COKFESSIOm 
 OF A 
 "BOOl^LOVEIi 
 
 a^UJ^ICE-FRANCIS-EGAM. 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 Z1003 .E28 
 
 Confessions of a book-lover, 
 
 oHn 
 
 3 1924 031 042 462 
 
'" 
 
 Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924031042462 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A 
 BOOK-LOVER 
 
Books by 
 Maurice Francis Egan 
 
 PRELUDES 
 
 SONGS AND SONNETS 
 
 STUDIES IN UTERATURE 
 
 THE GHOST IN HAMLET: A STUDY 
 
 IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 
 EVERYBODY'S ST. FRANCIS 
 THE IVY HEDGE 
 
 THE WILES OF SEXTON MAGINNIS 
 THE YEARS NEAR THE GERMAN 
 
 FRONTIERS 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A 
 BOOK-LOVER 
 
 BY 
 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN 
 
 GARDEN CITY 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 PAGE & COMPANY 
 1922 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLtrmifG THAT OF TRANSLATION 
 
 INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AT 
 
 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 
 
 First Edition 
 
IN MEMORY OF 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 A MAN OF ACTION 
 IN LOVE WITH BOOKS 
 
i^^ 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAFT£B 
 
 PAQE 
 
 I. My Boyhood Reading 1 
 
 Early Recollections. 
 The Bible. 
 
 Essays and Essayists. 
 
 II. Poets and Poetry 76 
 
 France — Of Maurice de Guerin. 
 
 Dante. 
 
 English and American Verse. 
 
 III. Certain Novelists 134 
 
 IV. Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs . , 156 
 
 V. Books at Random 205 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A 
 BOOK- LOVER 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 My Boyhood Reading 
 
 Early Recollections 
 
 To GET the best out of books, I am convinced 
 that you must begin to love these perennial friends 
 very early in life. It is the only way to know all 
 their "curves," all those little shadows of ex- 
 pression and small lights. There is a glamour 
 which you never see if you begin to read with a 
 serious intention late in life, when questions of 
 technique and grammar and mere words begin to 
 seem too important. 
 
 Then you have become too critical to feel through 
 all Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes and 
 woods, or the wUd fervour of romance beneath dear 
 Sir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unre- 
 claimable flavour of books. A friend you may 
 
2 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 irretrievably lose when you lose a friend — ^if you 
 are so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend — ^for 
 even the memories of him are embittered; but no 
 great author can ever have done anything that 
 will make the book you love less precious to you. 
 The new school of pedagogical thought disap- 
 proves, I know, of miscellaneous reading, and no 
 modern moralist will agree with Madame de 
 Sevigne that "bad books are better than no books 
 at aU"; but Madame de Sevigne may have meant 
 books written in a bad style, or feeble books, and 
 not books bad in the moral sense. However, I 
 must confess that when I was young, I read several 
 books which I was told afterward were very bad 
 indeed. But I did not find this out until somebody 
 told me! The youthful mind must possess some- 
 thing of the quality attributed to a duck's back! 
 I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau" 
 was snatched suddenly away from me by a careful 
 mother just as I had begun to think that Jean 
 Jacques was a very interesting man and almost as 
 queer as some of the people I knew. I believe 
 that if I had been allowed to finish the book, it 
 would have become by some mental chemical pro- 
 cess a very edifying criticism of life. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 3 
 
 "Tom Jones" I found in an attic and I was al- 
 lowed to read it by a pious aunt, whom I was visit- 
 ing, because she mixed it up with "Tom Brown 
 of Rugby"; but I found it even more tiresome than 
 "Eric, or Little by Little," for which I dropped 
 it. I remember, too, that I was rather shocked 
 by some things written in the Old Testament; and 
 I retorted to my aunt's pronouncement that she 
 considered "the 'Arabian Nights' a dangerous 
 book," by saying that the Old Testament was the 
 worst book I had ever read; but I supposed "people 
 had put something into it when God wasn't look- 
 ing." She sent me home. 
 
 At home, I was permitted to read only the New 
 Testament. On winter Sunday afternoons, when 
 there was nothing else to do, I became sincerely 
 attached to the Acts of the Apostles . And I came to 
 the conclusion that nobody could tell a short story 
 as well as Our Lord Himself. The Centurion was 
 one of my favourite characters. He seemed to be 
 such a good soldier; and his plea, "Lord, I am not 
 worthy," flashes across my mental vision every 
 day of my life. 
 
 In the Catholic churches, a part of the Gospel 
 is read every Sunday, and carefully interpreted. 
 
4 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 This always interested me because I knew in ad- 
 vance what the priest was going to read. Most 
 of the children of my acquaintance were taught 
 their Scriptures through the International Sunday- 
 school lessons, and seemed to me to be submerged 
 in the geography of Palestine and other tiresome 
 details. For me, reading as I did, the whole of 
 the New Testament was radiant with interest, 
 a frankly human interest. There were many pas- 
 sages that I did not pretend to understand, some- 
 times because the English was obscure or archaic, 
 and sometimes because my mind was not equal to 
 it or my knowledge too small. Whatever may be 
 the opinion of other people, mine is that the read- 
 ing of the New Testament in the simplicity of 
 childhood, with the flower of intuition not yet 
 blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental 
 experiences. In my own case, it gave a glow to 
 life; it caused me to distinguish between truth and 
 fairy tales, between fact and fiction — and this is 
 often very difiicult for an imaginative child. 
 
 This kind of reading implies leisure and the 
 absence of distraction. Unhappily, much leisure 
 does not seem to be left for the modern child. 
 The unhappy creature is even told that there 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 5 
 
 will be "something in Heaven for children to do!" 
 As to distractions, the modern child is surrounded 
 by them; and it appears to be one of the main in- 
 tentions of the present system of instruction not 
 to leave to a child any moments of leisure for the 
 indulgence of the imagination. But I am not of- 
 fering the example of my childhood for imitation by 
 the modern parents. 
 
 Nevertheless, it had great consolations. There 
 were no "movies" in those days, and the theatre 
 was only occasionally permitted; but on long 
 afternoons, after you had learned to read, you 
 might lose yourseK in "The Scottish Chiefs" to 
 your heart's content. It seems to me that the 
 beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that 
 you had time to visualize everything, and you felt 
 the dramatic moments so keenly, that a sense of 
 unreality never obtruded itself at the wrong time. 
 It was not necessary for you to be told that Helen 
 Mar was beautiful. It was only necessary for her 
 to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them, 
 "My Wallace!" to know that she was the loveliest 
 person in all Scotland. But " The Scottish Chiefs " 
 required the leisure of long holiday afternoons, 
 especially as the copy I read had been so misused 
 
6 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 that I had to spend precious half hours in putting 
 the pages together. It was worth the trouble, 
 however. 
 
 Before I could read, I was compelled on rainy 
 days to sit at my mother's knee and listen to what 
 she read. I am happy to say that she never read 
 children's books. Nothing was ever adapted to 
 Diy youthful misunderstanding. She read aloud 
 what she liked to read, and she never considered 
 whether I liked it or not. It was a method of dis- 
 cipline. At first, I looked drearily out at the soggy 
 city street, in which rivulets of melted snow made 
 any exercise, suitable to my age, impossible. 
 There is nothing so hopeless for a child as an after- 
 noon in a city when the heavy snows begin to 
 melt. My mother, however, was altogether re- 
 gardless of what happened outside of the house. 
 A.t two o'clock precisely — ^after the maimer of the 
 King in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise" — 
 she waved her wand. After that, all that I was 
 2xpected to do was to make no noise. 
 
 In this way I became acquainted with "The 
 Virginians," then running in Harper's Magazine, 
 with "Adam Bede" and "As You Like It" and 
 "Richard III. " and "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 7 
 
 Nickleby" and "Valentine Vox"— why "Valen- 
 tine Vox?" — ^and other volumes when I should 
 have been listening to "Alice in Wonderland." 
 But when I came, in turn, to "Alice in Wonder- 
 land," I found Alice's rather dull in comparison 
 with the adventures of the Warrington brothers. 
 And Thackeray's picture of Gumbo carrying in the 
 soup tureen! To have listened to Rebecca's de- 
 scription of the great fight in "Ivanhoe," to have 
 lived through the tournament of Ashby de la 
 Zouche, was a poor preparation for the vagaries of 
 the queer creatures that surrounded the inimi- 
 table Alice. 
 
 There appeared to be no children's books in the 
 library to which we had access. It never seemed 
 to me that "Robinson Crusoe" or "Gulliver's 
 Travels" or "Swiss Family Robinson" were chil- 
 dren's books; they were not so treated by my 
 mother, and I remember, as a small boy, going up 
 to Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, with divine 
 eagerness, to buy the latest number of a Dickens 
 serial. I think the name of the shop — the shop of 
 Paradise — ^which sold these books was called Ash- 
 burnham's. It may be asked how the episode in 
 "Adam Bede" of Hetty and that of "little Em'ly" 
 
8 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 in Dickens struck the child mind. As I remem- 
 ber, the child mind was awed and impressed, by 
 a sense of horror, probably occasioned as much by 
 the force of the style, by the suggestions of an un- 
 known terror, as by any facts which a child could 
 grasp. 
 
 It was a curious thing that my mother, who had 
 remarkably good taste in literature, admired Mrs. 
 Henry Wood extravagantly. She also admired 
 Queen Victoria. She never read "East Lynne" 
 aloud, because, I gathered, she considered it 
 "improper"; and Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's 
 Secret" came under the same ban, though I heard 
 it talked of frequently. It was difficult to dis- 
 cover where my mother drew the line between what 
 was "proper" and what was "not proper." Shake- 
 speare she seemed to regard as eminently proper, 
 and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when 
 she came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It 
 seems strange now that I never rated Mrs. Henry 
 Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or 
 Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some 
 imperceptible difference which my mother never 
 explained, but which I, instinctively, understood; 
 and when Anthony TroUope's "Orley Farm" was 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 9 
 
 read, I placed him above Mrs. Henry Wood, but 
 not on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray. 
 
 Harper's Magazine, in those days, contained 
 great treasure! There, for instance, were the de- 
 lightful articles by Porte Crayon — General Stroth- 
 ers, I think. These one listened to with pleasure; 
 but the bane of my existence was Mr. Abbott's 
 "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." It seemed to me 
 as if it would never end, and it stretched as dolor- 
 ously before me as that other fearful process 
 which appalled my waking days — ^the knowledge 
 that all my life I should be obliged to clean my 
 teeth three times a day with powdered charcoal! 
 
 After a time, I began to read for myself; but the 
 delights of desultory reading were gloomed by the 
 necessity of studying long lessons that no emanci- 
 pated child of to-day would endure. Misguided 
 people sometimes came to the school and told 
 childish stories, at which we all laughed, but which 
 even the most illiterate despised. To have known 
 George Warrington, to have mingled familiarly in 
 the society of George Washington, to remember 
 the picture of Beatrix Esmond coming down the 
 stairs — ^I am not speaking of Du Maurier's traves- 
 ties of that delightful book— to have seen the old 
 
10 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 ladies in " Cranford," sucking their oranges in the 
 privacies of their rooms, made one despise foolish 
 little tales about over-industrious bees and robins 
 which seemed not even to have the ordinary com- 
 mon sense of geese ! 
 
 Suddenly, my mother became a devout Catholic. 
 The scene changed. On one unhappy Sunday 
 afternoon "Monte Cristo" was rudely snatched 
 from my entranced hands. Dumas was on the 
 list of the "improper," and to this day I have 
 never finished the episodes in which I was so 
 deeply interested. Now the wagon of the circu- 
 lating library ceased to come as in the old days. 
 The children of the neighbours offered me Sunday- 
 school books, taken from the precious store of the 
 Methodist Sunday School opposite our house. 
 They seemed to me to be stupid beyond all words. 
 There was not one really good fight in them all, 
 and after an honest villain like Brian de Bois 
 Guilbert, the bad people in these volumes were 
 very lacking in stamina. The "RoUo" books were 
 gay compared to them. I concluded that if any- 
 thing on earth could make a child hate religion, 
 it was the perusal of these unreal books. My 
 mother saw that I had Alban Butler's "Lives of 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 11 
 
 the Saints" for Sunday reading. They were 
 equally dull; and other "Lives," highly recom- 
 mended, were quite as uninspiring as the little 
 volumes from the Protestant library. They were 
 generally translated from the French, without 
 vitality and without any regard for the English 
 idiom. I recall, through the mists, sitting down 
 one Sunday afternoon, to read "The Life of 
 Saint Rose of Lima." As it concerned itself with 
 South America, it seemed to me that there might 
 be in it a good fighter or two; or, at least, some- 
 body might cut off the ear of a High Priest's ser- 
 vant as was done iu the New Testament. But no, 
 I was shocked to read in the very beginning, that 
 
 so pure was the little Saint, even in her infancy, that when 
 her uncle, who was her godfather, kissed her after her bap- 
 tism, a rosy glow, a real blush of shame, overspread her 
 countenance. 
 
 In that book I read no more that day! 
 
 But I discovered a volume I have never for- 
 gotten, which probably after "The Young Ma- 
 rooners," had the greatest influence on me for a 
 short period. This was "Fabiola," by Cardinal 
 Wiseman. There was good stuff in it; it made me 
 
12 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 feel proud to be a Christian; it was full of thrills; 
 and it taught a lot about the archaeology of Rome, 
 for it was part of that excellent story. I have al- 
 ways looked on "Fabiola" as a very great book. 
 Then at Christmas, when my father gave me 
 "The Last Days of Pompeii," I was in a new 
 world, not alien to the world of "Fabiola," but 
 in some way supplementary to it. This gift was 
 accompanied by Washington Irving's "Tales of 
 the Alhambra." Conspuez les livres des poupees! 
 What nice little story books, arranged for the 
 growing mind, could awaken such visions of the 
 past, such splendid arabesques and trailing clouds 
 of glory as this book! Read at the right time, it 
 makes the pomegranate and the glittering cres- 
 cents live forever, and creates a love for Spain and 
 a romance of old Spain which can never die. 
 
 After this, I had a cold mental douche. I was 
 given "Les Enfants des Bois," by Elie Berthet in 
 French, to translate word for word. It was a 
 horrible task, and the difficulties of the verbs and 
 the laborious research in the dictionary prevented 
 me from enjoying the adventures of these infants. 
 I cannot remember anything that happened to 
 them; but I know that the book gave me an ever- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 13 
 
 enduring distrust of the subjunctive mood in the 
 Gallic language. Somebody had left about a copy 
 of a French romance called "Les A ventures de 
 Polydore Marasquin." It was of things that 
 happened to a man in a kingdom of monkeys. It 
 went very well, with an occasional use of the 
 dictionary, until I discovered that the gentleman 
 was about to engage himself to a very attractive 
 monkeyess. I gave up the book in disgust, but 
 I have since discovered that there have been lately 
 several imitators of these adventures, which I think 
 were written by an author named Leon Gozlan. 
 
 About this time, the book auction became a 
 fashion in Philadelphia. If your people had re- 
 spect for art, they invariably subscribed to a pub- 
 lication called the Cosmopolitan Art Magazine, 
 and you received a steel engraving of Shakespeare 
 and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh very much 
 in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed 
 doublet and very well-fitting hose, and another 
 steel engraving of Washington at Lexington. If 
 yoxu- people were interested in literature, they fre- 
 quented the book auctions. My father had a great 
 respect for what he called "classical literature.^" 
 He considered Cowper's "The Task" immensely 
 
14 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 classical; it was beautifully bound, and he never 
 read it. One day he secured a lovely edition of 
 the " Complete Works of Thomas Moore. " It had 
 been a subject of much competition at the auction, 
 and was cherished accordingly. The binding was 
 tooled. It was put on the centre table and adored 
 as a work of art. Here was richness! 
 
 Tom Moore's long poems are no doubt classed 
 at present as belonging to those old and faded 
 gardens in which "The Daisy" and "The Keep- 
 sake," by Lady Blessington, once flourished; but 
 if I could only recall the pleasure I had in the read- 
 ing of "LaUa Rookh" and "The Veiled Prophet 
 of Korhasson," I think I should be very happy. 
 And the notes to "Lalla Rookh" and to Moore's 
 prose novel of "The Epicurean"! "The Epicu- 
 rean" was not much of a novel, but the notes were 
 full of amazing Egyptian mysteries, which seemed 
 quite as splendid as the machinery in the "Arabian 
 Nights." The notes to "Lalla Rookh" smelled 
 of roses, and I remember as a labour of love copying 
 out all the allusions to roses in these notes with the 
 intention of writing about them when I grew up. 
 My mother objected to the translations from An- 
 acreon; she said they were "improper"; but my 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 15 
 
 father said that he had been assured on competent 
 authority that they were "classic," and of course 
 that settled it. There was no story in them, and 
 they seemed to me to be stupid. 
 
 Just about this time, one of the book auctions 
 yielded up a copy of the "Complete Works of 
 Miss Mitford." You perhaps can imagine how a 
 city boy, who was allowed to spend two weeks each 
 year at the most on the arid New Jersey seacoast, 
 fell upon "Our Village." It became an incentive 
 for long walks, in the hope of finding some country 
 lanes and something resembling the English prim- 
 roses. I read and reread "Our Village" until I 
 could close my eyes at any time and see the little 
 world in which Miss Mitford lived. I tried to 
 read her tragedy, "The Two Foscari." A tragedy 
 had a faint interest; but, being exiled to the attic 
 for some offense against the conventionalities de- 
 manded of a Philadelphia child, with no book but 
 Miss Mitford's, I spent my time looking up all the 
 references to roses in her tragedies. These I com- 
 bined with the knowledge acquired from Tom 
 Moore, and made notes for a paper to be printed 
 in some great periodical in the future. Why 
 roses? Why Miss Mitford and roses? Why Tom 
 
16 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Moore and roses? I do not know, but, when I 
 was sixteen years of age, I printed the paper in 
 Appleton's Journal, where it may still be found. 
 My parents, who did not look on my literary 
 attempts, at the expense of mathematics, with 
 favour, suggested that I was a plagiarist, but as 
 I had no time to look up the meaning of the word 
 in the dictionary, I let it go. It simply struck me 
 as one of those evidences of misunderstanding which 
 every honest artist must be content to accept. 
 
 My mother, evidently fearing the influence of 
 "classical" literature, gave me one day "The 
 Parent's Assistant," by Miss Edgeworth. I think 
 that it was in this book that I discovered "Rosa- 
 mond; or The Purple Jar" and the story of the 
 good boy or girl who never cut the bit of string 
 that tied a package; I sedulously devoted myself 
 to the imitation of this economic child, and was 
 very highly praised for getting the best out of a 
 good book until I broke a tooth in trying to undo 
 a very tough knot. 
 
 It was a far cry from the respectable Miss 
 Edgeworth to a series of Beadle's "Dime Novels." 
 I looked on them as delectable but inferior. 
 There was a prejudice against them in well- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 17 
 
 brought -up households; but if you thoughtfully 
 provided yourself with a brown paper cover, which 
 concealed the flaring yellow of Beadle's front page, 
 you were very likely to escape criticism. I never 
 finished "Osceola, the Seminole," because my 
 aunt looked over my shoulder and read a raptu- 
 rous account of a real fight, in which somebody 
 kicked somebody else violently in the abdomen. 
 My aunt reported to my mother that the book was 
 very "indelicate" and after that Beadle's "Dime 
 Novels" were absolutely forbidden. At school, 
 we were told that any boy who read Beadle's was 
 a moral leper; but as most of us concluded that 
 leper had something to do with leaper, the effect 
 was not very convincing. 
 
 Perhaps I might have been decoyed back to 
 Beadle's, for all the youngsters knew that there 
 was nothing really wrong in them, but I hap- 
 pened to remember the scene in Sir Walter Scott's 
 "Abbot," where Edward Glendenning wades into 
 the sea to prevent Mary Stuart from leaving 
 Scotland. I hied me to "The Monastery" and 
 devoured everything of Sir Walter's except "Saint 
 Ronan's Well." That never seemed worthy of the 
 great Sir Walter. " The Black Dwarf " and " Anne 
 
18 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 of Geierstein" were rather tough reading, and 
 "Count Robert of Paris" might have been written 
 by Lord Bacon, if Lord Bacon had been a con- 
 temporary of Sir Walter's. "Peveril of the Peak " 
 and "Ivanhoe" and "Bride of Lammermoor" 
 again and again dazzled and consoled me until I 
 discovered "Nicholas Nickleby." 
 
 "Nicholas Nickleby" took entire possession of 
 me. In the rainy winter afternoons, when nothing 
 could occur out of doors which a respectable city 
 boy was permitted to indulge in, I found that I 
 was expected to work. Boys worked hard at their 
 lessons in those days. There was a kitchen 
 downstairs with a Dutch oven not used in the 
 winter. There it was easy to build a small fire 
 and to toast bread and to read "Nicholas Nick- 
 leby" after one had rushed through the required 
 tasks, which generally included ten pages of the 
 "Historia Sacra" in Latin. If you never read 
 "Nicholas Nickleby" when you were young, you 
 cannot possibly know the flavour of Dickens. 
 You can't laugh now as you laughed then. Oh, 
 the delight of Mr. Crummies 's description of his 
 wife's dignified manner of standing with her head 
 on a spear! 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 19 
 
 The tragedy in "Nicholas Nickleby" never ap- 
 pealed to me. It was necessary to skip that. 
 "When the people were gentlemanly and ladylike, 
 they became great bores. But what young reader of 
 Dickens can forget the hostile attitude of Mr. Lilly- 
 vick, great-uncle of the little Miss Kenwigses, when 
 Nicholas attempted to teach them French? As 
 one grows older, even Mr. Squeers and 'Tilda 
 give one less real delight; but think of the first dis- 
 covery of them, and it is like Balboa's — or was it 
 Cortez's? — discovery of the Pacific in Keats's 
 sonnet. "Nicholas Nickleby" was read over and 
 over again, with unfailing pleasure. I found 
 "Little Dorrit" rather tiresome; "Barnaby 
 Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" seemed to be 
 rather serious reading, not quite Dickensish enough 
 for my taste, yet better than anything else that 
 anybody had written. My later impressions of 
 Dickens modified these instinctive intuitions. 
 
 One day, a set of Thackeray arrived, little green 
 volumes, as I remember, and I began to read 
 "Vanity Fair." My mother seized it and read 
 it aloud again. Her confessor had told her that 
 a dislike for good novels was "Puritan" and she, 
 shocked by the implied reproach, took again to 
 
20 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 novel reading. I am afraid that I disliked Colonel 
 Dobbin and Amelia very much. Becky Sharp 
 pleased me beyond words; I don't think that the 
 morality of the case affected my point of view at 
 all. . I was delighted whenever Becky "downed" 
 an enemy. They were such a lot of stupid people 
 — ^the enemies — and I reflected during the course 
 of the story that, after all, Thackeray had said 
 that poor Becky had no mother to guide her foot- 
 steps. When the Marquis of Steyne was hit on 
 the forehead with the diamonds, I thought it 
 served him right; but I was unhappy because poor 
 Becky had lost the jewels. In finishing the book 
 with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my 
 mother said severely, "That is what always hap- 
 pens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not 
 believe that Becky Sharp was a bad person at 
 all. 
 
 For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas 
 Nickleby," to "David Copperfield." I respected 
 Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that 
 I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later 
 — ^it was on one June afternoon I think — ^when the 
 news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed to me 
 that for a while all delight in life had ended. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 21 
 
 One of those experts in psychology who are al- 
 ways seeking questions sometime ago wrote to me 
 demanding if "Plutarch's Lives" had influenced 
 me, and whether I thought they were good reading 
 for the young. Our "Plutarch" was rather ap- 
 palling to look at. It was bound in mottled card- 
 board, and the pages had red edges ; but I attacked 
 it one day, when I was about ten years of age, and 
 became enthralled. It was "actual." My mother 
 was a veteran politician, and read a daily paper, 
 with Southern tendencies called the Age; my 
 father belonged to the opposite party, and admired 
 Senator Hoar as greatly as my mother admired the 
 famous Vallandigham. Between the two, I had 
 formed a very poor opinion of American statesmen 
 in general; but the statesmen in "Plutarch" were 
 of a very different type. 
 
 Julius Caesar interested me; but Brutus filled me 
 with exaltation. I had not then read Shake- 
 speare's "Julius Csesar." It seemed to me that 
 Brutus was a model for all time. Now, understand 
 I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers 
 every night and morning, but this did not prevent 
 me from hating the big bully of the school, who 
 made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a 
 
22 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 perpetual torment. How we suffered, no adult 
 human tongue can tell — and our tongues never 
 told because it was a convention that tales should 
 not be told out of school. One of the pleasant 
 tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the 
 little boys after school in the winter and bury them 
 until they were almost suffocated in the snow which 
 was piled up in the narrow streets. It was not 
 only suffocating snow, but it was dirty snow. It 
 happened that I had been presented with a pen- 
 knife consisting of two rather leaden blades cov- 
 ered with a brilliant iridescent mother-of-pearl 
 handle. The bully wanted this knife, and I knew 
 it. Generally, I left it at home; but it occurred to 
 me on one inspired morning, after I had read 
 "Plutarch" the night before, that I would display 
 the knife open in my pocket, and when he threw 
 the full weight of his body upon me, I would kill 
 him at once, by an upward thrust of the knife. 
 
 This struck me as a good deed entirely worthy 
 of Brutus. Of course, I knew that I should be 
 hanged, but then I expected the glory of making a 
 last dying speech, and, besides, the school would 
 have a holiday. On the morning preceding the 
 great sacrifice, I gave out dark hints to the small 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 23 
 
 boys, distributed my various belongings to friends 
 who were about to be bereaved, and predicted a 
 coming holiday. I was looked on as rather "crazy," 
 but I reflected that I would soon be considered 
 heroic, and my friends gladly accepted the gifts. 
 
 The fatal afternoon came. I displayed the pen- 
 knife. The chase began. The bully and his 
 chosen friends threw themselves upon me. The 
 moment had come; I thrust the knife upward; the 
 big boy uttered a howl, and ran, stiU howling. I 
 looked for blood, but there was none visible; I 
 came to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he 
 was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening 
 at home uttering dire predictions which were in- 
 comprehensible to the members of my family, and 
 reread Brutus, in the "Lives." 
 
 The next morning I went to school with lessons 
 unstudied and awaited events. The mother of 
 the bully appeared, and entered into an excited 
 colloquy with the very placid and dignified teacher. 
 I announced to the boy next to me, "My time has 
 come." I was called up to the awful desk. "Is 
 he dead.?" I asked. "Did he bleed internally?" 
 "You little wretch," the mother of the tyrant 
 said, "you cut such fearful holes in my son's coat. 
 
24 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 that he is afraid to come to school to-day!" Then 
 I said, regretfully, "Oh, I hoped that I had killed 
 him." There was a sensation; my character was 
 blackened. I was set down as a victim of total 
 depravity; I endured it all, but I knew in my heart 
 that it was "Plutarch." This is the effect that 
 "Plutarch" had on the mind of a good Christian 
 child. 
 
 The effects of "Plutarch" on my character were 
 never discovered at home, and as I grew older and 
 learned one or two wrestling tricks, the bully let 
 me alone. Besides, my murderous intention, 
 which had leaked out, gave me such a reputation 
 that I became a dictator myself, and made terms 
 for the small boys, in the name of freedom, which 
 were sometimes rather despotic. 
 
 It was also during these days that I remember 
 carrying confusion into the family when a patron- 
 izing, intellectual lady called and said, "I hope 
 that this dear little boy is reading the RoUo 
 books? "( "No," I answered quickly and in- 
 discreetly, "I am reading 'The New Magdalen,' by 
 Wilkie Collins." I did not think much of Wilkie 
 Collins until I read "The Moonstone." It seemed 
 that "The New Magdalen" had been purchased 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 25 
 
 inadvertently by my father, in a packet of "clas- 
 sics." 
 
 My father generally arrived at home late in the 
 afternoon, when he read the evening paper. After 
 a very high tea, he stretched himself on a long 
 horsehair-covered sofa, and bade me read to him, 
 generally from the novels of George Eliot, or from 
 certain romances running through the New York 
 Ledger by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. These were gen- 
 erally stories of the times of the Irish Kings, in 
 which gallowglasses and lovely and aristocratic 
 Celtic maidens disported themselves. My mother, 
 after her conversion, disapproved of the New York 
 Ledger. In fact, there were families in Philadel- 
 phia whose heads regarded it with real horror! 
 In our house, there was a large stack of this inter- 
 esting periodical, which, with many volumes of 
 Godey's Lady's Book, were packed in the attic. 
 
 It happened that a young man, in whom my 
 father had a great interest, was threatened with 
 tuberculosis. An awful rumour was set abroad 
 that he was about to die. He sent over a mes- 
 senger asking my father for the back numbers 
 of the New York Ledger containing a long serial 
 story by Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt. As I remember. 
 
26 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 it was a story of the French Revolution, and the 
 last number that I was allowed to read ended with 
 a description of a dance in an old chateau, when 
 the Marquise, who was floating through the min- 
 uet, suddenly discovered blood on the white-kid 
 glove of her right hand! I was never permitted 
 to discover where the blood came from; I should 
 like to find out now if I could find the novel. I 
 remember that my mother was terribly shocked 
 when my father sent the numbers of the New York 
 Ledger to the apparently dying man. "It's a 
 horrible thing," my mother said, "to think of any 
 Christian person reading the New York Ledger at 
 the point of death." The young man, however, 
 did not die; and I rather think my father attributed 
 his recovery to the exhilarating effect of one of 
 his favourite stories. 
 
 There were certain other serial stories I was 
 ordered to read; they were stories of the Irish 
 Brigade in France. My mother, I remember, dis- 
 approved of them because Madame de Pompadour 
 was frequently mentioned, and she thought that 
 my father regarded the lady in question too toler- 
 antly. These romances were, I think, written by 
 a certain Myles O'Reilly who was in some way con- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 27 
 
 nected with the army. This procedure of reading 
 aloud was not always agreeable, as my father 
 frequently went to sleep in the middle of a pas- 
 sage and forgot what I had already read. The 
 consequence was that I was obliged to begin 
 the same old story over again on the following 
 evening. 
 
 It happened that my father was one of the di- 
 rectors of a local library, and in it I found Bates's 
 volume on the Amazon — I forget the exact title of 
 the book. I found myself in a new world; I lived 
 in Para; I tried to manufacture an imitation of 
 the Urari poison with a view to exterminating rats 
 in the warehouse by the use of arrows; I lived and 
 had my being in the forests of Brazil; and I pro- 
 duced, at intervals, a thrilling novel, with the 
 glowing atmosphere of the Amazon as a back- 
 ground. I preferred Mr. Bates to any novelist I 
 had ever read. He held possession of my imagi- 
 nation, until he was forced out by a Mr. Jerning- 
 ham who wrote a most entrancing book on Brit- 
 tany. Saint Malo became the only town for me; 
 I adored Henri de la Rochejaquelein; and the Stu- 
 arts, whom I had learned to love at the knees of 
 Sir Walter Scott, were displaced by the Vendeans. 
 
28 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Noticing that I was devoted to books of travel, 
 my father asked me to parse Kane's "Arctic Voy- 
 ages." I found the volumes cold and repellent. 
 They gave me a rooted prejudice against the 
 North Pole. which even the adventure of Doctor 
 Cook has never enabled me to overcome. 
 
 About this time, my mother began to feel that 
 I needed to read something more gentle, which 
 would root me more effectively in my religion. 
 She began, I think, with Cardinal Newman's 
 "Callista" in which there was a thrilling chapter 
 called "The Possession of Juba." It seemed to 
 me one of the most stirring things I had ever 
 read. Then I was presented with Mrs. Sadlier's 
 "The Blakes and the Flanagans," which struck 
 me as a very delightful satire, and with a really 
 interesting novel of New York called "Eose- 
 mary," by Dr. J. V. Huntington; and then a 
 terribly blood-curdling story of the Carbonari 
 in Italy, called "Lionello." After this I was 
 wafted into a series of novels by Julia Kavanagh; 
 "Natalie," and "Bessie," and "Seven Years," I 
 think were the principals. My father declined to 
 read them; he thought they were too sentimental, 
 but as the author had an Irish name he was in- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 29 
 
 clined to regard them with tolerance. He thought 
 I would be better employed in absorbing "Tom 
 and Jerry; or The Adventures of Corinthian Bob," 
 by Pierce Egan. My mother objected to this, and 
 substituted "Lady Violet; or the Wonder of Kings- 
 wood Chace," by the younger Pierce Egan, which 
 she considered more moral. 
 
 My father was very generous at Christmas, and 
 I bought a large volume of Froissart for two dollars 
 and a haK at an old book stand on Fifth Street, 
 near Spruce. After this, I was lost to the world 
 during the Christmas holidays. After breakfast, 
 I saturated myself with the delightful battles in 
 that precious book. 
 
 My principal duty was to look after the front 
 pavement. In the spring and summer, it was care- 
 fully washed twice a week and reddened with some 
 kind of paint, which always accompanied a box 
 of fine white sand for the scouring of the marble 
 steps; but in the winter, this respectable sidewalk 
 had to be kept free from snow and ice. 
 
 Hitherto my battle with the elements had been 
 rather a diversion. Besides, I was in competition 
 with the other small boys in the block — or in the 
 "square," as we Philadelphians called it. Now 
 
30 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 it became irksome; I neglected to dig the ice from 
 between the bricks; I skimped my cleaning of the 
 gutter; I forgot to put on my "gums." The boy 
 next door became a mirror of virtue; he was quoted 
 to me as one whose pavement was a model to all the 
 neighbours; indeed, it was rumoured that the 
 Mayor passing down our street, had stopped and 
 admired the working of his civic spirit, while the 
 result of my efforts was passed by with evident 
 contempt. I did not care. I hugged Froissart 
 to my heart. Who would condescend to wield a 
 broom and a wooden shovel, even for the reward of 
 ten cents in cash, when he could throw javelins 
 and break lances with the knights of the divine 
 Froissart? The end of my freedom came after 
 this. The terrible incident of the Mayor's con- 
 tempt, invented, I believe, by the boy next door, 
 induced my mother to believe that I was not only 
 losing my morals, but becoming too much of a 
 book-worm. For many long weeks I was de- 
 prived of any amusing book except "Robinson 
 Crusoe." After this interval, vacation came; I 
 seemed to have grown older, and books were never 
 quite the same again. 
 
 In the vacation, however, when the days were 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 31 
 
 very long and there was a great deal of leisure, I 
 found myself reduced to Grimms' "Fairy Tales" 
 and a delightful volume by Madame Perrault, 
 and I was even then very much struck by the dif- 
 ference. Of course I read Grimm from cover to 
 cover, and went back again over the pages, hoping 
 that I had neglected something. The homeliness 
 of the stories touched me; it seemed to me that 
 you found yourseK in the atmosphere of old Ger- 
 many. Madame Perrault was more delicate; her 
 fairy tales were pictures of no life that ever ex- 
 isted, and there was a great dissimilarity between 
 her "Cendrillon" and the Grimms' story of 
 "Aschenputtel." As I remember, the haughty sis- 
 ters in the story of the beautiful girl who lived 
 among the ashes each cut off one of her toes, in order 
 to make her feet seem smaller and left bloody marks 
 on the glass slipper. Madame Perrault's slipper 
 was, I think, of white fur, and there was no such 
 brutality in her fairyland. But, except Hans 
 Christian Andersen's, there are no such gripping 
 fairy tales as those of the Brethren Grimm. Dur- 
 ing this vacation, too, I discovered the "Lepra- 
 chaun," the little Irish fairy with the hammer. 
 He was not at all like the English fairies in Shake- 
 
32 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 speare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, leav- 
 ing out Ariel, I think I liked him best of all. 
 
 That summer, too, I found an old copy of "Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream" in the attic. The print 
 was exceedingly fine, but everything was there. 
 No doubt there is much to be said by the peda- 
 gogues in favour of scrupulously studying Shake- 
 speare's plays; but if you have never discovered 
 "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's 
 Dream" when you were very young, you will 
 never know the meaning of that light which never 
 was on land or sea, and with which Keats sur- 
 rounds us in the "Ode to the Nightingale." The 
 love interest did not count much. In my youth- 
 ful experience everybody either married or died, 
 in books. That was to be expected. It was the 
 atmosphere that counted. One could see the 
 troopers coming into the open space in the Forest 
 of Arden and hear their songs, making the leaves 
 of the trees quiver before they appeared. And 
 Puck! and Caliban! "When I was young I was 
 always very sorry for Caliban, and, being very 
 religious, I felt that the potent Prospero might 
 have done something for his soul. 
 
 There was a boy who lived near us called 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 33 
 
 Lawrence Stockdale — ^peace be to his ashes where- 
 ever he rests! His father and mother, who were 
 persons of cultivation, encouraged him to read, but 
 we were not of one opinion on any subject. He 
 was devoted to Dumas, the Elder. After the 
 episode of "Monte Cristo" I was led to believe 
 that Dumas was "wrong." I preferred Sir Walter 
 Scott, and loved all the Stuarts, having a positive 
 devotion for Mary, Queen of Scots. One day, 
 however, I discovered somewhere, under a pile of 
 old geometries and books about navigation, a fat, 
 red-bound copy of "Boccaccio." Stockdale said 
 that "Boccaccio" was "wronger" than Dumas, 
 and that his people had warned him against the 
 stories of this Italian. As we lived near an 
 Italian colony, and he disliked Italians, while I 
 loved them, I attributed this to mere prejudice. 
 
 The "Boccaccio" was, as I have said, fat and 
 large. For a boy who likes to read, a fat book is 
 very tempting, and just as I had seated myself 
 one afternoon on the front doorstep, to read the 
 story of the Falcon, and having finished it with 
 great pleasure, dipped into another tale not so 
 edifying, my mother appeared. She turned pale 
 with horror, and seized the book at once. My 
 
34 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 father was informed of what had occurred. He 
 was little alarmed, I think. My mother said: 
 "We shall have to change the whole course of 
 this boy's reading." "We shall have to change 
 the boy first," my father said, with a sigh. But 
 this was not the end. At the proper time I was 
 led to the Pastor, who was my mother's con- 
 fessor. The book was presented to him for de- 
 struction. 
 
 "It's a bad book," the Monsignore said. "I 
 hope you didn't talk about any of these stories to 
 the other boys in school?" 
 
 "Oh, no," I said; "if I did, they would say 
 much worse things, and I would probably have to 
 tell them in confession. Besides," I added, "all 
 the people in the Boccaccio book were good 
 Catholics, I suppose, as they were Italians, and I 
 think, after all, when they caught the plague, they 
 died good deaths." 
 
 The Pastor looked puzzled, took the book, and 
 gave me his blessing and dismissed me. And my 
 mother seemed to think that I was suflBciently ex- 
 orcised. 
 
 After this the books I read were more carefully 
 considered. I was given the "Tales of Canon 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 35 
 
 Schmidt" — dear little stories of German children 
 in the Black Forest, with strange little wood-cuts, 
 which went very well with another volume I found 
 at this time called "Jack Halifax," not "John 
 Halifax, Gentleman," which my mother had al- 
 ready read to me — ^but a curious little tome long 
 out of print. And then there sailed upon my 
 vision a long procession of the works of the Flemish 
 novelist, Hendrik Conscience, whose "Lion of 
 Flanders" opened a new world of romance, and 
 there were "Wooden Clara." and other pieces 
 which made one feel as if one lived in Flanders. 
 Just about this time I read in Littell's Living 
 Age a novel called " The Amber Witch," and some of 
 Fritz Renter's Low German stories; but these were 
 all effaced by "The Quaker Soldier." This may 
 not have been much of a novel. I did not put it 
 to the touch of comparison with "The Virginians" 
 or "Esmond." They were what my father called 
 "classics" — ^things superior and apart; but "The 
 Quaker Soldier" was quite good enough for me. 
 It opened a new view of American Revolutionary 
 history, and then it was redolent of the country of 
 Pennsylvania. I recall now the incident of the 
 Pennsylvania Dutch housewife's using her thumb 
 
36 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 to spread the butter on the bread for the hungry 
 soldier. This is all that I can recall of those de- 
 lectable pages. But, later, neither Henry Peter- 
 son's "Pemberton" nor Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh 
 Wynne" seemed to have the glory and the fas- 
 cination of the long-lost "Quaker Soldier." 
 
 After this, I fell under the spell of the French 
 Revolution through a book, given to me by my 
 mother, about la Vendee. It was a dull book, but 
 nothing, not even a bad translation, could dim 
 the heroism of Henri de la Rochejaquelein for me, 
 and I became a Royalist of the Royalists, and held 
 hotly the thesis that if George Washington had 
 returned the compliment of going over to France 
 in '89, he would have done Lafayette a great ser- 
 vice by restoring the good Louis XVI. and the 
 beautiful Marie Antoinette! 
 
 When I had reached the age of seventeen I had de- 
 veloped, as the result of my reading, a great be- 
 lief in all lost causes. I had become exceedingly 
 devoted to the cause of Ireland as the kindly Pastor 
 had sent me a copy of "Willy Reilly and His 
 Colleen Bawn," perhaps as an antidote to the 
 lingering effects of "Boccaccio." I was rather 
 troubled to find so many "swear words" in it, but 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 37 
 
 I made all the allowances that a real lover of liter- 
 ature is often compelled to make ! 
 
 The Bible 
 
 The glimpses I had of the Bible, some of which 
 rather prejudiced me, as a moral child, against the 
 Sacred Book, were, however, of inestimable value. 
 Of course the New Testament was always open 
 to me, and I read it constantly as a pleasure. The 
 language, both in the Douai version and the King 
 James version, was often very obscure. Although 
 I soon learned to recognize the beauty of the 23rd 
 Psalm in the King James version— which I always 
 read when I went to one of my cousins — ^I found 
 the sonorous Latinisms of the Douai version inter- 
 esting. For a time I was limited to a book of 
 Bible stories given us to read at school, as it was 
 considered unwise to permit children to read the 
 Old Testament unexpurgated. After a while, 
 however, the embargo seemed to be raised for 
 some reason or other, and again I was allowed to 
 revel with a great deal of profit in the wonderful 
 poems, prophecies, and histories of the Old Testa- 
 ment. I soon discovered that it was impossible 
 to understand the allusions in English literature 
 
38 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 without a knowledge of the Bible. What would 
 "Ruth among the alien corn" mean to a reader 
 who had never known the beauty of the story 
 of Ruth? And the liUes of the field, permeating 
 all poetical literature, would have lost all their 
 perfume if one knew nothing about the Song of 
 Solomon. 
 
 Putting aside the question as to whether young 
 readers should be let loose in the Old Testament 
 or not, or whether modern ideas of purity are 
 justified in including ignorance as the supremest 
 virtue, he who does not make himself familiar with 
 Biblical ideas and phraseology finds himself in 
 after-life with an incomplete medium of expression. 
 It used to be said of the typical English gentleman 
 that all he needed to know was to ride after the 
 hounds and to construe Horace. This is not so 
 absurd, after all, as it appears to be to most 
 moderns. To construe Horace, of course, meant 
 that he should have at least a speaking acquaint- 
 ance with one of the masterpieces of Roman lit- 
 erature, and this knowledge gave him a grip on 
 the universal speech of all cultivated people. 
 However useless his allusions to ChloS and to 
 Mseeenas were in the business of practical life. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 39 
 
 he was at least able to understand what they 
 meant, and even a slight acquaintance with the 
 Latins stamped him as speaking the speech of a 
 gentleman. 
 
 Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is 
 fitted with allusions that clarify and illuminate 
 the ordinary speech. He may not have any tech- 
 nical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may 
 be so great as to debar him from meeting other 
 men in conversation on equal grounds; but his 
 reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a 
 background, a colour, a metaphorical strength, 
 which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike 
 the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience 
 and he is in a measure left out of much of that 
 conversation which helps to make life endurable. 
 
 Pagan mythology is rather out of fashion. 
 Even the poets often now assume that Clytie is a 
 name that requires an explanation and that Daphne 
 and her flight through the laurel do not bring up 
 immediate memories of Syrinx and the reeds. 
 The Dictionary of Lampriere is covered with 
 dust; and one may quote an episode from Ovid 
 without an answering glance of comprehension 
 from the hearer. This does not imply ignorance; 
 
40 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 it is only that, in the modern system, the old 
 mythology is not taken very seriously. 
 
 Since Latin and Greek have almost ceased to be 
 a necessary part of a gentleman's education, there 
 is no class of allusions from which we can draw to 
 lighten or strengthen ordinary speech unless we 
 turn to the Bible. This deprives conversation of 
 much of its colour and renders it rather common- 
 place and meagre. Unfortunately, among many 
 of our young people, the Bible seems to be a book 
 to be avoided or to be treated in a rather "jocose" 
 manner. To raise a laugh on the vaudeville stage, 
 a Biblical quotation has only to be produced, and 
 the weary comedian, when he is at a loss to get a 
 witty speech across the footlights, is almost sure 
 to speak of Jonah and the whale! 
 
 It is disappointing to notice this gradual change 
 that has taken place in the attitude of the younger 
 generation toward the Sacred Book. The Sunday 
 Schools, in their attempt to make the genealogies 
 of importance and to overload the memories of 
 their little disciples with a multitude of texts, or 
 to over-explain every allusion in the terms of 
 physical geography, etc., may in a measure be 
 responsible for this, but they cannot be entirely 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 41 
 
 responsible. One must admit that diversities of 
 interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures from a 
 religious point of view will always be an obstacle 
 to their use in schools where the children of Jews, 
 of Mohammedans, and of the various Christian 
 denominations assemble. But there is always the 
 home, where the first impetus to a satisfactory 
 knowledge of the Sacred Book ought to be given. 
 The decay of the practice of reading aloud in our 
 homes is very evident in the lack of real culture — 
 or, rather, rudiments of real culture — ^Ln our 
 children. But there is no use in declaiming against 
 this. Other times, other manners; accusatory 
 declamation is simply a luxury of Old Age! 
 
 Personally, my desultory reading of the Old and 
 the New Testaments gave me a background against 
 which I could see the trend of the books I devoured 
 more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment 
 of them; besides, it was a moral and ethical safe- 
 guard. It was easy even for a boy to discover that 
 the morality of the New Testament was the 
 standard by which not only life, but literature, 
 which is the finest expression of life, should be 
 judged. If there are great declamations, decla- 
 mations full of dramatic fire, which nearly every 
 
42 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 boy at school learns to love, in the Old Testament, 
 there are the most moving, tender, and simple 
 stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to 
 the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to 
 look on books as mere recitals of exciting adven- 
 tures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entranc- 
 ing episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth 
 to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned 
 that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of 
 letter writers, but as a figure of history more, 
 interesting than Julius Caesar, and certainly more 
 modern. Young people delight in human docu- 
 ments. They may not know why they delight 
 in these documents, but it is because of their hu- 
 manity. Now who can be more human than St. 
 Paul? And the more you read his epistles, and 
 the more you know of his life, the more human he 
 becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, 
 and the way he "takes it out" of those unreason- 
 able people who would not accept his mission has 
 always been a great delight to me! 
 
 Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure 
 to pick out the phases of his history — a history 
 that even then seemed to be so very modern, and to 
 a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 43 
 
 It seemed only natural that he should be converted 
 by a blast of illumination from God. It is not 
 hard for young people to accept miracles. All life 
 is a miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun 
 was to me no more of a miracle than the conversion 
 of this fierce Jew, who was a Roman citizen. He 
 seemed so very noble and yet so very humble. 
 He could command and plead and weep and de- 
 nounce; and he made you feel that he was gen- 
 erally right. And then he was a tentmaker who 
 understood Greek and who could speak to the 
 Greeks in their own language. 
 
 Late in the seventies when nearly every student 
 I knew was a disciple of Huxley and Tyndal and 
 devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible which 
 was Germanizing us all, I fortified myseK with St. 
 Paul, and with the belief that, if he could break the 
 close exclusiveness of the Jews, and take in the 
 Gentiles, if he could throw off, not contemptuously, 
 many of the rigid ceremonies of his people, Christi- 
 anity, in the modern time, could very well afford 
 to accept the new geological interpretation of the 
 story of Genesis without destroying in any way 
 the faith which St. Paul preached. 
 
 Somewhat later, too, when I read constantly and 
 
44 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 with increasing delight the letters of Madame de 
 Sevigne, I put her second as a writer of letters to the 
 great St. Paul. The letters of Lord Chesterfield 
 to his sons came next, I think; long after, Andrew 
 Lang's "Letters to Dead Authors," and a very great 
 letter I found in an English translation of Balzac's 
 "Le Lys dans la Vallee." 
 
 It must not be imderstood that I put St. Paul 
 in the same category with these mundane persons. 
 Nevertheless, I found St. Paul very often reason- 
 ably mundane. He preferred to work as a tent- 
 maker rather than take money from his clients, 
 and one could imagine him as preaching whUe he 
 worked. He frankly made collections for needy 
 churches, and he was very grateful to Phoebe for 
 remembering that he was a hungry man and_^in 
 need of homely hospitality. He was interested in 
 his fellow passengers Aquilla and Priscilla whom he 
 met on board the ship that was taking them from 
 Corinth to Ephesus. It was evident that they 
 had not been able to make their salt in Corinth, 
 where, however, their poverty had not interfered 
 with their zeal in the cause of Christ. Any tent 
 marked "Ephesus" was sure to have a good sale 
 anywhere. The tents from Ephesus were as 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 45 
 
 fashionable as the purple from Tyre, and St. 
 Paul was pleased that his two disciples should have 
 a chance of being more prosperous. I always felt, 
 too, that, in his practical way, he knew that 
 Ephesus would give him a better chance of sup- 
 porting himseK. 
 
 That Saul of Tarsus had not lacked for luxuries 
 in his youth, one easily guessed. It was plain, too, 
 that he had had the best possible instructors, and 
 I liked to believe, when I was young, that his 
 muscles had been well trained in the sports of 
 gentlemen of his class. Altogether, so graphic were 
 his descriptions and so potent his personality that, 
 whUe Julius Caesar and Brutus receded, he filled 
 the foreground, and all the more because at this 
 time I picked up an English translation of Sueto- 
 nius, just by chance one dark winter day, and as I 
 had not yet discovered that Suetonius was a 
 "yellow" gossip, my idols, some of the Roman 
 heroes, received a great shock. 
 
 The constant reading of St. Paul led me to the 
 Acts of the Apostles, and I found St. Luke very 
 good reading, though I often wished that, as I 
 understood he had some reputation as an artist, 
 he had adorned his writings with illustrations. 
 
46 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 It was a great shock to discover that none of 
 the Apostles wrote in English, for it seemed to me 
 that their styles were as different from one another 
 as any styles could be, and as I, having lived a 
 great part of my time in classes where Nepos and 
 Caesar were translated by my dear young friends, 
 had very little confidence in the work of any trans- 
 lator, I came to the conclusion that God had taken 
 special care of the translators of the Bible, for I 
 could not help believing that He had no interest 
 whatever in the translations which we made daily 
 for the impatient ears of our instructors! 
 
 One could not help loving St. Paul, too, because 
 he was such a good fighter. When he said he 
 fought with beasts, I was quite sure that these 
 beasts were the unreasonable and unrighteous per- 
 sons who persecuted and contradicted him. No 
 obstacle deterred him, and he was gentle, too, al- 
 though he caUed things by their right names and 
 his denunciations were so vivid and mouthfilling 
 that you knew his enemies must have been afraid 
 to open their lips while he was near them, whatever 
 they might have said behind his back. 
 
 My devotion to St. Paul brought me into dis- 
 repute one Friday at school when discipline was 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 47 
 
 relaxed, and the teacher condescended to con- 
 versation. "We were asked who was our favourite 
 hero, and when it came to my turn I answered 
 "St. Paul." As George Washington, Abraham 
 Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, General Grant, Gen- 
 eral Lee, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great, had 
 walked in procession before I produced my hero, 
 I was looked on as rather weakminded. The 
 teacher, too, seemed astonished, and he asked me 
 on what grounds I founded my worship. This 
 question, coming suddenly, petrified me for a mo- 
 ment, and I answered, "He fought with beasts." 
 This was taken as a personal aUusion by some of my 
 dear comrades with whom I had had altercations, 
 and I was made to suffer for it as much as these 
 dear comrades deemed prudent. However, they 
 discovered that I had "language" on my side, for 
 on the next composition day, when we read aloud 
 the work of our brains, I accused them of "being 
 filled with aU iniquity," and other evil things 
 which brought down a horrified remonstrance 
 from the teacher, who was unaccustomed to such 
 plain English, but he was knocked high and dry 
 by the proof that I was only quoting St, Paul to 
 the Romans. 
 
48 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Perhaps I became too familiar with St. Paul. 
 Be that as it may, I regarded him as a very good 
 friend indeed, for some of his "language," quoted 
 in times of crisis, produced a much better effect on 
 one's enemies than any swear word that could be 
 invented. I am not excusing my attitude toward 
 the Bible, but merely explaining how it affected 
 my youthful mind. There was something ex- 
 tremely romantic in the very phrase, "the tumult 
 of the silversmiths" at Ephesus. It seemed to 
 mean a whole chapter of a novel in itself. 
 
 And there was the good centurion — Christ al- 
 ways seemed to have a sympathy for soldiers — ^who 
 was willing to save Paul when the ship, on its way 
 to Rome, was run aground. So he reached Melita 
 where the amiable barbarians showed him no 
 small courtesy. And one could not help liking the 
 Romans; that is, the oflBcial Romans, even Felix, 
 whose wife was a Jew like St. Paul, and who, dis- 
 gusted when the Apostle spoke to him of chastity 
 and of justice to cpme, yet hoped that money 
 would be given him by Paul, and frequently sent 
 for, and often spoke with him. And how fine 
 seemed the Apostle's belief in his nobility as a 
 Roman citizen! He rendered unto Ceesar the 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 49 
 
 things that were Caesar's. And one could easily 
 imagine the pomp and circumstance when Agrippa 
 and Bernice entered into the hall of audience with 
 the tribunes and principal men of the city! And 
 one could hear St. Paul saying, protecting himself 
 nobly, through the nobility of a Roman law : 
 
 For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not 
 to signify the things laid to his charge, 
 
 and Agrippa's answer, after Paul's apologia: 
 
 In a little thou persuadest me to become a Christian! 
 
 But the story did not end then. I rehearsed 
 over and over again what the King Agrippa 
 might have said to his sister, the noble and 
 beautiful Bernice — ^I knew nothing of the lady's 
 reputation then — ^and how finally they did become 
 Christians. In my imagination, princely dignity 
 and exquisite grace were added to the external 
 beauty of religion; and Paul went to Rome pro- 
 tected by the law of the Romans. And yet the 
 very fineness of his attitude was the cause of his 
 further imprisonment. "This man," I often re- 
 peated with Agrippa, "might have been set at 
 liberty, if he had not appealed to Caesar." 
 
 It was St. Paul who sent me back to the Prophet 
 
50 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Micheas, who had previously struck me as of no 
 importance at all, and I read: 
 
 And Thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, art a Kttle one among the 
 thousands of Juda; out of thee shall he come forth unto me 
 that is to be the ruler in Israel; and his going forth is from 
 the beginning, from the days of eternity. 
 
 And back again to St. Matthew — 
 
 But they said to him: In Bethlehem of Juda; For so it is 
 written by the prophet; And thou, Bethlehem, the land of 
 Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda; for out of 
 thee shall come forth the captain, who shall rule my people 
 Israel. 
 
 These exercises in completing the prophecies of 
 the Old Testament with the fulfilments of the New 
 were interesting, and I found great pleasure in 
 them. And this led me to a greater appreciation 
 of the Old Testament, against which I had been 
 once rather prejudiced. One day, I was led, by 
 some reference or other in another book, to read 
 the twenty-third psalm of David, in the King 
 James version. It struck me as much more 
 simple and appealing than the version in the 
 Douai Bible, which begins in Latin "Dominus 
 regit me." It runs: 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 51 
 
 The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing. 
 
 2 He hath set me in a place of pasture. 
 
 He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment: 
 
 3 He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths 
 of justice, for his own name's sake. 
 
 4 For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of 
 death, I fear no evils, for thou art with me. 
 
 Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. 
 
 5 Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that 
 afflict me. 
 
 Thou hast anointed my head with oil: and my chalice which 
 
 inebriateth me how goodly is it. 
 
 And thy mercy will follow me all the days of my life. 
 
 And that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, imto length 
 
 of days. 
 
 In the Douai version this psalm was called the 
 twenty-second. 
 
 Without any special guidance — ^I think most of 
 my teachers would have looked on as dangerous 
 any attempt to ally English literature with the 
 Bible— 1 soon discovered that nearly everything 
 I read owed something to the Bible. At first, the 
 comparison of the twenty-third psalm in the King 
 James version enraptured me so much that I began 
 to find fault with the Latinized phrases of the Vul- 
 gate in English. It was the fashion in the early 
 
52 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 seventies to be very Saxon in speech, especially in 
 the little group at school interested in English 
 literature. Street cars at this time were com- 
 paratively new in Philadelphia, a,nd I think we 
 reached the last extremity of Saxonism in speech 
 when we spoke of them as "folk wains." The 
 tide then turned toward the Latins; and I pre- 
 ferred the Book of Job and the story of Ruth in 
 the Latinized version, because the words were more 
 mouth filling, and because it was very difficult to 
 translate everything into a bald "early English me- 
 dium", which for a time I had been trying to do. 
 It was Keats's lovely phrase "amid the alien corn" 
 which sent me back to "Ruth"; and a quotation 
 in Quackenbos's "Rhetoric" — "Can'st thou hook 
 the Leviathan" which made me revel in "Job." 
 
 Something Meg Merrilies said bore me on 
 toward the roaring storm of Isaiah. The Latinized 
 medium seemed to suit his denunciations best ; and 
 then, besides, I found more illuminating foot- 
 notes in the Douai version than in the King James. 
 In both versions, some passages were so obscure 
 that I often wondered how anybody could get any 
 meaning out of them. I was often astonished to 
 find in English novels that the old people in the 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 53 
 
 cottages were soothed by texts, quoted at a great 
 length, out of which I could make nothing, so I 
 limited myself to the Douai version, which I 
 found more illuminating. 
 
 Whether my system of reading is to be com- 
 mended or not to young persons, I am not pre- 
 pared to say, but for me it made the Bible a really 
 live book. To be frank, and perhaps shocking at 
 the same time — ^Lf anybody had asked me whether, 
 being marooned on an island, I should have most 
 preferred the Bible in my loneliness, I should 
 promptly have answered "No." At this age 
 "Nicholas Nickleby" or "Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," or "The Tempest," or "As You Like 
 it," or Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," 
 would have suited me better, provided, of course, 
 that I could have chosen only one book. 
 
 It was borne in on me many times that no 
 author could improve on the phrasing of the 
 Bible. Both in the Vulgate and the King James 
 versions there are passages which, leaving aside 
 all question of doctrine, it is sacrilege to try to im- 
 prove. The French translation of the Bible is, as 
 everybody knows, very paraphrastic, and that 
 may account for the fact that, while regarded as a 
 
54 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 precious depository of doctrine, it is not a house- 
 hold book, and the dreadfully dull interpretations 
 of Clement Marot — called hymns — ^naturally bored 
 a people who, in their hearts, believe that God 
 listens more amiably to petitions uttered in the 
 language of the Academy! In their novels, deal- 
 ing with the beginnings of Christianity — ^and there 
 are many such novels in French unknown in 
 other countries — it is hard for a French author 
 not to be rhetorical, in the manner of the writer 
 of "Ben Hur" when the death of Christ is de- 
 scribed. No human author could improve on 
 the words of the Vulgate, or the words of the King 
 James version. What young heart can ponder over 
 these words, without a thrill, St, John XIX 
 (Douai version: 1609; Rheims; 1582): 
 
 When Jesus therefore had seen his Mother and the disciple 
 standing whom he loved, he saith to his Mother: Woman, 
 behold thy son. 
 
 After that, he saith to the disciple. Behold thy mother. 
 And from that day the disciple took her to his own. 
 
 Afterwards, Jesus knowing that all things were now ac- 
 compHshed, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said: I 
 thirst. 
 
 Now there was a vessel set there full of vinegar, and they, 
 putting a sponge full of vinegar about hyssop, put it to his 
 mouth. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 55 
 
 And Jesus therefore when he had taken the vinegar, said, 
 it is consummated, and bowing his head, gave up the ghost. 
 
 When Mjarie Corelli became a popular author, 
 there were persons existing — ^happily, they have 
 all gone to the great beyond — who thought that 
 the "talented" author could have done better! 
 
 Essays and Essayists 
 
 I am aware that many persons look on Emerson 
 as somewhat dangerous reading for a boy of sixteen. 
 The mothers and fathers of my Baptist friends and 
 the imcle of my Methodist cousins forbade the 
 reading of Emerson because of his Unitarianism; 
 but, as the rector of our parish never denounced 
 Unitarians from the altar, though he frequently 
 oflfered his compliments to Martin Luther, I paid 
 no attention whatever to these objections. I trust 
 that I am not defending the miscellaneous reading 
 of my boyhood; I do not recommend this course 
 to the approval of parents and guardians; I am 
 simply expressing the impression that certain books 
 made on my youthful mind and heart; for, though 
 I never said so in words, the books I liked were 
 always nearer to my heart than to my mind. I 
 owe a great debt to Emerson. 
 
56 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 It was on a hot afternoon during the summer 
 vacation that, near sundown, sitting on the warm 
 marble steps of our house, I dipped into an early 
 edition of Emerson. I felt inspired at once to 
 think great thoughts and to do good things, to 
 lift myself above the petty things of the earth, and 
 to feel that to be an American was to be at once 
 proud and humble. Emerson's abrupt sentences, 
 like a number of brilliants set close together, re- 
 minded me of "Proverbs" ; but the Book of Proverbs 
 did not get so near to my actual life as the essays 
 of Emerson. I liked the lessons that he drew from 
 the lives of great men. I was shocked when he 
 mentioned Confucius and Plato in the same breath 
 as Christ; but I was amiably tolerant, for I felt 
 that he had never had the privilege of studying the 
 Little Catechism, and I thought of writing to him 
 on the subject. But somebody told me that he 
 was an "American Classic" and, from that, I con- 
 cluded he was dead, and had doubtless already 
 found out his mistake. 
 
 Perhaps I might have been better engaged in 
 reading the more practical books offered to boys 
 in our own time, if we had had them. There were 
 some books then on scientific subjects, reduced to 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 57 
 
 the comprehension of the young; but not so many 
 as there are now. One of my uncles recommended 
 the works of Samuel Smiles — "Self -Help" I think 
 was his favourite; but Samuel Smiles never ap- 
 pealed to me. My small allowance, paid weekly, 
 coi^d not have been affected by "Thrift", and 
 when my uncle quoted passages from this tiresome 
 book I astounded him by replying, in a phrase 
 I wrongly attributed to the adorable Emerson, 
 that if I had a quarter to spend instead of twelve 
 cents, I would give half of it for a hyacinth! My 
 miserly uncle said it sounded just like| Mohammed, 
 and that Emerson had doubtless found it in that 
 dangerous book, the Koran. 
 
 I cannot imagine any other author doing for me 
 just what the essays of Emerson did. In the first 
 place, they seemed to me to be really American; 
 in the second, and largely because of their quality, 
 they offered an antidote to the materialism in the 
 very air, which had succeeded the Civil War. At 
 this time there was much talk of money and luxury 
 everywhere about us. Even in our quiet neigh- 
 bourhood, where simple living was the rule, many 
 had burst into ostentation, and moved away into 
 newer and more pretentious quarters, and there 
 
58 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 was a rumour that some of these sought un- 
 limited opportunities for extravagant expenditure. 
 We saw them driving in new carriages, and con- 
 descendingly stopping before the white doors and 
 the green window-shutters of our old-fashioned 
 colonial houses. They had made money through 
 the war. For the first time in our lives we boys 
 heard of money making as the principal aini of 
 life. The fact that these successful persons were 
 classed as "shoddy" did not lessen the value of 
 the auriferous atmosphere about us. Emerson 
 was a corrective to this materialism. As to his 
 philosophy or theology, that did not concern me 
 any more than the religious opinions of Julius 
 Caesar, whose "Commentaries" I was obliged to 
 read. Emerson gave me a taste for the reading of 
 essay. 
 
 By chance I fell upon some essays of Carlyle. 
 The inflation of his style did not deter me from 
 thoroughly enjoying the paper on "Novalis." 
 That on " Cagliostro," however, was my favourite. 
 It introduced me intimately to the French Revo- 
 lution. I disliked this great charlatan for his 
 motto, "Tread the lilies under foot." I was for 
 the Bourbons ! The French Revolution, as a fact. 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 5d 
 
 was very near to me. My mother had been born 
 (in Philadelphia) in 1819, and my great-uncle and 
 my grandfather had lived through the French Revo- 
 lution. There was a legend, moreover — ^probably 
 the same legend exists in every family of Irish 
 descent whose connections had lived in France — 
 that one of them had been a clerk to Fabre d'Eglan- 
 tine, and had spent his time in crossing oflf the 
 list of the condemned the names of the Irish- 
 French aristocrats and substituting in their place 
 others that did not happen to belong to Celts ! 
 
 In spite of the Little Catechism and the up- 
 lifting influence of Emerson, I looked on this 
 probably mythical gentleman as one of the glories 
 of our family. And then there was an old man — 
 very old — ^who walked up and down Sixth Street 
 with his head wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief, 
 bearing a parrot on his shoulder. The boys of 
 the neighbourhood believed that he was Sanson, the 
 executioner of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. 
 We shivered when we saw him; but we boasted of 
 his existence in our neighbourhood, all the same. 
 After I had read "Caghostro" I devoured every 
 hne on the subject of the French Revolution I 
 could find. It seemed to me that I would have 
 
60 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 been willing to give five years out of my life to 
 have lived in Paris during those horrors, and to 
 have rescued Marie Antoinette and the Princess 
 Elizabeth! Such brutalities seemed impossible 
 in our time; and yet I have since lived very near 
 to friends who went through even greater horrors 
 in Russia — ^the Baroness Sophie de Buxhoevenden, 
 second lady-in-waiting to the Czarina, for instance, 
 whose letters lie before me as I write. 
 
 In spite of my taste for Carlyle, which induced 
 me to dip into Jean Paul Richter, of whose writ- 
 ings I remember only one line, 
 
 I love God and little children, 
 
 I did not get very far into his "French Revolu- 
 tion." It seemed then an unreal and lurid book. 
 Emerson led to Montaigne, whose essays, in an 
 old edition which I had from the Mechanics' In- 
 stitute, of which my father was a committeeman, 
 delighted me beyond words. I liked Emerson's 
 essay on "Friendship" better than his, but for 
 wit, quick repartee, general cheerfulness, he re- 
 minded me of my favourite heroine in literature, 
 Sir Walter Scott's Catherine Seton ! Later, I read 
 with astonishment that Montaigne was an un- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 61 
 
 believer, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was ex- 
 tremely indignant; he seemed to me to be a very 
 pious gentleman, with that wit and humour 
 which I seldom found in professedly pious books; 
 and to this day I cannot hear Montaigne talked 
 of as a precursor of Voltaire without believing 
 that there is something crooked in the mind of the 
 talker. So much for the impressions made in youth, 
 so much for the long, long thoughts of which Long- 
 fellow sings. 
 
 Who is more amusingly cheerful than Mon- 
 taigne, who more amusingly wise, who so well bred 
 and attractive, who knew the world better and 
 took it only as the world.? Give me the old volume 
 of Montaigne and a loaf of bread — ^no Victrola 
 singing to me in the wilderness ! — a thermos bottle, 
 and one or two other things, and I can still spend 
 the day in any wild place! I did not, of course, 
 know, in those early days, what in his flavour at- 
 tracted me. Afterward, I found that it was the 
 very flavour and essence of Old France. Carlyle's 
 impressions of historical persons interested me, but 
 Montaigne was the most actual of living persons 
 who spoke to me in a voice I recognized as wholly 
 his. To be sure, I read him in Florio's translation. 
 
62 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 I think it was about this time, too, that I dis- 
 covered a very modern writer, who charmed me 
 very greatly. It was Justin McCarthy who con- 
 tributed a series of sketches of great men of the 
 day to a magazine called the Galaxy. He "did" 
 Victor Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX. and Bis- 
 marck, and many other of the worthies of the 
 times. Nothing that he wrote before or after this 
 pleased me at all; but these sketches were so in- 
 teresting and apparently so true that they really 
 became part of my life. If I had been asked at 
 this time who was my favourite of all modern 
 authors, and what the name of the composer I 
 admired most, I should have said Justin McCarthy 
 and Offenbach! I regarded "Voici le Sabre" in 
 "La Grande Duchesse" as a masterpiece only to 
 be compared to an "Ave Verum," by Pergolesi, 
 which was often sung in St. Philip's Church at the 
 Offertory! A strange mixture, but the truth is 
 the truth. Although I have not been able to 
 find Justin McCarthy's series of sketches, they 
 still hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, 
 like other masterpieces that one loves in youth, 
 one would now find them like those beautiful 
 creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 63 
 
 and purple and gold under the waves, but are 
 drab and ugly things when taken out of the water. 
 This applies to some books that one reads with 
 pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, how 
 they were endured ! 
 
 There were not so many outdoor books in the 
 late '60's as there are now. We were all sent to 
 Thoreau's "Walden" and Dana's "Two Years 
 Before the Mast." "Walden" I learned to like, 
 but I much preferred Fenimore Cooper's descrip- 
 tion of nature. "Walden" struck me as the book 
 of a man playing at out-of-doors, imagining his 
 wildness, and never really liking to be too far from 
 the town. Singularly enough, it was not until I 
 discovered Hamerton's "A Painter's Camp" that 
 I began to see that nature had beauties in all 
 weathers. In truth, I hate to confess that nature 
 alone never appealed to me. A landscape with- 
 out human beings seemed deadly dull; and I did 
 not understand until I grew much older that I 
 had really believed that good art was an improve- 
 ment on nature. 
 
 I have not the sUghtest idea in what Kght the 
 modern critics see the works of Philip Gilbert 
 Hamerton. I tried to read one of his novels re- 
 
64 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 cently, and failed; but let me say that, allowing 
 for receptivity and what one may call tempera- 
 ment, I know of no book more revealing as to the 
 relations of nature and art than "A Painter's 
 Camp." I recall vividly the words of the be- 
 ginning of the preface to the first edition: 
 
 It is known to all who are acquainted with the present 
 condition of the fine arts in England that landscape-painters 
 rely less on memory and invention than formerly, and that 
 their work from nature is much more laborious than it used 
 to be. 
 
 I had seen so many pictures that seemed to be 
 "made up" in the artist's studio and I knew so 
 well from my experience in the drawing classes 
 at school, how nature was neglected for artifi- 
 cial models, that I hailed these words with great 
 
 joy- 
 
 Everything in life was rather conventional, rather 
 fixed, for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadel- 
 phia, to which our country owes the beginning of 
 the aesthetic awakening, had not yet taken place. 
 It may seem strange to this generation that we 
 were limited to the wood-cuts in Godey's Lady's 
 Book, the illustrations in Harper's Magazine, and 
 an occasional picture in some short-lived periodi- 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 65 
 
 cal. The reign of the chromo had just begun. 
 Rogers's groups were a fixture in nearly every seH- 
 respecting house, though I am glad to say, in my 
 own family, very good casts of the Clytie and the 
 Discus-thrower filled their place. My father greatly 
 admired Power's Greek Slave, whose praises had 
 been celebrated in the Cosmopolitan Magazine; but 
 my mother regarded it as almost "improper." 
 
 Nearly every youth of my generation, in Phila- 
 delphia, wanted not exactly something better, but 
 something more vivid. There were few sports; 
 long walks and a little cricket supplied the place 
 of the coming baseball and tennis. 
 
 In his "Steeplejack," James Huneker speaks of 
 his weekly walks with Mr. Edward Roth, the head 
 of a military school and the author of "Christus 
 Judex." I, too, looked on these walks with an 
 occasional row on the Schuylkill with him as the 
 best part of my education. But this was later. 
 All we could do, then, in our moments of leisure, 
 was to walk and talk and read. 
 
 The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun 
 to be developed. The beginning of "A Painter's 
 Camp" was most attractive to my thirsty soul. 
 Mr, Hamerton says: 
 
66 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 I had a wild walk yesterday. I have a notion of encamping 
 on the Bouls worth moors to study heather; and heartily 
 tired of being caged up here in my library, with nothing to 
 see but wet garden-walks and dripping yew trees, and a sun- 
 dial whereon no shadow had fallen the livelong day, I de- 
 termined, in spite of the rain to be off to the moors to choose 
 a site for my encampment. Not very far from this house 
 still dwells an old servant of my uncle's with whom I am on 
 the friendliest terms. So I called upon this neighbour on 
 my way and asked him if he would take a walk with me to 
 the hills. Jamie stared a little and remarked that "it ur 
 feefi weet" but accompanied me nevertheless, and a very 
 pleasant walk we had of it. 
 
 Hamerton opened his book in Jane Eyre's coun- 
 try; our family had lately read "Jane Eyre." 
 This added interest to the volume, and there 
 came the details of the invention of the new hut, 
 intended to be a shelter against all weathers, so 
 that the artist might study nature on intimate 
 terms. He made it in order to paint the heather 
 at close range. Now, this was a revelation! It 
 had never hitherto occurred to me that the heather 
 changes its aspect day by day, or indeed that our 
 pet place of beauty, the Wissahickon Creek, or 
 river if you like, was not the same every day 
 in the year except when the ice bound it! This 
 may seem a rather stupid state of mind; but 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 67 
 
 it is the stupidity that is very common. I could 
 understand how interesting it would be to be in 
 snow-fall while yet safely out of it. Mr. Hamerton 
 thus described his hut: 
 
 It consists entirely of panels, of which the largest are two 
 feet six inches square : these panels can be carried separately 
 on packhorses, or even on men's backs, and then united to- 
 gether by iron bolts into a strong little building. Four of 
 the largest panels serve as windows, being each of them 
 filled with a large pane of excellent plate-glass. When 
 erected, the walls present a perfectly smooth surface outside, 
 and a panelled interior; the floor being formed in exactly the 
 same manner, with the panelled or coffered side turned 
 towards the earth, and the smooth surface uppermost. By 
 this arrangement all the wall-bolts are inside, and those of 
 the floor underneath it, which protect? them not only from 
 the weather but from theft, an iron bolt being a great tempta- 
 tion to country people on account of its convenience and 
 utility. The walls are bolted to the floor, which gives 
 great strength to the whole structure, and the panels are 
 carefully ordered, like the stones in a well-built wall, so that 
 the joints of the lower course of panels do not fall below those 
 of the upper. The roof is arched and provides a current of 
 fresh air, by placing ventilators at each end of the arch, 
 which insures a current without inconvenience to the occu- 
 pant. 
 
 The chapters on "Concerning Moonlight in Old 
 Castles," "The Coming of the Clouds," and the 
 little sketches, like "Loch Awe after Sunset, Sept. 
 
68 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 23, 1860," enchanted me. It had not before 
 struck me that Loch Awe was different on Sep- 
 tember 23, 1860, from what it was at other times, 
 or — ^to carry the idea further — ^that the imperial 
 Delaware had changed since that momentous time 
 when George Washington crossed it, or the Schuyl- 
 kill since Tom Moore looked upon it. 
 To quote further: 
 
 The mountain is green-grey, colder and greener towards 
 the summit. All details of field and wood are dimly visible. 
 Two islands nearer me are distinct against the hill, but their 
 fohage seems black, and no details are visible in them. The 
 sky is all clouded over. From the horizon to the zenith it 
 is one veil of formless vapour. 
 
 And: 
 
 There is one streak of dead calm, which reflects the green 
 mountain perfectly from edge to edge of it. There is another 
 calm shaped like a great river, which is all green, touched 
 with crimson. Besides these there are delicate half calms, 
 just dulled over with faint breathings of the evening air; 
 these, for the most part being violet (from the sky), except 
 at a distance, where they take a deep crimson; and there is 
 one piece of crimson calm near me set between a faint violet 
 breeze and a calm of a different violet. There are one or 
 two breezes sufficiently strong to cause ripple, and these 
 rippled spaces take the dull grey slate of the upper sky. 
 
 Realise this picture as well as you may be able, and then 
 put in the final touch. Between the dull calms and the 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 69 
 
 glassy calms there are drawn thin threads of division burn- 
 ing with scarlet fire. 
 
 This fire is of course got from the lower sky. I know 
 whence it comes, but how or why it lies in those thin scarlet 
 threads there where it is most wanted, and not elsewhere, I 
 cannot satisfactorily explain. 
 
 Then there was a deUghtful and illuminating 
 chapter called "A Stream at Rest." Hamerton, 
 who is probably now very much out of fashion, 
 taught me the necessity of beauty in life; and, as an 
 accessory to Emerson, the philosophy of enjoying 
 the little, every-day things. It was Emerson who, 
 I think, said first to me, "Take short outlooks"; 
 and I still think that there can be no better intro- 
 duction to a consideration of the relation of art to 
 nature than "A Painter's Camp." It was "A 
 Painter's Camp" which led me to "The Intel- 
 lectual Life." There is a particular passage in 
 Hamerton's chapter on "A Little French City" 
 that emphasized the need of beauty. 
 
 The cathedral is all poetry; I mean that every part of it 
 affects our emotional nature either by its own grandeur or 
 beauty, or by its allusion to histories of bright virtue or 
 brave fortitude. And this emotional result is independent 
 of belief in the historical truth of these great legends: it 
 would be stronger, no doubt, if we believed them, but we are 
 still capable of feeling their solemn poetry and large signifi- 
 
70 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 cance as we feel the poetry and significance of "Sir Galahad" 
 or "The Idylls of the King." 
 
 Some persons are so constituted that it is necessary to 
 their happiness to live near some noble work of art or nature. 
 A mountain is satisfactory to them because it is great and 
 ever new, presenting itself every hour under aspects so un- 
 foreseen that one can gaze at it for years with unflagging in- 
 terest. To some minds, to mine amongst others, human 
 life is scarcely supportable far from some stately and mag- 
 nificent object, worthy of endless study and admiration. 
 But what of life in the plains? Truly, most plains are dreary 
 enough, but still they may have fine trees, or a cathedral. 
 And in the cathedral, here, I find no despicable compensation 
 for the loss of dear old Ben Cruacha. 
 
 There are some humorous and perhaps even 
 comic passages in "The Intellectual Life"; these 
 passages are unconsciously humorous or comic, as 
 Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton seems to have no 
 sense of humour. For instance, it was a great sur- 
 prise to me to discover that poverty was unfavour- 
 able to the intellectual life! It was enKghtening 
 to know the reason why a man should wear even- 
 ing dress after six o'clock, and why the sporting 
 of gray clothes in the evening was unworthy of 
 the Intellectual! Besides, it affects the character! 
 
 And letter XI "To a Master of Arts who said 
 that a Certain Distinguished Painter was Half- 
 educated," was a useful antidote to youthful 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 71 
 
 self-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated 
 in the chapters on "Women and Marriage," "To a 
 Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage," 
 but I thought the author very wise indeed, and 
 found many other pages which were intensely 
 stimulating. Let others decry Hamerton if they 
 like; I owe a great deal to him; and, though I 
 might be induced to throw "The Intellectual Life" 
 to the Young Wolves of the Beginning of this 
 Century, I shall always insist that "A Painter's 
 Camp" ought to be included in every list of books, 
 It was George Eliot who sent me to "The Follow- 
 ing of Christ," and she interested me in Saint Teresa, 
 that illustrious woman so well compounded of 
 mysticism and common sense, of whom, however, 
 I could find no good "Life." But Thomas a Kempis 
 was a revelation! He fitted into nearly every 
 crisis of the soul, but all his words are not for 
 every-day life. He seems to demand too much of 
 us poor folk of the world. Later, I came to under- 
 stand that the counsel of perfection which Christ 
 gave to the rich young man was not intended 
 for the whole world, and many fine passages in 
 A Kempis were meant for finer temperaments than 
 my own. 
 
72 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Somebody at this time presented me with a 
 copy of Marcus AureHus. I found him dull, 
 stale, and unprofitable in comparison with A Kem- 
 pis. His philosophy of life seemed to lead to 
 nothing except the cultivation of a very high 
 opinion of oneself. I gave this conclusion to one 
 of my English friends, who objected to my uncharted 
 course of reading, and he said, "A person like 
 you who finds nothing humorous or even philo- 
 sophical in 'Alice in Wonderland' cannot be ex- 
 pected to like the works of Marcus Aurelius!" 
 
 It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely 
 staked off little plots, each with its own date. 
 The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscel- 
 laneous reading which every normal man ought to 
 cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for 
 the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps 
 hands with a thousand other books. It has al- 
 ways seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" 
 would not have been conceived by Ruskin if he 
 had not heard well an echo of "The Following of 
 Christ." There was a time when the lovers of 
 Ruskin who wanted to read "The Stones of 
 Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves 
 obliged to form clubs, and to divide the expense, 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 73 
 
 if they were of moderate means, in order to get 
 what was good out of him. But somehow or 
 other, probably because it appealed more to every- 
 body, it was always possible to find a copy of "Se- 
 same and Lilies" at an old book stand. I think 
 I found one most unexpectedly at Leary's in 
 Philadelphia, where I also discovered the copy of 
 Froissart. The Froissart, as I have said, cost me 
 just half of my father's Christmas present that 
 year, which was five dollars. I must have man- 
 aged to get the Ruskin volume out of some other 
 fund, for I had many things to buy with the other 
 two and one half dollars! 
 
 Ruskin is left alone to-day; he does not seem to 
 fill that "long-felt want" which we, the young of 
 the sixties and seventies, admitted. No doubt 
 he is very mannered in his style, mitred and coped 
 when he might have been very simple in his rai- 
 ment. He was a priest in literature and art; and 
 he clothed himself as a priest. He marched with 
 a stately tread, and yet he stooped to the single 
 violets by the wayside. 
 
 By the way, I often wished when I was reading 
 Ruskin, who once made apple blossoms fashionable, 
 that he had led a crusade against the double and 
 
74 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 the triple violet, which have destroyed the repu- 
 tation of the real violet. What can be more re- 
 pellent to the lovers of simplicity than a bunch of 
 these artificialities, without perfume, tied by dark 
 green ribbon, and with all their leaves removed? 
 "Sesame and Lilies" had the effect of sending me 
 back to the single violet whenever I was inclined 
 to admire the camellia japonica or any other thing 
 that was artificial, or distorted from beauty or 
 simplicity. 
 
 Circumstances have a great deaj to do with our 
 affection for books. Propinquity, they say, leads 
 very frequently to marriage, and if a book happens 
 to be near and if it is any kind of book at all, there 
 is a great temptation to develop an affection for it. 
 All I can say is that I think that "Sesame and 
 Lilies" is a good book, for after all a book must be 
 judged by its effect. It led me further into Rus- 
 kin, and helped me to acquire a reverence for art 
 and to estimate the relations of art and life. One 
 would steel oneself against the fallacy that art, 
 true art, might exist only for art's sake, when one 
 had read "Sesame and Lilies" and "The Stones 
 of Venice." Those wise men who make literary 
 "selections" for the young have done well to 
 
MY BOYHOOD READING 75 
 
 include in their volumes that graphic description, 
 so carefully modulated in tone, of the Cathedral of 
 St. Mark. Its only fault is that it comes too near 
 to being prose poetry; and discriminating readers 
 who ponder over it will find some epithets possible 
 only to a writer who was an artist in lines and pig- 
 ments before he began to paint with the pen. 
 
 Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some 
 aspects of life which we, the young, did not know; 
 for the young after all learn very little by intuition. 
 They must be taught things. This is perhaps an 
 excuse for those vagaries in youth, those seemingly 
 inexplicable adventures which shock the old who 
 have forgotten what it is to be young. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Poets and Poetry 
 France — Of Maurice de Guerin 
 
 In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on 
 a few great names. These were generally the 
 names of Frenchmen, The sympathy of Ameri- 
 cans during the Franco-Prussian War had been 
 with France, and during the latter days of the 
 French Empire, before the war, Americans had 
 been much more interested in France than in any 
 other part of the world. There were letters from 
 Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eugenie 
 and her coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of 
 Offenbach, and the gossip about literary magnets 
 of the time, which included a great deal of Victor 
 Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations. 
 
 One could buy French books easily in Phila- 
 delphia; and the Mercantile Library — ^now dread- 
 fully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in 
 size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy 
 
 76 
 
POETS AND POETRY 77 
 
 of access as to its shelves — ^had an excellent col- 
 lection of volumes in French. 
 
 How often in later life I blessed the discrimi- 
 nating collectors of that library! Nothing worth 
 while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest 
 Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was 
 not always guided by the critics of the period, I 
 found Amedee Achard as interesting as Octave 
 Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get 
 through even "La Petite Fadette," although the 
 critics were constantly recommending her for her 
 "vitality." I found Madame de Gerardin's "La 
 Femme qui Deteste Son Mari" one of the cleverest 
 plays I had yet read. I have not seen it since; but, 
 outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed to 
 me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and 
 the human interest and the suspense were so ad- 
 mirably kept up. There were some plays by 
 Octave Feuillet — "Redemption" was one and "Le 
 Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre," which di- 
 vided my admiration with the management of 
 "Adrienne Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Made- 
 moiselle de la Seigliere," by Jules Sandeau. The 
 French playwrights of to-day have not even the 
 technique of their predecessors. 
 
78 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated 
 partisan of the Comte de Chambord — Henry V., 
 as a few of us preferred to call him. And this re- 
 minds me of my partisanship in things English — if 
 I may turn for the moment from things French — 
 and of a little incident not without humour. I 
 was ardently devoted to the cause of the Stuarts, 
 and was for a time attached to the White Rose So- 
 ciety, whose correspondents in England invariably 
 sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside 
 down, to indicate their contempt for the Guelf 
 dynasty. But when, at a small and frugal re- 
 union at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, 
 our host — ^he was an American Walsh of the family 
 of de Serrant — ^insisted on waving his glass of beer 
 over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were 
 drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water 
 — ^whoever he might be — ^and another member sug- 
 gested that, if it were not for the brutal Hano- 
 verians on the throne of England, we, in the British 
 Colonies, might be still enjoying the blessedness of 
 being ruled by a descendant of Mary Stuart, I 
 resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the di- 
 vine Mary of Scotland; but I would not have her 
 mixed up in American politics! 
 
POETS AND POETRY 79 
 
 Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. 
 Some of his people were not above reproach — 
 notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes 
 suddenly converted to a belief in God because her 
 twenty-fifth lover is suddenly restored to her. I 
 thought that, though he was somewhat corrupted 
 by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially 
 so admirably correct. 
 
 Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This 
 went by me as an idle dream, for I could never 
 understand why anybody should take a man 
 seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when 
 Renan's "Life of Jesus" seems ahnost forgotten, it 
 is strange to recall the fury of interest it excited in 
 the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much 
 more than Renan, whom I avoided deliberately be- 
 cause I understood that he had attacked the 
 Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les 
 Odeurs de Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" de- 
 lighted me almost beyond boimds. I did often 
 wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot 
 could have acquired such un-Christian use of 
 language. When he announced that if his wife 
 wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesi- 
 tate to recognize her children, it seemed to me that 
 
80 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 he had gone too far — still it was a pleasant thing to 
 shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting these 
 trenchant words when the novels of the lady in 
 question were mentioned with rapt admiration. 
 
 But to come to the poets ! 
 
 It was, I think, through the reading of the 
 "Limdis" of Sainte-Beuve that I discovered 
 Maurice de Guerin. He almost drove my beloved 
 Keats from my mind. Somebody warned me 
 against Maurice de Guerin on the ground of his 
 pantheism. I had been warned against the poems 
 of Emerson on account of their paganism; but as 
 I had been brought up on Virgil, I looked on pan- 
 theism and paganism as rather orthodox compared 
 to Renan's negation and the horrors of Calvinism. 
 And, after all, the Catholic Church had retained 
 so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was 
 sure to find myself ahnost as much at home among 
 the pagans as I was in the Old Testament at times. 
 
 Keats and Maurice de Guerin will be always 
 associated in my mind. I discovered them about 
 the same time. I had been solemnly told by an 
 eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the 
 only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare, 
 and that Keats had no intellectual value what- 
 
POETS AND POETRY 81 
 
 ever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. 
 I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific 
 jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and 
 the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which 
 was then aU the fashion; so I promptly devoted 
 myself to De Guerin. 
 
 I had already found great pleasure in the 
 "Journal" of his sister Eugenie. The "Journal" 
 ought never to be allowed to go out of fashion, and 
 probably it is only out of fashion in those circles 
 which Mr. Mencken so scorns, that devote them- 
 selves to imitations of Marie Bashkirtseff or Sarah 
 McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the 
 calm life of Eugenie at La Cayla when I found it 
 necessary, in order to understand the allusions, 
 to plunge again into the journals, letters, and 
 poems of Maurice de Guerin. Thus it happened 
 that I had fallen upon "Le Centaure" first. It 
 is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me 
 the most appealing poem I had ever read. 
 
 Keats's Greece seems somehow to be a Greece 
 too full of modern colour, too unclassical. This 
 was a mistake, of course, due to the fact that all 
 my Greek reading had been filtered through pro- 
 fessors and textbooks; and all my Greek seeing had 
 
82 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 been centred on pale white statues. It did not 
 occur to me then— at least I did not know it — ■ 
 that the great Greek statues were not colourless, 
 and that at Delphi there were statues that 
 glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, 
 though "Le Centaur e" seemed to me to be Greek 
 in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with human 
 emotion. "Who that has read it can forget the 
 simplicity of the opening? Says the Centaur: 
 
 I received my birth in the fastnesses of these mountains. 
 As the stream of this valley of which the primitive drops run 
 from the rocks which weep in a deep grotto, the first moment of 
 my life fell among the darkness of a secluded place in which 
 the silence was not troubled. When our mothers come 
 near the time of their deliverance, they flee towards the 
 caverns, and in the depth of the most remote, in the darkest 
 of shadows, their children are born without a moan and the 
 fruits of their womb are as silent as themselves. Their strong 
 milk enables us to overcome without weakness or a doubt- 
 ful struggle the first diflBculties of life; however, we go out 
 from our caves later than you from your cradles. It is 
 understood among us that we must hide and envelope the 
 first moments of existence as days filled by the gods. My 
 growth followed its course almost among the shadows where 
 I was born. The depth of my living place was so lost in 
 the shadow of the mountain that I would not have known 
 where the opening was if rushing sometimes into this open- 
 ing the winds had not passed about me certain movements 
 suddenly and refreshing breezes. Sometimes, too, my 
 
POETS AND POETRY 83 
 
 mother came back carrying the perfume of the valleys, or 
 dripping with the waves of the water she frequented. Now 
 these returns of hers gave me no knowledge of the valleys or 
 the stream, but their suggestions disquieted my spirit, and I 
 paced agitatedly in my shades. 
 
 After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the 
 writings of Eugenie de Guerin and her brother — I 
 inevitably think of this brother and sister together. 
 There always lingers about the genius of these two 
 delicate and sensitive beings a certain perfume of 
 the white lilac which Maurice loved. It happened 
 that through the amiability of my father, when I 
 read the Journals of the De Guerins, I had leisure. 
 A period of iU health stopped my work — ^I had 
 begun to study law — ^and there were long days 
 that could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount 
 Park in the early spring days, when it seems most 
 appropriate to associate one's self with these two 
 who ought to be read in the mood of the early 
 spring, and they ought to be read slowly and even 
 prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for quot- 
 ing a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 
 'seventies showing the impression that Maurice 
 de Guerin made. It was a great surprise to find 
 part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" 
 
84 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 of Walt "WBitman, who very rarely quoted any 
 verse. 
 
 The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes 
 
 Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair 
 
 Unseen by others; to him maidenhair 
 
 And waxen lilacs, and those birds that rise 
 
 A-sudden from tall reeds at slight surprise. 
 
 Brought charmed thoughts; and in earth everywhere 
 
 He, like sad Jacques, found a music rare 
 
 As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise. 
 
 A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he : 
 
 He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed. 
 
 Till earth and heaven met within his breast; 
 
 As if Theocritus in Sicily 
 
 Had come upon the Figure crucified 
 
 And lost his gods in deep, Christ given rest. 
 
 I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which 
 Hamerton had corroborated, in Eugenie de Gue- 
 rin's little sketches of outdoor scenery — sketches 
 which always have a human interest. I had not 
 yet begun to take any pleasure in Wordsworth; 
 and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be able to 
 enjoy nature for itseK — nature unrelieved or un- 
 improved by human figures — ^had no attractions for 
 me. And here the dear Edward Roth came in, and 
 confirmed my taste. And there were heavy argu- 
 ments with other clever Philadelphians, Doctor 
 
POETS AND POETRY 85 
 
 Nolan, the scientist who loved letters, and that 
 amateur of literature, Charles Devenny. 
 
 As for Pope and his school, they seemed to 
 represent an aspect of the world as unreal as the 
 world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but 
 pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of 
 Eugenie de Guerin had a living charm. At this 
 time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on 
 Maurice de Guerin, and I did not know that any 
 appreciation of his sister had been written in Eng- 
 lish. I had seen a paragraph or two written by 
 some third-rate person who objected to her piety 
 as sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "An- 
 glo-Saxon" world! That her piety should be 
 sentimental, if Eugenie's sentiment can be char- 
 acterized by that term, seemed to me to be ques- 
 tionable; and it was evident that any one who read 
 French literature at all must be aware that there 
 were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases 
 which the average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it 
 impossible to comprehend. 
 
 The beloved home of Eugenie, La Cayla, was not 
 a gay place. It was even more circumscribed than 
 Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugenie, being less 
 "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more 
 
86 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 sentiment and a more sensitive perception of the 
 meaning of nature — ^though, when it comes to 
 sentimentaHsm, the English man or woman, who 
 often masquerades under the shelter of "Anglo- 
 Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most senti- 
 mental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean 
 by the landscape charm of Eugenie de Guerin, and 
 yet the picture in this case is not a landscape, but 
 the interior of a room: 
 
 I was admiring just now a little landscape, presented by 
 my room, as it was being illuminated with the rising sun. 
 How pretty it was! Never did I see a more beautiful effect 
 of light on the paper, thrown through painted trees. It was 
 diaphanous, transparent. It was almost wasted on my 
 eyes; it ought to have been seen by a painter. And yet 
 does not God create the beautiful for everybody? All cur 
 birds were singing this morning while I was at my prayers. 
 This accompaniment pleases me, though it distracts me a 
 little. I stop to listen; then I begin again, thinking that the 
 birds and I are alike singing a hymn to God, and that, per- 
 haps, those little creatures sing better than I. But the 
 charm of prayer, the charm of communion with God, they 
 cannot enjoy that; one must have a soul to feel it. This 
 happiness that the birds have not is mine. It is sorrow. 
 How little time is needed for that. The joy comes from the 
 sun, the mild air, the song of birds, all delights to me; as 
 well as from a letter of Mimi's (who is now at Gaillac), in 
 which she tells me of Madame Vialar, who has seen thee, and 
 of other cheerful things. 
 
POETS AND POETRY 87 
 
 And again: 
 
 However, I had a delightful waking this morning. As 
 I was opening my eyes a lovely moon faced my window, 
 and shone into my bed, so brightly that at first I thought 
 it was a lamp suspended to my shutter. It was very sweet 
 and pretty to look at this white light, and so I contemplated, 
 admired, watched it till it hid itself behind the shutter to 
 peep out again, and then conceal itself like a child playing at 
 hide-and-seek. 
 
 Emerson tried to teach us that there can be in- 
 finite beauties in a httle space — ^untold joys within 
 a day — ^and he asks us to take short outlooks. 
 Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before 
 him in this; but Eugenie de Guerin exemplifies its 
 value much more than any other modern writer. 
 Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find 
 joy in the little happinesses of life. In our coun- 
 try, we are losing this faculty which the best of 
 the later New Englanders tried to recover. It 
 is a pity because it deprives us of the real joie de 
 vivre which is not dependent on ecstasies of rest- 
 less emotions or violent amusements. 
 
 The devotion of Eugenie de Guerin to her brother 
 resembles that of Madame de Sevigne for her 
 daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George Sand 
 who discovered the genius of that brother, though 
 
88 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 her characterization of the quahties of his genius 
 did not please the Christian soul of his sister. It 
 was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De Guerin's place 
 in French literature; and I recall now that the 
 reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems 
 of David Gray, now probably forgotten, and to go 
 back to Keats. 
 
 After Maurice de Guerin's "Le Centaure" I 
 found Keats even less Greek than I thought he 
 was, because he was less philosophical than De 
 Guerin, and because he did not concern himself 
 with the gravest questions of life; but, after all, 
 Keats is the poet for the poets! 
 
 My dear friend, Edward Roth — ^whom James 
 Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack" — ^named 
 Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser 
 is too hard to read — even harder than Chaucer, 
 and certainly more involved, while no poets that 
 ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full 
 of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, 
 it seemed absurd for the French poets of a cer- 
 tain genre to call themselves symbolists. When 
 Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because 
 he felt. It was not necessary for him to search 
 laboriously for the colour of a word. The thing 
 
POETS AND POETRY 89 
 
 itself coloured the word — ^and Keats, working hard 
 in a verbal laboratory, would have been an anom- 
 aly. It was not necessary for him to study care- 
 fully the music of his verse as Campion did or 
 Coventry Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is sup- 
 posed to have done — ^though one cannot have sus- 
 pected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory 
 was erected after his best verse had been written. 
 
 Maurice de Guerin, a very Christian soul, was 
 probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by 
 the defection of his old friend and director, Pere 
 de Lamennais — ^the "M. Feli" of the little para- 
 dise of la Chenie. To the delight of some of the 
 more independent and emancipated of the literary 
 circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Mau- 
 rice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. 
 He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an 
 altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost 
 equally adored, and this gave Eugenie great pain, 
 although it did not change her love or make a rift 
 in her belief in him. 
 
 De Guerin is a singing poet in a language which 
 is used by few singing poets for serious themes. 
 There are few lyric poems in French, like the 
 "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It 
 
90 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found 
 the verse of De Guerin somewhat too unusual. 
 Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine 
 reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all 
 the little turns of an intimate talk." Eugenie 
 complains that "it sings too much and does not 
 talk enough." However, one of the most charm- 
 ing of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's 
 seems almost "common," is that preceding Tre- 
 butien's "Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice 
 de Guerin." It would be folly for me to try to 
 permeate the mind of any other person with the 
 atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I 
 think of the first delight of reading at leisure the 
 poems of Maurice and the letters of Eugenie. I 
 might just as well attempt to make a young man of 
 om* time feel the thrill that came when we were 
 young and first heard the most beautiful of all 
 love songs — "Come into the Garden, Maud!" 
 
 One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior 
 giggles that would arise from a group of Green- 
 wich Villagers if they did me the honour to read 
 this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better 
 taste and is not so imitative — ^and paraphrases of 
 this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of 
 
POETS AND POETRY 91 
 
 the Luxembourg and on the heights of Mont- 
 martre. Tennyson, like De Guerin, had bent the 
 old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly 
 help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers 
 of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that 
 Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical 
 verse musical while discarding rime. Both Mau- 
 rice de Guerin and Tennyson, who have super- 
 ficial characteristics in common, send us back to 
 Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical, 
 the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who 
 wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to 
 all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this ! 
 — ^Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin, Keats, Madame 
 de Sevigne, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Eliza- 
 bethan Campion — ^and yet they are all related. 
 
 In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read 
 any good book that was not related intimately to 
 at least a score of other books. It is true that in 
 a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; 
 and we can only take much out of it when we ap- 
 proach the group of ministering authors who alone 
 make life both cheerful and endurable. 
 
 The received methods of "teaching" the clas- 
 sics in what people call "the dead languages" 
 
92 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, 
 while they may develop certain hidden abilities of 
 the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues 
 very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth 
 honestly believed that the Roman Empire had 
 risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin 
 language might live! The logical result of this 
 teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, 
 ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover 
 something about the Roman Empire, in order that 
 it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and 
 to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glori- 
 ous Empire had lived and died in order to pro- 
 duce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr. 
 Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, 
 managed to make the Romans interesting in 
 conversation; he always impressed one that the 
 Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, 
 which he admitted were full of colour and life, 
 were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and 
 aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to 
 describe them! 
 
 The impossibility of getting anything out of the 
 study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had 
 read Maurice de Guerin's "Centaure," to read 
 
POETS AND POETRY 93 
 
 joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in 
 French. While browsing I found on the shelves 
 of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourgueneff 
 in the same language. This delayed me a little. 
 I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the 
 Bohn Edition, which I think has now become 
 the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! 
 The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been dis- 
 covered, but some of the dialogues in these poems 
 contained all the best of their essences. My friends 
 among the hard workers at the "Classics" scorned 
 me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford who 
 gave us lessons three or four times a week and 
 held that, when we were able to translate at sight 
 a certain page of Greek which he had composed 
 himself from various great authors, that we were 
 perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no 
 difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to 
 saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian 
 poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to 
 Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the 
 original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly 
 from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too para- 
 phrastic. It is from the " Cyclops" : 
 
94 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Softer than Iambs and whiter than the curds, 
 
 Galatea, swan-nymph of the sea ! 
 
 Vain is my longing, worthless are my words; 
 Why do you come in night's sweet dreams to me. 
 And when I wake, swift leave me, as in fear 
 The lambkin hastens when a wolf is near? 
 
 Why did my mother on a dark-bright day 
 Bring you, for hyacinths, a-near my cave? 
 
 1 was the guide, and through the tangled way 
 I thoughtless led you; I am now your slave. 
 
 Peace left my soul when you knocked at my heart — 
 Come, Galatea, never to depart ! 
 
 Though I am dark and ugly to the sight — 
 
 A Cyclops I, and stronger there are few — 
 
 Of you I dream through all the quick-paced night. 
 
 And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you. 
 
 And four young bears : O rise from grots below. 
 
 Soft love and peace with me forever know ! 
 
 Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled, 
 Swam in the sea and saw you singing there: 
 I gave you lilies and your grotto filled 
 With the sweet odours of all flowers rare; 
 I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand. 
 And reddest poppies from my richest land. 
 
 Oh, brave the restless billows of your world : 
 They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove. 
 And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled 
 Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove 
 In vine-crowned ^tna, of pure-running rills ! 
 O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills! 
 
POETS AND POETRY 95 
 
 Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds, 
 
 O Galatea, listen to my prayer: 
 
 Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds; 
 
 Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair 
 
 As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep, 
 
 For you alone can bring her from the deep. 
 
 And Galatea, in her cool, green waves. 
 
 Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells, 
 
 And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves 
 
 And to the wind his love-lorn story tells : 
 
 For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long 
 
 Forget, as poets do, his pain in song. 
 
 No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, 
 even when interpreted in English prose, without 
 feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan 
 in life. His human nature is of the kind that 
 makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope 
 dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious 
 ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption 
 which a degenerate paganism condoned and pal- 
 liated, but we must remember, as an extenuation 
 of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi 
 protested against them. The cyprus plains of 
 Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada, 
 and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of 
 Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some 
 
96 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicihan poets 
 did not entice us to hear their echoes. 
 
 But to how many Unks of a long chain does 
 Maurice de Guerin lead us! Here is another link 
 — ^Jose de Heredia, and his jewelled and chiselled 
 soiuiets — ^the "Antique Medal" with its peerless 
 sestette, which combines the essential meanings of 
 Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn." 
 
 Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre meme s'use. 
 Argrigente n'est plus gu'une ombre, et Syracuse 
 Dort sous le bleu lineeul de son del indulgent; 
 
 Et seul le dur mStal que Varnour fit docile 
 Garde encore en sa fleur, aux mSdailles d' argent, 
 L'immortelle beaute des merges de Sidle." 
 
 A translation of which reads : 
 
 Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays; 
 
 A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse 
 
 Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades; 
 
 But the hard metal guards through all the days. 
 
 Silver grown docile unto love's own use. 
 
 The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids. 
 
 I always felt that Dante would have been less 
 devoted to Virgil had he known Theocritus. The 
 artificial Roman seems faded when one compares 
 his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the 
 first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus 
 
POETS AND POETRY 97 
 
 had more of the quaUty of Theocritus than of 
 Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good 
 guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was 
 a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart. 
 It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that 
 one reads Theocritus in English rather than in 
 Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic; 
 but, although my classical friends, or rather my 
 friends enrage of the "Classics," honestly despise 
 me for making this confession, I shamelessly en- 
 joy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even 
 using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text 
 rather than begin a course of Grecian philology 
 and to lose the perfimie of the crushed thyme or 
 the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub- 
 dotted prairie. 
 
 Dante 
 
 A constant reader is one who always returns to 
 his first loves. He may find them changed because 
 he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead 
 who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the 
 thrill of the famous tournament or to discover 
 whether Leather Stocking is the superman he 
 once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age. 
 
98 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 divided between two conflicting opinions. "There 
 is no leisure in this coimtry," I am told. "A great 
 change has taken place. The motor car has de- 
 stroyed the art of reading, and, as for the good old 
 books — ^nobody reads them any more." On the 
 other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they 
 read only frivolous books which follow one another 
 like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of 
 Mr. Child's restaurants." 
 
 Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In 
 the first place, the winter is the time for reading — 
 I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's "Winter 
 Hour" when I think of this — ^and the motor car, 
 especially in country places, does not function 
 violently in the winter time. Many journeys 
 from Boston, through New England, to the 
 Middle West have taught me that folk are reading 
 and discussing books more than ever. Whatever 
 may be said of the mass of American people, who 
 are probably learning slowly what national culture 
 means, there are at the top of this mass thousands 
 of Americans who love good books, who possess 
 good books, and who return each year to the loves 
 of their youth. 
 
 The celebration of the sixth centenary of the 
 
POETS AND POETRY 99 
 
 death of Dante Alighieri proves this. It is true 
 enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more 
 talked about in English-speaking countries than 
 read, and when the enthusiasm awakened in honour 
 of the great Florentine reached its height, there were 
 found many people in our country who were quite 
 capable of asking why Dante should be read. 
 
 Looking back I found it easy to answer this 
 question myself,, for, perhaps, beginning with a 
 little gentle aversion to the English rimed trans- 
 lations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for 
 Dante has been a slow growth. The Dante 
 specialists discourage us with their learning. There 
 are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly ex- 
 pose the foundations of the educations of Dante 
 to us without frightening us by the sight of a wall 
 of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot 
 approach Dante in order to begin an education 
 in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which 
 one never began in one's own time; but to be con- 
 soled by Dante it is not necessary to be erudite. 
 In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual enlighten- 
 ment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the con- 
 jectures of the erudite, are frequently wrong. 
 Even Israel Gollancz, in his three valuable volumes 
 
100 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes occa- 
 sionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the 
 reading of the "Divine Comedy" nothing can be 
 better than this Temple Edition, which contains the 
 Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into 
 English on the next. As I grew older I grew more 
 and more enamoured of Longfellow's Dantean Son- 
 nets, but not of his translation, for all rime trans- 
 lations must be one half, at least, the author and 
 the other haK the translator. GoUancz is best for 
 anybody who does not enjoy poetic tours de force. 
 
 In his note on the most popular lines in the 
 "Divine Comedy," 
 
 Nessun maggior dolors, 
 die ricordarsi del tempo felice 
 nella miseria; 
 
 GoUancz says: 
 
 Although these words are translated literally from Boe- 
 thius, and although we know that Dante had made a special 
 study of Boethius, yet we cannot well identify the dottore 
 with this philosopher : for how can we be expected to assume 
 that Francesca was acquainted with these two facts? The 
 reference is probably to Virgil, and to his position in Limbo. 
 
 Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two 
 years after Virgil's death and drew certain souls 
 
POETS AND POETRY 101 
 
 up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no 
 means certain that Virgil was happier on earth 
 than he was "upon the green enamel" {verde 
 smalto) in this place of quiet leisure which was 
 the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, 
 to some chosen souls, had already been a vestibule 
 to the Palace of the Beatific Vision. If Dante 
 had been translated in the old days of rigid Cal- 
 vinism in Scotland and New England, his toler- 
 ance of the pagans who found parts of Hell not 
 entirely imcomfortable would have caused him 
 to be looked on as a corruptor of the faith. But 
 what would they have said to the "Paradiso" 
 which I have always found more full of consolation 
 than any sermon that was ever preached.? Let us 
 take the description of the Church Triumphant in 
 Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of 
 the heresy that all children unbaptized by material 
 water are doomed: 
 
 Dunque, senza merce di lor costume, 
 locati son per gradi differenti, 
 sol differendo nel primiero acume. 
 
 Bastava si nei secoli recenti 
 con I'innocenza, 'per aver salute, 
 solamente la fede del parenti; 
 
102 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 poiche le prime etadi fur compiute, 
 
 convenne ■ ai maschi aW innocenti penne, 
 per circoncidere, acquistar virtute. 
 
 Ma poichee il tempo delta grazia venne, 
 senza hattesmo perfetto di Crista, 
 tale innocenza laggiu si ritenne. 
 
 And then remembering the innocence of the 
 httle children Dante turns to that face "which is 
 most hkest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the 
 Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all 
 children. If the strict Calvinists had known the 
 "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their 
 Old Testament, their theology might have found 
 more adherence among the merciful, for the "Para- 
 diso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and 
 of the final triumph of every soul that has sin- 
 cerely hoped in, or sought, the truth, even if the 
 truth were not crowned in its fullness in this world. 
 
 And Dante, put by Raphael without protest 
 from the Church Militant, among the Doctors 
 of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and 
 opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, 
 the falsity of the Voltairean mauvais mot, that all 
 the people worth meeting are in Hell ! And Dante 
 sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks 
 
POETS AND POETRY 103 
 
 that this Emperor's donation of territory was an 
 evil gift. Dante, who, by the way, was nearer to 
 the old records and this tradition of the older time, 
 is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that 
 the documents of Constantine's donation were 
 mediaeval forgeries. Dante believed, however, 
 that the donation was invalid, because the suc- 
 cessor of St. Peter, being of the spirit, could not 
 accept temporal power. This he asserts in his 
 "De Monarchia," which was for a time on the 
 "Index." Times have changed, and "De Mon- 
 archia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are no 
 longer in the "Index," though Balzac and Dumas, 
 in French, are. But many of the Faithful in the 
 United States console themselves by assuming that, 
 as in the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Sci- 
 ence," this the method of the Sacred Congregation 
 is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book, 
 suppressed in Italian, received the proper "im- 
 primatur" in English! So may "The Three Mus- 
 keteers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as 
 coming under the ban in the original, but as tol- 
 erated in the translation? 
 
 Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made 
 no rift in his creed, nor does it seem to have made 
 
104 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 him less respected by the Roman Court. There 
 is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the 
 poet's faith — ' 
 
 Cosi spirb di quell' amore acceso; 
 
 indi soggiunse: "Assai bene e trascorsa 
 
 d'esta moneta gia la lega e il peso; 
 ma dimmi se tu V hai nella tua borsa." 
 
 ed' io: "Si, I'ho, si lucida e si tonda, 
 
 die nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa." 
 
 Afpresso usci della luce profonda, 
 
 che li splendeva; " Questa cara gioia, 
 
 sopra la quale ogni virtu si fonda, 
 onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia 
 
 dello Spirito Santo, ch' e diffusa 
 
 in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia, 
 
 E sillogisTno, che la mia ha conchiusa 
 acutamente si, che in verso d' ella 
 ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa." 
 
 If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to 
 other books, so much the better. Aristotle is 
 worth whUe; he holds the germ of what is best in 
 modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, 
 with new harmonies added the Wagner to Aris- 
 totle's Mozart. No — ^that is going too far! — 
 the musical comparison fails. "If thou should'st 
 never see my face again, pray for my soul," is 
 
POETS AND POETRY 105 
 
 King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of Pope 
 Gregory that saved Trajan. 
 
 When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the 
 "Paradiso" too neglected, we find much that il- 
 luminates our minds and touches our hearts. The 
 "Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is 
 certainly very hiunan. For instance, there is the 
 case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti. 
 Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his ad- 
 dress is hardly tactful. He is evidently surprised 
 to find that Niao is not in HeU, 
 
 When he came near to me I said to him; 
 gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well 
 that I have seen thee here and not in Hell. 
 
 Nino begs that his innocent daughter, Giovanna, 
 may be asked by Dante, on his return to earth, to 
 pray for him. He is not pleased that his widow 
 should desire to marry 
 
 the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield. 
 
 He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as 
 she has discarded her "white wimples," which, 
 if she marries this inferior person, she may long for 
 once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a 
 
106 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one 
 may mightily well 
 
 know how short a time love may last In woman, if the eye 
 and the touch do not keep It alive. 
 
 One must admit that there is an element of 
 hiunour — ^not for the victim — ^in the "Inferno," 
 when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell 
 three and a half years before he died! Nicholas 
 III., whom Dante thought guilty of the unpardon- 
 able sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he 
 says, 
 
 E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta 
 la riverenza delle somme chiavi, 
 die tu tenesti nella vita lieta 
 r userei 'parole ancor piii gravi — 
 
 But for consolation, there is no great poem so 
 good as the "Paradiso." 
 
 English and American Verse 
 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled 
 the youths of his generation were when the new 
 poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It is 
 difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. 
 There is no great reigning poet to-day; there are 
 
POETS AND POETRY 107 
 
 great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as 
 crown princes by the groups that gather about 
 them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good 
 sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry 
 is a good sign. Teimyson's "Dream of Fair 
 Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the 
 old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott," with its 
 pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of 
 commonplace into something very beautiful, was 
 new. 
 
 We who succeeded Stedman by some years 
 loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were 
 not especially struck by those mediaeval lay figures 
 which he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Gala- 
 had" and "Sir Percival." They were too much 
 like what the English people at that time insisted 
 that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot 
 would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the 
 fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of 
 Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now 
 as it was then. It is the desire for " independence," 
 the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that 
 calls itself audacity, which brushes away the 
 delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply 
 because he does not represent a Movement. And 
 
108 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 yet all these new movements are very old move- 
 ments. The result of the education given me by 
 books was to convince me that the man of culture 
 proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any 
 literary expression as really new and if he cannot 
 enjoy the old, when the old is of all time. The 
 beautiful and the real can never be old or new be- 
 cause they are the same through the movement of 
 time. To explain what I mean, let me come sud- 
 denly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir 
 Arthur Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." 
 He is writing of the Bible, which is never old : 
 
 I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a 
 boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way 
 is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he 
 might through "The Arabian Nights": to let him take the 
 books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that 
 Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth 
 a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern 
 love-poem. Well, and what then? He will certainly get 
 less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly 
 more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole 
 splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham 
 and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the 
 figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and 
 Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; 
 Saul — ^great Saul — by the tent -prop with the jewels in his 
 turban : 
 
POETS AND POETRY 109 
 
 "All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at 
 heart." 
 
 Or consider — to choose one or two pictures out of the tre- 
 mendous procession — consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: 
 how first she is given in marriage to David to be a snare for 
 him; how, loving him, she saves his life, letting him down 
 from the window and dressing up an image on the bed in 
 his place; how, later, she is handed over to another husband 
 Phaltiel, how David demands her back, and she goes: 
 
 "And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping 
 behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, 
 retiu-n. And he returned." 
 
 Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter 
 as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her 
 affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy 
 countenance, so prone to weep in his bed: 
 
 "And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, 
 Michal, Saul's daughter" — 
 
 Mark the three words — 
 
 "Michal, Saul's daughter looked through a window, and 
 saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and 
 she despised him in her heart." 
 
 Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. 
 Maxwell, who are rapidly becoming too old- 
 fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs. 
 Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in 
 sympathy with what they might conceive to be 
 the trend of present emotion; for it is with the emo- 
 tions and not with the mind or the will that the 
 
no CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 novelist of the day before yesterday mostly deals. 
 If Mr. James Huneker had translated this into 
 the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with 
 minutely carved jewels, glowed with a perfume 
 and colour of crushed roses, and choked the reader 
 with the odour of musk. But could he have made 
 it any "newer"? Or if he could have made it 
 "newer," could he have made it more splendid 
 and appealing? 
 
 The old is new, and the new is old in art and 
 literature — ^in life itself, and the man who scorned 
 Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti were new; 
 or who scorns Browning — ^the best of Browning — 
 lacks the first requisite of true cultivation which 
 is founded on the truth that beauty is beyond the 
 touch of time. The women in Frangois Villon's 
 "Ballade of Dead Ladies" are gone, but their 
 beauty remains in that song. This beauty might 
 be none the less beautiful if expressed in vers libre; 
 its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. 
 The fact only that it was of our time and treated 
 in the manner of our time, could not give it that 
 essential and divine something which is perennial, 
 universal, and perhaps eternal. 
 
 Much affectionate reading of poetry — and poetry 
 
POETS AND POETRY 111 
 
 read in any other way is like the craekhng of small 
 sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day — 
 leads one to consider the structure of verse and to 
 ask how singing effects are best produced. This 
 inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger 
 poets to throw aside the older conventions, and, 
 imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even 
 newer composers, to produce that "free verse" 
 which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or 
 the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is ex- 
 asperating to the intolerant to find writers, young 
 in experience if not always young in age, talking of 
 themselves as discoverers — ^brave or audacious dis- 
 coverers — ^as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or 
 Cortez, or Ponce de Leon; and then, to hear some 
 of the old and conventional violently attacking 
 these verse makers as if they were new and dan- 
 gerous revolutionists. 
 
 The truth is that vers litre has its place, and it 
 ought to have a high place; but the writer who at- 
 tempts it must have a very perfect ear for the 
 nuances of music and great art in his technique 
 applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples 
 of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few. 
 Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or 
 
112 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 not, she has the fine art of producing musical 
 effects, deUcate and various and even splendid. 
 But there are others! 
 
 It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or 
 Campion that led me to read Coventry Patmore. 
 I know that it was not his "The Angel in the 
 House" which led me on. That seemed as little 
 interesting or important as the proverbial sayings 
 of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found 
 "The Unknown Eros" and a little later "The 
 Toys," and then his "Night and Sleep," one of the 
 most musical poems in our language. 
 
 How strange at night the bay 
 Of dogs, how wild the note 
 Of cocks that scream for day. 
 In homesteads far remote; 
 How strange and wild to hear 
 The old and crumbling tower, 
 Amid the darkness, suddenly 
 Take tongue and speak the hour! 
 
 Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not 
 dependent upon the rime, it is plain — as the form 
 of poetry appeals to the ear — ^that the rime is a 
 gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and 
 seventh lines of each stanza. The real musical 
 
POETS AND POETRY 113 
 
 charm of the poem — only one stanza, of four, is 
 given here — ^lies in the management of the rhythm. 
 
 We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in 
 the seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest 
 and most mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all 
 English, the common eight-syllable quatrain, 
 
 says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on Enghsh Met- 
 rical Law," 
 
 a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and 
 continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on 
 account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity 
 of movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable 
 verse as acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being 
 catalectic on at least one syllable, implying a final pause of 
 corresponding duration. 
 
 Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this 
 lovely "Night and Sleep" is merely accessory, a 
 lightly played accompaniment to a song which 
 would be as beautiful a song without it, yet which 
 gains a certain accent through this accompani- 
 ment; and that the real questions in verse are of 
 rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even 
 in the use of sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, 
 often proves the merely accessory value of rime, 
 but in no instance more fully than in 
 
114 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean. 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes. 
 In looking on the happy autimin fields. 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 There is every reason why the modern reader 
 should have become tired of academic poetry. 
 When poetry divorced itself from music and be- 
 came the slave of fixed rules of metre which could 
 not be imitated with any real success in English, 
 it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the 
 hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed 
 the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, 
 and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather de- 
 spised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms. 
 
 The truth that poetry was primarily written to 
 be sung is forgotten, and even in France the chant 
 of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah 
 Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous reci- 
 tation. For myself, I tried to get to the root of the 
 matter by reading Thomas Campion — Charles 
 Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs, 
 masks, etc., edited by A. H. BuUen — ^as an anti- 
 dote to Walt Whitman. In fact, my acquaintance 
 with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his 
 
POETS AND POETRY 115 
 
 use of what is to-day called vers libre resembled 
 somewhat Carlyle's Teutonic contortions of style. 
 It was impossible to get from the "Good Gray 
 Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that 
 he looked on rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick- 
 step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a hurried dash, or 
 a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on 
 the action of the heart, the acceleration of the 
 pulse, or the movement of the thought. 
 
 But no one who knows the best in Walt Whit- 
 man's poems can fail to perceive that there were 
 times when he understood thoroughly that poetry, 
 expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a 
 great pity that some of our newer poets do not 
 understand this. In their revolt from the outworn 
 academic rules, they have gone the length of the 
 most advanced Cubists, and do not realize that 
 no amount of splendid visualization compensates 
 for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melo- 
 dies. It is unfortunate, too, that the imitators of 
 Amy Lowell, many of whom have neither her feel- 
 ing for colour, her great power of concentration, 
 nor her naturally good ear, should imagine that 
 vers libre means the throwing together of words in 
 chaos. Even Strauss' s "Electra" is founded on 
 
116 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 carefully considered rules; his discords are not 
 accidents. 
 
 It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's 
 "Science of English Verse" would suppress the art 
 of expression, even in a genius. By the time he 
 learned how to write verse he would be too old to 
 write verse at aU! There are less intricate books. 
 I learned from the theories and the odes of Cov- 
 entry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art 
 of English Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his 
 practice that the best vers libra has freedom, 
 unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an appar- 
 ently imstudied charm, because the poet had 
 striven, not to sing as a bird sings, without art, 
 but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in 
 the opera sings, because he had acquired his 
 method of almost perfect expression through 
 science and art. And, if one wants an example 
 of the intangible "something," expressed artistic- 
 ally, why not take Benet's "Immoral Ballad".'' 
 A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, in- 
 capable of being analyzed by any rules known to 
 the pundits. But it is not vers libre. If it were, 
 its intangible appeal would not exist. 
 
 Nearly every versifier who disregards those 
 
POETS AND POETRY 117 
 
 models of form in verse which include rime, or 
 whose cadences are informal, is set down as an 
 imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, 
 Walt Whitman seemed to have been established 
 as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose 
 indecencies were his principal stock in trade. 
 Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had 
 its effect, and the very respectable — ^that is, gentle- 
 men of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church 
 in New York of his time — ^looked on him with 
 horror. He had, it seems, attacked established 
 religion when he made his onslaught in the Brook- 
 lyn Eagle on that eminently important body. 
 
 The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had 
 been broken by the time that I had begun to read 
 poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the 
 curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt 
 Whitman just as I accepted the musical Wagner. 
 At that time we had not yet learned to know that 
 Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet 
 discovered that "Lohengrin," for instance, was 
 woven of many melodies, for they were not de- 
 tached and made into arias. What could be ex- 
 pected of young persons brought up on "The 
 Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"? 
 
118 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 And yet we soon found out without any help 
 from the critics that Walt Whitman was essentially 
 a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had 
 been deliberately adopted as the best possible 
 form in which to clothe ideas which were not con- 
 ventional, and to attract attention. Most of the 
 young at that time thought that he had as much 
 right to do this as Browning had to be wilfully 
 inarticulate. The critics did not concern us much. 
 There was always a little coterie of students at the 
 University of Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, 
 or young men under the influence of Mr. Edward 
 Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was 
 a brilliant Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur 
 Henry, who died young; Daniel Dawson, whose 
 "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He 
 was a devout Whitmanite. Much younger was 
 Harrison Morris, whose opinions, carrying great 
 weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have 
 said. Whitman neither startled nor shocked us 
 nor did he cause us to imitate him. At this time, 
 I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not 
 easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight 
 help from the dictionary, were entrancing! I 
 could never understand, being enraptured with 
 
POETS AND POETRY 119 
 
 Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should 
 have chosen such a poor medium for lyrical ex- 
 pression or such a rude utterance for some noble 
 ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech 
 sensual dreams or passing shadows of evil thoughts 
 astonished us no more than the existence of the 
 photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of 
 the gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, 
 or the strajige and very improper representa- 
 tions of the Seven Deadly Sins which were some- 
 times carved on the backs and the undersides 
 of the stalls in old cathedrals. We Philadelphians 
 thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance. 
 There were persons who wallowed in pools of de- 
 civilization, and, though they might whisper of 
 their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there 
 was no point whatever in putting them into print. 
 But the great passages — there are very many — 
 and the noble complete poems — ^there are a few — 
 of Whitman were chosen and recited and en- 
 joyed. 
 
 Besides, Whitman lived just across the Dela- 
 ware River, and one could meet him almost at any 
 time in a street car or lounging about his haunts in 
 Camden, As he was part of our everyday life he 
 
120 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 did not for us represent anything essentially new. 
 When Swinburne and Rossetti and the Preraphael- 
 ites, however, came into our possession, it was 
 quite another thing! There was no Whitman 
 movement among our young. There was a marked, 
 but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphael- 
 ites. 
 
 Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did 
 not mean that a young man had a depraved mind 
 because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse 
 after verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. 
 It simply meant that a breath of rich, sensuous 
 odours from an exotic island had swept across the 
 conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens 
 of his life. I wonder if any young man feels to- 
 day, in reading Masefield's poems, or Walter de la 
 Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert 
 Frost's, or even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that 
 stirred us when we heard the choruses in " Atalanta 
 in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? 
 And there was William Morris and "The Earthly 
 Paradise!" 
 
 The first appearance of Kipling's poems re- 
 called the old thrills of "new" poets, but of late, 
 though the prospects of poetry are beginning to 
 
POETS AND POETRY 121 
 
 revive, no very modern poet seems to have become 
 a part of the daily Uves of the young, who de- 
 clare that the world is changed, and that the Old 
 hold no torches for them by which they can dis- 
 cover what they really want! The more things 
 change, the more they remain the same! And 
 the young woman who read Swinburne surrepti- 
 tiously and smoked a cigarette in private now 
 reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs 
 at a cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. 
 She is really no more advanced than the girl of 
 the period of the eighties, and not any more as- 
 tonishing. It's the same old girl ! And the young 
 men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and 
 who were rather bored by the thinness of their 
 aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more 
 colour and amazement and delight out of the 
 flashing of the meteors than the youth of to-day 
 seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blase 
 and cynical and bored with life; but nobody was 
 really bored because there were too many amusing 
 and delightful things in the world — ^as there are 
 now. 
 
 Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and 
 burning Southern lights and his intensities and his 
 
122 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 simulated passion, did not last long. In England 
 he was looked on as a typical American poet, more 
 decent than Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with 
 the charm Whitman had for the English — ^that no 
 Englishman could ever be like him! In England 
 they wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with 
 a savage flavour about them. 
 
 I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of 
 Edith Thomas, of Robert Underwood Johnson — 
 whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter 
 Hour" can never be forgotten — ^and certain verses 
 of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But les jeunes 
 prefer the new verse makers. There is even a 
 kind of cult for the Imagists. A spokesman for 
 the Imagists tells us briefly that "free verse" is a 
 term that may be attached to all that increasing 
 amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, 
 more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, 
 but which is not so violently or so obviously ac- 
 cented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard 
 Aldington's "Childhood" is a very typical ex- 
 ample of vers libre. It is also an Imagist poem. 
 It will be remarked that it is so free that there is 
 no cadence that any musician could find. It is a 
 pretty little joyful trifle! 
 
POETS AND POETRY 12S 
 
 There was nothing to see. 
 
 Nothing to do, 
 
 Nothing to play with. 
 
 Except that in an empty room upstairs 
 
 There was a large tin box 
 
 Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta, 
 
 Of the Declaration of Independence, 
 
 And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada; 
 
 There were also several packets of stamps. 
 
 Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots, 
 
 Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak, 
 
 Indians and Men-of-war 
 
 From the United States, 
 
 And the green and red portraits 
 
 Of King Francobollo 
 
 Of Italy. 
 
 I don't believe in God 
 
 I do believe in avenging gods 
 
 Who plague us for sins we never sinned 
 
 But who avenge us. 
 
 That's why I'll never have a child. 
 
 Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box 
 
 For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours. 
 
 Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall. 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only 
 sometimes musical, but he hammers in his images 
 with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans, 
 Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly 
 heard banjo accompaniment, are the most fasci- 
 nating and least tiresome of all the New, 
 
124 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 When one has wallowed for a time with the 
 Imagists and carefully examined the vers librists, 
 with the aid of a catalogue and explanations, one 
 turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la 
 Mare. Come, now! Listen to this: 
 
 When slim Sophia mounts her horse 
 And paces down the avenue. 
 
 It seems an inward melody 
 She paces to. 
 
 Each narrow hoof is lifted high 
 
 Beneath the dark enclustering pines, 
 
 A silver ray within his bit 
 And bridle shines. 
 
 His eye burns deep, his tail is arched. 
 And streams upon the shadowy air. 
 
 The daylight sleeks his jetty flanks. 
 His mistress' hair. 
 
 Her habit flows in darkness down. 
 Upon the stirrup rests her foot. 
 
 Her brow is lifted, as if earth 
 She heeded not. 
 
 'Tis silent in the avenue. 
 
 The sombre pines are mute of song. 
 The blue is dark, there moves no breeze 
 
 The boughs among. 
 
POETS AND POETRY 125 
 
 When slim Sophia mounts her horse 
 
 And paces down the avenue, 
 It seems an inward melody 
 
 She paces to. 
 
 It is difBcult for the simple minded to understand 
 why Walter de la Mare, who is a singer with 
 something to sing about, cannot be classed as an 
 Imagist. He uses the language of common speech 
 and tries always to say exactly what he means; he 
 suits his mood to his rhythm, and his cadences to 
 his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic 
 value of modern life; but he does not seem to see 
 why he should not write about an old-fashioned 
 aeroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the 
 centre of something interesting. 
 
 The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry 
 that is hard and clear and never blurred or in- 
 definite, and he holds that concentration is the 
 very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for 
 "free verse" as for the principle of liberty. But 
 why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical, if 
 it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in 
 terms that appeal to the mind or the heart or the 
 imagination, why should it be necessary to fight 
 for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make 
 
126 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 men of straw in order "to fight" for them; but all 
 the world loves a poet, if the poet once touches 
 its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a 
 good example of what "free verse" ought to be. 
 But it is not free because it is lawless; its freedom 
 is the freedom of all true art which does not ignore, 
 which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern 
 the expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Alding- 
 ton's "Daisy" is certainly a less appealing poem 
 than that one in which Swinburne sings of the lady 
 who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name! 
 
 Jose de Heredia, in "Les Trophees," is both an 
 Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration 
 and the science of the Sibyl without her contor- 
 tions. It is unfortunate that the truculent atti- 
 tude of the professional makers of "free verse" 
 should have arrayed a small and angry group 
 against them; and this group will have none of 
 Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of 
 great courage and originality. There are others, 
 however, who may not be imitators of Robert 
 Frost, but who seem as if they were. Tennyson's 
 "Owl," which is looked on to-day as an example of 
 Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. 
 Eliot's "Cousin Nancy": 
 
POETS AND POETRY 127 
 
 Miss Nancy Elllcott 
 
 Strode across the hills and broke them. 
 
 Rode across the hills and broke them — 
 
 The barren New England hills — 
 
 Riding to hounds 
 
 Over the cow-pasture. 
 
 Miss Nancy Ellieott smoked 
 
 And danced all the modern dances; 
 
 And her aunts were not quite sure ■how they felt about it. 
 
 But they knew that it was modern. 
 
 Upon the glazen shelves kept watch 
 Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, 
 The army of unalterable law. 
 
 The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and 
 this glimpse of character might be uttered in one 
 sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to orna- 
 mentation might have made the poem at least dec- 
 orative. After all, when one has emerged from the 
 rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist, 
 and the vers lihrist, one swims into the splendours 
 of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge 
 from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees, 
 in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a 
 series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful de- 
 scent from the heaven of Crashaw and the places 
 of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by 
 Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington. 
 
128 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and 
 his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me 
 that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to de- 
 cide on the position of a poet among poets, or of 
 a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak 
 modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the 
 taste of the man who thinks that Browning and 
 Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all 
 the modern English poets, deserve to be classed 
 indiscriminately together as "inspiring." And I 
 caimot even scorn the man who declares that Ten- 
 nyson is demode because his heroines are in crino- 
 line and conventional, and his mediaeval knights 
 cut out of pasteboard. 
 
 By comparison with the original of the "Idylls 
 of the King" this statement seems to be true. 
 Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies — ^by 
 modern standards they would hardly be called 
 "ladies" — do not bear the test of even the most 
 elemental demands of modern taste. They are as 
 different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's 
 " Hamblet " are from those in Shakespeare's " Ham- 
 let." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the 
 "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite 
 lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, 
 
POETS AND POETRY 129 
 
 and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory 
 with delight. When I hear raptures over Brown- 
 ing and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic 
 over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and 
 others new — chacun a son gout — ^I feel that by 
 comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets 
 are not rich. They are poor because they seem to 
 leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians. 
 
 Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because 
 he could not escape the shadow of the Crucifixion. 
 Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew 
 neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy 
 of the Resurrection. Keats was a lover of Greece, 
 was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful, sensuously 
 charming; but Keats could no more be a real 
 Greek than Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," 
 could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor 
 Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphael- 
 ites be really out of their time, for they could not 
 understand the essentially religious qualities of 
 the times into which they tried to project them- 
 selves. 
 
 If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with 
 those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily 
 see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the 
 
130 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 originals; they are not even paraphrases — ^to turn 
 again from painting to literature. They are fine 
 in themselves, and the critics of the future, more 
 reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will 
 give them their true place. As for Browning, it is 
 only necessary to read the Italian writers of the 
 Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his 
 poems that touch on that period. He is always 
 modern. With all his efforts he cannot under- 
 stand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism 
 which made the Renascence possible. He seems 
 to assimie that the Catholic Church in the time of 
 the Renascence produced men in whom paganism 
 struggled with Christianity. The fact is that 
 paganism had melted into Christianity and Christi- 
 anity had given it a new light and a new form. 
 It was not difficult for an artist of the Renas- 
 cence to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan 
 or Danae and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of 
 gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was 
 nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a 
 pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin. 
 It does not follow that Browning is not power- 
 fully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when 
 he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life 
 
POETS AND POETRY 131 
 
 of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, 
 as almost all modern poets, when they interpret 
 the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may 
 look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson, 
 with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that very 
 often they mistake the beating of their own hearts 
 for the sound of the pulsations of the hearts of 
 others. 
 
 Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be 
 orthodox are sometimes shocked when they are 
 told that Saint Peter, for example, did not believe 
 that a man might not be both circumcised and 
 baptized. According to a common belief, the two 
 could not exist together among the converted 
 Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to 
 think that paganism and Christianity were at 
 odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the 
 manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, 
 would dissipate an illusion which spoils so much 
 fine modern poetry. 
 
 Another point, in applying my canons of criti- 
 cism to poets whom I love in spite of this defect, 
 is that I find that they have no desire to be united 
 with God — ^you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or 
 Lord, to quote Pope. They are, as a rule, without 
 
132 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 mysticism and constantly without that ecstasy 
 which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest 
 of all the mystical poets writing in English, Francis 
 Thompson, so satisfactory. 
 
 Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as 
 Emerson certainly was, but in different ways they 
 made their search for the Absolute, and the search, 
 especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. 
 Neither had the splendours, the ecstasies of that 
 love that casteth out fear, the almost fierce and 
 violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apoca- 
 lypse of Saint John and the poems of Saint Teresa 
 and of Saint John of the Cross, which we find in 
 Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern 
 poets pale before him. He sees life as a glory as 
 Baudelaire saw it as a corpse. After a reading of 
 "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious colour, 
 its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to 
 me to be a pale mauve by comparison to its, flaming 
 gold and crimson. 
 
 To many of my friends who love modern poets 
 each in his degree, this seems unreasonable and 
 even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real; 
 and all literature which assumes to treat our lives 
 as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satis- 
 
POETS AND POETRY 133 
 
 factory quality which one finds in Dante, in Cal- 
 deron, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It 
 is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern 
 poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is 
 a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion 
 when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. 
 This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times 
 and joyous at times, but if their philosophers rep- 
 resent them, joyousness and gaiety were not es- 
 sential points of their lives. 
 
 The highest cultivation of its time could not 
 save Athens from despondency and destruction, 
 and when the leaders in the city of Rome came to 
 believe so little in life that only the proletariat had 
 children, it was evident that their very tolerant 
 system of adopting any god that pleased them did 
 not add to the joy of life. The poet, then, who 
 misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who 
 does not desire to be united to an absolute Per- 
 fection, who is sad by profession, cannot be, ac- 
 cording to my canons, a true poet. I speak, not as 
 a critic, but as a man who loves only the poetry 
 that appeals to him. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Certain Novelists 
 
 My friendship with Thackeray and Dickens 
 was an evolution rather than a discovery. Once 
 having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas 
 Nickleby," the book became not so much a book 
 but a state of mind — and, as is sometimes felt 
 about a friends-it is hard to remember a time 
 when we did not know him ! 
 
 Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping 
 Frog of Calavaras" and that chuckling scene in 
 "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian 
 guide introduces Christopher Columbus to the 
 American travellers, were joys indeed. These were 
 more delightful and satisfying than the kind of 
 humour that preceded them — ^they seemed better 
 than the whimsicalities of Artemus Ward, and not 
 to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs. 
 Partington. But, leaving out these amusing pas- 
 sages, my pleasure in the works of Mark Twain 
 faded more and more as I came to the age of rea- 
 
 134 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 135 
 
 son, which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was 
 hard to laugh at Mark after a time. Compared 
 to him, the "Pickwick Papers" had an infinite 
 variety. There were other things in Dickens 
 which were finer than anything in "Pickwick," 
 but the htmiour of Pickwick had a softness about 
 it, a human interest, a lack of coarseness, which 
 placed it immeasurably above that of Mark Twain. 
 
 The greatest failure of Dickens was "A Tale 
 of Two Cities." And the greatest failure of Mark 
 Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens re- 
 deemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark 
 Twain sank deeper and deeper into coarseness and 
 pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds ap- 
 parently the national American author, it is heresy 
 to say this; and I know persons who have assumed 
 an air of coldness as long as they could in my 
 presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of 
 Arc" as a masterpiece. 
 
 It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy 
 of life, it suggests his narrow and materialistic 
 point of view, and makes plain his lack of knowl- 
 edge of the perspectives of history. It is all the 
 worse for an appearance of tenderness. Mark 
 Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual. That 
 
136 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 does not mean that he was not a good husband and 
 father, a kind friend and a man very loyal to all 
 his engagements. There are many other authors 
 who had not all these qualities, but who would 
 have more easily understood the character of Joan 
 than did Mark Twain. 
 
 Dickens's failure in "A Tale of Two Cities" was 
 from very different causes. It was not through a 
 failure of tenderness, a lack of an understanding 
 of the real pathos of life, or through the want of a 
 spirituality without which no great work can be 
 effective. It was because Dickens relied very 
 largely on Carlyle for the foundation of his study 
 of the historical atmosphere of that novel — ^the 
 best, from the point of view of style, except 
 "Barnaby Rudge," that he ever wrote, probably 
 due to the fact that, treading as he did on ground 
 that was new to him, he had to guide his steps very 
 carefully. The novel is nevertheless a failure be- 
 cause it is untrue; it concerns itself with a France 
 that never existed seen through as artificial a 
 medium as the mauve tints through which certain 
 artists see their figures and landscapes. It was 
 not with Dickens a case of defect in vision, but a 
 lack of knowledge. It was not lack of perception 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 137 
 
 or the absence of a great power of feeling. It was 
 pure ignorance. He was without that training 
 which would have enabled him to go intelligently 
 to the sources of French history. 
 
 In Mark Twain's case it was not a lack of the 
 power to reach the sources; it was an inability to 
 understand the character of the woman whom he 
 reverenced, so far as he could feel reverence, and 
 an invincible ignorance of the character of her 
 time. Mark Twain was modern; but modern in 
 the vulgarest way. I know that "Huckleberry 
 Finn" and the other young Americans — ^whom 
 our youth are expected to like, if not to imitate — 
 are looked on as sacred by the guardians of those 
 libraries who recommend typical books to eager 
 juvenile readers. But let that pass for the mo- 
 ment. To take a case in point, there is hardly any 
 man or woman of refinement who will hold a brief 
 in defense of the vulgarity of "A Connecticut 
 Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." 
 
 It may be said that the average reader of Mark 
 Twain's books — ^that is, the average American 
 reader — ^for Mark Twain is read the world over — 
 cares nothing for his philosophy of life. The 
 average American reads Mark Twain only to be 
 
138 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 amused, or to recall the adventures of a time not 
 far away when we were less sophisticated. Still, 
 whether my compatriots are in the habit of looking 
 into books for a philosophy or not, or of considering 
 the faiths or unfaiths of the writer in hand, it 
 does not follow that it is to their credit if they 
 neglect an analysis which cultivated readers in 
 other countries seldom omit. 
 
 If I thought that any words of mine would de- 
 prive anybody of the gaiety which Mark Twain 
 has added to life, I should not write these words; 
 but as this little volume is a book of impressions, 
 and sincere impressions, I may be frank in the full 
 understanding that the average American reader 
 will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, 
 since he has become an integral part of American 
 literature. There may perhaps come a time when 
 his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on 
 all self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with 
 pride as a proof of culture, and never read. They 
 will perhaps one day be the Rogers's statuettes of 
 literature. But that day is evidently far off. I 
 do not think that any jester of the older day — ^the 
 day of Touchstone or of Rigoletto, with a rooted 
 sorrow in his heart, could have been more pessi- 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 139 
 
 mistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To 
 change the words of Autolycus — "For the hfe to 
 come, I jest out the thought of it!" 
 
 "You who admire Don Quixote," said an in- 
 furiated Mark Twainite, "should not talk of 
 coarseness. There are pages in that romance of 
 Cervantes which I would not allow my son or 
 daughter to read." 
 
 One should give both sides of an argument, and 
 I give this other side to show what may be said 
 against my views. But the coarseness of Cer- 
 vantes is, after all, a healthy coarseness. Modern 
 ideas of purity were not his. Ignorance in those 
 days — ^the days of Cervantes — did not mean in- 
 nocence. Even the fathers of the Church were 
 quite willing to admit that the roots of water 
 lilies were in the mud, and there was no con- 
 spiracy to conceal the existence of the mud. 
 Mark Twain's coarseness, however, is more than 
 that of Cervantes or Shakespeare. Neither Cer- 
 vantes nor Shakespeare is ever irreverent. 
 
 To them, even the ordinary things of life have 
 a certain sacerdotal quality; but Mark Twain 
 abhorred the sacerdotal quality as nature abhors 
 a vacuum. To say that he has aflFected the Amer- 
 
140 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 ican spirit or the American heart would be to go 
 too far— for Americans are irreverent only on the 
 surface. It seems to me that they are the most 
 reverent people in the world toward those essen- 
 tial qualities which make up the spiritual parts of 
 life. Curiously enough, however, Mark Twain is 
 just at present the one author to whom all Europe 
 and all outlanders point as the great typical 
 American writer! 
 
 That a delightful kind of American humour may 
 exist without exaggeration, or the necessity of 
 debasing the moral currency, many joyous books 
 in our literature show. There are a few, of course, 
 that are joyous without self -consciousness; but for 
 real joyousness and charm and innocent gaiety, 
 united to a knowledge of the psychology of the 
 American youth, none so far has equalled Booth 
 Tarkington's "Penrod," or, what is better, "Seven- 
 teen." 
 
 Now nobody has yet done anything so delight- 
 ful, so mirth provoking, so pathetic, in a way, as 
 "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of 
 the knowledge of this book, for when I swam into 
 the tide of literature. Booth Tarkington was in 
 that world from which Wordsworth's boy came, 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 141 
 
 bringing rainbows, which moved to all the music 
 of the spheres. It was during the late war that 
 "Seventeen" was cast on the coasts of Denmark, 
 at a time when American books scarcely reached 
 those coasts at all. St. Julian, the patron of merry 
 travellers, must have guided it through the maze 
 and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the 
 North Sea. It arrived just when the world seemed 
 altogether upside down; when death was the only 
 real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the 
 daily routine as the sunshine, and when joy seemed 
 to have been inexplicably crushed from the earth, 
 because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could 
 not be forgotten for a moment. Then "Seven- 
 teen" arrived. 
 
 Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs 
 in future, as he has had in the past. "The Gentle- 
 man from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one 
 of the most tiresome books ever invented, while 
 "Monsieur Beaucaire" was one of the most fas- 
 cinating, charming. You can hardly find a better 
 novel of American life than "The Turmoil," unless 
 it is Judge Grant's "Unleavened Bread." 
 
 But the best novels of American life seem to be 
 written in order to be forgotten. Who reads 
 
142 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the 
 professional "teacher" of hterature, recalls "Prue 
 and I"? Or that succession of Mrs. Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as pic- 
 tures of a section of our life, each of which better 
 expresses her talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? 
 The English and the French have longer memo- 
 ries. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carling- 
 ford" — ^some of us remember "Miss Majoribanks" 
 or "Phoebe Junior "^ — ^finds a slowly decreasing 
 circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost 
 forgotten, "Les Rois en Exile" and "Jack" are 
 still parts of current French literature. But 
 "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of 
 Theron Ware" or "Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe 
 Hohn's Stories" are so much of the past as to be 
 unread. 
 
 To the credit of the gentle reader. Miss Alcott's 
 stories perennially bloom. And, for some strange 
 reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series is found 
 under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody 
 gives the RoUo books to anybody. Why? One 
 may begin to believe that that degeneracy which 
 the prevalence of jazz, lip-sticks, and ballet cos- 
 tumes adapted to the subway is supposed to in- 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 143 
 
 dicate, is a real menace when one discovers that 
 "Penrod" or "Seventeen" has ceased to be read! 
 
 We may read Mark Twain and wallow in vul- 
 garity, but it is my belief that Sodom and Gomor- 
 rah would have escaped their fate, if a Carnegie of 
 that time had made it possible to keep books like 
 "Penrod" and "Seventeen" in general circulation! 
 
 It was once said of Anthony TroUope that as 
 long as English men and women of the upper and 
 middle classes continued to exist, he might go on 
 writing novels with ever-increasing zest. And 
 the same thing might be said of Booth Tarkington 
 in relation to his unique chronicles of youth — ^that 
 is, the youth of the Middle West, with a universal 
 Soul. His types are American, but there are 
 Americas and Americas. Usage permits us to use 
 a term for our part of the continent to which our 
 Canadian and South and Central Americans and 
 Mexicans might reasonably object; but while the 
 young Americans of Booth Tarkington are typi- 
 cally American, they personally could belong only 
 to the Middle West. The hero of "Seventeen" 
 would not be the same boy if he had been born in 
 Philadelphia or New York or Boston. Circum- 
 stances would have made him different. The 
 
144 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 consciousness of class distinction would have made 
 him old before his time; and though he might be 
 just as amusing — ^he would not have been amusing 
 quite in the same way. 
 
 And this is one of the fine qualities of Mr. 
 Tarkington's imaginative synthesis. He is in- 
 dividual and of his own soil; he knows very well 
 that it is unnecessary to exaggerate or even to 
 invent; he has only to perceive with those rare 
 gifts of perception which he possesses. It all 
 seems so easy until you try to do it yourself! 
 
 The state of mind of Penrod, when he is being 
 prepared for the pageant of the "Table Round," is 
 inexpressibly amusing to the adult reader; but no 
 child can look on it as entirely amusing, because 
 every child has suffered more or less, as Penrod 
 suffered, from the unexplainable hardness of heart 
 and dullness of mind of older people. Something 
 or other prevents the most persecuted boy from 
 admitting that his parents are bad parents because 
 they force impositions which tear all the fibres of 
 his soul and make him helpless before a jeering 
 world. When Penrod has gone through horrors, 
 which are nameless because they seem to be so 
 unreasonable, he murmurs aloud, " Well, hasn't this 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 145 
 
 been a day !" Because of the humour in " Penrod " 
 there is a pathos as true and real as those parts in 
 the "Pickwick Papers" where fortunately Dickens 
 is pathetic in a real sense because he did not strive 
 for pathos. Everybody admits now that Dickens 
 becomes almost repellent when he wilfuEy tries 
 to be pathetic. 
 
 One could pick out of "Seventeen" a score of de- 
 lightful situations which seem to ripple from the 
 pen of Booth Tarkington, one of the best being the 
 scene between the hero and his mother when that 
 esprit terrible, his sister, seems to stand between 
 him and the lady of his thoughts. And "Penrod" 
 is full of them. The description of that young 
 gallant's entrance into society is of Mr. Tarking- 
 ton's best. Penrod is expected to find, according 
 to the rules of dancing academies, a partner for the 
 cotillion. It is his duty to call on the only young 
 lady unengaged, who was Miss Rennsdale, aged 
 eight. Penrod, carefully tutored, makes his call. 
 
 A decorous maid conducted the long-belated applicant to 
 her where she sat upon a sofa beside a nursery governess. 
 The decorous maid announced him composedly as he made 
 his entrance. 
 
 "Mr. Penrod Schofield!" 
 
 Miss Rennsdale suddenly burst into loud sobs. 
 
146 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 " Oh ! " she wailed. " I just knew it would be him ! " 
 
 The decorous maid's composure vanished at once — ^like- 
 wise her decorum. She clapped her hand over her mouth 
 and fled, uttering sounds. The governess, however, set 
 herself to comfort her heartbroken charge, and presently 
 succeeded in restoring Miss Rennsdale to a semblance of 
 that poise with which a lady receives callers and accepts 
 invitations to dance cotillons. But she continued to sob 
 at intervals. 
 
 Feeling himself at perhaps a disadvantage, Penrod made 
 offer of his hand for the morrow with a little embarrassment. 
 Following the form prescribed by Professor Bartet, he ad- 
 vanced several paces toward the stricken lady and bowed 
 formally. 
 
 "I hope," he said by rote, "you're well, and your parents 
 also in good health. May I have the pleasure of dancing 
 the cotillon as your partner t'-morrow afternoon?" 
 
 The wet eyes of Miss Rennsdale searched his countenance 
 without pleasure, and a shudder wrung her small shoulders; 
 but the governess whispered to her instructively, and she 
 made a great effort. 
 
 "I thu-thank you fu-for your polite invu-invu-invutation; 
 
 and I ac " Thus far she progressed when emotion 
 
 overcame her again. She beat frantically upon the sofa with 
 fists and heels. "Oh, I did want it to be Georgie Bassett!" 
 
 "No, no, no!" said the governess, and whispered urgently, 
 whereupon Miss Rennsdale was able to complete her ac- 
 ceptance. 
 
 "And I ac-accept wu-with pu-pleasure ! " she moaned, and 
 immediately, uttering a loud yell, flung herself face downward 
 upon the sofa, clutching her governess convulsively. 
 
 Somewhat disconcerted, Penrod bowed again. 
 
 "I thank you for your polite acceptance," he murmured 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 147 
 
 hurriedly; "and I trust — I trust — I forget. Oh, yes — I 
 trust we shall have a most enjoyable occasion. Pray pre- 
 sent my compliments to your parents; and I must now wish 
 you a very good afternoon." 
 
 Concluding these courtly demonstrations with another 
 bow he withdrew in fair order, though thrown into partial 
 confusion in the hall by a final wail from his crushed hostess: 
 
 "Oh! Why couldn't it be anybody but him!" 
 
 Dickens would not have done the scene quite 
 this way; he could not have so conceived it, and he 
 might have overdone it, but Booth Tarkington 
 gets it just right. He has created boy characters 
 which will live because they are alive. One of the 
 most detestable books, after Mark Twain's "Yan- 
 kee at the Court of King Arthur," is Dickens's 
 "Child's History of England." The two books 
 have various gross faults in common and these 
 faults are due to colossal ignorance. Mr. Gilbert 
 Chesterton says that one of Dickens's is due to 
 
 the application of a plain rule of right and wrong to all cir- 
 cumstances to which it was applied. It is not that they 
 wrongly enforce the fixed principle that life should be saved; 
 it is that they take a fire-engine to a shipwreck and a life- 
 boat to a house on fire. The business of a good man in 
 Dickens's time was to bring justice up to date. The busi- 
 ness of a good man in Dunstan's time was to toil to ensure 
 the survival of any justice at aE. 
 
148 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 It seems to me that if all the works of Dickens 
 were lost we might do very well with the "Pick- 
 wick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby." To 
 these, one is tempted to add "Our Mutual Friend." 
 
 When I was young enough to assist at meetings 
 of Literary Societies, where papers on Dickens 
 were read, I was invariably informed that "Charles 
 Dickens could not paint a lady or a gentleman." 
 There was no reason given for this censure. It 
 was presumed that the authors of the papers meant 
 an English lady or gentleman. Nobody, to my 
 knowledge, ever defined what an English gentleman 
 or lady was. When one considers that for a long 
 period an English gentleman's status was deter- 
 mined by the fact that he owned land, had not 
 even a remote connection with "trade" or that 
 he was instructed at Eton or Harrow, in Oxford 
 or Cambridge, the more modern definition would 
 have been very different from what the English 
 of the olden time would have called a gentleman. 
 Even now, when a levelling education has rather 
 blurred the surface marks of class in England, it 
 might be difficult for an American to define what 
 was meant by this criticism of Dickens. It seems 
 to me that no one could define exactly what was 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 149 
 
 meant. The convention that makes the poet in 
 Pennsylvania write as if the banks of the Wis- 
 sahickon were peopled by thrushes, or orchestrated 
 by the mavis, or the soaring lark, causes him often 
 to borrow words from the English vocabulary of 
 England without analyzing their exact meaning. 
 There can be no doubt that Don Quixote^was a 
 gentleman but not exactly in the English con- 
 ventional sense. And, if he was a gentleman, why 
 are not Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller gentlemen? 
 An interesting thesis might be written on the 
 application of Cardinal Newman's definition of a 
 gentleman to both Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. 
 Why not? 
 
 There is a truth about the English people, at 
 least the lower classes, which Mr. Chesterton in 
 his illimiinating "Appreciations and Criticisms of 
 the Works of Charles Dickens" — one of his best 
 books — ^brings out, though he does not accentuate 
 it sufiiciently: this is that the lower classes of the 
 English are both witty and humorous. Witty be- 
 cause they are satirical and humorous because they 
 are ironical. Sam Weller represents a type — a 
 common type — ^more exactly than Samuel Lover's 
 "Handy Andy" or any of Charles Lever's Irish 
 
150 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 characters. When one examines the foundation 
 for the assertion that Dickens could not draw a 
 lady or a gentleman, one discovers that his ladies 
 and gentlemen, in the English sense, are deadly- 
 dull. It is very probable that all conventional 
 ladies and gentlemen bored Dickens, who never 
 ceased to be a cockney, though he became the 
 most sublimated of that class. Doctor Johnson 
 was a cockney, too, but, though it may seem para- 
 doxical to say it, not so greatly impressed by class 
 distinctions as Dickens was. 
 
 Dickens had the art of making insupportable 
 bores most interesting. This was an art in which 
 the delicate Miss Austen excelled, too; but Dick- 
 ens's methods compared to hers are like those of a 
 scene painter when compared to those of an etcher 
 in colours. There are times when Dickens is con- 
 sciously "common," and then he is almost un- 
 bearable; but this objection cannot be made to the 
 "Pickwick Papers." This book is inartistic; it is 
 made up of unrelated parts; the characters do not 
 grow; they change. But all this makes no dif- 
 ference. They are spontaneous. You feel that 
 for once Dickens is doing the thing he likes to do — 
 and all the world loves a lover who loves his work. 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 151 
 
 There are doubtless some people still living who 
 can tolerate the romantic quality in "Nicholas 
 Nickleby." There are no really romantic quali- 
 ties in the "Pickwick Papers" — ^thank heaven! — 
 no stick of a hero, no weeping willow of a heroine. 
 The heroic sticks of Dickens never bloom suddenly 
 as the branch in "Tannhauser" bloomed. Even 
 Dickens can work no miracle there. 
 
 It increases our admiration of him to examine 
 the works of those gentlemen who are set down in 
 the textbooks of literature as his predecessors. 
 Some of these learned authors mention Sterne's 
 "Tristram Shandy," a very dull and tiresome 
 narrative; and "Tom Jones," very tiresome, too, 
 in spite of its fidelity to certain phases of eigh- 
 teenth-century life. And later. Pierce Egan's 
 "Tom and Jerry." I was brought up to consider 
 the renown of the two Pierce Egans with rever- 
 ence and permitted to read "Tom and Jerry; or 
 The Adventures of Corinthian Bob" as part of 
 the family pedigree, but it requires the meticulous 
 analysis of a German research- worker to find any 
 real resemblance between the artificial dissipations 
 of "Tom and Jerry" and the adventures of the 
 peerless Pickwick. 
 
152 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 If the elder Pierce Egan had the power of in- 
 fluencing disciples, he ought to have induced his 
 son to produce something better than "The Poor 
 Boy; or, The Betrayed Baffled, " "The Fair Lilias, " 
 and others too numerous to mention. 
 
 The voracious reader of Dickens, as he grows 
 older, perhaps becomes a student of Dickens, and 
 is surprised to find that the development of 
 Dickens is much more marked and easily noted 
 than the development of Thackeray. In fact, 
 Thackeray, like his mild reflector, Du Maurier, 
 sprang into the public light fully equipped and 
 fully armed. Both these men had wide experience 
 and a careful training in form and proportion before 
 they attempted to write seriously. They were 
 educated in art and life and letters. The edu- 
 cation of Dickens, on the other hand, was only 
 begun with "Pickwick," which knew neither 
 method nor proportion; and he who reads "Bar- 
 naby Rudge" for the flavour of Dickens finds a 
 new and good perspective and proportion, and 
 even self-restraint. Artistically, it is the best of 
 all Dickens's novels. For that reason it lacks 
 that flavour which we find in the earlier books. 
 I could not get such thorough enjoyment from it as 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 153 
 
 from " Nicholas Nickleby ." In it Dickens sacrificed 
 too much to his self-restraint, and there is no mo- 
 ment in it that gives us the joy of the discovery of 
 Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummies or of 'Tilda Price. 
 
 Anthony TroUope, in his "Autobiography," 
 which ought to be a textbook in all those practical 
 classes of literature that work to turn out self- 
 supporting authors, tells us that the most import- 
 ant part of a novel is the plot. This may be true, 
 but the inefficiency of the plot in the works of 
 Charles Dickens may easily be shown in an at- 
 tempt to summarize any of them, except "The 
 Mystery of Edwin Drood." 
 
 Still, when all is said for Dickens, one cannot 
 even in old age begin to read him over and over 
 again, as one can read Thackeray. But who reads 
 an American book over and over again? Haw- 
 thorne never wearies the elect, and one may go 
 back to Henry James, in order to discover whether 
 one thinks that he means the same thing in 1922 
 one thought he meant in 1 9 1 2 . But who makes it a 
 practice in middle age to read any novel of Mrs. 
 Wharton's or Mrs. Deland's or Mr. Marion Craw- 
 ford's or Mr. Booth Tarkington's at least once a 
 year.? There are thousands of persons who find 
 
154 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 leisure to love Miss Austen, that hardiest of hardy 
 perennials; and during the war, when life in the 
 daytime became a nightmare, there was a large 
 group of persons who read TroUope from end to 
 end! This is almost incredible; but it is true. 
 And I must confess that if I do not read Miss 
 Austen's novels once every year, preferably cozily 
 in the winter, or "Cranford," or parts of Frois- 
 sart — ^whose chronicle takes the bad taste of 
 Mark Twain's "Joan of Arc" from my memory — I 
 feel as if I had had an ill-spent year. It makes me 
 seem as slothful as if I omitted a daily passage 
 from "The Following of Christ" or, at least, a 
 weekly chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul! 
 
 George Eliot I had known even before the time 
 I had begun to read. No well-brought-up child 
 could escape "Adam Bede" and the drolleries of 
 Mrs. Poyser. As I grew older, however, "Ro- 
 mola" attracted me most. The heroine is perhaps 
 a little too good for human nature's daily food, 
 but she is a great figure in the picture. I suspect 
 that the artificiality of Kingsley's "Hypatia," 
 which I read at almost the same time, made me 
 admire, if I did not love, Romola, by way of con- 
 trast. No youth could ever love Romola as 
 
CERTAIN NOVELISTS 155 
 
 Walter Scott made him love Mary Stuart or 
 Catherine Seton. But as it happened that jusl 
 at this time I was labouring with Blaekstone 
 (Judge Sharswood's Notes), with a volume of 
 scholastic philosophy "on the side" — ^I think it 
 was Jourdain's consomme of St. Thomas Aquinas 
 in French — Romola was a decided relief, and she 
 seemed truer and more interesting in every way 
 than Hypatia, who was as papier-mache as her 
 whole environment is untrue to the history of the 
 time. An historical novel ought not necessarily 
 to be true to history, but it ought to be illuminating 
 and interesting, as "Hypatia" is not and as 
 "Romola" is. So it makes no difference whether 
 George Eliot's reading of Savonarola is correct or 
 not, though it ought to be correct, of course. 
 Then there is Tito, the delicious and treacherous 
 Tito! and the scene in the barber shop! And if 
 you want a good, mouth-filling novel, give me 
 "Middlemarch." Few persons read it now, and 
 probably fewer will read it in the future. It is 
 nevertheless a great monument to the genius of a 
 woman who had such an infinite quality for taking 
 pains, that it almost defeated the end for which 
 she worked. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Letters, Biographies, and Memoirs 
 
 Some of us have acquired a state of mind which 
 helps us to beheve that whenever a man mentions 
 a book he either condemns or approves of it. In 
 a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism 
 of the book at once. It is true that books are 
 criticisms of hfe, and that Ufe, if it is not very 
 narrow and hmited, is a good criticism of books; 
 but one of the most pleasant qualities of a reader 
 who has lived among books all his life is that he 
 does not attempt always to recommend books to 
 others, or to preach about them. Besides, it is 
 too dangerous to recommend unreservedly or to 
 condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature 
 have undertaken the recommendation of books for 
 the young; there are schools of critics who spend 
 their time in approving of them for the old; and 
 the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task 
 of disapproval and condemnation. That lets me 
 out, I feel. 
 
 156 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 157 
 
 One of my most cherished books is the "Letters 
 to People in the World," by Saint Francis de Sales. 
 I have known people who have declared that it is 
 entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for 
 them. For me, it is a book of edification and a 
 guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint Francis 
 himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual 
 matters or the relations of spiritual matters to 
 life, are to me a constant source of pleasure. I 
 remember reading aloud to a friend the passage 
 in which this charming Bishop writes that, when 
 he slept at his paternal chMeau, he never allowed 
 the peasants on the domain to perform their usual 
 duty, which was to stay up all night and beat the 
 waters of the ponds, or perhaps of the moat, around 
 the castle, so that the seigneur and his friends 
 might sleep peacefully. My friend was very 
 much bored and could not see that it represented a 
 social point of view, which showed that the Saint 
 was much ahead of his time! It did not bring 
 old France back to him; he could not see the old 
 chateau and the water in the moonlight, or con- 
 ceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved 
 of their duty. I can read the "Letters" of Saint 
 Francis de Sales over and over again, as I read the 
 
158 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 "Letters" of Madame de Sevigne or the "Me- 
 moirs" of the Due de Saint Simon. 
 
 I think I first made acquaintance of Saint 
 Simon in an EngUsh translation by Bayle St. 
 John. If you have an interest in interiors — ^the 
 interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces — ^you 
 must like Saint Simon. Most people to-day read 
 these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I 
 think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn 
 French in order to become an understanding com- 
 panion of this malicious but very graphic author. 
 To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty 
 desert without the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. 
 Else, how could anybody realize a picture of Made- 
 moiselle de la Valliere looking hopelessly out of 
 the window of her little room just before the birth 
 of her child? Or what would the chapel be with- 
 out a memory of those devout ladies who knelt 
 regularly, holding candles to their faces, at the 
 exercises in Lent, after Louis XIV. had become 
 devout, in order that he might see them? 
 
 But because I love to linger in the society of 
 the Due de Saint Simon and Cardinal de Retz, it 
 does not follow that I mean to introduce modern 
 and ingenuous youth to the society of these 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 159 
 
 gentlemen. Each man has his pet book. I still 
 retain a great affection for a man of my own age 
 who gives on birthdays and great feasts copies 
 of "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy" to 
 his grandchildren and their friends! Could you 
 believe that.? He dislikes Miss Austen's novels 
 and sneers at Miss Farrar's "Marriage." He has 
 never been able to read Miss Edgeworth's book; 
 and he considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral 
 book! Now, I find it very hard to exist without 
 at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the 
 way, in a number of the Atlantic Monthly not so 
 long ago there is a vivid, pathetic, and excellently 
 written piece of literature. It is "A Portion of the 
 Diurnal of Mrs Eliz''' Pepys" by E. Barrington. 
 
 If anybody asks me why I like Pepys, I do not 
 feel obliged to reply. I might incriminate myself. 
 Very often, indeed, by answering a direct question 
 about books, one does incriminate oneself. 
 
 However, to return to what I was saying — 
 while I love the "Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz," 
 I adore — ^to be a little extravagant — ^the "Letters 
 of Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does 
 not know the real story of the life of Saint Vincent 
 de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the 
 
160 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. 
 This Frenchman really fought with beasts for the 
 life of children, and was the only real reformer in 
 the France of his time. 
 
 Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a 
 time the preceptor of Cardinal de Retz that I 
 find the Cardinal so delightful! On the contrary! 
 I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, 
 the Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type 
 of the polite, the worldly, and the intriguing gentle- 
 man of his time. He died a good peaceful death, 
 as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. 
 He earned the deepest affection and respect of 
 Madame de Sevigne, for which any discerning 
 man might have been willing to spend half a life- 
 time. But even that is beside the point. He lives 
 for me because he gives a picture of the French 
 ruling classes of his time which is shamelessly true. 
 No living man to-day in political office, although 
 he might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal, 
 would dare to be so interestingly shameless. That 
 is a great charm in itseK. And, then, if you read 
 him in French, you discover that he knew how 
 to make literature. 
 
 The only wonder in my mind has always been 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 161 
 
 how a taan who became so penitent during the last 
 years of his Ufe as Paul de Gondi should not have 
 been forced by his confessor to destroy his book 
 of revelations. But one must remember that 
 the confessors of his period — ^the period of the 
 founding of the French Academy — had a great 
 respect for mere literature. His father was Philip 
 Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni, General of the 
 Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the 
 Holy Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live 
 among the Fathers of the Oratory. There he 
 entered into holy orders, and there he died, with 
 the reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 
 29, 1662, aged eighty-one. 
 
 Give me leave, madame [Cardinal de Retz says] to reflect 
 a little here upon the natiu-e of the mind of man. I believe 
 that there was not in the world a man of an uprighter heart 
 than my father, and I may say that he was stampt in the 
 very mold of virtue. Yet my duels and love-intrigues did 
 not hinder the good man from doing all he could to tye to 
 the Church, the soul in the world perhaps the least ecclesias- 
 tical. His predilection for his eldest son, and the view of the 
 archbishoprick of Paris for me, were the true causes of his 
 acting thus; though he neither believed it, nor felt it. I dare 
 say that he thought, nay would have sworn, that he was led 
 in all this by no other motive than the spiritual good of my 
 soul, and the fear of the danger to which it might be ex- 
 posed in another profession. So true it is that nothing is 
 
162 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 more subject to delusion than piety. All manner of errors 
 creep and hide themselves under that vail. Piety takes for 
 sacred all her imaginations, of what sort soever; but the best 
 intention in the world is not enough to keep it in that re- 
 spect free from irregularity. In fine, after all that I have 
 related I remained a churchman; but certainly I had not 
 long continued so, if an accident had not happened which 
 I am now to acquaint you with. 
 
 This is not at all what is called "edifying," but, 
 from the moral point of view, it shows what Saint 
 Vincent de Pavil had to struggle against in the 
 Church of France; and the position of Paul de 
 Gondi in relation to an established church was just 
 as common in contemporary England, where 
 "livings" were matters of barter and sale but where 
 the methods of the clergymen highly placed were 
 neither so intellectual nor so romantic. 
 
 It must be admitted that Cardinal de Retz, like 
 a later French prelate, Talleyrand, made no pre- 
 tense of being fitted for the Church. Talleyrand's 
 only qualification was that he was lame; and, as a 
 younger son, he had to be provided for. But Car- 
 dinal de Retz, with all his faults, had a saving 
 grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did 
 his best to escape the priesthood. He fought his 
 first duel with Bassompierre behind the Convent 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 163 
 
 of the Minims, in the Bois de Vincennes; but it 
 was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry 
 of the Attorney General, "and so I remained in 
 my cassock notwithstanding my duel." His next 
 duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it 
 the utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no 
 use in opposing one's destiny; nobody took the 
 slightest notice of the scandal." 
 
 The elder Dumas has probably had his day, 
 though "Monte Cristo" and "The Three Muske- 
 teers" are still read. The newer romance writers 
 are less diffuse, and, not writing feuilletons, are not 
 forced to be diffuse. The constant reader of 
 French memoirs of the seventeenth century can 
 hardly help wondering why anybody should read 
 Dumas who could go directly to the sources of his 
 romances. 
 
 Speaking of the relation of books to books, it 
 was the "Memoirs" of Madame Campan that took 
 me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There 
 were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we 
 thought we knew more about this distinguished 
 American than anybody else; but it was through 
 certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoin- 
 ette and her Court" that I turned to his auto- 
 
164 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 biography, and then to such letters of his as could 
 be found. That autobiography is one of the 
 gems of American history, though it does not re- 
 veal the whole man. If he had been as frank as 
 Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have 
 been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could 
 ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has never 
 been done! Even the seemingly reckless James 
 Huneker understood that thoroughly. But the 
 autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is suffi- 
 ciently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to 
 me that it should be read just after one has fin- 
 ished for the second or third time the memoirs of 
 Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty 
 to acclaim the charm of the confessions of Ben- 
 venuto Cellini, and I have known a young woman 
 who read them reverently in the holy service of 
 culture as a pendant to a textbook on the Renas- 
 cence, and followed him by Jowett's translation of 
 the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left 
 to her fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris 
 were not in her course of reading, and they seem 
 almost to have been forgotten. I do not recom- 
 mend them to anybody. There are passages in 
 them which might shock the Prohibitionist, and 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 165 
 
 also those persons who believe in divorce a la mode 
 de Madame de Stael. 
 
 For me, they are not only constantly amusing, 
 constantly instructive, but they give the best pic- 
 tures of Parisian interiors of the time before and 
 during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly 
 convinced of this, is it necessary that I should be 
 expected to place them among the Best One Hun- 
 dred Books? To me they will be always among 
 my best twenty-five books. 
 
 In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well 
 how to serve his country efficiently; and he was too 
 sensible of the debt of that country to France and 
 too sympathetic with the essential genius of the 
 French people not to do his best to serve her, too. 
 The original verses in his memoirs are the worst 
 things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the 
 faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote 
 verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of 
 all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, culti- 
 vated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not 
 corroded with a venom of partisan politics. I re- 
 peat, with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that 
 no better picture has ever been given of the aristo- 
 cratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris. 
 
166 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 His gallantries are amusing; yet there is under- 
 neath his affectation of the frivolous vice of the 
 time, which might be euphemistically called "exag- 
 gerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which 
 one does not find in that class of systematic roues" 
 who were astonished at the virtue of the ladies at 
 Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends 
 dwelt in that town. There may be dull pages in 
 these memoirs, but if so I have not yet found 
 them. 
 
 In "The Diary and Letters" there are many 
 bits of gossip about certain great persons, notably 
 about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as soon 
 as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to 
 me that Talleyrand and Philippe Egalite were the 
 most fascinating characters of the French Revo- 
 lution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a 
 small boy who was listening to a particularly dull 
 history of the New Testament to exclaim sud- 
 denly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to 
 me about Judas!" 
 
 To persons who might censure Gouverneur 
 Morris's frankness one may quote a short passage 
 from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such 
 weakness," said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 167 
 
 speaking of the autobiography of Sir Robert Sib- 
 bald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," 
 said the pious and great lexicographer, "it is an 
 honest picture of human nature." 
 
 This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouver- 
 neur Morris for enlightening us as to the paternity 
 of a son of Madame de Flahaut. Morris, for a 
 time that condoned the amourettes of Benjamin 
 Franklin, was virtuous. Madame de Flahaut, 
 afterward Madame de Souza, gave Morris a hint 
 that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her 
 affection. "I may, if I please, wean her from all re- 
 gard toward him, but he is the father of her child, 
 and it would be unjust." In this noble moment 
 Mr. Morris chivalrously forgets the existence of the 
 Count de Flahaut! 
 
 In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic 
 verses to Madame de Flahaut; the Queen's circle 
 at Versailles is worried about the fidelity of the 
 troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in 
 the Orangery; De Launey's head is carried on a 
 pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered men lie 
 in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is 
 not disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is 
 invited for three o'clock, to the house of Madame 
 
168 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock 
 the CouBtess herseK came to announce dinner. 
 Morris is happy in the belief that his hunger will be 
 equal to the delayed feast. For this day, he thinks 
 he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He 
 is corroborated in his opinion that Madame de 
 Beauharnais is a poetess by 
 
 a very narrow escape from some rancid butter of which the 
 cook had been very liberal. 
 
 But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth 
 beneath. It seems to me that there is no more 
 interesting and useful book on the French Revolu- 
 tion than this autobiography. It ought to be placed 
 near De Tocqueville's "Ancient Regime" and 
 "Democracy in America." 
 
 On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the 
 general opinion that Mr. Jefferson was considered 
 a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would be chosen 
 President by the House of Representatives. The 
 gentlemen of the House of Representatives be- 
 lieved that Burr was vigorous, energetic, just, and 
 generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted 
 with all the cold-blooded vices, and particularly 
 dangerous from false principles of government 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 169 
 
 which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of 
 course, against Burr, because, Morris writes, 
 
 Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in 
 the President's chair! 
 
 John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson 
 vice-President, in 1800. It is edifying for us who 
 look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profound rev- 
 erence, to see them at close range in Gouverneur 
 Morris's pages. 
 
 Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette 
 not nearly so well : 
 
 one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle. 
 
 But, then, Morris had had money transactions 
 with the Lafayettes. Morris believed that no man 
 ever existed who controlled himself so well as 
 Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after 
 the "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," not 
 far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on 
 the same shelf with the perennial Boswell? 
 
 I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and 
 of Gouverneur Morris many times with a dip now 
 and then, by way of a change, into the Autobi- 
 ography of Anthony TroUope. This is rather a 
 change from the kickshaws of France to the roast 
 
170 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 beef of old England. This autobiograpliy never 
 seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage 
 authors to be industrious and hard-working. It 
 is more than that. It is the expression of the life 
 of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing, and 
 who writes about himself so well and so sin- 
 cerely that he gives us an insight into a phase of 
 English character which none of his novels ever 
 elaborated. 
 
 What TroUope did may be done again, but hardly 
 in the American atmosphere, with the restless 
 American nerves and that lack of doggedness which 
 characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of 
 himself as a member of the English gentry, deprived 
 of all the advantages of his caste except an inborn 
 class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of 
 self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew 
 very well what he wanted, and he secured it by the 
 most honest and direct means. He knew he could 
 get nothing without work, and he worked. His 
 exercise of literature as an avocation did not pre- 
 vent him from being a good public servant. 
 
 As a typical Englishman brought up in the coun- 
 try, he liked to hunt. Hunting is a prerogative of 
 the leisurely and the rich. He obtained leisure at 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 171 
 
 a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through 
 the same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a 
 manliness and lack of sentimentalism which en- 
 dears this book to me. It is so much the fashion 
 in our day to declare that society is against us when 
 we have to work unremittingly for what we want, 
 that TroUope's honesty is refreshing, and, though 
 most readers will consider the word rather absurd 
 as applied to him — ^inspiring! 
 
 In earlier days every American was brought up 
 with a prejudice against Mrs. TroUope's " Domestic 
 Manners of the Americans," as we were all taught 
 to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all 
 softened toward Dickens later, and it would be 
 difficult to read the simply told story of the heroic 
 devotion and courage which TroUope relates of his 
 mother without believing that the recording angel 
 in no way holds her responsible for her rather 
 vulgar book. 
 
 How fascinating to the budding author is the 
 record of sales of the books written by TroUope as 
 he ascended the ladder of popularity! How he 
 managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning 
 he does not teU us. They are not so easily man- 
 aged now. And there is the story of the pious 
 
172 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 editor who began the serial pubUcation of "Ra- 
 chel Ray," and although paying TroUope his hon- 
 orarium, stopped it abruptly because there was a 
 dancing party in the story ! In all this the author 
 of "The Warden" and "Barchester Towers" 
 nothing extenuates nor puts down aught in malice. 
 And I must say that for me this autobiography 
 is very good reading. As the sailor once said of a 
 piece of rather solid beef, "There's a great deal 
 of chaw in it." 
 
 I pause a moment to reflect on a letter which I 
 have just received from a young college woman 
 who has so far read the manuscript of this book. 
 She writes that it is really not a book so far for 
 professing Christians. 
 
 My mother and I had expected of you something more 
 edifying, something that would lead us to the reading of 
 good and elevating books. At college 'I looked on literature 
 as something apart. Since I have come home to Georgia, 
 I find that it is better for me to submit myself to the direction 
 of our good Baptist clergyman, and have no books on our 
 library shelves that I cannot read aloud to the young. One 
 of your favourites, Madame de Sevigne, shocks me by the 
 cruelty of her description of the death of the famous poisoner, 
 Madame de Brinvilliers. And I do not think that the pages 
 of the Due de Saint-Simon should be read by young people. 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 173 
 
 This is an example of what a refined atmos- 
 phere may do to a Georgia girl! I have written 
 to her by way of an apology that this is a little 
 volume of impressions and confessions, and that 
 personally I should find life rather duller if I had 
 not the Due de Saint-Simon at hand. Besides, 
 I do not think that there is a single young person 
 of my acquaintance who would allow me to read 
 any of his pages to him or her! 
 
 Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or 
 any other novel that happens to be the vogue. 
 As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de 
 Sevigne when she says, writing of her grand- 
 daughter, that bad books ought to be preferred to 
 no books at all. But it would be almost better 
 for the young not to begin to read until they are 
 old, if one is to gauge the value of books by the un- 
 fledged taste of youth. Purity, after all, is not 
 ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance 
 at a certain age is very desirable. 
 
 While I write this, I have in mind a little essay 
 of great charm and value by Coventry Patmore on 
 "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper 
 into the fundamentals of morality than any other 
 modern work on the subject. And, by the way, 
 
174 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main 
 Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and 
 several other novels, I turn from their lack of 
 gaiety to find a reason why art should not be 
 gloomy, and here it is, from Coventry Patmore's 
 "Cheerfulness in Life and Art." 
 
 "Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice," says one of the 
 highest authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible 
 in psychological science writes, "A cheerful heart is what 
 the Muses love." 
 
 Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; 
 though his own interior gaiety — of which a word by and by 
 — is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that 
 he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in 
 this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; 
 and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and one which, 
 strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when 
 rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave 
 heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be 
 afiBicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of 
 others, it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to de- 
 spondency; and thus a habit of mind is formed which can 
 discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave 
 rejoicing, and can thence infer at least a probability of such 
 cause in cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus 
 cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows, it is not over- 
 troubled by those of others, however tender and helpful its 
 sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for that 
 in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we 
 see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 175 
 
 small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated 
 by contempt for its cowardice. 
 
 There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of 
 Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, 
 but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which is 
 not quite the real thing. It is too sentimental 
 and rather too laboured. These two authors, 
 who, if the value of a writer could really depend 
 on the majority of the votes cast for him, would, 
 with the goldenrod, be our national flowers, seem 
 to work too hard in the pursuit of cheerful- 
 ness. 
 
 Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman 
 what supported the pleasant town of Stratford- 
 on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian 
 industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. 
 Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, 
 like the cheerfulness of "PoUyaima," seems to be 
 very much of an industry. It is not at all like 
 the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous 
 and unconscious, which one finds in the really great 
 authors. Why the modern realist should believe 
 that to be real he must be joyless — ^in the United 
 States, at least — ^is perhaps because he feels the 
 public need of protest against the optimistic 
 
176 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and 
 the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a 
 serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright 
 nor Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just 
 as serious a mistake as to assume that the late 
 Mary Jane Hohnes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. South- 
 worth had no value. They pleased exactly the 
 same class of people, in their day, which delights 
 in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They 
 answered to the demand of a public that is moral 
 and religious, that needs to be taken into coun- 
 tries which savoured something of Fairyland, and 
 yet which are framed by reality. However, as 
 long as Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold 
 Bell Wright, and novelists of higher philosophical 
 aspirations, like the author of "The Age of Inno- 
 cence," and "Blind Mice," and "Zell," and "Main 
 Street," continue to write, there is no danger that 
 the general crowd of American readers will be 
 shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the 
 Due de Saint-Simon or of the Comtesse de Boigne. 
 So I feel that I am absolved from the responsibility 
 of misleading any young reader to sup on the 
 horrors of the description of the death of Ma- 
 dame de Brinvilliers as painted by Madame de 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 177 
 
 Sevigne or to revel among the groups of Italians 
 who range through the scenes drawn by Benvenuto 
 Cellini. 
 
 While Pepys is always near at hand, I treat his 
 contemporary, Evelyn, with very distant polite- 
 ness and respect. Now Evelyn should not be 
 treated in that way. He is always so edifying and 
 so very correct, except when he moralizes about 
 the Church of Rome, that he ought to be read 
 nearly every day by the serious as an example of 
 propriety and as a model of the expression of the 
 finest sentiments on morals, philosophy, literature, 
 and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any 
 such passages as this, which Pepys writes on 
 October 19, 1662 (Lord's day) : 
 
 Put on my first new lace-band: and so neat it is, that I 
 am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it 
 will set off anything else the more. I am sorry to hear that 
 the news of the selling of Dunkirk is taken so generally ill, 
 as I find it is among the merchants; and other things, as 
 removal of oflScers at Court, good for worse; and all things 
 else made much worse in their report among people than 
 they are. And this night, I know not upon what ground, 
 the gates of the City ordered to be all shut, and double 
 guards everywhere. Indeed I do find everybody's spirit 
 very full of trouble: and the things of the Court and Council 
 very ill taken; so as to be apt to appear in bad colours, if 
 
178 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 there should ever be a beginning of trouble, which God 
 forbid! 
 
 Or, 
 
 29th (Lord's day). 
 
 This morning I put on my best black cloth suit, trimmed 
 with scarlet ribbon, very neat, with my cloak lined with 
 velvet, and a new beaver, which altogether is very noble, 
 with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago. 
 
 Evelyn never condescends to such weaknesses 
 as we find in our beloved Pepys ! 
 
 One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn 
 had been able to decipher some of the hidden 
 things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have 
 written this tribute, under the date of May 26, 
 1703: 
 
 This day died Mr. Sam Pepys, a very worthy, industrious 
 and curious person. . . . He lived at Clapham with 
 his partner, Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very noble 
 house and sweete place, where he enjoyed the fruite of his 
 labours in greate prosperity. He was universally belov'd, 
 hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skill'd in 
 music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he 
 had the conversation. His library and collection of other 
 curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of 
 ships especially. . . . Mr. Pepys had been for neere 40 
 years so much my particular friend, that Mr. Jackson sent 
 me compleat mourning, desiring me to be one to hold up the 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 179 
 
 pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hin- 
 dered me from doing him this last office. 
 
 AH the teachings of the histories of our student 
 days force us to look on Charles II. as one of the 
 weakest of English kings; but when we come to 
 enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to 
 see that there is much to be said for him as a 
 monarch, and that he did more for England under 
 difficult circumstances than conventional history 
 has given him credit for. 
 
 It took many years for me to find any diary or 
 memoir that appealed to me as much as that of 
 Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you 
 what formal history never does; he takes you into 
 the heart of his time, and introduces you into the 
 centre of his mind and heart. In literature, in 
 poetry and prose, the reader hopes that the roofs 
 of houses or the tops of heads might be taken off, 
 so that we could see with an understanding eye 
 what goes on. The interest of the human race, 
 though it may be disguised rhetorically, is the 
 interest that everybody finds in gossip. Malicious 
 gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us 
 know our fellow men and women somewhat as 
 we know ourselves — ^but perhaps more clearly 
 
180 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 — can never be rooted out of normal human 
 nature. 
 
 I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's 
 "Diary" many times, and I sat myself down in 
 many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, 
 and by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint- 
 Simon"; and then there was always Madame de 
 Sevigne. Much was hoped from the long-prom- 
 ised "Memoirs of Talleyrand." They came; they 
 were disappointing. 
 
 Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical 
 book that compares in a way with the perennial 
 favourites of mine I have been writing about. 
 And this is "The Education of Henry Adams," 
 and almost contemporaneously the "Letters of 
 William James." It is easy to understand the 
 delight with which intelligent people welcomed 
 "The Education of Henry Adams." Uncon- 
 sciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what 
 we talked about in our graduation essays and what 
 we believed in a vague way — ^that education con- 
 sists in putting value on the circumstances of life, 
 and regarding each circumstance as a step either 
 forward or backward in one's educational progress. 
 This is the lesson which young Americans are 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 181 
 
 taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton- 
 Porter; and which Samuel Smiles beat into the 
 heads of the English. Henry Adams's lesson, 
 however, is not taught in the same way at all. 
 There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures, 
 painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who 
 looks on the phenomena of life as no other American 
 has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other 
 American has ever expressed them. The judicious 
 and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may 
 shrink with horror from me when I say that I put 
 at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for 
 my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" 
 of Cardinal Newman! 
 
 There is the same delicate egoism in both; there 
 is the same reasonable and well-bred reticence. 
 There is one great difference, however; while 
 Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is 
 determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not 
 quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or 
 not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, 
 more interesting than Cardinal Newman, for, 
 while Newman is almost purely intellectual and 
 so much above the reach of most of us, Adams is 
 merely inteUigent — ^but intelligent enough to dis- 
 
182 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 cern the richness of life, and mystical enough to 
 long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman 
 not only longs, but reasons and acts. It was not 
 the definition of the unity of God that troubled 
 Adams. It was the question of His personality. 
 The existence of pain and wretchedness in the 
 world was a bar to his understanding that a per- 
 sonal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, 
 in fact, God Himself. 
 
 Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain 
 was no barrier to faith in a personal God. I am 
 speaking now only from my own point of view; 
 others who like to read both Newman and Adams 
 may look on this view as entirely negligible. 
 What other American than Adams would have 
 so loved without understanding the spirit of Saint 
 Francis d'Assisi: 
 
 Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by 
 school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, 
 and were as familiar with political assassination as though 
 they had lived under Nero. The climax of empire could 
 be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were 
 a President or McKinley a Consul. 
 
 Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this 
 simple and obvious — in no way unpleasant — truth; therefore 
 one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of com- 
 pleting the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to Assisi 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 183 
 
 and an interview with St. Francis, wliose solution of histor- 
 ical riddles seemed the most satisfactory — or suflBcient — 
 ever offered; worth fully forty years' more study, and better 
 worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St. Augustine, St. 
 Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of 
 all these fresh crosslights on the old Assistant Professor of 
 1874 was due to the astonishing contrast between what he 
 had taught them and what he found himself confusedly try- 
 ing to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards — between the 
 twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. 
 At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo- 
 Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of 
 derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of 
 Sac and Soc : — 
 
 Hie Jacet 
 
 Homunculus Scriptor 
 
 Doctor Barbaricus 
 
 Henricus Adams 
 
 Adae Fihus et Evae 
 
 Primo Explicuit 
 
 Socnam 
 
 The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he 
 meant as satire the claim that he had been first to explain 
 the legal meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German 
 professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presump- 
 tuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had 
 vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Ru- 
 dolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc. 
 Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that 
 politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's 
 scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no 
 other path to a profession. 
 
184 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any 
 other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no 
 more continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more 
 force of its own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt 
 for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting it 
 altogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and 
 contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no mean- 
 ing, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered. 
 
 After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his 
 thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of 
 that very great American John Burroughs. It is 
 the facts of life as seen through his personality, 
 the changes in our political history as analyzed so 
 skilfully by him after the manner of no other man 
 that make his book supremely interesting. 
 
 The real man is not hidden in "The Education 
 of Henry Adams." We can no longer talk of the 
 degeneracy of American literary taste when we 
 know that this very American, characteristic, and 
 illuminating book was a "best seller" in our 
 country for several months. Some who like to 
 bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and 
 of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply 
 due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and 
 therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate 
 book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biog- 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 185 
 
 raphies. This view may be dismissed with a 
 scornful wave of the hand. 
 
 When I took up "The Education of Henry 
 Adams," I was informed that it was "pathetic." 
 Personally, it has never struck me that Henry 
 Adams, as far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He 
 did not assume an air of pathos when he read my 
 review in Scribner's Monthly — ^before it became the 
 Century — of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Rich- 
 ard Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the 
 time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on 
 his return he read the things I had said about a 
 novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be en- 
 tirely un-American. 
 
 Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no 
 element of pathos. Adams lived a rare and inter- 
 esting life. He loved beauty, and was so pre- 
 pared by tradition and education that he knew 
 how to appreciate beauty wherever he found it, 
 and to give reasons for its being beautiful. Against 
 the rough material obstacles in life, which are 
 supposed to be good for a man, but are not at all 
 good, since they absorb a great deal of energy 
 that is subtracted from his later life, he was not 
 obliged to struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, 
 
186 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 the greatest of all modern Americans, wlio was a 
 man of letters in love with life, Adams was not 
 compelled to look up to social strata above him, 
 and, whatever the enraged democrats may say, 
 this in itself is a great advantage. One can see 
 from his "Education" that his material difficulties 
 were so slight that he could take them cheerfully, 
 even in our world where poverty is both a blunder 
 and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. 
 Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his 
 heart. His description of the death of his sister is 
 heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his 
 griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of 
 friends, no man more pleasant surrounding. He 
 was free in a way that few other men are free, and 
 to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he 
 does not always take advantage, that is one of 
 the most appealing qualities of his book. It is a 
 great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with 
 him, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the 
 power of using wings, whether he uses them or not. 
 There are many reasons for the success of his 
 book. The chapters on "Diplomacy," on "Friends 
 and Foes," on "Political Morahty," and on "The 
 Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our 
 
LETTEHS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 187 
 
 history. More than that, they elucidate condi- 
 tions of mind which are generally wrapped up, for 
 motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical 
 verbiage. 
 
 Some of the reviewers found "The Education" 
 egotistical. This is too strong a term. These 
 memoirs would have no value if they were not 
 egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies 
 conceit or self-complacency or the desire to show 
 one's better side to the public, "The Education" 
 does not deserve it. A man cannot write about 
 himseK without writing about himself. This seems 
 very much like a platitude. And Henry Adams 
 writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. 
 If anything, he underrates himself, as in conver- 
 sation he sometimes took a tone which made him 
 appear to those who knew him slightly as below 
 the average of the real Henry Adams. 
 
 Here, for instance, is a good passage: 
 
 Swinburne tested him [Henry Adams] then and there by- 
 one of his favourite tests — Victor Hugo; for to him the test 
 of Victor Hugo was the surest and quickest of standards. 
 French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners; it 
 requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare 
 refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French 
 verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of 
 
188 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he 
 never hstened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt 
 a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to 
 proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's 
 vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de 
 Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; De Musset was 
 unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing. 
 
 Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, 
 to sustain himself on the wing like De Musset, or even hke 
 Hugo; but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and 
 he succumbed. Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage 
 Landor. In truth the test was the same, for Swinburne ad- 
 mired in Landor's English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's 
 French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when 
 forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor 
 bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could 
 feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost. 
 
 The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. 
 He knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. 
 Keenly mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, 
 he knew he was no companion for Swinburne; probably he 
 could be only an annoyance; no number of centuries could 
 ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical 
 appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was 
 nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. 
 Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would 
 have been only too happy to bring, had he known how, was 
 hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France 
 is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became 
 absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendours of 
 Hugo and Landor, was almost as helpless as an American 
 private secretary in personal contact with them. Ten 
 years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva Conference, 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 189 
 
 fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he had made 
 on Hugo; "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with 
 women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and 
 Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo 
 raised his Voice solemnly, and uttered the words: "Quant a 
 moi, je crois en Dieu!" Silence followed. Then a woman 
 responded as if in deep meditation: "Chose sublime! un 
 Dieu qui croit en Dieu!" 
 
 The Chose sublime is an Adamesque touch! It 
 gives the last deUcate tint to the impression. 
 Page after page gleams with such impressions and 
 such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. 
 But he lacks faith! He is the discoverer of the 
 twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the dis- 
 coverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He 
 perceived the real architecture of both the Cathed- 
 ral of Chartres and of "The Song of Roland." 
 How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons 
 seem in comparison with his volume on Chartres, 
 and their conclusions are so laboured and inef- 
 fective in comparison with the Ughtning-like 
 glance with which he pierces the real meaning of 
 the twelfth century. He has his limitations, and 
 he is not unaware of them. But when one re- 
 flects on the hideous self-complacency, the eigh- 
 teenth-century ignorance, the half-educated vul- 
 
190 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 garity of most of the writers in German and 
 English who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, 
 one cannot help giving grateful thanks for having 
 found Henry Adams. 
 
 To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one 
 of his reasons seems to be that the Harvard man, 
 though capable of valuing the military architec- 
 ture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sym- 
 pathize with the beauties of Chartres or Sancta 
 Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more receptive. 
 However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, 
 would have discovered that both Yale and Har- 
 vard, both seekers after culture and the culti- 
 vated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinion- 
 ated, have profited greatly by the education he 
 has given them. It seems that Henry Adams 
 fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did 
 not realize that he would give his countrymen an 
 education which they greatly lacked, and which 
 many of them are sincerely grateful for. 
 
 The man that cannot read his chapter on "Ec- 
 centricity" over and over again is incapable of ap- 
 preciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books 
 to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small 
 space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 191 
 
 opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books 
 listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us 
 wiU make his own shelf of books. The book for 
 me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or 
 uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose crit- 
 icisms are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes 
 literature when he exercises his critical vocation; 
 Brunetiere has too heavy a hand; Francisque 
 Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give 
 delight. There are no really good French critics 
 to-day, probably because they have so little ma- 
 terial to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his 
 vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews 
 knows his line and the value of background and 
 perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; 
 but there are many leaves in our forests of critical 
 writing and not much wood. Literary criticism 
 is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, 
 who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. 
 The admitted existence of cliques and claques 
 in London makes us distrustful. You were work- 
 ed into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's 
 " Herod " until you found that half a score of notices 
 of this tragedy were written by the same hand! 
 It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of 
 
192 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 William James" should appear shortly after "The 
 Education of Henry Adams," and, though the 
 Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly 
 redolent of New England. We had begun to forget 
 our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. 
 Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as 
 writers of modern folk stories; but the Atlantic 
 Monthly has become eclectic. It has lost the fla- 
 vour of New England. That Boston which in 
 the Atlantic had always been a state of mind has 
 become different from the real old Boston. 
 
 In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole 
 of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had be- 
 gun to stain our map of culture with the modu- 
 lated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had re- 
 turned to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe — 
 leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I always 
 found detestable — ^to "Elsie Venner" and to "The 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in the hope that 
 the flavour of New England, which I foimd to my 
 horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. 
 There is always "The House of the Seven Gables!" 
 
 But, while I was lingering over some almost for- 
 gotten pages of Mrs. Stowe with great pleasure, 
 something she said reminded me of Walter Savage 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 193 
 
 Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor 
 which had ever attracted me, "The Imaginary 
 Conversations." There was an interlude of en- 
 joyment and exasperation. He shows himself so 
 malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable 
 of comprehending some of the historical persons he 
 presents to us. But there are compensations, all 
 the same. Whatever one may think of the ani- 
 mus of Landor, one cannot get on without an oc- 
 casional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." 
 Suddenly Landor reminded me of Marion Craw- 
 ford's "With the Immortals," and I rediscovered 
 Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine ! To have dis- 
 covered Heine in Zangwill's " In a Mattress Grave " 
 was worth a long search through many magazines. 
 Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zang- 
 will's few pages can never be obliterated from the 
 heart of a loving reader — by a loving reader I mean 
 a reader who loves men a little more than books. 
 You will remember that Crawford's Immortals 
 appear at Sorrento where Lady Brenda and Au- 
 gustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine 
 flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver 
 Lodge could only bring back to life, or induce to 
 come back to life. King Francis I. and Julius Caesar 
 
194 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,^ together 
 with that group of semi-happy souls who hve on 
 the "enamelled green" of Dante, spiritism might 
 have more to say for itself! 
 
 "'I call a cat a cat,' as Boileau put it," remarked Heine. 
 " I would like to know how many men in a hundred are dis- 
 appointed in the women they marry." 
 
 "Just as many as have too much imagination," said 
 Augustus. 
 
 "No," said Johnson, shaking his head violently and speak- 
 ing suddenly in an excited tone. "No. Those who are 
 disappointed are such as are possessed of imagination with- 
 out judgment; but a man whose imagination does not outrun 
 his judgment is seldom deceived in the realisation of his 
 hopes. I suspect that the same thing is true in the art of 
 poetry, of which Herr Heine is at once a master and a judge. 
 For the qualities that constitute genius are invention, im- 
 agination and judgment; invention, by which new trains of 
 events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed; 
 imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind, 
 and enables him to convey to the reader the various form 
 of nature, incidents of life and energies of passion; and judg- 
 ment, which selects from life or nature what the present 
 purpose requires, and by separating the essence of things 
 from its concomitants, often makes the representation more 
 powerful than the reality. A man who possesses invention 
 
 ' " Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto 
 mi fur moetrati gli spiriti magni 
 che del verderli in me stesso 'n esalto" 
 
 INFERNO. 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 195 
 
 and imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, 
 gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have 
 judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of pos- 
 sibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has 
 chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he 
 runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, how- 
 ever, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much 
 more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may 
 attribute the small number of poets who have flourished in 
 the world, and the great number of happy marriages among 
 civilised mankind." 
 
 "It appears that I must have possessed imagination after 
 all," said Francis. 
 
 "If you will allow me to say it," said Caesar in his most 
 suave tones, and turning his heavy black eyes upon the king's 
 face, "you had too much. Had you possessed less imagi- 
 nation and more judgment, you might many times have de- 
 stroyed the Emperor Charles. To challenge him to fight 
 a duel was a gratuitous and very imaginative piece of civility; 
 to let him escape as you did more than once when you could 
 easily have forced an engagement on terms advantageous 
 to yourself, was unpardonable." 
 
 "I know it," said Francis, bitterly. "I was not Caesar." 
 "No, sir," said Johnson in loud, harsh tones, "nor were 
 
 you happy in your marriages " 
 
 " I adore learned men," whispered Francis to Lady Brenda. 
 He had at once recovered his good humour. 
 
 "A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element 
 of judgment is necessary in the selection of a wife," con- 
 tinued the doctor. 
 
 "I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall 
 in love with each other," said Lady Brenda. 
 
 "Intuition, madam," replied Johnson, "means the mental 
 
196 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 view; as you use it you mean a very quick and accurate men- 
 tal view, followed immediately by an unconscious but cor- 
 rect process of deduction. The combination of the two, 
 when they are nicely adjusted, constitutes a kind of judg- 
 ment which, though it be not always so correct in its con- 
 clusions, as that exercised by ordinary logic, has neverthe- 
 less the advantage of quickness combined with tolerable 
 precision. For, in matters of love, it is necessary to be 
 quick." 
 
 "Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon," said 
 Francis, laughing. 
 
 "And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his 
 house clean," returned the doctor. 
 
 "Do you believe that people always fall in love very 
 quickly?" asked Lady Brenda. 
 
 "Frequently, though not always. Love dominates quite 
 as much because its attacks are sudden and unexpected, as 
 because most persons believe that to be in love is a desirable 
 state." 
 
 "Love," said Caesar, "is a great general and a great stra- 
 tegist, for he rarely fails to surprise the enemy if he can, but 
 he never refuses an open engagement when necessary." 
 
 Strange as it may appear, it does not seem to be 
 so much of a descent, or of a break in the chain of 
 continuity, to turn to hear William James speak in 
 letters, which have the effect of conversation. 
 From the very beginning of his precious book I 
 somehow feel that I am part of the little circle 
 about him. The conversation goes on — ^Mr. James 
 never loses sight of the point of view and sympathies 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 197 
 
 of the party of the second part — ^and you are not 
 made to feel as an eavesdropper. 
 
 Standing on the ladder, unhappily a rather shaky 
 ladder, to put back "With the Immortals" on the 
 shelf, I pass Wells's great novel of "Marriage," 
 which I would clutch to read again, if I had not al- 
 ready begun this Letter of James — ^written to his 
 wife: 
 
 I have often thought that the best way to define a man's 
 character would be to seek out the particular mental or 
 moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt 
 himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At 
 such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 
 "This is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the 
 circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how 
 some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others 
 do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy 
 where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy 
 and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, 
 this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element 
 of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trust- 
 ing outward things to perform their part so as to make it 
 a full harmony, but without any guaranty that they will. 
 Make it a guaranty — and the attitude immediately becomes 
 to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the 
 guaranty, and I feel (provided I am uberhaupt in vigorous 
 condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willing- 
 ness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physi- 
 cally by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone 
 (don't smile at this — it is to me an essential element of the 
 
198 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or 
 emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates 
 itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theo- 
 retic determination which I possess, . . . 
 
 Personal expression is, after all, what we long for 
 in literature. Cardinal Newman tells us, I think, 
 in his "Idea of a University," that it is the very es- 
 sence of literature. Scientia is truth, or conclu- 
 sions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the 
 personality of the speaker or writer. But litera- 
 ture, to be literature, must be personal. It is good 
 literature when it is expressed plastically, and in 
 accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader 
 like myself does not, perhaps, trouble himself suflB- 
 ciently with the philosophy of William James as 
 represented in these "Letters." One has a lan- 
 guid interest in knowing what he thought of Berg- 
 son and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but for the 
 constant reader his detachment or attachment to 
 Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so 
 important as his personal impressions of both the 
 little things and the big things of our contempo- 
 rary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you 
 must, if you are at all in love with life, become a 
 Jamesonian after you have read the "Letters"! 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 199 
 
 And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, 
 may resemble his father in time, has arranged them 
 so well, and kept himself so tactfully in the back- 
 ground, that you feel, too, that whether young 
 Henry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most under- 
 standing human being. The only way to read 
 these "Letters" is to dip into them here and there, 
 as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the 
 vinegar on drop by drop. To use an oriental meta- 
 phor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated by the 
 acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper 
 of humour. Frankly, since I discovered William 
 James as a human being I have begun to read him 
 for the same reason that I read Pepys — ^for pure 
 enjoyment ! 
 
 A friend of mine, feeling that I had taken the 
 "Letters of William James" too frivolously, told 
 me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to counteract 
 my mediaeval philosophy and too cheerful view of 
 life. Just as if I had not struggled with Mr. 
 Wells, and irritated myself into a temperature in 
 trying to get through his latest preachments ! I am 
 not quite sure what I said of Mr. Wells, but I find, 
 in an article by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy in the 
 "New Statesman," just what I ought to have said. 
 
200 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 This doctrine of the inspired priesthood of authors is ex- 
 aggerated and dangerous. Neither has it, you see, prevented 
 him from writing "The Wonderful Visit." Artists should feel, 
 and if necessary be told, that they are on their honour to do 
 their best. That will do. If they flatter themselves that 
 they are messengers from the Father of Light whenever 
 they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any emotional 
 hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has 
 been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a 
 short time afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in 
 a quite different direction. Sincerity of the moment is not 
 sincerity; those who have watched England's prime minister 
 know that. 
 
 William James helped me to wash the bad taste 
 of Mr. Wells's god out of my mouth. It seems re- 
 markable that such a distinguished man of talent — 
 if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a 
 man of genius — should not have been able to invent 
 a more attractive and potent Deity. Voltaire, 
 while making no definition, did better than that; 
 but Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, 
 and he had an education such as no modern writer 
 has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a 
 bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those 
 who, like the Athenians, are always seeking new 
 things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms seriously.? 
 Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 201 
 
 tells us that the merchant wants to be a sailor and 
 the sailor a merchant? Does he not begin with — 
 Qui fit, Maecenas? But Horace says nothing of 
 the authors of fiction — Stevenson calls them very 
 lightly "filles de joie," — ^who insist on being boldly 
 and brutally theologians and philosophers. Hor- 
 ace might have invented a better god than Wells; 
 but he had too much good taste and too much 
 knowledge of man in the world to attempt it. 
 
 The more one reads of the very moderns, the 
 more one falls in love with the ancients. Take 
 the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do 
 you think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes 
 and love him as we do if he insisted that we should 
 "sit under him" and assumed a pulpit manner? 
 This is as near as he ever comes to teaching us any- 
 thing: 
 
 •'o- 
 
 Lenit albescens animos capillus 
 Litium et rixae cwpidos protervae; 
 Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa, 
 Consule Planco. 
 
 Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved 
 himself very much, showed in his translations of 
 "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love 
 something as well as himself. It does not become 
 
202 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 me to recommend books — ^everybody to his own 
 taste! — ^but I should like to say that for those whose 
 Latin has become only a faint perfume of attar of 
 roses, like that which is said to cling faintly to one 
 of the desks of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, the 
 translations of our dear Horatius by Lord Lytton 
 is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the 
 most charming and most wise of pagan poets. 
 Horace says : 
 
 Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us, 
 Alas ! no piety delays the wrinkles, 
 Nor old age imminent. 
 Nor the indomitable hand of Death. 
 
 We might have, in spite of the awful examples 
 of Mr. Wells and the other preachers, who ought to 
 confine themselves to finer things, desired that 
 Horace should have gone further and told us what 
 kind of books we ought to read in our old age. 
 His choice was naturally limited; it was impossible 
 for him to buy a book every week, or every month. 
 The publishers were not so active in those days. 
 But he might have indicated the kind of book that 
 old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I 
 have tried "Robinson Crusoe," — ^the unequalled — 
 
LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS 203 
 
 and "Swiss Family Robinson"; but they seem too 
 grown up for me now. I have taken to "King 
 Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that 
 perfect gem of excitement and illusion, "The Mu- 
 tineers," by Charles Boardman Hawes, I read it, 
 and I'm young again. I trust that some enter- 
 prising bookseller will unblushingly compile a 
 library for the old, and begin it with "The Mu- 
 tineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the 
 Near Old is that the fear of shocking the Young 
 makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that 
 they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they 
 express intense interest in new and ponderous 
 books, in the presence of Youth — when they ought 
 to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. 
 But if the Old really want to save their faces, and 
 at the same time enjoy glimpses of that fountain 
 of youth which we long for at every age, let them 
 acquire two books — Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded 
 Man" and "The Quest of El Dorado," by Dr. J. A. 
 Zahm, whose nom de plume was H. J. Mozans. 
 There you have the real stuff. Together, these 
 two books are a combination of just' what the Old 
 need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke 
 he cannot dream with any facility when he grows 
 
204 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 old ; and if he has not possessed himself of these two 
 volumes, he cannot have acquired that basis for 
 dreams which the energetic Aged greatly need. 
 "The Gilded Man" is frankly a romance, and yet, 
 strangely enough, a romance of facts, and "The 
 Quest of El Dorado" is the only volume in the 
 English language when it deals with the El Dorado; 
 it has all the most attractive qualities of a romance. 
 But they are not enough. To them I add, " Bob, 
 Son of Battle," which the author of "Alice For 
 Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest 
 animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is 
 nobly human, and the Black Killer devilishly hu- 
 man, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs, in- 
 vented by clever writers. A great book! It is 
 too thrilling; it reminds of "Wuthering Heights"; 
 I shall, therefore, read this evening some of Henry 
 Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with 
 "Pride and Prejudice." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Books at Random 
 
 Among nature books that gave me many happy 
 hours on the banks of the Delaware — ^imperial 
 river! — ^is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Mea- 
 dow." "Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the 
 twelve labours of Hercules than attempt to cata- 
 logue the varied forms of life found in the area of 
 an average ramble !" Soit I And better than that, 
 "to feel that whatever creature we may meet will 
 prove companionable — ^that is, no stranger, but 
 rather an amusing and companionable friend — 
 assures both pleasure and profit whenever we 
 chance abroad." 
 
 "Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his 
 companion can forget the extracts from the diary 
 of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in 
 the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced 
 the number of wild ducks and geese, he says, even 
 then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was 
 often black with the smaller fowl. 
 
 205 
 
206 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 I do seldom see the great swans, but father says that they 
 are not unusual in the wide stretches of the Delaware. 
 
 Happy day! when the wedge-shaped battahons of 
 wild geese were almost as frequently seen as the 
 spattering sparrows now! 
 
 Father allowed me [writes the good Quaker boy, in 
 1734] to accompany my Indian friend, Oconio, to Watson's 
 creek, that we may gather wild fowl after the Indian manner. 
 With great eagerness, I accompanied Oconio, and thus 
 happened it. We did reach the widest part of that creek 
 early in the morning, I think the sun was scarcely an half- 
 hour high. Oconio straightway hid himself in the tall grass 
 by the water, while I was bidden to lie in the tall grass at a 
 little distance. With his bow and arrows, Oconio quickly 
 shot a duck that came near, by swimming within a Short dis- 
 tance of him. I marvelled much with what skill he shot, for 
 his arrow pierced the head of the duck which gave no alarm- 
 ing cry .... Oconio now did fashion a circlet of green 
 boughs, and so placed them about his head and shoulders that 
 I saw not his face ; he otherwise disrobed and walked into the 
 stream. He held in one hand a shotten duck, so that it 
 swam lustily, and, so equipped, was in the midst of a cluster 
 of fowl, of which he deftly seized several so quickly that their 
 fellows took no alarm. These he strangled beneath the 
 water, and, when he had three of them, came back with 
 caution to where the thick bushes concealed him. He de- 
 sired that I should do the same, and with much hesitation 
 I disrobed and assumed the disguise Oconio had fashioned; 
 then I put forth boldly towards the gathered fowl, at which 
 they did arise with a great clamour, and were gone. I marvel 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 207 
 
 much why this should have been, but Oconio did not make it 
 clear, and I forbore, through foolish pride, to ask him. And 
 let it not be borne in mind against me [pleads the good 
 Quaker boy] that, when I reached my home, I wandered 
 to the barn, and writing an ugly word upon the door, sat 
 long and gazed at it. Chagrin doth make me feel very 
 meek, I find, but I set no one an example by speech or act, 
 in thus soothing my feelings in so worldly a manner. 
 
 This example may be commended to players 
 of golf, who are inclined to be "worldly." The 
 episode of Oconio at the best is too long to quote; 
 it, too, has its lesson ! One reads Mr. Abbott's de- 
 fence of the skunk cabbage, for it harbours at its 
 root 
 
 the earliest salamanders, the pretty Maryland yellow throat 
 nests in the hollows of its broad leaves, and rare beetles find 
 a congenial home in the shelter it affords. 
 
 "Upland and Meadow" gives one occasion for 
 thought on the subject of raccoons. "Foolish 
 creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning 
 coons are forced to quest or die." 
 
 For a stroll by the Thames — ^I mean the New 
 England Thames — ^there is no book like Ik Marvel's 
 "Dream Life," but for a day near the Delaware — 
 imperial river! — give me "Upland and Meadow." 
 
 And then with what assurance of satisfaction 
 
208 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 may one turn for refreshment to the continual 
 charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby" and 
 " Pepacton," Burroughs's opinions upon the prob- 
 lems of humanity are more tiresome than John 
 Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with 
 him among the birds and the plants, to hope with 
 him that the soaring lark of England may find its 
 way down through Canada to our hedges, to look 
 with him into the nests in the shrubs that border 
 our roads is to begin to feel that joy in being an 
 American of the soil that no other author gives. 
 He cured the young New England poets and the 
 singers of the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills 
 of celebrating the English thrush and the nightin- 
 gale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades. 
 
 There is an epithet I should like to apply to 
 John Burroughs, but he might not like it if he were 
 alive. I recall the case of a pleasant Englishman 
 who admired two American girls very much, be- 
 cause, as he said, they were "so homely." In fact, 
 they were rather pretty girls, and he had not used 
 the term in reference to their looks. It is the word 
 with which I like to describe John Burroughs. 
 Forty years ago, I met him at Richard Watson 
 Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 209 
 
 "homely" in the sense in which the EngUshman 
 used the word. Some of the refined ladies at Mrs. 
 Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even 
 in the eighties there were still precieuses. The 
 truth is that his rural use of the vernacular was 
 part of the charm. It never spoiled his style; 
 but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which 
 smelt of the good soil of the country. 
 
 Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me — a 
 far-fetched comparison but I will not apologize for 
 it — of "As You Like It" played in one way by 
 Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia 
 Marlowe in another. Madame Dybwad, being 
 nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, 
 gives us an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of 
 "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's, like Ada 
 Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial 
 character of Watteau. "Walden," then, is some- 
 what too varnished; but "Riverby" and "Pepact- 
 on" are "homely" and "homey." 
 
 To return to memoirs for a moment, that most 
 delightful of all mental dissipations for a leisurely 
 man. In looking for the second volume of "Walden" 
 — ^for fear that I should have done Thoreau an 
 injustice — ^I find the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de 
 
210 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Boigne." One cannot imagine anything more un- 
 like Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John 
 Burroughs! Why is Madame de Boigne on the 
 same shelf with these two lovers of nature? Ma- 
 dame de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She 
 loved the world and the manifestations of the 
 world, and — ^not to be ungallant — she is more like 
 an irritated mosquito than like the elegant ca- 
 mellia japonica to which she would prefer to be 
 compared. 
 
 There is a great deal of solid comfort in the 
 revelations of Madame de Boigne; she is at times 
 so very untruthful that her malice does no real 
 harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors 
 so well; and gives the atmosphere of French So- 
 ciety before and during the Revolution in a most 
 fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, 
 of course; but a writer of memoirs who always 
 thought the best would be as painfully uninterest- 
 ing as Froude is when he describes the character 
 of Henry VIII. But this is a digression. 
 
 Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the 
 style of Sir Thomas Browne as displaying a 
 "rich maturity and heavy -scented blossom." Mr. 
 Mencken cannot accuse any modern Englishman 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 211 
 
 or American of imitating, in his desire to be aca- 
 demic, Browne's hyperlatinism or his use of 
 Latin words, hke "corpage," "confinium," "angus- 
 tias," or "Vivacious abominations" and "conga- 
 evous generations." 
 Mr. Symonds says: 
 
 He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the 
 most puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to 
 confessions of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the re- 
 sult of tortuous reflections on the enigmas of life and reve- 
 lation. Perhaps the following paragraph enables us to un- 
 derstand the permanent temper of his mind most truly: 
 
 "As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy sub- 
 tleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better 
 heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine. Me- 
 thinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an 
 active faith: t^ e deepest mysteries ours contains have not 
 only been illustrated but maintained by syllogism and the 
 rule of reason. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pur- 
 sue my reason to an O altitudo ! 'Tis my solitary recreation 
 to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and 
 riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection. I can 
 answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason 
 with that odd resolution I learned of TertuUian, Cerium est 
 quia impossible est. I desire to exercise my faith in the 
 difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects, 
 is not faith, but persuasion." 
 
 Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of 
 theology, aside, Sir Thomas lends himself to those 
 
m CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 noments when a man wants to dip a little into 
 he interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly- 
 ill the modern novelists who describe men seem to 
 ;hink that their interior life is purely emotional. 
 Sven Mr. Hugh Walpole/ my favourite among the 
 vriters in the spring of middle age, is inclined to 
 nake his heroes, or his semi-heroes (there are no 
 jood real honest villains in fiction now) lead lives 
 :hat are not at all interior. And yet every man 
 jither leads an interior life, or longs to lead an 
 nterior life, of which he seldom talks. He wants 
 narticulately to know something of the art of 
 neditation ; his dissatisfaction with life, even when 
 le is successful, is largely due to the fact that he 
 las never been taught how to cultivate the spirit- 
 lal sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de 
 sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert 
 md a group of his imitators great contentment in 
 he state to which they were called. As a book of 
 lecular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of 
 ;ood points. For instance, Sir Thomas starts one 
 )n the road to meditation on the difference between 
 
 1 Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who admired 
 lis quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The Young Enchanted" 
 it George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius." 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 213 
 
 democracy and freedom, hmnanity and nationalism 
 in this way : 
 
 Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without 
 heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with 
 another filed before him, according to the quality of his 
 desert and pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the 
 corruption of these times and the bias of present practice 
 wheel another way, thus it was in the first and primitive 
 commonwealths, and is yet in the integrity and cradle of 
 well-ordered politics: till corruption getteth ground; — ruder 
 desires labouring after that which wiser considerations con- 
 temn; — every one having a Hberty to amass and heap up 
 riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase any- 
 thing. 
 
 There are singular beings who have tried to 
 read "Religio Medici" continuously. Was it 
 Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one 
 of this class.'' "How do you like Shakespeare?" 
 the amiable donor asked. "I can't say yet; I 
 have not finished him!" It seems almost miracu- 
 lous that human beings should exist who take this 
 attitude toward Sir Thomas Browne, his "Urn 
 Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems al- 
 most more miraculous that this attitude should be 
 taken toward Montaigne, and that some folk 
 should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the 
 pleasant, curtailed edition of John Florio's trans- 
 
214 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 lation, edited by Justin Huntly McCarthy! These 
 small books are convenient, no doubt. If you can- 
 not have the original French, or the leisure to 
 browse over the big volume of Florio's old book as 
 it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an 
 agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It 
 somehow or other reminds one of that appalling 
 series of cutdown "Classics," so largely recom- 
 mended to a public that is seduced to run and 
 read. A condensed edition of Froissart may do 
 very well for boys; but who can visualize the kind 
 of mind content with a reduced version of "Vanity 
 Fair"? 
 
 Montaigne is a city of refuge from the whirling 
 words of the uplifters. At times I have been com- 
 pelled from a sense of duty, a mistaken one, to read 
 whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and 
 "The New MachiaveUi" and "Tono-Bungay," 
 will be remembered when "Mr. Britling" — ^by the 
 way, what did Mr. Britling see through.? — shall 
 be forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn 
 to Montaigne. It amazed me to hear Montaigne 
 called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward 
 the eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and 
 he has fewer superstitions. It was his humanity 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 215 
 
 and his love for religion that turned him from 
 Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for 
 Plato. He is a real amateur of good books. Lis- 
 ten to this : 
 
 As for Cicero, I am of the common judgment, that besides 
 learning there was an exquisite eloquence in him: He was a 
 good citizen, of an honest, gentle nature, as are comimonly fat 
 and burly men: for so was he. But to speake truly of 
 him, full of ambitious vanity and remisse niceness. And I 
 know not well how to excuse him, in that he deemed his 
 Poesie worthy to be pubUshed. It is no great imperfection 
 to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him that he 
 never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie of 
 his name. Concerning his eloquence it is beyond all com- 
 parison, and I verily believe that none shall ever equall it. 
 
 Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that 
 ever the book written by Brutus on Virtue was 
 lost. He consoles himself, however, by remember- 
 ing that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. 
 He would rather know what talk Brutus had with 
 some of his familiar friends in his tent on the night 
 before going to battle than the speech he made 
 to his army. He had no sympathy with eloquent 
 prefaces, or with circumlocutions that keep the 
 reader back from the real matter of books. He 
 does not want to hear heralds or criers. How he 
 
216 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 tvould have hated the flare of trumpets that pre- 
 cedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the 
 blazing "jackets," the lowest form of modern art, 
 svould have made him rip out the favourite oaths 
 Df his province with violence. 
 
 "The Romans in their religion," he says, "were 
 «vont to say ' Hoc age ' ; which in ours we say, ' Sur- 
 sum corda.'" 
 
 He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner; 
 he does not care for the hors d'oeuvres. Note how 
 he rushes with rather rough weapons to the trans- 
 lation, by his dying father's command, of Theo- 
 logia naturalis sive liber creaturarum magistri 
 Raimondi de Sebonde. He thinks that it is a good 
 antidote for the "new f angles" of Luther, who is 
 leading the vulgar to think for themselves and to 
 reject authority. His analysis of himself in the 
 essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man 
 to sane men; and he does not hesitate to point out 
 the fact that no hatred is so absolute as that which 
 Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. 
 The discord between zeal for religion and the fury 
 of nationality concerns him greatly, and he does 
 not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to his 
 contemporaries on the subject. 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 217 
 
 In Montaigne's time the theories which Machi- 
 avelli had gathered together in "The Prince," 
 governed Europe. One can see that they do 
 not satisfy Montaigne. To him they are ne- 
 farious. 
 
 '"The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more 
 direct action on real Hfe than any other book in 
 the world, and a larger share in emancipating 
 Europe from the Middle Ages." 
 
 It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the 
 "Essays" of Michel de Montaigne give me as 
 much pleasure, but not so much edification, as 
 the precious sentences of Thomas a Kempis. 
 They are foils; at first sight there seems to be no 
 relationship between them; and yet at heart 
 Michel de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, 
 has much in common with Thomas a Kempis. 
 If there were no persons in the world capable of 
 being Montaignes, Thomas a Kempis would have 
 written for God alone. He would have resembled 
 an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber 
 had erected. On the side toward the altar it was 
 foliated and exquisitely carved in a manner that 
 pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side 
 toward the people and not the side toward the 
 
218 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Presence of God, it was entirely plain and un- 
 ornamented! 
 
 The friendship of Thomas a Kempis I owe to 
 George Eliot. Emerson might easily perish; Plato 
 might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last 
 supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even 
 Rudyard Kipling might exist only in tradition; 
 but the loss of all their works would be as nothing 
 compared to the loss of that little volume which 
 is a marvellous guide to life. The translations of 
 Thomas a Kempis into English vary in value. 
 Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of 
 A Kempis in deleting the passages on the Holy 
 Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing Thomas a 
 Kempis ! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the 
 philosophy of his love of Christ limps when the 
 mystical centre of it, the Eucharist, is cut out. 
 If that meeting in the upper room had not taken 
 place during the paschal season, if Christ had not 
 offered His body and blood, soul and divinity to 
 his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas a 
 Kempis would never have written "The Following 
 of Christ." The Bible, even the New Testament, 
 is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. 
 Paul's Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 219 
 
 etter interpretation of the doctrines of Christ as 
 ppUed to everyday life can there be found than in 
 lis precious httle book? 
 
 You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather 
 'hat comfort you can from the philosophy of 
 'horeau's "Walden"— which might, after all, be 
 lore comfortable if it were more pagan. The 
 'an of Thoreau was a respectable Pan, because he 
 '^as a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in 
 [eble's "Christian Year" if you can; but A 
 [empis overtops all! It is strange, too, what an 
 ppeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers in 
 Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with 
 very day. And George Eliot was a remarkable 
 xample of this, for, in spite of her habitual rev- 
 rence, she cannot be said to have accepted ortho- 
 ox dogmas. Another paradox seems to be in the 
 let that Thomas a Kempis appeals so directly 
 nd consciously to the confirmed mystic and to 
 lose who have secluded themselves from the 
 orld. At first, I must confess that I found this 
 
 great obstacle to my joy in having found him. 
 
 If Montaigne frequently drove me to A Kempis, 
 . Kempis almost as frequently in the beginning 
 rove me back to Montaigne. It was not until 
 
220 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 I had become more familiar with the New Testa- 
 ment that I began to see that A Kempis spoke 
 as one soul to another. In this world for him 
 there were only three Facts — God, his own soul, 
 and the soul to whom he spoke. 
 
 It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many 
 of my friends who looked on the Last Supper as a 
 mere symbol of love and hospitality, should cling 
 to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. 
 Even the example of an intellectual friend of 
 mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in Italy, 
 could not make it clear. He often asserted that he 
 did not believe in God; and yet he was desolate 
 if on a certain day in the year he did not pay some 
 kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of 
 Padua ! 
 
 I have known him to break up a party in the 
 Adirondacks in order to reach the nearest church 
 where it was possible for him to burn a candle in 
 honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious 
 anniversary! As long as he exists, as long as he 
 continues to burn candles — les chandelles d'un 
 athee — ^I shall accept without understanding the 
 enthusiasm of so many lovers of A Kempis, who 
 cut out the mystical longings for the reception of 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 221 
 
 that divine food which Christ gave out in the 
 upper room. A Kempis says: 
 
 My soul longs to be nourished with Thy body; my heart 
 desires to be united with Thee. 
 
 Give Thyself to me and it is enough; for without Thee no 
 comfort is available. 
 
 Without Thee I cannot subsist; and without Thy visita- 
 tion I cannot live. 
 
 And, therefore, I must come often to Thee, and receive 
 Thee for the remedy, and for the health and strength of my 
 soul; lest perhaps I faint in the way, if I be deprived of this 
 heavenly food. 
 
 For so, O most merciful Jesus, Thou wast pleased once to 
 say, when Thou hadst been preaching to the people, and 
 curing sundry diseases: "I will not send them away fasting, 
 lest they faint in the way. " 
 
 Deal now in like manner with me, who has left Thyself 
 in the sacrament for the comfort of Thy faithful. 
 
 For Thou art the most sweet reflection of the soul; and he 
 that shall eat Thee worthily shall be partaker and heir of 
 everlasting glory. 
 
 To every soul, oppressed and humble, A Kempis 
 speaks more poignantly than even David, in that 
 great cry of the heart and soul, the De Profundis : 
 
 Behold, then, O Lord, my abjection and frailty [Ps. xxiv. 
 18], every way known to Thee. 
 
 Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire [Ps. Ixviii. 
 15], that I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly 
 3ast down forever. 
 
222 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in 
 Thy sight, to find that I am so subject to fall and have so 
 little strength to resist my passions. 
 
 And although I do not altogether consent, yet their as- 
 saults are troublesome and grievous to me, and it is exceed- 
 ingly irksome to live thus always in a conflict. 
 
 Hence my infirmity is made known to me, because wicked 
 thoughts do always much more easily rush in upon me than 
 they can be cast out again. 
 
 Oh, that Thou, the most mighty God of Israel, the zealous 
 lover of faithful souls, wouldst behold the labour and sorrow 
 of Thy servant, and stand by me in all my undertakings. 
 
 Strengthen me with heavenly fortitude, lest the old man, 
 the miserable flesh, not fully subject to the spirit, prevail 
 and get the upper hand, against which we must fight as long 
 as we breathe in this most wretched life. 
 
 Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and mis- 
 eries are never wanting; where aU things are full of snares 
 and enemies. 
 
 There is no pessimism here, for Thomas a 
 Kempis gives the remedies, the only remedies 
 offered to the world since light was created before 
 the sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to 
 him the sins of the intellect are worse than the 
 sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he 
 never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did de- 
 scribe it. They both knew their hearts and the 
 world; and the world has never invented any 
 remedy so effective as that which A Kempis offers. 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 223 
 
 It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot 
 !xist without the fear of hurting or offending the 
 Beloved. 
 
 The best book yet written on the causes that 
 nade for the World War and on their remedy is 
 'The Rebuilding of Europe," by David Jayne 
 Sill. There we find this quotation from Villari 
 Uuminated : 
 
 3ut it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work 
 sritten in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect ex- 
 pression of an emancipation from moral restraints far ad- 
 vanced. The Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had al- 
 ready largely disappeared. The old grounds of obligation 
 iad been swept away. Men looked for their safety to the 
 aatio-state rather than to the solidarity of Christendom; and 
 the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it, consisted in 
 absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one man 
 who should embody its unity, strength, and authority. 
 
 Montaigne felt rather than understood the 
 cruelty and brutality of the state traditions of his 
 time; and these traditions were seriously com- 
 batted when the United States made brave ef- 
 forts both at Versailles and Washington. Doctor 
 Hill sums up the essential principles which guided 
 the world from the Renascence to the year 1918: 
 
224 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 (1) The essence of a State is "sovereignty," defined as 
 "supreme power." (2) A sovereign State has the right to 
 declare war upon any other sovereign State for any reason 
 that seems to it sufficient. (3) An act of conquest by the 
 exercise of superior mihtary force entitles the conqueror to 
 the possession of the conquered territory. (4) The popu- 
 lation goes with the land and becomes subject to the will of 
 the conqueror. 
 
 What member of the memorable conference, 
 which began at Washington on November 12, 1921, 
 would have dared to assert these unmoral prin- 
 ciples, accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna 
 and the Congress of Berlin, in principle? King 
 John of England looked on their negation as an 
 unholy novelty, though that negation was the 
 leaven of the best of the life of the Middle Ages. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea 
 of freedom was kept alive, in the miasma which 
 poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's world, by 
 men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A 
 better understanding of the principles of these men 
 would have made Milton less autocratic— Lucifer, 
 though a rebel, was not a democrat — ^and Voltaire 
 less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the 
 French Republic lately named a war vessel, was the 
 friend of Frederick the Great and of Catherine II. 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 225 
 
 Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir 
 Thomas Browne and Montaigne sent me, says : 
 
 Down to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 the most odious 
 crime ever committed against a civihzed people was, no 
 doubt, the first partition of Poland; yet at the time not a 
 voice was raised against it. Louis XV. was "infinitely dis- 
 pleased," but he did not even reply to the King of Poland's 
 appeal for help. George III. coolly answered that "justice 
 ought to be the invariable rule of sovereigns"; but con- 
 cluded, " I fear, however, misfortunes have reached the point 
 where redress can be had from the hands of the Almighty 
 alone. " Catherine II. thought justice satisfied when " every- 
 one takes something. " Frederick II. wrote to his brother, 
 " The partition will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, 
 and Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the 
 same consecrated body, which is Poland." Only Maria 
 Theresa felt a twinge of conscience. She took but she felt 
 the shame of it. She wrote : " We have by our moderation 
 and fidelity to our engagements acquired the confidence, I 
 may venture to say the admiration, of Europe. . . . One 
 year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to endure it, and 
 that nothing in the world has cost me more than the loss of 
 our good name. " It is a strange phenomenon that in mat- 
 ters where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly 
 pronounces judgment and spontaneously condemns, the 
 sohd mass of moral conviction should count for nothing in 
 afiPairs of state. Against it a purely national prejudice has 
 never failed to prevail. 
 
 Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons 
 so clearly; nor does Sir Thomas Browne touch so 
 
226 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 unerringly the canker in the root of the politics of 
 his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the 
 works of either without contrasting them with the 
 physiocrats of the eighteenth century, who tore up 
 the cockles and the wheat together. 
 
 Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the 
 most adventurous, and one might almost say the 
 cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried. This 
 is admirably exemplified in "The American Lan- 
 guage," which appears in a second edition, revised 
 and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told that 
 Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 
 1880; that his family has been settled in Maryland 
 for nearly a hundred years ; and that he is of mixed 
 ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He 
 is, therefore, a typical American, and well qualified 
 to write on "The American Language." Mr. 
 Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in our 
 universities are those which concern themselves 
 with written and spoken English. He adds that 
 such grammar as is taught in our schools and col- 
 leges 
 
 is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and 
 false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, 
 eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 227 
 
 and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book 
 language which few of us ever actually speak and not many 
 of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately arti- 
 ficial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows 
 a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin 
 and the Golden Age to match; its " highly charged and heavy- 
 shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve ad- 
 mirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy 
 and of English parliamentary oratory and leader- writing; 
 it is something new for the literary artists of both countries 
 to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average 
 American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously 
 but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague 
 and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the pa- 
 rabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom 
 encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write 
 it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of 
 its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the 
 colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, 
 but he never thinks in it or quite feels it. 
 
 Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive; 
 but he is not so constructive as to build a road 
 through the marsh of confusion into which that 
 conflict of dialects in the English language — a 
 language which is grammarless and dependent 
 upon usage — ^has left us. He tells us that good 
 writing consists, as in the case of Ho wells, in de- 
 liberately throwing overboard the principles so 
 elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lin- 
 
228 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 coin, in standing unaware of them. Whether this 
 is true in the case of Howells or not, it must be re- 
 membered that Lincoln was fed, through his read- 
 ing, on the results of those linguistic principles 
 which are with us in English tradition. It is the 
 usage of Cardinal Newman or Hawthorne or Ste- 
 venson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln himself, 
 which those who want to write good English follow 
 rather than the elaborate rules of confused English 
 grammar which are forgotten almost as soon as 
 they are learned. 
 
 Personally, in youthful days, I could make 
 nothing out of the "grammar" of the English lan- 
 guage until I had begun to study Latin prosody; 
 and then it became clear to me that only a few 
 bones in the structure of English, taken from the 
 Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of the 
 English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton. 
 
 As the English language, spoken everywhere, 
 must depend on good usage, and the bad usage of 
 to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow, 
 it is regrettable that no scientific study of the 
 American vocabulary or of the influences lying at 
 the root of American word-formation — ^to quote 
 Mr. Mencken — ^has as yet been made. The elder 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 229 
 
 student was content with correcting the examples 
 of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he 
 read "The Dean's English," very popular at one 
 time, Richard Grant White's "Words and Their 
 Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The Ver- 
 balist." To this, one of the most bewildering books 
 on the manner of writing English ever written, 
 Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" was 
 added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a 
 sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories 
 that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy 
 to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so 
 lacking as in the "Philosophy of Style." Its 
 principles have a pereimial value and nearly every 
 author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated 
 them with variations; but Spencer's method of pre- 
 senting them is as involved as any method adopted 
 by a philosopher could be — ^and that is saying a 
 good deal. 
 
 The English of the universities hold that Amer- 
 icans are the slave of Webster's Dictionary; and 
 this is true of a certain limited class of Americans. 
 The English public speaker allows himself more 
 freedom in the matter of pronunciation than very 
 scrupulous Americans do. Lord Balfour's speeches 
 
230 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 at tlie Washington Conference ofifered several ex- 
 amples of this. 
 
 "The Supreme Court of the United States has 
 decided that Webster's Dictionary is the American 
 dictionary, and I propose to consider all its de- 
 cisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New 
 York lawyer who habitually uses "dontcha know" 
 and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as an 
 author whose English ought to be corrected; and 
 he became furious over what he called the mis- 
 pronunciation of "apotheosis, " which he said a 
 favourite preacher had not uttered according to 
 Webster. And I have known literary societies in 
 the South to be disrupted over the use of the word 
 "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for 
 "bloody," Mr. Mencken shows us that one of the 
 outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English 
 convention was his permitting the heroine of 
 "Pygmalion" to use it on the stage. There is one 
 Americanism, however, against which, as far as I 
 can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the 
 use of the word "consummated" in a phrase like 
 "the marriage was consummated in the First Bap- 
 tist Church at high noon"! 
 
 In spite of democratic disapproval, some will 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 231 
 
 still hold that "lift" is better than "elevator," and 
 "station" better than "depot." Though these 
 are departures from the current vernacular. We 
 speak English often when our critical friends in 
 England imagine that we are speaking American. 
 I have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has 
 cultivated English traditions of speech, to shrink 
 in horror at the mention of "flap- jack" and "ice- 
 cream." He could never find a substitute in real 
 English for "flap-jack," but he always substituted 
 "ices" for "ice-cream." On one occasion I heard 
 him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," 
 for those "detestable messy things sold by the ton 
 to the uncivilized"; and he spent the time of lunch 
 in pointing out that no such composition really ex- 
 isted in polite society; but when his "cook general " 
 was seen approaching with an unmistakable "pie," 
 the kind supposed by the readers of advertise- 
 ments to be made by "mothers," and ordered 
 hastily because of the coming of the unexpected 
 guest, he was cast down. The guest tried to save 
 the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry 
 as "a tart." The host shook his head — "a tart," 
 in English, could never be covered! 
 
 Mr. Mencken shows us that "flap-jack," "mo- 
 
232 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 lasses," "home-spun," "ice-cream" are old Eng- 
 lish; that "Bub," which used to shock London 
 visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial 
 English; and that "muss" is found in "Antony 
 and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when I 
 was young; it would have saved me a bad mark for 
 paraphrasing "Menelaus and Paris got into a muss 
 over Helen." But probably the use of "row" to 
 express that little difficulty would not have saved 
 me! 
 
 The best judge of Madeira in Philadelphia al- 
 ways said "cheer" for "chair" and "sasser" for 
 "saucer" and "tay" for "tea" and "obleged" for 
 "obliged"; and he drank from his saucer, too; and 
 his table was always provided with little dishes, 
 like butter plates, for the discarded cups. His ex- 
 ample gave me a profound contempt for those 
 newly rich in learning who laugh without under- 
 standing, who are the slaves of the dictionary, and 
 who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentle- 
 man was an education in himself; he had lived at 
 the "English court" — or near it — ^and when he 
 came to visit us once a year, we listened enrap- 
 tured. I once fell from grace; but not from my rev- 
 erence for him, by making a mistake in my search 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 233 
 
 for knowledge which involved his age. It was 
 very easy to ask him whether Anne Boleyn had 
 asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape from 
 the family denunciation that followed. It seemed 
 that he had not lived at or near the court of Henry 
 VIII! 
 
 Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" 
 for "ill" is taboo in England, except among the 
 very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr. 
 Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes 
 so far in one of the speeches of the atrocious Mrs. 
 Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used 
 by Mr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion 
 sinks into a pastel tint! Mr. Mencken says: 
 
 The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of 
 James I. and the Authorized Version, and their descendants 
 of a century later, inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to 
 be but little changed by the academic overhauling that the 
 mother tongue was put to during the early part of the 
 Eighteenth Century. 
 
 The Bible won against the prudery of the new 
 English; prudery will go very far, and I can recall 
 the objection of an evangelical lady, in Philadel- 
 phia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave 
 Maria" by a little Papist relative. This was not 
 
234 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 on religious grounds; it was because of "blessed 
 is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. 
 The little Papist had been taught to repeat the 
 salutation of the Angel Gabriel in Latin, so, at 
 bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus ven- 
 tris tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded 
 "more decent"! 
 
 Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's 
 revelation that "ante" came into our language 
 through the Spanish; he says, 
 
 cinch was borrowed from the Spanish ''cincha" in the early 
 Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until 
 much later. 
 
 It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr. 
 Mencken's judgment in regard to that very great 
 philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he 
 quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of 
 the English language, another great Dane, Doctor 
 Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our 
 tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It 
 has rare elements of strength in its simplicity. In 
 English the subject almost invariably precedes the 
 verb and the object follows it; even in English 
 poetry this usage is seldom violated. In Tenny- 
 son, its observance might be counted at 80, 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 235 
 
 but in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it falls 
 to 61, in Anatole France's prose, to 66, in Gabriele d' An- 
 nunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. 
 
 That our language has only five vowels, which 
 have to do duty for more than a score of sounds, is 
 a grave fault; and the unhappy French preacher 
 who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" 
 as "pluff" had much excuse. But on the other 
 hand, why do the French make us say "fluer de 
 lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? 
 How many conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" 
 responsible for ! 
 
 There is no book that ought to give the judicious 
 such quiet pleasure or more food for thought or 
 for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken's 
 "The American Language," except Burton's "An- 
 atomy of Melancholy," Boswell's "Johnson," the 
 "Devout Life" of Saint Francis de Sales, Pepys's 
 "Diary," the "Letters" of Madame de Sevigne, 
 Beveridge's "Life" of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" 
 of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book for odd mo- 
 ments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; 
 and a precious treasure is its bibliography! And 
 how pleasant it is to verify the quotations in a li- 
 brary; preferably with the snow falling in thick 
 
236 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, 
 even after dinner is announced. Mr. Mencken is a 
 benefactor ! 
 
 It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's 
 audacious disregard of English grammar in theory- 
 has not impaired the clearness of his point of view 
 and of his own style. If dead authors could 
 write after the manner in which Mr. Andrew Lang 
 has written to them, I should like to read Herbert 
 Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. 
 If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle want 
 really to please a small but discriminating public, 
 let them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. 
 Mencken's statements on the growth of the 
 English language! In my time we were expected 
 to take Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seri- 
 ously. There is no doubt that his principles have 
 been repeated by every writer on style, including 
 Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English 
 Composition," since Mr. Spencer wrote; but the 
 method of Spencer's expression of his principles re- 
 minds one of the tangled wood in which Dante lan- 
 guished before he met Beatrice. 
 
 There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us 
 think of writing as a science and art; his philosophy 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 237 
 
 of style is right enough. But while he provokes 
 puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more 
 meat in Robert Louis Stevenson's "A College 
 Magazine" than in all the complications in style 
 in the brochure of the idol of the eighties. 
 
 And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the 
 author of a little volume which I keep by my side 
 ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the terrifying 
 Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. 
 It is Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." 
 And if one wants to know how to read for pleasure 
 or comfort — ^for reading or writing does not come 
 by nature — ^there is "Moby Dick," by Herman 
 Melville, the close friend of the Hawthornes and a 
 writer so American that Mr. Mencken must love 
 him. But he ought to be read as a novelist. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea 
 Idyls" bring the flaneur — ^the chief business of a 
 flaneur of the pavements (we were forbidden in 
 old Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look 
 into unrelated shop-windows; but the flaneur 
 among books finds none of his shop-windows un- 
 related — ^back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give 
 us the genesis of a word that sounded something 
 like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every 
 
238 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants 
 interfered, and they often did interfere. You 
 might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you 
 should never say "druggist." I trust that it is 
 no breach of confidence to repeat that the devout 
 and very distinguished of modern Philadelphians, 
 Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two 
 languages in his neighbourhood, one for the ears 
 of his parents and one for the boys in the street. 
 One was very much in the position of the York- 
 shire lad I met the other day. "But you haven't 
 a Yorkshire accent!" "No, sir," he said, "my 
 parents whipped it out of me." But there is, in 
 New York City, at least the beginning of one 
 American language — the language of the street. 
 
 In considering the impression that books have 
 usually made on me, I have often asked myself 
 why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure 
 and even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his 
 own answer to this. For the plots of novels, I 
 have always had very little respect, although I 
 believe, with Anthony TroUope, that a plot is 
 absolutely necessaj-y to a really good novel, and 
 that it is the very soul of a romance. Of memoirs 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 239 
 
 — even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de 
 Crequy have always been very agreeable to me; 
 I have never been so dull or so tired, that I could 
 not find some solace in the Diary of Mr. Pepys, 
 in the Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless 
 journal of Mr. Boswell; and even the revelations 
 of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were 
 worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame 
 d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles 
 of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmos- 
 pheres, that it seems like a new discovery in 
 psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's 
 "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries in- 
 cluding that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barring- 
 ton. Life is worth hving! 
 
 I must confess that I have never found any 
 poet excepting King David whom I liked because 
 he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry " wearies 
 me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When 
 people praise Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," 
 because it is dogmatic, I am surprised — ^for if I 
 found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all 
 its splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The 
 Hoimd of Heaven" are glorious visions of truth 
 at a white heat. 
 
240 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value 
 when it ceases to be a picture and becomes an 
 important sermon. And as for Spenser, the 
 didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might 
 be lost forever with no great disadvantage to 
 posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be 
 preserved. Browning's optimism has always left 
 me cold, and I never could quite understand why 
 most of his readers have set him down as a great 
 philosopher. All may be well with the world, but 
 I could never see that Browning's poetry proved 
 it in any way. When the time comes for a culti- 
 vated English world — sl thoughtful English-speak- 
 ing world — ^to weigh the merits of English-speaking 
 poets. Browning will be found among the first. 
 Who has done anything finer in English than "A 
 Grammarian's Funeral"? Or "My Last Duch- 
 ess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of the 
 passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived 
 a better fable for a poem than that of "Pippa"? 
 And as for Keats, the world he discovered for us 
 is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than 
 all the philosophies of Wordsworth. 
 
 To me, the intense delight I have in novels and 
 poems is due to their power of taking me out of 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 241 
 
 myself, of enlightening me as to my own faults and 
 peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and 
 of raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of 
 gaiety of heart. 
 
 As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson 
 once applied to works of fiction becomes more and 
 more regrettable. He compared the followers of 
 this consoling art to "filles de joie. " He doubtless 
 meant that these goddesses — "les filles de joie" are 
 always young — ^gave us visions of the joy of life; 
 that they might be sensuous without being sensual; 
 but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There 
 are novels, like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which 
 are joyous and serious at once. Or take "The 
 Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez." 
 
 Every constant reader has his favourite essay- 
 ists. As a rule, he reads them to be soothed or 
 to be amused. In making my confession, I must 
 say that only a few of the essayists really amuse 
 me. They are, as a rule, more witty than hu- 
 morous, and generally they make one self-con- 
 scious, being self-conscious themselves. There 
 are a hundred different types of the essayist. 
 Each of us has his favourite bore among them. 
 Once I found all the prose works of a fine poet and 
 
242 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of 
 a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. "The re- 
 sult of a severe sense of duty!" he said. 
 
 Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility 
 and failed, though she gained in the end a greater 
 title. Her works are insufferably and compla- 
 cently conceited, and yet I always look at their 
 bindings with respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died 
 too soon, has given us, in her first volume — ^unfor- 
 tunately the only one — a new view of this Empress 
 of Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame 
 Roland could have been nourished by that most 
 stimulating of all books — "The Devout Life of 
 St. Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, 
 to my mind, the most practical of all the essayists, 
 even when he puts his essays in the form of letters. 
 Next comes Fenelon's and — ^I know that I shall 
 shock those who regard his philosophy as merely 
 Deistic — ^next comes, for his power of stimulation, 
 Emerson. 
 
 It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too 
 late, that these confessions may be taken as di- 
 dactic in themselves; in writing them I have had 
 not the slightest intention of improving anybody's 
 mind but simply of relieving my own, by button- 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 243 
 
 holing the reader who happens to come my way. 
 I should like to add that what is called the coarse- 
 ness of the eighteenth-century novel and romance 
 is much more healthful than the nasty brutality 
 of a school of our novelists — ^who make up for 
 their lack of talent and of wide experience by 
 trying to excite animal instincts. Eroticism 
 may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in 
 common with the process of "cooking stale cab- 
 bage over farthing candles," to use Charles Reade's 
 phrase. 
 
 If my habit of constant reading had not taught 
 me the value of calmness and patience, I should 
 like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason 
 for thanking God is that Americans have produced 
 a literature — ^the continuation of an older litera- 
 ture with variations, it is true, — ^that has added to 
 the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need 
 mention only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," 
 and I am glad to end my book by writing the name 
 of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with Eng- 
 land, or with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the 
 other continental nations, are no longer to our 
 disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who 
 writes of American books to put — ^in his own mind, 
 
244 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 at least — ^a title to his discourse that reminds me 
 of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It is 
 an outworn tradition, American literature is ro- 
 bust enough for smiles. 
 
 It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not 
 self-conscious. It is rapidly taking to itself all the 
 best traditions of the older literature and assimilat- 
 ing them. Christopher Morley and Heywood 
 Broun and Don Marquis and Mencken write — at 
 their best — as lightly and as trippingly as any past 
 master of the feuilleton. There is nobody writing 
 in the daily press in Paris to-day who does the 
 feuilleton as well as they do it. If you ask me 
 whether I, as a constant reader, pay much atten- 
 tion to what they say, I shall answer. No. But 
 their method is the thing. Will they live? Of 
 course not. Is Emile de Girardin alive ? Or all the 
 clever ones that James Huneker found buried and 
 could not revive ? One still reads the ' ' Portraits de 
 Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was 
 something more than a "columnist." And these folk 
 will be, too, in time! At any rate, they are good 
 enough for the present. 
 
 Who, writing in French or in any language, 
 outre-mer, does better, or as well, as HoUiday? 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 245 
 
 And where is the peer of Charles S. Brooks in 
 "Hints to Pilgrims"? "Luca Sarto," the best 
 novel of old Italian life by an American — since Mrs. 
 Wharton's "Valley of Decision" — proved him to 
 be a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better 
 psychologically than Mrs. Wharton, but here 
 there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, al- 
 though she is an admirable artist, grows indiflFerent 
 and insular at long intervals. 
 
 "Luca Sarto" dropped like the gentle rain from 
 heaven; and then came "Hints to Pilgrims." 
 This I wanted to write about in the Yale Review, 
 but the selfish editor, Mr. Cross, said that he pre- 
 ferred to keep it for himself! 
 
 "Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern 
 essay. Strangely enough, it sent me back to the 
 "Colour of Life" by the only real precieuse living 
 in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read that 
 with new delight between certain paragraphs in 
 Brooks's paper "On Finding a Plot." Why is not 
 "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth edition.? Or 
 why has it no claque? The kind of claque that 
 is so common now — ^which opens suddenly like 
 a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls of Theocritus"? 
 After all, your education must have been well be- 
 
246 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 gun before you can enjoy "Hints to Pilgrims," 
 while for "Huckleberry Finn" the less education 
 you have, the better. Mr. Brooks writes: 
 
 Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got 
 into that ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in 
 Barchester beneath the' towers. Would the shadow of the 
 cloister, do you think, have cooled her Southern blood? 
 Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? 
 Or, on the contrary, does not a hot colour always tint the colder 
 mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the 
 Cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay 
 parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's 
 window. 
 
 We can fancy his pen hangmg dully above his sermon, with 
 his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, 
 like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for 
 his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' 
 Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. 
 It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in 
 the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an 
 answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with 
 lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his 
 sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the pud- 
 dles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly 
 toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. 
 That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It 
 is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt. 
 
 "Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He 
 pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the 
 curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? 
 Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at oiu- little gather- 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 247 
 
 ings for the heathen." A text is forgotten. The clouds are 
 empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a 
 fresh neckcloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting 
 with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster. 
 
 You do not find delightful fooling like this every- 
 day; and there is much more of it. Take this: 
 
 Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark 
 Tapley, who always came out strong in adversity, were placed 
 in a modern Russian novel. As the undavmted Taplovitch 
 he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy 
 our own dear PoUyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt 
 in " Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have 
 laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding 
 — flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the 
 hired palms and a table of cut glass. 
 
 Oliver Twist and Nancy — merely acquaintances in the 
 original story — ^with a fresh hand at the plot, might have 
 gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off 
 shore. Suppose that the whole exciu-sion was wrecked on 
 Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except 
 Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player of the ships' 
 band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on 
 the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, 
 lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island — ob- 
 serve the cunning of the plot! — who battles with the waves 
 and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are 
 worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, OUver, Friday, and the 
 trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill 
 Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden 
 cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense 
 
248 CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER 
 
 triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are 
 only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good 
 luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is dis- 
 covered to be a retired clergyman — doubtless a Methodist. 
 The happy knot is tied. And then — a sail! A sail! Oliver 
 and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with 
 oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the um- 
 brella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at 
 the rear — tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faith- 
 ful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping 
 together the shrubs against the sunny wall. 
 
 When I found Brooks, I felt again the pang of 
 loss, that Theodore Roosevelt had not read "Hints 
 to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the other room" 
 and eternal light shone upon him ! He would have 
 discovered "Hints to Pilgrims," and celebrated it 
 as soon as any of us. 
 
 How he loved books! And he seemed to have 
 read all the right things in his youth; you forgot 
 time and kicked Black Care away when he talked 
 with you about them. He could drop from 
 Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in whom he had not much 
 interest, since he was a gourmet and did not 
 regard sausages as the highest form of German 
 art!) and his descents and ascents from book to 
 book, were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales — 
 and her scales were smoother than Patti's. 
 
BOOKS AT RANDOM 249 
 
 Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," 
 and "The Ancient Irish Sagas"? He caught fire 
 at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre"; 
 and concluded at once that the Celts were the only 
 people who, before Christianity invented chivalry, 
 understood the meaning of romantic love. It is 
 a great temptation to write at length on the books 
 he liked, and how he fought for them, and explained 
 them, and lived with them. Thinking of him, the 
 most constant of book-lovers, I can only say, 
 "Farewell and Hail!" 
 
 THE END