LITERATURE AND LIFE

by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS:

 Man of Letters in Business Confessions of a Summer Colonist The Young Contributor Last Days in a Dutch Hotel Anomalies of the Short Story Spanish Prisoners of War American Literary Centers Standard Household Effect Co. Notes of a Vanished Summer

 Short Stories and Essays: Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"

 Literary Passions Criticism and Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidaritywhich the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writerwishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that theyhave every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance toany central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makeshis way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something likethis relation and this allegiance. 

For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is hereon his defence, I have never been able to see much difference betweenwhat seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did notfind life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quitesure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seenreveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe itpleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it willdo this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at firstglance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly Ilove it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or asmany ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is somethingread, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is likelife, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be nooffence in it for which its truth will not make me amends. 

Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to whichis which. But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I havefound, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope willlast till I forget my letters. 

 "So was it when my life began; So is it, now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old. "

It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky withoutsome bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimesnot; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought ofthem than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted withglasses which would at least have helped their vision. 

As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I supposetheir bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. "The Man ofLetters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in theMay of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasantresort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; "AmericanLiterary Centres, " "American Literature in Exile, " "Puritanism inAmerican Fiction, " "Politics of American Authors, " were, with three orfour other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of theLondon Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the Britishunderstanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsoleteactuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from anextinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper'sWeekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenthcentury. Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel, " whichwas written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhapsbecause I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personallyrecognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer-memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper'sMonthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever-delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor'sRelations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth'sCompanion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats uponthe too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners. 

So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which maypersist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well-meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at leastattests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literaryproduction in time and space. From the beginning the journalist'sindependence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained withme, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serriedvolumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the librarytable, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summerhotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without adictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the runningbrooks outside. W. D. HOWELLS. 

THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS

I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception, and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, societyshould provide him with work and warrant him a living. I do not thinkany man ought to live by an art. A man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earnedhis daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is aninstinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusionof our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front withthe world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows verywell that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the workwhich cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading themarriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying thelast office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justiceitself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that isand must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his arthe cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hitits fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterlytrue. He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for hiswares. Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to makingsomething that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees themstill, with its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise, but Iwould rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write ofLiterature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying that Business isthe opprobrium of Literature. 

I. 

Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of thearts. It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves asthe other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it isthe mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all. It cannotawaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to expressprecisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it saysnothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much orlittle, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greaterthan when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor hasmodelled a statue to order. These are artists less articulate and lessintimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they areless personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson andLongfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the mostmystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. Theysubmitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does notjustify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions ofhucksters because they are imposed upon poets. If it will serve to makemy meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossedin love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife orchild. He pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears ofsacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundreddollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice. It isperfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it isperfectly true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his emotionsto pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does notpropose to pay his bills for him. Yet, and at the end of the ends, theunsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds itrepulsive, finds it shabby. Somehow he knows that if our hucksteringcivilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness ofthings, the poet's song would have been given to the world, and the poetwould have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any manshould be who does the duty that every man owes it. 

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art isso strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwiserefuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noblepride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience. But Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach hisreaders; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which herhusband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of protest againstbusiness in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis. I know of no others; but there may be many that I am culpably ignorantof. Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the fact thatLiterature is Business as well as Art, and almost as soon. At presentbusiness is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together withthat chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing of the Man of Letters as a Man ofBusiness I shall attract far more readers than I should in writing of himas an Artist. Besides, as an artist he has been done a great dealalready; and a commercial state like ours has really more concern in himas a business man. Perhaps it may sometime be different; I do notbelieve it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long wayoff. 

II. 

In the mean time I confidently appeal to the reader's imagination withthe fact that there are several men of letters among us who are such goodmen of business that they can command a hundred dollars a thousand wordsfor all they write. It is easy to write a thousand words a day, and, supposing one of these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that hisnet earnings during the year would come to some such sum as the Presidentof the United States gets for doing far less work of a much moreperishable sort. If the man of letters were wholly a business man, thisis what would happen; he would make his forty or fifty thousand dollars ayear, and be able to consort with bank presidents, and railroadofficials, and rich tradesmen, and other flowers of our plutocracy onequal terms. But, unfortunately, from a business point of view, he isalso an artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight thepublic disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. "No rose bloomsright along, " as the English boys at Oxford made an American collegiansay in a theme which they imagined for him in his national parlance; andthe man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons whenhe cannot blossom. Very often it shall happen that his mind will liefallow between novels or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; whenthe suggestions of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essaysor articles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, orshall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which he might sellindeed, but which it would not be good business for him to put on themarket. But supposing him to be a very diligent and continuous worker, and so happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights him and bears himalong, he may please himself so ill with the result of his labors that hecan do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day's work, aweek's work, a month's work. I know one man of letters who wrote to-dayand tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer. But even if part of themistaken work may be saved, because it is good work out of place, and notintrinsically bad, the task of reconstruction wants almost as much timeas the production; and then, when all seems done, comes the anxious andendless process of revision. These drawbacks reduce the earning capacityof what I may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that anauthor whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation iscommensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not transcendthem, shall have the income, say, of a rising young physician, known to afew people in a subordinate city. 

In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of anation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can establish theman of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man, after all. He must still have a low rank among practical people; and hewill be regarded by the great mass of Americans as perhaps a little off, a little funny, a little soft! Perhaps not; and yet I would rather nothave a consensus of public opinion on the question; I think I am morecomfortable without it. 

III. 

There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the businessside, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and, so farfrom having been protected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety yearsafter the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of stolengoods. It is true that we now have the international copyright law atlast, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but literaryproperty has only forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, andif it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors andpunish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon anyother kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suitagainst them, and recover damages, if he can. This may be right enoughin itself; but I think, then, that all property should be defended bycivil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of privatetenure. The Constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, butthe law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literaryindustry. So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the bestbusiness talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keephis present low grade among business men. 

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standingat all. I may say that it is only since the Civil War that literaturehas become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and verygood ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not rememberany of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and weall know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were either menof fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomesapart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out withpublic offices; one need not go over their names or classify them. Someof them must have made money by their books, but I question whether anyone could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books broughthim. No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could notrecognize as a work of literature. But many authors live now, and liveprettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writingsto the magazines. They do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to makethemselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of the case, beyond their fondest dreamsof pecuniary affluence and social splendor. Perhaps they do not want thechief seats in the synagogue; it is certain they do not get them. Still, they do very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes thatwould seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work withtheir hands for a living--when they can get the work. Their incomes aremainly from serial publication in the different magazines; and theprosperity of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as aclass, was wholly unknown among us before the Civil War. It is not onlythe famous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the muchlarger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to theeditors, and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well akind of acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get reprintedfrom the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readerswho say they do not read serials. The multitude of these is not great, and if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a muchmore imbittered man than he now generally is. But he understandsperfectly well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; thereturn from that he may count as so much money found in the road--a fewhundreds, a very few thousands, at the most, unless he is the author ofan historical romance. 

IV. 

I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are absolutely asgreat as they were earlier in the century, in any of the English-speakingcountries; relatively they are nothing like as great. Scott had fortythousand dollars for 'Woodstock, ' which was not a very large novel, andwas by no means one of his best; and forty thousand dollars then had atleast the purchasing power of sixty thousand now. Moore had threethousand guineas for 'Lalla Rookh, ' but what publisher would be rashenough to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the masterpiece of a minorpoet now? The book, except in very rare instances, makes nothing likethe return to the author that the magazine makes, and there are fewleading authors who find their account in that form of publication. Those who do, those who sell the most widely in book form, are often notat all desired by editors; with difficulty they get a serial accepted byany principal magazine. On the other hand, there are authors whosebooks, compared with those of the popular favorites, do not sell, and yetthey are eagerly sought for by editors; they are paid the highest prices, and nothing that they offer is refused. These are literary artists; andit ought to be plain from what I am saying that in belles-lettres, atleast, most of the best literature now first sees the light in themagazines, and most of the second-best appears first in book form. Theold-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in notreading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake, andsimply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that theycannot enjoy the best. Of course, this is true mainly, if not merely, ofbelles-lettres; history, science, politics, metaphysics, in spite of themany excellent articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to becalled various emergent occasions, are still to be found at their best inbooks. The most monumental example of literature, at once light andgood, which has first reached the public in book form is in the differentpublications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens has of late turned to themagazines too, and now takes their mint-mark before he passes intogeneral circulation. All this may change again, but at present themagazines--we have no longer any reviews form the most direct approach tothat part of our reading public which likes the highest things inliterary art. Their readers, if we may judge from the quality of theliterature they get, are more refined than the book readers in ourcommunity; and their taste has no doubt been cultivated by that of thedisciplined and experienced editors. So far as I have known these, theyare men of aesthetic conscience and of generous sympathy. They havetheir preferences in the different kinds, and they have their theory ofwhat kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but they exercisetheir selective function with the wish to give them the best things theycan. I do not know one of them--and it has been, my good fortune to knowthem nearly all--who would print a wholly inferior thing for the sake ofan inferior class of readers, though they may sometimes decline a goodthing because for one reason or another, they believe it would not beliked. Still, even this does not often happen; they would rather chancethe good thing they doubted of than underrate their readers' judgment. 

The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine hasachieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then with the bestreading public. Many factitious and fallacious literary reputations havebeen made through books, but very few have been made through themagazines, which are not only the best means of living, but of outliving, with the author; they are both bread and fame to him. If I insist alittle upon the high office which this modern form of publication fulfilsin the literary world, it is because I am impatient of the antiquated andignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephemeral. They areephemeral in form, but in substance they are not ephemeral, and what isbest in them awaits its resurrection in the book, which, as the firstform, is so often a lasting death. An interesting proof of the value ofthe magazine to literature is the fact that a good novel will often havewider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial. 

V. 

Under the 'regime' of the great literary periodicals the prosperity ofliterary men would be much greater than it actually is if the magazineswere altogether literary. But they are not, and this is one reason whyliterature is still the hungriest of the professions. Two-thirds of themagazines are made up of material which, however excellent, is withoutliterary quality. Very probably this is because even the highest classof readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love of pureliterature, which seems to have been growing less and less in allclasses. I say seems, because there are really no means of ascertainingthe fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making theirperiodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and thetimely topics which I will call contemporanics. But, however that maybe, their efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of literaryindustry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled by theunexampled prosperity of their periodicals. They pay very well indeedfor literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand words forthe work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty dollars a thousandwords for that of the most famous, or the most popular, if there is adifference between fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, wantenough literature to justify the best business talent in devoting itselfto belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel, or light essays; business talent can do far better in dry goods, groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like. I do notthink there is any danger of a ruinous competition from it in the fieldwhich, though narrow, seems so rich to us poor fellows, whose businesstalent is small, at the best. 

The most of the material contributed to the magazines is the subject ofagreement between the editor and the author; it is either suggested bythe author or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in anycase the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is no longer the customfor a well-known contributor to leave the payment to the justice or thegenerosity of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, norever a wise thing. Usually, the price is so much a thousand words, atruly odious method of computing literary value, and one well calculatedto make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his art at all. It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a square inch, or asculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the pound. But it is acustom that you cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most writersgladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand words is large enough. The sale to the editor means the sale of the serial rights only, but ifthe publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, therepublication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless thereis an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are anotheraffair. Formerly something more could be got for the author by thesimultaneous appearance of his work in an English magazine; but now thegreat American magazines, which pay far higher prices than any others inthe world, have a circulation in England so much exceeding that of anyEnglish periodical that the simultaneous publication can no longer bearranged for from this side, though I believe it is still done here fromthe other side. 

VI. 

I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard tothe magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every way improved foryoung authors. The magazines all maintain a staff for the carefulexamination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print hasbeen engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use isvery small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty inthe course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very good to beaccepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed. The pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one, two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the young writerhas not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels inthe courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, thebook is his immediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have triedto hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crudeenough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worsestill, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if notindecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not meansuccess with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which doesnot personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which theyoung author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it hasfound a publisher. It is human nature, as competition has deformed humannature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks, andhe possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own expense, and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing it. Ifnot that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotypeplates, and take fifteen per cent. Of the price of the book; or if thiswill not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he iscommonly only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offershim ten per cent. Of the retail price after the first thousand copieshave been sold. But if he fully believes in the book, he will give tenper cent. From the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publicationhimself. The book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and thepublisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundredcopies. Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased is aquestion, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself toblame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-fivedollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and try to find worksomewhere at five dollars a week. The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the author, and until a book has sold two thousandcopies the division is fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses ofmanufacturing have been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself;there is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to bemet, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher. The author has no right to complain of this, in the case of his firstbook, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at all. If itsucceeds, he has himself to blame for making the same arrangement for hissecond or third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which ispractically the same thing. It will be business for the publisher totake advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault;but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very oftennot do so. 

At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the author'sgains by subscription publication, and one very well-known Americanauthor prospered fabulously in that way. The percentage offered by thesubscription houses was only about half as much as that paid by thetrade, but the sales were so much greater that the author could very wellafford to take it. Where the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold ahundred; or at least he did so in the case of Mark Twain's books; and weall thought it reasonable he could do so with ours. Such of us as madeexperiment of him, however, found the facts illogical. No book ofliterary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens'sbooks, and I think these went because the subscription public never knewwhat good literature they were. This sort of readers, or buyers, were soused to getting something worthless for their money that they would notspend it for artistic fiction, or, indeed, for any fiction at all exceptMr. Clemens's, which they probably supposed bad. Some good books oftravel had a measurable success through the book-agents, but not at allthe success that had been hoped for; and I believe now the subscriptiontrade again publishes only compilations, or such works as owe more to theskill of the editor than the art of the writer. Mr. Clemens himself nolonger offers his books to the public in that way. 

It is not common, I think, in this country, to publish on the half-profits system, but it is very common in England, where, owing probablyto the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy outline to everyprospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring. One of my own early bookswas published there on these terms, which I accepted with the insensatejoy of the young author in getting any terms from a publisher. The booksold, sold every copy of the small first edition, and in due time thepublisher's statement came. I did not think my half of the profits wasvery great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost hadbeen charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture had beenmade to pay the expenses of composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies. The wonder ought to havebeen that there was anything at all coming to me, but I was young andgreedy then, and I really thought there ought to have been more. I wasdisappointed, but I made the best of it, of course, and took the accountto the junior partner of the house which employed me, and said that Ishould like to draw on him for the sum due me from the London publishers. He said, Certainly; but after a glance at the account he smiled and saidhe supposed I knew how much the sum was? I answered, Yes; it was elevenpounds nine shillings, was not it? But I owned at the same time that Inever was good at figures, and that I found English money peculiarlybaffling. He laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings andninepence. In fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies, there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent. Commission on sales, which reduced my half from pounds to shillings, andhandsomely increased the publisher's half in proportion. I do not nowdispute the justice of the charge. It was not the fault of the half-profits system; it was the fault of the glad young author who did notdistinctly inform himself of its mysterious nature in agreeing to it, andhad only to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed. 

But there is always something disappointing in the accounts ofpublishers, which I fancy is because authors are strangely constituted, rather than because publishers are so. I will confess that I have suchinordinate expectations of the sale of my books, which I hope I thinkmodestly of, that the sales reported to me never seem great enough. Thecopyright due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably mean, and I feel impoverished for several days after I get it. But, then, Iought to add that my balance in the bank is always much less than I havesupposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back to me, have theair of having been in a conspiracy to betray me. 

No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves inbusiness, that the distress we feel from our publisher's accounts issimply idiopathic; and I for one wish to bear my witness to the constantgood faith and uprightness of publishers. It is supposed that becausethey have the affair altogether in their hands they are apt to takeadvantage in it; but this does not follow, and as a matter of fact theyhave the affair no more in their own hands than any other business manyou have an open account with. There is nothing to prevent you fromlooking at their books, except your own innermost belief and fear thattheir books are correct, and that your literature has brought you solittle because it has sold so little. 

The author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the contrary, especially if he has written a book that has set every one talking, because it is of a vital interest. It may be of a vital interest, without being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it may be thekind of book that they are content to know at second hand; there are suchfatal books; but hearing so much, and reading so much about it, theauthor cannot help hoping that it has sold much more than the publishersays. The publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and the author hadbetter put away the comforting question of his integrity. 

The English writers seem largely to suspect their publishers; but Ibelieve that American authors, when not flown with flattering reviews, as largely trust theirs. Of course there are rogues in every walk oflife. I will not say that I ever personally met them in the flowerypaths of literature, but I have heard of other people meeting them there, just as I have heard of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe inboth the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses. I suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers, but, in the case of our books that do not sell, I am afraid that it isthe graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame thanthe wickedest of the publishers. It is true that publishers will drive ahard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing tohinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or whenhe must; and it is to be said of the publisher that he is always morewilling to abide by the bargain when it is made than the author is;perhaps because he has the best of it. But he has not always the best ofit; I have known publishers too generous to take advantage of theinnocence of authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do with anyrace less diffident than authors, they would have won a repute forunselfishness that they do now now enjoy. It is certain that in the longperiod when we flew the black flag of piracy there were many among ourcorsairs on the high seas of literature who paid a fair price for thestranger craft they seized; still oftener they removed the cargo andreleased their capture with several weeks' provision; and although therewas undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and scuttling, stillI feel sure that there was less of it than there would have been in anyother line of business released to the unrestricted plunder of theneighbor. There was for a long time even a comity among these amiablebuccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with each other, and so wereenabled to pay over to their victims some portion of the profit fromtheir stolen goods. Of all business men publishers are probably the mostfaithful and honorable, and are only surpassed in virtue when men ofletters turn business men. 

VII. 

Publishers have their little theories, their little superstitions, andtheir blind faith in the great god Chance which we all worship. Thesethings lead them into temptation and adversity, but they seem to dofairly well as business men, even in their own behalf. They do not makeabove the usual ninety-five per cent. Of failures, and more publishersthan authors get rich. 

Some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share together. One of these is that it is best to keep your books all in the hands ofone publisher if you can, because then he can give them more attentionand sell more of them. But my own experience is that when my books werein the hands of three publishers they sold quite as well as when one hadthem; and a fellow-author whom I approached in question of this venerablebelief laughed at it. This bold heretic held that it was best to giveeach new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all hisenergies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisherrested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that thefresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones. I never knew this to happen; and I must class it with the superstitionsof the trade. It may be so in other and more constant countries, but inour fickle republic each last book has to fight its own way to publicfavor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage. Of course this isstating it rather largely, and the truth will be found inside rather thanoutside of my statement; but there is at least truth enough in it to givethe young author pause. While one is preparing to sell his basket ofglass, he may as well ask himself whether it is better to part with allto one dealer or not; and if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginarycustomer who asks the favor of taking the entire stock, that will be hisfault, and not the fault of the customer. 

However, the most important question of all with the man of letters as aman of business is what kind of book will sell the best of itself, because, at the end of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell atall; kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal of culture, still goes by favor, and though innumerable generations of horses havebeen led to the water, not one horse has yet been made to drink. Withthe best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a bookinto acceptance. Advertising will not avail, and reviewing isnotoriously futile. If the book does not strike the popular fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no means be aprofound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten invain. The book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and, worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit. The secret ofthis, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in theawful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some luckychance. To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the unworthiest;and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of business, counselthe young author to do it. The best that you can do is to write the bookthat it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart andsoul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can toreach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That, and that alone, is good business for a man of letters. 

The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States thefate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is the women with us whohave the most leisure, and they read the most books. They are far bettereducated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if not theirminds, are more cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our womenread the books; the more refined among them read the magazines. If theydo not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them, and itis useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal fromthem. To go from them to the men would be going from a higher to a lowercourt, which would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the thingwere possible. As I say, the author of light literature, and often theauthor of solid literature, must resign himself to obscurity unless theladies choose to recognize him. Yet it would be impossible to forecasttheir favor for this kind or that. Who could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself? We must strive blindly for it, and hopesomehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we must remember atthe same time that it is not the ladies' man who is the favorite of theladies. 

There are, of course, a few, a very few, of our greatest authors who havestriven forward to the first place in our Valhalla without the help ofthe largest reading-class among us; but I should say that these werechiefly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any warmliking, and who have generally with us come up through the newspapers, and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers. They have becomeliterary men, as it were, without the newspaper readers' knowing it; butthose who have approached literature from another direction have won famein it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them; and then madetheir husbands and fathers read them. Perhaps, then, and as a matter ofbusiness, it would be well for a serious author, when he finds that he isnot pleasing the women, and probably never will please them, to turnhumorous author, and aim at the countenance of the men. Except as ahumorist he certainly never will get it, for your American, when he isnot making money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to doit. 

VIII

I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who approachesliterature through journalism is not as fine and high a literary man asthe author who comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; I havenot the least notion of condemning myself by any such judgment. But Ithink it is pretty certain that fewer and fewer authors are turning fromjournalism to literature, though the 'entente cordiale' between the twoprofessions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as mistakenin this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists wouldhave been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that thekindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of theself-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When anauthor is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse toglory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment abouthim; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and theywould willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise broughtto grief and shame. They are apt to gird at him for his unhallowedgains, and they would be quite right in this if they proposed any way forhim to live without them; as I have allowed at the outset, the gains areunhallowed. Apparently it is unseemly for two or three authors to bemaking half as much by their pens as popular ministers often receive insalary; the public is used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of theclergy, and at least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher canalways get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between theten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel and the five pounds Miltongot for his epic. I have always thought Milton was paid too little, butI will own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes tothat. Again I say that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame tothe art if not to the artist; but as yet there is no means of theartist's living otherwise and continuing an artist. 

The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the newspaper man, generally speaking. I have often thought with amazement of the kindnessshown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and of the help solavishly and freely given to rising and even risen authors. To put itcoarsely, brutally, I do not suppose that any other business receives somuch gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is, enormous, thespace given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to timeupon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimesdoubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the editorsgave them, but I have always said this under my breath, and I havethankfully taken my share of the common bounty. A curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity seems to have very little to dowith an author's popularity, though ever so much with his notoriety. Some of those strange subterranean fellows who never come to the surfacein the newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their horsesand yachts and country seats, while immodest merit is left to get abouton foot and look up summer-board at the cheaper hotels. That is probablyright, or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, likemillionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether thenewspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their actualgenerosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune, howevermuch they help one to fame. Such a question is almost too dreadful, and, though I have asked it, I will not attempt to answer it. I would muchrather consider the question whether, if the newspapers can make anauthor, they can also unmake him, and I feel pretty safe in saying that Ido not think they can. The Afreet, once out of the bottle, can never becoaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers havemade cannot be unmade by the newspapers. Perhaps he could if they wouldlet him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor, when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with thenewspapers. They consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills theland, and they keep visiting him there with an uproar which attracts moreand more notice to him. An author who has long enjoyed their favorsuddenly and rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions oncertain matters of literary taste, say. For the space of five or sixyears he is denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that oughtto convince him there is something wrong. If he thinks it is hiscensors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constancy, whileridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation, andpersonal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, forinstance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form offiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school ofTolstoy, Tourgunief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a moment'scomparison with the school of Rider Haggard. All this ought certainly tounmake the author in question, but this is not really the effect. Slowlybut surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishingone of his wicked opinions, or in any wise showing himself repentant, remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the oldkindness--not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, butcertainly to as much of it as he merits. 

I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case; believe thatit is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the press. Infact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be better business, for him to keep it altogether out of his mind. There is only one whom hecan safely try to please, and that is himself. If he does this he willvery probably please other people; but if he does not please himself hemay be sure that he will not please them; the book which he has notenjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. Still, I would not have himattach too little consequence to the influence of the press. I shouldsay, let him take the celebrity it gives him gratefully but not tooseriously; let him reflect that he is often the necessity rather than theideal of the paragrapher, and that the notoriety the journalists bestowupon him is not the measure of their acquaintance with his work, far lesshis meaning. They are good fellows, those hard-pushed, poor fellows ofthe press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly orunfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal thanknowledge in it. 

IX. 

There are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but nowapparently no longer desired by magazine editors, who ought to know whattheir readers desire. Among these is the travel sketch, to me a veryagreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline. There aresome reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and apossible surfeit. Travel itself has become so universal that everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has no longer thecharm of strangeness. We do not think the Old World either so romanticor so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an instinctive perceptionof this altered mood writers no longer appeal to our sentiment or ourhumor with sketches of outlandish people and places. Of course, this canhold true only in a general way; the thing is still done, but not nearlyso much done as formerly. When one thinks of the long line of Americanwriters who have greatly pleased in this sort, and who even got theirfirst fame in it, one must grieve to see it obsolescent. Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville, Ross Browne, Warner, Ik Marvell, Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Hay, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C. W. Stoddard, Mark Twain, and many others whose names will not cometo me at the moment, have in their several ways richly contributed to ourpleasure in it; but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor withan editor in a sketch of travel or a study of foreign manners andcustoms; his work would have to be of the most signal importance andbrilliancy to overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been donealready; and I believe that a publisher, if offered a book of suchthings, would look at it askance and plead the well-known quiet of thetrade. Still, I may be mistaken. 

I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary species--namely, the light essay. We have essays enough and to spare of certainsoberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and deal withconditions; but the kind that I mean, the slightly humorous, gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once did. I donot know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his readers' frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom find them in themagazines. I certainly do not believe that if any one were now to writeessays such as Warner's Backlog Studies, an editor would refuse them; andperhaps nobody really writes them. Nobody seems to write the sort thatColonel Higginson formerly contributed to the periodicals, or such asEmerson wrote. Without a great name behind it, I am afraid that a volumeof essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a publicin the magazines. There are, of course, instances to the contrary, butthey are not so many or so striking as to make me think that the essaycould be offered as a good opening for business talent. 

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid inthe magazines than it is now. I must say, too, that I think the qualityof the minor poetry of our day is better than that of twenty-five orthirty years ago. I could name half a score of young poets whose workfrom time to time gives me great pleasure, by the reality of its feelingand the delicate perfection of its art, but I will not name them, forfear of passing over half a score of others equally meritorious. We havecertainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poetsthemselves have to be so, and I do not think that even in the short storyour younger writers are doing better work than they are doing in theslighter forms of verse. Yet the notion of inviting business talent intothis field would be as preposterous as that of asking it to devote itselfto the essay. What book of verse by a recent poet, if we except somesuch peculiarly gifted poet as Mr. Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any profit to the author? Of course, it would be rathermore offensive and ridiculous that it should do so than that any otherform of literary art should do so; and yet there is no more provision inour economic system for the support of the poet apart from his poems thanthere is for the support of the novelist apart from his novel. One couldnot make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but itis a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men, and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have usuallybeen poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their devotion to acalling which is so seldom an election. 

To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up poetthan to set up historian. There is no outlay for copying documents, orvisiting libraries, or buying books. In fact, except as historian, theman of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of the expenses ofother men of business, but none of the expenses of other artists. He hasno such outlay to make for materials, or models, or studio rent as thepainter or the sculptor has, and his income, such as it is, is immediate. If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the first thing he offers, ashe very well may, it is as well with him as with other men after longyears of apprenticeship. Although he will always be the better for anapprenticeship, and the longer apprenticeship the better, he maypractically need none at all. Such are the strange conditions of hisacceptance with the public, that he may please better without it thanwith it. An author's first book is too often not only his luckiest, butreally his best; it has a brightness that dies out under the school heputs himself to, but a painter or a sculptor is only the gainer by allthe school he can give himself. 

X. 

In view of this fact it becomes again very hard to establish the author'sstatus in the business world, and at moments I have grave questionwhether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist. There is, ofcourse, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any other sortof literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some measure ofpreparation. A young writer may produce a brilliant and very perfectromance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but inthe field of realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel ofmanners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the outset. Forthis work he needs experience and observation, not so much of others asof himself, for ultimately his characters will all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character with such thoroughness andaccuracy as he can acquire only through his own heart. A man remains ina measure strange to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources ofnovelty in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give itfreshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and better. Buta young writer and an untrained writer has not yet begun to be acquaintedeven with the lives of other men. The world around him remains a secretas well as the world within him, and both unfold themselvessimultaneously to that experience of joy and sorrow that can come onlywith the lapse of time. Until he is well on towards forty, he willhardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he mayhave amassed them. The novelist, then, is a man of letters who is like aman of business in the necessity of preparation for his calling, thoughhe does not pay store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase is. He alone among men of letters may look forward to thatsort of continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligencein other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade, and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. It isnot a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief thatit does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines ofbusiness. Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man whogets a hundred dollars a thousand words or whose book sells five hundredthousand copies or less. That is a fact appreciable to business, and theman of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably feel that his placein our civilization, though he may owe it to the women who form the greatmass of his readers, has something of the character of a vested interestin the eyes of men. There is, indeed, as yet no conspiracy law whichwill avenge the attempt to injure him in his business. A critic, or adark conjuration of critics, may damage him at will and to the extent oftheir power, and he has no recourse but to write better books, or worse. The law will do nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might bepreached with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on thequestion of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism. Still the market forhis wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literarywares, and the prices are better. The historian, who is a kind ofinferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of thenovelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for theessayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they arenowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewerswho get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the pointof a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to seethem doing it. Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the bestwriters of fiction, who are most in demand with the magazines, probablyget nearly as much money for their work as the inferior novelists whooutsell them by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to theinnumerable multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers offiction in book form. I think they earn their money, but if I did notthink all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as theyget, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those whodid not. 

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has noobjective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so expressit. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, may beworth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to anothermood of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it tobe fairly marketed? All people must be fed, and all people must beclothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelterare things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have amarket price put upon them. But there is no such positive and obviousnecessity, I am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort offiction. The sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to thecircus and the variety theatre in the show-business seems essential tothe spiritual health of the masses, but the most cultivated of theclasses can get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. Thisis a great pity, and I should be-very willing that readers might feelsomething like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of their finerfiction; but apparently they never do. Their dumb and passive need isapt only to manifest itself negatively, or in the form of weariness ofthis author or that. The publisher of books can ascertain the factthrough the declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of the best writers, must feel the market with amuch more delicate touch. Sometimes it may be years before he cansatisfy himself that his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining forJones; even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he isby no means safe in cutting down Smith's price and putting up Jones's. With the best will in the world to pay justly, he cannot. Smith, who hasbeen boring his readers to death for a year, may write tomorrow a thingthat will please them so much that he will at once be a prime favoriteagain; and Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something souncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in themagazine. The only thing that gives either writer positive value is hisacceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to monthwholly uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion, like thisstyle of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last spring the dresses were allmade with lace berthas, and Smith was read; this year the butterfly capesare worn, and Jones is the favorite author. Who shall forecast the falland winter modes?

XI. 

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the publisher, alwaysthe contributor rather than the editor, whom I am concerned for. I studythe difficulties of the publisher and editor only because they involvethe author and the contributor; if they did not, I will not say with howhard a heart I should turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizingthe business conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the purveyors of it. 

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters everam business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is, exceptin those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is thepublisher as well as the author of his books. Then he puts something onthe market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business. Butotherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass ofwage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing doneor the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not bymarketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it. Thequality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of thecase; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a working-man, and isunder the rule that governs the working-man's life. If he is sick orsad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy, and will not, then he earnsnothing. He cannot delegate his business to a clerk or a manager; itwill not go on while he is sleeping. The wage he can command dependsstrictly upon his skill and diligence. 

I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and proud to beof those who eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows, and not thesweat of other men's brows; I think my bread is the sweeter for it. Inthe mean time, I have no blame for business men; they are no more of thecondition of things than we working-men are; they did no more to cause itor create it; but I would rather be in my place than in theirs, and Iwish that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that economicallythey are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. It ought to beour glory that we produce something, that we bring into the worldsomething that was not choately there before; that at least we fashion orshape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that binds us to allthe toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling chain, but as amystic bond also uniting us to Him who works hitherto and evermore. I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-working-men weartists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows. I like tolook the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are oftenterrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and I will not pretend, inthis light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for themasses, or so much. Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of theclasses. Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and thenthey fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual dulnesswith some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure that bruisesand abashes. In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is theless an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms hisart. We all know that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than thefigure which is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, andconceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. In the social world, aswell as in the business world, the artist is anomalous, in the actualconditions, and he is perhaps a little ridiculous. 

Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do wellto regard himself as in a transition state. He is really of the masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yetthe common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at all. He isapparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen to him; heoften amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease among them;whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of their kind. Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as thereare masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannotconsort with. The prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh theaccomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has beendivinely planted in the human soul. 

CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST

The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down Eastcoast where I have been passing the last three months, and with eachloath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant. A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go alreadybegins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form ofwords which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; someshadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or changeshould destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I shouldnever come back to it. Perhaps others in the distant future may turn toit for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristicphases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions ofour own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange. 

I. 

In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as thevisible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fireand a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American ofall American things is the least fitted among them to survive from thepresent to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soonbe a "portion and parcel" of our extremely forgetful past. 

It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one might say that lastyear it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogetherdifferent. In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when therudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, andvulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvandistinction. 

The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is the seven-o'clocksupper. Every one, in hotel or in cottage, dines between one and two, and no less scrupulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists whosup at half-past seven. At this function, which is our chief socialevent, it is 'de rigueur' for the men not to dress, and they come in anysort of sack or jacket or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pompswhich they forego. From this fact may be inferred the informality of themen's day-time attire; and the same note is sounded in the whole range ofthe cottage life, so that once a visitor from the world outside, who hadbeen exasperated beyond endurance by the absence of form among us (ifsuch an effect could be from a cause so negative), burst out with thereproach, "Oh, you make a fetish of your informality!"

"Fetish" is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mindsaying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place. Americanmen are everywhere impatient of form. It burdens and bothers them, andthey like to throw it off whenever they can. We may not be so verydemocratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies thatseparate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at oneanother; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as wedo the expenses. We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty inour colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humblethan of the great. In the nature of things it cannot last, however, andthe only question is how long it will last. I think, myself, until someone imagines giving an eight-o'clock dinner; then all the informalitieswill go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes willrush in. 

II. 

The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and some still exist in theearlier stages of mutation from the fishermen's and farmers' houses whichformed their germ. But these are now mostly let as lodgings to bachelorsand other single or semi-detached folks who go for their meals to theneighboring hotels or boarding-houses. The hotels are each the centre ofthis sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of their own scoresor hundreds of inmates. A single boarding-house gathers about it half adozen dependent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; andeven where the cottages have kitchens and all the housekeepingfacilities, their inmates sometimes prefer to dine at the hotels. By far the greater number of cottagers, however, keep house, bringingtheir service with them from the cities, and settling in their summerhomes for three or four or five months. 

The houses conform more or less to one type: a picturesque structure ofcolonial pattern, shingled to the ground, and stained or left to take aweather-stain of grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dormer-windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms. Within they are, if notelaborately finished, elaborately fitted up, with a constant regard tohealth in the plumbing and drainage. The water is brought in a system ofpipes from a lake five miles away, and as it is only for summer use thepipes are not buried from the frost, but wander along the surface, through the ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls onwhich the cottages are perched, and climb the old tumbling stone walls ofthe original pastures before diving into the cemented basements. 

Most of the cottages are owned by their occupants, and furnished by them;the rest, not less attractive and hardly less tastefully furnished, belong to natives, who have caught on to the architectural and domesticpreferences of the summer people, and have built them to let. Therugosities of the stony pasture land end in a wooded point seaward, andcurve east and north in a succession of beaches. It is on the point, andmainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlementare dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order asbirds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wildraspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouchedas possible. Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows findthe cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage fromanother, and people walk rather than drive to each other's doors. From the deep-bosomed, well-sheltered little harbor the tides swiminland, half a score of winding miles, up the channel of a river whichwithout them would be a trickling rivulet. An irregular line of cottagesfollows the shore a little way, and then leaves the river to theschooners and barges which navigate it as far as the oldest pile-builtwooden bridge in New England, and these in their turn abandon it to thefleets of row-boats and canoes in which summer youth of both sexesexplore it to its source over depths as clear as glass, past woodedheadlands and low, rush-bordered meadows, through reaches and openings ofpastoral fields, and under the shadow of dreaming groves. 

If there is anything lovelier than the scenery of this gentle river I donot know it; and I doubt if the sky is purer and bluer in paradise. Thisseems to be the consensus, tacit or explicit, of the youth who visit it, and employ the landscape for their picnics and their water parties fromthe beginning to the end of summer. 

The river is very much used for sunsets by the cottagers who live on it, and who claim a superiority through them to the cottagers on the point. An impartial mind obliges me to say that the sunsets are all good in ourcolony; there is no place from which they are bad; and yet for a certaintragical sunset, where the dying day bleeds slowly into the channel tillit is filled from shore to shore with red as far as the eye can reach, the river is unmatched. 

For my own purposes, it is not less acceptable, however, when the fog hascome in from the sea like a visible reverie, and blurred the whole valleywith its whiteness. I find that particularly good to look at from thetrolley-car which visits and revisits the river before finally leavingit, with a sort of desperation, and hiding its passion with a suddenplunge into the woods. 

III. 

The old fishing and seafaring village, which has now almost lost therecollection of its first estate in its absorption with the care of thesummer colony, was sparsely dropped along the highway bordering theharbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of the time-wornwharves are still rotting. A few houses of the past remain, but the typeof the summer cottage has impressed itself upon all the later building, and the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, intoabeyance. He takes the situation philosophically, and in the season hecaters to the summer colony not only as the landlord of the rentedcottages, and the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but aslivery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apothecary, and doctor;there is not one foreign accent in any of these callings. If the nativeis a farmer, he devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruitfor the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their doors; hischildren appear with flowers; and there are many proofs that he hasaccurately sized the cottagers up in their tastes and fancies as well astheir needs. I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if our somewhatconventionalized ideal of him is perfectly representative. He is, perhaps, more complex than he seems; he is certainly much moreself-sufficing than might have been expected. The summer folks are thematerial from which his prosperity is wrought, but he is not dependent, and is very far from submissive. As in all right conditions, it is herethe employer who asks for work, not the employee; and the work must berespectfully asked for. There are many fables to this effect, as, forinstance, that of the lady who said to a summer visitor, critical of theweek's wash she had brought home, "I'll wash you and I'll iron you, but Iwon't take none of your jaw. " A primitive independence is the keynote ofthe native character, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boastsitself. "We're independent here, I tell you, " said the friendly personwho consented to take off the wire door. "I was down Bangor way doin' apiece of work, and a fellow come along, and says he, 'I want you shouldhurry up on that job. ' 'Hello!' says I, 'I guess I'll pull out. ' Well, we calculate to do our work, " he added, with an accent which sufficientlyimplied that their consciences needed no bossing in the performance. 

The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly insome such form as, "Well, I don't know but what I can, " or, "I guessthere ain't anything to hinder me. " This compliance is so rarely, ifever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be saidthat all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported. The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in "toaccommodate"; but they will not "live out. " I was one day witness of theextreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him, and who applied to a friendly farmer's wife in the vain hope that shemight help him to some one who would help his family out in their strait. "Why, there ain't a girl in the Hollow that lives out! Why, if you wassick abed, I don't know as I know anybody 't you could git to set up withyou. " The natives will not live out because they cannot keep theirself-respect in the conditions of domestic service. Some people laughat this self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I own I do. 

In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his relation to us, heis imagined as holding a kind of carnival when we leave him at the end ofthe season, and it is believed that he likes us to go early. We have hadhis good offices at a fair price all summer, but as it draws to a closethey are rendered more and more fitfully. From some, perhaps flattered, reports of the happiness of the natives at the departure of thesojourners, I have pictured them dancing a sort of farandole, andstretching with linked hands from the farthest summer cottage up theriver to the last on the wooded point. It is certain that they gettired, and I could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of theirguests, and to go back to their own social life. This includes churchfestivals of divers kinds, lectures and shows, sleigh-rides, theatricals, and reading-clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellentlychosen free village library. They say frankly that the summer folks haveno idea how pleasant it is when they are gone, and I am sure that thegayeties to which we leave them must be more tolerable than those whichwe go back to in the city. It may be, however, that I am too confident, and that their gayeties are only different. I should really like to knowjust what the entertainments are which are given in a building devoted tothem in a country neighborhood three or four miles from the village. Itwas once a church, but is now used solely for social amusements. 

IV

The amusements of the summer colony I have already hinted at. Besidessuppers, there are also teas, of larger scope, both afternoon andevening. There are hops every week at the two largest hotels, which arepractically free to all; and the bathing-beach is, of course, a supremeattraction. The bath-houses, which are very clean and well equipped, are not very cheap, either for the season or for a single bath, and thereis a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands. This is always full ofgossiping spectators of the hardy adventurers who brave tides too remotefrom the Gulf Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty-fivedegrees. The bathers are mostly young people, who have the courage oftheir pretty bathing-costumes or the inextinguishable ardor of theiryears. If it is not rather serious business with them all, still Iadmire the fortitude with which some of them remain in fifteen minutes. Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there is a far morepopulous watering-place, east of the Point, known as the Beach, which isthe resort of people several grades of gentility lower than ours: somany, in fact, that we never can speak of the Beach without averting ourfaces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile. It is really a successionof beaches, all much longer and, I am bound to say, more beautiful thanours, lined with rows of the humbler sort of summer cottages known asshells, and with many hotels of corresponding degree. The cottages maybe hired by the week or month at about two dollars a day, and they aresupposed to be taken by inland people of little social importance. Verylikely this is true; but they seemed to be very nice, quiet people, and Icommonly saw the ladies reading, on their verandas, books and magazines, while the gentlemen sprayed the dusty road before them with the gardenhose. The place had also for me an agreeable alien suggestion, and inpassing the long row of cottages I was slightly reminded of Scheveningen. Beyond the cottage settlements is a struggling little park, dedicated tothe only Indian saint I ever heard of, though there may be others. Hisstatue, colossal in sheet-lead, and painted the copper color of his race, offers any heathen comer the choice between a Bible in one of his handsand a tomahawk in the other, at the entrance of the park; and there areother sheet-lead groups and figures in the white of allegory at differentpoints. It promises to be a pretty enough little place in future years, but as yet it is not much resorted to by the excursions which largelyform the prosperity of the Beach. The concerts and the "high-classvaudeville" promised have not flourished in the pavilion provided forthem, and one of two monkeys in the zoological department has perished ofthe public inattention. This has not fatally affected the captive bear, who rises to his hind legs, and eats peanuts and doughnuts in thatposition like a fellow-citizen. With the cockatoos and parrots, and thedozen deer in an inclosure of wire netting, he is no mean attraction; buthe does not charm the excursionists away from the summer village at theshore, where they spend long afternoons splashing among the waves, or inlolling groups of men, women, and children on the sand. In the moreactive gayeties, I have seen nothing so decided during the whole seasonas the behavior of three young girls who once came up out of the sea, andobliged me by dancing a measure on the smooth, hard beach in theirbathing-dresses. 

I thought it very pretty, but I do not believe such a thing could havebeen seen on OUR beach, which is safe from all excursionists, and sacredto the cottage and hotel life of the Port. 

Besides our beach and its bathing, we have a reading-club for the men, evolved from one of the old native houses, and verandaed round for summeruse; and we have golf-links and a golf club-house within easy trolleyreach. The links are as energetically, if not as generally, frequentedas the sands, and the sport finds the favor which attends it everywherein the decay of tennis. The tennis-courts which I saw thronged about byeager girl-crowds, here, seven years ago, are now almost wholly abandonedto the lovers of the game, who are nearly always men. 

Perhaps the only thing (besides, of course, our common mortality) whichwe have in common with the excursionists is our love of the trolley-line. This, by its admirable equipment, and by the terror it inspires inhorses, has well-nigh abolished driving; and following the old countryroads, as it does, with an occasional short-cut though the deep, green-lighted woods or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of apicturesque variety entirely satisfying. After a year of ferventopposition and protest, the whole community--whether of summer or ofwinter folks--now gladly accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottagerand the lowliest hotel dweller meet in a grateful appreciation of itsbeauty and comfort. 

Some pass a great part of every afternoon on the trolley, and one ladyhas achieved celebrity by spending four dollars a week in trolley-rides. The exhilaration of these is varied with an occasional apprehension whenthe car pitches down a sharp incline, and twists almost at right angleson a sudden curve at the bottom without slacking its speed. A lady whoventured an appeal to the conductor at one such crisis was reassured, andat the same time taught her place, by his reply: "That motorman's life, ma'am, is just as precious to him as what yours is to you. "

She had, perhaps, really ventured too far, for ordinarily the employeesof the trolley do not find occasion to use so much severity with theirpassengers. They look after their comfort as far as possible, and seekeven to anticipate their wants in unexpected cases, if I may believe astory which was told by a witness. She had long expected to see some onethrown out of the open car at one of the sharp curves, and one day sheactually saw a woman hurled from the seat into the road. Luckily thewoman slighted on her feet, and stood looking round in a daze. 

"Oh! oh!" exclaimed another woman in the seat behind, "she's left herumbrella!"

The conductor promptly threw it out to her. 

"Why, " demanded the witness, "did that lady wish to get out here?"

The conductor hesitated before he jerked the bellpull to go on: Then hesaid, "Well, she'll want her umbrella, anyway. "

The conductors are, in fact, very civil as well as kind. If they see ahorse in anxiety at the approach of the car, they considerately stop, andlet him get by with his driver in safety. By such means, with theirfrequent trips and low fares, and with the ease and comfort of theircars, they have conciliated public favor, and the trolley has drawntravel away from the steam railroad in such measure that it ran no trainslast winter. 

The trolley, in fact, is a fad of the summer folks this year; but what itwill be another no one knows; it may be their hissing and by-word. Inthe mean time, as I have already suggested, they have other amusements. These are not always of a nature so general as the trolley, or soparticular as the tea. But each of the larger hotels has been fullysupplied with entertainments for the benefit of their projectors, thoughnearly everything of the sort had some sort of charitable slant. Iassisted at a stereopticon lecture on Alaska for the aid of some youthfulAlaskans of both sexes, who were shown first in their savage state, andthen as they appeared after a merely rudimental education, in thecostumes and profiles of our own civilization. I never would havesupposed that education could do so much in so short a time; and I gladlygave my mite for their further development in classic beauty and a finalelegance. My mite was taken up in a hat, which, passed round among theaudience, is a common means of collecting the spectators' expressions ofappreciation. Other entertainments, of a prouder frame, exact anadmission fee, but I am not sure that these are better than some of thehat-shows, as they are called. 

The tale of our summer amusements would be sadly incomplete without somerecord of the bull-fights given by the Spanish prisoners of war on theneighboring island, where they were confined the year of the war. Admission to these could be had only by favor of the officers in charge, and even among the Elite of the colony those who went were a more electfew. Still, the day I went, there were some fifty or seventy-fivespectators, who arrived by trolley near the island, and walked to thestockade which confined the captives. A real bull-fight, I believe, isalways given on Sunday, and Puritan prejudice yielded to usage even inthe case of a burlesque bull-fight; at any rate, it was on a Sunday thatwe crouched in an irregular semicircle on a rising ground within theprison pale, and faced the captive audience in another semicircle, acrossa little alley for the entrances and exits of the performers. Thepresident of the bull-fight was first brought to the place of honor in ahand-cart, and then came the banderilleros, the picadores, and theespada, wonderfully effective and correct in white muslin and coloredtissue-paper. Much may be done in personal decoration with advertisingplacards; and the lofty mural crown of the president urged the public onboth sides to Use Plug Cut. The picador's pasteboard horse was attachedto his middle, fore and aft, and looked quite the sort of hapless jadewhich is ordinarily sacrificed to the bulls. The toro himself wascomposed of two prisoners, whose horizontal backs were covered with abrown blanket; and his feet, sometimes bare and sometimes shod withindia-rubber boots, were of the human pattern. Practicable horns, of asomewhat too yielding substance, branched from a front of pasteboard, anda cloth tail, apt to come off in the charge, swung from his rear. I havenever seen a genuine corrida, but a lady present, who had, told me thatthis was conducted with all the right circumstance; and it is certainthat the performers entered into their parts with the artistic gust oftheir race. The picador sustained some terrific falls, and in hisquality of horse had to be taken out repeatedly and sewed up; thebanderilleros tormented and eluded the toro with table-covers, one redand two drab, till the espada took him from them, and with due ceremony, after a speech to the president, drove his blade home to the bull'sheart. I stayed to see three bulls killed; the last was uncommonlyfierce, and when his hindquarters came off or out, his forequarterscharged joyously among the aficionados on the prisoners' side, and madehavoc in their thickly packed ranks. The espada who killed this bull wasshowered with cigars and cigarettes from our side. 

I do not know what the Sabbath-keeping shades of the old Puritans made ofour presence at such a fete on Sunday; but possibly they had got on sofar in a better life as to be less shocked at the decay of piety among usthan pleased at the rise of such Christianity as had brought us, likefriends and comrades, together with our public enemies in this harmlessfun. I wish to say that the tobacco lavished upon the espada wascollected for the behoof of all the prisoners. 

Our fiction has made so much of our summer places as the mise en scene ofits love stories that I suppose I ought to say something of this side ofour colonial life. But after sixty I suspect that one's eyes are poorfor that sort of thing, and I can only say that in its earliest andsimplest epoch the Port was particularly famous for the good times thatthe young people had. They still have good times, though whether on justthe old terms I do not know. I know that the river is still here withits canoes and rowboats, its meadowy reaches apt for dual solitude, andits groves for picnics. There is not much bicycling--the roads are roughand hilly--but there is something of it, and it is mighty pretty to seethe youth of both sexes bicycling with their heads bare. They go aboutbareheaded on foot and in buggies, too, and the young girls seek the tanwhich their mothers used so anxiously to shun. 

The sail-boats, manned by weather-worn and weatherwise skippers, arerather for the pleasure of such older summer folks as have a taste forcod-fishing, which is here very good. But at every age, and in whateversort our colonists amuse themselves, it is with the least possibleceremony. It is as if, Nature having taken them so hospitably to herheart, they felt convention an affront to her. Around their cottages, asI have said, they prefer to leave her primitive beauty untouched, and sherewards their forbearance with such a profusion of wild flowers as I haveseen nowhere else. The low, pink laurel flushed all the stony fields tothe edges of their verandas when we first came; the meadows were milk-white with daisies; in the swampy places delicate orchids grew, in thepools the flags and flowering rushes; all the paths and way-sides wereset with dog-roses; the hollows and stony tops were broadly matted withground juniper. Since then the goldenrod has passed from glory to glory, first mixing its yellow-powdered plumes with the red-purple tufts of theiron-weed, and then with the wild asters everywhere. There has comelater a dwarf sort, six or ten inches high, wonderfully rich and fine, which, with a low, white aster, seems to hold the field againsteverything else, though the taller golden-rod and the masses of the high, blue asters nod less thickly above it. But these smaller blooms deck theground in incredible profusion, and have an innocent air of being stuckin, as if they had been fancifully used for ornament by children orIndians. 

In a little while now, as it is almost the end of September, all thefeathery gold will have faded to the soft, pale ghosts of thatloveliness. The summer birds have long been silent; the crows, as ifthey were so many exultant natives, are shouting in the blue sky abovethe windrows of the rowan, in jubilant prescience of the depopulation ofour colony, which fled the hotels a fortnight ago. The days are growingshorter, and the red evenings falling earlier; so that the cottagers'husbands who come up every Saturday from town might well be impatient fora Monday of final return. Those who came from remoter distances havegone back already; and the lady cottagers, lingering hardily on tillOctober, must find the sight of the empty hotels and the windows of theneighboring houses, which no longer brighten after the chilly nightfall, rather depressing. Every one says that this is the loveliest time ofyear, and that it will be divine here all through October. But there aresudden and unexpected defections; there is a steady pull of the heartcityward, which it is hard to resist. The first great exodus was on thefirst of the month, when the hotels were deserted by four-fifths of theirguests. The rest followed, half of them within the week, and within afortnight none but an all but inaudible and invisible remnant were left, who made no impression of summer sojourn in the deserted trolleys. 

The days now go by in moods of rapid succession. There have been dayswhen the sea has lain smiling in placid derision of the recreants whohave fled the lingering summer; there have been nights when the windshave roared round the cottages in wild menace of the faithful few whohave remained. 

We have had a magnificent storm, which came, as an equinoctial stormshould, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the seaupon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high. Iwatched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage thatcrouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching therocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other. The sea wassuch a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriouslyshuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back, purring and softly crackling in a quiet indifference to the storm. 

Twenty-four hours more made all serene again. Bloodcurdling tales oflobster-pots carried to sea filled the air; but the air was as blandlyunconscious of ever having been a fury as a lady who has found her losttemper. Swift alternations of weather are so characteristic of ourcolonial climate that the other afternoon I went out with my umbrellaagainst the raw, cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it againstthe broiling sun. Three days ago I could say that the green of the woodshad no touch of hectic in it; but already the low trees of the swamp-landhave flamed into crimson. Every morning, when I look out, this crimsonis of a fierier intensity, and the trees on the distant uplands arebeginning slowly to kindle, with a sort of inner glow which has not yetburst into a blaze. Here and there the golden-rod is rusting; but thereseems only to be more and more asters sorts; and I have seen ladiescoming home with sheaves of blue gentians; I have heard that the orchidsare beginning again to light their tender lamps from the burningblackberry vines that stray from the pastures to the edge of the swamps. 

After an apparently total evanescence there has been a like resuscitationof the spirit of summer society. In the very last week of September wehave gone to a supper, which lingered far out of its season like one ofthese late flowers, and there has been an afternoon tea which assembledan astonishing number of cottagers, all secretly surprised to find oneanother still here, and professing openly a pity tinged with contempt forthose who are here no longer. 

I blamed those who had gone home, but I myself sniff the asphalt afar;the roar of the street calls to me with the magic that the voice of thesea is losing. Just now it shines entreatingly, it shines winningly, inthe sun which is mellowing to an October tenderness, and it shines undera moon of perfect orb, which seems to have the whole heavens to itself in"the first watch of the night, " except for "the red planet Mars. " Thisbegins to burn in the west before the flush of sunset has passed from it;and then, later, a few moon-washed stars pierce the vast vault with theirkeen points. The stars which so powdered the summer sky seem mostly tohave gone back to town, where no doubt people take them for electriclights. 

THE EDITOR'S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR

One of the trustiest jokes of the humorous paragrapher is that the editoris in great and constant dread of the young contributor; but neither myexperience nor my observation bears out his theory of the case. 

Of course one must not say anything to encourage a young person toabandon an honest industry in the vain hope of early honor and profitfrom literature; but there have been and there will be literary men andwomen always, and these in the beginning have nearly always been young;and I cannot see that there is risk of any serious harm in saying that itis to the young contributor the editor looks for rescue from the oldcontributor, or from his failing force and charm. 

The chances, naturally, are against the young contributor, and vastlyagainst him; but if any periodical is to live, and to live long, it is bythe infusion of new blood; and nobody knows this better than the editor, who may seem so unfriendly and uncareful to the young contributor. Thestrange voice, the novel scene, the odor of fresh woods and pastures new, the breath of morning, the dawn of tomorrow--these are what the editor iseager for, if he is fit to be an editor at all; and these are what theyoung contributor alone can give him. 

A man does not draw near the sixties without wishing people to believethat he is as young as ever, and he has not written almost as many booksas he has lived years without persuading himself that each new work ofhis has all the surprise of spring; but possibly there are wonted traitsand familiar airs and graces in it which forbid him to persuade others. I do not say these characteristics are not charming; I am very far fromwishing to say that; but I do say and must say that after the fiftiethtime they do not charm for the first time; and this is where theadvantage of the new contributor lies, if he happens to charm at all. 

I. 

The new contributor who does charm can have little notion how much hecharms his first reader, who is the editor. That functionary may bidehis pleasure in a short, stiff note of acceptance, or he may mask his joyin a check of slender figure; but the contributor may be sure that he hasmissed no merit in his work, and that he has felt, perhaps far more thanthe public will feel, such delight as it can give. 

The contributor may take the acceptance as a token that his efforts havenot been neglected, and that his achievements will always be warmlywelcomed; that even his failures will be leniently and reluctantlyrecognized as failures, and that he must persist long in failure beforethe friend he has made will finally forsake him. 

I do not wish to paint the situation wholly rose color; the editor willhave his moods, when he will not see so clearly or judge so justly as atother times; when he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will wantthis or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, or sketch, whichthe author knows to be simply perfect as it stands; but he is worthbearing with, and he will be constant to the new contributor as long asthere is the least hope of him. 

The contributor may be the man or the woman of one story, one poem, onesketch, for there are such; but the editor will wait the evidence ofindefinite failure to this effect. His hope always is that he or she isthe man or the woman of many stories, many poems, many sketches, all asgood as the first. 

From my own long experience as a magazine editor, I may say that theeditor is more doubtful of failure in one who has once done well than ofa second success. After all, the writer who can do but one good thing israrer than people are apt to think in their love of the improbable; butthe real danger with a young contributor is that he may become his ownrival. 

What would have been quite good enough from him in the first instance isnot good enough in the second, because he has himself fixed his standardso high. His only hope is to surpass himself, and not begin resting onhis laurels too soon; perhaps it is never well, soon or late, to restupon one's laurels. It is well for one to make one's self scarce, andthe best way to do this is to be more and more jealous of perfection inone's work. 

The editor's conditions are that having found a good thing he must get asmuch of it as he can, and the chances are that he will be less exactingthan the contributor imagines. It is for the contributor to be exacting, and to let nothing go to the editor as long as there is the possibilityof making it better. He need not be afraid of being forgotten because hedoes not keep sending; the editor's memory is simply relentless; he couldnot forget the writer who has pleased him if he would, for such writersare few. 

I do not believe that in my editorial service on the Atlantic Monthly, which lasted fifteen years in all, I forgot the name or thecharacteristic quality, or even the handwriting, of a contributor who hadpleased me, and I forgot thousands who did not. I never lost faith in acontributor who had done a good thing; to the end I expected another goodthing from him. I think I was always at least as patient with him as hewas with me, though he may not have known it. 

At the time I was connected with that periodical it had almost a monopolyof the work of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Parkman, Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others not so well known, but still well known. These distinguished writers were frequentcontributors, and they could be counted upon to respond to almost anyappeal of the magazine; yet the constant effort of the editors was todiscover new talent, and their wish was to welcome it. 

I know that, so far as I was concerned, the success of a youngcontributor was as precious as if I had myself written his paper or poem, and I doubt if it gave him more pleasure. The editor is, in fact, a sortof second self for the contributor, equally eager that he should standwell with the public, and able to promote his triumphs without egotismand share them without vanity. 

II. 

In fact, my curious experience was that if the public seemed not to feelmy delight in a contribution I thought good, my vexation anddisappointment were as great as if the work hod been my own. It was evengreater, for if I had really written it I might have had my misgivings ofits merit, but in the case of another I could not console myself withthis doubt. The sentiment was at the same time one which I could notcherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one stood more uponhis own feet; and the young contributor may be sure that the editor'spride, self-interest, and sense of editorial infallibility will allprompt him to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the public, and whom he has vouched for. 

I hope I am not giving the young contributor too high an estimate of hisvalue to the editor. After all, he must remember that he is but one of agreat many others, and that the editor's affections, if constant, arenecessarily divided. It is good for the literary aspirant to realizevery early that he is but one of many; for the vice of our comparativelyvirtuous craft is that it tends to make each of us imagine himselfcentral, if not sole. 

As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not revolve around anyone of us; we make our circuit of the sun along with the otherinhabitants of the earth, a planet of inferior magnitude. The thing westrive for is recognition, but when this comes it is apt to turn ourheads. I should say, then, that it was better it should not come in agreat glare and aloud shout, all at once, but should steal slowly uponus, ray by ray, breath by breath. 

In the mean time, if this happens, we shall have several chances ofreflection, and can ask ourselves whether we are really so great as weseem to other people, or seem to seem. 

The prime condition of good work is that we shall get ourselves out ofour minds. Sympathy we need, of course, and encouragement; but I am notsure that the lack of these is not a very good thing, too. Praiseenervates, flattery poisons; but a smart, brisk snub is always ratherwholesome. 

I should say that it was not at all a bad thing for a young contributorto get his manuscript back, even after a first acceptance, and even ageneral newspaper proclamation that he is one to make the immortalstremble for their wreaths of asphodel--or is it amaranth? I am neversure which. 

Of course one must have one's hour, or day, or week, of disabling theeditor's judgment, of calling him to one's self fool, and rogue, andwretch; but after that, if one is worth while at all, one puts therejected thing by, or sends it off to some other magazine, and sets aboutthe capture of the erring editor with something better, or at leastsomething else. 

III. 

I think it a great pity that editors ever deal other than frankly withyoung contributors, or put them off with smooth generalities of excuse, instead of saying they do not like this thing or that offered them. Itis impossible to make a criticism of all rejected manuscripts, but in thecase of those which show promise I think it is quite possible; and if Iwere to sin my sins over again, I think I should sin a little more on theside of candid severity. I am sure I should do more good in that way, and I am sure that when I used to dissemble my real mind I did harm tothose whose feelings I wished to spare. There ought not, in fact, to bequestion of feeling in the editor's mind. 

I know from much suffering of my own that it is terrible to get back amanuscript, but it is not fatal, or I should have been dead a great manytimes before I was thirty, when the thing mostly ceased for me. Onesurvives it again and again, and one ought to make the reflection that itis not the first business of a periodical to print contributions of thisone or of that, but that its first business is to amuse and instruct itsreaders. 

To do this it is necessary to print contributions, but whose they are, orhow the writer will feel if they are not printed, cannot be considered. The editor can consider only what they are, and the young contributorwill do well to consider that, although the editor may not be aninfallible judge, or quite a good judge, it is his business to judge, andto judge without mercy. Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment in anartistic result than in a mathematical result. 

IV. 

I suppose, since I used to have it myself, that there is a superstitionwith most young contributors concerning their geographical position. Iused to think that it was a disadvantage to send a thing from a small orunknown place, and that it doubled my insignificance to do so. Ibelieved that if my envelope had borne the postmark of New York, orBoston, or some other city of literary distinction, it would have arrivedon the editor's table with a great deal more authority. But I am surethis was a mistake from the first, and when I came to be an editor myselfI constantly verified the fact from my own dealings with contributors. A contribution from a remote and obscure place at once piqued mycuriosity, and I soon learned that the fresh things, the original things, were apt to come from such places, and not from the literary centres. One of the most interesting facts concerning the arts of all kinds isthat those who wish to give their lives to them do not appear where theappliances for instruction in them exist. An artistic atmosphere doesnot create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators;poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or apicture seen. 

This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into theinstruments and means of beauty. It may also suggest to that scholar-pride, that vanity of technique, which is so apt to vaunt itself in theteacher, that the best he can do, after all, is to let the pupil teachhimself. If he comes with divine authority to the thing he attempts, hewill know how to use the appliances, of which the teacher is only thefirst. 

The editor, if he does not consciously perceive the truth, willinstinctively feel it, and will expect the acceptable young contributorfrom the country, the village, the small town, and he will look eagerlyat anything that promises literature from Montana or Texas, for he willknow that it also promises novelty. 

If he is a wise editor, he will wish to hold his hand as much aspossible; he will think twice before he asks the contributor to changethis or correct that; he will leave him as much to himself as he can. The young contributor; on his part, will do well to realize this, and toreceive all the editorial suggestions, which are veiled commands in mostcases, as meekly and as imaginatively as possible. 

The editor cannot always give his reasons; however strongly he may feelthem, but the contributor, if sufficiently docile, can always divinethem. It behooves him to be docile at all times, for this is merely thewillingness to learn; and whether he learns that he is wrong, or that theeditor is wrong, still he gains knowledge. 

A great deal of knowledge comes simply from doing, and a great deal morefrom doing over, and this is what the editor generally means. 

I think that every author who is honest with himself must own that hiswork would be twice as good if it were done twice. I was once sofortunately circumstanced that I was able entirely to rewrite one of mynovels, and I have always thought it the best written, or at leastindefinitely better than it would have been with a single writing. As amatter of fact, nearly all of them have been rewritten in a certain way. They have not actually been rewritten throughout, as in the case I speakof, but they have been gone over so often in manuscript and in proof thatthe effect has been much the same. 

Unless you are sensible of some strong frame within your work, somethingvertebral, it is best to renounce it, and attempt something else in whichyou can feel it. If you are secure of the frame you must observe thequality and character of everything you build about it; you must touch, you must almost taste, you must certainly test, every material youemploy; every bit of decoration must undergo the same scrutiny as thestructure. 

It will be some vague perception of the want of this vigilance in theyoung contributor's work which causes the editor to return it to him forrevision, with those suggestions which he will do well to make the mostof; for when the editor once finds a contributor he can trust, herejoices in him with a fondness which the contributor will never perhapsunderstand. 

It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise editor understandsthis, and averts his countenance from the contributor who writes at him;but if he feels that the contributor conceives the situation, and willconform to the conditions which his periodical has invented for itself, and will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if he perceives that hehas put artistic conscience in every general and detail, and though hehas not done the best, has done the best that he can do, he will begin toliberate him from every trammel except those he must wear himself, andwill be only too glad to leave him free. He understands, if he is at allfit for his place, that a writer can do well only what he likes to do, and his wish is to leave him to himself as soon as possible. 

V. 

In my own case, I noticed that the contributors who could be best left tothemselves were those who were most amenable to suggestion and evencorrection, who took the blue pencil with a smile, and bowed gladly tothe rod of the proof-reader. Those who were on the alert for offence, who resented a marginal note as a slight, and bumptiously demanded thattheir work should be printed just as they had written it, were commonlynot much more desired by the reader than by the editor. 

Of course the contributor naturally feels that the public is the test ofhis excellence, but he must not forget that the editor is the beginningof the public; and I believe he is a faithfuller and kinder critic thanthe writer will ever find again. 

Since my time there is a new tradition of editing, which I do not thinkso favorable to the young contributor as the old. Formerly the magazineswere made up of volunteer contributions in much greater measure than theyare now. At present most of the material is invited and even engaged; itis arranged for a long while beforehand, and the space that can be givento the aspirant, the unknown good, the potential excellence, growsconstantly less and less. 

A great deal can be said for either tradition; perhaps some editor willyet imagine a return to the earlier method. In the mean time we mustdeal with the thing that is, and submit to it until it is changed. Themoral to the young contributor is to be better than ever, to leavenothing undone that shall enhance his small chances of acceptance. If he takes care to be so good that the editor must accept him in spiteof all the pressure upon his pages, he will not only be serving-himselfbest, but may be helping the editor to a conception of his duty thatshall be more hospitable to all other young contributors. As it is, however, it must be owned that their hope of acceptance is very, verysmall, and they will do well to make sure that they love literature somuch that they can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in itscause. 

The love of it is the great and only test of fitness for it. It isreally inconceivable how any one should attempt it without this, butapparently a great many do. It is evident to every editor that a vastnumber of those who write the things he looks at so faithfully, and readsmore or less, have no artistic motive. 

People write because they wish to be known, or because they have heardthat money is easily made in that way, or because they think they willchance that among a number of other things. The ignorance of techniquewhich they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the palpablefactitiousness of their product. It is something that they have made; itis not anything that has grown out of their lives. 

I should think it would profit the young contributor, before he puts pento paper, to ask himself why he does so, and, if he finds that he has nomotive in the love of the thing, to forbear. 

Am I interested in what I am going to write about? Do I feel itstrongly? Do I know it thoroughly? Do I imagine it clearly? The youngcontributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many morelike them as he can think of. Perhaps he will end by not being a youngcontributor. 

But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to his own conscience, byall means let him begin. He may at once put aside all anxiety aboutstyle; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be addedunto him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man's wayof saying a thing. 

If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to say, perhaps he willtry to say it in some other man's way, or to hide his own vacuity withrags of rhetoric and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from thisauthor and that. He will fancy that in this disguise his work will bemore literary, and that there is somehow a quality, a grace, imparted toit which will charm in spite of the inward hollowness. His vain hopewould be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is destined to sufferdefeat at the first glance of the editorial eye. 

If he really has something to say, however, about something he knows andloves, he is in the best possible case to say it well. Still, from timeto time he may advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he issaying the thing clearly and simply. 

If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully, and musically; and Iwould by no means have him aim to say it barely or sparely. It is not sothat people talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought ofthe writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue. 

To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some teach, is to practicea kind of quackery almost as offensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric. In either case the life goes out of the subject. 

To please one's self, honestly and thoroughly, is the only way to pleaseothers in matters of art. I do not mean to say that if you pleaseyourself you will always please others, but that unless you pleaseyourself you will please no one else. It is the sweet and sacredprivilege of work done artistically to delight the doer. Art is thehighest joy, but any work done in the love of it is art, in a kind, andit strikes the note of happiness as nothing else can. 

We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomesdrudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, ifyou do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as diggingditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the same blessingsof God, become arts if they are done with conscience and the sense ofbeauty. 

The young contributor may test his work before the editor assays it, ifhe will, and he may know by a rule that is pretty infallible whether itis good or not, from his own experience in doing it. Did it give himpleasure? Did he love it as it grew under his hand? Was he glad andwilling with it? Or did he force himself to it, and did it hang heavyupon him?

There is nothing mystical in all this; it is a matter of plain, every-dayexperience, and I think nearly every artist will say the same thing aboutit, if he examines himself faithfully. 

If the young contributor finds that he has no delight in the thing he hasattempted, he may very well give it up, for no one else will delight init. But he need not give it up at once; perhaps his mood is bad; let himwait for a better, and try it again. He may not have learned how to doit well, and therefore he cannot love it, but perhaps he can learn to doit well. 

The wonder and glory of art is that it is without formulas. Or, rather, each new piece of work requires the invention of new formulas, which willnot serve again for another. You must apprentice yourself afresh atevery fresh undertaking, and our mastery is always a victory over certainunexpected difficulties, and not a dominion of difficulties overcomebefore. 

I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely the strength that comesof overcoming and is never a sovereign power that smooths the path of allobstacles. The combinations in art are infinite, and almost never thesame; you must make your key and fit it to each, and the key that unlocksone combination will not unlock another. 

VI. 

There is no royal road to excellence in literature, but the youngcontributor need not be dismayed at that. Royal roads are the ways thatkings travel, and kings are mostly dull fellows, and rarely have a goodtime. They do not go along singing; the spring that trickles into themossy log is not for them, nor

 "The wildwood flower that simply blows. "

But the traveller on the country road may stop for each of these; and itis not a bad condition of his progress that he must move so slowly thathe can learn every detail of the landscape, both earth and sky, by heart. 

The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind, orapart. The successful writer especially is in danger of becomingisolated from the realities that nurtured in him the strength to winsuccess. When he becomes famous, he becomes precious to criticism, tosociety, to all the things that do not exist from themselves, or have notthe root of the matter in them. 

Therefore, I think that a young writer's upward course should be slow andbeset with many obstacles, even hardships. Not that I believe inhardships as having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard themin that way; but they oftener bring out the virtues inherent in thesufferer from them than what I may call the 'softships'; and at leastthey stop him, and give him time to think. 

This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward rapidly, we have notime for anything but prospering forward rapidly. We have no time forart, even the art by which we prosper. 

I would have the young contributor above all things realize that successis not his concern. Good work, true work, beautiful work is his affair, and nothing else. If he does this, success will take care of itself. 

He has no business to think of the thing that will take. It is theeditor's business to think of that, and it is the contributor's businessto think of the thing that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasurethat comes from the sense of worth in the thing done. Let him do thebest he can, and trust the editor to decide whether it will take. 

It will take far oftener than anything he attempts perfunctorily; andeven if the editor thinks it will not take, and feels obliged to returnit for that reason, he will return it with a real regret, with the honorand affection which we cannot help feeling for any one who has done apiece of good work, and with the will and the hope to get something fromhim that will take the next time, or the next, or the next. 

LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL

(1897)

When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle ofSeptember, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should bevery cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already;and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose fora whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemedto rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumnleaves. We were but a poor hundred at most where five hundred would nothave been a crowd; and, when we sat down at the long tables d'hote in thegreat dining-room, we had to warm our hands with our plates before wecould hold our spoons. From time to time the weather varied, as it doesin Europe (American weather is of an exemplary constancy in comparison), and three or four times a day it rained, and three or four times itcleared; but through all the wind blew cold and colder. We werepromised, however, that the hotel would not close till October, and wemade shift, with a warm chimney in one room and three gas-burners inanother, if not to keep warm quite, yet certainly to get used to thecold. 

I. 

In the mean time the sea-bathing went resolutely on with all its forms. Every morning the bathing machines were drawn down to the beach from theesplanade, where they were secured against the gale every night; andevery day a half-dozen hardy invalids braved the rigors of wind and wave. At the discreet distance which one ought always to keep one could notalways be sure whether these bold bathers were mermen or mermaids; forthe sea costume of both sexes is the same here, as regards an absence ofskirts and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, effectivelytights. The first time I walked down to the beach I was puzzled to makeout some object rolling about in the low surf, which looked like abarrel, and which two bathing-machine men were watching with apparentlythe purpose of fishing it out. Suddenly this object reared itself fromthe surf and floundered towards the steps of a machine; then I saw thatit was evidently not a barrel, but a lady, and after that I never daredcarry my researches so far. I suppose that the bathing-tights are morebecoming in some cases than in others; but I hold to a modest preferencefor skirts, however brief, in the sea-gear of ladies. Without them theremay sometimes be the effect of beauty, and sometimes the effect ofbarrel. 

For the convenience and safety of the bathers there were, even in thelast half of September, some twenty machines, and half as many bath-menand bath-women, who waded into the water and watched that the batherscame to no harm, instead of a solitary lifeguard showing his statuesqueshape as he paced the shore beside the lifelines, or cynically rocked inhis boat beyond the breakers, as the custom is on Long Island. Herethere is no need of life-lines, and, unless one held his head resolutelyunder water, I do not see how he could drown within quarter of a mile ofthe shore. Perhaps it is to prevent suicide that the bathmen are soplentifully provided. 

They are a provision of the hotel, I believe, which does not relax itselfin any essential towards its guests as they grow fewer. It seems, on thecontrary, to use them with a more tender care, and to console them as itmay for the inevitable parting near at hand. Now, within three or fourdays of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect asit could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sitdown every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love orvastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America. It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going ondelicately, almost silently. A strip of carpeting has come up from alongour corridor, but we hardly miss it from the matting which remains. Through the open doors of vacant chambers we can see that beds are comingdown, and the dismantling extends into the halls at places. Certaindecorative carved chairs which repeated themselves outside the doors haveceased to be there; but the pictures still hang on the walls, and withinour own rooms everything is as conscientious as in midsummer. Theservice is instant, and, if there is some change in it, the change is notfor the worse. Yesterday our waiter bade me good-bye, and when I said Iwas sorry he was going he alleged a boil on his cheek in excuse; he wouldnot allow that his going had anything to do with the closing of thehotel, and he was promptly replaced by another who speaks excellentEnglish. Now that the first is gone, I may own that he seemed not tospeak any foreign language long, but, when cornered in English, tookrefuge in French, and then fled from pursuit in that to German, andbrought up in final Dutch, where he was practically inaccessible. 

The elevator runs regularly, if not rapidly; the papers arriveunfailingly in the reading-room, including a solitary London Times, whicheven I do not read, perhaps because I have no English-reading rival tocontend for it with. Till yesterday, an English artist sometimes got it;but he then instantly offered it to me; and I had to refuse it because Iwould not be outdone in politeness. Now even he is gone, and on allsides I find myself in an unbroken circle of Dutch and German, where noone would dispute the Times with me if he could. 

Every night the corridors are fully lighted, and some mornings swept, while the washing that goes on all over Holland, night and morning, doesnot always spare our unfrequented halls and stairs. I note these littlefacts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we onceassisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before weleft, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died outbefore us except at long intervals in the passages; while there werelightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we hadto go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, afterthe last bell-boy had winked out. 

II. 

But in Europe everything is permanent, and in America everything isprovisional. This is the great distinction which, if always kept inmind, will save a great deal of idle astonishment. It is in nothing moreapparent than in the preparation here at Scheveningen for centuries ofsummer visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet ona scant generation of them. When it seemed likely that it might be awinning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the seawith spruce boards. It was very handsomely planked, but it was neverafterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs. Here, forhalf a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massivemasonry, and bricked for carriages, and tiled for foot-passengers; and itis all kept as clean as if wheel or foot had never passed over it. I amsure that there is not a broken brick or a broken tile in the wholelength or breadth of it. But the hotel here is not a bet; it is abusiness. It has come to stay; and on Long Island it had come to see howit would like it. 

Beyond the walk and drive, however, the dunes are left to the winds, andto the vegetation with which the Dutch planting clothes them against thewinds. First a coarse grass or rush is sown; then a finer herbage comes;then a tough brushwood, with flowers and blackberry-vines; so that whilethe seaward slopes of the dunes are somewhat patched and tattered, thelandward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly heldagainst such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket ofthe dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, andon week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocksdevoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who arehere as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home. Rocking there isnot, and cannot be, in the nature of things, as there used to be at MountDesert; but what is called Twoing at York Harbor is perfectlypracticable. 

It is practicable not only in the nooks and corners of the dunes, but ondiscreeter terms in those hooded willow chairs, so characteristic of theDutch sea-side. These, if faced in pairs towards each other, must be asfavorable to the exchange of vows as of opinions, and if the crowd isever very great, perhaps one chair could be made to hold two persons. It was distinctly a pang, the other day, to see men carrying them up fromthe beach, and putting them away to hibernate in the basement of thehotel. Not all, but most of them, were taken; though I dare say that onfine days throughout October they will go trooping back to the sands onthe heads of the same men, like a procession of monstrous, two-leggedcrabs. Such a day was last Sunday, and then the beach offered a livelyimage of its summer gayety. It was dotted with hundreds of hoodedchairs, which foregathered in gossiping groups or confidential couples;and as the sun shone quite warm the flaps of the little tents next thedunes were let down against it, and ladies in summer white savedthemselves from sunstroke in their shelter. The wooden booths for thesale of candies and mineral waters, and beer and sandwiches, were flushedwith a sudden prosperity, so that when I went to buy my pound of grapesfrom the good woman who understands my Dutch, I dreaded an indifferencein her which by no means appeared. She welcomed me as warmly as if I hadbeen her sole customer, and did not put up the price on me; perhapsbecause it was already so very high that her imagination could not riseabove it. 

III

The hotel showed the same admirable constancy. The restaurant wasthronged with new-comers, who spread out even over the many-tabledesplanade before it; but it was in no wise demoralized. That night wesat down in multiplied numbers to a table d'hote of serenely unconsciousperfection; and we permanent guests--alas! we are now becoming transient, too--were used with unfaltering recognition of our superior worth. Weshared the respect which, all over Europe, attaches to establishment, andwhich sometimes makes us poor Americans wish for a hereditary nobility, so that we could all mirror our ancestral value in the deference of ourinferiors. Where we should get our inferiors is another thing, but Isuppose we could import them for the purpose, if the duties were not toogreat under our tariff. 

We have not yet imported the idea of a European hotel in any respect, though we long ago imported what we call the European plan. No travelledAmerican knows it in the extortionate prices of rooms when he gets home, or the preposterous charges of our restaurants, where one portion ofroast beef swimming in a lake of lukewarm juice costs as much as adiversified and delicate dinner in Germany or Holland. But even if therewere any proportion in these things the European hotel will not be withus till we have the European portier, who is its spring and inspiration. He must not, dear home-keeping reader, be at all imagined in the moral ormaterial figure of our hotel porter, who appears always in his shirt-sleeves, and speaks with the accent of Cork or of Congo. The Europeanportier wears a uniform, I do not know why, and a gold-banded cap, and heinhabits a little office at the entrance of the hotel. He speaks eightor ten languages, up to certain limit, rather better than people born tothem, and his presence commands an instant reverence softening toaffection under his universal helpfulness. There is nothing he cannottell you, cannot do for you; and you may trust yourself implicitly tohim. He has the priceless gift of making each nationality, eachpersonality, believe that he is devoted to its service alone. He turnslightly from one language to another, as if he had each under his tongue, and he answers simultaneously a fussy French woman, an angry Englishtourist, a stiff Prussian major, and a thin-voiced American girl inbehalf of a timorous mother, and he never mixes the replies. He is aninexhaustible bottle of dialects; but this is the least of his merits, ofhis miracles. 

Our portier here is a tall, slim Dutchman (most Dutchmen are tall andslim), and in spite of the waning season he treats me as if I weremultitude, while at the same time he uses me with the distinction due thelast of his guests. Twenty times in as many hours he wishes me good-day, putting his hand to his cap for the purpose; and to oblige me he wearssilver braid instead of gilt on his cap and coat. I apologized yesterdayfor troubling him so often for stamps, and said that I supposed he wasmuch more bothered in the season. 

"Between the first of August and the fifteenth, " he answered, "you cannotthink. All that you can do is to say, Yes, No; Yes, No. " And he left meto imagine his responsibilities. 

I am sure he will hold out to the end, and will smile me a friendlyfarewell from the door of his office, which is also his dining-room, as Iknow from often disturbing him at his meals there. I have no fear of thewaiters either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits of sailorblue, and touch their foreheads when they bring you your letters like somany ancient sea-dogs. I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suitof snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of hiselevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived atthe beginning of the summer. 

IV

It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recallin their pathetic order the events of the final week. 

Nothing has been stranger throughout than the fluctuation of the guests. At times they have dwindled to so small a number that one must reckonchiefly upon their quality for consolation; at other times they swelledto such a tide as to overflow the table, long or short, at dinner, andeddy round a second board beside it. There have been nights when I havewalked down the long corridor to my seaward room through a harkingsolitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have come outto breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, and door-post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the place with alively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence. The worst wasthat, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some one came weonly won a stranger. 

Among the first to go were the kindly English folk whose acquaintance wemade across the table the first night, and who took with them so large ashare of our facile affections that we quite forgot the ancestralenmities, and grieved for them as much as if they had been Americans. There have been, in fact, no Americans here but ourselves, and we havedone what we could with the Germans who spoke English. The nicest ofthese were a charming family from F-----, father and mother, and son anddaughter, with whom we had a pleasant week of dinners. At the very firstwe disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann thatI was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of thecontroversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us. Our frank literary difference established a kindness between us that wasstrengthened by our community of English, and when they went they left usto the sympathy of another German family with whom we had mainly ourhumanity in common. They spoke no English, and I only a German whichthey must have understood with their hearts rather than their heads, since it consisted chiefly of good-will. But in the air of their sweetnatures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed each day for praise ofthe weather after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fondregrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, sadly perplexed inthe genders and the order of the verbs: with me the verb will seldomwait, as it should in German, to the end. Both of these families, verydifferent in social tradition, I fancied, were one in the amiabilitywhich makes the alien forgive so much militarism to the German nation, and hope for its final escape from the drill-sergeant. When they went, we were left for some meals to our own American tongue, with a briefinterval of that English painter and his wife with whom we spoke, ourlanguage as nearly like English as we could. Then followed a desperatelunch and dinner where an unbroken forest of German, and a still moreimpenetrable morass of Dutch, hemmed us in. But last night it was ourjoy to be addressed in our own speech by a lady who spoke it as admirablyas our dear friends from F-----. She was Dutch, and when she found wewere Americans she praised our historian Motley, and told us how hisportrait is gratefully honored with a place in the Queen's palace, TheHouse in the Woods, near Scheveningen. 

V. 

She had come up from her place in the country, four hours away, for thelast of the concerts here, which have been given throughout the summer bythe best orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged everyafternoon and evening by people from The Hague. 

One honored day this week even the Queen and the Queen Mother came downto the concert, and gave us incomparably the greatest event of our waningseason. I had noticed all the morning a floral perturbation about themain entrance of the hotel, which settled into the form of banks ofautumnal bloom on either side of the specially carpeted stairs, and putforth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much bigger round than abarrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor of the Queen's ancestral houseof Orange. Flags of blue, white, and red fluttered nervously about inthe breeze from the sea, and imparted to us an agreeable anxiety not tomiss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch succinctly call their sovereign andher parent; and at three o'clock we saw them drive up to the hotel. Certain officials in civil dress stood at the door of the concert-room tousher the Queens in, and a bareheaded, bald-headed dignity of militaryfigure backed up the stairs before them. I would not rashly commitmyself to particulars concerning their dress, but I am sure that theelder Queen wore black, and the younger white. The mother has one of thebest and wisest faces I have seen any woman wear (and most of the good, wise faces in this imperfectly balanced world are women's) and thedaughter one of the sweetest and prettiest. Pretty is the word for herface, and it showed pink through her blond veil, as she smiled and bowedright and left; her features are small and fine, and she is not above themiddle height. 

As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we who had waited to seeher go in ran round to another door and joined the two or three thousandpeople who were standing to receive the Queens. These had alreadymounted to the royal box, and they stood there while the orchestra playedone of the Dutch national airs. (One air is not enough for the Dutch;they must have two. ) Then the mother faded somewhere into thebackground, and the daughter sat alone in the front, on a gilt throne, with a gilt crown at top, and a very uncomfortable carved Gothic back. She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the rudest Republicancould not have helped wishing her well out of a position so essentiallyand irreparably false as a hereditary sovereign's. One forgot in thepresence of her innocent seventeen years that most of the ruling princesof the world had left it the worse for their having been in it; atmoments one forgot her altogether as a princess, and saw her only as acharming young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly. 

At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked slowly out, whilethe orchestra played the other national air. 

VI. 

I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and I like Holland so muchthat I should hate to differ with the Dutch in anything. But, as amatter of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is theregent and the daughter will not be crowned till next year. 

But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion to our dyingseason, and thrilled the hotel with a fulness of summer life. Since theywent, the season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can just saythat it is still alive. Last Sunday was fine, and great crowds came downfrom The Hague to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace ofthe hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that the waiters hadeach morning wiped dry of the dew, from a mere Dutch desire of cleaningsomething. The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played inthe edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the lovers wandered up intothe hollows of the dunes. 

There was only the human life, however. I have looked in vain for thecrabs, big and little, that swarm on the Long Island shore, and there arehardly any gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for them toeat, if they eat crabs; I never saw gulls doing it, but they must eatsomething. Dogs there are, of course, wherever there are people; butthey are part of the human life. Dutch dogs are in fact very human; andone I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly as a bad boy, with respect tohis muzzle. He did not like his muzzle, and by dint of turningsomersaults in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his masterin triumph to show him what he had done. 

VII. 

It is now the last day, and the desolation is thickening upon our hotel. This morning the door-posts up and down my corridor showed not a singlepair of trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely doormats. Inthe lower hall I found the tables of the great dining-room assembled, andthe chairs inverted on them with their legs in the air; but decently, decorously, not with the reckless abandon displayed by the chairs in ourLong Island hotel for weeks before it closed. In the smaller dining-roomthe table was set for lunch as if we were to go on dining there forever;in the breakfast-room the service and the provision were as perfect asever. The coffee was good, the bread delicious, the butter of anunfaltering sweetness; and the glaze of wear on the polished dress-coatsof the waiters as respectable as it could have been on the first day ofthe season. All was correct, and if of a funereal correctness to me, Iam sure this effect was purely subjective. 

The little bell-boys in sailor suits (perhaps they ought to be spelledbell-buoys) clustered about the elevator-boy like so many Roman sentinelsat their posts; the elevator-boy and his elevator were ready to take usup or down at any moment. 

The portier and I ignored together the hour of parting, which we haddefinitely ascertained and agreed upon, and we exchanged some complimentsto the weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to enjoy it longtogether. I rather dread going in to lunch, however, for I fear theempty places. 

VIII. 

All is over; we are off. The lunch was an heroic effort of the hotel tohide the fact of our separation. It was perfect, unless the boiled beefwas a confession of human weakness; but even this boiled beef wasexquisite, and the horseradish that went with it was so mellowed by artthat it checked rather than provoked the parting tear. The table d'hotehad reserved a final surprise for us; and when we sat down with the fearof nothing but German around us, we heard the sound of our own speechfrom the pleasantest English pair we had yet encountered; and thetravelling English are pleasant; I will say it, who am said by Sir WalterBesant to be the only American who hates their nation. It was really anadded pang to go, on their account, but the carriage was waiting at thedoor; the 'domestique' had already carried our baggage to the steam-tramstation; the kindly menial train formed around us for an ultimate'douceur', and we were off, after the 'portier' had shut us into ourvehicle and touched his oft-touched cap for the last time, while thehotel facade dissembled its grief by architecturally smiling in the softDutch sun. 

I liked this manner of leaving better than carrying part of my ownbaggage to the train, as I had to do on Long Island, though that, too, had its charm; the charm of the whole fresh, pungent American life, whichat this distance is so dear. 

SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY

The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses inputting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope thata courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to suchcollections when severally administered, suggests some questions as tothis eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader'spatience with. I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, orthat I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answeredseems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity fluttersaway from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away inthe 'hortus siccus' of accomplished facts. In view of this I may wishmerely to state the problems and leave them for the reader's solution, or, more amusingly, for his mystification. 

I. 

One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why aform which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a shortstory when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is saidto be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same asthat of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separatehouseholders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintanceswhen gathered into a boarding-house. 

Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story whereit is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazineis so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant themore short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roofof his pension. Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks sosignally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a bookof short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded becauseof them. He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books ofthem were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he allegedseveral well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had agreat vogue. He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I couldnot well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted inhis last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainlyhelped sell it. I had in mind many books of short stories of the firstexcellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded, for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in anyliterary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in anotherBase. 

I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in mydoubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that hisindolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failureof good books of short stories. He is commonly so averse to anyimaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to thatpeculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him. Hecan read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and apleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his ownconstructive faculty. But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories, he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies;whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeablesedative. A condition that the short story tacitly makes with thereader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill inthe details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions thestory can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this toomuch for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement toattempt it. 

My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accountsfor any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from thereader against a number of short stories in a magazine. But it may bethat the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety inthe authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read allthe short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'. On the other hand, theidentity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the shortstories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imaginationof the involuntary co-partner. 

II. 

Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for shortstories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively, andnot in variety, but in identity of authorship? Are they to be printedonly in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining avariety of authorship? Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasibleto purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to thereader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work required ofhim. In this event many short stories now cramped into undue limits bythe editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand to greater lengthand breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short story might not makeso heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader. 

If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should notcontradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can helpthe short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have greatpleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American. If we have notexcelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it;possibly because we are in the period of our literary development whichcorresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminentlyflourished among them. But when one has said a thing like this, itimmediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requiresone to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or forone's safety from the thoughtful reader. I am not much afraid of thatsort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what Imean, if I mean anything in particular. 

In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literarydevelopment can be recognized separately from that of the whole English-speaking world. I think it can, though, as I am always saying Americanliterature is merely a condition of English literature. In some senseevery European literature is a condition of some other Europeanliterature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originateindigenously. A younger literature will choose, by a sort of naturalselection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for nomore apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it willtransform them in the process so that it will give them the effect ofindigeneity. The short story among the Italians, who called it thenovella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fictionof epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if itderived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself inthe variety of its types. But still these remained types, and theyremained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella. It wasnot till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and transplantedit to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit inthe richness of their picaresque fiction. When the English borrowed itthey adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of theirnation, which was then both poetical and humorous. Here it was full ofcharacter, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the boundsof the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones. But in so far as thenovella was studied in the Italian sources, the French, Spanish, andEnglish literatures were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly, though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American literature is acondition of English literature. Each borrower gave a national cast tothe thing borrowed, and that is what has happened with us, in the fullmeasure that our nationality has differenced itself from the English. 

Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good dealof it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we arein some such period of our literary development as those other peopleswhen the short story flourished among them. Or, if I restrict our claim, I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had notthe novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we havethe novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitativeimportance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, andsome others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians. Wesurpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled inthe modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel. Or, if I maynot quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of manyGerman novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one Germannovel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though notof American novels. 

III. 

The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into forseveral centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modernrise of the short story. It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for aplay is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in thatform the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form;but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider thelittle studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatlerand Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises ofthe novella. The germ of the modern short story may have survived inthese, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucerand never wholly disappeared. With Crabbe the novella became asdistinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins. But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, foruntil our time so great work was never done with it. I remind myself ofBoccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from mybold stand. They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern workwhich deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficiallimits. They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it withlarge and profound impressions. 

An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; butI will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work isphilological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James orMiss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems tome of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literarypreciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those moreintangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and thoselasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece. 

The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that itmight be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfectionof form; though one might not like to affirm this. Yet there have beenbut few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions which have the beautyof form many a novella embodies. Is this because it is easier to giveform in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hideformlessness? It is easier to give form in the novella than in thenovel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and becausethe persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated. But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more inthe small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident. The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is noroom in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by whichthe artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel. 

IV. 

The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from theanecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound setbetween it and the novel. In both cases the difference of the novella isin the motive, or the origination. The anecdote is too palpably simpleand single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then anovella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity ofthe anecdote, but which, when released in the reader's consciousness, expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote. Manyanecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one shortstory, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent thestory, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classicanecdote in the novella. The anecdote offers an illustration ofcharacter, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a dramaand develops a type. 

It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceasesto be a novella and becomes a novel. The frontiers are so vague that oneis obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude, which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette. First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story, or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name asmaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or threetimes longer than a short story. We may realize them physically if wewill adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-numberstory, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number ora three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems tobecome a novel. As a two-number or three-number story it is the despairof editors and publishers. The interest of so brief a serial will notmount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when thetale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorableforce!) cares to handle. It is therefore still awaiting itsauthoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory toimagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yetscarcely divined. 

The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella. In fact, the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; andsome of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more thannovelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or SpringFloods. The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, isscarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but nodoubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions ofHamlet. If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for thecharacter and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answerthat there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet. 

But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally beof the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for thenovelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short. I amdisposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared thefavor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because untilsomebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like theone-number story or the serial. I should like to say as my last word forit here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of theirpadding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes indisguise. 

It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if theywere duly padded, would be found novelettes. In that dim, subjectiveregion where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with theauthority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the differencebetween the short-story motive and the long-story motive. One, if one isin that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carryingpower of the given motive. Or, if the reader prefers a different figure, the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere ismystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is goingto grow up a tree, if left to itself. Of course, the mind to which theseed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, orforce it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easilydetect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the first germinal impulsethe inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes theessential simplicity or complexity of the motive. There will be aprophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication ofcharacters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will bedivined indivisible, and there will be a small group of peopleimmediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact. The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that somethingmight be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it isgospel. 

The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to theuninspired. If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality andvitality. It is one stock from which its various branches put out, andform it a living growth identical throughout. The right novella is nevera novel cropped back from the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch ofa tree stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is anotherspecies, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousnessto be brought into being of its own kind, and not of another. 

V. 

This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story, while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there wasone), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them. It has shownitself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention, whether of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or broad farce ordelicate irony, of character or action. The thing that first made itselfknown as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalizedtypes and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the mostflexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of themind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, uponsome fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent somephase or fact of life. 

The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if weconsider what has been done in the short story, and is still doingeverywhere. The good novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle, since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make them, cannot be computed. In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in qualitythey are wonderfully satisfying. Then, why is it that so very, very fewof the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by you, asthe country people say, in characterization or action? How hard it is torecall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most signallygood! We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is it, afterall, a full meal? We become of a perfect intimacy and a devotedfriendship with the men and women in the short stories, but notapparently of a lasting acquaintance. It is a single meeting we havewith them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrenceand repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we holdthe personages in a novel. 

It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows itsirremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to thevery farce, which it may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by namemany characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters outof short stories can we recall? Most persons of the drama givethemselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhapsoblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of itscharacterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greaterfacilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly onthe imagination than the narrative form in the same small space. Thenarrative must give to description what the drama trusts torepresentation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency ofthe dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, forthey remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays. It ispossible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons willbecome more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and withlasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember byname any of the people in them. I may be risking too much in offering aninstance, but who, in even such signal instances as The Revolt of Mother, by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by namethe characters that made them delightful?

VI. 

The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems anessential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yethave short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination withcreations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand. Thestructural change would not be greater than the moral or material changewhich has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross andpalpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often thefilthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure oflisteners willing as children to have the same persons and the samethings over and over again. Now it has not only varied the persons andthings, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of thenatural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary formsthe vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one thinks of a bit of Mr. James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland'ssociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceivesthe immense distance which the short story has come on the way to theheight it has reached. It serves equally the ideal and the real; thatwhich it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short storieswhich have recently made reputations for their authors very few are ofthat peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic. The onlydistinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think ofis Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was soimperative as to be almost a condition of fiction. I am never soenamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tellagainst it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic shortstories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types andcharacters. We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuckand Tennessee's Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember theirseveral qualities. These figures, if we cannot quite consent that theyare persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator'simagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do, out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out ofIrving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich'sfamous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller. 

It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguishedthemselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order. Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long lifebefore him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can onlyinstance him provisionally. On the other hand, one can be much moreconfident that the best novelle have been written by the greatestnovelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others. These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that one istempted to call it their best work. It is really not their best, but itis work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their novels, if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories soldwell when they were good short stories. That they ought to do so is soevident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting theanomaly the other day, insisted that they did. I could only allege thetestimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did notsatisfy him. 

It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom thefault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story byitself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or willnot have, a dozen short stories in a book. This was the bafflingquestion which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with, after all the light I have thrown upon the subject. I leave it where Ifound it, but perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do. If I hadleft it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound to deal with itpractically by reading all the books of short stories he could lay handson, and either divining why he did not enjoy them, or else foreverforegoing his prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them. 

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR

Certain summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrivedat Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanishprisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly soldiers of the landforces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by farthe greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera's ill-fated fleet. I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have statedmade a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not holdout against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera toAnnapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those ofthe Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of thespectator. Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, andgot a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies inthe first hours of their imprisonment. 

I. 

It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of theAmerican summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered inthe sun with a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could lightup the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which ourWhite Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullenin the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities ofthe coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks, seemed quite unrelated. A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatenedthe fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered abouther, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep. She had, in fact, finished her mission. The captives whom death hadreleased had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived toa further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a milefarther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through theNarrows like a torrent. Its defiant rapidity has won it there thegraphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach theisland by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind andthe tide, both dead against us. Our boatman, one of those shore NewEnglanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master ofthe art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure Iwanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captiveswho had just looked upon it. It was beautiful, I had to own, even in myquality of exile and prisoner. The meadows and the orchards came down tothe water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and liftedin black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peeredover it. A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level;everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray oldfarmhouses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and likefreshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatnesswhich made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipatheticalertness. The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky, from which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire. I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturianfisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or anyof it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell inwhich I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands ofstrangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for acaptivity of unknown term. But I need not have been at so much pains;the intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author wouldhave sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another inwar it is its monstrous inconsequence. If we had a grief with theSpanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, wemight have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with theimproved means of assassination which modern science has put at ourcommand, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen--mother andthe little king. This would have been consequent, logical, and in a sortreasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish peasantsand fishermen, hapless conscripts to whom personally and nationally wewere as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliatingnecessity of war which makes it homicide in which there is not even thesaving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood. 

I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity ofthe Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearerand nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and littleravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry-bushes, bay, and lowblackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellowpine boards. Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side byside across the general slope, with the captive officers' quarters, sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them. About theirdoors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and onthe grass, where some of them lounged smoking. One operatic figure in along blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was such poverty ofdrama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we were gladof so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out of the stockade inhis buggy. On the heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns wereposted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty feet sentriesmet and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that we wondered if wemight get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called tous, "Fifty yards off, please!" Our young skipper answered, "All right, "and as the sentry had a gun on his shoulder which we had every reason tobelieve was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to thespecified limit. In fact, we came away altogether, after that, so littlepromise was there of our being able to satisfy our curiosity further. We came away care fully nursing such impression as we had got of a spectacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to feel. It relatedus, after solicitation, to the wars against the Moors, against theMexicans and Peruvians, against the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns ofthe Gran Capitan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to thewars of the Spanish Succession, and what others. I do not deny thatthere was a certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners therefor this effect; we came away duly grateful for what we had seen of them;and we had long duly resigned ourselves to seeing no more, when word wassent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to visit the island, and wished us to go with him. 

II. 

It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time wetook the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far asthe navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among thevast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in theKittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and thosepale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than theywould have been if resonant with saw and hammer. At several points, anunarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our pathwith a mute appeal for our permit; but we were nowhere delayed till wecame to the office where it had to be countersigned, and after that wehad presently crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were on theprison island. Here, if possible, the sense of something pastoraldeepened; a man driving a file of cows passed before us under kindlytrees, and the bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore abouther silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note as if from the depthof some grassy bosk, and instantly witched me away to the woods-pastureswhich my boyhood knew in southern Ohio. Even when we got to what seemedfortifications they turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, andbore on their gate a paternal warning that children unaccompanied byadults were not allowed within. 

We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a youngmarine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit, andthen went back satisfied. Then we found ourselves in the presence of asentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting. Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out theheadquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat. At theheadquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equallycivil, and with the intervention of an orderly our leader saw the officerof the day. He came out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he hadlearned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, but not to thestockade, which we might approach, at a certain point of vantage and lookover into, but not penetrate. We resigned ourselves, as we must, andmade what we could of the nearest prison barrack, whose door overflowedand whose windows swarmed with swarthy captives. Here they were, at suchclose quarters that their black, eager eyes easily pierced the pocketsfull of cigarettes which we had brought for them. They looked mostlyvery young, and there was one smiling rogue at the first window who wasobviously prepared to catch anything thrown to him. He caught, in fact, the first box of cigarettes shied over the stockade; the next box flewopen, and spilled its precious contents outside the dead-line under thewindow, where I hope some compassionate guard gathered them up and gavethem to the captives. 

Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short ofletting them go. They were a most friendly company, with an effect ofpicnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they hadpitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery aspossible. They were very polite to us, and when, after that misadventurewith the cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to throwing the box, merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), I wandered vaguely towards aGatling gun planted on an earthen platform where the laurel and thedogroses had been cut away for it, the man in charge explained with asmile of apology that I must not pass a certain path I had alreadycrossed. 

One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to backthem, and I retreated. That seemed the end; and we were goingcrestfallenly away when the officer of the day came out and allowed us tomake his acquaintance. He permitted us, with laughing reluctance, tolearn that he had been in the fight at Santiago, and had come with theprisoners, and he was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not letus into the stockade. I said I had some cigarettes for the prisoners, and I supposed I might send them; in, but he said he could not allowthis, for they had money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of ourparty, who had not a soul above buttons, and who asked if she could getone from the Spaniards, that so far from promoting her wish, he wouldhave been obliged to take away any buttons she might have got from them. 

"The fact is, " he explained, "you've come to the wrong end fortransactions in buttons and tobacco. "

But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought upon him. When wesaid we were going, and thanked him for his unavailing good-will, helooked at his watch and said they were just going to feed the prisoners;and after some parley he suddenly called out, "Music of the guard!"Instead of a regimental band, which I had supposed summoned, a singlecorporal ran out the barracks, touching his cap. 

"Take this party round to the gate, " the officer said, and he promised usthat he would see us there, and hoped we would not mind a rough walk. Wecould have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would wade throughfathoms of red-tape; but in fact we were arrested at the last point bynothing worse than the barbed wire which fortified the outer gate. Heretwo marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners lived, whilewe stared into the stockade through an inner gate of plank which was runback for us. They said the Spaniards had a breakfast of coffee, and hashor stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast; and now at fiveo'clock they were to have bread and coffee, which indeed we saw thewhite-capped, whitejacketed cooks bringing out in huge tin wash-boilers. Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt rightly, that these poorSpaniards had never known in their lives before what it was to have fullstomachs. But the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the onewho had a German accent intimated that gratitude was not a virtue of anyRoman (I suppose he meant Latin) people. But I do not know that if Iwere a prisoner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicitlythankful for being unusually well fed. I thought (or I think now) that afig or a bunch of grapes would have been more acceptable to me under myown vine and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who were indeedshowing themselves less my enemies than my own government, but were stillnot quite my hosts. 

III. 

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? The clock strikestwelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition. As we stoodthere expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenlystruck twelve. Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade ourmarines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure, where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, withmany polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it werenot chairs. 

The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trottowards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set. Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his turnreceived quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of steamingcoffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long tablesunder a shed at the side of the stockade. One young fellow tried to geta place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came backexplained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly. We heard thateight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers, for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile andobedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at theirbread and coffee. 

First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were thebest looking of all the captives. From their pretty fair average theothers varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to beex-convicts, brought up the rear. They were nearly all little fellows, and very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blondshowed among them. They were joking and laughing together, harmlesslyenough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather sorryjail-birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of our navyblue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, andsometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like jail-birds I am notsure. Still, they were not prepossessing, and though some of them werepathetically young, they had none of the charm of boyhood. No doubt theydid not do themselves justice, and to be herded there like cattle did notimprove their chances of making a favorable impression on the observer. They were kindly used by our officer and his subordinates, who mixedamong them, and straightened out the confusion they got into at times, and perhaps sometimes wilfully. Their guards employed a few handy wordsof Spanish with them; where these did not avail, they took them by thearm and directed them; but I did not hear a harsh tone, and I saw noviolence, or even so much indignity offered them as the ordinary trolley-car passenger is subjected to in Broadway. At a certain bugle-call theydispersed, when they had finished their bread and coffee, and scatteredabout over the grass, or returned to their barracks. We were told thatthese children of the sun dreaded its heat, and kept out of it wheneverthey could, even in its decline; but they seemed not so much to withdrawand hide themselves from that, as to vanish into the history of "old, unhappy, far-off" times, where prisoners of war, properly belong. Iroused myself with a start as if I had lost them in the past. 

Our officer came towards us and said gayly, "Well, you have seen theanimals fed, " and let us take our grateful leave. I think we were rathera loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance totalk. I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate, who walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerlywhen it brought him back. Then he delayed for a rapid and comprehensiveexchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending militarysubordination with American equality in his manner. 

The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the utterabsence of ceremony. Those good fellows were in the clothes they worethrough the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on muchsplendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish. They weresimple, straightforward, and adequate. There was some dry joking aboutthe superiority of the prisoners' rations and lodgings, and our officerironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers. But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupidand atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapersand politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind. There wasnothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to thatmilitary ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal ofself-interest. Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when thepeoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are unitedfor the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities. 

IV. 

Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike, imparted itself from what I had seen? Or was this more properly aneffect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundredand fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers? I cannot saythat a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a morepositive humanity which was at work. Most of the sufferers werestretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, whichreceived them, four days after the orders for their reception had come, with every equipment for their comfort. At five o'clock, when we passeddown the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalanteffect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it wasreally the thermometers with which the nurses were taking theirtemperature. It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked ifthey were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke, anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes ofcigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon. I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sickcaptives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to theleast. They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, "Muchas gracias, " but the others merely smiled sadly; andI looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in thefaces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity. Italians wouldhave met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of anothertradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though wesometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation. Perhapsthere are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities, and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans. When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas. 

They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark facestheir sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as theyturned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not "supportthe government" so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere. But thetruth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who, in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much likesomebody's brothers, and even somebody's children. I may have beeninfected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, whichprevailed in the place. There it was as wholly business to be kind andto cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be crueland to kill. How droll these things are! The surgeons had theirfavorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted;inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of theirhapless foes, whom they spoke of as "a sort of pets. " One of these wasvery useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was likedapparently because he was so likable. At a certain cot the chief surgeonstopped and said, "We did not expect this boy to live through the night. "He took the boy's wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderlyas he leaned over him, "Poco mejor?" The boy could not speak to say thathe was a little better; he tried to smile--such things do move thewitness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been halfchopped away by a machete tend to restore one's composure. 

AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES

One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear toa rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently aliterature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so muchliterature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have aliterary centre. We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Wherethere is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace. But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, wedeceive ourselves. Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we havekindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have adozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of aliterary centre is concerned, if it is not worse. 

I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which Iwrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has latelycome to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far asthat island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand theLondon friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literaryproduction" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand atpresent; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other suchcentres. "

I. 

Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garmentwhich this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I havea fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather toosuccinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italyor than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not betaken at my word. I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told thatin those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can onlysay that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we getfurther every day from having such a centre. The fault, if it is afault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life iscentrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life, it shares this tendency. I do not attempt to say how it will be when, inorder to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach theblessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of oureight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred atsome capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writingliterary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing senseof limits. 

Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: atPhiladelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the deathof Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, duringthe period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis, and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined bythe presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights. These are all still greatpublishing centres. If it were not that the house with the largest listof American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was nowthe chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, oreven Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controllinginfluence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither NewYork nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once havebeen. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when NewYork seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave itlustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was aNew Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, aBostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or theirprosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poedid not even die here, though he often came near starving. One cannotthen strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston, and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre. 

However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before theCivil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began tohave an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonialliterature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature. But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with thecoming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all thedifferent sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but notbefore that time. 

II. 

Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was soundedfrom California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know hisbeautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group ofpoets and humorists whom these names must stand for. The San Franciscoschool briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it enduredit made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, forits writers were of every American origin except Californian. 

After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in thedialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation ofall the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then hasbegun again. It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel ChandlerHarris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so longmasqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana found expression inthe Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems ofMr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr. Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finelydirected as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies ofcountry life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work. To be sure, theportrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists wasknown; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old TownStories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in herunromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose TerryCooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With the latergroup Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life withtruth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for thematerial which characterizes Russian fiction. 

Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men andWhite of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. OwenWister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions andcharacteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sadcircumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored fromthe experience of one who had been part of what he saw. Later came Mr. Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well assomething of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burlyof Chicago. 

III. 

A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own thatI am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me toan expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be sopersonal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism withintense sympathy. In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and intimes past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those whobelieved beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not nowbe doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that itschief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life. Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole Ihave no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interestedspectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity withwhich some phases of it have been rendered. The lightning--or theflash-light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in strikingthis ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notableeffect at some points. This began, I believe, with the local dramas ofMr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character, loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the threadof a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours. It was veryrough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held themirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gaveus East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which wereinstantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying. I never couldunderstand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gonefar enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others. Thenext to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge ofCourage wronged the finer art which he showed in such New York studies asMaggie: A Girl of the Streets, and George's Mother. He has been followedby Abraham Cahan, a Russian Hebrew, who has done portraits of his raceand nation with uncommon power. They are the very Russian Hebrews ofHester Street translated from their native Yiddish into English, whichthe author mastered after coming here in his early manhood. He broughtto his work the artistic qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and inhis 'Jekl: A Story of the Ghetto', he gave proof of talent which his morerecent book of sketches--'The Imported Bride groom'--confirms. He seeshis people humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as heis compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsypathos of their lives. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is whollywithout "tendentiousness. "

A good many years ago--ten or twelve, at least--Mr. Harry Harland hadshown us some politer New York Jews, with a romantic coloring, thoughwith genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness of his material;but I do not think of any one who has adequately dealt with our Gentilesociety. Mr. James has treated it historically in Washington Square, andmore modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as well as in some ofhis shorter stories; Mr. Edgar Fawcett has dealt with it intelligentlyand authoritatively in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander Matthews hassketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic cleverness, neatness, and point. In the novel, 'His Father's Son', he in fact facesit squarely and renders certain forms of it with masterly skill. He hasdone something more distinctive still in 'The Action and the Word', oneof the best American stories I know. But except for these writers, ourliterature has hardly taken to New York society. 

IV. 

It is an even thing: New York society has not taken to our literature. New York publishes it, criticises it, and circulates it, but I doubt ifNew York society much reads it or cares for it, and New York is thereforeby no means the literary centre that Boston once was, though a largenumber of our literary men live in or about New York. Boston, in my timeat least, had distinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or lesspervaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing of the kind, in anypervasive sense. It is a vast mart, and literature is one of the thingsmarketed here; but our good society cares no more for it than for someother products bought and sold here; it does not care nearly so much forbooks as for horses or for stocks, and I suppose it is not unlike thegood society of any other metropolis in this. To the general, here, journalism is a far more appreciable thing than literature, and hasgreater recognition, for some very good reasons; but in Boston literaturehad vastly more honor, and even more popular recognition, thanjournalism. There journalism desired to be literary, and here literaturehas to try hard not to be journalistic. If New York is a literary centreon the business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, asWeimar was, and as Edinburgh was. It felt literature, as those capitalsfelt it, and if it did not love it quite so much as might seem, it alwaysrespected it. 

To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Bostonto our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no suchliterary centre as Boston was. Boston itself has perhaps outgrown theliterary consciousness which formerly distinguished it from all our otherlarge towns. In a place of nearly a million people (I count in theoutlying places) newspapers must be more than books; and that alone sayseverything. 

Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, theNew-Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some suchmeans that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not passedto New York. But still there is enough literature left in the body atBoston to keep her first among equals in some things, if not easily firstin all. 

Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, theforemost of our poets. At Cambridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, anessayist in a certain sort without rival among us; and Mr. William James, the most interesting and the most literary of psychologists, whose reputeis European as well as American. Mr. Charles Eliot Norton alone survivesof the earlier Cambridge group--Longfellow, Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, and Henry James, the father of thenovelist and the psychologist. 

To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our abler historians, hasgone from Ohio; and there Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, the MassachusettsSenator, whose work in literature is making itself more and more known, was born and belongs, politically, socially, and intellectually. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a poet of wide fame in an elder generation, lives there;Mr. T. B. Aldrich lives there; and thereabouts live Mrs. Elizabeth StuartPhelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, the first of a famebeyond the last, who was known to us so long before her. Then at Boston, or near Boston, live those artists supreme in the kind of short storywhich we have carried so far: Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss AliceBrown, Mrs. Chase-Wyman, and Miss Gertrude Smith, who comes from Kansas, and writes of the prairie farm-life, though she leaves Mr. E. W. Howe(of 'The Story of a Country Town' and presently of the Atchison DailyGlobe) to constitute, with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontierliterary centre at Topeka. Of Boston, too, though she is of westernPennsylvania origin, is Mrs. Margaret Deland, one of our most successfulnovelists. Miss Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into NewJersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen. 

All these are more or less embodied and represented in the AtlanticMonthly, still the most literary, and in many things still the first ofour magazines. Finally, after the chief publishing house in New York, the greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with by far thelargest list of the best American books. Recently several firms ofyounger vigor and valor have recruited the wasted ranks of the Bostonpublishers, and are especially to be noted for the number of rather nicenew poets they give to the light. 

V. 

Dealing with the question geographically, in the right American way, wedescend to Hartford obliquely by way of Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in a little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropolitaninfluence and of distinctly literary tone is published. At Hartfordwhile Charles Dudley Warner lived, there was an indisputable literarycentre; Mark Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely countHartford among our literary centres, though it is a publishing centre ofmuch activity in subscription books. 

At New Haven, Yale University has latterly attracted Mr. William H. Bishop, whose novels I always liked for the best reasons, and has longheld Professor J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child's death atCambridge, our best Chaucer scholar. Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, onceendeared to the whole fickle American public by his Reveries of aBachelor and his Dream Life, dwells on the borders of the pleasant town, which is also the home of Mr. J. W. De Forest, the earliest real Americannovelist, and for certain gifts in seeing and telling our life also oneof the greatest. 

As to New York (where the imagination may arrive daily from New Haven, either by a Sound boat or by eight or ten of the swiftest express trainsin the world), I confess I am more and more puzzled. Here abide thepoets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Stedman, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and manywhom an envious etcetera must hide from view; the fictionists, Mr. R. H. Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. FrankHopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham Cahan, Mr. Frank Norris, and Mr. James LaneAllen, who has left Kentucky to join the large Southern contingent, whichincludes Mrs. Burton Harrison and Mrs. McEnery Stuart; the historians, Professor William M. Sloane and Dr. Eggleston (reformed from a novelist);the literary and religious and economic essayists, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mr. H. M. Alden, Mr. J. J. Chapman, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, withcritics, dramatists, satirists, magazinists, and journalists of literarystamp in number to convince the wavering reason against itself that herebeyond all question is the great literary centre of these States. Thereis an Authors' Club, which alone includes a hundred and fifty authors, and, if you come to editors, there is simply no end. Magazines arepublished here and circulated hence throughout the land by millions; andbooks by the ton are the daily output of our publishers, who are thelargest in the country. 

If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard tosay what does; and I am not going to try for a reason against such facts. It is not quality that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of thequality; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump. It may be thatNew York is going to be our literary centre, as London is the literarycentre of England, by gathering into itself all our writing talent, butit has by no means done this yet. What we can say is that more authorscome here from the West and South than go elsewhere; but they often stayat home, and I fancy very wisely. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris stays atAtlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb Riley stays at Indianapolis; Mr. Maurice Thompson spent his whole literary life, and General Lew. Wallacestill lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison Cawein stays atLouisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree stays at St. Louis, Missouri; FrancisR. Stockton spent the greater part of the year at his place in WestVirginia, and came only for the winter months to New York; Mr. EdwardBellamy, until his failing health exiled him to the Far West, remained atChicopee, Massachusetts; and I cannot think of one of these writers whomit would have advantaged in any literary wise to dwell in New York. Hewould not have found greater incentive than at home; and in society hewould not have found that literary tone which all society had, or wishedto have, in Boston when Boston was a great town and not yet a big town. 

In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was ever so much tasteand feeling for literature as there was in that Boston. At Edinburgh (asI imagine it) there was a large and distinguished literary class, and atWeimar there was a cultivated court circle; but in Boston there was notonly such a group of authors as we shall hardly see here again forhundreds of years, but there was such regard for them and their calling, not only in good society, but among the extremely well-read people of thewhole intelligent city, as hardly another community has shown. New York, I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see no signs that it everwill be. It does not influence the literature of the whole country asBoston once did through writers whom all the young writers wished toresemble; it does not give the law, and it does not inspire the love thatliterary Boston inspired. There is no ideal that it represents. 

A glance at the map of the Union will show how very widely our smallerliterary centres are scattered; and perhaps it will be useful infollowing me to other more populous literary centres. Dropping southwardfrom New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary centre of importanceat Philadelphia, since that is the home of Mr. J. B. McMasters, thehistorian of the American people; of Mr. Owen Wister, whose fresh andvigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir Mitchell, a novelist ofpower long known to the better public, and now recognized by the largerin the immense success of his historical romance, Hugh Wynne. 

If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre of great promise, butwhile I do not forget the excellent work of Johns Hopkins University intraining men for the solider literature of the future, no Baltimore namesto conjure with occur to me at the moment; and we must really get on toWashington. This, till he became ambassador at the Court of St. James, was the home of Mr. John Hay, a poet whose biography of Lincoln must rankhim with the historians, and whose public service as Secretary of Stateclasses him high among statesmen. He blotted out one literary centre atCleveland, Ohio, when he removed to Washington, and Mr. Thomas NelsonPage another at Richmond, Virginia, when he came to the national capital. Mr. Paul Dunbar, the first negro poet to divine and utter his race, carried with him the literary centre of Dayton, Ohio, when he came to bean employee in the Congressional Library; and Mr. Charles WarrenStoddard, in settling at Washington as Professor of Literature in theCatholic University, brought somewhat indirectly away with him the lasttraces of the old literary centre at San Francisco. 

A more recent literary centre in the Californian metropolis went topieces when Mr. Gelett Burgess came to New York and silenced the 'Lark', a bird of as new and rare a note as ever made itself heard in this air;but since he has returned to California, there is hope that the literarycentre may form itself there again. I do not know whether Mrs. CharlottePerkins Stetson wrecked a literary centre in leaving Los Angeles or not. I am sure only that she has enriched the literary centre of New York bythe addition of a talent in sociological satire which would beextraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us. 

Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago? I fancy, yes;or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constituteit. In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he hasalready done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may wellleave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking thatrole. Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original giftwho centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name wellknown in romantic fiction. Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, ofthe finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Paynein their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satiresform with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country. It would be hard to match among our critical journals the 'Dial' ofChicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often asgood within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim torank with our first literary centres. 

It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, withMr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me anAmerican literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston. Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, readyto say. When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts, I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, itseems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. 

THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY

My friend came in the other day, before we had left town, and lookedround at the appointments of the room in their summer shrouds, and said, with a faint sigh, "I see you have had the eternal-womanly with you, too. "

I. 

"Isn't the eternal-womanly everywhere? What has happened to you?"I asked. 

"I wish you would come to my house and see. Every rug has been up for amonth, and we have been living on bare floors. Everything that could betied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has beensewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chestshas been moth-balled and put away. Everything that could be taken downhas been taken down. Bags with draw-strings at their necks have beenpulled over the chandeliers and tied. The pictures have been hidden incheese-cloth, and the mirrors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my ownmiserable face anywhere. "

"Come! That's something. "

"Yes, it's something. But I have been thinking this matter over veryseriously, and I believe it is going from bad to worse. I have heardpraises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but thehousekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense. "

"Do you really believe that?" I asked. "And if you do, what of it?"

"Simply this, that if we don't put a stop to it, at the gait it's going, it will put a stop to the eternal-womanly. "

"I suppose we should hate that. "

"Yes, it would be bad. It would be very bad; and I have been turning thematter over in my mind, and studying out a remedy. "

"The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over in his mind and letssome one else study out a remedy. "

"Yes, I know. I feel that I may be wrong in my processes, but I am surethat I am right in my results. The reason why our grandmothers could besuch good housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the eternal-womanly was that they had so few things to look after in their houses. Life was indefinitely simpler with them. But the modern improvements, as we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeeping withoutsubtracting its burdens, as they were expected to do. Every novelconvenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every meansof refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to theburdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from thegrandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, whichwill not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiestof their superfluities. "

"Yes, I see what you mean, " I said. This is what one usually says whenone does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case Ireally did know, or thought I did. "That survival of the conscience is avery curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly. I suppose thatthe North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental Europeanconscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more orless religious and economical in its origin. But with the advance ofwealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simplyconscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social. The eternal-womanlycontinues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse, and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on. Itis something in the air, or something in the blood. Perhaps it issomething in both. "

"Yes, " said my friend, quite as I had said already, "I see what you mean. But I think it is in the air more than in the blood. I was in Paris, about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in myhouse that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag withdrawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests. At anyrate, I was there. One day I left my wife in New York carefully taggingthree worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, andtagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealingpaper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at thehouse of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her housewhen she went into the country for the summer. 'Leave them just as theyare, ' she said. 'But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust andthe tarnish?' She said, 'Why, the things would have to be all gone overwhen I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myselfdouble trouble?' I asked her if she didn't even roll anything up and putit away in closets, and she said: 'Oh, you mean that old American horrorof getting ready to go away. I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn't dream of it here. In the first place, there are noclosets in the house, and I couldn't put anything away if I wanted to. And really nothing happens. I scatter some Persian powder along theedges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, andI pull down the shades. When I come back in the fall I have the powderswept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again. Suppose alittle dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here andthere? The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of puttingeverything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks ofdiscomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness--I leftAmerican housekeeping in America. ' I asked her: 'But if you went back?'and she gave a sigh, and said:

"'I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest. Everybodydoes it there. ' So you see, " my friend concluded, "it's in the air, rather than the blood. "

"Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and livein Paris?"

"Oh, dear, not" said my friend. "Nothing so drastic as all that. Merelythe extinction of household property. "

"I see what you mean, " I said. "But--what do you mean?"

"Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all befurnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them, and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. Theremust be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his ownlinen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by theexpropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. Itmust be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case ofviolation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect orderwhen the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order whenthe tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to cleanit, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests. All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlordthat it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts toclose the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usualway that houses are now closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would bemeasurably vitiated. "

"I see what you mean, " I murmured. "Well?"

"Some years ago, " my friend went on, "when we came home from Europe, weleft our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about, and did not settle anywhere in particular. During that interval my wifeopened and closed five furnished houses in two years. "

"And she has lived to tell the tale?"

"She has lived to tell it a great many times. She can hardly be keptfrom telling it yet. But it is my belief that, although she brought tothe work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influenceof the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less inher encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now doeswith our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, andopens it for the winter. But if there had been a clause in the lease, asthere should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order whenshe left them, life would have been simply a rapture. Why, in Europecustom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you comeand go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mindtaking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are very far behind in thismatter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extendedscale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, moreperfectly than any other people in the world. You see what I mean?"

"I am not sure that I do. But go on. "

"I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would taxpersonal property of the household kind so heavily that it wouldnecessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costlythat it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also thevery wicked, and ought to suffer. "

"Oh, come, now!"

"I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all household property wouldpass into the hands of the state. "

"Aren't you getting worse and worse?"

"Oh, I'm not supposing there won't be a long interval when householdproperty will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and manymillionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants likeyou and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I have no doubt thatthere will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend itsrelations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole worldinto its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probablygroan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personalownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of themothball. We shall suffer, but--"

"I see what you mean, " I hastened to interrupt at this point, "but thesesuggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond--Do you think you coulddefer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?"

"Well, for not more than a week, " said my friend, with an air ofdiscomfort in his arrest. 

II. 

--"We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system, " saidmy friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week. Bythis time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on theveranda of a sea-side hotel. "As for the eternal-womanly, it will be hersalvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her householdeffects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those ofthe Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back herpeace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she beganhousekeeping. "

"That may all very well be, " I assented, though I did not believe it, andI found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme. "Butwhen we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is tobecome of our tender and sacred associations with them?"

"What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship ofancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living, so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and theground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be usedby their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell thebones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by, when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service ofthe gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that thetombs of one's forefathers could be sold without violence to theirspectres. I dare say it wouldn't be different in the case of our tenderand sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds andbedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a littlefurther. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point thattroubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed theirdomiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paidthe slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connectedwith them. I don't suppose you would say that a man has no suchassociations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has themwith the stuff that has furnished it?"

"No, I shouldn't say that. "

"If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet ateach remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards, portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils, and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear topart with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulatedstuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiffhouse-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing thatvery thing now! Aren't you?"

"I am--in a certain degree, " I assented. 

"We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wifeand I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste andslavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three orfour vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces wehad not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect anddecide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts ofrejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We hadn't had such lighthearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europeindefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of ourlives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every onehad been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again. "

"I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associationspretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But thethings that we have in daily use?"

"It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us thanthe floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with noparticular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainlynot to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with theanxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if shecould but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wrapsup with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is apiece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house foryears, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yetnot form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we havetender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not witha thing we have hired?"

"I confess, I don't know. And do you really think we could liberateourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't theeternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking themout for winter?"

"At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but itwould be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the StandardHousehold-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penaltyfor violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly ofher ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical, whatever we say about the dressmaker's bills; and the very futilities ofputting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with, are founded in the instinct of saving. "

"But, " I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal ofcharacter if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't our domestic interiorsbecome dreadfully impersonal?"

"How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let thedifferent dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the StandardHousehold-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that eitherwould choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in thefew cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In mostinteriors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they arethe mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; wherethey are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean bycharacter and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that letitself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and hassince gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanlywas supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a giftfor the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stampherself upon our interiors. One painted a high-shouldered stone bottlewith a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied thescarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon around the arm of achair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment, the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and thesofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, inslants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius. The wallsbecame all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignifiedugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to ahysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had their doors paintedblack, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them withmorning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day, thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black door and its morning-glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as WaltWhitman says. No, the less we try to get personality and character intoour household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be. As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession andrender it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architectand decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire anew house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanlyconcerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what shewill like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got athing she wants, begins to hate it. The company's agents will begin byconvincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered upher house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even inthe region of pure aesthetics. I once asked an Italian painter if he didnot think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said'SI. Ma troppa roba. ' There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas, pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers. 'Troppa roba' is the vice of allour household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanlyif it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly willteach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South, and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevailsamong the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with. What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?"

"That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtainsare concerned, " I said, "but surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures andobjects of art?"

"I would apply it to them first of all and above all, " rejoined myfriend, hardily. "Among all the people who buy and own such things thereis not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, andthe objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave anddegrade them further. The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by theStandard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a realsense of art, and a knowledge of it. When the house-letting and house-furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things wouldbe lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores forthe purpose. "

"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with theother pictures?" I sneered. 

"Ancestral portraits, of course, " said my friend, with unruffled temper. "So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad tohave ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of thecompany or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of theother, will study the existing type of family face, and will selectancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expressionagree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of thefamily whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shallbe no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraitsnow have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme, " my friendconcluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome. We mustalienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively andexclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community, I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; anysense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivismpunishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, willbe the salvation of the eternal-womanly. "

"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"

"What can be more precious?"

"Individuality. "

"My dear friend, " demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I wasgradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is anyindividuality in such things now? What have we been saying aboutcharacter?"

"Ah, I see what you mean, " I said. 

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER

Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against thesoutheasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in thenorthwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened theopen sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef ofWhaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorageswithin. 

Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with acasual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded knowinglyto one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the breast ofthe invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and pleasure-boatswhich always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe waters. Thecraft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seinersfrom Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; theycame with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on theirflying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seinespiled in black heaps between the thwarts. As soon as they came insidetheir jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from theirbows. Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty or seventyships in the harbor, and as the night fell they improvised a littleVenice under the hill with their lights, which twinkled rhythmically, like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine and NewHampshire coasts. 

There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but thatended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a storm. The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at anchor throughthe day; but the next night the weather cleared. We woke to the cluckingof tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea. Whenthey were fairly gone, the summer, which had held aloof in dismay of thesudden cold, seemed to return and possess the land again; and thesuccession of silver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil roundwhich we thought had ceased. 

I. 

One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, "There neverwas such a summer"; but if the summer is one of those which slip from thefeeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckonedwith the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad convictionof the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of neverseeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know. Each newsummer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: itsJunes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, incompliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compassthat fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size likeshrivelled peas in a pod. 

To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas putto soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we firstspent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hourslong. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where thereis nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and musebeside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Pointthat they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their length, are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without regardto the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail comes with a fewletters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. Athalf-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o'clock there isanother indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in themorning; and at seven the last mail arrives with the Boston eveningpapers and the New York morning papers, to make you forget any lettersyou were looking for. The opening of the mid-day mail is that which mostthrongs with summer folks the little postoffice under the elms, oppositethe weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pepperrell; but the eveningmail attracts a large and mainly disinterested circle of natives. Theday's work on land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, perchedupon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness whichwe should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slighton our own ground. 

II. 

The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a complexion which seems to beinherited rather than personally acquired; for the commerce of KitteryPoint perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to fit out fromher wharves have almost as long ago passed to Gloucester. All that isleft of the fishing interest is the weir outside which supplies, fitfullyand uncertainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets. But inspite of this the tint taken from the suns and winds of the sea lingerson the local complexion; and the local manner is that freer and easiermanner of people who have known other coasts, and are in some sortcitizens of the world. It is very different from the inland New Englandmanner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from theclipped nasals of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not theheavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of thedeck in it. 

Nothing could be better suited to progress through the long village, which rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legson; and nothing could be more charming and friendly than this village. It is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which have covered somuch of the coast, and made it look as if the aesthetic suburbs of NewYork and Boston had gone ashore upon it. There are two or threeold-fashioned summer hotels; but the summer life distinctly fails tocharacterize the place. The people live where their forefathers havelived for two hundred and fifty years; and for the century since thebaronial domain of Sir William was broken up and his possessionsconfiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in small red or whitehouses on their small holdings along the slopes and levels of the lowhills beside the water, where a man may pass with the least inconvenienceand delay from his threshold to his gunwale. Not all the houses aresmall; some are spacious and ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns; butmost are simple and homelike. Their gardens, following the example ofSir William's vanished pleasaunce, drop southward to the shore, where thelobster-traps and the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity. Butthe fish-flakes which once gave these inclines the effect of terracedvineyards have passed as utterly as the proud parterres of the oldbaronet; and Kittery Point no longer "makes" a cod or a haddock for themarket. 

Three groceries, a butcher shop, and a small variety store study the fewnative wants; and with a little money one may live in as great realcomfort here as for much in a larger place. The street takes care ofitself; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is not of theinsatiable Dutch type which will not spare the stones of the highway; butwithin the houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. The other day Ifound myself in a kitchen where the stove shone like oxidized silver; thepump and sink were clad in oilcloth as with blue tiles; the walls werepapered; the stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and braidedrugs; and I felt the place so altogether too good for me that I pleadedto stay there for the transaction of my business, lest a sharper sense ofmy unfitness should await me in the parlor. 

The village, with scarcely an interval of farm-lands, stretches fourmiles along the water-side to Portsmouth; but it seems to me that just atthe point where our lines have fallen there is the greatest concentrationof its character. This has apparently not been weakened, it has beenaccented, by the trolley-line which passes through its whole length, withgayly freighted cars coming and going every half-hour. I suppose theyare not longer than other trolley-cars, but they each affect me like aprocession. They are cheerful presences by day, and by night they lightup the dim, winding street with the flare of their electric bulbs, andbring to the country a vision of city splendor upon terms that do nothumiliate or disquiet. During July and August they are mostly filledwith summer folks from a great summer resort beyond us, and their lightsreveal the pretty fashions of hats and gowns in all the charm of thelatest lines and tints. But there is an increasing democracy in thesesplendors, and one might easily mistake a passing excursionist from someneighboring inland town, or even a local native with the instinct ofclothes, for a social leader from York Harbor. 

With the falling leaf, the barge-like open cars close up into well-warmedsaloons, and falter to hourly intervals in their course. But we arestill far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing orfading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn;the ancient Pepperrell elms fling down showers of the baronet's fairygold in the September gusts; the sumacs and the blackberry vines areablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but it is still summer, itis still summer: I cannot allow otherwise!

III. 

The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifferenceof one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the firstPepperrell, who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finallyat Kittery Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortunein colonial New England, which revolutionary New England seized anddispersed, as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personalquality I am of course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civiccapacity I am a patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth acentury old, and if I could now have my way, I would not have had theirpossessions reft from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly helpbeing loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors. Sir William, indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people whodespoiled him to a national consciousness. If he did not imagine, hemainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg atCape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and hissplendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught thecolonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer thanthey liked. His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding Americanarmies, and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sortnatural to an amiable man who knew most of them personally. He wasalready the richest man in America, and his grateful king made him abaronet; but he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his oldlife in a region where he had the comfortable consideration of anunrivalled magnate. He built himself the dignified mansion which stillstands across the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within aneasy stone's cast of the far older house, where his father wedded MargeryBray, when he came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles ofShoals, and established his family on Kittery. The Bray house had beenthe finest in the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansionwas built; it still remembers its consequence in the panelling andwainscoting of the large, square parlor where the young people weremarried and in the elaborate staircase cramped into the little, squarehall; and the Bray fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of thePepperrells. 

I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirtymiles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William's having done ithere a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had lefthis family, say, about a mile of it. They could now, indeed, enjoy itonly in the collateral branches, for all Sir William's line is extinct. The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, andthe fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his deathbelongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants ofa prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point asthe Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove ofdrooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of SirWilliam's father, cherishes the family memories with due American"proceedings. "

IV. 

The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chiefexcitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was anexcitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence ofour naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and krakenshapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in thefight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under mywindow. 

I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they werehere I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whitedlocomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recentaccident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetryof the man-of-war still clings to the "three-decker out of the foam" ofthe past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo aboutthe modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the Texas andthe Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, "Ah, but for you, and our need ofproving your dire efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with thewickedness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been no war!" Under myreluctant eyes the great, dreadful spectacle of the Santiago fightdisplayed itself in peaceful Kittery Harbor. I saw the Spanish shipsdrive upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hampshire, was camping ina little wooden shanty unconscious; and I heard the dying screams of theSpanish sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of their ownwicked war-kettles. 

As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like "kind LieutenantBelay of the 'Hot Cross-Bun', " seemed to be "banging away the whole daylong. " They set a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcastleshore, which, till they came, only recollected itself to salute thesunrise and sunset with a single gun; but which, under provocation of thesquadron, formed a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon. 

Other martial shows and noises were not so bad. I rather liked seeingthe morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks, with the lively music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bellswere charming; the week's wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness byday, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the wavesand shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive. There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latestcoon-songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from variousnations; and yes, I remember the white squadron kindly, though I was soglad to have it go, and let us lapse back into our summer silence andcalm. It was (I do not mind saying now) a majestic sight to see thosegrotesque monsters gather themselves together, and go wallowing, oneafter another, out of the harbor, and drop behind the ledge of WhalebackLight, as if they had sunk into the sea. 

V. 

A deep peace fell upon us when they went, and it must have been at thismost receptive moment, when all our sympathies were adjusted in a mood ofhospitable expectation, that Jim appeared. 

Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat; but unless one haslived at Kittery Point, and realized, from observation and experience, what a leading part cats may play in society, one cannot feel the fullimport of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, butevery house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, andyoung; of divers colors, tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell. With awhole ocean inviting to the tragic rite, I do not believe there is ever akitten drowned in Kittery; the illimitable sea rather employs itself insupplying the fish to which "no cat's averse, " but which the cats ofKittery demand to have cooked. They do not like raw fish; they say itplainly, and they prefer to have the bones taken out for them, thoughthey do not insist upon that point. 

At least, Jim never did so from the time when he first scented the odorof delicate young mackerel in the evening air about our kitchen, anddropped in upon the maids there with a fine casual effect of being merelyout for a walk, and feeling it a neighborly thing to call. He had on asilver collar, engraved with his name and surname, which offered itselffor introduction like a visiting-card. He was too polite to ask himselfto the table at once, but after he had been welcomed to the familycircle, he formed the habit of finding himself with us at breakfast andsupper, when he sauntered in like one who should say, "Did I smell fish?"but would not go further in the way of hinting. 

He had no need to do so. He was made at home, and freely invited to ourbest not only in fish, but in chicken, for which he showed a nice taste, and in sweetcorn, for which he revealed a most surprising fondness whenit was cut from the cob for him. After he had breakfasted or supped hegracefully suggested that he was thirsty by climbing to the table wherethe water-pitcher stood and stretching his fine feline head towards it. When he had lapped up his saucer of water; he marched into the parlor, and riveted the chains upon our fondness by taking the best chair andgoing to sleep in it in attitudes of Egyptian, of Assyrian majesty. His arts were few or none; he rather disdained to practise any; hecompleted our conquest by maintaining himself simply a fascinatingpresence; and perhaps we spoiled Jim. It is certain that he came undermy window at two o'clock one night, and tried the kitchen door. Itresisted his efforts to get in, and then Jim began to use language whichI had never heard from the lips of a cat before, and seldom from the lipsof a man. I will not repeat it; enough that it carried to the listenerthe conviction that Jim was not sober. Where he could have got hisliquor in the totally abstinent State of Maine I could not positivelysay, but probably of some sailor who had brought it from the neighboringNew Hampshire coast. There could be no doubt, however, that Jim wasdrunk; and a dash from the water-pitcher seemed the only thing for him. The water did not touch him, but he started back in surprise and grief, and vanished into the night without a word. 

His feelings must have been deeply wounded, for it was almost a weekbefore he came near us again; and then I think that nothing but younglobster would have brought him. He forgave us finally, and made us ofhis party in the quarrel he began gradually to have with the large yellowcat of a next-door neighbor. This culminated one afternoon, after a longexchange of mediaeval defiance and insult, in a battle upon a bed ofragweed, with wild shrieks of rage, and prodigious feats of ground andlofty tumbling. It seemed to our anxious eyes that Jim was getting theworst of it; but when we afterwards visited the battle-field and pickedup several tufts of blond fur, we were in a doubt which was afterwardsheightened by Jim's invasion of the yellow cat's territory, where hestretched himself defiantly upon the grass and seemed to be challengingthe yellow cat to come out and try to put him off the premises. 

LITERATURE AND LIFE--Short Stories and Essays

CONTENTS:

 Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wishnow to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtfulconsideration. 

I. 

The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there wasreally some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from beingtempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts offrigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury ofresentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passingthrough a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by thesports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from thesidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were nopeddlers' carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or fourshawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchasesin their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of thebeer saloons. The butchers' windows were painted with patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideousstalactites from the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sympathywith the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showersof powdered quartz. 

But it was before I reached this final point that I received into myconsciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been anincreasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child sosmall that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, untilshe appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to thepail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her littlemittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted towrite of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This wouldhave been more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truthobliges me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. The pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled tooverflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not beenfor this I might have taken her for a child of the better classes, shewas so comfortably clad. But in that case she would have had to befifteen or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently andresponsibly the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she wasactually doing at five or six. We must, indeed, allow that the earlyself-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more sobecause they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according to thetheories of all polite economists, they have to have their discontentwith their conditions put into their heads by malevolent agitators. 

From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest;it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothingof it. From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits ofcoke that tumbled from her heaping pail. She could not consent to loseone of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of themstay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of herjacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, whoplanted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands inhis pockets. I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in hisfurtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance to havefun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about tillshe cried with vexation, was one which might not often present itself, and I do not know what made him forego it, but I know that he did, andthat he finally passed her, as I have seen a young dog pass a little cat, after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it. 

I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towardsthe river again I received the second instalment of my presentperplexity. A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yardwhich I now perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed twobrisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the coldlike the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of cokethat were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them; suchold women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the witheredapples red in their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may have beenabout sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most women aregrandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats oftheir children's homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visionsof lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren. The fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimblebeldams, who hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking uptheir day's supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart. Even the attempt is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeblefancy, not bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring thembefore me in that figure. I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind ofthing; I can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard alltheir lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from theircradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight withoutceasing to their graves. But I am not unreasonable; I understand and Iunderstood what I saw to be one of the things that must be, for theperfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and atthe moment I got what pleasure I could out of the stolid indifference ofthe cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interestedme, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe inthe freezing eddies of the air behind him. 

II. 

It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it iswhat to do with the fact. The question began with me almost at once, orat least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with thewind at my back. I was then so much more comfortable that the aestheticinstinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I couldmake of what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I have somethingvery pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pickup coke for her sick daughter's freezing orphans till she fell sickherself? What should I do with the family in that case? They could notbe left at that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl ofabout eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in herhumble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother's place. I decidedthat I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, andcould manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena;either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw thatI must make her Venetian. Here I was on safe ground, and at once thelove-interest appeared to help me out. By virtue of the law ofcontrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance withScandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels. His name was Janssen, a good, distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and Ithought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner fromthat of a Swedish waitress we once had. 

Janssen--Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina's grandmotherused to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as theywere jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference. At first he noticed Marina--or Nina, as I soon saw I must call her--withthe same unconcern; for in her grandmother's hood and jacket and checkapron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly likethe old woman. I thought I would have Nina make her self-sacrificerebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow thecokecart with tears. This would catch Janssen's notice, and he wouldwonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old woman was crying about, and then he would see that it was not the old woman. He would see thatit was Nina, and he would be in love with her at once, for she would notonly be very pretty, but he would know that she was good, if she werewilling to help her family in that way. 

He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, Northern way. He woulddo nothing to betray himself. But little by little he would begin tobefriend her. He would carelessly overload his cart before he left theyard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not onlythis, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he woulddrive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load. 

Nina would get to watching for him. She must not notice him much atfirst, except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart. But after several mornings she must see that he is very strong andhandsome. Then, after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, hervivid black eyes, with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his coldblue eyes. This must be the climax; and just at this point I gave myfancy a rest, while I went into a drugstore at the corner of Avenue B toget my hands warm. 

They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and I had suffered pastseveral places trying to think of an excuse to go in. I now asked thedruggist if he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, andthis put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was verypolite. We agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave wayrespectfully when I doubted his opinion that the winters were gettingmilder. I made him reflect that there was no reason for this, and thatit was probably an illusion from that deeper impression which allexperiences made on us in the past, when we were younger; I ought to saythat he was an elderly man, too. I said I fancied such a morning as thiswas not very mild for people that had no fires, and this brought me backagain to Janssen and Marina, by way of the coke-cart. The thought ofthem rapt me so far from the druggist that I listened to his answer witha glazing eye, and did not know what he said. My hands had now got warm, and I bade him good-morning with a parting regret, which he civillyshared, that he had not the thing I had not wanted, and I pushed outagain into the cold, which I found not so bad as before. 

My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and I saw that to be trulymodern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy andstrength, I must not let them get further acquainted with each other. The affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning Jan mustnote that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who wasfollowing his cart. She must be very weak from a long sickness--I wasnot sure whether to have it the grippe or not, but I decided upon thatprovisionally and she must totter after Janssen, so that he must get downafter a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-boardof his cart, or something of that kind; I did not care for the detail. They should get into talk in the broken English which was the onlylanguage they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, andtell him that now Nina was sick; I imagined making this very simple, butvery touching, and I really made it so touching that it brought the lumpinto my own throat, and I knew it would be effective with the reader. Then I had Jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, andthe old woman limp feebly after. 

There should not be any more, I decided, except that one very coldmorning, like that; Jan should be driving through that street, and shouldbe passing the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, just as alittle procession should be issuing from it. The fact must be told inbrief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. The last touchmust be Jan's cart turning the street corner with Jan's figure sharplysilhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. Nothing more. 

But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a worldwhich gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to hissuggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing fromthe tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader willhave rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the head ofit, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youthwith ear-rings who had long had her heart. 

With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, atthe fond reader's expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, insuch a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. I should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan's part that Nina mightvery well have known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the veryend I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had nosuch feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine. 

III. 

The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is whathas ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented myever writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying useless on myhands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might be wrought into ashort story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and Ithink I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the brokenEnglish of Jan and Nina's grandmother, and certainly something novel. All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the reader, andlet him decide for himself how it should end. 

The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served forhaving regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all;that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I oughtto have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and triedto learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer myknowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy andhappy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us. I own there issomething in this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged bynice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, thatit is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and thatwe ought to be writing about good society, and especially creatinggrandes dames for their amusement. This sort of people could say to thehumanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to falloff from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment;for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must beaesthetically, though even this is deplorable in the presence of fictionalready overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours. 

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN

It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer asmall and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote fromcontinental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly uponthem, to show how sharp and swift the ship's course is, but they seem sofar and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down asteepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebuloussomewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from therush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and incidentscontrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the rawMarch morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonalseas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking andcocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came insight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes fromthe turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the whitewalls and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became thedreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through airbecame the sole reality. 

I. 

Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whateveroffers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. Those low hills, thatclimb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summersky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the coast ofMaine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palmsand bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you hadnever noticed these growths in Maine before, where you were so familiarwith the cedars. The hotel itself, which has brought the Green Mountainswith it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and thewhite-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistresslywaitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when itmigrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, andequally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. Therewill be the same American groups looking out over them, and rocking andsmoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking. 

But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or bluejackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and colorhere to the veranda groups? Where should one get the house walls ofwhitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun, and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? These things mustcome from some other association, and in the case of him who hereconfesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from watersas far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of VenetianJunes haunts the coral shore. (They are beginning to say the shore isnot coral; but no matter. ) To be sure, the white roofs are not accountedfor in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to thesnowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutelytropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries. They at least suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one remembersseeing it through Titbottom's spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofsof brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the lagoon-likeexpanses that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so Venetian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, tocomplete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good reason whythe rough little isles that fill the bay should not call themselvesrespectively San Giorgio and San Clemente, and Sant' Elena and SanLazzaro: they probably have no other names!

II. 

These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural Eden, that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, whenonce she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound inthe Summer Islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found. Thereare some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no otherreptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that itsvibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it hasnever yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchalage, and are fond of Boston brown bread and baked beans, if theirpreferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the careof an American family living on the islands. The observer whocontributes this fact to science is able to report the case of aparrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown andpurple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it waswith a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its nativewaters. The angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they are of atransparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not lend themselvesto the resemblance. 

Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; itmight better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in thepools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescentvegetable growths about it. All things here are of a weirdconvertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest factsof nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest andmost familiar. You drive through long stretches of wayside willows, andrealize only now and then that these willows are thick clumps ofoleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fieldsof Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they arepresently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are notfrequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, whichthey wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies'lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, unless because theyare not nearly enough to characterize the landscape, which in spite oftheir presence remains so northern in aspect. They were much whipped andtorn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of theislands, and some of the royal palms were blown down. Where these areyet standing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quiteone-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that of any king who couldpass by them: no sovereign except Philip of Macedon in his least judicialmoments could pass between them. 

The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to takeaway the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry andenterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and itmerits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. One such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a housewhich this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore fromthe steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interiorone of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersedamong the pleasant places of the earth. It fills the night with a heavyheliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of thewaxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legalowners stretches itself in an interminable reverie, and hears Youth comelaughing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where otherwhite houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning. In this dream the multiple drives home from the balls of either hotelwith the young girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn;and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation whichshall night-long gild the visions of their sleep with the flash ofmilitary and naval uniforms. Of course the multiple has been at thedance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms. 

III. 

In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly callingin the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of adeeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not sovaried, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land? Some think, on the strongerwings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that menbrought them. Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarmabout their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelierbirds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands. Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder placesthe catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, andholds its own against them. The little ground-doves mimic in miniaturethe form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anythingprettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailedwhite gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail theirmeteoric splendor against the midday sky. Full twenty-four inches theymeasure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them afoot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorterthan they, and they attack fiercely anything they suspect of too intimatea curiosity concerning their nests. 

They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer Islands, where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find itagain. Sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing humanquality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are inno wise light. Our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the largemajority, and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the fullenjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves fromtheir old inferiority. They do the hard work, in their own easy way, andpossibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whomhere, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which theirexistence involves for him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to ajoke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. If youhave them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or featherycanes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air andsky; nor are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, wherevisitors of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question. Suchvisitors spare no islander of any color. Once, in the pretty PublicGarden which the multiple had claimed for its private property, threeunmerciful American women suddenly descended from the heavens and beganto question the multiple's gardener, who was peacefully digging at therate of a spadeful every five minutes. Presently he sat down on hiswheelbarrow, and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it tothe other. Then he rose and braced himself desperately against thetool-house, where, when his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to thesoft eye of pity pinned to the wall by their cruel interrogations, whosebarbed points were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose featheredshafts stuck out half a yard before his breast. 

Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was. At least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a Jamaicanregiment of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the whitestreet, with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet andgold upon the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriolewere coming towards you, or a mighty tulip. These gorgeous creaturesseem so much readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to testthem with a joke. But it might fail. The Summer Islands are a Britishcolony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some otherthings. 

To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hearit first named, and when you are offered a 'loquat', if you are of afrivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with 'loquor'which it seems to intimate. Failing in this, you taste the fruit, andthen, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness asif you had bitten a green persimmon. But if it is ripe, it is delicious, and may be consumed indefinitely. It is the only native fruit which onecan wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimedthat with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws. These break outin clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which mayhave some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinitesummer. They are of the color and flavor of a very insipid littlemuskmelon which has grown too near a patch of squashes. 

One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard. It isbest when plucked by a young islander of Italian blood whose fatherorders him up the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to oblige thesignori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with themabout the two bad years there have been in Bermuda, and the probabilityof his doing better in Nuova York. He has not imagined our winter, however, and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets thesignori go with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses. 

The roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment whichattends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude, and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake atanother public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruitand white blossoms on the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose andeye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of thetropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausiblydeny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant inmid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet?

IV. 

What remains? The events of the Summer Islands are few, and none out ofthe order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what maybe called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight. But far better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain ofsuch like quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, nowfrom the south and now from the north, with the languor of the one andthe vigor of the other in them. There were drives upon drives that werealways to somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they hadbeen mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking littlelawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to beof grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were notgrass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed tosatisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and infact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which itwears with us in late August; and why not, after all its interminable, innumerable summers? Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coralhills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches of potatoes andlilies and onions drawing their geometrical lines across the brown-red, weedless soil; and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which arenever so snugly sheltered there but their broad leaves are whipped toshreds. The white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiabledisintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhairferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where thecactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces themwith speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboringbamboo. The loquat-trees cluster--like quinces in the garden closes, andshow their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit. 

For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes itclimbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-wornand wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the blacklegs of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostraterainbow. 

All this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how willit be when one has turned one's back upon it? Will it not lapse into thegross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who swapthem cannot themselves believe? What will be said to you when you tellthat in the Summer Islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard andtake out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to livingin it? What, when you relate that among the northern and southernevergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is nofall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keepingthem on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when youpretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in thedrowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, andin the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into theooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after themthe holes they emerged from?

These every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, evenin their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant backto New York you foresee that they will become impossible. As impossibleas the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderinglyfigures it a Bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruitingicicles and snowballs in the March air!

WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT

Looking through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey's charming book on the Flowersof Field, Hill, and Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly reminded ofthe number of these pretty, wilding growths which I had been finding allthe season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks ofartificial stone in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who hasbeen kept in New York, as I have been this year, beyond the natural timeof going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvaninvasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it. 

I. 

Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the earlyspring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender bluehepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and downBroadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where thecable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant mustfind itself at home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by anysympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of thepassing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars. The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey's book. He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight, I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in August. It isa shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought alongthe shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road overheadforms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes suchswampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man's Curveand the corners of Twenty third Street. This is in flower now, and willbe till September; and St. -John's-wort, which some call the falsegoldenrod, is already here. You may find it in any moist, low ground, butthe gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, arenot too dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. The other night, however, on the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted tosee it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response tothe cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at thebase of a potted ever green. This lonely insect had no sooner sounded itswinter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave anddroop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-sidepastures! But this may have been only a transitory response to thecricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he willfind golden-rod there every night. I believe there is always Golden Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of "deep, cool, moist woods, " where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, alongwith other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and DwarfLarkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman's breeches, and Pearlwort, andWood-sorrel, and Bishop's--cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, andSnowberry, and Adder's-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, andAdam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from somefairy of genius. I should say it was a female fairy of genius who calledthem so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when sheinvented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives. The author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know howthey looked from their names; and when you call them over they atonce transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between oursky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavationswhence other sky-scrapers are to rise. 

II. 

That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket's cry flowered the domewith golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra slopedall one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollargale that always blows over the city at that height. But as one turnsthe leaves of Mrs. Creevey's magic book-perhaps one ought to say turnsits petals--the forests and the fields come and make themselves at homein the city everywhere. By virtue of it I have been more in the countryin a half-hour than if I had lived all June there. When I lift my eyesfrom its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons ofwild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against theair after dwelling on his brightness. The rose-mallow flaunts alongFifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the housefronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that itwas all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion. 

Yet Mrs. Creevey's book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by anyof the ordinary arts. It is rather matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject. One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titlesof chapters as "Wet Meadows and Low Grounds"; "Dry Fields--Waste Places--Waysides"; "Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods"; and "Deep, Cool, MoistWoods"; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassingopulence of suggestion. The spring and, summer months pass in statelyprocessional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with thenames of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with theblooms themselves. 

They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, ortheir own wayward wills led them astray. A singularly fascinatingchapter is that called "Escaped from Gardens, " in which some of thesepretty runagates are catalogued. I supposed in my liberal ignorance thatthe Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that thePansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, theSnapdragon, the Prince's Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star ofBethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish StoneCrop are of the vagrant, fragrant company. One is not surprised to meetthe Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart;but that the Baby's Breath should be found wandering by the road-sidesfrom Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender pang as for alost child. Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feedat back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the Baby's Breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant. 

III. 

As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely theywere, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of theflowers. Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience, but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very wellknow; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar nameof the flowers she loves to write of. I am not saying that the Day-Lilywould not smell as sweet by her title of 'Hemerocallis Fulva', or thatthe homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in herscholar's cap and gown of 'Saponaria Officinalis'; but merely that theircollege degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or evenmelodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays. So Ilike best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makesthem grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that they would allvanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms. As long as I talk ofcat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fenceshelp me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiffspears; but if I called them 'Typha Latifolia', or even 'TyphaAngustifolia', there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roofand the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave meforlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageantif I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the 'Viola Pedata'; and thecommonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwoodmaligned as the 'Rhus Venenata'. The very milk-cans would turn to theirnative pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple AmericanCowslip as the 'Dodecatheon Meadia'. 

IV

Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and Ishould be far from undervaluing this side of Mrs. Creevey's book. Infact, I secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if everI get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to some of thehumblest flowers, such as I can feel myself on easy terms with, and tellthem what they are in Latin. I think it will surprise them, and I daresay they will some of them like it, and will want their initialsinscribed on their leaves, like those signatures which the medicinalplants bear, or are supposed to bear. But as long as I am engaged intheir culture amid this stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best toinvite their presence by their familiar names, and I hope they will notthink them too familiar. I should like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thousands of poor city children, who never saw them growingin their native places, might have some notion of how bountifully theworld is equipped with beauty, and how it is governed by many laws whichare not enforced by policemen. I think that would interest them verymuch, and I shall not mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, andcarrying them home by the armfuls. When good-will costs nothing we oughtto practise it even with the tramps, and these are very welcome, in theirwanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of mypleached bowers they come to. 

A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS

We dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have morethan our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past wehave been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as greatmisery as famine in that kind could be. For our sins, or some of ourfriends' sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of threerings and two raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in thecountry there are still circuses of one ring and no platform at all. We are accustomed, in the gross and foolish-superfluity of these citycircuses, to see no feat quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes atthe most important instant in the hope of greater wonders in anotherring. We have four or five clowns, in as many varieties of grotesquecostume, as well as a lady clown in befitting dress; but we hear none ofthem speak, not even the lady clown, while in the country circus the oldclown of our childhood, one and indivisible, makes the same style ofjokes, if not the very same jokes, that we used to hear there. It is noteasy to believe all this, and I do not know that I should quite believeit myself if I had not lately been witness of it in the suburban villagewhere I was passing the summer. 

I. 

The circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by thevast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fellupon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere withtheir festive pink. They prophesied it in a name borne by the firstcircus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals mustall have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerieattached to it. I did not know this when I heard the band brayingthrough the streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led theprocession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been intheir graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust anadvertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared tohimself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill ofexcitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, andI do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I haddone lunch. My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet sovery little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring andtwo-platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat womenand lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping underthe fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked likethe ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in itstriumph; and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at workover their kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk. 

I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of acrowd. I bought my admittances without a moment's delay, and the man whosold me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to lookat the change he had given me, mostly nickels. "I thought I didn't giveyou enough, " he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to thedoorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed. It was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be, to give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. Theywere already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices fromthe tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took myseat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermosttread of the benches, so that I had to step across its prostrate form. These reserved seats were carpeted; but I had forgotten how little onerank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon theback and legs. But for the carpeting, I could not see how I wasadvantaged above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and Ireflected how often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor. I could not see but they were as well off as I; they were much more gaylydressed, and some of them were even smoking cigars, while they werenearly all younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more. They did not look like the country people whom I rather hoped andexpected to see, but were apparently my fellow-villagers, in differentstages of excitement. They manifested by the usual signs theirimpatience to have the performance begin, and I confess that I sharedthis, though I did not take part in the demonstration. 

II. 

I have no intention of following the events seriatim. Front time to timeduring their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with thecircus-men. They were quite the same people, I believe, but strangelysoftened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and looking not a day older, which I cannot say of myself, exactly. The supernumeraries were patentlyfarmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit ofadventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and apair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, adeprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectatorsand were very glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dogto keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and hisdog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man cameup and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferredthat the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting toall the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family. He was good to thepoor supes, and instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best tomanage the guy ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began. 

There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over thewhole circus. This was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extremeproximity to its performances; I had never been on quite such intimateterms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but I think it wasalso largely from the good hearts of the whole company. A circus mustbecome, during the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especiallysisterhood, and its members must forget finally that they are not unitedby ties of blood. I dare say they often become so, as husbands and wivesand fathers and mothers, if not as brothers. 

The domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady ina Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waitingfor her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. She reallylooked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses musthave worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined in thebath, or just out of it. But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore onher slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than mostgoddesses. What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stoodthere by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she weretheir collective sister. They were all in their shirt-sleeves for thesake of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away asindifferent to her as so many born brothers. 

Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of thering, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might havebeen; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully, left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see whywe who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of otherpeople. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do thetrapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added apoignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow everymotion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin asshe bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the strainingeagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with whichshe forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance. 

III. 

How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! Whyshould such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhapsit does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one ofthe many delusions we are in with regard to each other in thisbewildering world. They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got fromthe clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. I remember thatI liked hearing his old jokes, not because they were jokes, but becausethey were old and endeared by long association. He sang one song which Imust have heard him sing at my first circus (I am sure it was he), about"Things that I don't like to see, " and I heartily agreed with him thathis book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth thehalf-dime asked for it, though I did not buy it. 

Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, I willnot allow that I did not feel for him and suffer with him because of thethick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with thesweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain. He was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke(though you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively, I dare say he outdated the pyramids. They must have made clowns whitentheir faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among theantediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means. Allthe same, I pitied this clown for it, and I fancied in his wildestwaggery the note of a real irascibility. Shall I say that he seemed theonly member of that little circus who was not of an amiable temper? ButI do not blame him, and I think it much to have seen a clown once morewho jested audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better of himin repartee. It was long since I had known that pleasure. 

IV. 

Throughout the performance at this circus I was troubled by a curiousquestion, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeuras the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin andslight, too. We all know how the places of our childhood, the heights, the distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was itpossible that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses?The doubt was painful, but I was forced to own that there might be moretruth in it than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. Very likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness andvariety of their entertainments, and I was spoiled for the simple joysof this. But I could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on theyoung faces around me, and I must confess that there was at least so muchof the circus that I left when it was half over. I meant to go into theside-shows and see the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take thegiant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly foot, if I might beso honored. But I did none of these things, and I am willing to believethe fault was in me, if I was disappointed in the circus. It was I whohad shrunk and dwindled, and not it. To real boys it was still the sizeof the firmament, and was a world of wonders and delights. At least Ican recognize this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress allover the country of the simple circuses which the towns never see, butwhich help to render the summer fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyesand hearts they appeal to. I hope it will be long before they cease tofind profit in the pleasure they give. 

A SHE HAMLET

The other night as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre andwaited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of therich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtainupon any Hamlet passed through my eager frame. There is, indeed, noscene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror)than that which opens the great tragedy. The sentry pacing up and downupon the platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greetingbetween him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints ofthe bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these beforethey can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are inthe act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of theghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulselessawe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturallysupernatural? What promise of high mystical things to come there is inthe mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us fromourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with thetroubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents!As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed inlong procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so much of theirworld, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actualone, that I should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of theless considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in itscourse. 

I. 

The trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for anintelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands. You do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free yourmind are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not reallyeffective for the purpose. The best way is to own yourself unfair at thestart, and then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if notyour subject. In other words, if you went to see the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely inthe end to be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blameher if you were. To be ideally fair to that representation, it would bebetter not to have known any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet ofShakespeare. 

From the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelminglyagainst her--her sex, her race, and her speech. You never ceased to feelfor a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy Dane, andthat the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess. These threeremoves put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and theimpassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is innothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or solittle French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetryexpressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which the French wordsalways failed to convey. The battle was lost from the first, and all youcould feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it wasnot war. 

While the battle went on I was the more anxious to be fair, because Ihad, as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and I welcomed, in theinterest of critical impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind, through readily traceable associations. This was a Hamlet also of Frenchextraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeplyderived than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large imagination ofCharles Fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of hersubtlest womanish intuition. His was the first blond Hamlet known to ourstage, and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for acomplexion; and it was of the quality of his Hamlet in masterlytechnique. 

II. 

The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt wasfiguring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was inbeing a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense ofthe word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was romanticistic. It was, therefore, the most realistic Hamlet ever yet seen, because the mostnaturally poetic. Mme. Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of herschool; for Fechter's poetic naturalness differed from theconventionality of the accepted Hamlets in nothing so much as thesuperiority of its self-instruction. In Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet, as inhis, nothing was trusted to chance, or "inspiration. " Good or bad, whatone saw was what was meant to be seen. When Fechter played Edmond Dantesor Claude Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; itmight be held to be nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and afterall, you said Hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with whathe gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel. When hechallenged the ghost with "I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane, " youWould hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as itwas; and when he said to Rosencrantz, "Will you pleh upon this pyip?"it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that youmade no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of theirquaintness afterwards. For the most part you were not aware of thesebetrayals of his speech; and in certain high things it was soulinterpreted to soul through the poetry of Shakespeare so finely, sodirectly, that there was scarcely a sense of the histrionic means. 

He put such divine despair into the words, "Except my life, except mylife, except my life!" following the mockery with which he had assuredPolonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal than hisleave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for thirtyyears, and I had been alert for them with every Hamlet since. But beforeI knew, Mme. Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever. HerHamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think thepoints of Hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation ofthe translator's interpretation of Shakespeare that they passedunrecognized. Soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for themost part, but as such things go that soliloquy of Hamlet's, "To be ornot to be, " is at least very noble poetry; and yet Mme. Bernhardt was sounimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of its delivery. Perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre melancholy ofShakespeare's thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it itsproper mystery. But there was always a hardness, not always from thetranslation, upon this feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell withno crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare's Hamletcould show, except for the one moment at Ophelia's grave, where hereproaches Laertes with those pathetic words--

 "What is the reason that you use me thus? I loved you ever; but it is no matter. "

Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and nota man. At the close of the Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a madwhirl, her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, amischievous she-crow. 

There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leadenlapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in herelocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit. Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strongemotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman. At timesher movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drollywomanish, especially those of the whole person. Her quickened pace was awoman's nervous little run, and not a man's swift stride; and to giveherself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman's high heels toher shoes, and she could not help tilting on them. 

In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and AmericanHamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of twobrothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme. Bernhardt's preferred full-length, life-size family portraits. The deadking's effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter'sart, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it inthe wall at the right moment. She achieved a novelty by this treatmentof the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took withthe wretched queen. Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though itcould be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of agood daughter to give it her?

One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had becomeimpossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet as a man, if itever had been possible. She had traversed the bounds which tradition aswell as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which anactress may personate a man. This condition is that there shall bealways a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know allthe time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herselfsuch before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of aman only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it. Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men's roles, which, aswomen's roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more naturally managed then than now. But when it came to theeclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts ofwomen disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must havebeen confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity ofdoing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, orPortia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women inmen's roles. These characters are, of course, "lighter motions boundedin a shallower brain" than the creation she aimed at; but she could atleast have made much of them, and she does not make much of Hamlet. 

III. 

The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence toan ideal. Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine typesthat we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeingMme. Bernhardt's Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from thefancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crisesof mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady. Hamlet is innothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himselfunequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them. If we could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved hisperplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex. As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be awicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet's father hard upon the murder of hermother, she would have made short work of her vengeance. No finescruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment'squestion whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out withher bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through heraunt's breast. 

To be sure, there would then have been no play of "Hamlet, " as we haveit; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme. Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully. It is in attempting amasculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates anideal. It is not thinkable. After you have seen it done, you say, asMr. Clemens is said to have said of bicycling: "Yes, I have seen it, butit's impossible. It doesn't stand to reason. "

Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonablein the work of an artist is inartistic. By the time I had reached thesebold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and todeclare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would beforbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to somethingprecious and sacred. 

In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals inthe arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves tojudgment when they violate them. After Mme. Bernhardt was perverselywilling to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did itwell or not was of slight consequence. She had already made her failurein wishing to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness as anartist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable asthe assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. Thereis an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader. I can notemerely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginaryactions to figure as men than for men to figure as women. In the theatrewe have conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for lessobvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. A womanmay tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but aman cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality ofa woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. One feelsthis true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is acase in point. Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shockingeffect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not playHamlet at all. That sublime ideal is the property of the humanimagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of theimpossible. No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the mostirreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched. Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by awoman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence. I felt that it would take many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare toefface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet; and as I prepared toescape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, I experienced anoble shame for having seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell'sword. I had not been obliged to come; I had voluntarily shared in thewrong done; by my presence I had made myself an accomplice in the wrong. It was high ground, but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure ofself-respect in assuming it. 

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

He had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspapermen trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print underthe guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life intotheir literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressivesights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he oughtto see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find itin his experience so largely subjective. If there was any drama at allit was wholly in his own consciousness. But the thing was certainlyimpressive in its way. 

I. 

He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it bychance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprisedto recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself thepleasure of seeing. 

Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that allhedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; thoughupon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to seehis fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole ofbread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnightto the next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, andthe sight of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of knowingjust what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowingan earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the doublefile of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other fromthe corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on thestroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with hisperspicacity. 

It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup, warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and waswrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as aduty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarmingthem for his health. He now practised another piece of self-denial: helet the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carryhim to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from theChristmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the childfrom anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, goingback, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He gotthe child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into thecoup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far overfrom his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "When youget up there near that bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have a lookat those men. "

"All right, sir, " said the driver intelligently, and he found his whyskilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonableChristmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there tillthey could get round to it with their carts. 

When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than itwas a few minutes before. Except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongsat the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. A tall, lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend inthe coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to theletters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand CentralStation. He listened with half an ear to the child's account of the funshe had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of themen waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves. 

He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with anapprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by theplace where he had left them. But the driver remembered, and checked hishorses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greaternumber than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out alongthe side street. They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under thenight sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-weekstars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for theirmutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the doorwhere the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them beforethey were all gone. 

II. 

My friend's heart beat with glad anticipation. He was really to see thisimportant, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage. He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnightloaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the nextday it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those whoneeded it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise. Sheunderstood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given withthe bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have likedvery much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic. Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of havingfancied it. 

He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would getout, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receivingthe bread. Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask themabout themselves. At the time it did not strike him that it would beindecent. 

A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture. Itwas not probable that they were any of them there for their health, asthe saying is. They were all there because they were hungry, or elsethey were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. But it wasalways possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if anytest was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving. If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did notso much matter. 

It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions theywould tell him lies. A fantastic association of their double files andthose of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tongueyGines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. He smiled, andthen he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts--slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty. All at once he fanciedthem actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captivestaken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted tobuy. He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it wouldever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would the world everoutlive it? Would some New-Year's day come when some President wouldproclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more?That would be fine. 

III. 

He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped alittle out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all therest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with nomore need of defence from the cold than the dead have. 

He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at asecond glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind amongthem. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and nottrue men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for theirdeceit. 

He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must besomething like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by thefact. 

To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the greatdry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of theblue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so nearthat the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, after vain prayer. 

Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind. Howearly did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole ofbread? As early as ten, as nine o'clock? If so, did the fact arguehabitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? Did the slaves in thecoffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though theywere closely neighbored night after night by their misery? Perhaps theyjoked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes. Whichof them were old-comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel overquestions of precedence? Had they some comity, some etiquette, which aman forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back? Couldone say to his next-hand man, "Will you please keep my place?" and wouldthis man say to an interloper, "Excuse me, this place is engaged"? Howwas it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the doorwhere the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rearthat the supply was exhausted? This must sometimes happen, and what didthey do then?

IV. 

My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts forall the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? But what wasthe use? There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not goround. 

The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. He was not onlywalking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by. His action caughtthe notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turnedand faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute asuperior. They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but theireyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through. 

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; hestood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know. He was Society: Society that was to be preservedbecause it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they hated him in hiscapacity of Better Classes. He no longer thought of getting out andwatching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. He wouldhave liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it;that he was their friend, and wished them well--as well as might bewithout the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which hecould have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He put his hand onthat of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at leastwith intelligence. 

"You mustn't mind. What we are and what we do is all right. It's whatthey are and what they suffer that's all wrong. "

V. 

"Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?" I asked, when hehad told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently notcoloring it at all. 

"I don't know, " he answered. "It seems to be the only way out. "

"Well, it's an easy way, " I admitted, "and it's an idea that ought togratify the midnight platoon. "

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn asbeyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet Ihave to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July, four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches nearNew York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not withinreach of them. I know very well that the excursionists must gosomewhere, and as a man and a brother I am willing they should goanywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry tohave them come much where I am. It is not because I would deny them ashare of any pleasure I enjoy, but because they are so many and I am sofew that I think they would get all the pleasure and I none. I hope thereader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfishpeople who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists. 

I. 

It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow-beings whose meremultitude was too much for me. They were otherwise wholly withoutoffence towards me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they were, in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude I ever saw in any country, and the very quietest. 

There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, ofthem, in every variety of age and sex; yet I heard no voice lifted abovethe conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of itsprivileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying theattractions of the spectacle in his charge. I used to think the Americancrowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived inItaly, I celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of theItalian crowds. But we have certainly changed all that within ageneration, and if what I saw the other day was a typical New York crowd, then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror itonce was to the peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness, either of the pure native East Side stock or of theCeltic extraction; yet there were large numbers of Americans with ratherfewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities. 

There was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in everykind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables underall the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet I sawnot one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women. No one that Isaw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude orunseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democraticideal of life in that very important expression of life, personalconduct, I have not any notion who or what the people were, or howvirtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that nosociety assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodlyoutside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd. 

I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all theAmericans in it, were Long-Islanders from the inland farms and villageswithin easy distance of the beach. They had probably the hereditaryhabit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of theirfathers and grandfathers, who had

 --"many an hour whiled away Listening to the breakers' roar That washed the beach at Rockaway. "

But the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaperdress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countrymanapart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and I canonly conjecture that the foreign-looking folk I saw were from New Yorkand Brooklyn. They came by boat, and came and went by the continuallyarriving and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, bothsexes. A few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of theneighborhood, but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor thetrains had brought had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so poor as not to be able to keep. The bicyclersstormed into the frantic village of the beach the whole afternoon, in theproportion of one woman to five men, and most of these must have riddendown on their wheels from the great cities. Boys ran about in theroadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, and put them forsafekeeping in what had once been the stable-yards of the hotels; therestaurants had racks for them, where you could see them in solid masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop was without its door-siderack, which the wheelman might slide his wheel into when he stopped for asoda, a cigar, or a sandwich. All along the road the gay bicycler andbicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the inns, munching, lunching, whiletheir wheels formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning of thehouse and a novel balustering for the steps. 

II. 

The amusements provided for these throngs of people were not differentfrom those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of muchthe same mind and taste the world over. I had fine moments when I movedin an illusion of the Midway Plaisance; again I was at the Fete deNeuilly, with all of Paris but the accent about me; yet again the countyagricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me. Atnone of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainouschute, and I made haste to experience the variety these afforded, beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chutemight be closed for the day if I waited to view it last. I meant only toenjoy the pleasure of others in it, and I confined my own participationto the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the waterysteep into the oblong pool below. When I bought my ticket for the carthat carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, certifying for me, "You have shot the chute, " and I resolved to keep thisand show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is acurious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwardscould not find the medal. So I will frankly own that for me it was quiteenough to see others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myselfin the car. There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea withits ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my mainobject was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute. There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat thatflew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, whoclutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; butsometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, who was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their fatherfor any harm that came of it. Apparently no harm came of it in any case. 

The boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half-perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struckagain and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farthershore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with theirviscera, and to get their breath as they could. I did not ask any ofthem what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as I couldconjecture, the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the raretransport of a fall from a ten-story building and the delight of atempestuous passage of the Atlantic, powerfully condensed. 

The mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite I mighthave had to witness the feats of strength performed by Madame La Noire atthe nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at thedoor-to testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force maybe masked in vast masses of adipose. She had a weary, bored look, andwas not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse thepublic; but I could not find her quite justifiable as a Sundayentertainment. One forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time Idid not pretend to be so much better than my neighbors that I would notcompromise upon a visit to, an animal show a little farther on. It was apretty fair collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and inthe cage of the lions there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired youngman, exciting them to madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom Iwas extremely glad to have get away without being torn in pieces, or atleast bitten in two. A little later I saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless, dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessnessone could wish. But perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with theintimacy of lions and lionesses. He had had his little triumph; onespectator of his feat had declared that you would not see anything likethat at Coney Island; and soiled and dusty as he was in his cottontights, he was preferable to the living picture of a young lady whom hereplaced as an attraction of the show. It was professedly a moral show;the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether it was good or not;and in the box-office sat a kind and motherly faced matron who would haveapparently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any distance, muchless have it at her elbow. 

Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the peopleto whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently, than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmlessenough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in theliving picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the facerespectable enough. 

I would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not inevery respect decorous. As a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, bothhorizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, andwas none the worse for being called by the French name of carrousel, forour people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallicwickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. At every other step therewere machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there werephotographers' booths, and X-ray apparatus for showing you the inside ofyour watch; and in one open tent I saw a gentleman (with his back to thepublic) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an Egyptianseeress. Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softerdrinks abounded. 

III. 

I think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat andsitting down to your wine or beer at a table. Again I say that I saw noeffects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants builtout over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to thebraying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figuresby the fumes of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety thatreigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placardswhich hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedlyannounced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carryumbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit onthe floor. 

The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; theyseemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, youngwives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for theday's pleasure. A slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby, passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the child'sfather meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to layit. Almost any place would do; at another great restaurant I saw twochairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid thecoming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home. 

Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especiallyfrankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them. They disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels, piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brownin deep skillets of fat. The old acrid smell of frying brought back manyholidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on the Riva at Venice, and in the Mercato Vecchio at Florence. But the Continental Sundaycannot be felt to have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; thePuritan leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consentwillingly to the transformation, I fancy they always enjoy themselves onSunday with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing. 

IV. 

I have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day itwas. Nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds. Itwas the Fourth of July, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, andit was the high day of the week. But if it was very wicked, and I mustrecognize that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feelbound to say that the people themselves did not look wicked. They lookedharmless; they even looked good, the most of them. I am sorry to saythey were not very good-looking. The women were pretty enough, and themen were handsome enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect ofbeauty than the average is anywhere else; I was lately from New England, where the people were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all thosethousands at Rockaway I found no striking types. It may be that as wegrow older and our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become morefastidious as to the looks of others. At any rate, there seems to bemuch less beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty years ago. 

On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they shouldbe in compensation. When we were all so handsome we could well afford towear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poorthings must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices ofthe modiste and the tailor. I do not mean that there was any distinctionin the dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly orgrotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as good as the customs, andI have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. I believe I mustexcept the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy ineffect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable fortottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrowlittle, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am!But those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in thewholesome exercise of the wheel, and to keep them in the tradition ofcheap coquetry still, and imbecilly dependent. 

V. 

I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that thereis a sea somewhere about at Rockaway Beach, and it is this that thepeople have come for. I might well forget that modest sea, it is sobuilt out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backsand shops that border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaringalong the road that divides the village, and the planked streets thatintersect this. But if you walk southward on any of the streets, youpresently find the planks foundering in sand, which drifts far up overthem, and then you find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the oceanbathing. Swarms and heaps of people in all lolling and lying andwallowing shapes strew the beach, and the water is full of slopping andshouting and shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white arms tothe life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these thelifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on theincoming surf. 

All that you can say of it is that it is queer. It is not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. An enfilading glance gives thisimpression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marinerestaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the addedeffect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs' legsinverted in a downward plunge. 

On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humblecondition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. This made us beg each other's pardon; he said that he did not know I wasthere, and I said it did not matter. Then we both looked at the bathing, and he said:

"I don't like that. "

"Why, " I asked, "do you see any harm in it?"

"No. But I don't like the looks of it. It ain't nice. It's queer. "

It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are notdressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making avery public appearance. This promiscuous bathing was not much in excessof the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; itcould not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct. Here and there agentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here andthere a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flightof naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. But otherwise all wasa damp and dreary decorum. I challenged my philosopher in vain for aspecific cause of his dislike of the scene. 

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were amultitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not thesea-bathing. A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies werecradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and overthem. There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, whoseemed getting the most of the good that was going. 

VI. 

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating thegood temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, Ihave since thought of it as rather melancholy. It was in fact no wiseror livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment itafforded. The best thing about it was that it left the guests very muchto their own devices. The established pleasures were clumsy andtiresome-looking; but one could eschew them. The more of them oneeschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for muchpleasure; and even a day's rest is more than most people can bear. Theyendure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after atwenty-mile run on the wheel. The road, by-the-by, was full of homewardwheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driverprofessed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of hisprofession. 

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus eventsI wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit ofseeing two circuses there. Or, strictly speaking, it was one entirecircus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying gloryof a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb inadversity. 

I. 

The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the exception of theclowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always Americans, oradvertised as such, in Italy. Its chief and almost absorbing event was areproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at Rome incelebration of Prince Tommaso's coming of age, and for a copy of a copyit was really fine. It had fitness in the arena, which must havewitnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and I am sensiblestill of the pleasure its effects of color gave me. There was onebeautiful woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might haveridden, as she was, out of a canvas of Titian's, if he had ever paintedequestrian pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent Carpaccio. Then, the 'Clowns Americani' were very amusing, from a platform devotedsolely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me tothink that we were almost the only people present who understood theirjokes. In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring lookedvery little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady's hat in frontof you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre wewere all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have beenneeded to distinguish the features of the actors. I could not make out, therefore, whether the 'Clowns Americani' had the national expression ornot, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the United States languagewith a cockney accent. I suspect that he was an Englishman who hadpassed himself off upon the Italian management as a true Yankee, and whohad formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of therecent English humorists have patterned after certain famous wits ofours. I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even ifoccasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our ownprimacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erringaspirates. 

The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audiencealways is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursionsconcerning the place and people. I reflected that it was the same raceessentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in thatarena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among thesespectators persons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians who hadleft their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claimthis or that seat for their own. In fact, there was so littledifference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that Ifelt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and ifNature had been present, I might very well have asked her why, when shehad once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go onrepeating it indefinitely? How were all those similar souls to knowthemselves apart in their common eternity? Merely to have beendifferently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and I think Naturewould have been puzzled to answer me. But perhaps not; she may have hadher reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and thatwhen the type was so fine in most respects as the Italian you could notdo better than go on repeating impressions from it. 

Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the youngofficer of 'bersaglieri', who had come down from antiquity to the topmostgradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against theclear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, whilehis thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind. I have sincewondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he didnot, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the youngofficer of 'bersaglieri'. 

II. 

I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circusI have mentioned. This event was one that I have often witnessedelsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping. The top of theouter arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in thecentre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet. At its base animmense net was stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derbyhat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixingthe guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with hisown hands. While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes evenfrom the loveliness of the officer of 'bersaglieri'. There the man inthe Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net andlooked up at her. 

She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, "Is it allright?"

He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, "Yes; keep to the left, "and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before shereached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh. 

It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerousit was; but I think that the brief English colloquy was the great wonderof the event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been perfectlyhappy again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy mycuriosity concerning the speakers. A few evenings after that, I was atthat copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, I sawthe man of the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat. I had already madeup my mind that he was an American, for I supposed that an Englishmanwould rather perish than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as I hadwished all my life to speak to a circus-man, I went down and boldlyaccosted him. "Are you a brother Yankee?" I asked, and he laughed, andconfessed that he was an Englishman, but he said he was glad to meet anyone who spoke English, and he made a place for me by his side. He wasvery willing to tell how he happened to be there, and he explained thathe was the manager of a circus, which had been playing to very goodbusiness all winter in Spain. In an evil hour he decided to come toItaly, but he found the prices so ruinously low that he was forced todisband his company. This diving girl was all that remained to him ofits many attractions, and he was trying to make a living for both in acountry where the admission to a circus was six of our cents, with fiftyfor a reserved seat. But he was about to give it up and come to America, where he said Barnum had offered him an engagement. I hope he found itprofitable, and is long since an American citizen, with as good right asany of us to wear a Prince Albert coat with a derby hat. 

III. 

There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where many Venetians hadthe only opportunity of their lives to see a horse. The horses were thegreat attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitualdestitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good. Itwas so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does, especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, onhis back-bared horse, and ends by waving an American flag in triumph athaving been so tiresome. 

I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumpsthrough paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to renderher transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hopover a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a mannerto minify her exertion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at allcircuses. At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse ofthe Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to theground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus theother day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world thancircus events. It must be as hard to think up anything new in that kindas in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largelyresembles. 

At a circus which played all one winter in Florence I saw for the firsttime-outside of polite society--the clown in evening dress, who now seemsessential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I missedso gladly at my village circus. He is nearly as futile as the ladyclown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of NewWomanhood. 

Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most the clown whocatches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrownacross the ring by an accomplice. This is a very pretty sight always, and at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted creature take hisstand high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats onhis head from a flight of a hundred feet through the air. This made meproud of human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether I donot think that after a real country circus there are many better thingsin life than the Hippodrome. It had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, apolish, which I should not know where to match, and when the superb coachdrove into the ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of theirevents, there was a majesty in the effect which I doubt if courts havethe power to rival. Still, it should be remembered that I have neverbeen at court, and speak from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only. 

AT A DIME MUSEUM

"I see, " said my friend, "that you have been writing a good deal aboutthe theatre during the past winter. You have been attacking its highhats and its high prices, and its low morals; and I suppose that youthink you have done good, as people call it. "

I. 

This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I prepared myself to takeit up warily. I said I should be very sorry to do good, as people calledit; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pridefor the doer and general demoralization for the doee. Still, I said, alaw had lately been passed in Ohio giving a man who found himself behinda high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and ifthe passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly tomy teachings, I should not altogether grieve for the good I had done. I added that if all the States should pass such a law, and other lawsfixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, orobliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as thelaw does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays--

"I see what you mean, " said my friend, a little impatiently. "You meansumptuary legislation. But I have not come to talk to you upon thatsubject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking yourself. I want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper amusements ofthis metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and charmingthings one may see there for a very little money. "

"Ten cents, for instance?"

"Yes. "

I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; andI expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of theamusement that could be had for that money. I questioned if anythingintellectual could be had for it. 

"What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?" my friend retorted. "Anddo you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?"

I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of mygrief with it. 

Then he said: "I don't contend that it is intellectual, but I say that itis often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is lessoften clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines. I think the averageof propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; andit is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that. The other day, " said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably inhis chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table heknocked off some books for review, "I went to a dime museum for an hourthat I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passedan hour's time more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of thelecturers on the curios called it--they had several lecturers in whitewigs and scholars' caps and gowns--there was not a great deal to see, Iconfess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of aperpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview;there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On aplatform at the end of the hall was an Australian family a good dealgloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staringdown the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholymadness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom gotfrom the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres. They allowed me to comequite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection inexile without stint. I couldn't enter into conversation with them, andexpress my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs andkangaroos and pinetree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was soevident. I didn't see their performance, and I don't know that they hadany. They may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a goodobject, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the priceof admission. 

"After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to aclose, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacleslectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated asmall model of it. None of the events were so exciting that we couldregret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of theentertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in thetheatre was about to begin. He invited us to buy tickets at anadditional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, or orchestra. 

"I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once. We were three inthe orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the littleboy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozenat least in the orchestra circle. An attendant shouted, 'Hats off!' andthe other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stageand began to play the piano in front of it. The curtain rose, and theentertainment began at once. It was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal ofconscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it withunflagging energy. The young woman was equipped for the dance shebrought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustainin the drama. It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if shewas tired of it, but was not going to falter. She delivered her lineswith a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come upin a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by astrong local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, or Peg Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not. 

"Her performance was followed by an event involving a single character. The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dresshe was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he hadtemperament. I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began toaddress his entire drama to me. This was not surprising, for it wouldnot have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and theother man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hardly have given the preference over me. I felt thecompliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me a publicity I would willingly have foregone. I did what Icould to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I evenfrowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated hisambition. He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off anumber of very good things which were received in perfect silence, andlooked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effectof delicate apology, 'I hope I'm not disturbing you any, ' I broke downand laughed, and that delivered me into his hand. He immediately said tome that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a prettylarge family, eight of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then forno reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a songwritten expressly for him--by an expressman; and he went on from one wildgayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzyof enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off. 

"I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad that the nextperformers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of Spanish-American extraction, behaved more impartially. They were reallyremarkable artists in their way, and though it's a painful way, Icouldn't help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses. The gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. Ithink perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailedamong us, we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approvalas a gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety inwitnessing her skill. But I could see that the poor girl was hurt in herartist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did I led off theapplause with my umbrella. She instantly lighted up with a joyful smile, and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathyto me while she clapped. We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and itwas very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I had better go. "

"And do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?" I asked, witha smile that was meant to be sceptical. 

"Profitable?" said my friend. "I said agreeable. I don't know aboutthe profit. But it was very good variety, and it was very cheap. Iunderstand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar theatreto come down to, or up to. "

"Not exactly, or not quite, " I returned, thoughtfully, "though I must sayI think your time was as well spent as it would have been at most of theplays I have seen this winter. "

My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: "It was all verypathetic, in a way. Three out of those five people were really clever, and certainly artists. That colored brother was almost a genius, a verycommon variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his callingthat couldn't be disputed. He was a genuine humorist, and I sorrowedover him--after I got safely away from his intimacy--as I should oversome author who was struggling along without winning his public. Whynot? One is as much in the show business as the other. There is adifference of quality rather than of kind. Perhaps by-and-by my coloredhumorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you arealways hoping to do with yours. "

"You don't think you're making yourself rather offensive?" I suggested. 

"Not intentionally. Aren't the arts one? How can you say that any artis higher than the others? Why is it nobler to contort the mind than tocontort the body?"

"I am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind, "I returned, "and I feel that to aim at nothing higher than the amusementof your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of theshow business. "

"Yes, I know that is your pose, " said my friend. "And I dare say youreally think that you make a distinction in facts when you make adistinction in terms. If you don't amuse your readers, you don't keepthem; practically, you cease to exist. You may call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? You do your littleact, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy youare not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places, with perhaps cruder means--"

"I don't know whether I like your saws less than your instances, or yourinstances less than your saws, " I broke in. "Have you been at the circusyet?"

II. 

"Yet?" demanded my friend. "I went the first night, and I have been agood deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever since. I can't find out just why I have so much pleasure in the trapeze. Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time I dolook away; but I wouldn't spare any actor the most dangerous feat. One of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net afterher performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprainedankle. It made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give upher perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, butit didn't take away my interest in the other trapezists flying throughthe air above another net. 

"If I had honestly complained of anything it would have been of thesuperfluity which glutted rather than fed me. How can you watch threesets of trapezists at once? You really see neither well. It's the samewith the three rings. There should be one ring, and each act should havea fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; I would willinglygive the time. Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays goingon at once!"

"No, don't fancy that!" I entreated. "One play is bad enough. "

"Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the sametime to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two platformsbetween the rings, " my friend calmly persisted. "The three rings are anabuse and an outrage, but I don't know but I object still more to thesilencing of the clowns. They have a great many clowns now, but they areall dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of thesingle clown of the old one-ring circus. Why, it's as if the literaryhumorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and thenput asterisks where the humor ought to come in. "

"Don't you think you are going from bad to worse?" I asked. 

My friend went on: "I'm afraid the circus is spoiled for me. It hasbecome too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the bestthing in the way of an entertainment that there is. I'm still very fondof it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because I have beenembarrassed with riches, and have been given more than I was able tograsp. My greed has been overfed. I think I must keep to thoseentertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till tenat night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall ofthe curtain. I suppose you would object to them because they're gettingrather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the firstseats. "

I said that I did not think this too much for twelve hours, if theintellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high. 

"It's as high as that of some magazines, " said my friend, "though I couldsometimes wish it were higher. It's like the matter in the Sundaypapers--about that average. Some of it's good, and most of it isn't. Some of it could hardly be worse. But there is a great deal of it, andyou get it consecutively and not simultaneously. That constitutes itsadvantage over the circus. "

My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked:

"Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the dimemuseums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place ofthe theatres?"

"You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn't seem to havemet with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness. Now, why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?"

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviableprimacy of the United States among countries where the struggle formaterial prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful inattributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to animaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, "the old race ofwriters of distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, andWashington Irving, have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are mostprominent in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, likeSargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America, and draw their inspiration from England, France, and Italy. "

I. 

If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what manyAmericans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sortof self-love which calls itself patriotism. If it would at all help toput an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuatedwith us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad tobelieve that it was driving our literary men out of the country. Thiswould be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to themillionaires and the tramps. But I am afraid it would not have thiseffect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for thestate of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, Ibelieve that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if ageneral mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to berich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not beconsiderably affected. As matters stand, I think we may reasonably askwhether the Americans "most prominent in cultivated European opinion, "the Americans who "live habitually out of America, " are not less exilesthan advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world. They may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined tooverrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries toour advantage. They probably themselves do not know it, but in the actof "drawing their inspiration" from alien scenes, or taking their ownwhere they find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe "thestruggle for material prosperity, " which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatalto them here?

There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is thequestion whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarmour patriotism. Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as wellas in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is verygreat; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fairmeasure of home-keeping authorship. Our destitution is not nearly sogreat now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in thetimes before the "struggle for material prosperity" when WashingtonIrving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nighhalf his life. 

Sir Lepel Griffin--or Sir Lepel Griffin's reporter--seems to forget thefact of Irving's long absenteeism when he classes him with "the old race"of eminent American authors who stayed at home. But really none of thosehe names were so constant to our air as he seems--or his reporter seems--to think. Longfellow sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain, and Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant was a frequenttraveller, and each of them "drew his inspiration" now and then fromalien sources. Lowell was many years in Italy, Spain, and England;Motley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne was away from usnearly a decade. 

II. 

If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I amproving too much in another. My facts go to show that the literaryspirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere. If any goodAmerican were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I shouldfirst advise him that American literature was not derived from thefolklore of the red Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition of English literature, and was independent even of ourindependence. Then I should entreat him to consider the case of foreignauthors who had found it more comfortable or more profitable to live outof their respective countries than in them. I should allege for hisconsolation the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterlythat of the Brownings and Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italianto an English sojourn; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in Vermont, and has "drawn hisinspiration" in notable instances from the life of these States. It willserve him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in France and Italy. HeinrichHeine loved to live in Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even inHamburg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any man's country couldget on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managedto dispense with his own in the French capital, and died there after hewas quite free to go back to St. Petersburg. In the last century Rousseaulived in France rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried to livein Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni left fameand friends in Venice for the favor of princes in Paris. 

Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an American viceor an American virtue. It is an expression and a proof of the modernsense which enlarges one's country to the bounds of civilization. I cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if anyAmerican feels it a grievance, I suggest that he do what he can to haveembodied in the platform of his party a plank affirming the right ofAmerican authors to a public provision that will enable them to live asagreeably at home as they can abroad on the same money. In the meantime, their absenteeism is not a consequence of "the struggle formaterial prosperity, " not a high disdain of the strife which goes on notless in Europe than in America, and must, of course, go on everywhere aslong as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances andpreferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable. 

THE HORSE SHOW

"As good as the circus--not so good as the circus--better than thecircus. " These were my varying impressions, as I sat looking down uponthe tanbark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison Square Garden;and I came away with their blend for my final opinion. 

I. 

I might think that the Horse Show (which is so largely a Man Show and aWoman Show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but Icould not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. Perhaps thecircus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master arejoined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator. I am surethat I have never been able quite to dissociate from it thepicturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest tome the last correctness of fashion. It is through the horse that thesefar extremes meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expressionof aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder worldprophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the Swell shall haveevolved into the Centaur. 

Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you asyou make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men aboutyou and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier. 

In this first affair of the new-comer, the horses are not so much onshow as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossingmanes, with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines ofpeople coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feetdeep, against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there inperfect relief, and it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you. The fact is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is thatthey are there to be seen. 

The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which I tasted withpleasure. It was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization, and the American might feel a characteristic pride that what came to Romein five hundred years had come to America in a single century. There wassomething fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and Iperceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive inits exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramaticallyapparent. "Yes, " I found myself thinking, "this is what it all comes to:the 'subiti guadagni' of the new rich, made in large masses and seeking aswift and eager exploitation, and the slowly accumulated fortunes, puttogether from sparing and scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, informer times, and now in the stainless white hands of the second or thirdgeneration, they both meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation, and create a Horse Show. "

I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now theyhad got it; and, so far as I have been able to observe them, people ofwealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of beingbored in the midst of their amusements. This reserve of rapture may betheir delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered;and I should not have objected to the swells at the Horse Show lookingdreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardnessof the countenance (which I found my own sympathetically taking on) Ishould not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may havebeen merely the consequence of being so much stared at. Perhaps, indeed, they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but only companies ofordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes;I understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization sofar misled. But certainly if they were swells they did not look quite upto themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities offoreign countries, and on one or two occasions when I have seen them, kings and emperors have failed me in like manner. They have all wantedthat indescribable something which I have found so satisfying inaristocracies and royalties on the stage; and here at the Horse Show, while I made my tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on footwho could much better have taken the role of the people in the boxes. The promenaders may not have been actors at all; they may have been thereal thing for which I was in vain scanning the boxes, but they lookedlike actors, who indeed set an example to us all in personal beauty andin correctness of dress. 

I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. We have notdistinction, as a people; Matthew Arnold noted that; and it is not ourbusiness to have it: When it is our business our swells will have it, just as our actors now have it, especially our actors of English birth. I had not this reflection about me at the time to console me for mydisappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what I took for anabsence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of itthat the result was necessarily a species of indistinction. But in thecomplexion of any social assembly we Americans are at a disadvantage withEuropeans from the want of uniforms. A few military scattered about inthose boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have beenheaping upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their dutyin personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at theHorse Show that I am complaining. If the men had borne their part aswell, there would not have been these tears: and yet, what am I saying?There was here and there a clean-shaven face (which I will not believewas always an actor's), and here and there a figure superbly set up, andso faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, andgloves as to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clotheswhich I will not at last call less than distinction. 

II. 

At any rate, I missed these marked presences when I left the lines of thepromenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers abovethe boxes. I am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not oneof those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poorwho could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets. I boughtit of a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that Iconceived it the last in the house; but I found the chairs by no meansall filled, though it was as good an audience as I have sometimes seen inthe same place at other circuses. The people about me were such as I hadnoted at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers fromprovincial towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home with, and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown uponme during my association with the swells below. My neighbors weresufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than theirbetters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion uponthem, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring. 

There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of costume. The buglerwho stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare(I hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were toenter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape thatfilled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the managementI thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. Atany rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from thefashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumesare always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. As I havehinted, I do not know just what costumes they were, but they took thelight well from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands of littleelectric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed thesullenness of the dull, rainy afternoon. When the knights entered thelists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, andthe spectacle was so brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven anovelist pining for the pageantries of the past. I do not know to thismoment whether these knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only theirdeputies, driving their tandems for them, and I am equally at a loss toaccount for the variety, of their hats. Some wore tall, shining silkhats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple black pot-hats;--and isthere, then, no rigor as to the head-gear of people driving tandems?I felt that there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule as towhere the number of each tandem should be displayed. As it was, this wassometimes carelessly stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it wasworn at the back of the groom's waist, and sometimes full upon hisstomach. In the last position it gave a touch of burlesque which woundedme; for these are vital matters, and I found myself very exacting inthem. 

With the horses themselves I could find no fault upon the grounds of mycensure of the show in some other ways. They had distinction; they werepatrician; they were swell. They felt it, they showed it, they rejoicedin it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory ofblood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all landsand ages. Their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, andfor an aristocracy I suppose that they had a high average ofintelligence, though there might be two minds about this. They made methink of mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spiritof the beholder with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvettingand caracoling, as they jingled in their shining harness around the longring. Their noble uselessness took the fancy, for I suppose that thereis nothing so superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of thebest society. It is something which only the ambition of wealth andunbroken leisure can mount to; and I was glad that the display of tandemswas the first event of the Horse Show which I witnessed, for it seemed tome that it must beyond all others typify the power which created theHorse Show. I wished that the human side of it could have been moreunquestionably adequate, but the equine side of the event was perfect. Still, I felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and simple andchildlike, in the next event. 

III. 

This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty Shetlandponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. A cry of delight went up from agroup of little people near me, and the spell of the Horse Show wasbroken. It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet andkindly pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had everhad, or ever wished to have, a Shetland pony; the touch of nature madethe whole show kin. I could not see that the freakish, kittenishcreatures did anything to claim our admiration, but they won ouraffection by every trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy. The smallcolts broke away from the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark inwanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinnyings, which might well havetouched a responsive chord in the bosom of fashion itself: I dare say itis not so hard as it looks. The scene remanded us to a moment ofchildhood; and I found myself so fond of all the ponies that I felt itinvidious of the judges to choose among them for the prizes; they oughtevery one to have had the prize. 

I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions;no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribewhen it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-workingdonkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings without too greatreproach. I gazed after the broken, refluent wave of these amiablecreatures, with the vague toleration here formulated, but I was not quiteat peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism till the nextevent brought the hunters with their high-jumping into the ring. Thesenoble animals unite use and beauty in such measure that the censor mustbe of Catonian severity who can refuse them his praise. When I reflectedthat by them and their devoted riders our civilization had beenassimilated to that of the mother-country in its finest expression, andanother tie added to those that bind us to her through the language ofShakespeare and Milton; that they had tamed the haughty spirit of theAmerican farmer in several parts of the country so that he submitted fora consideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they had all butexterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, once so common and destructiveamong us, I was in a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which werenow set up at four or five places for the purposes of the high-jumping. As to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, I think I must hedge alittle, while I stand firmly to my admiration of his use. To be honest, the tandem horse is more to my taste. He is better shaped, and he bearshimself more proudly. The hunter is apt to behave, whatever his reserveof intelligence, like an excited hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bredaway to nothing where the ideal horse abounds; he has the behavior of aturkey-hen when not behaving like the common or garden hen. But therecan be no question of his jumping, which seems to be his chief businessin a world where we are all appointed our several duties, and I at oncebegan to take a vivid pleasure in his proficiency. I have always felt ablind and insensate joy in running races, which has no relation to anyparticular horse, and I now experienced an impartial rapture in theperformances of these hunters. They looked very much alike, and if ithad not been for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the centre ofthe ring announcing that 650, 675, or 602 was now jumping, I might havethought it was 650 all the time. 

A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses havegot half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it isstill a fine sight. I became very fastidious as to which moment of itwas the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when hisaerial hoof touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking hisrider's head half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective;and I do not know to this hour which I prefer. But I suppose I wasbecoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on I noticedthat I was not satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses'execution. Will it be credited that I became willing something shouldhappen, anything, to vary it? I asked myself why, if some of the moreexciting incidents of the hunting-field which I had read of must befall;I should not see them. Several of the horses had balked at the barriers, and almost thrown their riders across them over their necks, but notquite done it; several had carried away the green-tufted top rail withtheir heels; when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the fartherside of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence had gone down. Ilooked eagerly for the prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but theywere cantering safely away. 

IV. 

It was enough, however. I perceived that I was becoming demoralized, andthat if I were to write of the Horse Show with at all the superiority onelikes to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come away. But Icame away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus forcircus, the Greatest Show on Earth which I had often seen in that placehad certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show. It had three ringsand two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in theraces, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands, instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses'ears. The events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitelymore varied and picturesque. As for the people in the boxes, I do notknow that they were less distinguished than these at the Horse Show, butif they were not of the same high level in which distinction wasimpossible, they did not show it in their looks. 

The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the firstqualities; and I had moments of suspecting that it was no more than theevolution of the county cattle show. But in any case I had to own thatits great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole, appeals to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than any other interest, not excepting politics or religion. I cannot, indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot bealways civilizing. 

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER

It has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how andwhere to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged tospend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in theproportion of one's ability to spend it wherever and however one chose. Few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few aregreatly to be pitied. I know that they are often envied and hated for itby those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake. If wecould look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so muchmisery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach themwith their better fortune, or what appeared so. 

I. 

For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summerbrings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted. They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hardnecessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placedsomewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are aninfinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. Their baneis not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has nochoice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. It is the problem of the Eastrather than of the West (where people are much more in the habit ofstaying at home the year round), and it is the problem of the city andnot of the country. I am not sure that there is one practical farmer inthe whole United States who is obliged to witness in his household thosesad dissensions which almost separate the families of professional men asto where and how they shall pass the summer. People of this class, whichis a class with some measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly ofvarying and decided minds, and I once knew a family of the sort whosecombined ideal for their summer outing was summed up in the simple desirefor society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing. They spent thewhole months of April, May, and June in a futile inquiry for a resortuniting these attractions, and on the first of July they drove to thestation with no definite point in view. But they found that they couldget return tickets for a certain place on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for it. There they decided next morning topush on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, butbefore it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weekswhere they were. Then they took train for a place on the coast, but inthe cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; theydecided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decidedagain to keep on. They arrived at their original destination, and thefollowing day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast. The answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready tostart, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel. The landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at asmaller house, and 'mealed' them (as it used to be called at Mt. Desert)in his own. But upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house theyliked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and theyspent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardlycome away when the house closed in the fall. 

This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not alwaysturn out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trustthemselves to Providence in these matters than they do. There is reallyan infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one couldquite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one shouldgo, and check one's baggage accordingly. I think the chances of anagreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and-fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it. My own experience isthat in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it doesin most non-moral things. 

II. 

A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of thekindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people wholeft their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stiflein the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels. Yet such people werein the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patientpersistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severediscouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed them altogether. I believe the city boarding-house remainsvery much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the countryboarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it. As for thesummer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained ofexcept the prices. I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of-town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that thechief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have alreadyspoken of. 

I have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice youmake, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense ofresponsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you. I observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish theydid not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and I have beentold that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though soeminently detachable. To great numbers Europe looks from this shore likea safe refuge from the American summer problem; and yet I am not surethat it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe;one has to choose where to go when one has got there. A European city iscertainly always more tolerable than an American city, but one cannotvery well pass the summer in Paris, or even in London. The heart there, as here, will yearn for some blessed seat

 "Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, "

and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world, you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere inparticular. 

III. 

It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as I say, myheart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer theconsequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but muststay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that theyhave any work to keep them there. I am not meaning now, of course, business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread--or, morecorrectly, the cake--of their families in the country, or even theirclerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people as Isometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctantmidsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms oversewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenementstreets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bendingover wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without. These all get on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not toaccuse themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another. Their fate is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those whodecide their fate are always rebelling against it. They it is whom I amtruly sorry for, and whom I write of with tears in my ink. Their case ishard, and it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish theywill look and how flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they areasked about their summer outings. I do not really suppose we shall beheld to a very strict account for our pleasures because everybody elsehas not enjoyed them, too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yetthere is an old-fashioned compunction which will sometimes visit theheart if we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many have nopleasures to take. I would suggest, then, to those on whom the curse ofchoice between pleasures rests, that they should keep in mind those whohave chiefly pains to their portion in life. 

I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, orcounselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has beenaccurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as things now are; but I would seriously entreat them to consider whetherthey could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at thesea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of othersin the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. I know very wellthat it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality totake comfort in one's advantages from the disadvantages of others, andthis is not quite what I mean to teach. Perhaps I mean nothing more thanan overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages, which would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of thesummer outer. It might be very interesting, and possibly it might beamusing, for one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock toinquire into the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is notbeyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion onthis subject would go far to enlighten the world upon a question that hasvexed the world ever since mankind was divided into those who work toomuch and those who rest too much. 

AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO

A study of New York civilization in 1849 has lately come into my hands, with a mortifying effect, which I should like to share with the reader, to my pride of modernity. I had somehow believed that after half acentury of material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before, New York in 1902 must be very different from New York in 1849, but if Iam to trust either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, NewYork is essentially the same now that it was then. The spirit of theplace has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidlycommercial. Even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration;it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of 'New Yorkin Slices' wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, orovergrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have beenstructural in it from the beginning. He felt in his time the samevulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that I havefelt in my time, and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, amidthe warring forms, with a prescience of my own affliction, which deprivesme of the satisfaction of a discoverer and leaves me merely the sense ofbeing rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions. 

I. 

I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his NewYork with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; butI am afraid I must own that 'New York in Slices' affects one as havingfirst been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings to thestudy of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a countryvisitor. This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he wished tomake with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a certaininnocent charm to his work. I may make myself better understood if I saythat his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller New York is muchthe same as that of Mr. Stead towards the wickedness of a much largerChicago. He seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of theprisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs(who then called themselves b'hoys and g'hals), the quacks, the theatres, and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their iniquities with aready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with him. 

But if he treated of these things alone, I should not perhaps havebrought his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers. He treats also of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all, "the literary soirees" of that remote New York of his in a manner to makeus latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it. Fifty-odd yearsago journalism had already become "the absorbing, remorseless, clamorousthing" we now know, and very different from the thing it was when"expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from thelightning's blue and fiery film. " Reporterism was beginning to assumeits present importance, but it had not yet become the paramountintellectual interest, and did not yet "stand shoulder to shoulder" withthe counting-room in authority. Great editors, then as now, ranked greatauthors in the public esteem, or achieved a double primacy by unitingjournalism and literature in the same personality. They were often theowners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and theyindulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not thechief use, of our contemporaneous journals. Apparently, however, notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made thedelight of their readers, and the press had not become the detectiveagency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities. 

But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre asstill eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism. "How can youexpect, " our author asks, "a frank and unbiassed criticism upon theperformance of George Frederick Cooke Snooks . . . When the editor orreporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewedpotatoes at Windust's, and regaling himself on brandy-and-water cold, without, at the expense of the aforesaid George Frederick Cooke Snooks?"The severest censor of the press, however, would hardly declare now that"as to such a thing as impartial and independent criticism upon theatresin the present state of the relations between editors, reporters, managers, actors--and actresses--the thing is palpably out of thequestion, " and if matters were really at the pass hinted, the press hascertainly improved in fifty years, if one may judge from its presentfrank condemnations of plays and players. The theatre apparently hasnot, for we read that at that period "a very great majority of thestandard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancyand their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with marriedwomen, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of everydescription . . . . Stage costume, too, wherever there is half achance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and afreedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece whichwould be kicked out of private society the instant it would have theaudacity to make its appearance there. "

II. 

I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if notquite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts werepresently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849. That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artistsclubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works amongthemselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions werefinally suppressed under the law against lotteries. While they lasted, however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, andintellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as ourprivate views now are, or ought to be; and the author "devotes an entirenumber" of his series "to a single institution"--fearless of beingaccused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of thefine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind. 

He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besidestreating of various literary celebrities at the "literary soirees, " heimagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants. At Delmonico's, where if you had "French and money" you could get in thatday "a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture byHuntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers, " he meets such amusical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean asN. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it wouldbe a warm day for Delmonico's when the observer in this epoch couldchance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among ushas no longer the French or the money. Indeed, the author of 'New Yorkin Slices' seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for hisown period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that ifWillis and Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico's, they ought tohave done so. He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musicalcritic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his "literarysoiree" a dozen distinguished-looking men and "twice as many women. .. . Listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held bya couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, readinga basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . The annual ValentineParty, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for thepurpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praisewhich a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb-spinners. "

It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a 'salon' asthis. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in itscelebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presentlyintending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the richand full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination ofposterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as "JohnInman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals andmagazines, " or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposesto be "stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . . An early copy of his forthcoming 'Female Poets of America'"; or as LewisGaylord Clark, the "sunnyfaced, smiling" editor of the KnickerbockerMagazine, "who don't look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever heard of him, "as he stands up to dance a polka with "a demure lady who has evidentlyspilled the inkstand over her dress"; or as "the stately Mrs. Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "thespiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like ababy, " where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like abird escaped from its cage"; or as Margaret Fuller, "her large, gray eyesTamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like aPythoness"?

I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said at the outset, affirming the persistent equality of New York characteristics andcircumstances, I wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warnmalign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see usas we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped inthe taste of 1849. Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as theauthor of 'New York in Slices' would have us believe; and perhaps any onewho trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived bya parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of ourmodern "society journalism. "

FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND

There is, of course, almost a world's difference between England and theContinent anywhere; but I do not recall just now any transition betweenContinental countries which involves a more distinct change in thesuperficial aspect of things than the passage from the Middle States intoNew England. It is all American, but American of diverse ideals; and youare hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects, which are the more apparent to you the more American you are. If youwant the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave New York on aSound boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle State civilization andwake into the civilization of New England, which seems to give its stampto nature herself. As to man, he takes it whether native or alien; andif he is foreign-born it marks him another Irishman, Italian, Canadian, Jew, or negro from his brother in any other part of the United States. 

I. 

When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out, and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England's influence of thissort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I couldwish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man canwell be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shorein search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded youngchicken in the road. The natural expectation is that any chicken inthese circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before itwith a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat(it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over thehay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, whichpassed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and thenfall still. The poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it well, compared with my driver. He could hardly stoplamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. "You goin' past Jim Marden's?" "Yes. " "Well, I wish you'd tell him Ijust run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess. I guess it wasa pretty big one. " "Oh no, " I put in, "it was only a broiler. What doyou think it was worth?" I took out some money, and the farmer noted thelargest coin in my hand; "About half a dollar, I guess. " On this I putit all back in my pocket, and then he said, "Well, if a chicken don'tknow enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain't to blame. "I expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. Whenwe parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to letthe owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckledhis pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and Ihave no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless hehas paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemoriallyplundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air itbreathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But thespirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecilebroiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributorynegligence, was saddening him, while I was off in my train without a pangfor the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for the pullet. 

II. 

The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in apsychological direction away from the simpler differences which I meantto note in New England. They were evident as soon as our train began torun from the steamboat landing into the country, and they haveintensified, if they have not multiplied, themselves as I have penetrateddeeper and deeper into the beautiful region. The land is poorer than theland to the southward--one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and oftenso thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borneany other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, cut away theprimeval woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light. Butwherever you come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one ofthe village groups that New England farm-houses have always liked togather themselves into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of arepair that ought to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-goingconditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that impartsan air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching andblackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into woodlots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches ofpotatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the NewEngland year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the cloverblows honey--sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cuthay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the sun. 

We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continentalweather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering byanticipation. But the farmsteads and village houses are safe in theshade of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass thatgrows so tall about them that the June roses have to strain upward to getthemselves free of it. Behind each dwelling is a billowy mass oforchard, and before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches above thequiet street. There is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as theAmerican elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these New Englandvillages, which are themselves, I think, the prettiest and wholesomest ofmortal sojourns. By a happy instinct, their wooden houses are allpainted white, to a marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and thecontrast of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. Therewas an evil hour, the terrible moment of the aesthetic revival nowhappily past, when white walls and green blinds were thought in badtaste, and the village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, ora doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have returned to theirearlier love. Not the first love; that was a pale buff with white trim;but I doubt if it were good for all kinds of village houses; the eyerather demands the white. The pale buff does very well for largecolonial mansions, like Lowell's or Longfellow's in Cambridge; but whenyou come, say, to see the great square houses built in Portsmouth, NewHampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns. 

In such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way tothe beach it was of an absolute fitness; and I wish I could convey a duesense of the exquisite keeping of the place. Each white house was moreor less closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; thegrassy door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing roseembowered the door-way with its bloom. Away backward or sidewisestretched the woodshed from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the wholeunder one cover; the turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, overwhich the elms rose and drooped; and from one end of the village to theother you could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. I know Holland; I have seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up forSunday to the very middle of their brick streets, but I doubt if Dutchcleanliness goes so far without, or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanliness of New England. I felt so keenly the feminine qualityof its motive as I passed through that village, that I think if I haddropped so much as a piece of paper in the street I must have knocked atthe first door and begged the lady of the house (who would have opened itin person after wiping her hands from her work, taking off her apron, andgiving a glance at herself in the mirror and at me through the windowblind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of good morals. 

III. 

I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of theNew England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and Iam still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under therelaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there. At best I was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it used togive me great pleasure--so penetratingly does the place qualify even thesojourning Westerner--to think of the defect of New York in the virtuethat is next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head for shame at themortifying contrast of the Boston streets to the well-swept asphalt whichI had left frying in the New York sun the afternoon before. Later, however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces I remembered sowell--good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof--they not only ignored thedisgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a stateof transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind it;and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares andnarrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, andseemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them. 

In New York you see the American face as Europe characterizes it; inBoston you see it as it characterizes Europe; and it is in Boston thatyou can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which allalien things must yield to till they take the American cast. It isalmost dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew;and in the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack yourconscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from itand make ready to do penance for them. I felt almost as if I had broughtthe dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lyingabout, so impossible were they with reference to the Boston face. 

It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and itlooked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of ourelderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we droveaway from the station. It was a little rigorous with us, as requiring usto have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it waspatient from long experience. In New York there are no elderly hackmen;but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe they would be capable ofbad faith with travellers. In fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere aspredatory as it is painted; but in Boston it appears to have the publichonor in its keeping. I do not mean that it was less mature, lessself-respectful in Portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so itcould not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in bothplaces, and all through New England it is of native birth, while in NewYork it is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numberstowards the Celtic strain. The prevalence of the native in New Englandhelps you sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are inAmerica as the first Americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in NewEngland is the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautifulold seaport of New Hampshire. In fact, without being quite prepared todefend a thesis to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is preeminentlyAmerican, and in this it differs from Newburyport and from Salem, whichhave suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and, though among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after Boston, arenow largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actuallythe majority, I believe, in Newburyport. 

IV. 

The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the century, but before thattime she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able tobuild themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of agrandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country. I do not knowwhat architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worthremembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such gracefulproportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines ofpious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to houseour well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. The decoration isoftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement;or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicateiron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultlesspropriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the archingelms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behindthem to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances. They are allof wood, except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stoutedifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as ifthey might keep it yet another century. 

Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whosegravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needscleaning. Even the business streets, and the quaint square which givesthe most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as ifthe wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and thenarrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowdeach other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water--side, aredoubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a NewEngland conscience against getting them untidy. 

When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high-shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few withtheir gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with theirmouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and thewhole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of thepast, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water'sedge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchantsand opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsomespace of gardened ground. 

My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty, and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm ofthe town. Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a richfield when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for itneeds some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, toexpress a fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the presentI know nothing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, andsigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. When now and then a youngshape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancywould have been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some girl ofthose flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become thecreative historian of the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen nowgrowing up in Portsmouth. 

V. 

If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shownherself in fiction, I might say the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was alreadywith us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from New Hampshire into Maine, andtook the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are alittle different sort of New-Englanders from those of Miss Wilkins. Theybegan to flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers andgrandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youthof marriageable age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the Sunday best which they had worn to the graduation exercises atthe High School, where we took them mostly up. The womenkind were in anervous twitter of talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyondtheir wont, "passing the time of day" with one another, and helping themore tumultuous sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car. Theycourteously made room for one another, and let the children stand betweentheir knees, or took them in their laps, with that unfailing Americankindness which I am prouder of than the American valor in battle, observing in all that American decorum which is no bad thing either. Wehad chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year, when people might well have been a little off their balance, but therewas not a boisterous note in the subdued affair. As we passed theschool-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white gowns and whiteslippers stood on the steps and gently smiled upon our company. Onecould see that they were inwardly glowing and thrilling with theexcitement of their graduation, but were controlling their emotions to acalm worthy of the august event, so that no one might ever have it to saythat they had appeared silly. 

The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors orgates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of privateownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters peoplealong its obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins's story where thebridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made methink more of Miss Jewett's people. The shore folk and the Down-Eastersare specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in'The Country of the Pointed Firs', or 'Sister Wisby's Courtship', or'Dulham Ladies', or 'An Autumn Ramble', or twenty other entrancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridlingtoss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slipround to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at oncebetween the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were asneat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white-walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept asthe very kitchen itself. 

The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in aneffect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and itclimbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of thecountry road which it followed. It is a land of low hills, broken byfrequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to seehow frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. Itscrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round asharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loudcaterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. Its coursedoes not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but asyet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as onewould think. The landscape has already accepted it, and is making thebest of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. It passes everybody's front door or back door, and the farmers can getthemselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouthin an hour, twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall ofwind or rain. In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to leta car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught outin a blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. "But thecah was so wa'm, I neva suff'ed a mite. "

"Well, " I summarized, "it must be a great advantage to all the peoplealong the line. "

"Well, you wouldn't 'a' thought so, from the kick they made. "

"I suppose the cottagers"--the summer colony--"didn't like the noise. "

"Oh yes; that's what I mean. The's whe' the kick was. The natives likeit. I guess the summa folks 'll like it, too. "

He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we bothunderstood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bowto the will of the majority. 

THE ART OF THE ADSMITH

The other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a badconscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulkybook under his arm, and said, "I see by a guilty look in your eye thatyou are meaning to write about spring. "

"I am not, " I retorted, "and if I were, it would be because none of thenew things have been said yet about spring, and because spring is neveran old story, any more than youth or love. "

"I have heard something like that before, " said my friend, "and Iunderstand. The simple truth of the matter is that this is the fag-endof the season, and you have run low in your subjects. Now take my adviceand don't write about spring; it will make everybody hate you, and willdo no good. Write about advertising. " He tapped the book under his armsignificantly. "Here is a theme for you. "

I. 

He had no sooner pronounced these words than I began to feel a weird andpotent fascination in his suggestion. I took the book from him andlooked it eagerly through. It was called Good Advertising, and it waswritten by one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almostto the grade of an art, or a humanity. 

"But I see nothing here, " I said, musingly, "which would enable aself-respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in giving duehold upon the public interest those charming characteristics of his bookwhich no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate sopersuasively. "

"I expected some such objection from you, " said my friend. "You willadmit that there is everything else here?"

"Everything but that most essential thing. You know how we all feelabout it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense ofinsufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poorauthors. The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for thereviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher--"

"I see what you mean, " said my friend. "But you must have patience. If the author of this book can write so luminously of advertising inother respects, I am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactorylight upon your problem. The question is, I believe, how to translateinto irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which a writerfeels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its singularbeauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, withoutinfringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is thedistinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?"

"Something like that. But you understand. "

"Perhaps a Roentgen ray might be got to do it, " said my friend, thoughtfully, "or perhaps this author may bring his mind to bear uponit yet. He seems to have considered every kind of advertising exceptbook-advertising. "

"The most important of all!" I cried, impatiently. 

"You think so because you are in that line. If you were in the line ofvarnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or ofmalt--"

"Still I should be interested in book--advertising, because it is themost vital of human interests. "

"Tell me, " said my friend, "do you read the advertisements of the booksof rival authors?"

"Brother authors, " I corrected him. 

"Well, brother authors. "

I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to add that I thought themlittle better than a waste of the publishers' money. 

II. 

My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, butseemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter. 

"I have often wondered, " he said, "at the enormous expansion ofadvertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted. But myauthor, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was unwittinglygroping for. When you take up a Sunday paper"--I shuddered, and myfriend smiled intelligence--"you are simply appalled at the miles ofannouncements of all sorts. Who can possibly read them? Who cares evento look at them? But if you want something in particular--to furnish ahouse, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go, tothe theatre--then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, andcares to look at them. They respond to the multifarious wants of thewhole community. You have before you the living operation of that law ofdemand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about. As often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that'sonly an appearance. You wanted something, and you found an offer to meetyour want. "

"Then you don't believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?"

"I see that my author believes something of the kind. We may be full ofall sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influenceof an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I have afeeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potentialwants is largely thrown away. You must want a thing, or think you wantit; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence. "

"There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I readwithout the slightest interest in the subject matter. Simply the beautyof the style attracts me. "

"I know. But does it ever move you to get what you don't want?"

"Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sortof advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint. "

"He doesn't contemn it, quite. But I think he feels that it may have hadits day. Do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?"

"No; the zest for nearly everything goes. I don't care so much forTourguenief as I used. Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconicsuggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning theseason's wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction. Theadvertising expert--"

"This author calls him the adsmith. "

"Delightful! Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it. It'sas legitimate as lunch. But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to havecaught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelistshave caught the American social tone. "

"Yes, " said my friend, "and he seems to have prospered as richly by it. You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars byadsmithing. They have put their art quite on a level with fictionpecuniarily. "

"Perhaps it is a branch of fiction. "

"No; they claim that it is pure fact. My author discourages theslightest admixture of fable. The truth, clearly and simply expressed, is the best in an ad. 

"It is best in a wof, too. I am always saying that. "

"Wof?"

"Well, work of fiction. It's another new word, like lunch or ad. "

"But in a wof, " said my friend, instantly adopting it, "my authorinsinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity, while inan ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness. In one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay by the word. That is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground than thewofsmith. "

"I should think your author might have written a recent article in'The---------, reproaching fiction with its unhallowed gains. "

"If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. He would have beenincapable of it. My author is no more the friend of honesty inadsmithing than he is of propriety, He deprecates jocosity inapothecaries and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business;and he is as severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attentionby disgusting or shocking the reader. 

"He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and I shouldn'thave minded his criticising the ready wofsmith. I hope he attacks theuse of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the poster-plastered fences around vacant lots. In New York there is only one paperwhose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves. "

"Well, " said my friend, "he attacks foolish and ineffective display. "

"It is all foolish and ineffective. It is like a crowd of people tryingto make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice. A paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congestedand delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions itis unnecessary, and it is futile. Compare any New York paper but onewith the London papers, and you will see what I mean. Of course I referto the ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with picturesand scare heads as all the rest. I wish your author could revise hisopinions and condemn all display in ads. "

"I dare say he will when he knows what you think, " said my friend, withimaginable sarcasm. 

III. 

"I wish, " I went on, "that he would give us some philosophy of theprodigious increase of advertising within the last twenty-five years, andsome conjecture as to the end of it all. Evidently, it can't keep onincreasing at the present rate. If it does, there will presently be noroom in the world for things; it will be filled up with theadvertisements of things. "

"Before that time, perhaps, " my friend suggested, "adsmithing will havebecome so fine and potent an art that advertising will be reduced inbulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing itseffectiveness. "

"Perhaps, " I said, "some silent electrical process will be contrived, sothat the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the fascination of aspring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady's consciousness withouteven the agency of words. All other facts of commercial and industrialinterest could be dealt with in the same way. A fine thrill could bemade to go from the last new book through the whole community, so thatpeople would not willingly rest till they had it. Yes, one can see anindefinite future for advertising in that way. The adsmith may be thesupreme artist of the twentieth century. He may assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all the arts and sciences. "

"Yes, " said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice, "that is verywell. But what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at everypore with a sense of the world's demand and supply?"

"Oh, that is another affair. I was merely imagining the possibleresources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising whileguarding the integrity of the planet. I think, very likely, if the thingkeeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able tocriticise the others. Or possibly the thing may work its own cure. Youknow the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotismto which conditions appeal. They do not deny that these foster greed andrapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth-winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and goodcomes of it all. I never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn'ta sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess andinvasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to usstill more by the adsmith? Come, isn't there hope in that?"

"I see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream, " said myfriend. "Why don't you turn it to account?"

"You know that isn't my line; I must leave that sort of wofsmithing tothe romantic novelist. Besides, I have my well-known panacea for all theills our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall legislatefoolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of the possibilityof existence. Most of the adsmithing is now employed in persuadingpeople that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. But in anycivilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much lessfoisted upon the community by adsmiths. "

"I see what you mean, " said my friend; and he sighed gently. "I had muchbetter let you write about spring. "

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

A late incident in the history of a very widespread English novelist, triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist hadcasually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the realauthor, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics. The friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuouslydismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, butdeclared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist'sworks. The novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so usingmaterial in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or ideafrom life, and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answercritics who regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation. In amanner he brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the generalpublic that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his ownway, duly to ticket the flies preserved in his amber. 

I. 

When I read this haughty vindication, I thought at first that if the casewere mine I would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friendas that; but since, I have not been so sure. I have asked myself upon acareful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be franklyavowed, as in nowise dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would takethe affair into consideration and make it clear for me. If we are tosuppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and thatpublic dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparentlyplagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases itdoes not disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, defines it as "the crime ofliterary theft"; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, ifit is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the word isnot harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law aswhite-lying. 

The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took his own where he foundit, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the thingsother people have rushed in with before them. But really they seem toneed neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they arecaught in the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rashintruder upon their premises. The novelist in question is by no meansthe only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant example. Whilethe ratification of the treaty with Spain was pending before the Senateof the United States, a member of that body opposed it in a speech almostword for word the same as a sermon delivered in New York City only a fewdays earlier and published broadcast. He was promptly exposed by theparallel-column system; but I have never heard that his standing wasaffected or his usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him. Afew years ago an eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his ownthe sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detectedand promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whateverhappened from the exposure. Every one must recall like instances, moreor less remote. I remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of ajournalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages ofMacaulay's article on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name tothe character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his dutyto devote to infamy. He was caught in the fact, and by means of theparallel column pilloried before the community. But the community didnot mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either. He prospered onamid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to anothercity it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commandinginfluence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape thedestinies of the nation. 

So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were asharmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which fromtime to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to itsfoundations. They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I donot believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latestvictim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts orheads of his readers. 

II. 

I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. I am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from myown sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them wheneveranother's have found him out. But as yet I have not convinced myselfthat the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for itseems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what thedictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a "crime" and a"theft. " If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if notdifferently natured, from all other crimes and thefts. These may be moreor less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carriesinevitable detection with it. If you take a man's hat or coat out of hishall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take hishorse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it;if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in thecrowd, and easily prove your innocence. But if you take his sermon, orhis essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery. The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only tooglad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showingtheir alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the courtof parallel columns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the authorfrom whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the moreindecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, andwishes to display his erudition. A man may escape for centuries and yetbe found out. In the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offenderseemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in alunatic asylum, was able to detect him at last, and to restore the goodsto their rightful owner, Sir Francis Bacon. 

In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure, plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probabilitythat it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, andjournalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mindat the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere. Now and thenit takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when theplagiarist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece ofliterary property. When Mr. William Allen Butler's famous poem of"Nothing to Wear" achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girldeclared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lostthe MS. In an omnibus. All her friends apparently believed so, too; andthe friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed theauthorship of "Beautiful Snow" and "Rock Me to Sleep" were ready tosupport them by affidavit against the real authors of those prettyworthless pieces. 

From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader thatplagiarism is not the simple "crime" or "theft" that the lexicographerswould have us believe. It argues a strange and peculiar courage on thepart of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure of havingit brought home to them, for they seem to dread the exposure, though itinvolves no punishment outside of themselves. Why do they do it, or, having done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not? Theirtemerity and their timidity are things almost irreconcilable, and thewhole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what one would do if one'sown plagiarisms were found out. But this is a mere question of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of the nature or essence of thething itself. 

PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

The question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression ofreality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one ofthose inquiries to which there is no very final answer. The mostbaffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident;and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking theconvictions of those whom they have persuaded. It will not do to affirmanything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrarypresent themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt ofthe verity which you cannot gainsay. The most that you can do is toappeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the artwhich created the picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it trueto human experience generally? If it is so, then it cannot well be falseto the special human experience it deals with. 

I. 

Not long ago I heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically, illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of ourwriters, whose art is of the kind I mean. A lady was driving with ayoung girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New York through one ofthose little towns of the North Shore in Massachusetts, where the small;wooden houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schoonersslip, in and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if theywere blown about through the tall grass. She tried to make her feel theshy charm of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to themanner born are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned New England villages;but she found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-coloredcottages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yardslit by patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with theirclose-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them, and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of themaltogether. She said that they were terrible, and she knew that in eachof them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, orunhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in Miss Wilkins'sstories. 

She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief ofthese stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and nodoubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching fortheir stoical sorrows. Without being so very young, I, too, have foundthe humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit ofexperiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote NewEngland village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and inquite the mood that Miss Wilkins's bleaker studies leave one in. Atmidday, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible tofling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and thefiction; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifyingthis or, that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins houseand in placing one of her muted dramas in it. One cannot know the peopleof such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot knowNew England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New Englandcharacter, though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort ofstories could be written which should as faithfully represent otherphases of New England village life. 

To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident thattheir truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature isseldom on show anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoyand Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I wentthrough Russia and met none of their people. I should be rather moresurprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga's or Fogazzaro's, but that would be because I already knew Italy a little. In fact, Isuspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to theconnoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artisthimself. One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of anauthor to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a greatdeal of patience to the scrutiny. Types are very backward and shrinkingthings, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if youseize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that isdistinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author'sreputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of histruth. 

II. 

The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there findsthem dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions aredramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in reallife are recreantly undramatic. One might go through a New Englandvillage and see Mary Wilkins houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet notwitness a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. It isonly too probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaintor humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; andyet I should not question her revelation on that account. The life ofNew England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and Miss Sarah O. Jewett, and Miss Alice Brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except tothe accustomed eye. It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by thePuritanic theology. One must not be very positive in such things, and Imay be too bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some NewEnglanders approaches this theology the belief of most is now far fromit; and yet its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the NewEngland character that Puritanism survives in the moral and mental makeof the people almost in its early strength. Conduct and manner conformto a dead religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generationswithout acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long afterthey cease to believe themselves chosen. They are often stiffened in theneck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point ofmaking them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterateresponsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they arestrengthened for any fate. They are what we see in the stories which, perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction. 

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now soPuritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet theinherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences itfrom the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however, always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest andsecurest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune ofsome novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also asentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase forit), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence fromthe dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by theancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of NewEngland manners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, whichprevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theologyceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism socommon in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, thereis a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villageswhich has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and whichforms with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his best. But asyet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and stillless of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exaltedbeauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was ablessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one canalways be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losingitself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still beginsthere, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large. The goodcauses, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in awholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New Englandconscience, has imparted itself to the American people. 

Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves tohave in such excellent degree, has spread from New England. That is, indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there beenbrought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful pictureof New England village life in some of its more obvious phases. I sayobvious because I must, but I have already said that this is a life whichis very little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought theportrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, andunnatural, though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic waswrong. 

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART

One of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of theartist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarelycare for their work artistically. They care for it morally, personally, partially. I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddledpreference for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by aphilistine question of the material when it should, aestheticallyspeaking, be concerned solely with the form. 

I. 

The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and amusingillustration of my point. They were playing a most soul-fillingmelodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first thatthere will be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just asit should, no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course ofthe action. An over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigenciesof the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment inbehalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never had the leastoccasion for anxiety. Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villainin the piece; so very black-hearted that he seemed not to have a singlegood impulse from first to last. Yet he was, in the keeping of the stageProvidence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadlyaims. He accomplished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intentshad been of the best; except for the satisfaction afforded by theedifying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been in theplay at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, he was socontinually baffled. But this was not enough for the audience, or forthat part of it which filled the gallery to the roof. Perhaps he wassuch an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very, very cold-blooded inhis wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out to him by thedramatist could not suffice. At any rate, the gallery took such a vividinterest in his punishment that it had out the actor who impersonated thewretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberatepassage across the stage before the curtain. The hisses were not at allfor the actor, but altogether for the character. The performance wasfairly good, quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part in thepiece, and easily up to the level of other villanous performances (Inever find much nature in them, perhaps because there is not much naturein villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but the mereconception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much foran audience of the average popular goodness. It was only after he hadtaken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectatorsforbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparentlythey did not care to "give him a realizing sense that there was apunishment after death, " as the man in Lincoln's story did with the deaddog. 

II. 

The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me uponthinking (I like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-centuryessayists were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorablereprobate is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers atpictures and statues, listeners to music, and so on through the wholelist of the arts. It is absolutely different from the artist's attitude, from the connoisseur's attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with theirattitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist worksfor. Art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it isproduced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally, personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions. 

Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not, he, does not succeed without it. Their brute liking or misliking is thefinal test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all. Only, insome cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o'clock on thefirst Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but remain openforever, and the voting goes on. Still, even the first day's canvass isimportant, or at least significant. It will not do for the artist toelectioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of hisdefeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universalinterest. He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to hisfellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, butwhose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. If he can makesomething that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he maynot have done any great thing, but if he has made something that theywill neither cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matterhow well, how finely, how truly he has done the thing. 

This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one's artist-pride such asone gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. Not long ago Iwas talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to mythinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from readingpoetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhapsputting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoypictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soulto those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly tointerest painters. He replied that it was a confession of weakness in apainter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in thespectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; andthat if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs ofpainting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear andappreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even insistedthat a picture ought to tell a story. 

The difficulty in humbling one's self to this view of art is in the easewith which one may please the general by art which is no art. Neitherthe play nor the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor washissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at allfine; and yet I perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved asupreme effect. If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should bevery sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very proud if, onthe level I chose and with the quality I cared for, I could invent avillain that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassingwickedness. In other words, I think it a thousand pities whenever anartist gets so far away from the general, so far within himself or alittle circle of amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens noresponse in the multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger of thearts among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain. It makes onesick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the common peopleis won. It is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting toany performance, we may be pretty sure it is not the greatestperformance. 

III. 

The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, toconfound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that. We talk, for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this isdifferent from talking of cookery for cooks. Poetry is not made forpoets; they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for peoplewho are not poets. If it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is poetry which has failed of its truest office. It is none theless its truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to doit. 

The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve thistruest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should studyhow and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest arewanting in universal interest, in human appeal. Leaving the drama out ofthe question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only thefavor of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a racemore open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours. Theartist who feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now andhere a chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the worldbefore. Of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanityare the simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when thecomplex and the recondite may not universally please. 288

The art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them inhim. Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters afoot high. 

The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has asuccess to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that itgoes no further. He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgarbecause bad art pleases them. It is part of his reason for being that heshould please them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he iswanting in force, however much he abounds in fineness. Who would notwish his picture to draw a crowd about it? Who would not wish his novelto sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid loveof gain which I am told governs novelists? One should not really wish itany the less because chromos and historical romances are popular. 

Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer togetherin a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions. I put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be morethan living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in themean time I think that the artist might very well study the springs offeeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quitehumbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, andinquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, sopersonal. Not being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatestcontempt of that play and its public. 

POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

No thornier theme could well be suggested than I was once invited toconsider by an Englishman who wished to know how far American politicianswere scholars, and how far American authors took part in politics. In mymind I first revolted from the inquiry, and then I cast about, in thefascination it began to have for me, to see how I might handle it andprick myself least. In a sort, which it would take too long to setforth, politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were todeal quite frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one mightaccuse one's self of an unwarrantable personality. So, in what I shallhave to say in answer to the question asked me, I shall seek above allthings not to be quite frank. 

I. 

My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors nolonger living. Not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safeto say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of menamong us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Curtis, Emerson, and Bryant moreor less promptly and openly took sides against slavery. Holmes was verymuch later in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his finalstrenuousness; as for Hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially aspectator of life to be classed with either party, though hisassociations, if not his sympathies, were with the Northern men who hadSouthern principles until the civil war came. After the war, when ourpolitical questions ceased to be moral and emotional and became economicand sociological, literary men found their standing with greaterdifficulty. They remained mostly Republicans, because the Republicanswere the anti-slavery party, and were still waging war against slavery intheir nerves. 

I should say that they also continued very largely the emotionaltradition in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things thepolitics of literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional. In fact, though the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly thegreater number of Americans are so. Nothing else would account for thefact that during the last ten or fifteen years men have remainedRepublicans and remained Democrats upon no tangible issues except ofoffice, which could practically concern only a few hundreds or thousandsout of every million voters. Party fealty is praised as a virtue, anddisloyalty to party is treated as a species of incivism next inwickedness to treason. If any one were to ask me why then Americanauthors were not active in American politics, as they once were, I shouldfeel a certain diffidence in replying that the question of other people'saccession to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them ascompared with literary questions. I should have the more diffidencebecause it might be retorted that literary men were too unpractical forpolitics when they did not deal with moral issues. 

Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and mighteven be regarded as complimentary. It is not our custom to be tenderwith any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not bebettered, especially in public affairs. We are apt to call such a oneout of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. Thismay be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part inpolitics with us. They are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, andalways averse to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrusttheir fitness to lead, when they have quite a firm faith in theirconvictions. They hesitate to urge these in the face of practicalpoliticians, who have a confidence in their ability to settle all affairsof State not surpassed even by that of business men in dealing witheconomic questions. 

I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at leastfor the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not. Our politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, sofar, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunnedour good society--which is not picturesque or apparently anything but atiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under thesame name. In nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with ourpolitics as material, they have given the practical politicians only toomuch reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand themere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life. 

II. 

There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did notwithhold me I might name some striking ones. Privately andunprofessionally, I think our authors take as vivid an interest in publicaffairs as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry tothink that they took a less intelligent interest. Now and then, but onlyvery rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side. In this event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like tovisit difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him. 

Such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man needshrink from, but they have a bearing upon what I am trying to explain, and in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in ourliterary men. No one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown athim, though they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrownin joke. But it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takesthem seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrownat him. He might burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; but if he spoke of public questions with heart andconscience, he could not do it with impunity, unless he were authorizedto do so by some practical relation to them. I do not mean that then hewould escape; but in this country, where there were once supposed to beno classes, people are more strictly classified than in any other. Business to the business man, law to the lawyer, medicine to thephysician, politics to the politician, and letters to the literary man;that is the rule. One is not expected to transcend his function, andcommonly one does not. We keep each to his last, as if there were nothuman interests, civic interests, which had a higher claim than the lastupon our thinking and feeling. The tendency has grown upon us severallyand collectively through the long persistence of our prosperity; ifpublic affairs were going ill, private affairs were going so well that wedid not mind the others; and we Americans are, I think, meridional in ourimprovidence. We are so essentially of to-day that we behave as ifto-morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. We have taught ourselves tobelieve that it will all come out right in the end so long that we havecome to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists. 

III. 

The turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if I may sophrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largelyattracted literary men. It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy himself, whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vastnumbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field ofpractical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes ofeconomic equality. But he virtually founded the Populist party, which, as the vital principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing itscandidate for the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named firstamong our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human sidesince the days of the old antislavery agitation. Without too greatdisregard of the reticence concerning the living which I promised myself, I may mention Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas WentworthHigginson as prominent authors who encouraged the Nationalist movementeventuating in Populism, though they were never Populists. It may beinteresting to note that Dr. Hale and Colonel Higginson, who later cametogether in their sociological sympathies, were divided by the schism of1884, when the first remained with the Republicans and the last went offto the Democrats. More remotely, Colonel Higginson was anti slaveryalmost to the point of Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in thewar. Dr. Hale was of those who were less radically opposed to slaverybefore the war, but hardly so after it came. Since the war a sort ofrefluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings inSouthern tradition Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sentimentof his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignantrenunciation of his fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequentlyceased to be the first of Southern authors, though he would still havecontinued the author of at least one of the greatest American novels. 

If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, asI seem really to be doing, I may mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, asan author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, Mr. Hamlin Garland has been known from the first as a zealous George man, orsingle-taxer. Mr. John Hay, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry CabotLodge are Republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing Uncle Remus, writes politicalarticles in a leading Southern journal. Mark Twain is a leadinganti-imperialist. 

IV. 

I am not sure whether I have made out a case for our authors or againstthem; perhaps I have not done so badly; but I have certainly not tried tobe exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to thereader, and I wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himselfwhether American literary men take part in American politics or not. I think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope(it may be too fondly) is the American way. They are none of thempoliticians in the Latin sort. Few, if any, of our statesmen have comeforward with small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do inSpain; none of our poets or historians have been chosen Presidents of therepublic as has happened to their French confreres; no great novelist ofours has been exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled asZola has been, though I have no doubt that if, for instance, one had oncesaid the Spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally 'conspue'. They have none of them reached the heights of political power, as severalEnglish authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed forpolitical reasons. I fancy they discharge their duties in voting ratherfaithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses orconventions. 

As for the other half of the question--how far American politicians arescholars--one's first impulse would be to say that they never were so. But I have always had an heretical belief that there were snakes inIreland; and it may be some such disposition to question authority thatkeeps me from yielding to this impulse. The law of demand and supplyalone ought to have settled the question in favor of the presence of thescholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him among us foralmost a generation past. Perhaps the response has not been very direct, but I imagine that our politicians have never been quite so destitute ofscholarship as they would sometimes make appear. I do not think so manyof them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as the politiciansof forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part ofthe impression of the general worsening of things, familiar after middlelife to every one's experience, from the beginning of recorded time. Ifsomething not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of finance, of economics, of international affairs is in question, it seems to go onrather more to their own satisfaction than that of their critics. Butwithout being always very proud of the result, and without professing toknow the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that under anoutside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in ourstatesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even sounscholarly as it might be supposed. It is not the effect of specifictraining, and yet it is the effect of training. I do not find that thematters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and inthis sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislationor administration; but still I should not like to say that none of ourpoliticians were scholars. That would be offensive, and it might not betrue. In fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted to callscholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not todeal quite frankly with this inquiry. 

STORAGE

It has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the onehalf of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might bebrought together in a family affection not now so observable in humanrelations. Probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still bethings, to bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself isso interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one canhardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in theadvantage of the ignorant, to find one's excuse with the better informed. 

I. 

City and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that onecan safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things. For instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, theysell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or ahundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vastwarehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, andammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, andcarefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they havedevastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do notdestroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such awarehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with theprivate tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only tothe tenants or their order. The aisles are concreted, the doors areiron, and the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated bysteam and lighted by electricity. Behind the iron doors, which in theNew York warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout allour other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households isstored--the effects of people who have gone to Europe, or broken uphouse-keeping provisionally or definitively, or have died, or beendivorced. They are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or theiryet living bodies held in hypnotic trances; destined again in some futuretime to animate some house or flat anew. In certain cases the spelllasts for many years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongsitself indefinitely. 

I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw visiting the warehouse totake out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years. He had been all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come home andbegin life again, in his own land. That dream had passed, and now he wastaking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to Italy. I did not envyhim his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him informless resurrection. It was not that they were all broken or defaced. On the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far moreheartbreaking than any decay. In well-managed storage warehouses thethings are handled with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into theappointed rooms that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm infifteen or fifty years. The places are wonderfully well kept, and if youwill visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture hasall been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, youshall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense ofsecure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of yourfamily vault. 

That is what it comes to. One may feign that these storage warehousesare cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whoseshelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners'lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one'sdead self that one revisits them. If one takes the fragments out to fitthem to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable andincapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which theyare steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock itupon them forever. One feels then that the old way was far better, andthat if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, aschance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough topay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal tothe cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the bestrecourse. Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attemptedthe reconstruction of their homes with these

 "Portions and parcels of the dreadful past"

have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve theirbelongings in an indiscriminate ruin. 

II. 

In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enterprise. It is not only sorrowful but itis futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the oldhappiness in taking them out and using them again. It is not that theywill not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the otherplaces where they served their purpose in other years will be only thekeener for the perfection with which they do it now. If they cannot besold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then theyhad better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again. 

That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sortof storage they are put into. The inexperienced in such matters may besurprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that thefire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal therent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which afamily's living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can besheltered. Yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sizedrooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfactionin seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, andseemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away. To besure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides orbacks, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or diningtables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions, pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses pad thewalls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture thatwould otherwise rend each other. Carpets sewn in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a wholebrood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and supportingon its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling ofthe cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from theircompanioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all thewhat-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion. 

There is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects;against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front ofand on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may befirst wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency ofthe homeless life of the owners, pending removal. The lightest andslightest articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in akind of fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind. The effect is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the RomanCapuchins design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt oftheir church, but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it, and feel an artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance. 

It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futiledream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past onthe old terms. It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, andwhen an end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as asuspense of function. When the poor break up their homes, with noimmediate hope of founding others, they must sell their belongingsbecause they cannot afford to pay storage on them. The rich or richerstore their household effects, and cheat themselves with the illusionthat they are going some time to rehabilitate with them just such a homeas they have dismantled. But the illusion probably deceives nobody solittle as those who cherish the vain hope. As long as they cherish it, however--and they must cherish it till their furniture or themselves fallto dust--they cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have keptnothing of the sort to link them to the past. This is one of thedisabilities of the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of ittill some means of storing the owner as well as the' furniture isinvented. In the immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps notimpossible. Why not, while we are still in life, some sweet obliviousantidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapsefor the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossessus of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall againarray it? Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmyfabric of a romance, and I handsomely make a present of it to the firstcomer. If the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to makethe reader feel that with the universal longing to return to formerconditions or circumstances it must always be a mistake to do so, and hewill subtly insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the storedpersonality in resuming its old relations. With that just mixture of thecomic and pathetic which we desire in romance, he will teach convincinglythat a stored personality is to be desired only if it is permanentlystored, with the implication of a like finality in the storage of itsbelongings. 

Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot beestablished in its former function without a sense of its comparativeinadequacy. It stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yeta new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be moreappropriate, if I may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time isnew, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives aremainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old thingswhich render them precious, but do not the associations rather renderthem painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer itis of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives!Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened tothe reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse ofyears? Such a meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tenderjoy, a rapture that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainlyin womanly tears. But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not ita cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide?The old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the other at that endof the earth from which he came? Have they any use for each other suchas people of unbroken associations have?

I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are boundtogether more closely than most men in a community of interests, occupations, and ideals. During a long separation they had kept accountof each other's opinions as well as experiences; they had exchangedletters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully toeach other, and found themselves constantly in accord. When they metthey made a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the otherjust what he used to be. They talked a long, long time, fighting theinvisible enemy which they felt between them. The enemy was habit, thehabit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and thingswhich in their separation they had not had in common. When the oldfriends parted they promised to meet every day, and now, since theirlines had been cast in the same places again, to repair the ravage of theenvious years, and become again to each other all that they had everbeen. But though they live in the same town, and often dine at the sametable, and belong to the same club, yet they have not grown togetheragain. They have grown more and more apart, and are uneasy in eachother's presence, tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect whichneither of them could avert or repair. They had been respectively instorage, and each, in taking the other out, has experienced in him theunfitness which grows upon the things put away for a time and reinstatedin a former function. 

III. 

I have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose offinding some way out of the coil. There seems none better than thecounsel of keeping one's face set well forward, and one's eyes fixedsteadfastly upon the future. This is the hint we will get from nature ifwe will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takesout of storage. Fancy rehabilitating one's first love: how nature wouldmock at that! We cannot go back and be the men and women we were, anymore than we can go back and be children. As we grow older, each year'schange in us is more chasmal and complete. There is no elixir whosemagic will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps weshall return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, tocome. Some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but onlyon condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, andhoard its mummified image in our hearts. We must not seek to storeourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof ofothers, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from oneplace to another. It is a curious and significant property of ouroutworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serveadmirably in the life of some other, and that this other can profitablymake them his when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope toresume them. They not only go down to successive generations, but theyspread beyond our lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we neverknew to be within the circle of our influence. 

Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes areclothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been storedwould have left the inferiors rude and barbarous. We have only to thinkhow socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautifulmanners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion whenit dropped them. 

All earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and notpreserved against decay by any unnatural artifice. Even when broken anddisabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which mustcommend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive graceof ruin. An old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay inthe woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, withall its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a brokenhome. Spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that isitself falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they aredragged from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft offresh tow, and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as theywere a few years ago. A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a batteredkettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery andcopper-ware stored in the possibility of future need. However carefullyhanded down from one generation to another, the old objects have aforlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to thecompassion rather than the veneration of the witness. 

It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne declared against anysort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generationshould newly house itself. He preferred the perishability of the woodenAmerican house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which inEurope affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of siresand sons and grandsons that had died out of them. But even of suchstructures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with thepassage of time. Where once a great city of them stood, you shall find afew tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than "the cellarand the well" which Holmes marked as the ultimate monuments, the lastwitnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations. It isthe law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and ifby reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishableshall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannotbe felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men'shappiness or cheerfulness. Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites thegayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfareshas the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, andthe ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world. As far ashis comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities hadnot been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all theircontemporaries. 

IV

No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam:if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period, and are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned againstputting them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type. Better, far better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to acontinuous use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will takethem, then hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames. By that means you shall bear witness against a custom that insults theorder of nature, and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes, where there is scarcely space for the living homes. Do not vainly fancythat you shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to theends that it served before it was put in. You will not be the same, orhave the same needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new placewhich you shall hope to equip with it will receive it with coldreluctance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions thatrender it ridiculous or impossible. The law is that nothing taken out ofstorage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed inthose rude 'graffiti' apparently inscribed by accident in the process ofremoval, has only such exceptions as prove the rule. 

The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes allthe difference. Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moodsand fashions change. The ideals remain, and these alone you can go backto, secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they wereyesterday. This perhaps is because they have never been in storage, butin constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away andtaken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but onlymoods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find inthem that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the oldmoods and fashions reappear. 

"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O"

There was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of amid-March day at Pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundrychimneys gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fellwith the constant rain which it dyed its own black. But early memoriesstirred joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness I wasmaking my tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lyingbeside the wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing itsbest to represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there inthe old days. It had the help of three others in its generous effort, andthe levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels andagricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-wornstones, in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud. The boats and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made uponthem by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who weresetting out on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, andfor whom much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitatedthe past. 

I. 

When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save itfrom the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of thesteamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them. From the clerk's office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the saloonstretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernoussplendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, andfenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass. Midway betweenthe great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stoveat the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which thetradition of Western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundredyears, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactlyduplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could havebelieved themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with theevents in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience. Whenthey sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort ofbelated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sootyfaces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those ofother days that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecidefeasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with theappetites of the year 1850. 

II. 

A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the tableof the good steamboat 'Avonek' left something to be desired, if tested bymore sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was ofan inapproachable preeminence. This bread was made of the white cornwhich North knows not, nor the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes atbreakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in theabundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice. The only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in aland flowing with ham and bacon was that the 'Avonek' had not imaginedproviding either for the guests, no one of whom could have had areligious scruple against them. 

The thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in thepassengers, was their perfectly American race and character. At thestart, when with an acceptable observance of Western steamboat traditionthe 'Avonek' left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, therewere very few passengers; but they began to come aboard at the littletowns of both shores as she swam southward and westward, till all thetables were so full that, in observance of another Western steamboattradition; one did well to stand guard over his chair lest some other wholiked it should seize it earlier. The passengers were of every age andcondition, except perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none theworse for being more like Americans of the middle of the last centurythan of the beginning of this. Their fashions were of an approximationto those of the present, but did not scrupulously study detail; theirmanners were those of simpler if not sincerer days. 

The women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from thestudy of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhereelse about, and open to observation. They were not so open toconversation, for your mid-Westerner is not a facile, though not anunwilling, talker. They sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the ovalpattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silentlyruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at theirfeet. They would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenestintelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to havenone of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by Dickens andother averse aliens. They had mostly faces of resolute power, and such alooking of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promisedwell for any collectively or individually opposing them. If ever thesense of human equality has expressed itself in the human countenance itspeaks unmistakably from American faces like theirs. 

They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few strikingexceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where theywere notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty. They were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face, absolute Greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, andslender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting downand leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly andgently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young comelinesshe was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewingand a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm. 

He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-Western human-beingsabout him. One heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort ofcities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk; and itmay have been not far enough West for the true Western humor. At anyrate, when they were not silent these men still were serious. 

The women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associatedwith the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, inthe spectator's eye. The average of them was certainly not above theAmerican woman's average in good looks, though one young mother of sixchildren, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type somemasters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows. Shehad the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes fitlywith such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many ofthe misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman whenshe is New. As she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his motherseeming. 

All these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along thestream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, ifquiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco andspat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior. Theuse of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuouslyrather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise, however they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steakdeserved no gentler usage, indeed. They were usually young, and theywere constantly changing, bent upon short journeys between the shorevillages; they were mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were saidto be going to find work at the great potteries up the river for wagesfabulous to home-keeping experience. 

One personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists wasa Kentucky mountaineer who, after three years' exile in a West Virginiaoil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all hisbrood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had neverceased to pine. His eagerness to get back was more than touching; it wasawing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that couldown no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region. He hadprospered at high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife andchildren had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the familyexpenses from it, but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that hemight return to a land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they came out and made you come in and eat. "When you eat where I'vebeen living you pay fifty cents, " he explained. "And are you taking allyour household stuff with you?" "Only the cook-stove. Well, I'll tellyou: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and theywere not worth-moving. " Here was the backwoods surviving into the day ofTrusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from the oldideals!

III. 

The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficientlyexpressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks ofoil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and themyriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment intothe quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like balefulsuns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltlessmeans of millionairing? There must be iron and coal as well as wheat andcorn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread. Ifthe combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giantclutch upon all those warring industries beside the Ohio and swept theminto one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse thancompetition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings ofthe universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealthshave always had the vision. 

The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all theland to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in itsstrenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. That was ratherof farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of thestream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough coulddrive. In the spring and in the Mall, when it is suddenly swollen by theearlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims overthose levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leavesthe cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since theforests were first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields havenever had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptiedinto their laps. They feel themselves so rich that they part with greatlengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good forthe river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whoseease learns slowly, are beginning more and more to fence their borderswith the young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash such agreat part of the way up and down the Ohio. Elms and maples wade inamong the willows, and in time the river will be denied the indigestionwhich it confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a difficultyof channel at all stages. 

Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to thestream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly thatthey are never out of sight. Most commonly they are of brick, butsometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences highenough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river thatthey cannot fail of its passing life. Usually a group of plantedevergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will notlose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the palingfence to watch the 'Avonek' float by: motionless men and women, who leanupon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their skirtsand hands. There is not the eager New England neatness about thesehomes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discordwith their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenlyin a ruinous neglect. Except where a log cabin has hardily survived thepioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facadesfront the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-storyforms the attic of the two stories below. Gardens of pot-herbs flankthem, and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stablesstretch into the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantilywooded, but ever lovely in the lines that change with the steamer'scourse. 

Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambitionbeyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is nosuch thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility ofname, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the landis not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keepit to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause towaste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The onlydistinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industryabove the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it ishoped is not dishonest. But, honest or dishonest, it is there apparentlyto stay in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeaton Occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far Cathay. 

They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists foundabsolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past everyother feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladlynaturalized to their memories of it. The houses had in common the formof a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter orlonger, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section ofstovepipe softly smoking from its roof. The windows might be curtainedor they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinctionamong the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among thewillows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake onshore. There were cases in which they had not followed the fall of theriver promptly enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to amore habitable level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house hadgone down with the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. Butthey all gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul ofthe beholder envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lordof the house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleansesome household utensil at its stern. Infrequently a group of the house-boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event theyexhibited a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuouscharacterized their attitude on any other occasion. The accepted theoryof them was that they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do andlive, and that by night their forays on the bordering farms supplied thesimple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but onlyto emulate Solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion. Thejoyful witness of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them anyamount of the facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them andleft them slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax-gatherer. Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the trueinterpretation of the sage's philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet'saspiration. 

 "Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things. "

How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from thefishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night? Did they read the newhistorical fictions aloud to one another? Did some of them even meditatethe thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude? Perhaps the ladies ofthe house-boats, when they found themselves--as they often did--incompanies of four or five, had each other in to "evenings, " at which oneof them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic. 

IV. 

The trader's boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition, sometimesshouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it, too, wasa peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand withcommerce. When the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of aneighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river's tide towhere it meets the ocean's tide in the farthermost Mississippi, and thereeither sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his home to somereturning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses, back to theupper Ohio. But his home is not so interesting as that of thehouseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor oflogs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current. Asthe pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which isadapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wideberth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole. By daythe raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with itsconvoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which havebroken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands orstamps. Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelvingbeaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames ofcorn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets havebrought down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows aretufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in oneplace a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water-maple, where it would form building material for countless generations ofbirds. The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckagewhich the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, andeverywhere were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well asenrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in itsmoments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from itsencroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, ifplanted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and keptthe torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwisecrumbling helplessly into it. 

The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders' boats, butthe most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of coal-bargeswhich, going or coming, the 'Avonek' met every few miles. Whether goingor coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer whichgathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-currentwith them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore whenthey were empty. They claimed the river where they passed, and the'Avonek' bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneysof their steamer towering above them and her gay contours graduallymaking themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with thewheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts orthe swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it. 

V. 

So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliestscenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. Theyperused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selectingshelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offeredthemselves to their choice up and down the shores. The weather commonlyfavored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower riverwhen the weather was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulledtheir nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that lookedthrough veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames andfound itself again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water-elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and thedrifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these alsospread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with theirvoices. There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in thoseopulent fields. 

When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited oruninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot ofthe two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream thelore of the river on which all their days had been passed. They knewfrom indelible association every ever-changing line of the constanthills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns;every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every budand bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared fornothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally farfrom them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but thatof abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishlydebating. Were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and ifthe State unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof ofthose railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which wouldhave made a solitude of the river if they could?

But they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightfulin this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffichad strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. Perhapsit was not; perhaps the fondness of those Ohio-river-born passengers wasabused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of avivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. But again, perhaps not. They were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs ofboth in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescriptsteam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, andclimbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotesthills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal. 

VI. 

The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men. She would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with histelescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or togather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wishedto ship. She lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchangingone cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which wecall commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws. Butwherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot's marvellous skill;for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place, couldbe twice the same. At each return the varying stream and shore must bestudied, and every caprice of either divined. It was always a triumph, a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under thepilot's inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and without ajar slipped from them again and went on her course. 

But the landings by night were of course the finest. Then the wide fanof the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and theheavy staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing thewillow hedges in it's fall, and scarcely touching the land before ablack, ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a linefast to the trunk of the nearest tree. Then the work of lading orunlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set intoradiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of thedeck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mockedor cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled backto the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to hisbroken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among theheaps of freight. 

No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! whyshould their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be allso gay and glad? But ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hardworld, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, whostill endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden oftheir brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of theirmother earth?

MY LITERARY PASSIONS

By William Dean Howells

1895

 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL. 

 I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME II. GOLDSMITH III. CERVANTES IV. IRVING V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT" VII. SCOTT VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES IX. POPE X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES XI. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN XII. OSSIAN XIII. SHAKESPEARE XIV. IK MARVEL XV. DICKENS XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER XVII. MACAULAY. XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS. XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE XX. THACKERAY XXI. "LAZARILLO DE TORMES" XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL XXIII. TENNYSON XXIV. HEINE XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW. XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE XXVII. CHARLES READE XXVIII. DANTE. XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO XXX. "PASTOR FIDO, " "AMINTA, " "ROMOLA, " "YEAST, " "PAUL FERROLL" XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY XXXV. TOLSTOY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The papers collected here under the name of 'My Literary Passions' wereprinted serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they mightwell have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that couldbe reasonably hoped for them. Nevertheless, they were reissued in avolume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had apleasing share of such favor as their author's books have enjoyed. Butit is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as heliked writing them--say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a NewYork flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles anda half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever hechose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscencesperhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader'sfollowing. The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popularpublication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration asthey might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editorand author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun. 

The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that littleremains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historicaldetail here given. Their short and simple annals could be eked out byconfidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of theliterary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to theimagination of such posterity as they may reach. They are ratherhelplessly frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helplessfrankness, offensively frank. They are at least not part of the polemicwhich their author sustained in the essays following them in this volume, and which might have been called, in conformity with 'My LiteraryPassions', by the title of 'My Literary Opinions' better than by thevague name which they actually wear. 

They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism and the art ofFiction, and so far their present name is not a misnomer. It followsthem from an earlier date and could not easily be changed, and it mayserve to recall to an elder generation than this the time when theirauthor was breaking so many lances in the great, forgotten war betweenRealism and Romanticism that the floor of the "Editor's Study" inHarper's Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters. The "Editor'sStudy" is now quite another place, but he who originally imagined it in1886, and abode in it until 1892, made it at once the scene of suchconstant offence that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence. The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the prime mover in theattack upon the masters of the Romanticistic school; but he lived to ownthat he had fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that he wasright. The Realists, who were undoubtedly the masters of fiction intheir passing generation, and who prevailed not only in France, but inRussia, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in allAnglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of Romanticism, who tothis day possess the land; though still, whenever a young novelist doeswork instantly recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is seenand felt to have wrought in the spirit of Realism. Not even yet, however, does the average critic recognize this, and such lesson as the"Editor's Study" assumed to teach remains here in all its essentials forhis improvement. 

Month after month for the six years in which the "Editor's Study"continued in the keeping of its first occupant, its lesson was more orless stormily delivered, to the exclusion, for the greater part, of otherprophecy, but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous manneralong with the fulminant matter in this volume. When the author came torevise the material, he found sins against taste which his zeal forrighteousness could not suffice to atone for. He did not hesitate toomit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a precept, but an example in criticism. He hopes that in other and slighter thingshe has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact thebook is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from which ithas here been a second time evolved. 

The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product ofthose unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of'My Literary Passions. ' They could not have been written in quite somany places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on theshores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo, in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions toBoston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of New England, until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and hevoluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and enemiesalike. 

The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not asstill appears to him with greater reason. At moments his deliverancesseemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, sofar as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas;and some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as itis his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacksupon their theories of criticism and fiction. His opinions were alwaysimpersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has beenslightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that itwas the belief of one English critic that their author had "placedhimself beyond the pale of decency" by them. It ought to be lesssurprising that, since these dreadful words were written of him, morethan one magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the authorthe feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazardedconvictions. The penitence of his countrymen is still waitingexpression, but it may come to that when they have recurred to theevidences of his offence in their present shape. 

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909. 

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME

To give an account of one's reading is in some sort to give an account ofone's life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me inthese papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of theauthors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught methis or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that Icould not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable oflearning. I do not know whether I have been what people call a greatreader; I cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I havealways been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and morediscreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from thevantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be foundwriting here rather than from the facts of the case. 

But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always keptthe lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right touse authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shalltry not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here ofall my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of thosebooks, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for. Ihave known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly ofthe loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the morefrankly because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than thatof any other person. 

I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literaturein a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes. From aletter of my great-grandmother's written to a stubborn daughter upon someunfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that shewas fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilfulchild that she has "planted a dagger in her mother's heart, " and I shouldnot be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that mygrandfather derived his taste for poetry rather than from his father, whowas of a worldly wiser mind. To be sure, he became a Friend byConvincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he wasaltogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded theindustry of making flannels in the little Welsh town where he lived, andhe seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us havesince grown for ours. My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly ingetting away from the world and its wickedness. He came to this countryearly in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin inthe Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences ofthe village where he was managing some woollen-mills. But he kept hisaffection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, andhe must have suffered his children to read them, pending that greatquestion of their souls' salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him. 

My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in the direction ofliterature, that he was not content in any of his several economicalexperiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then thesole means of satisfying a literary passion. His paper, at the date whenI began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but withoutthe least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much bettercondition. I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancementwhich most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of hisfinest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was notexempt from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed byneed but he could give himself at will not only to the things of thespirit, but the things of the mind too. After a season of scepticism hehad become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his ownfashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend whohad married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist. Myfather, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetingswhere my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, andhad at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings ofEmanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with acontent that has lasted him all the days of his many years. Ever since Ican remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library;he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a"Memorable Relation" from them to us children. But he did not force themupon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was verywell. I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so. But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and whenI began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice. 

His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was notgiven to theology, was given to poetry. I call it the library now, butthen we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was, because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection ofbooks, it was a larger private collection than any other in the townwhere we lived. Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in acase of very few shelves. It was not considerably enlarged during mychildhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulgedhimself in buying them even more rarely. My grandfather's book store(it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock ofliterature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers' agentcame to replenish it, he gave my father several volumes for review. Oneof these was a copy of Thomson's Seasons, a finely illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them themost beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of thebook aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter ofthat he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything butgood, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got noharm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, andhe used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressibleweariness. I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feelthe charm of the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos. Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read "Lalla Rookh" to my motherI sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story ofthe "Fire Worshippers. " I drew the line at the "Veiled Prophet ofKhorassan, " though I had some sense of the humor of the poet's conceptionof the critic in "Fadladeen. " But I liked Scott's poems far better, andgot from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy. I followedthe "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and when I first began to contriveverses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre. 

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which Iused to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, werePope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy inPhiladelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehowseemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said tome in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of suchpictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try. At any rate, I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume ofShakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me inlike manner with its wood-cuts. I cannot say just why I conceived thatthere was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps thiswas a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man fromwhom my father had it. If he were not profligate I ask his pardon. Ihave not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had ofhim, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. There may never have beensuch a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pureinvention of my own, like many things with children, who do not verydistinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in theworld where both project the same quality of shadow. 

There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which myconsciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember. Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe's 'Tales ofthe Grotesque and the Arabesque' (I long afflicted myself as to whatthose words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) andBulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding. Historyis known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of theUnited States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and bya 'Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada', by the ever dear and preciousFray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and thesame as Washington Irving. 

In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and Icannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not reallyvery much in school, and so I got small harm from it. The printing-office was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughlybelieved in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustratedas soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We couldgo to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must dosomething, for our souls' sake, though he was willing enough we shouldplay, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy thepleasures that manhood can share with childhood. I suppose that as theworld goes now we were poor. His income was never above twelve hundred ayear, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; welived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not knowthat we were poor. As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamedof (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) inthe little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happyboyhood was passed. 

II. GOLDSMITH

When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certainbooks above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith, Cervantes, and Irving. In the sharply foreshortened perspective of thepast I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order oftime in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first. He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read him, butit must have been before I was ten years old. I read other books aboutthat time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which Iperused with such a passion for those pagan gods and goddesses that, ifit had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana, I do not really knowwhether I should have been able to refuse. I adored indiscriminately allthe tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and heroes, as well as the highones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopledand ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers at night, and fellasleep in sorrow for my sins. I do not know in the least how Goldsmith'sGreece came into my hands, though I fancy it must have been procured forme because of a taste which I showed for that kind of reading, and I canimagine no greater luck for a small boy in a small town of SouthwesternOhio well-nigh fifty years ago. I have the books yet; two little, stoutvolumes in fine print, with the marks of wear on them, but without thosedishonorable blots, or those other injuries which boys inflict upon booksin resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wantonness. I was alwayssensitive to the maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a bookfaced down or dogs-eared or broken-backed. It was like a hurt or aninsult to a thing that could feel. 

Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much later, but quite asimmemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek Republics, which I dare say was not mistaken. Of course I liked Athens best, andyet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans in battle, which won a heart formed for hero-worship. I mastered the notion oftheir communism, and approved of their iron money, with the poverty itobliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the Helots failedto shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I had toforgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs. Therewas hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in those daysto the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as despatched adespot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I could onlygrieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things. 

I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made themall live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist usingfor my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to seethe loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my ownpoor account. I tried to make verses like those I listened to when myfather read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no suchhappiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then ofattempting to write like Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work asignorantly as I did my other blessings. I was concerned in getting atthe Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and bywhat lovely ways I was led to them. Some retrospective perception ofthis came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all ofhis poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but forthe present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in theworld of art. What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got atthem was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse, and in dramatic verse at that. The Romans were less civilized than theGreeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy's purpose. I didnot make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of theRomans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the"Lady of the Lake. " I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I amnot sure that I ever made it known to them. Still, they were notignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certainboy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outrankedme in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the name of the Romanemperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, thathe had lost a day. The boy was going to use the story, in a composition, as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor's name; Icould not tell him now without turning to the book. 

My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it torank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I havesince found that literature gives one no more certain station in theworld of men's activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk tryto believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period oflife, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, andwant to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted. I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome, or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have norecollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing theallegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems tohave been in my hands about the same time or a little later. I had adelight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannotaccount for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusionit made of my ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at all theancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's histories. 

I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have beenodd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginningto be troubled with work. As I have said, I was to and fro between theschoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I tired of the oneI must have been very promptly given my choice of the other. Thereading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no doubt my lovefor it won me a chance for it. There were some famous cherry-trees inour yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to have been in flower orfruit the year round; and in one of them there was a level branch where aboy could sit with a book till his dangling legs went to sleep, or tillsome idler or busier boy came to the gate and called him down to playmarbles or go swimming. When this happened the ancient world was rolledup like a scroll, and put away until the next day, with all its oratorsand conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; thoughsometimes they escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams. 

I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the 'ArabianNights' or 'Robinson Crusoe, ' but when it came to the 'IngeniousGentleman of La Mancha, ' I was not only first, I was sole. 

Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had myboyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt tothat not unequal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long after Ihad read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilersas they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came toknow his poetry. My father must have read the "Deserted Village" to us, and told us something of the author's pathetic life, for I cannotremember when I first knew of "sweet Auburn, " or had the light of thepoet's own troubled day upon the "loveliest village of the plain. "The 'Vicar of Wakefield' must have come into my life after that poem andbefore 'The Traveler'. It was when I would have said that I knew allGoldsmith; we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this waywithout having any tangible assets; and my reading has always been verydesultory. I should like to say here that the reading of any one whoreads to much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I hadbetter not say so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that Inever read any one author quite through without wandering from him toothers. When I first read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' (for I have sinceread it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found itspersons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard itread. It is still for me one of the most modern novels: that is to say, one of the best. It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and thenunmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be foreverimperishable. Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it isthese in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth thewhile of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take alittle thought of them. They are the source of all refinement, and I donot believe that the best art in any kind exists without them. The styleis the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that weshall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speechbetrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtlyyet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart. As toGoldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, ofworldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do notthink that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, hisspiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in theliterary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in hiswork. 

I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to closecriticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author Iloved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader. I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I wasfourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the'Citizen of the World' and other unsuccessful ventures of his. Itcontained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to writesketches and studies of life in their manner. But this attempt atGoldsmith's manner followed a long time after I tried to write in thestyle of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his 'Tales of the Grotesqueerred Arabesque. ' I suppose the very poorest of these was the "Devil inthe Belfry, " but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could inthe "Devil in the Smoke-Pipes"; I meant tobacco-pipes. The resemblancewas noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it orwould not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be foundto have produced an imitation. 

It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I hadimitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself. I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him. I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I shouldnot say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as likemyself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of someothers. I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn somethingfrom the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the youngwriter this seems impossible. He must form himself from time to timeupon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done thishe must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too. The loveralways desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adorationwhich a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing thelove of women. I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was oneof my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of hismastery than I had of Goldsmith's. 

III. CERVANTES

I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of 'DonQuixote, ' while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly withanybody's authorship. I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion ofliterature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually comeout rightly rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close of asummer's day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlesslylate, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about herwork, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brotherand me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of abook that he had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but thestory, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever ourfingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land ofadventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight trulywithout fear and without reproach burned itself out. I dare say that myfather tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book. I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant toridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do atonce was to get that book and plunge into its story. He told us atrandom of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of thenight in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of theinn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of theisland that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at theduke's and duchess's, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of thecapture of Mambrino's helmet, and of Sancho's invention of the enchantedDulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in themost wonderful and delightful book in the world. I do not know when orwhere my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time thatpassed between my hearing of it and my having it. The event must havebeen most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment whenthe precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of thatthere is nothing more capricious than a child's memory, what it will holdand what it will lose. 

It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not muchbigger each than my Goldsmith's 'Greece', bound in a sort of law-calf, well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo. Thetranslation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which, whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth-century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of theoriginal. If it had any literary influence with me the influence musthave been good. But I cannot make out that I was sensible of theliterature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed. I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of thatimmense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the naturalsequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough forthe events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streamsand hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons andpalaces, which were the setting of that matchless history. I took it assimply as I took everything else in the world about me. It was full ofmeaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kindthat literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon myinnocence. I did not know whether it was well written or not; I neverthought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, itsinexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams ofavarice. 

My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as abouthis 'Don Quixote', for I seem to have known from the beginning that hewas once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and Iloved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still livingand he could somehow return my love. His name and nature endeared theSpanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, andto this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in somethingof the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child. While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school, one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system ofeducation; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died toplease for Cervantes' and Don Quixote's sake, because I knew he spoketheir tongue. But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance todistinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before theblessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassionedreveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty, and because I would have been Spanish if I could. 

I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fonddreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there;in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heardof Don Quixote. But I believe that I carried the book about with me mostof the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it. Even inthe blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to mystore, I must still have been reading it. This was after we had removedfrom the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and Ihad barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of myuncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in theplace, forty miles away, where he practised medicine. We made the longjourney, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of thosedays, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home, and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left. I do not knowhow it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopelessblackness around me, I should have got my 'Don Quixote' out of my bag;I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for mynew career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion ofbeguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown mysorrows in it. But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweetyoung aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stoodtogether on the lawn in the summer evening light. My aunt held my DonQuixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child shecarried on her arm. She looked at the book, and then from time to timeshe looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, sothat as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had thesense that in her eyes I was a queer boy. She returned the book withoutcomment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where theconfidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep. 

In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I wasgoing home. Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down tothe stage-office with me and took my passage back. 

The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage-office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead. But my uncle ledme to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made metaste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehowgot home together alive. 

The reading of 'Don Quixote' went on throughout my boyhood, so that Icannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less, reading that book. In a boy's way I knew it well when I was ten, and afew years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable newversion of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my ownirrevocable past that I did not find it very gay. But I made a greatmany discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and mustalways have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a neweffect upon me. I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given itmy whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness ofthe book it seemed to me greater than ever. I believe that its free andsimple design, where event follows event without the fettering control ofintrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions, is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if weever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such largeand noble lines. As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in hisdignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotionto them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in mylatest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first, and had felt the sublimity of his nature. I did not want to laugh at himso much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things doneto him. Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, sothat it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as bothflowing from the same mind. But in my mature experience, which threw abroader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an authorwho had been almost personally, dear to me. 

IV. IRVING

I have told how Cervantes made his race precious to me, and I am surethat it must have been he who fitted me to understand and enjoy theAmerican author who now stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy inSpanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in time and circumstancebetween Irving and Cervantes. The most I can make sure of is that I readthe 'Conquest of Granada' after I read Don Quixote, and that I loved thehistorian so much because I had loved the novelist much more. Of courseI did not perceive then that Irving's charm came largely from Cervantesand the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, and that he had formedhimself upon them almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say thatthis fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. Afterwards Icame to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own inIrving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and hisoriginal, if somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was nocritical question with me. I gave my heart simply and passionately tothe author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in mysympathy, and companioned me with the stately and gracious actors inthem. 

I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more. I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, andyet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the pooryoung King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time afollower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved theLast Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, itwas as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast. I put boththese princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote. I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to aconclusion it does not greatly matter. I had never yet read anhistorical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt musthave been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving's history. I amcertain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at allvarying them. 

In reading his 'Chronicle' I suffered for a time from its attribution toFray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it, just as in reading 'Don Quixote' I suffered from Cervantes masqueradingas the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. My father explained theliterary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and Imade a practice of skipping those passages where either author insistedupon his invention. I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thingseems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and frankermethods of modern fiction will forbid its revival. Thackeray was fond ofsuch open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask ofYellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was inhis least modern moments. 

My 'Conquest of Granada' was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards, and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges. I do not know when the books happened in my hands. I have no remembrancethat they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort ofway they were as authentically mine as if I had made them. I saw them athome, not many months ago, in my father's library (it has long outgrownthe old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole Irather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, thoughI could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding theghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf, somewhere between the familiar pages. 

When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, ofwriting the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-oddyears to do it in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, whenI knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of thebook. My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himselfwritten a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let meplunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, andall the rest, when as yet I could not confidently call them by name, withthe serene belief that if I did not swim I would still somehow get ashorewithout sinking. The end, perhaps, justified him, and I suppose I didnot do all that work without getting some strength from it; but I wish Ihad back the time that it cost me; I should like to waste it in someother way. However, time seemed interminable then, and I thought therewould be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish literature; or, at least, I did not propose to do anything less. 

I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and withother authors at the same time. I did my poor best to be amused by his'Knickerbocker History of New York', because my father liked it so much, but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefullythrough it again. I could not laugh. Even as a boy I found some otherthings of his uphill work. There was the beautiful manner, but thethought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by'Bracebridge Hall', though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense thatit would be very 'comme il faut' to like it. But I did like the 'Life ofGoldsmith'; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative'Life by Forster', and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense ofGoldsmith in it. Better than all, except the 'Conquest of Granada', I liked the 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and the story of Rip Van Winkle, with their humorous and affectionate caricatures of life that was once ofour own soil and air; and the 'Tales of the Alhambra', which transportedme again, to the scenes of my youth beside the Xenil. It was long aftermy acquaintance with his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as anartist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of it only now, whenI perceive that he worked willingly only when he worked inventively. At last I can do justice to the exquisite conception of his 'Conquest ofGranada', a study of history which, in unique measure, conveys not onlythe pathos, but the humor of one of the most splendid and impressivesituations in the experience of the race. Very possibly something of theseverer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect of the pleasingand touching tale, but I do not under stand that this was really done. Upon the whole I am very well content with my first three loves inliterature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do not see how Icould choose better than Goldsmith and Cervantes and Irving, kindredspirits, and each not a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whosekindness could not fail to profit him. 

V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA

In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certainBoeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward inthe paths I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of theover-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should beashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact. My father hadsold his paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another atDayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it. My dailytasks began so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if Ihad the spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what was really release, came to us that I got back again to mybooks. Then we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress oftoil, with the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like thehorror of an evil dream. The only new book which I remember to have readin those two or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to haveread any old ones, was the novel of 'Jane Eyre, ' which I took in veryimperfectly, and which I associate with the first rumor of the RochesterKnockings, then just beginning to reverberate through a world that theyhave not since left wholly at peace. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoonwhen the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the storywas an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nailsand come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures hadbeen doing in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spiritswere beginning to make themselves felt. The thing did not really happenin my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily havehappened. 

If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand myacquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself. There was a haplesscompany of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us fortheir printing. I believe they never paid for it, or at least neverwholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I canmake out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, everynight. They gave two or three plays at every performance to housesungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper thatwould not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the billeach day. In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I readhim, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, andI saw "Macbeth" and "Hamlet, " and above all "Richard III. , " again andagain. I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send meto the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase athome, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them Iam not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than "Rollo, " "The Wife, " "The Stranger, " "Barbarossa, " "The Miser ofMarseilles, " and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which Isaw at that time. I have a notion that there were some clever people inone of these companies, and that the lighter pieces at least were wellplayed, but I may be altogether wrong. The gentleman who took the partof villain, with an unfailing love of evil, in the different dramas, usedto come about the printing-office a good deal, and I was puzzled to findhim a very mild and gentle person. To be sure he had a mustache, whichin those days devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blondmustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark and deadly thingit was behind the footlights at night. I could scarcely gasp in hispresence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid avisit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills. Thecompany he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them. 

Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming. Wehad to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when theworst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before. There was nomore waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking atdawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier forthe doom hanging over us. My father and his brothers had long dreamed ofa sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle whowas most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far fromDayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the otherscould shape their business to follow him. The scheme came to nothingfinally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and itssorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin, while a house was building for us. 

VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"

This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft werestored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase. I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendshipwith them. The light could not have been good, though if I brought mybooks to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning andwhistling gristmill I could see well enough. But perhaps I liked theloft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could bealone. At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow's "SpanishStudent, " which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of thebarrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all thingsSpanish inspired in me. As I read I not only renewed my acquaintancewith literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I hadbeen happy before those heavy years in Dayton. At the same time I felt alittle jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them aswell as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hatedthe poet for trespassing on my ground. But I could not hold out longagainst the witchery of his verse. The "Spanish Student" became one ofmy passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like 'Don Quixote' and the'Conquest of Granada', but still a passion, and I should dread a littleto read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty. The hero's rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards, so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my firstpseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed mylegislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it. I was in lovewith the heroine, the lovely dancer whose 'cachucha' turned my head, along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten, and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if shehad been a real person. 

VII. SCOTT

All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of play which I had notenjoyed in the toil-years at Dayton, and was trying to make my Spanishreading serve in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river. We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we were British andAmericans, or settlers and Indians. I suspect that the large, mild boy, the son of a neighboring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but adim notion of what I meant by my strange people, but I did my best toenlighten him, and he helped me make a dream out of my life, and did hisbest to dwell in the region of unrealities where I preferably had mybeing; he was from time to time a Moor when I think he would rather havebeen a Mingo. 

I got hold of Scott's poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most ofthe tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of myfather's. I could not say why "Harold the Dauntless" most took my fancy;the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do withit, I believe. I liked these things, all of them, and in after years Iliked the "Lady of the Lake" more and more, and from mere love of it gotgreat lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then orever a great passion with me. It was a sobered affection at best, whichcame from my sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly andhumane keeping of his genius. Many years later, during the month when Iwas waiting for my passport as Consul for Venice, and had the time on myhands, I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after another, without the interruption of other reading. 'Ivanhoe' I had known before, and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' and 'Woodstock', but the rest had remainedin that sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people expectto read as a matter of course, and come very near not reading at all, orread only very late. Taking them in this swift sequence, little ornothing of them remained with me, and my experience with them is againstthat sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so often heardadvised for young people by their elders. I always suspect their eldersof not having done that kind of reading themselves. 

For my own part I believe I have never got any good from a book that Idid not read lawlessly and wilfully, out of all leading and following, and merely because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to praisethat way of doing. The book which you read from a sense of duty, orbecause for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this willbe in its own unentreated way and in spite of your good intentions. Little of the book read for a purpose stays with the reader, and this isone reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofitable. I havedone a vast deal of this, but I have usually been aware that the book wassubtly withholding from me the best a book can give, since I was notreading it for its own sake and because I loved it, but for selfish endsof my own, and because I wished to possess myself of it for businesspurposes, as it were. The reading that does one good, and lasting good, is the reading that one does for pleasure, and simply and unselfishly, as children do. Art will still withhold herself from thrift, and shedoes well, for nothing but love has any right to her. 

Little remains of the events of any period, however vivid they were inpassing. The memory may hold record of everything, as it is believed, but it will not be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I findmyself striving in vein to recall the things that I must have read thatyear in the country. Probably I read the old things over; certainly Ikept on with Cervantes, and very likely with Goldsmith. There was adelightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the pioneer times, which was a good deal in the hands of us boys; and there was a book ofWestern Adventure, full of Indian fights and captivities, which we woreto pieces. Still, I think that it was now that I began to have aliterary sense of what I was reading. I wrote a diary, and I tried togive its record form and style, but mostly failed. The versifying whichI was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand. I shouldbe very glad to, know at present what it dealt with. 

VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES

When my uncles changed their minds in regard to colonizing their familiesat the mills, as they did in about a year, it became necessary for myfather to look about for some new employment, and he naturally looked inthe old direction. There were several schemes for getting hold of thispaper and that, and there were offers that came to nothing. In that daythere were few salaried editors in the country outside of New York, andthe only hope we could have was of some place as printers in an officewhich we might finally buy. The affair ended in our going to the Statecapital, where my father found work as a reporter of legislativeproceedings for one of the daily journals, and I was taken into theoffice as a compositor. In this way I came into living contact withliterature again, and the daydreams began once more over the familiarcases of type. A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in thelong reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case, I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity. I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in thosepreposterous deliriums. What I actually did was to write a good manycopies of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and Goldsmith, andsome minor poets, whose work caught my fancy, as I read it in thenewspapers or put it into type. 

One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances asto treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing Iever had in print. My father offered it to the editor of the paper Iworked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he haddone when I saw it in the journal. In the tumult of my emotions Ipromised myself that if I got through this experience safely I wouldnever suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not longbefore I offered the editor a poem myself. I am now glad to think itdealt with so humble a fact as a farmer's family leaving their old homefor the West. The only fame of my poem which reached me was when anotherboy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision. This covered mewith such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth. At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it wasattempted in a way which was not false or wrong. I had tried to sketchan aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very wellindeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poorlittle affair. 

My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where Iworked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that lighttrade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat. I readthem after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passionthat I bestowed upon my favorite authors. I believe I had no criticalreserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy. Still, we had great fun with Japhet in 'Search of a Father', and with'Midshipman Easy', and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darklingmoods of 'Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend. ' I do not remember even the names ofthe other novels, except 'Jacob Faithful, ' which I chanced upon a fewyears ago and found very, hard reading. 

We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields werehomesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate withthis longing the 'Farmer's Boy of Bloomfield, ' which my father got forme. It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mildwoodcuts in it. I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vagueresentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of itsparts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have feltthis. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfieldbetter; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabicswhich I preferred to any other verse. 

IX. POPE

I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun toread Pope, and that I must have read the "Deserted Village" of Goldsmith. I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the"Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took meso much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroicepic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, withthe wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods andgoddesses. It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best tobalance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line, and a neat antithesis at the end. 

The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments ofbeing intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase, and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with asense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing moreliterary, and less human. I fell in love with Pope, whose life I readwith an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited. I was ofhis side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I didnot understand them I was of his side anyway. When I found that he was aCatholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for hissake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to knowthat most of his friends were Protestants. If the truth must be told, I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chieflyattached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating, with a whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks, enamelled meads, rolling years, and the like. 

After my day's work at the case I wore the evening away in my boyishliterary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that unnatural kind, andrubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes takeon an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine. With all my pains I do not think I ever managed to bring any of mypastorals to a satisfactory close. They all stopped somewhere abouthalfway. My swains could not think of anything more to say, and themerits of my shepherdesses remained undecided. To this day I do not knowwhether in any given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of Sylviathat carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare say it does not muchmatter. I am sure that I produced a rhetoric as artificial and treatedof things as unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad that Iacquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood of literature which, whateverwe may say against it, seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood ofcivilization. 

The severe schooling I gave myself was not without its immediate use. I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness, and though I often employed them decoratively and with no vital sense oftheir qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be chosenintelligently, and after some thought about their structure and meaning. I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his methodwas to the last degree intelligent. He certainly knew what he was doing, and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish toknow, and ashamed of not knowing. There are several truer poets whomight not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, heseems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one ofthe great poets. The poor man's life was as weak and crooked as hisfrail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought hisway against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature. I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from timeto time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would haveliked always to respect himself if he could. He violently revolted, now and again, from the abasement to which he forced himself, and healways bit the heel that trod on him, especially if it was a very high, narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it. I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I amnot sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite. I humbly, own a vast debt to him, not the least part of which is the perceptionthat he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned than to be followedin literature. 

He was the first of the writers of great Anna's time whom I knew, and hemade me ready to understand, if he did not make me understand at once, the order of mind and life which he belonged to. Thanks to hispastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisitefor full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities atTasso's "Aminta" and Guarini's "Pastor Fido"; things which you willthoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how peopleonce seriously liked them as high examples of poetry. 

Of course I read other things of Pope's besides his pastorals, even atthe time I read these so much. I read, or not very easily or willinglyread at, his 'Essay on Man, ' which my father admired, and which heprobably put Pope's works into my hands to have me read; and I read the'Dunciad, ' with quite a furious ardor in the tiresome quarrels itcelebrates, and an interest in its machinery, which it fatigues me tothink of. But it was only a few years ago that I read the 'Rape of theLock, ' a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we may choose to think ofthe kind. Upon the whole I think much better of the kind than I oncedid, though still not so much as I should have thought if I had read thepoem when the fever of my love for Pope was at the highest. 

It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt by one'sidealizations of historical or imaginary characters, and I shall not tryto answer it fully. I suppose that if I once cherished such a passionfor Pope personally that I would willingly have done the things that hedid, and told the lies, and vented the malice, and inflicted thecruelties that the poor soul was full of, it was for the reason, partly, that I did not see these things as they were, and that in the glamour ofhis talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his defects, which hecertainly had, and partly that in my love of him I could not take sidesagainst him, even when I knew him to be wrong. After all, I fancy notmuch harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthusiasms for thisimperfect hero or that. In my own case I am sure that I distinguished asto certain sins in my idols. I could not cast them down or cease toworship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secretshame for them. I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believethat they were less evil for them than they would have been for lesspeople. This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good andevil. While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not evenunderstand the wrong. When I realized what lives some of my poets hadled, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue, I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and tothis day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxesitself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he shouldsuffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before anethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the racecompelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthyimages and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that theboy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from thesethrough his ignorance. Still I wish they were not there, and I hope thetime will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in usthat the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that whatis lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editionsas are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which nowperpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer haveits way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that isthe truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped fromliterature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some tothink of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation togeneration, and carefully passed down from age to age as somethingprecious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which theyare. 

During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father readthings aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with therest. I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson's 'Castle ofIndolence' in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient ofhaving things read to me. The trouble was that I caught some thought orimage from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that whilethe reading went on, and I lost the rest. But I think the reading wasless in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting andhis leisure less. My own hours in the printing-office began at seven andended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used forputting down such verses as had come to me during the morning. As soonas supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept ingreat disorder, and written in several different hands on severaldifferent kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at myblessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to riseagain at five. Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off onSaturdays, and though the days were long the work was not alwaysconstant, and was never very severe. I suspect now the office was not soprosperous as might have been wished. I was shifted from place to placein it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over thedistribution of my case. I was very fond of my work, though, and proudof my swiftness and skill in it. Once when the perplexed foreman couldnot think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would nottake it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my artof poetry than in my trade of printing. What went on in the officeinterested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of Englishletters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapelessdiary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of adistinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write. There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wetsponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them backand forth at each other. This amiable fray, carried on during theforeman's absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy whohas come to be a name well-known in literature. I admired his vigor as acombatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamedthat he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely asmyself. Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both becomejournalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for theAtlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship whicheventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse. 'The Poems ofTwo Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the Westwaited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the Eastsaid nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred cameback upon the publisher's hands. I imagine these copies were "ground up"in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the bookquoted the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, and Iinfer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity. It wasa very pretty little book, printed on tinted paper then called "blush, "in the trade, and it was manufactured in the same office where we hadonce been boys together, unknown to each other. Another boy of that timehad by this time become foreman in the office, and he was very severewith us about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin. Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs, and perhaps wemight have taken on airs if the fate of our book had been different. As it was I really think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and afterthirty four or five years for reflection I am still of a very modest mindabout my share of the book, in spite of the price it bears in the book-seller's catalogue. But I have steadily grown in liking for my friend'sshare in it, and I think that there is at present no American of twenty-three writing verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and high, and from an impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt's were then. Healready knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of theregion where we were both native, and in him the Middle West has its truepoet, who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and tenderimagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely andfully his own. I was reading over his poems in that poor little book afew days ago, and wondering with shame and contrition that I had not atonce known their incomparable superiority to mine. But I used then andfor long afterwards to tax him with obscurity, not knowing that my ownwant of simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect. My reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, ofdefiniteness; anything left in the vague was intolerable to me; but mylong subjection to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me sostrictly literary in my point of view that sometimes I could not see whatwas, if more naturally approached and without any technicalpreoccupation, perfectly transparent. It remained for another greatpassion, perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in which Iwas trying so hard to dance, and free me forever from the bonds which Ihad spent so much time and trouble to involve myself in. But I was notto know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the mean time Ikept on as I had been going, and worked out my deliverance in thepredestined way. What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness. I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, andunfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness. 

X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES

My father was very fond of Byron, and I must before this have known thathis poems were in our bookcase. While we were still in Columbus I beganto read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped meto a truer and freer ideal. I read "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, "and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm. These would, perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism formethodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic anddecasyllabic couplets was painful to me. The Spencerian stanza, with itsrich variety of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut "ChildeHarold" from me, and whenever I found a poem in any book which did notrhyme its second line with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all. 

This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay inColumbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned, and my father's employment ceased. He tried to find some editorial workon the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, andit was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it. We hadnothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money wouldavail us. This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in thenortheastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves onemoonlight night of early summer. The Lake Shore Railroad then ended atAshtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up fromthe station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled theomnibus, rode. We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to beanywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even sonear to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again. We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at theMills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially avillage peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it. I mustown that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in SouthernOhio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look backit still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have everknown, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elmsand maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass-bordered, sandy streets between them. The hotel, where we rejoined ourfamily, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the townpump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it. 

The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetlyromantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of itscharm. It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of theplain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village withoutbeing deserted. 

XI. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, wasthen beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has movedit. I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era, and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, as every one else did. YetI cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the otherbooks that I had loved intensely. I felt its greatness when I read itfirst, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and moreclearly that it was a very great novel. With certain obvious lapses inits art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhapsprimitive, the book is still a work of art. I knew this, in a measurethen, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I wasbeginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerfulappeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it. I couldnot say why this was so. Why does the young man's fancy, when it lightlyturns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that? There seems nomore reason for one than for the other. 

Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong interest of whatis still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed my tribute of tears, and wenton my way. I did not try to write a story of slaver, as I might verywell have done; I did not imitate either the make or the manner of Mrs. Stowe's romance; I kept on at my imitation of Pope's pastorals, which Idare say I thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such a poet asI meant to be. I did this, as I must have felt then, at some personalrisk of a supernatural kind, for my studies were apt to be prolonged intothe night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and a certainghost, which I had every reason to fear, might very well have visited thesmall room given me to write in. There was a story, which I shrank fromverifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung himself in it, butI do not know to this day whether it was true or not. The doubt did notprevent him from dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and manya time I shunned the sight of this problematical suicide by keeping myeyes fastened on the book before me. It was a very simple device, butperfectly effective, as I think any one will find who employs it in likecircumstances; and I would really like to commend it to growing boystroubled as I was then. 

I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he took himself out of theworld, if he really did so, or if he ever was in it; but I am sure thatmy passion for Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have beenpowerful indeed to carry me through dangers of that kind. I suspect thatthe strongest proof of their existence was the gloomy and ruinous look ofthe house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and the only onethat was for rent there. We went into it because we must, and we were toleave it as soon as we could find a better. But before this happened weleft Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few possibilities I haveenjoyed of seeing a ghost on his own ground, as it were. 

I was not sorry, for I believe I never went in or came out of the place, by day or by night, without a shudder, more or less secret; and at least, now, we should be able to get another house. 

XII. OSSIAN

Very likely the reading of Ossian had something to do with my morbidanxieties. I had read Byron's imitation of him before that, and admiredit prodigiously, and when my father got me the book--as usual I did notknow where or how he got it--not all the tall forms that moved before theeyes of haunted bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me fromit. There were certain outline illustrations in it, which were very goodin the cold Flaxman manner, and helped largely to heighten thefascination of the poems for me. They did not supplant the pastorals ofPope in my affections, and they were never the grand passion with me thatPope's poems had been. 

I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, and I dare say they werenot windier and mistier than the original. At the same time I read theliterature of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpherson anunquestioning faith. I should have made very short work of any one whohad impugned the authenticity of the poems, but happily there was no onewho held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I knew, or whocared for Ossian, or had even heard of him. This saved me a great dealof heated controversy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in manyangry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, who had dared to say in theirtime that the poems of Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard, handed down from father to son, and taken from the lips of old women inHighland huts, as Macpherson claimed. 

In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of the eighteenth centuryin which these curious frauds found polite acceptance all over Europe, and I think yet that they were really worthier of acceptance than most ofthe artificialities that then passed for poetry. There was a light ofnature in them, and this must have been what pleased me, so long-shut upto the studio-work of Pope. But strangely enough I did not falter in myallegiance to him, or realize that here in this free form was adeliverance, if I liked, from the fetters and manacles which I had beenat so much pains to fit myself with. Probably nothing would then havepersuaded me to put them off permanently, or to do more than lay themaside for the moment while I tried that new stop and that new step. 

I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessnesswas really better than formality. Something, it seems to me, may becontained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everythingspills and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect of ourAmerican Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies. He had great moments, beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations, and a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but he had nobounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the casing air, but he was oftenas vague and intangible. I cannot say how long my passion for Ossianlasted, but not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in thetime following our removal from Ashtabula to the county seat atJefferson. I kept on with Pope, I kept on with Cervantes, I kept on withIrving, but I suppose there was really not substance enough in Ossian tofeed my passion, and it died of inanition. 

XIII. SHAKESPEARE

The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been nonebefore, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events sofilling that they left little room for any other excitement but that ofgetting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going toparties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, anddances, and all the other pleasures in which that community seemed toindulge beyond any other we had known. The village was smaller than theone we had just left, but it was by no means less lively, and I thinkthat for its size and time and place it had an uncommon share of what hassince been called culture. The intellectual experience of the people wasmainly theological and political, as it was everywhere in that day, butthere were several among them who had a real love for books, and whenthey met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to dispute of theinspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens andThackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron. There were lawstudents who read "Noctes Ambrosianae, " the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's"Festus, " as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a publiclibrary in that village of six hundred people, small but very wellselected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free toall. It seems to me now that the people met there oftener than they doin most country places, and rubbed their wits together more, but this maybe one of those pleasing illusions of memory which men in later life aresubject to. 

I insist upon nothing, but certainly the air was friendlier to the tastesI had formed than any I had yet known, and I found a wider if not deepersympathy with them. There was one of our printers who liked books, andwe went through 'Don Quixote' together again, and through the 'Conquestof Granada', and we began to read other things of Irving's. There was avery good little stock of books at the village drugstore, and among thosethat began to come into my hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, strayvolumes of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of Thackeray. I believe I had no money to buy them, but there was an open account, or a comity, between the printer and the bookseller, and I must have beenallowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books. 

Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave myheart to any of them. Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, withoutnotice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too, and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together. Printers inthe old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and Isuppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature ofthings. I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began toread him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition ofours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of"Hamlet, " out of "The Tempest, " out of "Macbeth, " out of "Richard III. , "out of "Midsummer-Night's Dream, " out of the "Comedy of Errors, " out of"Julius Caesar, " out of "Measure for Measure, " out of "Romeo and Juliet, "out of "Two Gentlemen of Verona. "

These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or atleast at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were theHistories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaffappeared. This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy. I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym. I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was apersonal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him: blackguardfor blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard. Perhaps Iflatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, and entered into the author'swonderfully humorous conception of him. There is no such perfectconception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception isall the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice ofFalstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry companion. I am not sure but I should put him besideHamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artisticcompleteness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least hishumor. 

As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, andwould not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little. I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be ashappy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again inthe "Merry Wives of Windsor, " though at the bottom of my heart I felt thedifference. I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, inthat Ercles vein which is so easily caught. This was after a year or twoof the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which hasbeen my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved. My worshipof Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with noearlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myselfsaying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of aplanet. 

There ought certainly to be some bound beyond which the cult of favoriteauthors should not be suffered to go. I should keep well within thelimit of that early excess now, and should not liken the creation ofShakespeare to the creation of any heavenly body bigger, say, than one ofthe nameless asteroids that revolve between Mars and Jupiter. Even thisI do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I think that in thecase of all great men we like to let our wonder mount and mount, till itleaves the truth behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast. A wise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare because he is alreadygreat than it will magnify any less man. But we are loaded down with theresponsibility of finding him all we have been told he is, and we must dothis or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of sensibility. Atthe same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us toexpect this or that of him, and more truly his friends. I wish the timemight come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, assincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of ourcontemporaries. The course of criticism is towards this, but when Ibegan to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he wasnot at every moment great. I should no more have thought of questioningthe poetry of any passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holywrit. All the same, I knew very well that much which I read was reallypoor stuff, and the persons and positions were often preposterous. It isa great pity that the ardent youth should not be permitted and evenencouraged to say this to himself, instead of falling slavishly before agreat author and accepting him at all points as infallible. Shakespeareis fine enough and great enough when all the possible detractions aremade, and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer and greaterfor the loss of half his work, though if I had heard any one say such athing then I should have held him as little better than one of thewicked. 

Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my way to Shakespeareearlier, though it is rather strange that I had not. I knew him on thestage in most of the plays that used to be given. I had shared theconscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; manytimes, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked and sufferedwith Richard III. 

Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever broughtmore to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to thatof seeing the curtain rise on "Hamlet, " and hearing the guards begin totalk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself withoutany material embodiment! It is the same in the whole range of his plays:they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. Theyare neither worse nor better because of the theatre. They are so greatthat it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it totheir own proportions and endue it with something of their own livingforce. They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so whollythat you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one whotalks importantly to you. I have heard people say that they would rathernot see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agreewith them. He can better afford to be played ill than any other man thatever wrote. Whoever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who isspeaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I cantrace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them. 

The effect is so equal from either experience that I am not sure as tosome plays whether I read them or saw them first, though as to most ofthem I am aware that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth mustbe told there is still one of his plays that I have not read, and Ibelieve it is esteemed one of his greatest. There are several, with allmy reading of others, that I had not read till within a few years; and Ido not think I should have lost much if I, had never read "Pericles" and"Winter's Tale. "

In those early days I had no philosophized preference for reality inliterature, and I dare say if I had been asked, I should have said thatthe plays of Shakespeare where reality is least felt were the mostimaginative; that is the belief of the puerile critics still; but Isuppose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made the greatHistories so delightful to me, and that rendered "Macbeth" and "Hamlet"vital in their very ghosts and witches. There I found a worldappreciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander thanthe poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of, and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home andcitizen in it as where I actually lived. There I found joy and sorrowmixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing foritself, and not for some other thing. Then, I suppose it was theinterfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious andfriendly. I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered inme by my father's way of looking at life, and had certainly beenflattered by my intimacy with Cervantes; but whether this was so or not, I know that I liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages inShakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the comic was closest. Perhaps in a time when self-consciousness is so widespread, it is theonly thing that saves us from ourselves. I am sure that without it Ishould not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare'sHistories, where I used to spend so much of my leisure, with such a senseof his own intimate companionship there as I had nowhere else. I feltthat he must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and that in hisgreat heart he had room for a boy willing absolutely to lose himself inhim, and be as one of his creations. 

It was the time of life with me when a boy begins to be in love with thepretty faces that then peopled this world so thickly, and I did not failto fall in love with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I livedequally. I cannot tell whether it was because I found them like myideals here, or whether my ideals acquired merit because of theirlikeness to the realities there; they appeared to be all of one degree ofenchanting loveliness; but upon the whole I must have preferred them inthe plays, because it was so much easier to get on with them there; I wasalways much better dressed there; I was vastly handsomer; I was notbashful or afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to contendwith here. 

That friend of mine, the printer whom I have mentioned, was one with mein a sense of the Shakespearean humor, and he dwelt with me in the sortof double being I had in those two worlds. We took the book into thewoods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that remained to us whenwe had finished our work, and on the shining Sundays of the warm, latespring, the early, warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes orheaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is mixed for me with arapturous sense of the out-door beauty of this lovely natural world. We read turn about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as weread the drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air withsuch orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling streamafforded. It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on usfrom the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolongeditself with unbroken sweetness from one world to the other. 

But I think it takes two to read in the open air. The pressure of wallsis wanted to keep the mind within itself when one reads alone; otherwiseit wanders and disperses itself through nature. When my friend left usfor want of work in the office, or from the vagarious impulse which is sostrong in our craft, I took my Shakespeare no longer to the woods andfields, but pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little spacewhich I had for my study, under the stairs at home. There was a deskpushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling eloped down tomeet behind it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good light onthe writing-leaf of my desk. This was my workshop for six or sevenyears, and it was not at all a bad one; I have had many since that werenot so much to the purpose; and though I would not live my life over, Iwould willingly enough have that little study mine again. But it is gonean utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that Iwas fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest mein the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with verylittle hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave wayunder no burden, before no obstacle. Long ago changes were made in thelow, rambling house which threw my little closet into a larger room; butthis was not until after I had left it many years; and as long as Iremained a part of that dear and simple home it was my place to read, towrite, to muse, to dream. 

I sometimes wish in these later years that I had spent less time in it, or that world of books which it opened into; that I had seen more of theactual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it better. I mightso have amassed more material for after use in literature, but I had tofit myself to use it, and I suppose that this was what I was doing, in myown way, and by such light as I had. I often toiled wrongly andfoolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted. Somestrength, I hope, was coming to me, even from my mistakes, and though Iwent over ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been leftso much to find the way alone, yet I was not standing still, and some ofthe things that I then wished to do I have done. I do not mind owningthat in others I have failed. For instance, I have never surpassedShakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to do so; but then, itis to be remembered that very few other people have surpassed him, andthat it would not have been easy. 

XIV. IK MARVEL

My ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its height when I was betweensixteen and seventeen years old, for I fancy when I began to formulate myadmiration, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I was lesssimply impassioned than at some earlier time. At any rate, I am surethat I did not proclaim his planetary importance in creation until I wasat least nineteen. But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped ata single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of my idolatry, and Ibowed the knee to them all in a devotion which, if it was not of onequality, was certainly impartial. While I was reading, and thinking, andliving Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not see how therecould have been room in my consciousness for anything else, there seem tohave been half a dozen other divinities there, great and small, whom Ihave some present difficulty in distinguishing. I kept Irving, andGoldsmith, and Cervantes on their old altars, but I added new ones, andthese I translated from the contemporary: literary world quite as oftenas from the past. I am rather glad that among them was the gentle andkindly Ik Marvel, whose 'Reveries of a Bachelor' and whose 'Dream Life'the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture whichwould not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people ofthis. The books have survived the span of immortality fixed by ouramusing copyright laws, and seem now, when any pirate publisher mayplunder their author, to have a new life before them. Perhaps this isordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit bythem, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so oftenshows. 

I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I supposeit was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning toread, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and Icould not say why I thought it would be very 'comme il faut' to likethem. Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbingshoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of itspowder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be ofit, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do itnow. But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends, and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow ofpurpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from theirsentiment. I dare say I should find their pose now a littleold-fashioned. I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs andstarts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I amsure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of alltimes and always the latest wear. Whatever it was, it sufficed to win myheart, and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and mostpathetic in it. I read 'Dream Life' first--though the 'Reveries of aBachelor' was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book--and 'Dream Life' remains first in my affections. I have now littlenotion what it was about, but I love its memory. The book is associatedespecially in my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when Icarried it into the woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter ofemotion over its page. I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember howthe light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of thefoliage. My friend was away by this time on one of his several absencesin the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevantmelancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book. Ibegan to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airsand graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvelin the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with hisShakespearean prayer:

 "To Milan let me hear from thee by letters, Of thy success in love, and what news else Betideth here in absence of thy friend; And I likewise will visit thee with mine. "

Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our littlevillage; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the realplaces would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else inthe situation was really this or that. Heaven knows what gaudysentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travestyhad kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough. My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story, in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, forthat was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marveleither, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helpedmyself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was allvery well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the futuresufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as Iwent on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it. Mymaterial gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered andthreatened to perish on my hands. To crown my misery there grew up animpatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to meone day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say thathe did not think that story amounted to much. I did not think so either, but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortaleffect of the stroke I do not know. Somehow I managed to bring thewretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past. Slowlyit seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is alwaysthis consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that theworld's memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it willnot keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will itlong dwell upon your defeats. But that experience was really terrible. It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one's self in battlewithout the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action, or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appearin. I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame andanguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badlyconceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken. If it were notfor what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story onthe same lines in the future. 

XV. DICKENS

What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at thesame time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing aboutthe reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detachthemselves one from another. This may be so because my reading was muchmore multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was readingalways two or three authors at a time. I think Macaulay a littleantedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of thatmasterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as tothe times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail tofall under his spell. 

This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in brokenhealth the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends. It seemedfor a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of theafternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down tomy books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until thefamily were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that Ishould like to do it. The most that can be said in defence of such athing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it wasinevitable. If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it inthat way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than Iwanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing. I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I wastrying to do, except as a means to other things. As far as my pleasurewent, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have beenwandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under atree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort. But there wasmuch more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aimto achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped andaimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know verydistinctly what either was. As I look back at the endeavor of those daysmuch of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering. I can seethat doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sortof helpless force. 

I studied Latin because I believed that I should read the Latin authors, and I suppose I got as much of the language as most school-boys of myage, but I never read any Latin author but Cornelius Nepos. I studiedGreek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter of the Testament, and an ode of Anacreon. Then I left it, not because I did not mean to gofarther, or indeed stop short of reading all Greek literature, butbecause that friend of mine and I talked it over and decided that I couldgo on with Greek any time, but I had better for the present study German, with the help of a German who had come to the village. Apparently I wascarrying forward an attack on French at the same time, for I distinctlyrecall my failure to enlist with me an old gentleman who had once lived along time in France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent from. Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhapsbecause he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keepany of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he soabounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I wasleft to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eightyears later. At the same time I was reading Spanish, more or less, but neither wisely nor too well. Having had so little help in mystudies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even such as I might haveavailed myself of, without shame, in books, and I would not read anySpanish author with English notes. I would have him in an edition whollySpanish from beginning to end, and I would fight my way through himsingle-handed, with only such aid as I must borrow from a lexicon. 

I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boywho was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going todo that. In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; hehad no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever hasthat. Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle, undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as hehad was toughened by the prolonged stress. It could be said, of course, that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could havebeen well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of Englishliterature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; butthen, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless. I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from themthan it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making knownto me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek haveenabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I shouldhave had otherwise. 

But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture. What is certain isthat for the present my studies, without method and without stint, beganto tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner ofhypochondriacal fears. These finally resolved themselves into one, incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue, or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogetherand filled my morbid mind with the images of another's creation. 

In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the readingI had listened to. But now I devoured his books one after another asfast as I could read them. I plunged from the heart of one to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me. Some ofthem remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so thatwhen I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow. But I havesince read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinkingDickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived inthe days of the mighty magician. I fancy the readers who have come tohim since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have littlenotion how great it was. In that time he colored the parlance of theEnglish-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talentattempting fiction. While his glamour lasted it was no more possible fora young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poetto escape writing Tennyson. I admired other authors more; I loved themmore, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fictionI was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially inhis way. 

All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was awarethat it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert mysense of this against him in matters of character and structure. Tothese I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of theirdivine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius inthese kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted withoutsacrilege. But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, Isuffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind abouthis style, which I thought bad. 

I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from, and who might almost have come out of his books. He lived in Dickens ina measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely musthave brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief. He forgave it, no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on allother points. He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had cometo America early in life, and had lived in our village many years, without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of acontrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social. He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church wheneverit was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while hedisputed the authority of the Bible with all comers. He had become acitizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency onlyby voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to theinstitution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the Americanname. From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage andcynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him. I knownothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, orwhat his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from ahouse-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music. He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them withhis own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate thechurches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could makethem. He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he satbefore it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, hisnoble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture ofhis music. He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in everyfibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he wasa delightful companion. 

After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we tooklong, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore ofliterature. He must have been nearly three times my age, but that didnot matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there isneither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor. He had reada great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and wasalways coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed. He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and whenI praised Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he couldonly accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference. Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upperten thousand. His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure thatit was altogether mistaken. 

There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters thereader into the belief that he is better than other people. I do notmean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens, but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked himbetter; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finerporcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particulardifference in the various liquors poured into them. In Dickens thevirtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principlewhich sniffs, in his reader. The base of his work is the whole breadthand depth of humanity itself. It is helplessly elemental, but it is notthe less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations ofcharacter, character affected by the interests and passions rather thanthe tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moodsthrough them. I do not know that in the whole range of his work he oncesuffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through anysocial accident, or except for some moral cause. This makes him very fitreading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good fromhim. His view of the world and of society, though it was very littlephilosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it wasmost impossible. 

We are just beginning to discern that certain conceptions of ourrelations to our fellow-men, once formulated in generalities which metwith a dramatic acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by itas mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, and that if theyhave ever seemed false it was because of the false conditions in which westill live. Equality and fraternity, these are the ideals which oncemoved the world, and then fell into despite and mockery, as unrealities;but now they assert themselves in our hearts once more. 

Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often urged them, these idealsmark the whole tendency of his fiction, and they are what endear him tothe heart, and will keep him dear to it long after many a cunningerartificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness. I do not pretendthat I perceived the full scope of his books, but I was aware of it inthe finer sense which is not consciousness. While I read him, I was in aworld where the right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in thisworld, and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe willyet attend it in our daily life, untrammelled by social convention oreconomic circumstance. In that world of his, in the ideal world, towhich the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the showsof things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right. Of course it was in a way all crude enough, and was already contradictedby experience in the small sphere of my own being; but nevertheless itwas true with that truth which is at the bottom of things, and I washappy in it. I could not fail to love the mind which conceived it, andmy worship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet given anywriter. I did not establish with him that one-sided understanding whichI had with Cervantes and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was notpossible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the things he had saidagainst us, and the more hurt because I felt that they were often sojust. But I was for the time entirely his, and I could not have wishedto write like any one else. 

I do not pretend that the spell I was under was wholly of a moral orsocial texture. For the most part I was charmed with him because he wasa delightful story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me hotand cold; because he could make me laugh and cry, and stop my pulse andbreath at will. There seemed an inexhaustible source of humor and pathosin his work, which I now find choked and dry; I cannot laugh any more atPickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Nell or Paul Dombey; theirjokes, their griefs, seemed to me to be turned on, and to have amechanical action. But beneath all is still the strong drift of agenuine emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly, the unfortunate. In all that vast range of fiction, there is nothingthat tells for the strong, because they are strong, against the weak, nothing that tells for the haughty against the humble, nothing that tellsfor wealth against poverty. The effect of Dickens is purely democratic, and however contemptible he found our pseudo-equality, he was more trulydemocratic than any American who had yet written fiction. I suppose itwas our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctiveexpression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded our silly vanity sokeenly through our love when he told us the truth about our horrible shamof a slave-based freedom. But at any rate the democracy is there in hiswork more than he knew perhaps, or would ever have known, or everrecognized by his own life. In fact, when one comes to read the story ofhis life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of havingonce put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his motherfor suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was theslave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highestfunction of his fiction to help destroy. 

I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens were not verydiscriminating. I liked 'David Copperfield, ' and 'Barnaby Rudge, ' and'Bleak House, ' and I still like them; but I do not think I liked themmore than 'Dombey & Son, ' and 'Nicholas Nickleby, ' and the 'PickwickPapers, ' which I cannot read now with any sort of patience, not to speakof pleasure. I liked 'Martin Chuzzlewit, ' too, and the other day I reada great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the passages thatreferred to America, though it was surcharged in the serious moods, andcaricatured in the comic. The English are always inadequate observers;they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alienpeople; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look ofour life in certain aspects. His report of it was clumsy and farcical;but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught thenote of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality, and this was not altogether lost in his mocking horse-play. 

I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of Dickens because of it. I believe I was rather more willing to accept it as a faithfulportraiture then than I should be now; and I certainly never made anyquestion of it with my friend the organ-builder. 'Martin Chuzzlewit' wasa favorite book with him, and so was the 'Old Curiosity Shop. ' No doubta fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music madehim like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he wouldhave disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it wasa purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and hergrandfather. He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from bothbooks, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered intremulous emotion on the periods he loved. He would catch the volume upanywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness-shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of acountry village, in those days before the war, when people had all thetime there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose toread. One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the'Christmas Carol' in the Court-house, and people came from all about tohear him. 

He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering inthe saddest way. Several years before his death money fell to hisfamily, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vainto make himself at home. He never ceased to pine for the village he hadleft, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces;and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed, and he could come back no more. He was never reconciled to the change, and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened anhereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him. Off. My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of thisquaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before Iknew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of theother. 

XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER

Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom theorgan-builder and I were both fond. This was the young poet who lookedafter the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrotepoetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with suchstrength as he found in the disease preying upon him. He must have beenfar gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollectionof a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan, and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away, "Like wax in the fire, Like snow in the sun. "

People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragileand pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping orseeking to escape it. As the end drew near he left his employment andwent home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to seehim once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last. My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit passcheerfully with our wonted talk about books. Only at parting, when hetook my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, "I suppose my disease isprogressing, " with the patience he always showed. 

I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was verydistinct or very great. It was slight and graceful rather, I fancy, and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known, but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature, and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I cameinto appreciation of several authors whom I had not known, or had notcared for before. There could not have been many shelves of books inthat store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all beforeI began to buy them. For the most part, I do not think it occurred to methat they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent tothe commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them. 

I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found inhis charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond ofDr. Holmes's poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each representedin his slender stock by some distinctive work. There were several strayvolumes of Thackeray's minor writings, and I still have the 'YellowplushPapers' in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton'sPopular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in thefamous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant ofexcellence in the literature it covered. Besides these there werestandard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, fromwornout plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth inthis shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the "Excursion" init, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it isvery right and fit to have read the "Excursion. " To be honest, it wasvery hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I haveever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, Ido not suppose that any one ever did. I tried hard enough to likeeverything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I oughtto like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual andmoral inferiority in me. My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbledinto the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately beengiven in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in suchnewspaper report as I had of them. So, my preoccupations were all infavor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience tolike Wordsworth. If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the faultremains very much what it first was. 

I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not thinkthat I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I amsure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him. After sufferingonce through the "Excursion" I did not afflict myself with it again, but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancyit is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fondof. Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine;on the other hand, neither was Byron. Him, too, I liked in passages andin certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read himthroughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try toimitate Wordsworth. 

Those lectures of Lowell's had a great influence with me, and I tried tolike whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young peoplewhen they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched;they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the criticadmires. From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking;but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can onlyavail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective. When I readLowell's praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and asoften as I have tried I have found it impossible. It was not so withChaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted inthose lectures, and in Chambers's 'Encyclopaedia of English Literature, 'which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder. 

In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read himwith that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembledhim in a certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not allege this asthe reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like eitherof them. Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannotquite account for one's passions in either; what is certain is, I likedChaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinitybetween reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to nameit, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earthin human life. By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could findin the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made aclerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me thepoet's works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with aglossary. It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and liftedmy heart with a sense of noble companionship. 

I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet'stime, which I found often enough in the poet's verse, as well as thegoodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certainmisgiving about it. He repeated to me the librarian's question as towhether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the handsof a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me. It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and Isuppose he had not given me the book without due reflection. Probably hereasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad wouldbecome known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better knowthat he knew it. 

The streams of filth flow down through the ages in literature, whichsometimes seems little better than an open sewer, and, as I have said, I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious and noisomechannels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial, and sofar the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say. The worst oflewd literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in thelife, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is thedanger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked. Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucerwas probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am notgoing to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy wouldbe the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall betaken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praisehim. The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of ameans of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, andeven falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects justwhat it is, and not to feign it otherwise. I am not ready to say thatthe harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and thefilthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it doesnot corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader'stongue and pen to sin in kind. 

I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the bestin him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to lookfor the best, and to know it when I had found it. Of course I began tocopy him. That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind;they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but Istudied his verse, and imitated a stanza which I found in some of histhings and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness andsweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure wasobsolete, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier thanthe imported analogues that had taken the place of the phrases he used. 

I began to employ in my own work the archaic words that I fancied most, which was futile and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for thesimpler Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad. Of course, being left so much as I was to my own whim in such things, I could notkeep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives which wasnothing short of a craze. Some half-bred critic whom I had read made mebelieve that English could be written without them, and had better bewritten so, and I did not escape from this lamentable error until I hadproduced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prosewholly composed of monosyllables. I suspect now that I did not alwaysstop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as anyof the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short. 

The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this exercise happilycould not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless fromthe beginning. Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know, as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and inthe revolt from the slavish bondage I took upon myself I did not go sofar as to plunge into any very wild polysyllabic excesses. I still likethe little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the bigone, but I honor above all the word that says the thing. At the sametime I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that Icannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, andrather than use one of those detested vocables, even when I perceive thatit would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other. I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it. 

An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly inpoint was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity ofdiction in phrases of as "learned length and thundering sound, " as any hewould have had me shun, and who deplored the Latinistic English ofJohnson in terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity andronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoidedhis medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavoras vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived. It was nonethe less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificedmyself to it with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long afterI read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens orChaucer. 

XVII. MACAULAY

One of the many characters of the village was the machinist who had hisshop under our printing-office when we first brought our newspaper to theplace, and who was just then a machinist because he was tired of beingmany other things, and had not yet made up his mind what he should benext. He could have been whatever he turned his agile intellect and hiscunning hand to; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, and Ibelieve an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer; he talked and wrotebrilliantly, and he was one of the group that nightly disposed of everymanner of theoretical and practical question at the drug-store; it wasquite indifferent to him which side he took; what he enjoyed was themental exercise. He was in consumption, as so many were in that region, and he carbonized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in theliquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had finally prevailedover the consumption, but it had itself become a seated vice; that wasmany years since, and it is many years since he died. 

He must have been known to me earlier, but I remember him first as heswam vividly into my ken, with a volume of Macaulay's essays in his hand, one day. Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing-officeto expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism of an editor in aneighboring city, who had adapted with the change of names and a word ortwo here and there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to thedenunciation of a brother editor. It was a very simple-hearted fraud, and it was all done with an innocent trust in the popular ignorance whichnow seems to me a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced, and merited the public punishment which the discoverer inflicted by meansof what journalists call the deadly parallel column. The effect oughtlogically to have been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was reallynothing of the kind. He simply ignored the exposure, and the comments ofthe other city papers, and in the process of time he easily lived downthe memory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his profession. 

But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listenedas the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill whichlost itself in the interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author. Those facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the finestthings I had yet known in literature, and I borrowed the book and read itthrough. Then I borrowed another volume of Macaulay's essays, andanother and another, till I had read them every one. It was like a longdebauch, from which I emerged with regret that it should ever end. 

I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the machinist had in hislibrary, but it was useless; neither Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlylecould console me; I sighed for more Macaulay and evermore Macaulay. Iread his History of England, and I could measurably console myself withthat, but only measurably; and I could not go back to the essays and readthem again, for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly that Ihad left nothing unenjoyed in them. I used to talk with the machinistabout them, and with the organ-builder, and with my friend the printer, but no one seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I did, andthat I should now be quite unable to account for. 

Once more I had an author for whom I could feel a personal devotion, whomI could dream of and dote upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy inmany an impassioned revery. I do not think T. B. Macaulay would reallyhave liked it; I dare say he would not have valued the friendship of thesort of a youth I was, but in the conditions he was helpless, and Ipoured out my love upon him without a rebuff. Of course I reformed myprose style, which had been carefully modelled upon that of Goldsmith andIrving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quicksentences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words, whichhe prescribed, but did not practise. As for his notions of literature, Isimply accepted them with the feeling that any question of them wouldhave been little better than blasphemy. 

For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other criticism; he made itseem pale, and poor, and weak; and he blunted my sense to subtlerexcellences than I found in him. I think this was a pity, but it was athing not to be helped, like a great many things that happen to our hurtin life; it was simply inevitable. How or when my frenzy for him beganto abate I cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have wanedrapidly, for after no great while I found myself feeling the charm ofquite different minds, as fully as if his had never enslaved me. Icannot regret that I enjoyed him so keenly as I did; it was in a way agenerous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly whatever way hethought, I do not think yet that he swayed me in any very wrong way. Hewas a bright and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, itis to be said of him that his worst fault was only to have stopped shortof the finest truth in art, in morals, in politics. 

XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS

What remained to me from my love of Macaulay was a love of criticism, and I read almost as much in criticism as I read in poetry and historyand fiction. It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the villagecharacters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe; I do not know just how, but it must have been in some exchange of books; he preferredmetaphysics. At any rate I fell greedily upon them, and I read with noless zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-mindedcriticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes. As usual, I acceptedthem implicitly, and it was not till long afterwards that I understoodhow worthless they were. 

I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of literature, andits celebration of the monkey and the goat in us, is the spectacle suchcriticism affords of the tigerish play of satire. It is monstrous thatfor no offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and themistake of his powers in that direction, a writer should become the preyof some ferocious wit, and that his tormentor should achieve credit byhis lightness and ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think howalluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader emulous of suchcredit, and eager to achieve it. Because I admired these barbarities ofPoe's, I wished to irritate them, to spit some hapless victim on my ownspear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh. This is as faras possible from the criticism that enlightens and ennobles, but it isstill the ideal of most critics, deny it as they will; and because it isthe ideal of most critics criticism still remains behind all the otherliterary arts. 

I am glad to remember that at the same time I exulted in these ferocitiesI had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer andfiner work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and LeighHunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix. I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarifyand formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done;Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and on every hand I wasreaching out for light that should enable me to place in literary historythe authors I knew and loved. 

I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got at the four greatEnglish reviews, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the London Quarterly, and the North British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood'sMagazine. We got them in the American editions in payment for printingthe publisher's prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy, and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without havingto accuse myself of exaggeration. The love of literature, and the hopeof doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of allother interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all otherthings were as shadows. I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which wasthen filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of ourFugitive Slave Law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where thegreat struggle between the two great principles in our nationality wasbeginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these thingswere more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interestin literature. If I was not to live by it, I was somehow to live for it. 

If I thought of taking up some other calling it was as a means only;literature was always the end I had in view, immediately or finally. I did not see how it was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost allthe literary men in the country had other professions; they were editors, lawyers, or had public or private employments; or they were men ofwealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen infiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day whenpeople wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now. But I kept blindly at my studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for, as I have said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, and Iwas beginning to see authors in their proportion to one another, and tothe body of literature. 

The English reviews were of great use to me in this; I made a rule ofreading each one of them quite through. To be sure I often broke thisrule, as people are apt to do with rules of the kind; it was not possiblefor a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to English politics andeconomics, but I do not think I left any paper upon a literary topicunread, and I did read enough politics, especially in Blackwood's, to beof Tory opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and they did notexact of me any change in regard to the slavery question. 

XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE

I suppose I might almost class my devotion to English reviews among myliterary passions, but it was of very short lease, not beyond a year ortwo at the most. In the midst of it I made my first and only essay asidefrom the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart from it. After sometalk with my father it was decided, mainly by myself, I suspect, that Ishould leave the printing-office and study law; and it was arranged withthe United States Senator who lived in our village, and who was at homefrom Washington for the summer, that I was to come into his office. TheSenator was by no means to undertake my instruction himself; his nephew, who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow-student, and we wereto keep each other up to the work, and to recite to each other, until wethought we had enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test ourfitness for admission to the bar. 

This was the custom in that day and place, as I suppose it is still inmost parts of the country. We were to be fitted for practice in thecourts, not only by our reading, but by a season of pettifogging beforejustices of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small shrinkingof my shy spirit; but what really troubled me most, and was always thegrain of sand between my teeth, was Blackstone's confession of his ownoriginal preference for literature, and his perception that the law was"a jealous mistress, " who would suffer no rival in his affections. I agreed with him that I could not go through life with a dividedinterest; I must give up literature or I must give up law. I not onlyconsented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt to carry onthe reading I had loved, and to keep at the efforts I was always makingto write something in verse or prose, at night, after studying law allday. The strain was great enough when I had merely the work in theprinting-office; but now I came home from my Blackstone mentally fagged, and I could not take up the authors whom at the bottom of my heart Iloved so much better. I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal daywhen I found that confession of Blackstone's, my whole being turned fromthe "jealous mistress" to the high minded muses: I had not only to goback to literature, but I had also to go back to the printing-office. I did not regret it, but I had made my change of front in the public eye, and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage with my fellow-citizens; as for the Senator, whose office I had forsaken, I met him nowand then in the street, without trying to detain him, and once when hecame to the printing-office for his paper we encountered at a point wherewe could not help speaking. He looked me over in my general effect ofbase mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only toanswer him I had, and our conference ended. It was a terrible moment forme, because I knew that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, whichif it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no way to the WhiteHouse. I suppose now that he thought I had merely gone back to my trade, and so for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose that he judgedmy case narrow-mindedly, and I ought to have had the courage to have theaffair out with him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we hadsometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read them as well as I, and it ought not to have been impossible for me to be frank with him;but as yet I could not trust any one with my secret hope of some dayliving for literature, although I had already lived for nothing else. I preferred the disadvantage which I must be at in his eyes, and in theeyes of most of my fellow-citizens; I believe I had the applause of theorgan-builder, who thought the law no calling for me. 

In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, wasas nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I couldhave suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a professionand going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I hadthrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some peoplethought I was a fool to do that. No one, indeed, could have imagined therapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when Idropped the law from them. Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could haveconceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reachedI was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and Imyself felt the difference. My reading had given me criterions differentfrom those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flattermyself that my calling would have been thought one of great socialdignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living. My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was asnob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt itan honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is theframe of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands. I do notknow how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think itwas through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to aknowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine. 

XX. THACKERAY

It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray's books first. He knewtheir literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but Ibelieve he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them. He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect inme; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste. In a certainmeasure he was right. 

What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates himwith Thackeray. With his air of looking down on the highest, andconfidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of thescorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too, is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors heaffects to despise. His sentimentality is also dear to the heart ofyouth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easypathos. Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is takenwith that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there ishardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a greatliterary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque liferight and left from the literature always at his command. At the sametime he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his ownsimple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues. It is so pleasing to one's 'vanity, and so safe, to be of the master'sside when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in thesystem of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long asone does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from. 

I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, and expose theirwicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose todo away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it hasbeen, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all. He appeared tome one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided the shamsof society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, wasnecessarily a sham; when he made a mock of snobbishness I did not knowbut snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured byridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shallhave snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snuband crawl. I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them fortrying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be fromthe selfish motives which underlie our economic life. But I did not knowthese things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart toThackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refugefrom the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it. He had the effectof taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendidindifference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could not see thatsham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all. 

I think it was 'Pendennis' I began with, and I lived in the book to thevery last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to thesmallest detail. I am still not sure but it is the author's greatestbook, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he haswritten, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to readquite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twentytimes. 

After reading 'Pendennis' I went to 'Vanity Fair, ' which I now think thepoorest of Thackeray's novels--crude, heavy-handed, caricatured. Aboutthe same time I revelled in the romanticism of 'Henry Esmond, ' with itspseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwroughtideal of gentlemanhood and honor. It was long before I was duly revoltedby Esmond's transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whomhe is successively enamoured of. I believe this unpleasant andpreposterous affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I donot mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and ifI could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood tobe in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune. The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the'Spectator' then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, andSteele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will's, who arepresented evanescently in the romance. The intensely literary keeping, as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highestfascination for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts tothe reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it, was what helped turn my head. 

This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writing. He is himselfforever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tellsyou it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while. Itis not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; hismeek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glintof mundane splendor, in his lowliest. He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness, and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most ofthose who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable. He has a good word forthe virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit onthe head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence andpride of birth, and purse-pride. But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in theworld and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends. 

I should be far from blaming him for all this. He was of his time; butsince his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a visionwhich makes his seem rather purblind. He must have been immensely inadvance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people thenused to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which wecould hardly find in it now. It was the age of intense individualism, when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as agentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon yourcharacter, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thingbecause it was wrong, but because it was mean. It was romanticismcarried into the region of morals. But I had very little concern then asto that sort of error. 

I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have convenientlystooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray'snovels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least withmyself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much. Itmust be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of thefeeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able toenjoy such a fine sort. No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of somekind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuringThackeray for his effect upon me in this way. No doubt the effect wasalready in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it. 

In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety ofhis minor works--his 'Yellowplush, ' and 'Letters of Mr. Brown, ' and'Adventures of Major Gahagan, ' and the 'Paris Sketch Book, ' and the'Irish Sketch Book, ' and the 'Great Hoggarty Diamond, ' and the 'Book ofSnobs, ' and the 'English Humorists, ' and the 'Four Georges, ' and all themultitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures--as in the spaciousdesigns of his huge novels, the 'Newcomes, ' and 'Pendennis, ' and 'VanityFair, ' and 'Henry Esmond, ' and 'Barry Lyndon. '

There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, andstill seems, the farthest reach of the author's great talent. It iscouched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which nextto the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself withsuch flexibility to the purpose of the author. In 'Barry Lyndon' thereis imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he neversupposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day. Of course, thepicture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray'stime, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that ageneration apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should notpossibly miss the artist's meaning. But I do not think it is so muchsurcharged as 'Esmond;' 'Barry Lyndon' is by no manner of means soconscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifoldself-reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to thinkhe is the most perfect creation of Thackeray's mind. 

I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray's books all at once, or evenin rapid succession, and he at no time possessed the whole empire of mycatholic, not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I wascompassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burningincense at his shrine. But there was a moment when he so outshone andovertopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively hisalone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee ofthree or four others of the very great. From his art there flowed intome a literary quality which tinged my whole mental substance, and made itimpossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it theliterary color. That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I hadbeen so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I musthave tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint that wouldremind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men. 

It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do notknow that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, ofall the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly and profoundlyimbued with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words andblood, but with words and ink. You may read the greatest part ofDickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, andnot once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult, but you canhardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray's without beingreminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion. 

I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have beenany other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talentis not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of thestreet, the field, the open sky, the simple earth. I began to imitatethis master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be, and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probablyhave known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, Ishould have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, nomodel; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and Ihad but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of artaltogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been. I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master'sspectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, withhis self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire. I need notsay I was perfectly satisfied with the result, or that to be able toimitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been ableto imitate nature. In fact, I could have valued any picture of the lifeand character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character asthese had shown themselves to me in his books. 

XXI. "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"

At the same time, I was not only reading many books besides Thackeray's, but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as Icould, with or without help. I could now manage Spanish fairly well, andI was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue. I do notremember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum;but it must have been given me out of the sums we were all working sohard to make up for the debt, and the interest on the debt (that isalways the wicked pinch for the debtor!), we had incurred in the purchaseof the newspaper which we lived by, and the house which we lived in. I spent no money on any other sort of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it wasafforded me the more readily; but I cannot really recall the history ofthose acquisitions on its financial side. In any case, if the sums Ilaid out in literature could not have been comparatively great, theexcitement attending the outlay was prodigious. 

I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York, for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficientlypedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanishliterature. Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thoughtanything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village;but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers, I am sure. I haunted the post-office about the time the books were due, and when I found one of them in our deep box among a heap of exchangenewspapers and business letters, my emotion was so great that it almosttook my breath. I hurried home with the precious volume, and shut myselfinto my little den, where I gave myself up to a sort of transport in it. These books were always from the collection of Spanish authors publishedby Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper cover, printedfull of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue of other Spanish books which Imeant to read, every one, some time. The paper and the ink had a certainodor which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby. The look of thetype took me more than the glance of a girl, and I had a fever of longingto know the heart of the book, which was like a lover's passion. Sometimes I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did. Moratin's 'Originsof the Spanish Theatre, ' and a large volume of Spanish dramatic authors, were the first Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I sentfor them, unless it was because I saw that there were some plays ofCervantes among the rest. I read these and I read several comedies ofLope de Vega, and numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin's history, and Ireally got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, which has nowalmost wholly faded from my mind. It is more intelligible to me why Ishould have read Conde's 'Dominion of the Arabs in Spain;' for that wasin the line of my reading in Irving, which would account for my pleasurein the 'History of the Civil Wars of Granada;' it was some time before Irealized that the chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and notveritable records; and my whole study in these things was whollyundirected and unenlightened. But I meant to be thorough in it, and Icould not rest satisfied with the Spanish-English grammars I had; I wasnot willing to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish Academy. I sent to New York for it, and my booksellers there reported that theywould have to send to Spain for it. I lived till it came to hand throughthem from Madrid; and I do not understand why I did not perish then fromthe pride and joy I had in it. 

But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak norwrite the language. I never got more than a good reading use of it, perhaps because I never really tried for more. But I am very glad ofthat, because it has been a great pleasure to me, and even some profit, and it has lighted up many meanings in literature, which must always haveremained dark to me. Not to speak now of the modern Spanish writers whomit has enabled me to know in their own houses as it were, I had even inthat remote day a rapturous delight in a certain Spanish book, which waswell worth all the pains I had undergone to get at it. This was thefamous picaresque novel, 'Lazarillo de Tormes, ' by Hurtado de Mendoza, whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I writeit I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had knownin the flesh. I believe it would not have been always comfortable toknow Mendoza outside of his books; he was rather a terrible person; hewas one of the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian historyas the Tyrant of Sierra. But at my distance of time and place I couldsafely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him amost charming companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, whobegan life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and thenadventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought backthe atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder-world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with allthe old delight. 

I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, or that the generalreader would find his account in it, but I am sure that the intendingauthor of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresquenovels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the bestforms for an American story. The intrigue of close texture will neversuit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man'slife among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it is the life of aman who has risen, as we nearly all have, with many ups and downs. Thestory of 'Latzarillo' is gross in its facts, and is mostly "unmeet forladies, " like most of the fiction in all languages before our times; butthere is an honest simplicity in the narration, a pervading humor, and arich feeling for character that gives it value. 

I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost upon me, but Icertainly understood that it would not do to present it to an Americanpublic just as it was, in the translation which I presently planned tomake. I went about telling the story to people, and trying to make themfind it as amusing as I did, but whether I ever succeeded I cannot say, though the notion of a version with modifications constantly grew withme, till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my father. Therewas a branch house of an Eastern firm of publishers in that place, and Imust have had the hope that I might have the courage to propose atranslation of Lazarillo to them. My father urged me to try my fortune, but my heart failed me. I was half blind with one of the headaches thattormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign, "J. P. Jewett & Co. , Publishers, " which held me fascinated, and went homewithout at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused. 

XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL

I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that inthose days. It had necessarily passed beyond my father's suggestion, andI think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I readone book rather than another. He made some sort of newspaper arrangementwith a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our homelibrary with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse forthat, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover ofthem. Among these I found a treasure in Curtis's two books, the 'NileNotes of a Howadji, ' and the 'Howadji in Syria. ' I already knew him byhis 'Potiphar Papers, ' and the ever-delightful reveries which have sincegone under the name of 'Prue and I;' but those books of Eastern travelopened a new world of thinking and feeling. They had at once a greatinfluence upon me. The smooth richness of their diction; the amiablesweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy of theirsatire (which was so kind that it should have some other name), theirabundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlyingtheir airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was differentfrom any I had yet known. 

As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancywhen I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor. I tried towrite like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I shouldprobably have done so from the love I bore him. He was a favorite notonly of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were readingcurrent literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundantsympathy. The present generation can have little notion of the deepimpression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nationby the 'Potiphar Papers, ' or how its fancy was rapt with the 'Prue and I'sketches, These are among the most veritable literary successes we havehad, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautifulthings turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle forfreedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too greatif we could have dreamed it would be life-long. But, as it was, we couldonly honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which heshared with Longfellow. 

This divine poet I have never ceased to read. His Hiawatha was a newbook during one of those terrible Lake Shore winters, but all the otherpoems were old friends with me by that time. With a sister who is nolonger living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty and touching andlightly humorous tale of 'Kavanagh, ' which was of a village life enoughlike our own, in some things, to make us know the truth of its delicaterealism. We used to read it and talk it fondly over together, and Ibelieve some stories of like make and manner grew out of our pleasure init. They were never finished, but it was enough to begin them, and therewere few writers, if any, among those I delighted in who escaped thetribute of an imitation. One has to begin that way, or at least one hadin my day; perhaps it is now possible for a young writer to begin bybeing himself; but for my part, that was not half so important as to belike some one else. Literature, not life, was my aim, and to reproduceit was my joy and my pride. 

I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I wasalways chancing upon some book that served this end among the greatnumber of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any realresult of the sort. Schlegel's 'Lectures on Dramatic Literature' cameinto my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history ofthe Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous. I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by thelight it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but whichI now followed in the full day. 

Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said. I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italiantheatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic dramawhich had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, andwhich was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whomI seemed to own, they owned me so completely. It vexes me now to findthat I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could havesuggested it to me. It is possible that it may have been that artist whocame and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother's portrait. She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors andartists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen myadored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him. Her talkabout these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven ofhope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and conversewith them face to face. My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was notsuch a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy nohappier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least. 

XXIII. TENNYSON

I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the thingsI had in hand more or less. It is perfectly clear to me that I did noneof them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other thanexcellently. I was attempting the study of no less than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to these. I was reading right and left inevery direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction. From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a 'coupde main, ' or sat down before it for a prolonged siege. There wasoccasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietlygave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors werefew. I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, andthe relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knewpretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committedmyself to the task of reading it. Always I read for pleasure, for thedelight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very differentthing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as Ido still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts. There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read;I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at theperiod I speak of I do not think I wasted much time. 

My day began about seven o'clock, in the printing-office, where it tookme till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five. Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work withtheir hands for their dinners. In the afternoon I went back andcorrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case forthe next day. At two or three o'clock I was free, and then I went homeand began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book. We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till Iwent to bed at ten or eleven. I cannot think of any time when I did notgo gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as wellas a high privilege. 

But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which wasnot yet known as nervous prostration. When I could not sleep after mystudies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks ofhypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was notthe day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that Ishould leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion thatthe case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure. I passeddays in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myselfin heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesomeand very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write. No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause, and to be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, rather than bysome ignoble ague or the devastating consumption of that region. If Ilay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and listening to thedeath-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was notwithout the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature. At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could havecomposed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for myuntimely fate. But there was really not impairment of my constitution, and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the healthwhich has never since failed me under any reasonable stress of workestablished itself. 

I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I first becameacquainted with the poet who at once possessed himself of what was bestworth having in me. Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and fromthe English reviews, but I believe it was from reading one of Curtis's"Easy Chair" papers that I was prompted to get the new poem of "Maud, "which I understood from the "Easy Chair" was then moving polite youth inthe East. It did not seem to me that I could very well live without thatpoem, and when I went to Cleveland with the hope that I might havecourage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to a publisher it was withthe fixed purpose of getting "Maud" if it was to be found in anybookstore there. 

I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can onlyaccount for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlierthan the later English poetry. To be sure I had passed through what Imay call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply unknown to thepresent generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, andput with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time totime in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him. I readthis now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved ofhim by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his"Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passagesfrom it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the solecritic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun inGraham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphianspecies. I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither couldany of the critics who led me into it, I dare say. The reading world isvery susceptible of such-lunacies, and all that can be said is that at agiven time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who wasneither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosizedbefore and since. What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of thepoets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that Ibathed myself in his second-hand effulgence. I already knew pretty wellthe origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, andKeats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a suddenconvert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive. Like every other great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day, and I suppose that at the time he wrote "Maud" he said more fully whatthe whole English-speaking race were then dimly longing to utter than anyEnglish poet who has lived. 

One need not question the greatness of Browning in owning the fact thatthe two poets of his day who preeminently voiced their generation wereTennyson and Longfellow; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly nowmore modern than either. However, I had then nothing to do withTennyson's comparative claim on my adoration; there was for the time noparallel for him in the whole range of literary divinities that I hadbowed the knee to. For that while, the temple was not only emptied ofall the other idols, but I had a richly flattering illusion of being hisonly worshipper. When I came to the sense of this error, it was with thebelief that at least no one else had ever appreciated him so fully, stoodso close to him in that holy of holies where he wrought his miracles. 

I say tawdily and ineffectively and falsely what was a very precious andsacred experience with me. This great poet opened to me a whole world ofthinking and feeling, where I had my being with him in that mysticintimacy, which cannot be put into words. I at once identified myselfnot only with the hero of the poem, but in some so with the poet himself, when I read "Maud"; but that was only the first step towards the lastingstate in which his poetry has upon the whole been more to me than that ofany other poet. I have never read any other so closely and continuously, or read myself so much into and out of his verse. There have been timesand moods when I have had my questions, and made my cavils, and when itseemed to me that the poet was less than I had thought him; and certainlyI do not revere equally and unreservedly all that he has written; thatwould be impossible. But when I think over all the other poets I haveread, he is supreme above them in his response to some need in me that hehas satisfied so perfectly. 

Of course, "Maud" seemed to me the finest poem I had read, up to thattime, but I am not sure that this conclusion was wholly my own; I thinkit was partially formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I feltto be everywhere in the critical atmosphere, and which had alreadypenetrated to me. I did not like all parts of it equally well, and someparts of it seemed thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to sayso then), and they still seem so. But there were whole passages andspaces of it whose divine and perfect beauty lifted me above life. I didnot fully understand the poem then; I do not fully understand it now, butthat did not and does not matter; for there something in poetry thatreaches the soul by other enues than the intelligence. Both in this poemand others of Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there aremelodies and harmonies enfolding significance that appeared long after Ihad first read them, and had even learned them by heart; that lay weedyin my outer ear and were enough in their Mere beauty of phrasing, tillthe time came for them to reveal their whole meaning. In fact they coulddo this only to later and greater knowledge of myself and others, asevery one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book that he readwhen young; then he finds it twice as full of meaning as it was at first. 

I could not rest satisfied with "Maud"; I sent the same summer toCleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet's work, andabandoned myself so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other versethat I can remember. The volume was the first of that pretty blue-and-gold series which Ticknor & Fields began to publish in 1856, and whichtheir imprint, so rarely affixed to an unworthy book, at once carried farand wide. Their modest old brown cloth binding had long been a quietwarrant of quality in the literature it covered, and now this splendidblossom of the bookmaking art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to conveythe sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I thought theworld had yet known. After an old fashion of mine, I read itcontinuously, with frequent recurrences from each new poem to some thathad already pleased me, and with a most capricious range among thepieces. "In Memoriam" was in that book, and the "Princess"; I read the"Princess" through and through, and over and over, but I did not thenread "In Memoriam" through, and I have never read it in course; I am notsure that I have even yet read every part of it. I did not come to the"Princess, " either, until I had saturated my fancy and my memory withsome of the shorter poems, with the "Dream of Fair Women, " with the"Lotus-Eaters, " with the "Miller's Daughter, " with the "Morte d'Arthur, "with "Edwin Morris, or The Lake, " with "Love and Duty, " and a score ofother minor and briefer poems. I read the book night and day, in-doorsand out, to myself and to whomever I could make listen. I have no wordsto tell the rapture it was to me; but I hope that in some more articulatebeing, if it should ever be my unmerited fortune to meet that 'sommopoeta' face to face, it shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and hewill understand how completely he became the life of the boy I was then. I think it might please, or at least amuse, that lofty ghost, and that hewould not resent it, as he would probably have done on earth. I can wellunderstand why the homage of his worshippers should have afflicted himhere, and I could never have been one to burn incense in his earthlypresence; but perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence. I eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I could find abouthim, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed intimacy with him through hisverse, in which I could not presume nor he repel, and which I had enjoyedin turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub from them. 

I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the rapture of the newconvert could not last. That must pass like the flush of any otherpassion. I think I have now a better sense of his comparative greatness, but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not have than I hadat the beginning; and I believe this is the essential knowledge of apoet. It is very well to say one is greater than Keats, or not so greatas Wordsworth; that one is or is not of the highest order of poets likeShakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything ofvalue, and I never find my account in it. I know it is not possible forany less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one's life. Somedazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears hiswelcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-home if he knocks again. But it was only this morning that I read one ofthe new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which hefirst woke in me well-nigh forty years ago. There has been no year ofthose many when I have not read him and loved him with something of theearly fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poemof his has been for me a fresh joy. 

He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make myfirst venture away from home. My father had got one of those legislativeclerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors whentheir party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out ascheme for corresponding with some city newspapers. We were to furnish adaily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which Iwas mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together. Theletters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, andmy father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them whowas doing it. We were afraid they might not care for the reports of aboy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and Idid not boast of my youth among the lawmakers. I looked three or fouryears older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when afatherly Senator asked me my age. I got away somehow without saying, butit was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter, and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year. 

I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts ofbooks from it. Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all thenovels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 'TheCaxtons' and 'My Novel. ' I was dazzled by them, and I thought him agreat writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself. Little ornothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poetand his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and roguesof all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remainedwith me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say. If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say thatit was but a fitful fever. I also read many volumes of Zschokke'sadmirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and Ithink I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors Irecall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelesslyas they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandicpoems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studyingIcelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, anddecided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must havebegun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author atleast, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson;but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry. I suspect that Icarried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraidthat I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I wasready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation. This is theworst of the ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every one elseshare his rapture, will he, nill he. Many good fellows suffered from myadmiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids. I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I amafraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in thecase of the poems I did worse, I repeated them. This seems ratherincredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at leastattests my sincerity. It was long before I cured myself of so pestilenta habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safelytrusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener. I dare say Icould not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was notso nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me;I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish tomake them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as hewas to mine. My head was full of him; his words were always behind mylips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some oneelse, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could. It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for thefuture in which I must make my own place in the world. Work, and hardwork, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by nomeans the whole story. You may get on without much of it, or you may doa great deal, and not get on. I was willing to do as much of it as Icould get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had manyforebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to thesubstance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget. I wasalready imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthymodel for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did. None of theauthors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could nothave believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me. In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has been. 

XXIV. HEINE

That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of thelegislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction ofone of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it. I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was tohave charge of the local reporting. It was a great temptation, and for awhile I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune. I went down toCincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fitmyself for it by beginning as reporter myself. One night's round of thepolice stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was notmeant for that work, and I attempted it no farther. I have often beensorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life thatI have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life wassupremely interesting and important. I fancied that literature, thatpoetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to thinkof myself torn from my high ideals by labors like those of the reporter. I would not consent even to do the office work of the department, and theproprietor and editor who was more especially my friend tried to makesome other place for me. All the departments were full but the one Iwould have nothing to do with, and after a few weeks of sufferance andsuffering I turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for thesecond time returned to the printing-office. 

I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time tormented by my oldmalady of homesickness. But otherwise the situation was not cheerful forme, and I now began trying to write something for publication that Icould sell. I sent off poems and they came back; I offered littletranslations from the Spanish that nobody wanted. At the same time Itook up the study of German, which I must have already played with, atsuch odd times as I could find. My father knew something of it, and thatfriend of mine among the printers was already reading it and trying tospeak it. I had their help with the first steps so far as therecitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but I was impatient to readGerman, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy fromthe first line of his I had seen. 

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one authorthat I have known. Where or when I first acquainted myself with his mostfascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some articleof the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given inEnglish and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessedmy soul. I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great goodluck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books. He was abookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848sent to us in great numbers. He was a Hanoverian, and his accent wasthen, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the acceptedpronunciation. But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get atHeine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate thefriendship of that bookbinder in every way. I dare say he was glad ofmine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had nocompanionship outside of his own family. I clothed him in all theromantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which newtook the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections. He was avery quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of ourauthor's humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember verywell the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant, and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came tosome passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew hadunpacked all the insult of his soul. 

We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almostword by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English wasrather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, Iwas getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from othersources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or aconjugation. As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home tothe books, and worked away at them until supper. Then my bookbinder andI met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on thetable between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we readtill we were both tired out. 

The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flatcandlesticks heavily loaded with lead, which compositors once used. It seems to have been summer when our readings began, and they areassociated in my memory with the smell of the neighboring gardens, whichcame in at the open doors and windows, and with the fluttering of moths, and the bumbling of the dorbugs, that stole in along with the odors. I can see the perspiration on the shining forehead of the bookbinder ashe looks up from some brilliant passage, to exchange a smile of triumphwith me at having made out the meaning with the meagre facilities we hadfor the purpose; he had beautiful red pouting lips, and a stiff littlebranching mustache above them, that went to the making of his smile. Sometimes, in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story ofhis life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our reading, or quoted apassage from some other author. It seemed to me the make of a highintellectual banquet, and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything asmuch now. 

We walked home as far as his house, or rather his apartment over one ofthe village stores; and as he mounted to it by an outside staircase, weexchanged a joyous "Gute Nacht, " and I kept on homeward through the darkand silent village street, which was really not that street, but someother, where Heine had been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of hisknowledge, or of his dream. When I reached home it was useless to go tobed. I shut myself into my little study, and went over what we had read, till my brain was so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last, it was to lie down to slumbers which were often a mere phantasmagory ofthose witching Pictures of Travel. 

I was awake at my father's call in the morning, and before my mother hadbreakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him. To tellthe truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love ofliterature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me gothrough them. Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languagesI was worrying at, and though I could once write a passable literaryGerman, it has all gone from me now, except for the purposes of reading. It cost me so much trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the grammarand lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was impatient to read, thatI remember the words very well in all their forms and inflections, and Ihave still what I think I may call a fair German vocabulary. 

The German of Heine, when once you are in the joke of his capriciousgenius, is very simple, and in his poetry it is simple from the first, so that he was, perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with if Iwanted to go fast rather than far. I found this out later, when Iattempted other German authors without the glitter of his wit or thelambent glow of his fancy to light me on my hard way. I should find ithard to say just why his peculiar genius had such an absolute fascinationfor me from the very first, and perhaps I had better content myself withsaying simply that my literary liberation began with almost the earliestword from him; for if he chained me to himself he freed me from all otherbondage. I had been at infinite pains from time to time, now upon onemodel and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may make a wordwhich does not quite say the thing for me. What I mean is that I hadsupposed, with the sense at times that I was all wrong, that theexpression of literature must be different from the expression of life;that it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state or at leastof formality in it; that it must be this style, and not that; that itmust be like that sort of acting which you know is acting when you see itand never mistake for reality. There are a great many children, apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical authorities, whoare still of this youthful opinion of mine. But Heine at once showed methat this ideal of literature was false; that the life of literature wasfrom the springs of the best common speech and that the nearer it couldbe made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was. 

He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks withthem, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in hismanner, that is to say instantly. His tricks he had mostly atsecond-hand, and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well enough thento know their origin. But in all essentials he was himself, and my finallesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was tofind myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was. 

I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for several years, though, and for a much longer time than I should have done if I hadever become equally impassioned of any other author. 

Some traces of his method lingered so long in my work that nearly tenyears afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine thathe had been reading: "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones asmen do mercury, " and his kindness for me would not be content with lessthan the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time savedmy life. I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bonesafter it had done its office, but it did do its office. 

It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found theHeine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier workin verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for theAtlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was nota translation of Heine. Then he printed it, and I am bound to say thatthe poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see whyHeine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted. Hispotent spirit became immediately so wholly my "control, " as the mediumssay, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so faras any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like otherinspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of thespirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to usea medium. But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lastingharm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was onethat can only end with me. He undid my hands, which had taken so muchpains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though itmay be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither prettynor useful. 

XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW

Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was DeQuincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another, until I had read them all. We who were young people of that day thoughthis style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in thosepassages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life withan intimacy which was always-more rather than less. His rhetoric there, and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminousrichness, without losing its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed thissubtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lightedup so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksyglimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods andexperiences so like my own, as I was pleased to fancy. I have not lookedat his Twelve Caesars for twice as many years, but I should be greatlysurprised to find it other than one of the greatest historical monographsever written. His literary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitelyhumorous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me to have himpersonally present, with the warmth of his own temperament in regions ofcold abstraction; I am not sure that I should like that so much now. DeQuincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote of Kant, or theFlight of the Crim-Tartars, than when he wrote of his own boyhood or themiseries of the opium habit. He had the hospitable gift of making you athome with him, and appealing to your sense of comradery with something ofthe flattering confidentiality of Thackeray, but with a wholly differenteffect. 

In fact, although De Quincey was from time to time perfunctorily Tory, and always a good and faithful British subject, he was so eliminated fromhis time and place by his single love for books, that one could be in hiscompany through the whole vast range of his writings, and come awaywithout a touch of snobbishness; and that is saying a great deal for anEnglish writer. He was a great little creature, and through his intensepersonality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that you loved theman, who was forever talking-of himself, for his modesty and reticence. He left you feeling intimate with him but by no means familiar; with allhis frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted himself with thelives of his contemporaries, he is to me a figure of delicate dignity, and winning kindness. I think it a misfortune for the present generationthat his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I believe thatthey will emerge from it again to the advantage of literature. 

In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in myaffections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for morethan those two great poets there was then not much room. I read him thefirst winter I was at Columbus, and when I went down from the village thenext winter, to take up my legislative correspondence again, I read himmore than ever. But that was destined to be for me a very dishearteningtime. I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my healthmore broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled inthe capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel. It wasthe beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I beganto fight with various devices and must yield to at last. I triedmedicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take myletters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual respites. I made a little journey to my old home in southern Ohio, but there andeverywhere, the sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my feet, and I came back to Columbus and tried to forget in my work the fact thatI was no better. I did not give up trying to read, as usual, and part ofmy endeavor that winter was with Schiller, and Uhland, and even Goethe, whose 'Wahlverwandschaften, ' hardly yielded up its mystery to me. Totell the truth, I do not think that I found my account in that novel. It must needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, which I had readin English; but I dare say my disappointment was largely my own fault;I had certainly no right to expect such constant proofs and instances ofwisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had led me to hope for. I remember little or nothing of the story, which I tried to find verymemorable, as I held my sick way through it. Longfellow's "MilesStandish" came out that winter, and I suspect that I got vastly more realpleasure from that one poem of his than I found in all my German authorsput together, the adored Heine always excepted; though certainly I feltthe romantic beauty of 'Uhland, ' and was aware of something of Schiller'sgenerous grandeur. 

Of the American writers Longfellow has been most a passion with me, asthe English, and German, and Spanish, and Russian writers have been. Iam sure that this was largely by mere chance. It was because I happened, in such a frame and at such a time, to come upon his books that I lovedthem above those of other men as great. I am perfectly sensible thatLowell and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets I have givenmy heart to; I have read them with delight and with a deep sense of theirgreatness, and yet they have not been my life like those other, thoselesser, men. But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do not try toaccount for my literary preferences or to justify them. 

I dragged along through several months of that winter, and did my best tocarry out that notable scheme of not minding my vertigo. I tried doinghalf-work, and helping my father with the correspondence, but when itappeared that nothing would avail, he remained in charge of it, till theclose of the session, and I went home to try what a complete andprolonged rest would do for me. I was not fit for work in the printing-office, but that was a simpler matter than the literary work that wasalways tempting me. I could get away from it only by taking my gun andtramping day after day through the deep, primeval woods. The fatigue waswholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other creature suffered lossfrom my gain except one hapless wild pigeon. The thawing snow left thefallen beechnuts of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves, and the forest was full of the beautiful birds. In most parts of themiddle West they are no longer seen, except in twos or threes, but oncethey were like the sands of the sea for multitude. It was not now theseason when they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day;but they were in myriads all through the woods, where their iridescentbreasts shone like a sudden untimely growth of flowers when you came uponthem from the front. When they rose in fright, it was like the upwardleap of fire, and with the roar of flame. I use images which, after all, are false to the thing I wish to express; but they must serve. I triedhonestly enough to kill the pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, tillI happened to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the restin a softy tree-top. The poor creature I had widowed followed me to theverge of the woods, as I started home with my prey, and I do not care toknow more personally the feelings of a murderer than I did then. I triedto shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I could not do her thismercy, and at last she flew away, and I saw her no more. 

The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep more and more withNature, who was kinder to me than I was to her other children, or wishedto be, and I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me for nomore reason apparently than it came upon me. But I was still far fromwell, and I was in despair of my future. I began to read again--I suppose I had really never altogether stopped. I borrowed from myfriend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for me a message oflasting cheer. It was the 'Afraja' of Theodore Mugge, a story of life inNorway during the last century, and I remember it as a very lovely storyindeed, with honest studies of character among the Norwegians, and atender pathos in the fate of the little Lap heroine Gula, who was perhapssufficiently romanced. The hero was a young Dane, who was going up amongthe fiords to seek his fortune in the northern fisheries; and by aprocess inevitable in youth I became identified with him, so that Iadventured, and enjoyed, and suffered in his person throughout. Therewas a supreme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, and findinghimself apparently locked in by their mountain walls without sign or hopeof escape, but somehow always escaping by some unimagined channel, andkeeping on. The lesson for him was one of trust and courage; and I, whoseemed to be then shut in upon a mountain-walled fiord without inlet oroutlet, took the lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again. It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no means of thegreatest, should have had such an effect with me at a time when I was nolonger so young as to be unduly impressed by what I read; but it is truethat I have never since found myself in circumstances where there seemedto be no getting forward or going back, without a vision of that fiordscenery, and then a rise of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow, come out of my prisoning environment. 

XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE

I got back health enough to be of use in the printing office that autumn, and I was quietly at work there with no visible break in my surroundingswhen suddenly the whole world opened to me through what had seemed animpenetrable wall. The Republican newspaper at the capital had beenbought by a new management, and the editorial force reorganized upon afooting of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; and to my greatjoy and astonishment I was asked to come and take a place in it. Theplace offered me was not one of lordly distinction; in fact, it waspartly of the character of that I had already rejected in Cincinnati, but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties would not be so odious;and by the time I came to fill it, a change had taken place in thearrangements so that I was given charge of the news department. Thisincluded the literary notices and the book reviews, and I am afraid thatI at once gave my prime attention to these. 

It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading andstudy as I had at home. But now society began to claim a share of thisleisure, which I by no means begrudged it. Society was very charming inColumbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and aneasy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in iteverywhere. I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies, and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almostas freely as if they were our own. There we had music and cards, andtalk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any onehad said this was not the best planet in the universe I should havecalled him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not theword in those days. A world in which all those pretty and gracious womendwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat betweenabout the last instalment of 'The Newcomes, ' was good enough world forme; I was only afraid it was too good. There were, of course, some girlswho did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature, and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate ofthem. That was the day when 'Adam Bede' was a new book, and in this Ihad my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had nopassion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; andwhich has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics. 

I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I might easily refineupon them, and study that subtle effect for good and for evil which youngpeople are always receiving from the fiction they read; but this its notthe time or place for the inquiry, and I only wish to own that so far asI understand it, the chief part of my ethical experience has been fromnovels. The life and character I have found portrayed there haveappealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me;and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot. Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it nowonly in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and herfailure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment. There her work seems to me unphilosophical. 

It shares whatever error there is in its perspective with that ofHawthorne, whose 'Marble Faun' was a new book at the same time that 'AdamBede' was new, and whose books now came into my life and gave it theirtinge. He was always dealing with the problem of evil, too, and I founda more potent charm in his more artistic handling of it than I found inGeorge Eliot. Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romancewhere he liked to place his action; but I did not find his instances theless veritable because they shone out in

 "The light that never was on sea or land. "

I read the 'Marble Faun' first, and then the 'Scarlet Letter, ' and thenthe 'House of Seven Gables, ' and then the 'Blithedale Romance;' but Ialways liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and morerealistic than the others. They all moved me with a sort of effect suchas I had not felt before. They veers so far from time and place that, although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could notimagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed aremote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one mightactually meet, as not long afterward happened with me. I did not holdthe sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors, and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted meto them. But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominatedme as completely as any author I have read. More truly than any otherAmerican author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with akind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the'Scarlet Letter' bear reading now. I did not assent to the possibility, but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay. I thought how much that bookhad been to me, how much all of Hawthorne's books had been, and to haveparted with my faith in their perfection would have been something Iwould not willingly have risked doing. 

Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of thepure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out ofit, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; andperhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the'Scarlet Letter. ' But none of Hawthorne's fables are without a profoundand distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being. He came backfrom his researches with no solution of the question, with no message, indeed, but the awful warning, "Be true, be true, " which is the burden ofthe Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughtsthat we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the browin sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the thingsthat can never be said. Some of his shorter stories I have found thinand cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the 'Houseof Seven Gables, ' but the other day I was reading the 'BlithedaleRomance' again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly andstrangely true as when it first enthralled my soul. 

In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar ofGoethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry, but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through withhis Faust and come to know its power. For the present, I read 'WilhelmMeister' and the 'Wahlverwandschaften, ' and worshipped him much atsecond-hand through Heine. In the mean time I invested such Germans asI met with the halo of their national poetry, and there was one lady ofwhom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine. When I came tomeet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her houseon Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, andsome few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; andif I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear thatit might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet inthe flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I heldin the spirit. But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went onreading him much more than I read any other German author. I went onwriting him too, just as I went on reading and writing Tennyson. Heinewas always a personal interest with me, and every word of his made melong to have had him say it to me, and tell me why he said it. In a poetof alien race and language and religion I found a greater sympathy than Ihave experienced with any other. Perhaps the Jews are still the chosenpeople, but now they bear the message of humanity, while once they borethe message of divinity. I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature: hisrevengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness;and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read. Thetenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but, as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?

I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who was already a contributorto the Atlantic Monthly, and who read Browning as devotedly as I readHeine. I will not say that he wrote him as constantly, but if that hadbeen so, I should not have cared. What I could not endure without pangsof secret jealousy was that he should like Heine, too, and should readhim, though it was but an arm's-length in an English version. He hadfound the origins of those tricks and turns of Heine's in 'TristramShandy' and the 'Sentimental Journey;' and this galled me, as if he hadshown that some mistress of my soul had studied her graces from anothergirl, and that it was not all her own hair that she wore. I hid myrancor as well as I could, and took what revenge lay in my power byinsinuating that he might have a very different view if he read Heine inthe original. I also made haste to try my own fate with the Atlantic, and I sent off to Mr. Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order tomake sure that Heine had not written it, as well as authorized it. 

XXVII. CHARLES READE

This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literaryventure together in those 'Poems of Two Friends;' which hardly passed thecircle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literaryexaltation with me. I walked the streets of the friendly little city byday and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases thatit seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away;and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of mynewspaper paragraphs. Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and fromtime to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement ofthe leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp toothfor such self-betrayals in others. He wanted to print a burlesque reviewhe wrote of the 'Poems of Two Friends' in our paper, but I would notsuffer it. I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was alwaysa generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any thatcould have been dealt me then. He did not indeed care much for anypoetry but that of Shakespeare and the 'Ingoldsby Legends;' and when onemorning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson, and began to read, "The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn The love of love, "

he hitched his chair about, and started in on his leader for the day. 

He might have been more patient if he had known that this State Senatorwas to be President Garfield. But who could know anything of thetragical history that was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-60?Not I; at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and it seemedto me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was of it. To be sure I had my hard littlejournalistic misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a StateSenator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o'clock in the morning, andI dare say I felt myself superior in my point of view, though I could notresist the charm of the verse. I myself did not bring Tennyson to theoffice at that time. I brought Thackeray, and I remember that one daywhen I had read half an hour or so in the 'Book of Snobs, ' the leadingeditor said frankly, Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of that. He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, and not I, but I daresay I was a nuisance with my different literary passions, and must havemade many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors. I hadsome consciousness of the fact, but I could not help it. 

I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who wasthen beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed ofbeing a very great one. We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowingbooks, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set himabove Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, 'tulli quanti', so greatwas the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation. He was a manwho stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, andif he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of agreat school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content touse the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism. Hesaw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feignedabout it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not theclear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic whenprobably her artistic prepossessions were romantic. 

As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Readewas writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character, which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world aroundhim. He was intoxicated with the discovery he had made that the truthwas beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth inart after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly donot. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and weread him with much the same fury, that he wrote. 'Never Too Late toMend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'PegWoffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash, ' 'The Cloister and the Hearth, ''Foul Play, ' 'Put Yourself in His Place'--how much they all meant once, or seemed to mean!

The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I was reading, meantmore to me than the rumors of war that were then filling the air, andthat so soon became its awful actualities. To us who have our lives solargely in books the material world is always the fable, and the idealthe fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in theclouds, as light as any of them. I neither praise nor blame this fact;but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every time in my life, since the witchery of literature began with me. 

Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was finding opportunity andrecognition, were the heydey of life for me. There has been no time likethem since, though there have been smiling and prosperous times a plenty;for then I was in the blossom of my youth, and what I had not I couldhope for without unreason, for I had so much of that which I had mostdesired. Those times passed, and there came other times, long years ofabeyance, and waiting, and defeat, which I thought would never end, butthey passed, too. 

I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for mypassport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before Ishould set out for my post. If I hoped to serve my country there andsweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my primeintent was to add to her literature and to my own credit. I intended, while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems. Concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in thatkind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to makethe days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger. Inthis month I devoured all the 'Waverley novels, ' but I must have beendevouring a great many others, for Charles Reade's 'Christie Johnstone'is associated with the last moment of the last days. 

A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again, after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it withamazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aestheticerror shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth thatReade himself was always dimly groping for. The book is writtenthroughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjecturesacross its border, and with lapses into the fool's paradise ofromanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility. But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the lastword that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell thatheld us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety forthe years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before ourhome circle could be made whole again. I read on, and the rest listened, till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approachthrough the absolute silence of the village street. Then we shut thebook and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the palesky of the October night. There was one of the home group whom I was notto see again: the young brother who died in the blossom of his yearsbefore I returned from my far and strange sojourn. He was too young thento share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bidhim good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade eachother good-by forever!

XXVIII. DANTE

I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and frommy knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a readingacquaintance with the language. I had really wanted to go to Germany, that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I firstapplied for the consulate at Munich. The powers at Washington thought itquite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of theRoman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to declineit. Then the President's private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had writtenpoems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, andpromised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year, under the new law to embarrass privateers. It was really put up tofifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the citywhose influence changed the whole course of my literary life. 

No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that theFlorida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years ofnearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ inreading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic. The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did notquite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time;besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a gooddeal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian, preparatory to the efforts before me. 

I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted toread not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind. As amatter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of allthese, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went offfrom them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrightswho interested me so much more. After my wonted fashion I read half adozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which Ibegan with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at thattime, or ever for the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice Imet an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, andwho was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno. " Thispart of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, andwith a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do notappear in every line. 

Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about themasterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not everymoment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as iscertainly the case with Dante's. Some day, perhaps, we shall have thisway of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feelobliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not alwaysenjoying himself it is his own fault. At any rate I will permit myselfthe luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majestyand grandeur of Dante's design, many points of its execution bored me, and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhoodhistory in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblesteffect. What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante'spersonality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance itsgreatness as a work of art. I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed themthe more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began toopen all about me. Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did notunderstand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute aboutamong those who profess to know them clearly. What I finally perceivedwas that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, suchas it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expressesthat life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, itslove and its hate. 

Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the endof the ends the "Divine Comedy" will stand for the patriotism ofmedieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound andlofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. This isvague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess alsothat I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the"Inferno. " I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was thatsort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliantepisodes, the striking pictures. This was the effect with me of all thecriticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that thecriticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things "whole, "is of any definite effect. As a matter of fact we see nothing whole, neither life nor art. We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we candeal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor tocompass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger verythreatening to our intellectual integrity. 

Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am veryglad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, andpathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourthdimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. I tookmy sad heart's fill of the sad story of "Paolo and Francesca, " which Ialready knew in Leigh Hunt's adorable dilution, and most of the linesread themselves into my memory, where they linger yet. I supped on thehorrors of Ugolino's fate with the strong gust of youth, which findsevery exercise of sympathy a pleasure. My good priest sat beside me inthese rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of thesnuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in thingsthat he had often before enjoyed. No doubt he had an inexhaustiblepleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in themperennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read orrepeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself. This pleasurecame often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of aphrase quite apart from its meaning. I did not get then, and I have notgot since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and asoften as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I havefatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaningwas lost upon me. 

I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport, the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed, at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings inthe philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then hewould read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have inreading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out ofthe mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound. 

I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of thestrange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature--theprinter, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and thebookbinder--I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I who was then I, might besaid to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self inanything but the "increasing purpose" which has kept me one in my love ofliterature. He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing, quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled. I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact Iwas instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful howI consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy. I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believedhim other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I wasthen giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me. 

Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the "DivinaCommedia, " and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion soremote that no editor would print it. This was the first fruits and thelast of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as Iwould have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is toounconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is inhim, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that othersmay catch. 

XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO

However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that Iwrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity fromall the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no successwith any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedyfor the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had thenbegun to edit. I was in the mean time printing the material of VenetianLife and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejectionby the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, hadtaken the course of critical observance of books and men in theiractuality. 

That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me, and in such literature of Italy as was then modern. In this pursuit Imade a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized myinquiries. I found that the Italians had no novels which treated oftheir contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but thehistorical romance. I found that if I wished to know their life fromtheir literature I must go to their drama, which was even thenendeavoring to give their stage a faithful picture of theircivilization. There was even then in the new circumstance of a peoplejust liberated from every variety of intellectual repression andpolitical oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose plays were notonly delightful to see but delightful to read, working in the goodtradition of one of the greatest realists who has ever lived, andproducing a drama of vital strength and charm. One of them, whom I by nomeans thought the best, has given us a play, known to all the world, which I am almost ready to think with Zola is the greatest play of moderntimes; or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the modern dramathat surpasses "La Morte Civile" of Paolo Giacometti. I learned to knowall the dramatists pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on thestage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, and to lovesupremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, as one of them said, they didnot so much imitate as learn from to imitate nature. 

This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedatingconscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in theeighteenth century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with theromanticism of his day almost before that century had reached its noon. In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of hisrealism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in myhead, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was sotrue that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because Ihave loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly andlastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni. I was reading his memoirs, andlearning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature while I was learning toknow his work, and I wish that every one who reads his plays would readhis life as well; one must know him before one can fully know them. Ibelieve, in fact, that his autobiography came into my hands first. But, at any rate, both are associated with the fervors and languors of thatfirst summer in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of Goldoni'swithout a renewed sense of that sunlight and moonlight, and of the soundsand silences of a city that is at once the stillest and shrillest in theworld. 

Perhaps because I never found his work of great ethical or aestheticalproportions, but recognized that it pretended to be good only within itsstrict limitations, I recur to it now without that painful feeling of adiminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often when we go back tosomething that once greatly pleased us. It seemed to me at the time thatI must have read all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new onesafter I came home, and still I can take a volume of his from the shelf, and when thirty years are past, find a play or two that I missed before. Their number is very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have notread, I have really read once or more and forgotten. That might veryeasily be, for there is seldom anything more poignant in any one of themthan there is in the average course of things. The plays are light andamusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and where at times theydeepen into powerful situations, or express strong emotions, they do sowith persons so little different from the average of our acquaintancethat we do not remember just who the persons are. 

There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his conscience, and meantto make people think as well as laugh. I know of none of his plays thatis of wrong effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insultscommon sense with the romantic pretence that wrong will be right if youwill only paint it rose-color. He is at some obvious pains to "punishvice and reward virtue, " but I do not mean that easy morality when Ipraise his; I mean the more difficult sort that recognizes in each man'ssoul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but surely of his peace. Henever makes a fool of the spectator by feigning that passion is a reasonor justification, or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong ofanother. That was left for the romanticists of our own century todiscover; even the romanticists whom Goldoni drove from the stage, wereof that simpler eighteenth-century sort who had not yet liberated theindividual from society, but held him accountable in the old way. As forGoldoni himself, he apparently never dreams of transgression; he is ofrather an explicit conventionality in most things, and he deals withsociety as something finally settled. How artfully he deals with it, how decently, how wholesomely, those who know Venetian society of theeighteenth century historically, will perceive when they recall theadequate impression he gives of it without offence in character orlanguage or situation. This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy, that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, and so little toinexperience and worldly innocence. No doubt the Serenest Republic wasvery strict with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up tonature only when nature was behaving well, or at least behaving as ifyoung people were present. Yet the Italians are rather plain-spoken, andthey recognize facts which our company manners at least do not admit theexistence of. I should say that Goldoni was almost English, almostAmerican, indeed, in his observance of the proprieties, and I like thisin him; though the proprieties are not virtues, they are very goodthings, and at least are better than the improprieties. 

This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to do with my liking himso much, and I should be puzzled to account for my passion, as much inhis case as in most others. If there was any reason for it, perhaps itwas that he had the power of taking me out of my life, and putting meinto the lives of others, whom I felt to be human beings as much asmyself. To make one live in others, this is the highest effect ofreligion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the highest bliss weshall ever know. I do not pretend that my translation was through myunselfishness; it was distinctly through that selfishness which perceivesthat self is misery; and I may as well confess here that I do not regardthe artistic ecstasy as in any sort noble. It is not noble to love thebeautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining. I would not have any reader of mine, looking forward to some aestheticcareer, suppose that this love is any merit in itself; it may be thegrossest egotism. If you cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seekthe good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to yourself and notof yourself, and you might as well be going into business. In itself andfor itself it is no more honorable to win fame than to make money, andthe wish to do the one is no more elevating than the wish to do theother. 

But in the days I write of I had no conception of this, and I am surethat my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking andknowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped. I believe that ifI had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humaneItalian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived tobe delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth oftheir goodness. Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpsewas lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won. It is only inthinking back to there that I can realize how much they might always havemeant to me. They were both living in my time in Italy, and they weretwo men whom I should now like very much to have seen, if I could havedone so without that futility which seems to attend every effort to payone's duty to such men. 

The love of country in all the Italian poets and romancers of the longperiod of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure whichcriticism has not yet taken account of. I conceived of its effect then, but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no meanssure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, forbeauty's sake, may be considered something monstrous. There is forever apoignant meaning in life beyond what mere living involves, and why shouldnot there be this reference in art to the ends beyond art?The situation, the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified andbeautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, and evoked fromthem a quality which I was too little trained in their school toappreciate. But in a sort I did feel it, I did know it in them all, sofar as I knew any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in theromances of D'Azeglio, and yet more in the simple and modest records ofD'Azeglio's life published after his death, I profited by it, andunconsciously prepared myself for that point of view whence all the artsappear one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful that isfalse. 

I am very glad of that experience of Italian literature, which I lookback upon as altogether wholesome and sanative, after my excesses ofHeine. No doubt it was all a minor affair as compared with equalknowledge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of time. It isidle to dispute the general positions of criticism, and there is nouseful gainsaying its judgment that French literature is a majorliterature and Italian a minor literature in this century; but whetherthis verdict will stand for all time, there may be a reasonable doubt. Criterions may change, and hereafter people may look at the whole affairso differently that a literature which went to the making of a peoplewill not be accounted a minor literature, but will take its place withthe great literary movements. 

I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far from defending myselffor liking the comedies of Goldoni better than the comedies of Moliere, upon purely aesthetic grounds, where there is no question as to theartistic quality. Perhaps it is because I came to Moliere's comedieslater, and with my taste formed for those of Goldoni; but again, it ishere a matter of affection; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, andbecause he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise than find him morenatural, more true. I will allow that this is vulnerable, and as I say, I do not defend it. Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftierthan Goldoni's; and he has supplied types, characters, phrases, to thecurrency of thought, and Goldoni has supplied none. It is, therefore, without reason which I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more. I amperfectly willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I think thatif it had been Goldoni's luck to have had the great age of a mightymonarchy for his scene, instead of the decline of an outworn republic, his place in literature might have been different. 

XXX. "PASTOR FIDO, " "AMINTA, " "ROMOLA, " "YEAST, " "PAUL FERROLL"

I have always had a great love for the absolutely unreal, the purelyfanciful in all the arts, as well as of the absolutely real; I like theone on a far lower plane than the other, but it delights me, as apantomime at a theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being whollyoutside the realm of the probabilities. When I once transport myself tothis sphere I have no longer any care for them, and if I could I wouldnot exact of them an allegiance which has no concern with them. For thisreason I have always vastly enjoyed the artificialities of pastoralpoetry; and in Venice I read with a pleasure few serious poems have givenme the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini. I came later but not with fainter zestto the "Aminta" of Tasso, without which, perhaps, the "Pastor Fido" wouldnot have been, and I revelled in the pretty impossibilities of both thesecharming effects of the liberated imagination. 

I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live bysweets, unless one is willing to spoil one's digestion; but one may nowand then indulge one's self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two afterdinner may even be of advantage. What I object to is the romantic thingwhich asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground ofreality; that seems to me hopelessly bad. But I have been able to dwellin their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds andshepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and Itake the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves andsorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their politeanguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as thepurling streams of their enamelled meadows. I wish there were more ofthat sort of writing; I should like very much to read it. 

The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I began to find that Icould not help writing about the place, was in books relating to its lifeand history, which I made use of rather than found pleasure in. Mystudies in Italian literature were full of the most charming interest, and if I had to read a good many books for conscience' sake, there were agood many others I read for their own sake. They were chiefly poetry;and after the first essays in which I tasted the classic poets, they werechiefly the books of the modern poets. 

For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred toit in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; mySpanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the ageof twenty-six. My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitzeditions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then andthere. George Eliot's 'Romola' was then new, and I read it again andagain with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction toconceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in thatday. Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and Itrembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message fromthe only veritable perdition. His life, in which so much that was goodwas mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain ofegotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worstwere to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolutedivision in texture and color. The book was undoubtedly a favorite ofmine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which wereafterwards evident to me. 

There were not Romolas to read all the time, though, and I had to devolveupon inferior authors for my fiction the greater part of the time. Ofcourse, I kept up with 'Our Mutual Friend, ' which Dickens was thenwriting, and with 'Philip, ' which was to be the last of Thackeray. I wasnot yet sufficiently instructed to appreciate Trollope, and I did notread him at all. 

I got hold of Kingsley, and read 'Yeast, ' and I think some other novelsof his, with great relish, and without sensibility to his CharlesReadeish lapses from his art into the material of his art. But of allthe minor fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so much asthree books which had then already had their vogue, and which I knewsomewhat from reviews. They were Paul Ferroll, 'Why Paul Ferroll KilledHis Wife, ' and 'Day after Day. ' The first two were, of course, relatedto each other, and they were all three full of unwholesome force. As totheir aesthetic merit I will not say anything, for I have not looked ateither of the books for thirty years. I fancy, however, that theirstrength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic sort. They made yoursympathies go with the hero, who deliberately puts his wife to death forthe lie she told to break off his marriage with the woman he had loved, and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in greathappiness with her till her death. Murder in the first degree isflattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully inBoston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his storycould not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed. Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, thewife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized bythem. As a sort of atonement she wrote 'Day after Day, ' the story of adismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faintand farheard, filling the whole chamber. A carefuller study of thephenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by thesteam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid. 

As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books, and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather toexcuse it. But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and readthem with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is toown my subjection to them. It would be an interesting and importantquestion for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a. Certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly betterhave no influence with us. A curious proof of the subtlety of these PaulFerroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact thatI came to them fresh from 'Romolo, ' and full of horror for myself inTito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad whenhe got away. 

XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON

On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form thatmost of my reading was done for review. I wrote at first a good many ofthe lighter criticisms in 'The Nation', at New York, and after I went toBoston to become the assistant editor of the 'Atlantic Monthly' I wrotethe literary notices in that periodical for four or five years. 

It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began toshare these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure aslong as I had any relation to it. My reading for reading's sake, as Ihad hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake ofwriting about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it mightgive me. This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that Iforgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure. I was masterto review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed onlybooks I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book, and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do notthink were very useful, but I tried to make them honest. 

In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went to live inCambridge, a friend brought me several of the stories of Erckmann-Chatrian, whom people were then reading much more than they are now, Ibelieve; and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed since asoften as I have read one of their books. They have much the same qualityof simple and sincerely moralized realism that I found afterwards in thework of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very likely itwas this that captivated my judgment. As for my affections, battered andexhausted as they ought to have been in many literary passions, theynever went out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charming storyof 'L'Ami Fritz, ' which, when I merely name it, breathes the spring sunand air about me, and fills my senses with the beauty and sweetness ofcherry blossoms. It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that everwas written, and my heart belongs to it still; to be sure it belongs toseveral hundreds of other books in equal entirety. 

It belongs to all the books of the great Norwegian Bjorstjerne Bjornson, whose 'Arne, ' and whose 'Happy Boy, ' and whose 'Fisher Maiden' I read inthis same fortunate sickness. I have since read every other book of histhat I could lay hands on: 'Sinnove Solbakken, ' and 'Magnhild, ' and'Captain Manzanca, ' and 'Dust, ' and 'In God's Ways, ' and 'Sigurd, ' andplays like "The Glove" and "The Bankrupt. " He has never, as some authorshave, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, there I find him aslarge, and free, and bold as ever. He is a great talent, a clearconscience, a beautiful art. He has my love not only because he is apoet of the most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men, with a faith in them such as can move mountains of ignorance, and dulness, and greed. He is next to Tolstoy in his willingness to givehimself for his kind; if he would rather give himself in fighting than insuffering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less in degree. 

I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a patriot and asocialist when I read him; he is then purely a poet, whose gift holds merapt above the world where I have left my troublesome and wearisome selffor the time. I do not know of any novels that a young endeavorer infiction could more profitably read than his for their large and simplemethod, their trust of the reader's intelligence, their sympathy withlife. With him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened andregenerate will; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping God. InBjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful despair, nothing of hisanarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of apoetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in theother. I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should befar from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me withthe delight that Bjornson has. 

In those days I read not only all the new books, but I made many foraysinto the past, and came back now and then with rich spoil, though Iconfess that for the most part I had my trouble for my pains; and I wishnow that I had given the time I spent on the English classics tocontemporary literature, which I have not the least hesitation in sayingI like vastly better. In fact, I believe that the preference for theliterature of the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, ismainly the affectation of people who cannot otherwise distinguishthemselves from the herd, and who wish very much to do so. 

There is much to be learned from the minor novelists and poets of thepast about people's ways of thinking and feeling, but not much that themasters do not give you in better quality and fuller measure; and Ishould say, Read the old masters and let their schools go, rather thanneglect any possible master of your own time. Above all, I would nothave any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant ofhim; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it. When literaturebecomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering inthe world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the factotherwise. It is well to read for the sake of knowing a certain groundif you are to make use of your knowledge in a certain way, but it wouldbe a mistake to suppose that this is a love of literature. 

XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH

In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary experience withoutdoubt was the knowledge of Tourguenief's novels, which began to berecognized in all their greatness about the middle seventies. I thinkthey made their way with such of our public as were able to appreciatethem before they were accepted in England; but that does not matter. Itis enough for the present purpose that 'Smoke, ' and 'Lisa, ' and 'On theEve, ' and 'Dimitri Roudine, ' and 'Spring Floods, ' passed one afteranother through my hands, and that I formed for their author one of theprofoundest literary passions of my life. 

I now think that there is a finer and truer method than his, but in itsway, Tourguenief's method is as far as art can go. That is to say, hisfiction is to the last degree dramatic. The persons are sparelydescribed, and briefly accounted for, and then they are left to transacttheir affair, whatever it is, with the least possible comment orexplanation from the author. The effect flows naturally from theircharacters, and when they have done or said a thing you conjecture why asunerringly as you would if they were people whom you knew outside of abook. I had already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson, who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the grossdarkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of itsexcellence. When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizingof Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods andwinks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting ofDickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with ajoyful astonishment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief. 

Here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, whowas not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside fromthe whole affair, and letting the characters work the plot out. Themethod was revealed perfectly in 'Smoke, ' but each successive book of histhat I read was a fresh proof of its truth, a revelation of itstranscendent superiority. I think now that I exaggerated its valuesomewhat; but this was inevitable in the first surprise. The saneaesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, have seemed moreand more an essential part of the sane ethics of all the Russians I haveread. It was not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but thathe had painted it conscientiously. 

Tourguenief was of that great race which has more than any other fullyand freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or falseshame in its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the Frenchnovelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner andwith the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramaticpunishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personalsense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. If theend did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once readTourguenief; it became more serious, more awful, and with mysticalresponsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons werebathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with anintimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in thiswonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader'sown knowledge; who else but Tourguenief and one's own most secret selfever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at theopen window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields?I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with naturewhich scarcely put itself into words with him. As for the people of hisfiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from myexperience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin andpotentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt theirverity in every touch. 

I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impartsome sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I hadbeen waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richlycontent forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Tourgueniefsurpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine andtrue. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstancesfor the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has todo with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene isoften as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway, it isstill related to the great capitals by the history if not the actualityof the characters. Most of Tourguenief's books I have read many timesover, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years Iread them again and again without much caring for other fiction. It wasonly the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with nodiminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my firstsatisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I had reached thepoint through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even ofthe artifice that hid itself. In 'Smoke' I was now aware of an artificethat kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisiblyoperating the story. 

I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of thestories of Auerbach. It is true that I have never cared greatly for 'Onthe Heights, ' which in its dealing with royalties seems too far alooffrom the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fadesout into a German mistiness. But I speak of it with the imperfectknowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I havereally no right to speak of it. The book of his that pleased me most was'Edelweiss, ' which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very delicatelydone, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach'swork which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies. 

XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES

I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in thelives of persons, and I have at all times read it. I am not sure but Irather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back overthis record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for verylittle besides fiction. I read at the time I have just been speaking of, nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to itin its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, ortrickled from the antique urns of Italy. 

I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to readmuch in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it. 

Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, andautobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading inthe world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have neverenjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as havereasoned of themselves. 

I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not knowthat I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare andGoldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so ofMarlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeterlinck's. The taste for the oldEnglish dramatists I believe I have never formed. 

Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in my boyhood, I havenot cared for, and often I have found it repulsive. 

I have a fondness for books of popular science, perhaps because they tooare part of the human story. 

I have read somewhat of the theology of the Swedenborgian faith I wasbrought up in, but I have not read other theological works; and I do notapologize for not liking any. The Bible itself was not much known to meat an age when most children have been obliged to read it several timesover; the gospels were indeed familiar, and they have always been to methe supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testament I had not readwhen a man grown, and only passages of the Old Testament, like the storyof the Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of Job andEcclesiastes, with occasional Psalms. I therefore came to the Scriptureswith a sense at once fresh and mature, and I can never be too glad that Ilearned to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truerperspectives of experience. 

Again as lights on the human story I have liked to read such books ofmedicine as have fallen in my way, and I seldom take up a medicalperiodical without reading of all the cases it describes, and in factevery article in it. 

But I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the mainbusiness of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to thereader; he probably has had a great many of his own. I think I may classthe "Ring and the Book" among them, though I have never been otherwise adevotee of Browning. But I was still newly home from Italy, or away fromhome, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it tookme so with the old enchantment of that land, I gave my heart promptly toit. Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tiredof the same story told over and over from the different points of view, and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificentbreadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himselfheavily. There are certain books of it--"Caponsacchi's story, ""Pompilia's story, " and "Count Guido's story"--that I think ought to rankwith the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramaticexpression of the fact and character, which is without rival. There is anoble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi's statement, anartless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems tome the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia's story holds allof womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, thehelplessness. But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I haveliked, I do not know when I should stop. Yes, as I think it over, the"Ring and the Book" appears to me one of the great few poems whosesplendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presentlyfallen into abeyance. If it had impossibly come down to us from someelder time, or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition offeeling and motives ignored by the less conscious poetry of the past, itmight be ranked with the great epics. 

Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the"Life and Death of Jason, " the "Story of Gudrun, " and the "Trial ofGuinevere, " with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I haveequally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti. I have had a high joy insome of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves overConcord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled treadexpresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American museso often gets about in. 

The "Commemoration Ode" of Lowell has also been a source from which Idrank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet's own exalted mood, andI would set this level with the 'Biglow Papers, ' high above all his otherwork, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be rememberedby. Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is soobvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in whichhe shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men. The deepspiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness ofWhittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civicvirtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse. 

My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name becausethey are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure init not inconstant if not equal. I have spoken before of Longfellow asone of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; butsome of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrillsof happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter. 

Long after I had thought never to read it--in fact when I was 'nel mezzodel cammin di nostra vita'--I read Milton's "Paradise Lost, " and found init a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsedthe worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted hisworthiest. In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time Ispeak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and(shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez. After all, it is best tobe honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves thefewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that theRevenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be ableto whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the"AEneid" of Virgil; the "Georgics, " yes; but the "AEneid, " no. Sometime, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That isoften the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely. 

One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is thatwhen I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading. I fancy, that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merestpastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, andthat if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, insome other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff forit. At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for myfailure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet thatI spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge. I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given upreviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories, I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the earlydays before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy. But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month, so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparativelyspeaking. To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had readbefore, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intensepleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it. It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeplyto stir one's interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, andsuggest the most plausible theory I can think of. 

I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have itspsychological value. An important event of these years was a longsickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I wasforced to read in order to pass the intolerable time. But in this miseryI found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in theform of plays or of novels. The mere sight of the printed page, brokenup in dialogue, was anguish. Yet it was not the excitement of thefiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives oftravel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, orshipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was thedramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up toin the speech of his characters that I could not bear. I found a likeimpossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sentin to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wroughtsensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was. 

At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away theappetite for reading as completely as writing did. I recall nothing readin that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wroteof. 

XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY

In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston, in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books. Eventhen I had to wait for the time when I undertook a critical department inone of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the old enthusiasm for anauthor. That is to say, I had to begin reading for business again beforeI began reading for pleasure. One of the first great pleasures which Ihad upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary Spanish author. This was the 'Marta y Maria' of Armando Palacio Valdes, a novelist whodelights me beyond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his feelingfor character, and his subtle insight. I like every one of his booksthat I have read, and I believe that I have read nearly every one that hehas written. As I mention 'Riverito, Maximina, Un Idilio de un Inferno, La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, Espuma, ' the mere namesconjure up the scenes and events that have moved me to tears andlaughter, and filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in them. I think the 'Marta y Maria' one of the most truthful and profoundfictions I have read, and 'Maximina' one of the most pathetic, and'La Hermana de San Sulpizio' one of the most amusing. Fortunately, thesebooks of Valdes's have nearly all been translated, and the reader maytest the matter in English; though it necessarily halts somewhat behindthe Spanish. 

I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves rank Valdes with Galdos ornot, and I have no wish to decide upon their relative merits. They areboth present passions of mine, and I may say of the 'Dona Perfecta' ofGaldos that no book, if I except those of the greatest Russians, hasgiven me a keener and deeper impression; it is infinitely pathetic, andis full of humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is not lessdelicious. But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, andthough he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism thanValdes, since he has worked finally into such realism as that of LeonRoch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired. 

I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, called 'Morrina, 'which must rank her with the great realists of her country and age; she, too, has that humor of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish thanany other non-Anglo-Saxon people. 

A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less than these nobleSpaniards, is Giovanni Verga, who wrote 'I Malavoglia, ' or, as we call itin English, 'The House by the Medlar Tree': a story of infinite beauty, tenderness and truth. As I have said before, I think with Zola thatGiacometti, the Italian author of "La Morte Civile, " has written almostthe greatest play, all round, of modern times. 

But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epicgreatness? About his material there is no disputing among people of ourPuritanic tradition. It is simply abhorrent, but when you have oncegranted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to denyhis power. Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I tookup 'L'Assommoir, ' though unconsciously I had always been as much of arealist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascinationthat I felt the other day in reading his 'L'Argent. ' The critics knownow that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is fullof the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but forwhat he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, thatoutmasters him, and that is Tolstoy. For my own part, I think that thebooks of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through the factsthat they nakedly represent; they are infinitely more moral than thebooks of any other French novelist. This may not be saying a great deal, but it is saying the truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been oneof my great literary passions, almost as great as Flaubert, and greaterthan Daudet or Maupassant, though I have profoundly appreciated theexquisite artistry of both these. No French writer, however, has movedme so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor whichendears these, and is the quintessence of their charm. 

You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and Isuppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the companyof Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I shouldotherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as itis, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, havebeen a youthful rapture with me. Even without, much humor Trollope'sbooks have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness. Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to theBritish life and character present in them in the whole length andbreadth of its expansive commonplaceness. It is their serious fidelitywhich gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it werecarefully analyzed would afford a principle of the same quality in anauthor who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as themost Philistine of men. 

I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of what seems myperennial literary youth, to the love of Thomas Hardy, whom I first knewin his story 'A Pair of Blue Eyes. ' As usual, after I had read this bookand felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no otherauthor, and to read his books over and over. I love even the faults ofHardy; I will let him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not aboveplaying tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story or perplexed withit), if only he will go on making his peasants talk, and his ratheruncertain ladies get in and out of love, and serve themselves of everychance that fortune offers them of having their own way. We shrink fromthe unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy has divined in the heart ofour own race a lingering heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainlybeen no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians. Hisheroines especially exemplify it, and I should be safe in saying that hisEthelbertas, his Eustacias, his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies, are wholly pagan. I should not dare to ask how much of their charm camefrom that fact; and the author does not fail to show you how much harm, so that it is not on my conscience. His people live very close to theheart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives you a richerand sweeter sense of her unity with human nature. Hardy is a great poetas well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also hishumor would be enough to endear him to me. 

XXXV. TOLSTOY

I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of allthese enthusiasms--namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy. I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I donot know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect ofexaggeration. As much as one merely human being can help another Ibelieve that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aestheticsonly, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way Isaw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be aman; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leadsyou back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of thegentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men, but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentlemanshows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measureof his miserable egotism. I learned from Tolstoy to try character andmotive by no other test, and though I am perpetually false to thatsublime ideal myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me ashamedthat I am not true to it. Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the worldmay yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it, when allCaesars things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men shall comeinto their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruitsof their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other. He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personalhappiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the wholehuman family; and I can never lose this vision, however I close my eyes, and strive to see my own interest as the highest good. He gave me newcriterions, new principles, which, after all, were those that are taughtus in our earliest childhood, before we have come to the evil wisdom ofthe world. As I read his different ethical books, 'What to Do, ''My Confession, ' and 'My Religion, ' I recognized their truth with arapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them myallegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despairof the other. They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while Ilive. It is with inexpressible astonishment that I bear them attaintedof pessimism, as if the teaching of a man whose ideal was simple goodnessmust mean the prevalence of evil. The way he showed me seemed indeedimpossible to my will, but to my conscience it was and is the onlypossible way. If there, is any point on which he has not convinced myreason it is that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone. Eventhere he is logical, but as Zola subtly distinguishes in speaking ofTolstoy's essay on "Money, " he is not reasonable. Solitude enfeebles andpalsies, and it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the worldfrom itself, rather than themselves from the world. It was so theearliest Christians, who had all things common, understood the life ofChrist, and I believe that the latest will understand it so. 

I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, because they are ofthe first importance to me, but I think that his aesthetical works are asperfect. To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highestbeauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believethat they do this because they obey the law of the author's own life. His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will tobe true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others. Ithought the last word in literary art had been said to me by the novelsof Tourguenief, but it seemed like the first, merely, when I began toacquaint myself with the simpler method of Tolstoy. I came to it byaccident, and without any manner, of preoccupation in The Cossacks, oneof his early books, which had been on my shelves unread for five or sixyears. I did not know even Tolstoy's name when I opened it, and it waswith a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, and line byline, the truth of a new art in it. 

I do not know how it is that the great Russians have the secret ofsimplicity. Some say it is because they have not a long literary pastand are not conventionalized by the usage of many generations of otherwriters, but this will hardly account for the brotherly directness oftheir dealing with human nature; the absence of experience elsewherecharacterizes the artist with crudeness, and simplicity is the lasteffect of knowledge. Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in thissupreme grace. He has not only Tourguenief's transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value instyle, and which ought no more to be there than the artist's personalityshould be in a portrait; but he has a method which not only seems withoutartifice, but is so. I can get at the manner of most writers, and tellwhat it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy's manner is;perhaps he has no manner. This appears to me true of his novels, which, with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in theirsingle endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in theiraction and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion andcogitation. There are plenty of novelists to tell you that theircharacters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust;Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and nototherwise. If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesquedit is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; itis the only trait of his which I can put my hand on. 

After 'The Cossacks' I read 'Anna Karenina' with a deepening sense of theauthor's unrivalled greatness. I thought that I saw through his eyes ahuman affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to theInfinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature incircumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we havealmost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicitlove. When you have once read 'Anna Karenina' you know how fatallymiserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be. But the characterof Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna andVronsky. It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even meanin certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), infiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive withdignity. There is something crucial, and something triumphant, notbeyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in thiseffect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man. 

The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of 'War and Peace' madeit as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as 'Anna Karenina'had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interestsdid not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always asstrange and of a humanity always as known. 

I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came to this greatestwork of his: I read 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol, ' which is so muchof the same quality as 'War and Peace;' and I read 'Policoushka' and mostof his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as Ihad never felt with the people of other fiction. 

His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle intoallegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with thesimple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomesimpatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher, he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can moveonly through the realization of themselves in others. The simple pathos, and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of 'Poticoushka, 'the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large thanall his parables; and 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, ' the Philistineworldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the worldthan such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye havethe Light. " A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man whohas the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or tolet it rust out in disuse. 

Terrible as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' was, it had a moral effect dramaticallywhich it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, andapplied to marriage the lesson of one evil marriage. In fine, Tolstoy iscertainly not to be held up as infallible. He is very, distinctlyfallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certainthings it seems a failure. There was but one life ever lived upon theearth which was without failure, and that was Christ's, whose erring andstumbling follower Tolstoy is. There is no other example, no otherideal, and the chief use of Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age, after nineteen centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony forcharacter, and the creed for the life. I recognize the truth of thiswithout pretending to have been changed in anything but my point of viewof it. What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean andsordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy. 

Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he can never teach me. I am long past the age when I could wish to form myself upon anotherwriter, and I do not think I could now insensibly take on the likeness ofanother; but his work has been a revelation and a delight to me, such asI am sure I can never know again. I do not believe that in the wholecourse of my reading, and not even in the early moment of my literaryenthusiasms, I have known such utter satisfaction in any writer, and thissupreme joy has come to me at a time of life when new friendships, not tosay new passions, are rare and reluctant. It is as if the best wine atthis high feast where I have sat so long had been kept for the last, andI need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judgingvintages. In fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full ofmiracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, sothat I could profit most by it. I believe if I had not turned the cornerof my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have beenable to know him as fully as I did. He has been to me that finalconsciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on "Life. "I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt ofbefore, and began at least to discern my relations to the race, withoutwhich we are each nothing. The supreme art in literature had its highesteffect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with thewish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind, which any mancan pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy. 

CRITICISM AND FICTION

By William Dean Howells

The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one thatperpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor. Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of 'The Renaissance in Italy'treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so greatcry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but whichhe now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness andsoullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduringcriterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as tothe other arts. "Our hope, " he says, "with regard to the unity of tastein the future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings afterthe ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded uponidiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing acceptedbut what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make menprogressively more and more conscious of these 'bleibende Verhaltnisse, 'more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion aswe gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come tocomprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, andhonest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit thesequalities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the taskof a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws ofevolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence ofwork in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what thereis of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it. "

I

That is to say, as I understand, that moods and tastes and fashionschange; people fancy now this and now that; but what is unpretentious andwhat is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. Thisis not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do notplease; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time, andthen, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of therococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has. Fashion in women's dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will lookthrough a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that mostfashions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, havebeen very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these havepleased the greatest number of people. The ugly delights as well as thebeautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated withthe young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and wins agrace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is quite aslikely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be froman instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extremenaturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or toregard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than thebeautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather moreworthy, if anything. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutelybeautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of thebeautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the moreperfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but Ioffer it for no more than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith to thesaying of one whom I heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beautywas a joy forever. He contended that Keats's line should have read, "Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever, " and that anyassertion beyond this was too hazardous. 

II

I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, if I were to professany formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his "Beauty isTruth, Truth Beauty, " than even with my friend's reformation of the morequoted verse. It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the greatMr. Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful--a singularly modernbook, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steelewould have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of acertain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is ofthat droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got theneat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what itwas, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. "As forthose called critics, " the author says, "they have generally soughtthe rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give therules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists ingeneral, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle;they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Criticsfollow them, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge butpoorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easyobservation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, innature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity andindustry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights. "

If this should happen to be true and it certainly commends itself toacceptance--it might portend an immediate danger to the vested interestsof criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago; and we shallprobably have the "sagacity and industry that slights the observation" ofnature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some moreuseful trade than criticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am inhopes that the communistic era in taste foreshadowed by Burke isapproaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now overawedby the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything butthe expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than thatof their fidelity to it. The time is coming, I hope, when each newauthor, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to anyother author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known tous all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret. "Thetrue standard of the artist is in every man's power" already, as Burkesays; Michelangelo's "light of the piazza, " the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's "boys andblackbirds" have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; buthitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their ownsimplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of thebeautiful. They have always cast about for the instruction of some onewho professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-senseinto the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have fallengenerally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused andmisled" (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the falselights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taughtto compare what they see and what they read, not with the things thatthey have observed and known, but with the things that some other artistor writer has done. Especially if they have themselves the artisticimpulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not uponlife, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselvesupon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produceonly the still-born, the academic. They are not told to take their workinto the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, butto test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any othertest of their own work. The young writer who attempts to report thephrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he hasheard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of somethinglow and unworthy by people who would like to have him show howShakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, orBalzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize hispersonages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put thebook-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantryinto which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdrawsitself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imaginedsuperiority, and which would say with the same confidence to thescientist: "I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which youhave found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Nowdon't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I've got agrasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains andexpense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. It'smade up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventionaltint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like a realgrasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to representthe notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. Youmay say that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it'sideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'llfind the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace ofyours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do iscommonplace; but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the veryreason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it'sphotographic. "

As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but thecommon, average man, who always "has the standard of the arts in hispower, " will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the idealgrasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not "simple, natural, and honest, " because it is not like areal grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die outbefore the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field. I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find inthe mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them, eitherin print or out of it--some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentlemanwhose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago--and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favoriteauthors as all the law and the prophets. They have commonly read littleor nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standardtaken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; theyare destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; theysuppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is itswicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient forany occasion. The horror, the resentment, with which they receive anyquestion of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once veryfar in the moral and social scale, and anything short of offensivepersonality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are oneto be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturallyfallen. 

These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectualmission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an imageof a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a worldwhich was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest, but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longermistakable for heavenly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passingaway, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular. Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authorityexcept in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips andcaught her very accent. These moments are not continuous with anyauthors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am notafraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at allgreat, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like ourmeanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work bythe standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, thenatural, and the honest. 

Those good people must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and itis droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scornand hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in histurn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worshiphim. But it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever isestablished is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning ofthe century, when romance was making the same fight against effeteclassicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, theItalian poet Monti declared that "the romantic was the cold grave of theBeautiful, " just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic ofthat day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds ofsympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escapefrom the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse;and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience andprobability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginativeliterature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universallycharacterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feelshimself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk ofovermoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells fordestiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. Hecannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthyof notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the materialworld beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve theequality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vainshows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truthlives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false godsand misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grownpeople would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with "Jackthe Giant-killer" or "Puss-in-Boots, " under any name or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis deMontrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself thatBalzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; hewas not realistic, he was romanticistic. 

III

Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for contemninghis bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, andwhen he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. Inhis view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, nowignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude. He willnot expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even moreattracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than whenhe had become so. In 'Cesar Birotteau, ' for instance, he will beinterested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great thingsthat have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting likenessbetween his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's in 'Dead Souls, ' whichserves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men ofsuch widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent theircharacters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies; but in bringinghis story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence unknown to theRussian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon thefortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is not enough to haverehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him dietriumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst ofthe festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old home. Beforethis happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right andleft for acts of generosity towards the righteous bankrupt; even the kingsends him six thousand francs. It is very pretty; it is touching, andbrings the lump into the reader's throat; but it is too much, and oneperceives that Balzac lived too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men, especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses ofanalysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressingepithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. All this doesnot mean that 'Cesar Birotteau' is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good artstruggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean thatBalzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditionswhich he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct amechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly andbaldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is notso bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. It is simplyprimitive and inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it. 

IV

In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude inhis methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, andrecognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he wastediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolvedhis characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk asseldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive;that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express athought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that hetrusted his readers' intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in hisappeals to them. He was probably right: the generation which he wrotefor was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and inmaturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children ofto-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a greatman, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who wentbefore him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to beinstructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaevalideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy androyalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law ofGod; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he wereone of our contemporaries. Something of this is true of another master, greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being moreGerman, namely, the great Goethe himself. He taught us, in novelsotherwise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that itwas false to good art--which is never anything but the reflection oflife--to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom heoften allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in theactual world do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by itcan never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction toreaders; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goetheannovels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their solecontribution to the science of fiction. They are very primitive incertain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, anamusing helplessness in dramatization. "Wilhelm retired to his room, andindulged in the following reflections, " is a mode of analysis which wouldnot be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of nomenclature inWilhelm Meister is very drolly sentimental and feeble. The adventureswith robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and thetendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author'spart to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly, German as he was. Mixed up with the shadows and illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homelesslyabout among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of aluminosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry. What is useful in any review of Goethe's methods is the recognition ofthe fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master cannot produce amasterpiece in a new kind. The novel was too recently invented inGoethe's day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults ofapprentice work. 

V. 

In fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in manyways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance--it isnot worthy the name of novel--'Le Pere Goriot, ' which is full of amalarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After thatexquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabbyboarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by theexaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynicreasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villainof melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization athis command, and

 "So dyed double red"

in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrifiedspectators with his glare. A father fond of unworthy children, andleading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably andpathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, tremblingdotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to givethem happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct. The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternatingimpulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a careerof iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the mostcataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personagesthe plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot. Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural areimagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who reallythink about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in hisbetter mood he gave us such biographies as 'Eugenie Grandet, ' but becausehe wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify theexternals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things. It was still held that in order to interest the reader the charactersmust be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that"heroes" and "heroines" existed all around us, and that these abnormalbeings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy ofthe creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but thecritics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some ofthese poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, andthat human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them, are not good enough for novel-readers. 

This is more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics--and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out ofthe count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified intradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarilyconservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes andtheories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day, but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There isprobably no chair of literature in this country from which the principlesnow shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are notdenounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, orwhich teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has givenus the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia, of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of Vergain Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as towrite for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and moreperfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was inDickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been changed; theywill have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when itshall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all. 

VI. 

In the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us. To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savageswhom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe thathis use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservativesurgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assailthose who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must berude with those he does not like. It is too largely his superstitionthat because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thingit is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yetindefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personalpreference enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but onlyan assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise veryperfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. Heseems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himselfto disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or evenimplied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it isimmoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; itis hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at onetime and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business toclassify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as thenaturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise orblame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in histrampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as inthe botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find itpretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identifythe species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect andirregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty hewould be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more usefulmember of society; though considering the hard conditions under which heworks, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examinationof far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can evenhope to read, the average American critic--the ordinary critic ofcommerce, so to speak--is even now very, well indeed. Collectively he ismore than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the prettythorough appreciation of any book submitted to it. 

VII. 

The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that heis the heir of the false theory and bad manners of the English school. The theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person ofglib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch ofpolite literature; its manners are what we know. The American, whom ithas largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonlyhis criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that ofthe Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to beamateurish. In some degree our authors have freed themselves fromEnglish models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work ofthe Continent: but it is still the ambition of the American critic towrite like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, tostrive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him. He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of hisbusiness to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to placea book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, itsfunction, its character. The vast good-nature of our people preserves usfrom the worst effects of this criticism without principles. Our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence; I suspect that he is often offensivewithout knowing that he is so. Now and then he acts simply underinstruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is thetradition of his publication to do so. In other cases the critic isobliged to support his journal's repute for severity, or for wit, or formorality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked;this necessity more or less warps his verdicts. 

The worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is so easy and sonatural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect ourcriticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to itsranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when theyshall come to vote. They have come to write, and with the effect toincrease the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in ourliterary criticism before. They "know what they like"--that perniciousmaxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they passreadily from censuring an author's performance to censuring him. Theybring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work;they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they takekindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. But neitherhave they so much harm in them: they, too, are more ignorant thanmalevolent. 

VIII. 

Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learnfrom an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. A writer passes hiswhole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; thecritic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, butif he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and dosome other sort of thing--usually the sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently. If he could once understand that a man who haswritten the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about itskind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic mightlearn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by puttinghimself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use. He is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against himby writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far moreprofitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether theyhad better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author as not in anywise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect oflife, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him. 

The critic need not be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author. A little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact thata book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid thecivilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask forour criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its presentlustre. 

IX. 

I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the worldfor. The critic must perceive, if he will question himself morecarefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits ofliterature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, notto establish them; to report, not to create. 

It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than totell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that manyflourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if thescientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to knowsomething besides his own mind. He will have to know something of thelaws of that mind, and of its generic history. 

The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest andweakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do hisown work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, howmuch more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist thatcriticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was longalleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But criticism neithercured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, itcruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the criticto give pain to the author--the meanest critic to the greatest author--for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement hasbeen violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for hisvirtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads thecritics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself, and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off readingthem, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by theirharshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the generalexperience, modified, of course, by exceptions. 

Then, are we critics of no use in the world? I should not like to thinkthat, though I am not quite ready to define our use. More than one soberthinker is inclining at present to suspect that aesthetically orspecifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically;that we may register laws, but not enact them. I am not quite preparedto admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of itsfutility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so. It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popularfancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics, as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which nocritical favor can make acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon thatI wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point ofview was altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judgebooks not as dead things, but as living things--things which have aninfluence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely asexpressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Perhaps criticism has acumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of. It apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach himthrough the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish hisaudience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his ownpowers. If criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be throughthe writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonablyuncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again intheir own way. 

X. 

Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression of any creativeart is better than the finest comment upon it. I have sometimessuspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to thecreation of a poor novel than to the production of a brilliant criticism;and if any novel of our time fails to live a hundred years, will anycensure of it live? Who can endure to read old reviews? One can hardlyread them if they are in praise of one's own books. 

The author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, ifhe will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; thatthere have not been greater books since criticism became an art thanthere were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come muchearlier. 

That which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put aliterary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces, but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed inactivities, who have been used to employing language as they would haveemployed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing tobe said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort Ihave seen no modern book so unconscious as General Grant's 'PersonalMemoirs. ' The author's one end and aim is to get the facts out in words. He does not cast about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is, that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of menfor the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wastedin preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men; there isno thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the 'Book ofChronicles, ' as it is in the 'Pilgrim's Progress, ' with a peculiar, almost plebeian, plainness at times. There is no more attempt atdramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose; things happen in thattale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, withoutsetting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they wereall of one quality and degree. Judgments are delivered with the sameunimposing quiet; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which comesfrom the weight and justice of the opinions; it is always an unaffected, unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear theuniform of a private, with nothing of the general about him but theshoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets. 

XI. 

Canon Fairfax, 's opinions of literary criticism are very much to myliking, perhaps because when I read them I found them so like my own, already delivered in print. He tells the critics that "they are in nosense the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police";and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying that "a bad critic is probablythe most mischievous person in the world, " though a sense of theirrelative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worstamong them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad athing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far. Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the originalbooks which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself alaw-giver can give law only to the imitative and never to the creativemind. Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh andvital in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf ofthe old good thing; it has invariably fostered and encouraged the tame, the trite, the negative. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, the positive that has survived in literature. Whereas, if bad criticismwere the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implication ofthe words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, thatsurvived. 

Bad criticism is mischievous enough, however; and I think that much ifnot most current criticism as practised among the English and Americansis bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falselyprincipled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it isconditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the bestits opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiableprinciples, but are effects from the worship of certain models. They arein so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things that theoriginal mind cannot conform to models; it has its norm within itself; itcan work only in its own way, and by its self-given laws. Criticism doesnot inquire whether a work is true to life, but tacitly or explicitlycompares it with models, and tests it by them. If literary art travelledby any such road as criticism would have it go, it would travel in avicious circle, and would arrive only at the point of departure. Yetthis is the course that criticism must always prescribe when it attemptsto give laws. Being itself artificial, it cannot conceive of theoriginal except as the abnormal. It must altogether reconceive itsoffice before it can be of use to literature. It must reduce this to thebusiness of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing thematerial before it, and then synthetizing its impressions. Even then, itis not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectlywell without it. Just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays, sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism inthe literary world, and no more bad ones. 

But it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine itself acontrolling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issuedecrees. As it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatestmischief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened inmanner by the total abolition of anonymity. 

I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is somuch brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism ofliterature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproachingliterary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author withoutreference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite andprejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting aphrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints andcareless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author forhis opinions; with base and personal motives. 

Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals willcondemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never beenhis fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, thatin a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out forreview with the caution, "Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr. Blank's books. "

The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for humannature. 

XII. 

As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjustcriticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats's fame was long delayedby it, or Wordsworth's, or Browning's. Something unwonted, unexpected, in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the criticalperceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: But I haveno question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great menwere used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight ofthe wrong inflicted on them with impunity. This savage condition stillpersists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought tobe as extinct as the torture of witnesses. It is hard enough to treat afellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name toname, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in thedark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible. Every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that youshould say nothing in criticism of a man's book which you would not sayof it to his face. But I am afraid this is asking too much. I am afraidit would put an end to all criticism; and that if it were practisedliterature would be left to purify itself. I have no doubt literaturewould do this; but in such a state of things there would be no provisionfor the critics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reformthem, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption ofauthority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state. They are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there areprobably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and carefulmothers, among them. 

It is evident to any student of human nature that the critic who isobliged to sign his review will be more careful of an author's feelingsthan he would if he could intangibly and invisibly deal with him as therepresentative of a great journal. He will be loath to have his nameconnected with those perversions and misstatements of an author's meaningin which the critic now indulges without danger of being turned out ofhonest company. He will be in some degree forced to be fair and justwith a book he dislikes; he will not wish to misrepresent it when his sincan be traced directly to him in person; he will not be willing to voicethe prejudice of a journal which is "opposed to the books" of this orthat author; and the journal itself, when it is no longer responsible forthe behavior of its critic, may find it interesting and profitable togive to an author his innings when he feels wronged by a reviewer anddesires to right himself; it may even be eager to offer him theopportunity. We shall then, perhaps, frequently witness the spectacle ofauthors turning upon their reviewers, and improving their manners andmorals by confronting them in public with the errors they may now commitwith impunity. Many an author smarts under injuries and indignitieswhich he might resent to the advantage of literature and civilization, if he were not afraid of being browbeaten by the journal whose namelesscritic has outraged him. 

The public is now of opinion that it involves loss of dignity to creativetalent to try to right itself if wronged, but here we are without therequisite statistics. Creative talent may come off with all the dignityit went in with, and it may accomplish a very good work in demolishingcriticism. 

In any other relation of life the man who thinks himself wronged tries toright himself, violently, if he is a mistaken man, and lawfully if he isa wise man or a rich one, which is practically the same thing. But theauthor, dramatist, painter, sculptor, whose book, play, picture, statue, has been unfairly dealt with, as he believes, must make no effort toright himself with the public; he must bear his wrong in silence; he iseven expected to grin and bear it, as if it were funny. Every bodyunderstands that it is not funny to him, not in the least funny, buteverybody says that he cannot make an effort to get the public to takehis point of view without loss of dignity. This is very odd, but it isthe fact, and I suppose that it comes from the feeling that the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best he can for hisside in his book, play, picture, statue. This is partly true, and yet ifhe wishes to add something more to prove the critic wrong, I do not seehow his attempt to do so should involve loss of dignity. The public, which is so jealous for his dignity, does not otherwise use him as if hewere a very great and invaluable creature; if he fails, it lets himstarve like any one else. I should say that he lost dignity or not as hebehaved, in his effort to right himself, with petulance or withprinciple. If he betrayed a wounded vanity, if he impugned the motivesand accused the lives of his critics, I should certainly feel that he waslosing dignity; but if he temperately examined their theories, and triedto show where they were mistaken, I think he would not only gain dignity, but would perform a very useful work. 

XIII. 

I would beseech the literary critics of our country to disabusethemselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to theprogress of literature in the way critics have imagined. Canon Farrarconfesses that with the best will in the world to profit by the manycriticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least by any ofthem; and this is almost the universal experience of authors. It is notalways the fault of the critics. They sometimes deal honestly and fairlyby a book, and not so often they deal adequately. But in making a book, if it is at all a good book, the author has learned all that is knowableabout it, and every strong point and every weak point in it, far moreaccurately than any one else can possibly learn them. He has learned todo better than well for the future; but if his book is bad, he cannot betaught anything about it from the outside. It will perish; and if he hasnot the root of literature in him, he will perish as an author with it. But what is it that gives tendency in art, then? What is it makes peoplelike this at one time, and that at another? Above all, what makes abetter fashion change for a worse; how can the ugly come to be preferredto the beautiful; in other words, how can an art decay?

This question came up in my mind lately with regard to English fictionand its form, or rather its formlessness. How, for instance, couldpeople who had once known the simple verity, the refined perfection ofMiss Austere, enjoy, anything less refined and less perfect?

With her example before them, why should not English novelists have goneon writing simply, honestly, artistically, ever after? One would thinkit must have been impossible for them to do otherwise, if one did notremember, say, the lamentable behavior of the actors who support Mr. Jefferson, and their theatricality in the very presence of his beautifulnaturalness. It is very difficult, that simplicity, and nothing is sohard as to be honest, as the reader, if he has ever happened to try it, must know. "The big bow-wow I can do myself, like anyone going, " saidScott, but he owned that the exquisite touch of Miss Austere was deniedhim; and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater or lessmeasure to all her successors. But though reading and writing come bynature, as Dogberry justly said, a taste in them may be cultivated, oronce cultivated, it may be preserved; and why was it not so among thosepoor islanders? One does not ask such things in order to be at the painsof answering them one's self, but with the hope that some one else willtake the trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent partner inthe enterprise, which I shall leave mainly to Senor Armando PalacioValdes. This delightful author will, however, only be able to answer myquestion indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces oneof his novels, the charming story of 'The Sister of San Sulpizio, ' and Ishall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances. It isan essay which I wish every one intending to read, or even to write, anovel, might acquaint himself with; for it contains some of the best andclearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time whennearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it. 

Senor Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conceptionof realism; and he has some words of just censure for the Frenchnaturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimeseven mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference that passes betweenthis naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goessomewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The Frenchnaturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life. ". . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype ofthis literature is the 'Madame Bovary' of Flaubert. I am an admirer ofthis novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of itI have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this!There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there isin modern French life; but this seems to me exactly the best possiblereason for its being. I believe with Senor Valdes that "no literaturecan live long without joy, " not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but because no civilization can live long without joy. Theexpression of French life will change when French life changes; andFrench naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at itsbest. "No one, " as Senor Valdes truly says, "can rise from the perusalof a naturalistic book . . . Without a vivid desire to escape" fromthe wretched world depicted in it, "and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings whofigure in it. Naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for thenit would not merit the name of art; for though it is not the business ofart to preach morality, still I think that, resting on a divine andspiritual principle, like the idea of the beautiful, it is perforcemoral. I hold much more immoral other books which, under a glamour ofsomething spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray the vices in whichwe are allied to the beasts. Such, for example, are the works of OctaveFeuillet, Arsene Houssaye, Georges Ohnet, and other contemporarynovelists much in vogue among the higher classes of society. "

But what is this idea of the beautiful which art rests upon, and sobecomes moral? "The man of our time, " says Senor Valdes, "wishes to knoweverything and enjoy everything: he turns the objective of a powerfulequatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitates the infinitude ofthe stars, just as he applies the microscope to the infinitude of thesmallest insects; for their laws are identical. His experience, unitedwith intuition, has convinced him that in nature there is neither greatnor small; all is equal. All is equally grand, all is equally just, allis equally beautiful, because all is equally divine. " But beauty, SenorValdes explains, exists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effectwhich it receives from the true meaning of things; it does not matterwhat the things are, and it is the function of the artist who feels thiseffect to impart it to others. I may add that there is no joy in artexcept this perception of the meaning of things and its communication;when you have felt it, and portrayed it in a poem, a symphony, a novel, a statue, a picture, an edifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for whichyou were born an artist. 

The reflection of exterior nature in the individual spirit, Senor Valdesbelieves to be the fundamental of art. "To say, then, that the artistmust not copy but create is nonsense, because he can in no wise copy, andin no wise create. He who sets deliberately about modifying nature, shows that he has not felt her beauty, and therefore cannot make othersfeel it. The puerile desire which some artists without genius manifestto go about selecting in nature, not what seems to them beautiful, butwhat they think will seem beautiful to others, and rejecting what maydisplease them, ordinarily produces cold and insipid works. For, insteadof exploring the illimitable fields of reality, they cling to the formsinvented by other artists who have succeeded, and they make statues ofstatues, poems of poems, novels of novels. It is entirely false that thegreat romantic, symbolic, or classic poets modified nature; such as theyhave expressed her they felt her; and in this view they are as muchrealists as ourselves. In like manner if in the realistic tide that nowbears us on there are some spirits who feel nature in another way, in theromantic way, or the classic way, they would not falsify her inexpressing her so. Only those falsify her who, without feeling classicwise or romantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomelyreproducing the models of former ages; and equally those who, withoutsharing the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force themselves tobe realists merely to follow the fashion. "

The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking, for they sin against the living; whereas those who continue to celebratethe heroic adventures of "Puss-in-Boots" and the hair-breadth escapes of"Tom Thumb, " under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon theimmortals who have passed beyond these noises. 

XIV. 

"The principal cause, " our Spaniard says, "of the decadence ofcontemporary literature is found, to my thinking, in the vice which hasbeen very graphically called effectism, or the itch of awaking at allcost in the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do credit tothe invention and originality of the writer. This vice has its roots inhuman nature itself, and more particularly in that of the artist; he hasalways some thing feminine in him, which tempts him to coquet with thereader, and display qualities that he thinks will astonish him, as womenlaugh for no reason, to show their teeth when they have them white andsmall and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when there is nomud in the street . . . . What many writers nowadays wish, is toproduce an effect, grand and immediate, to play the part of geniuses. For this they have learned that it is only necessary to write exaggeratedworks in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they shall be quietlymade to think and feel, but that they shall be startled; and among thevulgar, of course, I include the great part of those who write literarycriticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach whatthey do not know . . . . There are many persons who suppose that thehighest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of acomplicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and thatanything else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagination. And not onlypeople who seem cultivated, but are not so, suppose this, but there aresensible persons, and even sagacious and intelligent critics, whosometimes allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the dramatic mystery andthe surprising and fantastic scenes of a novel. They own it is allfalse; but they admire the imagination, what they call the 'power' of theauthor. Very well; all I have to say is that the 'power' to dazzle withstrange incidents, to entertain with complicated plots and impossiblecharacters, now belongs to some hundreds of writers in Europe; whilethere are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with theordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner thanthe latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to theirfecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumasabove Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, withoutbelying much or little the natural and logical course of events. Thisnovel which was called 'Don Quixote, ' is perhaps the greatest work ofhuman wit. Very well; the same Cervantes, mischievously influencedafterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are nowand always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a livelyproof of his inventive talent, and wrote the 'Persiles and Sigismunda, 'where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, thepathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that itreally fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine, " says Seflor Valdes, "the place that Cervantes would now occupyin the heaven of art, if he had never written 'Don Quixote, '" but only'Persiles and Sigismund!'

From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to bemelted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose-fleshed, no less than to be "chippered up" in fiction, Senor Valdes wereindeed incorrigible. Not only does he despise the novel of complicatedplot, and everywhere prefer 'Don Quixote' to 'Persiles and Sigismunda, 'but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favorwith the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers "novelistsof the world, " and he says that more than any others they have the rageof effectism. "They do not seek to produce effect by novelty andinvention in plot . . . They seek it in character. For this end theybegin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them aparadoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . Love thatdisguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak ofweakness, virginal innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence, wit masquerading as folly, etc. , etc. By this means they hope to make aneffect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, andconscientious study of character. " He mentions Octave Feuillet as thegreatest offender in this sort among the French, and Bulwer among theEnglish; but Dickens is full of it (Boffin in 'Our Mutual Friend' willsuffice for all example), and most drama is witness of the result of thiseffectism when allowed full play. 

But what, then, if he is not pleased with Dumas, or with the effectistswho delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of theromances, what, I ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult Spanishgentleman? He would pretend, very little. Give him simple, lifelikecharacter; that is all he wants. "For me, the only condition ofcharacter is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to knowwhat was human, I should study humanity. "

But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes! Do not you know that this smallcondition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift ofthe whole earth? You merely ask that the character portrayed in fictionbe human; and you suggest that the novelist should study humanity if hewould know whether his personages are human. This appears to me thecruelest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you hadasked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, orpreterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not tohumanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it wouldhave been all very easy. The books are full of those "creations, " ofevery pattern, of all ages, of both sexes; and it is so much handier toget at books than to get at Men; and when you have portrayed "passion"instead of feeling, and used "power" instead of common-sense, and shownyourself a "genius" instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt andthe glory so cheap, that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful ofone's time. One may not make one's reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but onemay give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjuring, or from apuppet-show, or a modern stage-play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in the sort of stupor that comes from hitting the pipe; or if he is ayoung fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities and impulses likehis own in an apotheosis of achievement and fruition far beyond anyearthly experience. 

But apparently Senor Valdes would not think this any great artisticresult. "Things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who isnot an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit ofthe artist possesses itself of them. We all take part every day in athousand domestic scenes, every day we see a thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impression upon us, or if they make any it is one ofrepugnance; but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth, but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a mostinteresting work, whose perusal enchants us. That which in life left usindifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. Why? Simply becausethe artist has made us see the idea that resides in it. Let not thenovelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it andtwist it, to restrict it. Since nature has endowed them with thisprecious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will bebeautiful if they paint these as they appear. But if the reality doesnot impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impressothers. "

XV. 

Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and hernovels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and theywere beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with naturenearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism isnothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists totreat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, sheremains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy tobe matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. Itis not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English havemind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste hasbeen perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personalpreference, and not upon, principle; which instructs a man to think thatwhat he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish whatis good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and CharlotteBronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania ofromanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could notescape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery inEngland, because English criticism, in the presence of the Continentalmasterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and hasexpressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of theartist rather than the character of his work. It was inevitable that intheir time the English romanticists should treat, as Senor Valdes says, "the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, as Walter Scott and his kind did;" that they should "devote themselves tofalsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifyingpsychology after their own fancy, " like Bulwer and Dickens, as well aslike Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst ofall that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the disease;but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame forthe rest: not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, forcriticism can never affect the actual doing of a thing; but for theesteem in which this writer or that is held through the perpetuation offalse ideals. The only observer of English middle-class life since JaneAusten worthy to be named with her was not George Eliot, who was firstethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the formand method most essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her. It was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple honesty andinstinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day; but hewas so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be likeThackeray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over with hishands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusionin which alone the truth of art resides. Mainly, his instinct was toomuch for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relationsand a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty issurpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels ofThomas Hardy. Yet if a vote of English criticism even at this late day, when all Continental Europe has the light of aesthetic truth, could betaken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelmingly infavor of a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he neverhesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among hischaracters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him howbeautiful or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties. 

"How few materials, " says Emerson, "are yet used by our arts! The mass ofcreatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant, " and to break newground is still one of the uncommonest and most heroic of the virtues. The artists are not alone to blame for the timidity that keeps them inthe old furrows of the worn-out fields; most of those whom they live toplease, or live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it wantsrare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well as to invent it; and the"easy things to understand" are the conventional things. This is why theordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, ismore comfortable to the ordinary American than an American novel, whichdeals, at its worst, with comparatively new interests and motives. Toadjust one's self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort, and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. Itis only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson: "I ask notfor the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . I embrace the common;I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . Man issurprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrousthan things remote . . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgaris fruitful in discoveries . . . . The foolish man wonders at theunusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . To-day always looksmean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations ofwonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos. "

Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple ofDelphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they wouldstill insist upon having them. An English novel, full of titles andrank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weakand childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; theyknow what they are reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmedover reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studiedand faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving. Theyare not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is goodsociety; its characters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace;they say they do not wish to know such people. 

Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while thesense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weakwith most people, with the vast majority who "ask for the great, theremote, the romantic, " who cannot "embrace the common, " cannot "sit atthe feet of the familiar and the low, " in the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the finepeople we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeianingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarityconsists in trying to ignore "the worth of the vulgar, " in believing thatthe superfine is better. 

XVII. 

Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me greatpleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of Senor Valdes aboutfiction that he boldly declares himself, in the preface to his 'PepitaXimenez, ' "an advocate of art for art's sake. " I heartily agree with himthat it is "in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, toattempt to prove theses by writing stories, " and yet if it is true that"the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithfulrepresentation of human actions and human passions, and to create by thisfidelity to nature a beautiful work, " and if "the creation of thebeautiful" is solely "the object of art, " it never was and never can besolely its effect as long as men are men and women are women. If everthe race is resolved into abstract qualities, perhaps this may happen;but till then the finest effect of the "beautiful" will be ethical andnot aesthetic merely. Morality penetrates all things, it is the soul ofall things. Beauty may clothe it on, whether it is false morality and anevil soul, or whether it is true and a good soul. In the one case thebeauty will corrupt, and in the other it will edify, and in either caseit will infallibly and inevitably have an ethical effect, now light, nowgrave, according as the thing is light or grave. We cannot escape fromthis; we are shut up to it by the very conditions of our being. For themoment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one haslived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, itis not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affectsone, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them. Will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or thatprinciple involved? I cannot hold him to less account than this: he mustbe true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he maylet any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully. The greater his power, the greater his responsibility before the humanconscience, which is God in us. But men come and go, and what they do intheir limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment; it iswhat they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evilwhich Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur vive him. There is akind of thing--a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness andcommon-sense which is called the Unmoral; and is supposed to be differentfrom the Immoral; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of thefaults of Goethe. His 'Wilhelm Meister, ' for example, is so far removedwithin the region of the "ideal" that its unprincipled, its evilprincipled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced "unmorality, " and istherefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete withoutsome recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl thebook across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality. For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in hislife by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of hisliterature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of theday when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utteranceto the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, inart, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pridenor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the"geniuses" who have forgotten their duty to the common weakness, and haveabused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at manymonsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we stillmore or less openly adore for their "genius, " and shall account no manworshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle ofstrenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mislead; it will notsanctify or palliate iniquity; it will only render it the more hideousand pitiable. 

In fact, the whole belief in "genius" seems to me rather a mischievoussuperstition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition. From the account of those who talk about it, "genius" appears to be theattribute of a sort of very potent and admirable prodigy which God hascreated out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the restof us poor human beings. But do they really believe it? Do they meananything more or less than the Mastery which comes to any man accordingto his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have anend of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so longwriting and reading of the difference between talent and genius? It iswithin the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in thebelief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it;and why should we still suffer under the notion of "genius" which keepsso many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they haveit, or have only "talent"?

One of the greatest captains who ever lived [General U. S. Grant D. W. ]--a plain, taciturn, unaffected soul--has told the story of his wonderfullife as unconsciously as if it were all an every-day affair, notdifferent from other lives, except as a great exigency of the human racegave it importance. So far as he knew, he had no natural aptitude forarms, and certainly no love for the calling. But he went to West Pointbecause, as he quaintly tells us, his father "rather thought he wouldgo"; and he fought through one war with credit, but without glory. Theother war, which was to claim his powers and his science, found himengaged in the most prosaic of peaceful occupations; he obeyed its callbecause he loved his country, and not because he loved war. All theworld knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater militarymastery has not been shown than his campaigns illustrated. He does notsay this in his book, or hint it in any way; he gives you the facts, andleaves them with you. But the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, writtenas simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched inthe most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity orattitudinizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece ofliterature, because great literature is nothing more nor less than theclear expression of minds that have some thing great in them, whetherreligion, or beauty, or deep experience. Probably Grant would have saidthat he had no more vocation to literature than he had to war. He owns, with something like contrition, that he used to read a great many novels;but we think he would have denied the soft impeachment of literary power. Nevertheless, he shows it, as he showed military power, unexpectedly, almost miraculously. All the conditions here, then, are favorable tosupposing a case of "genius. " Yet who would trifle with that great heirof fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speaking of "genius" and himtogether? Who calls Washington a genius? or Franklin, or Bismarck, orCavour, or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lincoln? Were these mensecond-rate in their way? Or is "genius" that indefinable, preternaturalquality, sacred to the musicians, the painters, the sculptors, theactors, the poets, and above all, the poets? Or is it that the poets, having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shamelessself-flattery, and would persuade the inarticulate classes thatthey are on peculiar terms of confidence with the deity?

XVIII. 

In General Grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort ofinference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience ofthe novelist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be, there is certainly no question concerning the intention of acorrespondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather braggingclaims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have verygrave doubts, " he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things thatyou seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness inmyself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in mymental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever isinjurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worsethan that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of lifethat plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with nosympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over theimpossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine. "

I am not sure that I had the controversy with this correspondent that heseemed to suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every onepretending to cultivated taste and they really form the wholeintellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question oftheir influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to havethem frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise one's ideas andfeelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal ofhonesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, andas we have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part I willconfess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largelyinjurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost whollyinjurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and itsaimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-readingwhich people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mentalfaculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, andleft weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called thenegative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that mostnovels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of youngmen whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women ofall ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world theymisrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in the othercases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true--not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies abouthuman nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and tounderstand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fictionhabit "whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever isinjurious, " in one's life; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably notresponsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe thatif the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth withwhich the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself aswith the true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species. 

The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure; and thistest will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminentexamples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoralromances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited bythe penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the realworld, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickleour prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities orpamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, but theyare innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds. No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readersindifferent to "plodding perseverance and plain industry, " and to"matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace distress. "

Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the "gaudyhero and heroine" are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or thepassion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it waslasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was altogether a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; thatlove alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly incomparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and illustrateDuty, and she is hardly less mischievous in this new role, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and reason. The stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not fail to see was a most deplorableperson, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fictionhabit as admirable. With him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement or manifoldsuffering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the"virile, " the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agoniesof self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences of theinsane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor heis really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and hisdelusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of asavage, which the guilty author of his being does his best--or his worst--in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader assomething generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this chargeagainst that sort of fiction which is beneath literature and outside ofit, "the shoreless lakes of ditch-water, " whose miasms fill the air belowthe empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of someof the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned againstthe truth, which can alone exalt and purify men. I do not say that theyhave constantly done so, or even commonly done so; but that they havedone so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the duehistorical allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For I believethat, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate them intheir foibles and their errors, no one here after will be able to achievegreatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. The light of civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and noconscientious man can now set about painting an image of life withoutperpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling boundto distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, betweenwhat is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what ishealth and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters heportrays. 

The fiction that aims merely to entertain--the fiction that is to seriousfiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to thetrue drama--need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; buteven such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, andcriticism should hold it to account if it passes from painting toteaching folly. 

I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination withoutfirst of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before weask anything else, Is it true?--true to the motives, the impulses, theprinciples that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry--this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; andwithout it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning ofconstruction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well forthe truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood theyare merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone fornothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come naturally oftruth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. In thewhole range of fiction I know of no true picture of life--that is, ofhuman nature--which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full ofdivine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this specialcivilization or of that; it had better have this local color wellascertained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if thebook is true to what men and women know of one another's souls it will betrue enough, and it will be great and beautiful. It is the conception ofliterature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makesit really unimportant to the great mass of mankind, without a message ora meaning for them; and it is the notion that a novel may be false in itsportrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible evento those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as aserious or right-minded person. If they do not in some moment ofindignation cry out against all novels, as my correspondent does, theyremain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with nohigher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as thefrequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fillshis pipe with the drug. 

Or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youthhe "read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse racing and card-playing, " for which he had no time when heentered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merelycontemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhoodand sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion;and I urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that ofsome Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it isstill the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life isearnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it inour books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close thedoors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but wecannot shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at work, fromwherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, oftriviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape convictionexcept he prove himself worthy of his time--a time in which the greatmasters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veinswith the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them; we need notcopy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration andtheir power; and to draw from these no one need go far--no one needreally go out of himself. 

Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whomit was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrotein his study of Diderot: "Were it not reasonable to prophesy that thisexceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a newgeneration, gradually do one of two things: either retire into thenurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons ofboth sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric intothe dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have tounderstand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and willforever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance tous? Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing buthigher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons), Reality. "

If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for "children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, " it is nevertheless oneof the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that it has begun to workfor "grown persons, " and if not exactly in the way that Carlyle mighthave solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead ofbuilding the "novel-fabric, " still it has, in the highest and widestsense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do noteven care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceiveof a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade ofmake-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is toomuch honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. Butlet fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as theyare, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know;let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires;let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let itforbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism andprejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figuresand occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let itspeak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know--the languageof unaffected people everywhere--and there can be no doubt of anunlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it. 

XIX. 

This is what I say in my severer moods, but at other times I know that, of course, no one is going to hold all fiction to such strict account. There is a great deal of it which may be very well left to amuse us, ifit can, when we are sick or when we are silly, and I am not inclined todespise it in the performance of this office. Or, if people findpleasure in having their blood curdled for the sake of having ituncurdled again at the end of the book, I would not interfere with theiramusement, though I do not desire it. 

There is a certain demand in primitive natures for the kind of fictionthat does this, and the author of it is usually very proud of it. Thekind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to take hisreader's mind, or what that reader would probably call his mind, offhimself; they make one forget life and all its cares and duties; they arenot in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shameyou into at least wishing to be a helpfuller and wholesomer creature thanyou are. No sordid details of verity here, if you please; no wretchedbeing humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, sufferingfor his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortificationof self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great, whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroicadventure and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage"picture" at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in arow, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their righthands to the audience, in the old way that has always charmed and alwayswill charm, Heaven bless it!

In a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practicallybloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort offiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because hefancies it the first place. In fact, it is a condition of his doing wellthe kind of work he does that he should think it important, that heshould believe in himself; and I would not take away this faith of his, even if I could. As I say, he has his place. The world often likes toforget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, hishair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage. Perhaps this is a work of beneficence; and perhaps our brave conjurer inhis cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise. 

Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the wholeEnglish-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the"recrudescence" of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable inAmerica than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of thedry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anythingthat is wild and strange and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has beenevident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our periodicals has putinto convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a testof merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love ofthe marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by"the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters" for fictionof that sort, but by the "literary elect" also, is proof of someprinciple in human nature which ought to be respected as well astolerated. He seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion formsa sufficient answer to those who say that art should represent life, andthat the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art. Butit appears to me that a little carefuller reasoning from a little closerinspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions. In the first place, I doubt very much whether the "literary elect" havebeen fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if Isupposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still beable to account for their fondness and that of the "unthinking multitude"upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. It is thehabit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all themembers of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error. Manypersons in every civilized community live in a state of more or lessevident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and theirpropensities; and they are held in check only by the law. Many more yetare savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of theirhouses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and theseare left to the restraints of public opinion. In fact, no man can besaid to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, inwhich the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At thesetimes the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and theirgratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated personmay then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerelyand thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age. 

I do not blame him for these moods; I find something instructive andinteresting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him, I could not help deploring the state of that person. No one can reallythink that the "literary elect, " who are said to have joined the"unthinking multitude" in clamoring about the book counters for theromances of no-man's land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as theydo in a novel of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, Manzoni, Hawthorne, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor PalacioValdes, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the "unthinkingmultitude, " perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect tofind relaxation in feeling--feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For oncein a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all. It isperfectly natural; let them have their innocent debauch. But let usdistinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kindsof things that please the same kind of people; between the things thatplease them habitually and those that please them occasionally; betweenthe pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. Otherwise weshall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the "unthinkingmultitude, " and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage. We shall be soin moods and at moments; but let us not fancy that those are high moodsor fortunate moments. If they are harmless, that is the most that can besaid for them. They are lapses from which we can perhaps go forward morevigorously; but even this is not certain. 

My own philosophy of the matter, however, would not bring me toprohibition of such literary amusements as the writer quoted seems tofind significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity infiction. Once more, I say, these amusements have their place, as thecircus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, andprestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but wehad better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it ishardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the "literary elect"in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if itexists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature whichcomes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than thepermanent state of the "unthinking multitude. "

Yet even as regards the "unthinking multitude, " I believe I am not ableto take the attitude of the writer I have quoted. I am afraid that Irespect them more than he would like to have me, though I cannot alwaysrespect their taste, any more than that of the "literary elect. "I respect them for their good sense in most practical matters; for theirlaborious, honest lives; for their kindness, their good-will; for thataspiration towards something better than themselves which seems to stir, however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to literary pride orother forms of self-righteousness. I find every man interesting, whetherhe thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage or civilized; for this reasonI cannot thank the novelist who teaches us not to know but to unknow ourkind. Yet I should by no means hold him to such strict account asEmerson, who felt the absence of the best motive, even in the greatest ofthe masters, when he said of Shakespeare that, after all, he was onlymaster of the revels. The judgment is so severe, even with the praisewhich precedes it, that one winces under it; and if one is still young, with the world gay before him, and life full of joyous promise, one isapt to ask, defiantly, Well, what is better than being such a master ofthe revels as Shakespeare was? Let each judge for himself. To the heartagain of serious youth, uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it mustalways be a grief that the great masters seem so often to have beenwilling to amuse the leisure and vacancy of meaner men, and leave theirmission to the soul but partially fulfilled. This, perhaps, was whatEmerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gaveus, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homilyas "Macbeth, " one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations ofthe dramatist's art. Few consciences, at times, seem so enlightened asthat of this personally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, andso lost to the intensest curiosity of after-time; at other times he seemsmerely Elizabethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfectsympathy. 

XX. 

Of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, I wouldeven encourage the writing, though it is one of the hard conditions ofromance that its personages starting with a 'parti pris' can rarely becharacters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to theexpression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the God-givencomplexity of motive which we find in all the human beings we know. 

Hawthorne, the great master of the romance, had the insight and the powerto create it anew as a kind in fiction; though I am not sure that 'TheScarlet Letter' and the 'Blithedale Romance' are not, strictly speaking, novels rather than romances. They, do not play with some oldsuperstition long outgrown, and they do not invent a new superstition toplay with, but deal with things vital in every one's pulse. I am notsaying that what may be called the fantastic romance--the romance thatdescends from 'Frankenstein' rather than 'The Scarlet Letter'--ought notto be. On the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieveto lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful thingsthat amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a worldwhere men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to thedecorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot beranked with the works of the imagination--the works that represent andbody forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refinedpleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuabletruth. 

Perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened withadvantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face toface with human nature, but require the haze of distance or a farperspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost. Thereis no good reason why these harmless people should not be amused, ortheir little preferences indulged. 

But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are sofatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find themadmirably contrived in some respects. When I have owned the excellenceof the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which thecarpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, I am at theend of my praises. The people affect me like persons of our generationmade up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, andalmost amateurs. They have the quality that makes the histrionics ofamateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, thewickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene. 

Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earliertypes of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at humannature, and I will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by thepoetic romancer or the historical romancer because I find my pleasurechiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, andBalzac at his best. 

XXI. 

It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance inAmerica, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that therewere so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity;and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, 'TheCrime and the Punishment, ' that whoever struck a note so profoundlytragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as falseand as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certainnudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever theirdeserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, orfinally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth; and in a land wherejourneymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sumof hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class toclass has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for theworse. Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the moresmiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek theuniversal in the individual rather than the social interests. It isworth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true toour well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to besoftened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not besaid to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Sin and suffering and shame there must always be in the world, I suppose, but I believe that in this new world of ours it is still mainly from oneto another one, and oftener still from one to one's self. We have death, too, in America, and a great deal of disagreeable and painful disease, which the multiplicity of our patent medicines does not seem to cure;but this is tragedy that comes in the very nature of things, and is notpeculiarly American, as the large, cheerful average of health and successand happy life is. It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true tothe facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles, the race here has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that havedarkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfishbehavior. 

Fine artists we have among us, and right-minded as far as they go; and wemust not forget this at evil moments when it seems as if all the womenhad taken to writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men weretrying to be at least as hysterical in despair of being as improper. Other traits are much more characteristic of our life and our fiction. In most American novels, vivid and graphic as the best of them are, thepeople are segregated if not sequestered, and the scene is sparselypopulated. The effect may be in instinctive response to the vacancy ofour social life, and I shall not make haste to blame it. There are fewplaces, few occasions among us, in which a novelist can get a largenumber of polite people together, or at least keep them together. Unlesshe carries a snap-camera his picture of them has no probability; theyaffect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in such deadly oldengravings as that of "Washington Irving and his Friends. " Perhaps it isfor this reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four figures, or in studies of rustic communities, where there is propinquity if notsociety. Our grasp of more urbane life is feeble; most attempts toassemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is tootransitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfullyrepresented as really existent. 

I am not sure that the Americans have not brought the short story nearerperfection in the all-round sense that almost any other people, and forreasons very simple and near at hand. It might be argued from thenational hurry and impatience that it was a literary form peculiarlyadapted to the American temperament, but I suspect that its extraordinarydevelopment among us is owing much more to more tangible facts. The success of American magazines, which is nothing less than prodigious, is only commensurate with their excellence. Their sort of success is notonly from the courage to decide which ought to please, but from theknowledge of what does please; and it is probable that, aside from thepictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our bestmagazines. The serial novels they must have, of course; but rather moreof course they must have short stories, and by operation of the law ofsupply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellentin quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. By anotheroperation of the same law, which political economists have more recentlytaken account of, the demand follows the supply, and short stories aresought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and peopleread them willingly because they are usually very good. The art ofwriting them is now so disciplined and diffused with us that there is nolack either for the magazines or for the newspaper "syndicates" whichdeal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials. 

An interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the shortstory among us is that the sketches and studies by the women seemfaithfuller and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion totheir number. Their tendency is more distinctly in that direction, andthere is a solidity, an honest observation, in the work of such women, which often leaves little to be desired. I should, upon the whole, be disposed to rank American short stories only below those of suchRussian writers as I have read, and I should praise rather than blametheir free use of our different local parlances, or "dialects, " as peoplecall them. I like this because I hope that our inherited English may beconstantly freshened and revived from the native sources which ourliterary decentralization will help to keep open, and I will own that asI turn over novels coming from Philadelphia, from New Mexico, fromBoston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, everylocal flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure. Alphonse Daudet, in a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of Tourguenief, "What a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric languageto wade into! We poor fellows who work in the language of an oldcivilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only tofind in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing. The crown-jewels of our French tongue have passed through the hands of so manygenerations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of anylate-born pretender to attempt to wear them. "

This grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has a certainmeasure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more seriouslyexpressed by the Italian poet Aleardi:

 "Muse of an aged people, in the eve Of fading civilization, I was born. . . . . . . Oh, fortunate, My sisters, who in the heroic dawn Of races sung! To them did destiny give The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness Of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands Ran over potent strings. "

It will never do to allow that we are at such a desperate pass inEnglish, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinkingof "the spacious times of great Elizabeth, " when the poets were tryingthe stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises oftheir own music. We may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer aluxury of grief, by remembering that no language is ever old on the lipsof those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it drops from the pen. We have only to leave our studies, editorial and other, and go into theshops and fields to find the "spacious times" again; and from thebeginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divinedthis near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatestand finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabethwas still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not inviteslang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has beendropping its "s" and becoming language ever since the world began, and iscertainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of thedictionary. I would not have any one go about for new words, but if oneof them came aptly, not to reject its help. For our novelists to try towrite Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but beingborn Americans, I then use "Americanisms" whenever these serve theirturn; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speaktrue American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write whatthe critics imagine to be "English, " we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English. " There is alsothis serious disadvantage about "English, " that if we wrote the best"English" in the world, probably the English themselves would not knowit, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always beensupposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as theyfind it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. Godapparently meant them for the common people; and the common people willuse them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips ourcontinental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable. 

In fine, I would have our American novelists be as American as theyunconsciously can. Matthew Arnold complained that he found no"distinction" in our life, and I would gladly persuade all artistsintending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the factpointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building upa state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in theirrights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the godshave taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilizationin which there is no "distinction" perceptible to the eye that loves andvalues it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality ofsolidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to thedisadvantage of anything else. It seems to me that these conditionsinvite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and tothe portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which uniterather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order ofthings. The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day worldand catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, neednot fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured inthe superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, thedistinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving orwriting. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have theexpression of America in art; and the reproach which Arnold was halfright in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be"distinguished. "

XXII. 

In the mean time it has been said with a superficial justice that ourfiction is narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present Englishfiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in acertain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief andrestricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, isnarrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except Tolstoy, arenarrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguenief, is the narrowestgreat novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearlyalways with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most Americanfashion. In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency ofmodern fiction as much as the American school. But I do not by any meansallow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is auniversal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North andSouth, thorough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint usintimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhoodor a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be callednarrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and thisdepth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization likeours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not oftypes either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary indealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, becausethe whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoy is exceptionallyvoluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might besaid that the forte of Tolstoy himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and downward. 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch'leaves as vast an impression on the reader's soul as any episode of'War and Peace, ' which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and notas a whole. I think that our writers may be safely counselled tocontinue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yetknown. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what itssuperficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make itbig. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less looselyconnected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why thisthread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, orit may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from thetruth of each episode, not from the size of the group. 

The whole field of human experience as never so nearly covered byimaginative literature in any age as in this; and American lifeespecially is getting represented with unexampled fulness. It is truethat no one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not possible;our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may foreverforbid it. But a great number of very good writers are instinctivelystriving to make each part of the country and each phase of ourcivilization known to all the other parts; and their work is not narrowin any feeble or vicious sense. The world was once very little, and itis now very large. Formerly, all science could be grasped by a singlemind; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science mustdevote himself to a single department. It is so in everything--all arts, all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the universal ruleagainst universality. He contributes his share to a thorough knowledgeof groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspiringnovelty and interest. He works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfullythan the novelist ever worked before; his work, or much of it, may bedestined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines; but if heturns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the British or otherclassics, he knows that they, too, are for the most part dead; he knowsthat the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun atlast, with all its surviving literature upon it. The question is merelyone of time. He consoles himself, therefore, if he is wise, and workson; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most thingscannot be helped. Especially a movement in literature like that whichthe world is now witnessing cannot be helped; and we could no more turnback and be of the literary fashions of any age before this than we couldturn back and be of its social, economical, or political conditions. 

If I were authorized to address any word directly to our novelists Ishould say, Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but tryto be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, nobeauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things;and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered. 

At least three-fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages, no more lives than the poems and stories that perish monthly in ourmagazines. It is all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, century after century; but it is not alive; it is as dead as the peoplewho wrote it and read it, and to whom it meant something, perhaps; withwhom it was a fashion, a caprice, a passing taste. A superstitious pietypreserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic qualities which candelight or edify; but nobody really enjoys it, except as a reflection ofthe past moods and humors of the race, or a revelation of the author'scharacter; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy trash, which thepresent trash generally is not. 

XXIII. 

One of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent Americanauthors to speak their minds upon a point in the theory and practice offiction which had already vexed some of them. It was the question of howmuch or how little the American novel ought to deal with certain facts oflife which are not usually talked of before young people, and especiallyyoung ladies. Of course the question was not decided, and I forget justhow far the balance inclined in favor of a larger freedom in the matter. But it certainly inclined that way; one or two writers of the sex whichis somehow supposed to have purity in its keeping (as if purity were athing that did not practically concern the other sex, preoccupied withserious affairs) gave it a rather vigorous tilt to that side. In view ofthis fact it would not be the part of prudence to make an effort to dressthe balance; and indeed I do not know that I was going to make any sucheffort. But there are some things to say, around and about the subject, which I should like to have some one else say, and which I may myselfpossibly be safe in suggesting. 

One of the first of these is the fact, generally lost sight of by thosewho censure the Anglo-Saxon novel for its prudishness, that it is reallynot such a prude after all; and that if it is sometimes apparentlyanxious to avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before youngpeople, this may be an appearance only. Sometimes a novel which has thisshuffling air, this effect of truckling to propriety, might defenditself, if it could speak for itself, by saying that such experienceshappened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far from maiming ormutilating itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfullyrepresentative of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that waschaste, and with passion so honest that it could be openly spoken ofbefore the tenderest society bud at dinner. It might say that the guiltyintrigue, the betrayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the exceptionalthing in life, and unless the scheme of the story necessarily involvedit, that it would be bad art to lug it in, and as bad taste as tointroduce such topics in a mixed company. It could say very justly thatthe novel in our civilization now always addresses a mixed company, andthat the vast majority of the company are ladies, and that very many, ifnot most, of these ladies are young girls. If the novel were written formen and for married women alone, as in continental Europe, it might bealtogether different. But the simple fact is that it is not written forthem alone among us, and it is a question of writing, under cover of ouruniversal acceptance, things for young girls to read which you would beput out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice of yourintention, and so cutting yourself off from the pleasure--and it is avery high and sweet one of appealing to these vivid, responsiveintelligences, which are none the less brilliant and admirable becausethey are innocent. 

One day a novelist who liked, after the manner of other men, to repine athis hard fate, complained to his friend, a critic, that he was tired ofthe restriction he had put upon himself in this regard; for it is amistake, as can be readily shown, to suppose that others impose it. "Seehow free those French fellows are!" he rebelled. "Shall we always beshut up to our tradition of decency?"

"Do you think it's much worse than being shut up to their tradition ofindecency?" said his friend. 

Then that novelist began to reflect, and he remembered how sick theinvariable motive of the French novel made him. He perceived finallythat, convention for convention, ours was not only more tolerable, but onthe whole was truer to life, not only to its complexion, but also to itstexture. No one will pretend that there is not vicious love beneath thesurface of our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorcetrials would refute him; but if he pretended that it was in any justsense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easilyrefuted. Yet it exists, and it is unquestionably the material oftragedy, the stuff from which intense effects are wrought. The question, after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rathercheap effects. I incline to think they are, and I will try to say why Ithink so, if I may do so without offence. The material itself, the meremention of it, has an instant fascination; it arrests, it detains, tillthe last word is said, and while there is anything to be hinted. This iswhat makes a love intrigue of some sort all but essential to thepopularity of any fiction. Without such an intrigue the intellectualequipment of the author must be of the highest, and then he will succeedonly with the highest class of readers. But any author who will dealwith a guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the highestwith the lowest, as long as he hints the slightest hope of the smallestpotential naughtiness. He need not at all be a great author; he may be avery shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick of that sortof thing. The critics will call him "virile" and "passionate"; decentpeople will be ashamed to have been limed by him; but the low averagewill only ask another chance of flocking into his net. If he happens tobe an able writer, his really fine and costly work will be unheeded, andthe lure to the appetite will be chiefly remembered. There may be otherqualities which make reputations for other men, but in his case they willcount for nothing. He pays this penalty for his success in that kind;and every one pays some such penalty who deals with some such material. 

But I do not mean to imply that his case covers the whole ground. So faras it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complainthat fiction is enslaved to propriety among us. It appears that of acertain kind of impropriety it is free to give us all it will, and more. But this is not what serious men and women writing fiction mean when theyrebel against the limitations of their art in our civilization. Theyhave no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and sculptors freelydo in the worship of beauty; or with certain facts of life, as the stagedoes, in the service of sensation. But they ask why, when theconventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followersto the portrayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotionalnature, an American novelist may not write a story on the lines of 'AnnaKarenina' or 'Madame Bovary. ' They wish to touch one of the most seriousand sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoy and Flaubert, andthey ask why they may not. At one time, they remind us, the Anglo-Saxonnovelist did deal with such problems--De Foe in his spirit, Richardson inhis, Goldsmith in his. At what moment did our fiction lose thisprivilege? In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lipsof Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vitalinterests of life?

Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them bysaying that the Young Girl has never done anything of the kind. Themanners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; thatis all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, orabduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or sohabitually set about the ruin of their neighbors' wives, as they oncedid. Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; theyhave not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, butthey have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that. Theyrequire of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of hisseriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; theyrequire a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to bereceived on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higherfunction, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expecthim to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they holdhim solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. If hewill accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he maythen treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, ofsuch experiences, such relations of men and women as George Eliot treatsin 'Adam Bede, ' in 'Daniel Deronda, ' in 'Romola, ' in almost all herbooks; such as Hawthorne treats in 'The Scarlet Letter;' such as Dickenstreats in 'David Copperfield;' such as Thackeray treats in 'Pendennis, 'and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the mastersof English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. It isquite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have leftuntouched these most important realities of life. They have only notmade them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective inregard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to thespace and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England andAmerica. They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly wellthat unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laiddown in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could bemade to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances andconsequences. 

I justify them in this view not only because I hate what is cheap andmeretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics whorequire "passion" as something in itself admirable and desirable in anovel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling andcharacter. Most of these critics who demand "passion" would seem to haveno conception of any passion but one. Yet there are several otherpassions: the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion ofpity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship; and all these have agreater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, andinfinitely greater than the passion of guilty love. Wittingly orunwittingly, English fiction and American fiction have recognized thistruth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degreethan most other fiction. 

XXIV. 

Who can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparablytruer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to thecelebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, andcould frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all theinterests, all the facts? Every novelist who has thought about his artknows that it would, and I think that upon reflection he must doubtwhether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treatfreely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. But, as I have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized. This is proved again by the fact that serious criticism recognizes asmaster-works (I will not push the question of supremacy) the two greatnovels which above all others have, moved the world by their study ofguilty love. If by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, anyAmerican should now arise to treat it on the level of 'Anna Karenina' and'Madame Bovary, ' he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame andgratitude as great as those books have won for their authors. 

But what editor of what American magazine would print such a story?

Certainly I do not think any one would; and here our novelist must againsubmit to conditions. If he wishes to publish such a story (supposinghim to have once written it), he must publish it as a book. A book issomething by itself, responsible for its character, which becomes quicklyknown, and it does not necessarily penetrate to every member of thehousehold. The father or the mother may say to the child, "I wouldrather you wouldn't read that book"; if the child cannot be trusted, thebook may be locked up. But with the magazine and its serial the affairis different. Between the editor of a reputable English or Americanmagazine and the families which receive it there is a tacit agreementthat he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely leave her to read herself. 

After all, it is a matter of business; and the insurgent novelist shouldconsider the situation with coolness and common-sense. The editor didnot create the situation; but it exists, and he could not even attempt tochange it without many sorts of disaster. He respects it, therefore, with the good faith of an honest man. Even when he is himself anovelist, with ardor for his art and impatience of the limitations putupon it, he interposes his veto, as Thackeray did in the case of Trollopewhen a contributor approaches forbidden ground. 

It does not avail to say that the daily papers teem with facts far foulerand deadlier than any which fiction could imagine. That is true, but itis true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewestnewspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novelist'sskill to fix impressions in a young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture. The magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionablyits favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrowones. You cannot deal with Tolstoy's and Flaubert's subjects in theabsolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that isunknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of GeorgeEliot, of Thackeray, of Dickens, of society, you may deal with them evenin the magazines. There is no other restriction upon you. All thehorrors and miseries and tortures are open to you; your pages may dropblood; sometimes it may happen that the editor will even exact suchstrong material from you. But probably he will require nothing but theobservance of the convention in question; and if you do not yourselfprefer bloodshed he will leave you free to use all sweet and peaceablemeans of interesting his readers. 

It is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that little sign tokeep off the grass up at one point only. Its vastness is still almostunexplored, and whole regions in it are unknown to the fictionist. Diganywhere, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike riches; or, if youare of the mind to range, the gentler climes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are all free to you, and are so little visited thatthe chance of novelty is greater among them. 

XXV. 

While the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally, they have almost created a species of it in the Thanksgiving story. We have transplanted the Christmas story from England, while theThanksgiving story is native to our air; but both are of Anglo-Saxongrowth. Their difference is from a difference of environment; and theChristmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical inmotive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving story. If I wereto generalize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealtmore with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the criticshould beware of speaking too confidently on this point. It is certain, however, that the Christmas season is meteorologically more favorable tothe effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from aprodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, darker, and coldernights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all mannerof signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for theintervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. The dreams ofelderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lastingchange in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, andgrasping habits of a lifetime, and reconciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted them in marriage; or softeningthem to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampledupon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; and generally disposing them toa distribution of hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendlyreception of gentlemen with charity subscription papers. 

Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer excitingdifficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round thesteps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to theirdiscovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather isalso very suitable for encounter with murderers and burglars; and thecontrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotesthe gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in loveand marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be soavailable for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, orsavagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for thepurpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helpingthe author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or thedens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious lookingentertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out;or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunkexhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they hadso unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them. 

We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season foranything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arcticexplorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile;there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts onshipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own loggingcamps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, afterquarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and ismoved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in themining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardenedreprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother's doughnuts, andbreathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and thelittle brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him fromheaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes onthe butts of their revolvers. 

It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here, already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story of themoralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldomwritten, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meantto entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and toimprove him; and some such intention is still present in it. I ratherthink that it deals more probably with character to this end than itsEnglish cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable thata man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that heshould leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquerhis appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by goodresolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutionsin either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other. 

Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama andsimpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealtwith the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or theintervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close ofNovember than it is a month later, very little can be done with theelements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be, very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in itsrange; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters areof New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or NewYork, for the event of the little drama, whatever it may be. It may bethe reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled; or the union oflovers long estranged; or husbands and wives who have had hard words andparted; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in California and findthemselves agreeably disappointed in their return; or fathers who for oldtime's sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters. The notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have aSabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts andbetter moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of RoseTerry Cooke's, or some perfectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett's, orsome graphic situation of Miss Wilkins's; and then it is a very fine art. But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, forthe reader's emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to berather descriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figurethroughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the eveningsky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fashioned homestead. The parlance isusually the Yankee dialect and its Western modifications. 

The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene to the country; itdoes not seem possible to do much with it in town; and it is a seriousquestion whether with its geographical and topical limitations it canhold its own against the Christmas story; and whether it would not bewell for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival. 

The two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could beeasily covered by the sentiment of even a brief narrative. Under theagglutinated style of 'A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story, ' fictionappropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employednaturally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and thedevelopment of its characters. The plot for such a story could easily bemade to include a total-abstinence pledge and family reunion atThanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over a bowl ofpunch at Christmas. 

XXVI. 

It would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday literature, and I commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializesresearch in every branch of history. In the mean time, without being tooconfident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it came in with theromantic movement about the beginning of this century, when mountainsceased to be horrid and became picturesque; when ruins of all sorts, butparticularly abbeys and castles, became habitable to the most delicateconstitutions; when the despised Gothick of Addison dropped its "k, " andarose the chivalrous and religious Gothic of Scott; when ghosts wereredeemed from the contempt into which they had fallen, and resumed theirplace in polite society; in fact, the politer the society; the welcomerthe ghosts, and whatever else was out of the common. In that day theAnnual flourished, and this artificial flower was probably the firstliterary blossom on the Christmas Tree which has since borne so muchtinsel foliage and painted fruit. But the Annual was extremely Oriental;it was much preoccupied with, Haidees and Gulnares and Zuleikas, withHindas and Nourmahals, owing to the distinction which Byron and Moore hadgiven such ladies; and when it began to concern itself with theactualities of British beauty, the daughters of Albion, though inscribedwith the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descentfrom the well-known Eastern odalisques. It was possibly through anAmerican that holiday literature became distinctively English inmaterial, and Washington Irving, with his New World love of the past, mayhave given the impulse to the literary worship of Christmas which hassince so widely established itself. A festival revived in popularinterest by a New-Yorker to whom Dutch associations with New-year's hadendeared the German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust gayeties ofthe season in old-fashioned country-houses had charmed, would be one ofthose roundabout results which destiny likes, and "would at least beEarly English. "

If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like tofeel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickenssaw its aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins areobscure. For anything that we positively know to the contrary, theDruidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the invitingmistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by therecitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several plays ofShakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of theholidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept overmen's souls blotted out all such observance of Christmas with thefestival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with thereturning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration itenjoyed a perfunctory favor. There is mention of it; often enough in theeighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers;but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglectinto which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observeits surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantageas a literary occasion. He made it in some sort entirely his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to thewhole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than ithad ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race. 

The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light ofthe truer work which has since been done his literary principles seemalmost as grotesque as his theories of political economy. In no onedirection was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holidayliterature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, ofcourse, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a betterword, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; thematerial was there before him; the mood and even the need of his timecontributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subjecthelps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was thechief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have knownit, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christianholiday as we now have it. Other agencies wrought with him and afterhim; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, andhumanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all. 

Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, butthere is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas storiesin this later day--'The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricketon the Hearth, ' and all the rest--and with "a heart high-sorrowful andcloyed, " asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; thecharacter theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace;the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest; the people often speak the language of life, buttheir motives are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passionsand purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people. Yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once hadsymmetry and verity; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of thetime; they touched true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry. 

This was perhaps because the imagination, from having been fed mostlyupon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals. There has been an amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel ofinspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The most preposterousinventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as thegreatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has beennursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the factthat the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. It has beenflattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements ofcharacter, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign toexperience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics asmasterpieces of creative work. 

In the day of Dickens's early Christmas stories it was thought admirablefor the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to addto them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts andbirds talking. Now we begin to feel that human nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. But in thosestories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and-so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, in which thewholesome allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, thescheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It didnot perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school ofunrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder thosesentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandonedlong after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance. 

Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew upin the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formedthemselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and itwas often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who waswriting. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct applicationto Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilousadventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghostsand mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in awell-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these thingsimaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endlessrepetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with themcontented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means;and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded thempractise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention whichgave dignity to Dickens's Christmas stories of still earlier date hasalmost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked solong as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew thatcharacter is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghostcannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that alife cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, bythe most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and shame cannot becured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to makebelieve that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet theethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears. 

It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of theold, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and theendeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are theprinciples upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of thesavagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens wasalways teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, astenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage ofthe race; the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor. It did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, withthe imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers and porters not onlyhuman, but superhuman, and too altogether virtuous; and it remained truethat home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he likedto paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. It is still a factthat the sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevishness intotheir patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhoodand fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared fromthe better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorerfor the loss. 

XXVII. 

But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from Christmasfiction, I think it has never so generally characterized all fiction. One may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in anygreater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has thecurrent of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. Peopleare thinking and feeling generously, if not living justly, in our time;it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be helped, of bold denial that theconditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. Especially in America, where the race has gained a height never reachedbefore, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how evenhere vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day morehopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end inenslaving and imbruting them. 

Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friendswith Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the manyand leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whomit can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. The menand women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have aright to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them theywill have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to perceive it and express it somehow in everyform of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of thebest literature of our time to the service of humanity. No book writtenwith a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantlywritten; and the work done in the past to the glorification of merepassion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous andhideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, butat its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized thesupreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize thevictims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; buttruth, which has succeeded to the highest mission of romance, paintsthese victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not becausethey are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine cannever wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find these victimsamong the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but italso finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool's paradise of showsand semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes ofinsincerity and selfishness. 

I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to thiswork, or perhaps more than seldom so. But as I once expressed, to thelong-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finerart than it, has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements ofthe infallible standard. I have hopes of real usefulness in it, becauseit is at last building on the only sure foundation; but I am by no meanscertain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain asimportant as we believe it is destined to become. On the contrary, it isquite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in thefoolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaningof things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fictionthe most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form ofcontemporaneous history. I willingly leave the precise character of thisform to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have beennurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worthspeaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of theregions of conjecture. 

The art which in the mean time disdains the office of teacher is one ofthe last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing frompolitics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it isaverse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in someconventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, tostand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified. Democracy inliterature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell thetruth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not careto paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or tosentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are morelike than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of theirfraternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as theysomehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than therudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do thisoffice they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through thetruth. 

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Absence of distinction Advertising Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns An artistic atmosphere does not create artists Anise-seed bag Any man's country could get on without him Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery Artist has seasons, as trees, when he cannot blossom As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it Begun to fight with want from their cradles Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets Book that they are content to know at second hand Business to take advantage of his necessity Clemens is said to have said of bicycling Competition has deformed human nature Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts Do not want to know about such squalid lives Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety Fate of a book is in the hands of the women For most people choice is a curse General worsening of things, familiar after middle life God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us Hard to think up anything new Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows Heighten our suffering by anticipation Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness I do not think any man ought to live by an art If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading If one were poor, one ought to be deserving Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego Lascivious and immodest as possible Leading part cats may play in society Leaven, but not for so large a lump Literary spirit is the true world-citizen Literature beautiful only through the intelligence Literature has no objective value Literature is Business as well as Art Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof Malevolent agitators Man is strange to himself as long as he lives Mark Twain Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books More zeal than knowledge in it Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Neatness that brings despair Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it No man ought to live by any art No rose blooms right along Noble uselessness Not lack of quality but quantity of the quality Openly depraved by shows of wealth Our deeply incorporated civilization Our huckstering civilization People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions People might oftener trust themselves to Providence People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence Put aside all anxiety about style Refused to see us as we see ourselves Results of art should be free to all Reviewers Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century Rogues in every walk of life Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity So many millionaires and so many tramps So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer Some of it's good, and most of it isn't Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great Take our pleasures ungraciously The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance There is small love of pure literature They are so many and I am so few Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it Those who work too much and those who rest too much Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian Unfailing American kindness Visitors of the more inquisitive sex Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it Warner's Backlog Studies We cannot all be hard-working donkeys We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money Work would be twice as good if it were done twice