^mtm^ ?^-'-«s. IPS 2539 Copy 1 P3P5 IE PERSONAL >:iUATION isi^ ^^m LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Chap. Copyright No., ._ Shelf...1?.l-V-^ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THE PERSONAL EQUATION HARRY THURSTON PECK NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. ^11 ri,^hts reserved. TO GEORGE WILLIAM SHELDON, Litt.D, IN MEMORY OF SOME VERY PLEASANT HOURS CONTENTS PAGB William Dean Howells 3 Marcel Prevost 53 George Moore 89 The Evolution of a Mystic 135 The Passing of Nordau 157 The Migration of Popular Songs ... 173 The New Child and its Picture-books . 193 American Feeling towards England . . 213 President Cleveland 233 Some Notes on Political Oratory , . . 267 The Downward Drift in American Edu- cation 327 Quod Minime Reris. 359 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS Mr. Howells has essayed so many kinds of literary work, and has won so much de- served distinction in them all, as to make it very difficult to know from just what point of view one should regard him in considering his writings as a whole. It is, of course, primarily as a novelist that the popular mind will always think of him ; yet when we come to analyze the meaning of his work, and seek to grasp the underlying motive of it all, it will be quite ap- parent to the analyst that fiction is but one particular expression of a spirit that pervades his other literary work as well ; and that the novel is, at most, only one medium of several by which he has endeavored to effect a given purpose. A broad survey of all his writings will, I think, reveal that purpose in making clear the fact that it is really as a critic that we ought to view him, and in giving us the critic's motive as the fundamental basis for a final judgment of his place in literature. 4 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS It is not, however, merely as a literary critic that he most demands attention. One finds it quite impossible to narrow a consideration of his genius in such a way as this. Mr. Howells, to be sure, as well as others, is a critic of litera- ture, and he is a very searching and suggestive critic, too ; but one cannot even touch upon his literary criticism without feeling that in reality it is but a part, and a comparatively unimportant part, of his wider criticism of life ; and that the same is true of every other phase of his intellectual activity when regarded sep- arately and alone. This can, indeed, be said more broadly of Mr. Howells than of any other English-speaking author. Mr. Henry James, no doubt, is also in a way a critic of life ; but his little corner of observation is so very little, his lenses are so carefully adjusted to one par- ticular focus, and his instrument is so obvious- ly an opera-glass and not a telescope, as to make his books the impressions of a first-night- er rather than the accurate and cosmic view of a sociological astronomer. Mr. Howells, on the other hand, has swept the whole horizon of his time ; and it is not, therefore, merely as an essayist or as a novelist or as a poet that we must consider him, but as one who in his criticism and his fiction and his poetry alike WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 5 has set before himself the task of picturing the life of his own age and of analyzing its spirit and its tendencies. It is, of course, in fiction that his work has been most fully carried out ; and, therefore, chiefly from his fiction one obtains the truest insight into all his intellectual processes, and the best examples also of his critical felicities and his fundamental limitations. The circum- stance that fiction is his chosen field of effort gives the subject a peculiar interest, because it involves a glance at the question of the American Novel — the question whether there has yet been written, or whether there is ever to be written, a kind of fiction that Americans shall recognize as essentially national, not only in its theme and color, but in its external form and literary technique. Now, as to the American Novel when re- garded from one point of view, one cannot help agreeing on the whole with Mr. Rollo Ogden's witty and, in the main, most sensi- ble contentions. It is, indeed, absurd to sup- pose that, after all the centuries of creation and experiment which lie between Parthenius and Rudyard Kipling, we are going to witness the evolution of some new and striking literary manner, some principle of constructive art that 6 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS no one has hitherto perceived, some tremen- dous cpocJieniacliend discovery that shall do for fiction what steam and electricity have done for mechanics, and that shall subtly harmonize with the material bigness and boisterousness of our native land. This vaguely fascinating dream has not, however, been altogether val- ueless. It has given the young brood of mag- azine-writers a theme of perennial interest, over which they can moult their literary pin- feathers at twenty dollars a page, and it has provided the American public with a pleasant if evanescent sensation perhaps once in every six months ; for at intervals of just about this length the joyous announcement has gone forth that now at last the American Novel has been written ; and then the literary tom-toms have been violently beaten, and every one in the Literary Shop has whooped it up so long as people could be induced to listen to the row, and until they have gone back again to the reading of English novels that are not constructed on a scientific theory or from pa- triotic motives, but are simply good, strong specimens of writing that grip the reader's at- tention, and make him willing and even eager to part with his money for more of the same sort. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 7 Therefore, in this sense of the word, one need not be looking for an American novel as distinct from an English or a French or a Scandinavian or an Italian or a Graeco-Roman novel. It may be assumed that the resources of fiction-writing are just as thoroughly well known as they ever will be ; that all the ap- pliances of the art have been discovered and tested long ago ; that no amount of taking thought wuU add a single item to the technical equipment which is at the service of every novelist to-day ; and that whenever a really great novel is produced, it is great because of the man behind the book, and not because of any fine-spun theory which the book itself ex- emplifies, A heaven-born artist does not spend the best years of his life in hunting up new col- ors for his palette. It is only a servant-maid who makes a poor pen an excuse for her bad spelling. And so in fiction - writing, if the vivida vis inflame the writer, it doesn't make the slightest difi'erence whether he is an Ideal- ist or a Romanticist or a Realist or a Natural- ist or a Symbolist or a Sensltivist or a happy combination of all six. If he have it in him to write an immortal novel he will write it, and that is all there is to it. Nevertheless, from another point of view, 8 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS one may truly speak of the American Novel as a thing apart, because of the great difficulty in the conditions that attend its successful composition. The American Novel, as we un- derstand it, is not to be a novel constructed on hitherto unheard-of lines, or by some new formula thoughtfully evolved by American writers ; but a novel that shall give an ade- quate and accurate delineation of the life that is lived only in this huge, loose-hung, colossus of a country — a kind of life to which the his- tory of the world affords no parallel whatever. When the Englishman or when the French- man sits down to write a novel, he has no djf- ficulty in getting his social mise en scene to suit him ; he need not, indeed, give it any particu- lar thought at all. The social system that he knows is one whose framework is definite, well ordered, compact, and perfectly intelligible even to the casual foreigner. Everything has its place ; everything is regulated and under- stood ; everything, in fact, is obvious and ex- plicable. His background is, in a way, already filled in, and it is only figure-painting that he has to do. But how strangely different is the case with one who seeks to fix upon his canvas a true impression of American life ! A vast kaleido- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 9 scopic mass of color lies before him, shifting and changing with every touch, a society in a fluid state, heterogeneous, anomalous, bizarre, and shot all through with a million piquant incongruities. The boundless wealth and the squalid poverty, the splendor and the crudity, the magnificence and the cheapness, the reck- lessness and the conservatism, the cynicism and the faith, the intellectual keenness and the unspeakable fatuity, the strong common- sense and the foolish gullibility, the defiant arrogance and the patient meekness, the com- mercial acuteness and the political stupidity — can any one bring out all these wonderful con- trasts in the national character, and yet pre- serve the slightest trace of verisimilitude and probability? And the strange medley of hu- manity — the washer- woman of the diggings blossoming out into the grandc dame who en- tertains kings and gives her daughters in mar- riage to princes, the young girl with her " chaste depravity," the emancipated woman, the canal-boy fighting his way to the headship of the nation, the keen-eyed business man who is to-day cornering the market and to-morrow haranguing the Senate and the day after bring- ing out an edition of a classic, the curious bits of foreign life and custom embedded in the WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS midst of an Anglo-Saxon people, and under- neath it all a great compact mass of strong and simple and conservative men and women, bearing up the rest and giving cohesion and stability to the whole structure. Any one can tell of all these things ; any one can sketch them separately and in detail ; but who is able and who will ever be able to give one luminous picture of them as a single entity, each in its true relation to the rest, with a sense of pro- portion and relativity, and in such a way as to make one see and feel the truth of it all ? No such problem ever before confronted the novelist ; yet it is not until this problem has been solved that the American Novel in its largest sense will have an actual existence. To begin with, there is not even such a thing as an American type. There is a New England type, and there is a Southern type, and there is a Far Western type ; but even these are not perfectly defined, but shade off into each other with many an imperceptible nuance, while between them lie all sorts of individual and quite distinctive groups which an American easily recognizes, even though he cannot so easily describe them. In no country in the world are there so many local points of differ- ence ; for not only are a Bostonian and a New- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS II Yorker and a Philadelphian and a Chicagoan and a San Franciscan essentially unlike, but there are distinctions quite as clearly though more subtly to be drawn between a Buffa- lonian and a Syracusan, between a Baltimorean and a Charlestonian, between a Peorian and a Topekan. These people do not even speak an absolutely identical language, but display such dialectic variations as make the differ- ence of habitat immediately perceptible to the ear of a native. It is only the self-satisfied Englishman who ignores all these bewildering complications. He, of course, with the smug complacency of his kind, will talk with half a dozen Americans, read a few American news- papers, and then introduce into his next novel a " Yankee heiress " or a " Senator from Mi- kewa " with characteristics evolved from the writer's inner consciousness, and speaking a dialect the like of which was never heard from the mouth of any human being, but which is far more grotesque than if an American nov- elist should represent an Englishman speak- ing a blend of Cockney jargon, Dublin Irish, Yorkshire dialect, Welsh patois, and Lowland Scotch. Yet though foreigners do not understand the complicated difficulties that beset the 12 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS one who tries to limn in a large way the life and attributes of the American people, our own writers are fully aware of them ; and hence it is that they have given us, in the main, not the American Novel, but novels written in America, which is a very different thing. It is not likely that any better work will be done than much of that which already reveals some of the strange nooks and corners of American life. No one, for example, could show a subtler knowledge of New England than Miss Wilkins brings to her intensely vital delineations ; no one will ever make us feel more intensely the spirit of the North- west than Mr. Hamlin Garland does ; no one will better draw the dull, raw life of the little towns of Central and Western New York than Mr. Harold Frederic ; no one will have a fuller understanding of certain phases of existence in the American metropolis than has Mr. Brander Matthews. But who is to come forth equip- ped with the knowledge and the insight and the vivid power necessary to draw the picture as a whole, and with a master's touch to fling before us the great national cosmos in its en- tirety — vital, convincing, real ? But, says some one, there is Mr. Howells ; and sure enourrh, if we errant that Mr. Howells WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 13 has not succeeded in this task, then so far no one has succeeded. Indeed, we might say a priori that Mr. Howells is the one living writer who by the circumstances of training, experience, and exceptional gifts ought to grapple successfully with the difficulties that have proved insurmountable to so many others. Born in one of the Central Western States at a time when these were still in the making, his most impressionable years were spent amid influences that gave him at first hand an inti- mate knowledge of American life in its evo- lutionary stage. In an intensely American community, among those who typified all the primitive American virtues of courage, indus- try, integrity, and thrift, he looked upon the nation-builders as they did their work, and drank in the subtlest understanding of that stratum of society which is the base of the whole gigantic system. And for his purpose it was lucky that he never had the academic training, which, though it sharpens the critical powers, too often narrows the sympathies and deadens the creative faculty. He lived his early years as one of the people, as a printer, as a newspaper reporter, recording continually his impressions, learning the art of writing in a school that teaches clearness, vividness, and 14 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS compression, and being all the time in touch with the multifarious types that daily flit be- fore the keen eye of the American journalist. In i860, with his appointment by President Lincoln as Consul to Venice, began the other side of his preliminary training. From the raw and unformed civilization of the West he passed at once to an environment that was absolutely antithetical, to an atmosphere per- meated with memories of old-time magnif- icence and eloquent of art — an atmosphere in- stinct with sensuous beauty, in which all sorts of exquisite half-tints become perceptible, and in which the mind awakens to subtle mean- ings and delicate discriminations. This curious change from Columbus to the Canalazzo, from the Muskingum to Malamocco, was of all things the most ideal as a phase in the train- ing of the literary artist. It gave to him a wholly different point of view, a new standard of comparison, a sense of values and of pro- portion, and enabled him to see more clearly and with a truer perspective the other life that he had left behind him. Returning to the United States, his experience was enlarged in still different surroundings when he took the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and for many years made one of the set which in those WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1 5 days stood for all that was refined and culti- vated in American letters. The circle of his experience was completed when he passed from Boston to New York and made his home in the cosmopolitan whirl of the American metropolis. An experience and a training such as these, the like of which are rare indeed, could scarce- ly fail to give to their possessor a marvellous power, if coupled with the requisite natural gifts. And Mr. Howells has these gifts. A quick eye for what is striking in individuals or in life, a wonderful photographic instinct for detail, a shrewd insight into human motive, a truly American perception of the ludicrous, a natural gift of language, a talent for crystalliz- ing in a phrase or an epithet the essential at- tribute of any subject, a Frenchman's rever- ence for le mot juste — all these superimposed upon an experience so broad as to be national rather than sectional, and with the advantage of an international point of view, may surely warrant one in saying what has just been said : that if Mr. Howells has not written the Ameri- can Novel, then no one else as yet has written it. And, indeed, whether he has written it or not, he has at any rate received a reward com- mensurate with his native gifts and his excep- l6 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS tional endowment. He is to-day the most em- inent of all living American men of letters. As a novelist he is one of the greatest that our country has yet produced. A new book from his pen is always regarded as an important literary event. His name is known and hon- ored wherever the English language is under- stood. But has he, as a matter of fact, suc- ceeded at any time in writing the American Novel and not merely clever novels of Ameri- can life written in America by an American ? It may, perhaps, at first sight seem fanciful, but there can really be little doubt that the limitations which have prevented Mr, Howells from attaining supreme success as a fiction- writer, and that have made his general theory of criticism and of life inadequate, are to be traced directly to certain circumstances which have already been narrated. The first is his long residence in Boston, and the second is his subsequent identification with New York. Naturally, a thesis such as this requires some specific elucidation and defence. One of these days a work will, perhaps, be written upon the topograpical aspects of liter- ature, and in it at least one long chapter will have to be devoted to the influence of Boston upon American letters. Everybody knows WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 17 what Boston is — one of the most interesting, and perhaps the most absolutely individual, of American cities. It has a distinctive character and a distinctive flavor that no one has ever failed to recognize. The character is decided- ly pronounced, and the flavor is a little tart, with something of what the Boston dialect would describe as a "tang"; but both are wholesome, and, in a way, agreeable. Boston shows us, in fact, almost the sole survival upon American soil of a purely English influence — an influence seen alike in the city's external appearance, in the temperament of its people, and in their intellectual characteristics. Yet this strong suggestion of England never recalls semi-cosmopolitan London with its multitudi- nous interests and its consciousness of contact with the whole wide world. It is rather a sug- gestion of Leicester mingled with Leeds and perhaps a dash of Edinburgh — in fact, of a community not directly in touch with anything beyond its own borders, but very self-centred and compact, and taken up wholly with its own concerns. Its colonialism stands out all over it with both the virtues and the defects of its quality. There are all the integrity of purpose, all the anxious uneasiness about " duty," the intense self-respect and self-reli- l8 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS ance of the New-Englander, the love of truth and justice, the independence and the recti- tude ; but there can be found also all the in- tolerance, all the narrowness, all the impene- trable complacency, and all the intellectual myopia of the provincial Englishman. Charles Reade, in one of his novels, gives a series of maps to illustrate the point of view of the average English squire. His own coun- ty is first depicted in a large, clear map, with its smallest localities carefully noted ; a second map shows England as a whole, about half as large ; then in a third map, drawn very small, is displayed the rest of the world covering a space of about the size of one's thumb-nail. Now this is precisely the way in which a true Bostonian would set forth respectively the town of Boston, the United States as a whole, and the rest of the world, if he were to ex- press his real feelings in terms of comparative cartography ; and it simply means that Bos- ton's true afifinities are not at all with the great cities of the earth, but with the provincial Eng- lish towns. It has their atmosphere to perfec- tion ; so that although we know, as a matter of fact, that its customs are in reality those of the civilized world at large, one never meets a Boston man without a certain vague, yet irre- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 1 9 pressible feeling that he probably dines at five o'clock in the afternoon, and has a sweet cham- pagne served with the fish. The truest expression of the Boston spirit in literature is undyingly preserved in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose claim to im- mortality is to be found above all in this, that he is the quintessence of Boston, which is in itself the quintessence of New England ; and both his foreign travel and his belief in his own cosmopolitanism only serve to give a more striking background to his intense provincial- ism, and to enhance its piquant flavor. In his verse we find much less to make us think of Hippocrene than of the "kag" of cider. The poetic draught substitutes for the sparkle of the vintage of Champagne the nip of the gin- ger that gives life to the home-brewed switchel. It is not the poet of tradition who in Holmes appears to be singing to us, but more often the village bard, whose verses appear with beautiful regularity in the left-hand upper cor- ner of the county newspaper, and who has his neat little copy of rhymes for every celebra- tion, from the dinner of the village fire-com- pany to the opening of the ladies' oyster-sup- per for the benefit of the Orthodox Church. In like manner, when we read certain passages 20 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of the Autocrat, we can shut our eyes and pass behind the ostensible personality of the au- thor to his real prototype — the country smarty whose reputation as a funny fellow draws a group of admiring rustics about him as he sits on a cracker-barrel in the village " store " and emits his jokes, pausing only to refresh him- self from a contiguous cheese, and to spit pro- fusely upon the cast-iron stove. It may be frankly conceded that the wit is genuine, though suggesting Italian vinegar rather than Attic salt ; but it is intensely local, and its similes and metaphors all smack of the cider- mill, the quilting-bee, the town-meeting, and the " vendue." The influence of long contact with a com- munity whose spirit is such as this must neces- sarily stimulate self-consciousness and an in- trospection that may easily become morbid in its intensity. Yet its effects might well be salu- tary to one whose own temperament lacked re- pression and subjectivity. Unfortunately, Mr. Howells already possessed these qualities in excess. Just as the late Edward Henry Palmer, though born of English parents and in an Eng- lish home, was, from the moment of his birth, in every essential respect an Arab, so Mr. Howells, though a native of Ohio, and sprung WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS 21 from Welsh stock, has always been essentially a New-Englander. The remarkable self-analy- sis of his early mentality which he has given us in A Boys Tozvii proves this beyond a doubt. It shows him even as a child to have been self-conscious, introspective, abnormally prone to dwell upon his own sensations and emo- tions, and to exaggerate them out of all pro- portion to their real importance. This is the true New England temperament, rooted in in- dividualism, pushing self-analysis to the point of torture, regarding details as of infinite sig- nificance, teaching that the part is greater than the whole, and robbing its possessor of a sense of true proportion. But to the literary artist, as to the philosopher, the sense of proportion is everything ; for it is the one sovereign anti- dote to provincialism, philistinism, and mor- bidity. It and a sense of humor are God's greatest gifts to man ; and the first of these He seems in His infinite wisdom to have de- nied to the typical New-Englander, who, in politics and religion and literature alike, out- does Protagoras in devotion to the doctrine that the individual is the measure of all things. That Mr. Howells, with New England traits already so sharply accentuated, should have been definitely and irrevocably stamped with 22 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS the New England influence, must therefore be regarded as a distinct misfortune to American literature ; for it has narrowed his marvellous gifts of delineation to a single sphere and made him the novelist of a section, when his genius might otherwise have become broadly nation- al. This consideration fully answers the ques- tion whether he has written the American Novel, for it shows that he has not ; that fate had determined that he should merely write the Novel of New England. This, indeed, he has actually done. He has given us a single novel that is really great, another that is near- ly great, and one absolutely perfect story ; and each of these is New England to the core. In A Modern Instance one sees what he might have achieved but for the overmaster- ing influence that has fettered and restricted his gifts of portraiture. This book differs es- sentially from the general run of American novels in its breadth and grasp and color, and especially in being free from a certain thinness that characterizes pretty nearly all the fiction produced in the United States. American novels almost invariably lack body and sub- stance. They have a high, dry, rarefied atmos- phere which may be very clear, but in which it is very difficult to breathe for any length WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 23 of time. They may possess more subtlety than one finds in an English novel, but they are afflicted with so advanced an anaemia that one always turns from them with a sense of relief to the strong, well-nourished work of the Eng- lishman who shows us bone and muscle and flesh and blood in place of mere nerves, with plenty of good port -wine and roast beef in- stead of angel-food and ether. But A Modern Instance has body to it, and color and move- ment and vitality. Nearly all of its characters are living, human beings, and not mere psycho- logical studies. It is for this reason that one can read and re-read the book, and find several of its personages dwelling forever after in his memory, as do the men and women whom we have known in life. Bartley Hubbard, for ex- ample, is as real as Mr. Howells himself ; and the proof of it is found in the fact that, in spite of his baseness and cheapness, we cannot refrain from feeling sorry for him and even at times from almost liking him, just as we feel sorry for him and almost like him when we meet him in our daily life. And Marcia and Kinney and Witherby and the old Squire are living beings, too. Mr. Howells has drawn them with more freedom and boldness than he often shows, and has given himself far less 24 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS concern about accumulating mere details. He has, moreover, in a measure cut loose from his own pet theory of fiction-writing. He has not scrupled to give us some fine dramatic touches after the manner of the Romanticists, and has even led us up to an intensely powerful climax in the scene where the quaintly pathetic figure of Squire Gaylord rises in the Western court- room and pleads for justice and for vengeance in the last words that he ever utters. And this is one of the things that make for genuine realism, because such striking scenes as these are not so rare in life as Mr. Howells some- times appears to think. Altogether, one can- not say too much of A Modern Instance. It bears the true stamp of genius, and it will live as long as anything that American literature can show ; for in it the writer stands aside and lets the action evolve itself before the reader's eye, and thus comes very near to meriting the tribute which Hawthorne gave to the Cyclo- pean art of Anthony Trollope when he said that in reading him it seems as though some giant had hewn out a great lump of English soil and set it down before us, with all the hu- man beings on it going about their affairs un- conscious of our observation. And this is just what Mr. Howells has done in A Modern In- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 25 stance, only it is out of the soil of New Eng- land that he has hewn the lump. TJie Rise of Silas Lapham is, as a whole, be- low the level of A Modern Instance, but it is still a masterly and memorable book. The character of Silas Lapham himself is by all odds the most remarkable piece of portraiture that Mr. Howells has ever done, and it is the only one that attains to the proportions of a broadly national type. The self-made man who works his way up the ladder of material prosperity was never more convincingly depicted ; and the portrait is one that is true of the native American everywhere, East as well as West. Rooted in the soil of the farm, this homely figure with its heaviness and gentleness, its simplicity and shrewdness, its rugged honesty and worldly wisdom, its uncouthness and na- tive humor, its quaint conceit and innocent pride tempered always with a hesitating self- depreciation, its eye to the main chance, and its haunting and remorseless conscientiousness — we see them all in this amusing yet pro- foundly touching creation, which is as vital as anything that human art has ever limned. The opening chapter where Lapham is interviewed by Bartley Hubbard for the Events, in the office of the "mineral-paint" manufactory, is 26 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS a miracle of condensed pictorial power, in which each word goes with swiftness and pre- cision to the mark. When we have finished it, we know the Colonel through and through in every stage of his career, and if the book had ended there, it would still have given to our native fiction a new and permanent pos- session. In TJie Lady of the Aroostook we have the most perfect story that American literature has yet produced. It is the height of literary art, for its finish is as exquisite as its design. One can re-read it a score of times, and always with a fresh enjoyment of its unerring insight and convincing truth, and of the delicate hu- mor that plays along its lines and heightens here and there the scenes of really unstudied emotion that are elsewhere so infrequent in our author's work. But the book is more than a perfect story ; it is a concrete illustration of a phase of American civilization, and one that could not be half so well explained in any other way. It depicts social conditions that to a foreigner are quite inexplicable, yet which an American understands so thoroughly that if he had not learned to know the foreign point of view, as Mr. Howells came to know it, it never would occur to him to set it forth in the form WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 27 of a story. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner has made a very admirable use of some of the Eng- lish criticism upon this book in showing how certain of the conditions of American life dif- fer toto ccslo from anything that a European can understand. That Lydia Blood, a girl from rural New England, and reared amid sur- roundings that are homely in the extreme, should have all the delicacy and dignity of a " lady," and that she should be considered by the writer and by the personages of the story to be a " lady," was as strange and improbable to the foreign critic as that on reaching Venice she should at once have taken with entire com- posure a lady's place in its society. One dwells with fondness on this charming story, which compresses within a hundred pages so much rare portraiture, so much sympathet- ic knowledge, and so many delicate literary graces. With the possible exception of Stan- iford, every single character in the book is drawn to perfection, from Ezra Perkins, who drives the Concord stage at South Bradfield, and Aunt Maria and Captain Jenness, to the curiously cosmopolitan circle of Mrs. Erwin's set at Venice — Miss Landini, who invokes im- partially the devil and the Deity in her con- versation, Rose - Black, the crawling English 28 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS artist, Henshavv Erwin with his passion for collecting Americanisms, and Lydia herself, a second Marcia Hubbard, but with finer traits. Every one of these is sketched in with a firm hand and the most artistic sense of con- trast ; and the changes of scene from South Bradfield to the ship, and from the ship to Venice, give a fascinating and varied back- ground for the movement of the story. The last three or four pages would alone be sufifi- cient to make a lasting reputation for their author, so perfect is the finish of the picture where Staniford, after marrying Lydia, goes with her to visit her old home at South Brad- field in the midst of winter. Mr. Howells has caught the exact feeling of the scene, the peo- ple, and the atmosphere, and each successive stroke so artfully heightens the effect that in reading one almost cries out with wonder and delight. The prim house walled in by snow- banks, the social evening with the minister and his wife, which Aunt Maria, after passing coffee and sponge-cake, felt to be so brilliant as to be almost wicked, and, above all, the symbolis- tic parlor-lamp of pea-green glass with a large red woollen wick — that parlor-lamp alone is a sufficient claim to immortality, for its glow, somehow or other, makes the whole life and WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 29 aspect of South Bradfield perceptible at a glance. The remembrance of this story heightens one's regret that among all the other work that Mr. Howells has given us, nothing else is found quite worthy of being set beside it ; for as time went on the spell of Boston grew stronger and stronger upon him, and we find less and less of the comparative freedom and spaciousness that appear in the three fine books that we have just enumerated. Individualism marked him for its own. He began to abuse his gift of observation. Instead of going always swiftly and unerringly to the very heart of things, he sometimes seemed to consider it sufficient to accumulate a multiplicity of trivial details and to let a microscopic fidelity take the place of a broader sympathy. The keenness of vision involved in some of his details is almost star- tling, but in the end this sort of thing defeats its own purpose, for the reader is so astonished by the photographic accuracy of the observer, that his attention is distracted from the march of events, and he can think only of how very clever Mr. Howells is. In other words, the brill- iancy of the novelist casts into a semi-shadow the evolution of the novel, and Mr. Howells is the fatally successful rival of his own creations. 30 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS It is precisely in this respect that Thackeray too often suffers in comparison with Dickens ; for although his art is infinitely greater, it is not always the art that conceals itself, but an art that is too consciously exposed to the read- er's view. Thus when Dickens takes us with Pecksniff into Mrs. Todgers's immortal lodging- house, we actually go there. We snuff the sickly gushes of soup with our own noses, we see with our own eyes the worn-out floor-cloth and the table with its splashes of gravy, we hear with our own ears the convivial wit of Mr. Jinkins and the other commercial gentle- men, and for the moment Dickens has nothing to do with it at all. But when Thackeray de- scribes the similar Didnage of the Gann family in A Shabby Genteel Story, it is not we who see it for ourselves, but it is Thackeray who is telling us what he has seen. We are kept in a constant state of admiration over the ex- traordinary accuracy of his vision. He is al- ways present in his own person ; and, just as Mr. George Brandon reported it all to the Vis- count Cinqbars, so Thackeray reports it to us and in a somewhat similar spirit, with a con- stant appeal to " the principle in us that sniffs." It is all very brilliant ; but Mr. Howells has himself admitted that it has its defects ; that WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 3 1 it is too sophisticated ; and that if, by compar- ison, the magic of Dickens be rough magic and wholly elemental, it is at least grandly ele- mental and deals with larger moods than those that respond merely to tastes and preferences. So it is that all of Mr. Howells's novels, ex- cept the ones already noted as exceptions, are permeated with this suggestion of his own in- dividuality, and with that excessive elabora- tion which prevents us from seeing the wood by reason of the trees. The writer stands be- tween us and his books. Moreover, though the details of his work may be often remarkably characteristic and typical, their combination is not necessarily either characteristic or typ- ical ; and while his personages may be indi- vidually realistic, in combination they are of- ten quite unreal in that they show no life and movement and spontaneity. One is reminded by them of a painting in which every figure is admirably finished, but in which, neverthe- less, the effect of the whole is stiff and wood- en. Mr. Howells's gallery, in other words, contains an immense array of careful sketches, but only a very few successful pictures. And this is why of his later books even the most conscientious reader retains only a shadowy and confused impression. The titles and scenes 32 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS and plots (so far as there are any plots discern- ible) are all blurred and jumbled together ; and just a few strongly drawn individual portraits stand out in a hopeless if splendid isolation. One recalls the striking figure of the embezzler Northwick in The Quality of Mercy, wherein one scene is matchless in its psychology ; the gawky youth in The Minister s Cliarge ; Helen Harkness, the intensely Bostonian type of girl in A Woina7is Reason, who thinks that " the Indian trade" confers an aristocratic cachet ; and possibly Clara Kingsbury, though one may express a conscientious doubt whether even in Boston the ladies of the Brahminical set are wont to speak of their "gentleman friends;" but what befell these persons the present writer, at least, is unable to recall ; and he has found it necessary, at the present time, in every case to search through his collection of Mr. Howells's books in order to be quite cer- tain that he has assigned each character men- tioned to its proper source. The individual note is heard with even great- er clearness in our author's literary criticism, for here it has appeared to him unnecessary to do much more than state his own opinions with a dogmatism which is not less real because it is so often mingled vv^ith felicitous phrases WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 33 and spiced with bits of epigram. Within the last two or three years, in fact, he has begun to issue books whose very titles — My Literary Passiojis and Impressions and Experiences — quite frankly indicate how purely personal to himself his judgments are. In these books we are told not only what opinions he has formed, but the exact circumstances under which he came to form them ; who first led him to read this and that ; whether he was at home or at his uncle's when he made his first acquaintance with an author ; that he was shelling peas when he first heard of Don Quixote ; that it was his elder brother who introduced him to Captain Marryat ; with an infinite deal of sim- ilar personal detail continuously presupposing that the reader must regard these incidental facts as of extreme importance. In his latest volume he even devotes some thirty or forty pages to the chronicle of his personal experi- ences with beggars. In another writer this would be egoism of a gigantic growth ; but in Mr. Howells it is only the individualism of the New-Englander ex- pressing itself in terms of literary criticism. Yet to this sort of thing is due a good deal of the exasperation that some of Mr. Howells's opinions have excited ; for while they are sim- 3 34 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS ply the personal views of an individual, they are sometimes put forth as though they were meant to found a school of criticism and to abolish the canons that have been built upon the intellectual experience of centuries. It is all very well for Mr. Howells, as an individ- ual, to thrust Romanticism into his ash-barrel, as being nothing but a piece of literary junk ; but when he sets up as a master of criticism, the matter comes to be of more importance, and one may then quite reasonably question alike his authority and his critical capacity. A critic who prefers Realism to Romanticism is well within his rights ; but when he would hoot Romanticism out of existence altogether simply because it does not happen to appeal to him, then we may properly suspect him of a defective equipment. The curious thing about Mr. Howells is that he makes his own inability to appreciate certain phases of litera- ture an additional claim upon our attention. Thus, in the chronicle of his literary passions, he heads a chapter with the name of Scott, apparently for the sole purpose of telling us, as he does, that though he has read Scott's novels, he did so wholly from a sense of duty, and that little or nothing of them remains with him at the present time. Now when a literary WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 35 critic comes forward and declares that he has found nothing touching and tender in the char- acter of Jeanie Deans, nothing humorous in the portrayal of Andrew Fairservice, nothing im- pressively terrible in the story of Ravenswood, nothing breathlessly exciting in the unravel- ling of Bertram's weird, and nothing that stirs the blood like a trumpet-call in the splendid pictures of chivalry that stud the pages of Ivanhoe, and yet in the same breath announces that Mr. J.W. De Forest is one of the greatest of living novelists, then we may rightly liken such a critic to a person who assures us of his own ability as a judge of painting, and cites as one of his chief qualifications the fact that he is color-blind, and cannot tell blue from green. It is obvious that one so sensitive as Mr. Howells to external impressions must be sen- sibly affected by his environment ; and here, I think, is found an explanation of the com- parative inferiority of many of his later novels. This brings us to the second part of our origi- nal thesis — the effect upon his genius and its expression of his final removal from Boston to New York. One might argue, adducing the facts already set forth, that this change was precisely the thing needed to counteract the 36 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS excessive individuality and concentration of his literary methods. But this line of argu- ment leaves out of sight, first, the fact that the change was made only after Mr. How- ells's formative period was over, and that hence it occurred too late ; and it ignores, in the second place, the peculiar influence which New York exerts upon the typical Bos- tonian. It was long ago remarked by some superfi- cial observer that New York is in reality not an American city at all ; and the saying has been so constantly repeated by those who ought to have known better, that it has come to be regarded as axiomatic in its truth. But as a matter of fact, nothing could be more absolutely false ; for, apart from some of its external characteristics. New York is the most truly American city in existence — the only city that has assimilated and moulded into a whole all the attributes of our people, blend- ing them so perfectly as to yield for a result not a Northern or a Southern or an Eastern or a Western product, but one that is simply and typically American. And in doing this it has happily eliminated one quality that is else- where the bane of the American temperament — the quality of self-consciousness. For in its WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 37 own way the self -consciousness of Chicago, for example, is as marked as the self-conscious- ness of Boston, only the manifestation of it is different. Boston, being the old maid of American cities, displays the self-consciousness of primness ; while Chicago, the hobbledehoy of American cities, is troubled by the self-con- sciousness of overgrowth, and, so to speak, is always concerned as to what to do with its feet and hands, and troubled by the uneasy consciousness that its legs are far too long ; while if it wishes to speak impressively, its voice flies off the handle and ends in a falsetto squeak. In either city the individual is the unit of the whole, and is always sure of his own importance. But New York, whose quality is greatness rather than mere bigness, takes no account of the individual, and the individual knows it. The giant forces that are here at play are too vast for any one to control. They act and react with such a mighty sweep and power as to dwarf the individual altogether, who resembles a tiny bird that has built its nest in the beam of some colossal engine. It knows the movements of the great machine, it does not dread it, and it even comes to love it for its tremendous energy; but it would no more think of trying to direct or check it than 38 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS one of us would think of bridling a cyclone or staying the plunge of a water-spout. In the sphere of civics the immensity of this great Weltstadt has its disadvantages, but from every other point of view it is wonderful and inspiring. No single influence can affect it. No great university can ever leaven it as Har- vard has leavened Boston ; no great literary movement can ever make an impression on it ; no wave of religious excitement can ever spread through all its channels; no political cataclysm can disorganize the play of its co- lossal forces. Men of commanding influence and national reputation come to New York, and take their places meekly far down the line ; an invading army would be run in by the po- lice. The giant swallows everything, takes ev- erything to itself, and then moves on uncon- scious of it and unchanged. Nothing can be more inspiring to one who knows it well, and who exults in the largeness and power and magnificence of it all. But the effect of it upon the Bostonian born is very curious. Catch a typical Bostonian and suddenly transfer him to the heart of Brooklyn, or Philadelphia, or New Orleans, or San Francisco, or even of Chicago, and while he will recognize the unfamiliarity of his new WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 39 environment, it will not interfere with his en- joyment. He is still an important individual ; he is still some one to be reckoned with ; and those who meet him will appreciate the fact because they, too, are important individuals who count. But plump him down in the mid- dle of New York, and the difference is star- tling. A great bewilderment comes over him. He feels that he has somehow got out of his own snug little corner into a great whirl that bewilders him and makes him dizzy. He is uneasily conscious that he has been dwarfed to a mere human atom ; his complacency van- ishes ; he knows that his importance has shrunk into nothingness, and he doesn't like it. He resembles a small mouse that has crept timidly out into a vast hall, and then, appalled by the unwonted vista, scuds back to its hole with squeaks of genuine dismay. Mr. Howells has himself expressed this feel- ing in Their Wedding Journey, when Basil March and Isabel, fresh from the city of the triple mountain, stand before Grace Church and gaze up and down Broadway. And he has, in spite of himself, distilled the same feel- ing into those books of his that, written under the oppression of his new environment, convey something of that oppression to his readers' 40 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS minds. In A Hazard of New For times and TJic World of CJiance one finds no more the unforced humor and the cheerful spontaneity of his earlier novels. He has become melan- choly, and with the true New England sense of duty, he has begun to feel that he has a "mission." It was in New York, apparently, that Mr. Howells made the discovery that while there are in the world people who have plenty of money, there are also people who haven't any at all to speak of ; that there are people who are harshly used by their employers, people who are often ill, people who live in squalid tenements — people, in a word, who are unhap- py through no fault of their own. To a phil- osophical observer these and other facts of the kind discovered by Mr. Howells are hardly so pathetic as the thoroughly ;^«z/" surprise with which Mr. Howells suddenly became conscious of their existence ; and fully as pathetic also is the generous but quite inartistic impulse that has led him to spoil his novels in order to impart to others some knowledge of his discovery. For as soon as he began to write stories with an obvious Tcndcnz and perme- ated with all the uneasiness of the Bostonian who is consciously out of his element, the lit- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 4I erary quality of his work deteriorated in a per- ceptible manner. Who can recall anything of the two books just named except squalor, and unhappiness, and cheap eating-houses, and commonplace characters of all grades of fatu- ity, and a general feeling that the author evi- dently thinks the times are out of joint ? And so, doubtless, they are, and always were, for that matter; but Mr. Howells is not going to set them right by publishing vague pictures of Altruria, and asperging all of us with his diluted slops of Socialism. For everything will go on precisely as before ; and all that he will have accomplished will be the transforma- tion of a great literary artist into a gloomy and ineffectual Bellamy. But the depression which has grown upon Mr. Howells in the past few years has extend- ed beyond his view of existing social condi- tions, and has been formulated into a semi- pessimistic theory of life. This phase of his thought finds its fullest expression in his verse, some of which is really remarkable in its condensed expression of a sort of won- dering despair, poignant and terrible. No single poem better reveals this state of mind than the following from his Stops of Various Quills: 42 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS " I was not asked if I should like to come, I have not seen my host here since I came, Or had a word of welcome in his name. Some say that we shall never see him, and some That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know Why we were bid. How long I am to stay I have not the least notion. None, they say, Was ever told when he should come or go, But every now and then there bursts upon The song and mirth a lamentable noise, A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys Dumb in our breasts ; and then, some one is gone. They say v/e meet him. None knows where or when. We know we shall not meet him here again." And there comes up continually his old lament over the inequality that everywhere marks the lot of man. The sight of poverty makes him shudder, and the sight of riches makes him shudder, too. He draws us a picture of a gay company dancing among scarlet flowers to the sound of music, and then he goes on : " I looked again and saw that flowery space Stirring as if alive, beneath the tread That rested now upon an old man's head And now upon a baby's gasping face. Or mother's bosom, or the rounded grace Of a girl's throat ; and what had seemed the red Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed From hearts that broke under that frolic pace. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 43 And now and then from out the dreadful floor An arm or brow was lifted from the rest, As if to strike in madness, or implore For mercy ; and anon some suffering breast Heaved from the mass and sank ; and as before The revellers above them thronged and prest." Mr, Howells has, indeed, learned rather late in life a great fact which men, in general, ap- prehend after a very few years of observation. He has discovered that justice does not enter into the scheme of our existence here. And this is true. There is faith and there is truth, there are charity and chastity and honesty, but in all the world (speaking more hianano) there is no such thing as justice. And this discovery startles and appalls him, for here again his in- dividualism robs him of a sense of true propor- tion. It is the old New England trait, and it must be admitted that in religion and philoso- phy it is almost universal among men, though quite unreasoning and absurd. It is the con- viction of the individual that in the great plan of the universe he himself, his feelings, and his fate are of some importance. Doubtless, for instance, if Mr. Howells thinks that the narra- tive of his having given half a dollar to a beg- gar is of sufficient interest to the world at large to be preserved in several pages of printed text, 44 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS he also thinks that the question of his eternal welfare attains an importance of inconceivable vastness. But all this sort of feeling, so com- mon in popular religious discussion, most curi- ously fails to recognize the infinite littleness of the individual and of the world itself. There are some who, giving law to the Deity, tell us that the loss of a single soul would be a ca- lamity so appalling as to be quite inconceiva- ble ; but in reality if all the men and women who ever lived upon this earth and who ever will inhabit it were swept into Gehenna at a stroke, what would be the real importance of it among the myriads of vigintillions of greater and more glorious worlds that swarm amid the infinity of space ? Suppose that once upon a time, thousands of years ago, in a far -dis- tant quarter of our globe something once went wrong with a mote in a sunbeam ; this would not be a very vital fact in the history of the world. Yet it would really be relatively of far more importance than, in its relation to the whole infinite universe, would be the annihi- lation of the mote of a world itself with all the human atoms that breed and die upon it. Why, even in his own country and among his own kind, the individual does not count. Let him be racked with pain or tortured by all the WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 45 agony that mind and body can endure, and if he will but stand in his doorway he will see the little children laughing in the sunshine and hear the cackle of men and women to whom he is not even so much as a name. Or, like Ivan Ilyitch, he may lie hopeless and alone, watching his life ebb hourly away, and no one will really care. His wife, who loves him and whom he loves, will feel no more than a fleet- ing sorrow ; his child, whom he has watched and cherished from its birth, will never under- stand his anguish ; and both of them in the end will half resent an affliction that acts as a check upon their harmless pleasures. Nor can the individual cry out against this as a wrong, for God has willed it, and what He wills is right. The trouble with Mr. Howells is that he is a pessimist who has as yet learned only the al- phabet of pessimism. His eyes are opened to the truth, yet he still hopes on, and hence is torn with endless doubts. In speaking of one author he says : "While I read him I was in a world where right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in this world ; and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life, untram- melled by economic circumstances." 46 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS But there can really be no permanent halt- ing-place between optimism and pessimism ; and he who, like Mr. Howells, is pessimistic only up to a certain point lives in an inferno of his own creation ; for he sees the evils of ex- istence and is yet tormented by a hope that never can be realized. Therefore, if one would be at peace, he should be frankly either a con- sistent optimist or a profound pessimist ; for it is a mistake to suppose that the pessimist is unhappy. He is not. He is simply one who has no illusions, and who has once for all ac- cepted the inevitable. " He that is down need fear no fall ;" and when we come to recognize the fact that the very worst has happened to us in being born, we can share the cheerful- ness of him for whom this life has no surprises. Nor, however dark the world may appear to him, does he wish to leave it. His philosophy is that of the sagacious Greek who taught with great persuasiveness the doctrine that life is no better than death, but who, when one of his auditors asked him why, if life be no better than death, he did not hasten to leave it, re- plied, " Because death is no better than life." And, in fact, this is somewhat less than the entire truth, for it is always possible that death may be even worse than life. However firmly WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 47 we may hold to the teachings of religion, we can never escape the feeling that haunted the great Apostle to the Gentiles when he ex- pressed the fear that even after he had done everything he might still perchance become a castaway. One may live up to such light as he possesses, yet he can never quite be sure that his little all will be acceptable, or that when the time arrives for the dissolution of the ties that bind the body and the soul, the sentient part of him may not be doomed to go forth shuddering into infinite loneliness and everlasting gloom. Hence, the true pessimist is not concerned with little things or with the multifarious evils that he sees about him. He knows that noth- ing can be done ; that, suffer as he may, he cannot help himself; and that in the universal scheme it really doesn't matter. Therefore his mind is untrammelled by the cares and the anxieties that beset his fellows. If he hopes for nothing, he also fears nothing, and he alone can see the real unimportance of all human cares. Physical pain may torture him, bereavement may wring his heart and force from him a cry of anguish; yet even then he can perceive the underlving humor of it all, the uselessness of complaint when one is spitted on the skewer 48 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of destiny like a fly impaled upon a pin. So he schools himself to patience, and strives to acquire, not the sullen apathy of the Stoic, but the splendid ataraxy that Epicurus taught. Imbued with this, and knowing that whatever may befall him there is nothing that can hap- pen otherwise than God has willed it, he meets the events of life with calm composure, look- ing upon them all with an unruffled front, and with something of the divine serenity that marks the life of the immortal gods. In this short chapter, then, there have been briefly indicated what seem to be the salient points in the work of Mr. Howells — his artist- ry, his power of delineation, his mastery of de- tail, and his unerring keenness of observation ; and, on the other hand, the limitations that arise from too great subtlety, from lack of ob- jectivity, and from an imperfectly developed philosophy of life. Were it within the scope of this paper to dwell upon his personality, much more might well be said; but it is un- necessary. Every one who knows his work can feel how fine a nature lies behind it, how much love of truth and justice, how much charity, how much devotion to all that is best and noblest ; and every one who knows the man himself can tell of his unassumincf kindli- WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 49 ness, of his generosity to young writers who have still their spurs to win, and of all the traits that make his character so winning and so truly typical of the high-minded American gentleman. MARCEL PREVOST MARCEL PREVOST M. Marcel Prevost is a very interesting figure in the contemporaneous records of French literature. Making his first appear- ance as an author only seven or eight years ago with two not very successful books, he has since then reached the position of a writer whose popularity places him among the very first of Parisian novelists. His books run into forty, fifty, or sixty editions within a few months of their first publication, and they have at last become a topic of discussion in England, where Mr, Andrew Lang has lately been considering their author's merits ; while the only productions of his that have as yet been rendered into English have appeared in this country within the past two years. M. Prevost did not have long to wait for critical recognition — a fact that in itself bears striking testimony to the character of his liter- ary workmanship ; for in a country where the level of artistic excellence is so very high, and 54 MARCEL PREVOST where the critics, as a matter of duty, look coldly upon the productions of a young and aspiring writer who has still to show that he possesses something more than superficial cleverness and certain interesting tricks of style, it is not easy to attract the serious notice of a literary Rhadamanthus. M. Pre- vost's third novel, however, Mile. JaiifrCy which appeared in 1890, gained at once the attention of no less an authority than Jules Lemaitre, who praised the book most warmly in his Impressions Litteraircs ; while La Con- fession d'mi Amant, which was published in the following year, broke through even the austere reserve with which M. Ferdinand Brunetiere regards contemporary writers, and forced from him a cautiously uttered though very genuine note of admiration. L Aiitomne d'une Feinme, a subtle study of the woman whose grande passion comes to her only after the age of thirty years, deepened the impres- sion made by its immediate predecessors. Then followed M. Prevost's first great popu- lar success in two volumes of short stories, entitled respectively Lcttrcs dc Fcvimes and Nouvelles Lettrcs de Fevivics, which had an immense and instantaneous vogue, as did a somewhat similar collection entitled Notre MARCEL PREVOST 55 Compagne, whose fortieth edition was an- nounced within three months after the vol- ume first saw the light. A writer who in eight short years has won alike the commendation of the critics and the attention of the public is certainly deserving of some serious consideration. His own coun- trymen have compared him with George Sand and with M. Paul Bourget ; and there are, in- deed, some striking points of close resemblance in his work to that of these two writers ; but in each case the comparison, in part at least, does something less than justice to M. Pro- vost. His style, indeed, has much in common with the style of Mme. Dudevant. It has her great facility and charm ; and, too, her literary watchward " idealize, idealize," is also his, as he himself declared not very long ago ; but with him this fluency does not, as hers did, pass into fluidity, while the touch of ideality is never for an instant suffered to obscure that clear impression of the actual which is as well sustained by him as by the stoutest champions of realism. For his conception of idealism makes it to be not so much a thing apart from real life and quite beyond it, as an essential feature of that life itself. Thus, in a paper on Romanticism, he asserts for the Romantic 56 MARCEL PREVOST a lasting place in the sum of human life, a place in close association with the sphere of the emotions, of the passions, and of the im- agination. And in this he is far wiser than Mr. Howells, for instance, who, while kindly- granting to the Romantic an actual existence in our psychical and even in our material ex- perience, does hold it to be so utterly excep- tional as to rule it out of literary use and make it only the rouge and raddle of a meretricious art — a view of which, I think, each human life, if fully known, could prove the falsity. No less injustice is, in my opinion, done by any hard and fast comparison of M. Prevost's work with that of M. Paul Bourget. Both writers are extremely psychological, but with a difference. M. Bourget is psychological and little else. His novels, while their exposi- tion of conflicting motives is most curiously keen, and while he can pursue it through all its convolutions and tortuous complications, are nevertheless, or rather for this very reason, at times distinctly tedious. They often seem almost to have the character of laboratory demonstrations, and one's head often aches as he labors through their fine-spun mazes of analysis. But M. Prevost, while also very subtle, does not make his psychological stud- MARCEL PRKVOST 57 ies so portentous, nor spin them out to such a grievous length. He rather, by a few master- ly and incisive touches, throws a vivid light into the very heart of a situation, reveals as by a flash a mental attitude, and thus accom- plishes whatever M. Bourget can accomplish with all his slow accumulation of detail. It may be that M. Bourget's psychology is more profound ; but it is certain that M. Prevost's is much better held in hand, and that his use of it is far more consonant with literary art. It helps, in other words, his purpose ; it does not constitute that purpose. It is with him a means and not an end. In fact, if I were asked to name a modern writer as being one to whom M. Prevost is in his workmanship most closely kin, I should unhesitatingly choose out Guy de Maupassant. M. Prevost possesses the same swift, definite, and unerring manner, the same compactness, the same muscular grasp upon his material, the same deft touch and lucid presentation. Yet here, again, one must at once begin to qualify. In spite of a most striking super- ficial likeness, the spirit of the two is not the same. M. de Maupassant was saturated with the joyless pessimism of modern France. His cynical acceptance of the darkest side of 58 MARCEL PREVOST life as wholly normal, his torturing, agonizing hopelessness, the moral gloom of his horizon, the grim despair that, as one reads his work, sink down upon the heart like an overpower- ing weight — all these are alien to the pages of Marcel Prevost. For he is not, in many of his moods, a Frenchman of the modern school, but rather a reversion to an earlier type, the Frenchman of the sixteenth century, the ^(7z7- lai'd, the gaj^ adventurer, witty and gallant, convinced that he is wholly irresistible, and with a roguish eye wide open for some bonne fortune. This spirit is most clearly seen in his short stories, than which no better illustration of the esprit Gaiilois can be found ; and here the temperamental contrast and also the sty- listic likeness are most readily observed. Nor can one say, in opposition to this view, that Maupassant has also lighter moods and even moments of true tenderness, as shown respec- tively in La Patronne, that most audacious story of a young (ftndiant de droit, and in Le Pere dc Simon. For the difference lies just here : when Maupassant is simply droll or simply tender, he is not really at his best, while Prevost is. The finest work of Mau- passant is never seen in tales like these, but in such bits of concentrated cynicism as Un MARCEL PREVOST 59 Sage and Boulc de Snif; while Provost's gen- ius is most happy in those witty and ingenious talcs, of which La Mc'daillc and La Nuit de Rayvwnde are typical illustrations ; and when he takes a turn at cynicism he is distinctly ill at ease and less artistic. A critical comparison of the novels of the two will lead one to the same conclusion. Take, for example, Maupassant's powerful but quite repulsive Bel Ami and read it side by side with Prevost's L Autovine d'une Fcinme. In Bel Ami is shown a world of absolute and utter baseness, a world of prostitutes and scoundrels. Not one of all its characters is anj'thing but vile, from the hero of the book (a sorry hero) to the nymphomaniac Clotilde de Marelle, and Mme. Walter, and her sly, pre- cocious daughter Suzanne. This unrelieved depravity, as Mr. Henry James has pointed out, is really inartistic ; for the very effect which the writer apparently desires to pro- duce would have been more strikingly attain- ed had he availed himself of the aid of con- trast and drawn his darkest figures on a lighter background ; and furthermore, the mind in- stinctively revolts from the inherent falsity of such a picture, feeling at once that if man- kind and womankind had really sunk so low as 6o MARCEL PREVOST this, society could not be held together for a single day. Far different is the moral and artistic atti- tude of M. Pr6vost in L Automne d' une Femme. It may be said that this fine novel, by far the best its author has produced, is one whose story is extremely sad ; and this is true. But sadness is a thing far different from horror and despair; and neither horror nor despair finds any place in the melancholy half-light of this searching study. It tells, to summarize it very "briefly, of a charming and pure-minded woman, Julie Surgere, married, or rather sold, as a young girl to a repellent brute, who pres- ently is stricken by a strange disease that makes of him a living corpse. The years go on, and at last the son of one of her husband's part- ners, Maurice Artoy, a young man, crosses her path. She nurses him through an illness, and in- sensibly drifts into a tender and self-sacrificing love for him, a love that is her first. But she is much older than he, and in time he is attracted by the fresher beauty of a young girl, Claire Esquier, the daughter of another partner, and an inmate of her own home. The elder wom- an, who is fond of Claire, and who sees that Maurice every day is growing colder, renounces him and all her dreams of happiness, and lets MARCEL PREVOST 6l him marry her unconscious rival, while she herself suffers in silence and looks forward to a life of sorrow and self-abnegation. The treatment of this theme is the antithesis of anything that can be found in Maupassant. The hero of the book, Maurice Artoy, is, to be sure, as disagreeable as any of Maupassant's creations. He is a sentimental sensualist, and, if possible, is more repulsive even than Georges Duroy in Bel Ami — Duroy the thorough-paced blackguard, the sublimation of a type that finds its genesis in the viaqncrcau of the Faubourg St. Antoine. But Artoy's baseness and his selfishness serve only to bring out in strong relief the truth and beauty of the other char- acters — of Claire, the innocent young girl, her father Jean Esquier, the soul of honor and fidel- ity, and Julie Surgere herself, loving wrong- fully, indeed, but with a love which is more than half maternal, and whose sacrifice con- signs her to a life of sorrow that expiates her fault. There is passion here, and there is sin ; but there are also remorse and repentance and an infinite tenderness. Nothing could be more admirable than the self-restraint with which M. Prevost has managed the develop- ment of the theme, and nothing more delicate than the art that finds expression in this novel, 62 MARCEL PREVOST which as the study of a love outworn need not avoid comparison with George Sand's great masterpiece, Lucrezia Floriani. From what has now been said it can be readily inferred what are the leading qualities that give M. Prevost his marked distinction: a nearly perfect style, a very subtle insight into all the workings of the human mind, and a touch of ideality that differentiates his work from that of the uncompromising realists who ignore the one thing that is wanting to breathe life into their creations and make them truly vital and convincing. His minor literary virt- ues are equally conspicuous. Some one has said of the modern pessimistic school in fic- tion, whose foremost representative to-day is Gabriele D'Annunzio, that they are afraid to be amusing; and to this generalization M. Prevost is a most agreeable exception. A rare and irresistible drollery abounds in nearly all his lesser fiction ; and even his most cynical tales are lightened and relieved by a brilliant wit that is very far to seek in most of his con- temporaries. His ingenuity and intellectual dexterity are also most surprising ; so that one's breath is often taken quite away by the unexpectedness and audacity of his invention. Sometimes, again, he touches on the sphere of MARCEL PREVOST 63 the mysterious and occult, and then his art re- calls the art of Poe, as in La Demoiselle au Chat d'Or, a curiously weird conception whose power is enhanced by the simplicity and re- straint of the form in which the narrative is cast. It must, of course, be understood that what has just been said of M. Prevost's work is said of what is best in all that work. He has undoubtedly at times sunk far below his higher level, and has put his name to things that bear the marks of unadulterated medioc- rity. Two general criticisms have been lev- elled at him and may very briefly be consider- ed here. The first is one that equally applies to Maupassant and many others of the writers of French fiction. The very French and, to an Anglo-Saxon mind, unpardonable freedom that he often gives himself in his selection of a theme, makes many of his works, and nearly all his shorter stories, quite impossible for any but a Frenchman to admire without a qualm. With him the eonte leste touches on the very limits of audacity and unreserve ; and even the most hardened reader of contemporary conti- nental fiction is sometimes startled by the un- expected daring of his fancy. Yet this much may at least be said in his 64 MARCEL PREVOST behalf. He never, like M. de Maupassant, descends to any coarseness or offensiveness of phrase, but writes invariably in language whose discretion and extraordinary delicacy in part redeem his subject from that grossness and offensiveness which in the hands of any purely naturalistic writer it would certainly possess. In all that he has published, not a single page exists so thoroughly detestable as Maupassant's La Femme de Paul, of which the hideous brutality is fitly matched by its inartis- tic crudity of treatment. In Prevost's little story called An Caharet\\\Q same theme is just touched upon, yet the difference in the hand- ling is remarkable. The underlying thought is one that no Anglo-Saxon would ever for a moment dream of using as the basis of a story ; but in Prevost's hands it is a mere suggestion rather than a boldly voiced motif ; and the tale itself, in spite of its essential impropriety, leaves on the mind no lingering taint, but rather, by the artful use of contrast, a strong impression of the power of innocence and of the lurking good that lingers somewhere even in the loathliest. And so in all his work there can be found a glimpse, a hint, of something better, a certain humanity and warmth that save the writer and the reader, too, from an MARCEL PREVOST 65 unmitigated cynicism. Nor should one fail to note that some of his most perfect writing is morally impeccable. He has written several short stories that are as pure in thought as they are exquisite in literary finish, and these display, as in a drop of crystal, all his finest gifts — his power of compression, his unerring insight into character, his humor, his sym- pathy, and his moving pathos. Besides the censure of the moralist, how- ever, M. Pr6vost has often had to meet an- other criticism which, from the artistic point of view, is far more serious. Not long ago I said to a distinguished critic who had spoken rather slightingly of Prevost's work : " What is the real reason for your prejudice against Provost ? Why will you not admit his right to rank with Maupassant ?" And he replied : " Because I feel that Maupassant is quite sincere and that Provost is not." This confident assertion of his " insincerity" is rather common among the critics of Prevost, though less, I think, in France than in this coun- try, where it has almost become a formula. It rests, in my opinion, wholly on a desultory and imperfect knowledge of his writings. In the case of the critic who has just been quoted, a 5 66 MARCEL PREVOST further conversation showed that he had never read a single one of Prcvost's longer novels, nor even all his shorter stories ; and he very frankly said that his opinion was largely the result of some casual conversation with Pre- vost himself. How thoroughly unfair is any judgment formed in such a fashion, one scarce- ly needs to say. As a matter of fact, this un- favorable opinion in general is chiefly due to the bad impression produced by a single novel of Prevost's, Lcs Devii-Vicrges. It is, indeed, unfortunate that of all his writings this was the first to be rendered into English. It is still more unfortunate that he ever wrote it at all, for it is entirely unworthy of his genius. A bit of pure sensationalism and distorted psy- chology, untrue to life and quite offensive in its treatment, it shows the writer at his very worst, and strikes a thoroughly discordant note. Whoever judges him by this may read- ily be pardoned for ranking him with writers like Adolphe Belot and Paul Ginisty ; but surely no serious criticism of a literary artist ought ever to be made to rest upon the read- ing of a single book. Le Jardin Secret^ the latest novel that M. Pr6vost has written, has a very special inter- est. Of all his works this is the one that from I MARCEL PREVOST 67 the very moment of its publication met a per- fectly respectful treatment at the critics' hands, and it may, I think, be styled one of the most important works of fiction that the French have lately given us. It had in France, of course, the great advantage of being the first long novel written by its author since his liter- ary gifts were generally recognized ; but quite apart from this, it well deserves a careful study: and I think that from some points of view its interest is even greater for an English or an American reader than for the fellow-country- men of its creator. Its story is narrated by one Mme. Marthe Lecoudrier, who is its central figure. She is the wife of Jean Lecoudrier, the head of a de- partment in a banking-house, Le Credit Com- mercial, and hence the story has to do with the life and the environment of the bourgeoisie mc'diocre. At the commencement of the novel, M. Lecoudrier has left her for a few days' visit to his early home, Ingrandes, where his uncle has just died and willed him a small property. The wife, sitting alone throughout the even- ing in her apartment, with her little daughter sleeping quietly in an adjoining room, falls into a reminiscent mood, and for the first time in many years begins to summon up the recol- 68 MARCEL PREVOST lections of her girlhood, of la Martlie (T au- trefois, a girl ambitious, eager for a brilliant career, hopeful of a literary, and ultimately of a social, triumph. As she recalls her past, she smiles at the contrast afforded by her pres- ent life, the life of a bonne bourgeoise, satisfied with a humdrum existence and with long, un- eventful days of peace and commonplace con- tentment. Presently her eye falls upon a draw- er of her husband's desk from which a bunch of keys projects. Without much purpose she opens it and half mechanically turns over a packet of papers which the drawer contains. At once her attention is arrested. With a beating heart she unties the packet and finds in it the evi- dence of a secret whose existence she had never dreamed of. It holds a number of pho- tographs, a bunch of artificial flowers from a woman's hat, letters signed with the names of women quite unknown to her, a child's por- trait, and finally a bundle of government se- curities to the value of thirty thousand francs or more, from which the coupons have been regularly cut. A careful reading of the letters and an examination of the other articles lead her irresistibly to certain definite conclusions; that her husband has been for years untrue to her, that he has somewhere another child, and MARCEL PREVOST 69 that unknown to her he has set apart a sum of money whose income is devoted to the pur- poses of the other Hfe that he has lived apart from her. But there is even more to be in- ferred than this. A number of letters from Ingrandes, written apparently by a confiden- tial servant, give her reasons for believing that her husband's family is one afflicted by a ten- dency to epilepsy; and she recalls with a thrill of horror certain mysterious seizures that he has sometimes suffered from, and that have once or twice already appeared in her own young child. Her heart dies within her as she sits down to consider the revelation that has come to her. She has been deceived in every possible way in which a woman can be duped, and for the moment she is stunned. A terrible feeling of despair comes over her, followed by a flaming fever of indignation. Yet may she not be quite mistaken ? May there not be, after all, an explanation pos- sible that will be consistent with her hus- band's truth and constancy? When morning comes she hurries to an agency which gives renseignements intimes particulicrs dans I'm- t(frct des families — in other words, a sort of private detective bureau. To its chief she confides the compromising packet and asks 70 MARCEL PREVOST for informations discretes. An immediate and absolute divorce is in her mind, and she waits in a state of almost unendurable impatience for the confirmation of the apparent facts, and for the evidence that will set her free from a man so stained with treachery. For the mo- ment a dumb, helpless rage inspires her — a passionate longing for revenge. Soon, how- ever, when another day has dragged along, a strong reaction comes upon her, a physical lassitude, a sort of moral cowardice resulting from an exhausting waste of energy. " I feel like letting everything just go, without tak- ing the trouble to set matters right, without saying a word to my husband, without doing a single thing. . . . For a woman nearly forty years of age to leave her home like one of Ibsen's heroines, just because she has been deceived — this really seems to me, at three o'clock in the afternoon, somewhat absurd. For the first time I consider the question of remaining, with all the conscious superiority which my knowl- edge of Jean's secrets would give me — remaining, in fact, for my revenge. A sort of nerveless indecision has got hold of me. The thing is wholly in my hands — the household need not be upset; nothing need be changed in what Goethe's Egmont calls ' the amicable habits of one's life.' And, after all, this life with Jean would be endurable." For the first time she begins to realize how MARCEL PREVOST 71 wonderfully close, how almost irrefragable are the ties which years of married life can weave ; how all the little incidents and intimacies of the home, the myriad interests that man and wife possess in common, the very sight of one another day after day for years, establish a powerful habit, and constitute a bond almost impossible to break. " And, therefore, even the association of two beings who are quite indifferent to one another may come to be with the help of time an affectionate and lasting union of two souls united in reality. . . . For it is not the words of the marriage service that constitute the essence of true marriage, nor is it even mutual love, when that exists ; for words are only of the lips, and love may really be the negation of a marriage. A man and a woman are truly married only when they have become, through the influence of their life to- gether, kindi'cd, as when two persons are allied by blood. When the wife has become to the husband that sister of whom the Canticle makes mention, then only is the marriage truly consummated. This mys- tical process lies in a gradual transformation, of which neither of the pair has any consciousness until it has been actually wrought. No matter, then, how the laws may at any future time transform and modify its legal basis, so long as the life together and the com- munity of interests remain, for just so long will mar- riage, as we understand it now, continue to exist." Nevertheless, she gets from the detective 72 MARCEL PREVOST bureau facts which show that all her fears are true ; that all her wrongs are very real ; and they include names and dates and information as to places which make all further doubt im- possible. But in the meantime something else has come to her. The reminiscent mood that had begun upon the very evening of her terri- ble discovery returns. In judging her husband and condemning him as false to her, she calls to mind her own past years of life. She knows his secrets ; she has entered into that retreat which he had thought secure against invasion. But has she not herself some carefully seclud- ed jardin secret of memory which, could he likewise enter, he would find as eloquent of treachery to him ? The question deeply moves her, and her secret consciousness makes her shrink and shudder at the thought. Can she pronounce a judgment upon him and be her- self quite free from condemnation ? She meets the question, at first evasively, and at last un- flinchingly. She will summon up her past and judge it just as mercilessly as she judged her husband's. She goes back to her years of girlhood and its varied incidents. She remembers how her father, a cJief de gare, had misappropriated money to waste it at the gaming-table and MARCEL PREVOST 73 in other forms of dissipation. She brings to mind his pitiful disgrace, his conviction and imprisonment as a felon, her later years of shabbiness and squalor. She recalls how, af- ter he had died, she had become a sort of gov- erness, and then had met in her employer's family the son of a rich Belgian manufacturer and had loved him. She thinks once more of how she used to meet him secretly, and how these meetings, though quite innocent, were broken off when he was ordered by his parents to end the undesirable entanglement, and how her lover had obeyed because he feared to jeopardize for a woman's sake his hope of fort- une. She thinks of how, when she was still tormented by the agony and shame of this re- jection, a lady who was interested in her had proposed to bring about her marriage with M. Lecoudrier, whom she had never met, and of whom she knew no more than that he was re- ported fairly prosperous and of good repute. After a meeting or two she had accepted him, and a Diariage de convcnance'hdid been arranged. Her mind reverts to her thirteen years of married life. She remembers how, at first, the novelty of her surroundings, the comparative ease of her environment, her pleasure in being mistress of her husband's house and in the 74 MARCEL PRfiVOST kindness and consideration with wliich he al- ways treated her, had satisfied her mind and gradually tranquillized her. The birth of a daughter had bound her still more closely to her husband. But there came a time when all these things had palled upon her, when her home and all its duties had become unspeak- ably monotonous, when even her child had ceased to interest her, and when the prospect of a humdrum life of bourgeois dulness had be- come intolerable. Her old-time restlessness and craving for excitement were again awak- ened, and their satisfaction took the form of gallantry. She recalls how she began to accept and even seek the notice of those men about her who were young and easily toques. Then came a period of flirtation, of sentimental friendships such as certain types of men and women frequently affect — professedly Platonic liaisons in which the vocabulary of friendship is consciously substituted for the language of love, and in which the pressure of hands, the solitude (X deux, and the valsc significative play an important part. But as Platonic friendships seldom fill up all the blanks in the carte tendre of a woman's life, it was not long before a much more serious affair occurred, when a certain Captain Landouzic became a frequent visitor MARCEL PREVOST 75 in her drawing-room. This person, represent- ing le type biifflc — forceful, violent, and a good deal of a brute — was the sort of man who al- ways has a singular attraction for women of the sensitive, imaginative, half- neurotic tem- perament, who seem to find in the presence of a nature so completely physical something that rests their nerves and roughly overrides their finical hesitations. And it was so in this case ; for, as she now remembers but too well, in no long time Landouzie had completely dominated Marthe Lecoudrier ; and she was saved from taking the final step onl}^ by an unexpected incident that called him hastily to join his regiment. A long and serious illness followed ; and at its end her period of storm and stress was over. From that time down to the discovery of her husband's secret she had lived contentedly the life that once had seem- ed quite unendurable. She thinks of all these episodes, and as she thinks of them she feels that it is not for her to sit in judgment on her husband. She took him in the beginning without asking any ques- tions, just as he took her. If he concealed the physical taint that rested on his race, so had she equally concealed the social taint that her father's crime had fastened on herself. If her 76 MARCEL PREVOST husband came to her with the memory of other loves in mind, so had she come to him distract- ed by the loss of the only man she ever cared for, and one of whom the recollection still made any thought of marriage with another seem detestable. Her husband had professed no love for her, and she had equally professed no love for him. And after marriage, if she now knew that he had not lived for her alone, her conscience told her that she had not truly lived for him ; and that while she had never actually broken any vows as he had done, she still was morally as bad as he, since circum- stances, rather than her will, had saved her. Recalling all her past and weighing it against his secret, she hesitates no more. His faults are balanced by her own, and henceforth she will banish both forever from her memory and live with this thought always in her mind, that " from to-day, and only from to-day, I am in very truth a zvifd' Such is the outline of the story upon which Marcel Prevost has built his latest novel. So far as it possesses any moral, it appears to be intended to assert that every woman of thirty years of age or more who will look carefully into the souvenirs of her past, will find among the fruits of her experience quite enough to MARCEL PREVOST 77 make her charitable in her judgment of the other sex who have temptations such as she is largely shielded from. To this assertion many readers will very naturally demur ; and as for M. Prevost's view that every human being, man or woman, has his or \\q.x jardin secret, this thought is hardly new enough to justify the writing of a novel to expound it ; for, indeed, it was set forth by Thackeray many years ago in one of his most striking passages. The interest of the book for M. Provost's countrymen is, therefore, probably to be found in the skill and subtlety of its literary workmanship and in the innumerable touches that show so rare an understanding of the working of a woman's mind. But to the American and the English read- er this novel has an interest of a very different sort. These will perceive in it not only an en- tertaining story, a work of literary charm, an- other lucid and elaborate study of the eivig We lb lie he ; but, more than this, a document containing very valuable evidence as to the physiological and psychic basis of the mariage de convenance. Than this there is perhaps no social institution that more deeply interests the Anglo-Saxon student of French manners, as there is none more utterly at variance with yS MARCEL PREVOST 'Anglo-Saxon sentiment and prejudice. To find a keen observer, therefore, like M. Pre- vost, unconsciously affording us so accurate a demonstration of its practical results, is mar- vellously interesting ; nor should one pass over this demonstration without at least a general indication of what seems to be its obvious teaching. The French assert, in explaining and defend- ing their peculiar institution, that in the long run the happiness of marriage depends far more upon material considerations and upon environment than upon an actual affinity of two persons at the time of marriage. Given any conceivable amount of love between the two, this still must wane in time ; and sooner or later the union must rest upon a different basis from that of sentiment alone. Therefore, in the inariagc de convcnance, this basis is most carefully arranged beforehand by the family council, viewing with practical and unromantic eyes the permanent interests of both the prin- cipals. It is essential, for example, that they should be of equal, or of nearly equal, social rank ; that there should be no great disparity in age ; that character and temperament should be considered ; and that the united incomes of the two should be sufficient to assure them all MARCEL PREVOST 79 the comforts to which they have been hitherto accustomed, and to guarantee a suitable provi- sion for the presumptive responsibilities of the future. A second proposition which relates to the sentimental side of marriage is accepted as essentially complemental to the first. As love is, in its very last analysis, held to be a purely physical affair, and as it is inspired by mere proximity, its evocation may be safely counted on as an inevitable incident of any properly considered marriage. That is to say, if the young girl be educated in seclusion, so that no attachment for another has come to her before her marriage, the purely emotional side of her nature will at marriage be still a tabula rasa, a fair white page, on which her husband may in- scribe his name and win the affection which among ill-regulated Teutonic peoples he seeks to do as a preliminary to betrothal. Then, when in course of time the married pair adjust themselves to the relation that is to end at death alone, the wife has no remembrance of any other attachment to impair a single-mind- ed^ interest in her husband ; and with a com- fortable environment and an assured provision, both go through life's long journey hand-in- hand, unvexed by unforeseen anxieties, serene and confident, and with that complete tran- 8o MARCEL PREVOST quilHty which is the most secure of all founda- tions for mutual affection and esteem. The scheme is beautifully logical ; it possesses the lucidity, completeness, and simplicity that are so characteristic of all French theory ; it is based upon that intensely material view of life which in France has come to be a national possession ; and it has about it something of the impenetrable hardness which, with all their superficial sentiment, remains the one eternal- ly and profoundly significant trait that under- lies French character. But the Anglo-Saxon, who is never infatu- ated with any theory whatever merely because it is logical and lucid, and who has a most un- comfortable way of looking at its practical ap- plication, entertains some definite objections to this view of marriage ; and two of these may be restated here, because this book of M. Pre- vost seems to shed some light upon the ques- tions they involve. Assuming (which is a good deal to assume) that these businesslike and scientific marriages are really so extremely well arranged that women are never sacrificed to brutes, and that men are never tricked into a union with women whom they would not think of choosing for themselves, what is the actual relation of all these arrangements to the worn- MARCEL PREVOST 8l an's happiness? When a young and innocent girl, brought up in a conventual seclusion, is handed over to a man whom she has scarcely ever seen and for whom she can have no par- ticular prepossession, what, one may ask, are probably her feelings ? It may be true, as Mr. Howells very delicately puts it, that man is still imperfectly monogamous ; but it is also true that woman is essentially monandrous ; and this implies the right of choice, since it is a negation of the masculine promiscuity. Does she then, in fact, so very readily adjust herself to a situation which to her is quite unique ? Does she not, when roughly thrust into the intimacy of married life, feel a revolt so strong as to make her husband more or less an object of repulsion to her? This very natural inquiry gets a sort of answer from M. Prevost. I give his dictum in the very words that he has placed in the mouth of Marthe Lecoudrier : " Comment font toutes les autres, qui n'ont meme pas cette aide, petites bourgeoises quelconques que Ton marie commeon m'a mariee? Passent-elles outre les repugnances, grace a. leur naturelle inertia, a una vague et bestiale curiosite, ou simplement au desir niais d'avoir un menage, d'etre ' Madame ? Au fond, je crois que chez beaucoup de jeunes filles la peur de riiomme inconnu n'est pas telle que Ic bruit en court, 6 82 MARCEL PREVOST et que se I'imagine le petit nombre de celles que resi- dent au sommet de I'echelle des etres sensitifs. Beau- coup de jeunes filles n'ont aucune vraie pudeur. La pudeur leur est apprise, suggeree, comme un principe de sage economic generale : a savoir, qu'une femme perd un avantage a se donner. Mais elles n'eprouvent nulle gene a s'etendre a cote d'un homme, du moment que la perte est regulierement compensee, que I'usage social est respecte, qu'elles-memes sont sures de faire 'comme tout le monde.' . . . Oui, il faut I'avouer ! ces pauvres raisons suffisent a I'immense majorite des jeunes 6pouses ! On fait ' comme tout le monde,' dans une circonstance ou la vraie noblesse d'ame com- manderait de faire comme soi-meme, comme soi seul." This surely is a very C3mical defence, for it resolves itself into an expansion of the famous line of Pope that " every woman is at heart a rake," a saying which, by the way, was not original with Pope, but was drawn by him from a quite Gallic epigram of Jehan de Meung. Yet M. Prevost thoroughly believes in it; for in this very novel his account of the early days of the Lecoudriers' liine dc mid is but a concrete illustration of the same idea, recalling an extremely curious passage in Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maiipin^ where that adventurous young woman in her male dis- guise spends the first night of her freedom in a rustic inn. The Anglo-Saxon, with his great- MARCEL PREVOST 83 er reverence for women, will not find such an apologia conclusive. But something far more subtle and more vitally important still remains. M. Provost depicts his heroine when, by the accepted theory of the mariagc dc convenance, she should have reached the period of tranquil- lity, as a true boiirgeoise sotiniise, suddenly be- coming restless, bored, enniiyde, eager for ex- citement, and ready to seek it elsewhere than at home. Why is this so ? It seems to vitiate the principle laid down by all the social phi- losophers who defend the view of marriage which prevails in France. M. Prevost ex- plains it by a reference to what he styles la crise. Again I give his very words : " II y a un moment ou une femme qui jusque-la a ete satisfaite par le mariage, arrive a souhaiter autre chose. . . . Quand le regime conjugal est enfin etabli, quand raccoutumance est complete, aussitSt I'epouse sent que ce trouble delicieux, ce trouble anterieur lui manque. Regret du passe chez Thonnete femme, desir de I'aventure chez les autres ; combien eprou- vent le besoin d'un noiiveau viariage, oil tout ce qu'il y cut d'exquis dans la premiere initiation se recom- mence !" These very frank statements will seem to the Ano-lo-Saxon reader an unconscious condem- 84 MARCEL PREVOST nation of the whole theory of marriage which prevails in France, and to support by implica- tion the Teutonic view. For the Teutonic view assumes that the love on which alone a happy marriage can be based, so far from be- ing allied solely with the senses, is a far more spiritual thing — an exaltation arising, first of all, from certain psychical affinities between two persons whose temperament exactly fits them for each other. It has in it, on the one side, an element of maternal affection, and on the other something of the self-devotion and disinterestedness involved in ties of blood re- lationship. It cannot be called forth indiffer- ently by one person as well as by another, but must spring from an instinctive recognition of the subtle fitness of two natures for each oth- er ; and it is based, therefore, upon that prin- ciple of selection which is one of the most profound and universal of all natural laws. When, moreover, it is thus evoked, it so com- pletely moulds and masters every faculty of mind and body as to preclude the possibility of any other similar and coexistent sentiment. In its fullest and most perfect evocation it ap- pears but once in any human life ; and that it should be thus permitted to appear is both a physiological and a psychological necessity. MARCEL PREVOST 85 The nature that through special circumstances has never known it has been cheated of its rights ; and the whole being, whether con- sciously or unconsciously, will sooner or later rise up in revolt. Thus, as M. Huysmans in En Route declares (and I have heard the state- ment vouched for by very eminent ecclesias- tics of the Catholic Church), even in the cloister there comes a time in the life of the most de- voted religieuse when she finds with dismay that her existence is becoming quite intoler- able, when her best -loved duties fail to inter- est her, and when a mysterious lassitude creeps over mind and body. She, in her innocence and inexperience, does not understand its meaning, but her superiors do. They know it to be the crise, the mighty instinct of womanhood crying out within her, and they dread the outcome ; for with many nuns it assumes the form of physical decline and ends in early death. Now, in the mariage de convenance, which takes into account the physiological phase alone, and disregards a very vital psychic truth, the crise still lingers in the background to be reckoned with hereafter. It has not nec- essarily been coincident with marriage, but it may still occur at any time to overturn the scientifically accurate arrangements of the con- 86 MARCEL PREVOST sell de faniille and to provide the writers of French fiction with the particular sort of in- cident which forms the staple of their literary studies. In the Teutonic marriage, on the other hand, the crise is not a factor in the later matrimonial problem, for it has been synchro- nous with the marriage rite. Nature, which is mightier than Art, has had her due ; and hence- forth there exists in the mind of the wife no lingering dissatisfaction, no vaguely curious yearning after what M. Prevost calls Vhomine providcntiel. The basis for a lasting sympathy has been securely laid ; and man and wife live out their days together, bound fast by ties that do not gall, and that are infinitely stronger than those imposed in selfish bargaining and nice consideration of the dot — by ties, in fact, which will survive external shock, and which adver- sity itself will only knit more closely in bring- ing out through sacrifice of self the pure de- votion and eternal tenderness that blend two hearts in one and constitute the sacramental mystery of marriage. GEORGE MOORE GEORGE MOORE A YEAR or two ago M. Emile Zola made a sort of pilgrimage to London, and was there received with the overwhelming and indiscrim- inate attention which the English always give to the latest lion, whether he be a great bene- factor of the human race or a King of the Can- nibal Islands. Foremost among the throng that hastened to welcome the distinguished exponent of naturalism was observed a learned judge who, only a short time before, had sent a publisher to prison for issuing an English version of one of M. Zola's works ; and this cir- cumstance was very naturally taken as a text by the Continental press for sermons anent the hypocrisy and insincerity of the British nation. A perusal of the books produced of late by Mr. George Moore gives rise to some- what similar reflections. ■ Ten years ago, Mr. Moore's first great suc- cess, A Mimmier s Wife, was the talk of liter- ary London, and was sending thrills of horror go GEORGE MOORE down the spines of the Phihstines. It was cast out of Mudie's as unfit for any one's pe- rusal. The fiat of Mr. W. H. Smith excluded it from all the news- stalls. Mr. Moore was banned and badgered by the unco' guid, and even by many who made no special claim to virtue. To-day he is spoken of with marked respect as a bold, original, and powerful writer whose work deserves most serious study; and, in fact, his latest volumes come, not from the ill-starred press that first exploited him, nor from the neutral house that afterwards accept- ed books of his ; but they show upon the title- page an imprint that bears with it not only re- spectability, but distinction. Yet Mr. Moore himself has undergone no change in any way since the time when he was so bitterly denounced ; nor has his theory of art been changed. He is quite as pessimis- tic as he ever was. His plots reek quite as strongly as they ever did of adultery, and drink, and despair. Why is he now persona grata to the publishers, and the libraries, and the critics? The fact is, that the treatment accorded to M. Zola and Mr. Vizetelly, and to the George Moore of ten years ago, and that which this same novelist receives to-day, are not in reality symptomatic of British hypocrisy, but rather GEORGE MOORE 9 1 of British inconsistency, an inconsistency that comes from jumbHng together two utterly ir- reconcilable motives — the artistic motive and the motive of morality. At one time the lat- ter gets control, and Mr. Moore is damned ; at another the artistic sentiment is in the ascend- ant, and he is set upon a throne in a sort of apotheosis. Now, as a matter of fact, either point of view is quite defensible. It hardly admits of question that A Mummer s Wife and Mike Fletcher — yes, and Esther Waters and Celibates — are very far from being the sort of reading that one would recommend virginibus piierisque. Personally, I do not think their tendency to be immoral, but the contrary, be- cause they paint vice in such ghastly colors ; yet the knowledge of vice which they display is hardly edifying. On the other hand, it is quite as fair to judge them wholly on their literary merits, and thus to speak of them in the very warmest terms of praise. In Eng- land, however, the motive of morality is for- ever clashing with the purely artistic instinct, thus leading in practice to the paradoxical re- sult described above. Mr. Moore is unique among English writers of to-day. An Irishman by birth, he received his training in Paris, where he lived so long as 92 GEORGE MOORE almost to lose the idiomatic command of his mother-tongue, a fact recorded by himself in his interesting Confessions of a Young Man; and his first novel, a story of Ireland under the Land League, was actually written and pub- lished in French. Returning to England, how- ever, he recovered his use of literary English, and after a series of somewhat desultory ex- periments, began to contribute regularly to the pages of those ephemeral publications that are seldom seen outside of London, and that in London find their limited circulation within the borders of literary and artistic Bohemia. Mr. Moore wrote much and often — dramatic criticisms, art criticism, literary criticism — de- veloping a style and an intellectual purpose that have become very distinctive in his later and more ambitious work. He put forth also several fugitive attempts at fiction, until at last he gave to the world a novel which still remains the best known as well as the most striking thing that he has done. A Mummer s Wife narrates the story of a woman of the lower middle class, one reared in the strictest, narrowest fashion known to the English of the provincial towns, but one whose temperament is crossed by sensuous impulses that lie dormant in her early life, be- GEORGE MOORE 93 cause nothing has occurred as yet to waken them. So she lives on with her feeble, asth- matic husband, keeping his shop for him and eking out their income by her needle. She is a woman of much physical attractiveness, and when, one day, the manager of a travelling dramatic troupe becomes a lodger in the house, he immediately lays siege to her, and with ultimate success; so that she leaves her hus- band for her lover and with him enters on a life whose novel freedom and tawdry Bohemi- anism fascinate her, especially when she finally becomes herself a player and enters fully into the nomadic, happy-go-lucky, lawless existence of her new companions. The story that fol- lows is a curious study of the general deterio- ration of her character — of a pathetic and unceasing struggle between the enduring con- straint of heredity and of her early training, and the powerful influences with which her new environment appeals to those subtly in- terwoven traits that thrill her whole being in answer to their urgings. She is line dine d^s- oricntcc, distracted, unbalanced ; and the ex- position of the process by which she slowly sinks to the very lowest depths of degrada- tion is powerful, and pitiless, and searching. With one exception Mr. Moore has never done 94 GEORGE MOORE such perfect character-drawing as in this book, which contains a dozen men and women who are marvellously realized. Dick Lennox, the actor-lover, fat, vulgar, " sensual as a mutton- chop," absolutely devoid of sentiment, yet ab- solutely honest, and good-natured to the verge of weakness, is a remarkable study, and so is Kate herself in every stage of her career, from the first pages of the book, where we find her primly waiting in the shop, to the crisis, where at the death of her infant she takes to drink, and at the end, where she is wallowing in the gutters, wrecked in hope, enfeebled in intellect, and lost to shame. Intensely vivid is the mi- nutely curious picture of the life of the stroll- ing players, their intrigues, their quarrels, their shady, shifty, hand-to-mouth devices, their con- ceit, their comradeship, their paltry triumphs, and their squalid troubles. No less remarkable is the carefully drawn study of the develop- ment of the drink-habit in a woman who fights against it and endeavors to conceal its prog- ress with all the subtlety of deceit of which the drunkard and the opium-eater alone are capable. The vogue of A Miumncr s Wife, which, thanks partly to the advertising given it by those who tried to secure its practical sup- GEORGE MOORE 95 pression, passed to its fourteenth edition in the first year of its publication, won for Mr. Moore's succeeding novels an instant hearing. And they well deserved it ; for, in spite of many and obvious defects and inequalities, they were original and strong, and they represented be- sides a particular literary gen7-c that had had as yet no representative in English. Of these further works A JModcrn Lover is a novel of the world of art, its central figure being one of those effeminate, corrupt, deceitful natures so frequently found in men who follow the artistic career, and who for some not very obvious reason exercise a curious fascination upon women. Seymour, the artist in ques- tion, is wholly base, yet through his power over women, whom he systematically uses and de- ceives, he makes his way successfully from poverty to social and professional success. Vain Fortitnc^ the least interesting of anything that Mr. Moore has done, is a study of femi- nine jealousy, skilfully conceived and firmly drawn, but rather slight and lacking in per- spective. A Drama in Muslin was written as an attempt to draw the modern girl as shown in three distinct and different types, so that in this book men play no very important part; but as a study in temperament the attempt 96 GEORGE MOORE is scarcely a success. One gets an impression of nothing very characteristic, and certainly of nothing that may be taken as being really typical. Yet in another way the book is one of some importance. The scene is laid in Ireland, and the life depicted is that of the "Castle set" — the half- impoverished gentry and those who wish to be considered as among the gentry. To the future social historian of Britain this novel may well prove an inter- esting document ; for Mr. Moore knows his ground most thoroughly, and he has caught to perfection the squalid, frowzy setting and the scarcely subdued vulgarity of that mori- bund society which in another generation will be happily extinct. As A DravLa in Muslin was written to de- scribe the typical young woman, Mike Fletcher — a novel, by the way, whose title is said to have very materially hurt its sale — embodies Mr. Moore's conception of the men who are typical of our time. One would be very sor- ry, however, to accept the personages of this book as being any but sporadic specimens. At the most they can only typify the London " bounder " in several of his most unpleasant phases ; nor have they any real importance to readers whose lives are lived a hundred miles GEORGE MOORE 97 from Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus and the Strand. They are all more or less young, they are chiefly bachelors living in chambers in the Temple, or in contiguous lodgings. Some of them are journalists and some are artists and some are merely men- about-town ; but all of them alike devote their days and nights to wine and women and riot and brawling, with intervals of erotic verse- writing, and rather incoherent philosophical discussions punctuated with stupid jokes and ribald stories. Mike Fletcher himself, the un- savory hero of the book, who is described in its pages b}'' one of his admirers as a "toff," is a thorough-going cad, the son of an Irish peasant, who gets on after a fashion by a com- bination of impudence and subserviency, and whose success with women of every class is as great as that of Seymour in A Modern Lover. But Mike Fletcher, after inheriting a fortune from one of these impressionable beings and after having exhausted every possible form of what he views as pleasure, is haunted by a Weltschmerz so profound and so unconquer- able that in the end he takes his own life after a most ghastly scene of hopeless, horrify- ing self-communion. The book is in a way a powerful one, and some of its episodes are 7 98 GEORGE MOORE very striking ; but in writing it Mr. Moore did not have all of his material quite thoroughly in hand. The story is not compact, but is too often vague ; and he resorts now and then to improbabilities, as when he makes Mike Fletcher rush off to the desert in a moment of boredom and become the chosen friend of an Arab chief among the Bedawin — an episode that is most incongruous and bizarre. There is another special criticism to be made. In near- ly every book that he has written the author is very free with casual allusions to persons and things that presuppose a knowledge on the reader's part of all his other books; but in Mike Fletcher he refers to incidents which even to one who remembers every line that he has written are wholly unintelligible ; so that more than once a particularly exasperating vagueness settles down upon the mind to be- fog the interest and destroy the continuity of the story. Esther Waters was the first novel of Mr. Moore's to be reprinted in the United States, and it is still the only one by which in this country he is generally known. It is inferior to A Mummer s Wife, and, as a whole, to A Modern Lover and Mike Fletcher; but the first half of it contains some of the very best of all GEORGE MOORE 99 its author's work. It tells the story of an Eng- lish servant-maid, and it is written as a human document illustrative of the life, the ethics, and the average experiences of the class to which Esther herself belongs. Esther Waters goes out to service in the family of a country gentleman ; she is betrayed by one of the grooms, is turned out of her place, and is thrown upon her own resources. The por- tions of the book which tell of her life imme- diately before the birth of her child, of her hospital experiences, and of the struggle for a livelihood that follows, are very powerfully written. Mr. Moore succeeds here, as he has nowhere else so perfectly succeeded, in touch- ing the sources of sympathy and of pity. One reads these pages with an emotion that is almost irresistible, and that is the very strongest tribute to their author's grasp on life. But after that point in the story is reached where Esther's groom returns and marries her, and they settle down to the keeping of a " pub," and, on the husband's part, to the experiences of a typical British book-maker, the intensity of the inter- est wanes rapidly. The novel then becomes too obviously a Tcndcnzronian, after the fash- ion of Zola's L Argent, and is in its too appar- ent purpose almost a tract against the universal lOO GEORGE MOORE British vice of betting. The low life which Mr. Moore here depicts is given with extraordi- nary accuracy of detail, and the picture is of much sociological interest, but it is always borne in upon the reader that the facts have been " got up " for the occasion, and, unlike M. Zola in his similar performances, Mr. Moore has not the heat and glow of a great creative imagination to fuse his raw material into a dramatically satisfying whole. A book of his called Celibates, which appear- ed in 1895, contains three stories, two of them very short and comparatively unimportant, though striking and original ; but the third, which is almost long enough to be called a novel, is a very memorable piece of work. I think it not only the most remarkable thing that Mr. Moore has ever done, but as a piece of minute observation and psychological analy- sis, one of the most extraordinary things in all modern literature. It is entitled Mildred Law- son, and, summarized briefly, is the story of a young Englishwoman reared among common- place and comfortable surroundings, but filled with a belief that life has some higher mission for her than house-keeping and the bearing of children. Having some money of her own, she takes up painting, studies in London, hires GEORGE MOORE lOI an apartment in Paris, becomes a Bohemian of the extreme type, and flits about in a society that is frankly beyond the pale of decency. Yet because of her own coldness of tempera- ment and her perpetual thought of self, she remains physically pure, and we leave her toss- ing about upon her bed with the cry, " Give me a passion for God or man, but give me a passion ! I cannot live without one !" There is probably no living writer in any language who could have drawn this curious- ly subtle character as Mr. Moore has drawn it, with a feeling for the most evanescent nuances of temperament and a knowledge of certain phases and types that is absolutely marvel- lous. This story, in fact, should properly rank its author with the greatest masters of fiction — with Stendhal and Balzac and Flaubert and Thackeray ; yet it will not do so, and for a very obvious reason. When one thinks of it, why does it happen that the epoch-making novel- ists just named have not only won an enduring artistic success, but what may be called a pop- ular success as well, so that their names and their works alike are familiar to all cultivated men and women ? It is not merely because of their genius and their profound knowledge of life, their subtlety and the perfection of their I02 GEORGE MOORE literary methods. It is first of all because they have exercised these gifts and qualities in a field that is familiar to all who read. The types they draw are, in general, the types that the most casual person can recognize and judge. Every man of the world has, in his own ex- perience, met Major Pendennis and Costigan and Colonel Newcome. Becky Sharp has flit- ted across the life of every one who lives in the greater world. The tragedy of Pere Go- riot is enacted daily before the eyes of all of us. Every provincial town contains an Emma Bovary. Therefore, when these and others of their general ubiquity appear in the pages of a master, the perfect truth of the portraiture is at once perceived by all, and the achieve- ment is hailed with universal pleasure and ap- plause. But in drawing Mildred Lawson, Mr. Moore has deliberately fixed upon a type which is not a common one as yet, though it will grow commoner, I think, as society develops on its present lines. It is a type that even men of wide experience may not have hap- pened to encounter; and so, in reading this most subtle study, they may view it as a pure invention of the novelist, wonderfully consist- ent and impressive to be sure, but one that does not quite belong to actual life. They will GEORGE MOORE IO3 style it an abstraction, a mere personification of certain intellectual and moral qualities, the work of a literary Frankenstein, curious and masterly, but on the whole unreal. And this is the penalty which Mr. Moore must pay for his daring and for his devotion to what he feels to be the truth; for the type does actually ex- ist, and with those who know it, its complexity and its psychological abnormality, which partly elude and partly appall the analyst, can only heighten the unqualified amazement that is the one appropriate tribute to Mr, Moore's al- most incredible success. The rarity of the type drawn in Mildred Lawson is due to the fact that she combines so many different qualities, as to become a com- plex and not even a fairly simple character. One sees in these days many women who are at war with their environment and galled by conventionality, who have educated themselves beyond the control of every-day principles of conduct, and who are bent upon " living their own life," as the slang of the hour describes it. One sees many women, also, of great clever- ness and imagination and subtlety ; and of course one meets women of beauty and fas- cination and refinement. Nor is there any dearth of women who are introspective and I04 GEORGE MOORE self-analytical to the point of morbidity, and who in consequence are selfish in the intellect- ual as well as in the moral sense of that com- prehensive word. But what one very seldom sees is a woman who combines all of these qualities and attributes — who is beautiful, ac- complished, and fascinating, imaginative and intellectual, absolutely unfettered by the tra- ditional limitations that have their root in cen- turies of social conventions, and yet so self- centred and acutely conscious of self as to find in this one trait the check upon conduct as well as upon achievement which in others of her sex arises from the thought of extra- neous opinion. Now Mildred Lawson is the embodiment of all these characteristics ; and to one who knows her type in life, the study that Mr. Moore has given of her is, down to its very last and subtlest tint, a masterpiece. At the time when his book first appeared I said, in writing of the character of Mildred Lawson, that it suggests a blend of Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory ; but such a gen- eralization is altogether crude and superficial. Beside Mildred Lawson, Becky Sharp is com- monplace, and Blanche Amory is a bit of rather vulgar affectation. Mildred Lawson's domi- nant traits are curiosity and imagination. She GEORGE MOORE I05 wishes to know every phase of life, to experi- ence everything, to feel every passion, every emotion. Her imaginative mind shows her in anticipation wonderful things — the pleasure that comes from novelty, from achievement, from love, from passion. She figures it all to herself beforehand and thrills at the promise of it all. But the very intensity of the antic- ipation makes the reality when it approaches seem poor ; it is, after all, not what she hoped for, and she draws back from it with a kind of shrinking distaste. She has divined what ought to be the emotion for each phase of ex- perience, and at the critical moment she falls to analyzing the emotion until it vanishes and she is disillusioned. It is the cult of self, and it brings with it a fatal slavery. Even when tragedy enters into her immediate life she cannot suffer; she can only wonder why she does not feel what she knows she ought to feel. There is a conflict of thought and mo- tive at every moment. A young artist who had loved her, and for whom she had felt a sort of patronizing fondness, sends for her as he is dying : " A close observer might have noticed that the ex- pression on Mildred's face changed a little. ' He is dying for me,' she thought. And, as in a ray of sun- Io6 GEORGE MOORE light, she basked for a moment in a little glow of self- satisfaction. Then almost angrily she defended her- self agamst herself. She was not responsible for so casual a thought ; the greatest saint might be a victim of a wandering thought. She was, of course, glad that he liked her, but she was sorry that she caused him suffering. He must have suffered. Men will sacrifice anything to their passions. . , . They had had very pleasant times together — in this very gallery. , . . Suddenly her thoughts became clear and she heard these words as if they had been read to her: ' Lots of men have killed themselves for women, but to die of a broken heart proves a great deal more. Few women have inspired such a love as that.' " When her own brother dies she is overcome with a desire to weep, but she first carefully takes off her gown lest she should spoil it in abandoning herself to grief. Then she wonders whether that was really her reason, after all. Her love affairs were quite as fully mingled with doubts and shrinkings and hesitations. She has no principle ; the question of morality does not enter her mind. She is longing for the thrill of passion. It will be a new expe- rience. She is ready for it. So at Barbizon, where she goes to paint, she meets in that beautiful spot, amid the scent of flowers and the dewy dusk of the great forest, an English painter — a frank sensualist, a man of physical GEORGE MOORE 107 charm and with the added attractions of talent and fame. They roam the forest together. She thinks of how she longs for him. She would like to take him in her arms and kiss him. When they reach the very heart of the dim forest, with its endless billows of dark-green foliage and its mysterious murmurings instinct with nature, she wonders whether he will kiss her, whether he will take her hand and tell her how he loves her. But he does not un- derstand her, though he partly divines her thought. Her curious uncertainty, that stifles desire at the very moment when promise ap- proaches fulfilment, makes her manner half- repellent. Yet the two go on together with a curious frankness. They discuss Morton's for- mer mistresses ; they stick at nothing in word and phrase — but Mildred still shrinks from the critical step. She cannot feel the self-abandon- ment, the sublime unconsciousness that marks the triumph of love. And so the story is un- folded. She longs to do something really great, but her talent is not adequate for that, and she cares for nothing that is less than great. She longs for love, but her heart is cold and her emotions dulled. She fascinates others; she is brilliant, good-natured in a way, with that careless cood-nature which is often I08 GEORGE MOORE the very refinement of cruelty in that it is at bottom quite indifferent ; and she dissects and vivisects herself at every turn until she gets at last a horrible understanding of her own real nature. " Self had been her ruin ; she had never been able to get away from self ; no, not for a single moment of her life. All her love-stories had been ruined and disfigured by self-assertion — not a great, unconscious self, in other words, an instinct, but an extremely con- scious, irritable, mean, and unworthy self. She knew it all ; she was not deceived. She could no more cheat herself than she could change herself ; that wretched self was as present in her at this moment as it had ever been, and knowledge of her fault helped her nothing in its correction. She could not change herself ; she would have to bear the burden of herself to the end." The picture is astonishing ; and one despairs in attempting to convey to those who have not read the book even a faint conception of the startling power of analysis which it every- where displays. It has been said above that Mr. Moore has given to English literature an entirely new genre, and this is true ; for though, after he re- turned to England, he won back his English style, he has never separated himself from the GEORGE MOORE IO9 French school of literary art in which he re- ceived his earliest training; and he is to-day to be grouped, not with Hardy and Hope and Besant, but with far greater artists than even the first of these — with Guy de Maupassant and Zola and J. K. Huysmans. He is, in fact, the only writer of English who exemplifies the whole manner and spirit of the Realists. In everything but his language he is French, and not only French but Parisian. His models, his standards, his whole technique he finds among the writers of France ; and one is not surprised on learning that it was he who first made known to the English the works of Ver- laine and Rimbaud and Jules Laforge. There is not a single one of his longer novels that is not demonstrably inspired or sensibly in- fluenced by some great French masterpiece. The seduction of Kate Lennox, in A Miim- mers Wife, and her gradual degradation through drink, must be regarded as a reiMnis- cence of the story of Gervaise in L Assominoir, Mike Fletcher, who takes money from women and rises by their favor from back-alley journal- ism to fortune, is only an English (or Irish) replica of Georges Duroy in Bel- Ami. The story o^ Esther Waters is an evident borrowing from the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, with no GEORGE MOORE a greater minuteness of obstetrical description. In fact, while Mr. Moore is not a copyist, he is so saturated with the theories of the Realistic School as to make it impossible for him to avoid the reproduction of their themes. Nor is it merely in his themes that he recalls his Gallic masters. The pessimism of his writ- ings makes him still more closely kin to them ; and for this his Celtic origin is undoubtedly responsible, since the pessimism of the Celt is something to which the Anglo-Saxon can never by any possibility attain. The Celt, whether he be Irish or French, is always a creature of extremes. Light-hearted with a delightful joy- ousness and frivolity, he is, in his other mood, hopeless with an abysmal misery. The Anglo- Saxon, on the other hand, though he takes his pleasure sadly, takes his sorrow hopefully, and has an element of sturdy resistance in his nature that defies destiny and smites the inevitable in the face. The gloom of the Anglo-Saxon is a melancholy half-light; the gloom of the Celt is the blackness that presses on the eye-balls like a physical weight, and plunges the very soul into infinite despair. Mr. Hardy, for in- stance, gives us a fine expression of Anglo- Saxon pessimism. Things are often ordered for the very worst in this world ; but he accepts GEORGE MOORE III the worst, and can still perceive the humor that forever gleams amid the irony of fate. But the pessimism of a Maupassant is a grim, intense, and all- including monotony of horror that taints and corrodes like a mordant acid. And so nothing in all literature is more hideous than the last twenty pages of Mike Fletcher, after reading which one feels for the moment that life itself is a loathsome thing, pregnant with shame and nameless evil. How purely French is Mr. Moore's literary method can perhaps best be seen in what he has written as a critic of literature and art. To the general reading public his most impor- tant book of criticism is the one which in form is nearest akin to the conventional volume of essays, such as American and English writers put forth from time to time. Yet it is not in Impressions and Opinions that one finds the true George Moore, but in a curious and fas- cinating little volume entitled Tlie Confessions of a Yonng Man, put forth several years ago, and reprinted in this country, where it sloVvly passed into a second edition. This book, which is unique in English literature, is nominally the autobiography of one Edward Dayne ; but it may very fairly be regarded as containing a suggestion, and something more than a suggest- GEORGE MOORE ion, of the facts of Mr. Moore's own personal history. The thread of story, however, is a very slight one, and is broken and intercalat- ed with disconnected and apparently irrelevant paragraphs that touch upon the most diverse questions of art, literature, and morals. Thus, a propos of nothing in particular, the author will drop the narrative of Dayne's financial troubles, or of his vie dc BoJitme, to express a terse judgment on the Symbolists, or on the impossibility of marriage among enlightened persons, or on the artistic value of the music- hall, or on the respective merits of the eigh- teenth-century tavern and the nineteenth-cen- tury club ; or he will pause to discourse with curious psychological subtlety on la femme de trcntc ans, and then suddenly slip back into the narration that he has temporarily put aside. The lack of form in all this is, to a conventionally Anglo-Saxon reader, exasperat- ing and eccentric; to others it is simply piq- uant ; but in reality it is part of a perfectly consistent design in that it gives us a picture of mentality, of an intellectual and aesthetic condition, and thus fits in perfectly with the synchronous picture of a human life. In this, moreover, Mr. Moore is not violating literary precedent — he is following it ; only the model GEORGE MOORE II3 that he has before him is French, not English. It is as old as Jean Paul ; it is as new as Mau- rice Barres ; and, in fact, it is probably the curious Ennevii dcs Lois of Barres that Mr. Moore is consciously imitating in his plan, al- though he does not specifically mention that odd and brilliant writer. And the opinions themselves are strikingly original — audacious, independent, perverse, absolutely un-Enghsh, wholly French. Take this, for example : " I am sick of synthetical art ; we want observation direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped. What does this mat- ter ? What is more stereotyped than Japanese art .-* But that does not prevent it from being always beau- tiful." This is thinking aloud. Then take the fol- lowing : " How to be happy ! — not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the ' Nouvelle Athenes,' unless perhaps to play dominos like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too in- tense consciousness of life — to live in a sleepy coun- try-side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas 114 GEORGE MOORE out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are de- voured by insects ; the tame rook has flown away ; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church; she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy — and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts and give them passions. The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times." Here is a bit of personal feeling that is as French as though written by a Frenchman : " The years the most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence of the nation ; I, not an indiflferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striv- ing heart and soul to identify himself with his environ- ment, to shake himself free from race and language, and to recreate himself, as it were, in the womb of a new nationality, assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought ; and I had succeeded strangely well, and when I returned home England was a new country to me ; I had, as it were, forgotten every- thing. Every aspect of street and suburban garden was new to me; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds incredible; but it is so. I saw, but I could realize nothing. I went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far away — a dream, a presentment, nothing more ; I was in touch GEORGE MOORE II5 with nothing ; of the thoughts and feelings of those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympa- thize with them ; an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimau would be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the men, not in the women. French and English women are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from which they see life is the same, the same thoughts in- terest and amuse them ; but the attitude of a French- man's mind is absolutely opposed to that of an Eng- lishman ; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in color, form, and tempera- ment — two ideas destined to remain irrevocably sep- arate and distinct." Mr. Moore has something to say of con- temporary English literature. Here are some rather curious bits. The first has to do with Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. " I will state frankly that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed to delight me; but he never wrote a book. ... I think of Mr. Stevenson as a con- sumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate -glass window and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil. ... I do not care to speak of great ideas, for I am unable to see how an idea can exist, at all events can be great, out of language ; an allu- sion to Mr. Stevenson's verbal expression will perhaps Il6 GEORGE MOORE make my meaning clear. His periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect realizations of their sense ; in reading you often think that never before was such definiteness united to such poetry of expression ; every page and every sentence rings of its individuality. Mr. Stevenson's style is over-smart — • well dressed, shall I say? — like a young man walking in the Burlington Arcade. Yes, I will say so ; but, I will add, the most gentlemanly young man that ever walked on the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is com- petent to understand any thought that might be pre- sented to him ; but if he were to use it, it would in- stantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and graceful ; and it would lose all its original richness and harmony. It is not Mr. Stevenson's brain that prevents him from being a thinker, but his style." And this is what he has to say of Mr. George Meredith : " ' When we have translated half of Mr. Meredith's utterances into possible human speech, then we can enjoy him,' says the Pall Mall Gazette. We take our pleasures differently ; mine are spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell of a nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and than enjoy- ing it. " Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill- balanced, and out of tune. What remains } A cer- tain lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoulders and a small head pushing about in a crowd ; he shouts and works his arms ; he seems to be doing a great deal ; in reality, he is doing nothing. So Mr. GEORGE MOORE II7 Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist. His habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr. David Christie Mur- ray, Mr. Besant, Mr. Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place. I am out of sympathy with him — that is all ; and I regret that it should be so, for he is one whose love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism ; and if I may praise it for naught else, I can praise it for this." What he says of Mr. Hardy is particularly interesting, for it shows what I have always said, that, with all Mr. Hardy's pessimism and with all his frankness on certain social ques- tions, he is still essentially Anglo-Saxon, and is therefore, from the French point of view, likely to be misjudged and misunderstood. " His work is what dramatic critics would call good, honest, straightforward work. It is unillumined by a ray of genius ; it is slow and somewhat sodden. It reminds me of an excellent family coach — one of the old sort — hung on C-springs, a fat coachman on the box, and a footman whose livery was made for his predecessor. In criticising Mr. Meredith I was out of sympathy with my author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled ; but with Mr. Hardy I am on quite different terms. I am as familiar with him as with the old pair of trou- sers I put on when I sit down to write. I know all about his aims, his methods. I know what has been done in that line, and what can be done." Il8 GEORGE MOORE The following dictum is not wholly, perhaps, unfair to Mr. Henry James, but it is decidedly unjust to Mr. Hovvells: " What Mr. James wants to do is what he does. I will admit that an artist may be great and limited ; by- one word he may light up an abyss of soul ; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shake- speare gives us the word ; Balzac sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word ; Tourguenieff gives it with miraculous certainty ; but Henry James, no. A hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken ; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze or nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them. They pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you ; you know how they are dressed ; you watch the color of their eyes. ... I have seen a good many people I knew. I have observed an atti- tude and an earnestness of manner that proved that a heart was beating. ... I have read nothing of Henry James's that did not suggest the manner of a scholar. But why should a scholar limit himself to empty and endless sentimentalities .'' I will not taunt him with any of the old taunts. Why does he not write complicated stories.'' Why does he not com- plete his stories? Let all this be waived. I will ask him only why he always avoids decisive action .-* Why does a woman never say ' I will ' ? Why does a woman never leave the house with her lover ? Why does a man never kill a man } Why does a man never kill GEORGE MOORE I 19 himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished ? In real life, murder, adultery, and suicide are of com- mon occurrence ; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins ; suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage ; but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. ... In connection with Henry James I had often heard the name of W. D. Howells. I bought some three or four of his novels. I found them pretty, very pretty, but nothing more — a sort of Ashby Sterry done into very neat prose. He is vulgar, is refined as Henry James ; he is more do- mestic ; girls with white dresses and virginal looks, languid mammas, mild witticisms, here, there, and everywhere ; a couple of young men, one a little cyni- cal, the other a little overshadowed by his love ; a strong, bearded man of fifty in the background ; in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly spiced with American. Henry James went to France and read Tourguenieff. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." It is impossible to sum up Mr. Moore as a critic in any very satisfactory way. He is frankly a decadent, frankly a sensualist, but a decadent and a sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires : " A page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur. . . . Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of I20 GEORGE MOORE Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the pas- sion of the mural, of the window." But Mr. Moore's affinity with Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He could never follow him in that curious transformation of which I have elsewhere written, because he has never fol- lowed him to the full in the unrelieved bru- tality that was the essential condition of an ultimate reaction. Mr. Moore must remain in- tellectually apart from any actual translation of thought into action ; he must go on stirred by strange thoughts, forever sensitive to the subtlest aesthetic influences, but to the very last resisting absolutely any impulse towards a definite and final rangcuicnt. A word must be said of his style and liter- ary expression ; and here again the same anal- ogies with the French are unmistakable. As his critical writing recalls the manner of Barres and his associates, so his fiction is in style most powerfully dominated by the influence of Zola. This likeness is, indeed, the very first that strikes the casual reader of his pages. He is Zolaesque in his keen perception of the purely physical side of every scene, of every episode, and even of those situations that are properly and pri- GEORGE MOORE 121 marily psychological. Like Zola, he tries to see a sort of harmony between a state of mind and its external setting. Like Zola, too, and the other naturalistic writers, his sense of smell is exceedingly acute, and his odor-scheme is as well defined as is the color -scheme of Mr. Stephen Crane, and far less fanciful. He never spares you even the most nauseous osmic detail of the sick-room, of the slum, of the stale and stifling boozing-ken. In his ballroom scenes, under the fragrance of crush- ed and dying flowers and the most exquisite perfumes, he will detect and note the scent of perspiration, the suggestion of bared necks and arms. The escaping gas of the theatre, the whiff from the sewer-opening, and the in- describable sourness of the drunkard, all run through his descriptive passages like a musical accompaniment — a ;«^/?/ directed through the nostrils to the mind. This is reminiscent of Zola, and of Maupassant, the great high-priest of the sense of smell; but it is not imitative, for it is just as natural to Mr, Moore as it is to these great writers, and it is wonderfully effec- tive in its psychical results. We get in him, for example, not merely the Paris that meets the casual eye, but the Paris that is perceptible to the nose as well — the bouquet of the boulevard, 122 GEORGE MOORE the blend of leaves and earth, of wet as- phalt, of flaring gas and of cookery, suffused with the suggestion of wine and cigarette smoke, and just a whiff of opoponax and cory- lopsis from the perfumed silks and laces that brush against us in the gliding throng. To read some paragraphs of Celibates gives the exiled _/?^;/r/^r a curious reminiscent thrill that almost pulses into pain. Yet, though these subtle appeals to a sense too greatly scorned by the Anglo-Saxon are oftenest made through media that offend, it is only fair to say that, like Zola, and in a far higher degree, Mr. Moore is acutely sensitive to what is beauti- ful in nature. Some of his descriptions, though nearly always brief, are exquisitely realized, and are set in language that en- chants the ear, and through the ear the im- agination. Take this of the forest at Bar- bizon : " There was an opening in the trees, and below that the dark-green forest waved for miles. It was pleas- ant to rest — they were tired. The forest murmured like a shell. . . . It extended like a great temple, hush- ed in the ritual of the sunset. The light that suffused the green leaves overhead glossed the brown leaves underfoot, marking the smooth ground as with a pattern. And like chapels every dell seemed in the tranquil light, and leading from them a labyrinthine GEORGE MOORE 123 architecture without design or end. Mildred's eyes wandered from the colonnades to the underwoods. She thought of the forest as of a great green prison ; and then her soul fled to the scraps of blue that ap- peared through the thick leafage, and she longed for large spaces of sky, for a view of a plain, for a pine- plumed hill-top." " The forest murmured like a shell." That is one of the most exquisite touches of descrip- tion that the English language owns ; and the whole passage gives, as no painted picture, whether of Cazin or of Harpignies, can ever give, the full effect upon the senses of a vast forest, of its immensity, of its beauty, and of its overpowering oppressiveness. Here is Kate Lennox, as we first meet her, in A Miunnier s Wife : " Nothing was now heard but the methodical click of her needle as it struck the head of her thimble, and then the long swish of the thread as she drew it through the cloth. The lamp at her elbow burned steadily, and the glare glanced along her arm as she raised it with the large movement of sewing. Wher- ever the light touched it her hair was blue, and it en- circled, like a piece of rich black velvet, the white but tpo prominent temples ; a dark shadow defined the fine, straight nose, hinted at a thin indecision of lips, whilst a broad touch of white marked the weak but not unbeautiful chin. On her knees lay the patch- 124 GEORGE MOORE work, with its jagged edges, and the floor at her feet was covered with innumerable scraps, making a red and black litter." Few Anglo-Saxons ever fully entertain a true conception of word-values as the French do, and as George Moore has done. That the exact word always exists, and that any word but the exact word breaks the connection be- tween the writer and the reader's minds, is a fact of which few English or Americans in these slipshod days are cognizant ; but with George Moore, half sensitivist and half sen- sualist, and fed on Mallarme and Heredia, the cult of le mot juste is a passion. What can be more perfect as an example of cadenced melo- dy than what he has written of Gustave Kahn's Iiitcrniede f " The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and me- chanical after this, so exquisite and evanescent is the rhythm, and the intonations come as sweetly and sud- denly as a gust of perfume ; it is as the vibration of a fairy orchestra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver mist ; but the clouds break, and all the enchantment of a spring garden appears in a shaft of sudden sun- light." Our English tongue can get no nearer than it has done here to supreme felicity of phrasing. As a bit of striking personal description and GEORGE MOORE I 25 as the last of these quotations, I select Moore's interesting account of his first meeting with Paul Verlaine, recorded in Impressions and Opinions : " We got into an omnibus, and then we got into a tram. Then we took a cab, and I believe we had to take another tram. We passed factories and canals, and at one moment I thought we were going to take the boat. We at last penetrated into a dim and ec- centric region which I had never heard of before. We traversed curious streets, inhabited apparently by people who in dressing never got further than cauii- soles and shirt sleeves ; we penetrated into musty- smelling and clamorous court-yards, in which lingered Balzacian co7icierges ; we climbed slippery staircases upon which doors stood wide open, emitting odors and permitting occasional views of domestic life — a man in his shirt hammering a boot, a woman, presum- ably a mother, wiping a baby. ... In a dark corner, at the end of a narrow passage situated at the top of the last flight of stairs, we discovered a door. We knocked. A voice made itself heard. We entered and saw Verlaine. The terrible forehead, bald and prominent, was half covered by a filthy nightcap, and a night-shirt full of the grease of the bed covered his shoulders ; a stained and discolored pair of trousers were hitched up somehow about his waist. He was drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre. He told us that he had just come out of the hospital ; that his leg was better, but it still gave him a great deal of pain. He pointed to it. We looked away. 120 GEORGE MOORE "He said he was writing the sonnet, and promised that we should have it on the morrow. Then, in the grossest language, he told us of the abominations he had included in the sonnet ; and seeing that our visit would prove neither pleasant nor profitable, we took our leave as soon as we could." It remains only to consider what appears to be the most serious and constantly recur- ring limitation upon Mr. Moore's extraordinary' power as a delineator of contemporary life and manners. With all his acuteness of observa- tion, with all his sureness of touch, with all his insight and experience, it is impossible to over- look the very important fact that this insight and experience are very closely circumscribed by what one can only call his ignorance of the brighter side of the social world. Mr. Moore's social attitude is that of a man who has lived in clubs and mingled with men of the world only in those hours which they give to what is usually known as pleasure. His views are the sort of views that one may always hear set forth in the club smoking-room, and his notion of domestic life is the notion formed by one who takes all this cynicism literally and as representing a permanent and predom- inant state of mind. But every one of large experience knows how utterly misleading all GEORGE MOORE 12/ this is, especially when noted among men of our own race. That the cynic of the smok- ing-room will, over his petit vcrre and a good cigar, tell improper little stories of the world in which he lives, that he gibes at marriage, that he professes to suspect the virtue of all women, that he airs theories which are at vari- ance with all the traditions of his people — this means absolutely less than nothing in a vast majority of instances. It is the idle talk of men who are in reality tender-hearted, loyal, devot- ed, reverent, and true ; and when any one, like Mr. Moore, constructs for himself a society upon the basis of these post-cenatory conver- sations he is mistaking an idle phase for a per- manent condition. Now the social world that one discovers in Mr. Moore's novels is essen- tially a mirage of the clubs, and not a thing of which he has a first-hand knowledge. A very brilliant woman of my acquaintance, and one whose invincible determination not to write inflicts a real loss on English literature, has ex- pressed this thought in a figurative sort of way. " It is a pity," she said, after reading one of his novels, " that George Moore is not sometimes willing to drink a cup of tea in the afternoon." But he never is ; and brandy-and-soda is about the only beverage suggested by his writing. 128 GEORGE MOORE This would be no defect at all if he were strictly to confine himself to the actual corner of the world which he knows so well. The in- nermost recesses of Bohemia, the sweltering slum, the race -course, the public -house, the shop, the atelier, the club — here he is quite su- preme, a master of detail, a rhyparographer as faithful as Eumachus or the Flemish painters. But he is not content with this. In A Modern Lover and A Drama in Muslin and Mike Fletcher he tries to lead us elsewhere and to show us the English home, the country-side, the men and women who live far from Curzon Street and who know not Leicester Square or the " Em- pire." And then he fails, and fails in a way that not only disappoints but utterly repels; for here in the quiet nooks and in an atmos- phere of tranquillity and peace he shows us still the rakes and bullies, the immodest wom- en, the intrigue, and the assignation. The fragrance of the hedgerows is tainted by patch- ouly and by chypre ; and the heavy opium- charged scent of the Egyptian cigarette comes to our nostrils in the quiet countr}/ lanes. To read some of these pages is like witnessing the danse dit ventre performed around a May-pole. It is false ; it is monstrous ; it is actually loath- some. GEORGE MOORE I29 The club smoking-room is suggested also by the language in which Mr. Moore has set down much of what he writes. One does not mind his coarseness merely because it is coarse, but be- cause of its frequent inappropriateness, be- cause he is himself quite conscious of his offence, and because it is tainted by an almost omnipresent suggestion of vulgarity. He has some compunction himself on this score, but he drugs his literary conscience with the quite untenable belief that he is representing a genuine reversion to the freer speech of Field- ing and of Smollett ; whereas Fielding and Smollett, while often coarse, were never vulgar. They used the language and the phrases of their day with simplicity and complete uncon- sciousness ; while Mr. Moore, with other stand- ards and in a modern age, is forcing a note, and a very false one, in his effort to produce what at its best is but a pure anachronism. But this defect of his goes e^ven deeper down ; and one must frankly say that the source of his vulgarity is more than superficial and comes from something more than a mis- taken choice of models. It is far more funda- rrtental, for it colors his whole view of human life and makes this in its last analysis the life of swine and apes. His revelry is not the care- 9 I30 GEORGE MOORE less revelry of youth, soon set aside for the soberer duties of maturity ; it is studied sen- sualism reduced to a science whose joyless- ness is as striking as its depravity. It has no mirth, no spontaneity; its record gives us only the impression of jaded senses frantically seek- ing some new stimulant, loud, mirthless laugh- ter, and the sodden discontent that sits amid the stale odors of the feast in the gray hours of the morning, when the bloodshot eye and the twitching face look spectral in the ghastly light of dawn. And the persons whom he draws for us are fit for such a life as he describes. His women are of two set types. One is the bold-eyed, full- lipped woman whose person exhales a subtle suggestion of sensuality, and who is ever seek- ing a seducer. From the young girl in the con- vent-school to the matron in the ball-room, this is the type that Mr. Moore again and again is meeting and describing with a strange power of erotic suggestion, and a thorough dis- belief in the endurance of virtue for any longer time than that required to furnish an oppor- tunity for sin. Chastity, when he does dis- cover it, is not a matter of conscience, but is purely temperamental. A woman may be chaste just as she may be cross-eyed. She is GEORGE MOORE I3I not responsible for either. Some natures are too cold to sin ; they shrink from it only be- cause its promise does not stir them ; and in his philosophy natures such as these are rare and utterly abnormal. But over them George Moore devotes little time and thought. He sets the other type before us with a never-end- ing and persistent relish. When there appears upon the scene a woman's form, he thrusts it on us like a professional souteneur. With a frank brutality he catalogues her physical at- tractions ; a pervasive suggestion inspires his pen ; he mentally disrobes her, and he laughs softly with the cynical amusement of a Silenus as he notes the effect of his description. His men are, naturally enough, the moral complement of his women. He has never drawn one noble character, and there is no evidence in any of his work that he even com- prehends the English and American concep- tion of a high-bred gentleman. His world is a world of rakes and revellers, of cads, of 'Ar- ries and 'Arriets, with here and there a solitary figure, eccentric and unmanly, whose thin blood or mediaeval imagination leads him to slink into pure asceticism and to shudder at the joys of sense. And as among his women we miss the unselfish, the tender, the loyal, and 132 GEORGE MOORE the loving, so among his men we find no high- minded, generous, manly gentleman whose chiv- alry and purity of soul remove him to an equal distance from the monkey-cage and the mon- astic cell. Such, then, is George Moore — a strange and striking product of French training, a blend of subtlety and coarseness, of cynicism and vo- luptuousness, of extreme refinement and inef- fable vulgarity ; a profound psychologist, a sensitivist who feels to his very finger-tips the slightest breath of influence, a genius fettered by the chains of pure materialism, yet none the less and with all his limitations and per- versities the greatest literary artist who has struck the chords of English since the death of Thackeray. THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC What is the psychological secret of the mysterious connection that exists between religious desire in man and the desire that is sensuous and even sensual? That there is some such relation it is impossible to doubt when we look into the records alike of litera- ture and of life. Let one turn to the confes- sions of Saint Augustine, the loftiest and great- est of the Latin Fathers, and read the appalling chronicle of those wallowings in sin through which he ultimately passed to the saintly life that still shines with undimmed purity down the path of human effort. Let one also call to mind the strangely dual life of Paul Ver- laine, who so often sat down, reeking with the odors of the foulest of Parisian gargotcs, to pour out in verse of almost superhuman sweetness the aspirations of a soul pro- foundly touched with religious yearning. Nor is it without a deep significance that in ancient times the worship of the gods was 136 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC often blended with rites of indescribable eroti- cism, and that in all ages the vocabulary of religious exaltation has been borrowed from the language of human passion. The Song of Songs, ascribed to Solomon, is, to be sure, no longer viewed as a sacred allegory ; yet it was for many centuries so regarded, and the sternest and most ascetic Puritan was not re- volted by the thought that its amorous im- agery was meant to voice a spiritual senti- ment. To take a very modern instance, it was only a few years ago that one of the most widely popular of evangelical hymns was criti- cised, and not quite unreasonably, because its language was too emphatically suggestive of mere sexual desire. It may be, in fact, that there is something typical and significant in the legend of Saint Anthony, one of the holi- est of anchorites, whose chief temptation was that which filled his cell with visions of fair women. The subject is, perhaps, a little dangerous, and one need not here pursue it any further; yet it is quite irresistibly suggested by a vol- ume which now lies before me, entitled En Route, and which one may without exaggera- tion think not only the greatest novel of the day, but one of the most important, because THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC I37 it is one of the most characteristic books of our quarter of the century. Until its author, M. Huysmans, wrote it, his name suggested to the readers of French literature nothing more than naturalistic fiction of the rankest and most brutal type — fiction that surpassed the most typical work of Zola in the frankness of its physiology and the shamelessness of its indecency. With A Reboiirs, which appeared in 1885, this Flemish Frenchman reached a sort of morbid climax both in subject and in treatment, and because of this Herr Nordau chose him out as embodying the quintessence of moral and literary degeneracy. Yet it seemed to many at the time of its appearance that in A Reboiirs there was to be detected a new and striking note, an indication of new currents of tendency, a drift away from merely physical analysis, a reaching out towards some- thing which, if not ethically higher, was at any rate more subtle and more psychologically in- teresting. The later works of M. Huysmans have made it plain that this assumption was a true one ; and since La Bas has been succeeded by this latest work, the true significance of the change is very clear. Taking these three nov- els together, one may rightly view them as embodying a single purpose — a purpose of 138 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC which perhaps and probably the writer was himself not always fully conscious, but which, as his task proceeded, fully seized upon his in- tellect and was, no doubt, developed with the simultaneous development of his own experi- ence. For it is permissible to think that in setting before us the evolution of a true degenerate, M. Huysmans has been writing a spiritual and intellectual autobiography. Mr. Kegan Paul, to be sure, in an admirable introduction to his translation of the book, declares that such an assertion is both impertinent and unneces- sary; but even he avoids a flat denial of its truth. Whether it be impertinent or not, it will occur with great force to every one who knows the story of M. Huysmans' life and who is thoroughly familiar with his works ; nor can one think that the hypothesis is one which the author would himself resent. It seems, indeed, impossible that the strange things set forth in A Rcbours could have been imagined by a person whose own life had been free from any such experience, or that the in- tensity of feeling that marks the strongest chapters oi En Route could be merely the tour dc force of a clever writer. We shall not, there- fore, be far wrong if we assume that we have THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 39 now before us the record of a searching self- analysis, however much the superficial inci- dents of the story be altered from the actual facts. This must be borne in mind, for the books, that form a sort of series, refer ostensi- bly to different persons ; yet it is, in reality, but one single experience that M. Huysmans is relating. For whether the protagonist be spoken of as Des Esseintes in A Rebours or as Durtal in En Route, the change of name im- plies no change in personality, nor in the con- ditions of the psychological and moral pro- blem that is presented for our contemplation. The story itself is the narrative of a man who has deliberately cultivated sensation to the point where it has touched the very ex- treme of enervation, and who in this persistent quest has exhausted the possibilities of phys- ical pleasure, until at last the morbid and the abnormal have reached the narrow line that marks the verge of sanity. This phase is set before us in A Rebours, perhaps the strangest effort of perverse imagination that literature can show. Here we find the degenerate al- ready sated with the pleasures of the flesh, jaded and fatigued, yet seeking still for some- thing to excite at least a momentary interest, and endeavoring to find it in the piquancy 140 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC of a life in which everything shall be utterly abnormal, in which all the modes and all the conditions of ordinary existence shall be con- sistently reversed. He, therefore, creates for himself a home apart from any possible con- tact with other men, where in every possible way he follows out the cult of the artificial as being the supreme attainment of human genius. He is served by unseen attendants, who avoid entering his presence. He never quits his home. He sleeps, when his insomnia permits it, by day, and prowls about his habi- tation in the hours when other men are sleep- ing. His living-rooms are enclosed one within another, with holes that admit an artificial light through glass receptacles filled with water colored by essences to a muddy yellow, and containing mechanical fish that pass slowly back and forth through clusters of sham sea- weed. The chamber is impregnated with the smell of tar and decorated with crude litho- graphs of ships and seascapes. In this strange place he amuses himself with experimenting in the theories of Symbolism, translating each of the senses into terms of another. Wishing to hear music, he summons its sensations by drinking drops of curious liqueurs, whose effect upon the taste excites in his mind the sensa- THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC I4I tions analogous to those produced by different instruments of music — dry curacoa recalling the clarinet, gin and whiskey the trombone, anisette the flute, and Chios-raki and mastic the cymbal and the kettledrum. When he longs for the effect produced by pictures, he obtains it through his sense of smell, mixing together the perfumes that bring up before his depraved imagination landscapes or city scenes, the dressing-room of the theatre, or the surgeon's clinic, where ulcers and festering wounds attract his thought. His morbid in- genuity evokes from every scent an optical sensation, from the smell of stephanotis and ayapana to that of ordure and of human sweat. When he eats, and before his body revolts from the abnormality of his tastes, he dines on buttered roast beef dipped in tea. There is no need to recapitulate the further details of this phase of his development. On the face of it there seems to be nothing in the tale but what is morbid and delirious, and to a healthy mind both hideous and revolting. Yet, as has been already said, one can here detect a subtle note that is not found in Marthe pr Sceurs Vatard. The cult of the purely physical has ceased to satisfy, and there is a vaguely outlined longing for something 142 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC intangible which the flesh alone cannot allay. In Lh Bas, the second novel of the series, this longing has taken a more definite form. We see a quite distinctly formulated interest in the spiritual, or at least the supernatural. Mere animalism retires into the background of the mental picture, though it still exists as a discordant and disturbing element. The degenerate hero of the book has turned his mind towards the phenomena of the religious sentiment as a sphere neglected heretofore, and perhaps quite capable of affording new sensations. Yet, as before in other things he utterly reversed all normal notions, so in this new quest his impulses are inspired by per- versity. He approaches religion from the stand-point of its contemner. Where a normal sinner would seek the influence of prayer and worship, Durtal enrolls himself among those fearful creatures who embrace the cult of Sa- tanism. These singular rites, as one tradition tells us, were brought to Western Europe from the East by the Knights Templars at the time of the Crusades, and were finally at least the pretext for the dissolution of that famous order. As many know, the cult survives in France, and has not been unknown in Eng- THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 43 land during the past hundred years ; for stu- dents of Hterary history will remember how it found a devotee in Lord le Despencer, who practised it with men like Wilkes and Byron and Paul Whitehead at Medmenham in the old Cistercian abbey. Durtal is led by the influence of one Madame Chantelouve, a dia- bolic creature, to join in the frightful practices of the Satanists. He is present at a Black Mass, where blasphemy supplants the Litany, where prayer is mocked by cursing, and where images of the devil and his angels take the place of God and of the saints. By Madame Chante- louve he is lured into various acts of sacrilege, some of them involuntary; and thus he seems to have sunk to an even lower depth than when he lived the frankly pagan life of an ec- centric decadent. Yet one feels in laying down the book that the end is not yet ; that Durtal is still groping in the darkness, and that the very violence and outrageousness of his impulses may lead him at last into a re- action against the physical and moral disease that vexes him. In En Route we observe a striking contrast at the very outset. Durtal is presented to us as already weaned, in spirit at least, from the life that he has led so lonjr. He is shown as 144 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC one who has accepted in the fullest sense the faith of the Catholic Church. The processes of his conversion are not detailed, but they may- be inferred from what is told us in the opening chapter. Led on by curiosity, and perhaps by a desire for new experiences, he began to study the manifestations of the religious sentiment, and at once his mind and imagination alike were seized and held fast by the artistic side of the Roman ritual. He set himself to learn the inner history of the Church, the lives of saints, and the story of passionate devotion which those lives have illustrated. He steeped himself in the spirit of the Middle Ages, and sought out those sanctuaries where that spirit still finds its manifestations apart from the sordidness of modern life. The stately Gre- gorian music, the child-like yet affecting forms of mediaeval art, the ancient churches whose chapels are dimmed by the smoke of innumera- ble censers and impregnated with the odor of extinguished tapers and of burning incense, ex- cited in him indescribable emotions. "Among these [churches] St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most certain. He felt at home there ; he believed that if he could ever pray in earnest he could do it in that church ; and he said to himself that therein lived the spirit of the THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 145 fabric. It is impossible but that the burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for- ever impregnated the pillars and stained the walls ; it is impossible but that the vine of sorrows whence of old the saints gathered warm clusters of tears has not preserved from those wonderful days emanations which sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame of sin and the gift of tears." He enters into the dim aisles of a vast cathe- dral and listens to the magnificent music that the distant choir sings. The passage is a strik- ing one : " Durtal sat down again. The sweetness of his soli- tude was enhanced by the aromatic perfume of wax and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal recognized the Dies Ira, that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages ; instinctively he bowed his head and listened. " This was no more, as in the De Profuttdis, a hum- ble supplication, a suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough not to tremble ; it was the cry of absolute desolation and terror. And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of Mercy, to the Son who listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old Testament shows us overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke of the pyres 10 146 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC and the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. In this chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed, cried out in fear. " A crystalline voice, a clear, child's voice, proclaim- ed in the nave the tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of trumpet to purify by fire the rottenness of the world. " Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats more overwhelming; and after a short strain by the choir, an alto repeated them in still more detail. Then, as soon as the awful poem had exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill tones — the falsetto of a little boy — the name of Jesus went by, and a light broke in upon the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies of the Saviour, and His pardon, plead- ing with Him for absolution, as formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen. But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the solos continued, discouraged, inter- rupted by the recurrent weeping of the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special con- ditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the dif- ferent ages of tears. " At last, when, still mixed and blended, these voices THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 47 had borne away on the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the buoys of pray- ers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror, wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering Dona ezs requiem, they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive that it died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ. "What man could have imagined such despair or dreamed of such disasters? And Durtal made answer to himself, ' No man.' " In fact, Durtal was brought back to religion by his love for art ; and the sight of the count- less worshippers who knelt day after day be- fore the crucifix shook to the depths his taint- ed soul. He believed, and his whole being cried out for a refuge from his disgust with life, his infinite weariness of self. But as yet he had faith alone. He could not pray ; he could not even master the temptations of the flesh that kept assailing him with even great- er strength than heretofore. He sinned and sinned again, even while his mind was full of these new emotions. But at this moment he fell under the influence of a priest, a shrewd, kindly man, of vast experience, cultivated, and a keen judge of human nature. Him Durtal consults, not as a priest so much as a sym- pathetic friend ; and little by little he yields to the kindly influence of the shrewd old Abbe. 148 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC With infinite tact and delicate finesse the Abbe leads him on to take an interest in those orders in the Church that are purely contem- plative — especially the Trappist branch of the Cistercians. Little by little Durtal's imagina- tion is fired by the thought of a life of such pure devotion, until at last the Abbe Gevresin suggests that he spend a short time as a " re- treatant " in the Trappist monastery of Notre Dame de I'Atre, shut out from the world, and surrounded by the influence and example of those monks who approach in their lives the nearest to complete self-abnegation. Durtal is startled at the thought. He asks questions as to the restraints that are imposed upon a lay- man who enters even for a week a monastery such as this. His first objections are singular in their modernness. He is fond of cigarettes, and cannot think of giving up tobacco. He hates oily cookery, and he cannot digest milk in any form. But the notion of becoming a retreatant fascinates him. He reflects and hesi- tates. It occurs to him that he can perhaps find some way of smoking cigarettes by stealth in the woods about the monastery. He thinks that he can stand the cooking. At last, after days of internal conflict, he decides to go, and makes a prayer — a most curious prayer: THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 1 49 " Take count of this, O Lord : I know by experience that when I am ill -fed I have neuralgia. Humanly, logically speaking, I am certain to be horribly ill at Notre Dame de I'Atre ; nevertheless, if I can get about at all, the day after to-morrow I will go all the same. In default of love, this is the only proof I can give that I desire Thee, that I truly hope and believe in Thee ; but do Thou, O Lord, aid me." The same odd mixture of modernity and mediaevalism is seen throughout. Durtal, with his mind filled by thoughts of St. Magdalen of Pazzi and Bonaventura and Dionysius the Are- opagite, stuffs his valise with pink packages of cigarettes, and Menier's sweet chocolate, and antipyrine, and sets out for the monastery from the Gare du Nord. It is impossible to give here even the briefest recapitulation of his experiences, which Huysmans tells with minute detail and the most extraordinary frankness. His life as a retreatant, his spiritual struggles, his mental battles with unbelief, his victories and his defeats, are vivid in their realism. One feels that this is just what w^ld be the expe- rience of a modern, only half-weaned from a loose and lawless life, suddenly plunged into an atmosphere of the strictest mediaevalism. This life keeps recurring to the imagination of Durtal. A certain Florence comes to his mind 150 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC with maddening persistency. He sees continu- ally her sly face aping the modesty of a little girl, her slim body, her strange tastes that lead her to drink toilet -scents and to eat caviare with dates. Once he believes that Satan him- self enters the room and fills it with visions of horror. Again, in the midst of prayer, he is seized with a fearful longing to rise and yell out blasphemies. He finally goes to confession, and the scene is told with curious minuteness. Then at last a great calm comes upon him. The atmosphere of intense devotion, the sub- lime reality of the faith that inspires all about him, their life devoted to the single end of praise and worship and adoration, and the benignant and sympathetic kindness of the monks soothe and comfort and strengthen him. Here are rest and hope and perfect tranquillity; and the book ends with his regret- ful return to Paris and the expression of his longing for a life of religious contemplation. " If they [his loose companions] knew how inferior they are to the lowest of the lay brothers ! If they could imagine how the divine intoxication of a Trap- pist interests me more than all their conversations and all their books ! Ah, Lord, that I might live, live in the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon !" En Route is interesting in many ways. It is THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 151 unique among the other books of Huysmans in style no less than in spirit. Here he has wholly put aside the studied bareness and hardness of expression that characterize his earlier method, and the descriptive passages glow with color and abound in strange felicities of expression. His enthusiasm for the purely mediaeval fairly carries him away, and I think has led him into indefensible extremes. Did space permit we should like to say something of his evident devotion to plain song as against the harmonized Gregorian chant of Palestrina, for I think that the greatest masters of church music would decline to follow him in his lack of discrimination between the plain song in the Prefaces to the Mass and in the other portions of the service where more than a single voice is necessary for the full effect. His enthusiasm leads him also into long and rather tedious digressions upon the history of the mediaeval saints, whose lives he insists upon detailing with remorseless elaboration, so that the effect produced is thoroughly inartistic from a liter- ary point of view, and gives the impression of one who has crammed up a subject and is un- willing to lose any portion of his material. Interesting also is the psychological side of the book, with its implied thesis that faith, like 152 THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC all other emotions, is contagious ; and with its illustration of the thought with which I com- menced this paper, that the sensual nature under certain influences can become the most profoundly spiritual and religious. M. Huys- mans is usually classified as one of the disciples of Emile Zola ; but Zola could never have written a book like this, for, in spite of the contrary opinion that prevails, Zola is no sen- sualist, in the fullest meaning of the word. He is only an intense materialist, and he lacks a sympathetic insight into phenomena that are purely spiritual. He is like the photogra- pher who, with equal unconcern and as a mat- ter of mere business, will in the same hour turn his camera upon the dead child in its coffin filled with flowers, or upon the leering dancer in her spangled tights. To those of us who are Protestants the book is full of deep instruction in revealing with startling force the secret of the power of that wonderful religious organization which has made provision for the needs of every human soul, whether it requires for its comfort active service or the mystical life of contemplation. We see how every want is understood and how for every spiritual problem an answer is pro- vided ; how the experience of twenty centuries THE EVOLUTION OF A MYSTIC 153 has been stored up and recorded, and how all that man has ever known is known to those who guide and perpetuate this mighty system. And in these days when Doctors of Divinity devote their energies to nibbling away the foundations of historic faith, and when the sharpest weapons of agnosticism are forged on theological anvils, there is something reas- suring in the contemplation of the one great Church that does not change from age to age, that stands unshaken on the rock of its con- victions, and that speaks to the wavering and troubled soul in the serene and lofty accents of divine authority. THE PASSING OF NORDAU THE PASSING OF NORDAU It must seem a little curious to many read- ers of current literature that Max Nordau's ponderous indictment of modern civilization has so soon and so completely passed into the limbo of half-forgotten things. There was a moment when it appeared as though a great light had flashed upon the dark corners of so- ciety, displaying abysmal depths of foulness and corruption lying all about us; as though for an instant there had been revealed a ghast- ly spectre hovering over the modern world and, like the Erl-King of German legend, reaching out a hideous paw to destroy all that is dearest and holiest in the lives of mortal men. To-day, while in the remoter parts of the country Degeneration has probably its share of startled readers, the world at large has ceased to think of it ; and its portentous pages have left no mark behind them save the addition of a few phrases to the literary slang of the time, and perhaps a deeper taint upon 158 THE PASSING OF NORDAU the morbid imagination of a few disordered minds. What appeared for the moment to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the social cosmos for the damnation that was sure to come, is now very clearly seen to have been merely a well-timed though un- wholesome and spasmodic literary sensation. It is the strange rapidity and completeness of this decline of interest in Nordau's fulmina- tions that make the various volumes written to refute his arguments appear almost as an- tiquated as an attack on Fourierism or as a serious polemic against the Millerite delusion. Thinking men have taken Nordau's measure. They have analyzed his utterances, and ex- amined his facts, and tested the logic of his deductions ; and as a result of their examina- tion they have laid his book aside and turned to other and more profitable themes. It is, of course, from one point of view, un- fair to drag into a discussion the personality of a writer in estimating the value of his theses, for this sort of thing is bound to smack of the argument ad Jiomincni ; yet in the case of Herr Nordau it is impossible not to reflect upon his character and temperament as re- vealed in all his published work ; for a knowl- edge of these things has undoubtedly contrib- THE PASSING OF NORDAU 159 uted to minimize the influence of his book. Moreover, one need feel no great compunction in speaking of him very frankly, for in Degen- eration he has erected a whole mountain of theory upon his own estimate of living men, and has taken it upon himself in the most off- hand fashion to define their motives and to question their sincerity. And when his book was flung before the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon world, the first question asked on every hand was, " Who is Nordau ? " A quick-witted Jew, imbued, like many of his race to-day, with an impenetrable material- ism, a sceptic and yet a doctrinaire, Nordau is less an individual than a type, and a type raised to the ;/th. For him the world of spirit has absolutely no existence, the altruistic mo- tive no force, ideal beauty no reality. Trained to study the perversities of the phenomena that are revealed to the alienist, tracing every- thing to a physical source, and accepting to the full the theories of his master, Lombroso, he is an ideal illustration of the credulity of science. He cannot believe in imagination save as a symptom of irrationality ; he cannot recognize any love of beauty save as a mani- festation of erotomania. Yet he can worship physiology as a clue to all the mysteries of l6o THE PASSING OF NORDAU life, and think himself able to sound the very depths of the human soul by measuring men's ears and noting down the conformation of their frontal bones. From the earliest days of his student life he seems to have had a strangely morbid curiosity as to the abnormal. He pried into all the dark corners of diseased mentality; he collected all the prurient details of the psychiatrist's practice ; and with an avid delight he gleaned in the remotest fields of sexual psychopathy. The few unhappy creat- ures who in another age would have raved be- hind the bars of a mad-house, but whom the printing-press has given to-day a speaking-tube to reach the public ear, Nordau watches with the joy of a connoisseur, jotting down in a note-book every fearful phrase, and garnering up every perverse, disjointed thought. He wades through whole libraries, to wrench from its context any bit of reprehensible descrip- tion and add it to his collection. Presently he has volumes upon volumes of this sort of stuff ; he has haunted the hospitals and asy- lums, and made for himself a little world of his own, peopled by the ghastly figures of the diseased, the dying, and the degenerate ; and then at last he comes out into the greater world — the world of sunlight and sanity — with THE PASSING OF NORDAU l6l a mind that has itself become perverted, a mind that has lost its sense of proportion, and has grown intellectually color-blind. He has so accustomed himself to watching for telltale symptoms that he sees them on every side, even in the healthiest mind and the soundest body. The slightest coincidences are to him conclusive evidence of identity ; and he puts his own hideous interpretation upon everything that meets his view, until, as has been very truly said, he is himself an abnormality and a pathological type. Every large hospital for the insane knows his representative— the one sane man in a world of lunatics. Yet there is a very apparent method in his madness. He has a canny, commercial side to him that is ex- tremely characteristic of his race ; and seeing that certain topics are attracting some atten- tion, and that the world is ready for a new sensation, he infers that the psychological moment has arrived ; and at once, gathering up his ponderous note-books, he compacts them into a bulky volume, garnishes them with a pseudo-scientific sauce, cooks up a theory to justify his exposure, and launches the delect- able combination upon an appreciative mar- ket. Probably the strongest proof of the falsity l62 THE PASSING OF NORDAU of Nordau's view of society is to be found in the sensation which his book created ; for this sensation was not that which springs from startled conviction and guilty recognition, but from sheer astonishment and incredulity. It was the shock which might be felt by a trav- eller who, walking quietly along a pleasant road, should find his way blocked by a mighty avalanche of muck. At first he might beheve that here was some great cataclysm, some won- derful phenomenon of nature ; but a moment's inspection would speedily convince him that, after all, it was muck, and nothing more. And so with Nordau's book. The world wondered for a moment, because the world at large had never even dreamed that such things as Nordau wrote of were in existence. Thousands of in- telligent men and women had never so much as heard the names of Huysmans and Nietz- sche and Paul Verlaine. The subtleties of the Symbolists were unknown to them. They had innocently looked upon Wagner as a great master of dramatic music, upon Ruskin as a refined and stimulating critic, upon Tolstoi as a powerful novelist and a sincere if impractica- ble humanitarian. And as to the darker and more repellent facts set forth by Nordau from the treatises of Krafft-Ebing and other special- THE PASSING OF NORDAU 163 ists in neuropathy, of these thhigs they had never even had an inkling. Therefore, just as the traveller described above, after looking for a moment at the muck -heap, would simply hold his nose and pass around it, so Nordau's readers, after a very short consideration of his pages, metaphorically held their noses and turned away from the further contemplation of his pornographic pile. Some few, however, interested in the ab- normality of the whole thing, lingered for a while to investigate it in a scientific spirit ; and these speedily found good reasons for the contempt which was with the world at large a matter of unerring instinct and intuition. They at once detected the unreality and fun- damental unimportance of it all. They noted the singular perversity that deduced from ev- ery intellectual product of the age one and the same conclusion ; that called one man a maniac because he wrote so much, and another man a maniac because he wrote so little ; that set down still another as an incipient criminal be- cause his ears were said to be pointed at the ends, and a fourth as subject to " echolalia " because his verse abounds in cadenced repeti- tions ; that in one place declared human beings too good and noble to need the fear of hell, 164 THE PASSING OF NORDAU and in another place described them as too vile to dispense with the fear of the gallows and the hangman. They noted him saying that material success in life is a test of sound-mindedness, and yet considering just how far the same success is evidence of degeneracy. They saw him also, with a subtlety of erotic suggestion, detecting sexuality in what all men before him had seen nothing but the beauty and the joy of art, and infusing a lingering taint into some of the noblest creations of the human imagination. Finally, they turned to what Nordau had him- self produced in the sphere of fiction, and there finding writ large the sordid sensuality which he had wantonly ascribed to the masters of modern literature, they at once convicted him beyond the possibility of defence of all that he had claimed to see in others. It needed only a clear appreciation of these things to discredit and refute the whole elaborate attack that he had made upon the age ; and when it was quite plainly understood that the author of Degen- eration was himself simply a stray degenerate, raving with foul words at his environment, all interest in him, save as in an abnormal type, at once declined. To my mind the most forceful and truly il- THE PASSING OF NORDAU 1 65 luminative comment on his book is that in which the anonymous author of a recent vol- ume c:i\\ed Rcgcncratioji traces in Nordau'swork and in his mental attitude the influence of a powerful German bias, and which sets forth in very vigorous and convincing language the es- sential traits of the typical German. A single sentence will sufifice to give the reader a clue to his argument : "German education and German surroundings tend to foster in the human mind veneration for authority, contempt for the plebeian, distrust of liberty, a firm belief in the unquenchable power of man's lowest in- stincts, a nervous demand for authoritative repression of human passions, and contentment with prosaic ex- istence, small resources, and poor prospects." How true this is and how far-reaching is the truth in its practical manifestations, every one who has lived in Germany, or who has studied German character as mirrored in German his- tory and in the social characteristics of the German people, must be profoundly conscious. The typical German is a being who, if he gives play to the higher and more creative impulses at all, does so only in the sphere of imagina- tion, while his actual life is dominated by the most intense materialism. A pure sentimen- l66 THE PASSING OF NORDAU talist, his thought and his action have apparent- ly no relation whatever to each other. He con- templates with intellectual enthusiasm the ideal beauty, and he lives contented with the most squalid environment. He worships ideal purity, and he indulges himself in methodical sensual- ity. He writes lachrymose verse imbued with chivalrous sentiment for woman, and then he yokes his wife with a dog or an ass and sets her ploughing in his potato-fields. He can de- scribe on paper an elaborate Utopia of justice and political perfection, and he is governed by one of the rankest and most brutal despotisms that ever smothered human freedom under the bonds of a military bureaucracy. Hence it is that the Germans, with all their training and all their many admirable traits, are lacking in constructiveness, in spontaneity, in creative boldness. When things go wrong, and when an American or an Englishman would take his coat off and set them right by the vigor and originality of his native energy, a German rolls up his eyes helplessly and begins to whim- per for some higher power to tell him what to do. A curious indication of this national proneness to despair is seen in the fact that of all the suicides recorded in our daily press by far the greater number is that of men and THE PASSING OF NORDAU 167 women with German names. And this is wliy the history of Germany is what it is — a history of divided and discordant principalities, of a people submitting to the rule of a hundred petty despots, unable to do more than maunder over the liberty that none of them would strike a blow to win ; of a people who forgot at Napoleon's bidding their national self-respect, and fought his battles for him against their own kindred and natural allies. In 1848 they had a chance to show what they could do at constructing a parliamentary government, and they produced nothing but a windy debating society of visionary doctrinaires, to be soon dismissed contemptuously by a military prince. When some strong, masterful spirit arises among them — a man like Frederick the Great or Bismarck — they do not use him as a nation- al instrument, but he sets his foot on all their necks and forces them to do his bidding. Hence it is that Germany presents to-day the astounding spectacle of a nation, the most highly educated in the world, governed by drill-sergeants and sub-lieutenants, accepting a regime that makes it a penal offence to speak disrespectfully of an artillery -mule, and in which the best born, the most eminent, and the most highly trained all flock with enthusias- l68 THE PASSING OF NORDAU tic self-abasement to lick the jack-boots of a pinchbeck Caesar. It is quite reasonable, therefore, to recognize in Nordau's book a true reflection of the Ger- man temperament. The pedantic marshalling of documentary evidence to convict whole nations, the intellectual near-sightedness that sees no further than the hospital and the dis- secting-room and that knows nothing of the play of forces in the greater world beyond, the moral cowardice, the negation of hope, the grossness of the materialism, the suspicious distrust, the attempt to reduce the things of the spirit to an unvarying formula — surely these are not the traits of the broad-minded, far-seeing, and sane philosopher. They sug- gest rather the Herr Professor in his stuffy study, evolving from his books and from his inner consciousness a theory for interminable exploitation in the lecture - room. Nordau's whole work, in fact, came bearing the ear-marks of a nation that regards an intelligent machine as the perfection of human progress, that finds in every vista an impasse, and that sees in every paltry mole-hill the menace of a mighty moun- tain. But what is one to say of Nordau's main contention that our age is marked with the THE PASSING OF NORDAU 169 stigmata of degeneracy? Is the world really- growing better or is it growing worse ? Prob- ably the serious student of social phenomena would say that in reality there is little actual gain from one generation to another, but that in all ages and among all civilized peoples the sum total of essential morality remains un- changed. At one period some particular vice or some particular virtue will be in the ascen- dant, and at another period another. In early Rome, for instance, chastity and personal hon- esty were the rule, yet they were accompanied by an utter lack of humanity and of the softer virtues. A wife could be beaten to death for drinking wine ; Cato could order an innocent slave to be slain merely to impress the other serfs with their master's power. Under the Empire such cruelty became impossible, yet the growth of the sentiment of mercy was co- incident with a decline of integrity and of sexual morality. And so, too, in the case of contemporaneous peoples, neither the especial vice nor the especial virtue of the one is neces- sarily that of the other. There is no doubt, for instance, that the standard of commercial morality is appreciably higher in England than in the United States, and that the laws of property are held to be more sacred there than lyo THE PASSING OF NORDAU here ; but, on the other hand, the brute who in England kicks his wife with heavy clogs gets off with a small fine, while to all men is permitted a degree of license in the sphere of personal morality which if practised here would insure an instant ostracism. And so the balance is apparently kept even. Yet, after all, the impartial student of manners, who looks back over the pages of history and the record of men's lives, can scarcely fail to perceive with every cycle a certain steady prog- ress that is not merely onward, but upward too. The dark side of the picture is not quite so dark as it was once, and the bright side is far brighter. The standards of virtue are, at any rate, accepted now by all men, and acceptance must ultimately mean observance also. Hu- manity moves onward with a stumbling step and many a halt, yet it does advance, and with every century its gaze is fixed with an increas- ing steadiness upon the lofty and immutable ideals of justice and mercy and purity and truth. THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS Lest the reader should find, as he easily might, some ambiguity in the title of this short paper, it may be well to explain, by way of premise, that popular songs are here taken to mean only the songs of the day, ephemeral, trivial, and of little or no musi- cal value — the songs that spring up, as it Avere, in a night, that are sung and whistled and played for a few weeks or months, and are then forgotten. The songs that endure for generations, though often of no greater intrinsic merit, are more truly described as national songs ; for the national song is by no means necessarily one whose words and music, or even the circumstances of whose composition, are associated with an historical or patriotic event. The Ranz des Vaches, for instance, is most truly the national air of Switzerland, though it is only a herdsman's strain ; and Bayard Taylor's poem keeps alive the fact that on the eve of the bloodiest battle 174 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS of the Crimean War the Scotch regiments fed their martial spirit by singing, not the stirring music of their grandest battle-hymn, Scots wha hae, but the simple strains of Annie Laurie. Just what gives vitality to some of these songs it is hard to say ; but the fact is plain enough that while most of them pass out of memory Avithin a year, a (qw express in some subtle way the deeper feelings of a nation and live throughout the rest of its history. Thus Part- ant pour la Syrie, and ^a Ira, and the Car- magnole, and Yankee Doodle, and MarcJiing Through Georgia will outlive the French and American republics, while En R'vnant de la Revue, and Pire la Victoire, and Just Before the Battle, and We Don't Want to Fight are forgotten in a single generation. And the reason for the immortality of the one set and for the oblivion of the other is about equally mysterious. The popular song, however, in the restricted sense of the word — the song of the whistling boy and the street-piano — is at present often able to secure a brief respite from immediate forgetfulness, to cheat oblivion, and secure a second lease of life by a species of migration. In these days, when travel is cheap and when each nation, being more or less informed about THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 175 its neighbor's doings, finds it an amusing thing to be imitative and cosmopoHtan, the popular song is one of the objects that, Hke food, fash- ions, and Hterature, are amiably borrowed. Thus it happens that when some ditty has become such a nuisance in the land of its birth as to make its public rendition more or'* less unsafe, it suddenly disappears, and almost immediately reappears in some other country, where it is treated as an attractive novelty. When it springs up again in this way among a people whose language is not that of its author, it often suffers a sea-change; but the music is usually unaltered, while the transfor- mation of its words is often very characteristic and amusing. One would say a priori that England and America would be the greatest borrowers of the chansonctte. As Germany is the most musical land in the world, and as France is the home of the caf^ chantant, it might be supposed that the English "music-hall" and the American " variety show " would find the French and German airs an inexhaustible store to borrow from. But the truth of the matter is quite the reverse, and for two very different reasons. As regards Germany, it is precisely because the Germans are so musical that the 176 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS foreign conveyer of popular songs finds so little to appropriate. The German's taste in music is so educated and he takes his music so seriously, as to make nonsense-songs, such as those of our country and of England, ap- pear to him neither amusing nor agreeable. They are simply monstrosities, fit only for ec- centric and Philistine nations, such as he sup- poses us to be. The Tingeltangel plays no such important part in the economy of his amusements as does the cafe chantant in the diversions of the French. When he listens to music, it must be good in itself. The differ- ence is well seen in such an establishment as Kroll's Garten, in Berlin — a place in many re- spects akin to the Folies Bergere, of Paris. It is an immense beer-garden ; yet its open-air music is rendered by a really fine orchestra, supplemented occasionally by some of the military bands of the garrison ; while in the adjacent theatre appear singers of interna- tional celebrity, who interpret the roles of the lighter of the grand operas, such as the Meis- tersingcr, the Tronipetcr von Sdkingen, and The Flying Dutchman. In fact, the German sel- dom descends to any lower depth, musically, than the comic opera ; and when an American, an Englishman, or a Frenchman would be hum- THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 177 ming TJie Band Played On or Gigolette, a Ger- man contents himself with a bit of Millocker or Suppe — something far from classical, if you will, but by no means cheap and vulgar. And as he does not himself produce our sort of popular song, still less does he import those which we have made. Some of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas he will tolerate (the airs from the Mikado were rather popular in Germany at one time), and Mr. Reginald De Koven is not unknown ; but that is the limit of his toleration. It is true that in the numer- ous Tingeltangels our comic songs are often heard, but they are sung in their original form by foreign singers, English and American, and are listened to by the Germans in the same spirit in which a visitor to Chinatown enjoys the performance of a Mongolian orchestra. Hence our purveyors of popular music find nothing of the kind in Germany to appropri- ate ; but with true American audacity they have gone straight to the classical music, and from it have filched innumerable themes. It may not be generally known, for instance, that the chorus of OJi^Hoiv I Love My Ada is taken bodily from the overture to Zanetta, that the chorus of Paradise Alley is an echo of the drinking-song in Cavalleria Ricsticana, that 178 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS Anyiie Rooney is taken directly, with a mere change of tempo, from a chorale of Bach ; and that Down went McGinty is stolen from an- other. It is an amusing fact that Wagner derived the so-called bell-motif in Parsifal from the last-named source ; so that we have the great master of modern music drinking from the same fountain of inspiration as the author of Down went McGinty ! Again, not very much is borrowed from the French. The reason for this is to be found, I think, in the musical characteristics of the French cJiansonettes. The French popular music is eminently vivacious ; it has a sort of sparkle that is distinctly Gallic ; but there is something about it that makes it rather un- attractive to an English ear. It is too jerky ; it lacks rhythm and melody ; and it does not easily fix itself in the memory. It is, in fact, rather thin, and irresistibly suggests the nasal tones and cracked pianos of the gargotes through which it finally passes into obliv- ion. Hence it is not often borrowed, the exceptions being found principally in semi- military songs. These are occasionally trans- planted to England and America, though they are there not sung, but arranged for military bands and for orchestras. An instance of this THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 1 79 is the Boulangist chant, En Rvnant de la Re- vue, first sung by Paulus at the Alcazar d'Ete, and speedily taken up all over France by the partisans of the brav Gdnc'ral. It was at once cabled to this country (a journalistic feat achieved by the New York Herald), and was heard everywhere, but only as an air, no words ever having been written for it in Eng- lish, so far as I know. A later French success, Pere la Victoire, likewise " created " by Paulus at the Eldorado, was at one time a good deal played by military bands in England, where it was also set to new words ; but as a song it had no success. Therefore, the fact remains that while we borrow French fashions, French cookery, French plays, and French nov&ls, the Anglo-Saxon world cares very little for French popular songs. Equally unsuccessful has proved the attempt to adapt for English and American use any of the numerous canzonette of Italy, and for the same reasons. Perhaps the last attempt to make a hit in this way was that of Miss Lot- tie Collins, who, after the song which is es- pecially associated with her name had been worn threadbare, announced with a good deal of journalistic trumpeting a new one entitled Marguerite of Monte Carlo. This was in real- l8o THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS ity an English adaptation of a Neapolitan can- zone by the popular song- writer Piedigrotta, first sung at the Salone Margherita in Naples in 1892, when it caught the fancy of the populace immensely, and was soon sung, whistled, and played all over Italy. The original was called Margarita dc Parete, and was written in dia- lect. It has a good deal of swing to it, but in spite of Miss Collins's own popularity, and her persistent efforts to make it a success, it fell rather flat, and never reached the street-piano. Not many of our popular airs, then, are for- eign ; but a very great many of ours are caught up by the French, especially those songs whose English words have a jingle that tickles the Gallic ear with a suggestion of eccentricity. Such, for example, is an absurd but rather tuneful ditty, once much in vogue in England, though never very well known in this country, and entitled Linger Longer, Loo. The original is by Messrs. Young and Sidney Jones, and it so amused the first Frenchman who heard it that it was almost immediately carried to Paris. French words were written by M. Henri Dreyfus, the English chorus being re- tained, and it was sung by no less a personage than the famous Yvette Guilbert, and later by Mile. Duclerc at the Folies Berg^re. The first THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS l8l verse of the French rendering will give a good idea of Ic genre Aiiglaisiste, so called : ^a nVous amuse pas c'que j' dis lu Moi non plus je I'atteste, Mais il faut bien par ci par la, Chanter de tout et I'reste. Mon repertoire est folichon A c'que dis'nt les families Aussi ma p'tite English chanson Est fait' pour les jeunes (illes. Leurs papas diront c'est plus beau Bien qu' vous n' compreniez pas un mot. Ell's pens'ront, siir, y'a pas d'plaisir Du moment qu'on n' peut pas rougir! "Linger longer, Lucy, linger longer. Loo, How I love to linger, Lticy, linger long o' yon ; Listen -while I sing, ah, tell nie you'll be true. Linger lojtger, longer linger, linger longer. Loo!" The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo was a great favorite with the French, and their version of it was a close paraphrase of the Eng- lish, though it very characteristically repre- sented the breaker of the bank as a woman, and not a man. The title of it w2iS J'ai fait santcr la banqne a Monte Carlo, h.'s, a rule, the niusic alone is taken, the French words having no reference to the original ones. Thus, Daisy Bell, or, as the French usually wrote it. Daysey l82 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS Bell, furnished the music for a rather amusing set of verses by M, Dreyfus, who is an Anglo- phobe, in which Ics Anglaiscs pour rire are vig- orously mocked — their diet of bifteck, rumsteck, and other viandcs saignantcs, their prudery, and their dress. A verse may serve to amuse the reader. A Paris va des Anglaises L'air sec, avec Des appas comm' des punaises Des dents longu's et jaun's dans I'bec. Sur r boul'vard chacun' circule Vetu' comm' d'un foureau D'un macfarlaii ridicule Coiffe' d'un tout p'tit chapeau ! All right I All right' Rien ne les emotionne ; All right! All right ! Rien ne les passionne ; Ell's ont la sech'ress' d'un' planche, Ell's ont aussi sa raideur, Que c'soit la s'maine ou I'dimanche Un rien offense leur pioudeur! Tlie chorus of this had ah"nost as much suc- cess in France as the original enjoyed in Eng- land and the United States ; and up to the present time, when a gamin wishes to jeer at a stray Englishman, he greets him with the THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 183 " All right !" which, together with " Aoh yes !" is regarded in France as the shibboleth of the Anglo-Saxon race. As might be expected, Tai-ara-boom-dc-ay ex- actly suited the Anglaisistes. It had scarcely appeared in England and America before a French rendering was rushed into print, in fact so rapidly that the author of it, M. Fabrice Lemon, failed to notice the exact title of the original and altered a syllable, his version bear- ing the name Tha-inara-bouni-di-Ji^ ; but it was a great success, being sung at one and the same time at four of the principal cafe's con- certs — the Alcazar, the Horloge, the Ambas- sadeurs, and the Folies Bergcre. Before, how- ever, any French version at all had been made, the present writer, being in a provincial town in Normandy, read one day an announcement of the local theatre to the effect that on the following evening a new one-act play would be presented, with the remarkable title Miss Kiss- viy, in which the forward manners of the typi- cal vices Anglaise\NOw\di be held up to the rep- robation of a virtuous French audience. It was also announced as a special attraction that a certain Mile. Dufort would, in the course of the play, sing the celcbre chanson Anglaise, Tha-ra-ra-bouvi-der-i. When the time came 184 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS and Mile. Dufort appeared she had an immense audience. The first few lines made it evident (not to the audience, however) that this inge- nious young woman had shrunk from the task of " getting up " the Hnes of the genuine ver- sion, but had instead constructed a set of verses of her own by piecing together all the English words she had ever heard. The first verse, then, ran something like this : Ticket tramway clergyman Bifteck rumsteck rosbif van, Sandwich whitebaits lady lunch Cheri-gobler, wiskey-ponche ; Aoh-yes all right shocking stop Pel-el why-not moton-chop, Plum-kek miousic steamer boxe, Boule-dogue high-life five-o'clocks. Tha-ra-ra-boum-der-e, etc. It was an immense success. The audience rose at her. They knew that the English was all right, because they themselves recognized a good many of the words. She had an ova- tion and nine encores ; and this was probably the first rendition of the cclcbre chanson on French soil. It has already been noted that the French, in taking over the English popular songs, sel- dom or never translate the words literally. THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 185 The reason of this is very characteristic. In the first place, the French mind is too logically reasonable to relish mere nonsense such as de- lights with a childish joy a typical Anglo-Saxon audience. Possibly the Gallic lack of humor also stands in the way of an appreciation of pure absurdity. In the second place, the French have an innate literary instinct that demands precision, neatness of phrasing, and point, in even the lightest verses to which they are asked to listen ; and the commonplaces of our senti- mental ballads are to them indescribably inane. Hence in the lines that they write for our popu- lar music there are to be found almost always a wit and a meaning to which the English words have no claim. Yet in another way the balance is in our favor; for an unpleasant French trait almost always mars their verses — the fondness for striking the note of the un- cleanly suggestive. Our English words may be utterly nonsensical, their sentiment may be commonplace and its expression mawkish, yet both words and sentiment are clean and whole- some ; the nonsense is good, honest nonsense, and one never carries away, after listening to it, an unpleasant taste ; and this quality in our popular songs and popular singers is far better than all the tainted wit of a Dreyfus and a l86 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS Baneux, and the inspired diablerie of Yvette Guilbert and Duhamel. A good instance of how the French bedevil an innocent piece of fun can be seen by comparing the EngHsh popular song Ting-a-li?ig with the French ver- sion called Ling-a-ling, first sung by Edmee Lescot at the Casino de Paris. The EngHsh is a rollicking bit of harmless nonsense ; but of the French version there is not a single stanza that I should venture to reprint. There is one thing which seems quite remark- able in the popular songs of the French to-day, and which has a deep significance of its own. When we reflect upon the fact that France is now in reality a great armed camp, that its people are waiting with a feverish anxiety — an intense feeling of hope and fear — for the inevitable hour when they shall strike the great blow to avenge the humiliation of 1870; when one remembers how intensely martial is the spirit of the whole nation, how it is yearning for its old supremacy and for the glory that was dimmed at Gravelotte and Sedan, and at the same time recalls how effusive the French temperament is, it is simply marvellous to find the singers of the people's songs so silent on the one theme that lies closest to every patri- otic Frenchman's heart. No ballads revile the THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 1S7 hated Prussian ; no martial songs call for the hastening of the day of reckoning ; no new Beranger puts into the lyrics of the street the fierce longing that throbs in the pulses of so many millions. This very silence, ominous, universal, is the most profoundly impressive evidence of the intensity of the flame that needs no outward fanning to keep it in a glow. "The shallows murmur, but the deeps are dumb"; and the underlying thought seems to be this: that to recall the horrors of 1870 would be humiliating, unbearable ; while to sing of what all hope for in the future would be only to play the braggart's part in the face of possibilities that make the lightest spirit shrink back with awe from their contemplation. I have said that there is scarcely a trace in any popular song of the spirit of rcvatiche ; yet here and there a word, a phrase, or a turn of expression reveals it as by a flash. One of the most striking illustrations of this, and perhaps the boldest, is found in the MarcJic dcs Treize Jours, a song that was sung all over France not very long ago. It is professedly only a comic song, narrating the amusing experiences of a rcscrviste who goes into camp to perform his thirteen days of required military service ; but the last verse strikes a different note : l88 THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS Ouand les treiz' jours sont termines L'general nous dit: "J' vous r'mercie, Vous etes dign's de vos aines! A I'appel sacre de la Patrie Tous vous viendrez Et me direz : " ' Les Treize Jours ne tremblent pas ! Pour repousser les hordes etrangeres Nous saurons tous dans les combats Nous battr' comm' de vieux militaires!' " Puis nous montrant notre drapeau, " Sachez mourir," dit-il, "pour sa defense!" Et l'general elevant son chapeau, Nous dit "A bientot! Vive la France!" There is a world of meaning to every French- man in that a bientot ! Another of the recent popular songs in France is also very significant — this one not for its words, but for its music. It is a song that I have already mentioned — Pcre la Vic- toire — first sung by Paulus at the Eldorado in the winter of 1891-92. The words are noth- ing — the revery of an old soldier — but the music, arranged by Louis Ganne for military bands, is in its way a wonderfully effective thing — a sort of cantata, whose meaning all France interpreted at once. It opens with a roll of drums and a trumpet-call, as heralding THE MIGRATION OF POPULAR SONGS 189 the military character of its motif. Then comes a long strain of melancholy music, sombre, pa- thetic, rising almost into a wail, though still marked by the military accent. To the listener it depicts France in her humiliation, beaten to her knees by the merciless invader, betrayed, despairing. Then, as the music almost dies away, the muffled drums roll steadily, and a firmer note is struck. France lives ! The years of patience, of sacrifice, of preparation have come. Stronger and clearer the music swells again into a noble march, majestic, confident, courageous. Clearer and bolder ring out the notes, faster and faster and richer and grander are the harmonies. France is once more her- self, puissant, girt for battle, invincible. The hour has struck, and a storm of drums over- whelms the ear in a great crash of martial melody, with the trumpets once more ringing out, this time exultant in the fierce joy of vic- tory ! It is the musical apotheosis of la re- vanche. Professional musicians may call it a poor thing ; but when rendered by a fine mili- tary band, as I have often heard it, it has al- ways seemed to me inexpressibly thrilling ; and with its hidden meanings it must quicken the pulse and stir the blood of every one who loves France and her chivalrous people. THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE- BOOKS THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE- BOOKS An ingenious person of great eminence in educational theory, but one whose patience is evidently more highly developed than his sense of humor, has been making some experiments that are supposed to be very important to scien- tific teachers. He has found that it takes a young child -j^j^ of a second to recognize the letter c, xV/o" °^ ^ second to recognize the let- ter a, and -^^^-^ of a second to recognize the letter t ; while the word c-a-t as a whole is recognized in yijW of a second. Therefore, he says, all primary teaching should be done by words and not by letters, and the words should be -^ of an inch high and printed in a line not more than four inches long. One doesn't see exactly how he has discovered all these things, but that does not matter ; for he is evidently a very profound person. I have done some figuring myself on the basis of his researches, and I find that, following out his 13 194 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS method and adopting his kind of reading-book, a child of five years, in an average daily les- son, would each day save yV^r °^ ^ minute out of its valuable time. Think of that ! This investigation is beautifully illustrative of what is going on to-day in the sphere of education. We are living in an age in which the Educator has been gradually supplanted by the Educationist. The Educator was a person who felt that every child has its own individual temperament and mental idiosyn- crasies which differentiate it to some extent from every other child, so that the method of presenting a subject should be largely influ- enced by the teacher's knowledge of the indi- vidual to be taught. He felt that a good teacher should be quick to note the effects upon each child's mind of a particular man- ner of presentation, and that the practical re- sults obtained should be the final test of every method, inasmuch as the education of the child and not the exaltation of the teacher was the end to be secured. Hence quick sympathy, keen perception, ready adaptability, and in- genuity in fixing the attention and interest- ing the thought of the child were regarded as the prime qualifications of a successful Educator. THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 195 The Educationist has changed all that. So far as my own limited intelligence has been able to grasp the subtle distinction of mod- ern pa^dagogic doctrine, an Educationist is an individual who is not himself much of a hand at teaching, but who is able to tell all other persons how they ought to teach. He is great on method, and observes blandly, when ques- tioned, that it doesn't matter in the least whether the actual results amount to much so long as the correct psedagogic method has been employed. He abounds in statistics, and these statistics are usually in fractions. He perhaps could not himself succeed in teaching a young child to read, but, like the c-a-t inves- tigator, he can tell you just how many thou- sandths of a second it ought to take for some one else to make a letter perceptible to the child's intelligence. He has read several text- books on Psychology, and when he talks, he has a good deal to say about " concepts " and "apperception," and once in five minutes he will airily allude to the Laws of the Associa- tion of Ideas. He has, in fact, established a set of infallible formulas that never hang fire, and that render the education of children as simple a matter as rolling off a log. The ex- actness of these formulas is, indeed, a little 196 THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS startling to an ordinary mind. Thus, if the Educationist tells you that a child of twelve years and six months who is studying Latin must have exactly thirty-five minutes of reci- tation each day (preferably between nine and eleven o'clock), and you say doubtfully that you have been giving thirty minutes to this work between eleven and twelve o'clock, the Educationist will look at you with a pained surprise and tell you that you are evidently quite old fashioned. Then it would be wise to keep quiet unless you want to get into trouble ; for if you go on to say that your arrangement has worked very well, he will at once remark that you evidently know nothing of the Psychological Basis of Education ; and if you still persist, he will talk to you about Sturm, and Herbart, and maybe even Frcebel ; and if he once pulls Frcebel on you, you are gone. It is quite unsafe, too, for you to com- fort yourself with the thought that perhaps he doesn't know what he is talking about. You may think that he is by no means brilliant in his ordinary conversation, that he seems, in fact, in other matters to be rather dull ; and if you are exceptionally uninstructed and indis- creet, you may even go so far as to remark that he is evidently a good deal of an ass. THE NEW CHILD AND ITS PICTURE-BOOKS 197 But just wait, and Nemesis will at last get af- ter you. Some day or other you will see the Educationist reading a paper at a Teachers' Conference, and then you will know that he is really Great. Now, so far as we are personally concerned, we don't care how much he goes raiding around in the field of education, and we shouldn't say a word about him if he stopped right there. Children will tumble up somehow or other even under the rule of an Educationist ; and after all, the real training of every human be- ing comes largely from experience and from contact with his kind. Moreover, there is something to be said in behalf of the psycho- logical racket. In these days of overcrowded professions there are hundreds of shallow young men and rattle-pated young women who would have to carry a hod or go and get married if a wise dispensation of Providence had not specially opened up to them this new and fruitful field, wherein they can earn com- fortable salaries and much Kv8o