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 Cornell University Library 
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 Critical confessions. 
 
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CRITICAL CONFESSIONvS 
 
 By NEAL BROWN 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHER PRESS 
 
 WAUSAU WISCONSIN 
 
 
COPYRIGHTED 1899 
 By NEAL BROWN, 
 
 ,1 iHKiH^i'Qfr-. 
 •III, I 
 
 ^'"M 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 ANDREW LANG, 1 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC, .... 18 
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 27 
 
 DEGENERATION, 69 
 
 JOHN SMITH 116 
 
 A DEFERRED CRITICISM, . . . 171 
 
 AMERICAN NOTES, .... 201 
 
 AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE, . 223 
 
CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
ANDREW LANG 
 
 In pessimistic mood, one feels that 
 the world of letters has squandered most 
 of its genius, and is traveling toward an 
 intellectual poorhouse. The great poets 
 have certainly departed. Stevenson has 
 gone, and there are but two or three 
 story-tellers left. Fiction has become 
 short and choppy; a matter of frag- 
 ments, without sustained flights. The 
 few mountain peaks that are left are 
 nodding. The fruits of letters seem 
 over-ripe and ready to fall rotting to the 
 ground. It is a transition time, and 
 perhaps the soil is being fertilized by the 
 
2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 rank growths that spring up, for 
 something better to come. 
 
 We are seduced from healthy 
 standards by y?ra(i^5*^c/(g tendencies; the 
 color of nature is gone, and we have 
 green carnations and unsubstantial, un- 
 real things. Men are made to seem like 
 shadows walking. We are non-creative. 
 We either imitate, or else we rebel 
 against imitation, and the pendulum 
 swings as far the other way. The result 
 is strange, uncouth, fancies in art and 
 literature, and our romancists make 
 monkeys of men, to borrow a phrase 
 from the vernacular. The commercial 
 autocrats of magazinedom, and certain 
 of the hack writers of newspaperdom 
 set the fashion. With the small 
 arts of pufEery they build up small 
 reputations that die in a day. How 
 often the announcement ; "a genius is 
 coming, watch for him, he is here, — he 
 has written a great novel, a great 
 
ANDREW LANG 3 
 
 poem, or what not." We are put on 
 the qui vive, and by and bye when the 
 poor little puffed out product struts 
 upon the stage we find that he belongs 
 to the ephemera. These strains are 
 common. We watch anxiously for the 
 pool to move that we may be healed 
 of these grotesque vagaries of mental 
 disease. We gaze longingly up the road 
 for a rescuer and see but wind-piled 
 columns of choking dust. 
 
 We comfort ourselves a little with 
 Kipling; and Besant and Black are still 
 with us, but we sigh to be healed 
 of Hardy's decadence, and of the 
 tastelessness of The Martian, — poor 
 withered fruit of DuMaurier's dotage. 
 
 We cry out for something in 
 place of this dry rot, this attenuated 
 intellectuality; this vain struggling after 
 startling effects. Our sensibilities are 
 mangled and scarified day by day 
 by the rude contact of a crowd of 
 
4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 weird, grotesque, figures who flit their 
 fantastic way across the stage. 
 
 We are surrounded by writers of 
 queer distorted verse, drunken with their 
 own turgid, muddy, rhetoric; dancing 
 fauns and satyrs holding revels over social 
 uncleanness like crows over carrion; 
 dreamers of meaningless visions, makers 
 of verse full of incomprehensible 
 gibberish. Are they of healthy human 
 kind who beat time in this rout? Is 
 that young woman who writes tigerish 
 verses of a tigerish passion, all the 
 Sappho we shall have? Must we call a 
 plain case of erotic mania, poetic 
 fervour? Is that jingler of little 
 verselets, that journeyman carver of 
 odd forms of speech, to be our 
 Tennyson? Shall we force ourselves to 
 see deathless harmony in a mere mush 
 of words, simply because it is labeled 
 poetry? Must we give Jude The 
 Obscure and The Martian a place with 
 
ANDREW LANG 5 
 
 Vanity Fair and David Copperfield? 
 We "have been tolled by holy bell to 
 church, have sat at good men's 
 feasts," and we cannot forget those 
 feasts. If there is nothing else, give us 
 some good stories of bears and tigers, of 
 jungles, of far-off lands where men are 
 breathing free, and where there is good 
 wholesome blood-letting and killing. 
 
 Thus the Pessimist. 
 
 But we may be comforted in a 
 measure; we have our blessings and 
 must not be unmindful of them. Into 
 this world where everything is worn out 
 and steeped in the ditch-water of 
 dullness, comes an interrogation point 
 of a man, — Andrew Lang. If needs 
 be, he will smash every idol and question 
 every fad. Let the fashions change as 
 they will, here is a man who clings to the 
 verities of truth and mental good 
 health. 
 
 He is cool-blooded and temperate 
 
6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 when others are furious. He retains 
 his composure amidst the clamours 
 of little coteries of intellectual starvelings 
 frantically admiring each other and 
 bound to coerce all others into a like 
 service. Into this market-place of 
 small wares, Lang comes as the Sealer 
 of Weights and Measures. He hears 
 unmoved the dingdonging of the auction 
 bell, the selling of names. He cannot 
 be hypnotized by the posturings and 
 caperings of literary mountebanks. 
 Over the Kingdom of Fools, he is 
 the upright and just judge, with plenary 
 jurisdiction. 
 
 Many idols, some false and some 
 true, have been ranged before this 
 judgment seat. Along with other 
 stucco-work, is poor old Poet Bailey, the 
 solace and comfort of our grandmothers. 
 Look in your Poets Argosy or Gems of 
 Poetry, and you will unearth among 
 other ancient treasures, "O no, we never 
 
ANDREW LANG 7 
 
 mention her," and like lollipops and 
 sweet things from Bailey. I knew Bailey 
 first, through the melancholia of my 
 friend Mr. Richard Swiveller, who 
 turned from the perfidious Sophy to 
 Bailey's soothing charm. I learned 
 Bailey better through Lang, who treated 
 his reputation charitably, bestowing 
 only a spanking, — lightly laid on. In 
 fact Lang thinks that Bailey might 
 have been something of a poet, he 
 pleased so many simple folk. In this 
 genial fashion does he judge all small 
 sinners. 
 
 But when Lang reads the bead-roll 
 of genius, names that were before heard 
 and forgotten stick like burrs. They 
 stand for something. The dead heroes 
 walk again in new-kindled light. 
 Bunyan, and Montaigne, and Scott, and 
 all great and noble souls gain new 
 nobility and pass unscathed through 
 that wise and kindly judgment. Lang 
 
8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 has the grand hailing sign and password 
 of the kinship of genius. He recognizes 
 his fellows for what they are across the 
 centuries and the wide seas. 
 
 Thus it is that he flashed recognition 
 over to Holmes and Lowell, of all 
 Americans the most like himself. He 
 discovered Kipling in the wilderness of 
 India, and gave him a passport into the 
 World of Letters. And now Kipling 
 has become the man of three continents, 
 with fame enough to fill them all. 
 
 Lang is best as a critic and 
 hero-worshipper. He and Nordau are 
 almost the o'nly ones left to police our 
 world of literary nondescripts. Carlyle, 
 that harsh block of Scottish granite is 
 gone, and humbug and cant may thrive 
 apace. Thackeray, Keeper of a House 
 for the Correction of Snobs, stalks his 
 grim beat no more. Macaulay, who so 
 deftly put Mr. Robert Montgomery in 
 the pillory, is with the dust of the 
 
ANDREW LANG g 
 
 earth. Dr. Holmes, vested with large 
 jurisdiction over vulgar pretenders in 
 these American Colonies, has no further 
 judgments to execute. There are no 
 more. Gallant spirits, loyal to the 
 truth, when shall we look upon your like 
 again ! You yet have some security 
 that your work will be carried on, for 
 Lang is your living disciple. You may 
 be sure that some frothy cant will be 
 sponged out; some humbugs will be 
 dosed heroically; some literary reputa- 
 tions win be put in the stocks where we 
 may all have our fling at them. Who 
 shall say that these labors have been in 
 vain? The snobs did not run about at 
 ease while Thackeray was at them. 
 Some of them were killed and some 
 cured. 
 
 Where, for instance is the Fashion- 
 able Authoress, — where is Lady Fanny 
 Flummery? She was done to death by 
 Thackeray, and has left no heirs. I 
 
10 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 believe that Lang claims he had a 
 commission once to discover the habitat 
 of her successor, but was compelled to 
 make return of the same unsatisfied. It 
 is true, Thackeray was not always so 
 successful. He tried to suppress the poet 
 who writes Odes to Dying Things, such 
 as Frogs, Brook Trout, or whatever it 
 may be, but he could not do it. 
 She, — I use the feminine advisedly — is 
 immortal; suppress her in one generation 
 and she wiU break out in the next. She 
 still lives to infest the watches of the 
 moon, to write Odes and other nameless 
 things. She was a Miss Bunion in 
 Thackeray's time and averred that her 
 youth resembled: 
 
 A violet shrinking- meanly 
 When blow3 the March wind keenly; 
 A timid fawn on upland lawn. 
 Where oak-boughs rustle greenly. 
 These thrice-crazed ones scatter 
 sweet flowers about us still. Their 
 
ANDREW LANG ii 
 
 dainty ribbon-tied volumes strew our 
 libraries like autumn leaves in Vallom- 
 brosa. Yet after all, Thackeray's 
 punishment of Miss Bunion was not in 
 vain. His magisterial process is still out 
 against her successors. Nor was it a 
 vain labor for Mr. Yellowplush and the 
 Sallybrated Mr. Smith, over a cold 
 hoyster in the Yellowplush pantry, to 
 hale Mr. Bulwer Lyttpn to the torture. 
 That day was Fine Writing punctured 
 so that the sawdust padding ran out 
 of it. 
 
 Unlike Nordau, Lang is not a 
 Tartar of savage severity toward his 
 convicts. That Vidocq of continental 
 letters hangs his victims in chains, in 
 barbaric style, for the sun and wind to 
 bleach. In this he is like Carlyle, who 
 had a troglodyte nature and brained his 
 with a stone axe. Lang has an English- 
 man's love of fair play. He gives 
 quarter and treats his victim with 
 
12 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 courtly grace during the necessary 
 torture. Captain John Smith did not 
 behead the three Turks before the walls 
 of Regall with more blandness or gentle 
 affability. 
 
 Lang makes the desert places of 
 scholarship, fair and pleasant with 
 beauty and verdure. Greek is dry and 
 arid when taught by dusty-brained 
 pedantic parrots. Lang transmutes it 
 until it lives again, bringing forth 
 boughs like a plant. In his interpreta- 
 tion its dreary tasks become pleasant 
 pastimes. He would have the college 
 dry-as-dusts give way for one greater 
 than they, — the deathless singer, the 
 sightless poet who saw aU things; who 
 found the Soul of Song iu far oflE mystic 
 Illium, in surging seas and on battle fields, 
 on dreary ocean coasts and lonely lost 
 lands, in the tombs of the dead and in the 
 darkness beyond, in the loves and hopes 
 of statesmen and warriors, of rustics and 
 
ANDREW LANG 13 
 
 ploughmen round their hearth-fires, in 
 the legends of a thousand years, in the 
 wanderings of the Grecian Chieftan and 
 his return to the great hall where the 
 suitors met; who could pluck his dearest 
 thought from the welcome home which 
 the dumb and faithful Argus gave the 
 wanderer. Lang would have the ardent 
 student follow Ulysses in his wanderings 
 unbelittled by translators until by and 
 bye the splendour and power of that 
 wonderful melody would not let him 
 sleep. Soon a knowledge of Greek would 
 come, but better than this would come 
 a knowledge of Homer. The finest 
 thing in Lang is his worship of Homer. 
 He seems to continually hunger and 
 thrist for him. He holds him close to 
 his heart in half-boyish adoration and 
 fervour. He is a jealous lover and 
 cannot beaf that Pope and Morris and 
 others of the translator's mob should 
 put Homer into their rhyming strait- 
 
14 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 jackets. He is savage upon their 
 trespasses and punisbes them with many 
 stinging scoffs and gibes. He has lived 
 so much v?ith Homer, that at vpill the 
 centuries roll back and he sees the world 
 that Homer saw. He loves Homer's 
 lightest word better than all of Pope's 
 stilted rhymes. He makes one mourn 
 for his ignorance of Greek, for it means 
 that he can never know Homer for all 
 that he is. 
 
 Lang has the advantage of being a 
 Scotchman with English advantages. 
 He is a later Socrates in a dress coat. 
 Some one has said that he is too finished 
 a product to become popular with the 
 mass. I will admit that he is neither 
 dull and heavy nor light and vulgar. 
 After his title page there is not a dull 
 line, and even a title page with the name 
 of Andrew Lang on it will illuminate a 
 whole library. When I find a library 
 tenanted by Andrew Lang, I confess to 
 
ANDREW LANG 75 
 
 feeling vastly increased respect for the 
 proprietor. Even the presence of She, 
 or of Mr. Barnes of New York, in that 
 library, cannot entirely destroy this good 
 opinion. The scholar and man of letters 
 may, by inadvertence, become the victim 
 of the brazen train-boy. 
 
 Lang disdains fine writing, and yet 
 alvsrays vprites finely, vpith the virile 
 powerful touch of a master. He does 
 not hold himself above the common 
 speech of people if by ranging there he 
 can find the apt word or the rightly 
 turned phrase. A scholar with the art 
 to conceal the mere repelling externals of 
 scholarship, Yale or Oxford could not 
 take the fine temper out of such a soul 
 as his. He did not come forth from the 
 pedagogic inquisition afflicted with in- 
 tellectual rickets. Whether the Univer- 
 sity Procrustes found him too long or 
 too short, cannot be discovered from 
 any tokens he bears. He comes into a 
 
i6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 world of much fustian scholarship, a 
 true scholar, a loyal perfect knight of 
 the pen. 
 
 But Lang is not all the critic, not 
 all the man of war, — the knight whose 
 keen and biting rapier plays like 
 lightning among the false and the foolish 
 There is another Lang, — a poet 
 and hero-worshipper, a lover of homely 
 things, of homely human-kind; one who 
 takes content in watching his peaches 
 ripen on the wall and his grapes on their 
 trellis; one who loves walks of peace and 
 quietness, and who can see the 
 "splendour in the grass, the glory in 
 the flower;" one who can look upon 
 lovers strolling together in the sweet 
 English May-time with kindly eyes and 
 softened heart. He is no longer young, 
 but he can remember the loves and hopes 
 of youth. With him, — 
 
 "Manhood's noonday shadows hold 
 The dews of boyhood's morning." 
 
ANDREW LANG 17 
 
 If this were not so he could not have 
 written such verses of baffling svs^eetness 
 as these; — 
 
 Who wins his love shall lose her ; 
 
 Who loses her shall gain ; 
 
 For still the spirit vpooes her, 
 
 A soul without a stain ; 
 
 And mem'ry still pursues her, 
 
 With long-ings not in vain. 
 
 * * * 
 
 In dreams she grows not older, 
 The land of dreams among, 
 Though all the world wax colder 
 Though all the songs be sung; 
 In dreams shall he behold her. 
 Still fair, and kind, and young. 
 
HONORE DE BALZAC 
 
 As Balzac is favored with a minor 
 place in Max Nordau's Gallery of 
 Degenerates, I am disposed to make a 
 deprecatory bow to that eminent 
 vivisectionist. 
 
 Some characters should be described 
 by describing their opposites — Mr. Gulli- 
 ver said that he could better realize the 
 huge dimensions of the Brobdingnag- 
 gians, because of his recent experiences 
 in Lilliput. 
 
 If I shall take liberties of comparison 
 with any of the idols in our home 
 temple of fame, it is not to make them 
 
HON ORE DE BALZAC ig 
 
 seem more diminutive, but to give a 
 better perspective for Balzac. Few of 
 our countrymen have broken into his 
 prodigious storehouse. The charming 
 insularity of the truly patriotic 
 American, prejudices him against the 
 products of the effete despotisms. He 
 says, we have our own shrines, why go 
 abroad to worship? 
 
 Hence the elevation of Howells, who 
 never says damn, and who never levels 
 even a small corner of his faithful kodac 
 on any of the tabooed vulgarities. I 
 confess I prefer a somewhat coarse 
 bluntness to this chaste veiling. I defy 
 any one, for instance, to tell just what 
 sins Howells intends to impute to 
 Hartley Hubbard. If Balzac had dealt 
 with him, he would have stripped his 
 soul naked, even if it did take coarse and 
 vulgar words to do it. 
 
 As we progress in social develop- 
 ment, our society grows more clubbish. 
 
20 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Gentle woman organizes herself > and 
 pursues and gluts herself on Culture, 
 without ceasing. We have Arnold 
 Clubs and Browning Clubs, and what 
 not, and the stones of Rome and the 
 number of bricks in St. Paul's must 
 be counted in didactic essay. Culture 
 does not have much chance to escape 
 these indefatigable pursuers. Yet those 
 who grow weary of this child's game of 
 Culture, this fishing in a water-pail and 
 drawing nothing up, can find easy relief 
 in the wisdom and strength of Balzac. 
 
 Why watch continually the never- 
 moving waters of smug literary 
 mediocrity, when you have only to climb 
 the steeps a little way and look upon 
 the mighty sea? This immortal genius 
 can bide its time however. It may yet 
 become the fad of the Culture Clubs; a 
 reigning mode in literature. 
 
 The Lily of The Valley, or 
 Ursula, of crystal purity, may yet fill 
 
HONORE DE BALZA C 21 
 
 the place of the highly immoral Trilby. 
 P^re Goriot, may supersede Howell's 
 Broomfield Corey, or that delightful old 
 philistine, who gained ephemeral riches 
 in mineral paint. 
 
 We assure those who have become 
 accustomed to the pure and elevated 
 morality of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and 
 The Quick and the Dead, that they 
 will find nothing to shock or disturb 
 them in Balzac. The austere virgin, 
 Propriety, should also be warned that 
 she will see nothing very offensive in 
 Balzac and that she had better not take 
 the trouble to look for it. If she should 
 by any chance have breathed too long 
 the mephitic sewer gas of the Erotic 
 School of American Fiction and Poetry, 
 she may not at first have free respiration 
 in the higher altitudes of Balzac. 
 
 It is true- that he does not aim to 
 have a moral, ticketed and labeled as 
 such, for every tale. He paints human 
 
22 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 life as he finds it, in its baseness and 
 glory, in its weakness and its strength. 
 
 He does not announce the moral, 
 yet it is always present; in the 
 punishment and repentance of the 
 wicked, in the lives of the pure in heart, 
 and in the hells which evil souls build 
 for themselves. 
 
 Our gentle E. P. Roe, who should 
 be called Pencils-and-Pickles, he is so 
 much affected by young women towards 
 the end of their bread-and-butter age, 
 always builds his moral first, and then 
 fits his story to it afterwards. He 
 carries his pulpit around on his back as 
 a snail does its residence, or an organ- 
 grinder his instrument of torture and if 
 he gets half a chance he will set it up 
 and preach, 
 
 Balzac tells his story and lets the 
 moral take care of itself. He has no 
 patent theological-seminary plan for 
 converting sinners. Where is there a 
 
HONORE DE BALZA C 23 
 
 finer sermon than the conversion of 
 Doctor Minoret, led to repentance by the 
 child he loved. 
 
 "Can it be that you believe in God?" she 
 cried with artless joy, letting- fall the tears 
 that gathered in her eyes. 
 
 * * * 
 
 "My God," he said in a trembling- 
 voice; raising his head, "if any one can 
 obtain my pardon and lead me to Thee, surely 
 it is this spotless creature. Have mercy on 
 the repentant old age that this poor child 
 presents to Thee." 
 
 Balzac has the carelessness and 
 abandon of conscious power. He plays 
 the prodigal with his talents. The 
 sweepings of his attic would stock a 
 dozen common skulls with genius, and 
 make a dozen latter-day reputations. 
 He is not concerned with the petty fears 
 and alarms of small minds. One of their 
 gods is Brevity. Your writer of 
 magazine novelettes; your mere parlour 
 
24 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 entertainer, affects to abhor the 
 Superfluous Word. 
 
 Balzac never bothers his head about 
 it. His words come in great torrents, 
 and the excess cannot hide his kingly 
 port. Always present is the dramatic 
 quality. You watch with terror for his 
 next effect. Our colder Teutonic blood 
 has too little of this fire, and so genius 
 becomes atrophied and lifeless. Afraid 
 to give Nature speech, our strugglers 
 after fame belittle the passions and 
 make them tame and commonplace, or 
 paint them in strange bizarre colors and 
 in mangled grotesqueness. How differ- 
 ent the mighty genius of Balzac ! When 
 Doctor Minoret weeps, Balzac says: — 
 
 The tears of old men are as terrible as 
 those of children are natural. 
 
 The sorrows of Pfere Goriot have a 
 thousand eloquent tongues. What a 
 profound and immeasurable baseness is 
 that which robbed him of his peace. 
 
HON ORE DE BALZAC 25 
 
 Throned in the majesty of death his 
 whispers are heartrending. Sometimes 
 he babbles childish nonsense, and some- 
 times shrieks his last terrible resent- 
 ments. He calls for his daughters 
 alternately in curses and words of 
 endearment. You can feel him groping 
 through the thick shadows for them, but 
 they do not come. It is King Lear, with 
 a difference. Finally, in the moment 
 of dissolution, God is merciful to this 
 shattered soul. He sees again his 
 daughters as little children, and calls 
 them by the childish names he once 
 gave them; and so he passes from this 
 inhuman world. 
 
 One must walk with Balzac in fear 
 and dread. His are not always the 
 pleasant tasks of an idle hour. He will 
 lead you through the hell of the living 
 where you will meet dreadful shades and 
 weeping, crucified, souls. He will also 
 show you complacent Respectability 
 
26 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 sitting in placid ease, "storing yearly 
 little dues of wheat and wine and 
 oil. ' ' He preaches a thousand sermons 
 of the erring majesty of human life, but 
 he does not, like Zola, batten on 
 dunghills, and show you how much 
 muck he can dig up. 
 
 And now, what is the main 
 difference between him and the 
 Lilliputians? 
 
 They are mere photographers, tak- 
 ing machine pictures with painful care. 
 It is the difference between a kodac and 
 the brush of a great master. 
 
 He may be ever so careless and 
 slovenly, but he has the hand of power 
 and when he sweeps his brush across 
 the canvass, that canvass becomes one 
 of the dear and priceless treasures of the 
 world through all the centuries. 
 
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE 
 THACKERAY 
 
 Captious persons may insist that 
 they be made acquainted with the au- 
 thority which prompts this further 
 presentation of Thackeray lore. 
 
 This seems to be agreeable to the 
 demand that the distant suburbs of 
 culture shall remain in eternal calm, ex- 
 cept for the harryings of the Chatauqua 
 Course and the literary tea and toast of 
 the culture clubs. Yet this message 
 will be unpretending as becomes one 
 from a place so far distant from the 
 habitat of learned and approved re- 
 viewers. The point of view at least 
 
28 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 should not undulyprejudice the relation, 
 for the ferment of London, Boston and 
 New York is busy upon newer themes, 
 and the soil once worked to exhaustion 
 now lies fallow. 
 
 Not consenting to the paramount 
 jurisdiction of any reviewer whosoever, 
 there is here presented some cumulative 
 testimony on Thackeray, for it is the 
 duty of each generation to testify to all 
 that has aforetime been done in letters . 
 Thus divers testimonies can be pre- 
 served for the use of posterity when it 
 shall make up its final verdict. This 
 review is offered by one who loves his 
 task, a witness on minor points, merely 
 as a deposition in rei perpetua memo- 
 riam, for what even such an one has 
 thought of Thackeray may become a 
 matter of curious and valuable interest 
 some hundreds of years hence. The 
 toiler and dreamer must look to that 
 final judgment, and not the applause 
 
THACKERAY 2g 
 
 of the easily satisfied, who may crown 
 a favorite to-day and uncrown him 
 to-morrow. 
 
 Not in profane analogy to the final 
 judgment in the moral and spiritual 
 world, but in the conceit of an idle hour, 
 one can imagine a court of last resort 
 for authors in which there shall be a 
 final decree on all fames and reputations; 
 where worth and not names shall 
 control; where even some rejected manu- 
 scripts will give their testimony not 
 disqualified by any past editorial 
 verdict; where some obscure poets shall 
 have due commendation, and the swollen 
 reputations of some great men will 
 suffer proper diminution. The poor 
 scholar who has escaped prosperity 
 shall there be crowned with the tardy 
 bays, and many darkened garrets of our 
 Grub Streets will become visibly glorious 
 in that effulgent justice. The magazine 
 magnate who hears not the voice of 
 
so CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 genius until it be properly advertised, 
 and who has spent his life-time putting 
 its inspirations into strait -jackets; the 
 Professional Organizer of Clacques for 
 Small Performers; the Critics Banditti 
 who hold up all travelers on the road to 
 fame, will, let us trust, on that last 
 judgment day find their deserved place 
 among the goats. But surely there are 
 some fames that will grow brighter and 
 brighter in that last winnowing. Unless 
 the known standards of excellence shall 
 fail, in all the world of nineteenth 
 century authorship, Thackeray will be 
 given first place. 
 
 Sometimes, owing to the failing 
 memories of men, priceless things are lost 
 sight of for a time, yet assurance seems 
 now so full that it cannot be so with 
 Thackeray. With him, however, more 
 than with any other author, the effect 
 he produced on his readers forms a 
 curious study. Some minds instinc- 
 
THACKERAY 31 
 
 tively dislike him and yet delight in 
 Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Such 
 soils, however well sown with 
 Th acker ayism, blossom only into the 
 meagerest appreciation. This trait is 
 like unto the fabled inability of the 
 North Briton to comprehend a 
 joke. Is it because the satire of 
 Thackeray is so sweeping and all- 
 embracing that even the most obtuse 
 reader imagines he is being mocked at 
 and that all of his own vanities and 
 follies are being rudely caricatured 
 before his eyes? Happy is the man who 
 can laugh at his own follies and jest at 
 himself for the fool that he was on 
 yesterday. To him Thackeray is a 
 well-spring of delight. 
 
 Both the comedy and tragedy of life 
 have a sameness from generation to gen- 
 eration. It is a common place to say that 
 names and social customs and forms of 
 government change, but the nature of 
 
32 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 man remains as it was, and that the 
 creations of Moli^re and Shakespeare 
 will always have living duplicates. Who 
 has not known a Tartuffe? Even a 
 Falstaff is not difficult to find, and as 
 for Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, they are 
 as common as sawdust saloons. 
 
 I have met the Old Campaigner, — 
 busy breeder of divorces that she is, and 
 Becky Sharp still lives and continues to 
 shoot young curates, and other impres- 
 sionable males, dead with her soft 
 glances. 
 
 On the very threshold of Thack- 
 eray's world one cannot help but linger 
 a little over his endearing personal 
 qualities. Soon he will show us life's 
 baseness and meanness, and it seems good 
 to pause over some happier things before 
 launching into the blacker and deeper 
 currents. He was one of the lovable men of 
 literature. Count them up and you will 
 see how few of these there are. Some of 
 
THACKERAY 33 
 
 the greatest names stand for icebergs of 
 personality, and you can feel the lower- 
 ing temperature as you near them. Do 
 you ailways love the man behind the 
 book ? It is rank treason to suggest it 
 but can you feel affection for the man 
 Dickens, for the man Tennyson, or for 
 Bulwer Lytton? I confess that lean- 
 not; they are only graven images and 
 mere makers of books, as remotely 
 frigid as the north pole. There is some 
 coldness in the blood accounting for this 
 that cannot be explained or analyzed. 
 But, what warmth and cheer and 
 glow of good fellowship and kindliness 
 radiates from Thackeray and Lamb and 
 Holmes. When you read their words they 
 become alive again, and when you think 
 of them as dead, it brings a sharp pang 
 of grief; a sense of personal loss. Time 
 cannot still their heart throbs, and life 
 and love are pulsing yet, despite the 
 tokens of mortality. 
 
34 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 It may be that this repellant cool- 
 ness in Tennyson and Dickens is due to 
 the drop of Semitic blood ascribed to 
 them by anthropoligical investigators. 
 I think it is Besant who says that 
 this tincture of the elder race is necces- 
 sary to mental perfection, and that where 
 it comes it leavens with an added genius 
 the tough stubborn fibre of the Teutonic 
 intellect. He adds that we all need a 
 little of it in order to properly ripen our 
 talents. 
 
 In the lesser memoirs of the great 
 poet we read that after he -had written 
 The Revenge and commited it to his 
 publisher's hands and before it had be- 
 come public property, he invited a choice 
 company to hear it read. Probably no 
 one but he could bring together such a 
 group of listeners within the four seas. 
 His grave biographer describes his 
 reading generally as a "mysterious 
 incantation exceedingly impressive," and 
 
THACKERAY 35 
 
 as he read on towards the end every 
 heart was awed by the wonderful power 
 of the immortal poem. 
 
 He finally came to the close with 
 such a strange mixture of genius and 
 thrift that his hearers were frozen 
 lifeless: — 
 
 And they mann'd the Revenge with a 
 
 swarthier alien crew, 
 And away she sail'd with her loss and 
 
 longf'd for her own ; 
 When a wind from the lands they had 
 
 ruin'd awoke from sleep 
 And the water began to heave and the 
 
 weather to moan, 
 And or ever that evening ended a great 
 
 gale blew. 
 And a wave like the wave that is raised 
 
 by an earthquake grew. 
 Till it smote on their hulls and their sails 
 
 and their masts and their flags. 
 And the whole sea plunged and fell on 
 the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, 
 
36 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 And the little Reveng-e herself went down 
 
 by the island crag-s 
 To be lost evermore in the main, 
 
 and the beg-g-ars only g'ave me three 
 
 hundred pounds for it — " 
 Quoth my Lord Tennyson, not 
 making pause at all between the last 
 words of the poem and his execrations 
 on the hard-hearted publishers who had 
 driven a close bargain with him. It is 
 hard to have the deathless minstrel 
 sweep one hand across his harp, while 
 with the other he clinks and counts his 
 guineas. Doubtless not one of that 
 noble assemblage ever forgot the scene, 
 or could ever look on Locksley Hall as 
 anything but a commercial pot-boiler, or 
 on In Metnoriam as other than a task to 
 be paid for at so much a line. 
 
 Behind the scenes one sees dimly 
 the publishers and the poet, driv- 
 ing the bargains of an old clothes 
 shop. 
 
THACKERAY 37 
 
 How difEerent this from Dante who 
 "could hold heart-break at bay for 
 twenty years and not let himself die 
 until his task was done," or Lamb 
 ' ' winning his way, with sad and patient 
 soul, through evil and pain, and strange 
 calamity." These two marshalled life's 
 forces through black shadows, the one 
 with a warrior's stern, set, face, that 
 never lightened and the other with 
 pleasant jest, heedless of whether he won 
 or lost, so he but hid the heartache. 
 Who could turn from this real tragedy 
 to Byron's counterfeit, or feel affection 
 for him in his theatrical sorrow as he 
 displayed in many postures his many 
 times broken heart to the public gaze? 
 
 It is for him who is a man first and 
 a genius afterwards, that we reserve our 
 best affection. We accord this to 
 Thackeray for he had the heart of a 
 child that worldly wisdom could not 
 spoil. 
 
j8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 It is a far leap from these thoughts 
 to Thackeray's land of snobs. He is 
 markedly eminent as the only great 
 specialist on this subject. He has taken 
 them apart and put them together, and 
 reduced them to their original elements. 
 He has admired, dissected and played 
 with them, and artfully drawn them out 
 and felinely leaped upon them from 
 cunning concealments. He has dug and 
 searched for snobs in all social forma- 
 tions, and never without reward. He 
 has made scientific research into all 
 kinds, qualities, conditions and degrees 
 of snobs, and classified, arranged, 
 named, numbered, indexed and cross- 
 referenced them. He has grilled them, 
 sometimes savagely, and sometimes 
 lovingly, for he had a grotesque form of 
 affection for them such as Dickens said 
 that he had for the pigs which he saw 
 disporting themselves in the streets of 
 New York. Given one scale of any 
 
THACKERAY jg 
 
 species of snob, and Thackeray could 
 construct the complete animal. He takes 
 a just pride in his cabinet of snobs where 
 there are multitudes of them artistically 
 arranged with pens stuck through 
 their snobbish thoraxes. Among these 
 remains are Clerical, Royal, Military, 
 Respectable, Great, City, Banking, 
 Scholastic, Irish, Sporting, University, 
 Theatrical, Professional and Official 
 Snobs. Being pressed to define Literary 
 Snobs, the satirical rogue says: — 
 
 The fact is that in the literary profes- 
 sion there are no snobs. Look around 
 over the whole body of British men of 
 letters, and I defy you to point out a 
 single instance of vulg-arity, or envy, or 
 assumption. 
 
 This genial snob-hunter sometimes 
 beats up his own thickets. He admits 
 that he would rather walk down Pall 
 Mall arm in arm with a Lord than with 
 a commoner, and would feel a snobbish 
 
40 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 elation if he could only be seen between 
 two dukes in Picadilly. In the divine 
 ardour of the chase he is willing to 
 jeeringly trice hixTiself up. If at any 
 time one feels a tendency to snobbish- 
 ness, he can de-snobize himself by 
 consulting Thackeray's probe and 
 scalpel. We arise from this feast of 
 snobs to ask if there is any place free 
 from the Snob? Is there no wild of 
 England, Scotland or Ireland, or Thibet 
 or Crim-Tartary, or among the 
 Anthroppopphaghi, where a snob is 
 not? 
 
 Thackeray never gave but the most 
 casual investigation to the fauna of this 
 continent. He had doubtless read our 
 history and knew that there were no 
 snobs here, and that in this republic all 
 men were created equal and recognized 
 neither rank nor social condition as 
 conferring any distinction. He must 
 have found that snobs, like weeds, do 
 
THACKERAY 41 
 
 not grow on new soils. No, we do not 
 love a lord better than a commoner; we 
 do not envy our neighbours; we do not 
 think meanly of and inflict slights on 
 those less fortunate than ourselves; we 
 do not think better of any man because 
 of his wealth. No one here "meanly 
 admires mean things," which is his 
 definition of a snob. Our international 
 marriages with foreign titles have been 
 possible only because of the singular 
 worth of the groom involved, and, — also 
 by reason of the worth of the bride . 
 
 With us, kind hearts are more than 
 coronets, and, thank heaven, we have a 
 proper contempt for the social sycophancy 
 of the degenerate Briton. Those fecund 
 Irish kings and noble families of the 
 three islands have no noble descendants 
 here who brag of their long descent, and 
 we who know that our ancestry is 
 noble, never mention it and do not 
 esteem ourselves for it. 
 
42 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 There is one line of fiction in which 
 Thackeray is not great. He portrayed 
 no murderers, no Napoleonic criminals 
 who slept in the contriving of crime and 
 awoke to do it. He had no love for 
 slumming, and did not, like a respect- 
 able sort of scavenger, rake over the 
 refuse of the London streets for lessons 
 and sermons and fine morals with which 
 to adorn his romance. 
 
 He made the novel a public convey- 
 ance where all sorts of people might find 
 carriage; where Parson Honeyman is 
 rudely jostled by Mr. Moss, and the 
 gentle Amelia and Captain Raff touch 
 elbows; where callow Pendennis hotly 
 courts the ancient Fotheringay, chap- 
 eroned by the redoubtable Costigan; 
 where Becky Sharp and her vis-a-vis, the 
 stately Semiramis Pinkerton, picked up 
 as the coach rolls by Chiswick Mall, make 
 faces at each other; where the Castle- 
 woods cease not their genteel family 
 
THACKERAY 43 
 
 quarrels, and Lady Maria begins that 
 little Affair with the French dancing 
 master; where the Virginians arrange 
 for the early morning meeting with their 
 lately esteemed friend, G. W. ; where 
 Philip glowers hatred at his father, and 
 Clive and Barnes Newcome fall to 
 cousinly insults and blows; while ever 
 watchful in his corner sits a humorous 
 "Literary Gent," as the genial Harry 
 Foker calls him, taking notes and 
 chuckling now and then as the coach 
 speeds away, and the ruts bring out the 
 temper of the passengers. 
 
 There are inns to be made, and new 
 passengers to be taken up, and old ones 
 to be put down, and country roads 
 stretching before, and narrow towns to 
 pass, and by and by, the din and roar of 
 the great Babylon. But the journey is 
 never long and never weary for al- 
 ways you are keeping close company 
 with human life, and are looking 
 
44 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 breathlessly into its meanness and 
 its majesty. 
 
 Take joy of this ferment and 
 turmoil of living and loving and hating, 
 and so that you may love it the more 
 heartily, turn and look upon the single- 
 seated equipages of romance that are 
 trundled before us in this part of the 
 world. The single nondescript passen- 
 ger that you see is the author's fad in 
 morals, religion or politics, or some 
 flotsam gleaned from the nine days talk 
 of the tea parties, or furbished out of 
 the last labor strike, the newest phase 
 of the New Woman, the Chicago Fire, 
 the Charleston Earthquake, or the last 
 visitation of Cholera or Yellovr Fever. 
 Any commonplace of this kind furnishes 
 plot and pabulum and all manner of 
 excellencies to our story-writers of 
 pauperized wits. Among them are the 
 Obituary Novelists, who, like the 
 Obituary Poets in the country news- 
 
THACKERAY 45 
 
 papers, go hand in hand with Death. 
 Let Death come to a city with generous 
 stroke, in Flood, Fire, Earthquake, or 
 Plague and the public can draw at 
 ninety days on the Obituary Novelists 
 for this mortuary aftermath of fiction. 
 Thus comes our Dreary School of 
 Romance. 
 
 Its upbuilders select a supposed 
 dramatic situation or center and round 
 it range the puppet characters, who 
 chatter from page to page some text of 
 commonplace and are as sentient and 
 alive as a lot of wooden Indians. Thus 
 we have had; "Bulwarks Burned 
 Down," "The Earth Shook," "Saved 
 by the Flood," "Plague Stricken," 
 etc., etc. "The Washerwoman of 
 Finchley Common," would be of riotous 
 interest as compared with some of 
 these. Their admirers are one with the 
 Exeter Hall enthusiast who declared that 
 he would rather be the author of the 
 
46 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 tract named than of Paradise Lost. 
 But come away to where we have 
 better metal. Thackeray deals with 
 respectable wickedness in the main; a 
 wickedness of cushioned pews and pretty 
 pulpits, and eminently virtuous drawing 
 rooms; of assemblies where highly 
 respectable people such as you and I 
 know, eat, drink and make merry; a 
 wickedness of pleasant family circles 
 where all hands quarrel in a perfectly 
 genteel way; a wickedness which goes 
 hand in hand with Christian church- 
 going, with Christian alms-giving, with 
 loyal support of the State and all 
 established institutions; a wickedness 
 which dresses in the paint and tinsel of 
 conventional moralities, which sits in the 
 boxes in Vanity Fair, and looks down 
 with stern scorn on the ungenteel low- 
 down wickedness of the pit; — in short a 
 Philistine, pharisaical, canting, time- 
 serving, toadying, sham-loving, holier- 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 47 
 
 than-thou wickedness that cankers and 
 rots character like a leprosy . You will 
 sometimes turn your head away from 
 this rout of respectable sinners for shame 
 of our common humanity. 
 
 You do not need to pray to be 
 saved from the crimes of the statute 
 books, but you may need to be saved 
 from the sins of the Old Campaigner, of 
 Mrs. Bute Crawley, of Barnes Newcome, 
 of Old Osborne, of Lady Kew, and the 
 Reverend Honeyman, of the Pontos, the 
 Botibels, the Clutterbucks, and Lady 
 Susan Scraper, and many others. 
 These were all of approved respectability 
 and some of them made a great figure 
 in Vanity Fair. They did not pick 
 pockets or commit murder, but acted in 
 all things as a great many respectable 
 people about you do, yet how you 
 despise and loathe them. These are 
 Thackeray's Helots, drunken with greed 
 and selfishness and all uncharitableness, 
 
48 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 shown as examples of what respectable 
 men and women may do and still keep 
 their rags of respectability. 
 
 We do not have to be warned 
 against the wickedness of Sykes, and 
 Fagin, and Jonas Chuzzlewit, of Quilp 
 and Brass. Their depravity has no 
 enticement; it is vulgar and repellant. 
 The warning in Thackeray's sermons is 
 for the Respectable Wicked, and the 
 most complacent sinner will wince under 
 this lash. Thackeray loved a man, and 
 would have nothing less. With him: — 
 One ruddy drop of manly blood 
 The surg-ing sea outweighs. 
 He never spares himself. Here is 
 one of his self -indictments. 
 
 I never could count how many causes 
 went to produce any given effect in a 
 person's life, and have been, for my own 
 part many a time quite misled in my own 
 case, fancying some grand, some mag- 
 nanimous, some virtuous reason for an 
 
THACKERAY 4g 
 
 act of which I was proud, when lol 
 some pert little satirical monitor springs 
 up inwardly, upsetting- the fond humbug 
 which I was cherishing — the peacock's 
 tail wherein my absurd vanity had clad 
 itself — and says; "Away with boasting; 
 I am the cause of 5'our virtue my lad. 
 You are pleased that yesterday at dinner 
 you refrained from the dry champagne. 
 My name is Worldly Prudence, not Self 
 Denial, and I caused you to refrain. 
 You are pleased because you gave a 
 guinea to Diddler. I am Laziness, not 
 Generosity which inspired you. You hug 
 yourself because you resisted other 
 temptation? Coward, it was because you 
 dared not run the risk of the wrong! 
 Out with your peacock's plumage I Walk 
 off in the feathers which Nature gave 
 you, and thank Heaven they are not alto- 
 gether black." 
 
 Yet the same hand wrote 
 this of a woman looking back forty 
 
50 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 years to the love of her youth: — 
 Oh, what tears have they shed, gentle 
 eyes 1 Oh, what faith has it kept, tender 
 heart I If love lives through all life, and 
 survives through all sorrow; and remains 
 steadfast with us through all changes; 
 and in all darkness of spirit burns bright- 
 ly; and. if we die, deplores us forever, 
 and loves still equally; and exists with 
 the very last gasp and throb of the faith- 
 ful bosom— whence it passes with the pure 
 soul beyond death; sure it shall be im- 
 mortal. 
 
 And like it is what he said of the 
 
 gulf of time, and parting, and grief. — 
 And the past and its dear histories, 
 and youth and its hopes and passions, 
 and tones and looks forever echoing in 
 the heart, and present in the memory — 
 these no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard 
 as he looked across the great gulf of time, 
 and parting, and grief, and beheld the wo- 
 man he had loved for many years. There 
 
THACKERAY 57 
 
 she sits; the same, but changed; as gone 
 from him as if she were dead; departed 
 indeed into another sphere, and into a 
 kind of death. 
 
 If Thackeray dearly loved a man, 
 he also loved a boy. He is the historian, 
 the epic poet of boyhood. The boy is 
 an unknovpn quantity to the average 
 novelist; he is elusive and protean and 
 evades description. Some great novel- 
 ists, although undoubtedly once boys 
 themselves, make merecaricatures of boys. 
 Little Lord Fauntelroy vpas a charming 
 creature but he vpas not a boy. D'Israeli's 
 boys are all old men; they attain three- 
 score before they are tv^renty. Witness 
 the grand entrance of some of these un- 
 feathered ones in the world of politics 
 and letters. They discourse of affairs 
 of state before they have achieved the 
 big manly voice. If you should chance 
 to meet one of these very old young gen- 
 tlemen at Rodvv^ell Regis or Dr. Birch's 
 
52 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 school you would no more think of giv- 
 ing him a tip to buy sweets with, than 
 you would of tipping Mr. Gladstone. 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Mark Twain 
 have told us of some real boys, and Wil- 
 liam Allen White is now engaged, as I 
 understand, in the restoration of the Boy, 
 to fiction. 
 
 In behalf of these gentlemen and all 
 men who have been boys I protest 
 against expurgated editions of boyhood. 
 Like Cromwell with the portrait painter, 
 I want to have the picture show all the 
 blemishes. You will have to make long 
 search in Dickens before you v?ill find a 
 real boy. He has some impossible crea- 
 tions that are called boys, but as a rule 
 they are grotesque freaks, mere carica- 
 tures, made up by selecting and empha- 
 sizing some one boyish trait. This 
 gives a mere fragment of a boy. The 
 Fat Boy for instance, simply eats 
 and sleeps, — admittedly too meager 
 
THACKERAY 33 
 
 an endowment of boyish talent. 
 The Dickens Boy is given to the 
 most impossible grown-up language. 
 Here is a sample from Mrs. Lirriper's 
 Lodgings. The boy says, in a burst of 
 childish confidence to the old lady who 
 has adopted him. — 
 
 And now dear Gran, let me kneel 
 down here, where I have been used to say 
 my prayers, and let me fold my face for 
 just a minute in your gown, and let me 
 cry, for you have been more than mother, 
 more than father, more than sisters, 
 friends to me. 
 
 This is exactly the way the forty- 
 year-old boy talks in a popular play. 
 But no real ten-year-old ever talked like 
 that. Oliver Twist was not much of a boy. 
 The nearest he came to it, was when he 
 asked for more, and when he blacked 
 Noah Claypole's eye. But these events 
 seemed in the nature of accidents and not 
 indicative of any settled boyish habit. 
 
54 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Thackeray has no counterfeit boys. 
 He never got over being a boy himself 
 and so he knevp boys. He does not 
 have them continually at stage business. 
 They fight and fag each other and are 
 flogged religiously and unavailingly; they 
 fill up on hardbake and raspberry 
 tart, they run in debt for goodies, and 
 dote on hampers from home, and hate 
 books and love fun. Clive goes to Aunt 
 Honeyman's and she stuffs him with 
 svsreets as is the manner of aunts the 
 world over. Sad is the childhood that 
 does not have such an aunt. I vow I 
 would rather have seen the fight between 
 Champion Major the First Cock of 
 Doctor Birch's School, and the Tut bury 
 Pet, or the one between Cuff and 
 Dobbin, than the combat between the 
 late Messrs Fitzsimmons and Corbett. 
 
 But Thackeray is most happy with 
 his boys in the salad time, between hay 
 and grass, when the childish treble 
 
THACKERAY 55 
 
 changes to a more virile note. Few 
 elders understand a boy at this time, 
 nor does he understand himself. If you 
 choose to laugh at the many nebulous 
 aspirations, hopes and ambitions that 
 come to him, then you are laughing over 
 the grave of your own youth where lies 
 all that was best in you. Make your 
 mirth kindly, for so you toiled, and 
 sorrowed and played up the slope of 
 manhood. The silly hours, the follies in 
 love, the wanton freaks and callow 
 vices, the fitful starts that mark the 
 changing mind, are all pictures of your 
 own youth. You have turned them to 
 the wall and forgotten them, or wish 
 you could forget them. Thackeray 
 has dealt kindly with this world of 
 hobbledehoyhood. He has peopledit with 
 Arthur Pendennis, Phillip, Clive, the 
 Virginians and many more of unripe 
 wits. He is youth's kindliest, most 
 generous mentor. 'T is sorrietimes one 
 
56 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 whether this boy-man is laughing or 
 crying over this dreamland of youth. 
 
 It was as if he had the same opinion 
 of Dr. Busby, who was asked how he 
 contrived to keep all his preferments, and 
 the head-mastership of Westminister 
 School, through the turbulent times of 
 Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II; 
 He replied: — "The fathers govern the 
 nation; the mothers govern the fathers; 
 the boys govern the mothers; and I 
 govern the boys, ' ' 
 
 He could live over again that many- 
 sided boyhood with its selfishness and 
 generosity, its cruelty and humanity, its 
 justice and injustice, its queer, strange, 
 code of established laws and customs. 
 Always a boy at heart, he could easily 
 turn back to the old days of smiles and 
 tears, of feasting and fighting, of loosely 
 mingled work and play, and feel again 
 the thrill of those early griefs and joys, 
 and that first fond love for many 
 
THACKERAY sj 
 
 companiqns whom the dust has long 
 covered. 
 
 It was in child-hearted mood that 
 Jie wrote the poem where are these lines. - 
 I'd say we suffer and we strive 
 Not less or more as men than boys; 
 With grizzled beards at forty-five, 
 As erst at twelve in corduroys. 
 And if in time of sacred youth, 
 We learned at home to love and pray, 
 Pray heaven that early love and truth 
 May never wholly pass away. 
 
 The Thackeray Woman is a delicate 
 subject — a complex creature, and not to 
 be roughly classified. Our author has 
 been widely accused of making his 
 women either fools or knaves, and of 
 disparaging the sex to the point of 
 slander. This criticism is really based 
 on supersensitive gallantry. In fact, 
 Thackeray treated the sexes impartially, 
 and dealt out stripes and favor with an 
 equal hand. 
 
38 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 He did not create any lofty and 
 flawless women, but neither did he 
 create any men of this character. 
 
 Becky Sharpe, The Old Campaigner, 
 and the fair false Beatrix and many 
 other selfish, nagging, toadying, re- 
 spectable and semi-respectable women 
 that he has painted are in his Rogues' 
 Gallery, side by side with George 
 Osborne, the brainless cad, the Marquis 
 of Steyne, and Barnes Newcome. 
 
 We are not unmindful that Zenobia 
 Packer, who belongs to no one knows 
 how many clubs, and is president of the 
 Woman's Emancipation League, and 
 who aims a rapid fire of treatises and 
 addresses at the Tyrant, Man, and is 
 high chum with Lady Summersault, the 
 English Head of the Movement for 
 Purity and Reform, thinks that Amelia 
 Sedley was a little fool, and that all of 
 the Thackeray women of gentle mould 
 who prayed among their children, and 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 59 
 
 clung fiercely to their household deities, 
 and never cared whether they had any 
 rights or not, were poor puling weak- 
 spirited creatures, who would be entirely 
 out of date now. 
 
 Go thy way, Zenobia, to thy clubs 
 and thy culture, and thy meat for the 
 strong-minded; pace the platform with 
 mannish strides; harangue obdurate 
 Man until he cries for quarter, and 
 hunt the bubble Notoriety from conven- 
 tion to convention. 
 
 Tyrant Man would return your 
 compliments with interest if he dared. 
 And you, Hysterical One who spleen on 
 marriage service lest it have occult 
 power to subjugate you, and who 
 analyze and re-analyze all your emotions 
 and feelings before you use them, and 
 hold high prate and debate over 
 deum and teum, follow your 
 labyrinth and let petty Discontent 
 gnaw you, but leave healthy humanity 
 
6o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 to its worship of old-fashionfed idols. 
 If to be gentle, and loving, and 
 kindly, and unselfish; to be ignorant of 
 most of the wickedness of the world, to 
 believe in and trust and idealize a faulty, 
 human, son or brother or husband, 
 and to forgive him seventy times sevenj 
 and to pour unmeasured love upon him 
 without pausing to see whether it is all 
 measured back or not; to be generous 
 and charitable to all erring souls, and to 
 hate all wickedness, stamps a woman as 
 a poor vreak-spirited creature, then may 
 heaven send us more of stich women to 
 bless and cheer the world and make it 
 better. Amelia^ it is true, loved a 
 cad, but evil tongues were huished in her 
 presence. Th6 Little Sister artlessly 
 dropped heir h's, and said "feller," and 
 was not at all strong-ihinded, but in 
 silence she let her own good name 
 suffer a deadly wound in order that 
 she might save the boy, not heir 
 
THACKERAY 6i 
 
 own, from an inheritance of shame. 
 
 Some apology is due for approach- 
 ing the everlasting parallel between 
 Dickens and Thackeray; but this habit 
 of comparison has become a fixed and 
 ineradicable tr£iit in all of their admirers. 
 The question of superiority between 
 them is probably as unworthy of serious 
 contention as are some of those favorites 
 of the Ethopian debating societies. 
 
 Dickens will undoubtedly always be 
 more popular with the masses. His 
 humor, his mannerisms, his bent for 
 fine writing, his long drawn pathos, his 
 unwearying play of sorrow and emotion 
 and his cOhventiohal sermonizing on the 
 moralities, are more taking than the 
 qilick, sweeping strokes of Thackeray. 
 
 Thackeray disdained pretentious 
 writing and all overdrawn, overworn 
 scenes; He has no Solitary Horsemen, 
 no prefatory tafesof wind and Storm, no 
 stale theatrical tricks or devices, or 
 
62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS ' 
 
 tawdry stage properties. He leaves all 
 the gorgeous imagery of sky and storm 
 and landscape to other limners. Life's 
 great joys and sorrows are not made 
 wearying with long speech or ornate 
 funeral rhetoric. Before a death bed, 
 he is not like Dame Quickly or some 
 garrulous caretaker of the chamber, 
 chattering and gossipping of the last 
 hour; he but reverently draws the 
 curtain back for a momentary view and 
 then closes it again. He does not 
 prologue his art and bid you prepare to 
 laugh or weep before the occasion. 
 
 Yet he excels Dickens, and, indeed, 
 most others, as a masters of style. The 
 pedant, the mere grammarian, or 
 linguistic martinet, prunes and pares 
 our mother-tongue into bashful regular- 
 ity, — into ordered line and phrase. It 
 is then as the trees in the ground of 
 some pervenue gardener, trimmed into 
 grotesque architecture and deformity^ 
 
THACKERAY 63 
 
 shorn of their grace and beauty, and 
 mere caricatures of the great forests. 
 
 Thackeray will have none of this; he 
 touches the barren rock of dictionary 
 lore and the living vi^ords gush forth. 
 
 Some of the best examples of his 
 style are found in the introduction of 
 Major Pendennis reading his morning 
 mail, in the perusal of vphich you get 
 several life histories; in the scene where 
 Colonel Esmond discards the young 
 pretender, and in Colonel Newcome's 
 last hour. In these are shown the 
 marvel and power of a few simple words. 
 
 Like music answering music is a 
 younger author's affectionate tribute to 
 the great master. 
 
 In his Letters to Dead Authors, 
 Lang says of Thackeray's style, using 
 for his text Thackeray's own words, 
 "Forever echoing in the heart and 
 present in the memory: — " 
 
 Who has heard these tones, who does 
 
64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 not hear them as he turns over your 
 books that, for so many years have been 
 companions and comforters? We have 
 been young and old, we have been sad 
 and merry v?ith you, we have listened to 
 the midnight chimes with Pen and 
 Warrington, have stood with you beside 
 the deathrbed, have mourned at that yet 
 more awful funeral of lost love, and with 
 you have prayed in the inmost chapel 
 sacred to our old and immortal affec- 
 tions, a leal souvenir! And whenever 
 you speak for yourself, and speak in 
 earnest, how magical, how rare, how 
 lonely in our literature is the beauty of 
 your sentences! 'I cannot express the 
 charm of them, ' so you wrote of George 
 Sand; so we may write of you. They 
 seem to me like the sound of country 
 bells, provoking I don't know what vein 
 of music and meditation, and falling 
 sweetly and sadly on the ear. Surely 
 that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of 
 
THACKERAY 65 
 
 surprises — that style which stamps as 
 classical your frag-ments of slang-, and 
 perpetually astonishes and delights — 
 would alone g-ive immortality to an 
 author, even had he little to say. 
 
 But you with your whole wide world 
 of fops and fools, of good women and 
 brave men, of honest absurdities and 
 cheery adventurers; you who created the 
 Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and 
 Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B. and 
 the Chevalier Strong — all that host of 
 friends imperishable — you must survive 
 with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the 
 memory and affections of men. 
 
 When Thackeray grows weary of 
 snobs and their ways, and of the 
 meanness and baseness of life, he has 
 places of refuge, where no evil comes, 
 but only charity and worth and manli- 
 ness. These are his temples, and some 
 deity of truth is worshipped in each. 
 You can weep and pray with him here. 
 
66 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and walk forth with new-opened heart. 
 I liken him to the Ancient Mariner, 
 homeward bound after that voyage of 
 evil sights, who crosses the harbo nr 
 bar, and sees the light-house top, and 
 the kirk and feels the familiar homely 
 flush of life in his own country once 
 more. Straightway his spirit falls prone 
 and he learns the messages he is to take 
 to all, that he prayeth best, who loveth 
 best, all things both great and small. 
 So, when Thackeray comes to the lives 
 of good men and women, he casts ofE 
 his hardihood and cynicism, and sees 
 only the things that he loves best. If 
 he created Becky Sharpe, and George 
 Osborne and Barnes Newcome, he also 
 gave us the Little Sister, and Amelia 
 Sedley, and dear old Dobbin. 
 
 The wickedness and baseness is 
 overmatched by Colonel Newcome, and 
 where in all literature is there so 
 simple, kindly, manly and chivalrous a 
 
THACKERAY 6j 
 
 soul. Almost the first we see of him is in 
 the coffee room when he arises from his 
 seat, trembling with indignation and 
 stalks out with little Clive, because one 
 of the bachanalians commences to sing 
 a ribald song. His life is all one prayer 
 for his boy. When the evil days came 
 and the lash of The Old Campaigner fell 
 upon him, he bowed his shoulders in 
 charity and patience. In the real world 
 it might be hard to find men like 
 him, but unquestionably there are 
 women like her. We last see him in 
 Gray Friars, one of the Poor Brethren 
 accepting with blended pride and 
 humility the dole of charity for a little 
 time until death comes. With Clive, and 
 Ethel, and Madame de Florae, whom he 
 had loved and lost forty years before, 
 clinging to his hands, he heard the 
 evening bell strike as his summons 
 came, and raising his head called 
 " Adsum," the word he answered with 
 
68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 when names were called at school. 
 Colonel Newcome alone redeems Thack- 
 eray from the charge of thinking too 
 meanly of human kind. His own careless 
 lines best close the page: — 
 
 The play is done; the curtain drops, 
 
 Slow falling to the prompter's bell; 
 
 A moment yet the actor stops, 
 
 And looks around to say farewell. 
 
 It is an irksome work and task; 
 
 And when he's laug-hed and said his say, 
 
 He shows, as he removes the mask, 
 
 A face that's anything- but gay. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Come wealth or want, come good or ill, 
 Let young and old accept their part. 
 And bow before the Awful Will, 
 And bear it with an honest heart. 
 Who misses, or who wins the prize? 
 Go, lose or conquer as you can; 
 But if you fail, or if you rise. 
 Be each, pray God, a gentleman. 
 
DEGENERATION. 
 
 In his Degeneration, Dr. Nordau 
 comes crashing into literature like 
 the traditionary bull into a china 
 shop. When that rude invasion oc- 
 curred, according to some accounts, the 
 proprietor of the shop, after the intruder 
 had been led away to the shambles, took 
 an inventory of the ruins. He found 
 great wreckage of siUy gingerbread- 
 ware, of costly stucco, and antique 
 vases, priceless because they were old; he 
 found broken specimens made famous 
 and notable because some mad fancier 
 had started the fashion of doting on 
 
70 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 them, and many other sheep-like mad- 
 men had chased after their leaders. 
 Some of these fragments were ground 
 into dust and past all patching; but 
 others he noted he could stick together 
 and hide their wounds, or, better 
 still, could parade them maimed and 
 battered in proof of their great anti- 
 quity. To maintain my figure properly 
 I choose to believe that this shopkeeper 
 was a collector, a connoisseur , a lover of 
 rare old pottery who paid fabulous prices 
 for such as pleased his taste; one who 
 valued many of the gems of his collec- 
 tion, not because they were artistic, but 
 because they were hideous, and other 
 pieces because no one else had them, and 
 still others because some Royal Society 
 had set its approval on them. I shall 
 assume that he had some dingy lies 
 purporting to come from the palaces of 
 Pompeii, or the tombs of Etrusca, that 
 really hailed from the shed of some vile 
 
DEGENERA TION 77 
 
 nineteenth century potter. The bull 
 must have knocked some of the grimy 
 deceiving glaze from these gauds and 
 shown them for vs^hat they were. Our 
 antiquarian could solace himself with the 
 thought that he could afford to lose 
 some of his wares; could patch others 
 and deceive the public with the frag- 
 ments, and that after all, his best 
 treasures were on the higher shelves and 
 received no harm. In the case at bar, as 
 the lawyers say, we who keep the literary 
 shop have walked about since Nordau 
 darkened our doors, picking up the 
 ruins and ruefully surveying the broken 
 idols. 
 
 We find much dull clay gilded as 
 wedgewood and rare china; we find 
 antiquities that were made yesterday 
 with no more lies to tell; we find that 
 some things can be patched together; 
 and, thankfully, we find that some 
 priceless treasures were placed so high 
 
72 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 that this raging iconoclast could not 
 harm them. Let us, then, rejoice over 
 our salvage. As for Nordau, he has 
 been led away to the critic's shambles, 
 there to await the lethal strokes of ten 
 thousand daggers. 
 
 The vendetta between him and his 
 victims, and victim's victims has become 
 international. It is our happiness to sit 
 around in the pleasant amphitheatre and 
 watch the killing, moved only by the 
 love of truth. Under no circumstances 
 let us turn up our thumbs for the king's 
 mercy. This charge of one man upon 
 an army will be one of the famous 
 braveries in literature. He faced only 
 the leaders at first, ' 'the prime in order 
 and in might," but behind these come 
 the inferior orders, and then the ten 
 thousand thousand disciples of the 
 Degenerates. This rude shock did not 
 even spare the temple of France where 
 the Forty Immortals are safely housed 
 
DEGENERA TION 73 
 
 beyond all necessity of struggling for 
 fame. It is vain however to suppose 
 that the common business of establishing 
 cults will be lessened much. We will 
 still continue to give to our newest 
 Genius assurance of fame by naming 
 clubs after him, and disciplining an army 
 to ring his perpetual eulogy. In club 
 circles it will still bethought blasphemous 
 that critics like Nordau should disturb 
 public worship by their rude and fretful 
 speech. We shall spend many a 
 decade hereafter listening to the donkey 
 chorus, and watching the halo, which 
 Dullness always delights to place around 
 Dullness, grow and fade. 
 
 I have my own fee-grief however. 
 After reading Nordau, I bethought me 
 of those ancient library favorites — those 
 storehouses of polite letters — The 
 Poets' Argosy; Treasures of Verse; 
 and Sheaves Gleaned From the Great 
 Ocean of Literature. I fear that I have 
 
7^ CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 been harbouring Degenerates behind, 
 these wooden walls. I know that 
 the gentle-souled compilers, always 
 thoughtful of the manners and morals 
 of their patrons, have already expurgated 
 much, yet I may have to follow them 
 with the blue pencil. If I must, I shall 
 even tear out a forbidden leaf here and 
 there. If an intimate friend of mine is 
 arrested at my house charged with a 
 heinous crime, shall I go off to gaol and 
 bail him out, and provide for his 
 defense, not caring for my own safety? Or 
 will it be more prudent for me to 
 come out boldly and honestly against 
 him; frankly admit that he may be 
 guilty, and that I have observed 
 suspicious things about him for a long 
 time, as I frequently remarked to my 
 other friend, Smith, as Smith very well 
 knows? Is not this the best way to get 
 away from the ridicule and shame of the 
 matter, especially as I remember trying 
 
DEGENERA TION 75 
 
 to make many people believe that my 
 friend in custody was a worthy honest 
 fellow? How can I clear myself of the 
 suspicions arising from my intimacy 
 with the criminal unless I repudiate 
 him utterly? If I have had a 
 sneaking fondness for Swinburne and 
 Maeterlinck, now that Nordau has made 
 his arrest, is it my best policy to attempt 
 a rescue, or, shall I abandon them to 
 their fate; denounce them in an airy 
 off-handed way, and announce that I 
 never approved of them and am glad of 
 their exposure? 
 
 Indeed, Nordau says that Degener- 
 ates love a Degenerate, and thus I may 
 become classified as a Mattoid, an 
 Egomaniac, or a Graphomaniac, simply 
 because of the company I have 
 kept. These questions as to what faith 
 shall be maintained with old friends are 
 matters of casuistry that the honorable 
 reader will settle for himself. 
 
j6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 For my own part, I think that if an 
 author, after having deceived us these 
 many years, now turns out under a new 
 diagfnosis to be a Mattoid or other 
 monster, he is not entitled to much 
 consideration, and we owe it to ourselves 
 to look out for ourselves. The dear 
 ladies who have wept sentimentally over 
 Ibsen's multifarious sweet follies; the 
 loveless ones who have 'scaped either 
 matrimony or its happiness, and who 
 find comfort in Tolstoi because he 
 preaches that marriage is not only a 
 failure but a desecration; the ardent 
 devotees of realism who have followed 
 in Zola's furrow as he subsoUed 
 dunghills; the many youths of kindling 
 minds who have been lured by the 
 gorgeous coloring of Swinburne and 
 Rossetti, as the savage is lured by a red 
 blanket and glass beads; those who 
 love the dictionary conglomerates of 
 Maeterlinck, Baudelaire and Nietzsche 
 
DEGENERA TION 77 
 
 — must endure the shock of seeing 
 their deified good masters turned into 
 swine — into Yahoos, whom none shall 
 reverence. 
 
 Nordau has the scientist's rage for 
 classifying the unclassifiable. To the 
 layman the task seems as vain as that 
 of the phrenologists who subdivide the 
 human skull into compartments, stocking 
 each with its appropriate tenant. It is 
 urged that Nordau pleads his cause 
 against the Degenerates with too much 
 vehemence; but a juror need not assume 
 that an advocate has a bad case, because 
 he argues it with exaggeration and 
 energy. This new science of Degeneration 
 has begotten names and titles that 
 are appalling to the non-professional 
 reader. How are pupils in the lower 
 forms to know what Masochism, Megalo- 
 mania, Neo-Catholicism, Graphomania, 
 Anthropomorphism, Zoomorphism, Ec- 
 holalia and many other titles of strange 
 
78 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 disease, are? The scholars must supply 
 literature with a new index for its 
 maladies, or else allow us to lump 
 them off under the head of Nervous 
 Prostration or General Debility. 
 
 To a native of the upper Mississippi 
 Valley, this baiting and harrying of the 
 Degenerates seems like a visitation of 
 righteous wrath only too long delayed. In 
 places where literature has an established 
 service and a common law of tradition 
 and custom, success seems generally 
 to follow persistent clacking and 
 tickling. You talk up my new poem 
 and I will talk up your new novel; thus 
 pigmy calls to pigmy, and a great deal 
 of noise is made about nothing. If this 
 persistent reciprocal advertising be kept 
 up long enough the Public will soon 
 come to think we are both great 
 men. Would you know how great fame 
 is built up out of nothing, read Nordau's 
 account of the making of Maeterlink. 
 
DEGENERA TION 79 
 
 This pitiable mental cripple vegetated 
 for years wholly unnoticed in his corner 
 of Ghent without the Belgian Symbolists, 
 who outbid even the French, according 
 him the slightest attention; as to the 
 public at large, no one had a suspicion 
 of his existence. Then one fine day in 
 1890 his writings fell accidentally into the 
 hands of the French novelist, Octave 
 Mirbeau. He read them, and whether 
 he desired to make fun of his 
 contemporaries in grand style, or whether 
 he obeyed some morbid impulsion is not 
 known; it is sufficient to say that he 
 published in Le Figaro an article of 
 unheard of extravagance, in which he 
 represented Maeterlinck as the most 
 brilliant, sublime, moving poet which 
 the last three hundred years had 
 produced, and assigned him a place 
 near — nay, above Shakespeare. And then 
 the world witnessed one of the most 
 extraordinary, and most convincing 
 
So CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 examples of the force of sug-gestion. The 
 hundred thousand rich and cultivated 
 readers to whom Figaro addresses itself 
 immediately took up the views which 
 Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to 
 them. They at once saw Maeterlinck 
 with Mirbeau 's eyes. They found in 
 him all the beauties which Mirbeau 
 asserted that he perceived in him. 
 Anderson's fairy tale of the invisible 
 clothes of the emperor repeated itself 
 line for line. They were not there, but 
 the whole court saw them. Some imagined 
 they really saw the absent state robes ; the 
 others did not see them, but rubbed their 
 eyes so long that they at least doubted 
 whether they saw them or not; others 
 again could not impose on themselves, but 
 dared not contradict the rest. Thus 
 Maeterlinck became at one stroke, by 
 Mirbeau 's favour, a great poet, and a 
 poet of "the future," Mirbeau had also 
 given quotations which would have 
 
DEGENERA TION 8i 
 
 completely sufficed for a reader who was 
 not hysterical, not g-iven over irresistibly 
 to suggestion, to recognize Maeterlinck 
 for what he is, namely, a mentally 
 debilitated plagiarist; but these very 
 quotations wrung cries of admiration 
 from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had 
 pointed them out as beauties of the 
 highest rank, and every one knows that 
 a decided affirmation is sufficient to 
 compel hypnotic patients to eat raw 
 potatoes as oranges and to believe 
 themselves to be dogs or other 
 quadrupeds. 
 
 Nordau gives out this as his text: 
 Degenerates are not always criminals, 
 prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced 
 lunatics; they are often authors and 
 artists. These however manifest the 
 same mental characteristics, and, for the 
 most part, the same somatic features as 
 the members of the above anthropological 
 family. 
 
82 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 This is his indictment of the great 
 
 donkey-like public: 
 
 But grievous is the fate of him who 
 has the audacity to characterize cesthetic 
 fashions as forms of mental decay- The 
 author or artist attacked never pardons a 
 man for recognizing in him the lunatic or 
 charlatan; the subjectively garrulous 
 critics are furious when it is pointed out 
 how shallow and incompetent they are, or 
 how cowardly when swimming with the 
 stream; and even the public is angered 
 when forced to see that it has been 
 running after fools, quack dentists, and 
 mountebanks as so many prophets. 
 Some among these degenerates in 
 literature, music and painting have in 
 recent years come into extraordinary 
 prominence, and are revered by numerous 
 admirers as creators of a new art, and 
 heralds of the coming centuries. 
 
 He defines Degeneration as "a 
 
 morbid deviation from an original 
 
DEGENERA TION 83 
 
 type." He says: 
 
 The society which surrounds the 
 degenerate always remains strange to 
 him. The Englishman is conquered 
 by an absurdity accompanied by dia- 
 grams. Ruskin is one of the most turbid 
 and fallacious minds, and one of the most 
 powerful masters of style of the present 
 century. * * * ^\^ Pre-Raphselites 
 who got all their leading principles from 
 Ruskin, went further. They misunder- 
 stood his misunderstandings. He had 
 simply said that defectiveness in form 
 can be counterbalanced by devotion and 
 noble feeling in the artist. They, how- 
 ever raised it to the position of a 
 fundamental principle, that in order to 
 express devotion and noble feeling, the 
 artist must be defective in form. * * * 
 If any human activity is individualistic, it 
 is that of the artist. True talent is 
 always personal. In its creations it 
 reproduces itself, its own views and 
 
84 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 feelings, and not the articles of faith 
 learned from an aesthetic apostle. If 
 Goethe had never written a line of verse, he 
 would all the same have remained a man 
 of the world, a man of good principles, a 
 fine art connoiseur, a judicious collector, a 
 keen observer of nature. Lombroso, a 
 very great authority, says of degenerates : 
 "If they are painters, then their predomi- 
 nant attribute will be the color sense ; they 
 will be decorative. If they are poets they 
 will be rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, but 
 barren of thought; sometimes they will 
 be decadents." 
 
 In this connection it may be said 
 that the curious style of some artists of 
 this generation, notably Monet and his 
 school bears out the above statement. 
 Nordau says of Monet: 
 
 Thus originate the violet pictures of 
 Monet and his school which spring from 
 no actual observable aspect of nature, but 
 from the subjective view due to the 
 
DEGENERA TION 85 
 
 condition of the nerves. When the entire 
 surface of walls in salons and art 
 exhibitions of the day appears veiled in 
 uniform half-mourning, this predilection 
 for violet is simply an expression of the 
 nervous debility of the painter. 
 
 Of our own decadents only Walt. 
 Whitman is taken; perhaps the crop is 
 too small and too immature to merit 
 reaping. This belittlement of those 
 who are spared may be deserved, and 
 yet if Nordau could have read our 
 Tigerish Affection Poetry, our Poetry 
 of Cold Soggy Dreams, or our Small 
 Poetry for Big Magazines, he might 
 have found a trace at least of the deadly 
 virus of degeneration. We do not 
 worship overmuch our home-born 
 degenerates. Some of our attempts at 
 literature are puerile, imitative, and 
 vacuous enough, but it is the siUy 
 madness and unreason of childhood 
 rather than the rancid ripeness and 
 
86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 putrescent maturity of old-world 
 degeneration. You can readily dis- 
 tinguish between the childish prattle of 
 the kindergarten, and the awful adult 
 babble and clamor of the madhouse. 
 
 Our small-and-early literature is so 
 dessicated and unfattened in its life, that 
 it cannot spoil; there is nothing in it for 
 decay to feed upon, and so it dies without 
 the grosser tokens of mortality. The 
 diseases of degeneration must draw 
 nutriment from something having life and 
 power, even though it be of a degraded 
 sort. We have no madmen with burning 
 brains, like Tolstoi, crying in our 
 wilderness; they belong to an older 
 civilization. Our erotic literature has a 
 brief and transitory life; it is infected 
 with a thin, washed-out, enfeebled and 
 innocuous depravity that is impotent to 
 do harm except among school children. 
 Its makers put it up in imitation of 
 Zola, Rossetti and Swinburne, who are 
 
DEGENERA TION 87 
 
 as eagles to these midges. The 
 nympho- maniacal young women who 
 write prose and verse for the patient 
 American public deserve to be put in 
 straight-jackets, only they are not worth 
 a commission de lunatico. They try to 
 fly as eagles but cannot clear the stye 
 where they seem to live. 
 
 Nordau digs up the early remains 
 of the Pre-Rapheelites to point his 
 moral. This Brotherhood is referred to 
 as an instance of how men of real talent 
 can indulge in grotesque affectation. 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt 
 and MiUais formed the Pre-Raphaelite 
 Brotherhood in 1848; CoUinson and 
 Stephens, two painters andWoolner, the 
 sculptor, joined later. For a time they 
 marked all their work P. R. B. Nordau 
 says of them: 
 
 In course of time the Pre-Raphselites 
 laid aside many of their early extrav- 
 agances. MiUais and Holman Hunt no 
 
88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 longer practice the affectation of wilfully 
 bad drawing and of childish babbling in 
 imitation of Giotto's language. * * * 
 They did not paint sober visions but 
 emotions. They therefore introduced 
 into their pictures mysterous allusions 
 and obscure symbols which have nothing 
 to do with the visible reality. 
 
 Nordau defines Pre-Raphaelitism 
 thus: 
 
 It is true that the Pre-Raphaelites 
 with both brush and pen betray a 
 certain, though by no means exclusive 
 predilection for the Middle Ages ; but the 
 mediaevalism of their poems and paintings 
 is not historical but mythical, and simply 
 denotes something outside time and 
 space — a time of dreams and a place of 
 dreams, where all unreal figures and 
 actions may be conveniently bestowed. 
 That they decorate their unearthly world 
 with some features which may remotely 
 recall mediaevalism; that it is peopled 
 
DEGENERA TION 8g 
 
 with queens and knights, noble damozels 
 
 with coronets on their golden hair, and 
 
 pages with plumed caps — these may 
 
 be accounted for by the prototypes 
 
 which, perhaps unconsciously, hover 
 
 before the eyes of the Pre-Raph^lites. 
 
 Rossetti finally becomes a man of 
 
 letters, dominated possibly by his 
 
 name. William Morris finally joins the 
 
 Pre-Raphcelites, and I am reluctantly 
 
 compelled to say that he has, on one 
 
 occasion at least, stolen something 
 
 besides inspiration from the "mournful 
 
 Tuscan 's haunted rhyme. ' ' This practice 
 
 of conscripting a blessed damozel out of 
 
 the Middle Ages to do duty in poetry is 
 
 common with Rossetti and his school. 
 
 Tennyson — a healthy poet, teaches us 
 
 that a simple maiden in her flower, is 
 
 worth a hundred blessed damozels. 
 
 In Rossetti 's poem "TroyT-own, " 
 the refrain "O Troy Town," and "O 
 Troy's down," and "TaU Troy's on 
 
go CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 jBire," is tacked on as the alien and 
 unassisting tail-piece to each one of 
 fourteen strophes. Thus: 
 
 Helen knelt at Venus' shrine, 
 [O Troy town!] 
 Saying-, "A little gift is mine, 
 A little g-ift for a heart 's desire, 
 Hear me speak and make me a sign! 
 [O Troy 's down, 
 Tall Troy 'son fire!]" 
 Nordau says: 
 He is ever muttering as he 
 goes, monotonously as in a litany, the 
 mysterious invocations to Troy, while he 
 is relating the visit to the temple of Venus 
 at Sparta. 
 
 SoUier has the proposition that : 
 A special characteristic found in 
 literary mattoids, and eilso, as we have 
 seen, in the insane, is that of repeating 
 some words or phrases hundreds of 
 times in the same page. 
 
 His twin brother, Swinburne, is 
 
DEGENERA TION gi 
 
 called upon for his contribution to the 
 
 poetical crazy quilt. 
 
 We were ten maidens in the green corn, 
 Small red leaves in the mill-water; 
 Fairer maidens never were born, 
 Apples of gold for the King 's daughter. 
 
 "We were ten maidens by a well-head. 
 
 Small white birds in the mill-water ; 
 
 Sweeter maidens never were wed. 
 
 Rings of red for the King 's daughter. 
 
 This mill-water is a monotonous 
 
 receptacle for almost everything from 
 
 "small white birds," to "a little 
 
 wind," and it bears its variegated 
 
 burdens through many verses to the 
 
 end; when the final grave is dug for the 
 
 star daughter, it is still on duty. In 
 
 the last verse "running rain, " is cast in 
 
 aqueous tautology into the mUl-water. 
 
 This practice of putting a tether on 
 
 Fancy "skyward flying," and bringing 
 
 her back with a jerk to the same point 
 
g2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 after every flight, seems unneccessarily 
 cruel and inharmonious. 
 
 The Belgian poet, Maurice Maeter- 
 linck, furnishes rare sport for this hunter 
 of Degenerates. From the Serres 
 chaudes of Maeterlinck this sample is 
 given : 
 
 O hot-house in the middle of the 
 woods. And your doors ever closed ! And 
 all that is under your dome I And under 
 my soul in your analogies I The thoughts 
 of a princess who is hungry ; the tedium 
 of a sailor in the desert; a brass-band 
 under the windows of incurables. Go into 
 the warm moist corners I One might say 
 'tis a woman fainting on harvest-day. In 
 the courtyard of the infirmary are 
 postilions ; in the distance an elk-hunter 
 passes by, who now tends the sick. 
 Examine in the moonlight ! [O, nothing 
 there is in its place 1] One might say, a 
 madwoman before judges, a battle ship in 
 full sail on a canal, night-birds on 
 
DEGENERA TION 
 
 93 
 
 lilies, a death-knell towards noon [down 
 there under thosebells], a halting--place for 
 the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether 
 on a sunny day. My God I My God I when 
 shall we have rain and snow and wind in 
 the hot-house? 
 
 To show how easy this is, Nordau 
 
 writes a parody of it in this fashion: 
 
 O Flowers! And we groan so heavily 
 under the very old taxes 1 An hour-glass, 
 at which the dog barks in May; and the 
 strange envelope of the negro who has 
 not slept. A grandmother who would 
 eat oranges and could not write ! Sailors 
 in a ballroom, but blue I blue 1 On the 
 bridge this crocodile and the policeman 
 with the swollen cheek beckons silently ! 
 O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the 
 razor is notched! But the chief prize 
 they have not drawn. And on the lamp 
 are ink spots I 
 
 Nordau despairingly asks: "Why 
 
 parody Maeterlinck? His style bears no 
 
g4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 parody, for it has already reached the 
 extreme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite 
 worthy of a mentally sound man to 
 make fun of a poor devil of an idiot. ' ' 
 
 Zola and his school do not escape 
 punishment. 
 
 M. Zola boasts of his method of 
 work; all his books "emanate from 
 observation." The truth is that he 
 has never "observed;" that he has 
 never, following Goethe "plung-ed into 
 the full tide of human life," but has 
 always remained shut up in a world of 
 paper, and has drawn all his subjects out 
 of his own brain, all his "realistic " details 
 from newspapers and books read 
 uncritically. * * * jjjg eyes are • 
 never directed towards nature or 
 humanity, but only to his own "Ego." In 
 order that the borrowed detail should 
 remain faithful ' to reality, it must 
 preserve its right relation to the whole 
 phenomenon, and this is what never 
 
DEGENERA TION gs 
 
 happens with M. Zola. To quote only 
 two examples. In Pot-Bouille, among- the 
 inhabitants of a single house in the Rue 
 de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the 
 space of a few months all the infamous 
 things he has learnt in the course 
 of thirty years, by reports from 
 acquaintances, by cases in courts of 
 law, and various facts from newspapers 
 about apparently honourable bourgeois 
 families; in La Terre, all the vices 
 imputed to the French peasantry or 
 rustic people in general, he crams into 
 the character and conduct of a few 
 inhabitants of a small village in Beauce ; he 
 may in these cases have supported every 
 detail by cuttings from newspapers, or 
 jottings, but the whole is not the less 
 monstrously and ridiculously untrue. I 
 allowed myself for thirteen years to be 
 led astray by his swagger, and credulously 
 accepted his novels as sociological 
 contributions to the knowledge of French 
 
g6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 life. The family whose history Zola 
 presents to us in twenty mighty volumes 
 is entirely outside normal daily life, and 
 has no neccessary connection whatever 
 with France and the Second Empire. It 
 might just as well have lived in Patagonia 
 and at the time of the Thirty Years' War. 
 Nordau says that the history of one 
 family of criminals in France has supplied 
 M. Zola with material for all of his 
 novels. It is comforting to know that 
 the human beasts described in works Uke 
 La Terre are selected cases. Thinking 
 that they were samples of the French 
 people, I have felt like giving voice to 
 Byron 's adjuration, slightly paraphrased : 
 Arise ye Teutons and glut your ire. 
 A land peopled with Zola's char- 
 acters would be a carcass that even 
 vultures would disdain, 
 
 Nordau says of Friedrich Nietzsche: 
 As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its 
 poet, so in Nietzsche it has found its 
 
DEGENERA TION gj 
 
 philosopher. The deification of filth by 
 the Parnassians with ink, paint and 
 cla,y; the censing among- the diabolists 
 and decadents of licentiousness, disease 
 and corruption; the glorification, by 
 Ibsen of the person who "wiUs," is "free" 
 and "wholly himself " — of all this Nietzsche 
 supplies the theory, or, something which 
 proclaims itself as such, * * * From 
 the first to the last page of Nietzsche 's 
 writings the careful reader seems to hear 
 a madman, with flashing eyes, wild 
 gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting 
 forth deafening bombast ; and through it 
 all, now breaking out intq frenzied 
 laughter, now sputtering expressions of 
 filthy abuse, and invective, now skipping 
 about in a giddily agile dance, and 
 now bursting upon the auditors with 
 threatening mien and clenched fists. 
 Nietzsche evidently had the habit of 
 throwing on paper with feverish haste all 
 that passed through his head, and when he 
 
g8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 had collected a heap of these snippings, he 
 sent them to the printer and there was a 
 book. * * * It remains a disgrace to 
 the German intellectual life of the present 
 age, that in Germany a pronounced 
 maniac should have been regarded as a 
 philosopher and have founded a school. In 
 proof of the correctness of the foregoing 
 criticism I take a passage from 
 Zarathustra. 
 
 "The world is deep and deeper than 
 the day thinks it. Forbear I forbear ! I 
 am too pure for thee. Disturb me 
 not I Has not my world become exactly 
 perfect? My flesh is too pure for thy 
 hands. Forbear, thou dull, doltish and 
 obtuse dayl Is not the midnight 
 clearer? The purest are to be lords of 
 the earth, the most unknown, the 
 strongest, the souls of midnight who are 
 clearer and deeper than each day. * * * 
 My sorrow, my happiness are deep thou 
 strange day ; but yet I am not God, no 
 
DEGENERA TION 
 
 99 
 
 Hell of God; deep is their woe. God's 
 
 woe is deeper, thou strange World 1 Grasp 
 
 at God's woe, not at me I What am 
 
 I? A drunken sweet lyre — a lyre of 
 
 midnight, a singing frog understood by 
 
 none, but who must speak before the 
 
 deaf, O higher men I For ye understand 
 
 me not I Hence I Hence I O Youth!" etc. 
 
 It would make too lengthy a review 
 
 to do more than refer to what Nordau 
 
 says of the other French degenerates. 
 
 Among them, is Verlaine, who was in 
 
 prison for two years for a hideous 
 
 crime; with this preparation he comes 
 
 forth and establishes a school or cult in 
 
 literature. Stephane Mallarme admired 
 
 as a great poet in certain circles in 
 
 France, but who affected silence, with 
 
 the pretension that it was indelicate and 
 
 vulgar to expose his naked soul in 
 
 print. From the top of the pedestal 
 
 where his worshippers placed him he 
 
 stimulates their adoration by speechless 
 
100 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 posturing, leaving them to read without 
 the aid of the ink-well the great thoughts 
 which they credulously attribute to 
 him. With these comes Moreas, another 
 leader of the Symbolists. Leaving 
 France, we fly at higher game in 
 Tolstoi. Nordau says of him: 
 
 He has become in the last few years 
 one of the best known, and apparently, 
 also, one of the most widely read authors 
 in the world. Every one of his words 
 awakens an echo among' all the civilized 
 nations on the globe. His strong influence 
 over his contemporaries is unmistakable. 
 The universal success of Tolstoi's 
 writings is undoubtedly due in part to 
 his high literary gifts. * * * Tolstoi 
 would have remained unnoticed like any 
 Knudson of the seventeenth century, if 
 his extravagances as a degenerate mystic 
 had not found his contemporaries 
 prepared for their reception. The 
 wide-:spread hysteria from exhaustion 
 
DEGENERA TIOM loi 
 
 was the requisite soil in which alone 
 Tolstoi could flourish, In England it 
 was Tolstoi's sexual morality that excited 
 the greatest interest, for in that country 
 economic reasons condemn a formidable 
 number of girls, particularly of the 
 educated classes, to forego marriage ; and 
 from a theory which honored chastity as 
 the highest dignity and noblest human 
 destiny, and branded marriage with 
 gloomy wrath as abominable depravity, 
 these poor creatures would naturally 
 derive rich consolation for their lonely, 
 empty lives and their cruel exclusion 
 from the possibility of fulfilling their 
 natural calling. The Kreutzer Sonata 
 has, therefore, become the book of 
 devotion of all the spinsters of England. 
 * * * Lombroso instances a certain 
 Knudson, a madman, who lived in Schles- 
 wig about 1680, and asserted that there 
 was neither a God nor a hell; that 
 priests and judges were useless and 
 
102 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 pernicious, and marriag-e an immorality; 
 that men ceased to exist after death ; that 
 every one must be g-uided by his own 
 inward insight, etc. Here we have the 
 principal features of Tolstoi 's cosmolog-y 
 and moral philosophy. Kundson has, 
 however, so little pointed out leading the 
 way to those coming after, that he still 
 only exists as an instructive case of 
 mental abberation in books on diseases 
 of the mind. 
 
 Nordau's work would be incomplete 
 
 without an exposition of Ibsenism. He 
 
 says of Ibsen: 
 
 That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great 
 verve and power is not for a moment 
 to be denied. He is extraordinarily 
 emotive, and has the gift of depicting in 
 an exceptionally life-like and impressive 
 manner that which has excited his 
 feelings. * * * Similarly it must be 
 acknowledged that Ibsen has created 
 some characters possessing a truth to 
 
DEGENERA TION 103 
 
 life and a completeness such as are not 
 to be met with in any poet since 
 Shakespeare. Gina, in The Wild Duck, 
 is one of the most profound creations of 
 world-literature — almost as great as 
 Sancho Panza, who inspired it. Ibsen 
 has had the daring to create a female 
 Sancho, and in his temerity has come very 
 near to Cervantes, whom no one has 
 equaled. If Gina is not quite so 
 overpowering as Sancho, it is because 
 there is wanting in her his contrast to 
 Don Quixote. 
 
 Through many pages of Nordau, 
 Ibsen is dissected and examined. Ibsen's 
 childish ignorance of the simplest facts 
 taught by modern science; his silly 
 expositions and illustrations of the effect 
 of heredity; his habit of mounting little 
 hobbyhorses that have already been 
 ridden to death by the authors of the 
 Sunday-school literature of a generation 
 back; the artless discussions carried on 
 
104 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 by his characters, of delicate and complex 
 social problems, are all given by Nordau 
 as signs of Degeneration. 
 
 I should rather say tha;t these things 
 were proofs that Ibsen was a mere 
 dreamer, lacking accuracy; one who was 
 but a shallow student of facts and social 
 problems, and who has had but slight 
 training as a man of the world and of 
 affairs. He has but a dry and tedious 
 closet-wisdom, yet it is sugar-coated at 
 times with his rare poetic and dramatic 
 gifts. It would be a far deduction to 
 say that these faults denoted Degenera- 
 tion. They rather strongly prove 
 the vaguely nebulous condition of 
 thought, incident to one in his 
 non-age. His ideas of sacrifice, of 
 expiation for sin; his doctrine that 
 men and women must live out their 
 lives, which he explains to mean that 
 they should foUow their own sensual or 
 selfish impulses no matter at what 
 
DEGENERA TION 105 
 
 cost or shame to others; his open 
 abandonment of all these theories and 
 the advocacy of their opposites from 
 time to time as fits his mood, are 
 certainly marks of mental and moral 
 perversion. If he have a sound lesson on 
 the necessity of right living, to-day, he is 
 sure to contradict it on some other 
 day vrith guileless and shameless 
 inconsistency. His career is like that of 
 the Libyan vpho vpished to become a 
 god. With this purpose he caged 
 a large number of parrots and 
 taught them to say "Apsethus, the 
 Libyan is a god." Then he set them 
 loose and they spread all over 
 Lybia, and repeated in every wood 
 what he had taught them. The Libyans 
 not knowing of his trick were astounded 
 and finally came to regard him as a 
 god. Nordau uses this story as 
 illustrative of Ibsen, and adds: 
 
 In imitation of the ingenious 
 
io6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few 
 "comprehensives," Brandes, Eberhards, 
 Jaegers, etc. — the words "Ibsen is a 
 modern," "Ibsen is a poet of the future," 
 and the parrots have spread over all the 
 lands and are chattering with deafening 
 din in books and papers, "Ibsen is 
 great!" "Ibsen is a modern spirit!" and 
 imbeciles among the public murmur the 
 cry after them, because they hear it 
 frequently repeated, and because on such 
 as they, every word uttered with emphasis 
 and assurance makes an impression. 
 
 No enthronement however high is 
 
 safe from Nordau; he invades temples 
 
 that a humbler critic may not enter even 
 
 on tiptoe. He confronts the mighty 
 
 Wagner in his pride of place and shows 
 
 the plague-spots in his character. I copy 
 
 only a fragment from this arraignment: — 
 
 The shamless sensuality which 
 
 prevails in his dramatic poems has 
 
 impressed all his critics. Hanslick 
 
DEGENERA TION joy 
 
 speaks of the "bestial sensuality" in 
 Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: "The 
 feverish accents so much beloved by 
 Wagner, of an insatiable sensuality, 
 blazing to the uttermost limits — this 
 ardent moaning, sighing, crying, sinking 
 to the ground, move us with repugnance. 
 The text of these love-scenes becomes 
 sometimes in its exuberance, sheer 
 nonsense." Compare in the first act of 
 the Walkure, in the scene between 
 Siegmund and Sieglinde, the following 
 stage direction: "Hotly interrupting;" 
 "embraces her with fiery passion;" "in 
 gentle ecstacy;" "she hangs enraptured 
 upon his neck;" "close to his 
 eyes;" "beside himself;" "in the 
 highest intoxication," etc. At the 
 conclusion, it is said "the curtain falls 
 quickly," and frivolous critics have 
 not failed to perpetrate the cheap 
 witticism, "very necessary, too." The 
 amorous whinings, whimperings and 
 
io8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ravings of Tristan and Isolde, the entire 
 second act of Parsifal, in the scene 
 between the hero and the flower-girls, and 
 then between him and Kundry in 
 Klingsor 's magic garden, are worthy to 
 rank with the above passages. It 
 certainly redounds to the high honour of 
 German public morality, that Wagner's 
 operas could have been publicly performed 
 without arousing the greatest scandal. 
 How unperverted must wives and maidens 
 be when they are in a state of mind to 
 witness these pieces without blushing 
 crimson and sinking into the earth for 
 shame I How innocent must even 
 husbands and fathers be who allow their 
 womankind to go to these representations 
 of "lypanar" incidents I Evidently the 
 German audiences entertain no misgivings 
 concerning the actions and attitudes of 
 Wagnerian personages; they seem to 
 have no suspicion of the emotions by 
 which they are excited, and what 
 
DEGENERA TION log 
 
 intention their words, gestures and acts 
 denote; and this explains the peaceful 
 artlessness with which these audiences 
 follow theatrical scenes during which, 
 among a less childlike public, no one 
 would dare to lift his eyes to his neighbour 
 or endure his glance. 
 
 This new science of Degeneration 
 has enriched our vocabulary with odd 
 grotesque forms of speech, but lately 
 sprung up in the madhouses, dissecting 
 rooms and hospitals; the doctors have 
 been plagiarized and their livery stolen 
 for the service of literature. So dressed 
 forth, Nordau's clinic becomes too 
 physiological for the Critics' Corner in 
 a ladies' magazine, even if in that locality 
 w^e could endure so strong an antidote 
 to the gentle adjacent gush. The critics 
 who hover as vultures alike over the 
 mountain peaks of genius and the dead 
 plains of mediocrity wiU have rare 
 feasting on what Nordau has left; he 
 
no CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 has certainly run the game to earth for 
 them. 
 
 The art of criticism has always 
 owed much to the earlier classics. They 
 furnished it inspiration, names, titles, 
 figures, and illustrations. One hundred 
 and fifty years ago no critical discourse 
 would have been thought worthy a place 
 in letters if it did not contain industrious 
 gleanings from mythology ; critics hunted 
 from Rome back to Troy for whips with 
 which to scourge offenders against their 
 laws. Homer was the most constant 
 source of supply; now his verses, (if I 
 may use a bit of jesting vernacular,) have 
 become back-numbers. I detest Smith's 
 absurd book of essays; if I reviewed it in 
 the style of the last century, I would call 
 him a modern Theresites, or compare 
 him to some other equally unvalued 
 ancient; or I would suggest that he had 
 found some bog -hole and drank from it 
 under the mistake that it was the 
 
DEGENERA TION iii 
 
 Pierian Spring. All this is old style, 
 and was very well in its day. 
 
 With the aid of this new science, I 
 call Smith, a Literary Mattoid, an 
 Egomaniac, a Phraseomaniac, or some 
 other of the hospital-coined titles and 
 epithets. It will be so much more 
 puzzling and painful for Smith, when he 
 shall find that his essays are not damned 
 by the dictionary, and that in order to 
 know what it is that I have called him, he 
 must consult his medical man. A more 
 serious thought that may well give us 
 pause, is, what effect do these new 
 discoveries have on the law of libel and 
 slander? Is the term Mattoid, when 
 applied to an author, actionable? What 
 should be the rule of damages for an 
 author who has been called on Egomaniac ? 
 Is the term Nymphomaniac calculated 
 to excite an assault and breach of the 
 peace, and therefore indictible? Some 
 of these questions will unhappily find an 
 
112 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 answer in court, and I will not prejudice 
 the final judgment by any hasty 
 opinion. 
 
 This excursion into Darkest Litera- 
 ture, has all the fascinations attending 
 new discoveries in lands of strange beasts 
 and birds and men, — 
 II * * * wliatever title please thine ear 
 "Whether thou choose Cerventes serious air 
 Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair." 
 
 Quoting Pope is a reminder that 
 Degeneration has not yet been called 
 the nineteenth century Dunciad — an 
 omission which is, I fancy, entitled to 
 some comendation. Yet prompted 
 now, so strong is the habit of fashioning 
 the divine parallel, we recur to that 
 earlier Dunciad in search of all marks of 
 likeness or difference. Pope, probably a 
 degenerate himself, hunted his enemies 
 like a ferret out of the ratholes of Grub 
 Street; yet he distils his poison in courtly 
 numbers, and fair-sounding verse. He 
 
DEGENERA TION 113 
 
 runs the Dunciad in heroic mould, and 
 puts Theresites mockingly into the 
 shining armour of AchiUes. He compels 
 the mogrel mob in his Kingdom of 
 Dullness to walk in god-Hke struts before 
 he jeeringly dispatches them to the 
 shades. A dunce is more of a dunce 
 dressed in the rhetorical frippery of old 
 gods and kings, just as the ass in the 
 fable who puts on the lion's hide, thereby 
 becomes more of an ass. Pope's heroic 
 rhyme is like a parade of gloriously 
 equipped warriors sent out apparently 
 to honourable battle, only finally to be 
 employed as catchpoles for curbstone 
 criminals. The rhyming garniture of 
 the Dunciad with its myriad harmonies 
 has some obscurities that somewhat dim 
 the wit after so long a time. There is a 
 species of wit indigenous to time and 
 place; it wiU not bear transplanting, and 
 withers a little in a strange environment. 
 After nearly two centuries have passed. 
 
114 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 we lose the point of much of this 
 venom-dripping rhyme; the near-by 
 audience laughed it to the echo. We 
 cannot bring back that fretting, fuming 
 Bohemia where Pope was king. One 
 must have seen the fribbling rout of 
 vulgar pretenders whom Pope left 
 howling, in order to take fuU pleasure 
 in their correction. We should go back 
 to Will's, and hear the daily gossip that 
 ranged from the street to the chambers 
 of great noblemen, to make us apt in the 
 study of this devilish delicate wit. Who 
 can interpret it now, or pluck the fuU 
 meaning of these fleshless jests, from 
 their graveyard? No more can we teU 
 aU that Rabelais and Swift meant by 
 their stupendous satires. 
 
 As Hamlet in sad derision picked 
 up the skull of poor Yorick, so do we 
 take up the Dunciad. It was a thing of 
 infinite jest once; but now, where be its 
 gibes? its gambols? its flashes of 
 
DEGENERA TION 115 
 
 merriment that were wont to set the 
 table on a roar? All are gone and we 
 are sitting gazing at a stage-full of mere 
 skeletons of jests whose appearance once 
 shook the galleries. 
 
 Nordau on the other hand has 
 constructed for us a scientific treatise — a 
 text book; a cold phlegmatic analysis 
 that win be understood in distant 
 times, and without the aid of local 
 history. He does not adorn his labour 
 with the coloring of divine fancy as 
 the ancients decked victims for the 
 sacrifice. He does not waste strength 
 on glowing verse and cunningly turned 
 phrases; he has no place for these in his 
 materia inedica. He assumes a sterner 
 task, and stands, knife in hand, coolly 
 dissecting and expounding — the genius 
 of the lecture-room. 
 
JOHN SMITH. 
 
 I find from my daily that the Smith 
 family is to hold a reunion near Altoona 
 on August 19. It is needless to say 
 that this reunion will be largely 
 attended. Those in charge of the afFair 
 have issued a large number of invitations 
 to members of the family in all parts of 
 the world. On these invitations appears 
 a sort of a family tree, being a statement 
 of the fecundity and antiquity of the 
 Smiths. It states that the name 
 antedates the building of King Solomon's 
 Temple by forty years, and the Christian 
 era by 1855 years. There will doubtless 
 
JOHN SMITH II J 
 
 be presented at this reunion, a book of 
 Chronicles of the Smith Family, compiled 
 by some enthusiastic Smith, with 
 veracious accounts of how knightly de 
 Smiths won honour in many great battles 
 from Leuctra to Agincourt. Letters 
 are to be read at this gathering from 
 famous absent Smiths and addresses 
 made by famous attendant Smiths. 
 ' ' Invitations, ' ' so my account runs, ' 'have 
 been sent to the Italian Smithis, the 
 Spanish Smithos, the German Schmidts, 
 the French Smeets, the Russian 
 Smithtowskis, the Greek Smikons, and 
 the Turkish Seefs. ' ' I cannot find from 
 this legend whether the invitations were 
 sent to theSmythes, and the Smithes, but 
 these aristocrats may have been omitted 
 from this felicitation, by the plain 
 Smiths, who constitute the majority of 
 the clan. Caste is a dreadful thing, but 
 it seems to have crept like an alphabetical 
 serpent into the Smith family in the 
 
iiS CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 form of the interpolated y or e. To those 
 afflicted with this aristocratic addition, I 
 would say that the greatest member of 
 the Smith family was plain Smith, with 
 his name-plainess stiU further accentuated 
 by the Christian name of John. Not to 
 wear this matter out; — I mean Captain 
 John Smith, who fought robbers in 
 England and Prance, and pirates on the 
 Mediterranean, who did great deeds 
 against the Turk, cutting off the heads 
 of three Turkish champions before the 
 walls of Regall; who bore Turkish 
 and Indian captivity with undaunted 
 soul, and found in the thick darkness of 
 that captivity a glowing romance of 
 love; who was saved from death by an 
 Indian girl, and who performed so many 
 prodigies of valour as to pale "what 
 resounds in fable or romance of Uther's 
 son begirt with British and Armoric 
 knights." The Knights of the Table 
 Round with all their fabled prowess 
 
JOHN SMITH iig 
 
 taken for true, could not show his 
 fellow. He was the peer of them all, the 
 courtliest, the bravest and the greatest 
 of soul of all the brave gentlemen 
 adventurers that England sent into far 
 countries three hundred years ago. All 
 that was said of the peerless Launcelot 
 could be said of our captain : 
 
 Thou were head of all Christian 
 knights; and thou were the courtiest 
 knig-ht that ever bare shield; and thou 
 were the truest friend to thy lover that 
 ever bestrode horse; and thou were the 
 truest lover of a sinful man that ever 
 loved woman; and thou were the kindest 
 man that ever strake with sword; and 
 thou were the goodliest person ever came 
 among press of knights ; and thou were 
 the meekest man and the gentlest that 
 ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou 
 were the sternest knight to thy mortal 
 foe that ever put spear in rest. 
 
 Hero worship may run an unchecked 
 
120 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 course with this great-hearted man, for 
 all about him seems to have been fine 
 and worthy. The chance which selects 
 parents for great men gave him those by 
 the name of Smith as if in derision of 
 the paltry birthright of a name. His 
 parents followed this commonplace, in 
 an age when there were plenty of Mor- 
 timers and Percys by giving their eaglet 
 the name of John. It was later Smiths 
 who have been tempted from the 
 pathway of plain and unromatic orthoepy 
 to insert the extra vowel. But our 
 Smith could afford to wear his name 
 plain, as a prince can afford to wear 
 plain clothes. 
 
 He was born of good family in 
 Willoughy, Lincolnshire, in 1579. Lord 
 Bacon, then a young man of nineteen, 
 was studying law at one of the Inns of 
 Court. One Sir Thomas Coke was in a 
 large practice before the courts at 
 Westminster; Queen Elizabeth was in 
 
JOHN SMITH I2J 
 
 the midst of her long and glorious 
 reign; and there was much fighting and 
 blood-letting going on all over the 
 globe. Spain was wasting the 
 
 Netherlands with fire and sword. The 
 Turks were in continual war with the 
 nations of southern and western 
 Europe. Eight years before Smith's 
 birth the great battle of Lepanto was 
 fought between the Turks and the 
 Spanish, Italians, and Venetians under 
 Duke John of Austria. Cervantes served 
 as a common soldier in this battle under 
 the banner of Spain. It shattered the 
 sea-power of the Turks, but on land 
 they continued to terrorize Europe until 
 John Sobeski turned them back before 
 the walls of Vienna one hundred years 
 later. It was in this same year of 
 1579 that Sir Walter Raleigh and his 
 half-brother, Sir Humphrey, sailed for 
 America on a voyage of discovery under 
 a patent from the queen, giving them 
 
122 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the right "to discover and take 
 possession of such remote, heathen, and 
 barbarous lands as were not actually 
 possessed by any Christians, or inhabited 
 by any Christian people." Rome was 
 at- open war with England, and Pope 
 Gregory issued his famous bull against 
 the heretic nation. As for Spain and 
 France, war was chronic between them 
 and England. Spain was then a mighty 
 power. She held sway over a portion of 
 Italy and over the Low Countries. Her 
 generals were able and ruthless. She 
 had plundered the New World of 
 countless treasure in gold and silver, and 
 scores of her galleons were engaged in 
 bringing the spoil home. A papal 
 decree gave the New World to Spain, but 
 Englishmen were hurrying to dispute 
 this claim. It was in 1580 that 
 Drake dropped anchor in Plymouth 
 harbour, having completed the circuit of 
 the globe, bringing back with him half a 
 
JOHN SMITH 123 
 
 million of Spanish treasure. Queen 
 Elizabeth honoured the great freebooter 
 with knighthood, and wore some of the 
 jewels he had taken from the Spaniard 
 in her crown. This was one of the 
 causes that led Phillip to send the great 
 Armada against England, a few years 
 later. By the queen's command Drake 
 again despoiled the Spanish cities in the 
 New World. In these stirring times 
 young Smith grew up. The tales of 
 Drake's adventures, and of the struggle 
 in the Netherlands-, and of the Armada 
 with its wreck of ships strewn along the 
 Scottish coast, must have inflamed his 
 youthful imagination, for at the age of 
 thirteen, he sold his books and satchel and 
 started to run away to sea. His father's 
 death, however, kept him at home for a 
 time, and his guardians, solid business 
 men, would have none of youthful folly 
 and so apprenticed him to a merchant 
 at Lynn. This merchant tyrannically 
 
124 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 refused to allow his apprentice to go to 
 
 sea, and so Smith went without leave to 
 
 France with a son of Lord Willoughby. 
 
 From there he went to the Netherlands 
 
 where there was good fighting and 
 
 engaged with the Spaniards for three 
 
 or four years, under an Englishman, one 
 
 Captain Druxbury, who was in the 
 
 service of Prince Maurice. He finally 
 
 sailed for Scotland, was shipwrecked 
 
 on the voyage, but escaped without 
 
 harm, and came again to Willoughby, but 
 
 not to engage in the arts of peace. He 
 
 turned hermit. To use his narrative: 
 
 Where, within a short time, being 
 
 glutted with too much company, vpherein 
 
 he took small delight; he retired himself e 
 
 into a little woodie pasture, a good way 
 
 from any towne, environed with many 
 
 hundred Acres of other woods. Here by 
 
 a faire brook he built a Pavillion of 
 
 boughes, where only in his cloaths he 
 
 lay. His studie was Machiavill's Art of 
 
JOHN SMITH 123 
 
 Warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his food 
 
 was thought to be more of venison than 
 
 anything else; what he wanted his man 
 
 brought him. The countrey wondering 
 
 at such an Hermite * * * Long these 
 
 pleasures could not content him, but he 
 
 returned againe to the Low-Countreyes. 
 
 This effort not to commit himself 
 
 directly to the venison, seems to have 
 
 been out of delicate respect for the 
 
 game laws which were then hanging 
 
 matter. Hence the expression "His 
 
 food was thought to be more of 
 
 venison, — ' ' as if he was simply giving 
 
 the neighbourhood rumour, rather than 
 
 admitting a fact against himself. In 
 
 going into the Low Countries, his plan 
 
 was to hunt up the Turks and fight 
 
 with them as soon as possible. He 
 
 thought himself fitted for this warfare 
 
 for he says of his acquirements: 
 
 Thus when France and the Nether- 
 lands had taught him to ride a Horse and 
 
126 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 use his Armes, with such rudiments of 
 warre as his tender yeeres in those 
 martial Schooles could attaine unto; he 
 was desirous to see more of the world, and 
 trie his fortune ag-ainst the Turkes; both 
 lamenting- and repenting- to have seen 
 so many Christians slaughter one an- 
 other. 
 
 Various side adventures caused 
 him to deviate from his purpose to 
 immediately fight the Turks. He was 
 nineteen years of age when he arrived in 
 France. On the voyage over, four 
 robbers stole his baggage, and he had 
 to sell his cloak to pay his passage. He 
 landed in Picardy and went in pursuit 
 of the robbers. He was in great 
 poverty, and, as he says: 
 
 But wandring- from Port to Port to 
 finde some man-of-war, spent that he 
 had; and in a Forest, neere dead with 
 grief e and cold, a rich Farmer found him 
 by a faire Fountaine under a tree. This 
 
JOHN SMITH 127 
 
 kind Pesant releeved him againe to his 
 content, to follow his intent. 
 
 Soon after he found Cursell, one of 
 his robbers, and, to follow his narrative: 
 His piercing- injuries had so small 
 patience, as without any word they both 
 drew, and in a short time Cursell fell to 
 the ground, when, from an ruinated 
 Tower, the inhabitants seeing them 
 were satisfied, when they heard Cursell 
 confesse what had formerly passed. 
 
 He next came to the chateaux of a 
 noble earl in Brittainy, whom he had 
 known in England, and was hospitably 
 treated there, and from there he 
 journeyed over France for a time, sur- 
 veying fortresses and other notable 
 objects. At Marseilles he took a ship 
 for Rome. His voyage was not a happy 
 one and he describes the ship's company 
 thus: 
 
 Here the inhuman Provincialls, with 
 a rabble of Pilgrims of divers Nations 
 
128 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 going to Rome, hourely cursing him, not 
 only for a Hugenoit, but his Nation they 
 swore were all Pyrats, aad so vildly 
 railed on his dread Soveraigne Queene 
 Elizabeth, and that they never should 
 have faire weather so long as hee was 
 aboard them; their disputations grew 
 to that passion, that they threw him 
 overboard ; yet God brought him to that 
 little Isle, where was no inhabitants, but 
 a few kine and goats. 
 
 He did not allow this indignity 
 however, without breaking a good many 
 heads. The next day a French ship, the 
 Britaine bound for Alexandria took him 
 off, and he grew into great favour 
 with the captain. This was always 
 his way; he always landed on his 
 feet. Fortune was continually reducing 
 him to a last gasp and then suddenly 
 restoring him to comfort and safety. 
 Soon after, the Britaine fell in with a 
 large Venetian ship with a rich 
 
JOHN SMITH i2g 
 
 cargo. There did not seem to be any 
 particular occasion for a battle, but of 
 course there had to be one, and it arose 
 over a little discourtesy on the part of 
 the Venetian. The Britaine hailed her 
 and she replied with a shot that killed a 
 sailor on the Britaine. A terrific battle 
 ensued, out of which the Britaine came 
 off victor. The Venetian ship had lost 
 twenty men and was ready to sink, and 
 so part of the cargo was transferred to 
 the Britaine. Smith was no deadhead 
 in this fight, but bore his part, and 
 when it was over, he received for his 
 share of the spoil "five hundred 
 chicqueenes, and a little box God sent him 
 worth neere as much more." In those 
 days piety of the approved sort always 
 had Divine assistance. The spoil must 
 have been great, for Smith says: 
 
 The Silkes, Velvets, Cloth of g-old 
 and Tissue, Pyasters, Chicqueenes and 
 Sultanies, which is g-old and silver, they 
 
ISO CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 unloaded in four and twentie houres, was 
 wonderful!; whereof having sufficient, and 
 tired with toile, they cast her off with her 
 company, with as much good merchandise 
 as would have fraughted another 
 Britaine, that was but two hundred 
 Tunnes, she foure or five hundred. 
 
 He landed at Piedmont and thence 
 traveled through Italy, into Dalmatia 
 and Albania. At Rome he said it was 
 "his chance to cee Pope Clement 
 the eight, with many Cardinalls, Creepe 
 up the holy Stayres, which they say 
 are those our Saviour Christ went 
 up to Pontius Pilate." He was 
 still eager to fight the Turks, and 
 finally came to the court of Archduke 
 Ferdinand of Austria, "where he 
 met an English man and an Irish 
 Jesuite; who acquainted him with 
 many brave Gentlemen of a good 
 qualitie. " Soon after he joined the 
 army, the Turks beseiged Olympcha. 
 
JOHN SMITH 131 
 
 Smith suggested to Baron Kissell, one 
 of his superior officers, that he could 
 devise a system of .telegraphic fires and 
 communicate with the beseiged. To 
 quote from Smith's narrative: 
 
 Kisell inflamed with this strange 
 invention; Smith made it so plain, that 
 forthwith hee gave him guides, who in 
 the darke night brought him to a 
 mountaine, where he showed three 
 torches equidistant from each other 
 which plainly appearing to the 
 Towne; the Governour presently 
 apprehended, and answered againe with 
 three other fires in like manner; each 
 knowing the others being and intent; 
 Smith, thought distant seven miles, signi- 
 fied to him these words; On Thursday 
 at night I will charge on the East, at the 
 Alarum, salley you. Ebersbaught, 
 commander of the city, answered that 
 he would, and thus it was done. 
 
 Smith has preserved for us the 
 
132 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 alphabet and signals that he used. By 
 means of this plan the Duke's army and 
 the beseiged acted in concert and the 
 Turks were defeated with great slaughter 
 and compelled to raise the seige. In this 
 same battle Smith contrived a plan to 
 deceive the Turks as to the point of 
 attack, by arranging on a line two or 
 three thousand pieces of match, which 
 were fired all at once, that it might 
 appear that there was the Duke's force 
 with its matchlocks. Barely twenty-one 
 years of age, after this battle, Smith 
 was given command of a company of two 
 hundred and fifty men. At the seige of 
 Stowlle-Wesenburg in 1601, Smith's 
 inventive genius was again called into 
 play. He prepared some bombs by 
 filling earthern pots with various 
 explosive and inflammable substances, 
 together with musket balls. These were 
 thrown among the Turks from slings. He 
 describes the effect: 
 
JOHN SMITH ijs 
 
 At midniglit upon the Alarum, it was 
 a fearful sight to see the short flaming 
 course of their flight in the aire; but 
 presently after their fall, the lamentable 
 noise of the miserable slaughtered Turks 
 was most wonderf uU to heare. 
 
 Smith, with most excellent naivete, 
 entitles these devices thus: — "An ex- 
 cellent stratagem by Smith ; " ' 'Another, 
 not much worse. ' ' In this siege the 
 Christians took the town by storm, ' 'with 
 such merciless execution, as was most 
 pittiful to behold." At the battle of 
 Girke, soon after, the Turks were again 
 defeated, but Smith lost half his 
 regiment. Appealing to his narrative 
 again: 
 
 Captain Smith had his horse slaine 
 under him, and himself e sore wounded ; 
 but he was not long unmounted for there 
 ■was choice enough of horses that wanted 
 masters. 
 
 Soon after the Christian army 
 
134 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 beseiged Regall in the Transylvania, a 
 
 place supposed to be almost impregnable. 
 
 Now Smith gives us one of the most 
 
 dramatic incidents of war: 
 
 * * * they spent neere a month in 
 entrenching themselves and raising- their 
 mounts to plant their batteries. Which 
 slow proceedings the Turkes often 
 derided, that the Ordnance were at 
 pawne, and how they grew fat for want 
 of exercise ; and fearing lest they should 
 depart ere they could assault their 
 citie, sent this Challenge to any Captaine 
 in the Armie. That to delight the 
 ladies, who did long to see some court-like 
 pastime, the Lord Turbashaw did defie 
 any Captaine, that had command of a 
 Company, who durst combat with him 
 for his head. The matter being 
 discussed, it was accepted; but so many 
 questions grew for the undertaking, it 
 was decided by lots; which fell upon 
 Captaine Smith, before spoken of. 
 
JOHN SMITH 13s 
 
 With this luck to favour him, Smith 
 rode before the armies and met My Lord 
 Turbashaw in mortal combat, unhorsed 
 him and cut off his head. ' 'The head 
 hee presented to the Lord Moses, the 
 GeneraU, who kindly accepted it; and 
 with joy to the whole armie he was 
 generally welcomed. " He tells us also 
 that the "Rampiers were all beset with 
 faire Dames, and men in Armes. ' ' The 
 ennui of the Turks not being 
 sufficiently dissipated, they sent another 
 challenge to Smith to meet one 
 Grualgo, a friend of Turbashaw. The 
 dauntless Smith took his head, and sent 
 his body and rich apparel back to his 
 friends. No more challenges coming 
 from the Turkish camp. Smith took 
 the initiative. " * * * to 
 delude time. Smith with so many 
 uncontradictable perswading reasons, 
 obtained leave that the Ladies might 
 know he was not so much enamoured 
 
ijt CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of their servants ' heads, but if any Turke 
 of their ranke would come to the place 
 of combate to redeeme them, should 
 have his also upon like conditions, if he 
 could winne it." Bonny Mulgro, a 
 Turkish Lord, accepted this challenge 
 and the combatants met with great fury 
 before the armies. The first advantage 
 was with the Turk, and Smith lost his 
 battle axe. 
 
 "The Turk prosecuted his advatag-e to 
 the uttermost of his power; yet the 
 other, what by the readiness of his 
 horse, and his judgment and dexterity in 
 such a businesse, beyond all mens' ex- 
 pectation, by God's assistance, not only 
 avoided the Turke 's violence, but having- 
 drawne his Faulchion, pierced the Turke 
 so under the Culets thorow backe and 
 body, that although he alighted from his 
 horse, he stood not long ere hee lost his 
 head, as the rest had done." 
 Smith goes on to say: 
 
JOHN SMITH Tjy 
 
 This good success gave sucli great 
 encouragement to the whole Armie, that 
 with a guard of six thousand, three spare 
 horses before each, a Turke's head 
 upon a Lance, he was conducted to the 
 Generall's Pavillion with his Presents. 
 Moyses received both him and them 
 with as mucli respect as the occasion 
 deserved, embracing him in his armes, 
 gave him a f aire Horse richly furnished, a 
 Semitere and belt worth three hundred 
 ducats ; and Meldritch made him Sergeant 
 of his regiment. 
 
 These valourous performances of 
 Smith before the walls of RegaU are 
 worthy to be told of Saladin or Richard 
 the Lion-hearted, or of an earlier 
 chivalry. I cannot find that there were 
 any Christian ladies watching these 
 combats, but there must have been, for 
 Smith never lacked aU the accessories of 
 valour. With the Turkish ladies 
 watching from the "Rampieres, " it 
 
138 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 would have been cruel in Fortune, ever 
 so kindly to Smith, not to have supplied 
 the scene vpith tearful Christian ladies to 
 welcome him back from the fearful 
 field, to bind his bruises and refresh him 
 with words of praise, and to rejoice over 
 the downfall of the cruel Turk, the 
 enemy of all women, Turkish or 
 Christian. After a desperate struggle 
 the Christian army took Regall by 
 storm and all Turks that could bear 
 arms were put to death. To kill Turks 
 in those days was considered a work of 
 great merit. The superfluous youth of 
 every European country, thronged to do 
 battle with the hated Turk. England 
 sent her share of these, and Smith gives 
 the roster of the English dead in the 
 next great battle that was fought with 
 the Turks — Rotenton — in which the 
 Christian army was cut to pieces. We 
 take up Smith's narrative: 
 
 And thus in this bloudy field, neere 
 
JOHN SMITH Tjg 
 
 30,000 lay ; some headlesse, armlesse, and 
 leglesse, all cut and mangled; where 
 breathing' their last, they gaue this 
 knowledge to the world that for the Hues 
 of so few, the Crym-Tartar neuer paid 
 dearer. Give mee leave to remember the 
 names of our owne Country-men with 
 him in those exploits, that as resolutely 
 as the best in the defence of Christ 
 and his Gospell ended their dayes, 
 as Baskerfield, Hardwick, Thomas 
 Milmer, Robert MuUineaux, Thomas 
 Bishop, Francis Compton, George 
 Davison, Nicholas Williams, and one 
 John, a Scot, did what men could doe, and 
 when they could doe no more, left there 
 their bodies in testimonie of their 
 mindes; only ensign Carleton, and 
 Sergeant Robinson escaped. But Smith, 
 among the slaughtered dead bodies, and 
 many a gasping soule with toile and 
 wounds, lay groaning among the rest, till 
 being found by the Pillagers, hee was 
 
140 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 able to live ; and perceiving- by his armor 
 and habit his ransome might be better to 
 them than his death, they led him prisoner 
 with many others. 
 
 Smith was sold into slavery at 
 Axapolis, and purchased by one Bashaw 
 BogaU, who sent him as a present to his 
 mistress in Constantinople, assuring her 
 that the slave was a great Bohemian 
 Lord whom he had overcome. "This 
 Noble gentlewoman," as Smith calls 
 her, took a more than friendly interest 
 in her sale. She could talk Italian and 
 feigned herself sick that she might make 
 occasion to talk with him. She was 
 bound to know whether Bogall really 
 took him prisoner, or whether this was 
 a boast. Smith told her that he was an 
 "English-man, onely by his adventures 
 made a Captaine in those Countreyes. ' ' 
 He won her like another Othello, for he 
 could say: 
 
 She loved me for the dangers I had pass 'd, 
 
JOHN SMITH 141 
 
 And I loved her that she did pity them. 
 He says: — 
 She tooke muche compassion on 
 him ; but having no use for him, lest her 
 mother should sell him, she sent him to 
 her bfother, the Tymor Bashaw of 
 Nalbritz in the Countrey of Gambia, a 
 province of Tartaria. * * * 'pg jjgj. 
 unkinde brother, this kinde Ladie writ so 
 much for his good usage, that he halfe 
 suspected as much as she intended; for 
 shee told him, he should there but 
 sojourne to learne the language, and 
 what it was to be a Turk, till time made 
 her Master of her selfe. 
 
 The brother was very wroth that 
 his sister should entertain an affection 
 for a Christian dog, and so he treated 
 Smith with great cruelty, put him in 
 irons and made him a slave of other 
 slaves. He was "no more regarded than 
 a beast. " Smith says of this period: 
 All the hope he ever had to be 
 
142 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 delivered from this thraldome was only 
 the love of Tragbigzanda, who surely 
 was ignorant of his bad usage. 
 
 This is his last reference to his 
 Turkish mistress. Smith did not forget 
 her, hovi^ever, for fourteen years later 
 when he was surveying the coast of New 
 England, he named what is now 
 Cape Ann, Cape Tragbigzanda, after 
 her. Prince Charles, with no respect 
 for sentiment, changed this name to 
 Cape Ann. Otherwise this sand dune 
 would have been to this day a 
 geographical monument to the gallant 
 Captain's earliest romance. How this 
 bit of Turkish color on the map would 
 have lighted up the horn-books. Smith 
 finally killed his master, the Bashaw, with 
 a threshing bat and made his way into 
 the wilderness. After days of wandering 
 and much suffering, he came to a Russian 
 outpost on the river Don, and thence 
 found his way into Transylvania, where 
 
JOHN SMITH 143 
 
 he was received as one arisen from the 
 dead, with great rejoicing. He says 
 "he was glutted with content, and neere 
 drowned with joy." He came to 
 the camp of his commander, Duke 
 Sigismund. The Duke gave him a sum 
 equal to five hundred pounds sterling 
 of English money and a patent of 
 arms. This patent is dated December 
 9th, 1603, and Smith had it recorded in 
 the Herald's Office at London, August 
 19th, 1625. I give some of its quaint 
 recitals: 
 
 * * * we have given leave and 
 license to John Smith, an English 
 Gentleman, Captain of 250 Soldiers, etc. * 
 * * Wherefore out of our love and 
 favour according to the law of Armes, We 
 have ordained and given him in his shield 
 of Armes, the figure and description of 
 three Turks heads, which with his 
 sword, before the towne of Regall, he did 
 overcome, kill, and cut off in the Province 
 
144 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of Transilvania. But fortune, as she is 
 very variable, so it chanced and happened 
 to him in the Province of Wallachia in the 
 yeare of our Lord 1602, the 18th day of 
 November, v?hen he with many others, as 
 well Noble men, as also divers other 
 Souldiers, were taken prisoners by the 
 Lord Bashaw of Gambia, a Country of 
 Tartaria; whose cruelty brought him 
 such good fortune, by the helpe and 
 power of AJmighty God, that hee delivered 
 himselfe, and returned againe to his 
 company and fellow souldiers; of whom 
 We doe discharge him, and this he hath 
 in witnesse thereof, being much more 
 worthy of a better reward; and now 3 
 intends to return to his owne sweet 
 Country. 
 
 Smith says of this: — 
 
 With great honour hee gave him three 
 
 Turkes heads in a Shield for his Armes, by 
 
 Patent, under his hand and Scale, with an 
 
 Oath ever to weare them in his V 
 
JOHN SMITH 145 
 
 Colours, his Picture, [i. e., Sigismund 's 
 portrait] ib. Gould and three hundred 
 Ducats, yearely for a pension. 
 
 What would not some of our tuft 
 hunters, who buy coats of arms and 
 disport them in gaudy and meretricious 
 state, give for the right to bear such a 
 title of nobility as this? With all our 
 spleen against titles, the most ardent 
 republican might yield to temptation, if 
 he could claim such a token of noble 
 rank as this. But for one fact, I would 
 not answer for the virtue of the most 
 ambitious of the republican Smiths; no 
 Smith can claim to be the lineal 
 descendant of this coat of arms, for he 
 who earned it with his valour, died a 
 bachelor. Unless, indeed, he should 
 have the undiscriminating pride of race 
 of a certain worthy lady I once knew, who 
 claimed to be a lineal descendant of 
 Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 After parting with Duke Sigismund, 
 
1^6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Smith traveled through Germany, France 
 and Spain, and finally determined to go 
 and fight in the civil wars in Morocco. He 
 sailed in a French ship for Africa, but 
 changed his purpose, and brave as he 
 was does not hesitate to record 
 that this was — 
 
 By reason of the uncertaintie, and 
 tlie perfidious, treacherous, bloudy 
 murthers rather thanwarre, among those 
 perfidious, barbarous Moores. 
 
 He did not lack occasion for his 
 courage, however, for presently the 
 French ship fell in with two Spanish 
 men-of-war, and they had a brave sea 
 fight lasting for two days. The 
 Frenchman finally beat off the Spaniards 
 with the loss of an hundred men. This 
 ends Smith's adventures on the 
 continent. He returned to England 
 in 1604. 
 
 Fitting out expeditions for the New 
 World had by this time become a 
 
JOHN SMITH I4J 
 
 gentleman's adventure, and many men 
 of high degree joined in these 
 expeditions. After the voyages of the 
 Cabots under English authority in 
 1598, England remained inactive in the 
 NevF World for about one hundred 
 years. The Cabots had sailed from 
 Labrador to Florida, touching here and 
 there along the coast. Yet upon this 
 slender scintilla of discovery England 
 before a hundred years had passed, 
 claimed sovereignty over the continent 
 from sea to sea. She vpas alvpays equal 
 to such claims. She calmly took seisin 
 of a continent by the simple act of going 
 ashore for wood, water or the casual 
 circumstances of a trade of glass beads 
 with some Indians. The other European 
 nations spent a century or two trying to 
 get used to this British habit of claiming 
 the most of the earth. The impact of 
 the beef-eaters was too much for 
 them. By right of the discovery of 
 
148 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Cabot, who was the first white man to 
 see the continent of North America, 
 England wrested the Hudson from the 
 Dutch and absorbed the Swedish 
 settlements on the Delaware, and fought 
 with France over territory for about a 
 hundred years, and finally compelled her 
 ancient enemy to yield up every foot of 
 land east of the Mississippi. In like 
 manner she at a later date reached 
 for India, seized Australia and New 
 Zealand, and innumerable islands, and 
 win soon have Africa in her grasp. It 
 is comforting to put the responsibility 
 for this outreaching on Destiny. 
 
 When she parted company with her 
 children on this side of the Atlantic, she 
 bequeathed to them a generous portion 
 of Destiny. Americans took Texas 
 from the weaker Mexicans, and then 
 California. Spain yielded up Florida 
 because she must have known we were 
 bound to have it anyway. Napoleon 
 
JOHN SMITH i4g 
 
 probably had the same fear when he sold 
 us Louisiana, for our western pioneers, 
 for years before he sold it had been 
 threatening to break through the 
 French barrier at the mouth of the 
 Mississippi. We had an attack of 
 Destiny lately and annexed Haiwai. Next 
 comes Porto Rico, and the Philippines, 
 and by and by, Cuba. Between spells 
 we have dispossessed the Indians of 
 nearly all the lands they once held. In 
 view of our record it seems a huge jest to 
 see our pharisees and devotees of the 
 gospel of cant, grow tender-hearted over 
 England's greed for territory. How we 
 do pity the poor Boer, and the enslaved 
 Hindoo. When a few missionaries' sons 
 stole Haiwai from the simple natives, we 
 blandly received this acquisition and 
 thanked God we are not as Englishmen 
 are. At a time when we owned millions 
 of slaves we were holding mass meetings 
 to denounce the oppression of Ireland. 
 
ISO CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Thus securely enthroned upon her 
 virtuous pedestal Columbia has made 
 great discoveries of motes in her 
 neighbours' eyes. Occasionally she will 
 vacate her coign of vantage long enough 
 to grab a few principalities that may 
 happen to be lying around loose. But 
 her eyes are always rolled heavenward in 
 holy contemplation of the beatitudes of 
 "equal rights," and of "government by 
 the consent of the governed." All 
 would be well and we should at least 
 escape the charge of hypocrisy, if we 
 would drop Cant, and boldly avow that 
 England or America, or any other 
 civilized nation has the right to seize and 
 hold and police the lands of blood and 
 barbarism, and make them a safe 
 abiding place for native and stranger 
 alike. 
 
 After having exhausted the pleasures 
 of European warfare. Smith came to 
 England, and threw himself with ardour 
 
JOHN SMITH I SI 
 
 into the colonization of the New 
 World. He sailed with an expedition 
 for the American continent in 1606. On 
 the way out he was accused of conspiracy 
 and imprisoned, but on reaching 
 America, he established his innocence 
 and was liberated and admitted to The 
 Council. The lives of all the men who 
 plotted against him were afterwards at 
 his mercy, but he spared them. Once 
 again his life was attempted by secret 
 plotters in his own force, but he 
 escaped, although at this time he was 
 badly injured by a gunpowder explosion. 
 Every schoolboy knows his adven- 
 tures in Virginia. He was great-hearted, 
 devoted, and untiring, the life and soul 
 of the infant colonies, and proved that 
 he was born for counsel as well as for 
 war. He had the craft of Ulysses in his 
 dealings with the Indians, and though 
 he was severe towards their treacheries, he 
 was humane. His treaties with them, his 
 
152 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 many hairbreadth escapes, his battles 
 with them, his capture and rescue from 
 death by the Indian maiden, Poca- 
 hontas, are familiar tales. They cannot 
 be recounted within the bounds of 
 this sketch. Posterity has made 
 him the central figure of one heroic 
 incident, forgetting his many-sidedness, 
 and the many other scenes, in which 
 he faced death. As a man of letters he 
 is well-nigh forgotten, although he 
 wrote many histories, and a partial 
 autobiography, wherein, with the 
 modesty of a great soldier he told in 
 vivid language of his perils and 
 adventures. He was so modest in his 
 first book, The True Relation, that 
 he did not mention the Pocahontas 
 incident, and one dry-as-dust antiquarian 
 has seen fit from this omission to throw 
 doubt on the story. Smith was so 
 familiar with death that he might well 
 omit to mention all his chance meetings 
 
JOHN SMITH I S3 
 
 with it. To him this was only a casual 
 circumstance, a mere informal passing 
 the time of day with Death, and 
 no more worthy of a chronicle than any 
 of the other thrilling encounters with the 
 great destroyer. No one doubted the 
 story in his life time, and many of 
 his contemporaries have testified to 
 it. Seemingly fearful that he might be 
 charged with ingratitude, for making no 
 record of it, in June, 1616, he addressed 
 a letter to "The Most High, and 
 Vertuous Princesses, Queene Anne of 
 Great Brittanie, " as follows: 
 
 The loue I beare my God, my King- 
 and Countrie, hath so oft emboldened 
 mee in the worst of extreme danglers, that 
 now honestie doth constraine mee to 
 presume thus farre beyond my selfe, to 
 present your Maiestie this short 
 discourse; if ingratitude be a deadly 
 poyson to all honest vertues, I must bee 
 guiltie of that crime if I should omit any 
 
154 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 meanes to be thankfull. So it is, that 
 some ten yeeres agoe, being in Virginia, 
 and taken prisoner by the power of 
 Powhatten their chiefe King, I receiued 
 from this great Saluage exceeding great 
 courtesie, especially from his sonne 
 Nantaquas, the most manliest, comeliest, 
 boldest spirit, leuer saw in a Saluage, and 
 his sister, Pocahontas, the King's most 
 deare and wel-beloued daughter, being 
 but a childe of twelue or thirteene yeeres 
 of age, whose compassionate pitifuU 
 heart, of my desperate estate, gaue me 
 much cause to respect her. I being the 
 first Christian, this proud King and his 
 grim attendants euer I saw; and thus 
 enthralled in their barbarous power, I 
 cannot say I felt the least occasion of want 
 that was in the power of those my 
 mortall foes to preuent, notwithstanding 
 all their threats. After some six weeks 
 fatting among those Saluage Courtiers, at 
 the minute of my execution, she hazarded 
 
JOHN SMITH 155 
 
 the beating out of her owne brains to sane 
 mine ; and not only that, but so preuailed 
 with her father that I was safely conducted 
 to lames towne; where I found about 
 eig'ht and thirtie miserable poore and sicke 
 creatures to keepe possession of all those 
 large territories of Virginia; such was the 
 weakness of this poore Commonwealth, as 
 had the Saluages not fed vs, we directly 
 had starued. And this reliefe, most 
 gracious Queene, was commonly brought 
 vs by this Lady Pocahontas. 
 
 The Indian Princess fed the colonists 
 and warned them of plots against 
 them. Finally she came at a later day 
 after Smith had gone to Europe, and 
 they told her he was dead. She then 
 married an English gentleman by the 
 name of Rolf. Smith met her after her 
 marriage and at first she was cool and 
 would not speak. As he teUs of this 
 meeting: 
 
 But not long after she began to 
 
156 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 talke, and remembered mee well what 
 courtesies shee had done, saying-, You 
 did promise Powhatan what was yours 
 should bee his and hee the like to you ; you 
 called him father being in his land a 
 stranger, and by the same reason so * 
 must I doe you; which thoug-h I would 
 have excused, I durst not allow of that 
 title, because she was a King's daughter; 
 with a well set countenance she said. Were 
 you not afraid to come into my father 's 
 Countrie, and caused feare in him and all 
 his people [but mee] and feare you here I 
 should call you father ; I tell you then I 
 will, and you shall call mee childe, and so 
 I will bee for euer and euer your 
 Countrieman. They did tell vs alwaies 
 you were dead, and I knew no other until 
 I came to Plimoth. 
 
 From this it would seem that but 
 for a chance estrangement, Smith 
 would not have lived and died a 
 bachelor. Although the dust has 
 
JOHN SMITH 157 
 
 gathered upon his fame, he was not 
 unhonoured in his own day. His 
 companions in peril and his friends in 
 England, have given him unstinted 
 praise. Some of them marred eulogy, by 
 putting his praises into verse, and we 
 are compelled to say that none of them 
 were poets. They entered into a poetical 
 conspiracy of great magnitude against 
 the beloved one. This is probably a 
 sure certificate of fame, for no man can 
 truly be called great until admiring 
 worshippers have written pdetry about 
 him. It is true that many men of small 
 figure come to this favour, but they make 
 fine verse only a grotesque pleasantry — 
 a tinsel sword and crown. But mere 
 doggerel gains a dignity when it is spent 
 in eulogy of real greatness, as the 
 manhood of Ulysses shone through his 
 rags and dignified them when he 
 returned to his own hall. Bad as they 
 are, I consider these loving eulogists 
 
158 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 worthy of some mention. R. Braithwait 
 indites his verse, "To my worthy 
 friend, Captain lohn Smith." In this 
 he alludes to: 
 
 Tragabigzanda, Callamata 's love, 
 Deare Pocahontas, Madam Shanoi 's too. 
 I take the liberty of suggesting that 
 for "Callamata's love," we read 
 "Calamity's love," believing that this is 
 only another form of naming the 
 Turkish Princess, and does not mean 
 another love, and that this line lost its 
 real meaning in the transcription. But 
 what shall be said of "Madam Shanoi's 
 too?" and was she another love, and 
 was Smith a soldier of many loves? This 
 being the only record of Madam 
 Shanoi, she will have to be dismissed as 
 an unimportant personage, and a mere 
 casual intrusion into history. It is quite 
 evident that we are warranted 
 in maintaining that Smith's real 
 loves like those of kings, made history. 
 
JOHN SMITH T39 
 
 and when they did not do this 
 they were the merest ephemera of 
 the affections. Braithwait concludes 
 with: 
 
 And I could wish [such wishes would 
 
 doe well,] 
 Many such Smiths in this our Israel. 
 Anthony Fereby, begins his verse: 
 ' ' To my noble brother and friend. ' ' He 
 says: 
 
 * * * for what deservedly 
 
 With thy lifes danger, valour, pollicy, 
 
 Quaint warlike stratagems, abiUity 
 
 And Judgement, thou has got, fame sets 
 
 so high 
 Detraction cannot reach ; thy worth shall 
 
 stand 
 A patterne to succeeding ages. * * * 
 Tuissimus Ed. Jorden, addresses 
 his verse "To his valiant and deserving 
 friend. " His eulogy closes thus: 
 Good men will yeeld thee praise; then 
 sleight the rest ; 
 
i6o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Tis best praise-worthy to have pleased 
 the best. 
 Richard James, speaks of liis: 
 Deare noble Captaine, who by Sea and 
 
 Land, 
 To act the earnest of thy name hast hand 
 And heart ; * * * 
 
 Ma. Hawkins achieves the worst 
 poetry, opening with the thrilling line: 
 Thou that hast had a spirit to flie like 
 thunder. 
 Richard Meade inquires in a burst 
 of poetical emotion: 
 Will not thy Country yet reward thy 
 
 merit, 
 Nor in thy acts and writings take delight? 
 In his closing line Edward Ingham 
 avers that: 
 Reader 'tis true; I am not brib'd to 
 flatter, 
 as if his poetry were not evidence enough 
 on this point. 
 
 M. Gartner says: 
 
JOHN SMITH i6i 
 
 But verse thou need 'st not to expresse thy 
 worth. 
 He compares Smith to the famed 
 Ithacan, and so also do I. C, and 
 C. P., two unnamed eulogists who take 
 a strong classical vein. Brian O'Rourke 
 with true Hibernian splendour of diction 
 begins with this line: 
 
 To see bright honour sparkled all in gore. 
 
 Salo. Tanner says: 
 Let Mars and Nepture both with 
 
 pregnant wit, 
 ExtoU thy due deserts, lie pray for it. 
 Smith offered to lead the Pilgrim 
 Fathers to America in 1619, but the 
 mission was denied him because he was 
 not a Puritan. He died in 1631, having 
 spent the last years of his life in 
 authorship. His accounts of his life and 
 explorations on this continent are filled 
 with historical facts of real value. He was 
 not too much of an historian to disdain 
 small things, and even gives the names 
 
1 62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 of his comrades and fellow colonists. This 
 method of writing history puts the thrill 
 of human life into what lie relates. One 
 cannot help but feel a friendly interest in 
 the Wests, the Russells, the Burtons, the 
 Bradleys, and the Walkers, and many 
 others of familiar sound, for these are 
 the names of people aU about you. You 
 find yourself wondering whether Burton, 
 your shoemaker, is a descendant of 
 the early adventurer, and whether 
 Russell, your surgeon, derived any of his 
 skill by inheritance from a soldier 
 ancestor, who went out with Smith, and 
 did his carving with the sword. As old 
 Fuller quaintly says in like case, taking 
 as his text, the discovery of a Hastings 
 among the peasantry on the Earl of 
 Huntingdon's estate: 
 
 And I have reason to believe, that 
 some who justly own the surnames 
 and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers and 
 Plantag-anets [though ignorant of their 
 
JOHN SMITH 163 
 
 own extractions,] are hid in the heap of 
 common people, where they find that 
 under a thatched cottage which some of 
 their ancestors could not enjoy in a 
 leaded castle — contentment, with quiet 
 and security. 
 
 The painted walking sticks who 
 become cabinet ministers, the accidents 
 of birth who become kings and the 
 accidents of politics who become 
 presidents, who infest the pages of 
 history with a dessicated and puerile 
 immortality, cut but a sorry figure when 
 aligned with a manhood like this great 
 captain's. The Genius of Platitude and 
 Palaver has tried in vain to make them 
 great; he is great because he has done 
 the things, and no man ever spoke 
 better of his deeds than the truth would 
 bear. An English scholar, who has 
 compiled his work, says of him: 
 
 One cannot read the following Works 
 without seeing that John Smith was 
 
i64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 something more than a brave and 
 experienced soldier. Not only in his 
 modesty and self restraint, his moderation 
 and magnanimity, his loyalty to the 
 King, affection for the Church, and love 
 for his Country, did he represent the best 
 type of the English Gentleman of his 
 day; but he vi^as also a man of singular 
 and varied ability. * * * It is not 
 too much to say that had not Captain 
 Smith of Willoughby, strove, fought and 
 endured as he did, the present United 
 States of America might never have come 
 into existence. 
 
 A pleasing eulogy to read is that of 
 two of the survivors of the "starving 
 time, ' ' of the Virginia colony, as it was 
 called. They thus testified to his 
 worth: 
 
 * * * that in all his proceedings 
 made justice his first guide and 
 experience his second; ever hating 
 baseness, sloth, pride and indignity, more 
 
JOHN SMITH 165 
 
 than any dangers; that never allowed 
 more for himself than for his soldiers 
 with him; that upon no danger would 
 send them where he would not lead them 
 himself; that would never see us want 
 what he either had, or could by any 
 means get us; that would rather want 
 than borrow, or starve than not pay; that 
 loved actions more than words, and hated 
 falsehood and cozenage more than 
 death; whose adventures were our lives 
 and whose loss our deaths. 
 
 But the best key to his character 
 is found in his written works. There 
 in simple words that can charm 
 little children, this faithful heart is 
 recorded. In one burst of retrospect, he 
 says: 
 
 Having been a slave to the Turks, 
 prisoner amongst the most barbarous 
 Salvages, after my deliverance commonly 
 discovering and ranging those large 
 rivers and unknowne Nations with such 
 
i66 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 ahandfullof ignorant companions that the 
 wiser sort often g-ave mee up for 
 lost, alwayes in mutinies, wants and 
 miseries, blowne up with gunpowder; a 
 long time prisoner among the French 
 Pyrats, from whom escaping in a little 
 boat by my selfe, and adrift all such a 
 stormy winter night when their ships 
 were split, more than a hundred thousand 
 pounds lost, they had taken at sea, and 
 most of them drowned on the He of 
 Ree, not farr from whence I was driven 
 ashore in my little boat, &c. And many 
 a score of the worst of winter moneths 
 lived in the fields ; yet to have lived neere 
 37 yeares in the midst of wars, pestilence 
 and famine, by which many hundred 
 thousand have died about mee, and scarce 
 five living of them that went first with 
 mee to Virginia; and yet to see the fruits 
 of my labours thus well begin to 
 prosper; though I have but my labour 
 for my pains, have I not much reason both 
 
JOHN SMITH 167 
 
 privately and publikely to acknowledge it 
 and give God thankes, whose omnipotent 
 power onely delivered me, to doe the 
 utmost of my best to make his name 
 knowne in those remote parts of the 
 world, and his loving mercy to such a 
 miserable sinner. 
 Again he says : — 
 Who can desire more content that 
 hath small meanes; or but only his merit 
 to aduance his fortune, then to tread and 
 plant that ground hee hath purchased 
 by the hazzard of his life? If he haue 
 but the taste of virtue and magnanimitie, 
 what to such a minde can bee more 
 pleasant, than planting and building a 
 foundation for his Posteritie, gotte 
 from the rude earth by God's blessing 
 and his owne Industrie, without prejudice 
 to any? If hee haue any graine of faith or 
 zeale in Religion, what can hee doe lesse 
 hurtfuU to any, or more agreeable to 
 God; then to seeke to conuert those 
 
i68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 poore Saluag-es to know Christ and 
 humanitie, whose labours with discretion 
 will triple requite thy charge and 
 paines? What so truely suites with 
 honour and honestie, as the discouering 
 things unknowne? erecting Townes, 
 peopling Countries, informing the 
 ignorant, reforming things vniust, 
 teaching virtue; and gaine to our Native 
 mother-countrie a kingdom to attend 
 her ; finde employment for those that are 
 idle, because they know not what to 
 doe ; so farre from wronging any, as to 
 cause Posteritie to remember thee and 
 remembering thee euer honour that 
 remembrance with praise? * * * Then 
 seeing we are not borne for our 
 selues, but each to helpe other, and 
 our abilities are much alike at the houre 
 of our birth and the minute of our 
 death; Seeing our good deedes, or our 
 badde, by faith in Christ's merits, is all 
 we haue to carrie our soules to heauen, or 
 
JOHN SMITH , i6g 
 
 hell; Seeing honour is our Hues 
 
 ambition; and our ambition after death 
 
 to haue an honourable memorie of our 
 
 life ; and seeing by noe meanes wee would 
 
 bee abated of the dignities and glories of 
 
 our predecessors; let vs imitate their 
 
 vertues, to bee worthily their successors. 
 
 Sleep great Captain in your humble 
 
 grave — you who were thrice worthy 
 
 to be laid beside great kings at 
 
 Westminister. No grave of England's 
 
 dead holds more kingly dust than 
 
 yours. We have read your story as you 
 
 and your companions in arms have set it 
 
 down. It is a tale of many lands and 
 
 many peoples, of life eloquent and 
 
 glorious. It brings us close to you and 
 
 makes three hundred years seem but as 
 
 a day. We have Wcilked beside you as 
 
 with satchel and shining morning face 
 
 you crept, like snail, unwillingly to 
 
 school. We have seen your hermitage 
 
 in the woods of Lincolnshire where you 
 
170 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 took the queen's deer, and communed 
 with Marcus Aurelius, dreaming of 
 greatness like his. Dear to us is every 
 passing fancy and every careless grace of 
 that noble non-age. Dear and friendly 
 are you as you lead us among the 
 battle-fields of Europe, and through the 
 perils that beset you. We have fearfully 
 watched you careering down the lists at 
 Regall to meet the flower of Turkish 
 chivalry. We have felt your heart-throbs 
 when the Turkish maiden made you a 
 double captive, and we thought no ill of 
 you that you honoured her love with your 
 gratitude, and cherished her memory 
 after many years had gone when you 
 came to name the New World. Whether 
 in school-boy cap and gown, or 
 clad in mail, or naked in slavery, or 
 bound before Powhattan awaiting his 
 dreadful judgment, or watching and 
 guarding Western Civilization in its very 
 cradle-time, you were a man. 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 
 
 TO A POETESS OP PASSION 
 
 You in the Bohemia of newspaper- 
 dom, must be constantly reminded, as 
 I am in other places, that the age of 
 chivalry is not yet past. The pencil of 
 the wandering hack-writer still does as 
 much for the succor of distressed 
 damsels seeking fame as did the 
 lance of the ancient knight for his lady 
 fair. 
 
 The lady lawyer, I use this term 
 unadvisedly, argues her first case, and 
 this becomes an event worthy of an 
 admiring chronicle. The charms of 
 toilet, the grace of manner, and the 
 
172 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 erudition of the fair Portia, are set 
 forth with glowing eulogy. Young 
 Briefless might argue twenty cases and 
 not awaken half this interest. Perhaps 
 if Portia would analyze the flattery 
 offered her she might come to doubt 
 whether it was entirely complimentary, 
 and might feel that it carried with it a 
 certain astonishment that a mere woman 
 should do so well, instead of assuming 
 this as a matter of course. But flattery 
 is as immune from analysis on the part 
 of the greedy, as sugar-plums. The 
 new ways of the sex bring multiform 
 embarrassments, and your critic has not 
 the least of these. The aged professor 
 and the young medico at the clinic and 
 in the dissecting room hardly know how 
 to harmonize their new relations towards 
 the brave intruder upon their ways. 
 Portia in the court room is apt to 
 demand all things as belonging to her 
 of hereditary right, and to concede as 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 173 
 
 few obligations on her own part, as 
 possible. The seasoned practitioner 
 hardly knows how much satire or brute 
 strength he may use to check her, or 
 how much deference he should show her 
 when he finds her tempted into trickery 
 or pettiEoggiag. So he shuffles and 
 temporizes and evades responsibility, and 
 saves his thunderbolts for the next bout 
 with his learned brother. 
 
 One cannot object to the emancipa- 
 tion of sex, but can fairly object to the 
 self conscious way in which the 
 emancipation goes on. The demands 
 upon our attention by women who are 
 admitted to the bar, or who write 
 books, or turn politicians, or practice 
 medicine, or do the other things that 
 seem novelties to them, has become a 
 bore. It is not necessary that these 
 pioneers should be eternally calling 
 attention to the fact that they are 
 women. Men do all of these things. 
 
174 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and, heaven knows, are vain enough 
 about it, but they do them v^ithout the 
 air of saying "You see, I am only a man, 
 and yet I can do this. ' ' May v^e not be 
 allowed to yet look on women as a part 
 of the great human family and not as a 
 distinct species ? 
 
 Although literature is not a new 
 field for women, yet the consciousness of 
 sex follows them there, and becomes the 
 worst of hypertrophied mental tissue. I 
 cannot find that " violet- weaving, pure, 
 sweet-smiling Sappho," was thus 
 afflicted, and it is now nearly three 
 thousand years since she sang of 
 love. So we must now be in a time 
 of retrogression. These prefatory 
 observations concluded, I am presump- 
 tions enough to think that I can, without 
 violating the proper canons of gallantry 
 suggest some reasons which may' cause 
 you to refrain from further poetical 
 activity along certain lines. 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM ijs 
 
 Some trespass on gallantry should 
 be pardoned, for gallantry in our sex 
 has been the bane of your life. It has 
 spoiled any promise you may have shown 
 in earlier years. I remember when you 
 were first putting forth your maiden 
 efforts in verse. They were good 
 enough rhymes to be published in the 
 cross-roads weekly free of charge. It is 
 true, as even you must admit, that if 
 you thought them poetry you were more 
 self-flattered than Mercutio. They were 
 just plain rhymes; little jingles, and 
 sometimes little jangles. I have tried to 
 give them no dull-eared search, yet I 
 cannot find a single line in them that is 
 really yours that rings with music and 
 power. However, if your verse had 
 been simply of woods, and hills, and 
 streams, and summer days, and 
 blossoming flowers, you would have 
 lived unknown to the great world, 
 although you might have been the 
 
176 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 queen of letters at the cross-roads. But 
 your constituency would have been 
 limited by the subscription list of the 
 cross-roads weekly. Whether by accident 
 or design you struck other than bucolic 
 themes and opened a vein of most 
 amatory verse, and this advertised you 
 because it was excessively amatory. You 
 also met a lot of good fellows, both 
 young and old in the newspaper 
 world. They are always lion hunters, 
 eager to make new finds, and gallant 
 and quick to extend help to the latest 
 female immigrant into Bohemia. They 
 gave you the freedom of the kingdom 
 in two-column laudation. They bade 
 Flattery play you silvery airs and agreed 
 that you should be heralded as a poet. 
 They puffed your poems, and, gross and 
 palpable though it was, you sickened 
 not, but under this inspiration only 
 ground out more. They announced 
 your goings and your comings, and 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 177 
 
 varied the monotony of their efforts to 
 give you fame by occasionally announcing 
 that you were about to be married to a 
 distinguished gentleman, to v?hom, with 
 their light and playful fancy, they 
 attached great place in wealth or 
 position. When a mere man journeys 
 from place to place, the gleaners for the 
 press do not always attend upon 
 him, unless, indeed, he should happen 
 to be a murderer or some other person 
 of equal importance. But if you should 
 happen to make a metropolitan visit. 
 Genial Jenkins would be rapping at 
 your boudoir door within half an hour 
 after your arrival. Then as surely 
 follows this interview which I take from 
 next morning's Daily Bangle: 
 
 The reporter for the Bangle met with 
 a pleasant reception last evening from 
 the beautiful Poetess of Passion in her 
 charming Boudoir at the Auditorium. She 
 wore a pale green tea-gown which showed 
 
178 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 to decided advantagfe her petite and 
 symetritical figure. Your reporter 
 caug-ht the merest tantalizing glimpse of 
 a white satin slipper, together with its 
 contents, peeping from the wondrous 
 tea-gown. The softly shaded electric 
 light shed a langorous glamour over the 
 sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks of the 
 poetess. 
 
 "May I ask what literary work you 
 are now engaged on?" I said, after I 
 had been cordially greeted. 
 
 "O, I have concluded to write a novel 
 of the Present, which will also be a novel 
 of the Future," said the poetess. "It 
 will be in the highest form fin de Steele. 
 I shall give a realistic picture of the 
 young man of the present day with all 
 his vices. It has been said so often by 
 the critics in this country and Europe 
 that I could only excel in verse and 
 especially in the poetry of the passions, 
 that I shall now produce something 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM lyg 
 
 worthy in prose, for I have really achieved 
 all the fame I care for in poetry." 
 
 Of course this is quoted • from 
 memory and I cannot give the literal 
 rendering of the blank form used for 
 these many interviews. But you have a 
 surer authority; turn to your scrap-book 
 of newspaper clippings about yourself 
 and you will find this interview 
 there, tea-gown, slippers and all. They 
 are ancient stage properties of yours, 
 although, of late years they have had a 
 diminishing use. But puffing counts in 
 the long run; it makes prime ministers 
 as well as poets. You had some 
 commendation that was honest enough 
 even though it was shallow. Some of 
 the people whose good opinion you 
 should have valued and respected, refused 
 to read your poetry; others read it with 
 indignation, and others refused to 
 consider it seriously either for good or 
 bad, but treated it with broad humor 
 
i8o CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 and blunt wit, and your muse as of the 
 opera bouffe order. 
 
 Slowly the deference of the press for 
 you has become rather third class with a 
 tinge of good-natured contempt in 
 it. The newspaper brethren like fine 
 titles and second names for every public 
 character. They do not permit any 
 Mavericks on their range, and like to 
 put their own brand on the herds they 
 round up from far and near. When 
 you have been in their eye long enough 
 in one capacity they fi.x a name on 
 you. So they created the Sweet Singer 
 of Michigan, and the Poet of the 
 Sierras. To you they gave the name of 
 Poetess of Passion, and joyed in its 
 euphony. You have been one of their 
 Cherry Sisters, and they have accorded 
 you a mock deference, thinly disguised 
 as real. It must be difficult some of the 
 time to determine whether the flowers 
 they throw at you are cabbages or 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM iSi 
 
 roses; superficially, they might be 
 either. You can hardly get much of a 
 review now, no matter how burns the 
 lava tide of your verse. You have become 
 a stock figure as much as The Grand 
 Old Man, or The Langtry Lily, and you 
 do not need description or explanatory 
 notes, or an introduction. Your 
 epitomization is embodied in Poetess 
 of Passion. But these are horizon 
 fancies, and I want to look into the 
 near-by heavens. 
 
 I have a copy of your Red 
 Book, called Poems of Passion. A 
 wilder fancy than mine would suggest 
 that the blushing cover was stirred by 
 what it covered. The preface alone is 
 worth all the labour of reading the 
 book; it is a delicious bit of egotism that 
 cannot be duplicated anywhere. In its 
 opening sentence you say: 
 
 Among the twelve hundred poems 
 that have emanated from my too-prolific 
 
i82 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 pen, there are some forty or fifty which 
 treat entirely of that emotion which 
 has been denominated "the g-rand 
 passion, love." A few of these are of an 
 extremely fiery character. 
 
 Then you proceed to state that you 
 had issued a prior book of verse from 
 which you had omitted these fiery 
 sonnets. Now you describe how you 
 were called to account for this most 
 laudable expurgation, thus: 
 
 But no sooner was the book published 
 than letters of regret came to me from all 
 parts of the globe, asking- why this or 
 that love-poem was omitted. These 
 regrets were repeated to me by so many 
 people, that I decided to collect and issue 
 these poems in a small volume to be called 
 Poems of Passion. 
 
 This picture of "friends and 
 strangers in all parts of the 
 globe," crying out for their loved ones 
 among your love-poems, is more affecting 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 183 
 
 than authentic. It is impossible for the 
 healthy mind to even imagine their 
 grief. One would like to see these 
 devotees of passion; they vsrould doubtless 
 present some curious, if not instructive 
 anthropological studies. Did these bitter 
 disappointments well up in Thibetan 
 Polyandry, or by the Bosphorus, or on 
 the shore of Great Salt Lake, or where 
 that other community of Passion 
 Worshippers taints the air of the Empire 
 State? One cannot locate elsewhere, any 
 large collection of those who are ruled by 
 Her of the Hydra Head. You confess 
 with strange pride to the authorship of 
 twelve hundred poems. The magnitude 
 of your score has tempted me to 
 investigate other poets to see if they 
 make up your sum. Keats wrote fifty 
 poems, Hood seventy-six. Burns six 
 hundred and fifty, and Tom Moore 
 about the same; Bryant, fifty, Tennyson 
 about three hundred and fifty. Pope, one 
 
i84 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 hundred and sixty, Wordsworth about 
 eight hundred, and Mrs. Hemans two 
 hundred and fifty. Surely these figures 
 will still further serve to increase the 
 appreciation your admirers have for your 
 poems. One may be allowed to guess 
 that those admirers are found pretty 
 exclusively among men who have dealt 
 in lumber or pork with but little time 
 for literature. This sort of a business 
 man is apt to imagine that if a poem is 
 not positively bad in all ways, and if the 
 mere externals of poetry have been 
 attended to, it is real poetry and not a 
 clever counterfeit. In the fruitfulness of 
 your muse you excel all the great names 
 of English literature. It may possibly 
 be said that these figures are compiled 
 from merely published poems and that 
 there are others not published. If you 
 could have considerately refrained in lilie 
 manner we should not now have twelve 
 hundred publicly announced poems. You 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 183 
 
 have evidently lisped in numbers 
 for the numbers came, although your 
 numbers, unlike most of Pope's are of 
 a mathmatical-amorous sort. This 
 standard compels us to measure poetical 
 greatness as certain loyal Americans do 
 national greatness — as if it w^ere a matter 
 of barrels of pork and bushels of 
 w^heat. Thus our Western Muse scorns 
 her barren European sister. You 
 consider it necessary to explain some of 
 the poems in this book and to shovp^ why 
 they were written, and in doing this you 
 hint, not too obscurely, that they were 
 inspired by some experiences that have 
 come under your own observation. You 
 also explain that the most amorous of 
 these verses have not so bad a meaning 
 as the superficial reader might impute to 
 them. Now this explanation only 
 accentuates the prevelant suspicion that 
 these poems are irretrievably bad. With 
 delicate naivete you say of one of them: 
 
1 86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Delilah was written and first 
 published in 1877. I had been reading- 
 history and became stirred by the power 
 of such women as Aspasia and Cleopatra 
 over such grand men as Anthony, Socrates 
 and Pericles. Under the influence of 
 this feeling I dashed off Delilah, which I 
 meant to be an expression of the powerful 
 fascination of such a woman upon the 
 memory of a man, even as he neared 
 the hour of death. If the poem is 
 immoral, then the history which inspired 
 it is immoral. I consider it my finest 
 effort. 
 
 Now if this poem is a good poem 
 people don't care how you came to write 
 it. Your fame is too new and garish to 
 warrant any excessive curiosity on that 
 score. Nor did the public need to be 
 told that you " dashed off Delilah. ' ' It 
 is characteristic of the young poet to 
 "dash off" his poems (in prefaces). It 
 gives one an air of verve and fire, and 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 187 
 
 careless excess of power to " dash off ' ' these 
 rough patterns, and makes one's muse 
 like swift Camilla scour the plain. You 
 say that if the poem is immoral, the 
 history that inspired it is immoral. "The 
 history that inspired it," — aye, there's 
 the rub ; that history is immoral. Aspasia 
 and Cleopatra are not characters out of 
 a Sunday-school book. Socrates was a 
 loose fish, and Pericles was no better 
 than he should be, and we must 
 not confound Mark Anthony with 
 Saint Anthony. It may be of no 
 significance, but I find no poem in my 
 Red Book speaking forth the woes 
 of the wife in these ancient marital 
 difficulties. If Zanthippe could have her 
 epic, it might show how it was that she 
 lost her temper and became the jest of 
 the centuries on account of trouble 
 over that woman Aspasia. As for 
 Mrs. Pericles, she was probably a poor 
 little mouse of a woman, living a decent 
 
1 88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 humble life, and not worth comparing 
 with that grand creature, Aspasia — 
 certainly not worth a nineteenth century 
 poem of passion. I think that 
 Mrs. Caesar and Mrs. Anthony, 
 could tell us some things if 
 they had a fit chronicler, either 
 in prose or verse, that would demoralize 
 the halo which poetesses of passion 
 have placed round the heads of those 
 "grand characters." You complete 
 your confession as to this poem by 
 stating that you consider it your "finest 
 effort. ' ' This practice of battering 
 yourself with boquets has something so 
 colossally egotistical about it, that the 
 critic, supposed to be used to the worst 
 cases, gasps for breath. Returning to 
 our text, I quote the finest lines of this 
 finest effort of yours: 
 
 She smiles — and in mad tiger fashion. 
 
 As a she-tiger fondles her own, 
 
 I clasp her with fierceness and passion, 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM i8g 
 
 And kiss her with shudder and groan. 
 And here is some more from Ad 
 Finem, which you say is another of 
 the poems which have been condemned 
 so much: 
 
 I know in the way that sins are reckoned, 
 This thought is a sin of the deepest 
 
 dye; 
 But I know too, that if an angel beckoned, 
 Standing close to the throne on High, 
 And you, adown by the gates infernal. 
 Should open your loving arms and smile, 
 I would turn my back on things supernal, 
 To lie on your breast a little while. 
 
 To know for an hour you were mine 
 
 completely — 
 Mine in body and soul, my own — 
 I would bear unending tortures sweetly. 
 With not a murmur and not a moan. 
 
 Another of the Great Condemned 
 is Comtnunism and in this you 
 express yourself thus: 
 
igo CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 And on nights like this when my blood 
 
 runs riot 
 With the fever of youth and its mad 
 
 desires, 
 When my brain in vain bids my heart 
 
 be quiet, 
 When my breast seems the center of 
 
 lava-fires. 
 Oh, then is the time when most I miss you. 
 And I swear by the stars, and my soul, 
 
 and say, 
 That I would have you and hold you, and 
 
 kiss you. 
 Though the whole world stands in the 
 
 way. 
 
 And like Communists, mad and disloyal. 
 My fierce emotions roam out of their lair; 
 They hate King Reason for being loyal — 
 They would fire his castle, and burn 
 
 him there. 
 O love, they would clasp you, and crush 
 
 you, and kill you, 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM igi 
 
 In the insurrection of uncontrol, 
 Across the miles, does this wild war 
 
 thrill you 
 That is rag-ing in my soul. 
 
 As for your Conversion it is so 
 Swinburnish, or Whitmanish that I 
 desire not to give it, having what you 
 have not, a fear of the repressive rules of 
 the United States postal department 
 against aiding in the dissemination of a 
 certain kind of literature. In the title to 
 this poem you have stolen the very altar 
 cloth and dyed it scarlet. Of what avail 
 is this lawless, wanton, verse? It bears 
 the stigmata of mental debauchery and 
 hysteria and does not teach one valuable 
 lesson. To the psychopathist it may 
 possess a curious scientific interest; but 
 to laymen this demented verse is as 
 abhorrent as the maunderings of a 
 maniac. If it does express the language 
 of a human heart is it not better 
 that that language should remain 
 
ig2 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 untranslated, or at least that it should 
 have no such brutal translation? Even 
 poets who have compelled us to print 
 expurgated editions of their poetry do 
 not vapour in such trite eroticism as 
 this. In some instances Burns wrote for 
 the ale-house, evidently to win the 
 applause of his pot-companions; it is 
 vulgar enough too, but little redeemed 
 by his splendid genius. But you nowhere 
 find him afSicted with hysteria. Plain 
 common vulgarity and coarseness carries 
 its own antidote against harm. But 
 Burns held the sacred things sacred from 
 poetical defilement. There is no taint 
 in these lines: 
 
 Thou ling 'ring star with less'ning ray, 
 That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
 Again thou ush 'rest in the day 
 
 My Mary from my soul was torn. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The golden hours on angel wings 
 Flew o 'er me and my dearie. 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM igj 
 
 My love is like the red, red rose 
 
 Just newly sprung in June. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Never met, or never parted. 
 We had n 'er been broken-hearted. 
 
 Fare thee wee '1 thou first and fairest. 
 Fare thee wee '1 thou best and dearest. 
 Do you find in the great Scottish 
 poet of the affections any trace of that 
 tigerish affection, that howls for its 
 tiger mate, through your poems? 
 Civilized love is iiot a beast raging 
 rampantly abroad seeking whom it may 
 devour. It is not a vampire or a vulture 
 that claws and tears and drinks warm 
 blood on occasion. It is decent and fair 
 to look upon, and does n6t say to 
 flaming ydUth — Let virtue be as wax 
 and melt in her own fire. It goes with 
 the bride in her happy innocence to the 
 
ig4 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 altar; it guards and purifies the mother's 
 heart as she watches over her children; it 
 makes the dullest and homeliest life, noble 
 and kindly; it follows to the end, and 
 through life's last and greatest affliction 
 it clings in dearest remembrance to the 
 departed spirit beyond the confines of 
 the grave. It has no affinity for that 
 raging fever which you grow eloquent 
 over. The great alienists would find 
 something familiar in your verse. For 
 such manifestations they have a 
 name — Sadism. Here are some specimens 
 of this poetic abandon from the German 
 philosopher, Nietzsche. 
 
 The splendid beast ragingf in its lust 
 after prey and victory. Do your pleasure 
 ye wantons; roar for very lust and 
 wickedness. The path to one's own 
 heaven ever leads through the voluptous- 
 ness^of one's own hell. How comes it 
 that I have yet met no one * * * y^^o 
 knew morality as a problem, and this 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 193 
 
 problem as his personal distress, torment, 
 voluptousness, passion? 
 
 You have few noble words to relieve 
 these darker passages — in fact your 
 other verse seems but a setting for 
 them. Whittier said of Burns: 
 And if at times an evil strain, 
 To lawless love appealing. 
 Broke in upon the clear refrain 
 Of pure and healthful feeling-, 
 
 It died upon the eye and ear 
 
 No inward answer gaining ; 
 
 No heart had I to see or hear 
 
 The discord and the staining. 
 This loving eulogist tells what every 
 heart must feel. The Burns of the 
 ale-house was also the Burns of Bonnie 
 Doon and Afton Water, of the Cotter's 
 Hearth, and Highland Mary. The vulgar 
 line which comes now and then is but a 
 passing shadow cast lightly on this 
 shining gold of love and honour and 
 
ig6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 plighted troth, and all the hearthstone 
 deities. Your poems of peaceful refuge 
 are too small and too few to give us safe 
 escape from the surging riot that fills 
 your Red Book. When you aim at a 
 restful poem you are bound to make it a 
 thing of silly gush and affectation, as 
 like real emotion as that depicted by the 
 painted, shrill voiced belle of the music- 
 hall stage. Lovers named Guilo, Lippo, 
 Beppo, and Romney, and one by the 
 Christian name of Paul, are the subjects 
 of the lighter and less gustatory strokes 
 of your prolific pen. Thus does your 
 muse make eyes at the audience through 
 the paint and tinsel: 
 
 Yes, yes, I love thee, Guilo ; thee alone. 
 Why dost thou sigh and wear that face of 
 sorrow? 
 
 Solloved Romney?Hush thou foolish one — 
 I should forg-et him wholly, wouldst thou 
 let me; 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM 197 
 
 Or but remember that his day was done 
 From that most supreme hour when first 
 
 I met thee. 
 And Paul? WeU, what of Paul? Paul 
 
 had blue eyes, 
 And Romney gray, and thine are darkly 
 
 tender. 
 One finds fresh feelings under change of 
 
 skies — 
 A new horizon brings a newer splendour. 
 You play this tune with variations; 
 here is another form: 
 
 Why art thou sad my Beppo? But last eve, 
 Here at my feet, thy dear head on my 
 
 breast, 
 I heard thee say thy heart would no more 
 
 grieve. 
 Or feel the old ennui and unrest. 
 
 What troubles thee? Am I not all thine 
 
 own — 
 I, so long sought, so sighed for and so 
 
 dear? 
 
ig8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 And do I not live but for thee alone? 
 Thou has seen Beppo, whom I loved last 
 year. 
 
 Thou art not first? Nay, and he who 
 
 would be 
 Defeats his own heart 's dearest purpose 
 
 then. 
 No surer truth was ever told to thee, 
 Who has loved most, the best can love 
 
 again. 
 
 If Lippo, [and not he alone] has taught 
 The arts that please thee, wherefore art 
 
 thou sad 
 Since all my vast love-lore to thee is 
 
 brought? 
 Look up and smile my Beppo, and be glad. 
 This apish verse, coined in the 
 cheap and vulger similitude of Italian 
 love-making, soft and langorous, breath- 
 ing of orange groves and summer 
 nights, with its thees and thous put in 
 
A DEFERRED CRITICISM igg 
 
 to hide its verbal poverty, must have 
 been thought poetry by you or it would, 
 not be in the Red Book. According to 
 this, life in order to be at its happiest 
 must consist of a quick succession of 
 casual, yet tigerish love affairs, the 
 more the merrier and the more the 
 better. This gospel may do for the 
 man-about-town, and for his compatriots 
 in the half- world, but it wiU hardly do to 
 bring up a family on. This verse looks 
 easy and tempting; it fires your critic 
 into parodistic emulation. Here are 
 some verses which suffer in the same 
 way, "tossed off," of course: 
 
 My Beppo why dost thou complziiQ, 
 Thou hast my this year 's kisses ; 
 Lippo was my last year 's swain, 
 He took those last year 's blisses. 
 Why task me for a thing forgot. 
 When this year I am all thine own, 
 That happy past remember not, 
 When me its bliss long since has flown. 
 
200 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 The ragbags of the past disclose 
 One tangled web of silken skein 
 Which other hands than thine have wove, 
 But which thy own must weave again. 
 
 Let loves be new and ever range, 
 
 Scorning dull-ey'd Satiety, 
 
 Hunting content in change on change, 
 
 And pleasure in variety. 
 And so we take leave of tlie Red 
 Book — a book which contains no reason 
 for having been written. 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 
 
 It was many and many a year 
 ago — ^for so the account should run with 
 us who have seen fast history-making, 
 that Dickens came over the sea to look 
 at England's First-bom. The brat 
 was lusty, raw and ungainly, full of 
 strange oaths, bumptious, arrogant and 
 a braggart. These qualities made its 
 parentage easily recognizable, and yet 
 gave great offense to its kinsman. Being 
 of the same blood, perhaps he should 
 have treated the faults of extreme 
 youth more kindly, yet time softens 
 resentments, and we can now afford to 
 
202 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 laugh over the follies of our whelp- age. He 
 hurt our feelings terribly in Martin 
 Chuzzlewit and American Notes, yet 
 despite the pain of wounded vanity we 
 took him into favour again. Those who 
 loved him tried to condone his guilt by 
 attributing it to British bull-headedness 
 and ignorance. 
 
 There is a strong suspicion now 
 extant that there were Americans a few 
 decades since, who were as narrow, insular 
 and provincial as the John Bulls 
 themselves. Our average is better 
 now, and still we have something to 
 mend. General Choke and Jefferson 
 Brick are no longer with us, but we 
 have their modifications in the more 
 refined, self-styled Intense American. He 
 has established the Thirty-second 
 Degree of Americanism, infested by his 
 class alone. Still, his vagaries are mild 
 and innocuous. Sometimes they are 
 manifested in a desire to run the 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 203 
 
 American Flag up in all parts of the 
 landscape, and. I have expected that he 
 would eventually adorn every corn-crib 
 and smoke-house in the land with it. He 
 has a theory that the daily and 
 hourly use of the Flag increases 
 patriotism. Jacob with his device of 
 the peeled twigs for increasing the 
 number of his flocks, was not more 
 cunning than our Professional Patriot 
 with his devices for increasing the 
 number of Patriots in this country. To 
 the American who carries his patriotism 
 in his heart and not on his sleeve, his 
 country's flag tells more eloquently 
 than printed page or martial song, of 
 American valour — of brave men and 
 brave deeds. If it be a standard scarred 
 and torn in battle, the whole earth holds 
 no inspiration like it. But he does not 
 need the aid of artificial excitants to 
 make him love his country and her flag. 
 Recently an ex- president has come 
 
204 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 forward with some new renditions of 
 Flag-Service. This fresh pattern of 
 patriotism is announced by the fortunate 
 magazine that secured it — at great 
 expense — thus : 
 
 It was * * * idea that the stars 
 and stripes should float over every school 
 house in America. Now in a stirring 
 article he carries the idea further and 
 shows why the flag' should find a place 
 over every fireplace in our country ; what 
 it would mean to future generations, and 
 why the flag should appeal to every 
 woman. 
 
 We are further informed that ' ' the 
 article wiUrank with the author's most 
 eloquent public utterances." As much 
 as we respect ex-presidents, we cannot 
 avoid suspicion that this promised mine 
 of rich eloquence has been "salted" in 
 the advertisement. Commonplace at a 
 dollar a line is too dear, even when it is 
 the commonplace of an ex-president. 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 205 
 
 There are living American women who 
 have been taught patriotism in a sterner 
 school than the Great American 
 Kindergarten for Women. They cannot 
 gain new inspiration from pedagogical 
 and dilletant patriotism, addressed to a 
 magazine constituency assumed to be in 
 its milk teeth. The Firesides are not 
 clamouring to be fed new rations of 
 spoon-vicutals by Eminent Hands. This 
 nursery employment does not suggest a 
 fit answer to the common, vacuous 
 query, "what shall we do with our 
 ex-presidents? ' ' Let us rather continue 
 to employ them for periodical deliverances 
 of other platitudes whose prosperity lies 
 in our acutely adoring ears. 
 
 With all the decadence among the 
 followers of General Choke and Jefferson 
 Brick they still have a stifled sneer for 
 the migratory American, acknowledging 
 ancestral fealty to the great mother-land 
 of nations, if he shall buy a pair of 
 
2o6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 trousers in London. One of the minor 
 regulations of the Intense American is 
 that you must not travel in foreign 
 lands, or at least only do so under 
 apology, before you "have seen all there 
 is to see in your ow^n country." You 
 must inspect the colorless vraste between 
 Saco and Waco as a condition precedent 
 to foreign travel. Our Intense American 
 may be said to be in his richest vein 
 when he detects the harmless and 
 necessary immigrant to these shores 
 bringing out the flag of his native land 
 on some fete day. Only a call for troops 
 win suffice for this treason. I do not 
 forget that I first learned from Jefferson 
 Brick of the Curse of British Gold, and 
 how it was being used to corrupt the 
 free American electorate. Originally it 
 was the hideous Cobden Club that was 
 distributing this gold, and thereafter 
 and more recently the Money Kings of 
 Lombard Street. From this same well 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 207 
 
 of patriotism I learned that before we 
 adopt national policies we ought to find 
 out what England wants us to do, and 
 then not do it. Upon these activities 
 the bunting trust thrives, and the voice 
 of our hustings becomes a mere hysterical 
 echo of the patriot cannon at Bunker Hill. 
 Since Dickens was with us in 1841 
 many things have come to pass that the 
 Muse of History with her large disdain 
 for trifles has made no note of. She 
 only records the big events in her 
 tiresome folios and never descends to 
 chronicling small beer. The real life of 
 human kind has been left to gossips like 
 Pepys, who have saved for us the tattle 
 of the tea parties and the coffee 
 houses. While the Gibbons have been 
 telling in sonorous phrase of camps and 
 courts, these humble chatterers have 
 remained unemulous, telling trifling 
 tales. They cared not a button about 
 the dress parades of kings, nor were they 
 
2o8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 fearsome of posterity. They thought it 
 important to set down what they ate and 
 drank, what they wore, what physic 
 they took and how they dressed 
 themselves or quarreled with their 
 neighbours, or amused themselves on 
 yesterday. The trial of the Seven 
 Bishops will not lack a historian, but we 
 must look to these gleaners of little 
 sheaves, if we wish to know what Hodge 
 was doing, or how 'Arry and 'Arriet 
 spent their holidays in the English 
 meadows in the year 16 — . There is a 
 suggestion in this for modest chroniclers 
 of our own time, who are willing to wait 
 two hundred years for fame. As topics 
 for these little histories I would suggest 
 in passing: 
 
 The Rise and Fall of the Crazy 
 Quilt. 
 
 The Age of Plush. 
 
 The Influence of Pie on National 
 Character. 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 2og 
 
 The Moral Aspect of Tidies. 
 
 The Strange Career of the Pillow 
 Sham. 
 
 Disquisitions on these subjects, 
 sagely written would in time become as 
 valuable as those of the older Tattlers 
 and spectators. I consider that My 
 Lady Lizzard's Tucker, and the gentle 
 follies of Clarinda and Bubalina, as 
 worthy of a memoir as the stilted 
 performances of a fat-witted prime 
 minister. 
 
 Dickens saw us before we had 
 stolen Texas or the Empire of the 
 Golden Gate from poor Mexico. It was 
 before the Argonauts of '49 had 
 commenced to thread the bufEalo trails 
 over the plains and to hunt the passes 
 of the Sierras. Our line of expansion 
 was into the fever-and-ague belt of the 
 Mississippi Valley. The City of Eden 
 in Martin Chuzzlewitt was undoubtedly 
 a much exaggerated caricature of the 
 
210 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 reality, just as Bumble the beadle, the 
 Parish Workhouse, or Doctor Squeers' 
 School were exaggerations. But in none 
 of these would you have the least trouble 
 in finding the original. JefFerson Brick 
 and General Choke and the New York 
 Daily Sewer and the Rowdy Journal, 
 were not all a myth. The criticism of 
 Dickens touched us where we were most 
 sensitive. We always had an inner 
 feeling that slavery was an abomination. 
 We dimly saw that in its atrocities, the 
 fifth century lived again and mocked 
 at number nineteen — the great pharisee 
 of the centuries. Dickens came from a 
 nation whose war-ships had patrolled 
 the African coast in crushing the 
 slave trade, when this century was 
 young. Through our assertiveness and 
 Fourth of July declamation, we must 
 have felt that our nation was yet unripe 
 and that our morals might be 
 bettered. Hence our anger when the 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 211 
 
 exposed nerve was touched by our 
 kinsman. 
 
 Our jingoes were offensive and 
 truculent and they could smeU the blood 
 of an Englishman at a considerable 
 distance, and long for it. Th^y wreaked 
 a ruder and more brutal vengeance on 
 the Lion, than now, and the spleen and 
 hatred engendered by two wars was 
 invigorated by the presence of the 
 crippled veterans of the Revolution who 
 were disposed on all Fourth of July 
 platforms. So buoyant and joyous and 
 obtuse was our national conceit that we 
 saw no incongruity in prating of liberty 
 and freedom, while we were holding 
 minions of human beings in slavery. We 
 furnished rare sport for a satirist like 
 Dickens, who had never spared his own 
 country a deserved gibe. 
 
 The genius which described the 
 Circumlocution Office, the abuses of the 
 courts, and the Parish Workhouses and 
 
212 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Charity Schools of England would 
 naturally riot in the wealth of raw 
 material found here. 'Tis a vain 
 task to balance all the gains and losses 
 of fifty years. It must be admitted that 
 when Dickens first saw us we were 
 somewhat imperfect in the use of the 
 fork, and we ate our meals with such 
 dispatch that one who sat at meat more 
 than ten minutes was looked on as a 
 person of sedentary habits. We frescoed 
 the floors in public places with 
 tobacco, and the hotel towel was the 
 subject of frequent and acrimonious 
 remark. Pie was still our national 
 dish and dominated all more effete 
 refections from Passamaquaddy to 
 Carondelet. 
 
 Life in 1841 had some advantages 
 however. The Fifth Empire of the 
 Distended Hoop was still in the womb of 
 Fashion. Women did not adorn their 
 backs and heads with the monstrous 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 213 
 
 pads of a later time. The Age of Plush 
 had not yet arrived. The Japanese 
 gewgaws, and Chinese decorative 
 misfits, the hand-painted china and 
 ceramic fads, the hideous tidies and 
 inflammable strawstack lamp chimneys, 
 and above all, the crazy quilt, were 
 unknown. Woman partook of literature 
 in those golden days by the simple 
 method of sitting down and reading a 
 book. She did not pursue Culture with 
 a Club, bristling with constitutions 
 and by-laws and presidents and 
 vice-presidents and boards of directors 
 and committees and a general hurrah 
 and whirl of parliamentary practices. She 
 did not chastise the Tyrant, Man, with 
 the vigor recently shown. She did 
 tatting, chrocheting and fancy work, and 
 made samplers and penwipers and woolly 
 dogs. If she was literary she wrote nice 
 stories for whatever magazine was the 
 embryonic Ladies' Home Journal of 
 
214 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the time. She did not "wallow" in 
 conventions and congresses then as 
 now. It was a day when the sepulchral 
 Best Room was the good housewife's 
 shrine, and the what-not and the 
 fair, round center-table, were her 
 household gods. 
 
 If a reincarnated Dickens should 
 return here, he might still find some food 
 for satire. We should probably accept 
 his corrective offices more kindly now in 
 these days of close fraternization between 
 the Lion and the Eagle. On the way 
 over he would be sure to meet a young 
 lady — one of Cook's, from Cherry 
 Valley, 111., — who would pester him for 
 his autograph. He would have to 
 triple-plate himself in dogged British 
 reticence to withstand the assaults of 
 our indefatigable reporters. The Lotus 
 Club or some other club would feast 
 him, and smooth lawyers and weU-fed 
 brokers of a literary turn, would smother 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 215 
 
 him with after-dinner adulation. 
 In his purblind British way he 
 would seek to find out something about 
 New York politics. He would see Piatt 
 and Croker in their busy whirls and 
 would never be able to tell which was 
 which. Among other reflections, he 
 would conclude that this was the Age of 
 Woman, and that this gentle metal was 
 to take its place in the social formation 
 with stone, and gold and iron. We 
 have Womens' magazines and news- 
 papers, and womens' corners, and 
 womens' supplements to great dailies, and 
 womens' clubs and conventions and 
 congresses, and a woman's revision of 
 the Bible, and a religious cult established 
 by a woman, principally for women. The 
 Pilgrim Mothers having been non- 
 progressive in their day, a movement has 
 been organized to rescue them from 
 obscurity, and to compel equal mention 
 for them with the Pilgrim Fathers. We 
 
21 6 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 have women doctors, and lawyers, and 
 drummers and undertakers. We are 
 industrously building up a separate 
 literature for women, strictly antiseptic 
 and free from coarse rude things. Letters 
 are becoming Bokized — ' ' male and female 
 created He them." Perhaps the time 
 will come when we have sufficiently 
 segregated woman from the great 
 human family, that it wiU be considered 
 as improper for men and women to read 
 each other's literature, as it is now for 
 them to wear each other's clothes. The 
 Expurgated Novel has appeared, 
 evidently censored by the Order of 
 Decayed Clergymen. Ladies' magazines 
 are edited with the camera, and the 
 kodac is mightier than the pen. The 
 Genius of Tatting is at the helm. With 
 all this favour to The Young Person, the 
 newspaper still brings its daily muck of 
 crime into our homes; althoughbut lately 
 Dickens' novels were excluded from 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 217 
 
 a New England public library as 
 immoral. Having once reaped so well in 
 our field of folly, Dickens, if he could 
 return would get good gleanings from 
 the aftermath of that field. 
 
 But perhaps Dickens would be 
 best charmed with Chicago — behemoth, 
 biggest born of cities, the chief shrine in 
 the Gospel of Bigness. Here, as in all 
 other places where the soul of his unblest 
 British feet should seek rest, he would 
 be compelled to ' ' see the town. ' ' This 
 rite of American hospitality would not 
 be omitted, either in Chicago, or 
 Oshkosh, Kalamazoo or Topeka. No 
 matter what the town was, or how little 
 there was to see, he would have to 
 undergo this supreme ordeal. He would 
 have to go and gaze admiringly at 
 factories and shops and other monuments 
 to civic pride. Seeing the town in 
 Chicago would certainly embrace the 
 stockyards, where as the prideful native 
 
2i8 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 informs all strangers, they kill a hog a 
 second, the year round. The reporters 
 would give out that he was "very much 
 impressed with Chicago. ' ' That is the 
 way in Chicago; the traveler from 
 Mars, the New Zealander, the man from 
 poor old London, and from poorer old 
 New York, is always "very much 
 impressed, ' ' when he reaches Chicago. 
 
 If the wayfaring stranger is not 
 apparently impressed offhand and at 
 first blush, the priests of the Gospel 
 of Bigness have this formula of 
 attack. First inform him that Chicago 
 has two millions of people, and that fifty 
 years ago it was a village of log 
 cabins. This ought to fetch him, but if 
 it fail, then refer to the Chicago Fire, and 
 to the New Chicago springing 
 Phoenix-like from its ashes. If he be 
 still stubborn-kneed, bring on the Stock 
 Yards with its toll of death, or the 
 tunnel under the lake — that wonder of 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 21 g 
 
 the world twenty-five years ago. If he 
 remain obdurate, the new thirty million 
 dollar sewer may fetch him. If everything 
 else fails, he must succumb to the 
 World's Fair. This is Chicago's 
 chef-d'oeuvre. On this subject look out 
 for the inquisitors, for if you have not 
 seen this wonder, you will have meted to 
 you supreme pity and contempt. You 
 will be made to wish that the Fair had 
 been swallowed up before you heard of 
 it. However, this will not ease your 
 pain, for ever after it would be spoken 
 of as the greatest swallowing-up in 
 history. Dickens would find the Great 
 Fire still celebrated with rejoicings, and 
 lurid woodcut flames in the newspapers. 
 The Fire has really lost all the advantages 
 it once had as a Public Calamity, but 
 its fame for Bigness will endure 
 forever. From the Chicago point of 
 view, pity and contempt for New York 
 rises to the sublime; the island city is 
 
220 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 a mere wart on the face of the earth. 
 It is a trait of municipal callowness to 
 brag. London and Paris never yell their 
 brags at one another. Their secure 
 position does not need to be continually 
 asserted. Let a journalistic wag in New 
 York fling a grotesque gibe at Chicago 
 and she arises in majesty and pours 
 vitriol on her decrepit rival. I quote 
 from memory a waggish leader on 
 Chicago that appeared in a New York 
 paper: 
 
 As you approach Cliicag-o, she 
 becomes foully manifest by a dull, livid 
 cloud that obscures the sky. You burst 
 into this mephitic drapery, feelingf as 
 though you had tumbled into a sewer. * 
 * * It is a common thing- to see her 
 merchant princes in their shirt sleeves 
 sitting on the front porches of their 
 palatial homes enjoying an evening 
 smoke. * * * The knife-swallowing 
 act can still be seen at the hotels. The 
 
AMERICAN NOTES 221 
 
 Gent flourishes in Chicago — it is his 
 natural home. Few Chicago families 
 have grandparents; they cannot afford to. 
 The Home Guards in Chicago 
 took this waggery seriously. They 
 asserted that Chicago was as good as 
 anybody, and that her pedigree, sanita- 
 tion and manners were A. 1. 
 
 These are the reflections of new 
 readings of American Notes. If Dickens 
 could come again, he would find a 
 nation mellowed and ripened with the 
 years. He would find that the old order 
 had given way to the new. He would 
 find cities provincial and rustic 
 then, cosmopolitan now. He would find 
 a national life and ambition broad and 
 catholic, not narrow and jealous. He 
 would find a nation that remembers 
 slavery as a horrible dream is remembered 
 in the clear light of mid-noon, a 
 nation purified by war, and the 
 long, smouldering embers of that 
 
222 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 war, dead and lifeless. He would find us 
 able to laugh at the follies and vices he 
 mocked. He would find the great 
 republic of the west living in happy 
 amity with its mother land, the old 
 hatreds and bickerings gone forever. 
 
AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 
 
 The critic who ventures discussion 
 of American literature, risks an encounter 
 with the Intense American. The 
 jurisdiction of this national policeman is 
 to see that the patriotism of his 
 countrymen suffers no diminution or 
 abatement. Of late he has paid some 
 attention to the literary part of his 
 authority. He insists on running the 
 American Flag up in the library, as a 
 lightning rod to protect American 
 authors from any chance thunderbolts 
 of criticism. The British critic is 
 
224 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 especially warned to keep off the green 
 growth of American letters. Our 
 watchman's oath of allegiance to 
 American authors, excludes loyalty to 
 all others, and so he becomes an 
 uncomfortable and uncompromising 
 person. I have long wanted to criticise 
 Longfellow for the didactic character of 
 some of his poems, and the ticketed 
 and labeled moral that is so often 
 intruded. A good tale is often spoiled 
 by the intrusive moral. If it were not 
 rank treason I would like to say that 
 Hiawatha as a poem is partly spoiled 
 because of its form as a long monotonous 
 chant in which the refrain of the 
 unvariant lines is early worn out, and 
 thenceforth becomes a weariness. We 
 ieam from the Intense American that 
 some of our authors have Intense 
 Americanism, that Bryant was a 
 "thorough American," and that a 
 "spirit of True Americanism breathes 
 
AMERICANISM 225 
 
 in Longfellow. ' ' These awe-inspiring 
 terms not being defined, we may take 
 them to be simply an exercise in phrase- 
 mongering. 
 
 Perhaps after all, this True, this 
 Thorough, this Intense Americanism, is 
 simply a State of Mind, in which 
 Patriotism uplifts itself into a seventh 
 heaven by simply tugging at its 
 boot-straps. The vocabulary of uncritical 
 adulation in Europe does not seem to 
 have an equivalent term. He would be 
 a daring idolator indeed who should in- 
 sist that Dickens, or Thackeray, or Reade 
 were gifted with Intense Britishism, for 
 they committed many treasons by 
 attacking every British institution from 
 the House of Lords down to the dinners 
 of snobs. It is diflBcult to discover that 
 Cervantes had True CastUeanism, or 
 Plato True Greceianism, or Dante True 
 Italianism. Our own Brander Mathews 
 has set us some lessons in literary 
 
226 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 patriotism, the humor of which seems 
 unconscious on his part. Thus does he 
 warn youngest readers against the 
 deadly snare of British literature: 
 
 It cannot be said too often or too 
 emphatically that the Britishi are foreign- 
 ers, and that their ideals in life, in 
 literature, in politics, in taste, in art, are 
 not our ideals. 
 
 From this author we also learn that 
 it is: 
 
 In consequence of the wholesome 
 Americanism imparted in the school 
 room, that American boys and girls have 
 increased their demand for American 
 books. 
 
 Foolish Americans have always had 
 the same weakness for foreign authors, 
 that they have for foreign goods, and 
 this unnatural appetite must be checked 
 by authority. The sad admission must 
 be made that it is too late to put a tariff 
 on British brains — the serpent has 
 
AMERICANISM 227 
 
 has already crept in. The dogberrys of 
 our literary police will call out in the 
 street, but despite their warnings, 
 vagrom Englishmen will to some extent 
 still commit breaches of our peace in 
 prose and verse. I refuse to thrill over 
 the spectacle of the American Youth 
 becoming so infected with True 
 Americanism of the Bander Mathews 
 kind that he rapidly turns to American 
 authors. If there is any one primal and 
 unchanging element in the character of 
 the American Youth, it is his disregard 
 of the authors who write his books. Nor 
 does he care very much about the exact 
 locus in quo of his fiction. Robinson 
 Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, 
 and Tom Brown, mean just as much to 
 an American boy as to an English boy. 
 Such books have no nationality; they 
 are written for the universal boy. For 
 like reasons the Eton boy could gloat 
 over Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry 
 
228 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Finn, without disloyalty to the Crown, 
 So many of us Yankees are Jacobites 
 at heart, drinking secretly to the king 
 over the water; we find creative genius 
 where we can, undeterred by the True 
 American. Our nation drones through 
 one generation in deadly peace, hearing 
 no sound but that of mill and loom, and 
 the pleasant tinkle of little verses. No 
 minstrel of our own breaks the silence, but 
 from across the seas comes a strain of 
 daring music from England's new 
 singer. The majestic Recessional has 
 set her heart afire and made us wish that 
 heaven would send us such a poet. This 
 poem would have an equal appeal for the 
 Pharaohs, for Moses and Aaron, for the 
 nations of later times, that grow drunken 
 with power. It has the measured 
 majesty of the speech of the prophets 
 when they foretold the doom of 
 nations. It is a lost fragment from 
 Jeremiah or Isaiah. It has a Scriptural 
 
AMERICANISM 22g 
 
 eloquence, sonorous, uplifting, called 
 from the clearer hill-tops to the valleys 
 below. It is a battle hymn and also a 
 hymn of peace for the time when battles 
 are over. It seems to close the century 
 with the sound we have been listening 
 for. This singer surely does not belong 
 to the puddering rout of birth-day 
 ode-makers who periodically sing luUabys 
 to the English people. Perhaps he stole 
 his fire from strange lands where he 
 wandered, loving every spot where there 
 was a man alive. Was there some 
 alchemy in the branding Indian sun that 
 made his soul great so that he could 
 stand stern-browed at England's jubilee 
 and tell her in Homeric verse that all her 
 pomp was one with Nineveh and 
 Tyre? This psalm is his title deed to 
 Westminster. None but he could smite 
 the chords with might, as there was but 
 one in that heroic test of long ago, who 
 could bend the great bow of Ulysses and 
 
230 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 make the string "sound sweetly as the 
 swallow 's song, ' ' The lines of Coleridge 
 seem meant for this music: 
 
 And now 'twas like all instruments, 
 
 Now like a lonely flute ; 
 
 And now it is an angel 's song- 
 
 That makes the heavens be mute. 
 
 We would like to feel that he owed 
 some debt to New England, where he 
 tarried awhUe, but it is plain that he is 
 English to the core, a child of the 
 Thames, and not of the Ganges or the 
 Merrimac. A little later when our 
 ambition was leaping ocean barriers he 
 sobered us by telling how basely or how 
 nobly we might bear The White Man's 
 Burden. 
 
 Shall we shut any part of this 
 inspiration from our ears because it did 
 not come from the banks of the Hudson 
 or the Mississippi? Could our army of 
 flag-wavers with their artificial devices 
 for manufacturing artificial patriotism, so 
 
AMERICANISM 231 
 
 move a great race? Meanwhile Brander 
 Mathews and his constabulary will 
 continue to pick their flints and fight 
 Bunker Hill over again against the 
 British invader. 
 
 The even-blooded American who 
 does not care whether an author has the 
 ingredient of True Americanism in his 
 inkwell or not, will still claim free trade 
 rights with British literature. Perhaps 
 this weakness of Intense Americanism is 
 responsible for the belief, current in 
 certain quarters that A Man Without 
 a Country., is a great romance. This 
 patriotic sermon — this high class Fourth 
 of July oration has been given the title 
 of the Great American Story. It is 
 really quite interesting and instructive 
 for fifteen-year-olds. It is the history of 
 a youth, who in a moment of silly 
 pique, being nagged by his captors, said 
 that he wished he might never hear of 
 the United States again. This was only 
 
232 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the bitter froth of his real sin, for he had 
 intrigued with Aaron Burr against his 
 country, and that fascinating traitor 
 had woven him tight in his web. The 
 Powers-That-Be could forgive the real 
 treason, and let the head traitor go 
 free, but they could not forgive the boy's 
 petulant lack of lip service. So they 
 sent him on the high seas, where he 
 wandered for many weary years a 
 remorseful derelict, and by great 
 command he was never to hear his 
 country spoken of. They adopted 
 towards him an Americanized version of 
 the punishment of the Wandering Jew 
 and of Tantalus, until old age came and 
 death relieved him of his pain. This is 
 a pretty story with a moral as obvious 
 as a mountain. Later editions of it are 
 spoiled somewhat by the egotism of 
 authorship, which impels Mr. Hale to 
 explain that it is a myth, and his reasons 
 for writing it and all about the lesson 
 
AMERICANISM 233 
 
 that it teaches. But the moral 
 somewhat loses its flavour with the 
 callowest youth, when he sees around 
 him many patriots who wave the Old 
 Flag with one hand while they reach for 
 a fat appropriation or a swindling 
 government contract with the other. 
 Aaron Burr at least did not buy 
 legislatures and boards of aldermen. 
 
 The moral seems to be, superficially, 
 that to be immune, you need only shape 
 your schemes for the destruction of the 
 institutions of your country to the 
 prevailing fashion. You can then 
 found an orphan asylum or a great 
 university, and the hats will fly off as 
 you go by. 
 
 All this may be thought a by-path 
 from books, but human life is stretched 
 along the by-ways as well as along the 
 main traveled roads. This preface 
 brings to mind some Americans who 
 have not made a strutting parade of 
 
234 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 their patriotism. In example of this we 
 have such Americans as Lowell, whose 
 patriotism and love of country had no 
 dross upon it; whose scholarship was as 
 broad and generous as the seas that 
 wash our shores; who never penned 
 provincial and rustic cant about True 
 Americanism; who loved books as a man 
 and not as an American, and who could 
 love a book neither more nor less because 
 of the nationality of the author; who 
 held close fellowship with the great of 
 every land without a thought that it 
 made him any the less an American. 
 With him the world of letters had no 
 narrowing partition lines that could 
 separate Shakespeare, Cervantes, and 
 Moliere from Hawthorne and Poe and 
 Emerson and make one less than 
 the other. The dead who sleep 
 at Westminster were his blood 
 brothers. With him we can safely place 
 Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and Holmes. The 
 
AMERICANISM 235 
 
 fame of these rests on their genius and 
 not on the accident of nationality. The 
 many influences that may have somewhat 
 dwarfed American scholarship, have not 
 modified Lowell's genius. He would 
 have honoured any land. As a poet and 
 essayist he had a ripened wit and 
 learning that places him as the first of 
 American scholars. He had a broader 
 and more varied scholarship than either 
 Holmes or Emerson. Pie entered into 
 the death grapple with slavery with a 
 stern and knightly courage and ardour 
 that never swerved or turned aside. His 
 words were "battles for freedom, " when 
 freedom most needed defenders. He 
 was the peer of England's greatest 
 scholars, and his fame wiU brighten with 
 the years. 
 
 New soils do not always fatten 
 genius. In a new land the activities of 
 the people are expended in subduing the 
 wilderness, in building great cities, and 
 
236 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 in developing material resources. With 
 this justification it should be no blemish 
 on our patriotism that we esteem 
 Tennyson as greater than Longfellow, 
 and Scott than Cooper. It should not 
 shame us that we find a richer, deeper 
 tone in Caledonia and Bannockburn, and 
 that they crowd so closely in our 
 affections the songs of our own 
 lands. We have much didactic verse 
 and dainty verse and here and there an 
 anthem full of power, but few of our 
 poets have put such inspirations into 
 verse as Scott, and Tennyson, Burns, and 
 Kipling. It may be that Columbia 
 lingers too long in the market place 
 listening to the music of the ticker and 
 the song of the stockjobber, forgetting 
 the dreams and inspirations that can 
 alone make her children great. 
 
 Is it not a question whether our 
 battle hymn has yet been written? 
 Yankee Doodle is a silly jingle; The 
 
AMERICANISM 237 
 
 Star Spangled Banner is of limited 
 compass, Marching Through Georgia, 
 and some other war songs are a mere 
 matter of music without fit words, and 
 besides they cannot be as well sung in 
 Georgia as in Wisconsin. Few of our 
 patriotic songs wiU be long remembered 
 although they are dressed in stirring 
 music for the mob. They have but a 
 spark of that immortal fire that blazes in 
 Kipling's latest verse, of in Tennyson's 
 epic, the battle of the one against the 
 fifty-three. Our Spanish War has no 
 poet, although it has inflicted upon us 
 any amount of doggerel and raphsodical 
 music. There was no residium of verse 
 after our war of 1812, and the 
 Mexican war was not provocative of 
 poetry. Perhaps the American Muse 
 was ashamed of that conquest and 
 remained silent even over the glories of 
 Chapultepec and Monterey. I had 
 almost forgotten a song however, with 
 
238 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 some fine lines in it written by one 
 Hoffman: 
 
 We were not many, we who pressed 
 Beside the brave who fell that day ; 
 But who of us has not confessed 
 He 'd rather share their warrior rest 
 Than not have been at Monterey. 
 This seems to be the solitary poet 
 of the Mexican War. Who hath 
 remembrance of him now? In our first 
 struggle for freedom, no Koemor turned 
 the soldier's barracks into temples where 
 liberty was deified in song. The battle 
 against slavery called out some stormy 
 verse, yet how little we now remember of 
 the scathing passion, the tender, burning 
 words, that Whittier and Longfellow 
 breathed over the wrongs of our 
 bondmen. Some of our jewels it is true 
 are covered with later rubbish. Like a 
 dimly remembered song heard' in remote 
 childhood is that eloquent fragment of 
 Emerson's, commencing: 
 
AMERICANISM sjg 
 
 By the rude bridge that arched the flood. 
 
 Joaquin Miller's Song of Peace 
 is not half so well known as the 
 Recessional. We seem to miss the 
 nearer music and. remember best the 
 rival lines of Scott and Burns and 
 Kipling. 
 
 Upon what meat do these islanders 
 feed that they have such power to charm 
 us with their songs, and make us forget 
 old wrongs, old feuds and old 
 battles? It may be their ocean empire 
 with its outposts on every main. The 
 declamations of our schoolboys bind the 
 race together and annul the bitterness 
 sown by politicians. When we turn 
 from the American poet to his English 
 likeness we are apt to find an enlarged 
 edition. 
 
 Whittier's poetry is a crystal 
 winding brook, reflecting summer days 
 and moonlit nights, and the leaf and 
 flower of forest and meadow. But 
 
240 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 Tennyson's verse is a river running in 
 stormier measure, and mirroring a larger 
 life. Nature has dealt kindlv with us ; she 
 has given us sunnier days and mightier 
 lakes and rivers, but in partial mood she 
 has added an Attic savour to the vfind 
 that blovps across the island kingdom 
 that our more arid breezes have not. The 
 Mississippi Valley lacks several things to 
 make it a place of poetic inspiration. Its 
 mountain fringes lie a thousand miles 
 apart vpith a flat between. It has no 
 ruins, no traditions, no history except 
 the new and yeasty product begun since 
 our possession of it. Very early, no 
 doubt the human family sent out some 
 meager outposts to this continent. A 
 thousand generations have since flitted 
 through its forests, yet they have died 
 like the cave bear and made no 
 sign. Their literary remains consist 
 in a few attenuated traditions. Even 
 Cooper's book, or artificial, Indian 
 
AMERICANISM 241 
 
 could furnish no theme for the 
 poet. Longfellow tried to fuse this 
 stubborn personality of the Red Brother 
 into song, with something of a success 
 considering the material, but the form of 
 his verse is a long, oft-repeated 
 chant, with the monotonous rythm of 
 the prayer-drums at a Chippewa corn 
 dance. At such a festival, the 
 prayer-drums booming through the 
 wilderness, typify the Indian character. 
 It is an unchanging, ceaseless roll that 
 carries with it the somber unchanging 
 history of the race. It has no vital, 
 living music in it. It belongs to and is 
 a part of the unchanging forests and 
 prairies, and the endless flow of lonely 
 streams where nature broods alone over 
 her own and all things remain as in the 
 first day. Centuries of silence and 
 shadow have passed over this race, and 
 yet its history can be read in a few 
 scattered arrow heads. Such a people 
 
242 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 could not fatten a soil with legend and 
 story. 
 
 I fancy Scott and Bums would 
 have sung no songs had they been born 
 on Bark River Flats, their only 
 indigenous inspirations and occasional 
 flint spear point, or an ancient Indian 
 trail blazed through the forest. They 
 owed all to the mountains of Scotland, 
 her heathery hills and moors, her tarns 
 and brooks peopled with the legends of 
 men outworn. For them a thousand 
 rude singers from the cave-man down 
 had been building a rich alluvium of 
 romance and story. In such a soil poets 
 grow spontaneously and involuntarily. 
 Poetry is an exotic in a flat country and 
 not of natural growth. Mountains 
 have always been a great boon to 
 letters; thegods dwelt on a mountain, and 
 the muses on a high hill. The level 
 plains and flat surfaces of earth have 
 always been the abode of cattle herders 
 
AMERICANISM 24.3 
 
 and uninspired men. Burns was not a 
 sudden creation; his poetry was in the 
 nature of inherited wealth. He was the 
 heir of many singers, and all the cur- 
 rents of Scctttish poetry from the earliest 
 times converged in him. Whittier says: 
 
 I saw the same blithe day return, 
 
 The same sweet fall of even. 
 
 That rose on Wooded Cragie-burtij 
 
 And sank oa Crystal Devon. 
 
 I matched with Scotland's heathery hills 
 The sweetbriar and the clover, 
 With Ayr and Doon my native rills 
 Their wood-hymns chanting over. 
 
 Grive lettered pomp to teeth of Time. 
 
 So Bonny Doon but tarry. 
 
 Blot out the epic 's stately rhyme, 
 
 But spare his Highland Mary. 
 
 Whittier wrote some of the sweetest 
 minor poetry in our language, but he 
 could not traiispknt to the banks of 
 
244 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 
 
 the Susquehannah, or the Connecticut^ 
 the ruined castle of Scotland with its 
 thousand-year-old volume of human 
 life, or the myriad legends that throng 
 the banks of the Doon and the 
 Ayr. His song to Burns is a tribute 
 to the richer life, to the deeper power 
 and passion of Scotland's poet. It is 
 the generous tribute of a poet who 
 stands in a new land barren of 
 tradition, to the land hoary with age 
 and recorded legend. 
 
 In our first half-century we had 
 great soldiers and orators and 
 statesmen, but the crop of letters was 
 scanty. There must have been many 
 unsung Odysseys in the lives of those 
 hardy adventurers who came with 
 Raleigh and Smith, and whose descend- 
 ants later drifted down the Ohio and 
 the Mississippi and over the plains, 
 driving the Indian and the buffalo 
 before them. But we had no Homers 
 
AMERICANISM 245 
 
 to put this pioneer wonder-land into 
 verse. Life was too stern and exacting 
 and pitched in too intense a key, so we 
 built literature slowly in our pioneer 
 age. This early poverty had its effect 
 on the really great builders like 
 Longfellow and Cooper, who came later.