CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 No. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 1657.A4 1889 
 
 3 1924 021 978 980 
 
16S7 
 1669 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021978980 
 
AGNOSTICISM 
 
Edgar Fawcett's Writings. 
 
 :fftttion. 
 
 Rutherford. 
 
 A Gentleman of Leisure. 
 
 A Hopeless Case. 
 
 An Ambitious Woman. 
 
 Social Silhouettes. 
 
 Tinkling Cymbals. 
 
 The Adventvres of a Widow. 
 
 The Confessions of Claud. 
 
 The House at High Bridge. 
 
 Olivia Delaplaine. 
 
 A Man's Will. 
 
 Douglas Duane. 
 
 Divided Lives. 
 
 Miriam Balestier. 
 
 A Demorauzing Marriage. 
 
 Fantasy and Passjon. 
 Song and Story. 
 Romance and Revery. 
 
 3!3umorouB Trvse. 
 
 The Buntling Ball. 
 The New King Arthur. 
 
AGNOSTICISM 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 EDGAR FAWCETT 
 
 WITH A PROLOGUE BY 
 ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 
 
 New York, Chicago, and San Francisco 
 BELFORD, CLARKE AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 London ; IL J. Drane, Lovell's Coukt, Paterkostkr Rui" 
 
95 "<^ 
 
 Copyright, i8 
 
 BttLFORD, Clarke & Co. 
 
 A -^U3 73/ 
 
 .1.1 ,'iW').') 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FAGB 
 
 Robert G. Ingersoll's Prologue, ... 7 
 
 I. Edgar Fawcett, 7 
 
 II. Science, 9 
 
 III. Morality, 14 
 
 IV. Spirituality 18 
 
 V. Reverence, 20 
 
 VI. Existence of God, 21 
 
 Agnosticism, ... .... 25 
 
 The Arrogance of Optimism, . . . .65 
 
 The Browning Craze, 106 
 
 The Truth about Ouida, . . . .148 
 
 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? . . . 194 
 
" ' Heaven help us ! ' said the old religion ; the new 
 one, from its very lack of that faith, 'will teach us all 
 the more to help one another." 
 
 — George Eliot's Letters. 
 
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL'S PRO- 
 LOGUE. 
 
 EDGAR FAWCETT. 
 
 Edgar Fawcett — a great poet, a meta- 
 physician and logician — has been far years 
 engaged in exploring that strange world 
 wherein are supposed to be the springs of 
 human action. He has sought for some- 
 thing back of motives, reasons, fancies, pas- 
 sions, prejudices, and the countless tides 
 and tendencies that constitute the life of 
 man. 
 
 He has found some ®f the limitations of 
 mind, and knows that beginning at that 
 luminous centre called consciousness, a few 
 short steps bring us to the prison wall 
 where vision fails and all light dies. Be- 
 yond this wall the eternal darkness broods. 
 This gloom is "the other world" of the 
 
 7 
 
8 Agnosticism. 
 
 supernaturalist. With him, real vision be- 
 gins where the sight fails. He reverses 
 the order of nature. Facts become illu- 
 sions, and illusions the only realities. He 
 believes that the cause of the image, the 
 reality, is behind the mirror. 
 
 A few centuries ago the priests said to 
 their followers : The other world is above 
 you ; it is just beyond where you see. Af- 
 terwards the astronomer with his telescope 
 looked, and asked the priests : Where is 
 the world of which you speak ? And the 
 priests replied : It has receded — it is just 
 beyond where you see. 
 
 As long as there is "a beyond" there is 
 room for the priests' world. Theology is 
 the geography of this beyond. 
 
 Between the Christian and the Agnostic 
 there is the difference of assertion and 
 question — between " There is a God " and 
 "Is there a God?" The Agnostic has the 
 arrogance to admit his ignorance, while 
 the Christian from the depths of humility 
 impudently insists that he knows. 
 
 Mr. Fawcett has shown that at the root 
 of religion lies the coiled serpent of fear, 
 and that ceremony, prayer, and worship 
 are ways and means to gain the assistance 
 or soften the heart of a supposed deity. 
 
Robert G. IngersoWs Prologue. g 
 
 He also shows that as man advances in 
 knowledge he loses confidence in the 
 watchfulness of Providence and in the effi- 
 cacy of prayer. 
 
 II. 
 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 The savage is certain of those things 
 that cannot be known. He is acquainted 
 with origin and destiny, and knows every- 
 thing except that which is useful. The 
 civilized man, having outgrown the igno- 
 rance, the arrogance, and the provincialism 
 of savagery, abandons the vain search for 
 final causes, for the nature and origin of 
 things. 
 
 In nearly every department of science 
 man is allowed to investigate, and the dis- 
 covery of a new fact is welcomed, unless it 
 threatens some creed. 
 
 Of course there can be no advance in 
 a religion established by infinite wisdom. 
 The only progress possible is in the Com- 
 prehension of this religion. 
 
 For many generations what is known 
 under a vast number of disguises and be- 
 hind many masks as the Christian relig- 
 ion has been propagated and preserved by 
 
10 Agnosticism. 
 
 £>' 
 
 the sword and bayonet — that is to say, by 
 force. The credulity of man has been 
 bribed and his reason punished. Those 
 who believed without the slightest ques- 
 tion, and whose faith held evidence in 
 contempt, were saints ; those who inves- 
 tigated were dangerous, and those who 
 denied were destroyed. 
 
 Every attack upon this religion has been 
 made in the shadow of human and divine 
 hatred — in defiance of earth and heaven. 
 At one time Christendom was beneath the 
 ignorant feet of one man, and those who 
 denied his infallibility were heretics and 
 atheists. At last a protest was uttered. 
 The right of conscience was proclaimed, to 
 the extent of making a choice between the 
 infallible man and the infallible book. 
 Those who rejected the man and accepted 
 the book became in their turn as merci- 
 less, as tyrannical and heartless, as the fol- 
 lowers of the infallible man. The Protes- 
 tants insisted that an infinitely wise and 
 good God would not allov/ criminals and 
 wretches to act as his infallible agents. 
 
 Afterwards a few protested against the 
 infallibility of the book, using the same 
 arguments against the book that had for- 
 merly been used against the pope. They 
 
Robert G. Ingersoll's Prologue. 1 1 
 
 said that an infinitely wise and good God 
 could not be the author of a cruel and 
 ignorant book. But those who protested 
 against the book fell into substantially the 
 same error that had been fallen into by 
 those who had protested against the man. 
 While they denounced the book, and in- 
 sisted that an infinitely wise and good being 
 could not have been its author, they took 
 the ground that an infinitely wise and 
 good being was the creator and governor 
 of the world. 
 
 Then was used against them the same 
 argument that had been used by the Prot- 
 estants against the pope and by the Deists 
 against the Protestants. Attention was 
 called to the fact that Nature is as cruel 
 as any pope or any book — that it is just as 
 easy to account for the destruction of the 
 Canaanites consistently with the goodness 
 of Jehovah as to account for pestilence, 
 earthquake, and flood consistently with the 
 goodness of the God of Nature. 
 
 The Protestant and Deist both used ar- 
 guments against the Catholic that could in 
 turn be used with equal force against them- 
 selves. So that there is no question among 
 intelligent people as to the infallibility of 
 the pope, as to the inspiration of the 
 
12 Agnosticism. 
 
 book, or as to the existence of the Chris- 
 tian's God — for the conclusion has been 
 reached that the human mind is incapable 
 of deciding as to the origin and destiny 
 of the universe. 
 
 For many generations the mind of man 
 has been travelling in a circle. It accepted 
 without question the dogma of a First 
 Cause — of the existence of a Creator — of 
 an Infinite Mind back of matter, and sought 
 in many ways to define its ignorance in this 
 behalf. The most sincere worshippers have 
 declared that this Being is incomprehen- 
 sible, — that he is "without body, parts, or 
 passions" — that he is infinitely beyond 
 their grasp, — and at the same time have 
 insisted that it was necessary for man not 
 only to believe in the existence of this 
 Being, but to love him with all his heart. 
 
 Christianity having always been in part- 
 nership with the State, — having controlled 
 kings and nobles, judges and legislators — • 
 having been in partnership with armies 
 and with every form of organized de- 
 struction, — it was dangerous to discuss the 
 foundation of its authority. To speak 
 lightly of any dogma was a crime punish- 
 able by death. Every absurdity has been 
 bastioned and barricaded by the power of 
 
Robert G. Inger soil's Prologue. 13 
 
 the State. It has been protected by fist, 
 by club, by sword and cannon. 
 
 For many years Christianity succeeded 
 in substantially closing the mouths of its 
 enemies, and lived and flourished only 
 where investigation and discussion were 
 prevented by hypocrisy and bigotry. The 
 Church still talks about " evidence," about 
 " reason," about " freedom of conscience " 
 and the "liberty of speech," and yet 
 denounces those who ask for evidence, who 
 appeal to reason, and who honestly express 
 their thoughts. 
 
 To-day we know that the miracles of 
 Christianity are as puerile and false as those 
 ascribed to the medicine-men of Central 
 Africa or the Fiji Islanders, and that the 
 " sacred scriptures " have the same claim 
 to inspiration that the Koran has or the 
 Book of Mormon — no less, no more. These 
 questions have been settled and laid aside 
 by free and intelligent people. They have 
 ceased to excite interest; and the man who 
 now really believes in the truth of the Old 
 Testament is regarded with a smile — looked 
 upon as an aged child — still satisfied with 
 the lullabys and toys of the cradle. 
 
14 Agnosticism. 
 
 III. 
 
 MORALITY. 
 
 It is contended that without religion — 
 that is to say, without Christianity — all 
 ideas of morality must of necessity perish, 
 and that spirituality and reverence will be 
 lost. 
 
 What is morality ? 
 
 Is it to obey without question, or is it to 
 act in accordance with perceived obliga- 
 tion ? Is it something with which intel- 
 ligence has nothing to do? Must the 
 ignorant child carry out the command of 
 the wise father — the rude peasant rush to 
 death at the request of the prince ? 
 
 Is it impossible for morality to exist where 
 the brain and heart are in partnership? 
 Is there no foundation for morality ex- 
 cept punishment threatened or reward 
 promised by a superior to an inferior ? If 
 this be true, how can the superior be 
 virtuous ? Cannot the reward and the 
 threat be in the nature of things ? Can 
 they not rest in consequences perceived by 
 the intellect ? How can the existence or 
 non-existence of a deity change my obli- 
 gation to keep my hands out of the fire ? 
 
Robert G. Ingersoll s Prologue. 1 5 
 
 The results of all actions are equally cer- 
 tain, but not equally known, not equally 
 perceived. If all men knew with perfect cer- 
 tainty that to steal from another was to rob 
 themselves, larceny would cease. It can- 
 not be said too often that actions are good 
 or bad in the light of consequences, and 
 that a clear perception of consequences 
 would control actions. That which in- 
 creases the sum of human happiness is 
 moral ; that which diminishes the sum 
 of human happiness is immoral. Blind, 
 unreasoning obedience is the enemy of 
 morality. Slavery is not the friend of 
 virtue. Actions are neither right nor 
 wrong by virtue of what men or gods can 
 say ; the right or wrong lives in results — 
 in the nature of things, growing out of 
 relations violated or caused. 
 
 Accountability lives in the nature of con- 
 sequences — in their absolute certainty — in 
 the fact that they cannot be placated, avoid- 
 ed, or bribed. 
 
 The relations of human life are too 
 complicated to be accurately and clearly 
 understood, and, as a consequence, rules 
 of action vary from age to age. The ideas 
 of right and wrong change with the ex- 
 perience of the race, and this change is 
 
1 6 Agnosticism. 
 
 wrought by the gradual ascertaining of 
 consequences — of results. For this reason 
 the religion of one age fails to meet the 
 standard of another, precisely as the laws 
 that satisfied our ancestors are repealled by 
 us ; so that, in spite of all efforts, religion 
 itself is subject to gradual and perpetual 
 change. 
 
 The miraculous is no longer the basis of 
 morals. Man is a sentient- being — he suf- 
 fers and enjoys. In order to be happy he 
 must preserve the conditions of well-being 
 — must live in accordance with certain 
 facts by which he is surrounded. If he 
 violates these conditions the result is un- 
 happiness, failuref disease, misery. 
 
 Man must have food, roof, raiment, fire- 
 side, friends — that is to say, prosperity; and 
 this he must earn — this he must deserve. 
 He is no longer satisfied with being a 
 slave, even of the Infinite. He wishes to 
 perceive for himself, to understand, to in- 
 vestigate, to experiment ; and he has at 
 last the courage to bfear the consequences 
 that he brings upon himself. He has also 
 found that those who are the most religious 
 are not always the kindest, and that those 
 who have been and are the worshippers 
 of God enslave their fellow-men. He has 
 
Robert G. Inger soli's Prologue. 1 7 
 
 found that there is no necessary connection 
 between religion and morality. 
 
 Morality needs no supernatural assistance 
 — needs neither miracle nor pretence. It 
 has nothing to do with awe, reverence, 
 credulity, or blind, unreasoning faith. 
 Morality is the highway perceived by the 
 soul, the direct road, leading to success, 
 honor, and happiness. 
 
 The best thing to do under the circum- 
 stances is moral. 
 
 The highest possible standard is human. 
 We put ourselves in the places of others. / 
 We are made happy by the kindness of 
 others, and we feel that a fair exchange of 
 good actions is the wisest and best com- 
 merce. We know that others can make us 
 miserable by acts of hatred and injustice, 
 and we shrink from inflicting the pain upon 
 others that we have felt ourselves : this is 
 the foundation of conscience. 
 
 If man could not suffer, the words right 
 and wrong could never have been spoken. 
 
 The agnostic, the infidel, clearly per- 
 ceives the true basis of morals, and, so 
 perceiving, he knows that the religious 
 man, the superstitious man, caring more 
 for God than for his fellows, will sacrifice his 
 fellows, either at the supposed command of 
 
1 8 Agnosticism. 
 
 his God, or to win his approbation. He 
 also knows that the religionist has no basis 
 for morals except these supposed com- 
 mands. The basis of morality with him 
 lies not in the nature of things, but in the 
 caprice of some deity. He seems to think 
 that, had it not been for the Ten Command- 
 ments, larceny and murder might have 
 been virtues. 
 
 IV. 
 
 SPIRITUALITY. 
 
 What is it to be spiritual ? 
 
 Is this fine quality of the mind destroyed 
 by the development of the brain ? As the 
 domain wrested by science from ignorance 
 increases — as island after island and con- 
 tinent after continent are discovered — as 
 star after star and constellation after con- 
 stellation in the intellectual world burst 
 upon tlie midnight of ignorance, does the 
 spirituality of the mind grow less and 
 less ? Like morality, is it only found in the 
 company of ignorance and superstition ? Is 
 the spiritual man honest, kind, candid ? — or 
 dishonest, cruel, and hypocritical ? Does 
 he say what he thinks ? Is he guided by 
 reason ? Is he the friend of the right ? — 
 
Robert G. Inger soil's Prologue. ig 
 
 the champion of the truth ? Must this 
 splendid quality called spirituality be re- 
 tained through the loss of candor ? Can 
 we not truthfully say that absolute candor 
 is the beginning of wisdom ? 
 
 To recognize the finer harmonies of con- 
 duct — to live to the ideal — to separate the 
 incidental, the evanescent, from the per- 
 petual — to be enchanted with the perfect 
 melody of truth — open to the influences of 
 the artistic, the beautiful, the heroic — to 
 shed kindness as the sun sheds light — to 
 recognize the good in others, and to include 
 the world in the idea of self — this is to be 
 spiritual. 
 
 There is nothing spiritual in the worship 
 of the unknown and unknowable, in the 
 self-denial of a slave at the command of a 
 master whom he fears. Fastings, prayings, 
 mutilations, kneelings, and mortifications 
 are either the results of, or result in, in- 
 sanity. This is the spirituality of Bedlam, 
 and is of no kindred with the soul that 
 finds its greatest joy in the discharge of 
 obligation perceived. 
 
20 Agnosticism. 
 
 REVERENCE. 
 
 What is reverence ? 
 
 It is the feeling produced when we stand 
 in the presence of our ideal, or of that 
 which most nearly approaches it — that 
 which is produced by what we consider the 
 highest degree of excellence. 
 
 The highest is reverenced, praised, and 
 admired without qualification. Each man 
 reverences according to his nature, his ex- 
 perience, his intellectual development. He 
 may reverence Nero or Marcus Aurelius, 
 Jehovah or Buddha, the author of Leviti- 
 cus or Shakespeare. Thousands of men 
 reverence John Calvin, Torquemada, and 
 the Puritan fathers ; and some have greater 
 respect for Jonathan Edwards than for 
 Captain Kidd. 
 
 A vast number of people have great 
 reverence for anything that is covered by 
 mould, or moss, or mildew. They bow low 
 before rot and rust, and adore the worth- 
 less things that have been saved by the 
 negligence of oblivion. They are enchanted 
 with the dull and fading daubs of the old 
 masters, and hold in contempt those mir- 
 
Robert G. IngersoWs Prologue, 21 
 
 acles of art, the paintings of to-day. They 
 worship the ancient, the shadowy, the 
 mysterious, the wonderful. They doubt 
 the value of anything that they understand. 
 
 The creed of Christendom is the enemy 
 of morality. It teaches that the innocent 
 can justly suffer for the guilty, that conse- 
 quences can be avoided by repentance, and 
 that in the world of mind the great fact 
 known as cause and effect does not apply. 
 
 It is the enemy of spirituality, because it 
 teaches that credulity is of more value 
 than conduct, and because it pours con- 
 tempt upon human love by raising far 
 above it the adoration of a phantom. 
 
 It is the enemy of reverence. It makes 
 ignorance the foundation of virtue. It be- 
 littles the useful, and cheapens the noblest 
 of the virtues. It teaches man to live on 
 mental alms, and glorifies the intellectual 
 pauper. It holds candor in contempt, and 
 is the malignant foe of mental manhood. 
 
 VI. 
 
 EXISTENCE OF GOD. 
 
 Mr. Fawcett has shown conclusively 
 that it is no easier to establish the existence 
 of an infinitely wise and good being by the 
 
22 Agnosticism. 
 
 existence of what we call "good" than to 
 establish the existence of an infinitely bad 
 being by what we call " bad." 
 
 Nothing can be surer than that the his- 
 tory of this world furnishes no foundation 
 on which to base an inference that it has 
 been governed by infinite wisdom and 
 goodness. So terrible has been the condi- 
 tion of man that religionists in all ages have 
 endeavored to excuse God by accounting 
 for the evils of the world by the wickedness 
 of men. And the Fathers of the Christian 
 Church were forced to take the ground 
 that this world had been filled with briers 
 and thorns, with deadly serpents and with 
 poisonous weeds, with disease and crime 
 and earthquake and pestilence and storm, 
 by the curse of God. 
 
 The probability is that no God has 
 cursed, and that no God will bless, this 
 earth. Man suffers and enjoys according 
 to conditions. The sun shines without love, 
 and the lightning blasts without hate. 
 Man is the Providence of man. 
 
 Nature gives to our eyes all they can see, 
 to our ears all they can hear, and to the 
 mind what it can comprehend. The human 
 race reaps the fruit of every victory won on 
 the fields of intellectual or physical conflict. 
 
Robert G. Ingcr soil's Prologue. 23 
 
 We have no right to expect something for 
 nothing. Man will reap no harvest the 
 seeds of which he has not sown. 
 
 The race must be guided by intelligence, 
 must be free to investigate, and must have 
 the courage and the candor not only to 
 state what is known, but to cheerfully ad- y 
 mit the limitations of the mind. 
 
 No intelligent, honest man can read what 
 Mr. Fawcett has written and then say that 
 he knows the origin and destiny of things — 
 that he knows whether an Infinite Being 
 exists or not, that he knows whether the soul 
 of man is or is not immortal. 
 
 In the land of , the geography of 
 
 which is not certainly known, there was for 
 many years a great dispute among the in- 
 habitants as to which road led to the City 
 of Miragia, the capital of their country, and 
 known to be the most delightful city on the 
 earth. For fifty generations the discussion 
 as to which road led to the city had been, 
 carried on with the greatest bitterness, un- 
 til finally the people were divided into a 
 great number of parties, each party claim- 
 ing that the road leading to the city had 
 been miraculously made known to the 
 founder of that particular sect. The various 
 parties spent most of their time putting up 
 
24 Agtwsticism. 
 
 guide-boards on these roads and tearing 
 down the guide-boards of others. Hun- 
 dreds of thousands had been killed, prisons 
 were filled, and the fields had been ravaged 
 by the hosts of war. 
 
 One day, a wise man, a patriot, wishing 
 to bring peace to his country, met the 
 leaders of the various sects and asked them 
 whether it was absolutely certain that the 
 City of Miragia existed. He called their 
 attention to the facts that no resident of 
 that city had ever visited them and that 
 none of their fellow-men who had started 
 for the capital had ever returned, and 
 modestly asked whether it would not be 
 better to satisfy themselves beyond a doubt 
 that there was such a city, adding that 
 the location of the city would determine 
 which of all the roads was the right one. 
 
 The leaders heard these words with 
 amazement. They denounced the speaker 
 as a wretch without morality, spirituality, 
 or reverence, and thereupon he was torn in 
 pieces. 
 
 Robert G. Ingersoll. 
 
PART II. 
 AGNOSTICISM. 
 
 Rationalism owes a debt of gratitude to 
 him who coined the word "agnostic." 
 Previously there had been only "infidel" 
 and " atheist," and one or two other similar 
 terms, all irate bayonets pointed at the 
 very teeth of orthodoxy. They were words, 
 too, that had attained a kind of rowdy, 
 buccaneering prominence ; they appeared 
 to prowl, like verbal guerillas, upon the 
 outskirts of accepted vocabularies. Be- 
 sides, they failed clearly to express, in 
 many cases, the mental attitudes of those 
 to whom they were applied. A good many 
 sensible and moral people abode in the 
 world who felt as averse to denying the ex- 
 istence of a deity as they did to affirming 
 it. They resembled, to a certain degree, 
 the chancellor in Tennyson's " Sleeping 
 Beauty," who diplomatically 
 
 " Dallied with his golden chain and smiling put the 
 question by." 
 
 25 
 
26 Agnosticism. 
 
 Still, about the real agnostic spirit there is 
 much more sincerity than diplomacy. It 
 means, in its finest sense, a courageous en- 
 visaging of the awful problems of life and 
 death, and an admission of their total in- 
 solubility. It might almost, in particular 
 temperaments and personalities, be said to 
 have become a sort of new religion by it- 
 self; simpler than that of Comte, with his 
 complex and deliberated apings of Christian 
 forms, and yet capable in some respects of 
 being classed with Positivism. At the 
 same time, a very large majority of agnos- 
 tics are quite without the reverential sense. 
 " I do not know " precludes in them all 
 tendency to "divine" or to "feel." Nor 
 should they be blamed for this indifference, 
 reluctance, or whatever it may be called. 
 Emotion and reason have an arctic and ant- 
 arctic divergence. 
 
 The average type of agnostic has reached 
 his present position through the help of 
 reason, and therefore he cannot be expected 
 to abandon the power which has made him 
 what he is. That power would not desert 
 him, indeed, even if he should try to ex- 
 orcise it. He recognizes this truth and so 
 patiently accepts the ally with which 
 destiny has provided him. If he leans 
 
Agnosticism. 27 
 
 toward absolute atheism — toward a denial 
 of any conscious and intelligent ruler 
 of the universe — he does so because vast 
 weight of evidence impels him in that 
 direction, while a comparatively small in- 
 fluence lures him in another. Not long ago 
 an eminent thinker said to me, in a moment 
 of colloquial confidence : " Truly, the most 
 extraordinary idea which ever entered the 
 brain of man is that of a personal, over- 
 watching deity.'' Most modern agnostics 
 may be said to hold precisely this amazed 
 view of the case. And yet they will not 
 deny the deity either of ecclesiastic faith or 
 of operative imagination. No one has ever 
 seen the other side of the moon, and if you 
 were to tell an agnostic that you felt sure 
 this concealed lunar hemisphere was blazing 
 with active volcanoes he would not consider 
 himself authorized to deny your statement. 
 He might seriously doubt it, but he would 
 not deny it. His quarrel with the atheist 
 is not bitter, but it is appreciable. The 
 latter declares "There is no god," but the 
 former, firmly as he may believe so, scorns 
 assertion based upon partial proof. "Until 
 I have solved the secret of the universe," 
 says the agnostic, " I shall forbear from 
 stating how, why or by whom it was 
 
28 Agnosticism. 
 
 created." He realizes just how potent an 
 CEdipus is requisite to make the Sphinx 
 cast herself into the sea. 
 
 What, may be asked, are the causes which 
 lead agnosticism to doubt that an almighty, 
 tutelary and merciful power dwells behind 
 the manifestations of nature ? In the first 
 place one might almost affirm that the good 
 and evil which we see around us make any 
 kind of conscious beneficent power beyond 
 them a self-contradiction if not a nullity. 
 For it is hard to conceive of a virtuous 
 and omnipotent god permitting misery 
 such as that with which our planet teems, 
 and it is equally hard to conceive of a 
 diabolic and omnipotent god not stamp- 
 ing out the happiness which also cer- 
 tainly abounds upon earth. John Stuart 
 Mill has suggested the possibility of there 
 being two gods forever at war with one 
 another, from whose perpetual contest all 
 admirable and deplorable things result ; 
 but this acute English thinker has touched 
 upon the idea of such a celestial antago- 
 nism with a delicacy that might be defined 
 as the irony of metaphysics, and no one 
 more clearly apprehended than did he the 
 complete idleness of mere a priori specula- 
 tion. Again, agnosticism has to-day con- 
 
Agnosticism. 29 
 
 vinced itself that all religions bear the sure 
 evidence of having originated solely in 
 man's intercourse with his fellow-men. At 
 the root of all worship lies one element — 
 that of fear, and the fear-begotten desire 
 to propitiate some hostile though viewless 
 agency. Christianity, and other creeds de- 
 pendent upon a so-called " revelation," have 
 never produced a single authentic proof of 
 their validity. Waiving members of the 
 Brahmin, the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, 
 the Parsee, and of other noteworthy faiths, 
 no Christian would at the present time ac- 
 cept for an instant as credible any fact so 
 faintly supported by historic data as that 
 of the alleged miraculous birth of Christ, 
 not to mention his having turned water 
 into wine, his having caused a dead man 
 to live again, or his having defied the laws 
 of gravitation by floating up into the sky 
 and so disappearing before the gaze of a 
 multitude. But the Christian insists upon 
 accepting as facts these follies redolent of 
 the grossest ignorance and superstition. 
 The Christian unhesitatingly asserts, too, 
 that morality is a product of direct revela- 
 tion from some sort of anthropomorphic 
 spirit to mankind, instead of having been 
 gradually evolved through slow stages of 
 
30 Agnosticism. 
 
 civilization, which began at a condition 
 lower than barbarism or cannibalism. The 
 Christian clings to this astonishing tenet 
 in the face of all that science has so ably 
 and amply taught him to the contrary. 
 And yet he by no means rejects the copious 
 and precious teachings of science. He re- 
 spects them, indeed, with all the practical 
 ardor of an agnostic. If the wind blows 
 harsh from the east he does not content 
 himself with praying to his god that it 
 may fail to inflict pneumonia upon his fa- 
 vorite child. He bids that child button 
 stout wraps about the person and avoid 
 breathing too deeply the icy air. No 
 amount of trust in " providence " would 
 induce him to let a bushel of rotting vege- 
 tables pollute his cellar for a single day. 
 When he or any one dear to him is ill, he 
 seeks physician and not parson. Even if 
 he be a Roman Catholic, he gives the calo- 
 mel or the quinine, the nux vomica or the 
 bismuth, full curative scope, before he wel- 
 comes the hollow mummery of extreme unc- 
 tion. In all his goings and comings, among 
 all the details of his daily routine, the 
 Christian is quite as much a servant and 
 devotee of scientific discovery and testi- 
 mony as the most pronounced agnostic 
 
Agnosticism. 3 1 
 
 who ever smiled at the absurdities of an 
 Adam, an Eve and an Eden. He will tell 
 youone minute thata benign tenderness and 
 compassion are forever invisibly befriending 
 him, and he will refer, the next, to having 
 taken passage for Europe on a particular 
 line of steamers because that is notorious- 
 ly the safest. If his house be insufficiently 
 guarded against lightning and yet be 
 struck some day without injury resulting 
 to any of its occupants, he will fall on his 
 knees, most probably, in heartfelt thanks- 
 giving to a kindly and protective person- 
 ality whose august will forges the thunder- 
 bolt and determines its flight. But on the 
 following day he will be sure, if he can af- 
 ford it, to have the whole house well- 
 equipped with lightning-rods. 
 
 From proofs like these the agnostic finds 
 himself arguing that the Christian does not 
 believe half so implicitly as he is under the 
 impression that he believes. For, if his be- 
 lief were absolute, he would ignore his nat- 
 ural environment a great deal more than he 
 already does, in a fixed certainty that what 
 was to be would be, and that from first to 
 last his mortal career was under a clement 
 and sympathizing guardianship. Or, if it 
 were really credited by the Christian that 
 
32 Agnosticism. 
 
 human ills befall the faithful as blessings 
 in disguise, then he would nerve himself to 
 receive such apparent disasters with ten 
 times that stoicism which we now see him 
 exhibit. 
 
 That any other than a god of exquisite 
 cruelty should inflict these disasters upon 
 mankind while the centuries continue to 
 roll along, puzzles the agnostic in marked 
 degree. Nothing is more common than to 
 hear, from enthusiastic Christians, words 
 that express passionate encomium of the 
 grandeur and splendor of creation. " How 
 could all this beauty and magnificence ex- 
 ist," they cry, " unless a god of surpassing 
 worth and wisdom produced them ?" But 
 they forget that for every agreeable or al- 
 luring feature there is one correspondingly 
 odious and repellent. If the rose blooms, 
 the poisonous plant thrives as well. If the 
 sky bends blue and lucid above us, the 
 tempest, with shafts of death and hurri- 
 canes of ruin, also has its reign there. If 
 health glows in certain faces, disease rav- 
 ages others. If sanity is the blessed en- 
 dowment of many minds, madness is to 
 many a curse and bane. If sexual love 
 finds often its rightful and genial gratifica- 
 tion, often it finds a terrible discontent, an 
 
Agnosticism. 33 
 
 agonizing repulse. If there are the buoy- 
 ancy and gladness of youth, so are there 
 the decrepitude and pathos of old age. If 
 there is the joy of perfect marriage, so is 
 there the sorrow of the widower and the 
 widow — or, perhaps even worse, the troub- 
 lous disunion of ill-mated pairs. And thus 
 the chain of contrast might be extended, 
 until we have seen that, link by link, it all 
 means just so much happiness for just so 
 much distress, just so much light for just 
 so much darkness. 
 
 Now, if an affectionate god is the author 
 of all that we term good, we cannot deny 
 his accountability for all that we term evil. 
 If he made the lily, in its chaste and odor- 
 ous loveliness, he made the cancer, a flower 
 of hideous petal and mephitic exhalation. 
 Nor will it serve us to affirm that all bale- 
 ful things in life are the offspring of a hid- 
 den, inscrutable charity toward the race. 
 It is within the limit of every man's imag- 
 ination to picture himself as realizing, in 
 some post-mortem state, that all afflictions 
 poured upon humanity have indeed been 
 "for the best." But even if he were then 
 to concede that this had been wholly true, 
 he could never fairly avoid the declaration 
 that anguish and calamity are, here and 
 
34 Agtiosticism. 
 
 now, persecutions and martyrdoms ruth- 
 lessly wreaked upon his living earthly kin- 
 dred. He must always have that quarrel 
 with any god he might meet outside of the 
 flesh from which be has escaped. To le 
 grand peutifre he must always be ready to 
 present le grand pourquoi. At least, he 
 must do so if we can speak of a disembod- 
 ied soul as an entity to be dealt with by 
 laws of human consciousness. And how 
 else can we possibly deal with such an 
 entity ? 
 
 But, on the other hand, can we deal with 
 it at all ? Do we know, even in the vaguest 
 way, what the words ' a disembodied soul ' 
 mean ? They, and the melodious polysyl- 
 lable, ' immortality,' pass glibly enough 
 from the lips. A great many estimable 
 people are quite sure that they know pre- 
 cisely what is meant in the utterance of 
 them. But in reality these expressions are 
 quite wild and void. It will not do to say 
 that the Bible has told us what they mean, 
 for even admitting that the Bible be not a 
 book wrought by excessively ignorant and 
 superstitious men from material in part if 
 not wholly fabulous, the information which 
 it conveys on subjects of a supernatural 
 import is of no more real value than a tale 
 
Agnosticism. 35 
 
 like Ihat of Leda and the Swan or any of 
 the thousand myths embedded amid other 
 creeds. There is not the slightest reason 
 why we should look upon the chronicle of 
 either Jeremiah or St. Matthew, of either 
 Samuel or St. Mark, as veracious. No his- 
 torian of the least real repute would, at the 
 present day, affirm them to be so. The 
 very existence of that particular Christ 
 whose life and death are recorded in the 
 New Testament is by no means a proven 
 fact. The ridiculous story that he was 
 born of a virgin is scarcely less to be re- 
 spected by unbiassed judges than the story 
 that he was ever born at all. He is a fig- 
 ure not a whit more actual than Helen of 
 Sparta, Achilles or Hector, and the entire 
 legend of his crucifixion has no more his- 
 toric weight than that of the siege of Troy. 
 But there probably was an Achilles, a 
 siege of Troy, and there probably was a 
 Christ, a crucifixion. No proof that his 
 Messiah was divine seems to the Christian 
 a stronger one than such reported words 
 and deeds as those of the four gospels. 
 Yet here are both words and deeds which 
 often partake rather of the anchorite's aus- 
 tere self-mortification and asceticism than 
 of the liberal and virile philanthropist's; 
 
36 Agnosticism. 
 
 doctrines and axioms. The character of 
 Christ, as his apostles depict it, is that of a 
 sweet-souled, pure-minded communist, yet 
 it is also an individuality filled with im- 
 practicable meekness and a tendency to- 
 ward beautiful yet dangerous kindliness in 
 its dealings with the frailties, crimes and 
 sins of society. The best and purest of 
 modern Christians could not conscien- 
 tiously endorse the pardoning posture 
 shown by this Christ whom he so adores. 
 It is one thing to worship such an un- 
 fiawed spirit as an ideal of mildness and 
 compassion ; it is another to approve meas- 
 ures of lowlihead and amiability which, if 
 carried out in the government of multi- 
 tudes by an executive, would entail an- 
 archy of the worst license. We cannot tell 
 hardened culprits to go and sin no more ; 
 tliey are always glad enough to "go," but 
 their wrongdoing is not half so easy of 
 dismissal. To be roughly assaulted by 
 some miscreant and to bid him assault 
 us again — to turn the other cheek toward 
 him after he has smitten us upon one — is 
 a personal revelation of self-control com- 
 mendable only within the limits of Christ's 
 especial disposition: — that of altruistic 
 goodfellowship, equally wide and indulgent 
 
Agnosticism. 37 
 
 But if we overlook the question of slighted 
 self-respect, how can we approve, in this 
 connection, a course so fatally destructive 
 to all true social order as that of forgive- 
 ness for wrong and outrage unaccompanied 
 by the least thought of corrective discipline 
 and punishment ? Christ, during the brief 
 period that he is said to have appeared be- 
 fore men, preached a theory which would 
 have flung open the doors of prisons and 
 set loose upon cities and communities the 
 most depraved desperadoes whom iron 
 cages ever sought to detain. And this 
 form of counsel in him his v/orshippers 
 have admired as a piece of poetic abstrac- 
 tion alone. They have no more made it 
 the actual rule of their lives than they 
 have thus made the socialistic " leave all 
 and follow me " of his other celebrated 
 sayings. 
 
 But while agnosticism of to-day recoils 
 from much that Christ has been accredited 
 with stating and desiring as devoid of due 
 dignity for the individual and without 
 proper adhesive effect upon society at large, 
 it still fails to see in surrounding nature 
 even a vague confirmation of the promise 
 which this lovely and smooth-voiced 
 prophet so perpetually gives us of a life 
 
38 Agnosticism. 
 
 after death. That wittiest and occasion- 
 ally saddest of writers, Dumas the younger, 
 is said to have inscribed these words in the 
 album of a friend who solicited some sen- 
 timent over his autograph : " L'espoir qu'a 
 Vhomme de la vie immortelle lui vient de son 
 dhespoir de se trouver mortel dans celui-ci." 
 Here, one might say, lies the whole pith 
 and marrow of modern if not ancient re- 
 ligion. Our despair of being mortal in 
 this world prompts us to fabricate for our- 
 selves an eternal duration in some other ! 
 And yet the epigram of Dumas has not 
 touched the entire truth. Epigrams rarely 
 do that ; they are fire-flies glittering in dark 
 places but not illuminating them, and they 
 show us little except their own transitory 
 brightness. He neglects that impulse of 
 hope in every healthful human breast — 
 that " will to live," which is the one solid 
 grain of truth in Schopenhauer's and Von 
 Hartmann's brilliant though faulty philoso- 
 phies. The vast majority of mankind can- 
 not help believing in a future existence, 
 because for men not to have hope is either 
 to be the victim of distemper or else to 
 verge upon death itself. Forms of insanity 
 called melancholia and suicidal mania show 
 a complete collapse of this energy ; the 
 
Agnosticism. 35 
 
 skilled physician knows well these symp- 
 toms in his demented patient, unless it may 
 be that their sudden manifestation defeats 
 his most wary vigilance. Yet agnosticism, 
 which insists upon regarding facts and re- 
 jecting such fanciful ghosts of them as 
 strut in their borrowed robes, has clearly 
 taught itself that our hopes of immortality 
 bear an exact analogous relation to our 
 yearnings and desires in all affairs of a 
 more restricted yet equally pungent kind. 
 Supposing that we are in a state of ordi- 
 nary health, we wake at a certain hour of 
 the morning after a fairly restful sleep. 
 Our pulse is firm; our liver acts ; the ma- 
 chinery of vitality does not falter. Imme- 
 diately, as soon as we are well awake, we 
 begin plans for the day, we bethink our- 
 selves of engagements made on the day 
 previous, we wish to enter upon one more 
 diurnal routine of employment, duty and 
 diversion. Agnostics or Christians, we 
 have this same quiet, automatic longing. 
 And yet the extreme futility of all human 
 endeavor, the evanescence of all we pur- 
 pose and perform, may be and often is 
 inexorably clear to the agnostic, while he 
 himself would nevertheless be the first to 
 admit that a strenuous force which he can- 
 
40 Agnosticism. 
 
 noi explain forever lifts and buoys him. 
 But with the ill or ailing man how differ- 
 ent it is ! A pessimist might maintain that 
 the jaundiced eyes of such a man often 
 behold us as the masque of shadows we 
 really are. To his despondent brain life 
 will sometimes appear as arid and weari- 
 some as a burnt prairie under a sky of 
 slate. The concept of an immortality for 
 the human soul will seem to him like some 
 remote conjecture born of a fanatic's 
 revery. 
 
 And such it really deserves to be called. 
 The agnostic, though he may hope to win 
 it or though he may prefer the nepcnthean 
 boon of complete annihilation, sees that, 
 for all he can possibly learn to the contrary, 
 it shines the ignis fatuus which must per- 
 petually evade philosophic grasp. With 
 wings wrought from rainbows, and eyes 
 from stars, it is but the intangible child of 
 story, song and dream. Like the kXCOl fxoi 
 of Homeric text, reference to it constantly 
 recurs on page after page of the immense 
 book of life. The tale of no nation could 
 be adequately told without it, and when- 
 ever fancy has conspired with faith to 
 achieve the most madcap results of illusion, 
 we are confronted by its Elysiums, Valhal- 
 
Agnosticism. 41 
 
 las and Nirwanas. But the agnostic well 
 understands that the species of theological 
 ecstasy which has always surrounded it 
 conduces ill toward a proper logical sur- 
 vey. " Refrain," says Herbert Spencer, in 
 his great ' Psychology,' " from rendering 
 your terms into ideas, and you may reach 
 any conclusion whatever. ' The whole is 
 equal to its part ' is a proposition that may 
 be quite comfortably entertained, so long 
 as neither wholes nor parts are imagined." 
 It will probably be many centuries before 
 mankind at length abandons all belief in 
 immortality. Resembling not a few sim- 
 ilar delusions, it possesses undeniable 
 charm, and has that sort of beauty which 
 the astute Mr. Lecky tells us that religious 
 ideas, like a dying sun, expend their last 
 rays in creating. 
 
 Agnosticism finds little rebuff nowadays 
 for its lack of conventional belief. The 
 pulpiteers make " infidelity " their texts, 
 it is true, but it takes a very ardent church- 
 goer, among really intelligent classes of 
 church-goers, not to compare the keen, lim- 
 pid reasoning of our modern scientific 
 writers with the mystic, turgid, involved 
 utterances of the Bible greatly to the tat- 
 ter's disadvantage. There is more moral 
 
42 Agnosticism. 
 
 profit in half-a-dozen pages of Herbert 
 Spencer's " Data of Ethics " or " Social 
 Statics" than in all the statements of Paul, 
 vague, problematic, transcendental. And 
 3'et the accusation of unmoral apathy and 
 indifference is often brought against agnos- 
 ticism. " It builds no hospitals," cry its 
 foes ; " it endows no charities ; it is pagan 
 in its unconcern for the sufferings of hu- 
 manity. It is so occupied in sneering at 
 Holy Writ that it forgets the sweet lessons 
 of loving-kindness and of devotion to an 
 unstained ideal with which those deathless 
 leaves abound." Now, agnosticism forgets 
 nothing of the sort, and is willing to give 
 the New Testament credit for every line 
 and word of sound ethics contained there, 
 just as it is unsparing in its denunciation 
 and disgust when asked an opinion of those 
 crimes and horrors with which the records 
 of the Old Testament teem, and of that 
 bloody, vengeful Jehovah who makes up 
 for not possessing the sensualism and lust 
 of Jupiter by exhibiting ten times more of 
 his deliberate cruelty and hatred. Agnos- 
 ticism is very far, moreover, from the cal- 
 lous indifference v/ith which it is so fre- 
 quently charged. If it has not erected 
 many charitable institutions and has headed 
 
Ai^nosticisin. 
 
 43 
 
 few eleemosynary lists, we must remember 
 tliat it has not, like Christianity, almost 
 two thousand years behind it. There have 
 been a great many lukewarm Christians, 
 if almsgiving is a test of the finer devoted- 
 ness. But already agnosticism has made, 
 in this respect, an excellent showing, when 
 we consider its youth as a modern move- 
 ment — a nineteentli-century wave of ten- 
 dency — apart from earlier unorthodox 
 growths. Professor Felix Adler has deep- 
 ly and valuably interested himself in tene- 
 ment-house reform, and many another New 
 York citizen (to say nothing of those in 
 London) yearly gives large sums to the 
 poor, unstimulated by any expectation of 
 receiving angelic compound interest here- 
 after upon his earthly loan. Indeed, I 
 learned, not long ago, that the English 
 poet, Mr. William Morris, had expended a 
 large fortune in aiding what he believed to 
 be the cause of the poor against the rich. Mr. 
 Morris's motives may be declared socialis- 
 tic rather than simply and humanely gen- 
 erous; but they nevertheless afford one 
 more instance of a rationalist and free- 
 thinker who does not live in selfish disre- 
 gard of his fellow-men. In fact this fling 
 at ao^nosticism as beine so cold-blooded- 
 
44 Agnosticism. 
 
 ly epicurean resembles the absurd rumors 
 which were set afloat after the deaths of 
 Voltaire and Thomas Paine. It is prob- 
 able that these two famous infidels died 
 very much the same as ordinary mortals 
 die, though a few random, delirious mur- 
 murs may have been readily misinterpreted 
 by partisan listeners. Not long ago we 
 had occasion to see with what sweet and 
 sublime courage a freethinker could 
 breathe his last, when Courtlandt Palmer 
 summoned wife and children to his bedside 
 and addressed them in v/ords full of the 
 gentlest and most fearless tranquillity. 
 And yet if Palmer's mind had wandered, 
 at the last, and some grisly hallucination 
 had chanced to usurp it, how probable that 
 there would have been somebody — a servant, 
 perhaps, or one of the country-folk in that 
 quiet Vermont retreat where his death oc- 
 curred — who would have asserted mon- 
 strous things about bis final " remorseful 
 agonies" ! 
 
 As for charitable inclination on the part 
 of agnosticism, it is just as certain to aug- 
 ment with increasing years as frigid ava- 
 rice is certain to develop. There was never 
 a more preposterous statement than that 
 the religion of Christ brought humanita- 
 
Agnosticism. 45 
 
 rianism into the world. Man's pity for his 
 fellow-man existed a thousand years pre- 
 viously in India, where hospitals were 
 among the comforts of civilization. Very 
 possibly the standard of physical health in 
 Greece and Rome was far above ours, and 
 hence hospitals were not required in either 
 nation. If it were true, as so often has 
 been affirmed, that the Romans exposed 
 their old people to die on an island in the 
 Tiber, then such action (grossly inconsist- 
 ent with the splendid morality of the race 
 previous to its downfall) must be explained 
 as the deed perpetrated by a clique rather 
 than a class — and a most depraved and 
 vagabond one at that. And even in the 
 latter case these exposed persons were 
 probably slaves. Both Rome and Greece, 
 the countries that produced Caesar and 
 Themistocles, Cicero and Aristotle, were 
 cursed by slavery. So was the United 
 States, until a few years ago. Who shall 
 presume to say that in this highly Chris- 
 tian country cruelties have not taken place 
 that might bring envious glitters into the 
 eyes of a Caligula ? And if agnosticism had 
 been a prevailing characteristic of the 
 populace south of Mason and Dixon's line, 
 how easy to have held it blamable for the 
 
46 Agnosticism. 
 
 brutalities of the whipping-post, the drunk- 
 en overseer, the hideous auction and the 
 pursuant bloodhound ! In the days of 
 their real glory Greece and Rome were 
 marked by a phenomenal refinement and 
 a morale of surpassing integrity. Chris- 
 tianity, which may be said to have bathed 
 Europe in bloodshed, brought also the im- 
 passioned zealot with his dreams of heav- 
 enly bliss and the martyr with his unflinch- 
 ing gaze at the fagots which were to con- 
 sume him. But there are no grander ex- 
 amples in mediaeval times of unswerving 
 adherence to duty at the price of absolute 
 self-sacrifice and self-immolation than those 
 given us in ancient times by such men as 
 Brutus and Virginius. And if agnosticism 
 should wish to point toward a man of un- 
 paralleled probity, consistency and bravery 
 as its representative, what figure could 
 more sufficiently stand for these qualities 
 than that intrepid and picturesque one 
 of Giordano Bruno ? When we consider 
 the superb intellectual heights which were 
 attained by Athens, how nonsensical seems 
 the claim that Christianity bore civili- 
 zation in its wake, or that what we call 
 European civilization was anything except 
 that evolutional result of cerebral and 
 
Agnosticism. 47 
 
 climatic conditions indicated so compe- 
 tently by Buckle, Draper and writers of 
 their forceful calibre ! Full as many sins 
 as virtues have been committed in the name 
 of the Cross. The Inquisition, the Massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew, the slaughter of the 
 Albigenses, the appalling persecutions of 
 the Jews, all should now belong to the very 
 alphabet of juvenile instruction. But alas ! 
 it is not every child who is permitted to 
 profit by such historic truths in their can- 
 did nakedness. Happily, the children of 
 agnostics are always allowed this privilege. 
 A novel which has for many months 
 been occupying the attention of English 
 and American readers, presumably has 
 won its great vogue from the challenge 
 which its charming though not profound 
 pages have cast at agnosticism. There 
 are few more entertaining stories than 
 " Robert Elsmere," and if it were a trifle 
 more chiselled in style than it already is, it 
 might easily take rank among the master- 
 pieces of fiction. This is said, however, 
 purely from the literary standpoint ; from 
 the standpoint of sincere and valid think- 
 ing it is a work narrow with all the pecul- 
 iar and "trimming'' narrowness of the late 
 Matthew Arnold, v.hose influence has been 
 
48 Agnosticism. 
 
 diffused through its pages and who easily 
 shows himself as the Mentor of its creative 
 Telemachus. Robert Elsmere is a noble 
 and lovable being, and one plainly meant 
 by the author to express liberalism and 
 large-mindedness at the very last limit of 
 their admissible extension. But Mrs. Ward, 
 like her kinsman and posthumous coadju- 
 tor, Matthew Arnold, halts at a point plainly 
 within the bounds of conventional thought. 
 Elsmere, though trained as an English 
 clergyman, gives up his living because a 
 belief in the " divinity" of Christ has be- 
 come to him a void and sham. But in- 
 stead of allowing full play to his rich gifts 
 of fellowship and helpfulness without fur- 
 ther concern for the ghost-worship from 
 which he should now be happily freed, we 
 find him building a new faith upon the 
 ruins of the old. Unitarianism has always 
 been one of the drollest of compromises 
 between Christianity and agnosticism ; and 
 although Elsmere does not attempt to walk 
 on this curious bridge that joins two such 
 widely different banks, he nevertheless 
 clearly avoids that boldness and justice of 
 mental demeanor which might have been 
 expected from a man of both his native and 
 cultivated equipments. Mr. Huxley says : 
 
Agnosticism. 49 
 
 " If a man asks me what the politics of the 
 inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply 
 that I do not know, that neither I nor any- 
 one else have any means of knowing, and 
 that under these circumstances I decline to 
 trouble myself about the subject, I do not 
 think he has any right to call me a skep- 
 tic." Robert Elsmere might with consist- 
 enc)' and excellent common-sense have 
 taken a stand like this. Yet no ; he had 
 renounced Christ, but he must still concern 
 'himself with — the politics of the inhabi- 
 tants of the moon. Precisely as Matthew 
 Arnold was forever doing, he personifies 
 all the good in the world with an actual 
 wantonness of unfortified assumption, calls 
 it by the name of God and insists upon 
 paying it reverence. 
 
 There is, Matlhew Arnold long ago 
 declared, a " power not ourselves which 
 makes for righteousness," and it has al- 
 v/ays seemed to me that just such enemies 
 as this talented and facile writer are at 
 once the most polite and most irritating 
 of any with whom agnosticism is called 
 upon to deal. Matthew Arnold belonged 
 to that type of essayist and controversial- 
 ist who is wrecked and enfeebled by the 
 very "culture" of which he is so impas- 
 
50 Agnosticism. 
 
 sioned a convert. He diluted his own abil- 
 ities into feebleness by mixing them with 
 dilettanteism. It might be said of him 
 that his future fame, unlike Keats's, has 
 been written not so much in water as in 
 Arnold-and-water. Born under the Oxon- 
 ian shadow of episcopacy, possessing a 
 father whom his " Literature and Dogma" 
 must have struck as the riot and carnival 
 of heterodoxy, Matthew Arnold was never 
 able to welcome those honest doubts which 
 his own width of intellect had summoned; 
 The age forced him to weigh, to sift, to 
 investigate reverend things ; but he did so 
 a contre cmur, and always with vivid mem- 
 ories of how his youth had treasured their 
 sacredness. Agnosticism, pure and sim- 
 ple, had for him a violence of emphasis 
 that set his teeth on edge. It was ex- 
 tremely unfortunate for the gentleman's 
 teeth — rather more so than for agnosti- 
 cism. He was a man born either too early 
 or too late. Perhaps it had best be said of 
 him that he was born too late, for, taking 
 him all in all, he would have made a much 
 better Church of England dignitary than 
 the agnostic he is sometimes incorrectly 
 called. 
 
 To state that there is a, " power not our- 
 
Agnosticism. 51 
 
 selves which makes for righteousness" is to 
 postulate the undemonstrable. It has al- 
 ways been the favorite method of Matthew 
 Arnold and men who resemble him, to let 
 sentiment pose on the pedestals of their 
 overthrown gods. If there be such a 
 power, what is it ? Does it really exist 
 outside the consciousness of man ? If so, 
 can its existence be proven, or partly 
 proven, or even vaguely revealed ? Provided 
 my neighbor and I choose to live an up- 
 right and sinless life, what is the power 
 not ourselves that leads us to do so ? Is not 
 the power essentially of and in ourselves ? 
 Is it not a result of our respective relation- 
 ships with the men and women around us ? 
 Imagine that the planet contained but a 
 single human being, and lo, the moral or 
 unmoral acts that he could commit would 
 be reduced to almost a minimum ! Even 
 suicide would not be criminal, for in put- 
 ting an end to his solitary life this lone 
 creature would wound no kinsman or friend, 
 he would break no dear ties, deal grief to no 
 loving hearts, bring sliame upon no house 
 or clan. But give this lonely denizen of 
 earth a single companion, and at once new 
 moral and unmoral conditions arise. Say 
 that his companion is feminine, and that the 
 
52 Agnosticism. 
 
 Adam who now finds himself in the society 
 of an Eve is called upon to perform a hun- 
 dred little acts of protective kindliness 
 which she in turn reciprocates by gentle 
 sympathies peculiar to her sex. Of neces- 
 sity a new order of moral conduct has 
 been established. There are acts good and 
 evil which this pair can mutually wreak 
 upon one another. And then, if we in- 
 crease our duo by one, two, three, or say 
 ten individuals, how complicated the rela- 
 tions will become ! We have the begin- 
 ning of a society ; and in a society all vir- 
 tue and all wrongdoing must depend upon 
 the aidful or deterrent relations between 
 its members. 
 
 Here, then, is where the pseudo-liberalism 
 of such thinkers as Matthew Arnold, after 
 leaving the beaten path of Christianity, 
 swings back to its monotheism and its 
 pietism by another route. This is what 
 Robert Elsmere does in the engaging novel 
 of that name. He confuses his desire for 
 a celestial and infinite Friend (whom he 
 has accepted in the place of a lost Christ) 
 virith the meagre and insufficient proofs 
 afforded by nature and all ethnologic 
 history that any such occult potency lives 
 outside of space and time. Other men as 
 
Agnostidsi/t. 53 
 
 brave and fine as he have had the same 
 desire and yet have separated it from the 
 perceptive push of their brains as they 
 would wrinnow chaff from wheat. Experi- 
 ence is forever teaching us that the gulf 
 between what we want and what we get 
 here below the visiting moon is indeed 
 abysmal. Into that abyss the real agnostic 
 unflinchingly gazes. Elsmere had so gazed 
 as well, but had grown foolishly fascinated 
 by the bodiless and tricksy sprites that 
 seemed to float through its uncharted 
 vacuum. 
 
 An objection often made to agnosticism 
 by persons of penetration and scholarship 
 is that it destroys without replacing, and 
 that he only destroys who can replace. In 
 other words, religion, as these excellent 
 people claim, is mutable but ineradicable ; 
 you cannot take it away from the human 
 race in one form without substituting it in 
 another. Worship has always been and 
 will always be. Agnosticism is not wor- 
 ship, but simply negation. It can never 
 satisfy the cravings of mortality ; it can 
 never be made to stand for the rolling 
 organ, the stately altar, the chanted hymn, 
 the curling incense, the prayerful genuflec- 
 tion, . . . Now, the truth is, all such dissent 
 
54 Agnosticism. 
 
 is founded upon a single error — that of sup- 
 posing mankind has any natural tendency 
 to worship at all. In his barbarous condi- 
 tions his worship is grovelling, and shows 
 clearly the terrorism which has induced it. 
 Afterward fear changes to awe, and with 
 many impressionable persons (these being 
 chiefly women) a kind of love is generated, 
 perfervid, idolatrous, tinged by hysteria. 
 But let us imagine that all religious peo- 
 ple in the world could to-morrow become 
 absolutely certain this god whom they 
 venerate was himself but a portion of nature, 
 subject to its laws and powerless to alter 
 them by the least fraction of an infringe- 
 ment. What would then result ? Would 
 not all this zealous ' love ' depart on the 
 instant ? Would not the monk slip off his 
 shirt of serge, and the nun forego her fasts ? 
 ' God is love,' say the churchmen. It 
 would be equally true, judging from what 
 life shows us, to declare that ' God is hate.' 
 But truer than either would it be to main- 
 tain that ' God is fear.' We cannot really 
 love an incorporeal dream, a fantasy im- 
 palpable as moonlight. We may love the 
 idea of loving it, and cultivate in ourselves 
 that delicate or robust sort of frenzy which 
 is to all religion what its greenness is to a 
 
Agnosticism. 5 5 
 
 letif; but the effort of evolution is rather to 
 produce in man a complete discontinuance 
 of prostration before unknowable finalities. 
 A man's home is all the church he needs. 
 Wife and children make charming choris- 
 ters and acolytes. He can find plenty of 
 spiritual elevation, if so disposed, in min- 
 istering to the needs and comforts of his 
 fellows. There is more merit and import 
 in one charitable act than in the hallelujahs 
 and hosannas of a mighty concourse. 
 Prayer is merely a refinement of fetishism. 
 Herbert Spencer says that volumes could 
 be written on the impiety of the pious ; he 
 might have added that volumes could also 
 be written on the idiocy of prayer. To 
 call god omniscient, omnipotent, an all-lov- 
 ing and all-merciful father, one moment, 
 and the next, perhaps, implore him to save j 
 a treasured child in the agonies of croup or 
 meningitis — who is there that does not see 
 the mockery of such a contradiction ? 
 
 It would be hard to conceive of a more 
 peaceful state of things for the world at 
 large than that which would result from a 
 cessation to think at all concerning the un- 
 knowable and the beginning to accept some 
 pantheistic creed like Spinoza's. Incessant 
 dread of what may be the life to come has 
 
56 Agnosticism. 
 
 often caused neglect of the concerns and 
 demands of life here. If we knew to-mor- 
 row for a certainty that death meant an 
 eternal falling asleep, we should doubtless 
 busy ourselves much more than we do with 
 that term of wakefulness allotted to us. 
 As John Stuart Mill has most tellingly said, 
 there is horror in the idea of dying, solely 
 because our minds insist upon fancying 
 that we should continue conscious after 
 ceasing to breathe — as if any such phase 
 were possible as that of being dead ! Of 
 course the actuality of death as a dark 
 human ill could never be argued away. It 
 is not so much that we feel the ego decay- 
 ing, weakening, and at last ending, as that 
 we are doomed before our own demise to 
 look on those whom we love or admire 
 while they fade before our sight. Death, 
 howsoever we rationally consider it, is a 
 curse, not alone because it visits us in 
 countless ghastly shapes and because we 
 are never sure what fierce sufferings its 
 visits will entail, but because it constantly 
 tears from us those whom we love under 
 circumstances of the most immature and 
 ill-timed quality. If we could all live to be 
 so old that death would affect us as ex- 
 treme ripeness affects a fruit, causing it to 
 
Agnosticism. 57 
 
 drop from its bough after completing a 
 period of progressive and harmonious 
 thrift, the dolor and exaction would be far 
 less apparent. But even Xh.&i\ pallida mors 
 would not be stripped of its worst repul- 
 sion, for there are many old people who 
 yet cling to life after senility has brought 
 them its deepest wrinkles, its most halting 
 footsteps. " Live sanely," say the hygien- 
 ists, "and you will die happily." But this 
 counsel is the most fallible of apothegms, 
 for there are thousands who must live not 
 only in the sanest way but with the rigid- 
 est self-denial in order to live at all, be- 
 cause of inherited maladies. Even agnos- 
 tics will sometimes tell you that perpetual 
 life on this planet would be wearisome to 
 them ; but what man or woman could will 
 to die if health and the companionship of 
 a few loved ones were vouchsafed him ? To 
 live on like Zanoni or the Wandering Jew 
 would indeed prove a torment ; but pro- 
 vided certain dear existences could be 
 healthfully and vigorously prolonged to- 
 gether with our own, what paradise ever 
 sketched by the most dazzling poetic fancy 
 could equal the loveliness of this orb in 
 which we now dwell ? Harsh winters may 
 prevail upon certain tracts of it ; angry 
 
58 Agnosticism. 
 
 tempests may pour their liquid and electric 
 rage upon it ; the tumbling domains of its 
 ocean may abound with shipwreck ; heat 
 may often parch its meadows, and drouth 
 may turn its rivers to arid hollows of sand; 
 but the glorious beauty of our planet, its 
 charms of rock, sea, field, foliage, land- 
 scape, are an unending consolement and 
 delight. The extraordinary reputed visions 
 of John in the isle of Patmos are as noth- 
 ing to it, nor could our intelligence evolve 
 any conceivable picture in which both col- 
 ors and lines, howsoever newly commin- 
 gled, are not borrowed from its own. No ; 
 immortality here on earth, under the cir- 
 cumstances just named, could not well fail 
 ot enjoyment. The very persons who now 
 shudder at the prospect of its ennui would 
 hardly fail to choose it if given a chance. 
 At any rate, dismay might result to any- 
 one who counted too rashly upon the cer- 
 tainty of their refusal. 
 
 Say that some youth were brought up in 
 absolute ignorance of all the bitterness and 
 melancholy with which religion has associ- 
 ated death. Let us suppose that he had 
 grown to regard death simply as a tender 
 peace, a blessed rest after toil, a slumber 
 which indeed "knits up the ravell'd sleave 
 
Agnosticism. 59 
 
 of care." Then say that sudden tidings 
 came to him, at the age of twenty or there- 
 abouts, which entirely upset all his former 
 deductions. Thus far, perhaps, he had 
 seen a parent or a sister die. Pain had 
 preceded dissolution, making its ultimate 
 repose all the more grateful, and he had 
 joined with others in the relief that such 
 emancipation and exemption produced. 
 But now, abruptly, he learns of the fright- 
 ful things that man has been for many 
 years believing about death. The ghastli- 
 ness of Hell, the forlornness of Purgatory, 
 and the tedium of an interminable Heaven 
 all rise before him. Orthodoxy seizes 
 him by one hand, bigotry by the other, 
 and no wonder if he recoils terrified, dis- 
 gusted, from the contact of each. It would 
 not be strange if he were to go mad from 
 the shock of his discoverj', provided he 
 became a convert to any of the creeds it 
 has laid bare. After years of entire mental 
 calm he has been beset by turmoil and 
 vexation. Agnosticism is his only refuge, 
 end if he takes it he may there find at 
 least a similitude of the contentment he 
 knew before. 
 
 Of course this instance is only a supposi- 
 titious one. But the imagination can easily 
 
6o Agnosticism. 
 
 deal with it, and it might be real enough 
 were any human being educated like the 
 individual whom I have fancied. Agnos- 
 ticism would sponge tlie slate clean, and 
 thus wipe away every past impression and 
 prejudice. To state that it must replace 
 what it has destroyed is idle verbiage, for 
 to require that it shall replace one super- 
 stition by another would mean that it 
 should bring the recurrence of captivity 
 instead of a new and unique liberation. If 
 I tell my friend that he has in his pocket 
 a counterfeit banknote I am not compelled 
 to give him genuine money as the price of 
 my news. The great mistake of those who 
 condemn and oppose agnosticism is their 
 stubborn insistence that it sliall build some 
 sort of new church, establish some sort of 
 new priesthood. This mistake is natural 
 enough, and quite pardonable considering 
 its source. Agnosticism pretends to be 
 nothing in the way of a new religion; you 
 might as well ask it to explain itself as ask 
 the sunshine that pierces a cloud-swathed 
 sky after days of gloom and storm. It is 
 the reasoning faculty of humanity grown 
 an assertion instead of an abnegation, a 
 sound instead of a silence, a courage in- 
 stead of a cowardice. Such writers as Mr. 
 
Agnostkisiti. 6i 
 
 Frederic Harrison, Mr. W. H. Mallock, 
 and others of either a sentimental or an 
 infatuated turn, wholly fail to comprehend 
 that the sense of being free from all codes 
 and restrictions invented by human credu- 
 lity alone, is at once exhilarant and fortify- 
 ing. It may be said that certain minds 
 cannot do without the religions of churches ; 
 if so, there is no objection to the possessors 
 of these minds continuing to thumb pray- 
 er-books. But others of hardier mould, of 
 firmer fibre, will prefer the one large 
 republic of rationalism to the little mon- 
 archies and duchies of orthodoxy. Profes- 
 sor Huxley has well called this latter " the 
 Bourbon ofjhought." And he adds : " It 
 learns not, neither can it forget; and 
 though at present bewildered and afraid to 
 move, it is as willing as ever to insist that 
 the first chapter of Genesis contains the 
 beginning and the end of sound science, 
 and to visit with sucii petty thunderbolts 
 as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl those 
 who refuse to degrade nature to the level 
 of primitive Judaism." 
 
 We near the birth of a new century, and 
 it may be true that before the world is 
 a hundred years older marvellous effects 
 will have accrued from the persistent and 
 
62 Agnosticism. 
 
 undaunted efforts of science. Possibly 
 agnosticism will then almost have changed 
 into a certain kind of gnosticism ; before 
 many more centuries have elapsed we are 
 led to trust that it will surely have so 
 changed. If the denizens of Mars were 
 actually signalling to us, as that Italian 
 astronomer is reported not long ago to 
 have claimed that they are, and if anything 
 like interplanetary communication were 
 established between Mars and ourselves, 
 this event would really be no more extraor- 
 dinary than others brought about by men 
 like Newton, Franklin, Fulton or Edison. 
 If our descendants master the secret of 
 death and wring immortality from nature, 
 these acts will be only analogous to what 
 man is already doing. Toward such a 
 millennial result every loyal agnostic will 
 have given his share. He who has lifted 
 but a single stone of it still helps to build 
 the pyramid. What a debt do we owe to 
 the ancestors that freed us from supersti- 
 tion's trammelling tyrannies ! A like debt 
 will our successors owe to us in the ages 
 unborn. Tliis realization must content the 
 agnostic. It is a lofty one, and it is 
 chastely unselfish as well. He cannot say 
 that he has no good cause for thanks ; he 
 
Agnosticism. 6i 
 
 has been saved from temporizing and 
 makeshift ; he lias escaped the silliness of 
 Theosophy, " Christian Science," " spirit- 
 ualism," and like tawdry lures to the fancy 
 and the senses ; he has stooped his lips to 
 the crystal waters of pure knowledge and 
 found there a draught far wholesomer and 
 more flavorous than any sacramental wine 
 ever served by foolish priests ! 
 
 Agnosticism, it might be said, kneels 
 before a mighty door, in whose huge lock 
 is a massive, rusted key. Year after year 
 she bruises her hands trying to turn the 
 key ; again and again she has moved it a 
 little — but only a little, always. She does 
 not know what lies beyond the door ; she 
 does not profess, she does not even ask, to 
 know. But it is the door of human life, 
 and beyond it is infinity. Though her 
 hands are crimson with blood and their 
 flesh is torn to the bone, she will never 
 desist from her task. She may faint for a 
 time, but she will not die, for her other 
 name is Truth-Seeker, and that means 
 imperishability. And now and then, while 
 she strives with all her power to turn the 
 monstrous key, her teeth will clench them- 
 selves and she will defiantly murmur : " Not 
 if it takes ten thousand years will I ever 
 
64 Agnosticism. 
 
 cease to struggle, until the key has been 
 swung round in its lock and the door has 
 been flung open!" 
 
 She does not grow old with the years, 
 either, this obstinate Agnosticism. Time 
 brings her strength instead of weakness, 
 and though she is very old she is yet 
 younger to-day than in the period of 
 Lucretius. Will she fail in her supreme 
 design ? It may be. But no matter ; she 
 will have striven ! 
 
THE ARROGANCE OF OPTIMISM. 
 
 Not very long ago the present writer had 
 occasion to examine a criticism in the New 
 York Times which dealt with a recent novel 
 by Mr. Edgar Saltiis. This novel, as many 
 readers will remember, had attracted at- 
 tention because of its chiselled phrases 
 and diamond-like epigram. It was not, 
 however, a book which might be expected 
 to please everybody, and perhaps its young 
 author was far from anticipating that it 
 would. But possibly, on the other hand, 
 he was not prepared to hear, as the acid 
 newspaper critic soon informed him, that 
 he had been presenting " in an ugly bou- 
 quet the poison-weeds that Schopenhauer 
 and Von Hartmann cultivated." And then, 
 almost immediately afterward, this impla- 
 cable person went on to declare that Mr. 
 Saltus was "imbued with the most horri- 
 ble of all human dementia," and that he 
 
 6s 
 
66 The Arrogance of Optitnism. 
 
 had written a work which, "as a romance, 
 drips pessimism." 
 
 Such assertions as these are beginning to 
 have a very old ring. It is now a good, ap- 
 preciable length of time since the genuine 
 agnostic was successfully pulverized by the 
 wrathful pulpiteer. He is not pulverized 
 any more ; occasionally he is shrieked at 
 after the style of Mr. Talmage, whose well- 
 known energy in this capacity has long ago 
 become for thousands an amusement as 
 purely national as that of base-ball or roll- 
 er-skating. Still, the agnostic and the pes- 
 simist are not by any means necessarily one. 
 The agnostic may be, and not infrequently 
 is, an optimist of sunny and even roseate 
 outlook. He will tell you that because the 
 roots of all earthly progress are wrapped 
 in obscurity, and because the goal toward 
 which the mighty steps of evolution ad- 
 vance is veiled by unknowableness, that is 
 no reason for despair of the " one far-off di- 
 vine event " which Tennyson's verses have 
 prophesied so beautifully. He may even 
 inform you of how his own religious uncer- 
 tainty and insecurity do not forbid him to 
 hope, trust, and at times feel almost confi- 
 dent that the entire vast system of the uni- 
 verse is governed by an intelligence wholly 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 6'j 
 
 beneficent and gracious — one whose appar- 
 ently cruel deeds are disguised mercies 
 and whose seeming enmity hides a love 
 which our future immortality shall both 
 comprehend and applaud. The modern 
 agnostic has a logical and consistent right 
 to this attitude if he can sincerely assume 
 it. But he has not the right to treat with 
 arrogance the opposite views aud opinions 
 of the pessimist, nor is he often found in 
 the employment of any such mischievous 
 and ill-advised tactics. All that he leaves 
 for the religionists, the orthodox believers, 
 the zealots of a " revealed " faith. And it 
 must be admitted that even in this age of 
 toleration the poor pessimist has a rather 
 unpopular and dreary time of it. A rat set 
 upon by a terrier might expect about as 
 much sympathy from unmerciful bystand- 
 ers as he receives from the majority of his 
 contemporaries. A great many sensible 
 men dismiss his creed with a sneer as silly 
 in the extreme ; it is no less a triviality to 
 them than theosophy would be to Mr. Hux- 
 ley or spiritualism to Mr. Lecky. A great 
 many good and sensible women turn from 
 it with a shudder as "hopeless," "despair- 
 ing," and "sinful." An enormous number 
 of ignorant or half-educated people, if they 
 
68 The Arrogance of Optindsui. 
 
 regard it at all, do so with contemptuous 
 aversion. Then there are those of all classes 
 who insist that the pessimist does not be- 
 lieve what he professes to believe — that he 
 is attitudinizing, posing, and that every- 
 body ought to faire son possible in the way 
 of frowning him out of such folly. These 
 methods of treatment, when considered 
 without prejudice or bias of any sort, are 
 best defined by a single word — arrogance. 
 They savor of precisely the same spirit as 
 that which was manifested, only a few years 
 ago, toward everybody who presumed to 
 doubt the inspiration of Scripture. Nowa- 
 days a man can be an agnostic with some 
 degree of mundane comfort, but the lot of 
 the pessimist has not yet been similarly 
 favored. I have observed that his great- 
 est enemy, as in the case of Mr. Saltus, 
 is the newspaper. This exults in having 
 its fling at the writer or thinker who dares 
 to "look on the dark sides of things" or 
 to " don green spectacles '-^both of which 
 idioms flow from the editorialist's pen with 
 a glibness that bespeaks long practice in 
 their use. It is an easy matter, surely, to 
 write down anything in this way, from a 
 political measure to a pot of Recamier 
 Cream, from an execution by electricity to 
 
TIte Arrogcmce of Optimism. 69 
 
 a new Gilbert-and-Sullivan opera. Very 
 probably, too, the current newspaper has 
 one of its innumerable self-preservative 
 "policies" to uphold, since it would never 
 do for the average citizen so sharply to 
 realize the complete nothingness of things 
 that he cared no longer for his morning 
 and evening journal. And yet the point- 
 of-view taken in every cited instance is an 
 arrogant one. Expediency may prompt, 
 very often, the crushing blows aimed at a 
 gloomy system of philosophy; for there are 
 many people in the world foolish enough to 
 doubt whether the naked truth should ever 
 be looked on by mortality provided its 
 limbs are graceless and its tinges repelling. 
 But by far the larger part of these antago- 
 nists whom I have mentioned consider 
 themselves in duty bound to discounte- 
 nance uncheerful tenets. It is right and 
 godly that they should do so ; it would be 
 arrant wickedness to behave otherwise 
 than as the wagers of a vigorous crusade 
 against such vicious notions. "Bah! Stuff 
 and nonsense !" cries irritated society. 
 " This world not a pleasant place to live 
 in ? Mankind had far better not have been 
 born? Go, preach your rubbish to the 
 'cranks' that are not above lir-lening- to it!" 
 
70 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 All of which has, when coming from the 
 lips of society, a truly impressive sound. 
 That is, at first. But a little later we might 
 find ourselves reflecting that society has had 
 a fashion of being obstinately unconvinced, 
 as regarded the greatest and most vital 
 questions, for a period of several thousand 
 years. All history, it might be stated, is 
 only a vast record of the mistakes made 
 by the masses. Naturally those preachers 
 who succeed in getting the hugest muUi- 
 tudes to hear them are not merely such as 
 thrill their listeners with promises of an 
 abundant and beatific immortality, but who 
 embellish the vistas of that fortunate pros- 
 pect with a most lavish charm of ornamen- 
 tation. It might be said of the big public, 
 indeed, that such persons as the Rev. Dr. 
 Talmage have spoiled them for ordinary 
 theological treatment : they are no longer 
 satisfied unless their immortality is served 
 them, so to speak, with a thick layer of 
 icing and a good many plums. Here is the 
 sort of pungent encouragement they need, 
 and the paragraphs containing it are quoted 
 from a sermon delivered by the gentleman 
 already named : 
 
 ''Friends, the exit from this world, or death, 
 if you please to call it, to the Christian is glo- 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 71 
 
 rious expectation. It is demonstration. It is 
 illumination. It is sunburst. It is the opening 
 of all the ivindows. It is shutting up the cate- 
 chism of doubt, and the unrolling of all the scrolls 
 of positive and accurate information. . . . It is 
 the last mystery taken out of botany and astrono- 
 my and geology. O, 7vill it not be grand to have 
 all questions answered! . The Bible intimates 
 that we will talk with Jesus in heaven Just 
 as a brother talks with a brother. Now, ivhat 
 will you ask him first 1 . . . I shall first want 
 to hear the tragedy of his last hours, and then 
 Luke's account of the crucifixion and then Mark's 
 account of the crucifixion and Johns account 
 of the crucifixio7i will be nothing, while from 
 the living lips of Christ the story shall be told 
 of the gloom that fell, and the devils that arose. 
 . . . All heaven will stop to listen until the story 
 is done, and evety harp will be put down, and 
 every lip closed, and all eyes fixed on the Divine 
 narrator, until the story is done ; and then, at 
 the tap of the baton, the eternal orchestra tvill 
 rouse up; finger on string of harp, and lips to 
 the mouth of trumpet, there shall roll forth 
 the oratorio of the Messiah." 
 
 If there were any refined or cultivated 
 people who took this kind of flambo}'ant 
 materialism at all seriously, they might be 
 pardoned for feeling that an eternity of 
 
/- 
 
 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 such proceedings would prove quite tiie 
 reverse of celestial. But that people with 
 no refinement or cultivation should dis- 
 cover latent "comfort" in talk of so en- 
 tirely whimsical a character only serves to 
 illustrate what a particularl3,r small minor- 
 ity of votes the pessimistic person could 
 ever be able to command. On every side 
 he would seem to have the inherent^azW/i/ii 
 cciur of humanity against him. This con- 
 dition of affairs, let it once more be pointed 
 out, clearly exhibits the arrogance of op- 
 timism. What that tendency wills to be- 
 lieve, it does believe. It refuses to think 
 that life is not worth living, and it thus re- 
 fuses in the face of myriad facts indicated 
 by the rigid and unerring finger of science. 
 No assertion is made that this arrogance is 
 one just now to be avoided or lived down ; 
 it may, in fact, be inseparable from the race 
 as thus far evolved, and constitute that very 
 " will to live " without which, as Schopen- 
 hauer asserts, there would be no organic or 
 even inorganic existence whatever. But 
 viewed from the standpoint of him who 
 opposes it determinedly, it is arrogance, 
 nevertheless. For while the pessimist can 
 give countless proofs that life is a curse, a 
 snare, a bewilderment, a disappointment. 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 73 
 
 an affliction, the optimist can give no cor- 
 respondingly valid proofs to the contrary. 
 No design is now proposed either to endorse 
 or condemn optimism, but merely to define 
 it. The optimist may say, and veraciously 
 enough, that under given conditions of 
 happiness or contentment he holds life to 
 bo amply worth living. But the pessimist 
 refuses to deal solely with those conditions. 
 Hs insists upon looking at life as alto- 
 gether an impersonal, un-individual affair. 
 Ha weighs its aggregate of unsolicited 
 misery against its aggregate of reaped and 
 garnered joy, and concludes that the former 
 far outbalances the latter. 
 
 The pessimist, in his purely unemotional 
 role of scientist, can no more be despised 
 than any other dispassionate taker of sta- 
 tistics. If he shouts anathemas against the 
 optimist he at once ranks himself among 
 the great throng of inexact and therefore 
 untrustworthy thinkers. He must either 
 be rational and credible or he swiftly be- 
 comes absurd. He has already been called 
 absurd by legions of alert detractors. Can 
 he prove that such vilifiers are menda- 
 cious ? What are his real renseignements ? 
 In which avenue of reputable thought or 
 
74 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 philosophy can he find his hardy allies of 
 argument ? 
 
 He will answer you, if he be a pessimist 
 of unblemished and invulnerable honesty, 
 that he finds every known aid in the vivid, 
 austere rank-and-file of human experience. 
 " I am not a believer in any ' revealed ' re- 
 ligion," he will tell you. " I set my Bible 
 and my Koran on the same shelf of my li- 
 brary, and if the slightest patrician differ- 
 ence exists between their separate bindings, 
 that is a question which entirely refers it- 
 self to the orthodoxy or the liberalism of 
 my bookseller. I observe life with an at- 
 tentive but unbiassed gaze." 
 
 "And you see in life," instantly responds 
 the adverse auditor, "innumerable pleas- 
 ures, benefits, blessings, mercies. You 
 cannot deny this. You say that life is not 
 worth living, and yet you, this particular 
 pessimist whom I now address,* are rich 
 in worldly goods, unassailed as to reputa- 
 tion, possessed of a wife who not merely 
 adores you but who piques your vanity 
 enjoyably by being the favorite of all vifhom 
 she meets. You have children who are 
 
 * A prosperous member of society is here inten- 
 tionally specified. 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 75 
 
 straight and tall and beautiful, and who 
 look on the heaviest task as merest leis- 
 ure provided you approve its onus and its 
 discipline. Your friends group about you 
 and esteem you. You breakfast with dis- 
 cretion ; you sup with sanity. You have 
 learned long ago the wisdom of abstemi- 
 ousness; you are the despair of your family 
 physician, whose fat income of dollars can 
 secure no augment from your exasperat- 
 ing prudence. The worn and hackneyed 
 interrogatory of cut bono has no meaning 
 for your ears ; you live without a misfor- 
 tune ; your very sleep is undisturbed by 
 even so much as im agreeable dream. 
 Your exemption from an hour, a minute 
 of distemper, weakness, indisposition, is 
 not the least of all these favors. Can 
 you truthfully tell me that simply with 
 such complete freedom from all physi- 
 cal aches and pains you do not congratu- 
 late yourself on being the possessor of a 
 human existence ? Can 3-ou truthfully as- 
 sert that you would rather not have been at 
 all than be as you are ? Nullity, non-exist- 
 ence, is, I admit, inconceivable to human 
 consciousness in a subjective way. If you 
 had never been born you would never have 
 known even the peaceful serenity of not 
 
"j^i The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 having breathed ; you would simply have 
 been (if one may presume to say it) a 
 minus quantity in the enormous equation 
 of our terrestrial algebra. But would you 
 have preferred extinction to your present 
 sojourn upon the planet named Earth ? 
 Are not the loves you have felt worth lov- 
 ing? Is not the music you have heard 
 worth hearing ? Are not the paintings and 
 sculptures you have seen worth seeing ? 
 Have not the numberless complexities of 
 human character with which circumstance 
 has associated you been worth exploring 
 and scrutinizing? Plainly, candidly, as 
 man to man, do you not think the whole 
 problem of life has been one which you 
 would have chosen to confront, provided 
 you had been a naked spirit on the borders 
 between chaos and order, with volition 
 enough to decide between annihilation or 
 creation, consciousness or cerebral blank ?" 
 '■I grant all that you say," answers the 
 pessimist thus directly addressed. '■ I am 
 a happy husband, a happy father ; I am 
 the possessor of wealth ; all the pleasures 
 that environment may bestow upon me are 
 mine. My heart beats with an equal stroke ; 
 my digestion waits on appetite ; I have my 
 book-shelves lined with the masterpieces in 
 
The Arrogaiut' of Optiinisin. 77 
 
 literature of the immortal dead ; I cannot 
 complain that I have been visited v/ith a 
 single ill of the many to which flesh is heir. 
 And yet I am miserable. I do not accept 
 life ; it has been forced upon me. I go to 
 my bed, I awake from my repose, with one 
 immitigable sensation — despair." 
 
 "But why do you despair?" comes the 
 query. 
 
 " Why ? Can you ask me ? I am under 
 a rigid death-sentence. It is true that all 
 my human encompassment shares the same 
 bitter doom of threat. But that is no com- 
 fort to me. If I had been a condemned 
 prisoner waiting for execution it would 
 afford me no solace that hundreds of others 
 near me had been similarly treated. Im- 
 mortality? I know nothing about it. You 
 tell me that a certain book, written centu- 
 ries ago, abounds in hope and assurance of 
 it. But I reject the evidence of that book. 
 I cannot admit that it is divinely inspired. 
 I know that a man named Polycarp said 
 that it was, and another man named Euse- 
 bius, and another man named Irenaeus. 
 But I reject the evidence of these witnesses. 
 They were born in an age that was bale- 
 fully fertile in the most odious of supersti- 
 tions. I have only the frailest of proofs 
 
78 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 that even such a man as Jesus Christ ever 
 existed. But if he did exist I can gain no 
 consolation from legendary statement that 
 he was the son of a benign overruling 
 deity. You speak of the happiness that is 
 afforded me by the society of my wife. It 
 is true that I adure her — that every linea- 
 ment of her visage, every curve of her form, 
 is unspeakably dear to me. And yet I have 
 never known the untrammelled delight of 
 loving her for the sweet, winsome v/oman 
 she is. My adoration for her has ever been 
 mingled with terror. I mean the terror of 
 losing her. You, an optimist, would de- 
 clare this an ' unhealthy ' mood. You 
 would affirm it to be the ' borrowing of 
 trouble.' Easy phrases, my friend ! And 
 yet I have lain awake at night with the be- 
 loved form of my wife near me, and shud- 
 dered at the thought of my awful solitude 
 if death should rid me of her priceless 
 compan)^ ! You remonstrate with me, you 
 of the sunny mind^ the imperishable op- 
 timism. 'Why,' you ask, 'should I dream 
 of horrors where none are to be found ?' 
 Yet pause, my genial-souled friend. A 
 month ago my next-door neighbor would 
 stop me in the street to clasp my hand 
 with eager amit)% He was the picture 
 
The Arrogance of optimism. "jO) 
 
 of ruggedness then — only a month ago ! 
 In his cheek health blushed, in his eye 
 health kindled. His wife, who worshipped 
 him, had said to me : 'I am so happy be- 
 cause my husband has no ailment, because 
 he is unharmed by the least bodily ill.' 
 ...Yesterday I saw that wife. Her attire 
 was one blackness of mourning. Her 
 lip trembled as I took her hand. Life 
 to her had suddenly become a torture. 
 Why should it not so become to me, at any 
 hour, at any instant ? I fold my arms all 
 the closer about my own wife in realizing 
 the possibility of a like calamity ; but my 
 love is none the less mingled with fear. 
 What should I do if she were torn from 
 me? Could I take up again the burden of 
 living? No, no ; as I watch her live face it 
 seems impossible that she should be made 
 mute and irresponsive to this devotion I 
 hoard for her, inexhaustible, the sweet 
 miserly accrument of conjugal years ! And 
 my children ! How I love them ! They are 
 she ; they are even more ; the guileless 
 egotism of fatherhood invests their treas- 
 ured vitality. I press my lips to my daugh- 
 ter's lips, to the lips of my son, with a 
 passion different from yet even more sacred 
 than the ecstasy of manhood's early love. 
 
8o The Arrogance of Optitnisvi. 
 
 And yet they, my children, are menaced 
 by the same dreadful threat ! Yesterday 
 Agnes told me that her heart pulsated too 
 rapidly ; I placed my hand upon her bosom 
 with a sense of unspeakable anxiety. 
 Yesterday Harold said to me, ' Father, I 
 have a headache.' My touch upon his 
 brow seemed so cold to myself that I feared 
 lest he might shrink from it. ' Idle self- 
 tormentings !' cry you, my optimist friend. 
 And vet we both know that Nature is 
 pitiless. My love for my offspring is not so 
 large — immeasurable though I feel it ! — 
 as the deadly ambuscaded forces of ever- 
 watchful, ever-treacherous death! My Ag- 
 nes, my Harold, are well ; my worriment 
 was nonsense. Oh, yes, I admit it.. .but 
 a cofKn was lately carried out of a house 
 in the next street to mine, and in it lay a 
 youth of Harold's age, smitten by pneu- 
 monia. A few streets further away there 
 was another funeral last week ; a young 
 girl, just the age of my Agnes, had died of 
 diphtheria. Oh, it is all mere 'croaking' 
 to speak as I speak now. But what may a 
 human soul do with all its love if it cannot 
 be the guardian and warder of that love's 
 perpetuity? I tell myself that I should go 
 mad if I lost my wife or m)' son or my 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 8i 
 
 daughter. And yet others, on every side 
 of me, survive disasters as keen and strin- 
 gent. Perhaps I would survive them, too 
 ...I dorl't know... I only know that I would 
 infinitely have preferred not being born 
 into this world at all than being born 
 into it with the dear, sweet weight and 
 burden of what I now must bear ! Are 
 the joy and satisfaction of possessing kin- 
 dred as treasured as my own commensu- 
 rate with the stern and persevering fear of 
 their possible loss ? I answer, No. And I 
 answer it not only from the depths of my 
 intellect but from the depths of my love !" 
 How can the optimist answer a plaint 
 like this ? He cannot rationally assert that 
 the pessimist puts forward one illogical 
 claim. He may laugh with as blithe a 
 mirth as Hebe's at the fabled banquets of 
 Jove. He may point to the sun and revel 
 in its golden ardors. But he must accede 
 that night follows, howsoever the jubilance 
 and splendor of day may tarry. The arro- 
 gance of optimism must at certain times 
 make itself felt to him, even though he de- 
 nies that it has been exerted. He, like the 
 pessimist, has loved ones. The stealthy 
 and irreversible advance of age cannot be 
 disputed by him. He does not grow old 
 
82 The Arrogance of Optiinism. 
 
 half so gracefully as he professes to do. 
 His hair does not turn into the sarcastic 
 silver of decay, his limbs do not secrete a 
 subtle chalk in their joints, his forehead 
 does not develop the immedicable wrinkles 
 and crow's-feet, his teeth do not turn ache- 
 haunted and loose, without his knowledge 
 and sure comprehension of such piteous 
 disintegration. He may "philosophize"; 
 he may don a bold front against the grad- 
 ual, loitering advance of the sure destroyer ; 
 and ytt in his inmost heart he recognizes 
 and bitterly appreciates the slow, terrible 
 change. 
 
 There is some uplifting force, affirms the 
 disciple of Schopenhauer, which enables 
 us to eat our daily meals (provided we are 
 among the limited though fortunate num- 
 ber of those who can procure them) and 
 bear a comparatively stout heart along with 
 us during the brief passage between cradle 
 and grave. What, you ask, is that peculiar 
 undemonstrated force ? " It is," the Scho- 
 penhauerite will answer you, " ' the will to 
 live,' the undeniable yet mysterious influ- 
 ence that equally causes a violet to spring 
 up by the side of a brook and Saturn to 
 wheel his awful globe about the sun." 
 
 "Not so," affirms the Christian, "it is 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 85 
 
 God, conscious and supremely intelligent, 
 ordering His universe with unrivalled wis- 
 dom and ability." The Christian and op- 
 timist are, in this case, supposed to be one 
 and the same, though many Christians ex- 
 ist who are thorough pessimists at heart, 
 fighting for dogma with an invincible stub- 
 bornness, yet ruling their lives by principles 
 and doctrines which the Galilean would 
 have held forlornly foolish. Bat the real 
 pessimist will not for a moment hear that 
 the least proof of intelligence is to be found 
 among the workings of Nature. " My great 
 reason," he will tell you, "for holding ex- 
 istence to be a curse and a bore, is my firm 
 conviction that we are, all of us, the mere 
 puppets of some sightless and wholly mind- 
 less Process, which moves us, not whither- 
 soever it Vv'ill, but whithersoever it must. 
 You assure me that above all things there 
 is a presiding and prevailing Consciousness. 
 But I have no such certainty, and the creed 
 to which I cling is in thousands of ways 
 more tenable than yours. You affect to 
 despise me in the arrogance of your optim- 
 ism, and you hurl sentences of Scripture at 
 me, such as ' The fool hath said in his heart, 
 There is no God.' But I am not to be dis- 
 missed half so easily as that. My doubts 
 
84 The Afrogance of Optimism. 
 
 will return to Jiaunt you at many future hours 
 of your life, even though you now profess 
 so valiantly to despise them. For this 
 faith of yours in the complete mercy of your 
 God I fail to find half as thorough as you 
 yourself would have me think it. The 
 arms of optimists like you are not torn away 
 any the more easily, I have observed, from 
 the forms of their beloved dead because of 
 that 'corruptible' which 'must put on in- 
 corruption' or that 'house not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens.' Your sobs, 
 at times like these, echo none the less 
 drearily than those wrung from the lips of 
 the unbelieving. You say that the intense 
 physical alteration brought about by death 
 is sufflcient to create in you this horror, 
 this agony. But I cannot at all agree with 
 you that it would be thus sufficient, pro- 
 vided your faith were as strong as you rep- 
 resent. That is a faith, you yourself say, 
 which passeth understanding ; it is rooted 
 in emotions and longings ; its promises to 
 you are copious and priceless. But I can- 
 not reconcile your trust with your tears, 
 your heavenly confidence with your very 
 earthly lamentation. What if this friend 
 wio has just breathed his last had come to 
 you some day and said: 'I am going into 
 
Tlie Arrogance of Optimism. 85 
 
 a beautiful country, where I shall be ex- 
 quisitely happy and whither you shall one 
 day follow me"? Would you fall on his 
 neck and tremble with suffering? Would 
 you seek to detain him from that delightful 
 sojourn by every means in your power?... 
 Come, now ; there is either a grave flaw in 
 your well-jointed, oft-vaunted armor of 
 faith, or you have deceived both yourself 
 and others with regard to its resistance, its 
 durability. For it fails to stand the one 
 needed test. It is impotent in the face of 
 that very calamity which it boasts of under- 
 rating. At the door of the tomb it falters 
 and loses courage. If I had it I make bold to 
 say that I would see joy in the dead man's 
 obsequies, and resent as irrelevant the 
 mournful emblem on his door-bell. You 
 are an optimist, yet you have not the due 
 and consistent courage of one when it comes 
 to a question of bearing that very ordeal 
 which you rebuke me for calling crucially 
 severe.... Now, let us see how far this 
 same alleged courage will serve you with 
 relation to the laws of living — those laws, 
 remember, which you name the product of 
 a supreme Benignity, ever watchful for 
 your welfare. How do you really oppose 
 the unpleasant stress of poverty ? By ar- 
 
86 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 dent prayer ? I do not deny that you may 
 pray devoutly, but do you not also take 
 pains to work with industry as well, and to 
 exert all your faculties of unsullied trades- 
 manship toward the end of gaining a com- 
 fortable livelihood? By prayer, too, you 
 may seek to rid yourself of countless other 
 ills ; but if you should to-morrow discover 
 that your cellar was filled with stagnant 
 water, would you not instantly resort to 
 the services of a competent di-ainer ? If an 
 earthquake should suddenly shake your 
 house, would you drop on your knees, or 
 would you rush with expedition from the 
 doorway ? If your child fell ill to-day of 
 scarlet-fever, would prayer or medicine be 
 first in your parental thought ? And yet 
 you would denounce as unpardonably 
 ' godless ' the man who should presume to 
 speak with you of the inefBcacy of prayer. 
 The arrogance of optimism would swiftly 
 rise in revolt against his theories. I do not, 
 be it borne in mind, deny the assertiveness 
 of my own pessimism. And yet I seldom 
 get even the chance of exploiting it. The 
 large mass of ' civilization ' to which you 
 belong will rarely accord me that chance. 
 You are always crying at me from your 
 pulpits, your church-meetings, your popular 
 
The A rrogance of Optimism. 87 
 
 assemblages of many sorts. When I point 
 to John Stuart Mill's essay On Nature you 
 shudder, and marvel how I can be so ' ma- 
 terialistic' And yet, practically, you treat 
 Nature as the same implacable foe that I 
 treat her. If a sharp wind rushes from the 
 north, you button your great-coat over your 
 chest. If you read in your sympathizing 
 newspapers that several wretched Italian 
 immigrants have been detained at quaran- 
 tine, reeking with the microbes of cholera, 
 you have dismal dreams of a horrified 
 Broadway and a demoralized Fifth Avenue. 
 You are, in other words, as much of an ac- 
 tive, operative pessimist as I am, and the 
 only positive difference between us is that 
 you orally proclaim an optimism which I 
 will not proclaim at all, since I cannot live 
 up to it, nor take pleasure in flagellating 
 my fellow-creatures with its arrogance — 
 its arrogance, on which I am never tired, in 
 my present arraignment of you, aggrievedly 
 to harp." 
 
 There is no doubt that a so-called 
 " healthy" state of the human mind general- 
 ly, if not always, is allied to one of stupidity. 
 If we think at all of whence we have come, 
 whither we are going, and wherefore we 
 are here, we inevitably recoil from that 
 
88 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 trinity of mysteries ; and to let our thoughts 
 dwell habitually upon any subject invested 
 with so much gloomy dissatisfaction and 
 unrest is of course an occupation highly 
 injurious to happiness. There can be no 
 doubt, either, that idiots and animals, when 
 freed from bodily pain, are perfectly happy. 
 Still, on the other hand, it is not denied 
 that contentment is incompatible with 
 brains, for the simple reason that very 
 many persons are as firm-nerved and as 
 fearless in their contemplation of le grand 
 peut-Hre as Napoleon was on the eve of 
 a battle. But there is no excuse for 
 beings thus endowed with perennial forti- 
 tude to cast scorn upon others of weaker 
 mould ; for if the manifold ills of life keenly 
 alarm me and do not disconcert my neigh- 
 bor, the point as to whether my agitation 
 or his imperturbability is most in order 
 must be solely determined by the inimical 
 degree of the assailant agency ; and only 
 fools will persist in saying that life is not 
 pregnant with ills. Wise men may offset 
 these ills with blessings, but the latter still 
 remain convertible at even a moment's 
 notice into their distinct reverse, while 
 many of the former, such as old age, death, 
 sundering of attached souls, bereavement. 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 89 
 
 the failure of eyesight or hearing, are with- 
 out cure, consolation, alleviation. Nor do 
 the Latin words, Pulvis et umbra sumus, 
 thoroughly convey the surpassing melan- 
 choly of human life. Ours is not merely 
 a world where we die. It is one in which 
 heredity exerts an increasing and inex- 
 orable mastery. The edicts of heredity, 
 expressed in Biblical phrase by " the sins of 
 the fathers . . visited upon the children," 
 are too often as tyrannous as any that a 
 Nero or a Caligula could devise. Our asy- 
 lums and hospitals make harshly plain to 
 us the unmerited woes that are visited upon 
 generations of mortals. There we may see 
 diseases transmitted by progenitors to their 
 descendants which entail years of torment 
 that the worst despot history can produce 
 would have been loath to visit upon his 
 guiltless victims. Adults and little children 
 alike quiver beneath the lash of these de- 
 plorable inflictions. Inherited rheumatic 
 gout will twist and distort the limbs of an 
 infant from its birth until it has reached 
 nine or ten years, and then kill it in the end, 
 ruthlessly and with perhaps only a sliglit 
 moribund interval of surcease from exces- 
 sive pain. Inherited cancer lingeringly 
 slays both saint and sinner with frigid dis- 
 
90 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 regard of either desert or innocence. The 
 babe is born to live a week, a month, a j'ear, 
 and then perish with pangs that make us 
 thankful its racked and persecuted little 
 body could cease from breathing when it 
 did. The middle-aged are flung upon beds 
 of misery by some malady which has been 
 slowly, insidiously developing within them 
 while they labored for the peaceful compe- 
 tence which now at last they have just at- 
 tained, and no more. The old are stricken 
 by the same hideous ailment which de- 
 stroyed their fathers or mothers at a similar 
 age. Heredity has, in its demoniac quiver, 
 arrows tipped with a poison more baneful 
 than any of which the Borgias ever 
 dreamed. 
 
 Nor is this all. The optimist may toss 
 his head as merrily and dissentiently as he 
 will, but that very "spiritual" part of us 
 whose divine origin he is so fond of extol- 
 ling as indestructible, has its throes to en- 
 dure, for which no merciful anaesthetic has 
 yet been invented by psychologist or meta- 
 physician. To love and to be loved in this 
 life may present ineffable enjoyment. But 
 to love and to be loved are forever forming 
 the saddest of non-sequiturs. It is not always, 
 by any means, that the intervention of caste 
 
The Arrogaticc of Optimism, 91 
 
 and wealth tears two lovers apart from one 
 another. Nature, no less than man, has her 
 Montague and her Capulet, her Abelard 
 and her Heloise. A man adores, worships 
 a certain woman, and finds her cold to him 
 as marble. A woman is stirred by the same 
 unquenchable preferment, and is met by 
 the same stolid indifference. Such passions 
 as these, thwarted in their very births, are 
 at once the marvel and the despair of all 
 whom they besiege. They are like birds 
 with bleeding and shattered wings ; they 
 are powerless to fly, and can only crawl 
 along with their smarting burdens. George 
 Eliot (whose morality and charity as a 
 writer are immense, yet whose pessimism 
 is no less a fact to all who have studied her 
 faithfully) touches, in "Daniel Deronda," 
 on this wide, eternal reality of the lover's 
 unrequited affection. Women hide it more 
 than men — and suffer more on this account. 
 Men have larger means for seeking and 
 obtaining forgetfulness. Perhaps very few 
 of either sex fail ultimately to heal their 
 aching wounds. But when such love as 
 theirs has become simply memory, the sting 
 that succeeds its disappearance is some- 
 times a persistent, if not a poignant one. 
 How could we ever so vehemently have 
 
92 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 loved and yet now feel this torpid callous- 
 ness in a heart that was once so tremu- 
 lously sensitive ? Our love, when we were 
 thralled by it, made us feel a sacred kin- 
 ship with the stars ; we looked into the red 
 bosoms of roses and the balmy chalices of 
 lilies, with new eyes for their richness and 
 chastity ; our most prosaic tasks took a 
 halcyon edge upon their very commonness 
 and dulness, like ordinary objects when seen 
 through prisms. We pressed our friends' 
 hands more warmly than had been our wont, 
 because friendship was allied with love, and 
 love was a divine melody that every wind 
 sang to us, every sunbeam laughed to us. 
 ...But, deseried by all that old, delicious 
 exaltation, we ask ourselves what its frenzy 
 could have meant or been ? How may we 
 any longer call it ideal and poetic when it 
 has passed away from us with no more 
 ceremony in its quick evanishment than if 
 it were an impulse of hunger or a prefer- 
 ence of claret over champagne ? Never do 
 we seem more clearly to ourselves the tran- 
 sient shadows of a void and profitless dream 
 than then, in such disillusionized and 
 doubly solitary hours ! Shakespeare, held 
 by those highest in critical autliority as 
 the greatest poet that mankind has thus 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism 93 
 
 far been called upon to admire, is the 
 author of many a pessimistic verse. In- 
 deed, it is the belief of that fearless and 
 wonderful reasoner, Robert G. IngersoU 
 (himself a profound Shakespearian scholar), 
 that the author of " Hamlet" was a con- 
 firmed agnostic and freethinker. Opponents 
 of this theory will eagerly seize upon the 
 dramatic form of Shakespeare's work as 
 ample justification of every " impious" line 
 he ever wrote. But how about the " Son- 
 nets "? Do they not literally overflow with 
 thought such as this : 
 
 " Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake. 
 And die as fast as they see others grow; 
 And nothing' gainst Time's scyihecan make defence..." 
 
 Or again, these meaning verses : 
 
 " Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, 
 And make the earth devour her own sweet brood; 
 Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws 
 And burn the long-liv'd phoenix in her blood...; 
 But I forbid thee one most heinous cnme : 
 O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow..." 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " When I consider everything that grows 
 Holds in perfection but a little moment, 
 That this huge state presenteth naught but shows 
 Whereon the stars in secret influence comment..." 
 
94 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud; 
 Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, 
 And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud..." 
 
 Or, still once again : 
 
 "Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, 
 But sad mortality o'ersways their power, 
 How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea. 
 Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" 
 
 Or, Still once again, and the last time, 
 though many more similar passages of 
 gloom and despondency could be cited, 
 let us now reproduce the whole of a son- 
 net which has long been famed as one of 
 the brightest jewels in this very remark- 
 able collection. A more plaintive moan of 
 despairing revolt against the entire earthly 
 scheme was never uttered by any poet, liv- 
 ing or dead. 
 
 " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, — 
 As, to behold desert a beggar born. 
 And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 
 And purest faith unhappily forsworn, 
 And gilded honor shamefully misplac'd. 
 And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted. 
 And right protection wrongfully disgrac'd. 
 And strength by limping sway disabled, 
 And art made tongue-tied by authority. 
 And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, 
 
Tlie Arrogance of Optintisin. 95 
 
 And simple truth miscall'd simplicity. 
 And captive good attending captain ill . 
 
 Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, 
 Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." 
 
 Such denunciations of life, vented by 
 Shakespeare, are in the poet's own voice, 
 and not that of any portrayed dramatic 
 character. The poet here speaks through 
 his individual lips, and not those of any 
 malign creation like lago or Macbeth. 
 " This little life is rounded by a sleep," and 
 " All the world's a stage " are but two, as it 
 were, among the multitudinous black pearls 
 of thought which help to make up that 
 other truly royal chaplet. What would the 
 modern newspaper say to ideas like these, 
 if so illustrious an authority had not uttered 
 them ? Here are some words of condemna- 
 tion against pessimism, taken a day or two 
 ago from a New York daily journal 0/ 
 prominence and power : 
 
 " An author who depicts life in dreary 
 colors is sure to exert a most undesirable 
 influence over many of his readers. The 
 force of this applies to all kinds of writing. 
 Whether a man pens an epic poem or a 
 newspaper editorial, the tone of his philos- 
 ophy is sure to leave its ultimate effect on 
 those who peruse his words. Is it not then 
 
g6 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 incumbent upon an author to shun, as far 
 as possible, that mocking pessimism which 
 in our day serves to cover a vast amount of 
 mental inability? One word in literature 
 by an optimistic thinker is worth ten thou- 
 sand by a grumbler, even though the latter 
 may adorn his thoughts with the brightest 
 gems of wit and poesy." 
 
 The above is a most salient example of 
 the arrogance of optimism. This little 
 group of sentences may be said to contain 
 the same condescension and patronage 
 which mark uncounted pages of our current 
 newspapers. It is always the same a priori 
 course of mingled laudation and damnation 
 Why is one word of optimism worth ten 
 thousand of pessimism ? If neither manner 
 of surveying life can be set aside as in- 
 nately false, why should this be upheld and 
 applauded while that is decreed to "cover 
 a vast amount of mental inability"? Do 
 the sonnets of Shakespeare, that mourn so 
 eloquently and untiringly '■ the wreckful 
 siege of battering days," perpetrate such a 
 flimsy concealment ? Was George Eliot a 
 "grumbler' because she wrote that heart- 
 breaking story of " Middlemarch," where 
 destiny rewards hardly a single noble intent 
 or disinterested yearning ? Did the shrewd 
 
The Arrogance of Optiviisin. 97 
 
 lips of Voltaire lie when they reminded us 
 that ' we never live, but are always in expec- 
 tation of living ' ? If, as Montaigne some- 
 where axiomatcs, ' ignorance is the mother 
 of all evils,' why should it exert " an unde- 
 sirable influence " to depict life in " dreary 
 colors," when those dreary colors are all 
 borrowed from the sure shadows cast by 
 every-day occurrences ? Have the stimu- 
 lating prophecies and warrants of Christi- 
 anity prevented a million cases of madness, 
 a million acts of suicide? Allowing all the 
 beauty, allurement, pastime, lofty pursuit, 
 glorious intoxication of life to be credible 
 and tangible, why should its ugliness, re- 
 pulsion, disappointment, failure, overthrow, 
 receive but furtive glances, as though fable 
 had first begotten and fatuity afterward 
 exaggerated them ? Is the optimistic fer- 
 mentation brought about in unenlightened 
 minds by sermons like those of Dr. Tal- 
 mage and others equal to a tranquil facing 
 of verities — a square and honest confront- 
 ing of the whole sweet-and-bitter, dark-and- 
 bright enigma, and a frank subsequent con- 
 fession that both ourlaughter and ourgroans 
 are the products of an inscrutable, abysmal, 
 tantalizing source ? If I concede your 
 right to say that the Mediterranean breaks 
 
98 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 with voluptuous cadences on the shores of 
 the Riviera, why should you refuse me my 
 right to answer that the cyclone is death- 
 fully raging in the wilds of Nebraska? 
 But the arrogance of optimism does refuse 
 me this right. It chides me and frowns 
 upon me when I maintain that Emerson's 
 amiable treatise concerning Nature is but 
 the complement of John Stuart Mill's dolo- 
 rous one, and that while each may be in 
 its way undeniable, the first only leaves 
 off where the last begins. If optimism 
 could disprove the avowals of pessimism it 
 would be quite another affair with her. 
 But she cannot ; she can only berate and 
 abuse them. And yet the professedly buoy- 
 ant members of society are the very ones 
 who tell 5'ou that they have had " oh, such 
 a wretched attack of the blues," or that 
 they have heard Brown's book is doleful, 
 and therefore do not want to read it, since 
 there is such ait enormous ainount of sadness in 
 life that one cannot escape, whether he will or 
 no. It is usually the person impartially 
 observant of life in all her phases who has 
 the best time as years crowd upon him. The 
 present article offers no plea for pessimism, 
 no recommendation of its counsels, no en- 
 dorsement of its assumptions and prem- 
 
The Arrogance of Opiitnisnt. 99 
 
 ises. But a plea certainly is offered for the 
 respectful consideration of a doctrine so 
 much of which is irrefutable truth. If it 
 be not too commonplace, I would suggest 
 that the kind of truth we men and women 
 want most of all — the kind to live by and 
 to die by — is midway between these two 
 strenuous extremes. The crown of a per- 
 fect education might be defined as a perfect 
 freedom from prejudice. It is extraordi- 
 nary how much of a peculiar sort of preju- 
 dice the optimist of to-day fosters. It 
 would seem as if he were only arrogant 
 with living pessimists, and forgivingly 
 overlooked tlie sins of all others. We oc- 
 casionally find him allowing greatness to 
 Voltaire ; he has been known to discredit 
 the story that Thomas Paine died in mis- 
 eries of repentance, imploring the pardon 
 of heaven for his blasphemies. But not to 
 faire des examples with too much prolixity, 
 we note that the optimist abides unruffled 
 in his contemplation of what are perhaps 
 the most daring pessimisms ever put into 
 verse. I mean those of Omar Khayydm, 
 the Persian astronomer-poet. When, about 
 thirty years ago, the late Mr. Edward Fitz- 
 gerald rendered these astonishing stanzas 
 into admirable English verse, it was curious 
 
lOO The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 to observe the popularity they at once se- 
 cured. Both here and in England optimism 
 was never weary of praising them. It was 
 so safe to do so ; Omar had been born seven 
 hundred years ago ; there was nothing sac- 
 rilegious in hearing the voice of material- 
 ism at that distance away. And so the op- 
 timist would smile to himself as he read of 
 the old poet's vie orageuse and the epicurean 
 conclusions that he had drawn from it. That 
 book, to half the optimists in the land, was 
 like a "jolly bank-holiday " to a lot of Lon- 
 don clerks. They interchanged shocked 
 looks as they read, but with none the less 
 avidity they did read — 
 
 "What, without asking, liither hurried whence? 
 And, without aslcing, whither \i\ixx\£& hence? 
 
 O many a cup of this forbidden wine 
 Must drown the memory of that insolence !" 
 
 Of course, they argued, if any modern 
 human being, such as Col. IngersoU, should 
 speak in the style of the following quat- 
 rain, it would be outrageous to the last 
 degree. But then it sounded so much less 
 abominable (it sounded so fascinatingly 
 quaint, in fact !) when you heard a voice 
 pealing forth from a seven-hundred-year- 
 old past with such words as these ; 
 
Tlic Arrogance of Opiiinisni. loi 
 
 " Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin 
 Beset the road I was to wander in. 
 
 Thou wilt not with predestined evil round 
 Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin !" 
 
 Still, with all the dilettante laxity which 
 the optimist is known to have permitted 
 himself regarding the perusal of Omar 
 Khayydm's Rubiiyit, it is difficult to un- 
 derstand how he could quite have steadied 
 his nervous system sufficiently for a placid 
 consideration of the following — perhaps 
 more scathingly militant against accepted 
 codes than anything in the whole most un- 
 conventional poem : 
 
 "Oh, Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, 
 And even with paradise devise the snake, 
 
 For all the sin wherewiih the face of man 
 Is blackened, man's forgiveness give — and lake!" 
 
 I recall that, when Omar Khayydm's little 
 book was first published in this country, a 
 certain gentleman who had been one of its 
 earliest and most enthusiastic readers im- 
 parted to me his private suspicions concern- 
 ing its actual authorship : " I feel con- 
 vinced," he said, " that this ' astronomer- 
 poet of Persia ' is a graceful myth, invented 
 by the Rev. Edward Fitzgerald himself, in 
 order to conceal his own athestic tenden- 
 cies." I could not help thinking this a 
 
102 The Arrogance of Opthnism. 
 
 rather singular course and plan bj' which 
 a clergyman should seek to win his bdton 
 marechal as a poet, and subsequent develop- 
 ments proved my friend's hypothesis to 
 have been a mistaken one. But I have 
 often afterward ruminated upon the gen- 
 eral social result of a discovery that the Ru- 
 biiyat had really been the work of a Chat- 
 terton-like literary impostor. Ah, what re- 
 cantations and retractions would have 
 poured from the lips of our mortified op- 
 timists, if they had been called upon to re- 
 gard all these acrid and sinister sayings as 
 the outcome of a living, breathing pessimist, 
 and not of one that had been romantically 
 and picturesquely dead for seven long cen- 
 turies ! It is doubtful if Mr. Elihu Vedder 
 would have presumed to make those very 
 imaginative and captivating illustrations of 
 his, which now accompany at least one 
 precious edition of the work, and which, 
 moreover, in all their bitter and often ter- 
 rible beauty, are treasured by optimists of 
 every sect, from Roman Catholic to Uni- 
 tarian. 
 
 The arrogance of optimism will probably 
 cease to exert itself when it has received 
 from evolution a disclosure of its own hy- 
 pocrisy. For very few of us can live at 
 
The Arrogance of Optimism. 103 
 
 all without being in a measure pessim- 
 ists. " Theologians have exausted in- 
 genuity," says Ingersoll, " in finding ex- 
 cuses for God." But this is not so bold, 
 after all, as the remark of the Frenchman 
 who said that the sole excuse for ihe deity 
 was " qu'il 71'existe pas." Still, whether we 
 revolt or submit, it is very apt to be one 
 and the same with us : we are what George 
 Eliot has somewhere called " yoked crea- 
 tures with private opinions." None of us 
 can afford to sneer at him who looks more 
 sombrely than we do at the unutterable 
 wretchedness of the world, or at him who 
 distrusts more thoroughly than ourselves 
 the sinful and selfish races that people it. 
 Advancement in knowledge will bring pes- 
 simist and optimist nearer together. If 
 there are any who refuse sunshine its ra- 
 diance, flowers their bloom and odor, hu- 
 man love its tenderness and majesty, pity 
 its tears and almsgiving, virtue its cleanli- 
 ness and candor, justice its righteousness 
 and nobility, — if there continue any so par- 
 tisan and feeble of judgment as this, then 
 optimism may turn didactic to her heart's 
 content, and with an unassailable authority. 
 In the meantime let her use against the 
 " fallacies " of her foe other weapons than 
 
104 The Arrogance of Optimism. 
 
 those of idle invective. Let her imitate the 
 calm methods of science, who condemns 
 nothing, sneers at nothing, but accepts, 
 investigates, analyzes, utilizes all. You 
 cannot make me think malaria, lightning, 
 earthquake, rattlesnakes, treason, malice, 
 falsehood, meanness are less of the curses 
 I know them, because you cry out at me 
 that I am a malicious fool, and endanger 
 the Vi^elfare of life and society by noting 
 too closely such uncanny developments. 
 Neither can I make you think the warble of 
 birds, the murmur of streams, the limpid- 
 ness of heaven, the flocculence and purity 
 of a summer cloud, the exuberance and del- 
 icacy of a rose, the mirth and innocence of 
 childhood, the dignity and strength of hon- 
 est manhood, the rapture of a maiden's first 
 love, the sanctity of a mother's protective 
 caress, are slighter blessings than I know 
 them, because you cry out at me that I am 
 a mawkish sentimentalist, and endanger 
 the welfare of life and society by dwelling 
 with too much emphasis upon these espe- 
 cially agreeable phenomena. Some day, 
 when their present constituents long have 
 been dust, these two inimical factions of 
 intellectuality, optimism and pessimism, 
 will meet on a common ground — that of 
 mutual conc'^''~ion and conciliation. Some 
 
Tlie Aj-rogancc of Opthnisin. 105 
 
 day ? And yet who shall dare to dream 
 what far grander results that future day 
 may accomplish ? Science may then have 
 scaled heights which we now hold insu- 
 perable for even her dauntless foot. The 
 whole order of seeing and believing may 
 be changed. What now seems to us finality, 
 may then have become the rudimentary 
 commonplace of physics. If the twentieth 
 century marches along at the same superb 
 pace as that of the nineteenth, there is no 
 prophesying — there is hardly any fanciful 
 guessing, even — what invaluable certitudes 
 respecting life, death and the human soul 
 miiy be reached ! Nor is there anything 
 millennial, Utopian, impracticable in such a 
 deduction. Not so very long ago the mere 
 mention of an era in which instantaneous 
 submarine communication between Europe 
 and America was attainable, would have 
 been scoffed at as the wildest of fanatical 
 visions. It may be that in the twentieth or 
 twenty-first century pessimism and optim- 
 ism will be so welded together into a wider 
 conception of what is now deemed insolu- 
 ble that the ' arrogance ' which this pro- 
 test has attempted to exhibit will have 
 grown as inconsiderable an issue as many 
 a present optimist, after- reading thus far, 
 will feel disposed to pronounce it. 
 
THE BROWNING CRAZE. 
 
 Critical surprise has been more than 
 once expressed, of late, that in an -age so 
 militant against the development of the 
 poetic spirit, a single man should find him- 
 self (and that, too, at an advanced period 
 of his life) surrounded, not to say besieged, 
 by hosts of ardent admirers. Everybody 
 has now heard of the " Browning Craze," 
 and it is quite probable that many had 
 heard of it while Mr. Robert Browning 
 himself was hardly more to them than a 
 meaningless name. And yet to the major- 
 ity of literary men and women in England 
 and America this cult has long been a 
 familiar one. Not until perhaps a decade 
 ago did it begin to assume its present spa- 
 cious proportions. I remember meeting 
 devout Browningites at least twenty years 
 ago, when almost a boy. And as boys will, 
 when their thoughts turn toward the letters 
 of their time and land, I soon felt an ambi- 
 tious craving to graduate into a Brown- 
 ingite myself. 
 
 io6 
 
The Browning Craze. 107 
 
 Such a worship then possessed so fasci- 
 nating an element of rarity ! It was so at- 
 tractive a role for one to give a compas- 
 sionate lifting of the brows and say, " No, 
 really ?" when somebody declared himself 
 quite unable to understand the obscure 
 author of " Sordello." You knew perfectly 
 well that any number of his lines were 
 Hindostanee to you, and yet you made use 
 of your patronizing pity and your " No, 
 really ?" all the same. There is safety in the 
 assertion that Mr. Browning has driven more 
 pedantic youngsters to unblushing false- 
 hood than any other writer in the language. 
 All sorts of roads lead to fame, and his, 
 oddly indeed, has been the very oblique one 
 of an unpopularity which bore superficial 
 signs that it was preferred and courted. 
 But a deeper glance assures the unbiassed 
 observer that this is by no means fact. Al-v...^ 
 most every poem of the many which he has I 
 written bears evidence that the attitudina- i 
 rian has been at work, that the conscious ; 
 trickster has again and again superseded the ; 
 conscientious artist, and that the notoriety ; 
 we too often give caprice and whimsicality 
 has been aimed after with a studied zeal. 
 It is in this way that Mr. Browning inces- 
 santly betrays what might be called the 
 
io8 The Broivning Craze. 
 
 frivolity inseparable from his temperament. 
 Take, for example, in "Men and Women," 
 his most coherent collection of dramatic 
 and lyrical poetry, the profusion of rank 
 affectations mingled with their hardy op- 
 posites. Indeed, this one book, which is 
 by far the most serene, lucid and endur- 
 able that he has ever given to the world, 
 contains much that art cannot fail to find 
 hideous, even repulsive. Scarcely a poem 
 is exempt from some shocking flaw. In 
 " A Lover's Quarrel," which possesses good 
 human touches, if the verse does jerk like 
 a sled on a road filmed meagrely with snow, 
 we read such rhymed crudity as 
 
 See the eye, by a fly's foot blurred — 
 
 Ear, when a straw is heard 
 Scratch the brain's coat of curd ! 
 
 But effects of unpardonable bathos like 
 this abound in " Men and Women." The 
 present essay would exceed all allowable 
 scope if half of them were quoted. Poems 
 which have received rapturous praise fairly 
 teem with them. In " The Statue and the 
 Bust" (a piece of work so often declared 
 faultless) there are obscurities of construc- 
 tion for which a school-boy would be rated 
 by his teacher. " Master Hugues of Saxe- 
 
The Browning Craze. 109 
 
 Gotha" racks and tortures the most ordi- 
 nary ear. " Childe Roland to the Dark 
 Tower Came" (another object of devout 
 veneration) has little about it that is met- 
 rically slipshod, but affects an impartial 
 reader, after finishing it, as a lyric literally 
 torn from an unwilling talent ; its very 
 rhymes have a forced, factitious queerness, 
 and its abrupt ending seems to exclaim, 
 " Look at my wonderful suggestiveness of 
 allegory ! " And we look, if our eyes are 
 not bloodshot with the " Browning Craze," 
 only to conclude that the entire poem is on 
 such mystical stilts as to transcend the 
 reach of all sensible interpretation. "Pop- 
 ularity," which endeavors to laud the su- 
 periority of genius over mere facile aptitude, 
 ends with two stanzas regarding '' Hobbs, 
 Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes," which few liv- 
 ing men of taste would have cared to print 
 at all, and none except their creator would 
 have cared to offer his public as poetry. 
 "Old Pictures in Florence" repeatedly 
 massacres what should be a mellifluous 
 anapaestic measure, and leaves you as tired 
 of its eccentric attitudinizing as if you had 
 been button-holed by some loquacious 
 rhapsodist in one of the Arno-fronting 
 streets. 
 
110 The Browning Craze. 
 
 But it would be idle, on the other hand, 
 to deny "Men and Women" both poems 
 and passages of poems glowing with merit. 
 We find there " Evelyn Hope," a bit of pas- 
 sion worth careful heed, though overrated 
 by its lovers because so massively self- 
 satisfied in its transcendentalism. We find 
 "Bishop Blougram's Apology," a brilliant 
 study of a narrow, glib, specious-tongued 
 prelate, and interesting if on no other 
 ground than its dramatic exposition of a 
 meretricious moralist. We find the tender 
 and pathetic " Andrea del Sarto," whose 
 sole objection is the mannered and inhar- 
 monious blank verse which Mr. Browning 
 always employs. We find the fervid little 
 "Love among the Ruins," and wish its 
 author, so often insolent in his defiance of 
 art, had chosen to sing many more times 
 like that for the delight of folk unborn. 
 We find "Saul," burning with eloquence 
 and yet perfectly intelligible, notwithstand- 
 ing its cloying pietism. We find "In a 
 Balcony," perhaps the best piece of drama 
 Mr. Browning has ever written. We find 
 "The Last Ride Together," an ardent epi- 
 sode of love-making, but lyrically spoiled 
 by its far-fetched subtleties of simile and 
 illustration. We find "Any Wife to Any 
 
The Broivning Craze. 1 1 1 
 
 Husband," which to read over ten times 
 very patiently and studiously is to con- 
 vince us that it is fine — and what more of 
 critical irony could be heaped on a poem 
 than that? We find "Two in the Cam- 
 pagna," which begins exquisitely and gets 
 labored and befogged toward the end. We 
 find "A Grammarian's Funeral," which 
 makes the blood beat quicker, in parts, and 
 in parts lamentably cools it. We find "A 
 Toccata of Galuppi's," which gives us a 
 laugh or two as excellent Italian comedy. 
 And lastly we find " Fra Lippo Lippi," 
 winsome, sweet, and a poem which Tenny- 
 son might have told to us in verse as en- 
 chanting as that in which he has embalmed 
 "Tithonus." 
 
 It has been the writer's deliberate purpose 
 to deal first with " Men and Women," for 
 this book, in its entirety, faults and virtues 
 both included, will most probably mark the 
 uncrumbling corner-stone of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's future fame. Before this he had writ- 
 ten a very sane and splendid poem called 
 " How they Brought the Good News from 
 Ghent to Aix." It is so fine a piece of 
 work, indeed, that I can easily imagine his 
 worshippers despising it. It is no nut to 
 crack; it shows what an artist its parent 
 
1 1 2 Tlie Broivning Craze. 
 
 viight have been. Published originally in 
 the same volume, if I mistake not, vi^as 
 " My Last Duchess," a brief enough thing, 
 which has attained an extraordinary repu- 
 tation for no apparent cause. It has the 
 chute de phrase of a cruel man speaking 
 heartlessly about a wife whom his neglect 
 killed. But, except for the mild shudder 
 it awakens, it is in no sense noteworthy, 
 and the verse drags and hobbles with so 
 much sluggishness that no one save the 
 '" professional reader" (a great friend of 
 Mr. Browning's, because elocution helps 
 the latter's frequent disjointed and staccato 
 technics) can ever succeed in rendering it 
 rightly. Among the earlier " Dramatic 
 Lyrics'' must be remembered "The Pied 
 Piper of Hamelin," one of the few English 
 poems that have achieved a deserving pop- 
 ularity among the masses. It is a child's 
 poem, and therefore its occasional bizarre 
 falsetto may be pardoned. Not so "Tlie 
 Flight of the Duchess," however, in which 
 a charming and most spiritual tale is told 
 somewhat after the style of an Ingoldsby 
 Legend or Bab Ballad. It is filled with 
 such rhymes as " tintacks" and "syntax," 
 " stir-up" and "syrup," " news of her," and 
 " Lucifer," and many others equally un- 
 
The Brozviiiiig Craze. 1 1 3 
 
 suited to a history at once so serious and 
 so exalted. Here we are confronted with 
 tliat deliberated oddity which might be 
 termed Mr. Browning's most irritating 
 fault, as it certainly is his least honest one. 
 We see that he has planned all these fire- 
 cracker surprises of diction ; they bear 
 slight resemblance to that "rough power" 
 by which his artistic laziness has so often 
 been misnamed. For there is a certain 
 class of critics (and, I regret to add, a large 
 one) who only need the evidence of an 
 author's bad rhymes, haphazard rhythms 
 and defective constructions in order to dis- 
 cover that he fairly bristles with " rough 
 power." Le mot juste, the polished and ac- 
 curate utterance, is in severe disrepute 
 with these persons. It has been they who 
 for years have flung their jibes at the 
 unrivalled perfection of Lord Tennyson's 
 verse. Apparently, as they love to put it, 
 the latter had not power because it was 
 not " rough." He was mincing because 
 he never slurred a line ; he lacked the 
 higher kind of emotion because he had 
 patiently chiselled his work into a dignity 
 above the frenzies of Byron or the hysteria 
 of Shelley. I sometimes wonder, for my 
 own part, if those cavillers who ring such 
 
1 14 77^1? Broivning Craze. 
 
 wearisome changes on this one theme have 
 ever considered how much great power is 
 often at the root of poetical grace. Even 
 if Tennyson were only felicitous (and he is 
 that besides being a very noble poet as 
 well) he would have accomplished much. 
 All the remarkable poets who ever lived 
 have had as much grace as grandeur. 
 Grace is frequently inseparable from grand- 
 eur, but when it is not it is never weak- 
 ness ; it is always strength. The elastic 
 step and flexible form of some delicate 
 maiden may typify an endurance and forti- 
 tude not possessed by the sturdiest athlete. 
 Just as there wei'e thousands of people 
 who would have lost all regard for Carlyle 
 if he had been dowered with a decorous 
 and not an uncouth English idiom, so there 
 are thousands to-day who would consider 
 Mr. Browning's poetry very tame indeed 
 were it not studded with such points of 
 ugliness and idiosyncrasy as those which 
 disfigure "The Flight of the Duchess." 
 But other poems that belong to Mr. Brown- 
 ing's earlier manner, that were published 
 among the two or three collections with 
 which, years ago, he first presented the 
 world, and that deserve deep if not un- 
 qualified commendation, are "Soliloquy in 
 
The EroioniHg Craze. 1 1 5 
 
 a Spanish Cloister,'' " The Confessional," 
 and "Holy-Cross Day." All these are 
 alive with vigor, and not always by any 
 means impossible to understand after a 
 second or third reading — which is saying a 
 good deal against them, perhaps, in the 
 opinion of the confirmed Browningite. 
 "Holy-Cioss Day" is an especially original 
 and striking presentation of the Jew's de- 
 graded condition during the Middle Ages. 
 Nothing can be more trenchant than its 
 incidental sarcasms, nothing more acute 
 tlian the reproaches it hurls against the 
 bigotries and hypocrisies of its time. 
 
 All these better and wiser poems of Mr. 
 Browning appeared many years ago. "Sor- 
 dello'' had, unless I err, preceded them, 
 and from the absurd enigma of that book 
 their comparative clearness was a welcome 
 change. Mr. Browning began to be hailed 
 as a poet emergent from darkness, and in 
 a few quarters bright hopes were enter- 
 tained of his future. ''Sordello," when 
 heeded at all, may have made the cynics jest 
 and the thoughtful look grieved, but we 
 have no record that it had more materially 
 injured the young versifier who had chosen 
 to masquerade in it en sphinx. Everybody 
 knows the story of how Barry Cornwall's 
 
1 1 6 Tlie Broiviiing C?'aze. 
 
 wife gave him the book during his con- 
 valescence after a great illness, and of how 
 he read the first page bewilderedly, then 
 amazedly, and at length in nervous terror. 
 Handing it a little later to his wife, he 
 asked the tremulous question, ''What do 
 you make of this ?" And when, some fif- 
 teen or twenty minutes afterwards, Mrs. 
 Proctor replied, " I don't understand a 
 word of it," her husband burst forth in 
 delight, " Thank God I am not mad/" This 
 tale may or may not be false, but it cer- 
 tainly bears the stamp of probability. I re- 
 call, in about my eighteenth year, discred- 
 iting the statements I had heard relative to 
 " Sordello's'' unintelligibility, and attempt- 
 ing to read the book with a confidence in 
 my own anti-Philistine comprehension of 
 rt. But a few pages convinced me that 
 report had not falsified its odious "tough- 
 ness." Beautiful gleams occur in it, but 
 they are like flying lights over a surface of 
 heavy darkness. Now and then, for twenty 
 lines or so, you feel as if you had smoothly 
 mastered its meaning ; again, all is dis- 
 array and density. It is like seeing a fine 
 statue reflected in a cracked mirror : here 
 is the curve of a symmetric arm, but you 
 follow it only to meet an abortive bulge of 
 
The Broivning Craze. 117 
 
 elbow ; there is the outline of a sculptur- 
 esque cheek, but you trace below it a re- 
 pellent deformity of throat ; once more 
 you light with joy upon a thigh of fault- 
 less moulding, but lower down you are 
 shocked by obese distortion. The whole 
 " poem" resembles a caricature of some 
 Gothic cathedral, in planning which some 
 demented architect has treated his own 
 madness to a riot of gargoyles. The en- 
 semble is monstrous, inexcusable. But, like 
 many of Mr. Browning's later modern 
 poems, it strikes you as more of a wilful 
 failure than a feeble one. 
 
 All the plays of this author were pub- 
 lished by him while he was still a young 
 man. He calls himself, in one of his lyrics, 
 " Robert Browning, you writer of plays," 
 and it is evident, from the dramatic spirit 
 informing a great deal of his verse, that he 
 believed himself with extreme seriousness 
 to be a dramatist of high rank. Eulogy 
 untold has been poured upon him in this 
 capacity. Long before the " Browning 
 Craze'' had developed its first febrile symp- 
 toms, no less an authority than Dickens 
 was reported to have exclaimed, in a burst 
 of enthusiastic reverence, that he would 
 rather have written "A Blot in the 'Scut- 
 
Ii8 Tlie Browning Craze. 
 
 cheon" than all the novels to which his 
 name was signed ! It seems impossible 
 that the creator of "David Copperfield " 
 could ever have made any such wantonly- 
 random declaration. And yet, not very 
 long ago, an English writer of some distinc- 
 tion endeavored to prove that " Strafford," 
 " Colombe's Birthday," and " The Return 
 of the Druses" had been successfully per- 
 formed before London audiences. They 
 may have been performed, but that they 
 were in any degree successful cannot for 
 an instant be credited. They are not 
 dramas at all ; they ai-e no more than dia- 
 logues divided arbitrarily into acts. And 
 yet they have been compared to the plays 
 of Shakespeare by several inflammable 
 zealots in the Browning cause. Still, after 
 all, writers have existed who rejoiced, dur- 
 ing the past two hundred years, in heaping 
 odium upon Shakespeare as a charlatan, 
 and we all recollect the contempt with which 
 Sir Samuel Pepys wrote of him, not to men- 
 tion Oliver Goldsmith's freely-expressed 
 disdain in the "Vicar of Wakefield." Thus 
 it becomes apparent that human taste has 
 many foibles and vagaries, and that the 
 blare of a few partisan trumpets cannot do 
 much for the establishment of a genuine 
 
Tlie Browning Craze. iig 
 
 literary fame. As for that mightily be- 
 lauded play, "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," 
 it was accorded an admirable oral chance 
 at the Star Theatre in New York, two or 
 three years ago. Mr. Lawrence Barrett 
 took the part of Tresham, and all the other 
 characters, as the newspapers put it, were 
 "in good hands." Mr. Barrett and all his 
 company did their best for the play. At 
 the end of the third act I heard somebody 
 near me murmur that it was " Oh, im- 
 mensely fine, don't you know, but a closet- 
 play . . . yes, decidedly a closet- play." I 
 could not help asking myself whether the 
 reputation which it had through years en- 
 joyed were not a sort of closet-reputation 
 as well. For my own part, I had heard it 
 somewhat apathetically and mechanically 
 called "marvellous" and "grand" a great 
 many times, before I attempted to read it, 
 by people who used these epithets as though 
 they were somehow pledged to propriety 
 for their correct delivery. But I realize 
 now that it is a work of talented adroitness 
 and little more. There is something curi- 
 ously professorial and factitious about it, 
 brought forth more clearly by the foot- 
 lights than by perusal, and yet perceptible 
 through either medium. Its " psychology' 
 
120 The Browning Craze. 
 
 becomes overburdening, oppressive. Every- 
 body, from the first scene till the last, is on 
 transcendental stilts ; nor is such impres- 
 sion diminished by the blunt, choppy char- 
 acter of Mr. Browning's blank verse. As 
 Tresham is made to fling this forth in sen- 
 tence after sentence, his character grows 
 more and more unsympathetic. He is 
 meant to be the ideal of honor and nobility, 
 and he gradually becomes to us, during the 
 progress of the piece, more and more of a 
 petulant metaphysician. He says to the 
 seducer of his sister, on finding him at the 
 casement of this lady, about to enter it 
 surreptitiously at night,- 
 
 " We should join hands in frantic sympathy 
 If you once taught me the unteachable, 
 Explained how you can live so, and so lie. 
 With God's help I retain, despite my sense, 
 The old belief — a life like yours is still 
 Impossible. Now draw." 
 
 Could the far-fetched be carried much 
 further than to make a bluff English cav- 
 alier talk (and especially under these con- 
 ditions of anguish and preoccupation) in a 
 strain of such hair-splitting highfalutinism ? 
 As for the killing of Mertoun by Tresham, 
 it becomes, considering his approaching 
 marriage to Mildred, almost ridiculous as 
 
The Broivning Craze. 1 2 1 
 
 a tragic expedient. We cannot but feel 
 how muchi safer than a.femme couverte that 
 sister, married to her imprudent boyish 
 lover, would have remained for the rest of 
 her life. And regarding the way in which 
 Mildred not merely forgives but blesses the 
 slayer of him whom she worshipped, I will 
 venture to afBrm that there was not a single 
 auditor in the Star Theatre on the night of 
 the performance to which I have alluded, 
 who did not feel that here a note of the 
 very falsest exaggeration had been struck. 
 But the " Browning Craze" was in full fury 
 at that time, and perhaps not a few qualms 
 of natural dislike were loyally repressed. 
 Of the many incontestable merits that be- 
 long to "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" I will 
 not speak : for a quarter of a century the 
 world has had these dinned into its ears, 
 and alike the friends and foes of Mr. 
 Browning should by this time be well ac- 
 quainted with them. They are not, in my 
 own judgment, at all equal to the praise 
 with which they have been so lavishly 
 greeted. The play is at best three acts of 
 inexorable grimness, lit by not one ray of 
 humor. To have compared it with any of 
 Shakespeare's masterpieces was by no 
 means a friendly office to perform toward 
 
122 The Browning Craze. 
 
 it, since time is apt to avenge such mistakes 
 rather harshly. Perhaps the retribution 
 may be quite tardy in coming : it usually 
 is. La vengeance est un plat qui se mange 
 froid. But in the end it is apt to come. 
 No amount of thrifty bushes may reconcile 
 the daintier palate to inferior wine, though 
 when it is good it may need no bush at all. 
 
 " Pippa Passes" deserves mention as the 
 most charming of its writer's plays ; but, 
 with the exception of "Paracelsus" (a very 
 voluminous affair, full of untold tedium), 
 it is perhaps the least " actable" of them 
 all. It is, however, a most delightful pro- 
 duction, and the only member of its group, 
 I should say, which has not been rated far 
 above its deserts. The others attempt to 
 be plays and are not ; they drag ; they are 
 over-subtle ; they lack freshness or attract- 
 iveness of story. But "Pippa Passes," an 
 airy, graceful, and yet deeply significant 
 composition, succeeds, somehow, in being 
 a play without the slightest apparent effort. 
 That it will not act is nothing derogatory 
 to it, for the same view could sensibly be 
 held of " The Tempest." 
 
 With these more youthful achievements 
 it might be said that the fame of Mr. 
 Browning passed through its primary 
 
The Broii'uing Craze. 123 
 
 phase, His name, between twenty and 
 thirty years ago, was rarely spoken without 
 an accent of mingled admiration and amuse- 
 ment. Few except silly adulators failed 
 to admit his grave and glaring faults ; few 
 except those whom such faults drove back 
 from an acquaintance with him, failed to 
 perceive that he was dowered with extra- 
 ordinary natural gifts. By such a poem 
 as "In a Gondola" he had won his right 
 to the highest future recognition. " In 
 a Gondola " was marred by follies of 
 conception and execution, but it seemed 
 toforetell a great deal, and it was a dra- 
 matic lyric that now and then pierced and 
 enraptured its reader. Much of it was 
 superb, and other portions were almost 
 puerile in their fantastic heedlessness of 
 performance. There was, up to this point, 
 no doubt that Mr. Browning could sing 
 with a new voice, but at the same time a 
 voice clogged by discordant notes. Would 
 he ever rid himself of those notes through 
 a careful stud)'^ of what art really meant ? 
 Would he cast aside all his semi-barbarous 
 peculiarities and rise divested of their en- 
 cumbering mannerisms? 
 
 " The Ring and the Book " proved other- 
 wise, Mr. Browning, with an immense 
 
124 The Browning Craze. 
 
 challenge, flung scorn in the face of those 
 who had hoped the brightest things for 
 his poetic future. 
 
 At the time " The Ring and the Book " 
 appeared, Tennyson had set the spire upon 
 his cathedral of majestic song. He had 
 written 'Maud," and its novelty of melody 
 had enchanted thousands; he had written 
 " The Princess, "and its prismatic yet potent 
 verses were known and loved countless 
 miles past the rainy little isle in which he 
 had conceived them; he had made "In 
 Memoriam " break like a sea upon a thou- 
 sand shores of thought, throb amid count- 
 less caves of speculation and yearning, sob 
 amid unnumbered reaches of passion and 
 regret. Tennyson's fame had already based 
 itself upon undying pediments. Mr. Brown- 
 ing was expected by a few earnest adher- 
 ents to surpass the Laureate. Another 
 effort came from him, and as " The Ring 
 and the Book " this effort was promptly 
 obsM^ with flattering bravos. 
 
 But what, after all, was it, this "Ring 
 and the Book "? I recall spending a whole 
 summer in trying to make myself believe 
 that it was a great poem. I was then about 
 three-and-twenty years old, and many re- 
 views had counselled me into crediting that 
 
The Browning Craze. 125 
 
 it was something worthy to be put side-and- 
 side with Milton, Dante and Heaven knows 
 whom else in the way of epic splendor, I 
 am tempted to write now with the boyish 
 animus that filled me then, but in doing so 
 I must first record that I respected the re- 
 viewers very fervently and wanted to prove 
 I was their mate in funds of devout appre- 
 ciation. And how I did struggle to bring 
 about this result ! How I beat back the 
 promptings of my better judgment ! How I 
 insisted upon assuring myself that such 
 and such a line was not brutally obscure ! 
 How I strove to convince myself that the 
 telling of the same story over and over 
 again, even though different mouths thus 
 told it, was not a travesty upon analytic 
 poignancy ! I was in that servile mood 
 toward the newspaper critics then, which 
 may in a measure account for my persist- 
 ent distrust during later years. . . . And at 
 last my good angel informed me, toward 
 autumn, that I had wasted my summer, 
 that language was never given us to con- 
 ceal our thought, and that every artist must 
 either seek to strengthen his expression 
 through the clarification of it or be content 
 to have oblivion punish him for such neg- 
 lect. 
 
126 The Broivniiig Craze. 
 
 " The Ring and the Book " was le com- 
 mencement de la fin with Mr. Browning. It 
 must have made him somewhat like the 
 hero in his own praiseworthy poem, "A 
 Lost Leader," and cost him many rational 
 devotees. But it gained him others. His 
 final poetic step had been taken. He was 
 going to yield himself to freaks and whims; 
 he intended to despise the artist and culti- 
 vate the Jtoseur. 
 
 He has cultivated the poseur, nearly al- 
 ways, ever since. 
 
 I do not deny the brilliancy of his mistake 
 in writing "The Ring and the Book." To 
 refuse force to that work would be like re- 
 fusing force to a cyclone. But a cyclone is 
 not a poem. Perhaps nothing so daringly 
 prolix has ever been perpetrated in the 
 whole range of English literature. Hidden 
 away amid the quartz-like Browningese of 
 text lies many a diamond of thought and 
 song. But reading and mining are two 
 different occupations. One cannot well 
 conceive of " The Ring and the Book" dy- 
 ing. Death will will probably not be its 
 fate, but a protracted oblivion will find it 
 instead. Fashion makes people read it and 
 talk about it now, but fashion is often an- 
 other name for forgetfulness. Human pa- 
 
The Broivning Craze. 127 
 
 tience will not endure its endless repetitions 
 of the same theme, its terribly tiresome 
 presentations of one bloody and unsavory 
 tale at different angles of vision. You can 
 scarcely see in the whole massive bulk and 
 plan of this metrical monstrosity any trace 
 of the humor which Mr. Browning has oc- 
 casionally shown elsewhere ; a keener hu- 
 morous sense would, I think, have saved him 
 from the attempt to saddle poor posterity 
 with so cumbrous a burden. Nor is Mr. 
 Browning's blank verse, even when most 
 clear of meaning, an agreeable species of 
 invention. It is original enough ; its ear- 
 marks are not to be confounded with those 
 of any other poet ; but when least marred 
 by parentheses, inversions, involutions, 
 quos egos and ellipses, it is almost never 
 free from a particular trick or conceit, 
 which grov/s, after incessant recurrence, as 
 much a monotony as an aggravation. This 
 consists in making one substantive stand 
 for several verbs, each verb being at the 
 root, so to speak, of a new and distinct sen- 
 tence, but all sentences being huddled to- 
 gether in a way that sometimes renders 
 turbid the simplest thought. Let us try to 
 find an instance or two of this painful pe- 
 
icS Tlic Browning Craze. 
 
 culiarity. Take the following, for exam- 
 ple, from " The Ring and the Book :" 
 
 "The Canon Caponsacchi, then, was sent 
 To change his garb, retrira his tonsure, tie 
 The clerkly silk round every plait correct. 
 Make the impressive entry on his place 
 Of relegation. . ." 
 
 Or this, from a like source : 
 
 " What if he gained thus much, 
 Wrung out this sweet drop from the bitter Past, 
 Bore off this rose-bud from the prickly brake 
 To justify such torn clothes and scratched hands, 
 And, after all, brought something back from Rome?" 
 
 But the illustrations of this most infelic- 
 itous tendency could be made to cover 
 pages. And we are now accepting Mr. 
 Browning's blank verse at its best, not at 
 its worst. Its worst is sometimes posi- 
 tively horrifying. Surely the man should 
 have a very wondrous message for human- 
 ity who aims to deliver this message as a 
 poet and yet continually scorns to do so as 
 an artist. But, after all, who of us has a 
 hard enough conscience to giant that the 
 artist and the poet are ever separable? 
 Whatever his mentality, his reach of spirit- 
 ual vision, his command of pungent and 
 illuminative epithet, how shall a writer 
 
The Broivning Craze . 129 
 
 presume to disdain form in searching after 
 the expression of truth ? Quand on se bat 
 on ne choisit pas ses armes may reasonably 
 explain the method of some hot contestant 
 against a political or social wrong. But 
 when the poet fights what he believes to 
 be worst error, are we not justified in ex- 
 pecting from him a well-burnished blade 
 and a wrist whose turns reveal both dex- 
 terity and harmonious movement ? To the 
 merest beginner in verse-making it is com- 
 monly understood that clashes of conso- 
 nants are the sorriest destruction of melody. 
 He must avoid them if he wishes to write 
 presentable or reputable iambs. And yet 
 Mr. Browning outrages taste in the follow- 
 ing lines, taken at random from his works, 
 where remain innumerable other specimens, 
 just as dissonant, strident, and sibilant : 
 
 It strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in its nose . . . 
 Two must discept . . . has distinguished . . . 
 God'sgold just shining its last where that lodges . . , 
 Billets that blaze substantial and slow . . . 
 The Knights who to the Dark Tower's search 
 
 addressed . . . 
 Fear which stings ease . . . 
 " You are sick, that's sure," they say . . . 
 Who breasted, beat Barbarians, stemmed Persia 
 
 rolling on . . . 
 To a city bears a fall'n host's woes . . . 
 
1 30 Tlie Browning Craze. 
 
 Wagner, Dvorak, Liszt ... to where . . . trumpets, 
 
 shawms . . . 
 Adjudges such . . . how canst thou . . . this wise 
 
 bound . . . 
 
 And finally, from " Ferishtah's Fancies:'' 
 
 When my lips just totiched your cheek . . . 
 
 The italics here are my own ; for although 
 the consonantal gruffnessin this last quoted 
 line is not so striking as that of many 
 which have preceded it, the contrast be- 
 tween its tender sentiment and its coarsely 
 unmelodic versification affects one like a 
 vulgar slap in the face. Multitudes of 
 other similar lines exist throughout Mr. 
 Browning's copious work. And I cannot 
 see how any vigor of idea can excuse such 
 feebleness of presentation. Surely nature 
 and life, which are so akin to art, do not 
 demand of us an indulgence for such un- 
 happy imperfection. Because a gnarled 
 and blasted tree bears a few sprays of fresh 
 and glossy leaves we do not gaze upon it 
 to the neglect of healthful surrounding 
 growths. Because we know that a child 
 or a woman possesses mental charms we 
 do not tolerate a waspish acerbity of phrase 
 in either. But from art we exact the near- 
 est approach to perfection, not the most 
 
Tlie Brotvning Craze. 131 
 
 zigzag deviation from it. Poetic fame has 
 no pathway to its temple like that traditional 
 one to a forlorner goal ; it is not paved with 
 good intentions ; we insist, indeed, upon 
 its being quarried from the very marbles 
 of Pentelicus. 
 
 Mr. Browning's published writing since 
 " The Ring and the Book '' need not be 
 dwelt upon in this essay. Those loyal mani- 
 acs to the " Browning Craze " have their own 
 Bedlamite reasons, no doubt, for admiring 
 "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" and 
 " The Inn Album." And, after all, what 
 (in America, at least) does the " Browning 
 Craze " signify ? The spirit of American 
 culture has always been an imitative one, 
 and not seldom to a snobbish degree. It 
 was quite in the order of things that the 
 " Browning Craze " should rise in London, 
 flow a westerly course, and empty into 
 Chicago. But it submerged Boston on its 
 way — or at least parjtially so. I have no 
 doubt that in both cities the societies which 
 have been its offspring possess many intel- 
 ligent and sincere members. But it is very 
 improbable that all these members are 
 either intelligent or sincere. One might 
 confidently assert that a great many of 
 them arc clouded by dulness and tinctured 
 
132 Till' Browning Craze. 
 
 with toadyism. It does not require much 
 brains for anybody to perceive that the as- 
 sumption of a certain taste will produce 
 the appearance of exclusiveness on the part 
 of such an assumer. The jargon of the 
 iart-schools, for example, is easily caught, 
 and at almost any exhibition of foreign 
 paintings you will discover that some pic- 
 ture which the general public would turn 
 from as unpardonably quaint, rococo, or 
 audacious will attract a little cSterie of 
 fervid adorers. Perhaps a few of these 
 may honestly believe that the painter in 
 question is a towering genius ; but the ma- 
 jority are yearning to anoint his locks with 
 spikenard and myrrh solely because he is 
 considered " caviare to the general," above 
 the vulgar herd et id genus omne. It is 
 doubtful whether the Browning societies of 
 England have gained as many recruits from 
 any other cliques or associations as from 
 those whom Mr. Gilbert has so mercilessly 
 satirized as the Esthetes. But to be an 
 aesthete is by no means to be a fool. These 
 persons laugh among each other at the 
 caricatures into which they turn themselves, 
 very much as we may believe that any two 
 augurs did of old. Possibly the Brown- 
 ingites laugh now and then among each 
 
The Browning Craze. 133 
 
 other at the solemn importance with which 
 they are supposed to inform the digging 
 out of a poor tortured thought from be- 
 neath crushing layers of words. And when 
 they reflect at all seriously upon their 
 undertakings and their achievements, the 
 result certainly cannot be very edifying. 
 To become a Browningite is indeed not 
 to have distinguished one's self for much 
 sense, either common or uncommon. Hero- 
 worship is always an unwholesome occupa- 
 tion, even if the hero shine with a truly 
 glorious light. Yet in the case of Mr. 
 Browning there is no glorious light at all, 
 but one put under a bushel, and put there 
 with not a little of the same insufferable 
 vanity that made Diogenes take up his 
 abode in a tub. There are very few broad- 
 minded and unaffected people who have 
 read Mr. Browning's poetry, or the worthier 
 portion of it, who would not be willing 
 unhesitatingly to tell us that he might have 
 grown a poet of wide and persistent fame. 
 But he has chosen so to mantle himself in 
 the most rash and headlong moods of ob- 
 scurity, he has so trivialized, cheapened and 
 frittered away the talents which might 
 have made him serve efficiently the mag- 
 nificent art he professes to revere, that his 
 
1 34 The Browning Craze. 
 
 laurels will turn dry and brittle long before 
 another century has dealt with his present 
 renown. Meanwhile he has a kind of adu- 
 lation to-day, but one with which no true 
 artist should be content. Indeed, the 
 author of " Fifine at the Fair " and " Pac- 
 chiarotto " is no longer an artist, though 
 he who wrote '' Pippa Passes" and "Love 
 among the Ruins" may once have closely 
 approximated to such a distinction. He 
 may not be aware of the biting and dis- 
 creditable fact, but hundreds of those who 
 now "study" and" cultivate" him are 
 beings of the kind who would rave hysteri- 
 cally over some headless and armless torso, 
 if thoroughly sure that the leve vulgus 
 would not presume to join in their pedantic 
 chorus, after so forlorn a fragment of 
 sculpture had been excavated and set up 
 for popular inspection. 
 
 That Mr. Browning is a poet representa- 
 tive of the age in which he now so eminently 
 flourishes cannot with any fairness be con- 
 ceded. His work makes one point plain, 
 though it leaves so many others in darkness. 
 The impetus of rationalistic thought seems 
 hardly to have touched him. He is an 
 orthodox believer of the most acquiescent 
 type, as his " Christmas Eve and Easter 
 
The Broivning Craze. 135 
 
 Day " would conclusively reveal, apart from 
 hundreds of other evidences throughout 
 the vast volume of his work. The sinewy 
 scientific push of his time has left him 
 conservatively unaffected. He regards the 
 priceless teachings of such men as Herbert 
 Spencer, Buckle, Tyndall, Huxley and 
 Lecky with as much unconcern as if he 
 were a clergyman sanctified by the most 
 rigid Church-of-England orders. No qualm 
 of doubt regarding the Thirty-Nine Articles 
 appears ever to disturb him. He is just as 
 pious as he is frequently opaque. He refers 
 to God with that familiarity of personal 
 acquaintanceship which might distinguish 
 our own Dr. Talmage. He is perfectly 
 sure and satisfied on the question not only 
 of an anthropomorphic deity but on that of 
 a future immortality, accountability, par- 
 don and punishment. A good deal of 
 his vagueness is like that of the current 
 theological treatise ; to the consistent and 
 logical agnostic of our time it means nearly 
 the same thing. Those who want their 
 modern poets to be men permeated by the 
 so-called materialism of the century will 
 not find a poet after their own heart in a 
 singer to whom the divinity of Christ is 
 romantically indisputable. For some minds 
 
136 The Broivning Craze. 
 
 it will seem difficult to accept this kind of 
 poet as great, at an epoch when English 
 philosophy has drawn so sharp a limit be- 
 fore the abyss of the unknowable. Mr. 
 Browning might be inclined to shift the 
 entire burden of ecclesiastic responsibility 
 off his shoulders by declaring that he does 
 not speak for himself but for his countless 
 dramatic characters ; and yet he speaks 
 through no lips except his own when he 
 says, with hardy dogmatism : 
 
 God's work, be sure, 
 No more spreads wasted than falls scant I 
 He filled, did noi exceed, man's want 
 Of beauty In this life. 
 
 And again : 
 
 So hapt 
 
 My chance. He stood there. Like the smoke 
 
 Pillared o'er Sodom when day broke, — 
 
 I saw Him. One magnific pall 
 
 Mantled in massive fold and fall 
 
 His dread, and coiled in snaky swathes 
 
 About his feet ; night's black, that bathes 
 
 All e'.se, broke, grizzled with despair. 
 
 Against the soul of blackness there. 
 
 A gesture told the mood within — 
 
 That wrapped right hand which based the chin. 
 
 That intense meditation fixed 
 
 On his procedure, — pity mixed 
 
The Brotvning Craze. 137 
 
 With the fulfilment of decree. 
 Motionless, thus, lie spoke to me. 
 Who fell before his feet, a mass, 
 No man now. 
 
 Bugabooism could not go much further 
 than this. There is something Calvinistic 
 in these words, emanent soon afterward 
 from the mouth of a palpable and tangible 
 deity : 
 
 In the roll 
 Of judgment which convinced mankind 
 Of sin, stood many, bold and blind. 
 Terror must burn the truth into. . . . 
 
 These and like passages indicate unmis- 
 takably that Mr. Browning accepts Chris- 
 tianity in not a few of its most conventional 
 forms. This may be all well enough ; it is 
 quite the gentleman's own business if he 
 goes regularly to church every Sunday and 
 hears a sermon less involved as to meaning 
 than one of his own poems and at times 
 considerably more grammatical. But it 
 would be idle to claim that he who exhibits 
 this theologic passivity, this religious com- 
 plaisance, can be said to rank at all abreast 
 of his period as a strenuous and catholic 
 thinker. It is true that the most amaz- 
 ing doctrines exist with regard to the 
 right province of poetry and the fitting 
 
138 Tlie Broivning Crane. 
 
 equipments of poets, and a multitude of 
 critics, otherwise quite credible, will tell 
 you that it is not half so necessary for the 
 poet to think as to feel. But thinking and 
 feeling, as modern science explains, are 
 pretty nearly one and the same thing. 
 Wordsworthian " inspiration " is not es- 
 teemed so highly as it was forty years ago. 
 The canons and requisitions of art, 
 however, remain unaltered. Emotion is 
 still a splendidly reputable factor in all 
 poetry when governed by that self-control 
 which is the secret equally of Shakespeare's 
 best verse as it is of Longfellow's or Lord 
 Tennyson's. License of expression has 
 been so often and imprudently praised in 
 poets that an unfortunate abuse of latitude 
 has become far too manifest among En- 
 glish-speaking circles of them. Who has 
 not heard the contemptuous declaration 
 that " there is more truth than poetry " in 
 such and such a statement ? If scientific 
 investigation is the reigning intellectual 
 stimulus of our nineteenth century, that is 
 very far from being a cause why poetry 
 should perish. For poetry, we now per- 
 ceive, is not to be defined as Milton (a 
 great poet) defined it, or as Poe (a very 
 poor one) also defined it. Poetry is life, as 
 
The Brotvning Craze. 1 30 
 
 all literature is life. But it is life in this 
 different way from the rest of literature, 
 that over it is flung the influence of beauty, 
 and so the phases of human experience are 
 made in turn sublimely, tenderly, or pa- 
 thetically noteworthy. This influence is 
 like a transfiguri"ng light ; it is presentment, 
 treatment, in a certain limited meaning, 
 enchantment. The subject itself may be 
 more or less susceptible of elevation. By- 
 ron had merely to let this light play over 
 such a subject as Venice, Lake Leman, 
 Petrarch's tomb, the stars of heaven, or a 
 storm in the Jura Alps, and enthralling po- 
 etic pictures glowed with vividness before 
 the mind. But Burns, as his admirers as- 
 sert, made a mouse immortal by precisely 
 the same means. Often you hear it affirmed 
 that this or that subject cannot be dealt 
 with by poetry, that it is too mean, too 
 inferior, too recondite, too coarse, too 
 prosaic. In these cases the transfiguring 
 light has been more difficult to throw, or 
 perhaps the imaginative flame and lenser, 
 whence it has taken origin have been ill-fed 
 and ill-managed. The more un-ideal the 
 subject the harder to idealize it, to turn it 
 into poetry. And yet we have seen Shakes- 
 peare in his creation of "Caliban," Milton 
 
140 The Browning Crasc. 
 
 in his " Satan," Coleridge in his " Ancient 
 Mariner," and Lord Tennyson in his "Vis- 
 ion of Sin," envelop the uncanny and repul- 
 sive with a raiment as of magical tissue. 
 Students of French poetry will remember 
 " La Charogne " of Baudelaire, a poem which 
 has always struck me with' the same effect 
 as if it were a moonlit dung-heap. I do 
 not applaud, or even suggest an approval of, 
 such poetry. But if the dung-heap is there, 
 so, somehow, is the moonlight ; and who 
 that has read this thrilling poem can for- 
 get the melody and eloquence of its last 
 stanza ? — 
 
 A lots, ma denul^, dites a la vermine 
 
 Qui te mangera de baisers. 
 Que je garde la foniie et ressence divine 
 
 De nits amours decomposes ! 
 
 The English have, as Mr. Browning's 
 own famous wife said of them, in her 
 " Aurora Leigh," 
 
 A scornful insular way 
 Of calling the Frencii liRht. 
 
 But, notwithstanding this alleged Gallic 
 lightness, I do not believe it would be pos- 
 sible for a "Sordello," an "Inn Album," a 
 "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country," or 
 even a " Ring and the Book," to have ap- 
 
Tlu Browning Craze. 141 
 
 peared in French without promptly being 
 crushed by the heaviest judicial censure. 
 And what rigid, healthy, uncompromising 
 lessons would Mr. Browning have been 
 taught if he had been born a Frenchman ! 
 Not that he could not have learned excel- 
 lent lessons while still remaining an Eng- 
 lishman. But as a writer of French verse 
 his crimes against style would have suf- 
 fered condign and relentless punishment. 
 The French would either have long ago 
 made it impossible for him to attain the 
 least celebrity, writing as he has written, 
 or they would have trained and taught 
 him by the simple yet forcible formula, 
 that no great poet can ever achieve great- 
 ness through the wilful wrapping up of his 
 meaning. And this is the sin which Mr. 
 Browning has repeatedly, unrepentingly 
 committed. The "craze" which he has 
 succeeded in rousing is one of those inex- 
 plicable drifts of literary fashion that 
 mark, both here and in England, our 
 strange passing century. But in England 
 it is not their first similar mistake. They 
 crowned and then discrowned poor Sidney 
 Dobell ; they raved over and then flouted 
 Alexander Smith ; they lifted Gerald Mas- 
 sey upon a lyric pedestal only to hurl him 
 
142 The Browning Craze. 
 
 downward a little later. For us Ameri- 
 cans to catch this curious fever is far less 
 excusable, and a good deal of fatuous, 
 cringing Anglomania is at the bottom of 
 it. To-day we are devoutly imitating 
 British perversity in our genuflection be- 
 fore a very ordinary Russian novelist 
 named Tolstoi, and both writing and 
 speaking of that sketchy, padded, inter- 
 minable tale, "Anna Karenina," as if it 
 v/ere really a classic masterpiece. But the 
 gods, as everybody knows, are very angry at 
 the idea of an International Copyright, and 
 in their animosity they seem to have made 
 the American reader their diligent abet- 
 tor. Until the American reader pays less 
 attention to the curiosities of transatlantic 
 literature and more to the honest efforts 
 enshrined within his own, we cannot hope 
 for much chance of his even desiring that 
 Congress shall do her work of reparation 
 and atonement. He might not, after all, 
 find it so very unpalatable to exchange his 
 "Brov/ning Craze" for an Emerson one. 
 Emerson was a great deal more spiritual 
 poet than is Mr. Browning, and yet quite 
 as virile. He had the faculty, also, of con- 
 veying his thoughts neither in spasms nor 
 mysticisms. Moreover, he is a wonder- 
 
The Browning Craze. 143 
 
 fully stimulating writer to other minds, 
 and debates and discussions that took 
 either his prose or verse as their lext 
 might perhaps bring just as much profit as 
 wading through pages that too often seem 
 but a turbulent brawl and snarl of verbi- 
 age. 
 
 One of the most distressing features 
 about Mr. Browning's existent reputation 
 — distressing, I mean, to those who discern 
 and measure its basis of humbug— is the 
 way in which his admirers are never -ired 
 of saying that it wholly outshines the re- 
 nown of Lord Tennyson, and that its pos- 
 sessor has touched, thus far in our cen- 
 tury, the high-tide mark of English poetry. 
 So, until not very long since, fanatics cried 
 that Carlyle, with his barbarisms, loomed 
 above that most masterly and dignified 
 of writers, Macaulay ; but now the brief 
 prejudice of the hour has passed, and the 
 morrows have begun to dole out equity, 
 as they generally do, with no matter how 
 tardy a service. 
 
 Never was a greater literary injustice 
 perpetrated than the placing of Mr. 
 Browning above Lord Tennyson. The 
 Laureate has indeed served his art with a 
 profound and lovely fidelity, v/hile it is no 
 
144 '^^^'^ Broivniiig Ciazc. 
 
 cxagger.'ition to state of Mr. Browning 
 that he has not seldom insulted his as 
 though it were a pickpocket. " In a Gon- 
 dola " may be a fine love-lyric; but who 
 would compare its halting ruggedness to 
 the fairy music of " The Day-Dream ? " 
 Only the people who profess to like the 
 Venus of Milo better without her lost 
 arms than with them— the people to whom 
 deficiency and inadequacy are held dearer 
 than flawlessness and finish. A passion 
 for Mr. Browning's work has frequently 
 been one of the refuges of mediocrity. 
 You are thrown, as it were, with a mixed 
 but rather patrician society of, let us say 
 . . invalids, in the same asylum. And it 
 is such a mild, elegant sort of lunacy ! 
 Nobody is very much in earnest, after all. 
 They have learned, most of them, to look 
 as if they thought " A Pillar at Sebzevat " 
 luminiferous reading and "Jochanan Hak- 
 kadosh" a model of perspicuity. If you 
 say to them that Mr. Browning has never 
 produced a poem half so grand as the 
 "Ode on the Duke of Wellington," they 
 appear to feel so sorry for you that you 
 begin to feel sorry, yourself, for having 
 drawn thus largely, if unintentionally, 
 upon the funds of their compassion. And 
 
The Browning Craze. 145 
 
 yet bid them to show you where, through- 
 out all Mr. Browning's dramatic idyls, 
 dramatic lyrics and dramatic everything 
 else, there are poems that so burn with 
 beauty as the monologues of " CEnone,'' of 
 "Tithonus," of "The Miller's Daughter," 
 of "Maud," of "The Dream of Fair Wo- 
 men," of " The Palace of Art," of " St. Sim- 
 eon Stylites," of "The Gardener's Daugh- 
 ter," of "Sir Galahad," and they will be 
 apt to give you response as indefinite as if 
 it had been taken from some of their great 
 master's verse. For all these poems just 
 mentioned are monologues ; all, in varying 
 degrees, are essentially dramatic. Tenny- 
 son chose, until his later life, to ignore 
 the writing of drama ; but if he had at- 
 tempted, in the full flush of his masterly 
 vigor, to produce a "Cup," a "Harold" or 
 a "Queen Mary," there cannot be much 
 real question as to whether he would or 
 would not have eclipsed "Colombe's Birth- 
 day " and " King Victor and King Charles." 
 I can ill imagine how any actual artist 
 would not instantly make up his mind to 
 retain "In Memorlam " and "The Prin- 
 cess " (those two inestimable marvels) even 
 if by doing so he were threatened with the 
 loss of everything that Mr. Browning has 
 
146 The Brozvning Craze. 
 
 ever done, from the murky glooms of 
 " Sordello" down to the recent most indo- 
 lently scribbled "Parleyings." And as for 
 those four incomparable "Idyls of the 
 King" — "Enid," "Elaine," Vivien" and 
 "Guinevere" — where amid the bristling 
 entanglements of such verse as that pub- 
 lished by the author of " Prince Hohen- 
 stiel-Schwangau ' shall we reach either 
 their peers or their semblances ? 
 
 Scientific criticism, which is the only 
 kind meriting both credence and respect, 
 will one day, perhaps, demonstrate much 
 of what I have here only postulated, with- 
 out aspiring logically to prove. And when 
 such an event occurs it should strike a tell- 
 ing blow at the languor which enervates a 
 large proportion of those readers who have 
 permitted their tastes to play very fantas- 
 tic tricks with them. There is no objec- 
 tion to the hottest rebellion against purity 
 and sanity of method among iconoclasts 
 who would replace gentle order by dan- 
 gerous misrule ; it is only when anarchy 
 gets into the high places of literature and 
 begins its assaults, mutilations and sub- 
 versions there that the intemperate are 
 led to exult and the judicious to deplore. 
 Still, progress, that arrives at so many of 
 
The Broivning Craze. 147 
 
 her destinations by circuitous paths, may 
 be trusted yet again to set the crooked 
 straight. It deserves to be held as proba- 
 ble that she is at the present date mysti- 
 cally concerning herself with a future 
 demolition of the " Browning Craze ; " and 
 that her action may be speedy is a likeli- 
 hood which all consistent optimists ought 
 to place well up on the list of their rosiest 
 hopes. 
 
THE TRUTH ABOUT OUIDA. 
 
 Readers of current literature may have 
 recently observed that two writers of repu- 
 tation, Miss Harriet W. Preston and Mr. 
 Julian Hawthorne, have been expressing 
 rather pronounced opinions regarding the 
 works of Ouida. Mr. Hawthorne's judg- 
 ment was brief, and I need only add that it 
 was extremely severe — far more severe, 
 indeed, than any critical statement which I 
 ever remember to have seen expressed by 
 that writer. Miss Preston's decision took 
 a much ampler form, and occupied nearly 
 twelve pages of the Atlantic Monthly. What- 
 ever may have been Miss Preston's inten- 
 tion, she certainly does not appeal to us as 
 one whom the merits of Ouida have more 
 than lukewarmly affected. And yet, at the 
 beginning of her essay, she assumes the at- 
 titude of an appreciator rather than a de- 
 tractor, taking pains to declare that her 
 inquiry regarding the true causes of Ouida's 
 immense popularity shall be " primarily 
 
 148 
 
The Trjith about Onida. 149 
 
 and chiefly a search for merits rather than 
 a citation of defects." With this excellent 
 resolution fully formed, she at once pro- 
 ceeds to draw comparisons between Ouida 
 and such great writers as Scott, George 
 Sand, and even Victor Hugo. This has an 
 encouraging sound enough ; we have the 
 sensation that a refreshingly new note is to 
 be struck in the general tone of fierce 
 vituperation by which Ouida has been so 
 persistently assailed for twenty years. The 
 truth about Ouida would be a pleasant 
 thing to hear; we have heard so much facile 
 falsehood. But Miss Preston proceeds to 
 invest her theme with a curiously languid 
 and tepid atmosphere. She finally aston- 
 ishes all the sincere admirers of Ouida — 
 and their number is to-day, among intelli- 
 gent people, thousands and thousands — by 
 saying that her " imagination, vigorous 
 though it be and prolific, seldom rises to 
 really poetic heights." This is certainly 
 depressing for any one who has taken de- 
 light in such exceptional prose-poems as 
 " Ariadne" and "Signa." Still, a proper 
 avoidance of enthusiasm must always form 
 part of the modern critic's equipment ; the 
 fashion is to look at everything imperturb- 
 ably, from the Sphinx to the Brooklyn 
 
150 The Truth about Omda. 
 
 Bridge ; we somehow only tolerate the ex- 
 orbitant and the florid when it takes the 
 shape of disgusted invective. For a long 
 period Ouida has endured the latter (not 
 always quite patiently, if some of her retali- 
 atory newspaper letters are recalled), and I 
 confess that we owe Miss Preston a debt of 
 gratitude for breaking the ice at last. None 
 the less, however, do we own to a feeling 
 that the ice might have been assailed by a 
 little heavier and more efficient cleaver. 
 The Atlantic reviewer appears, indeed, to 
 be a trifle afraid, not to say ashamed, of 
 her own pioneership. Tradition would 
 seem to be furtively reminding her that she 
 is heading a revolt against it. And there 
 certainly might well seem a kind of literary 
 defiance in any defence of Ouida. She has 
 stood so long as a pariah that to give her 
 boldly a few credentials of respectabilty, as 
 it were, might in a temperament by no 
 means timid still require some courage. I 
 would not even appear to suggest that Miss 
 Preston has doubted her own assertions 
 concerning this great romancist, whenever 
 they have been of a favorable turn. But it 
 has struck me that she has almost doubted 
 the advisability of her own position as so 
 distinct a non-conformist. One smiles to 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 1 5 1 
 
 remember the ridiculous abuse poured upon 
 Ouida in England ever since somewhere 
 about the year 1863. She has probably- 
 afforded more opportunity for the callow 
 undergraduate satirist than any author of 
 the present century. I do not maintain that 
 she was at first the recipient of an unde- 
 served ridicule. But afterward this ridi- 
 cule, because of the radical change in her 
 work, became pitiably tell-tale ; it revealed 
 that aggravating conservatism in those who 
 arraigned her which had its root in either 
 a very unjust, hasty and perfunctory skim- 
 ming of her later books, or an entire igno- 
 rance of their contents. She undoubtedly 
 began all wrong. There are some liberal 
 and high-minded people with whom the 
 follies and faults of such stories as "Gran- 
 ville de Vigne" and " Idalia" have wrought 
 so disastrously that all their future impres- 
 sions have been colored by these uncon- 
 querable associations. It seems to me that 
 Mr. Hawthorne is one of these, and I am 
 certain that the late Bayard Taylor was 
 one. When "Ariadne" appeared, only a 
 year or two before Taylor's lamentably ill- 
 timed death, he wrote concerning that en- 
 chanting tale in the New York Tribune with 
 a sternness of condemnation most regret- 
 
152 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 table, as I thought, in so alert and vigorous 
 an intellect. When I expressed to Taylor 
 my surprise that he should have seen noth- 
 ing beautiful or poetic in " Ariadne," he 
 frankly declared to me that he saw nothing 
 commendable in any line that Ouida had 
 written. But many of her lovely sketches 
 had already appeared, and that exquisite 
 idyl, " Bebee, or The Two Little Wooden 
 Shoes," with its tearful tenderness and its 
 fiery, gloomy, piercingyf;;a/^ of passion, had 
 given proof of its author's wakening force 
 and discipline. 
 
 Miss Preston's chief error, I should affirm, 
 has been her somewhat careless huddling 
 together of all Ouida's works and passing 
 criticism upon them en bloc, without more 
 than vague indication of the different peri- 
 ods in which they were produced, or the 
 various stages of development which they 
 exhibit. This talented lady, however she 
 is to be praised for taking Ouida seriously 
 (and that is a fine thing to have done at all, 
 when it meant the flinging down of a 
 gauntlet before disparagement no less in- 
 sensate than cruel), has still failed in taking 
 Ouida half seriously enough. I read with 
 astonishment in the Atlantic review, for ex- 
 ample, an extended notice of " Idalia," 
 
Tlie Truth about Ouida. 1 5 3 
 
 while such vastly better work as " Folle- 
 Farine" or " In Maremma" was quietly ig- 
 nored. Candidly, I hold that Miss Preston's 
 entire consideration of Ouida has been as 
 limited, unsatisfactory and insufficient as, 
 when all circumstantial points are duly 
 recognized, it has been kindly, generous, 
 and honorable. 
 
 I have already expressed it as my con- 
 viction that Ouida began very badly. She 
 indeed began as badly as any genius did 
 whose early and subsequent accomplish- 
 ments in English letters are now known to 
 us and may be read side by side with hers. 
 Byron certainly showed far less power at 
 the commencement of his career than she 
 did at the commencement of hers ; and 
 those who possess my own deep veneration 
 for the grandeur of Tennyson's poetry at 
 its highest heights may have read some of 
 the deplorable stanzas, modelled on a sort 
 of hideous German-English plan, which 
 have thus far, I believe, escaped the savage 
 exposures of even his most merciless Amer- 
 ican publishers. I find myself involuntarily 
 tracing a parallel between the young Ouida 
 and the young poets who preceded her by 
 a few decades more or less. But this tend- 
 ency easily explains itself, since she is pre- 
 
1 54 The Truth about Oiiida. 
 
 eminently a poet, notwithstanding her great 
 gifts for romantic narration. The rhythmic 
 faculty has been denied her, and for this 
 reason she probably has written so much 
 of that " poetical prose'' which the average 
 Englishman has been taught to hold in 
 such phlegmatic contempt. If " Granville 
 de Vigne" had appeared in rhymes as clever 
 and as prolix as Owen Meredith's " Lucile," 
 it would doubtless have won a place far 
 above that bright, hybrid, pseudo-poetic 
 popular favorite. But " Granville de Vigne'' 
 has won no place, nor has "Strathmore," 
 nor has " Idalia," nor has " Puck,'' nor even 
 " Chandos,'' pronounced as was the dawn- 
 ing change it exhibited. These works all 
 mean a palaeozoic age for Ouida : her ex- 
 traordinary powers were yet struggling for 
 worthier expression. They are valuable 
 alike in their absurdities and their better 
 revelations, though the latter shone fitful, 
 indeterminate, and often distressingly tran- 
 sient, The superabundance of " color," the 
 weight of adjective piled on adjective, the 
 lavish display of an erudition as volumin- 
 ous as it was sometimes erratic, the mere- 
 tricious defects of style, the collet mont^ 
 superfluity of rhetoric, the impossible and 
 ludicrous descriptions of luxury — all this 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 1 5 5 
 
 has become with many of us in a manner 
 comically classic. Ouida's early heroes, 
 with their fleet Arabian steeds, their lordly 
 lineage, their fabulous wealth or sentiment- 
 ally picturesque poverty, their fatal fascina- 
 tions for women and their deadly muscular 
 developments for men — Ouida's early 
 heroes, I say, have grown as representative 
 of the overwrought in fiction as those of 
 Byron have grown representative of like in- 
 discretion in poetry. Nor are these faults 
 of her youth entirely outlived by Ouida. 
 " Fine writing" is still occasionally her 
 bane, though it becomes less and less so 
 with each new book she now produces. Her 
 vocabulary has always been as copious as 
 the sunlight itself, and her style is at pres- 
 ent a direct, flexible and notably elegant 
 one. She has been accused of "cramming," 
 and of making a little knowledge do ser- 
 vice for much. But only very illiterate 
 people could believe such a masquerade 
 possible with her. She is indisputably a 
 woman of spacious and most diversified 
 learning, though she has not always known 
 either the art of modestly concealing this 
 fact, or that of letting it speak spontane- 
 ously and judiciously for itself. Still, 
 pedantry is not seldom the attribute of a 
 
1 56 The Truth about Oitida. 
 
 greatly cultivated mind. We have seen 
 this in the case of George Eliot, whose ad- 
 mirers will perhaps feel like mobbing me 
 when they read that I think her genius in 
 many ways inferior to that of Ouida. And 
 yet I grant that to a very large extent she 
 possesses what Ouida was for a long time 
 almost totally without — taste, artistic pa- 
 tience, and that surest of preservatives, a 
 firm and chiselled style. 
 
 "Under Two Flags" maybe said to have 
 recorded a turning-point in this unique 
 writer's career. It was full of the same 
 tinselled and lurid hyperboles which had 
 made so many readers of the extraordinary 
 series hold up horrified hands in the past. 
 But itsgaudiness and opulence of language 
 were suited to its Algerian locale, and the 
 drowsy palms and deep-blue African skies 
 of which it spoke to us accorded with the 
 tropic tendencies of its phrases. It dis- 
 played a wondrous acquaintance, also, with 
 military life in Algeria, and for this reason 
 amazed certain observers of an altered 
 mise en seine in a novelist whom they had 
 believed only able to misrepresent the 
 patrician circles of England. But "Under 
 Two Flags'' amazed by its perusal from 
 still another cause. It contained one of 
 
77/1? Truth about Oiiida. 157 
 
 the most thrillingly dramatic episodes ever 
 introduced into any novel of the school to 
 which such episodes belong, namely, the 
 wild desert journey of Cigarette, the vivaii- 
 diere, bearing a pardon for the condemned 
 soldier whom she loves. Cigarette reaches 
 the place of execution just in time to fling 
 herself upon her lover's breast and save 
 him from the bullets of his foes by dying 
 under them. We are apt nowadays to look 
 askance at such heroic incidents, and the 
 word "unnatural" easily rises to our lips 
 as we do so. Perhaps it rises there too 
 easily. Self-sacrifice of the supreme kind 
 has gone out of fashion in modern story- 
 telling, and by a tacit surrender we have 
 given scenes like this, with all their warm- 
 blooded kinships, to the domain of the 
 theatre. That fiction will ever care to re- 
 sume her slighted prerogative, the thriving 
 influence of Zola and his more moderate 
 American imitators would lead us to believe 
 improbable. Still, the caprices of popular 
 demand lend themselves unwillingly to 
 prophecy. One fact, however, cannot plaus- 
 ibly be contradicted: the theatre has not 
 invested her gift at any very profitable rate 
 of interest, nor justified her present mono- 
 poly of all that is stirring in romanticism. 
 
IS8 The Triiili about Ouida. 
 
 " Tricotrin,'' if I mistake not, was the 
 first important successor of " Under Two 
 Flags,'' and here Ouida gave us the note- 
 worthy proof that she had turned her at- 
 tention toward ideal and poetic models. I 
 fear it must be chronicled that the chaff in 
 ''Tricotrin" predominates over the wheat. 
 The whole story is not seldom on stilts, 
 and we often lose patience with the hero 
 as more of s. poseur than of the demigod he 
 is described. The entire donnee is too high- 
 strung for its nineteenth-century concomi- 
 itance. We feel as if everybody should 
 wear what the managers of theatres would 
 Cidl ''shape dresses." Ouida still tempts 
 the parodist ; the machinery of her plot, so 
 to speak, almost creaks with age, now and 
 then ; her personages attitudinize and are 
 often tiresomely verbose. Tricotrin does 
 so much with the aid of red fire and 
 a calcium that his glaringly melodramatic 
 death becomes almost a relief in the end. 
 And yet the book scintillates with brilliant 
 things, and if it had been written with an 
 equal power in French instead of English, 
 might have passed for the work of Victor 
 Hugo. There is a great deal about it that 
 the passionate and democratic soul of the 
 French poet would have cordially delighted 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 1 59 
 
 in. It belongs to the same quality of in- 
 spiration that produced "Notre Dame de 
 Paris," '' L'Homme Qui Rit," and "Fan- 
 tine." But there have always been English 
 people who have laughed at Hugo's tales, 
 and in much the same spirit Ouida's coun- 
 trymen laughed at the itinerant, commu- 
 nistic Tricotrin, with his superb beauty, his 
 pastoral abstemiousness and purity, his al- 
 truistic philanthropy, his forsworn birth- 
 right of an English earl, his wide clientele oi 
 grimy and outcast worshippers, and his as- 
 tounding range of opportunity to appear 
 just in the nick of time and succor the op- 
 pressed. Far more daring license with the 
 manipulation of fact, however, has been 
 taken by the elder Dumas and others. 
 Ouida's book came about thirty or forty 
 years too late for sober critical acceptance 
 in her own country, and it was of a kind 
 that her own country has never perma- 
 nently accepted. Still, it revealed her per- 
 haps for the first time as an original power 
 in letters. She had struck in it the one 
 note which has always been most positively 
 her own ; she had told the world that she 
 was a prose-poet of dauntless imagination 
 and solitary excellence. As an idealist in 
 prose fiction no English writer has thus far 
 
i6o The Truth about Oiiida. 
 
 approached her. "Tricotrin" would not 
 alone have made her wliat she is. It re- 
 mained for her to improve upon this re- 
 markable effort, and to fling up, like some 
 tract of land under convulsive disturbance, 
 peaks that for height and splendor far out- 
 rivalled it. The valleys in her literary 
 landscape are sometimes low indeed ; a few 
 even have noxious growths in them, and 
 are haunted by foolish wills-o'-the-wisp. 
 Such, I should say, are her first few sus- 
 tained works, like " Granville de Vigne " 
 and "Strathmore. " Nor has she always 
 clung to the talisman by which she after- 
 ward learned to invoke her best creations. 
 At times she has seemed to cast this tem- 
 porarily away, as in " Friendship " and 
 "A Winter City." I have now reached, as 
 it were, my one sole conclusion regarding 
 her abilities at their finest and securest 
 outlook. She is an idealist, and that she 
 should have determinedly remained. The 
 foibles of modern society are no subjects 
 for either her dissection or her satire. She 
 has never been any more able to become a 
 Thackeray or a Dickens than they, under 
 any conceivable circumstances, could have 
 become Ouidas. It is an immense thing 
 for a writer to recognize just what he is 
 
The Truth about Ouida. i6i 
 
 capable of doing best, and to leave all the 
 rest alone. But Ouida, with a burning un- 
 easiness, has continually misunderstood her 
 own noble gifts. With an eye that couTd 
 look undimmed at the sun, she has too 
 often grown weary of his beams. Once 
 sure of her wings, white and strong as they 
 proved, she had nothing to seek except the 
 soft welcome of the air for which they 
 were so buoyantly fitted. But no : she has 
 repeatedly folded them and walked instead 
 of flying. Birds that fly with grace do not 
 often walk so. She is a poet, tind she has 
 forgotten this truth with a pertinacity 
 which has been a deprivation to the litera- 
 ture of her time. And yet for several years 
 after the publication of "Tricotrin" the 
 idealist was most hopefully paramount in 
 all that she did. If " Folle-Farine" had 
 been her first book instead of her sixth or 
 seventh, it would have made even the Eng- 
 lish blood that she has more than once de- 
 clared so sluggish, tingle with glad appre- 
 ciation of its loveliness. The change in her 
 was for a time absolute and thorough. 
 " Folle-Farine " was the story of a despised 
 outcast girl, ignorant and unlettered, yet 
 with a soul quick to estimate and treasure 
 the worth and meaning of beauty wherever 
 
1 62 The Truth about Oiiida. 
 
 found. It is all something which the real- 
 ists would pull long faces or giggle at as 
 hopelessly "highfalutin." But then the 
 realists, when they ride their hobby with a 
 particularly martial air, are inclined quite 
 to trample all poetry below its hoofs. I 
 don't know how well the story of " Folle- 
 Farine " would please some of Balzac's suc- 
 cessors, but I am sure that he himself would 
 have delighted in it. The girl's infancy 
 among the gypsies and subsequent fierce 
 persecution at the hands of her grandfather, 
 Claudis Flamma, as one devil-begotten and 
 loathsome, are treated with an intensity 
 bordering on the painful. But through all 
 the youthful anguish and martyrdom of 
 "Folle-Farine " there flows a charming 
 current of idyllic feeling. Such passages 
 as these, stamped with the individuality 
 of Ouida, meet us on every page : " In 
 one of the most fertile and fair districts of 
 Northern France there was a little Norman 
 town, very, very old, and beautiful exceed- 
 ingly by reason of its ancient streets, its 
 high peaked roofs, its marvellous galle- 
 ries and carvings, its exquisite grays and 
 browns, its silence and its color, and its 
 rich still life. Its centre was a great cathe- 
 dral, noble as York or Chartres ; a cathedral 
 
The TrutJi about Ouida. 163 
 
 whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose 
 innumerable towers and pinnacles were all 
 pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone 
 and the birds of the air flew all through 
 them. A slow brown river, broad enough 
 for market-boats and for corn-barges, stole 
 through the place to the sea, lapping as it 
 went the wooden piles of the houses, and 
 reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, 
 the hues of the signs and the draperies, the 
 dark spaces of the dormer windows, the 
 bright heads of some casement-cluster pi 
 carnations, the laughing face of a girl lean- 
 ing out to smile on her lover." 
 
 This certainly is not what we call com- 
 pact writing ; there is none of that neat- 
 ness and trimness about it which bespeak 
 the deliberative pen or the compunctious 
 eraser. But what a sensuous and winsome 
 poetic effect does it produce ! Few writers 
 can afford the loose clauses, the random 
 laissez-aller, of Ouida. She sometimes 
 abuses her assumed privilege, even in her 
 most authentic moments — those, I mean, 
 of pure imagination. But it is then that 
 the superabundance of her diction and its 
 careless yet shining fluency hardly ever lose 
 their attractiveness. It is then that the 
 prolixity to which I have before referred is 
 
164 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 an attribute we are glad to pardon, and 
 love while we are doing so. The argument 
 of " Folle-Farine" soon ceases to deal with 
 the sufferings of a child. The poor crea- 
 ture's hopeless love for the cold and un- 
 consciously heedless Arslan, bitter at the 
 world's indifference to those magnificent 
 gods and goddesses that he still goes on 
 painting in his old granary among water- 
 docks and rushes there by the river-side, 
 is portrayed with unnumbered masterly 
 strokes. And afterward, when Folle-Farine 
 tends him as he lies stricken with fever in 
 a Parisian attic, the evil temptings of the 
 unprincipled Sartorian, as they offer life 
 and fame to Arslan at a price whose infamy 
 cannot be questioned by her who hears 
 them, cloud this whole narrative with a 
 truly terrible gloom. Folle-Farine's immo- 
 lation of self to save him whom she wor- 
 ships, and her final self-inflicted death amid 
 the peace of the river-reeds, far away from 
 the loud and gilded Paris that she detests, 
 are the very darkest essence of the most 
 absorbing and desolating tragedy. But 
 the poetry of this whole fervid conception 
 is never once lost sight of. We close the 
 book with a shudder, as if we had been 
 passing through the twilight of some magic 
 
Tlie Truth about Ouida. 165 
 
 forest where the dews are death. But we 
 realize how matchless is the sorcery that 
 can so sombrely enchain us, and long after 
 its woful spell has vanished memory vi- 
 brates with the pity and sorrow it roused. 
 "Ariadne" is another masterpieee, and 
 not unlike the foregoing in the main sources 
 of its excessive melancholy. It is the story 
 of a feminine spirit swayed by an unrecip- 
 rocated love, as waywardly given as lightly 
 undervalued. The characters are without 
 subtlety, as in all Ouida's prose-poems. 
 They are fascinating or repelling shadows, 
 whom we can name adoration, egotism, 
 fidelity, as we please, but whose eerie jux- 
 tapositions, whose pictorial and half-illu- 
 sory surroundings, may summon sensations 
 not unlike those caused in us by some ad- 
 mirable 5'et faded fresco. Never was Rome, 
 in all her grandeur and desuetude, made 
 the more majestic background of a heart's 
 forlorn history. We read of " the silver 
 lines of the snow new-fallen on the mount- 
 ains against the deep rose of dawn ;" of 
 how " shadows of the night steal softly from 
 off the city, releasing, one by one, dome 
 and spire and cupola and roof, till all the 
 wide white wonder of the place ennobles 
 itself under the broad brightness of full 
 
1 66 The Truth about Oitida. 
 
 day ;" of how one can " go down into the 
 dark cool streets, with the pigeons flutter- 
 ing in the fountains, and the sounds of the 
 morning chants coming from many a church 
 door and convent window, and little schol- 
 ars and singing- children going by with 
 white clothes on, or scarlet robes, as though 
 walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli 
 or Garofalo." Sculpture forms what one 
 might call the pervading stimulus of this 
 most impassioned story, its young heroine 
 being a sculptor of inspired powers. In the 
 same way music supplies an incessant ac- 
 companiment for the glowing words of 
 '• Signa." The youth who gives his name 
 to the book is a musician who possesses 
 something more glorious than mere apti- 
 tude. Psychologically it is the reverse of 
 •'Ariadne," delineating the torment of a 
 man who puts faith in the most shallow 
 and vacant female nature. It is just as 
 plaintive, just as haunting, as its prede- 
 cessor, but it is simpler, less penetrative 
 and less wide-circling, less Dantesque in 
 its mournful dignity and less astonishing 
 through its scholarship. These three prose- 
 poems, " Folle-Farine," "Ariadne" and 
 " Sigiia," are the three high alps of Ouida's 
 accomplishment thus far. It is not easy 
 
The Truth aboKt Ouida. 167 
 
 to praise them with full justice, because 
 unrestrained panegyric is never that, and 
 yet the lyrical spontaneity of the works 
 themselves — their evidence of having won 
 their splendid vitality by having been 
 poured from the writer's inmost heart, as 
 warm as that heart's blood — would tempt 
 one who had fully felt their strength, orig- 
 inality and greatness, to dip his pen in ex- 
 ceedingly rosy ink and then shape with it 
 very ardent encomiums. I am far from call- 
 ing these memorable undertakings "idyls," 
 as Miss Preston terms them, or in any man- 
 ner agreeing that " Friendship " ''marks a 
 distinct intellectual advance." 
 
 Here was a woman who had shown us as 
 no one else, living or dead, ever had shown 
 in precisely the same way, that she could 
 make the sweetest and most impressive 
 poetry do service as the medium for telling 
 the sweetest and most impressive of tales. 
 Mixed with their Gothic fantasy there was 
 something Homeric in these three volumes 
 which I have before named. There were 
 no touches that reminded us at all of the 
 modern novel. Each had its separate 
 aesthetic haze clingingabout it, andagolden 
 haze this was, in every case. With only a 
 few changes here and there, the atmosphere 
 
1 68 The TruiJi about Ouida. 
 
 of each story might have been made Greek, 
 or even Egyptian. The delights or horrors 
 of life -^^TQ put most strikingly under our 
 vision; but the details of life, the routine 
 oi things au Jour le Jour, the trifling modes 
 and customs of mortality, as it pursues its 
 whims, its vices, its flirtations, its amours, 
 its divorce-suits, all remained remote and 
 unconsidered. The glamour of dream clung 
 to every character and event. The joys and 
 miseries outrolled before us were as abstract 
 and aloof, when viewed with relation to our 
 morning mail or our menaced butcher's- 
 bill, as the loves of Paris and Helen in the 
 Iliad, or of Ulysses and Calypso in the 
 Odyssey. These three enticing stories no 
 more concerned our bread-and-butter-get- 
 ting existences of prosaic actuality than 
 they concerned the wash of tides at either 
 pole. We turned their glowing leaves to 
 escape from our own silent quarrel with 
 realities rather than to meet the monoto- 
 nous recurrence of them either photographed 
 painstakingly or sketched felicitously. In 
 other words, we gave ourselves up to the 
 alternately gentle or stormy wizardries of 
 a poet, contented in the oblivion thus be- 
 gotten for decorated statistics of the annal- 
 ist or placid vivisections of the surgeon. 
 
Tlie Trutli about Oiiida, 169 
 
 I am aware that all such departure from 
 his cherished modern standards must at 
 once be tyrannously cried down as a bore 
 by that self-satisfied arbiter, the average 
 reader of to-day. Perhaps Ouida felt some 
 necessity of propitiating this multiform 
 custodian of profit and loss. It may have 
 been that her publishers told her, with that 
 sincere sadness born of financial depression, 
 how much handsomer had been the " re- 
 turns" from '' Strathmore" and " Chandos" 
 than from "Ariadne" or " Signa." Be this 
 as it may, Ouida forsook her new gods, and, 
 except in the composition of some exquisite 
 short pieces which recalled the purity, the 
 human breadth and the past star-like ra- 
 diance of "A Provence Rose," "A Dog of 
 Flanders" and " The Niirnberg Stove," I 
 do not know of her having ever again hewn 
 her statues from the same flawless Pentelic 
 marble. 
 
 But the resumption of her old more ma- 
 terialistic task — that of writing novels 
 which should reflect the doings and misdo- 
 ings of her own century — she was now pre- 
 pared to undertake with a much firmer 
 hand and with an unquestionably chastened 
 sense of old delinquencies. The tale 
 " Friendship" may be said to commemorate 
 
I/O The Tr7ith about Ouida. 
 
 this unfortunate transition. It marks the 
 third distinct change in Ouida's mental 
 posture toward her public. It is to me a 
 descent and not an elevation, and yet I 
 freely concede that the novelist rediviva was 
 in every way superior to the novelist who 
 lived and rhapsodized before. In " Friend- 
 ship" we see much of the flare and glare 
 once thrown upon every-day occurrences 
 tempered to a far more tolerable light. 
 Deformity often takes the lines of just pro- 
 portion, and not seldom of amiable sym- 
 metry as well. Miss Preston praises 
 " Friendship" as pre-eminently readable in 
 every part, and here I should again differ 
 from her, since in my judgment the book 
 contains a great deal of insufferable tedium. 
 Ouida's worst fault as a stylist is here laid 
 tormentingly bare. She harps with such 
 stress of repetition upon the guilty bondage 
 of Prince loris to Lady Joan Challoner that 
 the perpetual circumlocution makes a kind 
 of maelstrom in which interest becomes at 
 last remorselessly swallowed. It has been 
 stated tliat incidents and characters in 
 "Friendship" were taken from Ouida's own 
 life, and that Lady Joan Challoner's name 
 conceals one belonging to a foe of the au- 
 thor. Whether this report be true or false. 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 171 
 
 we resent the almost maliciously periphras- 
 tic style in which we are told again and 
 again that Lady Joan was the jailer of loris 
 and watched him struggle in vain with the 
 gyves of his own sin. To have a nature of 
 the most detestable selfishness described 
 over and over till we are familiar with its 
 meanest impulse, its narrowest spite, re- 
 sembles being seated by a person of repul- 
 sive phj'siognomy in a chamber lined with 
 mirrors. The reduplications become un- 
 bearable to us, till we take the only feasible 
 course for avoiding them: we go into an- 
 other apartment. Still, in the present case, 
 I did not go into another apartment; I fin- 
 ished "Friendship," and received from it an 
 impression as vivid as disagreeable. C'est 
 le ton qui fait la 77iusique, and this story, not- 
 withstanding its eternity of repetitions, 
 appeared to me told in a querulous, railing 
 voice which robbed it of charm. But it 
 evinces a most undeniable improvement in 
 method. The sentences are terser and 
 crisper than in those other adolescent nov- 
 els, and the syntax is no longer straggling 
 and hazardous. Of a certain redundancy 
 Ouida has never wholly rid herself. The 
 effort to do so is manifest in her later books, 
 but it still remains a weakness with her to 
 
172 The Truth about Oiiida. 
 
 tell us the same thing a number of times, 
 and with only a comparative alteration of 
 phraseology. Still, no one — not even Bal- 
 zac himself — has a more succinct, dry, 
 poignant wray of putting epigram. It seems 
 to me that she is writhout humor ; her fun 
 inevitably stings as wit alone can do ; that 
 soft phosphorescent play of geniality which 
 would try to set its reflex gleam in the 
 stony gaze of a gorgon, appears quite un- 
 known to her. She has been wise, too, in 
 not cultivating humor, for it is something 
 which must fall upon a writer from heaven : 
 he might as well try and train himself into 
 having blue eyes instead of black. But 
 Ouida has trained many of her qualities, and 
 the self-search with which she has done so 
 has betokened the most scourge-like rigors. 
 The novelist in her is to me all a matter of 
 talent vigilantly guarded and nurtured ; 
 the poetic part of her — the part to which 
 we are indebted for three supreme achieve- 
 ments — could not have helped delivering 
 its beautiful message. Afterward Ouida 
 remembered that she was somebody quite 
 outside of what one would call a genius — 
 that she was a woman of enormously ver- 
 satile information, and that the possibility 
 of her writing- novels which would excite a 
 
The Truth about Oidda. 173 
 
 great deal of public attention could scarcely 
 be overestimated. Beyond doubt she had 
 now reached a state of dexterity as regarded 
 mere craftsmanship which thoroughly 
 eclipsed the crudity of former times. But 
 just as she had been raw and experimental 
 in a way quite her own, so was she now 
 adroit, self-restrained and professional with 
 a similar freshness. 
 
 " Moths" came next, and was a book 
 sought and commented upon, admired and 
 execrated, from St. Petersburg to San Fran- 
 cisco. Of all her novels, this is perhaps 
 the one which has brought her the greatest 
 number of readers in what may be set down 
 as the third period of her singular celebrit)^. 
 It is filled with the most drastic interest 
 for even the most jaded and enniiye exam- 
 iner. The story is the perfection of enter- 
 tainment, of diversion. Its sarcastic scorn 
 of fashionable frailties and flippancies even 
 surpasses that which made " Friendship" 
 notorious. Social life among the most 
 aristocratic people of Europe is drawn so 
 sumptuously and prismatically that with- 
 out ever having enjoyed the honor of din- 
 ing or supping with princes and duchesses, 
 we still own to a secret revolt against the 
 verisimilitude of their recorded pastimes 
 
174 Tlie Truth about Ouida. 
 
 and dissipations. In "Moths," as in all her 
 purely fictional and unpoetic work, Ouida 
 gives us the belief that she is flying her 
 kite entirely too high, that she is too greatly 
 enamoured of the rank and titles of her 
 dukes and earls, that the European beau 
 monde, as an idea, has too bewilderingly in- 
 toxicated her fancy. As Balzac delighted 
 in letting us know the exact number of 
 francs per annum possessed by almost 
 every member of his ComMie Humaine, so 
 Ouida loves to tell us of her grandees' cas- 
 tles and palaces, of xh&\r fetes and musicales, 
 of their steam-yachts and their four-in- 
 hands, of their "private physicians" (it is 
 rarely one simple physician with her), of 
 their multitudinous retainers and servants. 
 Her heroines go to their apartments to 
 dress, and in so doing give themselves up 
 to their " women :" it is seldom that any 
 one of them is humbly enough placed to 
 have merely a single femme de chambie. All 
 the horses are blooded animals, all the 
 jewels priceless, all the repasts miracles of 
 gastronomy, all the ladies' toilets royally 
 costly. Saloons and boudoirs and bed- 
 chambers are adorned with wonders of 
 modern art, on canvas or in marble, in 
 tapestry or bric-i-brac, in panellings or 
 
Tlu Tnitli about Ouida. 175 
 
 frescos. Nearly every new book that she 
 writes is a sort of edition de luxe of itself. 
 I am by no means sure that she does not 
 smile at the dazzling glories which she 
 evokes, while continuing to spread them 
 before us with a secret conviction that they 
 will allure hundreds and even thousands, 
 though ihey repel tens and twenties, of 
 those whom they confront. What to many 
 refined observers may have seemed a streak 
 of trivial childishness in her may be, after 
 all, a shrewder cleverness than these ac- 
 credit her with. For Ouida is superlativelj' 
 clever ; indeed, it may be added by those 
 whom none of her sham glitterings have 
 blinded to the genuineness of her actual 
 gold, that she is lamentably clever. Had 
 she thought less of a certain transient ap- 
 plause which writers incomparably beneath 
 her may win, she might much sooner have 
 attained that firm fame during her lifetime 
 which her death alone will now create. In 
 " Moths'' the cleverness to which I have 
 alluded is everywhere apparent. She has 
 made it a story that the shop-girl or the 
 dry-goods clerk may read with thrills and 
 tears. Vera's horrible misfortune in hav- 
 ing been sold by her mother to the brutish 
 Russian prince admits of no misinterprcta- 
 
176 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 tion. The vast command of wealth and 
 the lofty station which now follow for 
 the dreamy and statuesque heroine are skil- 
 fully blended with her love for the brilliant 
 marquis-tenor Correze and the distressing 
 captivity of her jewelled chains. There is 
 a strong suggestion of the " penny dread- 
 fuls " in the whole entourage of the tale, 
 with Vera's anguished heart beating under 
 robes of velvet and her tortured brain 
 throbbing under coronets of gems. But it 
 is immeasurably above the vulgarity of 
 those gaudy and often mawkish serials. 
 Its pathos is intense, and its continuous 
 intervals of pure poetr)' are undeniable. It 
 is dramatic, too, in the very strictest sense, 
 and its adaptation for the English stage 
 was naturally to be expected. As for what 
 the moralists would call its "lesson," I 
 should affirm that to be exempt from the 
 least chance of misconstruction. Like all 
 these later stories of Ouida's, " Moths " has 
 been denounced as grossly unwholesome 
 for young minds. I do not know about 
 young minds gaining benefit from its pe- 
 rusal ; I should imagine that, like many 
 things which minors do not understand, its 
 effect upon them might be harmful, and 
 even noxious. So is the effect of rich 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 177 
 
 dishes and indigestible fruit upon young 
 stomachs, while stronger gastric juices 
 sustain no hurt from their consumption. 
 It is time that this outcry against what is 
 evil in literature for young minds should 
 be silenced by a sensible consideration of 
 how potent or impotent are the defences 
 reared by educators and guardians. It 
 would surely be unwise to cut down all the 
 apple-orchards because in those days which 
 precede autumn's due ripeness multitudes 
 of foraging children have brought on them- 
 selves avoidable colics. If the colics sleep 
 in the undeveloped apples, and mischiev- 
 ous little Adams and Eves w/// taste thereof, 
 a stout wall and an ill-tempered dog behind 
 it are the only trustworthy preventives 
 against their temerity. To claim that 
 Ouida's works are not healthful reading 
 for those whose youth makes the mere 
 mention of evil and vice deleterious be- 
 cause in all their bad meanings unexplain- 
 able, is to claim, I think, that any author 
 may be misunderstood provided the men- 
 tality of his public is sufficiently meagre 
 for his miscomprehension. The decried 
 " immoralit)'" of Ouida I have never at all 
 been able to perceive. I ignore the ques- 
 tion of her immoral purport in the prose- 
 
178 The Truth about Oidda. 
 
 poems heretofore treated. There such a 
 discussion wears colors of absurdity ; it is 
 almost as if some one should assure me 
 Milton's Satan was a matter of shame to 
 his portrayer. But with regard to all 
 Ouida's novels of what I have called her 
 third period, the accusation (and it is a 
 very wide accusation) becomes at least 
 worthy of attention. Ouidahas no hesita- 
 tion in referring to relations between the 
 sexes which common conventionality lias 
 reprobated and condemned. A great deal 
 of her more modern work deals frankly wiiii 
 this theme. Sometimes it is dealt with in 
 tones and terms of a most scathing irony ; 
 again it is handled with mixed disdain and 
 ridicule ; and still again it is openly grieved 
 over and deplored. But I fail to find a 
 single instance of the vileness of adultery 
 being either condoned or alleviated. To 
 choose an uncanny subject is very different 
 from handling the subject with the grosser 
 motive of extenuating what is base in it. 
 I should assert that Ouida never — abso- 
 lutely never — does the latter. There are 
 one or two scenes in " Moths" which have 
 a shocking nudity of candor. But they 
 are never dwelt upon for the purpose of 
 pandering to any despicable taste in the 
 
The Truth about Oiiida. 179 
 
 reader. They form a link in the dolorous 
 chain-work of the heroine's ills, and they 
 are introduced for the purpose of render- 
 ing her final step of rebellion against 
 the world's legally imposed pressure more 
 pardonably consistent with the whole 
 scheme of her unsolicited mishaps. While 
 revealing what she believes to be low and 
 contemptible in society of to-day, Ouida 
 employs merely the weapons which Juvenal 
 himself made use of. She is never sympa- 
 thetic with wrong-doing, any more than 
 the Latin poet was in fulminating against 
 Roman decadence. Witness, as an exam- 
 ple of this impersonal sincerity, her un- 
 sparing denunciations hurled at such char- 
 acters as Lady Joan in " Friendship " and 
 Lady Dolly in '' Moths." How cordially 
 she seems to detest the artificiality of ev- 
 ery mauvais siijet she describes ! She lays 
 bare alike the sordid and the sensual aim; 
 she pierces with her shafts of wit and hate 
 the adventurer, the hypocrite, the scandal- 
 monger, the titled voluptuary, the mendaJ 
 clous and guileful male flirt, the modest- 
 visaged and still more deceptive intrigante. 
 But througli all her danse macabre of ill- 
 behaved people there is no revelation which 
 mav even faintlv indicate that she is in anv 
 
i8o Tlic Truth about Ouida. 
 
 way sympathetic with their indiscreet or 
 reckless caperings. For those who shout 
 Ouida down as abominable because she 
 chooses to touch the abominable, I have 
 no answer. All that point of view merely 
 involves the question of whether the abomi- 
 nable can be touched or not in literature, 
 provided it is so approached and so grasped 
 that the author makes its mirk and stain 
 seem nothing but the soilure and grossness 
 which they really are. I am acquainted 
 with several American men of letters who 
 have told me that they deeply regret the 
 broad public distaste for so-called " in- 
 decency " in novel-writing. These men 
 have already written novels of merit and 
 force, but they greatly desire to write nov- 
 els which may express the full scope and 
 depth of life as they see and feel it. They 
 declare themselves, however, debarred from 
 such performance by the stringent edicts 
 of their publishers and editors. It seems 
 to me that Ouida has quietly contemned 
 the inclinations of her publishers and edi- 
 tors. She has chosen to tell the whole 
 trutli — not as Zola tells it, but as George 
 Sand (virhom she resembles in one way as 
 much as she resembles Victor Hugo in 
 another) always chose uncompromisingly 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 181 
 
 to tell it. Her gorgeousness of surround- 
 ing has made her perfectly pure and refor- 
 matory motive dim to those- who cannot 
 eliminate fi-om the scum and reek of a stag- 
 nant pool the iridescence filmed there. 
 Ouida has seen the rainbow colors close- 
 clinging to such malodorous torpor in 
 human society, and she has striven to re- 
 port of them as faithfully as of the brackish 
 waters below. But she has intensified 
 their baleful tints. She has made the er- 
 mine that wraps her sinful potentates too 
 white and the black spots which indent 
 this ermine too inky. She is and has al- 
 ways been incapable of saying to her muse 
 what Mr. Lowell says in his profound 
 though pietistic poem, "The Cathedral:" 
 
 '■ Oh, more than half-way turn that Grecian front 
 Upon me, while with half-rebuke I spell. 
 On the plain fillet that confines thy hair 
 In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, 
 The Naught in overplus, thy race's badge !" 
 
 No; Ouida determinedly delights in 
 overplus, and when one thinks of her muse 
 at all it is of a harried and overtaxed muse, 
 with feverish imprecations against the wear 
 and tear to which divinity has been heart- 
 lessly subjected. When I turn toward the 
 
1 82 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 novels which have succeeded " Moths," I 
 am constrained to declare Ouida a writer 
 more fertile in expedients for disillusioning 
 her most loyal adherents than any other 
 known through the past centuries' as one 
 deserving the name of a genius. She is so 
 incontestably a genius, however, that she 
 can go on committing her excesses without 
 alienating her leal devotees. She is like 
 some monarch confident of his subjects' 
 worship while he crowns himself with roses 
 and quaffs wine from gold beakers to the 
 detriment and discontent of throngs wait- 
 ing at his gates. There are no throngs 
 waiting at Ouida's gates, however ; or 
 rather the throngs are her entranced read- 
 ers, and not by any means those fastidious 
 about the requirements of true royalty. 
 But a few, knowing her grand mind, re- 
 gret the self-forgetfulness to which it has 
 stooped. 
 
 "In Maremma" startled these few, as 
 if it were a pledge of permanent return 
 among the classic idealisms which have 
 made this author's best right to assert her- 
 self one of the greatest figures in contem- 
 porary literature. And "In Maremma" is 
 a tale of matchless grace and sweetness. 
 We marvel as we read of the Italian girl 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 183 
 
 who went and dwelt in the Etruscan tomb, 
 loving the dead whom she found buried 
 there, and finally meeting in it, by a most 
 terrible satire of circumstances, him who 
 dealt her a death-wound of passion — we 
 marvel, I say, as we read of this delicious, 
 free-souled, innocent kinswoman to FoUe- 
 Farine and Ariadne, how any human brain 
 could be so multiplex and many-shaded as 
 that of Ouida. What gulfs of difference 
 separate this new heroine of hers from 
 the world-encompassed and society-beset 
 beings whom she has so recently pictured ! 
 And )'et for a time the novelist has dropped 
 her microscope (often so foolishly misem- 
 ployed) and the poet has resumed her 
 neglected lyre. Their old notes are still 
 struck with dulcet harmony. " In Marem- 
 ma" is Ouida again at her loftiest and 
 most authentic. She shows in it her old 
 impetuous desire to feel with and for the 
 persecuted and maltreated of the earth. I 
 cannot explain why it should not be ranked 
 with the three great masterpieces to which 
 I have already made such enthusiastic 
 reference. Pehaps it should be so ranked. 
 If there is any excuse for depriving it of a 
 place on this exquisite list, that excuse 
 must be found in its more earthy raison 
 
184 The Truth aboitt Ouida. 
 
 d'etre when compared with the almost ethe- 
 real spirituality of the other books. 
 
 "Wanda," "Princess Napraxine," and 
 " Othmar," coming afterward with a speed 
 of succession that showed the most earnest 
 industry, have given proof of their author's 
 second return to at least relative realism. 
 But "Wanda" is a romance of inexpressi- 
 ble grace and force. It is the purest ro- 
 mance: to speak of it as highly colored 
 is like calling a particularly rich sunset 
 overfraught with glows and tints. Judging 
 it by the modern methods of the " natural- 
 istic" school is to pronounce it a monstrosity 
 of art. But a great many of the elder Du- 
 mas's works would suffer in a like way if so 
 considered, and nearly every prose line of 
 Hugo's would fall under the same ban of dis- 
 favor. " Wanda" is a great romantic story. 
 Its mode of telling is one protracted intensi- 
 ty. Its fires burn with a raging and heavy- 
 odored flame. But they spring forth, for all 
 that, with no ungoverned madness. They 
 are kindled by a hand desirous of their 
 heat and curl but avoidant of their reck- 
 less outflow. It is very easy to denounce 
 such a tale as vulgar. In these final years 
 of our dying century all literary fierce- 
 ness and eagerness of this kind are so de- 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 185 
 
 nounced. If romanticism is to fade away 
 forever, this volcanic bit of sensationalism 
 is undoubtedly doomed. But its sensation- 
 alism is of the sort we think of when we 
 remind ourselves of "Monte Christo " and 
 " Le Juif Errant." The haughty Austrian 
 countess, with her prestige of stainless 
 pedigree and her imperial self-esteem, — 
 the Russian serf who has concealed his 
 disgraceful birth under a stolen title, — 
 the Hungarian nobleman of almost kingly 
 rank and unblemished honor, who con- 
 temptuously lays bare the shameful brand 
 of imposture in his rival, — the ancestral 
 castle in the Tyrol, with obeisant swarms 
 of vassals and its regal household admin- 
 istration, — all these are the old materials 
 and manoeuvres of " Strathmore " and 
 " Idalia," but presented with tenfold more 
 adroitness and savoir faire. The secret of 
 reading "Wanda" with the keenest relish 
 for its exuberant ardors must lie in com- 
 plete forgetfulness of life as it is and pious 
 acceptance of life as it might be. But this 
 is the test by which nearly all romance is 
 tried. I have no space to treat at length 
 of "Princess Napraxine " and its sequel, 
 "Othmar;" but if space were broadly al- 
 lowed me I could state of them no more 
 
1 86 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 and no less than I have already stated of 
 " Wanda." Princess Napraxine herself is 
 a silly and patience-taxing person. Ouida's 
 enemies must have exulted in her as " im- 
 moral," which she indeed truly would be 
 were she not so transparently le'gire. The 
 chief pity is that so fine a fellow as Othmar 
 should have done anything except disdain 
 her. But both these two last novels teem 
 with pages of description, reflection, ten- 
 derness, sweetness and pathos which make 
 the fact doubly sad that Princess Naprax- 
 ine (a pedant, a prig and a strutting com- 
 bination of silliness and bad manners) 
 should ever have been summoned to blot 
 and mar them by her paltry charlatanisms. 
 The isolated position held by Ouida in an 
 age when principles and theories essentially 
 opposite to her own have seemingly cap- 
 tured the world of letters, would of itself 
 point to endowments both rare and sturdy. 
 That she has pushed her way into renown 
 against obstacles which were often all the 
 more stubborn because they were of her 
 own rearing, is a matter for serious inquiry 
 and reflection ; but that she should have 
 forced from certain able contemporaries 
 who originally satirized and flouted her, 
 the respect and homage which we pay to 
 
The Truth about Onida. 187 
 
 transcendent competency, is a still more 
 significant truth. It means that Ouida 
 must mount to her place of deserved 
 state in spite of faults which would shape 
 for many another writer stairways with a 
 wholly different direction. But there has 
 seldom been a writer whose virtues and 
 vices were so inextricably blended. For 
 example, the very people, in her stories of 
 fashionable society, who conduct them- 
 selves with the least lucid common-sense 
 perpetually spice their repartees and rail- 
 leries with a most engaging wit. We may 
 not sympathize with what they say, but 
 we are keenly amused by their modes of 
 saying it. Disraeli, whom I believe Ouida 
 sincerely admires as a novelist, possesses 
 all her love for palatial filigree and por- 
 phyry ; yet he has nothing of her sprightli- 
 ness, crispness and verve '^\\t.n telling us of 
 the bores, the simpletons and the few passa- 
 bly bright people who make up "society." 
 In more than a single way Ouida is be- 
 hind her time, — a time over whose rather 
 barren-looking levels of analysis and for- 
 mulation she flings the one large light of ro- 
 mance now visible. In this latter respect 
 she is, indeed, a kind of glorious anachro- 
 nism, but from another stand-point her 
 
1 88 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 grooves of thought appear painfully nar- 
 row. Occasionally she airs a contempt for 
 her own sex which makes us wish that with 
 all her learning she knew a little more of 
 the dispassionate repose taught by science, 
 and of its hardy feuds against reckless as- 
 sumptions. Ouida has made declarations 
 about womankind which cause us to won- 
 der how she can possibly have been so un- 
 fortunate in her feminine friends, with' the 
 thousands of chaste and lovable women 
 now to be met inside the limits of civiliza- 
 tion. The mauvaise langue, when turned 
 against womanhood, is nowadays classed 
 among effete frivolities. What we forgave 
 at the beginning of the century, on this 
 head, we now simply dismiss as beneath 
 anything like grave heed. The day has 
 passed when such Byronics of misogyny, 
 however gilt with flashing sarcasms, will 
 either delude or solace. We leave " sneers 
 at the sex " to the idleness of otherwise 
 unemployed club-loungers, whose growls 
 are innocuous. Still, in justice to Ouida, I 
 should deny that her hatred of women ever 
 reached anything like an offensive boiling- 
 point except in the early novel "Puck," 
 which has probably done as much to feed 
 the spleen of her enemies as any work to 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 189 
 
 which she has given her name. In subse- 
 quent novels she has created many women 
 of great sweetness and high-mindedness, as 
 Etoile in "Friendship," Vera in "Moths," 
 Wanda in the story of that title, Yseult 
 in " Princess Napraxine," and Damaris in 
 "Othmar." Perhaps a depraved and sin- 
 ful woman is more execrable than a man 
 of the same perverted traits. This is a 
 question open to debate, though Ouida 
 somehow suggests an opposite judgment. 
 It is true that the majority of her very bad 
 people are not men, though she is capable, 
 at a pinch, of some darkly Mephistophelian 
 types. 
 
 On the other hand, her love for the help- 
 less and the unfriended, her profound char- 
 ity toward the down-trodden and destitute 
 and neglected among humanity, is one of 
 the several bonds between her own genius 
 and that of Hugo — a poet whom she re- 
 sembles more than I have availed myself 
 of opportunity to indicate. 
 
 But I do not claim that these words about 
 Ouida — though I have called them "the 
 truth," and though, as regards my own 
 most sincere faith and equally sincere un- 
 faith, I so insist upon calling them — are in 
 any degree a satisfactory criticism. How 
 
1 9*3 The Trntli about Onida. 
 
 this woman's littleness dies into a shadow 
 beside her imaginative greatness, a real 
 critic will hereafter tell. I have already 
 stated in another essay my fixed belief 
 concerning the scientific method which 
 every critic who at all merits the place of 
 one should infallibly use. For myself, I 
 wish to be thought no more than that 
 purveyor of opinions whom I have previ- 
 ously sentenced with some emphasis. I 
 simply print what I think and believe about 
 Ouida, and I have declared it to be " the 
 truth " only as I see and realize truth. If 
 it be falsehood, I shall welcome with glad- 
 ness an)' actual critic who so proves it. 
 But to satisfy me of my own errors he 
 must not by any means deport himself in 
 the same arbitrary and downright fashion 
 as I have done. He must bear in mind 
 that if he desires to convince me of my one- 
 sidedness he must not oppose it with dicta 
 as unfoundedly hypothetical as my own. 
 He must not be a man who profusely deals, 
 as I do, in unverified declarations. He 
 must logically elucidate to me where I am 
 wrong and why I am right. It occurs to 
 me, with that vanity of all essayists who 
 temporarily have the field quite to them- 
 
The Truth about Ouida. igi 
 
 selves, that I am more often right than 
 wrong. But if I am conclusively proved 
 more often wrong than right by that s)''s- 
 tem of acute investigation which only the 
 science-bred critic understands, then I shall 
 still feel that I have been of marked service 
 to the writer thus empirically reviewed ; 
 for I shall at least have made myself a 
 means of rousing careful and faithful con^ 
 sideration toward a series of imaginative 
 works thus far either unreasonably con- 
 temned or irresponsibly lauded. The scien- 
 tific tone and poise is so prevailing and 
 favorite a one at the present time in works 
 which a few years ago it rarely invaded, 
 that I cannot help asking myself why the 
 critics, who of all living persons are most 
 easily accredited with the scientific tone 
 and poise, should not more fondly and un- 
 hesitatingly employ it. They almost uni- 
 versally fail to employ it, however ; and on 
 this account the wandering verbiage of 
 their estimates may be said to be as value- 
 less as the announcements which I now 
 pluck up boldness enough to print. But 
 my boldness has a weak fibre or two of 
 cowardice in it, I fear, after all. I should 
 never have presumed to write of Ouida as I 
 
192 The Truth about Ouida. 
 
 have written, had I not prized her compo- 
 sitions, franlcly and de bon cceur, far more 
 than I blame them. For this reason I have 
 given my favorable views publicity. Ouida 
 is so internationally popular that I am 
 confident of friendly endorsements which 
 will mitigate for me the necessary agony 
 of being anathematized as her defender. 
 There my cowardice stops— in a certainty 
 of helpers and supporters. For the rest, 
 if I am called names because I pay to a 
 reigning genius what I hold as her rightful 
 tribute, my stolid resignation will be equal 
 to any martyr's. I shall endure the odium, 
 certain of its ultimate destruction. Times 
 change, and I think the day is not far dis- 
 tant when Ouida will be amazed at the sov- 
 ereign fame which she herself has builded 
 through all these years of failure and tri- 
 umph, of weakness and power. But per- 
 haps she will not be astonished at all, being 
 dead. Or perhaps . . . But I leave that 
 point for the religionists and the agnostics 
 to fight out between themselves. One gets 
 immortality of a certain kind, now and then, 
 vi'h&thQX pallida inors bring to us posthumous 
 beatitude, brimstone or annihilation. And 
 Ouida, I should insist (with deference to the 
 
The Truth about Ouida. 193 
 
 coming scientific critic), has secured this 
 terrene kind of immortality. I don't know 
 whether or not she would rank it as a very 
 precious boon. To judge from a good 
 many passages in her abundant writing, I 
 should be inclined to decide negatively. 
 
SHOULD CRITICS BE GENTLEMEN ? 
 
 Not long ago I received from a lady of 
 much culture and fine natural intelligence 
 a letter whose chief contents chanced to 
 bear upon a recent hostile newspaper no- 
 tice of a book which she had herself cor- 
 dially admired. One paragraph of this 
 letter especially struck me. It ran thus : 
 
 "The attack upon Mr. 's book has 
 
 served more than ever to convince me that 
 there is something all wrong with modern 
 ' criticism ' — so called. Why should not 
 the same courtesy be preserved in writing 
 of a book which accepted usage forces 
 upon us in speaking of one before its au- 
 thor ? Reckless personality is condemned 
 in social intercourse as vulgar, and even 
 odious; why should it be held admissible 
 the instant that the reviewer takes up his 
 pen ? I remember hearing, as a school-girl, 
 of ' polite literature. Is politeness an im- 
 perative requisite of literature alone, or are 
 there similar kindly demands upon the 
 
 194 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen? 195 
 
 people who set themselves to consider it ? 
 . . . Suppose we put into actual life 
 the same ill-breeding which now exists 
 among the newspaper critics. My hus- 
 band, as you know, is a Wall Street bank- 
 er. Imagine that some gentleman strolled 
 of a morning into his office, and instead of 
 the usual decent ' good-day,' began coolly 
 to assure him that his business ability was 
 overrated, that his financial success had 
 been cheaply purchased, that he owed his 
 present prosperity to a mere drift of luck, 
 and that, taken altogether, he was a person 
 of very little real consequence. I am 
 nearly certain that my husband, under such 
 circumstances, would become exceedingly 
 angry. And if he added to his anger a fiat 
 request that this same outspoken individ- 
 ual should never again cross his threshold, 
 I am positive in my belief that hundreds 
 of thoughtful and fair-minded outsiders 
 would promptly support the course he had 
 taken. . . . The great difficulty with all 
 you literary people is that you almost 
 wholly waive good manners in your dis- 
 cussions of one another. You pour upon 
 the book of a fellow-writer abuse which 
 you would despise yourselves for venting 
 if it were a question of his ill-cut coat, his 
 
196 Should Critics be Gentlemen f 
 
 inseparable squint or his hereditary freck- 
 les. You draw quite too sharp a line be- 
 tween what you may hold to be good criti- 
 cism and what your own sense of common 
 propriety has long ago convinced you to 
 be good breeding." 
 
 This communication, after I had read 
 and pondered it, struck me as a somewhat 
 lucid view of the whole matter. If not a 
 comprehensive judgment, it is certainly 
 one which contains the true reformatory 
 element. There is perhaps no one of its 
 factors with which civilization could less 
 easily dispense than with that of courtesy. 
 Imagine the horrors of a drawing-room or 
 a dinner-table where everybody said to 
 everybody else precisely what he consid- 
 ered to be deserved or appropriate, regard- 
 less of the pain it would cost. In the re- 
 public of letters, it might be answered, we 
 are supposed to replace formality by sin- 
 cerity. That is not unlike the method, 
 take it all in all, adopted by Robespierre 
 in his republic. There was a great deal of 
 sincerity about that. Critics and criticism 
 there had it all their own way. It was an 
 incisive way, and one essentially brutal. 
 For the latter reason its admirers were 
 numerous. 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 197 
 
 Censure would find it hard to adequate- 
 ly discountenance the arrogance and rude- 
 ness of the newspaper critic as they exist 
 at the present time. His effort to show 
 mental superiority and notable acumen 
 quite too often makes him forget that he 
 is also expected to appear a gentleman. 
 He may not be one (he is, alas ! too fre- 
 quently the dreary reverse), but he is never- 
 theless required to seem one by that very 
 standard of high cultivation which he has 
 so emphatically assumed. Even he would 
 admit that there is something in good 
 manners, after all. Only, it is difficult to 
 remember manners while you are being 
 radiantly judicial. The sun has beams 
 that kill. Is it so painful a calamity that 
 you should give some one poor Jones his 
 quietus while you illuminate your entire 
 period and pour consequent benefit on 
 many Joneses ? 
 
 I know the modern critic to be a very 
 sensitive person, — quite as much so as the 
 most thin-skinned poet who ever bled un- 
 der his bodkin. I have never been able 
 to explain this peculiarity except through 
 the tremulous effects of an evil conscience. 
 It is constantly manifest, however, and it 
 has more than once led me to realize the 
 
19S Should Critics be Gcntlanen ? 
 
 keenness of those shocks which its posses- 
 sor must find himself called on to sustain 
 when he encounters printed impressions of 
 fellow-critics diametrically different from 
 his own. That he is always finding him- 
 self disagreed with there can be no admis- 
 sible doubt. I don't know what heroic 
 self-reliance buoys up his sense of infalli- 
 bility under these trying conditions. For 
 my own part, I have more than once ex- 
 amined with amusement the variations be- 
 tween the verdicts passed by " authori- 
 ties " upon my own humble work. I have 
 read the eulogies of Rhadamanthus in the 
 Tomahawk till my cheeks tingled with 
 pleasurable blushes. " How entirely charm- 
 ing of Rhadamanthus !" I have said to 
 myself. "He understands me; he and I 
 are kindred souls, and the next time I 
 meet him on Broadway I hope it will be 
 lunch-time, so that I can ask him to join 
 me somewhere for a chop and a swallow 
 of claret." Then I have taken up the 
 Hatchet, and discovered that Minos thinks 
 I have just added new indignity to the 
 persecutions of an over-patient public. I 
 am styleless and flaccid; I am aspiring, 
 but effete; I have blundered into a pseudo- 
 reputation, and am a complex junction of 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 199 
 
 dulness, falsity and feebleness. This both 
 alarms and depresses me. I ask myself, 
 with the vague and meek ratiocination of 
 one simultaneously petted and persecuted, 
 how I can be, on account of the same piece 
 of literary achievement, at once wise and 
 foolish, profound and shallow, talented 
 and vacuous. But the Lancet soon reas- 
 sures me. I am, according to .^Eacos, 
 neither large nor small; it is quite ex- 
 plained now : I am simply a nice blending 
 of mediocrity and industry. Here are 
 three mighty judges, all stoutly opposed 
 to one another. They cannot all be right; 
 and if one is right the other two are fatally 
 wrong. But how shattering to my own 
 impulses of reverence ! It is like a vulgar 
 family quarrel in the household of Jupi- 
 ter. 
 
 These discordances of opinion are not 
 occasional; they occur every day. They 
 are to my mind the great proof of how ab- 
 surdly needless are all published comments 
 on books in current newspapers. Many 
 an author might find two or three of his 
 works adorning the " parlor table" of some 
 "flat" in Harlem owned by the reviewer 
 who has hotly abused them all during past 
 months. This gentleman has no doubt 
 
200 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 forgotten his own abuse. Perhaps he has 
 really read the books afterward, unpro- 
 fessionally, as it were, in the quiet of his 
 own home and beneath the light of his 
 evening lamp, enjoying their contents. 
 Most fair and thoughtful criticism is of 
 necessity kindly, and you are very apt to 
 cut a sorry figure in recommending a book 
 which you have not thoroughly read. In 
 nine cases out of ten your praise rings false 
 and silly, for your ignorance of what you 
 are praising betrays itself, like the piece 
 of futile hypocrisy it is. You resemble a 
 maid who rouges her mistress in a dim 
 light; there is danger of the lady's nose 
 getting a little rosy accidental spot on its 
 tip. But the criticism that puts down its 
 head like a bull and " makes " for a book 
 never requires the least preparation, pre- 
 meditation. Not very long ago I met a 
 critic who engaged me in conversation on 
 the subject of more than one recent book 
 which I myself happened carefully to have 
 read, and which he had presumably read, 
 as he had reviewed each of them. To my 
 surprise, he spoke of one these books in 
 tones of extreme praise. He had forgot- 
 ten, no doubt, that he had ever denounced 
 it. I could not help feeling that I should 
 
Should Critics be Gentleme7t? 20 1 
 
 altogether have preferred this gentleman's 
 blame. 
 
 Nothing is so easy as to be what we 
 nowadays call a critic. Unless you are 
 mentally unsound, you must have certain 
 opinions regarding the books which may 
 come under your eye. Entertaining such 
 opinions, you are required to express them 
 with moderate ease and glibness, though 
 the integrity demanded of your syntax 
 will, I suppose, vary according to the 
 " tone " of your journal or the liberality of 
 your wage. For my own part, when re- 
 flecting that I too possess, in common with 
 the rest of my race, opinions about the lit- 
 erary performances of my contemporaries, 
 I cannot but feel that I would sell almost 
 anything else in the world rather than be- 
 come a daily^or weekly — vender of these 
 opinions. Oranges, bananas, gentlemen's 
 braces, lead-pencils — you may go through 
 a very long list of salable things (if you 
 will only leave me my good name), and I 
 feel certain that you will hit upon nothing 
 which I should not prefer to sell rather 
 than these inevitably haphazard and often 
 grossly unjust personal opinions. I have 
 not the slightest doubt that some future 
 day will see newspaper criticism as com- 
 
202 Should Critics be Gcntlcvioi ? 
 
 pletely abolished as the whipping-post, the 
 stocks, imprisonment for debt and other 
 exploded nuisances. 
 
 The first delicious sense of power in a 
 young writer is always accompanied by a 
 conviction that he can teach others how to 
 write and how not to write. He may him- 
 self have done nothing more noteworthy 
 than a few lyrics in the Waverley Magazine, 
 that publication which takes pride, I am 
 informed, in asserting that it thrives upon 
 the cacoethes of the would-be Tennysons 
 and Thackerays, and which boasts of never 
 having paid a dollar for any of the extra- 
 ordinary verses and stories thronging its 
 innumerable pages. He may only have 
 written a vapid little tale for some local 
 journal, — let us say in Brundusium, Ohio, 
 — or a peppery editorial or two in the pages 
 of a sheet eagerly subscribed for by the 
 citizens of Gomorrah, Wyoming Territory. 
 But he will feel himself a critic, just the 
 same. Give him his head, and he will 
 scamper rough shod over Dante and Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, Milton and Henry James, 
 with the same unsparing ardor of treatment. 
 He will adore, he will hate ; he will dissect, 
 he will generalize ; he will vituperate, he 
 will condone ; he will scorn, he will wor- 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 203 
 
 ship. In other words, he possesses pre- 
 judices/;-^ and con, for which he desires un- 
 restricted vent. If the editor of the New 
 York Tribune were to advertise for a critic 
 to-morrow, I have no doubt that the appli- 
 cants for such office would swiftly swell 
 into thousands throughout a single day. 
 The one thing that all literary tyros believe 
 themselves capable of doing, and of doing 
 superlatively well, is criticism upon writers 
 of recognized name. They think it, in the 
 words of the old phrase, to be 'as easy as 
 lying ;" and I regret to add that in other 
 respects they often make it not dissimilar 
 from that wide-spread weakness. News- 
 paper offices naturally swarm with persons 
 of just this analytic and ambitious turn. 
 The editors will tell you that many more 
 neophytes aspire to do "review work" than 
 to embark upon the mundane reportorial 
 drudgeries. It is chiefly from these very 
 self-sufficient and audacious beings that the 
 author receives his worst assaults. The 
 world appears to perceive that this is true, 
 and yet with regard to the author himself 
 it rather curiously misunderstands and mis- 
 values the whole situation. " Do not notice 
 your critics !" it cries to the indignant vic- 
 tim, about whose ears peas from ambus- 
 
204 Should Critics be Gentlemen f 
 
 caded shooters may be whizzing, and with 
 some annoyance if with no actual peril. 
 "They are quite beneath you. It is in the 
 worst possible taste for you to show the 
 least consciousness on your part that they 
 exist at all." But meanwhile the injured 
 author, recipient as he so often is of abso- 
 lute insult, finds himself called upon to ob- 
 serve that the world gives his critics a fair 
 share of respectful attention. My own ex- 
 periences of this self-contradictory move- 
 ment have been rather amusing. I have 
 on certain occasions inly smiled as I heard 
 comments delivered to me upon my own 
 works which echoed with a servility that 
 was perhaps unconscious more th;m a single 
 statement extant in yesterday's newspaper. 
 Whether, indeed, the general reading pub- 
 lic does concern itself with these observa- 
 tions is, after all, questionable ; but it is 
 true that there are two classes who do 
 peruse them and often study them carefully 
 as well — an authors friends and his ene- 
 mies. This is a constituency which never 
 fails the most spiteful reviewer, and it is 
 one upon which he counts in the main- 
 tenance of his wholly useless position. 
 
 I insist that it is in every case a useless 
 position, even when it is charitably rather 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen f 205 
 
 than maliciously maintained. Newspaper 
 critics are as little wanted as newspaper 
 advertisements are greatly wanted — and 
 paid for on that account. Publishers send 
 books to the daily or weekly press with but 
 one motive — that they shall be copiously 
 praised. Some three or four volumes of a 
 work are for this reason given away when- 
 ever publication occurs. The distribution 
 is made for commercial reasons alone, and 
 the publishers, through slender sales, are 
 often losers because of it. Upon them the 
 loss alone falls ; they are so many copies 
 "out." They read adverse notices — too fre- 
 quently tissues of reckless falsehood when 
 not the product of minds either jaded from 
 underpaid overwork or by nature meagrely 
 equipped for the tasks entered upon — with 
 a bitterness quite as acute as the author's. 
 Hostility that touches a man's pocket irri- 
 tates him quite as much as that which 
 touches his self-esteem. Publishers are to- 
 day groaning at the churlish paragraphic 
 treatment which their gratuitous copies 
 receive from newspapers to which they are 
 sent. And yet these gentlemen still con- 
 tinue to send. They recognize the absurdity, 
 the foolhardiness, of the whole system, but, 
 like many another abuse, it obtains because 
 
2o6 Should Critics be Gentlemen f 
 
 it has become time-honored, and they still 
 go on practically sanctioning it. A few 
 months ago I received from a publisher of 
 excellent standing and universally accepted 
 shrewdness a declaration that surprised me 
 because of its unexpected frankness. It 
 was distinctly to the effect that he himself 
 would be glad enough to do away with the 
 whole custom of offering books for journal- 
 istic attention and dis'^ussion, provided 
 three or four houses of similar repute to 
 his own would agree upon a similar course. 
 But there lay the fatal impediment. His 
 confreres were always hoping that a book 
 issued by them would have the luck to 
 secure wide approval from the critics, be 
 written about in one homogeneous strain 
 of praise from Vermont to Utah, and hence 
 secure a '■ boom" that would swell financial 
 receipts afterward. But such a golden 
 trouvaille of good fortune is very rarely hit 
 upon. It is nearly always the same order 
 of things with the despots of the many 
 petty provinces. They may be clad with a 
 little brief authority, but they propose to 
 get all the wear procurable out of this 
 flimsy and transient vestment. They are 
 determined to strut about in it, to drape its 
 foldsj as might be said, with a becoming 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 207 
 
 personal dignity. Tompkins would not 
 write of the last novel or poem or biogra- 
 pliy as Smith has done for even an extra 
 dollar a week added to his pathetic salary ; 
 and there are nine chances out of ten that 
 B.-own will feel himself equally thrilled by 
 his own individualism and mental import- 
 ance when examining the decisions of 
 Tompkins or Smith. No ; the commercial 
 value of the whole arbitrary and whimsical 
 process is almost always nil to the aggrieved 
 publisher. He finds that as a rule his 
 " selling" books are those which the critics 
 treat even more shabbily than usual, or 
 concerning which they disagree with an 
 unwonted ardor. He feels in his heart that 
 the newspaper is to be trusted simply as a 
 medium of information between himself 
 and his public, declaring that certain works 
 have been issued by him, and can be bought 
 just as he has bought the means of so 
 asserting. He has a full perception of the 
 flippancy, the acrimony and the incom- 
 petence by which his donations are inces- 
 santly rewarded. And he still makes them, 
 notwithstanding. Some day there will be 
 a quiet and effectual revolt against this 
 flagrant injustice. Some day the wrong 
 will right itself, and instead of receiving 
 
2o8 Should Critics be Gentkinen ? 
 
 bundles of new books by the morning mail 
 or express, that sapient institution, our 
 modern newspaper, will find the avowal of 
 its literary loves and hates alike unsolicited. 
 Such a prophecy may sound millennial ; so 
 does that of an international copyright 
 law, whose absence makes us properly the 
 jeer of almost every other civilized nation, 
 and turns all our authors into men without 
 countries. But one day we shall have in- 
 ternational copyright, nevertheless, just as 
 one day we shall carelessly and almost un- 
 consciously dispense with all such minor 
 tyrannies as newspaper critics. 
 
 As an example of extreme sincerity and 
 honesty among members of this guild, I 
 should like to chronicle a particular in- 
 cident which befell myself. One evening, 
 about eight years ago, just before the ap- 
 pearance of my first book of poems, " Fan- 
 tasy and Passion," I went to a reception 
 given at the Lotos Club, in New York. 
 Among the assembled guests was a certain 
 person whom some optimists have seriously 
 stated to be a poet. He had a position, 
 then, upon some evening paper as its liter- 
 ary critic ; I am not quite sure -whether or 
 no it was the journal which he at present 
 represents, though I think not. He had 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 209 
 
 been writing with belligerence and not a 
 little clear malignity about certain poems 
 of mine in the Atlantic Monthly and else- 
 where, and when I received from a mutual 
 acquaintance his request to cross the rooms 
 and speak with him, I felt considerable 
 surprise. After very little hesitation, how- 
 ever, I refused point-blank ; and yet I sent 
 no uncivil message, since the whole affair 
 was one of quite too much indifference to 
 me for that. As I subsequently learned, 
 however, he became excessively angry on 
 hearing of my unwillingness, and indeed 
 lost all control of his temper. " I will kill 
 that man !" he exclaimed to my peaceful 
 and astonished emissary, finishing his sen- 
 tence with a robust oath, and beginning 
 
 his next sentence with another. " By , 
 
 I've killed bigger men than he is, and I'll 
 kill him!" This murderous threat bore no 
 allusion to my own life, but rather to that 
 of my first book of poems, " Fantasy and 
 Passion." On the appearance of that book, 
 the gentleman certainly behaved like a 
 critic with a private graveyard for the 
 corpses of those reputations which he had 
 already wrathfully slain. Whether he suc- 
 ceeded in burying my own there or not I 
 leave his most amiable conscience to decide. 
 
2IO Should Critics be Gentlemen? 
 
 I seem to have somehow risen from my 
 ashes, if this is true ; hut it may be only 
 one of those delusions born of an author's 
 inextinguishable egotism, even after he him- 
 self has been given a permanent quietus. 
 
 But I deny that the least egotism has 
 impelled me to record this dramatic little 
 episode. I have merely wished to show 
 what exquisite fidelity to principles, what 
 honorable discharge of responsibility, may 
 exist among these critics of newspapers, 
 from whom we are entitled surely to ex- 
 pect an unbiassed and disinterested ex- 
 pression of their likes and dislikes, if noth- 
 ing more final and valuable. There is no 
 part of my narration at all doubtful as to 
 fact. The gentleman who was a witness of 
 this critic's fine rageful outburst and an 
 auditor of his anathema, made no mistake 
 in what he saw and heard. Now, let us 
 consider, from an article signed with his 
 own nime in a recent issue of his journal, 
 just what philosophic and flawless theories 
 of criticism this reviewer, who vowed he 
 would kill me and who has killed bigger men 
 than I am, fosters enough diverting effront- 
 ery to print. "They," writes our Thalaba, 
 alluding to certain other reviewers whom 
 his own rancorous postulates have offended, 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 211 
 
 "might keep their temper, as I do mine, 
 and they need not attribute personal motives to 
 me, for I have none. No man who is worthy 
 of the name of a critic ever writes from a per- 
 sonal motive. His business is not to deal 
 with the author, the artist, the actor, but 
 with his work." Yes, my lusty arch-foe, 
 you are for once wholly right. And you 
 might have added, " His business is also 
 not to growl profane and ridiculous menaces 
 against an author whose book he has not 
 yet even seen, and then to indulge in slan- 
 derous comments regarding that author, 
 whenever occasion serves, during a period 
 of eight succeeding years." I can scarcely 
 explain why memory wanders just here to 
 that tragic incident in " Pendennis" where 
 the "Spring Annual" containing poor Pen's 
 verses (and very lovely verses they were, 
 as we all recall in thinking of " The Church 
 Porch") fell into the hands of Mr. Bludyer. 
 "Mr. Bludyer," runs the passage, "who 
 was a man of very considerable talent, . . . 
 had a certain notoriety in his profession, 
 and reputation for savage humor. He 
 smashed and trampled dov/n the poor 
 spring-flowers with no more mercy than a 
 bull vrould have on a parterre ; and, hav- 
 ing cut up the volume to his heart's con- 
 
3 1 2 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 tent, went and sold it at a book-stall, and 
 purchased a pint of brandy with the pro- 
 ceeds of the volume." 
 
 I am well aware that it is nowadays the 
 fashion for authors not to "answer" their 
 critics. If Byron should write his " Eng- 
 lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers" at the 
 present time, its pungent satire would be 
 denounced as in execrable taste, and all 
 his friends would pull long faces when 
 they met him, in sorrow at his exceeding 
 temerity. The newspapers are now sup- 
 posed to be omnipotent in crushing a man, 
 and to " fight" them, as the phrase goes, is 
 looked upon as courting sure destruction. 
 But while the law mercifully draws a line 
 at positive libel, I cannot see just why the 
 publicity which they are capable of causing 
 should deter an honest man or an honest 
 woman from resenting outrage. If you 
 are reviled because you have dared to write 
 a book, I fail to understand why you 
 should shrink from a little more abuse for 
 denying false charges against it. You say 
 to me, my friend, that I should hold all 
 critics in contempt. So I will, when the 
 publishers refrain from holding them in 
 respect. So I will, when I cease to find 
 their praise used in advertisements of my 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 213 
 
 works, like the certificate of a schoolboy's 
 good conduct. So I will, when I know 
 them receiving disregard, and not propitia- 
 tion. So I will, when society says to me, 
 "It is a very serious and great art, this art 
 of criticism, and it is neither the ruffianly 
 swinging of a bludgeon nor the insecure 
 handling of a scalpel." 
 
 It seems to me that if a true critic should 
 arise in the world he would be as worthy 
 of homage and reverence as the noblest 
 philosopher or poet who ever lived. He 
 would be as dispassionate as the law of 
 gravitation and as charitable as the all- 
 dispensing sun. But, alas ! when and 
 where have we had a true critic ? Emer- 
 son ? He is as divine in his misjudgments 
 as he is trustworthy in his splendid intui- 
 tions. Carlyle ? He was a.poseur, a shrieker, 
 who scolded ostentatiously and made peo- 
 ple remark his tempest because it was en- 
 closed in so fantastic a teapot. Besides, 
 these men were not literary critics in any 
 true sense. But Taine, the remarkable and 
 brilliant Taine, is a literary critic ; and yet 
 who can forgive him for being so much of a 
 Frenchman as to put De Musset above Ten- 
 nyson ? There is no criticism at all except 
 that which founds itself upon inflexible, 
 
214 Shoiild Critics be Gentlemen? 
 
 logical science. If beauty, eloquence, poet- 
 ry, rhythm, harmony, style, taste, insight 
 inlo human character, sympathy with the 
 phases and subtleties of ntiture, are not 
 susceptible of scientific definition and clas- 
 sification, they are not truth — for all truth 
 is so susceptible, sooner or later. It will 
 not do for A to tell me that Poe's "An- 
 nabel Lee" has an "indefinable melody," 
 an "unfathomable tenderness." B, who 
 does not see with the eyes of A at all, may 
 think "Annabel Lee" a mere sensuous and 
 senseless jingle. Both sides may rave, for 
 and against, over the merits or the short- 
 comings of these stanzas. But enthusi- 
 asm settles no more than vituperation does. 
 De gustibus non disputandum is a sword of 
 epigram that simply tries to cut the throat 
 of criticism. I do not mean that he who 
 tells me why a poem is beautiful should 
 explain to me what beauty is. He can no 
 more do that than he can tell me what 
 matter is when he states that one mass of 
 it, the earth, moves round another mass of 
 it, the sun. But he can find some living 
 law — as I almost believe the German 
 thinker, Schopenhauer, has done — v/hich 
 governs beauty in all its forms of develop- 
 ment and manifestation. All modern crit- 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 215 
 
 icism is summed up in this : " I, John 
 Smith, declare that John Brown has or has 
 not genius, has or lias not ability, is or is 
 not a poet, a philosopher, a historian, a 
 novelist." We are overrun with essays and 
 disquisitions on writers ; we are surfeited 
 with ipse dixi ; we have had enougli and 
 more than enough of a priori dogmatism. 
 I know that there are a great many people 
 who are prepared to shudder at the thought 
 of science being applied to any of their 
 aesthetic pleasures. Whenever it is a ques- 
 tion of their bodily health, of the bread they 
 eat, of the air they breathe, of the clothes 
 they wear, of the colds they catch, of the 
 deaths they are likely to die, they accept the 
 only aid and guidance which their reason 
 assures them to be the potent one. But 
 with literature they must indulge a sen- 
 timental acceptance of the inscrutable. It 
 appears to me that newspaper critics and 
 all the numberless foibles which their ran- 
 dom dicta beget are a result of just this 
 drowsy bigotry. " How," cries the quiver- 
 ing voice of sentimentality, "can you de- 
 monstrate to me the fragrance of the rose 
 or the whiteness of the lily?" My answer 
 must be, " I can do neither ultimately, but 
 I can do both relatively. If I were a news- 
 
2i6 Should Critics be Gentlemen f 
 
 paper critic, I might assert that the rose was 
 odorless and the lily blood-red. These 
 would be statements quite as unsupported 
 by proof as many which stare at us from the 
 pages of our morning journals, in their ' lit- 
 erary' columns. But I can prove inductively 
 and comparatively, if you will, that to you 
 the odor diffused by your rose has a right to 
 be called agreeable, and similarly that the 
 purity of your lily has a right to be called 
 chaste." I am prone to believe that very 
 marvellous things may be done in litera- 
 ture when this abhorred science has begun 
 to investigate it. There must be very pow- 
 erful radical reasons why we are all so 
 willing to think " Hamlet" a work of genius. 
 Thus far nearly all the writers who have 
 told us why have considered rather too 
 much who is telling it and how it is being 
 told. The paths of the essayist and the 
 analyst are widely divergent. One is full 
 of the pretty buds of rhetoric — th& flosculi 
 senteniiarum — which it is hard not occasion- 
 ally to stop and pluck. The other is bloom- 
 less, and even granitic, with no temptations 
 for the rhapsodist over floriculture, and a 
 very stern method in the recurrence of its 
 mile-stones. 
 
 There is a publishing-house in New York 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 217 
 
 — that of Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls, if I may- 
 be permitted to meniion its name without 
 bringing on myself the awful accusation of 
 wishing to " puff " it— which has struck me 
 as having hit, in the turmoil and fatuity of 
 newspaper criticism, upon a mode of win- 
 ning public attention at once legitimate 
 and salutary. This house has conceived 
 the plan of sending to authors of estab- 
 lished fame copies of the new books which 
 it has issued, and asking from them a few 
 lines, to be printed as advertisement if 
 thought advisable. Surely this attitude, if 
 persistently perserved, is one which in time 
 could be made stoutly to prevail over all 
 the haphazard treatises of the ordinary re- 
 viewers. If the author under considera- 
 tion, whoever he may be, could look into 
 the columns of a newspaper and find that 
 Tennyson, Mr, Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lecky, 
 Mr. Tyndall or Mr. Froude had not only 
 praised his work, but allowed such praise 
 to be openly published as a help to him 
 against the puerilities and jealousies of the 
 mere empirical bunglers, how thankful he 
 might have good reason to feel ! And 
 even if lesser writers could be brought to 
 lend each other their warm, sweet aid, 
 whenever they could truthfully and sin- 
 
2 1 8 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 cerely do so, what a gentle but telling fight 
 would be waged against those wrangling 
 " professionals'' who now swarm about a 
 book like minnows round a freshly-dropped 
 bait ! True enough, there would be no 
 real criticism in all this. It would be a 
 compromise, not a settlement ; an improve- 
 ment, not a remedy. Authors are not crit- 
 ics, because all individual talent (or genius, 
 which is precisely the same as talent in 
 kind, though not in degree) presupposes 
 limitation. But authors are in most cases 
 vastly better critics than the so-termed 
 critics themselves. I know with what de- 
 rision the latter might feel inclined to hail 
 my statement. It would be as extraor- 
 dinary, if they did not so hail it, as the 
 popularization of agnosticism among the 
 clergy. And yet if you, reader, had written 
 a poem, whom would you choose to have 
 for its eulogist ? The Dryasdust who glares 
 at it with a preconceived hatred because 
 the Muses are nine and so are the children 
 whom he has to support by hack-work on 
 the Saturday Scorpion ? Or would }'our pref- 
 erence be just one brief sentence from the 
 wise and tender lips of such a man as the 
 late Mr. Longfellow ? Whose approval 
 would please you more ? Would not the 
 
Should Cj-iiics be Gentlemen ? 2 19 
 
 first, indeed, turn to utter tameness beside 
 the last ? Surely yes, I think, although 
 few poets have ever been more infamously 
 assailed in their time than Longfellow was. 
 I remember that once while I was a guest 
 in his lovely home our conversation drifted 
 upon critics. His mild, lucid eye almost 
 flashed as he said to me, "Whenever I have 
 been attacked by one of those fellows I 
 always feel as if I had been blackguarded 
 in the street !" This may prove interest- 
 ing to a few of " those fellows" who still 
 live ; but, whether it does or not, I repeat 
 Longfellow's exact words. A little later, 
 during that same visit, he said to me, 
 " Never notice your critics, under any cir- 
 cumstances." And I have always remem- 
 bered the little gesture of disdain that went 
 with these words ; for Longfellow was by 
 no means the milk-and-water personage 
 v/hom some of his biographers have painted 
 him, but a man of the world, trained in the 
 choicest niceties and elegances, and with a 
 savoir-faire and dignity of demeanor that 
 I have seldom seen equalled. Even if he 
 had not been the true and noble poet he 
 was, he could never have become a critic ; 
 his manners were far too good for that. 
 In allusion to Poe's pitiable dirt-throwing. 
 
220 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 he spoke with the gentlest reserve ; and yet 
 he told me, shaking his head for a moment 
 with evident melancholy, that Poe was in 
 his debt for a considerable sum of money 
 at the period this scurrilous onslaught had 
 been made. Well, time has been the 
 avenger, and Poe's meanness has borne no 
 fruit. The fame of Longfellow will stay 
 luminous for generations to be, while that 
 of Poe, in the poetical sense, is kept fever- 
 ishly alive by fanatical admirers whom the 
 meretricious tawdriness of his verse (apart 
 from the really astonishing quality of his 
 prose) fails to convince that he was by no 
 means a poet. I have always been able to 
 understand just why Poe was so ferocious, 
 narrow and ungentlemanly a "critic" of 
 other men's writing since I heard the words 
 of a man who had once seen and talked 
 with him. The man was a printer, the 
 head of a reputable printing establishment, 
 and what he communicated to me regard- 
 ing his single experience of Poe I then had 
 every reason to believe, and still believe 
 implicitly. "I once saw Edgar Poe." de- 
 clared my informant, "and shall never 
 forget the meeting. He called upon me 
 and made to me a proposition regarding a 
 newspaper which he wished to establish. 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen? 221 
 
 His proposition was thoroughly immoral, 
 involving a distinct scheme of fraud, and 
 his condition when he made it was one of 
 the most revolting drunkenness." If Poe 
 had ever succeeded in starting that news- 
 paper, we can easily imagine, from the in- 
 solent personalities which some of his mis- 
 cellanies now contain, how detestable would 
 have been its "critical " posture. What he 
 wrote in it regarding his contemporaries 
 would probably have been as foolish as his 
 poetr}', and a great deal more poisonous. 
 As a weaver of wondrous romances his ex- 
 ceptional intellect deserves all honor; but 
 when he attitudinizes as a newspaper critic 
 he almost teaches us to forget " The Fall of 
 the House of Usher" and "The Cask of 
 Amontillado," while we remember vividly 
 enough the strut and nonsense of "Ulalume" 
 and the verbose, theatrical prolixity of 
 "The Raven. " Scientific criticism can make 
 plain enough just why such poems as these 
 are worthless, and a like test will serve, I 
 am very certain, to demolish as equally 
 trivial the volleys poured upon Longfellow 
 and others. 
 
 If all the misery, the despondency, the 
 feeling of brutal wrong and the despairing 
 
222 Should Critics be Gentlancn? 
 
 apathy which has resulted from newspaper 
 criticism could be massed together in one 
 dolorous chapter, such accumulation would 
 form a tragedy horrible past thought. No 
 writer has ever been young and striven 
 who has not passed through stages of 
 needless pain at comments which are some- 
 times bruited abroad concerning his work 
 by people who might not wish, in the or- 
 dinary following of their lives, to injure a 
 fly. Gifford may not have really killed 
 Keats, after all : I hope there never has 
 been a Gifford in the world strong enough 
 to kill, or a Keats weak enough to let him 
 self be killed. But if the free lances of the 
 press really could see the red and vital 
 blood which their calumnious thrusts will 
 sometimes draw from young and sensitive 
 breasts, I am confident that they would 
 blush with shame as red as the blood itself. 
 I have thought a great deal on the subject, 
 and I am wholly unable to understand why 
 a young man who publishes a trashy novel, 
 or a trashy poem, or a trashy anything else, 
 should have it fulminated against in the 
 newspapers. It may be as bad as human 
 intelligence can conceive of, and it may 
 write its author down an ass fifty times 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 223 
 
 over. But it is nearly always a work of 
 perfectly unconscious absurdity. I have 
 always suspected that the " Sweet Singer 
 of Michigan" was a clever man or woman 
 wfho played a deliberate part in those ap- 
 parently well-intentioned stanzas of his or 
 hers. But there are many singers who be- 
 lieve themselves to be sweet and are not, 
 and who have got into print, and yet who 
 possess nerve-centres, capacities for trem- 
 bling under fierce rebuff, organizations fit 
 to thrill with quite as much emotion as 
 their verses are powerless to express. Why 
 rail against these harmless victims of an 
 illusive will-o'-the-wisp? Why call them 
 names, and stamp upon them, and question 
 Jove himself as to the object of their crea- 
 tion ? No service to literature is done by 
 giving them sleepless nights and days of 
 torment. Their feeble books are perfectly 
 sure of dying, without denunciation being 
 hurled at them the moment they are born. 
 Nobody will read them, in any case. Pray 
 do not flatter yourself, fiery-eyed critic, 
 with your furious foot still upon one of 
 their gilt-edged offspring, that you have 
 performed the slightest public benefit by 
 your frenzy of condemnation. You have 
 
224 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 simply succeeded in making a fellow-crea- 
 ture's heart suffer — nothing more. Your 
 rodomontade was not at all wanted ; so- 
 ciety could have done quite as well without 
 it. The world at large has the same re- 
 luctance to buy the book of a new author 
 that you or I may have to strike an 
 acquaintance with some plausible person 
 who accosts us on a steamboat or a railway- 
 car. And with the author of fixed position 
 it is very much the same. He has won his 
 spurs, and you critics can neither burnish 
 them brighter nor cast upon them the least 
 film of tarnish. There is more potency in 
 a word or two, favorable or unfavorable, 
 
 about my last book, delivered by X to 
 
 Z over their friendly dinner, than in all 
 
 the glory of your paneg3'ric or all the dark- 
 ness of your diatribe. Leave the authors 
 alone, and their destinies are just as certain 
 as though you did not seek to manipulate 
 them. A good book was never yet made 
 unpopular because you contemned it, nor 
 a poor one salable because you shouted in 
 its behalf. The community can find out 
 what they want to read without your mul- 
 tiplex and bewildering counsel. There is 
 one thing that you can do, and I am im- 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen? 225 
 
 pressed with an idea that you do it most 
 pertinaciously and relentlessly : you can 
 inflict torture upon the callow authors and 
 sharp annoyance upon the veteran ones. 
 Don't believe any author, though his hair 
 be as white as eighty years can turn it, 
 when he tells you that he doesn't care for 
 your stabs and pin-pricks. Of course he 
 cares. I will warrant you he is a pretty 
 tepid and spineless kind of an author if he 
 does not. Would not you care, messieurs, 
 if you were trying to ford a muddy street, 
 and a troop of vicious roysterers passed 
 you in another direction, splashing the mud 
 farther than your boots — as far even as 
 your eyes ? Mud is mud, you know, gen- 
 tlemen, no matter who throws it at one. 
 It dries easily, and Jane the housemaid or 
 John the valet can quite nicely dust it 
 from one's trousars or waistcoat the next 
 morning. But you have a disagreeable 
 after-thought, nevertheless, of how easy it 
 would have been for those riotous persons 
 who met you yesterday not to have cast 
 it. 
 
 I should like for once to see and shake 
 hands with a newspaper critic who had no 
 conscientious belief that he was one of the 
 
226 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 
 
 guardians at the gates of his national 
 literature. It would be delightful to find 
 so welcome a product of modern intelli- 
 gence. I should naturally object to him 
 for being a newspaper critic at all, but I 
 should control that objection without diffi- 
 culty because of gratitude at his charming 
 rarity. If it were in my power to secure 
 him a clerkship in a bank, a position in the 
 custom-house, how gladly I would offer to 
 do so ! And I am certain he would accept 
 with alacrity, for he would be so anxious 
 to leave the company of his fellow-critics, 
 who all had convinced themselves that they 
 held, each one, an especial grip upon the 
 wheel that moves public appreciation this 
 way or that. Ah, let such autocrats as 
 these go to their elders, who have passed 
 years in supposably moulding the fates of 
 authors. Let them ask such warriors in a 
 trifling war if they honestly think they 
 have ever either slain or saved an author. 
 I fancy that I know what the answer will 
 be, if it is truly an honest one. And then 
 comes the irreversible question : Why harass 
 and retard and irritate energies which, 
 after all, provided they be energies of the 
 slightest real momentum, must finally 
 
Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 227 
 
 brush away such embarrassments as if they 
 were gnats ? Learn your trade, gentlemen 
 (or your art, if it be an art), before you at- 
 tempt to practise it. Science points you 
 the path, not whim or conceit or vainglory. 
 It is a straight path, but a clear one. And 
 its first foothold, if I mistake not, is hu- 
 mane courtesy. 
 
A 
 
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