sheer sublimity. 
 
 One prefers to think of him as he appeared in his 
 old age, enjoying a modest income, already secure 
 of his fame, visited by many friends and warmly 
 praised by Dryden. At his home, he sat in the sun- 
 shine, or played upon the organ, the cares and pas- 
 sion of his middle Ufa having long since died away. 
 
MILTON 63 
 
 He had given new splendour and fresh power to our 
 noble English speech. If much that he wrote is no 
 longer widely read, it still resembles some gigantic 
 monolith covered with written records in characters 
 which few are able to decipher. Their purport has 
 none the less passed into the life and speech and 
 thought of myriads who unconsciously preserve 
 them and thereby do them reverence. 
 
Hi- 
 
 THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 
 
IV 
 
 THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 
 
 A GKEAT author, as he passes through the centuries, 
 resembles somewhat the master of a caravan who 
 parses through the difficulties and dangers of a 
 dreary desert. When the latter sets out, he has, let 
 us suppose, all the appointments required for the 
 journey — the luxuries as well as the necessities. As 
 he proceeds, however, day after day, encountering 
 dangers, unforeseen accidents, sand-storms, and the 
 hardships that weary his pack-animals, he finds it 
 necessary to dispense with much of his equipment. 
 One thing after another is cast away — ^first those 
 things which are really superfluous, and then those 
 which, though greatly needed, are not absolutely in- 
 dispensable. When he reaches the end of his journey 
 he has with him only such as could not possibly 
 have been spared. They represent the inevitable 
 residuum. Because they were the most necessary of 
 all that he had, they have become the most precious. 
 For this reason they have stayed with him until the 
 very end. 
 
 So it is with the author who has written much. 
 The men and women of his own time can not be sure 
 which of his works are the finest and the most likely 
 to endure. Some will prefer one, and some another, 
 according to their particular tastes. It is only after 
 
 67 
 
68 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 the writer has died, and when he begins, so to speak, 
 his j ourney through the ages, that the real test comes 
 which will sift out of all his writings those that can 
 best be spared, and will save the few that most de- 
 serve to live and that can not be spared at all. 
 
 There are numerous illustrations of this in literary 
 history, and it is not necessary to look back many 
 centuries in order to find some very interesting ones. 
 Thus, out of the mass of plays and stories which 
 Cervantes wrote, Don Quixote is the only work that 
 has endured. Of Dryden's multifarious writings the 
 world remembers now only his Ode on St. Cecilia's 
 Day, and the single play. All for Love, which tells 
 the story of Antony and Cleopatra in a manner rival- 
 ing even that of Shakespeare. Coming nearer to our 
 own time, Goethe will be remembered by the world at 
 large only through the first part of his Faiist. Sir 
 Walter Scott's long string of novels and romances 
 are likewise being sifted out, so as to leave only half 
 a dozen which any one but special students of Eng- 
 lish literature will care to read. Robert Southey 
 wrote every day from nine o'clock in the morning 
 until noon; he corrected proofs through the after- 
 noon; and In the evening he made memoranda for 
 new works; but out of all his epics, poems, satires, 
 and histories, which he thought would live forever, 
 there remains practically nothing except the little 
 nursery classic known to every child as The Three 
 Bears. And these examples could be multiplied in- 
 definitely were it worth our while. Only in the case 
 
THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 69 
 
 of a genius of the highest order, such as Shakespeare, 
 is every scrap of his work preserved and cherished; 
 and even of Shakespeare's, there are many plays 
 which are never put upon the stage, and which in- 
 terest only the critic and the scholar. 
 
 With Alfred Tennyson, though he died only seven- 
 teen years ago, the sifting process has begun. In 
 fact, it may be said to have begun before his death. 
 His own ambition was to write historical dramas, and 
 he did write three which can be admired from many 
 points of view ; yet they failed when acted in the 
 theatre. Nor can it be said that this fate befell them 
 because they were written in Tennyson's old age. A 
 little poem which he published only three years be- 
 fore his death, and which was set to music by Leve- 
 son-Gower, struck an answering chord all over the 
 English world, and is very sure of immortality. This 
 is Crossing the Bar, two stanzas of which could 
 have been written by no one save Tennyson — a master 
 of that artistic simplicity which blends melody and 
 feeling within the compass of a few naturally uttered 
 words that every one can understand. 
 
 But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep. 
 
 Too full for sound and foam, 
 When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
 
 Turns again home. 
 
 Twilight and evening bell, 
 
 And after that the dark! 
 And may there be no sadness of farewell 
 
 When I embark. 
 
70 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 These are almost the last lines that Tennyson ever 
 wrote. On the day of his death the present writer 
 was in London, and it seemed as if nearly every human 
 being had in his hands the words of this infinitely 
 appealing poem. It will be noted that it is a lyric. 
 Tennyson's fame, indeed, began when he gave the 
 world his first book in 1830 — a slender little volume 
 entitled Poems Chiefly Lyrical; and his last poetic 
 breath, so to speak, sought instinctively a lyrical ex- 
 pression. To-day this greatest poet of the nineteenth 
 century is admired for many splendid achievements ; 
 but I believe that in the end, when the inexorable 
 process of time shall have eaten away the memory 
 of what many now think to be his finest work, there 
 will remain, as an imperishable part of English liter- 
 ature, those poems which are " chiefly lyrical." 
 
 The lyric is the most interesting form of poetry 
 that we have. It affects more human beings than any 
 other kind. It is elemental. It Is undoubtedly the 
 first type of poetry that was ever evolved, the type 
 out of which sprang all the others. For what is the 
 lyric when you come to analyse it ? It is the simplest 
 and most natural literary expression of unmixed emo- 
 tion — usually the emotion of an individual. It may 
 be personal, or religious, or amatory, or patriotic; 
 but in the beginning it must have been removed by 
 only one stage from cries, ejaculations, shouts — 
 primitive expressions of pure feeling. Now, just as, 
 aU over the world, a cry of passion or of pain is 
 
THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 71 
 
 understood by every human being, so is the lyric 
 the nearest literary representative of an inarticulate 
 cry. It began probably, as soon as language did, in 
 simple lines and with a short refrain. It gradually 
 developed into a longer and more artificial kind of 
 verse. But because it represents feeling rather than 
 complex thought, it goes straightest and surest to 
 the human heart. Men and women who care nothing 
 for any other sort of poetry instinctively love the 
 lyric in some of its many forms, as the old fa- 
 miliar " pennyroyal hymns " of the New Englander, 
 or the patriotic song, or the love poem, or the battle 
 chant — all the way up the scale of genius from Wes- 
 ley to Campbell, and from Campbell to Burns and 
 Longfellow and Tennyson. The lyric speaks out 
 from the heart the things which belong to every 
 nature; and thus It is the most primitive kind of 
 poetry. 
 
 Hence, I think that if Tennyson was the greatest 
 English poet of the nineteenth century, this was not 
 because "of his dramas, or his idyls, or any half -fan- 
 tastic poems such as the narrative part of The 
 Trmcess; but because his genius at its very highest 
 was neither dramatic nor epic, but lyrical. He caught 
 the ear of the public first with such wonderful bits 
 of harmony as Airy, Fairy Lilian and Mariana; and 
 soon afterward the whole English-speaking world 
 was wondering over the exquisitely undulating lines 
 of LocTesley Hall, almost every couplet of which is 
 
72 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 a golden memory to lovers of pure poetry. Just one 
 phrase in it seems to describe the whole cluster of 
 Tennysonian lyrics, which 
 
 Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid. 
 
 Can any of the following lines ever be forgotten 
 while the English language lasts ? 
 
 Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glow- 
 ing hands; 
 
 Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. 
 
 Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords 
 with might; 
 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music 
 out of sight. 
 
 Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the 
 
 shore. 
 And the individual withers, and the world is more and 
 
 more. 
 
 Greek and more than Greek is the choric song 
 which forms a part of The Lotos-Eaters. It seems 
 to me that nothing in any language can surpass the 
 almost cloying sweetness of these lines. 
 
 How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream. 
 
 With half-shut eyes ever to seem 
 
 Falling asleep in a half -dream! 
 
 To dream and dream, like yonder amber light. 
 
 Which wiU not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; 
 
THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 73 
 
 To hear each other's whisper'd speech; 
 Eating the lotos day by day. 
 To watch the crisping ripples on the beach. 
 And tender curving lines of creamy spray. 
 
 In quite another strain is Lady Clara Vere de Vere. 
 It appeals to honest manhood with all that noble in- 
 dependence which thrills through the most famous 
 lyric of Robert Bums. One single stanza of Tenny- 
 son sums up the creed of that true aristocracy which 
 is not of blood but of achievement and high char- 
 acter : 
 
 Howe'er It be, it seems to me, 
 ' Tis only noble to be good. 
 Kind hearts are more than coronets. 
 And simple faith than Norman blood. 
 
 The deep yet profoundly thoughtful melancholy 
 of In Memoriam is shot through with glimpses of 
 nature which show one " the pleasant fields and 
 farms," the little shallop " at anchor in the flood 
 below," the grey old grange, the sheep-walk on the 
 wold, " the runlet tinkling from the rocks " — 
 
 Till from the garden and the wild, 
 A fresh assiaciation blows. 
 
 Besides this there are such memorably impressive 
 lines as the two which make loom before us : 
 
 The shadow cloaked from head to foot 
 That keeps the keys of all the creeds; 
 
74 STUDIES IN SEVEEAL LITERATURES 
 
 while toward the end of the poem comes that famous 
 lyrical outburst of hope and prophecy : 
 
 Ring out the old, ring in the new. 
 Ring happy bells, across the snow; 
 The year is going, — ^let him go; 
 
 Ring out the false, ring in the true. 
 
 Ring in the valiant man and free, 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 
 Ring out the darkness of the land. 
 
 Ring in the Christ that is to be ! 
 
 What shall one say of the marvellous lyrics which 
 glitter throughout The Prmcessf They have no di- 
 rect relation to the theme of the main poem, but they 
 are jewels of song with which nothing else in Eng- 
 lish can be compared. I should like to quote them 
 here, yet they are too well known. Who does not 
 recall Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead, and 
 The Bugle Song, and Sweet and Lorn, and Tears, 
 Idle Tears, than which music can aiFord nothing 
 more melodious, and poetry nothing more fragrant 
 of delicate suggestion? 
 
 It is odd that no one seems to have noted how 
 deeply indebted to Tennyson's art is Rudyard Kip- 
 ling in those ballads of Kipling's which rise above 
 the strife and clamour of the barrack-room and dis- 
 play the deeper feeling that is always hidden some- 
 where in the Anglo-Saxon nature. Tennyson's deftly 
 managed alliteration, his bold simplicity of phrase, 
 
THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 75 
 
 his compactness, and his high-strung spirit, are all 
 to be detected in Kipling when at his best. Kipling 
 is not a copyist of Tennyson, but he has felt Tenny- 
 son's influence very deeply. If we did not already 
 know that these eight lines were written by the lau- 
 reate, we should without any hesitation ascribe them 
 to the author of The Recessional: 
 
 Thy voice is heard through rolling drums. 
 That beat to battle where he stands; 
 
 Thy face across his fancy comes. 
 And gives the battle to his hands: 
 
 A moment, while the trumpets blow. 
 
 He sees his brood about his knee; 
 The next, like fire he meets the foe — 
 
 And strikes him for thine and thee! 
 
 It is almost certain, too, that Swinburne learned 
 much of his art from Tennyson. Indeed, he may be 
 described as a sensual Tennyson, as Kipling may be 
 called a ruder, rougher Tennyson. 
 
 Tennyson was markedly an English type. No 
 poet in our time has probably been so truly 
 English as was Alfred Tennyson. In his veins 
 there ran the blood of the three great peoples 
 whose gradual union made England what it is and 
 what it has been for the past thousand years. His 
 father's family was of Danish extraction, descended 
 from the invaders who occupied the north of England 
 in King Alfred's time. Upon his mother's side there 
 
76 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 were French ancestors to represent the Norman in- 
 fluence. These two elements in every century had 
 been blended with the pure Saxon strain. 
 
 Hence, Tennyson himself was almost an epitome 
 of the English race, and his poetry shows signs of 
 each of the three racial influences. From the French 
 blood that was in him he derived his perfect clarity, 
 his flexibility of diction, and his appreciation of the 
 exact and fitting word. From the Danish strain 
 came the eery picturesqueness, the touch of North- 
 ern wlldness which are found here and there glim- 
 mering through his poetry. From the Anglo-Saxon 
 came the strength and sturdiness, and the enduring 
 power which bound all the other qualities together. 
 
 In the Idyls of the Kmg, the French and Danish 
 traits predominate ; but it is the Saxon that we see 
 most clearly in such domestic, homely poems as The 
 May Queen, and Enoch Arden, and in the rough, 
 stirring, hard-hitting, irregular metre of The Charge 
 of the Light Brigade. This last poem, it is interest- 
 ing to know, was struck off at a white heat imme- 
 diately after reading in the London Times an ac- 
 count of the charge at Balaldava. In the newspaper 
 despatch, Tennyson noted the phrase " some one had 
 blundered," and this phrase gave him alike his in- 
 spiration and the metrical scheme of the poem. Oddly 
 enough, this is the line which was most criticised at 
 the time. In the mid- Victorian period, literary taste 
 was rather finical; and the blunt phra 
 
THE LYRICS OF TENNYSON 77 
 
 thought to be a blemish on the poem. Yet both in 
 movement and in sound it fits in admirably with the 
 rest, suggesting, as it does, the rhythmic gallop 
 and the thunder of the horses' hoofs. 
 
 It was not often, however, that Tennyson wrote 
 so rapidly. His Idyls of the King was planned by 
 him as early as 1830 ; but not until after more than 
 twenty years did he publish a first instalment of 
 the poem. Not for another period of thirty years 
 did he finish the twelve books, and thus round out one 
 of the noblest monuments of our literature. So, too, 
 In Memoriam is a growth, an evolution, since the 
 stanzas of it were written at many diff^erent times 
 and places. This poem, more than any other of the 
 Tennysonian cycle. Is lyrical in the broadest sense of 
 the word ; for here, although the author speaks in his 
 own person and of a personal grief, he regards him- 
 self as doing so in terms of the Universal; and, as 
 he once described it, " the voice of the whole human 
 race is speaking through him." 
 
 The Saxon side of Tennyson came out most 
 strongly in his private intercourse with those who 
 knew him best. This master of the most delicate har- 
 monies spoke with a Lincolnshire burr. His vocabu- 
 lary was full of common words, some of which were 
 often coarse. When Longfellow visited him, the sen- 
 sitive New England poet was disturbed by the broad- 
 ness of the stories which Tennyson told him and by 
 the roughness of his manners, for which, indeed. Ten- 
 
78 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 nyson afterward apologised in a letter. All this repre- 
 sented the yeoman side of his nature, and it was won- 
 derfully characteristic of the Englishman. Yet it 
 really sprang from his intense individuality, and is 
 therefore of itself significant. In it we see just why 
 the highest form of poetical expression is the lyri- 
 cal; for the lyric, as I have already said, is the 
 spontaneous expression of a strongly dominant 
 individualism. 
 
LONGFELLOW, 
 
LONGFELLOW 
 
 What sort of human being is the typical Ameri- 
 can? There are Americans of the East and of the 
 West, of the North and of the South, and they are 
 distinguished from one another by all kinds of ex- 
 ternal traits; so that superficial observers have said 
 that there is no single American type at all. This 
 would be true if we considered only habits of speech, 
 local customs, and perhaps idiosyncrasies of manner. 
 But these things are of the surface only. Is there 
 not somewhere, deep down, a sentiment, a mode of 
 feeling, a temperamental quality, which all our coun- 
 trymen, taken in the mass, possess in common, and 
 which enables us to say that, after all, there does 
 exist a typical American and an American ideal.'' 
 
 Foreign critics are apt to select eccentric traits 
 which are sometimes found among us and to call 
 them national, instead of accidental and individual. 
 To such as these the genuine American is a loud- 
 mouthed braggart, worshipping bigness, glorifying 
 materiahsm, and caring nothing for what pertains to 
 beauty or for what belongs to the spirit and the 
 soul. Very lately a comment like this was made upon 
 us by two Russians — Maxim Gorky, the novelist, and 
 Gregory Maxim, the sociologist. Sometimes such 
 
 Si 
 
82 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 criticism is accepted as true even by our own coun- 
 trymen, and it is exaggerated with that perversely 
 humorous instinct which so many Americans possess. 
 And at first sight there is much to justify it. As a 
 people we do undoubtedly love to see things done 
 upon an enormous scale. We are eager for success, 
 for material prosperity, for money, and for power. 
 But, after all, are these the things for which Ameri- 
 cans care most ? Is there not another side more sub- 
 tle, more profound, and less obvious to the casual 
 eye than mere noise and tumult and concrete im- 
 mensity? It is not to stock exchanges and manufac- 
 turing establishments, or to the pulsing heart of 
 cities, that one ought to go in quest of what is most 
 indicative of the character of any people. Of the 
 eighty millions of our countrymen and country- 
 women, only a comparatively few are dragged into 
 the vortex of this struggle for life; and even those 
 who are engaged in it have times and seasons in 
 which they can be themselves, and find leisure for 
 what Robert Louis Stevenson called " pleasure trips 
 into the Land of Thought," where, as Burns said, 
 there are hours for " happy thinking." 
 
 The genuine characteristics of the nation may be 
 tested in many ways ; but the test of literature alone 
 is very striking, and ought to bear conviction with it. 
 If Americans were in reahty a people of strident 
 voice, of crass materialism, and of a thinly disguised 
 brutality, their favourite poet should beyond all ques- 
 
LONGFELLOW 83 
 
 tion be Walt Whitman. Whitman of the red shirt 
 and unkempt hair. Whitman despising all conven- 
 tionalities, Whitman glorifying hugeness, and, as 
 he said, " sounding his barbaric yawp over the house- 
 tops " — surely here is the poet who would make an 
 instantaneous appeal to that typical American whom 
 foreigners believe that they have seen. He was, as 
 Sidney Lanier admirably expressed it, " poetry's 
 butcher," offering as food " huge raw coUops cut 
 from the rump of poetry," arguing that because a 
 Western prairie is wide, therefore, debauchery is ad- 
 mirable, and because the Mississippi is long, there- 
 fore, every American is a god. 
 
 But, as a matter of fact, Whitman's poetry, if it 
 can so be called, tells of those national traits which 
 are only on the surface. That he speaks with elo- 
 quence and power, at times, is undeniable. When he 
 pictures a great locomotive in winter, plunging its 
 way through the snowstorm, and apostrophises it as 
 
 Fierce-throated beauty! 
 
 Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, 
 
 he is superb. And, too, when in the great Platte 
 Canon of Colorado he describes 
 
 These tumbled rock-piles, grim and red. 
 These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks. 
 These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, 
 
 he is again superb, and undoubtedly American. In^ 
 
84 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 a sense, also, his lawlessness, his glorification of him- 
 self and of his physical desires, compel, at times, 
 one's admiration. They are so unfettered, so defiant, 
 and so magnificently insolent. 
 
 Yet, at heart, the American of reality is not the 
 American whom Whitman knew. The true Ameri- 
 can's ideal is not found in a machine of iron and 
 brass, however powerful it may be. His love of na- 
 ture is not stirred merely by gigantic and misshapen 
 products of volcanic convulsion. His love of woman 
 is not satisfied by the purchased favours of a strum- 
 pet. And so, as a matter of actual fact, Whitman 
 has never been very widely read by his own country- 
 men. Curiously enough, his most numerous admirers 
 are to be found among aliens who imagine him to be 
 American just because he is blatant and boastful 
 and grotesque. His praises have been loudest sung 
 by foreign poets, such as Swinburne, in whom the 
 erratic and the erotic are ingeniously interwoven, and 
 who look upon this transatlantic roisterer as they 
 would look upon any freak of nature, because it is 
 something strange and novel and, therefore, interest- 
 ing. But the America of Whitman is neither that of 
 Washington, with his grave dignity, nor of Frank- 
 lin, with his quiet humour and good sense, nor of 
 Lincoln, underneath whose uncouth exterior were 
 hidden nobility and tenderness. 
 
 The true American laureate, the poet of our peo- 
 ple, and in a sense of the whole English-speaking 
 
LONGFELLOW 85 
 
 race, Is Longfellow, bom little more than a century 
 ago. No one could be more utterly unlike the crude 
 conception of the American; yet no one else has 
 written lines that have sunk so deeply down into the 
 national consciousness, making their strong appeal 
 to men and women of every rank and station, and 
 of every degree of culture and refinement. 
 
 In England he has been more read than Tennyson. 
 His bust is in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Ab- 
 bey. In the United States he has, for fifty years at 
 least, stood first, and with no rival. His lines are 
 recited in the country school; they are read in the 
 remote farmhouse; they are part and parcel of the 
 intellectual equipment of every man of letters. Yet 
 Longfellow is the very antithesis of Whitman. His 
 verses are, for the most part, as smooth and as mu- 
 sical as the other's are rough and formless. Their 
 beauty is as exquisite as the ugliness of much that 
 Whitman wrote is startling and repellent. Critics 
 sometimes say that Longfellow lacks vigour and vi- 
 rility ; but in such poems as The Skeleton in Ar- 
 mour, in his Norse ballads, and in The Building of 
 the Ship, one may hear the roar and thunder of 
 the sea and feel the daring spirit of the primitive 
 man who is elemental in his emotions, yet who, never- 
 theless, stands far above the brutes that perish. Lis- 
 ten to these stanzas, for example, which are familiar 
 yet ever new : 
 
86 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Then launched they to the blast, 
 Bent like a reed each mast. 
 Yet we were gaining fast. 
 
 When the wind failed us; 
 And with a sudden flaw 
 Came round the gusty skaw. 
 So that our foe we saw 
 
 Laugh as he hailed us. 
 
 And as to catch the gale 
 Round veered the flapping sail. 
 Death ! was the helmsman's hail. 
 
 Death without quarter! 
 Mid-ships with iron keel 
 Struck we her ribs of steel; 
 Down her black hulk did reel 
 
 Through the black water! 
 
 And for conveying the dour strength of the 
 primitive man, what could be better than this from 
 The Saga of King Olaf: 
 
 Ploughing under the morning star. 
 Old Iron-Beard in Yriar 
 Heard the summons, chuckling with a low laugh. 
 
 He wiped the sweat-drops from his brow. 
 
 Unharnessed his horses from the plough. 
 
 And clattering came on horseback to King Olaf. 
 
 He was the churliest of the churls; 
 Little he cared for king or earls; 
 Bitter as home-brewed ale were his foaming passions. 
 
 Hodden-grey was the garb he wore. 
 And by the Hammer of Thor he swore. 
 He hated the narrow town, and all its fashions. 
 
LONGFELLOW 87 
 
 Small wonder that in Kipling's curiously fascinat- 
 ing tale, The Finest Story in the World, Charlie 
 Mears, the undersized, underbred, cockjiey bank- 
 clerk, in whom are reincarnated the viking and the 
 Greek galley-slave, should be roused to a dim con- 
 sciousness of his former lives by hearing these Norse 
 poems of Longfellow, and that for a moment he 
 should get a vanishing glimpse of an existence which 
 he had led centuries before, shackled to the seat of a 
 rocking, sea-tossed ship under the savage, red-haired, 
 red-bearded chieftain who steered straight through 
 surging waves to Furdurstrandi and the " Long and 
 Wonderful Beaches." Longfellow could, indeed, at 
 times use English with the same rude strength which 
 belonged to Tennyson, as when the latter wrote in 
 Enid: 
 
 The brawny spearman turned and let his cheek 
 Bulge with th' unswallowed piece. 
 
 Perhaps this is why Tennyson was a little jealous 
 of Longfellow, who could almost match him in so 
 many ways. 
 
 But where Longfellow is inferior to Tennyson 
 is in having only a very superficial knowledge 
 of classical literature, while Tennyson is vocal 
 with faintly charming echoes from the Romans and 
 the Greeks. It was a rather temerarious venture 
 of Longfellow to essay the dactylic hexameter 
 
88 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 in writing Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles 
 Standish. In a sense, the attempt has been justi- 
 fied, and may be said almost to have grafted that 
 splendid measilre on our poetry ; so much is there in 
 these poems of his that delights the ear and makes 
 pictures before the mind. Yet on the whole, Longfel- 
 low's hexameters are not very good. One willingly 
 accepts the accentual system in place of the quanti- 
 tative, for this we find also in the later Latin writers. 
 What Longfellow, however, seems not to have under- 
 stood is that if you write accentual poetry you 
 must abide strictly by its laws. The verse must 
 " read itself," quite as easily as any other kind of 
 verse, and must not compel us to lay stress on sylla- 
 bles which would not be stressed in prose. Professor 
 C. E. Bennett, writing of Latin poetry, says what is 
 also true of English: " Anyone who can read prose 
 with accuracy and with fluency has no difficulty in 
 reading poetry. The poet arranges the words in 
 such wise that they make poetry of themselves if 
 they are only properly pronounced. No other kind 
 of poetry was ever known in any language. No 
 other is conceivable." But in Longfellow's hexam- 
 eters we are too often compelled to place the accent 
 incorrectly in order to make out the line. That is, 
 the verse becomes poetry only when improperly pro- 
 nounced. Thus, again and again in Evangeline, 
 there are lines which begin with little unaccented 
 words like " and," " as," and with pronouns which 
 
LONGFELLOW 89 
 
 are not emphatic. Take, for example, such hexam- 
 eters as these: 
 
 As apart by the window she stood, with her hand in her 
 
 lover's. 
 Blushing Evangeline heard the words that her father had 
 
 spoken; 
 And as they died on his lips the worthy notary entered. 
 
 Now in the first of these three hexameters, we are 
 obliged to stress the word " as," although we should 
 not stress it in prose. Yet unless we do so here, the 
 first foot is a pyrrhic instead of a pseudo-spondee 
 (trochee) as Longfellow meant it to be. In the last 
 hexameter, unless we strongly stress the initial word 
 " and " — which we should never think of doing in 
 prose — we get a tribrach in place of a dactyl. In- 
 deed, Longfellow had little understanding of the 
 classic metres except such as came to him by ear, 
 imperfectly. On one occasion he composed, in a hu- 
 morous vein, an elegiac couplet in English ; and in the 
 second half of the pentameter he introduced a spon- 
 dee, whereas the classic rule is a rigid one in requir- 
 ing two dactyls after the caesura. 
 
 Much of what he wrote has been so often quoted 
 and so many times recited as to seem, it may be, 
 trite ; but his Psalm of Life, and even the imperfect 
 stanzas of Excelsior, have power to stir the blood; 
 and what is more, they point always upward to a 
 noble and inspiring ideal of human life — a life that 
 is more than the life of the flesh, since it means 
 
90 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 strenuous effort and high endeavour toward truth 
 and righteousness and justice. Indeed, here is the 
 essential distinction between Whitman and Long- 
 fellow. The former never saw the moral background 
 of our daily life ; the latter never failed to see it and 
 to make his readers see it. Whitman finds in cattle 
 a rather admirable type of the existence which 
 pleased him, since cattle " never have to be respect- 
 able." Longfellow, on the other hand, with courage 
 and manliness, exclaims : 
 
 Be not like dumb driven cattle — 
 Be a hero in the strife! 
 
 It is, however, in another sphere that Longfellow 
 draws closest to the inner heart of those for whom he 
 wrote. This is the sphere of what has lately come to 
 be known as " the simple life." Here the poet's eye 
 can see the fineness and the charm of what belongs to 
 every-day experience. The village blacksmith, swart 
 and strong beside his forge, where the flames flare 
 out from the blown fire, and the sparks leap in corus- 
 cating cascades as his hammer smites the red-hot 
 metal on the anvil; the wreck of the coasting vessel 
 overwhelmed by mountainous billows while the cap- 
 tain's daughter prays to the Christ who stilled the sea 
 at Galilee; the old clock chiming on the stairs; the 
 hanging of the crane in the new home; the musing 
 figure on the historic bridge — ^here are themes which 
 in their usual aspect are quite commonplace, but 
 which under Longfellow's magic touch have become 
 
LONGFELLOW 91 
 
 instinct with an exquisite beauty to which he has 
 opened every reader's eyes. 
 
 More than all, it is Longfellow's sympathy with 
 children and with women that gives him the firmest 
 hold upon his countrymen. There are the quietly 
 playful verses of The Children's Hour, when the poet 
 is made a willing prisoner by the laughing little elves 
 who swarm into his study and take him captive. 
 There are the blind girl of Castel-Cuille, and the 
 sleeping child for whose waking smile the father 
 watches, fearful lest it may be dead and not asleep. 
 There are the happy children who play upon the stairs 
 about the ancient clock, and there are the village ur- 
 chins who, coming home from school, look in at the 
 doorway and watch the blacksmith at his task. 
 
 When Longfellow thinks of women he thinks of 
 them as the native-born American always thinks of 
 them — whether he be a clergyman or a cowboy — with 
 reverence and respect. One sees the poet smile with 
 quiet amusement at the charmingly coquettish girl of 
 whom he writes, almost as Horace wrote of Pyrrha, 
 " Trust her not, she's fooling thee " ; and again he 
 makes us feel and see the grace and glory of that mo- 
 ment when she who is no longer girl nor yet wholly 
 woman, but is 
 
 Standing with reluctant feet 
 Where the brook and river meet. 
 
 And we can not turn many pages without coming 
 upon lines both tender and impassioned, written to the 
 
92 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 wife who filled his home with a radiant gentleness 
 that made of it an earthly paradise. 
 
 In a larger sense is Longfellow to be regarded as 
 the American laureate. Had he written only his three 
 poems of Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles 
 Standish and Hiawatha, he would still have rightly 
 won the laurel crown. Through these poems he peo- 
 pled the waste places of our then prosaic land with 
 the creations of his fancy. In Hiawatha he stretched 
 out his hand and set the mark of his genius upon 
 the West, giving us a poem which is not far from 
 being an epic, sprung from the soil and from the 
 forests of aboriginal America. He had, indeed, the 
 epic poet's gift of true constrQctiveness. As Mr. 
 Horace Scudder said of him, " He was first of all, 
 a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relation, 
 rather than in their essence," though he saw them 
 in their essence, too. What could be nobler, and 
 what could sound more perfectly the motif of Evan- 
 geline, than the wonderful proem in which the forest 
 primeval with its murmuring trees, its long, dim 
 vistas, and the far-off disconsolate accent of the 
 ocean, attune our minds, as it were, to a symphony 
 in which unsophisticated nature and the sorrow of 
 love are curiously and poignantly intermingled? 
 Htere Longfellow is certainly American in theme and 
 thought alike; nor is there any trace of that bas- 
 tard Americanism which is sordid, or boastful,' or 
 ignoble. 
 
LONGFELLOW 93 
 
 One finds the same type of Americanism — the high- 
 est and therefore the most representative of all — in 
 Longfellow's own personality, in the urbanity of his 
 tone, the perfection of his breeding, and the fineness 
 of his manner. To me, one of the most striking traits 
 of Longfellow has always been his innate gentility, 
 which must have come first of all from nature, and 
 which was merely fostered and ripened by the circum- 
 stances of his life. Born in what was then a paro- 
 chial country settlement, educated at a provincial 
 college, and finally transferred to Cambridge, which 
 was still only a small, self-conscious, and somewhat 
 pedantic community, Longfellow was from the very 
 first not only a man of refinement, but one who had 
 that indescribable tone and feeling which come to 
 most men only from long contact with the world. 
 His early letters make this plain. His correspond- 
 ence with old Josiah Quincy, then president of Har- 
 vard College, shows a striking contrast between two 
 types of men. Quincy is upright, just, and, in his 
 narrow way, benignant; yet he is after all a subli- 
 mated sort of schoolmaster; while Longfellow, in 
 what he writes, reveals in every line the courtesy and 
 taste and breeding of an accomplished gentleman 
 whose scholarship is but one of his claims to dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 His life was like his poetry, simple, yet beautifully 
 true. His hospitality was gracious and unvarying; 
 and his historic home at Cambridge was the hterary 
 
94 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Mecca of our country. Yet he was not aloof from 
 public interests. It is noted by one of his biogra- 
 phers that he always voted at elections, that he took 
 a keen interest in local affairs — that he was, in fact, 
 a good citizen as well as a great poet. With all this 
 he preserved " that integrity of nature which never 
 abdicates," and, like Emerson, because of the power 
 of his personality, " he dwelt in a charmed circle be- 
 yond the lines of which men could not penetrate." 
 The thought of money-making never came into his 
 mind; and though, toward the end of his life, he had 
 a comfortable income, he made no change in the man- 
 ner of his living. For many years he was what most 
 men to-day would call quite poor ; and it is related 
 by a friend of his that he felt himself exceedingly 
 well off when he had in the bank so large a sum as 
 eight hundred dollars. 
 
 In all this he seems to be the type of the American 
 citizen — ^American not merely in his poetic themes, 
 but in the homelike qualities of his existence. His 
 personal dignity, his quiet humour — of which he pos- 
 sessed an abundant store — ^his love of what is sane 
 and wholesome, his cordial friendships, and his united 
 household — aU these together sum up the things 
 which, as we like to think, belong to the American 
 ideal of what life means. When his bust was placed 
 within the consecrated walls of Westminster Abbey, 
 his friend and fellow-poet spoke of him some words 
 that should not be forgotten. Lowell said : " Never 
 
LONGFELLOW 95 
 
 have I known a more beautiful character. I was 
 familiar with it daily — with the constant charity of 
 his hand and of his mind. His nature was conse- 
 crated ground, into which no unclean spirit could 
 ever enter." 
 
 Hence, it is not wrong to say that in Longfellow 
 we find the traits which, notwithstanding an as- 
 sumed indifference or bravado, Americans at heart 
 most value. His is not a personal ideal, but an ideal 
 that is national. And rightly so ; since when we grasp 
 the highest possible conception of our republic it is 
 not to be found in a sordid herding together of the 
 uncouth and the avaricious, since of all forms of 
 government a republic must depend — ^to quote Lanier 
 once more — upon the self-control and the fitness for 
 rule of its every member. " You can not make a re- 
 public out of muscles and prairies and rocky moun- 
 tains. Republics are made of the spirit." And of 
 our American republic the essential, vivifying spirit 
 speaks with clear, unerring tones in all the lines and 
 through the voice of Longfellow. 
 
POE AS A STORY-WRITEB 
 
YI 
 
 POE AS A STORY-WRITER 
 
 Of those who admire Edgar Allan Poe, some admire 
 him chiefly as a poet, while others admire him chiefly 
 as a writer of prose. If we analyse both his poetry 
 and his prose, and try to understand the true nature 
 of his genius, we shall find that fundamentally he was 
 first of all a mathematician. 
 
 Now most persons think of a mathematician as a 
 mere vulgar weigher and measurer and calculator — 
 a very prosaic person, utterly devoid of all imagina- 
 tion. Poe himself seems to have held this view; for 
 in one of his most famous stories — The Purloined 
 Letter — ^he makes his ingenious hero, Dupin, say of 
 another character : " As a mere mathematician, he 
 could not have reasoned at all." And then he goes 
 on to remark that because the person in question 
 was both a poet and a mathematician, he could rea- 
 son well, and was, therefore, a very dangerous 
 opponent. 
 
 Yet Poe, of all men, should have known that imag- 
 ination is just as necessary to a really great mathe- 
 matician as it is to a lyric poet, since the great 
 mathematician does not limit his speculations to 
 finite truths, but passes into transcendental regions 
 of thought, where finite truths have no validity- In 
 
 99 
 
100 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 other words, it is wrong to say, as Poe does, that 'a 
 mathematician may be a poet. Rather is it true that 
 a great mathematician irmst have many of those 
 qualities of mind which make a poet. It is only thus 
 that he can rise above the finite to the infinite, and 
 form those bold conceptions which do not, indeed, 
 belong to arithmetic and to the theorems of Euclid- 
 ean geometry, but which are absolutely vital to the 
 higher mathematics. 
 
 That Poe's natural bent was mathematical is seen 
 in many facts. Even in his early youth, when he was 
 a cadet at West Point — ^he was then only nineteen 
 years of age — ^it was recorded of him by a friend, 
 " He had a wonderful aptitude for mathematics." To- 
 ward the end of his life, disregarding all that he had 
 previously written as being relatively unimportant, 
 he planned his so-called prose poem. Eureka, which 
 he said and thought to be his strongest claim upon 
 the remembrance of posterity. He went to Mr. Put- 
 nam, the publisher, all quivering with excitement, 
 and declared that this prose poem was of momentous 
 interest, and that a first edition of fifty thousand 
 copies, if Mr. Putnam would publish it, would be 
 only a small and inadequate beginning. Remember 
 that in those days publishers regarded an edition of 
 two thousand copies as a large one, and it will be 
 plain that Poe really thought this book to be his 
 greatest work. In his preface to it he declares 
 Eureka to be " an art product," and says that only 
 
POE AS A STORY-WRITER 101 
 
 as a poem does he wish it to be judged after he is 
 dead. 
 
 Now, what is this EureJca, on which Poe desired 
 to rest his final reputation ? It is a work of minutely 
 analytical reasoning of the most abstract character, 
 intended to explain the process of creation and the 
 constitution of the universe. In it, like some ancient 
 Greek — Empedocles or Leucippus, for example — he 
 discourses of primordial atoms thrown off in a num- 
 ber directly proportioned to the surface of the par- 
 ticular sphere which they had occupied; and he 
 argues that since the surfaces were directly propor- 
 tioned to the squares of their distances from the cen- 
 tre, the radiating force was directly proportioned 
 to the squares of the distances to which the several 
 atomic showers were driven. Poe then assumes a 
 recoil of the atoms and a tendency which represents 
 the mutual attraction of atoms with a force inversely 
 proportioned to the squares of the distances. 
 Again, in some still later papers, he busies himself 
 with a mathematical explanation of Kepler's plane- 
 tary laws, and with certain mathematical deduc- 
 tions from Newton's theory of gravitation. 
 
 In aU this complex speculation who discovers the 
 author of The Bells, The Raven, and The Haunted 
 Palace? Who readily detects the mind which con- 
 structed the story of The Gold Bug, or The Purloined 
 Letter, or The Murders in the Rue Morgue ? Appar- 
 ently very few. Even Professor Woodberry, in his 
 
102 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 admirable biography, explains these scientific la- 
 bours as " showing how egregiously genius may 
 mistake its realm." Yet they certainly do show that 
 Poe felt a powerful impulse toward mathematics and 
 the related sciences. As I see them, the same qualities 
 which appear in Eureka are the qualities which are 
 conspicuous in his poetry, and no less so in the 
 stories which every one had read, though no one 
 reads Eureka. In the present chapter I have nothing 
 to do with the poems ; but I venture to propound the 
 thesis that both the merits and the defects of Poe's 
 short stories are largely traceable to the fact that 
 their author was before all else a mathematician, 
 with a mathematician's mind and temperament. 
 
 Let us take a few of these short stories by way of 
 illustration. First of all, there is The Purloined 
 Letter, of which the hero, Auguste Dupin, is a man 
 saturated with mathematical knowledge, even though 
 he has a species of contempt for algebraists and 
 geometricians. To him comes the prefect of police, 
 begging his assistance to recover a letter which is 
 Icnown to be in the possession of a minister of state, 
 and which is probably in the house of the minister; 
 yet which the most minute ransacking of the house 
 by the police has failed to bring to light. Every inch 
 of space in every room has been examined. The legs 
 of the chairs and the cushions on the couches have 
 been bored into or ripped open. The very books in 
 the library have been taken down one by one ; each 
 page has been turned, and even the bindings have 
 
POE AS A STORY-WRITER 103 
 
 been tested. The prefect is in despair ; for the letter 
 is a compromising one, and its possession by the 
 minister may lead to serious political results. 
 
 Dupin listens, says very little, and soon the pre- 
 fect goes away. A month later he once more visits 
 Dupin, and again expresses his despair. The letter 
 has not yet been found. An enormous reward has 
 been privately offered for it. The prefect would him- 
 self willingly give fifty thousand francs to any one 
 who should recover it. Then Dupin, who has been 
 puffing at his pipe, tosses a cheque-book to the pre- 
 fect and says : 
 
 " You may as well fill me up a cheque for the 
 amount mentioned. When you have signed it I will 
 hand you the letter." 
 
 The prefect gasps and stares, then makes out a 
 cheque for fifty thousand francs and gives It to 
 Dupin. Thereupon Dupin quietly unlocks a writing- 
 desk, takes out the missing letter, and hands it over 
 to the thunderstruck official. 
 
 This is an extremely interesting and dramatic 
 story. Merely as regards incident, it is absolutely 
 perfect. Then, when Dupin comes to explain how 
 he got possession of the letter where the police had 
 failed, his explanation is a beautiful blending of 
 mathematics and psychology. To be sure, it seems 
 at first sight to be a criticism of mathematics, yet 
 it is just the sort of criticism which a transcendental 
 mathematician would bestow upon a mathematician 
 of the ordinary type. We have here, in reality, a 
 
104 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 suggestion of mathematical imagination applied to 
 a psychological problem. Dupin has read the mind 
 both of the prefect of police and of the minister, and 
 he reasons from thought to action with the close logic 
 of the advanced mathematician. By so doing he has 
 been able to arrive at a solution which the profes- 
 sional detectives absolutely failed to hit upon. 
 
 Again, there is the story of The Gold Bug, in 
 which the discovery of a hidden treasure depends 
 upon the deciphering of a cryptogram composed of 
 numbers. Cryptography was a subject in which Poe 
 always took an extraordinary interest. When he was 
 connected with a Philadelphia periodical, he issued a 
 sort of challenge, declaring that he could read any- 
 thing that might be sent to him written in cipher. In 
 consequence, many cryptograms reached him from all 
 parts of the country, some of them concocted by per- 
 sons who did not observe the conditions of the chal- 
 lenge, but either used foreign languages or blended 
 several alphabets in the same ciphesr, or even ran 
 words and sentences together without any indicated 
 intervals. Yet Poe solved all of these intricate puz- 
 zles, except one which was meaningless, being made 
 up of a jargon based upon characters used at ran- 
 dom. 
 
 Afterwards, Poe wrote a series of papers on Secret 
 Writing, which appeared in the pages of Graham's 
 Magazine. In these papers he analysed the methods 
 by which cryptograms could be deciphered, and he 
 
POE AS A STORY-WEITEE 105 
 
 did so with an obvious zest in that sort of mathemat- 
 ical trick-work. In all this we see the mathema- 
 tician at play. The story of The Gold Bug is 
 written around a cryptogram just as his poem, The 
 Raven, was built up around the single word " Never- 
 more." 
 
 Another famous tale, The Mystery of Marie 
 Roget, affords a still more extraordinary instance of 
 Poe's logical and mathematical skill. As every one 
 is aware, a young girl named Mary Cecilia Rogers, 
 well known in New York, was found murdered in 
 Hoboken. The police were unable to discover any 
 clue to the mystery of her death. The problem baf- 
 fled all investigation. Then, Poe, merely from put- 
 ting together the facts that had been reported in the 
 newspapers, composed a story in which, laying the 
 scene in Paris and substituting French names and 
 places for the real ones, he unravelled the tangled 
 skein of evidence and explained just how and why the 
 murder had been done. 
 
 His flawless, relentless reasoning is remarkable, 
 and the story itself ends with a paragraph which is 
 essentially mathematical, referring directly to the 
 calculus of probabilities. It also contains the fol- 
 lowing very striking sentence: 
 
 This is one of those anomalous propositions which, seem- 
 ingly appealing to thought altogether apart from the mathe- 
 matical, is yet one which only the mathematician can fully 
 understand. 
 
106 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 This sentence may well be applied to the working 
 of Poe's mind in all of his most famous stories. His 
 mathematical exactitude was confirmed in regard to 
 the Mary Rogers case when, long afterward, the 
 confession of two persons proved that Poe's deduc- 
 tions had been absolutely correct. 
 
 The same intense mathematical reasoning was 
 brought to bear when Dickens began to put forth in 
 serial form the novel, Barnahy Rudge. Before many 
 numbers had appeared, Poe published an exposition 
 of the entire plot of the story, and he did it so accu- 
 rately that Dickens was aghast. "Are you the de- 
 vil? " he asked of Poe. Here again was a mental 
 feat, not obviously mathematical, yet one which only 
 a mathematician's mind could successfully accom- 
 plish. 
 
 Poe's great popularity in France is largely due to 
 the scientific lucidity of his thought ; for the French 
 are a mathematical people, ruthlessly logical, and 
 with a love for what is definite and precise. Their 
 instinct for the dramatic accounts for the tolera- 
 tion of his stilted rhetoric, which at times offends 
 the taste of the Anglo-Saxon reader. Perhaps the 
 fact that Poe rants in some of his stories is due to 
 hereditary influences, for both his father and his 
 mother were actors. Take, for example, these sen- 
 tences from his greatly overpraised Fall of the 
 House of Usher: 
 
POE AS A STOEY-WRITER 107 
 
 And now — to-night — Ethelred — ha! ha! — the breaking of the 
 hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the 
 clangour of the shield! Say, rather, the rending of her coffin, 
 and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her 
 struggles within the coppered archway of the vault ! Oh, 
 whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? 
 
 This is surely Ercles' vein. It will not do to say- 
 in Poe's defence that this sort of overwrought decla- 
 mation was characteristic of the style in which men 
 wrote at the time when Poe composed the story. He 
 himself by no means lapses very often into verbal 
 hysteria. In the best of his tales he writes with the 
 same naturalness that we expect to-day of even sec- 
 ond-rate authors. The real defect of Poe is not to be 
 discovered in his occasional bombast. It is a defect 
 that is far less superficial and far more profound ; and 
 it deserves not only mention, but concrete illustration. 
 
 The mathematical quality of Poe's mind gave sin- 
 gular effectiveness to his fiction. His imagination 
 was a constructive one. It worked in harmony with 
 his reasoning faculties, and he proceeded bit by bit 
 to build up an almost flawless literary structure. Dr. 
 Charles Sears Baldwin has very weU said of Poe : 
 
 When he talked of literary art, he talked habitually in 
 terms of construction. When he worked, at least he planned 
 an ingeniously suspended solution of incidents; for he was 
 always pleased with mere soliMion. 
 
 It is true that because of his invention, his con- 
 
108 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 structiveness, and his correlation of details, Poe is 
 one of the great masters of the short story. But I 
 should be unwilling to say with Dr. Baldwin that 
 " from his brain was bom the short story as a com- 
 plete, finished, and self-sufficing whole." This seems 
 to imply that Poe originated the short story in its 
 perfection. It is difficult to understand how a pro- 
 fessor of English literature or, for that matter, of 
 any literature whatever, could make so extraordinary 
 an assertion. What does Dr. Baldwin think, for 
 example, of Balzac's short stories, such as El Ver- 
 dugo. La Grande Breteche, and Le Colonel Chabaf 
 ■ — not to mention others.'' Every one of these is 
 superior to Poe's, while still representing " the gro- 
 tesque and the arabesque." Or, if Dr. Baldwin 
 pleads that Balzac was a contemporary of Poe, what 
 could be more nearly perfect than Sir Walter Scott's 
 horror-story called The Tapestried Chamber — ^won- 
 derful in its simplicity, yet so powerful in its effect 
 that, after reading it, men of the strongest nerves 
 are unwilling to go to bed immediately or to be left 
 alone in the dark ? But retrace our steps still further 
 to the Decameron of Boccaccio, or still further to the 
 Milesian Tales which are interwoven by Apuleius in 
 his Metamorphoses. The story of the commercial 
 traveller in the first book, and that of the robber in 
 the fourth book, are " complete, finished, and self- 
 sufficing." And how about the tales in Herodotus, 
 that superb story-teller? The narrative of Rhamp- 
 
POE AS A STORY-WEITER 109 
 
 sinitus and the Robber has invention, directness, and 
 suspense as its chief quahties. And we may con- 
 tinue our researches and look at some of the short 
 stories in the Bible, of which, for example, the story 
 of Joseph and his brethren, of Samson, of Esther, 
 and of Job, have always been fascinating to men and 
 women and children, and they show that the true 
 genesis of the short story antedates Christianity as 
 it probably antedates any written records which the 
 world possesses. It would surely have been odd if 
 men had been obliged to wait until the year 1830 
 for a short story that was " complete, finished, and 
 self-sufficing " ! Yet my principal reason for dis- 
 senting from Dr. Baldwin's dictum is found in the 
 very hmitations which were imposed upon Edgar 
 Allan Poe by the mathematical bias of his mind. 
 
 A truly mathematical mind dwells, as it were, in a 
 sort of vacuum. It conceives order, harmony, pro- 
 portion, form — that is to say, every sort of abstrac- 
 tion. It does not often, however, possess sympathy 
 and an understanding of the emotions in their wider 
 range. This truth is admirably and rather pathetic- 
 ally-exemplified in Poe. He can construct a plot and 
 compress it within small compass. He can work out 
 its solution with marvellous ingenuity. He can excite 
 wonder, curiosity, and terror. But the one thing that 
 he can not do is to create character. 
 
 In this respect, his short stories are just as de- 
 fective as the short stories which the Greeks com- 
 
110 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 posed three centuries before Christ. His personages 
 are dummies. What they do is extremely interesting; 
 what they are and what they feel, no one knows or 
 cares. Thus, M. Dupin is a thinking-machine, an 
 embodiment of reason, impassive, impersonal; but he 
 does not live for us as a man, since he is not a man. 
 
 Compare him, for example, with Sherlock Holmes 
 as drawn by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle 
 has not so original a genius as Poe had ; yet, none the 
 less, he has some qualities which make his best work 
 more pleasing and far closer to the universal under- 
 standing. The proof of this is found in the fact 
 that the name of Sherlock Holmes is known all over 
 the civilised world; while if you mention M. Dupin 
 to the man of average intelligence, it is long odds 
 that he will not remember and recognise it. 
 
 Let me illustrate this sharp distinction by examin- 
 ing a famous short story of Poe's, and by comparing 
 it with a short story of Conan Doyle's which was 
 clearly suggested by the other. 
 
 The Cask of Amontillado is one of the shortest and 
 also one of the best known of Poe's fictions. It is sup- 
 posed to be narrated by an Italian who has suffered 
 insults at the hand of a professed friend, Fortu- 
 nato. He plans revenge ; and at the time of the car- 
 nival he asks Fortunato's advice about the merits of 
 some Amontillado wine. Fortunate is a connois- 
 seur of wine, and willingly consents to go down into 
 the vaults where the great cask is supposed to be. 
 
POE AS A STORY-WRITER 111 
 
 His enemy really conducts him into the catacombs, 
 through heaps of bones — a slimy, gloomy, terrifying 
 place, beneath the river's bed, and reeking with the 
 moisture which has oozed down through the walls. 
 Fortunato enters a sort of niche, only to find that 
 his progress is arrested by solid rock. In an instant 
 his enemy has shackled him to the wall, and almost 
 at once begins, with stone and mortar, to close up 
 the entrance to the niche and to make of it a tomb 
 where Fortunato must perish in the dark. The story 
 is told most vividly; and at the end one hears the 
 shrieks of the victim and the tinkle of the bells that 
 he wore upon his carnival attire. The sound ceases; 
 the vault is closed ; and vengeance is achieved. 
 
 Now, this narrative is made to thrill us with a 
 sort of nameless horror ; yet the defect In its art lies 
 in the fact that our sympathies go out entirely to 
 Fortunato, and we regard the man who seeks revenge 
 in this dreadful way as far worse than an ordinary 
 murderer. Poe has not made us feel the justice of 
 the act. He merely speaks quite casually of " the 
 thousand injuries of Fortunato " without giving any 
 clue to what they were. Hence the effect of the story 
 is impaired by our natural human sympathies, of 
 which the author has taken no account. 
 
 Compare now Conan Doyle's story called The New 
 Catacomb, the plot of which is directly borrowed from 
 this theme of Poe's. It is told by one Julius Berger, 
 a German student in Rome, who has deeply loved 
 
112 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 an English girl and has hoped to marry her. A dis- 
 solute Englishman, however, has wronged her, and 
 has cynically told his friends of what he deems a 
 gay adventure. The girl's honour is lost, and she 
 disappears in order to hide her shame. The Eng- 
 lishman does not know that she had first loved Julius ; 
 and in talking with him, he makes a jest of the whole 
 affair. 
 
 Here the art of Conan Doyle is higher than the 
 art of Poe. He has appealed to our humanity, and 
 has aroused in us a lively indignation, so that we 
 are prepared for the terrible revenge which Julius 
 takes. The German student has discovered a cata- 
 comb of which no one else has learned the secret ; and 
 he invites the Englishman to accompany him through 
 its mazes to the central chamber. When there, Julius, 
 who knows every turn of the catacomb, suddenly ex- 
 tinguishes the light, retreats backward into the ap- 
 palling darkness, and in a voice which echoes 
 strangely through the hollow vaults, tells the reason 
 why he has done this deed. The story ends with an 
 impressive awfulness which is not inferior to that 
 attained by Poe, and which affects us far more, be- 
 cause we feel that justice has been done, and that 
 innocence has been avenged. 
 
 Herein, briefly, lies the difference between the short 
 story, as Poe wrote it, and the further development of 
 the short story which is not inferior in invention and 
 constructiveness, while it is otherwise superior, be- 
 
POE AS A STORY-WRITER 113 
 
 cause in it the cold-blooded impersonality of the 
 mathematician has been replaced by a warmth of feel- 
 ing which belongs to men and women who have hearts 
 as well as heads, and in whom the whole gamut of 
 emotion can be stirred by the hand of a master who 
 knows how to make an instantaneous appeal. 
 
HAWTHORNE AND "THE 
 SCARLET LETTER" 
 
Ill 
 
 HAWTHORNE AND "THE SCARLET 
 LETTER " 
 
 If Nathaniel Hawthorne had never written The 
 Scarlet Letter, it is almost certain that to-day he 
 would be remembered only as one of America's minor 
 writers. The Scarlet Letter has won readers for his 
 other books and has raised him to the position of a 
 classic. When he began its composition, he was in the 
 forty-fifth year of his life. He had struggled hard 
 to win success in literature and had lamentably failed. 
 His inventiveness had given him material for scores of 
 tales and sketches. He had edited the manuscripts 
 of other men. He had contributed to many publica- 
 tions. Yet only a very few paid much attention to 
 him as a writer, and those few were largely influenced 
 by their personal regard for him. His pen could not 
 provide for him even a meagre livelihood, and he felt 
 the pinch of actual poverty. There was a time when, 
 with his devoted wife, he lived at Concord on the 
 products of his kitchen-garden. He chopped wood, 
 and cooked the scanty meals, and even washed the 
 dishes in the back-parlour of the Old Manse. He re- 
 corded the menu of his Christmas dinner in 1843 as 
 " quince, apples, bread-and-cheese, and milk." 
 
 But soon even bread-and-cheese and milk became 
 117 
 
118 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 almost too much to hope for. The wolf was not only 
 at the door, but was forever thrusting Its gaunt head 
 within. And to all this anxiety for the morrow, there 
 was added the bitter thought that he had failed. " I 
 am the obscurest man of letters in America ! " said he 
 on one occasion ; and he was, indeed, obscure. Then, 
 at the moment of his dire need, there came, through 
 his old college friend, Franklin Pierce, an appoint- 
 ment to be surveyor of customs for the port of Salem. 
 It meant bread and butter to the discouraged writer ; 
 and he turned his back on literature, to sit in a dingy 
 ofBce on a rickety wharf, where his physical outlook, 
 as he has described it, was limited to " glimpses of the 
 shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers and ship- 
 chandlers." The name of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 ceased for a time to appear in books, but was instead 
 " imprinted, with a stencil and black paint, on pep- 
 per-bags and baskets of anatto, and cigar-boxes and 
 bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise." 
 
 It seems, as we look back upon it, almost a desecra- 
 tion that one with so fine an intellect and so remark- 
 able a personality should have been compelled to 
 drudge amid surroundings so uncongenial. Still, it 
 is almost certain that this was in reality a period 
 of recuperation, of germination. Hawthorne needed 
 exactly such a physical and mental change. His 
 literary faculty was a peculiar one. When he did 
 more than a slight amount of creative work, he al- 
 ways experienced a sort of intellectual exhaustion. 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 119 
 
 His fancy must lie fallow for a time. He exhibits, 
 when one studies him, a certain low vitality which he 
 shared with some of his contemporaries, though in a 
 degree far greater. This low vitality, which one may 
 call an intellectual anaemia, is felt sometimes in Emer- 
 son. It was very marked in Bronson Alcott and In 
 William EUery Channing. Even In Longfellow it 
 has been made the basis of a criticism that he is 
 defective in virility and force, — that he is at once 
 too gentle and too fond of what Is commonplace. 
 Indeed, in most of the New England penmen one 
 finds a thinness and lack of body, affording a strong 
 contrast with the full-blooded, hearty strength of 
 Old England's writers. Plain living may Induce 
 high thinking, but It must not be so very plain as 
 to afford Imperfect nourishment. To make a friv- 
 olous comparison, the Yankee writers of the middle 
 nineteenth century seem to have been fed on pie and 
 pickles, when a more normal fare of good roast beef 
 and ale would have given them much stronger bodies 
 to support still sounder minds. 
 
 Hawthorne, at any rate, could never safely spur 
 his Pegasus. His multitudinous short stories show 
 this plainly. Almost every one of them contains the 
 germ, of an original and often quite remarkable Idea. 
 Here are Imagination, mystery, a fondness for the 
 dark things of human life and of the supernatural. 
 In the hands of Poe or of Hoffmann these con- 
 ceptions would have been worked out into concrete 
 
120 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 masterpieces, Hawthorne, however, lets them, as 
 it were, slip through his fingers. His hands are 
 nerveless ; and in the actual moment of execution, he 
 falters and drops into sheer futility. He knows so 
 well just what he wants to do, and yet he can not do 
 it ! The result is shadow and not substance, a mirage 
 in place of what might well have been a miracle. And, 
 therefore, out of the hundred tales which are the work 
 of his first period, only a dozen or so are read to-day 
 by any save the conscientious student of American 
 literature. 
 
 The cause of this futility was the author's lack of 
 intellectual robustness, the devitalised condition into 
 which he often fell. Had he written twenty stories 
 instead of five times twenty, resting between whiles, 
 every one of them would have been upon his highest 
 level of achievement. As it is, let us not deplore the 
 fact that three years of his life were spent among 
 dull custom-house inspectors and bluff sea-captains 
 and the tarry-salty smells of Salem's wharf. Those 
 three years of lull were a lucky chance for Hawthorne 
 and for our literature. He hated them at the time, 
 though he found some comfort in the thought that 
 both Bums and Chaucer had been in the customs- 
 service in their day. But he also hated and re- 
 sented his summary removal from office when Presi- 
 dent Taylor succeeded Polk. Hawthorne was once 
 more cast out upon the world. His friends sub- 
 scribed a sum of money to meet his immediate neces- 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 121 
 
 sities; and Mr. James T. Fields, the publisher — a 
 bustling, cheery optimist — coming down to Salem, 
 found that Hawthorne had again begun to write with 
 the zest which years of abstemiousness had given him. 
 Fields begged to see what he had written. Haw- 
 thorne, with his habitual faintheartedness, drew back. 
 
 " Who would risk publishing a book for me, the 
 least popular writer in America ? " 
 
 " I would," responded the jovial Fields. " I'll be- 
 gin with an edition of two thousand copies of any- 
 thing you choose to write." 
 
 " What madness ! " cried Hawthorne. " Your 
 friendship for me gets the better of your judgment." 
 
 There was a long and friendly wrangle between the 
 two. At last, when Fields was leaving empty-handed, 
 Hawthorne shamefacedly thrust a roll of manuscript 
 upon him. 
 
 " There," said he ; " it is either very good or very 
 bad — I don't know which." 
 
 The manuscript contained the first draft of The 
 Scarlet Letter. The novel in its final form was pub- 
 lished in 1850. Two editions of it were almost im- 
 mediately exhausted. At the age of forty-six, the 
 " obscurest man of letters in America " took rank 
 among the few who have achieved a lasting fame. 
 
 When Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he did, 
 for the one time in his whole life, exactly what he 
 meant to do. He has himself recorded that he penned 
 its pages at a white heat, thrilled by the emotions 
 
122 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 that were excited in him, — " as if I were tossed up 
 and down upon an ocean." For once, his grasp was 
 firm. Physical energy sustained the effort of intel- 
 lectual power. And so, in its own way, the story Is 
 very nearly perfect — all except the anticlimax of the 
 last few pages. 
 
 There were reasons for Hawthorne's doubt, ex- 
 pressed to Fields, as to whether the book was very 
 good or very bad. Had its author been merely a 
 clever writer and not a man of genius, his work would 
 have sunk to the level of melodrama. As Hawthorne 
 actually wrought it out, it is dramatic and some- 
 thing more. It may, indeed, be styled theatric, and 
 I might go still further and call it operatic. No 
 wonder that it has been taken by a living composer 
 for musical interpretation. The libretto fairly leaps 
 out of its pages. The scenes are already indicated 
 with sharp distinctness, for the whole tale is episodic. 
 The grim and weather-beaten prison with its oaken, 
 iron-clamped door — -the pillory — a balcony project- 
 ing from beneath the church's eaves — ^beyond, the 
 harbour with a glimpse of high-decked ships — a 
 beautiful but guilty woman wearing the Scarlet Let- 
 ter on her breast and passing from the prison to the 
 pillory — here is a strangely vivid setting for the 
 lever de rideau. How much colour and picturesque- 
 ness in the chorus, or the stage mob, if you please ! 
 'Aged women and young girls, stem Puritan inhabi- 
 tants of Old Boston with bell-crowned hats and 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 123 
 
 gloomy looks, an Indian or two m paint and feath- 
 ers, and a group of swaggering buccaneers, garbed 
 strangely, — it is of the essence of the operatic stage. 
 
 Then think of those especial episodes which stand 
 out most vividly. The chorus greets Hester Prynne 
 as she walks proudly to the pillory, and it gives the 
 clue to what has gone before. Then comes the trio 
 between Wilson, the old clergyman, Arthur Dimmes- 
 dale and Governor Bellingham ; followed by the im- 
 passioned appeal of Dimmesdale to Hester, urging 
 her to tell the truth, if it be for her soul's peace. Plis 
 appeal is broken by her short and sharp refusals, 
 and by the deep voice of Roger Chillingworth — ob- 
 viously a basso. Think also of the operatic possi- 
 bilities of the prison scene, where Roger plays the 
 physician and is alone with Hester, the wife who dis- 
 honoured him by reason of her love for some man 
 whom he threatens to discover and of whom he says : 
 " Let him live ! Let him hide himself in outward 
 honour, if he may. None the less, he shall be mine ! " 
 
 And again, the crafty, stealthy arts of Chilling- 
 worth, suspecting Dimmesdale, and playing with ma- 
 lignant skill upon that tortured conscience, until at 
 last, the misshapen seeker after vengeance learns the 
 secret of the minister, and finds upon his breast the 
 great scarlet A. And the forest scene, where Hester 
 meets her former lover, while the uncanny little Pearl 
 sports near them, is full of dramatic and operatic 
 possibilities. The powerful climax is worked up with 
 
124 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 all the mastery of stage effect that the most skilful 
 playwright could imagine. Here the chorus is di- 
 versified by the introduction of soldiers in burnished 
 steel who enter to the strains of military music. The 
 procession of the Governor and magistrates varies 
 the spectacle, while the tense excitement of the mo- 
 ment is raised to a stiU higher pitch by the seaman's 
 message which shows that the devilish Roger has pre- 
 vented the escape of Dimmesdale and Hester. And 
 at last, Dimmesdale, in the hour of his seeming tri- 
 umph, which is also the hour of his death, mounting 
 the scaffold where once Hester stood, reveals his 
 guilt, and with convulsive hand tears open his black 
 vestment and displays the scarlet symbol of his shame 
 and hers. 
 
 The genius of Hawthorne is clearly shown in the 
 art with which he has done so much with such slight 
 material. There are only three characters in the 
 story. There is, first of all, Hester Prynne, noble 
 and strong and pure of heart, in spite of the trans- 
 gression which has marred her life. If she has sinned, 
 it is because of the great law of Nature which gives 
 to every woman the desire for love. There is Arthur 
 Dimmesdale, gifted, sensitive, and with the instincts 
 of a saint; yet still a sinner, guilty of a double sin 
 because of his holy calling, and swayed by moral 
 cowardice which ties his tongue until the end and 
 lets him live a hypocrite. And finally, there is Roger 
 Chillingworth, cold-hearted, implacable, and showing 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 125 
 
 that malignant spirit which so often goes with physi- 
 cal deformity. These three — the confessed and 
 branded sinner, the undetected sinner, and the man 
 who is a self-appointed instrument to scourge the 
 other two — these are the only figures on which the 
 author has concentrated the glaring light of his 
 imagination. Yet out of what would seem to be the 
 meagerest of material, he has created something for 
 which there is no parallel in English literature. How 
 skilfully he manages the physical aspects of his story ! 
 In it he was almost the first to cast the glamour of 
 pure romance about the harshness and severity of 
 New England. Old Boston, as he limns it, is as 
 quaint and full of fascinating possibilities as any 
 Rhenish town with a whole millennium of legend. 
 The trackless woods which circle It, seem, under Haw- 
 thorne's magic touch, to teem with mystery as though 
 he had transported the Schwarzwald to the Western 
 world. The beauty of its silent glades, where the 
 sunlight sifts through the greenery, makes it en- 
 chanted ground; while the lurking Indians who now 
 and then appear so silently, take not so strong a 
 hold upon the fancy as do the dark hints concerning 
 what takes place at night when in the gloom, grim 
 hags steal out to meet the Black Man who has bought 
 their souls. There is a smell of witchcraft In the air, 
 as Hawthorne tells the story; and his reticence and- 
 half-spoken Intimations are proofs of his consum- 
 mate art. 
 
126 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Hawthorne was a symbolist, one who spoke in alle- 
 gory, and let the concrete always serve as a clue to 
 the intangible yet more intense reality of what lay 
 behind it. Thus, the scaffold on which Hester stood 
 to be stared at by a thousand eyes, is a symbol of 
 her public shame. The prison is another symbol. 
 The forest, where she yielded to her lover, reminds 
 us always of the guilt that has been hers as well as 
 Dimmesdale's. But it is the scarlet letter which is 
 the one pervasive and almost terrifying symbol, giv- 
 ing in itself the motif of the whole. As Mr. Wood- 
 berry has well expressed the thought : " It multiplies 
 itself, as the tale unfolds, with greater intensity and 
 mysterious significance and dread suggestion, as if in 
 mirrors set round about it; . . . and as if this 
 were not enough, the scarlet letter, at a climax of the 
 dark story, lightens forth over the whole heavens as 
 a symbol of what can not be hid even in the intensest 
 blackness of night." This recurrence of a physical 
 object to keep the meaning of the book before the 
 reader's mind forever, is an instinctive bit of art in 
 Hawthorne. It was employed with conscious purpose 
 by Emile Zola three decades later, in the great bra- 
 zen still of L'Assommoir, in the reeking mine-pit of 
 Germinal and in the Napoleonic bees of La Debacle. 
 
 But it is not the outward aspects of The Scarlet 
 Letter that excite the deepest and most lasting in- 
 terest. This is to be found in its subtler phases, in 
 its moral lesson, if there be one, and in its revelation 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 127 
 
 of the inner mind of him who wrote it. And to under- 
 stand these things, we must ever so briefly scan the 
 lesson of heredity which helps explain so much. 
 Hawthorne's first ancestor on American soil exhib- 
 ited a strange melamge of tastes and tasks. He was 
 a warrior, a preacher of great eloquence, a reader of 
 fine English prose, and a stern magistrate who or- 
 dered the public whipping of women because they were 
 proven to be Quakers. His son condemned to death 
 women who were reputed witches ; and he showed 
 such savagery and blood-lust in the court-room, that 
 one whose wife was sentenced by him, cursed him 
 and the children of his children's children, in a curse 
 that was Oriental in its fury and completeness, and 
 that was not forgotten after many generations. 
 
 Hawthorne's father was a sailor, the captain of a 
 Salem vessel, and he bore the reputation of being 
 black and stem to those whom he commanded. When 
 he died, in far-ofF Surinam, his wife was only twenty- 
 seven years of age. Yet she, too, had the intensity 
 and deep passion of the family which she had entered. 
 She called young Hawthorne, with his sisters, to her 
 room, and told them dryly that their father was now 
 dead. Then she sent her children to her own father's 
 house and for forty years lived in a solitude that was 
 rarely broken. Long after Hawthorne had grown 
 to manhood, he wrote to a friend of having eaten din- 
 ner with his mother — " for the first time in my life 
 that I can remember." 
 
128 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Recalling, then, his ancestral traits, we can in part 
 explain Nathaniel Hawthorne as a man, and more 
 especially the Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter. AH 
 the sunshine of his nature was lavished on his wife 
 and children, with whom his every hour was an hour 
 of unclouded happiness. But to the world at large 
 he was the true descendant of the men who scourged 
 the Quaker women and doomed the witches and terri- 
 fied the sailors, as he was also the son of her who let 
 her whole life wither for what she felt to be a " princi- 
 ple." Hawthorne had friends who loved him well, 
 yet he never spared them in his criticism. He was 
 burdened with a secret pessimism which was ever 
 a dark blot on his secret soul. He wearied both of 
 men and places in a little time. When he left his 
 native Salem, he described it as " an earthly cavern." 
 When he left Brook Farm, he wrote : " Even my 
 custom-house experience was not such a thraldom 
 and weariness." When at last, by the kindness of 
 President Pierce, he left America for the lucrative 
 consulship at Liverpool, he was glad, so his biogra- 
 pher informs us, " to get away from his native land, 
 upon which ... he looked back with the feel- 
 ing that he never desired to return to it." Yet in 
 England he was wholly discontented and displeased. 
 He refused to meet many of the famous men who 
 would have been glad to offer him their hospitality. 
 One instance of almost incredible tactlessness has 
 been preserved in a brief, surly note which he penned 
 
"THE SCARLET LETTER" 129 
 
 from Liverpool to a Mr. Bright, who had striven to 
 make this difficult genius happy. " Dear Mr. 
 Bright," wrote Hawthorne, " I have come back (only 
 for a day or two) to this black, miserable hole." His 
 contempt for England he has recorded in the pages 
 of Our Old Home. The English he described as 
 "beefish, muttonish, portish, and porterish." Yet 
 he was unwilling to meet such Englishmen as Tenny- 
 son and Thackeray and Macaulay, who were not 
 beefish and muttonish. He did not care for men of 
 letters. It is hard to say for what, precisely, he did 
 care. At heart, he was a pessimist, a man of gloom, 
 a fatalist, a Yankee Heraclitus. And with it all there 
 was a moral sternness, a relentlessness which his biog- 
 raphers have called Puritanism. Yet in Hawthorne 
 it was not really Puritanism, since the deep religious 
 conviction which was the moving force, the main- 
 spring, of Puritanism, was in his case lacking. For 
 Puritanism, while ascetic and severe in doctrine, was 
 not always unsparing, pitiless, relentless. There 
 were the " uncovenanted mercies of the Lord," and 
 even Jonathan Edwards did not forever preach of 
 dire damnation and the glaring flames of hell. There 
 was a place even in his stern creed, for charity and 
 hope. Therefore, it seems to me that Hawthorne's 
 ultimate belief was rather Paganism — ^not the joyous, 
 gladsome, irresponsible Paganism of the Greeks, but 
 Paganism of a darker hue, — the Paganism of the 
 Orientals. 
 
ISO STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 In this sense, The Scarlet Letter is the fullest rev- 
 elation of his innermost convictions. Hence, in its 
 last analysis, it is a deeply hopeless book, tinged with 
 morbid thoughts. It means that sin can not be for- 
 given in this life ; that its taint, of which the scarlet 
 letter is a symbol, must remain forever. That which 
 is done can never be undone. Though years of ex- 
 piation pass, though the sinner repent in tears, and 
 sweat great drops of blood, and eat the bread of bit- 
 terness, his sin is unforgiven. If he confess it, he is 
 exposed to public shame. If he conceal it, he is riven 
 by remorse. Love and affection may minister to 
 him, as wild-flowers and green ivies grow about a 
 fire-scarred trunk in the forest — ^yet the marks of 
 scorching flame are there, and the charred stump can 
 never be again a stately tree. In all this there is no 
 Christ, no hint of gentleness and grace and pity. 
 The Scarlet Letter brings to mind a very different 
 work of genius written by a very different type of 
 man, yet one of which the moral is the same, — ^Ros- 
 setti's Jenny. There the man of much experience 
 muses over the street-waif as she sleeps, and he thinks 
 of all the problems of existence. He, too, like Haw- 
 thorne, feels the mystery of life and death, of sin 
 and sorrow, and he turns away perplexed ; for though 
 it is a mystery that stares men always in the face, 
 not one has ever fathomed it. 
 
EMERSON 
 
VIII 
 
 EMERSON 
 
 Some of these days there will have to be a general 
 readjustment of values in the accepted criticism of 
 American literature. For a long, long while our 
 people were necessarily so given over to material 
 things as to have little time for cultivating any of 
 the arts. In this respect, Americans were like the 
 Romans of the early period. They were engaged 
 in a struggle for existence. Their thoughts were 
 turned toward what was useful rather than toward 
 what was beautiful. Hence, in this country, as in 
 early Rome, the artistic instinct was approved only 
 when it seemed to have in it an element of the prac- 
 tical. Thus, while painting was not entirely dis- 
 couraged, it was only the portrait-painter who could 
 make a living in the young commonwealth. He 
 could transmit to posterity the features of his con- 
 spicuous contemporaries ; and so they let him paint 
 them, being moved by that pride which was shared 
 alike by Puritan and by Cavalier. Again, in litera- 
 ture it was only the historian and the orator who 
 were viewed with approbation. The historian could 
 record the exploits of soldiers and of nation-builders. 
 The orator, whether political or theological, could 
 influence his hearers to action. Therefore, histories 
 and speeches and sermons were committed to writing, 
 
 133 
 
1S4 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 and were printed and even read; but poets and dra- 
 matists and essayists were for a long time scarcely 
 known. When, in the early nineteenth century, they 
 finally appeared, they wrote for a public which had 
 long since lost all the finer standards of apprecia- 
 tion. It was thought to be remarkable that any one 
 could write a book at all. Even a newspaper poet 
 was worth consideration, and had at least a local 
 fame; while professional authors, though they made 
 but little money, and wrote, as Prescott once did, 
 for a dollar a page, were viewed with indiscrim- 
 inating admiration. 
 
 This is why, if you open one of the early Ameri- 
 can anthologies, such as Griswold's, or if you turn 
 over the pages of the " literary keepsakes " and 
 " gift-books " of that generation, you will find the 
 productions of a few men of talent indiscriminately 
 mixed with the crudest scrawls of mediocrity. The 
 reading public could not feel the difference, for ex- 
 ample, between the early writings of Longfellow and 
 those of Maria Brooks ; between the strange harmo- 
 nies of Poe and the slipshod verse of Amelia Welby ; 
 or between the graceful, accurate scholarship of 
 Prescott and the ponderous pedantry of Bancroft. 
 Poe himself pilloried Longfellow as a mere plagiar- 
 ist, while praising very highly women scribblers 
 whose verse was mawkish to the last degree. 
 
 It came about, therefore, that American literature, 
 as our first critics understood it, was reaUy a most 
 
EMERSON 135 
 
 bizarre assemblage of unequal work — a sort of crazy- 
 quilt in which silk and velvet were cobble-stitched to 
 calico. Only by very slow degrees did there begin 
 a process of sifting, and even now this process has 
 not been fully carried out. Take any recent history 
 of American literature — like that, for example, of 
 Professor Trent — and you will find serious attention 
 given not merely to Irving and Cooper and Haw- 
 thorne and Lowell, but likewise to such feeble folk as 
 Thomas Prince and John Woolman and Joseph Den- 
 nis and John P. Kennedy and Enos Hitchcock. 
 
 So, as I said before, the time is coming when all 
 this literary underbrush must be rooted out remorse- 
 lessly. Then we shall have remaining a number of 
 writers to whom new values will be assigned. At the 
 present time the practice is to rank them as being 
 almost equally important. Soon, however, it will be 
 no longer necessary to hold that Cooper was a very 
 great romancer, that Hawthorne was in every book 
 of his a genius of extraordinary accomplishments, 
 that Bayard Taylor was very much of a poet, or that 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes possessed more than clever- 
 ness and facility. We shall have to balance these 
 earlier writers with those of our own time, and to 
 judge them, not by parochial standards, but by the 
 criterion of world-literature. 
 
 When this is done, we may be sure that two men, 
 at least, will meet any test that shall be applied to 
 them. Longfellow and Emerson have nothing to 
 
136 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 fear. Their place is fixed ; or, if it be changed at all, 
 they will be advanced to still greater heights. 
 
 I need not speak of Longfellow, because I have 
 already done so in this volume. His fame has grown 
 each year. He Is no longer a poet of America alone, 
 but of the whole English-speaking world. Yet he 
 must yield to Emerson, and for a reason that is very 
 plain. In Longfellow, one admires most of aU the 
 beauty and fitness of the form in which he has em- 
 bodied what he thought and felt. Apart from the 
 form, his thought and feeling are not remarkable. 
 Translate him into any other language, and his 
 poetry would not rise very much above the level of 
 the commonplace. It is the exquisite gift of ex- 
 pression which makes his lines so lovely, so touching, 
 and so impossible to forget. 
 
 Emerson, on the other hand, unites the intellectual 
 quality with the emotional, fineness of form with 
 originality of content. Longfellow soothes and 
 charms and pleases. Emerson stimulates and in- 
 spires. In one you find a certain sensuousness and 
 sweetness as in music. In the other there is that 
 which energises the brain and is a trumpet-call to 
 action. 
 
 What is remarkable about both these men is the 
 circumstance that, although their surroundings in 
 the formative period of their lives were plain, pro- 
 vincial, and almost rustic, they both wrote in the 
 language of a larger world — a language that was 
 
EMERSON 137 
 
 and still remains devoid of what is local. Emerson, 
 speaking at Oxford or at Edinburgh, would not have 
 been recognised as a citizen of the New World. Far 
 less would one think of him as a rural Yankee who in- 
 variably breakfasted on pie, who picked peas in his 
 little garden, who was regular in his attendance at 
 " town meetings," and who entered into all the inter- 
 ests of the hamlet where he lived. Matthew Arnold, 
 the most fastidious of critics, tells us of the impres- 
 sion made upon him by the first reading of Emer- 
 son's early essays: 
 
 There came to us in that old Oxford time a clear and pure 
 voice, which, for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new 
 and moving and unforgettable as the strain of Newman or Car- 
 lyle or Goethe. To us at Oxford, Emerson was but a voice 
 speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he 
 spoke that from that time forth, Boston Bay and Concord 
 were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to 
 that which invests for me the names of Oxford and of 
 Weimar. 
 
 It is odd, yet.it gives proof of the American lack 
 of critical power at the time, that Emerson's own 
 countrymen by no means greeted him with the same 
 enthusiasm. In 1840, Dean Stanley, meeting some 
 Americans at Malta and desiring to please them, 
 spoke with hearty admiration of the Essays, which 
 had just been published. Whereupon the Americans 
 shook their heads and said that, in the United States, 
 Emerson was thought to be much too " greeny." It 
 
138 STUDIES IN. SEVEEAL LITEEATUEES 
 
 was the very perfection of his style and the origi- 
 nality of his mind that made his sentences appeal with 
 far more force to cultivated foreigners than to the 
 home public, which preferred the obvious, dressed up 
 in tawdry rhetoric. 
 
 It is, indeed, impossible to discover just how Em- 
 erson acquired the felicitous touch that gives his 
 writings such distinction, the wealth of illustration 
 that enriches them, the penetration of thought that 
 fills them with so much power. He was but an indif- 
 ferent student in his college days. His reading was 
 very wide, but very desultory. His allusions are 
 often quite inaccurate. None the less, in some strange 
 fashion he absorbed the essence of Platonism and 
 an understanding of the great German philosophers, 
 together with a myriad facts and fancies from all 
 the world's best writers — facts and fancies which he 
 unconsciously assimilated so that they gave bril- 
 liancy and beauty to his own most Esoteric thoughts. 
 
 He was a most unusual figure, this man of Con- 
 cord. He lived a life which touched the world at 
 many points, though he was scarcely of the world 
 himself. His consistent attitude was one of intellec- 
 tual detachment. He had many friends, yet no one 
 really knew him. No one ever clapped him on the 
 shoulder and called him Waldo. There was some- 
 thing almost Buddhistic in his serene aloofness in 
 that small community where every one knew every- 
 body else, and where, for most men, there was little 
 
EMERSON 139 
 
 privacy. Yet Emerson was quite apart, composed 
 and tranquil, friendly, .but with little heat of friend- 
 ship. He seldom laughed. He disliked loud laugh- 
 ter in others, or loud speaking. He detested the 
 superlative degree in everything. 
 
 Perhaps this sensitiveness may have been partly 
 physical in its origin. Writing once to Carlyle, he 
 used the phrase " my vast debility." It was surely 
 not a debility of mind. It was perhaps a debility of 
 body which made the noise and bustle of what he 
 called " this great, intelligent, sensual, and avari- 
 cious America " distasteful to him. Even in good 
 causes he deplored the strenuous attitude. He wrote : 
 
 Nature does not like our benevolence or our learning much 
 better than she Ukes our frauds and wars. When we come 
 out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, 
 or the temperance meeting, or the Transcendental Club, into 
 the fields and woods, she says to us: "So hot, my little sir?" 
 
 And thus to Emerson all the actualities of material 
 life were more or less a dream. At least, they never 
 stirred his depths. When, as a clergyman, he found 
 himself unable, by reason of conscientious scruples, 
 to administer the sacrament, he caused no schism 
 in the church. He merely told his people of his 
 changed belief; and when they could not follow him, 
 he left the pulpit very quietly and put aside the cler- 
 ical profession. Whenever he received offence in pri- 
 vate life — which was but seldom — ^he showed no an- 
 
140 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 ger, but simply withdrew into himself and ceased 
 thereafter to know the persons who had offended 
 him. Though he sympathised with the Abolition 
 movement, he toot no active part in it. Though the 
 Brook Farm experiment in socialism interested him, 
 he would not himself become a member of the broth- 
 erhood. Politics repelled him. Of personal ambi- 
 tion he had none. 
 
 A great deal has been said and written concerning 
 the philosophy of Emerson, and a great deal of what 
 has been said and written is little better than nebu- 
 lous nonsense. Emerson, in truth, had no philoso- 
 phy — at least, no system of philosophy which can be 
 reduced to any definite form. He was rather a great 
 fountain of isolated thoughts which he put forth in 
 essays, some of which have no structural coherence. 
 At times, as in his essay on " The Over-Soul," he 
 scarcely apprehended what he wished to say, but 
 merely struggled amid a flood of half-shaped ideas. 
 As Ohver Wendell Holmes has well expressed it: 
 " His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that 
 break apart and are independent units, like the frag- 
 ments of a coral colony." Of course, his thoughts 
 were fundamentally Platonic. His quest was for 
 ideals. He had a truly Oriental belief In the trans- 
 migration of souls, and this was supplemented by a 
 kind of pantheism ; since he believed that God Is om- 
 nipresent, that He pervades every living thing, and 
 that our souls are but a part of the Divine Soul which 
 
EMERSON 141 
 
 IS the very essence of the universe. Philosophically, 
 there is nothing new in Emerson. What made him 
 so remarkable a figure in his time and country was 
 his splendid advocacy of free thought, of the right 
 of every mind to think precisely as it would. It was 
 because of this that Carlyle wrote to him with a 
 touch of Scottish condescension: "You are a new 
 era, my man, in your new, huge country." 
 
 It was his championship of intellectual freedom 
 that burst through the petty, narrow, provincial way 
 of thinking which had clamped New England in a 
 strangling grip. His doctrine worked like new yeast 
 upon the brains of those who heard and read him. 
 Some of these brains were very feeble brains, and 
 they were responsible for much babbling and for 
 much of the absurdity of Transcendentalism. The 
 cheap cleverness of Margaret Fuller and the bore- 
 some, windy platitudes of Bronson Alcott are rather 
 favourable specimens of the occasional miscarriage 
 of Emerson's inspiration. But in the end, his influ- 
 ence was tonic and stimulating; and after he had 
 taught for many years, his influence led his country- 
 men into a wider world of thought, just as it made 
 for courage, for self-reliance, and for a love of truth 
 eternal. 
 
 It may seem odd to couple the names of Emerson 
 and Walt Whitman, since no two human beings 
 could have lived more different lives; yet each of 
 these two men gave his supreme devotion to the doc- 
 
142 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 trine of an intense individualism. Whitman, how- 
 ever, seems to feel only the intoxication of physical 
 well-being. He is drunken with the pride of flesh 
 and blood, the joy of sense, the glory of the outward 
 man. Emerson, striking a far higher note, yields 
 not to Whitman in his exaltation of humanity. But 
 to him, man is not a mere eating, drinking, loafing, 
 sprawling creature, likening himself to cattle because 
 they are not " respectable," and approving lust be- 
 cause untamed nature prompts it. Listen to Emer- 
 son and see how gloriously he rises above the purely 
 sensual view of life: 
 
 Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. 
 We are now men, and must accept from the highest minds 
 the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids 
 in a protected corner, nor cowards fleeing before a revolu- 
 tion, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Al- 
 mighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. 
 
 The nonchalance of boys, who are sure of a dinner and 
 would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to con- 
 ciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. 
 
 We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with 
 our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands 
 in God, we know the particular thing, and everything, and 
 every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons 
 stands behind us and casts His dread omniscience through 
 us over things. 
 
 No society can ever be so large as one man. He in his 
 friendship, in his natural and momentary association, doubles 
 or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages 
 himself to two, or ten, or twenty, he dwarfs himself below 
 the stature of one. 
 
EMERSON 143 
 
 That country is the fairest which is inhabited by the noblest 
 minds. 
 
 Insist on yourself; never imitate. Every great man is unique. 
 Do that which is assigned to you, and you can not hope 
 too much, or dare too much. 
 
 Let a man, then, know his worth and keep things under his 
 feet. 
 
 Here is p, proclamation of the grandeur and dig- 
 nity of man, as forcible as Whitman's, yet delivered 
 as it were in clear tones from a mountain-peak, while 
 Whitman bellows vociferously in a valley. 
 
 These sentences alone would give one who had not 
 read him a very good understanding of the rare 
 quality which Emerson possessed of concentrating a 
 pungent thought within the compass of a few words. 
 He teaches in aphorisms. As I have already said, 
 his essays seem often a collection of unrelated units. 
 One might liken each essay to a quiver filled with 
 arrows. Every shaft flies forth unerringly to its 
 mark. It is a mere accident that they all leap, as it 
 were, from a single bowstring. Each sentence is 
 often in its effect equivalent to a long disquisition 
 by a writer whose phrases are less pregnant. I can 
 think of no parallel to certain of these papers except, 
 perhaps, in some of the Epistles of Horace, where 
 maxim after maxim, and epigram after epigram, 
 strike the mind as a succession of lightning-flashes 
 strikes the vision. Take, for example, the famous 
 essays on " Compensation " and " Circles," and note 
 these remarkable sayings which, as you pass from 
 
144 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 page to page, scintillate like a riviere of diamonds 
 in a golden setting: 
 
 Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. 
 Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty 
 which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its 
 abuse. For every grain of wit, there is a grain of folly. For 
 everything you have missed, you have gained something else; 
 and for everything you gain, you lose something. 
 
 Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. 
 
 The only sin is limitation. 
 
 The world globes itself in a drop of dew. 
 
 Character makes an overpowering present. Character dulls 
 the power of particular events. When we see the conqueror, 
 we do not think much of every one battle or success. We see 
 that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. 
 
 Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That 
 soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. The 
 dice of God are always loaded. 
 
 Our strength grows out of our weakness. 
 
 A great man is always willing to be little. 
 
 Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a 
 newspaper. 
 
 The man is all. 
 
 Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. 
 W,e gain the strength of the temptations we resist. 
 
 Horace is the most quoted writer of classical 
 antiquity. Emerson is certainly the most quoted 
 writer who holds a place in American literature. It 
 is probably to the fact that these single, poignant 
 thoughts of his have found a lodgment in so many 
 minds that we may ascribe the power which he has 
 exerted for several generations. He may be criti- 
 cised for unevenness, for a lack of philosophic sys- 
 
EMERSON 145 
 
 tem, and for many other things. Yet all such criti- 
 cism is but the cheep of insects when we consider how 
 splendidly this one writer has combated the forces of 
 materialism, how he has taught men to look upward 
 to the ideal truth, and how he has given a multitude 
 of lofty thoughts to Instil nobility in minds which 
 would have been ignoble had he never lived and 
 written. 
 
 So far as our native literature has advanced in 
 its gradual evolution, there can be no doubt that 
 Emerson to-day is the very foremost of those who 
 have shed lustre on its annals. 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY 
 FAIR" 
 
IX 
 
 THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 
 
 To set oneself the task of writing about Vanity 
 Fair recalls Schopenhauer's famous saying: "Every- 
 thing has been thought, everything has been done, 
 everything has been written, everything has been 
 said." It would not be possible, for example, to dis- 
 cover anything in Becky Sharp which had escaped 
 the observation of a host of critics long ago. From 
 Dobbin and Amelia and Lord Steyne, with his buck- 
 teeth and great jarring laugh, and old Osborne, and 
 the gluttonous Jos, down to Kirsch, the courier, 
 and the frowsy German students dabbling their blond 
 moustaches in their beer-mugs at Pumpernickel, all 
 the people in the book have been held beneath the 
 microscope since the time when they were first created 
 for us, sixty years ago. There is not one of them 
 that lacks the breath of life ; but for this very reason 
 they are too familiar to need interpretation. Like 
 old acquaintances, we have come to know them down 
 to the very last detail. We do not dwell upon their 
 virtues or deplore their vices. We simply ac- 
 cept them as they are and take them quite for 
 granted. 
 
 Nevertheless, of the book itself there remains, per- 
 haps, something still to say. The most curious 
 
 149 
 
150 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITEEATURES 
 
 thing about it is the circumstance that, when Thack- 
 eray set out to write it, he did not in the least sup- 
 pose that he was going to produce a masterpiece. 
 He had been scribbling nearly all his life, often for 
 the sheer love of self-expression, and later, after he 
 had lost his fortune, because of the money which his 
 pen would bring him. As a college boy, he had writ- 
 ten skits in verse and prose for an undergraduate 
 journal. Afterward, even while he imagined that he 
 was studying art in France, he was filling volumi- 
 nous note-books with his impressions of men and 
 things and places. At twenty-five he had gambled 
 away a very considerable sum of money, and was 
 thrown upon his own resources. It was then that 
 he took to writing for the magazines and newspa- 
 pers — especially for Fraser's and for Punch. He 
 even consented to contribute to a newspaper in New 
 York — ^the Corsair — for the sum of a guinea a 
 column. 
 
 Nearly everything he wrote was in a vein of irony 
 or humour. He took nothing very seriously, least 
 of all himself and his own writings. What he ac- 
 tually valued most was his bent for art. This is only 
 another example of what we so often see — the am- 
 bition of a gifted man to shine in some sphere other 
 than that for which his native genius fits him. 
 Thackeray really thought himself an artist of the 
 brush and pencil, and he was hurt when Dickens 
 would not employ him as an illustrator for the early 
 books of " Boz." He was pleased that Punch would 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 151 
 
 accept and publish his faulty drawings. So Dick- 
 ens, in his turn, valued more the perfunctory praise 
 which he won in amateur theatricals than he did 
 the true fame which came to him spontaneously as 
 an author. 
 
 Finally after having written an immense deal that 
 is hardly worth recalling, and some other things 
 which do not deserve remembrance, Thackeray put 
 forth, on New Year's Day in 1847, the first number 
 of Vanity Fair, in a yellow wrapper. He was led to 
 begin a story to appear in parts by the great suc- 
 cess which Dickens had won in the same way. But 
 Vanity Fair at first seemed likely to be an utter dis- 
 appointment. When four numbers had been Issued, 
 the publishers were so assured of its failure that 
 they proposed to discontinue it. It is probable 
 that Thackeray himself had no great hope. Then, 
 with the fifth number, the tide turned, and all liter- 
 ary London began talking of the story which in 
 spirit and in manner was something genuinely new. 
 
 Nevertheless, if it succeeded, it did so almost in 
 its author's own despite. Thackeray had really 
 planned it as a burlesque. If any one will compare 
 the first edition of it with the form in which we have 
 it now, it will be plain enough that the novel was 
 meant to be written in a comic vein. Whole passages 
 that were farcical were afterward eliminated. In 
 one of the earlier chapters, for instance, the author 
 stops the progress of the tale to explain, with a sort 
 of side-wink to the reader, that, had he chosen, he 
 
152 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 might have written the adventures of Jos and Becky 
 and Amelia in one of two other manners. Thus, 
 he says, he might have promoted all his characters 
 to the peerage; or, on the other hand, he might 
 have copied the Bulwer-Lytton of his time and made 
 them lackeys and roughs and burglars, who patter 
 thieves' argot — " beladle your glumbanions and bim- 
 bole your chickeys " — whatever that may mean. He 
 even writes in a little scene as a specimen of what he 
 could do in the latter genre had he but chosen. As 
 he went on, however, his " novel without a hero " took 
 strong hold of him. He afterwards confessed that 
 he " wasn't going to write it in that way when he 
 began." He started out to perpetrate a carica- 
 ture. He ended by producing a finished painting. 
 The reason why Vanity Fair succeeded at the 
 time is to be found in its freshness of manner. The 
 historical romance, which had been so splendidly 
 developed by Scott, had grown stale in the hands of 
 G. P. R. James, Harrison Ainsworth, and a hundred 
 smaller men. The sentimental romance pure and 
 simple had reached the verge of mawkishness with 
 Miss Landon and Bulwer-Lytton. The latter had 
 also led the ranks of writers who revelled in low life 
 and the psychology of crime. Then upon the scene 
 came Thackeray, to give the English-speaking people 
 a novel of manners, of social experiences, of life as 
 men and women of the world beheld it. Every one 
 had become tired of " fine writing," and Thackeray 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 153 
 
 gave them good writing instead — writing that was 
 often half colloquial and still more often wholly so. 
 Men read him with that sense of relief which, in an 
 earlier generation, they had felt in passing from the 
 rhodomontade of Mrs. RadclifFe and her school to 
 the sturdy, vigorous manner of Sir Walter Scott. 
 But Thackeray pushed the easy style a stage farther. 
 He left rhetoric alone and spoke in that level, easy 
 tone which marks the talk of the club smoking- 
 room rather than the library of the professional man 
 of letters. It was sophisticated writing, but still 
 it had the effectiveness of simplicity. 
 
 The men and the women who appear in Vanity 
 Fair are also, if not themselves sophisticated, at 
 least seen through sophisticated eyes. Thackeray 
 called the book " a novel without a hero." It is just 
 as truly a novel without a heroine, at least in the 
 old sense of that word. There is, indeed, nothing 
 heroic in any of the characters. There is not one 
 of them who is free from vice or folly or from some 
 petty failing. Thackeray himself declared that he 
 meant to make " a set of people living without God 
 in the world." He did not really do this ; yet, none 
 the less, he has created a set of people who are always 
 far below the level on which we can unfeignedly ad- 
 mire them. Amelia Sedley, for example, is almost 
 worse than Becky Sharp. She is quite as selfish, and 
 she has no brains. She can be maudlin over the 
 cockney dandy who married her almost against his 
 
154 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 will, and she can weep over her little son, who is as 
 selfish as his father was ; but she can not understand 
 the loyal love of an honest man. She will use it un- 
 scrupulously for her own convenience, and she will 
 give it no reward except at the last, when she is 
 forced to take it because she needs its strong pro- 
 tection. Thackeray never intended to let Dobbin 
 marry Amelia; but he was urged to do so by his 
 readers until at last he yielded, saying pettishly: 
 
 " Well, he shall marry her ; but when he has got 
 her, he shall not find her worth the having." 
 
 What a wonderful panorama of human weakness 
 is unrolled before our eyes in the chapters of Vanity 
 Fair! Try to recall one character whom you can 
 admire without reservation. Dobbin, perhaps, stands 
 forth a finer person than the rest. In character and 
 in mind he makes a strong appeal ; yet his awkward- 
 ness and loutishness of bearing are continually harped 
 upon. Again and again he appears to be entirely 
 ridiculous. His foolish infatuation for Amelia almost 
 makes one's blood boil, it is so utterly unjustified. 
 For the rest, think of the miserly and clownish old 
 baronet. Sir Pitt Crawley; his fox-hunting, hard- 
 drinking parson brother; his graceless, selfish, and 
 bewigged old sister, and his two sons, one a dissolute 
 bully, and the other a feeble prig. Think of Wenham, 
 the smooth pander, of the senile old general just 
 before Waterloo, and of the cowardly and glutton- 
 ous Jos Sedley! 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 155 
 
 It must be confessed that in this maze of living 
 meannesses, Becky Sharp stands out by contrast 
 almost a good woman. At least, she is consistent 
 from beginning to end. If she is selfish, she is thor- 
 oughly good-natured. She is fighting for her own 
 hand, but she does so with wit and grace and astound- 
 ing cleverness. At the last she is willing even to 
 efi'ace herself to help Amelia, although, of course, 
 she does so only after Amelia's environment begins to 
 bore her. When you close the book you rather sym- 
 pathise with this free-lance of society ; for she is a 
 gallant little campaigner, and she has had to deal 
 with persons who are worse than she, or else infinitely 
 stupid. One resents a little the fact that she fooled 
 poor old Miss Briggs, because Miss Briggs was 
 fooled so very easily; but that she fooled George 
 Osborne and the Crawleys, young and old, is only 
 fitting. Her magnificent insolence to Lady Bare- 
 acres in the hotel courtyard at Brussels is really de- 
 lightful. And when she actually fools Lord Steyne 
 our admiration is unqualified. Indeed, as the reader 
 will remember, it extorted admiration from that 
 hardened sinner himself when he found out that 
 Becky had by tears and pitiful pleas got money from 
 him, ostensibly to pay Miss Briggs, and had then 
 kept it for herself. 
 
 "What an accomplished little devil it is!" thought he. 
 " What a splendid actress and manager ! She had almost got 
 a second supply out of me the other day, with her coaxing 
 
156 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITEEATUEES 
 
 ways. She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course 
 of all my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. 
 I am a greenhorn myself, and a fool in her hands — an old 
 fool. She is unsurpassable in lies ! " 
 
 His Lordship's admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at 
 this proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing 
 — but getting double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody — 
 it was a magnificent stroke. 
 
 From Thackeray's standpoint, he was, after all, 
 merely stripping ofF the false pretences, the hypo- 
 critical masks, behind which every one must hide 
 himself while in the confines of Vanity Fair. The 
 picture is true to life itself, though it is not true to 
 all of life. In this respect Thackeray is like Mau- 
 passant. Every human being whom he draws is 
 drawn with a pitiless realism. Each separate impres- 
 sion is veracious. The only false thing is the tacit 
 assumption that aU the world is peopled by such 
 types as we discover in Vcmity Fair, and that there 
 are none who are wholly pure-minded, generous, and 
 noble. 
 
 Thackeray, in his book, has looked at human na- 
 ture, not face to face and in the open air, but rather 
 through the bay-window of a club. His philosophy 
 is the philosophy of the man who lives in clubs, and 
 who listens to the talk which comes buzzing to the 
 ear in club-room comers. It is talk made up of 
 risque stories, of hinted scandal, of cynical observa- 
 tion and of worldly aphorisms. So far as It goes, 
 it conveys the truth while it looks only at the seamy 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 157 
 
 side of character. It questions motives with a sneer. 
 It dissects and vivisects and analyses with consum- 
 mate cleverness. It strips away illusions, and pries 
 into hidden meannesses. But it takes no account of 
 another and fairer world in which men are not de- 
 bauchees, or card-sharps, or tuft-hunters, or snobs 
 and social climbers, but where they believe in right 
 and justice and in God, where they treat women with 
 respect, and where women are deserving of respect. 
 Vanity Fair displays for us a microcosm. Its art is 
 microcosmic. 
 
 It was not unnatural that Thackeray should view 
 life from this standpoint. He himself was essentially 
 an inhabitant of clubs. The insanity of his wife had 
 deprived him of a home. He had roamed about in 
 the Bohemia of Paris and the Bohemia of London ; 
 and the club-window was the nest on which he set- 
 tled down as other men repose before their firesides. 
 Later, when many homes were open to him, he knew a 
 world which had not forgotten God; and then we 
 find him writing in a nobler vein, quite as rich in ob- 
 servation and richer far in a perception of what is 
 fine and true. The Newcomes shows far less the in- 
 fluence of the club fumoir. In Henry Esmond we 
 breathe the free air of the greater world which 
 reaches beyond Hyde Park and Piccadilly, beyond 
 London, and even beyond England. 
 
 The comparison of Thackeray and Dickens is an 
 old, old literary game. As it is often carried on, 
 
158 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 nothing can be more absurd. From the standpoint 
 of their art, in a limited way, it is like comparing 
 the Mneid with the Binomial Theorem. Indeed, the 
 two men and their work are not properly comparable 
 at all. They can not, so to speak, be reduced to a 
 common denominator. Yet, in a broad way, some 
 comparison may be instructive. Both of them were 
 intensely English; but Thackeray was an English- 
 man of London, while Dickens was an Englishman of 
 England ; and his imagination, grotesque and strained 
 as it sometimes is, reaches out beyond the sphere of 
 the Particular up into the illimitable spaces of the 
 Universal. His pathos may be at times theatrical. 
 His humour may be often farcical. Yet, in his might- 
 ier moments he appeals to something to which every 
 human heart responds. Thackeray, on the other 
 hand, is technically the greater artist. He is the 
 truest realist that England has produced, except 
 his contemporary, Trollope. But in Vanity Fair his 
 realism is a realism that is shrunken to a single cor- 
 ner of his country. It is not large enough and 
 broad enough to comprehend the hearts of men and 
 women everywhere. Vanity Fair is a wonderful ex- 
 ample of urban literature. Yet unless you are a 
 Londoner, unless you are worldly-wise, unless you 
 have yourself a touch of cynicism in your nature, 
 you will not greatly care for Thackeray. To prefer 
 Dickens to him is to show yourself more broadly 
 human. 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" 159 
 
 This is why both the young and the old can always 
 find in Dickens something that will please and touch 
 them. And this is why thousands upon thousands 
 turn away from Thackeray. To enjoy Thackeray, 
 you must have a certain milieu; whereas, to enjoy 
 Dickens, you need only have the mind and heart and 
 soul which belong to every normal human being. 
 Thackeray is little read outside of England, and 
 among sophisticated Americans who know English 
 life and London life. Dickens is read all over the 
 world, in many countries and in many languages. 
 Foreigners are often puzzled by his burlesque. They 
 are sometimes startled by his humour. His pathos 
 affects them in a way far different from that in 
 which it moves the Anglo-Saxon. Yet, none the less, 
 they read him when they have never even heard of 
 Thackeray; and thus they pay unconscious tribute 
 to the sort of genius that is universal. 
 
 Here is an odd fact which proves how impossible 
 it is for mere environment to make of any man that 
 which he was not made by nature at his birth. Thack- 
 eray, born in India, long resident in France, a visitor 
 at Weimar, where he met Goethe — Thackeray, widely 
 travelled in the East — ^was far more insular, far more 
 local than Dickens, who, when he wrote his greatest 
 novels, had scarcely ever been outside his native land. 
 Thackeray could draw individual Frenchmen and 
 Germans from life with the deft touch of a portrait- 
 painter. In The Newcomes, M. de Florae is deli- 
 
160 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 ciously French, yet Thackeray could never have 
 given us the impressive, overwhehning picture of 
 France in the throes of the Revolution which Dickens 
 spreads before us in A Tale of Two Cities. 
 
 To the last Thackeray remained the Englishman of 
 London. He never understood the French. His 
 judgments on them are oftentimes absurd. He set 
 Balzac far below such second-rate French authors 
 as Bernard and Reybaud, whom the world has long 
 ago forgotten. He declares that he could not read 
 Dumas " without a risk of lighting upon horrors." 
 He is sometimes still more smug, as when in Athens 
 he sees nothing but its shabbiness, " which beats 
 Ireland." His smugness is equally apparent in the 
 pages of Vanity Fair, whenever he breaks off his 
 marvellous portrait-painting to preach sermons, or 
 again as where he spoils a passage of fine pathos 
 with a sort of cynic leer, so that, as Mr. Whibley 
 says, " he seems to snigger amid sobs." It is equally 
 true that he often sobs amid sniggers. He can not 
 be the artist pure and simple — all of one piece, con- 
 sistent, whole. He is a product of the clubs, and yet 
 one thinks of him, perhaps, as sneaking out of his 
 club to appease his conscience with an evening in a 
 Wesleyan chapel. This would be commendable did 
 he go boldly to the chapel ; but he certainly does not 
 do that. He discovers his place of worship in some 
 remote back alley where his fine friends will not see 
 him; and then, returning and sitting once more in 
 
THACKERAY AND "VANITY FAIR" l6l 
 
 his club-window, he will light a fresh cigar and sneer 
 at the devout. 
 
 Vanity Fair is one of the greatest books in Eng- 
 lish literature, but it belongs to purely English lit- 
 erature, and not to the great masterpieces which the 
 whole world owns and to which it gives an unforced 
 admiration. If you can breathe its atmosphere, you 
 will read it over and over to the end of life. Other- 
 wise its author will be to you simply a remarkable 
 English novelist whom Englishmen will always place 
 in the first rank of their fiction-writers. 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 
 
 Whatever else may be said or written concerning 
 Anthony TroUope, one thing at least must be con- 
 ceded — that of all writers of British fiction he is 
 the most typically English. A famous passage writ- 
 ten by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1860, while Trol- 
 lope's reputation was still wholly insular, has been 
 often quoted, because it gives in the fewest possible 
 words the truest estimate of Trollope's literary work. 
 TroUope himself in his Autobiography/ has cited it 
 with pleasure, and it may well be repeated here : 
 
 Have you ever read the novels of Anthony TroUope? They 
 precisely suit my taste — solid and substantial, written on 
 the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and 
 just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out 
 of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all the in- 
 habitants going about their daily business, and not suspect- 
 ing that they were being made a show of. And these books 
 are just as English as a beefsteak. It needs an English 
 residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still 
 I think that their human nature would give them success any- 
 where. 
 
 This marvellously apt and felicitously worded 
 piece of criticism contains two points that are essen- 
 tial to a thorough understanding of Anthony Trol- 
 lope and of his place in the history of EngUsh letters. 
 
 165 
 
166 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 First of all, it makes clear the intensely national 
 character of his realism; and, in the second place, 
 it recognises the fact that his art can give us some- 
 thing broader and deeper than what is purely na- 
 tionail, since it is an art which finds its ultimate 
 source in a profound and comprehensive knowledge 
 of humanity. 
 
 In order to appreciate and explain the enduring 
 existence of TroUope's finest work, one must know 
 something of the man himself, of his training, of his 
 life, of his surroundings, and more especially of his 
 own character and temperament. There is, indeed, 
 a striking contrast to be found between the man as 
 others knew him in the casual intercourse of daily 
 life, and the inner man as he revealed himself in that 
 curiously frank, and at times pathetic, series of con- 
 fessions which was given to the public only after his 
 death. The man, in external things, was largely the 
 creation of his environment. He was a bluff, self- 
 assertive, dogmatic, thoroughly aggressive English- 
 man, brusque, burly, money-loving, and singularly 
 matter-of-fact, so that even among his own country- 
 men and the men of his own set he was never gener- 
 ally popular. The man who dwelt within, however, 
 and whom only his most cherished intimates ever 
 really knew, was genial, tender-hearted, kindly, and, 
 more than that, intensely sensitive to all the pain and 
 all the pathos of human life. Both sides of his nature 
 are felt in what he wrote, and both were necessary to 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE l67 
 
 his greatness as an author. He had power and force ; 
 he had humour and a rich vein of wholesome English 
 fun ; he had insight into character and motive ; and, 
 finally, he had a wide and accurate first-hand knowl- 
 edge of men and women, gained from the circum- 
 stances of his various vocations. 
 
 Anthony Trollope was bom in London in the year 
 1815. His father was a gentleman, a scholar, a 
 former Oxford man, and, at the time of TroUope's 
 birth, a Chancery barrister of some ability in his 
 profession, but one from whom fortune had withheld 
 the successful temperament. Born to a small for- 
 tune, he muddled it away; trained to a learned pro- 
 fession, he off'ended and repelled his clients by his 
 execrable temper. By the time that young Anthony 
 was old enough to enter upon the period of his educa- 
 tion, the elder Trollope had been forced to give up his 
 London home and to take shelter in a wretched farm- 
 house on land which is accurately described in Orley 
 Farm. The mother of the future novelist was a 
 clever, jovial, coarse-grained woman, with a natural 
 gift of observation — powers which are shown in her 
 most unfair yet eminently readable account of the 
 domestic manners of the Americans, and in a num- 
 ber of novels which, though hastily and superficially 
 composed, enjoyed a certain temporary vogue. When 
 Anthony was of an age to be sent to school, his 
 mother had not yet begun to write, and the fortunes 
 of the family were at their lowest ebb. He was en- 
 
168 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 tered at Harrow, where he passed three most unhappy 
 years, and which he left with a reputation for sloven- 
 liness of person and invincible dulness of mind. This 
 reputation was not redeemed at a private school to 
 which he was transferred, nor at Winchester College, 
 where the poverty of his parents made him contempt- 
 ible not only in the eyes of his fellows, but in those of 
 his masters also. Big, ugly, and uncouth, he stulked 
 about the place, feeling himself to be despised, ill- 
 dressed, and dirty; and ere he left he had acquired 
 a conviction that his life was destined to be an utter 
 failure. The story of his next few years is pain- 
 ful reading; for it is a story of hopeless effort, of 
 unrelieved dejection, of indignities, of failure. He 
 tried to study, but for study he appears to have had 
 no aptitude. He tried to teach, but he had neither 
 knowledge nor self-confidence. He endeavoured twice 
 to win a sizarship at Cambridge and again at Oxford, 
 but failed ignominiously in both attempts ; so that he 
 gave up once for all the notion of a university career. 
 It was at this period that a gleam of light appeared, 
 almost for the first time in his life. His mother's 
 book of travels in America succeeded with the public, 
 so that within a few months she received from her 
 publishers the sum of £800. The family's pecuniary 
 difficulties were somewhat lightened ; yet none the less 
 there was iUness and there were debts, and finally 
 there was death; and in the end it became necessary 
 for Anthony TroUope to choose a definite career. 
 
ANTHONY TROLLO'PE 169 
 
 The singular offer was made to him of a commission 
 in an Austrian cavalry regiment, and he actually set 
 about the study of the German language, so that he 
 might be qualified for this command ; but at the end 
 of six weeks he had another oflFer of a very different 
 character, and immediately accepted a clerkship in 
 the General Post Office, with which branch of the 
 public service he remained connected until 1867 — a 
 period of more than thirty years. 
 
 During seven of these years he held the ofBce of 
 a junior clerk, with an income which began at £90 
 a year and slowly rose to £140. These seven years, 
 at first sight, seem almost a continuation of what had 
 gone before. Trollope was always in debt, he was 
 almost always In trouble, his superiors disapproved 
 of him, his companions led him into card-playing, 
 which he could ill afford, and into the drinking of 
 much whiskey and water, and the consumption of 
 much tobacco. He had trouble with money-lenders, 
 and especially did he have trouble with a certain 
 young woman, whose mother once appeared in the 
 midst of the office, demanding of Trollope in a loud 
 voice when he was going to marry her daughter. 
 Nevertheless, there was another side to this life of his 
 which must not be overlooked. He made some friends 
 who were not only an inspiration to him, but who in 
 their own homes gave him a saving glimpse of what 
 was good and wholesome. Partly through their in- 
 fluence and partly from that gradual development of 
 
170 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 taste which comes slowly to men like Trollope, he 
 began to read; and even in those days it occurred 
 to him that he might at some time write a novel. 
 Though he studied little in a systematic way, he 
 taught himself to translate both French and Latin ; 
 he came to know Horace from beginning to end ; and 
 he eagerly absorbed whatever was finest in English 
 poetry. His imagination had now begun to stir 
 within him, and the form in which it was first mani- 
 fested is described by him in an interesting passage : 
 
 Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself 
 by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always 
 going about with some castle in the air firmly built within 
 my mind. For weelcs, for months, if I remember rightly, 
 from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding 
 myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and 
 proprieties, and unities. Nothing Impossible was ever intro- 
 duced — nor even anything which from outward circumstances 
 would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was, of 
 course, my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. 
 But I never became a king or a duke. I never was a learned 
 man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever per- 
 son, and beautiful. Young women used to be fond of me. 
 . . . There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous 
 mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it 
 not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I 
 learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious 
 story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, 
 and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my 
 own material life. In after years I have done the same, — 
 with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my 
 early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity 
 aside. 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 171 
 
 These years then, in spite of all their shabbiness 
 and their Bohemianism, were in reality the years 
 in which the foundations of the future novelist were 
 laid. He had come to know at least one side of life ; 
 he was learning from the great masters of literary 
 style; he had begun, without knowing it, the study 
 of his technique; and, in a way, he had begun also 
 to garner the rich material out of which he was after- 
 ward destined to construct so much that is solid and 
 enduring. Even to his squalid experiences, to his 
 dreary life in lodgings, to his squabbles with his 
 superiors, and to the trouble with the young woman 
 already mentioned, his readers have good cause for 
 gratitude, since upon these things are based some of 
 the most interesting episodes in the story of young 
 Eames, as told in The Small House at Allington. 
 
 In 1841, came a gleam of the success which had 
 hitherto appeared to be quite unattainable. In that 
 year, at the age of twenty-six, TroUope accepted a 
 surveyorship in connection with the Post-OfBce De- 
 partment in Ireland, which at once removed him from 
 the scene of all his past unhappiness and adversity, 
 and gave him a position of comparative independence, 
 with an income, during the very first year, of £400. 
 " This," he says, " was the first good fortune of my 
 hfe." From that time on, he rose steadily in the 
 postal service; and whereas his character in London 
 had been officially regarded as extremely bad, after 
 the day of his transfer to Ireland he never heard 
 
172 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 one word of censure, and he speedily acquired the 
 reputation of a most efficient public servant. It was 
 in Ireland that TroUope acquired the passion for 
 hunting, which had a most important influence on 
 his literary work ; and it was in Ireland also that he 
 married. Finally, it was in Ireland that he wrote 
 his first novel, The MacDermots of Ballyclorcm, which 
 was begun in 1843 and finished in 1845, but was not 
 published until 1847. It was an utter failure, al- 
 though TroUope himself in after life declared that he 
 had never made another plot so good. The book was 
 never noticed in the reviews; the author never got 
 an accounting from his publisher; and to that pub- 
 lisher he never wrote a single letter with regard to 
 it. Undismayed, however, he tried a second story — 
 again an Irish one — and again he failed; for of The 
 Kellys and the O'Kellys only one hundred and forty 
 copies were sold, and the publisher incurred a loss of 
 something like £60. He now tried an historical novel. 
 La Vendee; and It was, perhaps, the most utter 
 failure of them all. By this time even TroUope him- 
 self, although still sanguine as to the merits of what 
 he had written, began to disbelieve in the possibility 
 of success. After experimenting with a comedy 
 which was at once condemned by a critic to whom he 
 had submitted it, and after vainly offering to prepare 
 for a London publisher a handbook of travel for 
 Ireland, he turned to his official duties, and for sev- 
 eral years put forth no book. 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 173 
 
 These years may well have seemed to be just so 
 much valuable time deducted from the novelist'is' 
 literary life. Yet nothing is more certain than that 
 to them and to the experiences which they gave him, 
 TroUope owed a lasting obligation. Transferred 
 from Ireland to England, he was assigned to the 
 special service of devising an improved plan for the 
 delivery of letters in the rural parts of England. In 
 the discharge of this duty it became necessary for 
 him to visit personally almost every nook and corner 
 of Devonshire, Cornwall, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, 
 Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcester- 
 shire, Hertfordshire, Monmouthshire, and six of the 
 Welsh counties, besides the Channel Islands. 
 
 For two years he almost lived on horseback, going 
 back and forth continually through this tract of 
 country, which contains some of the most beautiful 
 and romantic scenery of Britain. He came to know 
 it by heart — the towns and villages, the manors and 
 the granges, even the woods and copses, the lanes 
 and bypaths. And what was infinitely more impor- 
 tant, he came to know the people ; for the nature of 
 his mission brought him into personal contact with 
 men and women of every type and class. He entered 
 the hovel of the peasant and the mansion of the noble- 
 man, the tradesman's shop, the tap-room of the vil- 
 lage inn, the lonely farmhouse, the pretentious villa, 
 the country parsonage, and the bishop's palace. He 
 chatted with the yokels, he made friends with the 
 
174 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 sturdy, shrewd, hard-headed yeomen and their buxom 
 wives, he visited and rode to hounds with the country 
 gentlemen. He was, to be sure, the government 
 official, but he was also the keenly analytical observer 
 of human nature. He loved to study men and women, 
 to learn their ways of thinking, to understand their 
 interests and their prejudices, to fathom their 
 motives, to watch the play of their activities ; and so 
 the two years of this close contact with the most 
 English part of England were not two years of 
 wasted opportunity or of neglected effort, but rather 
 they were two years of the very richest gain; for he 
 was all the while unconsciously absorbing a minute 
 and sympathetic knowledge of his countrymen and 
 acquiring that Insight into their character which 
 was to make him the most profoundly national of 
 England's novelists. 
 
 One midsummer evening, in the Close at Salisbury, 
 as he stood watching the mellow moonlight shimmer 
 on the spire of the great cathedral, there came to him 
 the first conception of a novel that should depict the 
 life of a cathedral city, with all the varied interests 
 and intrigues that gather about the society of such 
 a place. The general plan of such a novel having 
 once possessed his thoughts, the individual details 
 soon worked themselves out swiftly and harmoniously. 
 The characters began to grow into life; the scenes 
 and incidents began to stand out vividly before his 
 mental vision ; and at last, in July, 1853, he sat down 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 175 
 
 with a full mind to begin the composition of The 
 Warden — the first of those remarkable novels which, 
 in the minds of all who are familiar with her fiction, 
 have given to England a new county, Barsetshire, 
 and have created for us a whole group of men and 
 women who are as real as any of the men and women 
 whom we meet and know in actual life. The Warden 
 appeared in 1855, and for the first time TroUope was 
 made to feel that as a writer he had within him the 
 elements which go to make success. The Warden, to 
 be sure, caused no great stir at the time of its appear- 
 ance; but its author knew that at least it had not 
 failed. The critics noticed it; and TroUope could 
 discover that those about him were aware that he had 
 written a book. From a commercial point of view 
 the result might have seemed almost as discouraging 
 as was the case with his early failures. 
 
 By the end of 1857, exactly ten years from the 
 time when he published his first book, he had received 
 altogether from his novels the paltry sum of £55. As 
 he says himself, he could have done vastly better had 
 he spent the time in breaking stone. He had, how- 
 ever, received sufficient recognition of another kind 
 to give him heart ; so that he took up the writing of 
 Barchester Towers in an optimistic spirit, such as 
 before had never animated him. The writing of it, 
 as he teUs us, was a source of great delight to him; 
 and his pen moved swiftly over the pages of that 
 novel, upon which, perhaps, more than upon any 
 
176 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 other single book, his fame must rest. It carried on 
 the story of The Warden, but with a broader scope, 
 a firmer grasp, a finer fancy, and a most remarkable 
 fertility in the drawing of characters ; while the 
 discursiveness that is the bane of several of his later 
 novels is almost wholly absent from this fascinating 
 book. Barchester Towers at once made TroUope 
 generally known ; and from this time a definite posi- 
 tion in the world of letters was assured to him. He 
 was no longer simply an official of the General Post- 
 Office ; he was Anthony Trollope, a man whose name 
 stood for something definite and admirable. A little 
 while before, promotion in the postal service had 
 more than doubled his official income ; so that now at 
 last he was in a position of ease, lifted above the 
 minor worries of practical life, and with the path to 
 a successful literary career made smooth before him. 
 Then came a period not only of success, but a 
 period also in which he was destined to round out 
 and complete the cycle of experience that was to fit 
 him not merely for describing localities and partial 
 phases of existence, but for the understanding and 
 the analysis of life and of society as a whole. Hith- 
 erto he had known Great Britain only ; but now he 
 could indulge a taste for foreign travel. He visited 
 the Continent as a tourist, and in 1858 the govern- 
 ment sent him to Egypt to make a postal treaty with 
 the Pasha. Somewhat later a similar errand took 
 him to the United States, to Cuba, and to Central 
 
ANTHONY TEOLLOPE 177 
 
 America, and he afterward visited Australia and 
 South Africa, and made a voyage to Iceland. Be- 
 sides the broadening effects of foreign travel, he was 
 to make acquaintances and to form lasting friend- 
 ships, whose inspiration was of a value quite ines- 
 timable. Changing his home to London, which he 
 had left years before as a debt-ridden junior 
 clerk in the post-office, regarded alike by him- 
 self and by others as something of a pariah, he now 
 received a cordial welcome to that inner sanctuary 
 of London life in which is to be found all that is 
 best of English Intellect and English bonhomie, 
 where statesmen and scholars and artists and men of 
 letters meet with utter unreserve to give to one 
 another the very choicest vintage of their genius. 
 Among the friends that TroUope made were such 
 political luminaries as the Earl of Derby, Lord 
 Ripon, Lord Kimberly, Sir William Vemon-Harcourt 
 and George Bentlnck ; the world of letters was splen- 
 didly represented by Thackeray and Dickens, by 
 George Eliot, Charles Reade, Lord Lytton, George 
 Henry Lewes, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Tom 
 Taylor, Tom Hughes, and Lord Houghton; while 
 statesmanship and literature were both combined in 
 the enigmatically fascinating person of Disraeli. A 
 more brilliant set of associates had not been gathered 
 together since the days of Elizabeth ; and among them 
 TroUope moved as one who by his own unaided genius 
 had made himself their equal. 
 
178 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Precisely, then, as Trollope's two years on horse- 
 back amid the English rural countries had yielded 
 an extraordinary knowledge of that English life 
 which is racy of the soil, so his years in London 
 gave him no less an understanding of the tone, the 
 ways, and the modes of thought that characterise 
 the governing class of Englishmen — ^the class also 
 that establishes the intellectual standards of the 
 English race. Foreign travel, too, was for him a 
 salutary antidote to the narrowness that sometimes 
 afflicts the British mind. It is not, therefore, to be 
 wondered at if in the splendid series of novels which 
 Trollope now composed, he drew a broad and com- 
 prehensive and minutely accurate picture of England 
 as it is and of English men and English women as 
 they are. He trusted nothing to imagination pure 
 and simple, nor was he willing even to evolve his 
 facts and scenes from out his inner consciousness. 
 Had he not stood for Parliament himself, he would 
 never have given us those extraordinarily vivid im- 
 pressions which are to be found in such of his novels 
 as have to do with the strife of parties. Had he not, 
 week after week, sat in the gallery of the House of 
 Commons, listening patiently to the debates and 
 noting all the special usages and customs of that 
 interesting place, he would never have planned and 
 carried out the brilliant series of novels which relate 
 to parliamentary life, and of which Phineas Finn 
 was the precursor. He wrote only of what he ac- 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 179 
 
 tually knew ; and when he wrote he wrote with a per- 
 fect knowledge and a wonderful power of making it 
 intensely real; for he himself in his own person had 
 seen and felt and understood it all. 
 
 The latter years of TroUope's life were not event- 
 ful save for their literary performance and the 
 measure of success which it received. Before his 
 death in 1882 he had written and published forty-six 
 novels, besides having in manuscript one completed 
 novel (An Old Man^s Love) and one unfinished novel 
 (The Land Leaguers). He had likewise published 
 four books of travel, five volumes of stories, and four 
 biographical works. After his death appeared his 
 Autobiographt/, a singularly frank and interesting 
 revelation of his personal experiences and of his per- 
 sonal opinions and theories regarding his own literary 
 work. The narrative ends with the year 1879, and 
 it is supplemented by a few pages from the pen of 
 his son Henry, who edited the book. 
 
 Having so far considered the main features of his 
 life and of his environment, it remains for us to 
 estimate the character and the value of his achieve- 
 ments as a writer, and to hazard also some observa- 
 tions as to the place in Enghsh literature which 
 is likely to be assigned him by the judgment of pos- 
 terity. 
 
 In the decade which succeeded TroUope's death 
 there is no doubt that his reputation as a novelist 
 almost immediately waned. From the time of the 
 
180 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 production of Barchester Towers down to the year 
 in which he died he had remained steadily a favourite 
 writer with a very large and discriminating public. 
 No single novel that he wrote ever produced what is 
 popularly called " a literary sensation." That was 
 not the day when novels by writers known or unknown 
 leaped at once to the sales that require six figures 
 for their computation, any more than It was the 
 day when novels were produced to be read by every 
 one in the course of a few short months, and then 
 to be forgotten absolutely. Yet if Trollope's suc- 
 cess had not been spectacular, nevertheless it had 
 been substantial. A new novel from his pen was 
 always looked for with keen interest, and its appear- 
 ance was always an event. Why, then, almost imme- 
 diately after his death did this interest decline, and 
 why until within the last few years have his books 
 appeared to be gradually passing into a species of 
 oblivion.'' If these books have within them, as they 
 most surely have, all the essential qualities that give 
 vitality to fiction, why should they have suffered a 
 decline in the estimation of the reading public? 
 There are, I think, two explanations to be given of 
 this phenomenon, and both these explanations are 
 quite consistent with a belief that Trollope's obscur- 
 ation is but a passing phase, and that even now he 
 is beginning to take high rank and an enduring place 
 among the very greatest masters of modern fiction. 
 First of all, there is no doubt that the publication 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 181 
 
 of his Autobiography did him serious harm, not only 
 with the critics, but with his own admirers — with all, 
 indeed, who entertain and who love to entertain what 
 may be termed the inspirational theory of literary 
 creation. In the fancy of these persons an author 
 still retains something of the traditional sanctity 
 which clung to him in the days of Greece and Rome, 
 when, garlanded with bays, he was supposed to write 
 under the guidance of the Muses whom he invoked, 
 and who were thought to touch his lips with the fire 
 of inspiration. Trollope, however, roughly and 
 almost brutally rejected the notion that a producer 
 of literature is anything more than any other kind 
 of a producer. His chief motive for writing is to 
 be found, not in the love of fame or in the worship 
 of art for its own sake, but in the desirability of 
 money. Read his own words upon this subject: 
 
 I am well aware that there are many who think that an 
 author in his authorship should not regard money — nor a 
 painter, or sculptor, or composer in his art. I do not know 
 that this unnatural self-sacrifice is supposed to extend itself 
 further. A barrister, a clergyman, a doctor, an engineer, 
 and even actors and architects, may without disgrace follow 
 the bent of human nature and endeavour to fill their bellies 
 and clothe their backs and also those of their wives and chil- 
 dren as comfortably as they can by the exercise of their 
 abilities and their crafts. They may be rationally realistic 
 as may the butchers and the bakers; but the artist and the 
 author forget the high glories of their calling if they con- 
 descend to make a money-return a first object. They who 
 preach this doctrine will be much offended by my theory; 
 
182 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 and by this book of mine, if my theory and my book come 
 beneath their notice. 
 
 The last sentence has, I think, been justified by the 
 event. His book did come beneath the notice of many 
 who preached the altruistic doctrine of literary pro- 
 duction, and they were, indeed, offended both by his 
 theory and by his book. Again, as a sort of corol- 
 lary to his original proposition, the account that he 
 has given of his own methods of writing, undoubtedly 
 did much to discredit him with the critics. As, in 
 the passage just quoted, he compared the work of 
 the author and the artist with the work of the 
 butcher and the baker, so was he fond — undoubtedly 
 too fond — of saying that the methods of the author 
 need not differ in kind from the methods of the 
 tradesman or the artisan. The following passage is 
 extremely characteristic : 
 
 I had long since convinced myself that in such works as 
 mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to 
 be bound to rules of labour similar to those which an artisan 
 or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker when he has 
 finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contem- 
 plate his work In idle satisfaction. "There is my pair of 
 shoes finished at last! What a pair of shoes it is!" The 
 shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages 
 half his time. It is the same with a. professional writer of 
 books. An author may, of course, want time to study a new 
 subject. He will, at any rate, assure himself that there is 
 some such good reason why he should pause. He does pause, 
 and will be idle for a month or two while he tells himself 
 how beautiful is that last pair of shoes which he has finished ! 
 
ANTHONY TEOLLOPE 183 
 
 Having thought much of all this, and having made up my 
 mind that I could be really happy only when I was at work, 
 I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as 
 soon as the first was out of my hands. 
 
 And, again, occurs a curious passage, written 
 down soon after he had been requested by the Lon- 
 don Graphic to write for it a Christmas story : 
 
 I feel with regard to literature somewhat as I suppose 
 an upholsterer and undertaker feels when he is called upon 
 to supply a funeral. He has to supply it, however distaste- 
 ful it may be. It is his business, and he will starve if he 
 neglect it. So have I felt that when anything in the shape 
 of a novel was required, I was bound to produce it. Nothing 
 can be more distasteful to me than to have to give a relish 
 of Christmas to what I write. I feel the humbug implied by 
 the nature of the order. . . . Alas! at this very moment, 
 I have one to write, which I have promised to supply within 
 three weeks of this time — the picture-makers always require 
 a long interval — as to which I have in vain been cudgelling 
 my brain for the last month. I can't send away the order 
 to another shop, but I do not know I shall ever get the coffin 
 made. 
 
 If this was Trollope's theory, he certainly carried 
 it out in actual practice. He was an official of the 
 post-office as well as a novelist, and in consequence 
 he could not always pick and choose the times and 
 places for his literary labour. The inspirational 
 theory, therefore, was impossible to him; for the 
 moments of his inspiration would frequently be sure 
 to clash with the moments of his opportunity. Hence 
 quite early in his literary career he resolved that 
 
184 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 every day he would devote three hours to composition, 
 and that these three hours should be taken whenever 
 they could be, and from whatever time was at his dis- 
 posal, no matter where he chanced to be. This rule 
 he never broke. If he were at home, he sat before 
 his desk and wrote. If he were on a railway journey, 
 he carried with him a writing-pad, and in the rail- 
 way carriage pursued his task, regardless of his 
 surroundings until his daily stint had been 
 completed. If he were making a sea voyage, he had 
 a little table screwed to the side of his stateroom; 
 and upon it, even in the stormiest of weather, when 
 the ship was pitching and rocking, and when he 
 himself was suffering from the direst qualms of 
 seasickness, he wrote each day until he had produced 
 three thousand words — for he exacted of himself 
 at least two hundred and fifty words each quarter 
 of an hour — and with his watch before him he would 
 labour with all the exactness and precision of an 
 accountant. 
 
 Now, all these things — ^his liking for money, his 
 bourgeois views about the literary profession, and 
 the stolidly methodical way in which, apparently, 
 he did his work — seemed very shocking to very many 
 persons. The critics all cried out in reprobation, 
 and thousands of those who had read his books with 
 intense delight grew speedily ashamed of their en- 
 thusiasm when they learned just how these books 
 had been composed. They experienced a sort of 
 
ANTHONY TEOLLOPE 185 
 
 disillusionment. They suddenly perceived all sorts 
 of defects of which before they had been utterly 
 unconscious. It became the fashion to speak of 
 Trollope as a mechanical and uninspired writer, and, 
 being mechanical and uninspired, as one whose writ- 
 ing must of necessity be dull. In course of time this 
 judgment passed into an accepted formula, and I 
 have often heard it repeated by intelligent men and 
 women who, upon being questioned, were forced re- 
 luctantly to admit that they had never read a single 
 line of Trollope in their lives. They were simply 
 parroting the dicta of Mr. Henry James and other 
 critics of the Transcendental School. They did not 
 see, and the critics did not see, that it makes no dif- 
 ference how or when or by whom or with what 
 theory a book is written; since it can be rightly 
 judged only by what it holds within itself. If it be 
 good, if it be true to life, if it can make you laugh 
 with its humour and thrill with its passion, if it can 
 make your heart beat faster by its power, and your 
 lip quiver and your eyes grow dim by its pathos — 
 why should you listen to the arid little judgments of 
 some paltry critic, equipped with a yardstick and a 
 set of rules rather than with a heart to feel and a 
 brain to understand.? There are those who can see 
 none of the splendour of Byron's poetry because 
 Byron was himself a mocker and a rake. There are 
 some who will not take the trouble to become familiar 
 with the exquisite beauty of Newman's prose, because 
 
186 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 they think of him as a recreant to the faith in which 
 he had been born. Philistines such as these may 
 scofF at TroUope and may say that he was uninspired 
 and mechanical because he wrote three hours a day 
 with his watch before him; but no man who reads 
 his books and feels their magic and their elemental 
 vigour and virility can deny that Anthony TroUope 
 was, in his own sphere, just as great as Thackeray, 
 and (with certain definite limitations) almost the 
 peer of Balzac. 
 
 It is not, however, necessary to defend him only 
 in this way. The impartial critic should recall not 
 merely all those passages where TroUope has flouted 
 at " inspiration " in its hackneyed sense, and where 
 he has half -defiantly and, as it seems to me, with a 
 conscious exaggeration, crammed down the critic's 
 throat a bluntly phrased repudiation of pure art. 
 There is another side to this; for there is something 
 else that TroUope tells us which should modify the 
 judgment of even the most captious and fastidious. 
 A few sentences that he has himself written about 
 Thackeray will give a clue to what I have in mind: 
 
 Late in Thackeray's life — ^he never was an old man, but 
 toward the end of his career — he failed in his power of charm- 
 ing, because he allowed his mind to become idle. In the 
 plots which he conceived, and in the language which he 
 used, I do not know that there is any perceptible change; 
 but in The Virginians and in Philip the reader is intro- 
 duced to no character with which he makes a close and 
 undying acquaintance. And this, I have no doubt, is so be- 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 187 
 
 cause Thackeray himself had no such intimacy. His mind 
 had come to be weary of that fictitious life which is always 
 demanding the labour of new creation; and he troubled him- 
 self with his two Virginians and his Philip only when he 
 was seated at his desk. 
 
 This criticism by him of a brother author throws 
 a flood of light on what has been so carelessly de- 
 scribed as Trollope's mechanical process of compo- 
 sition. Did TroUope trouble himself with his 
 creations only when he was seated at his desk.'' If 
 so, then it may be that he deserves the reproach of 
 being a mere literary artisan. Nothing, however, 
 could be more untrue. His hours of real composi- 
 tion were not the hours when he was writing, but 
 when he was alone, untroubled by society, free from 
 all other cares and other duties and able to pass 
 from the world of fact which lay about him, to that 
 other no less actual world which he himself created. 
 It was then that he wrought out his plots, and called 
 into existence the men and women whom the world 
 has learned to know, and when (though he himself 
 rejected the idea) true inspiration came to him. I 
 have quoted the words for which his critics have con- 
 demned him. Let me now quote the words which 
 make that condemnation utterly unjust: 
 
 At such times I have been able to imbue myself thor- 
 oughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wan- 
 dered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their 
 grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying 
 
188 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 their joy. I hare been impregnated with my own creations 
 till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my 
 hand, and drive my team before me at as quids a pace as I 
 could make them travel." 
 
 Are these the words and is this the feeling of a 
 literary artisan? Could the most brilliant writer 
 whom the world has ever known bring to our minds 
 more vividly the creative spirit, the throbbing brain, 
 and the living soul of the inspired artist? And, as 
 a last quotation, let me cite these sentences which 
 Trollope wrote down very soberly in summing up 
 his thoroughly matured opinions of his own pro- 
 fession : 
 
 The novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his 
 plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted 
 with his characters, that the creatures of his brain should 
 be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures. This 
 he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages 
 himself; and he can never know them unless he can live 
 with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They 
 must be with him as he lies down to sleep and as he wakens 
 from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love 
 them. He must argue with them, forgive them, and even 
 submit to them. He must know of them whether they be 
 cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how 
 far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and 
 the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear 
 to him. 
 
 It is so that I lived with my characters, and thence has 
 come whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery 
 of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know 
 the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 189 
 
 of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man 
 I could assert whether he would have said these or the 
 other words; of every woman, whether she would thus have 
 smiled or so have frovraed. 
 
 These passages and others like them make it clear 
 enough that TroUope's three hours a day of writing 
 and the imposition upon himself of a stated task 
 are to be viewed quite differently from the way in 
 which the critics view them. These three hours were 
 not hours of composition in the real sense of the 
 word. When he came to his desk he did not come to 
 it with an empty mind and with a feeling of uncer- 
 tainty as to what he was about to do. He came to 
 it with the work of composition and creation already 
 quite accomplished, with everything thought out, 
 and with a rnind, as he himself described it, impreg- 
 nated with his own creations; so that all he had to 
 do was to take his pen in hand and transcribe with 
 the utmost rapidity the scenes, the incidents, the 
 dialogue, and the reflections with which his active 
 brain was teeming. His three hours of daily work, 
 then, were hours of clerical work alone. The real 
 labour had been already done. 
 
 Therefore, it is unfair and almost dishonest to 
 take a part of what he has revealed to us regarding 
 his own method, and to ignore the other part which 
 is necessary to a perfect understanding of it all. 
 TroUope was not uninspired. He was not mechani- 
 cal. His novels were not turned out as a cobbler 
 
190 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 turns out shoes, nor as an undertaker turns out cof- 
 fins. But they were called into being as every great 
 artistic creation is called into being, with pain and 
 travail and joy and exultation, by a mind aroused 
 to put forth all its powers, an imagination splen- 
 didly aflame, and a soul pierced through and 
 through by poignant birth-pangs. And the novels 
 themselves show all of this quite plainly to one who 
 reads them with a sentient mind. If TroUope, with 
 a certain healthy contempt for the dilettante and 
 the amateur, has sometimes seemed to hold all 
 art in slight esteem, and to blurt out bluntly that 
 there is no art, and that he wrote his novels in the 
 spirit of a man of business, then there is always at 
 hand the reply which a critic once made to Mr. 
 Rudyard Kipling in answer to a brilliant gibe of 
 his directed against Art. The critic in question 
 took down a volume of Mr. Kipling's poems and, 
 turning to that wonderful ballad " Mandalay " — a 
 ballad curiously blended of human passion and ori- 
 ental colour and haunting music — ^he simply said, 
 " But, Mr. Kipling, this is Art." 
 
 I have remarked, however, that for the temporary 
 decline of general interest in Trollope's work there is 
 another reason, and it is one that has reference to 
 the literary history of our own times. It was near 
 the date of Trollope's death that the English read- 
 ing world began to feel the influence of the so-called 
 naturalistic school of French fiction. In 1881, 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 191 
 
 after the appearance in England of the two novels 
 {L'Assommoir and Nana) that are the most famous 
 if not the best of all that he ever wrote, Emile 
 Zola first became known and was first seriously read 
 in England and the United States. The almost epic 
 power of this man took a strong hold upon every 
 class of readers, while his grossness and brutaUty, 
 though at first they horrified, at length came to pos- 
 sess a morbid fascination for those to whom the 
 combination of extraordinary genius and unbridled 
 license had been hitherto unknown. The more whole- 
 some and self-restrained realism of native English 
 writers like Thackeray and Trollope seemed for the 
 moment to be pale and cold beside the panorama 
 unrolled before the eyes of Zola, in which all that 
 was morally hideous and physically loathsome was 
 exploited with the utmost frankness, and in which 
 every form of vice stood out in bold relief against 
 a background glaring with infernal fires. 
 
 Then began and then contmued for a time the 
 cult of the Unmentionable. American and English 
 readers and students of literature went through a 
 strange experience, from which not even yet do they 
 seem to be recovering. The Gallic influence was 
 paramount. French writers, hitherto but little read 
 outside of France, were hastily translated. We went 
 back to Stendhal and the Goncourt brothers. We 
 read and re-read Balzac and Flaubert. We hailed 
 the rise of Maupassant in his cynicism, of Mendes in 
 
192 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 his monstrosity, and of Huysmans in his degener- 
 acy. With a few, all this was an initiation into new 
 theories of fiction. With the many, it was a baptism 
 of filth. The fashion spread, and at last in English 
 we had rivals of the French — George Moore and 
 Gissing, and (longo intervallo) Edgar Saltus and 
 Flowerdew and Frank Norris — while English play- 
 wrights arose to present the same distorted views of 
 life in a dramatic form. This naturalistic movement 
 ran a rapid course. It was a strange infection, 
 a furious fever, and it has left lasting traces upon 
 our intellectual life; but as an infection and a fever 
 it will pass away, and men and women will revert 
 once again to healthier tastes and saner literary 
 pleasures — to an appreciation of the Romantic and 
 a preference for that truer realism which views life 
 as a whole and does not find its normal phases in a 
 gutter. 
 
 Of this truer realism there have been just three 
 great masters, and these are Balzac, Thackeray, 
 and Trollope. All three of them are free alike from 
 any taint of Naturalism and from the paltriness of 
 Trivialism. By universal consent Balzac stands pre- 
 eminent among the three, not because he alone saw 
 all of life, but because he alone both saw it and had 
 the courage and the power to set it forth. The real 
 supremacy of Balzac is not to be found in his mas- 
 tery of detail, in the completeness and perfection of 
 any single book of his, or in the unique fidelity to life 
 
ANTHONY TEOLLOPE 193 
 
 of any single character or single set of characters 
 portrayed for us. No one of the many novels which 
 are linked together to form his wonderful Comedie 
 Humaine — no one of these, I say, not even Eugenie 
 Grandet, or Pere Goriot, can, taken by itself, be 
 favourably compared with Pendennis or The New- 
 comes or even with Vanity Fair. He has drawn no 
 characters more absolutely true to life and more en- 
 during in the minds of men than Becky Sharp and 
 Lord Steyne and Major Pendennis and Harry Foker 
 and Colonel Newcome. 
 
 Balzac's supremacy really lies in the vastness and 
 fulness of his achievement, in the immensity of his 
 canvas, in his Titanism. He at times works roughly, 
 but he is not cutting delicate little figures upon a 
 gem ; he is always hewing monumental sculptures 
 out of a gigantic crag. To know him as he is, we 
 must know every line he wrote; for only in his en- 
 tirety can he be really known at all. His conspicu- 
 ous merit is not that he has given us an accurate 
 and artistic picture of this or that or the other sec- 
 tion of human life, but that with an almost super- 
 human sweep of vision he has revealed to us in 
 one immortal picture all of life in its completeness. 
 Thackeray has not done this. He doubtless saw 
 all life, but he never drew it all. He had not the 
 audacity, he had not the energy and the tremen- 
 dous vitality, both of body and mind, for such a 
 task; and he was hampered by the conventions of 
 
'194 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 much in human life from which not even transcend- 
 ent genius may draw aside the veil. Thackeray's 
 work, therefore, is the work of one who laboured 
 under limitations — limitations that were partly self- 
 imposed — and the result is a wonderful reproduction 
 of his own sphere of life and of all that entered into 
 it, with glimpses also, though they are only glimpses, 
 of the half-world that lay beyond. His artistry is 
 perfect; his feeling for his subject is, perhaps, even 
 more true than that of Balzac. Yet blot out the 
 city of London from the world of his creation, and 
 how little is there left ! With him, in his finer work, 
 all interest centres there. 
 
 When we come to consider the relative place of 
 Anthony TroUope in the realistic triad, we must 
 bear in mind precisely the same standards that have 
 been applied to Balzac and to Thackeray. No sin- 
 gle book of TroUope's, not even Barchester Towers 
 j^ or He Knew He Was Right, can be favourably com- 
 pared with any of the three great Thacker^yan 
 novels. Like Balzac, TroUope is inferior to Thack- 
 eray in execution and in mastery of detail, though 
 quite his equal in his insight into character ; for Mrs. 
 Proudie and the Bishop of Barchester and Lady 
 Glencora and Lizzie Eustace and Lily Dale and Mr. 
 Chaff anbrass have long since won a place among the 
 immortals. But, like Balzac, he reveals to us a 
 larger world than Thackeray's, and always with a 
 perfect comprehension of it. It is a Briton's world. 
 
ANTHONY TEOLLOPE 195 
 
 as Balzac's is a Frenchman's; but it is not, as is 
 Thackeray's, the world of a mere Londoner. Trol- 
 lope gives us London life, too, and much more fully 
 than Thackeray has done ; for he shows us in a series 
 of brilliant novels the very penetralia of the politi- 
 cal world as Thackeray never could have done, be- 
 cause he lacked the knowledge. TroUope performed 
 the task with such success as to extort a wondering 
 applause from the men who lived the life that was 
 lived by the Mildmays and Daubeneys, the De Ter- 
 riers and Monks, and all the smaller fry whose am- 
 bitions and intrigues are inextricably tangled with 
 the work of government. 
 
 But Trollope has done more than this. He has 
 given us also rural England and provincial England 
 — an England with which London has no close asso- 
 ciation. Thackeray never created for us a cathedral 
 city like Barchester, much less an entire county like 
 Barsetshire. We can not go with him among the 
 yeomanry, among the boors, among the country gen- 
 tlemen, among the small tradesmen, among the local 
 lawyers and provincial clergy, and get, not merely 
 passing glimpses of the life they lead, but a thor- 
 ough knowledge of it in all its phases. Again, Trol- 
 lope has shown us Ireland, which he knew as few 
 Englishmen have ever known it, in all its wit and 
 pathos and squalor and improvidence. And in this, 
 as in all he wrote, there is everywhere, as Plawthorne 
 said, the human nature that must make these novels 
 
196 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 universally successful in their appeal to human in- 
 terests and human sympathies. 
 
 Take, then, these three great writers and compare 
 them. Balzac, first of all, the master of his craft, 
 the artist and the psychologue, who in drawing all 
 of France drew also, broadly speaking, all human- 
 ity. Then TroUope, far more limited than Balzac, 
 because there were depths that he could not sound, 
 as there were unclean haunts that he refused to pene- 
 trate, yet still one who revealed his country and his 
 countrymen more fully and more truly than any 
 other Englishman has ever done. And, finally, there 
 is Thackeray, superior in some things to Balzac, 
 and to Trollope, but working in a field so narrow, 
 and producing what is comparatively so very little, 
 as to deserve the third place when regarded from the 
 standpoint of his actual achievement. 
 
 There are many things that make a parallel be- 
 tween Balzac and Anthony Trollope very interesting. 
 Each passed through a long apprenticeship to 
 poverty ; each gave much thought to money and to 
 material things ; each laboured with an energy that 
 was astonishing; each was the most prolific writer 
 among his contemporaries; each knew his country 
 and his countrymen of every class and type and 
 station; each drew them as they were and are, and 
 with a thorough understanding of humanity at 
 large; and each stands forth as the novelist of a 
 nation, Trollope has written nothing that can be 
 
ANTHONY TROLLOPE 197 
 
 matched with Balzac at his best ; yet he has never 
 descended to the inanity of Balzac at his worst. If 
 he could not have penned a book so sombre and so 
 terrible as Cous'me Bette, neither could he have 
 brought himself to perpetrate so wildly meaningless 
 a screed as Seraphita. If his pages do not sting 
 with epigram, they glow with humour. If he often 
 shuts his eyes to what is foul and morbid and re- 
 volting, he sees more clearly still that which is good 
 and true and tender. In a word, if he lacks some- 
 thing of the brilliancy and something of the hard- 
 ness and something of the unpitying logic of the 
 Frenchman, all this but makes him the more typically 
 English, and gives us one more reason for believing 
 that, in the end, when the swift years shall have 
 swept away the cobweb reputations which confuse 
 men's judgments for the moment, the name, of 
 Anthony Trollope will rightfully be recognised as 
 first upon the roll of England's realistic novelists. 
 
EMILE ZOLA 
 
XI 
 
 EMILE ZOLA 
 
 Had Emile Zola died some fifteen years earlier 
 than he actually did, the comments and appreciations 
 called forth by his death would have had for their 
 main themes the peculiar theory of fiction-writing 
 which he so passionately upheld, the merits of the 
 naturalistic movement, of which he was the guiding 
 force, and finally those literary productions in which 
 alike the theory and the practice of literary Natural- 
 ism received a concrete demonstration. The pages 
 of his controversial monographs, Le Roman Expe- 
 rimental and Les Romanciers Naturalistes, would 
 have been restudied by the critics, and the views ex- 
 pressed in them would have been again attacked, de- 
 fended and discussed with all the heat engendered by 
 a novel cause that is still sub iudice. 
 
 But in 1902 the note of interest in that bygone 
 controversy was no longer sounded, even as a rem- 
 iniscence. Not even the death of the great master 
 revived the curious feeling of astonishment and in- 
 credulity that passed like a wave over so many minds 
 when Zola first enunciated the formula whereby he 
 thought that he had transmuted the indefinable magic 
 of an art into the precise and definite dulness of a 
 
 30I 
 
202 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 science. The intervening years have long ago de- 
 prived his theory of even its piquant flavour of orig- 
 inality. His belief that literature is comparable, 
 not to painting or sculpture or music, as the case 
 may be, but to anatomy and physiology; that the 
 novelist is a demonstrator ; that his study is a labo- 
 ratory; and that he can, by observation and re- 
 search, illumined by imagination, arrive at new and 
 unsuspected truths possessing scientific interest and 
 artistic value — all these assertions were whistled 
 down the wind so long before his death as to make 
 the simple statement of them now appear prepos- 
 terous. 
 
 An artist's theory of his own creative processes 
 is never of much general interest or real worth. In 
 the long run the world does not care much about the 
 fancied method or technique through which memor- 
 able things are done. It is the purest folly to analyse 
 an inspiration or to attempt the vivisection of elusive 
 genius. For, at the very last, one must be judged 
 by what he has in fact achieved, and not at all by 
 the peculiar means through which achievement was 
 accomplished. So, if Zola, when he sat down to his 
 desk each day to write the four pages which con- 
 stituted his diurnal task, loved to regard himself as 
 a biologist and not a novelist, as a demonstrator in 
 anatomy and not an artist, that circumstance pos- 
 sesses no more real importance to the world at large 
 than the fact that Dumas found it necessary to wear 
 jack-boots and a long scarlet coat before he could 
 
EMILE ZOLA 203 
 
 compose with fluency, or that Flaubert could do 
 no literary work until he had arrayed himself in 
 velvet. 
 
 These were the idiosyncrasies of remarkable men, 
 and they have a personal interest as being bits of 
 intimate and curious gossip. Our knowledge of 
 them does not, however, affect even in the most im- 
 perceptible degree our balanced and matured opinion 
 of either L'Assommoir or Monte Crista or Madame 
 Bovary. It is not what Zola thought about himself 
 for which we care. It is rather by his completed 
 work, no matter how it may have been produced, 
 that we judge him and assign to him his place in 
 the Pantheon of creative genius. 
 
 Zola has been most wofully misunderstood out- 
 side of France by those whose judgments have no 
 reference to careful knowledge. By many he has 
 been condemned offhand as one who sought for por- 
 nographic notoriety because it promised him pecu- 
 niary gain. He has been accused of deliberately 
 striving to secure success by sensational and un- 
 worthy means, by pandering to pruriency and 
 becoming for pay a sort of literary seneschal to sen- 
 suality. In other words, these critics would not dis- 
 criminate between Zola, grimly and powerfully work- 
 ing out a great, though terrible, conception, and 
 such enervating disciples of commercial lubricity as 
 [Adolphe Belot and Paul Ginisty and Octave Mirbeau. 
 
 Others, again, such as Max Nordau, would have us 
 see in Zola not a conscious trader in literary nasti- 
 
204 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 ness, but an unconscious pervent, essentially neu- 
 rotic, " a high-class degenerate with some peculiarly 
 characteristic stigmata which completely establish 
 the diagnosis " afflicted with onomatomania and cop- 4 
 rolalia. How utterly untrue are both of these de- 
 testable hypotheses, a very brief consideration of 
 the facts will serve to show. In the first place, we 
 must consider the literary movement in which he 
 became at last the dominant and directing influence ; 
 and then we must recall the circumstances of his own 
 career. 
 
 Realism as a literary motive is no new phenom- 
 enon. It is as old as Euripides and Alciphron 
 among the Greeks. It was developed almost to its 
 very fullest possible expression by Petronius among 
 the Romans. After the Renaissance it is seen in the 
 picaresque romances which represent a reaction from 
 the stately tedious tales of chivalry, just as in Field- 
 ing it represents a like reaction against the fine-spun 
 sentimentalism of Richardson. But it can scarcely 
 be regarded as embodying a conscious purpose or a 
 definite theory before the early decades of the nine- 
 teenth century, when Henri Beyle began under the 
 pseudonym of " Stendhal " to dissect with an un- 
 shaking, ruthless hand the society that he saw about 
 him, laying bare as with a surgeon's knife the hide- 
 ous ulcers, the angry flesh and the rotting bones 
 which others had so decorously hidden beneath the 
 flowers of their fancy. 
 
EMILE ZOLA 205 
 
 Historically, it may be that Rousseau in his Con- 
 fessions gave the first suggestion of the tremendous 
 force which lies in naked truth ; but if so, it was only 
 a suggestion ; and in fiction, at any rate, the begin- 
 nings must be traced to Stendhal. Realism, how- 
 ever, was not a creation or a rediscovery by any one 
 particular man. Its germ was in the air. It was 
 and is essentially consistent with the whole tone of 
 modern thought, which limits the scope of the imag- 
 ination, rejects illusions and demands in a spirit of 
 hardy scepticism to view the thing that is, rather 
 than the thing that seems to be. Democracy in poli- 
 tics, rationalism in theology, materialism in philos- 
 ophy and realism in literature, are very closely 
 linked together. They are, one and all, simply dif- 
 ferent phases of the same mood and the same mental 
 attitude toward life. The centuries of dreaminess 
 have gone by perhaps forever, and to-day man looks 
 with keen unclouded vision into the verities of his 
 existence, asking no one to prophesy smooth things, 
 but banishing illusions, uncovering nakedness, and 
 facing with a certain hard composure born of cyni- 
 cism, the ghastly facts that render human life so 
 terrible. ''^ 
 
 This being so, it is not surprising that witherso- 
 ever we may turn in the history of modem fiction 
 we find traces of the tendency away from the roman- 
 tic, and not least of all in the very romanticists them- 
 selves. Even as early as Chateaubriand, whom lit- 
 
206 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 erary historians are wont to style " the Father of 
 Romanticism," you can detect resemblances to the la- 
 ter development of Realism, and even of Naturalism. 
 His curious, nauseating book, Rene, is from one 
 point of view almost the prototype of A Rebours; 
 for In each of these apparently antithetical studies 
 the central theme of morbid egoism affects the 
 reader in precisely the same way, so that Rene Is 
 morally the twin brother of Des Esseintes. Indeed, 
 Chateaubriand's debilitating story goes even farther 
 and invokes In certain of Its episodes the stark mon- 
 strosity upon which Mendes In our own time reared 
 the structure of that shameful and vertiginous de- 
 lirium, Zo'har; and In Victor Hugo, too, there are 
 innumerable chapters which are realistic In the 
 fullest meaning of the word. A single scene of 
 Notre Dame, where In the Cour des Miracles all the 
 leprous, loathsome life of the social sewer is revealed 
 to us by an effective tour de force, may be safely 
 set beside anything that Zola ever wrote for its 
 sheer lavishness In squalor, its multitudinous heap- 
 ing up of sordid and unsavoury details, and a cer- 
 tain breadth and sweep in Its vivid rhyparography 
 which render it a sort of minor epic of the slums. 
 
 The general drift of the realistic movement from 
 Stendhal to Flaubert is too well known for recapitu- 
 lation here. We see it mingled with Idealistic ten- 
 dencies in the colossal life-work of Balzac. We find 
 it meretriciously, yet most effectively, appearing In 
 
EMILE ZOLA 207 
 
 Germmie Lacerteux of the brothers Goncourt, a 
 book which doubtless gave to Zola many a subtle 
 hint. It reaches absolute perfection with Madame 
 Bovary, into which novel Flaubert laboriously dis- 
 tilled the thought and observation and minutely 
 technical stylistic preciosity of a lifetime. Realism, 
 as such, can never go beyond what Flaubert care- 
 fully wrought for us in this one exquisitely-finished 
 etching, of which every line is bitten out as by an 
 acid upon metal, and of which, in consequence, the 
 sombre memory can never die. Nothing that Sten- 
 dhal wrote, no single work of Balzac even, is com- 
 parable with this depressing masterpiece of Gustave 
 Flaubert, whose art is flawless as a gem, and whose 
 accurate dissection of the human soul is as disquiet- 
 ing as the sting of an awakened conscience. After 
 Flaubert came Zola, — ^not to work further miracles 
 in the name of Realism, but to give to Realism a 
 new development and to call it Naturalism. 
 
 It should be always borne in mind that EmUe 
 Zola never was, in any sense, Parisian. It is only 
 on his mother's side, indeed, that he was French. His 
 father was of Italian origin. His grandmother was 
 a Greek of Corfu. The influence of atavism, which 
 he himself selected as the central motive of his most 
 striking studies, is clearly seen in Emile Zola. From 
 his Italian father, the successful engineer and would- 
 be author, came the ambition for great achievement, 
 the love of letters, the passion and energy of 
 
208 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 an intense nature, and the imagination of a 
 tragic poet. To the Greek strain in him is to 
 be ascribed an instinctive love of beauty, which 
 by a curious psychological permutation he displays 
 so often in an inverted form. From his Norman 
 mother came the steadiness and shrewdness which 
 stamp the bourgeoisie of Northern France. 
 
 His childhood, like Balzac's, was passed wholly 
 en province, away from Paris, in the freedom and 
 healthfulness of the country; and it was only when 
 the years of early manhood came, that the youthful 
 Zola was thrust into the strife and turmoil of Pari- 
 sian life to make his own way, quite unbefriended 
 and pitifully poor, in the most beautiful and most 
 heartless city of our modern world. Some account 
 of the squalid years through which he lived in that 
 depressing period, he gave himself not long before 
 his death; yet even he was chary of recalling too 
 particularly all he saw and felt and suffered. 
 
 In the foul environment of a hotel horgne he be- 
 held about him every type of want and degradation 
 and debauchery. His eyes perpetually rested on 
 strange scenes of sin and shame in that underworld 
 where men and women herd together reduced by piti- 
 less despair to the condition of mere animals, know- 
 ing no law but the law of their own appetites and 
 preying upon one another to satisfy their hunger, 
 their greed, or the craving of their elemental lusts. 
 His senses felt the heavy burden of physical distress 
 
EMILE ZOLA 209 
 
 in all the sights and sounds and smells of that un- 
 savoury habitation. The greasy stairs, the oozing 
 waUs, the pungent stenches as from a wild beast's 
 lair, the darkness even at midday, the wailing of 
 diseased and dying children, the vociferous obsceni- 
 ties of the brutal bully, the yell of the enraged 
 prostitute who is cheated of her hire, and the whim- 
 pering and maundering of the sodden drunkard on 
 the landing — who that has once set foot within the 
 walls of such a place for even a brief moment has 
 not had the loathsome memory of it burned into 
 his brain forever? 
 
 Yet for two long years amid these scenes of physi- 
 cal and moral horror into which he had come straight 
 from the sweet tranquillity of the sunlit meadows, 
 young Zola lived' and learned by heart the lesson of 
 it all. Even then the creative impulse was strong 
 upon him. At night (the only time that was his 
 own) he shut himself within his miserable room, and 
 when he could afford the luxury of a candle he wrote, 
 with fingers numbed by cold, such stories as would in 
 imagination free him most completely from the 
 squalors that oppressed him. He was still an 
 idealist at heart, and perhaps the illusions of his 
 boyhood still cast their spell upon him; for there 
 was as yet no trace in either subject or in style of 
 the Zola whom the world best knows. Romantic 
 fancies came most readily from his pen, and, strange 
 as it may appear, he even gave his thoughts expres- 
 
210 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 sion in poetic form. At last, however, his circum- 
 stances gradually improved. He secured a very- 
 humble place in the publishing house of Hachette, 
 and in 1864( saw his first book issue from the press. 
 This book was the collection entitled Contes a Ninon, 
 than which nothing could be more unlike the later 
 Zola. It brought him nothing in the way of money, 
 but it made him friends, and he began to write 
 ephemeral articles for the press while still continuing 
 his work in fiction. Entrusted with the art criticism 
 in the Figaro, he wrote with a boldness and a vigor- 
 ous independence which defied restraint, so that he 
 soon lost the post in gaining enemies, among them 
 the editor himself, the influential Villemessant. Al- 
 most at the same time, a novel of his. La Confession 
 de Claude, to which the censorship objected, led to 
 the severance of his connection with Hachette, so 
 that for a time he was once more dependent upon his 
 own resources, and the precarious earnings of his 
 pen. These facts alone are quite suflScient to con- 
 vince a reasonable mind that Zola from the very 
 outset of his career possessed the courage of his 
 convictions, and that no man was less likely than he 
 to sell his literary conscience for a price. 
 
 Success came to him very slowly. He was long 
 in finding what it was he wished to do and in con- 
 centrating his intensely energetic nature on the task. 
 The first clear light that dawned upon him was 
 when he wrote Therese Raquvn, forever to be ranked 
 
EMILE ZOLA 211 
 
 among his masterpieces, and standing almost alone 
 as a searching, horrifying study of remorse, of 
 which Vapereau remarks that it depicts " adultery 
 taking refuge in murder and finding only agony." 
 Yet remarkable as is this novel, its interest for us is 
 less than that inspired by the first of the Rougon- 
 Macquart series, La Fortune des Rougon, which ap- 
 peared in 1871. With this book the author once for 
 all sets foot upon sure ground, and in the plan which 
 he had outlined two years before, he shows a con- 
 sciousness of his own great powers and boldly chal- 
 lenges comparison with Balzac. 
 
 In explaining his purpose in commencing this 
 Histoire Naturelle et Sociale d'une Famille sous le 
 Second Empire he wrote of it as follows : 
 
 I desire to explain how a single family, a little group of 
 human beings, comes into relations with society at large, as 
 it increases by begetting and giving birth to ten or twenty 
 individuals, who, though at first sight they seem quite dis- 
 similar, when analysed reveal how intimately they are bound 
 together, since heredity has laws as well as mathematics. 
 The members of the family Rougon-Macquart, the one group 
 that it is my purpose to depict, have as a family trait the 
 gnawing of lust, the appetite that leaps to its gratification. 
 Historically they are a part of the people; they make them- 
 selves felt by contemporary society; they rise to see spheres 
 of life by that characteristically modern impulse which the 
 lower classes feel; and thus they explain the Second Empire 
 by their individual histories. 
 
 In these words Zola introduced that remarkable 
 group of twenty novels, beginning with La Fortune 
 
212 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 des Rougon and ending in 1893 with Le Docteur 
 Pascal. To this group belongs the very best of all 
 that Zola did. When it was finished he had done all 
 that makes him a distinctive figure in the world of 
 letters. The plan of the series, sketched in 1869, 
 was based upon a genealogy which he had carefully 
 worked out. In this genealogy the starting point is 
 with Pierre Rougon of Plassans, his half-brother 
 Antoine Macquart, and his half-sister Ursula Mac- 
 quart. The mother of the three developed a con- 
 genital neurotic disorder, which appears and reap- 
 pears in her descendants of two generations, these 
 being the principal characters of the different books. 
 Lisa, in Le Ventre de Paris, exhibits a clinging, cloy- 
 ing sensuality; Gervaise, in L'Assommoir, reverts 
 to the alcoholism of her grandfather; Nana, in the 
 novel of that name, typifies triumphant har- 
 lotry ; Jacques, in La Bete Humaine, is cursed with 
 homicidal mania ; while in the Rougon branch of the 
 family, the protagonists exhibit an intense ambition, 
 as for money in L' Argent, for scientific achievement, 
 as in Le Docteur Pascal, for political power in Son 
 Excellence Eugene Rougon, where Zola has drawn 
 with a sure, firm touch the portrait of Napoleon 
 Third's powerful minister Eugfene Rouher. These 
 are but a few of the ramifications of the Rougon- 
 Macquart stock; yet it will be seen, even from this 
 incomplete enumeration, how many sides of life the 
 author necessarily touches in delineating them — • 
 
EMILE ZOLA 213 
 
 passing from the garret, the brasserie and the gut- 
 ter, to the camp, the Bourse and the imperial palace. 
 
 Some timid, twittering literary scribblers have 
 sapiently asked of late whether Zola's works will 
 live. The question is the acme of fatuity. That 
 all he wrote will live, in the sense that it will be gen- 
 erally read, is, of course, untrue. In this sense it can 
 not be said of any modem author, outside, perhaps, 
 of a group of three or four, that his work will live. 
 Zola was a very prolific writer, and his successes were 
 surpassed in number by his failures. Even now, few 
 persons who are not professional students of litera- 
 ture know anything of La Confession de Claude or 
 Madeleine Ferat or Celle Qui M'Aime; and before 
 long, many of Zola's other novels, such as La Joie 
 de Vivre and L'Oeuvre and that glorified guide-book, 
 Rome, with his other works of his last ten years, 
 will be remembered by their titles only. Not all of 
 the Rougon'Macquart series will stand the test of 
 time. L' Argent and Germinal and La Terre wiU 
 always find some readers among the discriminating, 
 though not belonging to the imperishable literature 
 of the world. Out of the whole mass of Zola's 
 works, however, there loom up three colossal master- 
 pieces, so wonderful, so overwhelming in the evi- 
 dence of genius which they afford, and so impossible 
 to forget, as to be assured of an unquestioned im- 
 mortality. 
 
 These three masterpieces are L'Assommoir, Nana, 
 
214 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 and La Debacle, and they are linked so closely in 
 their purpose and in the development of one domi- 
 nant idea, as to form a trilogy from which no mem- 
 ber can be removed. They are the residuum — ^the 
 enduring residuum — of the whole ambitious series 
 of the Rougon-Macquart ; and they, above and apart 
 from any of their companion volumes, effect the pur- 
 pose which Zola formed in 1869 of explaining 
 through the medium of fiction the social life and the 
 political decadence of the Second Empire. This is 
 precisely what these three extraordinary books ac- 
 complish; and in writing them their author was in- 
 spired far more than perhaps he ever knew. For 
 the three exhibit an unbroken sequence, and they 
 work out with all the precision and the sureness of 
 a scientific demonstration the thesis which was in the 
 writer's mind. In L'Assommoir we have to do with 
 individuals; in Nana, with society; in La Debacle, 
 with an entire nation. In L'Assommoir there are ex- 
 hibited to us the vicious influences which beset the 
 proletariat, the leaven of evil and uncleanness work- 
 ing amidst the haunts and hovels of the degraded 
 poor. In Nana the poison spreads and eats its way 
 like a cancer into the homes of those who live in the 
 great world. In La Debacle we see a chivalrous and 
 gallant nation infected with the foul disease, and 
 smitten to the earth because of the rottenness that 
 has eaten out its manhood and destroyed its strength. 
 L'Assommoir, as we have said, deals with indi- 
 
EMILE ZOLA 215 
 
 viduals, the central figures being the blanchisseuse, 
 Gervaise, and. her husband, the tinsmith Coupeau. 
 Gerraise is one of the most pathetic characters in 
 fiction — and all the more because she is drawn so 
 simply and so naturally, and because there is not 
 the slightest touch of the melodramatic in her story, 
 no high lights such as Hugo loved, no false senti- 
 ment and no moralising. She is a figure stepping 
 before us straight out of life itself. A womanly, 
 affectionate, naturally gentle creature, she appears 
 in the first chapter of the book as the cast-off mis- 
 tress of a vulgar maquereau, one Lantier, whom she 
 has sincerely loved, but who has suddenly deserted 
 her and her children. In time she meets the tinsmith, 
 Coupeau, who marries her, and with whom she begins 
 her life anew with every prospect of a good, hard- 
 working, happy, uneventful, every-day existence. But 
 Coupeau suffers an accident which disables him for 
 a while and he acquires the habits of idleness and 
 drink. He lives upon his wife; she also takes to 
 drink; and there begins a gradual degradation 
 which is detailed with patient minuteness through all 
 its squalid, shameful, sickening stages until it ends 
 in a dog's death for both — Gervaise a bedraggled 
 street-walker, sodden, hopeless and void of any feel- 
 ing, even of despair, and Coupeau a furious maniac, 
 meeting his death with frantic yells of horror at the 
 hideous fancies of his gin-crazed brain. 
 
 Around these two poor wretches the action of the 
 
216 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 story surges, panoramic in its multitudinous life, 
 gigantic in its sweep and breadth and terrific in 
 its concentrated vitriolic power. The whole stratum 
 of that world to which Gervaise and Lantier and 
 Coupeau belong is revealed so vividly and so un- 
 sparingly that there is nothing left to ask or tell. 
 We know not merely the Coupeau menage, but we 
 know also a whole swarm of human beings, each one 
 distinctly individualised, — artisans, petty shopkeep- 
 ers, policemen, washerwomen, bullies, panders, drabs 
 and drunkards — the whole population of the slums. 
 There are some genre pictures in the book that are 
 extraordinary in their stark veracity — the marriage 
 of Gervaise at the mairie, and the wedding breakfast 
 at the Moulin d' Argent; and later in the book the 
 maudlin revel amid which Lantier, the former lover 
 of Gervaise, once more appears as a bird of evil omen. 
 Heart-rending is the story of the poor, patient child, 
 Lalie, whose drunken father, Bijard, flogs her to 
 make her dance for him until she says quite gently 
 and very simply: "Je ne puis pas, comprends-tu? 
 Je vais mourir. . . Sois gentil a cette heure, et 
 dis-moi adieu, papa." And among the most awful 
 of all episodes in fiction is the chapter where Ger- 
 vaise, tempted by Lantier to renew her old relations 
 with him, returns to her home to find her husband 
 stretched across their chamber floor, helpless with 
 drink and wallowing in his vomit, so that Gervaise, 
 repelled and overcome by the sickening sight, yields 
 
EMILE ZOLA 217 
 
 to Lantier's entreaties and passes with him into the 
 inner room, while her child Nana, unobserved, peers 
 through the dusky window with eyes illumined by a 
 vicious curiosity. 
 
 In L'Assommoir is best studied the climax of 
 Zola's so-called Naturalism, which has been defined 
 as " an attempt to reach the beast in man. . , the 
 beast which his (the writer's) temperament leads him 
 always to see and to see exclusively. A swarming, 
 huddled mass of grovelling creatures, each hounded 
 by his foul appetite of greed and lust." And Zola 
 finds the beast unerringly ; nor does he spare us one 
 detail of its bestiality. His beasts growl in the 
 language of their kind. Those words which one is 
 startled to behold in print are all set down with an 
 unflinching accuracy. The oaths, the blasphemies, 
 the obscenities of the vilest of men and women, their 
 strange, repulsive argot, half-unintelligible yet full 
 of sinister significance, are reproduced for us, and 
 show the knowledge gleaned in the unsavoury pre- 
 cinct of the hotel borgne. For Zola has a purpose 
 in his frankness. He desires us to see as in a socio- 
 logical clinic the muck-heaps over which society has 
 builded, that he may prepare us for a demonstration 
 of the logical result. 
 
 Such a demonstration is given us in Nana. The 
 purpose of this book is admirably described by an 
 American critic as an attempt to show us how the 
 crushed and mud-stained rabble inflicts upon the 
 
218 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 classes that are gorged with wealth and insolent with 
 power a kind of hideous retribution. Nana is the 
 daughter of Gervaise, born among the lowest haunts 
 of Paris and nurtured In close proximity to the gut- 
 ters. Depraved even as a child by association with 
 other children prematurely initiated into every form 
 of vice, she breathes of sensuality and exhales the 
 very aroma of lasciviousness, so that men of every 
 rank and station feel her strange, tormenting physi- 
 cal fascination. Yet she is not herself a devotee of 
 passion for its own sake. She loves as the caprice 
 of the moment moves her — ^now the inexperienced 
 boy whom she corrupts, now the aristocratic cour- 
 tier, and again, and perhaps most of all, the goat- 
 faced acrobat, Fontan, who beats her and who lives 
 upon her shameful earnings. But she is, first and 
 foremost, wanton greed personified. To quote again: 
 
 She is conceived as some fair ogress into whose yawning 
 cave multitudes of men in hurried and endless procession 
 descend and are engulfed. There is room for all ranks and 
 grades of this social hierarchy. . . It is merely indis- 
 pensable that each shall bring an offering of some kind in 
 his hand. He that can not defray the charge of the estab- 
 lishment may pay the dressmaker; another shall furnish pin- 
 money; another trinkets and bouquets. There is a certain 
 breadth and grandeur in her insatiate greed and compre- 
 hensive harlotry; her net drags great and small; she seems 
 to have infected a whole city. . . She has grown like a 
 rank weed amid the garbage of the Parisian pavement; she 
 has the gorged luxuriance of a plant whose turgid leaves 
 betray its compost bed. With the superb curves of her deli- 
 cate flesh she avenges the beggars and outcasts who gave 
 
EMILE ZOLA 219 
 
 her birth. She becomes a malignant force of nature, a pes- 
 tiferous yeast, tainting and disintegrating Paris, turning it 
 sour like curdled milk. In one chapter she is compared to a 
 gold-spangled horsefly, spawned from ordure, hovering above 
 the carrion that lies rotting by the wayside, sending vermin 
 from its putrescence, and poisoning the wayfarer whose 
 cheek it brushes with its fetid wing. ... At length 
 the task of ruin and death is completed; wretchedness has 
 spent its store of venom; Nana has exacted blood-money for 
 her bruised and smarting kindred. The beggar and the out- 
 cast are avenged. 
 
 The whole book is a minute and startling study of 
 the infection not only of Paris but of France; and 
 its multiplicity of details and its extraordinary first- 
 hand knowledge of the darker side of Parisian social 
 life astonish and appal. For Nana is only one of a 
 number of her kind who flit across the scene ; and in 
 the tainting influence which they exercise, we feel in- 
 stinctively the doom of an Empire in which a plague- 
 spot such as this is festering and spreading. It is 
 not alone the wantonness of Nana that we recognise ; 
 it is the presence in the background of influences 
 far more sinister than hers. The enigmatical episode 
 of Mme. Laure and the implications in the story of 
 the girl Satin are full of strangely baleful import 
 when read between the lines. And, as the book pro- 
 ceeds, we see quite clearly that the menace of its 
 meaning is more than a menace to mere individuals, 
 and that the very vitals of a nation are growing 
 putrid with disease and death. The last few pages 
 indicate almost symbolically the doom that is im- 
 
220 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 pending over France ; for while Nana lies dying, with 
 her once seductive face transformed by smallpox into 
 a repulsive mask, we hear, outside, the rabble, drunken 
 with war's blood-madness, give utterance to the 
 frantic cry of "A Berlin ! A Berlin ! " 
 
 La Debacle shows the garnered fruits of what has 
 gone before. A debased and brutalised proletariat, 
 corrupting its masters with noxious vices that rise 
 from the social cesspools into the mansions of the 
 great, has done its work, and now the moment comes 
 when the ruin is revealed. France, challenged in her 
 supremacy, has thrown down the gage of war, and 
 the trumpets sound to battle. The helmeted hosts 
 of Germany have crossed the Rhine; the trail of 
 their huge columns desecrates French soil. The old 
 martial ardour leaps again to life, the furor Gallicus 
 flames up once more, apparently as invincible as in 
 the days of Jena and of Austerlitz. But alas! 
 France is herself no longer. Her brain has been 
 drugged by years of luxury; her energy is sapped 
 by vice; she reels and totters to her fall. Here in- 
 dividuals no longer count; and Zola rises to an epic 
 vastness of execution as he draws that masterful 
 picture of blended defiance and despair in the armies 
 which go forth Uke misdirected mobs — their aimless 
 marching and countermarching, their woful lack 
 of leadership, their pitiful privation in the midst of 
 plenty, until at last their splendid courage becomes 
 abject cowardice when they are paralysed by the ter- 
 
EMILE ZOLA 221 
 
 rible conviction that they have been betrayed. The 
 vividness of all this portion of the story is inde- 
 scribable. The reader is hurried on with breathless 
 interest from scene to scene — the bloody struggle 
 at Bazeilles, the horrors of Sedan, the glaring flames 
 that mark the triumph of the mad Commune. And 
 here and there we get a glimpse of the infinitely 
 mournful figure of the Third Napoleon, dragged 
 along at the tail of his army, unnoticed, helpless and 
 despairing, as his haggard face, made still more 
 ghastly by its rouge, peers forth above the golden 
 bees that symbolise his fallen dynasty. For sus- 
 tained and almost savage power, it is safe to say that 
 no prose work of the nineteenth century can fully 
 equal La Debacle. 
 
 The two writers with whom Zola must inevitably 
 be compared are Balzac and Victor Hugo, — Balzac 
 because the whole conception of the Rougon-Mac- 
 quart was suggested by the Comedie Humaine; and 
 Hugo because he, too, like Zola, was dynamic in his 
 method. The comparison with Balzac only leaves 
 us with a heightened sense of that great master's 
 sure supremacy. Not merely was his plan the vaster, 
 but although his death left it unfinished in details, he 
 really did complete it, and at the moment of his 
 death was still possessed of all his pristine power. 
 
 There is no part of the Comedie Hmnaine that any 
 lover of immortal genius can neglect or overlook; 
 while Zola, working out a smaller plan, grew weary 
 
222 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 of his task, and wrote the last volume of the series 
 with a flagging, hesitating pen. But with Hugo 
 the comparison brings out into the clearest possible 
 relief the immense superiority of Zola. For while 
 Hugo is at times stupendous in the gigantic energy 
 with which he works, he never ceases to impress us 
 as theatrical. At his best he is less dramatic than 
 melodramatic; and while we admire and are aston- 
 ished, it is with the kind of admiration and astonish- 
 ment that we give to a carefully prepared and gor- 
 geous spectacle upon the stage. We marvel at the 
 ingenuity of his eif ects ; but even as we marvel we 
 find ourselves considering them a miracle of stage 
 management rather than a spontaneous creation of 
 artistic genius. With him sublimity shades off into 
 the grotesque, and his most tremendous imagery for- 
 ever trembles upon the verge of the fantastic. He 
 knew not when to stay his hand, and the unerring 
 instinct which teaches the true artist where to pause 
 was never his. He is sometimes magnificent, but he 
 is oftener bizarre. The eternal vanity of Hugo, his 
 self-consciousness and his pose make almost every- 
 thing he wrote ring false. 
 
 But with Zola the case is otherwise. The great, 
 unbending, pitiless sincerity of the man grips you 
 as in a vise, and at his best he masters emotion, im- 
 agination and belief with a spell which is impossible 
 to break. Compare the greatest scenes in Hugo — 
 that of the devil-fish in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 
 that of the life-and-death struggle in Bug-Jargal, 
 
EMILE ZOLA 223 
 
 that of the battle between man and cannon in 
 Quatre-Vingt-Treize — with the most famous things 
 in Zola, and the difference is the difference between 
 the acted tragedy of the theatre and the crushing, 
 poignant tragedies of human life. 
 
 Since Shakespeare's time no English writer, with 
 the possible exception of Sir Walter Scott, has arisen 
 fit to be compared with any one of these great 
 Frenchmen for sheer vitality and overwhelming 
 power. How cold and pale our Anglo-Saxon fiction 
 looks beside the splendid unrestraint of the master- 
 pieces of French genius ! Even Thackeray seems 
 merely an amiable, mildly cynical, grandfatherly sort 
 of person when we come to him straight from the 
 reading of Cousme Bette or L'Assommoir; while 
 Dickens shrinks to the proportions of a Cockney 
 sentimentalist whose maudlin moments are varied 
 with sporadic bursts of forced buffoonery. What- 
 ever France has come to be among the political forces 
 of the world, her sons still keep the flame of genius 
 brilliantly aglow. And not the least among them was 
 l^mile Zola — ^in temperament an epic poet, in ambi- 
 tion a literary sociologist, in fact a cyclopean pano- 
 ramic artist. Of his own theories and of his own 
 motives nothing new can now be said, nor does it 
 matter what one thinks of them. His work speaks 
 for itself; and literary analysts who know and un- 
 derstand that work must feel that in his death a 
 mighty elemental influence passed away from earth. 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA EARENINA" 
 
XII 
 
 TOLSTOI'S " ANNA KARENINA " 
 
 Opinions may perhaps differ as to which one of 
 Tolstoi's novels should be set first among his great 
 literary achievements. Some may incline to War 
 and Peace, that astonishing prose epic which, in its 
 own way, recalls Zola's cyclopean picture of the 
 Franco-Prussian War. Over this work Tolstoi cer- 
 tainly brooded longest. His wife copied the manu- 
 script of it seven times ; and each time that she 
 copied it, Tolstoi altered, added, and erased with the 
 minutely critical assiduity of a Balzac. Others 
 again may see in Resurrection the crowning proof 
 of his peculiar genius, because it so sweepingly de- 
 nounces what most of us believe to be the funda- 
 mental laws of social and political stability. But, 
 on the whole, one's thought rests longest upon Anna 
 Karenina; and this remarkable book, written in its 
 author's mid-career, seems worthy of the highest 
 place. 
 
 There are two reasons which support this judg- 
 ment. In the first place, the novel represents more 
 completely than any other modem book yet written, 
 a somewhat unusual theory of fiction-writing. In 
 the second place, as Tolstoi long afterward himself 
 declared, a good part of it is autobiographical. In 
 
 227 
 
228 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 it, Tolstoi has painted his own portrait for us. 
 Therefore, Arma Karenma has some of that special 
 interest for the students of Tolstoi which David Cop- 
 perfield possesses for the admirers of Dickens. So 
 far as the power of it goes, this is fully equal to the 
 power displayed in any of his creations. The added 
 value of his literary theory, and the frankness of 
 his unsparing self -revelation, seem to place the story 
 at the very head of the long list of books which this 
 strange, pessimistic Russian has given to the world. 
 
 Anna Karenma was completed in 1876, having 
 been published as a serial in a Russian newspaper. 
 It had no great success in Russia at the time. Later 
 it was analysed and praised by Matthew Arnold in 
 England and by William Dean Howells in this 
 country. From that time began its vogue. Arnold, 
 with his usual acuteness, saw at once just how this 
 story differed from ordinary novels, and even from 
 the other novels of Tolstoi himself. He laid an un- 
 erring finger on the fact which explains just why 
 the book was long in winning a general recognition 
 of its merit. 
 
 The conventional novel must belong to one of two 
 classes. In the one case, it is written with a defi- 
 nite plot, more or less intricate, and worked out with 
 more or less ingenuity. It is meant, for a time, to 
 puzzle and fascinate the reader by curious compli- 
 cations which resolve themselves under the author's 
 touch, until we reach what is sometimes called " a 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 229 
 
 logical ending," either happy or unhappy, as the 
 case may be. Such, for example, is Scott's Guy 
 Mannering, or Dickens's Bleak House, or Thack- 
 eray's Henry Esmond. On the other hand, the con- 
 ventional novel may not have any definite plot; yet 
 none the less, its author interests us by the skilful 
 development of character, and in so doing he elimi- 
 nates everything which will not throw a clear light 
 upon the motives and the acts of the principal per- 
 sonages. TroUope's novels are of this sort, and so 
 are Maupassant's. But in either case, the conven- 
 tional novel is constructed with conscious art, and 
 bears out Michelangelo's definition, which says that 
 " art is the purgation of superfluities." 
 
 Now, this purgation of superfluities, this elimi- 
 nation of everything that is not strictly essential, 
 makes a work of fiction compact, symmetrical, and, 
 therefore, interesting. Nothing is told that does not 
 " play up " to the central theme. Everything that 
 is irrelevant is excluded. Nothing happens which 
 does not have a special significance. This method 
 of writing fiction is essentially artistic, but it is not 
 true to life. Life is full of things which are really 
 meaningless. It is replete with trivialities, with co- 
 incidences which have no importance, with episodes 
 which have no relation to the whole, which we scarcely 
 notice at the time, and which we almost instantly 
 forget. 
 
 Almost all novelists prefer the artistic treatment. 
 
230 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 Tolstoi has preferred, in Anna Karenina, to write a 
 book which shall show us not merely the comedies 
 and tragedies of life, but the inconsequence of much 
 of it. Matthew Arnold saw this very clearly, and 
 as none of his contemporaries saw it. He wrote: 
 
 There are many characters in Anna Karinina — too many, 
 if we look in it for a work of art in which the action shall 
 be vigorously one, and to that one action everything shaU 
 converge. People appear in connection with the two main 
 actions whose appearance and proceedings do not in the 
 least contribute to develop them. Incidents are multiplied 
 which we expect are to lead to something important, but 
 which do not. 
 
 Mr. Arnold very justly says that we are not to 
 take the book as work of art at all, but rather as a 
 piece of life. 
 
 A piece of life it is. The author has not invented and 
 combined it. He has seen it. It has all happened before his 
 inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened. The 
 author saw it all happening so — saw it, and therefore relates 
 it; and what his novel in this way loses in art, it gains in 
 reality. 
 
 This is admirable criticism. So far as it goes it 
 can not be gainsaid. Nevertheless, it does not tell 
 us that this disjointed and therefore truly realistic 
 method, is far from being original with Tolstoi. In 
 an earlier chapter of this book we have seen that 
 Alciphron of Athens worked out the same method 
 in his imaginary letters, which do not narrate a story 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 231 
 
 from beginning to end, but which give hints of many 
 stories. Alciphron, like Tolstoi, saw life just as it 
 goes on around us, and he deliberately rejected art 
 by admitting irrelevancies and superfluities. In our 
 own times, Anatole France has done precisely the 
 same thing. His novels are so full of this same 
 looseness of construction that some persons scarcely 
 think them to be novels at all, and, therefore, read 
 them only for their delicate analysis of passion, their 
 irony, and their vivacity. 
 
 Another thing which Matthew Arnold failed to 
 note was the fact that in Anna Karenina, Tolstoi did 
 not cut loose completely from the conventional and 
 artistic method. He has given us in the story two 
 main themes, or~" actions," which have no real rela- 
 tion to each other. The first of these has to do with 
 the illicit love of a rich and handsome type of the 
 high-placed Russian, Count Vronsky, and Anna 
 Karenina, the charming wife of a very tiresome and 
 pedantic bureaucrat. This theme is developed quite 
 in the traditional way — ^very much, indeed, as Flau- 
 bert might have developed it. So far as these two 
 persons are concerned, the story runs on after the 
 fashion of the artistic novelist. It is good drama 
 from beginning to end — Vronsky's sudden infatua- 
 tion for Anna Karenina, with whom he falls in love 
 at first sight, to whom at once he makes hot love, and 
 in whom he inspires almost instantaneously a mighty 
 passion. This continues until Anna is completely 
 
232 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 compromised, so that at last she leaves her husband 
 and takes up her home with Vronsky, whose love for 
 her is boundless. He surrounds her with luxury. 
 He responds to her every wish. He lives whoUy for 
 her. Yet Anna is not in love with him alone. She 
 has a deep aifection for her son, whom she has left 
 in her husband's home. Her husband is willing to 
 divorce her, so that she may marry Vronsky, but 
 naturally he will do so only on condition that he 
 retain possession of the child. 
 
 Here begins the conflict between the passionate 
 side of Anna's nature, which responds to Vronsky, 
 and her maternal instinct, which rejects the thought 
 of giving up all claim to her little son. She is torn 
 between these two distinct currents of emotion; and 
 therefore she will neither accept a divorce, which 
 would unite her legally and morally with Vronsky, 
 nor will she, on the other hand, give up Vronsky and 
 return to her husband and her son. Passion and 
 maternal instinct are evenly balanced in her nature, 
 and the struggle between the two makes her at last 
 profoundly morbid. She becomes unjust, suspicious, 
 and distrustful of her lover. She broods continually 
 over her separation from her son. In the end, yield- 
 ing to an impulse of despair, she throws herself un- 
 der a passing railway train, and dies horribly. 
 
 All this part of the novel is told with the vivid- 
 ness and swift movement of an accomplished fiction- 
 writer. The action moves forward steadily and with 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 233 
 
 no interruption. There is, however, the second 
 theme, or " action," of which I have spoken, and 
 which is the autobiographical portion of the tale. 
 It has to do fundamentally with the mental and 
 spiritual development of Constantine Levin, who is 
 no other than Tolstoi himself. 
 
 Levin is represented as belonging by birth to 
 the greater world, and yet by inclination living re- 
 mote from cities on his landed property. He reads 
 and thinks. He is conscientious, and busies himself 
 with the people on his estates, with schools and agri- 
 culture, and with the social improvement of the 
 peasants. He falls in love with a girl named Katia, 
 the daughter of a prince ; and after a long and tedi- 
 ous courtship, which is full of uninteresting details, 
 he wins her and marries her, and takes her home. 
 
 This second " action " of the novel is endured by 
 most people because it is somewhat interwoven with 
 the affairs of Vronsky and Anna. It is perhaps 
 studied carefully by those who wish to understand 
 the peculiar views and personality of Tolstoi. 
 Levin goes through the various phases which 
 marked Tolstoi's own career. We may, indeed, turn 
 away from Levin and speak directly of Tolstoi's 
 spiritual and mental evolution. 
 
 Some one has said that Tolstoi spent the first half 
 of his life in the pursuit of pleasure, and the last 
 half of his life in doing penance for that pleasure. 
 Many have a notion that in his youth he was not 
 
284 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 merely gay, but dissipated. This is inferred from 
 his Confessions, published in 1886, in which he writes 
 with something of the morbid agony of a mediaeval 
 ascetic. Because, as a young man, he was an oflBcer 
 in the army, commanding a battery at Sebastopol, 
 he now calls himself a murderer. Because he col- 
 lected the rent from his tenants and spent the 
 money, he now declares himself to have been a rob- 
 ber. Because he made careless love to the ladies of 
 the court, and even because he subsequently married 
 and had children, he now thinks of himself as one 
 whose life was tainted by profligacy. 
 
 This view may appeal to his immediate disciples, 
 but most sane men and women will properly regard 
 it as morbid nonsense. The fact that he can clothe 
 these strange ideas in glowing language, and hurl 
 them at you with the force of genuine conviction, 
 does not make them fundamentally any more sound 
 than the ravings of an ordinary man who has no 
 genius. In the end, he proceeded to cast aside man- 
 made theology, to hate the social structure as we 
 know it, to forswear belief in human law, in all politi- 
 cal institutions, and in pretty nearly everything 
 which normal human beings recognise as true. The 
 sum and substance of his final teaching is comprised 
 in a rule of life summed up in five commandments : 
 
 Live in peace and allow no anger. 
 
 Let there be no libertinage and no divorce. 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 235 
 Neyer take an oath of service to any oile, or of any kind. 
 
 Employ no force against an evil-doer, but bear the wrong 
 he does you without endeavouring to have him punished. 
 
 Give up all feeling of nationality. 
 
 This curious evolution of belief, which, if it should 
 continue, would dissolve society, represents the drift 
 of what we find in the story of Levin in Anna 
 Karenina. Levin is comfortably off. He has 
 estates and duties and friendships. He is happily 
 married. He has children. Nevertheless, he is a 
 self-tormentor, sometimes because of things external, 
 as when he is unreasonably jealous of his wife, but 
 often because of the restlessness and ceaseless striv- 
 ing of a morbid mind. The story is full of aimless 
 talk, of unmeaning happenings, of intolerable di- 
 gressions. Did the novel contain only the second 
 " action," which relates to Levin, it would be simply 
 a socialistic tract. It becomes a masterpiece only 
 because of the dramatic and brilliant way in which 
 the tragedy of Anna Karenina herself is wrought 
 out by a master hand. 
 
 After we have thrust Levin aside, we see the real 
 greatness of the book. Tolstoi takes us into the 
 very heart of the ruling classes of Russia. He draws 
 for us a score of portraits to the very life — Anna 
 herself, with her great masses of hair, her half-closed 
 yet observant eyes, her passionate nature, her grace 
 and beauty. There is Katia, the innocent young 
 
236 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 girl who flutters over the attentions of attractive 
 men, and feels that ordinary compliments have deep 
 significance. There is Daria, the worn and anxious 
 wife of Stiva Arcadievitch, faded while still young, 
 anxious for her children, stinted in money, badly 
 dressed and with the bitter certainty that her hus- 
 band no longer loves her — yet still an honest, af- 
 fectionate creature, conscientious to the last degree 
 even while she doubts whether virtue may not be, 
 after all, a sad mistake. Best, perhaps, is Stiva him- 
 self, whom we meet at the very opening of the book, 
 worried because his wife has discovered his fond- 
 ness for the French governess. Stiva is a wonder- 
 fully well-drawn human being — selfish, attractive, 
 pleasure-loving, susceptible, a jovial companion, 
 open-handed — the sort of man whom everybody likes 
 and whom everybody is bound to help along. We 
 see him very vividly in this single paragraph : 
 
 When Stiva Arcadievitch had finished his toilet, he sprinkled 
 himself with perfume, drew down his cuffs, filled his pockets 
 with cigarettes, his letter-case, match-hox, and his watch 
 with its double chain and charms; and then, feeling clean, 
 well-scented, fresh, and physically well, in spite of his domes- 
 tic troubles, he strode lightly into the library, where his coffee 
 was awaiting him. 
 
 Stiva is a type of the easy-going man of the 
 world, wherever found. He is pleased with himself. 
 Other persons, from princes and nobles down to the 
 waiters in his club, take pleasure even in looking at 
 
TOLSTOI'S "ANNA KARENINA" 237 
 
 him. He is always lunching or dining in restaurants 
 on oysters and capons and French wines. He likes 
 to make other people happy. He is sorry that his 
 wife is grieved. He loves his children. He loves 
 also to flirt, to scatter money — ^to live, in short, in a 
 state of physical and mental well-being " in a land 
 flowing with roubles and champagne." Vronsky is 
 a far higher type, yet he is less interesting. He is 
 a man of great capacity, genuine power, of real 
 nobility of character. When he falls in love with 
 Anna Karenina, it is genuine love. He would marry 
 her if he could. As it is, he sacrifices his position 
 at the imperial court for her sake, and devotes him- 
 self to her happiness. After her tragic death he 
 loves no more ; and the book leaves him in command 
 of a body of volunteers whom he is to lead against 
 the Turkish troops in the hope that a bullet will 
 finish his existence. 
 
 Altogether, Arnia Karemna is a great canvas upon 
 which there have been painted, not impressionistic 
 pictures, but a series of portraits rendered with the 
 minute fidelity of a Meissonnier. The combination 
 of detail puzzled the reading public for a while ; but 
 as has been well said, " the effect was at last recog- 
 nised to be the very acme of throbbing, breathing 
 life itself," 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET'S MASTER- 
 PIECE 
 
XIII 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET'S MASTERPIECE 
 
 When Alphonse Daudet wrote Sappho, in 1884, he 
 inscribed it : " For my sons when they are twenty 
 years of age." Could an American or English au- 
 thor have designed a book like this, he would surely 
 have designed it for readers more mature than boys 
 of twenty. Yet French youths are in some things 
 more mature than English and American boys 
 of twenty. Their temptations are different and 
 greater. They know of many sides of life which 
 are, perhaps, never revealed at all to the majority 
 of English-speaking men and women. And, there- 
 fore, Daudet's dedication to his sons must be re- 
 garded as no pose, but as evidence of a sincerity 
 and seriousness which are, indeed, quite plainly felt 
 throughout the entire book. 
 
 Written by one of the few genuine humourists 
 whom France has yet produced, the creator of the 
 amusing Tartarin and the truly comic Delobelle, in 
 Sappho there is not a trace of levity. On the other 
 hand, there is nothing cynical. A great gulf here 
 separates Daudet from Maupassant. Compare the 
 latter's novel Bel Ami with Sappho, and note how 
 
 311 
 
242 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 diiFerently each analyst looks on life. Maupassant 
 sees only what is base or vile or venal. His men and 
 women are, almost without exception, cowards or 
 sharpers or dupes or drabs. The psychology of 
 every type he draws is pitilessly true, yet the aggre- 
 gation of them is lamentably false. We do not live 
 in such a world as Maupassant delineates; for no 
 such world could last a year. 
 
 But Daudet sees life clearly, and he sees it as a 
 whole — the good, the bad, the mediocre, the noble, 
 and the weak. To him its very vices are often only 
 a perversion of its virtues. Its goodness shines out 
 clear and beautiful amid the murk of its depravity. 
 And nowhere do we feel this more acutely than in 
 Sappho — a story written with perfect purity of pur- 
 pose, even though it leads us through the depths of 
 degradation. It is profoundly touching — a moral 
 tragedy — the more impressive in that it is simply 
 told, with none of the pauses for that sort of preach- 
 ing which Thackeray, for instance, loved too well. 
 There is not a word that can offend the most cen- 
 sorious. Its lesson is writ large in the mere narra- 
 tion of the story; yet its severe simplicity is the 
 product of consummate art, revealing all the subtle 
 genius of a master. 
 
 Some have said that in this book is to be found 
 a key to all the mysteries of woman's nature; that 
 every phase of the Eternal Feminine is here revealed ; 
 and that Sappho is, therefore, the clue to woman- 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 243 
 
 hood, given in a single book. This assertion I be- 
 lieve to be absolutely true, yet not quite in the way 
 that critics have intended it. They would have us 
 think that Daudet has drawn for us a dozen or more 
 women, each representing some especial type of char- 
 acter. Thus, the pure young girl is shown to us in 
 the charming figure of Irene Bouchereau, whom the 
 distracted hero of the novel really loves and whom 
 he would marry were it not for the strangely evil fas- 
 cination which Sappho exerts upon him in his own 
 despite. The cold, patrician woman who bears her 
 wrongs in uncomplaining silence is drawn in Mme. 
 de Potter, the great musician's wife, neglected by 
 him for the vulgar, insolent circus-woman Rosa, who 
 treats him like a dog, yet holds him through long- 
 continued habit. And there is Mme. Hettema, fat, 
 lazy, dull, and desiring, with her burly husband, only 
 to be sated with the grossest of animal comforts — ^the 
 pair being at their best mere human cattle — " com- 
 panions of stall and litter." Hettema himself sums 
 up their swinish ideal of happiness: 
 
 "I come home muddy and wet and worried, with all the 
 weight of Paris on my back, to find a good fire, a bright 
 lamp, a savoury soup, and under the table a pair of wooden 
 shoes stuffed with straw. Then, after I have eaten plenty 
 of cabbage and sausages and a piece of Gruyfere, kept fresh 
 under a cloth, and have emptied a bottle of liquor, isn't it 
 fine to draw my armchair to the fireside, light a pipe and 
 drink my coffee with a thimbleful of brandy in it; and then, 
 seated opposite each other, to Indulge in forty winks while 
 
244 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 the hoar-frost is making patterns on the windows outside? 
 Afterward, when the wife clears everything away, turns down 
 the bed, gets the hot bottle out, and has warmed a place, I 
 turn in and feel as cosy as if I had crept bodily into the 
 straw of my wooden shoes." 
 
 The pathetic figure of Alice Dore, the poor little 
 Parisian waif, picked up by a rich and careless syba- 
 rite amid the motley crowd of a skating-rink in order 
 that she may satisfy a moment's whim — how vividly 
 she stands out in the few pages that tell her piteous 
 story! A quiet, mouselike little creature, so gentle 
 and by nature so refined, she is at heart still virginal, 
 though in all her life she has never known respect, 
 or any of that deference which some men show to 
 every woman. Her temporary possessor, Dechelette, 
 bears her away to his palace of a home, where he 
 treats her with the tenderness of a devoted lover. 
 She forgets the noise, the oaths, the coarse jests, and 
 the meretricious strife that have surrounded her ; and 
 amid the palms and flowers and luxury of her new 
 abode, finds what to her is heaven. It is but for a 
 few days. She knows she must return to the old 
 life, and that Dechelette will think of her no more. 
 Then the child, after a short and piteous plea that 
 she may stay, grows silent, dries her tears, and flings 
 herself to death from an open window. She is the 
 woman who was born for goodness, but whom Fate 
 condemned to a life of shame and outrage. When 
 she came to know that there was something better in 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 245 
 
 the world, she died because she would not go back 
 to the horror of her old existence. 
 
 Then there are other figures no less sharply and 
 clearly drawn, and each as sharply dliferentiated. 
 There is Divonne, the peasant woman, married to 
 a fatuous scion of a good old family, of whom she 
 makes a man by her strong sense, her patience, and 
 her tact. Divonne is in refreshing contrast to the 
 enervated and enervating Parisienne. Her physical 
 perfection, graceful yet strong; her rustic beauty, 
 her love of home, her cleanly mind, and her wifely 
 faithfulness, are all as wholesome as mountain air, 
 giving us a sort of moral tonic that restores our 
 faith in righteousness. And, finally, there is Sappho 
 herself, who is the incarnation of light love and of 
 the ruin which light love works in man. 
 
 Taking these vital figures, together with some 
 minor ones which it is unnecessary to mention in de- 
 tail, this great novel of Daudet is quite truly the 
 condensation of all experience, the complete psychol- 
 ogy of what, with unconscious absurdity, is often 
 called " the weaker sex." Yet, as I shall presently 
 attempt to show, this view of it, while it is entirely 
 correct, takes no account of the most curious fact 
 of all. 
 
 Sappho is the nickname given to Fanny Legrand, 
 the daughter of a full-blooded, liquorish old cabman 
 and of a mother whom she can not recall. She has 
 grown up in the streets of Paris, learning everything 
 
246 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 that Paris has to teach such girls as this. She has 
 been an artist's model ; she knows the life of the stu- 
 dios; and she has loved, sometimes with terrible in- 
 tensity, men of the brilliant Bohemia by the Seine. 
 From each one — ^poet or painter, musician or sculp- 
 tor — she has picked up accomplishments. Each of 
 her liaisons has left its trace upon her mind. Now 
 she is well past thirty — still graceful, charming, and 
 ripe for that last great love which Balzac says can 
 be satisfied in woman only by the first fresh love of 
 man. 
 
 At a studio entertainment she meets a handsome 
 young fellow from the country — Jean Gaussin — who 
 is in Paris, preparing to pass the examinations for 
 a place in the consular service. Fanny flings her- 
 self upon him with an abandonment and an intensity 
 of passion that surprise him. He thinks that she is 
 but the acquaintance of an evening; but he soon 
 finds that he can not shake her off. She sits waiting 
 outside his door night after night. She writes him 
 letters, touching in their humility and devotion. At 
 last, she nurses him through a fever, and a bond be- 
 tween them is established. She forgets that she has 
 ever loved before. This creature of the studios dis- 
 plays the tenderness, the self-sacrifice, and the ar- 
 dent fondness of one who for the first time feels the 
 breath of passion. It is understood between them 
 that some day this must end; but Jean can never 
 shake her off. She has bound him fast with the silken 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 247 
 
 cords of intimacy — of that strange habitude of con- 
 tinued association of which Petronius has tersely 
 said: Antiquus amor cancer est. 
 
 Still, Jean does not in his heart of hearts feel any 
 ennobling love for her. He yields rather to her 
 strange subtleties of corruption, even while he sees, 
 at times, the woman as she really is — one who con- 
 ceals beneath her often radiant charm the beginnings 
 of complete putrescence. He can hear, in her fre- 
 quent bursts of rage, the raucous voice and the foul 
 speech of the common courtesan. He can see, in the 
 hardening lines of her face, in her broken tooth, in 
 her thinning hair, the approach of an unlovely age. 
 And he knows too well that she has been the play- 
 thing of others, whose tricks of speech and manner, 
 as well as their opinions and their tastes, he can 
 detect in her. From one lover she had got her pref- 
 erence for a special brand of cigarette; from a 
 second, a sculptor, she had acquired the habit of 
 sticking out her thumb " as if to mould or fashion 
 something " ; from a third she had learned the trick 
 of clipping her words ; still another had taught her 
 an arrogant, scornful intonation. She was, indeed, 
 a human phonographic record, upon which a thou- 
 sand scratches blurred and altered the tone pro- 
 duced. 
 
 Again and again Jean seeks to break the fetters 
 that grow every day more galling; but Sappho has 
 possessed his whole nature. When he revisits his 
 
248 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 country home, it seems changed and dull. Its whole- 
 someness makes no appeal to him. He falls in love 
 with a beautiful young girl, and hopes that mar- 
 riage will destroy the sway of Sappho. None the 
 less, in the end, he abandons home, breaks off his 
 intended marriage, and becomes an outcast. Sappho 
 has played upon his jealousy, and he plans to go 
 with her to South America, there, in a strange land, 
 to h-ave her to himself. 
 
 But the woman herself shrinks from this final step. 
 She knows that she will soon be old, and that all her 
 lures and wiles will fail to hold him. And so, at the 
 seaport whither he has gone to meet her, he receives 
 from her a letter of farewell. She has blasted his 
 career, yet she must protect herself. She writes: 
 
 Five years ago, in the happy days, a sign from you would 
 have caused me to follow you to the other end of the world; 
 for you can not deny that I loved you passionately. I have 
 given you all that I had, and when it became necessary 
 to part from you, I suffered as I never did for any man 
 before. But such a love wears out. To know you are so 
 handsome, so young, would make me tremble — always so many 
 things to guard. Now I can not. You have made me live 
 too much, made me suffer too much. I am exhausted — 
 you are free; you will never hear me spoken of again. 
 Farewell. One kiss, the last, on the neck, my own. 
 
 Superficially, in spite of all its marvellous touches 
 and the supreme artistry with which it is told, this 
 story may appear to be only a study of what the 
 French describe as la femme collante. The expres- 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 249 
 
 sion IS one that has no equivalent in English; and 
 haply, outside of France, there is seldom any need to 
 use it. The femme collante is the woman who glues 
 herself to one man or another, who lives wholly in 
 her emotions, and who sacrifices to them everything 
 — all self-control, all traces of reserve, and even tran- 
 quil happiness ; for, if she can not be emotionally 
 happy, she prefers to be emotionally miserable. One 
 of the characters in Sappho describes the type in 
 speaking of Fanny Legrand: 
 
 "Ah, catch her killing herself! She is too fond of Iotb, 
 and will burn down to the end, down to the very socket. She 
 is like the tribe of young comedy actors, who never change 
 their class of characters, who die without teeth or eyebrows, 
 but are young lovers to the very last." 
 
 The gradually strengthening hold, the almost im- 
 perceptible deepening of the taint which Fanny Le- 
 grand displays as her intimacy with Jean increases 
 month by month, are set forth with extraordinary 
 vividness in the following passage: 
 
 There was greater freedom of manner and expression, « 
 consciousness of her power, strange confidences unsought by 
 him concerning her past life, her old debaucheries and 
 follies. She did not deprive herself of smoking now; she 
 rolled, and in her fingers, put down on the furniture, the 
 eternal cigarettes which help to pass the unconventional 
 woman's day; and in her conversation she let fall her views 
 of life, the infamy of men, the treachery of women, — the 
 most cynical theories on all subjects. Even her eyes assumed 
 
250 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 a different expression, dimmed by a film of moisture through 
 which flashed a libertine laugh. 
 
 And the intimacy of their affection also changed. At first 
 restrained by the youth of her lover, of which she respected 
 the first illusions, the woman having seen the effect on the 
 man, of her roughly disclosed, debauched past^ — did not now 
 trouble herself to restrain the unwholesome fever with which 
 she had infected him. So the wayward caresses long restrained, 
 all the delirious words which her closed teeth had shut back — 
 she let loose now, showed herself in her true colours, in all the 
 nakedness of the amorous and practised courtesan, in all the 
 horrible glory of Sappho! 
 
 Yet this book of Daudet is something infinitely 
 greater in its importance than a study of collage. I 
 have already quoted the opinion of those who call the 
 novel a comprehensive study of woman, because of 
 the great range of feminine types which it contains. 
 To my mind, this is not giving it all the praise which 
 it deserves. It is not in the multiplicity of types 
 which Daudet has collected that he has depicted fem- 
 ininity. He has done what is far more remarkable 
 than that. In the single character of Fanny Le- 
 grand herself, he shows us womanhood, complete — 
 crowned and glorious upon the heights to which it 
 often soars, and again, bedraggled and befouled, in 
 those abysses which are deeper than any into which 
 man ever falls. 
 
 In the book it is said of Fanny Legrand that she 
 represents toute la lyre; and the phrase has refer- 
 ence only to her faults and vices. It might more 
 truly refer to both her virtues and her vices, for in 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 251 
 
 reality she represents the entire gamut of those traits 
 and attributes which go to make up the complex 
 character of woman in her full development. Fanny 
 possesses charm, quick wit, and great intelligence, 
 surpassing in its rapier-like flash and penetration 
 the intelligence of man. She has the tenderness and 
 material sweetness which are also woman's, as when 
 she nurses Jean and cares for the strange little child, 
 the son of a former lover. She is capable of supreme 
 self-sacrifice. She can endure poverty and distasteful 
 toil for the sake of Jean. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, all these nobler traits are 
 displayed only to those for whom she cares. She 
 can be brutally unjust and hideously insulting to a 
 discarded lover. One feels the shock precisely as 
 Jean felt it when Fanny, at one of their first meet- 
 ings, reveals the dual quality of her nature. She 
 had been so gentle, so womanly, and so submissive 
 that he is charmed into a delicious dream. Then 
 she is called suddenly to an outer room into which 
 a former lover has just forced his way. Jean hears 
 the sound of a fierce quarrel. "A man's voice, irri- 
 table at first, and then imploring, in which the out- 
 bursts were choked with emotion and pleading, alter- 
 nated with another voice which he did not immediately 
 recognise — hard and hoarse, full of hatred and vile 
 epithets, assailing his ears like a brawl in a low tav- 
 ern." Fanny returns, out of breath, and twisting 
 her flowing hair with a movement full of grace. 
 
252 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 " What a fool a man is who cries ! " she says. 
 Daudet's comment is illuminating: 
 
 Jean thought her cruel. He had not yet learned that 
 a woman who loves has no pity except for her love. All 
 her feelings of charity, kindness, good-nature, and pity, and 
 devotion, are concentrated in one individual and in one 
 alone. . . . He felt a great disgust, when, after his night 
 of love, he had heard the sobs of the deceived lover mingling 
 with her washerwoman's oaths. 
 
 Fanny Legrand, indeed, has no faith in her own 
 sex, and she thinks that all other women are like 
 herself. Even when she loves Jean most intensely, 
 she lies to him because of a stray sentiment which 
 she cherishes for a convict. At the last supreme 
 crisis she thinks of self; and, having ruined Jean, 
 she deserts him and makes for herself another home 
 in which she will be adored without the trouble of 
 adoring in her turn. Here Daudet has revealed the 
 extraordinary inconsistency and contradiction which 
 enter into a woman's passion — its lack of logic, its 
 unreasonableness, its fickleness, and its heats which 
 come and go like lightning-flashes shuddering across 
 a summer sky. 
 
 To have wrought this out in the drawing of a 
 single character makes the book a memorable achieve- 
 ment. It will endure beyond the life of all its au- 
 thor's other books. It will, I think, remain forever 
 one of the great books of the world ; for it embodies 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 253 
 
 everlasting truth. As Mr. Sherard says, it is a book 
 which should be written in Latin, or, as an equiva- 
 lent, carved on imperishable bronze or marble ; " for, 
 when the French language may be a forgotten 
 tongue, and when all our paper shall have crumbled 
 into dust, there will always be the love of man and 
 woman." And no other book has told so subtly, and 
 with such impressive force, the power of that love 
 for evil and for good, and the mighty hold it has 
 upon the lives and souls of those who let it sway 
 them as it will. 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORYi 
 
XIV 
 
 THE DETECTIVE STORY 
 
 SuPEECiLiotrs persons who profess to have a high re- 
 gard for the dignity of " literature " are loath to 
 admit that detective stories belong to the category 
 of serious writing. They will make an exception in 
 the case of certain tales by Edgar Allan Poe, but in 
 general they would cast narratives of this sort down 
 from the upper ranges of fine fiction. They do this 
 because, in the first place, they think that the detect- 
 ive story makes a vulgar appeal through its exploi- 
 tation of crime. In the second place, and with some 
 reason, they despise detective stories because most 
 of them are poor, cheap things. Just at present 
 there is a great popular demand for them; and in 
 response to this demand a flood of crude, ill-written, 
 sensational tales comes pouring from the presses of 
 the day. But a detective story composed by a man 
 of talent, not to say of genius, is quite as worthy of 
 admiration as any other form of novel. In truth, 
 its interest does not really lie in the crime which gives 
 the writer a sort of starting point. In many of these 
 stories the crime has occurred before the tale begins ; 
 and frequently it happens, as it were, off the stage, 
 in accordance with the traditional precept of Horace. 
 The real interest of a fine detective story is very 
 SSI 
 
258 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 largely an intellectual interest. Here we see the con- 
 flict of one acutely analytical mind with some other 
 mind which is scarcely less acute and analytical. It 
 is a battle of wits, a mental duel, involving close logic, 
 a certain amount of applied psychology, and also a 
 high degree of daring on the part both of the crim- 
 inal and of the man who hunts him down. Here is 
 nothing in itself " sensational " in the popular ac- 
 ceptance of that word. 
 
 The reasoning, for instance, in Poe's story of The 
 Purloined Letter would excite the admiration of a 
 mathematician or of a student of metaphysics. In 
 the same author's most famous story, The Murders 
 in the Rue Morgue, there are to be sure some details 
 that are terrible to read — ^hideous traces of a mon- 
 strous crime; but these details are necessary. The 
 perpetrator of the crime is not a human being, but an 
 orang-outang, and this fact compels a description of 
 the unhuman and frightful manner in which the mur- 
 ders were committed. But in general, not only in 
 Poe, but in Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau and 
 Boisgobey and Conan Doyle, the evil deed which is 
 the cause of the whole action is usually passed over 
 lightly, and very often it is not a crime of vio- 
 lence. Indeed, the matter may turn out to be no 
 crime at all, but simply a mysterious happening, 
 which the quick-witted, subtle hero is called in to 
 solve, as in Doyle's The Man with the Twisted Lip, 
 or the same author's slighter tale, A Case of Identity. 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 259 
 
 Therefore, when we speak of the detective story, 
 and regard it seriously, we do not mean the penny- 
 dreadfuls, the dime-novels, and the books which are 
 hastily thrown together by some hack-writer of the 
 " Nick Carter " school, but the skilfully planned work 
 of one who can construct and work out a complicated 
 problem, definitely and convincingly. It must not be 
 too complex; for here, as in aU art, simplicity is the 
 soul of genius. The story must appeal to our love 
 of the mysterious, and it must be characterised by 
 ingenuity, without transcending in the least the limits 
 of the probable. 
 
 The origin of the detective story is to be found in 
 Voltaire's clever romance, Zadig, which he wrote 
 under peculiar circumstances. He had fallen out of 
 favour with the French court, because he had inti- 
 mated that some of the members of the royal circle 
 were guilty of cheating at cards. This brought upon 
 him the keen displeasure of the queen. He feared 
 lest at any moment he might be arrested and impris- 
 oned in the Bastille. Within the hour, almost, he 
 had his carriage prepared, and hurried away at half- 
 past one in the morning. Arriving at a little wayside 
 inn, he sent a letter to the Duchesse du Maine, beg- 
 ging her to hide him in her chateau until he had been 
 pardoned. For a month he lived in two rooms, which 
 she provided for him, behind barred shutters, and 
 with candles burning night and day. 
 
 There Voltaire wrote and wrote continually in his 
 
260 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 cramped hand, while his valet copied the sheets which 
 his master kept tossing upon the floor with the ink 
 still wet upon them. At two o'clock in the morning, 
 Voltaire would go softly down to where the duchess 
 was awaiting him, and eat a little supper in her pres- 
 ence, amusing her by his brilliant talk. Then he 
 would creep back to his prison, and after a brief in- 
 terval of sleep, would once more fall to writing. It 
 was under these strange circumstances that he com- 
 posed the miniature masterpiece of romance which he 
 called Zadig. Zadig, of course, is not a detective 
 story. It is an oriental tale, and its hero, Zadig, is 
 a marvellous philosopher and acute observer. One 
 passage in the story tells how he described to the 
 Persian king's attendants a horse and a dog which 
 had been lost, and which Zadig had never seen. Nev- 
 ertheless, he was able by his powers of observation, 
 and from certain indications, not only to describe 
 the dog — its sex, size, and condition — ^but to tell cor- 
 rectly what sort of a bit was in the horse's mouth, 
 and with what sort of shoes the animal had been 
 shod. 
 
 It should be noted that the suggestion of this 
 story, Le Chien et Le Cheval, was not original with 
 Voltaire. The, tale is found in a slightly different 
 form in De Mailly's Voyage et Aventures des Trois 
 Princes de Sarendip, which appeared in 1719, or 
 twenty-eight years before Zadig was written, and 
 
THE DETECTIVE STOEY 261 
 
 was even rendered Into English twenty-four years 
 before Voltaire conveyed It. But careful investiga- 
 tion has shown that De Mailly himself was not the 
 originator. His story professes to have been trans- 
 lated from the Persian, but was, In fact, taken from 
 an obscure Italian writer, Cristoforo Armeno, whose 
 book was printed In Venice in 1557, and translated 
 into French as early as 1610. As a matter of fact, 
 the episode with which we are all familiar in Vol- 
 taire has an oriental ancestry which can be traced 
 through Arabic, Turkish, and Persian literature, 
 and Talmudic Hebrew, until the clue is lost in the 
 mists of a remote past.* 
 
 In all these tales occurs the same kind of deduct- 
 ive reasoning which plays so great a part In the 
 best detective stories of modem times. Just as 
 Voltaire derived his hint from De Mailly, so Poe, 
 who was steeped in French literature, must have 
 drawn from Voltaire the same Idea which he so bril- 
 liantly developed in his story, The Purloined Let- 
 ter. It is Interesting to remember that the scene of 
 all three of Poe's most famous detective tales — The 
 Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, 
 and The Mystery of Marie Roget — is laid In France. 
 
 iSee an interesting paper by Mr. Leon Fraser entitled 
 "A Study in Literary Grenealogy," published in Modern 
 Language Notes under date of December, 1906. (Vol. xxi. 
 pp. 24,5-347.) 
 
262 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 As has been said elsewhere in this book, no one 
 has surpassed the ingenuity of Poe in the construc- 
 tion of these stories. It was noted, however, that 
 one's admiration ends with the matter of his con- 
 structiveness and reasoning, and I ventured to say 
 that the defect in all these tales lies in the fact that 
 their author could not create a living, breathing 
 character. His personages are nothing but abstrac- 
 tions. He moves them about like chessmen on a 
 board, and we are interested, not in them, but in the 
 problem with which they have to do. 
 
 In order that the detective story should be some- 
 thing more than mathematics applied to fiction^ 
 or, perhaps, fiction applied to mathematics — it was 
 necessary that what Poe did should be combined 
 with a sympathetic understanding of human nature. 
 This combination was effected — imperfectly, to be 
 sure, but still with great ability— by Emile Gabo- 
 riau in the best of his detective stories, M. Lecoq. 
 
 Gaboriau was a journalist before he turned a 
 novelist; and as a journalist he came to be inter-" 
 ested in the problems with which the police of Paris 
 had to deal. This was under the Second Empire, 
 when Napoleon III., for his own personal safety, 
 had established a marvellously elaborate system of 
 espionage. The police records contained the daily 
 history of almost every human being within the 
 boundaries of France. Enrolled in the organisation 
 were not merely the usual police, but a host of un- 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 263 
 
 loiown spies. These might apparently be shop- 
 keepers, janitors, labourers, or whatever else seemed 
 best; but apart from their ordinary occupations, 
 they were the eyes and ears of the men who con- 
 trolled them all at the central prefecture of police 
 or the mysterious Black Room in the Tuileries, and 
 to whom they reported daily. Every foreigner, 
 even though he were known to be merely a traveller 
 for pleasure, was watched, and everything that he 
 did was carefully recorded. An inquiry addressed 
 to the minister of police could bring from him at 
 once complete particulars concerning almost any 
 man or woman — where they had been at a given 
 time, who were their friends, how they amused them- 
 selves, and a great deal more besides. All this in- 
 formation might not be used, and much of it was 
 never used, yet scarcely anything was unknown to 
 the men who cast this great spider's web over 
 France, and who could from their files produce facts 
 which, if generally known, would have wrecked fam- 
 ilies, destroyed reputations, and laid bare the dark 
 secrets of many a life that seemed wholly spotless. 
 
 Gaboriau became fascinated by the thorough- 
 ness and precision of this remarkable system. He 
 studied it in all its phases, and with the greatest 
 care. As a result of this study, he wrote the nov- 
 els which, with all their blemishes, are still read 
 eagerly in many countries and in many languages. 
 
 Of these novels, the one best constructed and 
 
264 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATUEES 
 
 most deserving of fame is that entitled M. Lecoq, 
 which he pubHshed in 1869, not many years before 
 his death. In it is seen an ingenuity equal to that 
 of Poe, while there is also shown a fair success in 
 sketching character. Moreover, the author has in- 
 troduced a new type of deductive reasoner which 
 suggested to Conan Doyle the interesting Mycroft 
 Holmes, brother of Sherlock Holmes, and that great 
 detective's superior in the subtlety of his intellec- 
 tual processes. 
 
 It will be rememtered that the story of M. Lecoq 
 opens with the commission of a crime, which, on 
 the face of it, was no't mysterious, but was appar- 
 ently just one of those everyday tragedies that 
 take place in the lowest quarters of Paris. Several 
 detectives are making their rounds in the outskirts 
 of the city, on a winter night, when they hear cries 
 and pistol-shots from a low drinking-den of evil re- 
 pute, situated in an open field on which the snow 
 lies deep. The detectives hurry to the scene, sur- 
 round the house, break in the door, and see, by the 
 light of some flaming pine knots upon the hearth, 
 that an act of violence has been committed. Tables 
 and chairs have been overturned. Two men are 
 stretched dead, while a third is already in the throes 
 of death. Behind an oaken table stands a young 
 and stalwart man, clenching a revolver. His torn 
 garments resemble those of a railway porter. He 
 declares that he has shot the men in self-defence, 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY £65 
 
 because they made a desperate attack upon him, 
 believing him to be a police spy. 
 
 On the face of it there is nothing improbable in 
 this. His story is believed by the men who arrest 
 him, and especially by Gevrol, a police-officer of 
 some rank. The youngest of the detectives, how- 
 ever, whose name is Lecoq, feels a vague suspicion 
 that the prisoner is not what he declares hinlself to 
 be, and that underneath this crime there is hidden 
 a tale of peculiar mystery. Two women are known 
 to have been present, but they have escaped. There 
 are also, to the mind of Lecoq, indications that the 
 prisoner, in spite of his common clothing, is no 
 common person; that he is a man of education, of 
 great natural ability, and perhaps of rank; and 
 finally that he had a male accomplice. These de- 
 ductions of Lecoq are scouted by Gevrol; but nev- 
 ertheless the young detective resolves to establish 
 his theory and to solve the problem. From that 
 moment there begins a conflict of wits between the 
 prisoner on the one side and Lecoq on the other, 
 the latter having the sympathy and confidence of 
 the examining magistrate. The scene of the pris- 
 oner's examination by this magistrate is one of 
 thrilling interest, and it gives to us Anglo-Saxons 
 a vivid picture of the workings of French law in 
 its assumption that a prisoner Is guilty unless he 
 proves his innocence. The long, searching inquiry 
 in which the judge alternately pleads with the ac- 
 
^66 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 cused and browbeats, threatens, and tortures him, 
 hoping at last to break him down and wring from 
 him a full confession, is wonderfully written. 
 
 The prisoner tells the magistrate a perfectly 
 straightforward story, and yet there are parts of 
 it which, under a keen cross-examination, show 
 weakness and self-contradiction sufficient to 
 strengthen the suspicion of Lecoq. Nevertheless, 
 the detective is for the time quite baffled. All the 
 external evidence that can be found, curiously con- 
 firms the prisoner's story. Lecoq becomes convinced 
 that there is a shrewd accomplice acting from with- 
 out, who, in some mysterious way, is working as the 
 prisoner's second self. The accused is kept in 
 prison. His every action is watched, both night 
 and day. Extraordinary tricks are devised to com- 
 pel him to betray himself. They completely fail. 
 
 At last, Lecoq arranges matters so that the mys- 
 terious criminal may escape. Lecoq's plan is to 
 follow him after he has escaped, and thus discover 
 who are his friends and who he really is. The es- 
 cape takes place. The prisoner threads his way 
 through the most intricate mazes of criminal Paris, 
 followed by Lecoq, who carries on the pursuit with 
 the keenness of a hound; but at the end of the long 
 hunt the object of it unexpectedly disappears 
 over a high wall, which surrounds the magnificent 
 grounds and mansion of the Due de Sairmeuse, one 
 of the noblest members of the French aristocracy. 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 267 
 
 Though Lecoq and the police at once enter the man- 
 sion, and search all the rooms in i't, their bird ap- 
 parently has flown. A ball and reception are in 
 progress in the great house. There are no traces 
 in it of the fleeing criminal ; and Lecoq for the time 
 confesses himself defeated, suffering in silence the 
 jeers of his associates, and especially of Gevrol, 
 who has become jealous of his able and enthusiastic 
 subordinate. 
 
 Lecoq finally betakes himself to the house of an 
 old retired tradesman, who is an amateur in crimi- 
 nology and detection. This person, named Taba- 
 ret, but known to the police as Pere Tirauclair, is 
 much of the time confined in bed by gout. For his 
 own amusement, however, he collects all the details 
 of every conspicuous crime and studies them with 
 intense avidity, not as crimes, bu't as psychological 
 problems. Given all the facts, he can, by the un- 
 erring processes of pure reason, sift out the false 
 from the true, the irrelevant from the essential, and 
 go swiftly to the heart of any mystery. It is he 
 who gives Lecoq the clue to the identity of the es- 
 caped prisoner. 
 
 Here is the original suggestion of Mycroft 
 Holmes, who, it will be remembered, was fat and 
 lazy, spending his spare hours in the Diogenes Club, 
 of which no member ever spoke to any other mem- 
 ber. Mycroft Holmes does not trouble himself with 
 any active work. He relies entirely upon his deduct- 
 
268 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 ive powers and relentless logic. It may be said 
 that this is only a copy of Poe's Auguste Dupin, 
 but such is not the case. Dupin did " outside 
 work," personally visited the scenes of crimes, in- 
 serted advertisements in newspapers, and, in fact, 
 employed the whole machinery of detection. But 
 Mycroft Holmes, Hke old Pere Tirauclair, simply 
 thought out the problem presented to him, and then 
 directed others what to do. Here we find a concep- 
 tion more attractive even than that of Poe; and 
 the literary touches of Gaboriau and Doyle give 
 us a genuine personality that far surpasses the in- 
 terest of a mere calculating machine. 
 
 It is true that Gaboriau mars his story by inject- 
 ing into it a long secondary narrative. Conan 
 Doyle made precisely the same mistake in his first 
 successful detective tale, A Study in Scarlet; but 
 it was a mistake which he never repeated. Gabo- 
 riau, therefore, is a link between Edgar Allan Poe 
 and Conan Doyle, just as Poe himself is a link be- 
 tween Voltaire and Gaboriau. 
 
 Conan Doyle is the supreme writer of detective 
 stories. He, like Gaboriau, plays the game fairly, 
 since he lets the reader have all the knowledge which 
 Holmes himself possesses. It has been written of 
 his tales: 
 
 The really remarkable thing about these stories is that, 
 before the mystery is solved, the reader is put in possession 
 of every fact material to its solution. The Chinese puzzle 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY ^69 
 
 is handed over with no missing pieces. We are freely offered 
 every single bit of evidence which could convince the detective. 
 That is, the reader has been kept in exactly the mental state 
 of the ingenuous Dr. Watson, or the blundering officials, 
 Lestrade and Gregson. He has seen all there is to be seen; 
 and if he fails to interpret events aright, it is simply because 
 his own acuteness does not equal that of the detective. 
 
 In other words, the cleverness of Doyle lies in his 
 simplicity and frankness, and also in the fact that 
 his people are living, breathing human beings. One 
 grows fond of Sherlock Holmes, not only because 
 of his wonderful mind, but because of his faults and 
 failings. His addiction to the cocaine habit, his 
 dislike of women, his skill as a boxer, his need when 
 thinking out a problem of smoking great quanti- 
 ties of shag tobacco which he keeps in an old shp- 
 per, his trick of shooting bullets into his mantel- 
 piece so as to form the royal initials (V. R.), the 
 general disorderliness of his housekeeping — all 
 these things give him individuality. We feel that 
 we actually know him. We are almost as much in- 
 terested in his personal whims and prejudices, and 
 in his casual talks with Watson, as we are with his 
 triumphs of detection. 
 
 And the same interest adheres to Watson, that 
 admirable, commonplace, and usual Briton, and in 
 a less degree to the oflBcial police who employ Sher- 
 lock's skill and then take credit to themselves. No 
 imitators of Poe, or of Doyle himself, have been suc- 
 cessful in this thing. They can think out prob- 
 
270 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 lems, but they can not create men and women. Com- 
 pare, for instance, the detective stories lately writ- 
 ten by Mr. Jacques Futrelle and M. Gaston Leroux. 
 Their work is purely machine work. To go further 
 back, even Balzac, who made an attempt at detect- 
 ive fiction in his Ferragus, was wise enough to see 
 that this was not his forte. He and Ponson du 
 Terrail in this one particular field seem stodgy and 
 mechanical. Yet even Gaboriau is superior to Poe. 
 Had there been no Gaboriau, we might never have 
 had that fascinating cycle of stories which Conan 
 Doyle has written around the great detective who 
 lived in Baker Street, and whose name is as well 
 known all over the world to-day as that of Shylock, 
 FalstafF, or any other creation of Shakespeare 
 himself, with, perhaps, Hamlet as the one excep- 
 tion. 
 
 Of course, this seems extravagant; but the con- 
 temporary public is seldom a good judge of what 
 is best or of what is worst in the writers of their 
 own time. They either overpraise or underestimate. 
 It is, or ought to be, a truism that professional 
 critics of literature are generally the very last per- 
 sons in the world to recognise the value of new lit- 
 erature when they see it. This is par'tly because 
 such standards as they have are purely conven- 
 tional, and partly because they themselves are 
 timorous and mistrustful and afraid of making mis- 
 takes. Hence they hesitate to commit themselves 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 271 
 
 to a definite opinion until they are pretty sure that 
 they are on the side of the majority. The result is 
 that they foUow where they ought to lead, and are 
 apt to come in at the tail of the procession when 
 they ought to come in at its head. Just as the ven- 
 erable Austrian commanders in Italy were convinced 
 that Napoleon knew nothing about the art of war 
 because he was defeating them in reckless defiance 
 of the rules laid down in the military text-books, so 
 our literary critics would not admit that Kipling's 
 first five books had any value; for these were bril- 
 liant in an utterly new way, and not in the thor- 
 oughly recognised old way. Originality is terribly 
 disconcerting to unoriginal people. They think it 
 frivolous or " unsound " or " queer." They never 
 quite approve of it. Therefore, they glorify Rob- 
 ert Louis Stevenson for those productions of his 
 that are good in a conventional style, but ignore his 
 one extraordinary tour de force which is unique in 
 literature. For, a century hence, Treasure Island 
 and The Master of Ballantrae and all the essays will 
 be only names to the reading public, while Dr. 
 JeJcyll and Mr. Hyde will stand as the most strik- 
 ing allegory ever written on the curious duaHty of 
 man's moral nature. 
 
 The case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is almost as 
 interesting as the case of Mr. Kipling, in kind 
 though not in degree. Sir Arthur does not take 
 himself and his writings very seriously. Neither did 
 
272 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 Plautus or Shakespeare, for that matter. Sir Ar- 
 thur Doyle is a genial, wholesome, sensible Anglo- 
 Celt who turns off his work in a comfortable sort 
 of way. He is not a genius of the highest order, 
 but he has a leaven of genius in his make-up, and 
 he is a born story-teller as truly as was Herodotus 
 or Defoe. Most of his books are just admirable 
 examples of the story-telling quality which in some 
 mysterious fashion makes its possessor able to give 
 real interest to even a commonplace narrative. In 
 fact, the least important of his stories — as for in- 
 stance some of those in Round the Red Lamp — are 
 worth reading many times. They may be as im- 
 probable as the one about the resuscitated Egyp- 
 tian mummy or the electrocution at Los Amigos ; 
 but all the same you will be glad to know them and 
 you will wish for more. In his historical novels. 
 The White Company and Micah Clark, this story- 
 telling is of a high oirder, yet still not going beyond 
 the limits of great cleverness. The critics, how- 
 ever, would select these books as containing the 
 best of which Doyle is capable. The one thing of 
 his that is really indicative of creative genius they 
 merely smile upon indulgently, and pass by with as 
 little notice as they would give to a dime-novel, and 
 with much less notice than they often devote to some 
 schoolgirl's machine-made historical romance. It 
 never occurs to them that English fiction was per- 
 manently enriched when Dr. Doyle, as he then was, 
 
THE DETECTIVE STOEY 273 
 
 began the cycle of stories whose protagonist is Mr. 
 Sherlock Holmes. 
 
 It is likely that most literary critics, if asked to 
 give an opinion about these remarkable stories, 
 would at once compare them with those of Gabo- 
 riau and feel that there was nothing more to say. 
 But, as a matter of fact, the Sherlock Holmes s'to- 
 ries are not only immensely superior to anything of 
 Gaboriau's, but in some respects the best of them 
 are better than those tales of Poe which treat of 
 crime and its detection. Gaboriau is an excellent 
 literary artisan. His mysteries are very neatly 
 constructed. The parts all dovetail perfectly. But 
 they have little artistic value, and the unravelling 
 of their complicated plots is like the dissection of 
 a Chinese puzzle which interests by its ingenuity, 
 but appeals neither to the intellect nor to the im- 
 agination. Poe, on the other hand, is highly intel- 
 lectual, and in TJie Murders in the Rue Morgue, for 
 instance, he stirs the imagination very powerfully. 
 He can rouse the sense of horror and make his mys- 
 tery deepen into ghastliness and terror. 
 
 Conan Doyle, however, can do these things and 
 give us still another ingredient — the human ele- 
 ment. Sherlock Holmes, as has been said, would 
 interest us simply as a man. His curiously varied 
 tastes, his fondness for good music and rare books, 
 his disorderly rooms, his utter boredom when not 
 absorbed in disentangling mysteries, his grodigious 
 
274 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITEEATUEES 
 
 consumption of shag tobacco when working out his 
 problems, his addiction to the cocaine habit — a cu- 
 rious touch — all these things amuse or in'terest or 
 pique us until we grow fond of him and get at last 
 to know him almost as well as though we, too, 
 shared his rooms in Baker Street. Watson is an- 
 other creation. Like all true artists, who do "their 
 best work by instinct rather than self-consciously, 
 it is probable that Doyle had no idea of how su- 
 premely clever a thing it was to make Watson the 
 companion and chronicler and also the foil of Sher- 
 lock Holmes. Watson, the matter-of-fact, sensible, 
 and friendly surgeon, always planting both his 
 broad feet squarely on the earth, is a typically 
 British character, and his lack of insight makes 
 Holmes's wonderful intuition appear twice as won- 
 derful by the force of contrast. Moreover, by let- 
 ^ting Watson be the narrator of the stories, they 
 are made to seem always plausible to the reader, 
 because of their sober, unemotional manner. Le- 
 strange and Gregson, of the regular detective force, 
 are also types drawn adequately with a few broad 
 strokes. Beside them Gaboriau's Gevrol is shadowy 
 and unreal. The creation of Mycroft Holmes was 
 a stroke of genius. That Sherlock Holmes should 
 have had a brother, superior In Inductive reasoning 
 even to Sherlock himself, is interesting; that he 
 should be fat and luxurious and far too lazy to use 
 his gifts in any practical way, is delicious. The 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 275 
 
 likeness of mind and the utter unlikeness of temper- 
 ament between the indolent Mycroft and the keen, 
 nervous, high-strung Sherlock is fascinating. That 
 Mycroft Holmes is introduced in but a single story 
 — that of the Greek interpreter ^^shows a remark- 
 able artistic self-control on the part of Doyle. The 
 glimpse that is given of him is tantalising. One 
 longs to know more about him, but his creator very 
 wisely stayed his hand. 
 
 The very best of all these stories are not the long 
 ones — A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four 
 ■ — though each of these contains many very strik- 
 ing things, and the first of them (of which Dr. 
 Doyle himself is said to have thought so little that 
 he sold the manuscript outright for $125) intro- 
 duces us to Sherlock at the outset of his career. 
 There is no doubt that the most finished and most 
 effective tale is that of The SpecMed Band. This 
 is a marvel of construction and of execution not 
 merely worthy of Poe, but better than Poe's best. 
 From the very first page the reader's interest is 
 riveted upon a mystery which, as it develops, is ut- 
 terly inscrutable and fascinates one by its unde- 
 fined yet very evident horror. The inexplicable 
 death of the elder sister, the warnings given to the 
 surviving girl, the peculiar whistle in the night, the 
 clanging sound of metal, the strange discoveries 
 
 1 He is seen again, to be sure, in The Final Problem, but 
 only in a casual way, having no " speaking part." 
 
276 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 made by Holmes, and then that nerve-racking vigil 
 in the blackness of midnight with the hideous reve- 
 lation at the end of it — ^I know of nothing in fiction 
 of this genre which possesses an interest so absorb- 
 ingly intense. 
 
 Of a different character is The Naval Treaty, 
 which I place next to The SpecMed Band in merit 
 as a story. This tale aiFords a good example of 
 the method by which the circumstances of a mys- 
 terious event are set forth quite frankly and yet in 
 such a way that the perfectly simple and obvious 
 explanation never once occurs to you. The draft 
 of a secret naval treaty between England and Italy 
 Is to be copied by young Phelps, of the Bri'tish For- 
 eign Office, who is a near relative of Lord Hold- 
 hurst, the Foreign Minister. No one but Phelps 
 and Lord Holdhurst know of it. The reputation 
 of both these men is at stake, if the terms of the 
 trea'ty shall be discovered; and, moreover, serious 
 diplomatic complications will ensue. Phelps has re- 
 mained at his desk in the Foreign Office after every 
 one but the janitor has left, and then he begins to 
 make the required draft. Finding that it will keep 
 him later than he had expected, he goes downstairs 
 to ask the doorkeeper to get him a cup of coffee. 
 While he is giving the order, he hears a bell in his 
 room ring, and, rushing back again, he finds the 
 room empty and the treaty gone. Now, in the first 
 place, as no human being knew that the treaty was 
 
THE DETECTIVE STORY 277 
 
 there, and, in the second place, as the thief, instead 
 of stealing it and sneaking quietly away, rang the 
 bell to announce his presence, the problem seems on 
 the face of it insoluble; yet the explanation of it, 
 when it comes, is really the simplest and most nat- 
 ural thing in the world. Herein Doyle's plots dif- 
 fer utterly from Gaboriau's. Those of the French 
 writer are complex to a degree; those of Doyle are 
 simplicity itself. The reader is just as hopelessly 
 puzzled by them, but the solution, when it comes, 
 comes not as a mathematical demonstration, but as 
 a flash of light in a dark place — illumining, sur- 
 prising, delighting, all at once. 
 
 After the two stories just mentioned, I should 
 place, without attempting to assign them a definite 
 order of merit, Silver Blaze, The Resident Patient, 
 The Engineer's Thumb, The Boscombe Valley Mys- 
 tery, The Five Orange Pips, The Reigate Puzzle, 
 and The Final Problem. Three stories make too 
 strong a demand upon the reader's credulity. 
 These are, The Red Headed League, A Case of 
 Identity, and The Man with the Twisted Lip, yet 
 the first of them is none the less one of the most 
 absorbing interest. There is, indeed, not one story 
 in the whole cycle which does not contain many 
 touches that positively fascinate one by their in- 
 genuity and unexpectedness. 
 
 Doyle will sooner or later get the recognition 
 from the critics which he has already won from the 
 
278 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 reading public. His hold upon that public is an 
 extraordinary one. Many books of the day sell by 
 the hundreds of thousands, yet they are not talked 
 about and no one clamours for more from their au- 
 thors' pens. But in the case of the Sherlock Holmes 
 adventures, the public not only buys and reads, but 
 discusses them continually; and it has so strenu- 
 ously insisted upon having more that Dr. Doyle 
 has been obliged to yield to the demand. This com- 
 pliance has been most unfortunate for the author's 
 reputation. He has written not because he wished 
 to write, but because he was made to do so. Hence, 
 the later stories about Sherlock Holmes are feeble 
 trash with the exception of The Hownd of the Bas- 
 Jcervilles. Whatever is best in his studies of the 
 great detective will be found in the Adventures and 
 the Memoirs. The others will be forgotten, just as 
 Dred has been forgotten, while Uncle Tom's Cabin 
 is sure of immortality. But when the dross shall 
 have been purged away, there will remain a group 
 of stories so fascinating as to give their author the 
 highest rank among those who have attempted this 
 very interesting kind of fiction. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE 
 PRINTED PAGE 
 
XV 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 
 
 There used to be a perennially recurring gibe di- 
 rected against amateurs in writing, and especially 
 against women amateurs, to the effect that the 
 " copy " which they sent to editors was in the form 
 of manuscript written on both sides of the paper and 
 tied with a blue ribbon. In these days, and since the 
 invention of the typewriter, even amateurs know bet- 
 ter than to do a thing like that; yet neither they 
 nor many professional writers and makers of litera- 
 ture consider with sufficient care the value and the 
 very serious Importance of the external form In 
 which their thoughts, their narratives, and their 
 descriptions are laid before the editor and, after him, 
 the public. The subject is not a trifling one; and 
 an analysis of It and of some of the elementary prin- 
 ciples that underlie it Is well deserving of attention. 
 To go back to the very beginning, why is It bet- 
 ter, In submitting anything to an editor or to the 
 reader for a publishing house, to have it typewritten 
 rather than to send it in the form of manuscript? 
 Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred will answer 
 immediately : " Oh, because typewriting is easier to 
 
 Lj^ 
 
282 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 read than handwriting; and very likely an editor 
 will not trouble himself over a manuscript; whereas, 
 if it had been typewritten, he would be quite willing 
 to examine it." That theory has no truth in it, at 
 least according to the meaning which it is intended 
 to convey. An editor or a publisher's reader ex- 
 amines everything that is submitted to him; in the 
 first place, because it is his business to do so, and in 
 the second place, because he is always on the alert 
 for something original and striking, and he never 
 knows before reading it, whether even the roughest 
 scrawl may not contain something that is worth his 
 while. 
 
 The real advantage of the typewritten copy over 
 the manuscript is one that depends upon a principle 
 which Herbert Spencer was the first to notice care- 
 fully. This is the principle of the Economy of At- 
 tention, and its relation to the subject now under 
 discussion ought to be well weighed by everyone who 
 writes for publication. When this is done, the reason 
 will be plain why it is more advantageous for an au- 
 thor to have his copy read in a typewritten form 
 rather than in his own handwriting. In examining 
 any piece of literary work with intelligence and crit- 
 ical judgment, it is greatly to be desired that the 
 mind should not be distracted from the real task be- 
 fore it, and that it should be directed wholly to the 
 thought, the style, and the feeling of the writer, and 
 to nothing else whatever. Now, in reading a manu- 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 283 
 
 script in almost anyone's chirography, the mind can 
 not possibly concentrate its whole attention upon the 
 only things that really count. First of all, some lit- 
 tle time is needed to adjust one's eye to the ordinary 
 peculiarities of the writing ; and this, at the very out- 
 set, divides the attention and makes necessary a con- 
 scious effort which is unfavourable to concentrated 
 thought. Then, again, there are always special pe- 
 culiarities which occur and re-occur; and every time 
 that one of these is met, it checks to some extent the 
 current of thought and, if often repeated, results in 
 giving a blurred impression in place of an impression 
 that is clean-cut and distinct. Of course, when the 
 handwriting is very bad, this is all very much intensi- 
 fied; and it often happens that after the reader has 
 laid down the manuscript, he can remember very little 
 about its contents, because his attention has been so 
 greatly divided that he has really given the larger 
 part of it to the purely mechanical difficulties of 
 his task. 
 
 Yet there is something else which is less obvious 
 than what has just been described, though fully as 
 important. In reading manuscript, you necessarily 
 (and because of the reasons already mentioned) 
 read it line by line — sometimes almost word by word ; 
 whereas, if set forth in print, you get a certain per- 
 spective and a certain completeness as you read, so 
 that you see not only the isolated expressions and 
 the separate phrases, but also their relation to what 
 
284 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 goes before and to what comes immediately after. 
 In other words, you can easily criticise the writer's 
 sense of unity and harmony and proportion. 
 
 Reading anything in manuscript is like judging 
 an army by inspecting each soldier individually. 
 Reading a printed page is like seeing an army in the 
 field and watching its evolutions, which exhibit not 
 only the Individual soldiers, but the formation and 
 the inter-relation of companies, battalions, regiments, 
 and brigades. It is, indeed, impossible to judge ac- 
 curately any piece of literary work until you read 
 it with a perfect unconsciousness of everything that 
 is external to the writer's thought and to his expres- 
 sion of it. The typography, the mechanical means 
 by which thought and expression pass through the 
 eye into the brain, ought to be like a sheet of flaw- 
 less crystal, so clear that you can gaze through it 
 without ever being conscious that it is there. To my 
 mind, indeed, the innermost soul of any literary crea- 
 tion can never be seen in all its clarity and truth 
 until one views it through the medium of the printed 
 page, in which there must be absolutely nothing to 
 divide attention, to interrupt the thought, or to of- 
 fend one's sense of form. 
 
 This last remark inevitably opens up another 
 phase of the subject that I have been considering, 
 and it takes us into a wider and more interesting 
 field. In the printed page, apart from typographical 
 errors (which, as they are mere accidents, need not 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 285 
 
 be mentioned), what is it that may enter to divide 
 attention and to oifend our sense of form? And, 
 moreover, if the typographical arrangement can in- 
 terfere with one's pleasure and can do something to 
 mar the effect of what we read, may it not be possible, 
 on the other hand, that there are certain principles of 
 typography which if properly observed may augment 
 that pleasure and heighten the satisfaction of the 
 reader without his ever being conscious of the cause, 
 just as some of Mr. Swinburne's concealed allitera- 
 tions charm the ear and give to the lines a hidden har- 
 mony whose source we do not recognise until we come 
 to analyse the verses? Or, to put the question more 
 directly, can an author, by taking thought about the 
 typographical arrangement of his printed work, give 
 to that work a greater power to interest and attract 
 than it would possess were its arrangement left to the 
 mercies of the proof-reader and compositors who fol- 
 low blindly an " office system " ? 
 
 I think decidedly that he can. In fact, I would 
 go still further and say that while a really interest- 
 ing book can not be made dull nor a dull book in- 
 teresting, even by a psychological typographer, it 
 is entirely possible to print an interesting book in 
 such a way that at first sight it shall seem to be a 
 dull one, and in like manner to print a dull book in 
 such a way that at first sight it shall seem to be in- 
 teresting. Every one of us has many times picked 
 up a book and turned its pages over in a casual sort 
 
286 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 of fashion and then put it down with the remark: 
 " That looks like a tiresome book," or again, " That 
 book looks readable." How Is it that we come to 
 form such instinctive judgments as these? Why 
 does one book " look tiresome " and another seem to 
 be attractive? For either opinion there is always a 
 good and suiEcient reason, and it would be well if 
 authors, in their own interest, should try to learn 
 just what the reason is. 
 
 A book is like a human being. You meet a person 
 for the first time and your immediate impression of 
 him is necessarily based upon what is wholly super- 
 ficial. You judge him by his face, his manner, his 
 voice, and even by his clothes ; and you are attracted 
 or repelled by the combination of all these purely 
 extraneous attributes. Further acquaintance may 
 show that your first impression was incorrect. The 
 man whose eye is dull, whose manner is awkward, and 
 whose appearance is slovenly, may turn out to have 
 an interesting mind and a heart of gold. Another, 
 whose face attracts you, whose manners are perfect, 
 and whose personal appearance is immaculate, may 
 have an empty head or an evil heart. But just as 
 it would be better if all of us could possess not only 
 internal merit but external polish, so is it also with 
 any book. In what way, then, can the typography 
 of a printed page contribute to the reader's interest 
 without dividing his attention? There enter here 
 two principles, of which the first is the principle of 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 287 
 
 Variety, and the second the principle of Fitness. 
 Both of them in part subserve the principle of Econ- 
 omy of Attention. 
 
 The principle of Variety is first involved in the 
 division of the text Into paragraphs. This is the 
 initial step toward making the printed page take 
 on an interesting look. A solid unbroken mass of 
 words is of all things the most repellant to a person 
 who takes up a volume and looks it over; for here 
 solidity of appearance Is taken as sjraonymous with 
 heaviness and even dullness of content. This effect 
 is largely eliminated and the page Is noticeably light- 
 ened as soon as it is judiciously paragraphed. We 
 then feel that our author is not wearily pursuing a 
 single train of thought, but that he possesses the men- 
 tal mobility which allows him to shift his ground be- 
 fore he becomes monotonous. The division into para- 
 graphs, however, should be very carefully made, 
 and not in any arbitrary fashion ; since the perfect 
 paragraph contains the development of a single 
 idea, and It ought not to end until that development 
 has been fully rounded out. There is, however, al- 
 most always a slight transition In the thought as one 
 develops it, from one phase to another, and at this 
 point of transition a new paragraph may always 
 very properly begin. Too short paragraphs are 
 quite as bad as paragraphs that are too long; for 
 while the latter make the page seem heavy, the for- 
 mer make it seem scatterbrained and scrappy, as 
 
288 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 though the writer had dashed from one idea to an- 
 other without giving adequate treatment to any one 
 of them. This is a great defect in many of the books 
 that are printed in France, which sometimes com- 
 mence a new paragraph almost with every sentence. 
 I fancy that this practice began with the feuilleton- 
 istes of the Parisian journals, who are paid by the 
 line and who, in paragraphing liberally, eke out a 
 few more francs by splitting up their text without 
 any reference to unity or continuity. 
 
 In writing a novel, a solid paragraph at the begin- 
 ning is a bad thing. The reader has not as yet be- 
 come interested; and when he meets at the outset a 
 long piece of description or a diffuse preliminary ex- 
 planation, he feels that he is being compelled, as it 
 were, to work his way into the story and to submit to 
 a certain amount of boredom before his interest is 
 aroused. This is a terrible defect in Sir Walter 
 Scott's first novel, Waverley, wherein the real action 
 of the story does not commence until one reaches 
 the end of about forty pages of almost irrelevant 
 discourse. Scott's was a leisurely and easy-going 
 age, and the traditions of Mademoiselle de Scudery 
 still lingered in it. Were Waverley to appear to-day 
 for the first time, it is doubtful whether anyone 
 would ever have the patience to get far enough along 
 in it to discover that it is, after all, a work of genius. 
 The novel which commences with a conversation is 
 the novel which commences best. When you take 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 289 
 
 it up, you see that there is no preliminary penance 
 to be exacted of you, but that you can plunge at 
 once into the middle of the action ; whereas the long 
 introductory paragraph gives you the same feeling 
 that you have whenever you make a call and are 
 kept for half an hour waiting in the drawing-room, 
 with this additional disadvantage in the case of the 
 novel that you are not even aware in advance whether 
 the person on whom you are calling is one whom you 
 really care to see after all. 
 
 Variety and lightness are stiU further gained by 
 the judicious use of capital letters, of italics, of quo- 
 tation-marks, and sometimes (though sparingly) of 
 a line or two of verse, which requires the use of a 
 smaller type. Capital letters, of course, come in 
 mainly through the employment of proper names. 
 In novels and stories this, from the nature of the 
 case, adjusts itself. In other kinds of writing, how- 
 ever, as, for instance, in essays and exposition, the 
 author ought to bear the point in mind. Lest some- 
 one should say that this is an absurdly mechanical 
 way of looking at literary composition, I would point 
 out that the principle involved rests upon a very 
 sound psychological basis. Why, in an essay, for 
 example, does a page appear to be more readable 
 when it contains a number of words commencing with 
 capital letters .i* It is not merely because these let- 
 ters afford variety to the eye, but it is because they 
 indicate that the writer is not indulging in gener- 
 
290 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITEB-ATUEES 
 
 alities or in abstractions, but that be is giving con- 
 crete instances, illustrations, and examples — in other 
 words, that he is interesting. For in all writing, the 
 strongest effects are produced by the citation of 
 specific instances, since these come home with the 
 greatest force to the reader's mind — a principle laid 
 down by Horace when he said that the story-telling 
 Homer was a more effective teacher of moral philoso- 
 phy than was the abstract reasoner, Chrysippus. 
 
 Italics, here and there employed, afford another 
 very useful means of securing the effect of variety. 
 When used to indicate the title of a book, the name 
 of a ship, or the introduction of a foreign word 
 or phrase, they produce the impression of vivacity 
 and colour, and never fail to catch the eye as one 
 looks along the printed page. Quotation-marks 
 are even more valuable as a means to the same end. 
 They embody the suggestion of something piquant, 
 unexpected, or unusual, because they imply that the 
 writer has quoted something that is particularly 
 worth the attention of the reader. By all these de- 
 vices, therefore, a printed page may be transformed, 
 in appearance at least, from one that is characterless 
 and tiresome into one that has the outward indica- 
 tions of attractiveness and personality and interest. 
 
 Some may say, of course, that the principle of 
 Variety seems on the face of it quite contradictory 
 to the principle of Economy of Attention. Does not 
 variety itself imply an attention that is divided? 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 291 
 
 Hardly ; for the variety which interests and which is 
 an essential part of an impression as a whole is one 
 of the most powerful factors in riveting attention 
 upon the work in hand. Indeed, there are few things 
 more fatal than monotony to continuous and undi- 
 verted mental eiFort. Take down a volume of Lucre- 
 tius and read three pages of his poetry aloud. His 
 hexameters have the same majestic roll and cadence 
 that mark the later lines of Vergil ; but in Lucretius 
 this roll and cadence soon take on a certain sameness, 
 so that presently you discover that your thoughts are 
 wandering from his argument to other things, and 
 that you are conscious only of the sound. With the 
 hexameters of Vergil this is not the case, since he has 
 introduced into them the principle of Variety by 
 contriving with consummate art so many delicate 
 changes of rhythm, so many shiftings of the cjesura, 
 and so delightful a diversity in the division of his 
 lines, as to destroy monotony and thereby keep the 
 mind intent upon what he is saying, while the ear is 
 still ravished by his harmonies. 
 
 The principle of Fitness is the principle which 
 controls and subtly limits the principle of Variety, 
 and in doing so subserves, as I have said, the prin- 
 ciple of the Economy of Attention. Its essence is 
 good taste and a sensitive appreciation of what is 
 allowable. For, while variety is always to be sought, 
 it must be discreetly sought and in a way that will 
 gently stimulate the attention and not distract it. 
 
292 STUDIES IN SEVERAL' LITERATURES 
 
 For example, in the use of capital letters, apart 
 from proper names in the strictest definition of that 
 term, there are many words regarding which diversity 
 prevails. Shall we capitalise such titles as " Czar," 
 "Mikado," "King?" Yes, when they relate to a 
 specific czar, mikado or king, but not when they are 
 otherwise employed. In the first instance they are 
 truly proper names, and they bring to the mind a 
 distinctly personal and definite conception. Hence, 
 to capitalise them gives variety to the appearance of 
 the printed page, thus not only catching the atten- 
 tion of the reader, but retaining it ; whereas to print 
 " the czar," " the mikado " and so forth, since it is 
 not what one is looking for, gives us pause and 
 checks, if ever so slightly, the train of thought. 
 
 So with certain other words that stand out as im- 
 portant. There is a newspaper which I have in mind 
 that is guilty of such anomalies and crudities as 
 "Park row," "Maiden lane," "Grand street," 
 " War ofiice," and " Land league " — expressions in 
 which the last word is just as much a part of the 
 name as is the first — and also " dreibund," " treaty 
 of Paris," and " declaration of independence." 
 These last are quite as specific, as important and as 
 individual as the names of persons ; so that when you 
 find a neglect to capitalise them properly, you stop 
 for the moment in your reading, your thought wan- 
 ders from the subject, and you feel a little stirring 
 of resentment which puts you, half unconsciously, 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 293 
 
 out of sympathy with the writer. On the other hand, 
 to use capitals lavishly, as a German does and as 
 Carlyle did, is an affectation which equally offends 
 you ; for it also hinders mental concentration. 
 
 As to the use of inverted commas, or quotation- 
 marks, a whole treatise might be written; but the 
 general principles can be summed up briefly. The 
 misuse of quotation-marks is the surest sign of the 
 amateur in writing. It is the hall-mark of the liter- 
 ary novice. Apart from their principal function of 
 indicating actual quotations of what some one else 
 has said, quotation-marks may be made to serve two 
 distinct purposes. The first is the purpose of indi- 
 cating that the writer has employed a word or a 
 phrase that is unusual and of showing that he is per- 
 fectly aware of the fact. The unusual word or phrase 
 may be one that has just come into use and is not 
 generally known ; or it may embody an allusion that 
 is a bit abstruse ; or it may perhaps be just a bit un- 
 dignified. In the first two instances the quotation- 
 marks mean that the writer desires to avoid the re- 
 sponsibility of the quoted words. In the third in- 
 stance they explain that he is well aware that he is 
 unbending a little too much, and wishes to have it 
 known that he does not usually employ that sort of 
 diction. In all these cases they convey a tacit apol- 
 ogy. Now the literary amateur shows his amateur- 
 ishness by not knowing precisely what words and 
 phrases fall under these several heads. If he is the 
 
294 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 editor of a country newspaper, he will write (with 
 quotation-marks) of " the wee sma' hours " in which 
 the surprise party given to the village pastor termi- 
 nated; and he will describe the local tavern-keeper as 
 " our genial host." If he is a somewhat less rudi- 
 mentary person, he will perhaps quote such expres- 
 sions as " survival of the fittest " and " new woman " 
 and " vingtieme siecle," and " epoch-making." To 
 say that a thing is epoch-making is, of course, en- 
 tirely proper; but an experienced writer knows that 
 all cultivated men and women are now perfectly fa- 
 miliar with this importation from the German, and so 
 he would not dream of setting it off by quotation- 
 marks, because it is already naturalised in our every- 
 day vocabulary. 
 
 The second use of quotation-marks is to convey a 
 sort of contempt when one employs an expression 
 which is rather usual and by amateurs regarded as 
 allowable, but which the professional person wishes to 
 discredit. Such are the words " brainy," " talented," 
 " locate," and a host of others. Mr. E. L. Godkin 
 was a master of the art of making a current phrase 
 ridiculous by this typographical device. Such polit- 
 ical expressions as " point with pride," " jamming it 
 through," " visiting statesmen," " something equally 
 as good," " leading citizen " and " a friend to silver " 
 were so pilloried by him in this way that only an ama- 
 teur can now ever dream of using them with any seri- 
 ous intent. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PRINTED PAGE 295 
 
 A regard for the principle of Fitness will take all 
 these things into careful account and will never dis- 
 miss them as being of slight importance. Side by 
 side also with other typographical matters is the 
 question of punctuation, which most writers unwisely 
 leave wholly to the compositor and proof-reader in 
 the belief that punctuation is a purely mechanical 
 and formal thing for which there exist definite, rigid 
 rules that can be applied by any one. There never 
 was a more egregious error. There are rules for 
 punctuation as there are rules for painting and 
 rules for elocution ; but these rules are for the guid- 
 ance of the ignorant beginner In his earliest attempts. 
 They do not guide the finished artist or the consum- 
 mate orator. And so with punctuation. Its rules 
 are general rules, and at the best are only roughly 
 true. The higher punctuation has an unrecognised, 
 yet in its way an Important, share in aiding the per- 
 fect utterance of recorded thought. It rests wholly 
 upon psychological principles, since it is a device to 
 make the writer's meaning absolutely unmistakable, 
 and hence it, too, is an expression of his person- 
 ality. 
 
 The summing up of the whole subject is that the 
 arrangement, the typographical system, and the 
 punctuation of the printed page, if studied carefully 
 and with discrimination, can do very much for any 
 author. A knowledge of them can not make the 
 fortune of a book that ought to live, nor can It save 
 
296 STUDIES IN SEVERAL LITERATURES 
 
 a book that ought to die. But It may secure for the 
 first a quicker recognition, and it may sometimes 
 preserve the latter from that severest condemnation 
 of the critic which takes the form of an impenetrable 
 silence.