The Bibliotaph, and Other People

by Leon H. Vincent

IV

These men have sap and juice in their talk. When they think they think clearly. When they speak they express themselves with an energy and directness which mortify the thin speech of conventional persons. Here is Farfrae, the young Scotchman, in the tap-room of the Three Mariners Inn of Casterbridge, singing of his ain contree with a pathos quite unknown in that part of the world. The worthies who frequent the place are deeply moved. ‘Danged if our country down here is worth singing about like that,’ says Billy Wills, the glazier,—while the literal Christopher Coney inquires, ‘What did ye come away from yer own country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?’ Then it occurs to him that it wasn’t worth Farfrae’s while to leave the fair face and the home of which he had been singing to come among such as they. ‘We be bruckle folk here—the best o’ us hardly honest sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and God-a’mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill ’em with. We don’t think about flowers and fair faces, not we—except in the shape of cauliflowers and pigs’ chaps.’

I should like to see the man who sat to Artist Hardy for the portrait of Corporal Tullidge in The Trumpet-Major. This worthy, who was deaf and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the head by a piece of shell at Valenciennes in ’93. His left arm had been smashed. Time and Nature had done what they could, and under their beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical rattle-box. People interested in Corp’el Tullidge were allowed to see his head and hear his arm. The corp’el gave these private views at any time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt to bore him a little. His fellows displayed him much as one would a ‘freak’ in a dime museum.

‘You have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven’t ye, corp’el?’ said Anthony Cripplestraw. ‘I have heard that the way they mortised yer skull was a beautiful piece of workmanship. Perhaps the young woman would like to see the place.’

The young woman was Anne Garland, the sweet heroine of the story; and Anne didn’t want to see the silver plate, the thought of which made her almost faint. Nor could she be tempted by being told that one couldn’t see such a ‘wownd’ every day. Then Cripplestraw, earnest to please her, suggested that Tullidge rattle his arm, which Tullidge did, to Anne’s great distress.

‘Oh, it don’t hurt him, bless ye. Do it, corp’el?’ said Cripplestraw.

‘Not a bit,’ said the corporal, still working his arm with great energy. There was, however, a perfunctoriness in his manner ‘as if the glory of exhibition had lost somewhat of its novelty, though he was still willing to oblige.’ Anne resisted all entreaties to convince herself by feeling of the corporal’s arm that the bones were ‘as loose as a bag of ninepins,’ and displayed an anxiety to escape. Whereupon the corporal, ‘with a sense that his time was getting wasted,’ inquired: ‘Do she want to see or hear any more, or don’t she?’

This is but a single detail in the account of a party which Miller Loveday gave to soldier guests in honor of his son John,—a description the sustained vivacity of which can only be appreciated through a reading of those brilliant early chapters of the story.

Half the mirth that is in these men comes from the frankness with which they confess their actual thoughts. Ask a man of average morals and average attainments why he doesn’t go to church. You won’t know any better after he has given you his answer. Ask Nat Chapman, of the novel entitled Two on a Tower, and you will not be troubled with ambiguities. He doesn’t like to go because Mr. Torkingham’s sermons make him think of soul-saving and other bewildering and uncomfortable topics. So when the son of Torkingham’s predecessor asks Nat how it goes with him, that tiller of the soil answers promptly: ‘Pa’son Tarkenham do tease a feller’s conscience that much, that church is no holler-day at all to the limbs, as it was in yer reverent father’s time!’

The unswerving honesty with which they assign utilitarian motives for a particular line of conduct is delightful. Three men discuss a wedding, which took place not at the home of the bride but in a neighboring parish, and was therefore very private. The first doesn’t blame the new married pair, because ‘a wedding at home means five and six handed reels by the hour, and they do a man’s legs no good when he’s over forty.’ A second corroborates the remark and says: ‘True. Once at the woman’s house you can hardly say nay to being one in a jig, knowing all the time that you be expected to make yourself worth your victuals.’

The third puts the whole matter beyond the need of further discussion by adding: ‘For my part, I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything. You’ve as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties, and even better. And it don’t wear your legs to stumps in talking over a poor fellow’s ways as it do to stand up in hornpipes.’

Beings who talk like this know their minds,—a rather unwonted circumstance among the sons of men,—and knowing them, they do the next most natural thing in the world, which is to speak the minds they have.

There is yet another phase of Hardy’s humor to be noted: that humor, sometimes defiant, sometimes philosophic, which concerns death and its accompaniments. It cannot be thought morbid. Hardy is too fond of Nature ever to degenerate into mere morbidity. He has lived much in the open air, which always corrects a tendency to ‘vapors.’ He takes little pleasure in the gruesome, a statement in support of which one may cite all his works up to 1892, the date of the appearance of Tess. This paper includes no comment in detail upon the later books; but so far as Tess is concerned it would be critical folly to speak of it as morbid. It is sad, it is terrible, as Lear is terrible, or as any one of the great tragedies, written by men we call ‘masters,’ is terrible. Jude is psychologically gruesome, no doubt; but not absolutely indefensible. Even if it were as black a book as some critics have painted it, the general truth of the statement as to the healthfulness of Hardy’s work would not be impaired. This work judged as a whole is sound and invigorating. He cannot be accused of over-fondness for charnel-houses or ghosts. He does not discourse of graves and vaults in order to arouse that terror which the thought of death inspires. It is not for the purpose of making the reader uncomfortable. If the grave interests him, it is because of the reflections awakened. ‘Man, proud man,’ needs that jog to his memory which the pomp of interments and aspect of tombstones give. Hardy has keen perception of that humor which glows in the presence of death and on the edge of the grave. The living have such a tremendous advantage over the dead, that they can neither help feeling it nor avoid a display of the feeling. When the lion is buried the dogs crack jokes at the funeral. They do it in a subdued manner, no doubt, and with a sense of proprieties, but nevertheless they do it. Their immense superiority is never so apparent as at just this moment.

This humor, which one notes in Hardy, is akin to the humor of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, but not so grim. I have heard a country undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would have been matter for Hardy’s pen. There are few scenes in his books more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault of the Luxellians, when John Smith, Martin Cannister, and old Simeon prepare the place for Lady Luxellian’s coffin. It seems hardly wise to pronounce this episode as good as the grave-diggers’ scene in Hamlet; that would shock some one and gain for the writer the reputation of being enthusiastic rather than critical. But I profess that I enjoy the talk of old Simeon and Martin Cannister quite as much as the talk of the first and second grave-diggers.

Simeon, the shriveled mason, was ‘a marvelously old man, whose skin seemed so much too large for his body that it would not stay in position.’ He talked of the various great dead whose coffins filled the family vault. Here was the stately and irascible Lord George:—

‘Ah, poor Lord George,’ said the mason, looking contemplatively at the huge coffin; ‘he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be when one is a lord and t’other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He’d clap his hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familiar and neighborly as if he’d been a common chap. Ay, ’a cussed me up hill and ’a cussed me down; and then ’a would rave out again and the goold clamps of his fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while I, being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liken en sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering height, I’d think in my inside, “What a weight you’ll be, my lord, for our arms to lower under the inside of Endelstow church some day!”’

‘And was he?’ inquired a young laborer.

‘He was. He was five hundred weight if ’a were a pound. What with his lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t’other’—here the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that caused a rattle among the bones inside—‘he half broke my back when I took his feet to lower en down the steps there. “Ah,” saith I to John there—didn’t I, John?—“that ever one man’s glory should be such a weight upon another man!” But there, I liked my Lord George sometimes.’

It may be observed that as Hardy grows older his humor becomes more subtle or quite dies away, as if serious matters pressed upon his mind, and there was no time for being jocular. Some day, perhaps, if he should rise to the dignity of an English classic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is characterized by the terms ‘pessimistic’ and ‘unhealthy.’

That he is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won’t tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or much work. Many who have not taken up permanent residence beneath the roof of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann are occasional guests. Then there is that great mass of pessimism which is the result, not of thought, but of mere discomfort, physical and super-physical. One may have attacks of pessimism from a variety of small causes. A bad stomach will produce it. Financial difficulties will produce it. The light-minded get it from changes in the weather.

That note of melancholy which we detect in many of Hardy’s novels is as it should be. For no man can apprehend life aright and still look upon it as a carnival. He may attain serenity in respect to it, but he can never be jaunty and flippant. He can never slap life upon the back and call it by familiar names. He may hold that the world is indisputably growing better, but he will need to admit that the world is having a hard time in so doing.

Hardy would be sure of a reputation for pessimism in some quarters if only because of his attitude, or what people think is his attitude, toward marriage. He has devoted many pages and not a little thought to the problems of the relations between men and women. He is considerably interested in questions of ‘matrimonial divergence.’ He recognizes that most obvious of all obvious truths, that marriage is not always a success; nay, more than this, that it is often a makeshift, an apology, a pretense. But he professes to undertake nothing beyond a statement of the facts. It rests with the public to lay his statement beside their experience and observation, and thus take measure of the fidelity of his art.

He notes the variety of motives by which people are actuated in the choice of husbands and wives. In the novel called The Woodlanders, Grace Melbury, the daughter of a rich though humbly-born yeoman, has unusual opportunities for a girl of her class, and is educated to a point of physical and intellectual daintiness which make her seem superior to her home environment. Her father has hoped that she will marry her rustic lover, Giles Winterbourne, who, by the way, is a man in every fibre of his being. Grace is quite unspoiled by her life at a fashionable boarding school, but after her return her father feels (and Hardy makes the reader feel) that in marrying Giles she will sacrifice herself. She marries Dr. Fitzspiers, a brilliant young physician, recently come into the neighborhood, and in so doing she chooses for the worse. The character of Dr. Fitzspiers is summarized in a statement he once made (presumably to a male friend) that ‘on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time.’

His flagrant infidelities bring about a temporary separation; Grace is not able to comprehend ‘such double and treble-barreled hearts.’ When finally they are reunited the life-problem of each still awaits an adequate solution. For the motive which brings the girl back to her husband is only a more complex phase of the same motive which chiefly prompted her to marry him. Hardy says that Fitzspiers as a lover acted upon Grace ‘like a dram.’ His presence ‘threw her into an atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over.’ Afterward she felt ‘something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced.’

But this same story contains two other characters who are unmatched in fiction as the incarnation of pure love and self-forgetfulness. Giles Winterbourne, whose devotion to Grace is without wish for happiness which shall not imply a greater happiness for her, dies that no breath of suspicion may fall upon her. He in turn is loved by Marty South with a completeness which destroys all thought of self. She enjoys no measure of reward while Winterbourne lives. He never knows of Marty’s love. But in that last fine paragraph of this remarkable book, when the poor girl places the flowers upon his grave she utters a little lament which for beauty, pathos, and realistic simplicity is without parallel in modern fiction. Hardy was never more of an artist than when writing the last chapter of The Woodlanders.

After all, a book in which unselfish love is described in terms at once just and noble cannot be dangerously pessimistic, even if it also takes cognizance of such hopeless cases as a man with a chronic tendency to fluctuations of the heart.

The matter may be put briefly thus: In Hardy’s novels one sees the artistic result of an effort to paint life as it is, with much of its joy and a deal of its sorrow, with its good people and its selfish people, its positive characters and its Laodiceans, its men and women who dominate circumstances, and its unhappy ones who are submerged. These books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous, sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them; and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as irony God has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of concealing that fact either. He is of such ample intellectual frame that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear foolish. I find a measure of Hardy’s mind in passages which set forth his conception of the preciousness of life, no matter what the form in which life expresses itself. He is peculiarly tender toward brute creation. In that paragraph which describes Tess discovering the wounded pheasants in the wood, Hardy suggests the thought, quite new to many people, that chivalry is not confined to the relations of man to man or of man to woman. There are still weaker fellow-creatures in Nature’s teeming family. What if we are unmannerly or unchivalrous toward them?

He abounds in all manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a ‘Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.’ Such books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed to be given away at holiday time to acquaintances who are too important to be put off with Christmas cards, and not important enough to be supplied with gifts of a calculable value.

One must praise the immense spirit and vivacity of scenes where something in the nature of a struggle, a moral duel, goes on. In such passages every power at the writer’s command is needed; unerring directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an athlete’s garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes is an illustration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in handling the sword—weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake fashion, is another example. Still more brilliant is the gambling scene in The Return of the Native, where Wildeve and Diggory Venn, out on the heath in the night, throw dice by the light of a lantern for Thomasin’s money. Venn, the reddleman, in the Mephistophelian garb of his profession, is the incarnation of a good spirit, and wins the guineas from the clutch of the spendthrift husband. The scene is immensely dramatic, with its accompaniments of blackness and silence, Wildeve’s haggard face, the circle of ponies, known as heath-croppers, which are attracted by the light, the death’s-head moth which extinguishes the candle, and the finish of the game by the light of glow-worms. It is a glorious bit of writing in true bravura style.

His books have a quality which I shall venture to call ‘spaciousness,’ in the hope that the word conveys the meaning I try to express. It is obvious that there is a difference between books which are large and books which are merely long. The one epithet refers to atmosphere, the other to number of pages. Hardy writes large books. There is room in them for the reader to expand his mind. They are distinctly out-of-door books, ‘not smacking of the cloister or the library.’ In reading them one has a feeling that the vault of heaven is very high, and that the earth stretches away to interminable distances upon all sides. This quality of largeness is not dependent upon number of pages; nor is length absolute as applied to books. A book may contain one hundred pages and still be ninety-nine pages too long, for the reason that its truth, its lesson, its literary virtue, are not greater than might be expressed in a single page.

Spaciousness is in even less degree dependent upon miles. The narrowness, geographically speaking, of Hardy’s range of expression is notable. There is much contrast between him and Stevenson in this respect. The Scotchman has embodied in his fine books the experiences of life in a dozen different quarters of the globe. Hardy, with more robust health, has traveled from Portland to Bath, and from ‘Wintoncester’ to ‘Exonbury,’—journeys hardly more serious than from the blue bed to the brown. And it is better thus. No reader of The Return of the Native would have been content that Eustacia Vye should persuade her husband back to Paris. Rather than the boulevards one prefers Egdon heath, as Hardy paints it, ‘the great inviolate place,’ the ‘untamable Ishmaelitish thing’ which its arch-enemy, Civilization, could not subdue.

He is without question one of the best writers of our time, whether for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his lively farce called The Hand of Ethelberta. He can write dialogue or description. He is so excellent in either that either, as you read it, appears to make for your highest pleasure. If his characters talk, you would gladly have them talk to the end of the book. If he, the author, speaks, you would not wish to interrupt. More than most skillful writers, he preserves that just balance between narrative and colloquy.

His best novels prior to the appearance of Tess, are The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. These four are the bulwarks of his reputation, while a separate and great fame might be based alone on that powerful tragedy called by its author Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Criticism which glorifies any one book of a given author at the expense of all his other books is profitless, if not dangerous. Moreover, it is dangerous to have a favorite author as well as a favorite book of that favorite author. A man’s choice of books, like his choice of friends, is usually inexplicable to everybody but himself. However, the chief object in recommending books is to make converts to the gospel of literature according to the writer of these books. For which legitimate purpose I would recommend to the reader who has hitherto denied himself the pleasure of an acquaintance with Thomas Hardy, the two volumes known as The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native. The first of these is the more genial because it presents a more genial side of Nature. But the other is a noble piece of literary workmanship, a powerful book, ingeniously framed, with every detail strongly realized; a book which is dramatic, humorous, sincere in its pathos, rich in its word-coloring, eloquent in its descriptive passages; a book which embodies so much of life and poetry that one has a feeling of mental exaltation as he reads.

Surely it is not wise in the critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the idols of the reading world, it would seem that the office of public Jeremiah should be continued rather from courtesy than from an overwhelming sense of the needs of the hour.

A READING IN THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS

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One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock. Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,—his poetry surely could not make this impression,—but rather that the popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley’s preface to the Adonais, the Keats whose story is written large in the world’s book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes. Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow) alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader, with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to his first dip into the letters.

The legendary Keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when the sentence was first penned, that ‘a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.’ Among the many readers of good books, there will always be some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the facts of Keats’s history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think that the poet’s sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when they are tired of reading Endymion, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing.

The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of reality, for example, does one get in reading that ‘Wordsworth went rather huff’d out of town’! One is not in the habit of thinking of Wordsworth as capable of being ‘huffed,’ but the writer of the letters feared that he was. All of Keats’s petty anxieties and small doings, as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the man. One learns how he ‘went to Hazlitt’s lecture on Poetry, and got there just as they were coming out;’ how he was insulted at the theatre, and wouldn’t tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like her father, only ‘her father had more color than the engraving;’ how he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook’s window, ‘and had just begun on the jellies;’ how indignant he was at being spoken of as ‘quite the little poet;’ how he sat in a hatter’s shop in the Poultry while Mr. Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron’s ‘last flash poem,’ Don Juan; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he ‘had been measured for it;’ how he dined with Horace Smith and his brothers and some other young gentlemen of fashion, and thought them all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value than all the ‘recollections’ of all his friends put together. In their breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the impression one gets of him in Haydon’s account, ‘lying in a white bed with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself.’ This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him, but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told Fanny Keats, ‘when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like Larks to me…. I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily as a Pen’orth of Lady’s fingers.’ And then he bewails the fact that when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented ‘with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of Eggs morning, noon, and night.’ Here is the active Keats, of honest mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens’ to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.’

Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man’s weaknesses—if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that was quite universally sung to this actor’s virtues, acquiesced by saying amiably, ‘Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can’t spell;’ yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile follower of the ‘monster Conventionality’ even in his spelling, while in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he would spell Romeo with a small r, Irishman with a small i, and God with a small g.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which he proposes to have bound ‘in Gothique,’ so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely ‘curious.’

One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats’s genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, ‘there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).’ The necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh Hunt’s instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, ‘for fear of demolishing receipts.’

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention: ‘Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out—then all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.’ The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general adonizing could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet’s literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet’s manuscript. By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it. Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. ‘I read and write about eight hours a day,’ he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats’s Oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o’clock in the afternoon. He was then writing Endymion. His stint was about ‘fifty lines a day, … and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters…. Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.’ Bailey quotes, in connection with this, Keats’s own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come ‘as naturally as the leaves of a tree.’ Whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved Tom Nash’s sneer at those writers who can only produce by ‘sleeping betwixt every sentence.’ Keats had in no small degree the ‘fine extemporal vein’ with ‘invention quicker than his eye.’

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one’s lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. ‘Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,’—a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare was forever ‘coming new’ to him, and he was ‘haunted’ by particular passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. ‘I find I cannot exist without Poetry,—without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do,—the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.’ He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and ‘so long together,’ that he could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare’s sonnets. He rioted in ‘all their fine things said unconsciously.’ We are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment. Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses. He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats’s ambition trembled in the presence of Keats’s conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. ‘I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.’ Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work good,—better even than that of a certain other great name in English literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when Endymion was spoken of as ‘slipshod’ Keats could reply, ‘That it is so is no fault of mine…. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man…. That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.’

Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don’t win the prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. Keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another. Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. ‘There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one’s self into an idea of being a great Poet.’

Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in February, 1818, had little expectation that his Endymion was going to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as ‘Johnny,’ or of getting recommendations to return to his ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’ In fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that in Endymion he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. ‘If Endymion serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride,—to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that I am not appreciated.’ And for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad, can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his Pot of Basil as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death!’

Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint. But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats’s attitude towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the fact that he applauded Reynolds’s Peter Bell, and inquired almost petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth’s ‘Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand.’ But it is also impossible that his sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, ‘Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,’—a sentence, by the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use of simple means in his art, he says, ‘I think that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.’

‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us…. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.’ Or as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, ‘Entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it.’

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables. Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed his humble origin; nevertheless, the constitution of English society would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing mental attitude.

Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that ‘men are the idealists, after all;’ yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women. This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest of what is noblest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his attitude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats’s sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, ‘The Idea of your sending it to Wordsworth put me out of breath—you know with what Reverence I would send my well wishes to him.’

But interesting as a chapter on Keats’s friendships with men would be, we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance with Fanny Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume of Buxton Forman’s edition of Keats’s Works tell the story of this affair of a poet’s heart. These are the letters which Mr. William Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of ‘listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.’ This is not a just illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,—such an editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public, the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open. Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great passion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.’ Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters described in the Spectator, and says that it would please him more ‘to scrape together a party of lovers.’ If this letter be genuine and the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he had succumbed to the attractions of Fanny Brawne. Perhaps he was trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment.

In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes and fine manners and a ‘rich Eastern look.’ He discovers that he can talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. ‘I am too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble…. She kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart’s might do…. I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me.’ But he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two pages on the subject of this dark beauty. She was a friend of the Reynolds family. She crosses the stage of the Keats drama in a very impressive manner, and then disappears.

The most extraordinary passage to be met with in relation to the poet’s attitude towards women is in a letter written to Benjamin Bailey in July, 1818. As a partial hint towards its full meaning I would take two phrases in Daniel Deronda. George Eliot says of Gwendolen Harleth that there was ‘a certain fierceness of maidenhood in her,’ which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl’s feeling towards men as described a little later, when Rex Gascoigne attempted to tell her his love. Gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of fury that was surprising to herself. The author’s interpretative comment is, ‘The life of passion had begun negatively in her.’

So one might say of Keats that the life of passion began negatively in him. He was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. ‘I am certain I have not a right feeling toward women—at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot.’ He certainly started with a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he thought a fair woman a pure goddess. And now he is disappointed at finding women only the equals of men. This disappointment helps to give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as George Eliot’s phrase throws light upon it. He thinks that he insults women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. ‘Is it not extraordinary,’ he exclaims, ‘when among men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; … I am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone.’ He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of it as a prejudice produced from ‘a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel.’ And then, with a good-humored, characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, ‘After all, I do think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.’

Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or November, 1818. Keats’s description of Fanny is hardly flattering, and not even vivid. What is one to make of the colorless expression ‘a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort’? But she was fair to him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. We look at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which ensnared Keats. But if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day passed for dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the artistic capabilities of a silhouette. Not infrequently is it true that the style of dress seems to disfigure. But we have learned, in course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them.

It is easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover. Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called ‘the world,’ and so did he when he was well; but looking through the discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. For these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to being documents in love-madness. Many a line in them gives sharp pain, as a record of heart-suffering must always do. You may read Richard Steele’s love letters for pleasure, and have it. The love letters of Keats scorch and sting; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid reflecting upon the transitory character of such a passion. Withering young love like this does not last. It may burn itself out, or, what is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. But in its earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last; a man would die under it. Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly extinct.

These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and it is wonderful to see how Keats’s elastic nature would rebound the instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times almost gay. The singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural epistolary voice: ‘There’s the Thrush again—I can’t afford it—he’ll run me up a pretty Bill for Music—besides he ought to know I deal at Clementi’s.’ And in the letter which he wrote to Mrs. Brawne from Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that ‘it’s misery to have an intellect in splints.’ He was never strong enough to write again to Fanny, or even to read her letters.

I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter written to Reynolds in February, 1818. Keats says: ‘I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, … and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it, until it becomes stale—but when will it do so? Never! When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all the “two-and-thirty Palaces.” How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!… Nor will this sparing touch of noble Books be any irreverence to their Writers—for perhaps the honors paid by Man to Man are trifles in comparison to the Benefit done by great Works to the Spirit and pulse of good by their mere passive existence.’

May we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be able to be read in the manner here indicated? As Keats read, so did he write. His own work was

‘accomplished in repose
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.’

AN ELIZABETHAN NOVELIST

[Return to Contents]

The fathers in English literature were not a little given to writing books which they called ‘anatomies.’ Thomas Nash, for example, wrote an Anatomy of Absurdities, and Stubbes an Anatomy of Abuses. Greene, the novelist, entitled one of his romances Arbasto, the Anatomy of Fortune. The most famous book which bears a title of this kind is the Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. It is notable, first, for its inordinate length; second, for its readableness, considering the length and the depth of it; third, for its prodigal and barbaric display of learning; and last, because it is said to have had the effect of making the most indolent man of letters of the eighteenth century get up betimes in the morning. Why Dr. Johnson needed to get up in order to read the Anatomy of Melancholy will always be an enigma to some. Perhaps he did not get up. Perhaps he merely sat up and reached for the book, which would have been placed conveniently near the bed. For the virtue of the act resided in the circumstance of his being awake and reading a good book two hours ahead of his wonted time for beginning his day. If he colored his remark so as to make us think he got up and dressed before reading, he may be forgiven. It was innocently spoken. Just as a man who lives in one room will somehow involuntarily fall into the habit of speaking of that one room in the plural, so the doctor added a touch which would render him heroic in the eyes of those who knew him. I should like a pictorial book-plate representing Dr. Johnson, in gown and nightcap, sitting up in bed reading the Anatomy of Melancholy, with Hodge, the cat, curled up contentedly at his feet.

It would be interesting to know whether Johnson ever read, in bed or out, a book called Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. It was published in the spring of 1579 by Gabriel Cawood, ‘dwelling in Paules Churchyard,’ and was followed one year later by a second part, Euphues and his England. These books were the work of John Lyly, a young Oxford Master of Arts. According to the easy orthography of that time (if the word orthography may be applied to a practice by virtue of which every man spelled as seemed right in his own eyes), Lyly’s name is found in at least six forms: Lilye, Lylie, Lilly, Lyllie, Lyly, and Lylly. Remembering the willingness of i and y to bear one another’s burdens, we may still exclaim, with Dr. Ingleby, ‘Great is the mystery of archaic spelling!’ Great indeed when a man sometimes had more suits of letters to his name than suits of clothes to his back. That the name of this young author was pronounced as was the name of the flower, lily, seems the obvious inference from Henry Upchear’s verses, which contain punning allusions to Lyly and Robert Greene:—

‘Of all the flowers a Lillie once I lov’d
Whose laboring beautie brancht itself abroad,’ etc.

Original editions of the Anatomy of Wit and its fellow are very rare. Probably there is not a copy of either book in the United States. This statement is ventured in good faith, and may have the effect of bringing to light a hitherto neglected copy.^[1] Strange it is that princely collectors of yore appear not to have cared for Euphues. Surely one would not venture to affirm that John, Duke of Roxburghe, might not have had it if he had wanted it. The book is not to be found in his sale catalogue; he had Lyly’s plays in quarto, seven of them each marked ‘rare,’ and he had two copies of a well-known book called Euphues Golden Legacie, written by Thomas Nash. The Perkins Sale catalogue shows neither of Lyly’s novels. List after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where the Anatomy of Wit ought to be. From this we may argue great scarcity, or great indifference, or both. In the compact little reprint made by Professor Arber one may read this moral tale, which was fashionable when Shakespeare was a youth of sixteen. For convenience it will be advisable to speak of it as a single work in two parts, for such it practically is.

To pronounce upon this romance is not easy. We read a dozen or two of pages, and say, ‘This is very fantastical humours.’ We read further, and are tempted to follow Sir Hugh to the extent of declaring, ‘This is lunatics.’ One may venture the not profound remark that it takes all sorts of books to make a literature. Euphues is one of the books that would prompt to that very remark. For he who first said that it takes all sorts of people to make a world was markedly impressed with the differences between those people and himself. He had in mind eccentric folk, types which deviate from the normal and the sane. So Euphues is a very Malvolio among books, cross-gartered and wreathed as to its countenance with set smiles. The curious in literary history will always enjoy such a production. The verdict of that part of the reading world which keeps a book alive by calling for fresh copies of it after the old copies are worn out is against Euphues. It had a vivacious existence between 1579 and 1636, and then went into a literary retirement lasting two hundred and thirty-six years. When it again came before the public it was introduced as ‘a great bibliographical rarity.’ Its fatal old-fashionedness hangs like a millstone about its neck. In the poems of Chaucer and the dramas of Shakespeare are a thousand touches which make the reader feel that Chaucer and Shakespeare are his contemporaries, that they have written in his own time, and published but yesterday. Read Euphues, and you will say to yourself, ‘That book must have been written three hundred years ago, and it looks its age.’ Yet it has its virtues. One may not say of it, as Johnson said of the Rehearsal, that it ‘has not wit enough to keep it sweet.’ Neither may he, upon second thought, conclude that ‘it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’ It has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had Malvolio. It is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what passed for wit among many readers of that day. Often the wit is of a tawdry and spectacular sort,—mere verbal wit, the use of a given word not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because the author wants a word beginning with the letter G, or the letter M, or the letter F, as the case may be. On the second page of Greene’s Arbasto is this sentence: ‘He did not so much as vouchsafe to give an eare to my parle, or an eye to my person.’ Greene learned this trick from Lyly, who was a master of the art. The sentence represents one of the common forms in Euphues, such as this: ‘To the stomach quatted with dainties all delicates seem queasie.’ Sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side. For example, the companions whom Euphues found in Naples practiced arts ‘whereby they might either soake his purse to reape commodotie, or sooth his person to winne credite.’ Other illustrations are these: I can neither ‘remember our miseries without griefe, nor redresse our mishaps without grones.’ ‘If the wasting of our money might not dehort us, yet the wounding of our mindes should deterre us.’ This next sentence, with its combination of K sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: ‘Though Curio bee as hot as a toast, yet Euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a cocke of the game, yet Euphues is content to bee craven and crye creake.’

Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly’s style. That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance. In truth, one does not know which to admire the more, the ingenuity of the man who constructed the book, or the ingenuity of the scholars who have explained how he did it. Between Lyly on the one hand, and the grammarians on the other, the reader is almost tempted to ask if this be literature or mathematics. Whether Lyly got his style from Pettie or Guevara is an important question, but he made it emphatically his own, and it will never be called by any other name than Euphuism. The making of a book on this plan is largely the result of astonishing mental gymnastics. It commands respect in no small degree, because Lyly was able to keep it up so long. To walk from New York to Albany, as did the venerable Weston not so very long since, is a great test of human endurance. But walking is the employment of one’s legs and body in God’s appointed way of getting over the ground. Suppose a man were to undertake to hop on one leg from New York to Albany, the utility or the æsthetic value of the performance would be less obvious. The most successful artist in hopping could hardly expect applause from the right-minded. He would excite attention because he was able to hop so far, and not because he was the exponent of a praiseworthy method of locomotion. Lyly gained eminence by doing to a greater extent than any man a thing that was not worth doing at all. One is more astonished at Lyly’s power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance as reader. For the volume is actually readable even at this day. Did Lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative trick-ponies? Apparently not. The book is ‘executed’ with a vivacity, a dash, a ‘go,’ that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet the author halfway. Euphues became the rage, and its literary style the fashion. How or why must be left to him to explain who can tell why sleeves grow small and then grow big, why skirts are at one time only two and a half yards around and at another time five and a half or eight yards around. An Elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff starched. Lyly’s style bristles with extravagances of the starched ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual deficiencies in the matter of doublet and hose.

Of plot or story there is but little. The hero, Euphues, who gives the title to the romance, is a young, clever, and rich Athenian. He visits Naples, where his money and wit attract many to his side. By his careless, pleasure-seeking mode of life he wakens the fatherly interest of a wise old gentleman, Eubulus, who calls upon him to warn him of his danger. The conversation between the two is the first and not the least amusing illustration of the courtly verbal fencing with which the book is filled. The advice of the old man only provokes Euphues into making the sophistical plea that his style of living is right because nature prompts him to it; and he leaves Eubulus ‘in a great quandary’ and in tears. Nevertheless, the old gentleman has the righteous energy which prompts him to say to the departing Euphues, already out of hearing, ‘Seeing thou wilt not buy counsel at the first hand good cheap, thou shalt buy repentance at the second hand, at such unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy hard heart.’ Euphues takes to himself a new sworn brother, one Philautus, who carries him to visit his lady-love, Lucilla. Lucilla is rude at first, but becomes enamored of Euphues’s conversational power, and finally of himself. In fact, she unceremoniously throws over her former lover, and tells her father that she will either marry Euphues or else lead apes in hell. This causes a break in the friendship between Euphues and Philautus, and there is an exchange of formidably worded letters, in which Philautus reminds Euphues that all Greeks are liars, and Euphues quotes Euripides to the effect that all is lawful in love. Lucilla, who is fickle, suddenly dismisses her new cavalier for yet a third, while Euphues and Philautus, in the light of their common misfortune, fall upon each other’s necks and are reconciled. Both profess themselves to have been fools, while Euphues, as the greater and more recent fool, composes a pamphlet against love. This he calls a ‘cooling-card.’ It is addressed primarily to Philautus, but contains general advice for ‘all fond lovers.’ Euphues’s own cure was radical, for he says, ‘Now do I give a farewell to the world, meaning rather to macerate myself with melancholy, than pine in folly, rather choosing to die in my study amidst my books than to court it in Italy in the company of ladies.’ He returns to Athens, applies himself to the study of philosophy, becomes public reader in the University, and, as crowning evidence that he has finished sowing his wild oats, produces three volumes of lectures. Realizing how much of his own youth has been wasted, he writes a pamphlet on the education of the young, a dialogue with an atheist, and these, with a bundle of letters, make up the first part of the Anatomy of Wit. From one of the letters we learn that Lucilla was as frail as she was beautiful, and that she died in evil report. The story, including the diatribe against love, is about as long as The Vicar of Wakefield. It begins as a romance and ends as a sermon.

The continuation of the novel, Euphues and his England, is a little over a third longer than Part One. The two friends carry out their project of visiting England. After a wearisome voyage they reach Dover, view the cliffs and the castle, and then proceed to Canterbury. Between Canterbury and London they stop for a while with a ‘comely olde gentleman,’ Fidus, who keeps bees and tells good stories. He also gives sound advice as to the way in which strangers should conduct themselves. A lively bit of writing is the account which Fidus gives of his commonwealth of bees. It is not according to Lubbock, but is none the less amusing. In London the two travelers become favorites at the court. Philautus falls in love, to the great annoyance of Euphues, who argues mightily with him against such folly. The two gentlemen expend vast resources of stationery and language upon the subject. They quarrel violently, and Euphues becomes so irritated that he must needs go and rent new lodgings, ‘which by good friends he quickly got, and there fell to his Pater noster, where awhile,’ says Lyly innocently, ‘I will not trouble him in his prayers.’ They are reconciled later, and Philautus obtains permission to love; but he has discovered in the mean time that the lady will not have him. The account of his passion, how it ‘boiled and bubbled,’ of his visit to the soothsayer to purchase love charms, his stately declamations to Camilla and her elaborate replies to him, of his love letter concealed in a pomegranate, and her answer stitched into a copy of Petrarch,—is all very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making between Pyrocles and Philoclea, or between any other pair of the many exceedingly tiresome folk in Sidney’s Arcadia. Grant that it is deliciously absurd. It is not to be supposed that a clever eighteen-year-old girl, replying to a declaration of love, will talk in the language of a trained nurse, and say: ‘Green sores are to be dressed roughly lest they fester, tettars are to be drawn in the beginning lest they spread, Ringworms to be anointed when they first appear lest they compass the whole body, and the assaults of love to be beaten back at the first siege lest they undermine at the second.’ Was ever suitor in this fashion rejected! It makes one think of some of the passages in the History of John Buncle, where the hero pours out a torrent of passionate phrases, and the ‘glorious’ Miss Noel, in reply, begs that they may take up some rational topic of conversation; for example, what is his view of that opinion which ascribes ‘primævity and sacred prerogatives’ to the Hebrew language.

But Philautus does not break his heart over Camilla’s rejection. He is consoled with the love of another fair maiden, marries her, and settles in England. Euphues goes back to Athens, and presently retires to the country, where he follows the calling of one whose profession is melancholy. Like most hermits of culture, he leaves his address with his banker. We assume this, for he was very rich; it is not difficult to be a hermit on a large income. The book closes with a section called ‘Euphues Glasse for Europe,’ a thirty-page panegyric on England and the Queen.

They say that this novel was very popular, and certain causes of its popularity are not difficult to come at. A large measure of the success that Euphues had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of ‘miscellany thoughts,’ and he cheerfully parted with them. His book succeeded as Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy and Watts’ On the Mind succeeded. People believed that they were getting ideas, and people like what they suppose to be ideas if no great effort is required in the getting of them. It is astonishing how often the world needs to be advised of the brevity of time. Yet every person who can wade in the shallows of his own mind and not wet his shoe-tops finds a sweet melancholy and a stimulating freshness in the thought that time is short. John Lyly said, ‘There is nothing more swifter than time, nothing more sweeter,’—and countless Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books,—if they had such painful aids to culture,—and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made. This glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb and the ‘old said saw,’ is a marked characteristic of the work. It emphasizes the youth of its author. We learn what could not have been new even in 1579, that ‘in misery it is a great comfort to have a companion;’ that ‘a new broom sweepeth clean;’ that ‘delays breed dangers;’ that ‘nothing is so perilous as procrastination;’ that ‘a burnt child dreadeth the fire;’ that it is well not to make comparisons ‘lest comparisons should seem odious;’ that ‘it is too late to shut the stable door when the steed is stolen;’ that ‘many things fall between the cup and the lip;’ and that ‘marriages are made in heaven, though consummated on earth.’ With these old friends come others, not altogether familiar of countenance, and quaintly archaic in their dress: ‘It must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat’s ear;’ ‘It is a mad hare that will be caught with a tabor, and a foolish bird that stayeth the laying salt on her tail, and a blind goose that cometh to the fox’s sermon.’ Lyly would sometimes translate a proverb; he does not tell us that fine words butter no parsnips, but says, ‘Fair words fat few,’—which is delightfully alliterative, but hardly to be accounted an improvement. Expressions that are surprisingly modern turn up now and then. One American street urchin taunts another by telling him that he doesn’t know enough to come in when it rains. The saying is at least three hundred years old, for Lyly says, in a dyspeptic moment, ‘So much wit is sufficient for a woman as when she is in the rain can warn her to come out of it.’

Another cause of the popularity of Euphues is its sermonizing. The world loves to hear good advice. The world is not nervously anxious to follow the advice, but it understands the edification that comes by preaching. With many persons, to have heard a sermon is almost equivalent to having practiced the virtues taught in the sermon. Churches are generally accepted as evidences of civilization. A man who is exploiting the interests of a new Western town will invariably tell you that it has so many churches. Also, an opera-house. The English world above all other worlds loves to hear good advice. England is the natural home of the sermon. Jusserand notes, almost with wonder, that in the annual statistics of the London publishers the highest numbers indicate the output of sermons and theological works. Then come novels. John Lyly was ingenious; he combined good advice and storytelling. Not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to moralize as long as he would. He shows no timidity, even declares upon one of his title-pages that in this volume ‘there is small offense by lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered to the wanton.’ Such courage in this day would be apt seriously to injure the sale of a novel. Did not Ruskin declare that Miss Edgeworth had made virtue so obnoxious that since her time one hardly dared express the slightest bias in favor of the Ten Commandments? Lyly knew the public for which he acted as literary caterer. They liked sermons, and sermons they should have. Nearly every character in the book preaches, and Euphues is the most gifted of them all. Even that old gentleman of Naples who came first to Euphues because his heart bled to see so noble a youth given to loose living has the tables turned upon him, for Euphues preaches to the preacher upon the sovereign duty of resignation to the will of God.

A noteworthy characteristic is the frequency of Lyly’s classical allusions. If the only definition of pedantry be ‘vain and ostentatious display of learning,’ I question if we may dismiss Lyly’s wealth of classical lore with the word ‘pedantry.’ He was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little else was studied. Young men and their staid tutors were compelled to know ancient history and mythology. Like Heine, they may have taken a ‘real delight in the mob of gods and goddesses who ran so jolly naked about the world.’ In the first three pages of the Anatomy of Wit there are twenty classical names, ten of them coupled each with an allusion. Nobody begins a speech without a reference of this nature within calling distance. Euphues and Philautus fill their talk with evidences of a classical training. The ladies are provided with apt remarks drawn from the experiences of Helen, of Cornelia, of Venus, of Diana, and Vesta. Even the master of the ship which conveyed Euphues from Naples to England declaims about Ulysses and Julius Cæsar. This naturally destroys all dramatic effect. Everybody speaks Euphuism, though classical allusion alone is not essentially Euphuistic. John Lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise bestowed by Hazlitt upon Shakespeare when he said that Shakespeare’s genius ‘consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose.’ Lyly’s genius was the opposite of this; it consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a reduplication of himself. There is no change in style when the narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. All the persons of the drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly’s novel there is not even an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism.

What makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. No man (unless he were a Coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such inordinate length. When the characters can’t talk to one another they retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. They polish their language with the same care, open the classical dictionary, and have at themselves in good set terms. Philautus, inflamed with love of Camilla, goes to his room and pronounces a ten-minute discourse on the pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. They are amazingly patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. Euphues, angry with Philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. If Lyly had set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into it alone ‘what is not life,’ his product would have been what we find it now. One could easily believe the whole affair to have been intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so serious. We are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but look at a serious child,—there is nothing more serious in the world. Lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. Much of the seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years’ experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward carried.

Being, as we take it, an unmarried man, Lyly gives directions for managing a wife. He believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man should select his own wife. ‘Made marriages by friends’ are dangerous. ‘I had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel as appoint what wife I shall have by his mind.’ He prefers in a wife ‘beauty before riches, and virtue before blood.’ He holds to the radical English doctrine of wifely submission; there is no swerving from the position that the man is the woman’s ‘earthly master,’^[2] but in taming a wife no violence is to be employed. Wives are to be subdued with kindness. ‘If their husbands with great threatenings, with jars, with brawls, seek to make them tractable, or bend their knees, the more stiff they make them in the joints, the oftener they go about by force to rule them, the more froward they find them; but using mild words, gentle persuasions, familiar counsel, entreaty, submission, they shall not only make them to bow their knees, but to hold up their hands, not only cause them to honor them, but to stand in awe of them.’ By such methods will that supremest good of an English home be brought about, namely, that the wife shall stand in awe of her husband.

The young author admits that some wives have the domineering instinct, and that way danger lies. A man must look out for himself. If he is not to make a slave of his wife, he is also not to be too submissive; ‘that will cause her to disdain thee.’ Moreover, he must have an eye to the expenditure. She may keep the keys, but he will control the pocket-book. The model wife in Ecclesiastes had greater privileges; she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if she liked it. Not so this well-trained wife of Lyly’s novel. ‘Let all the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare.’ But in setting forth his theory for being happy though married, Lyly, methinks, preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the possibility of a man’s wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree, expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says that if a man does let himself loose in this fashion his wife must not know it. ‘Imitate the kings of Persia, who when they were given to riot kept no company with their wives, but when they used good order had their queens even at the table.’ In short, the wife was to duplicate the moods of her husband. ‘Thou must be a glass to thy wife, for in thy face must she see her own; for if when thou laughest she weep, when thou mournest she giggle, the one is a manifest sign she delighteth in others, the other a token she despiseth thee.’ John Lyly was a wise youth. He struck the keynote of the mode in which most incompatible marriages are played when he said that it was a bad sign if one’s wife giggled when one was disposed to be melancholy.

An interesting study is the author’s attitude toward foreign travel. It would appear to have been the fashion of the time to indulge in much invective against foreign travel, but nevertheless—to travel. Many men believed with young Valentine that ‘home keeping youth have ever homely wits,’ while others were rather of Ascham’s mind when he said, ‘I was once in Italy, but I thank God my stay there was only nine days.’ Lyly came of a nation of travelers. Then as now it was true that there was no accessible spot of the globe upon which the Englishman had not set his foot. Nomadic England went abroad; sedentary England stayed at home to rail at him for so doing. Aside from that prejudice which declared that all foreigners were fools, there was a well-founded objection to the sort of traveling usually described as seeing the world. Young men went upon the continent to see questionable forms of pleasure, perhaps to practice them. Whether justly or not, common report named Italy as the higher school of pleasurable vices, and Naples as the city where one’s doctorate was to be obtained. Gluttony and licentiousness are the sins of Naples. Eubulus tells Euphues that in that city are those who ‘sleep with meat in their mouths, with sin in their hearts, and with shame in their houses.’ There is no limit to the inconveniences of traveling. ‘Thou must have the back of an ass to bear all, and the snout of a swine to say nothing…. Travelers must sleep with their eyes open lest they be slain in their beds, and wake with their eyes shut lest they be suspected by their looks.’ Journeys by the fireside are better. ‘If thou covet to travel strange countries, search the maps, there shalt thou see much with great pleasure and small pains, if to be conversant in all courts, read histories, where thou shalt understand both what the men have been and what their manners are, and methinketh there must be much delight where there is no danger.’ Perhaps Lyly intended to condemn traveling with character unformed. A boy returned with more vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon himself. ‘There was no crime so barbarous, no murder so bloody, no oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that I could readily recite where I learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.’ Here, indeed, is no lack of plain speech.

In the section called ‘Euphues and his Ephœbus’ twenty-nine pages are devoted to the question of the education of youth. It is largely taken from Plutarch. Some of the points are these: that a mother shall herself nurse her child, that the child shall be early framed to manners, ‘for as the steele is imprinted in the soft waxe, so learning is engraven in ye minde of an young Impe.’ He is not to hear ‘fonde fables or filthy tales.’ He is to learn to pronounce distinctly and to be kept from ‘barbarous talk,’ that is, no dialect and no slang. He is to become expert in martial affairs, in shooting and darting, and he must hunt and hawk for his ‘honest recreation.’ If he will not study, he is not to be ‘scourged with stripes, but threatened with words, not dulled with blows, like servants, the which, the more they are beaten the better they bear it, and the less they care for it.’ In taking this position Lyly is said to be only following Ascham. Ascham was not the first in his own time to preach such doctrine. Forty years before the publication of The Schoolmaster, Sir Thomas Elyot, in his book called The Governour, raised his voice against the barbarity of teachers ‘by whom the wits of children be dulled,’—almost the very words of John Lyly.

Euphues, besides being a treatise on love and education, is a sort of Tudor tract upon animated nature. It should be a source of joy unspeakable to the general reader if only for what it teaches him in the way of natural history. How much of what is most gravely stated here did John Lyly actually believe? It is easy to grant so orthodox a statement of physical fact as that ‘the Sunne doth harden the durte, and melte the waxe;’ but ere the sentence be finished, the author calls upon us to believe that ‘Perfumes doth refresh the Dove and kill the Betill.’ The same reckless extravagance of remark is to be noted whenever bird, beast, or reptile is mentioned. The crocodile of Shakespeare’s time must have been a very contortionist among beasts, for, says Lyly, ‘when one approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him, stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.’ Perhaps the fame of this creature’s powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Thames. The ostrich was human in its vanity according to Lyly; men and women sometimes pull out their white hairs, but ‘the Estritch, that taketh the greatest pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth them.’ Nay, more than that, being in ‘great haste she pricketh none but hirselfe which causeth hir to runne when she would rest.’ We shall presently expect to hear that ostriches wear boots by the straps of which they lift themselves over ten-foot woven-wire fences. But Lyly used the conventional natural history that was at hand, and troubled himself in no respect to inquire about its truth or falsity.

There is yet another cause of the popularity of this book in its own time, which has been too little emphasized. It is that trumpet blast of patriotism with which the volume ends. We feel, as we read the thirty pages devoted to the praise of England and the Queen, that this is right, fitting, artistic, and we hope that it is tolerably sincere. Flattery came easily to men in those days, and there was small hope of advancement for one who did not master the art. But there is a glow of earnestness in these paragraphs rather convincing to the skeptic. Nor would the book be complete without this eulogy. We have had everything else; a story for who wanted a story, theories upon the education of children, a body of mythological divinity, a discussion of methods of public speaking, advice for men who are about to marry, a theological sparring match, in which a man of straw is set up to be knocked down, and is knocked down, a thousand illustrations of wit and curious reading, and now, as a thing that all men could understand, the author tells Englishmen of their own good fortune in being Englishmen, and is finely outspoken in praise of what he calls ‘the blessed Island.’

This is an old-fashioned vein, to be sure,—the ad captandum trick of a popular orator bent upon making a success. It is not looked upon in all places with approval. ‘Our unrivaled prosperity’ was a phrase which greatly irritated Matthew Arnold. Here in America, are we not taught by a highly fastidious journal that we may be patriotic if we choose, but we must be careful how we let people know it? We mustn’t make a fuss about it. We mustn’t be blatant. The star-spangled banner on the public schools is at best a cheap and vulgar expression of patriotism. But somehow even this sort of patriotism goes with the people, and perhaps these instincts of the common folk are not entirely to be despised. Many a reader of Euphues, who cared but little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy, who didn’t read books simply because they were fashionable, must have felt his pulse stirred by Lyly’s chant of England’s greatness. For Euphues is John Lyly, and John Lyly’s creed was substantially that of the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, ‘I am an Englishman.’

In the thin disguise of the chief character of his story the author describes the happy island, its brave gentlemen and rich merchants, its fair ladies and its noble Queen. The glories of London, which he calls the storehouse and mart of all Europe, and the excellence of English universities, ‘out of which do daily proceed men of great wisdom,’ are alike celebrated. England’s material wealth in mines and quarries is amply set forth, also the fine qualities of the breed of cattle, and the virtues of English spaniels, hounds, and mastiffs; for these constitute a sort of good that all could appreciate. He is satirical at the expense of his countrymen’s dress,—‘there is nothing in England more constant than the inconstancie of attire,’—but praises their silence and gravity at their meals. They have wise ministers in the court, and devout guardians of the true religion and of the church. ‘O thrice happy England, where such councilors are, where such people live, where such virtue springeth.’

In the paragraphs relating to the queen, Lyly grows positively eloquent. He praises her matchless beauty, her mercy, patience, and moderation, and emphasizes the fact of her virginity to a degree that would have satisfied the imperial votaress herself if but once she had considered her admirer’s words: ‘O fortunate England that hath such a Queen; ungratefull, if thou pray not for her; wicked, if thou do not love her; miserable, if thou lose her.’ He calls down Heaven’s blessings upon her that she may be ‘triumphant in victories like the Palm tree, fruitful in her age like the Vine, in all ages prosperous, to all men gracious, in all places glorious: so that there be no end of her praise, until the end of all flesh.’

With passages such as these, this interesting book draws to a conclusion. A most singular and original book, worthy to be read, unless, indeed, the reading of these out-of-the-way volumes were found to encroach upon time belonging by right of eminent intellectual domain to Chaucer and to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Milton. That Euphues is in no exact sense a novel admits of little question. It is also a brilliant illustration of how not to write English. Nevertheless it is very amusing, and its disappearance would be a misfortune, since it would eclipse the innocent gayety of many a man who loves to bask in that golden sunshine which streams from the pages of old English books.

1. The writer of this paper once sent to that fine scholar and gracious gentleman, Professor Edward Arber, to inquire whether in his opinion one might hope to buy at a modest price a copy of either the first or the second part of Euphues. Professor Arber’s reply was amusingly emphatic: ‘You might as well try to purchase one of Mahomet’s old slippers.’ But in July of 1896 there were four copies of this old novel on sale at one New York bookstore. One of the copies was of great beauty, consisting of the two parts of the story bound up together in a really sumptuous fashion. The price was not large as prices of such books go, but on the other hand ‘’a was not small.’ [Return]
2. Lady Burton’s Dedication of her husband’s biography,—‘To my earthly master,’ etc. [Return]

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FAIR-MINDED MAN

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It is by no means necessary that one be a man of letters in order to write a good book. Some very admirable books have been written by men who gave no especial thought to literature as an art. They wrote because they were so fortunate as to find themselves in possession of ideas, and not because they had determined to become authors. Literature as such implies sophistication, and people who devote themselves to literature do so from a variety of motives. But these writers of whom I now speak have a less complex thought back of their work. They do not, for example, propose pleasure to the reader as an object in writing. Their aim is single. They recount an experience, or plead a cause. Literature with them is always a means to an end. They are like pedestrians who never look upon walking as other than a rational process for reaching a given place. It does not occur to them that walking makes for health and pleasure, and that it is also an exercise for displaying a graceful carriage, the set of the shoulders, the poise of the head.

To be sure one runs the risk of being deceived in this matter. The actress who plays the part of an unaffected young girl, for aught that the spectator knows to the contrary may be a pronounced woman of the world. Not every author who says to the public ‘excuse my untaught manner’ is on this account to be regarded as a literary ingénu. His simplicity awakens distrust. The fact that he professes to be a layman is a reason for suspecting him. He is probably an adept, a master of the wiles by which readers are snared.

But aside from the cases in which deception is practiced, or at least attempted, there is in the world a respectable body of literature which is not the work of literary men. Its chief characteristic is sincerity. The writers of these books are so busy in telling the truth that they have no time to think of literature.

Among the more readable of these pieces is that unpretentious volume in which Dr. Joseph Priestley relates the story of his life. For in classing this book with the writings of authors who are not men of letters one surely does not go wide of the mark. There is a sense in which it is entirely proper to say that Priestley was not a literary man. He produced twenty-five volumes of ‘works,’ but they were for use rather than for art. He wrote on science, on grammar, on theology, on law. He published controversial tracts: ‘Did So-and-So believe so-and-so or something quite different?’ and then a discussion of the ‘grounds’ of this belief. He made ‘rejoinders,’ ‘defenses,’ ‘animadversions,’ and printed the details of his Experiments on Different Kinds of Air. This is distinctly uninviting. Let me propose an off-hand test by which to determine whether or no a given book is literature. Can you imagine Charles Lamb in the act of reading that book? If you can; it’s literature; if you can’t, it isn’t. I find it difficult to conceive of Charles Lamb as mentally immersed in the Letter to an Anti-pædobaptist or the Doctrine of Phlogiston Established, but it is natural to think of him turning the pages of Priestley’s Memoir, reading each page with honest satisfaction and pronouncing the volume to be worthy the title of A BOOK.

It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by the practice of which authors please their public. There is no eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three really dramatic events in Priestley’s career are not handled with a view to producing dramatic effect. There are places where the author might easily have become impassioned. But he did not become impassioned. Not a few paragraphs contain unwritten poems. The simple-hearted Priestley was unconscious of this, or if conscious, then too modest to make capital of it. He had never aspired to the reputation of a clever writer, but rather of a useful one. His aim was quite as simple when he wrote the Memoir as when he wrote his various philosophical reports. He never deviated into brilliancy. He set down plain statements about events which had happened to him, and people whom he had known. Nevertheless the narrative is charming, and the reasons of its charm are in part these:—

In the first place the book belongs to that department of literature known as autobiography. Autobiography has peculiar virtues. The poorest of it is not without some flavor of life, and at its best it is transcendent. A notable value lies in its power to stimulate. This power is very marked in Priestley’s case, where the self-delineated portrait is of a man who met and overcame enormous difficulties. He knew poverty and calumny, both brutal things. He had a thorn in the flesh,—for so he himself characterized that impediment in his speech which he tried more or less unsuccessfully all his life to cure. He found his scientific usefulness impaired by religious and political antagonisms. He tasted the bitterness of mob violence; his house was sacked, his philosophical instruments destroyed, his manuscripts and books scattered along the highway. But as he looked back upon these things he was not moved to impatience. There is a high serenity in his narrative as becomes a man who has learned to distinguish between the ephemeral and the permanent elements of life.

Yet it is not impossible that autobiography of this sort has an effect the reverse of stimulating upon some people. It is pleasanter to read of heroes than to be a hero oneself. The story of conquest is inspiring, but the actual process is apt to be tedious. One’s nerves are tuned to a fine energy in reading of Priestley’s efforts to accomplish a given task. ‘I spent the latter part of every week with Mr. Thomas, a Baptist minister, … who had no liberal education. Him I instructed in Hebrew, and by that means made myself a considerable proficient in that language. At the same time I learned Chaldee and Syriac and just began to read Arabic’ This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley’s mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an illustration his experience in keeping school.

He had pronounced objections to this business, and he registered his protest. But suppose the alternative is to teach school or to starve. A man will then teach school. I don’t know that this was quite the situation in which Priestley found himself, though he needed money. He may have hesitated to enter a profession which in his time required a more extensive muscular equipment than he was able to furnish. The old English schoolmasters were ‘bruisers.’ They had thick skins, hard heads, and solid fists. The symbols of their office were a Greek grammar and a flexible rod. They were skillful either with the book or the birch. It has taken many years to convince the world that the short road to the moods and tenses does not necessarily lie through the valley of the shadow of flogging. Perhaps Priestley objected to school-mastering because it was laborious. It was indeed laborious as he practiced it. One marvels at his endurance. His school consisted of about thirty boys, and he had a separate room for about half-a-dozen young ladies. ‘Thus I was employed from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, without any interval except one hour for dinner; and I never gave a holiday on any consideration, the red letter days excepted. Immediately after this employment in my own school-rooms I went to teach in the family of Mr. Tomkinson, an eminent attorney, … and here I continued until seven in the evening.’ Twelve consecutive hours of teaching, less one hour for dinner! It was hardly necessary for Priestley to add that he had ‘but little leisure for reading.’

He laid up no money from teaching, but like a true man of genius spent it upon books, a small air-pump, an electrical machine. By training his advanced pupils to manipulate these he ‘extended the reputation’ of his school. This was playing at science. Several years were yet to elapse before he should acquire fame as an original investigator.

This autobiography is valuable because it illustrates the events of a remarkable time. He who cares about the history of theological opinion, the history of chemical science, the history of liberty, will read these pages with keen interest. Priestley was active in each of these fields. Men famous for their connection with the great movements of the period were among his friends and acquaintance. He knew Franklin and Richard Price. John Canton, who was the first man in England to verify Franklin’s experiments, was a friend of Priestley. So too were Smeaton the engineer, James Watt, Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, and Erasmus Darwin. He knew Kippis, Lardner, Parr, and had met Porson and Dr. Johnson. His closest friend for many years was Theophilus Lindsey. One might also mention the great Lavoisier, Magellan the Jesuit philosopher, and a dozen other scientific, ecclesiastical, and political celebrities. The Memoir, however, is almost as remarkable for what it does not tell concerning these people as for what it does. Priestley was not anecdotal. And he is only a little less reticent about himself than he is about others. He does indeed describe his early struggles as a dissenting minister, but the reader would like a little more expansiveness in the account of his friendships and his chemical discoveries. These discoveries were made during the time that he was minister at the Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds. Here he began the serious study of chemistry. And that without training in the science as it was then understood. At Warrington he had heard a series of chemical lectures by Dr. Turner of Liverpool, a gentleman whom Americans ought to regard with amused interest, for he was the man who congratulated his fellows in a Liverpool debating society that while they had just lost the terra firma of thirteen colonies in America, they had gained, under the generalship of Dr. Herschel, a terra incognita of much greater extent in nubibus. Priestley not only began his experiments without any great store of knowledge, but also without apparatus save what he devised for himself of the cheapest materials. In 1772 he published his first important scientific tract, ‘a small pamphlet on the method of impregnating water with fixed air.’ For this he received the Copley medal from the Royal Society. On the first of August, 1774, he discovered oxygen. Nobody in Leeds troubled particularly to inquire what this dissenting minister was about with his vials and tubes, his mice and his plants. Priestley says that the only person who took ‘much interest’ was Mr. Hey, a surgeon. Mr. Hey was a ‘zealous Methodist’ and wrote answers to Priestley’s theological papers. Arminian and Socinian were at peace if science was the theme. When Priestley departed from Leeds, Hey begged of him the ‘earthen trough’ in which all his experiments had been made. This earthen trough was nothing more nor less than a washtub of the sort in common local use. So independent is genius of the elaborate appliances with which talent must produce results.

The discoveries brought fame, especially upon the Continent, and led Lord Shelburne to invite Priestley to become his ‘literary companion.’ Dr. Price was the intermediary in effecting this arrangement. Priestley’s nominal post was that of ‘librarian,’ and he now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne’s guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be. Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed to it. On the other hand, Shelburne appears to have treated the philosopher with kindness and delicacy, and the situation was not without difficulties for his lordship.

Among obvious advantages which Priestley derived from this residence were freedom from financial worry, time for writing and experimenting, a tour on the Continent, and the privilege of spending the winter season of each year in London.

It was during these London visits that he renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Franklin. They were members of a club of ‘philosophical gentlemen’ which met at stated times at the London Coffee House, Ludgate Hill. There were few days upon which the Father of Pneumatic Chemistry and the Father of Electrical Science did not meet. When their talk was not of dephlogisticated air and like matters it was pretty certain to be political. The war between England and America was imminent. Franklin dreaded it. He often said to Priestley that ‘if the difference should come to an open rupture, it would be a war of ten years, and he should not live to see the end of it.’ He had no doubt as to the issue. ‘The English may take all our great towns, but that will not give them possession of the country,’ he used to say. Franklin’s last day in England was given to Priestley. The two friends spent much of the time in reading American newspapers, especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America, and as Franklin read the addresses to the inhabitants of Boston, from the places in the neighborhood, ‘the tears trickled down his cheeks.’ He wrote to Priestley from Philadelphia just a month after the battle of Lexington, briefly describing that lively episode, and mentioning his pleasant six weeks voyage with weather ‘so moderate that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way.’ At the close of his letter he says: ‘In coming over I made a valuable philosophical discovery, which I shall communicate to you when I can get a little time. At present I am extremely hurried.’ In October of that year, 1775, Franklin wrote to Priestley about the state of affairs in America. His letter contains one passage which can hardly be hackneyed from over-quotation. Franklin wants Priestley to tell ‘our dear good friend,’ Dr. Price, that America is ‘determined and unanimous.’ ‘Britain at the expense of three millions has killed 150 yankees this campaign, which is 20,000 l. a head; and at Bunker’s Hill, she gained a mile of ground, all of which she lost again, by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America.’ From these data Dr. Price is to calculate ‘the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer the whole of our territory.’ Then the letter closes with greetings ‘to the club of honest whigs at the London Coffee House.’

Seven years later Franklin’s heart was still faithful to the club. He writes to Priestley from France: ‘I love you as much as ever, and I love all the honest souls that meet at the London Coffee House…. I labor for peace with more earnestness that I may again be happy in your sweet society.’ Franklin thought that war was folly. In a letter to Dr. Price, he speaks of the great improvements in natural philosophy, and then says: ‘There is one improvement in moral philosophy which I wish to see: the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another’s throats.’

Priestley lamented that a man of Franklin’s character and influence ‘should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.’ Franklin acknowledged that he had not given much attention to the evidences of Christianity, and asked Priestley to recommend some ‘treatises’ on the subject ‘but not of great length.’ Priestley suggested certain chapters of Hartley’s Observations on Man, and also what he himself had written on the subject in his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion. Franklin had promised to read whatever books his friend might advise and give his ‘sentiments on them.’ ‘But the American war breaking out soon after, I do not believe,’ says Priestley, ‘that he ever found himself sufficiently at leisure for the discussion.’

Priestley valued his own scientific reputation not a little for the weight it gave, among skeptics, to his arguments in support of his religious belief. He found that all the philosophers in Paris were unbelievers. They looked at him with mild astonishment when they learned that he was not of the same mind. They may even have thought him a phenomenon which required scientific investigation. ‘As I chose on all occasions to appear as a Christian, I was told by some of them that I was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe Christianity.’ Priestley began to question them as to what they supposed Christianity was, and with the usual result,—they were not posted on the subject.

In 1780 Priestley went to Birmingham. In the summer of 1791 occurred that remarkable riot, perhaps the most dramatic event in the philosopher’s not unpicturesque career. This storm had long been gathering, and when it broke, the principal victim of its anger was, I verily believe, more astonished than frightened. The Dissenters were making unusual efforts to have some of their civil disabilities removed. Feeling against them was especially bitter. In Birmingham this hostility was intensified by the public discourses of Mr. Madan, ‘the most respectable clergyman of the town,’ says Priestley. He published ‘a very inflammatory sermon … inveighing against the Dissenters in general, and myself in particular.’ Priestley made a defense under the title of Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham. This produced a ‘reply’ from Madan, and ‘other letters’ from his opponent. Being a conspicuous representative of that body which was most ‘obnoxious to the court’ it is not surprising that Priestley should have been singled out for unwelcome honors. The feeling of intolerance was unusually strong. It was said—I don’t know how truly—that at a confirmation in Birmingham tracts were distributed against Socinianism in general and Priestley in particular. Very reputable men thought they did God service in inflaming the minds of the rabble against this liberal-minded gentleman. Priestley’s account of the riot in the Memoir is singularly temperate. It might even be called tame. He was quite incapable of posing, or of playing martyr to an audience of which a goodly part was sympathetic and ready to believe his sufferings as great as he chose to make them appear. One could forgive a slight outburst of indignation had the doctor chosen so to relieve himself. ‘On occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of the French revolution, on July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first burned the meeting-house in which I preached, then another meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus, and as far as they could everything belonging to me.… Being in some personal danger on this occasion I went to London.’

A much livelier account from Priestley’s own hand and written the next day after the riot is found in a letter to Theophilus Lindsay. ‘The company were hardly gone from the inn before a drunken mob rushed into the house and broke all the windows. They then set fire to our meeting-house and it is burned to the ground. After that they gutted, and some say burned the old meeting. In the mean time some friends came to tell me that I and my house were threatened, and another brought a chaise to convey me and my wife away. I had not presence of mind to take even my MSS.; and after we were gone the mob came and demolished everything, household goods, library, and apparatus.’ The letter differs from the Memoir in saying that ‘happily no fire could be got.’ Priestley afterwards heard that ‘much pains was taken, but without effect, to get fire from my large electrical machine which stood in the Library.’

It is rather a curious fact that Priestley was not at the inn where the anniversary was celebrating. While the company there were chanting the praises of liberty he was at home playing backgammon with his wife, a remarkably innocent and untreasonable occupation. Mr. Arthur Young visited the scene of the riot a few days later and had thoughts upon it. ‘Seeing, as I passed, a house in ruins, on inquiry I found that it was Dr. Priestley’s. I alighted from my horse, and walked over the ruins of that laboratory which I had left home with the expectation of reaping instruction in; of that laboratory, the labours of which have not only illuminated mankind but enlarged the sphere of science itself; which has carried its master’s fame to the remotest corner of the civilized world; and will now with equal celerity convey the infamy of its destruction to the disgrace of the age and the scandal of the British name.’ It is not necessary to supplement Arthur Young’s burst of indignation with private bursts of our own. We can afford to be as philosophic over the matter as Priestley was. That feeling was hot against him even in London is manifest from the fact that the day after his arrival a hand-bill was distributed beginning with the words: ‘Dr. Priestley is a damned rascal, an enemy both to the religious and political constitution of this country, a fellow of a treasonable mind, consequently a bad Christian.’ The ‘bad Christian’ thought it showed ‘no small degree of courage’ in Mr. William Vaughan to receive him into his house. ‘But it showed more in Dr. Price’s congregation at Hackney to invite me to succeed him.’ The invitation was not unanimous, as Priestley with his characteristic passion for exactness is at pains to tell the reader. Some of the members withdrew, ‘which was not undesirable.’

People generally looked askance at him. If he was upon one side of the street the respectable part of the world made it convenient to pass by on the other side. He even found his relations with his philosophical acquaintance ‘much restricted.’ ‘Most of the members of the Royal Society shunned him,’ he says. This seems amusing and unfortunate. Apparently one’s qualifications as a scientist were of little avail if one happened to hold heterodox views on the Trinity, or were of opinion that more liberty than Englishmen then had would be good for them. Priestley resigned his fellowship in the Royal Society.

One does not need even mildly to anathematize the instigators of that historic riot. They were unquestionably zealous for what they believed to be the truth. Moreover, as William Hutton observed at the time, ‘It’s the right of every Englishman to walk in darkness if he chooses.’ The method employed defeated its own end. Persecution is an unsafe investment and at best pays a low rate of interest. No dignified person can afford to indulge in it. There’s the danger of being held up to the laughter of posterity. It has happened so many times that the unpopular cause has become popular. This ought to teach zealots to be cautious. What would Madan have thought if he could have been told that within thirty years one of his own coadjutors in this affair would have publicly expressed regret for the share he had in it? Madan has his reward, three quarters of a column in the Dictionary of National Biography. But to-day Priestley’s statue stands in a public square of Birmingham opposite the Council House. Thus do matters get themselves readjusted in this very interesting world.

Rutt’s Life of Priestley (that remarkable illustration of how to make a very poor book out of the best materials) contains a selection of the addresses and letters of condolence which were forthcoming at this time. Some of them are stilted and dull, but they are actual ‘documents,’ and the words in them are alive with the passion of that day. They make the transaction very real and close at hand.

Priestley was comparatively at ease in his new home. Yet he could not entirely escape punishment. There were ‘a few personal insults from the lowest of the rabble.’ Anxiety was felt lest he might again receive the attentions of a mob. He humorously remarked: ‘On the 14th of July, 1792, it was taken for granted by many of my neighbors that my house was to come down just as at Birmingham the year before.’ The house did not come down, but its occupant grew ill at ease, and within another two years he had found a new home in the new nation across the sea.

It is hardly exact to say that he was ‘driven’ from England, as some accounts of his life have it. Mere personal unpopularity would not have sufficed for this. But at sixty-one a man hasn’t as much fight in him as at forty-five. He is not averse to quiet. Priestley’s three sons were going to America because their father thought that they could not be ‘placed’ to advantage in a country so ‘bigoted’ as their native land was then. ‘My own situation, if not hazardous, was become unpleasant, so that I thought my removal would be of more service to the cause of truth than my longer stay in England.’

The sons went first and laid the foundations of the home in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. The word ‘Susquehanna’ had a magic sound to Englishmen. On March 30, 1794, Priestley delivered his farewell discourse. April 6 he passed with his friends the Lindsays in Essex Street, and a day later went to Gravesend. For the details of the journey one must go to his correspondence.

His last letters were written from Deal and Falmouth, April 9 and 11. The vessel was six weeks in making the passage. The weather was bad and the travelers experienced everything ‘but shipwreck and famine.’ There was no lack of entertainment, for the ocean was fantastic and spectacular. Not alone were there the usual exhibitions of flying-fish, whales, porpoises, and sharks, but also ‘mountains of ice larger than the captain had ever seen before,’—for thus early had transatlantic captains learned the art of pronouncing upon the exceptional character of a particular voyage for the benefit of the traveler who is making that voyage. They saw water-spouts, ‘four at one time.’ The billows were ‘mountain-high, and at night appeared to be all on fire.’ They had infinite leisure, and scarcely knew how to use it. Mrs. Priestley wrote ‘thirty-two large pages of paper.’ The doctor read ‘the whole of the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Bible as far as the first book of Samuel.’ He also read through Hartley’s second volume, and ‘for amusement several books of voyages and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’ ‘If I had [had] a Virgil I should have read him through, too. I read a great deal of Buchanan’s poems, and some of Petrarch’s de remediis, and Erasmus’s Dialogues; also Peter Pindar’s poems, … which pleased me much more than I expected. He is Paine in verse.’

On June 1 the ship reached Sandy Hook. Three days later Dr. and Mrs. Priestley ‘landed at the Battery in as private a manner as possible, and went immediately to Mrs. Loring’s lodging-house close by.’ The next morning the principal inhabitants of New York came to pay their respects and congratulations; among others Governor Clinton, Dr. Prevoost, bishop of New York; Mr. Osgood, late envoy to Great Britain; the heads of the college; most of the principal merchants, and many others; for an account of which amenities one must read Henry Wansey’s Excursion to the United States in the Summer of 1794, published by Salisbury in 1796, a most amusing and delectable volume.

Priestley missed seeing Vice-president John Adams by one day. Adams had sailed for Boston on the third. But he left word that Boston was ‘better calculated’ for Priestley than any other part of America, and that ‘he would find himself very well received if he should be inclined to settle there.’

Mrs. Priestley in a letter home says: ‘Dr. P. is wonderfully pleased with everything, and indeed I think he has great reason from the attentions paid him.’ The good people became almost frivolous with their dinner-parties, receptions, calls, and so forth. Then there were the usual addresses from the various organizations,—one from the Tammany Society, who described themselves as ‘a numerous body of freemen, who associate to cultivate among them the love of liberty, and the enjoyment of the happy republican government under which they live.’ There was an address from the ‘Democratic Society,’ one from the ‘Associated Teachers in the City of New York,’ one from the ‘Republican Natives of Great Britain and Ireland,’ one from the ‘Medical Society.’

The pleasure was not unmixed. Dr. Priestley the theologian had a less cordial reception than Dr. Priestley the philosopher and martyr. The orthodox were considerably disturbed by his coming. ‘Nobody asks me to preach, and I hear there is much jealousy and dread of me.’ In Philadelphia at a Baptist meeting the minister bade his people beware, for ‘a Priestley had entered the land.’ But the heretic was very patient and earnest to do what he might for the cause of ‘rational’ Christianity. The widespread infidelity distressed him. He mentioned it as a thing to be wondered at that in America the lawyers were almost universally unbelievers. He lost no time in getting to work. On August 27, when he had been settled in Northumberland only a month, he wrote to a friend that he had just got Paine’s Age of Reason, and thought to answer it. By September 14 he had done so. ‘I have transcribed for the press my answer to Mr. Paine, whose work is the weakest and most absurd as well as most arrogant of anything I have yet seen.’

Priestley was fully conscious of the humor of his situation. He was trying to save the public, including lawyers, from the mentally debilitating effects of reading Paine’s Age of Reason, while at the same time all the orthodox divines were warning their flocks of the danger consequent upon having anything to do with him.

Honors and rumors of honors came to him. He was talked of for the presidency of colleges yet to be founded, and was invited to professorships in colleges that actually were. He went occasionally to Philadelphia, a frightful journey from Northumberland in those days. Through his influence a Unitarian society was established. He gave public discourses, and there was considerable curiosity to see and hear so famous a man. ‘I have the use of Mr. Winchester’s pulpit every morning … and yesterday preached my first sermon.’ He was told that ‘a great proportion of the members of Congress were present,’ and we know that ‘Mr. Vice-President Adams was a regular attendant.’

In company with his friend Mr. Russell, Priestley went to take tea with President Washington. They stayed two hours ‘as in any private family,’ and at leavetaking were invited ‘to come at any time without ceremony.’

About a year later Priestley saw again Washington, who had finished his second term of office. ‘I went to take leave of the late president. He seemed not to be in very good spirits. He invited me to Mt. Vernon, and said he thought he should hardly go from home twenty miles as long as he lived.’

Priestley was not to have the full measure of the rest which he coveted. He had left England to escape persecution, and persecution followed him. Cobbett, who had assailed him in a scurrilous pamphlet at the time of his emigration, continued his attacks. Priestley was objectionable because he was a friend of France. Moreover he had opinions about things, some of which he freely expressed,—a habit he had contracted so early in life as to render it hopeless that he should ever break himself of it. Cobbett’s virulence was so great as to excite the astonishment of Mr. Adams, who said to Priestley, ‘I wonder why the man abuses you;’ when a hint from Adams, Priestley thought, would have prevented it all. But it was not easy to control William Cobbett. Adams may have thought that Cobbett was a being created for the express purpose of being let alone. There are such beings. Every one knows, or can guess, to what sort of animal Churton Collins compared Dean Swift, when the Dean was in certain moods. William Cobbett, too, had his moods.

Yet it is impossible to read Priestley’s letters between 1798 and 1801 without indignation against those who preyed upon his peace of mind. He writes to Lindsay: ‘It is nothing but a firm faith in a good Providence that is my support at present: but it is an effectual one.’ His ‘never failing resource’ was the ‘daily study of the Scriptures.’ In moments of depression he loved to read the introduction to Hartley’s second volume, those noble passages beginning: ‘Whatever be our doubts, fears, or anxieties, whether selfish or social, whether for time or eternity, our only hope and refuge must be in the infinite power, knowledge and goodness of God.’

Priestley was indeed a remarkable man. His services to science were very great. He laid the foundations of notable structures which, however, other men were to rear. He might have been a greater man had he been less versatile. And yet his versatility was one source of his greatness. He clung to old-fashioned notions, defending the doctrine of ‘philogiston’ after it had been abandoned by nearly every other chemist of repute. For this he has been ridiculed. But he was not ridiculous, he was singularly open-minded. He knew that his reputation as a philosopher was under a cloud. ‘Though all the world is at present against me, I see no reason to despair of the old system; and yet, if I should see reason to change my opinion, I think I should rather feel a pride in making the most public acknowledgment of it.’ These are words which Professor Huxley might well have quoted in his beautiful address on Priestley delivered at Birmingham, for they are the perfect expression and symbol of the fair-minded man.

He was as modest as he was fair-minded. When it was proposed that he should accompany Captain Cook’s expedition to the South Seas, and the arrangements were really completed, he was objected to because of his political and religious opinions. Dr. Reinhold Foster was appointed in his stead. He was a person ‘far better qualified,’ said Priestley. Again when he was invited to take the chair of Chemistry at Philadelphia he refused. This for several reasons, the chief of which was that he did not believe himself fitted for it. One would naturally suppose that the inventor of soda-water and the discoverer of oxygen would have been able to give lectures to young men on chemistry. But Priestley believed that he ‘could not have acquitted himself in it to proper advantage.’ ‘Though I have made discoveries in some branches of chemistry, I never gave much attention to the common routine of it, and know but little of the common processes.’

Priestley still awaits a biographer. The two thick volumes compiled by Rutt more than sixty-three years ago have not been reprinted, nor are they likely to be. But a life so precious in its lessons should be recorded in just terms. It would be an inspiring book, and its title might well be ‘The Story of a Man of Character.’ Not the least of its virtues would consist in ample recognition of Joseph Priestley’s unwavering confidence that all things were ordered for the best; and then of his piety, which prompted him to say, as he looked back upon his life: ‘I am thankful to that good Providence which always took more care of me than ever I took of myself.’

CONCERNING A RED WAISTCOAT

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Hero-worship is appropriate only to youth. With age one becomes cynical, or indifferent, or perhaps too busy. Either the sense of the marvelous is dulled, or one’s boys are just entering college and life is agreeably practical. Marriage and family cares are good if only for the reason that they keep a man from getting bored. But they also stifle his yearnings after the ideal. They make hero-worship appear foolish. How can a man go mooning about when he has just had a good cup of coffee and a snatch of what purports to be the news, while an attractive and well-dressed woman sits opposite him at breakfast-table, and by her mere presence, to say nothing of her wit, compels him to be respectable and to carry a level head? The father of a family and husband of a federated club woman has no business with hero-worship. Let him leave such folly to beardless youth.

But if a man has never outgrown the boy that was in him, or has never married, then may he do this thing. He will be happy himself, and others will be happy as they consider him. Indeed, there is something altogether charming about the personality of him who proves faithful to his early loves in literature and art; who continues a graceful hero-worship through all the caprices of literary fortune; and who, even though his idol may have been dethroned, sets up a private shrine at which he pays his devotions, unmindful of the crowd which hurries by on its way to do homage to strange gods.

Some men are born to be hero-worshipers. Théophile Gautier is an example. If one did not love Gautier for his wit and his good-nature, one would certainly love him because he dared to be sentimental. He displayed an almost comic excess of emotion at his first meeting with Victor Hugo. Gautier smiles as he tells the story; but he tells it exactly, not being afraid of ridicule. He went to call upon Hugo with his friends Gérard de Nerval and Pétrus Borel. Twice he mounted the staircase leading to the poet’s door. His feet dragged as if they had been shod with lead instead of leather. His heart throbbed; cold sweat moistened his brow. As he was on the point of ringing the bell, an idiotic terror seized him, and he fled down the stairs, four steps at a time, Gérard and Pétrus after him, shouting with laughter. But the third attempt was successful. Gautier saw Victor Hugo—and lived. The author of Odes et Ballades was just twenty-eight years old. Youth worshiped youth in those great days.

Gautier said little during that visit, but he stared at the poet with all his might. He explained afterwards that one may look at gods, kings, pretty women, and great poets rather more scrutinizingly than at other persons, and this too without annoying them. ‘We gazed at Hugo with admiring intensity, but he did not appear to be inconvenienced.’

What brings Gautier especially to mind is the appearance within a few weeks of an amusing little volume entitled Le Romantisme et l’éditeur Renduel. Its chief value consists, no doubt, in what the author, M. Adolphe Jullien, has to say about Renduel. That noted publisher must have been a man of unusual gifts and unusual fortune. He was a fortunate man because he had the luck to publish some of the best works of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Paul Lacroix; and he was a gifted man because he was able successfully to manage his troop of geniuses, neither quarreling with them himself nor allowing them to quarrel overmuch with one another. Renduel’s portrait faces the title-page of the volume, and there are two portraits of him besides. There are fac-similes of agreements between the great publisher and his geniuses. There is a famous caricature of Victor Hugo with a brow truly monumental. There is a caricature of Alfred de Musset with a figure like a Regency dandy,—a figure which could have been acquired only by much patience and unremitted tight-lacing; also one of Balzac, which shows that that great novelist’s waist-line had long since disappeared, and that he had long since ceased to care. What was a figure to him in comparison with the flesh-pots of Paris!

One of the best of these pictorial satires is Roubaud’s sketch of Gautier. It has a teasing quality, it is diabolically fascinating. It shows how great an art caricature is in the hands of a master.

But the highest virtue of a good new book is that it usually sends the reader back to a good old book. One can hardly spend much time upon Renduel; he will remember that Gautier has described that period when hero-worship was in the air, when the sap of a new life circulated everywhere, and when he himself was one of many loyal and enthusiastic youths who bowed the head at mention of Victor Hugo’s name. The reader will remember, too, that Gautier was conspicuous in that band of Romanticists who helped to make Hernani a success the night of its first presentation. Gautier believed that to be the great event of his life. He loved to talk about it, dream about it, write of it.

There was a world of good fellowship among the young artists, sculptors, and poets of that day. They took real pleasure in shouting Hosanna to Victor Hugo and to one another. Even Zola, the Unsentimental, speaks of ma tristesse as he reviews that delightful past. He cannot remember it, to be sure, but he has read about it. He thinks ill of the present as he compares the present with ‘those dead years.’ Writers then belonged to a sort of heroic brotherhood. They went out like soldiers to conquer their literary liberties. They were kings of the Paris streets. ‘But we,’ says Zola in a pensive strain, ‘we live like wolves each in his hole.’ I do not know how true a description this is of modern French literary society, but it is not difficult to make one’s self think that those other days were the days of magnificent friendships between young men of genius. It certainly was a more brilliant time than ours. It was flamboyant, to use one of Gautier’s favorite words.

Youth was responsible for much of the enthusiasm which obtained among the champions of artistic liberty. These young men who did honor to the name of Hugo were actually young. They rejoiced in their youth. They flaunted it, so to speak, in the faces of those who were without it. Gautier says that young men of that day differed in one respect from young men of this day; modern young men are generally in the neighborhood of fifty years of age.

Gautier has described his friends and comrades most felicitously. All were boys, and all were clever. They were poor and they were happy. They swore by Scott and Shakespeare, and they planned great futures for themselves.

Take for an example Jules Vabre, who owed his reputation to a certain Essay on the Inconvenience of Conveniences. You will search the libraries in vain for this treatise. The author did not finish it. He did not even commence it,—only talked about it. Jules Vabre had a passion for Shakespeare, and wanted to translate him. He thought of Shakespeare by day and dreamed of Shakespeare by night. He stopped people in the street to ask them if they had read Shakespeare.

He had a curious theory concerning language. Jules Vabre would not have said, As a man thinks so is he, but, As a man drinks so is he. According to Gautier’s statement, Vabre maintained the paradox that the Latin languages needed to be ‘watered’ (arroser) with wine, and the Anglo-Saxon languages with beer. Vabre found that he made extraordinary progress in English upon stout and extra stout. He went over to England to get the very atmosphere of Shakespeare. There he continued for some time regularly ‘watering’ his language with English ale, and nourishing his body with English beef. He would not look at a French newspaper, nor would he even read a letter from home. Finally he came back to Paris, anglicized to his very galoshes. Gautier says that when they met, Vabre gave him a ‘shake hand’ almost energetic enough to pull the arm from the shoulder. He spoke with so strong an English accent that it was difficult to understand him; Vabre had almost forgotten his mother tongue. Gautier congratulated the exile upon his return, and said, ‘My dear Jules Vabre, in order to translate Shakespeare it is now only necessary for you to learn French.’

Gautier laid the foundations of his great fame by wearing a red waistcoat the first night of Hernani. All the young men were fantastic in those days, and the spirit of carnival was in the whole romantic movement. Gautier was more courageously fantastic than other young men. His costume was effective, and the public never forgot him. He says with humorous resignation: ‘If you pronounce the name of Théophile Gautier before a Philistine who has never read a line of our works, the Philistine knows us, and remarks with a satisfied air, “Oh yes, the young man with the red waistcoat and the long hair.” … Our poems are forgotten, but our red waistcoat is remembered.’ Gautier cheerfully grants that when everything about him has faded into oblivion this gleam of light will remain, to distinguish him from literary contemporaries whose waistcoats were of soberer hue.

The chapter in his Histoire du Romantisme in which Gautier tells how he went to the tailor to arrange for the most spectacular feature of his costume is lively and amusing. He spread out the magnificent piece of cherry-colored satin, and then unfolded his design for a ‘pour-point,’ like a ‘Milan cuirass.’ Says Gautier, using always his quaint editorial we, ‘It has been said that we know a great many words, but we don’t know words enough to express the astonishment of our tailor when we lay before him our plan for a waistcoat.’ The man of shears had doubts as to his customer’s sanity.

‘Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is not the fashion!’

‘It will be the fashion when we have worn the waistcoat once,’ was Gautier’s reply. And he declares that he delivered the answer with a self-possession worthy of a Brummel or ‘any other celebrity of dandyism.’

It is no part of this paper to describe the innocently absurd and good-naturedly extravagant things which Gautier and his companions did, not alone the first night of Hernani, but at all times and in all places. They unquestionably saw to it that Victor Hugo had fair play the evening of February 25, 1830. The occasion was an historic one, and they with their Merovingian hair, their beards, their waistcoats, and their enthusiasm helped to make it an unusually lively and picturesque occasion.

I have quoted a very few of the good things which one may read in Gautier’s Histoire du Romantisme. The narrative is one of much sweetness and humor. It ought to be translated for the benefit of readers who know Gautier chiefly by Mademoiselle de Maupin and that for reasons among which love of literature is perhaps the least influential.

It is pleasant to find that Renduel confirms the popular view of Gautier’s character. M. Jullien says that Renduel never spoke of Gautier but in praise. ‘Quel bon garçon!’ he used to say. ‘Quel brave cœur!’ M. Jullien has naturally no large number of new facts to give concerning Gautier. But there are eight or nine letters from Gautier to Renduel which will be read with pleasure, especially the one in which the poet says to the publisher, ‘Heaven preserve you from historical novels, and your eldest child from the smallpox.’

Gautier must have been both generous and modest. No mere egoist could have been so faithful in his hero-worship or so unpretentious in his allusions to himself. One has only to read the most superficial accounts of French literature to learn how universally it is granted that Gautier had skillful command of that language to which he was born. Yet he himself was by no means sure that he deserved a master’s degree. He quotes one of Goethe’s sayings,—a saying in which the great German poet declares that after the practice of many arts there was but one art in which he could be said to excel, namely, the art of writing in German; in that he was almost a master. Then Gautier exclaims, ‘Would that we, after so many years of labor, had become almost a master of the art of writing in French! But such ambitions are not for us!’

Yet they were for him; and it is a satisfaction to note how invariably he is accounted, by the artists in literature, an eminent man among many eminent men in whose touch language was plastic.

STEVENSON: THE VAGABOND AND THE PHILOSOPHER

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A certain critic said of Stevenson that he was ‘incurably literary;’ the phrase is a good one, being both humorous and true. There is comfort in the thought that such efforts as may have been made to keep him in the path of virtuous respectability failed. Rather than do anything Stevenson preferred to loaf and to write books. And he early learned that considerable loafing is necessary if one expects to become a writer. There is a sense in which it is true that only lazy people are fit for literature. Nothing is so fruitful as a fine gift for idleness. The most prolific writers have been people who seemed to have nothing to do. Every one has read that description of George Sand in her latter years, ‘an old lady who came out into the garden at mid-day in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or wandered slowly about. So she remained for hours looking about her, musing, contemplating. She was gathering impressions, absorbing the universe, steeping herself in Nature; and at night she would give all this forth as a sort of emanation.’ One shudders to think what the result might have been if instead of absorbing the universe George Sand had done something practical during those hours. But the Scotchman was not like George Sand in any particular that I know of save in his perfect willingness to bask in the sunshine and steep himself in Nature. His books did not ‘emanate.’ The one way in which he certainly did not produce literature was by improvisation. George Sand never revised her work; it might almost be said that Robert Louis Stevenson never did anything else.

Of his method we know this much. He himself has said that when he went for a walk he usually carried two books in his pocket, one a book to read, the other a note-book in which to put down the ideas that came to him. This remark has undoubtedly been seized upon and treasured in the memory as embodying a secret of his success. Trusting young souls have begun to walk about with note-books: only to learn that the note-book was a detail, not an essential, in the process.

He who writes while he walks cannot write very much, but he may, if he chooses, write very well. He may turn over the rubbish of his vocabulary until he finds some exquisite and perfect word with which to bring out his meaning. This word need not be unusual; and if it is ‘exquisite’ then exquisite only in the sense of being fitted with rare exactness to the idea. Stevenson wrote so well in part because he wrote so deliberately. He knew the vulgarity of haste, especially in the making of literature. He knew that finish counted for much, perhaps for half. Has he not been reported as saying that it wasn’t worth a man’s while to attempt to be a writer unless he was quite willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single sentence? In general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. That scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days, and few authors are willing to take a prophet’s chances. But Stevenson was one of the few.

He laid the foundations of his reputation with two little volumes of travel. An Inland Voyage appeared in 1878; Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, in 1879. These books are not dry chronicles of drier facts. They bear much the same relation to conventional accounts of travel that flowers growing in a garden bear to dried plants in a herbarium. They are the most friendly and urbane things in modern English literature. They have been likened to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The criticism would be better if one were able to imagine Stevenson writing the adventure of the fille de chambre, or could conceive of Lawrence Sterne writing the account of the meeting with the Plymouth Brother. ‘And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common-house, I have a hope to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.’ That was written twenty years ago and the Brother was an old man then. And now Stevenson is gone. How impossible it is not to wonder whether they have yet met in that ‘one common-house.’ ‘He feared to intrude, but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.’

The Inland Voyage contains passages hardly to be matched for beauty. Let him who would be convinced read the description of the forest Mormal, that forest whose breath was perfumed with nothing less delicate than sweet brier. ‘I wish our way had always lain among woods,’ says Stevenson. ‘Trees are the most civil society.’

Stevenson’s traveling companion was a young English baronet. The two adventurers paddled in canoes through the pleasant rivers and canals of Belgium and North France. They had plenty of rain and a variety of small misadventures; but they also had sunshine, fresh air, and experiences among the people of the country such as they could have got in no other way. They excited not a little wonder, and the common opinion was that they were doing the journey for a wager; there seemed to be no other reason why two respectable gentlemen, not poor, should work so hard and get so wet.

This was conceived in a more adventurous vein than appears at first sight. In an unsubdued country one contends with beasts and men who are openly hostile. But when one is a stranger in the midst of civilization and meets civilization at its back door, he is astonished to find how little removed civilization is from downright savagery. Stevenson and his companion learned as they could not have learned otherwise how great deference the world pays to clothes. Whether your heart is all right turns out a matter of minor importance; but—are your clothes all right? If so, smiles, and good beds at respectable inns; if not, a lodging in a cow-shed or beneath any poor roof which suffices to keep off the rain. The voyagers had constantly to meet the accusation of being peddlers. They denied it and were suspected afresh while the denial was on their lips. The public mind was singularly alert and critical on the subject of peddlers.

At La Fere, ‘of Cursed Memory,’ they had a rebuff which nearly spoiled their tempers. They arrived in a rain. It was the finest kind of a night to be indoors ‘and hear the rain upon the windows.’ They were told of a famous inn. When they reached the carriage entry ‘the rattle of many dishes fell upon their ears.’ They sighted a great field of snowy table-cloth, the kitchen glowed like a forge. They made their triumphal entry, ‘a pair of damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp India-rubber bag upon his arm.’ Stevenson declares that he never had a sound view of that kitchen. It seemed to him a culinary paradise ‘crowded with the snowy caps of cookmen, who all turned round from their sauce-pans and looked at us with surprise.’ But the landlady—a flushed, angry woman full of affairs—there was no mistaking her. They asked for beds and were told to find beds in the suburbs: ‘We are too busy for the like of you!’ They said they would dine then, and were for putting down their luggage. The landlady made a run at them and stamped her foot: ‘Out with you—out of the door,’ she screeched.

I once heard a young Englishman who had been drawn into some altercation at a continental hotel explain a discreet movement on his own part by saying: ‘Now a French cook running amuck with a carving knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.’ There were no knives in this case, only a woman’s tongue. Stevenson says that he doesn’t know how it happened, ‘but next moment we were out in the rain, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a disappointed mendicant.’

‘It’s all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.’

Stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of Diana on fire that night if it had been handy. ‘There was no crime complete enough to express my disapproval of human institutions.’ As for the baronet, he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again; and he registered a vow before Heaven never to be uncivil to a peddler. But before making that vow he particularized a complaint for every joint in the landlady’s body.

To read An Inland Voyage is to be impressed anew with the thought that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. They are instinctively for being on the move. Like the author of that book they travel ‘not to go any where but to go.’ If they behold a stage-coach or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard. They are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when they are on the move. Talk to them of foreign lands and they are seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. Stevenson met an omnibus driver in a Belgian village who looked at him with thirsty eyes because he was able to travel. How that omnibus driver ‘longed to be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.’ ‘Here I am,’ said he. ‘I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God, is that life?’ Stevenson opined that this man had in him the making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to Africa or to the Indies after Drake. ‘But it is an evil age for the gipsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.’

In his Travels with a Donkey the author had no companionship but such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. ‘My lady-friend’ he calls her. Modestine was her name; ‘she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.’ She gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her own gait. ‘What that pace was there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run.’ He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her sex. ‘The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty.’

From time to time Modestine’s load would topple off. The villagers were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. ‘Judge if I was hot!’ says Stevenson. ‘I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jack-ass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days before this trouble came upon me.’

He had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep’s wool within, and in this portable house he passed his nights afield. Not always by choice, as witness his chapter entitled ‘A Camp in the Dark.’ There are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to perfection,—if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. I don’t know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in which Stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking next morning to see the ‘world flooded with a blue light, the mother of dawn.’ He had been in search of an adventure all his life, ‘a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,’ and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that morning found him, an inland castaway, ‘as strange to his surroundings as the first man upon the earth.’

Passages like these indicate Stevenson’s quality. He was no carpet-knight; he had the true adventurer’s blood in his veins. He and Drake and the Belgian omnibus-driver should have gone to the Indies together. Better still, the omnibus driver should have gone with Drake, and Stevenson should have gone with Amyas Leigh. They say that Stevenson traveled in search of health. Without doubt; but think how he would have traveled if he had had good health. And one has strange mental experiences alone with the stars. That came of sleeping in the fields ‘where God keeps an open house.’ ‘I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists.’

Much as he gloried in his solitude he ‘became aware of a strange lack;’ for he was human. And he gave it as his opinion that ‘to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.’ It may be so. Such a woman would need to be of heroic physical mould, and there is danger that she would turn out of masculine mould as well. Isopel Berners was of such sort. Isopel could handle her clenched fists like a prizefighter. She was magnificent in the forest, and never so perfectly in place as when she backed up George Borrow in his fight with the Flaming Tinman. Having been in the habit of taking her own part, she was able to give pertinent advice at a critical moment. ‘It’s of no use flipping at the Flaming Tinman with your left hand,’ she said, ‘why don’t you use your right?’ Isopel called Borrow’s right arm ‘Long Melford.’ And when the Flaming Tinman got his knock-down blow from Borrow’s right, Isopel exclaimed, ‘Hurrah for Long Melford; there is nothing like Long Melford for shortness all the world over!’

But what an embarrassing personage Miss Berners would have been transferred from the dingle to the drawing-room; nay, how impossible it is to think of that athletic young goddess as Miss Berners! The distinctions and titles of conventional society refuse to cling even to her name. I wonder how Stevenson would have liked Isopel Berners.

And now his philosophy. Yet somehow ‘philosophy’ seems a big word for so unpretentious a theory of life as his. Stevenson didn’t philosophize much; he was content to live and to enjoy. He was deliberate, and in general he would not suffer himself to be driven. He resembled an admirable lady of my acquaintance who, when urged to get something done by a given time, usually replied that ‘time was made for slaves.’ Stevenson had the same feeling. He says: ‘Hurry is the resource of the faithless. When a man can trust his own heart and those of his friends to-morrow is as good as to-day. And if he die in the mean while, why, then, there he dies, and the question is solved.’

You think this a poor philosophy? But there must be all kinds of philosophy; the people in the world are not run into one mould like so much candle-grease. And because of this, his doctrine of Inaction and Postponement, stern men and practical women have frowned upon Stevenson. In their opinion instead of being up and doing he consecrated too many hours to the idleness of literature. They feel towards him as Hawthorne fancied his ancestor the great witch judge would have felt towards him. Hawthorne imagines that ghostly and terrible ancestor looking down upon him and exclaiming with infinite scorn, ‘A writer of storybooks. What kind of employment is that for an immortal soul?’

To many people nothing is more hateful than this willingness to hold aloof and let things drift. That any human being should acquiesce with the present order of the world appears monstrous to these earnest souls. An Indian critic once called Stevenson ‘a faddling Hedonist.’ Stevenson quotes the phrase with obvious amusement and without attempting to gainsay its accuracy.

But if he allowed the world to take its course he expected the same privilege. He wished neither to interfere nor to be interfered with. And he was a most cheerful nonconformist withal. He says: ‘To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.’ Independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one’s own good estate. He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, ‘so long as he boasts of what he really has.’ If people but knew this they would boast ‘more freely and with a better grace.’

Stevenson was humorously alive to the old-fashioned quality of his doctrine of happiness and content. He says in the preface to an Inland Voyage that although the book ‘runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God’s universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself—I really do not know where my head can have been.’ But while this omission will, he fears, render his book ‘philosophically unimportant’ he hopes that ‘the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles.’

Stevenson could be militant. His letter on Father Damien shows that. But there was nothing of the professional reformer about him. He had no hobby, and he was the artist first and then the philanthropist. This is right; it was the law of his being. Other men are better equipped to do the work of humanity’s city missionaries than was he. Let their more rugged health and less sensitive nerves bear the burden; his poet’s mission was not the less important.

The remaining point I have to note, among a number which might be noted, is his firm grasp of this idea: that whether he is his brother’s keeper or not he is at all events his brother’s brother. It is ‘philosophy’ of a very good sort to have mastered this conception and to have made the life square with the theory. This doctrine is fashionable just now, and thick books have been written on the subject, filled with wise terms and arguments. I don’t know whether Stevenson bothered his head with these matters from a scientific point of view or not, but there are many illustrations of his interest. Was it this that made him so gentle in his unaffected manly way? He certainly understood how difficult it is for the well-to-do member of society to get any idea not wholly distorted of the feelings and motives of the lower classes. He believed that certain virtues resided more conspicuously among the poor than among the rich. He declared that the poor were more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. ‘A workman or a peddler cannot shutter himself off from his less comfortable neighbors. If he treats himself to a luxury he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. And what should more directly lead to charitable thoughts?’ But with the advent of prosperity a man becomes incapable of understanding how the less fortunate live. Stevenson likens that happy individual to a man going up in a balloon. ‘He presently passes through a zone of clouds and after that merely earthly things are hidden from his gaze. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order and positively as good as new. He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the sky-larks. He does not precisely sing, of course; but then he looks so unassuming in his open landau! If all the world dined at one table this philosophy would meet with some rude knocks.’

In the three years since Stevenson’s death many additions have been made to the body of literature by him and about him. There are letters, finished and unfinished novels, and recollections by the heaping handful. Critics are considerably exercised over the question whether any, or all, or only two or three of his books are to last. The matter has, I believe, been definitely decided so that posterity, whatever other responsibilities it has, will at least not have that one; and anything that we can do to relieve the future of its burdens is altruism worthy the name.

Stevenson was one of the best tempered men that ever lived. He never prated about goodness, but was unaffectedly good and sunny-hearted as long as he lived. Of how many men can it be said, as it can be said of him, that he was sick all his days and never uttered a whimper? What rare health of mind was this which went with such poor health of body! I’ve known men to complain more over toothache than Stevenson thought it worth while to do with death staring him in the face. He did not, like Will o’ the Mill, live until the snow began to thicken on his head. He never knew that which we call middle age.

He worked harder than a man in his condition should have done. At times he felt the need to write for money; and this was hostile to his theory of literature. He wrote to his friend Colvin: ‘I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come in—mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. What I want is an income that really comes in of itself while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs.’

I wish he might have had it; I can think of no other man whose indolence would have been so profitable to the world.

STEVENSON’S ST. IVES

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With the publication of St. Ives the catalogue of Stevenson’s important writings has closed. In truth it closed several years ago,—in 1891, to be exact,—when Catriona was published. Nothing which has appeared since that date can modify to any great extent the best critical estimate of his novels. Neither Weir of Hermiston nor St. Ives affects the matter. You may throw them into the scales with his other works, and then you may take them out; beyond a mere trembling the balance is not disturbed. But suppose you were to take out Kidnapped, or Treasure Island, or The Master of Ballantrae, the loss would be felt at once and seriously. And unless he has left behind him, hidden away among his loose papers, some rare and perfect sketch, some letter to posterity which shall be to his reputation what Neil Paraday’s lost novel in The Death of the Lion might have been to his, St. Ives may be regarded as the epilogue.

Stevenson’s death and the publication of this last effort of his fine genius may tend to draw away a measure of public interest from that type of novel which he, his imitators, and his rivals have so abundantly produced. This may be the close of a ‘period’ such as we read about in histories of literature.

If the truth be told, has not our generation had enough of duels, hair-breadth escapes, post-chaises, and highwaymen, mysterious strangers muffled in great-coats, and pistols which always miss fire when they shouldn’t? To say positively that we have done with all this might appear extravagant in the light of the popularity of certain modern heroic novels. But it might not be too radical a view if one were to maintain that these books are the expression of something temporary and accidental, that they sustain a chronological relation to modern literature rather than an essential one.

Matthew Arnold spoke of Heine as a sardonic smile on the face of the Zeitgeist. Let us say that these modern stories in the heroic vein are a mere heightening of color on the cheeks of that interesting young lady, the Genius of the modern novel—a heightening of color on the cheeks, for the color comes from without and not from within. It is a matter of no moment. Artificial red does no harm for once, and looks well under gaslight.

These novels of adventure which we buy so cheerfully, read with such pleasure, and make such a good-natured fuss over, are for the greater part an expression of something altogether foreign to the deeper spirit of modern fiction. Surely the true modern novel is the one which reflects the life of to-day. And life to-day is easy, familiar, rich in material comforts, and on the whole without painfully striking contrasts and thrilling episodes. People have enough to eat, reasonable liberty, and a degree of patience with one another which suggests indifference. A man may shout aloud in the market-place the most revolutionary opinions, and hardly be taken to task for it; and then on the other hand we have got our rulers pretty well under control. This paragraph, however, is not the peroration of a eulogy upon ‘our unrivaled happiness.’ It attempts merely to lay stress on such facts as these, that it is not now possible to hang a clergyman of the Church of England for forgery, as was done in 1777; that a man may not be deprived of the custody of his own children because he holds heterodox religious opinions, as happened in 1816. There is widespread toleration; and civilization in the sense in which Ruskin uses the word has much increased. Now it is possible for a Jew to become Prime Minister, and for a Roman Catholic to become England’s Poet Laureate.

If, then, life is familiar, comfortable, unrestrained, and easy, as it certainly seems to be, how are we to account for the rise of this semihistoric, heroic literature? It is almost grotesque, the contrast between the books themselves and the manner in which they are produced. One may picture the incongruous elements of the situation,—a young society man going up to his suite in a handsome modern apartment house, and dictating romance to a type-writer. In the evening he dines at his club, and the day after the happy launching of his novel he is interviewed by the representative of a newspaper syndicate, to whom he explains his literary method, while the interviewer makes a note of his dress and a comment on the decoration of his mantelpiece.

Surely romance written in this way—and we have not grossly exaggerated the way—bears no relation to modern literature other than a chronological one. The Prisoner of Zenda and A Gentleman of France, to mention two happy and pleasing examples of this type of novel, are not modern in the sense that they express any deep feeling or any vital characteristic of to-day. They are not instinct with the spirit of the times. One might say that these stories represent the novel in its theatrical mood. It is the novel masquerading. Just as a respectable bookkeeper likes to go into private theatricals, wear a wig with curls, a slouch hat with ostrich feathers, a sword and ruffles, and play a part to tear a cat in, so does the novel like to do the same. The day after the performance the whole artificial equipment drops away and disappears. The bookkeeper becomes a bookkeeper once more and a natural man. The hour before the footlights has done him no harm. True, he forgot his lines at one place, but what is a prompter for if not to act in such an emergency? Now that it is over the affair may be pronounced a success,—particularly in the light of the gratifying statement that a clear profit has been realized towards paying for the new organ.

This is a not unfair comparison of the part played by these books in modern fiction. The public likes them, buys them, reads them; and there is no reason why the public should not. In proportion to the demand for color, action, posturing, and excessive gesticulation, these books have a financial success; in proportion to the conscientiousness of the artist who creates them they have a literary vitality. But they bear to the actual modern novel a relation not unlike that which The Castle of Otranto bears to Tom Jones,—making allowance of course for the chronological discrepancy.

From one point the heroic novel is a protest against the commonplace and stupid elements of modern life. According to Mr. Frederic Harrison there is no romance left in us. Life is stale and flat; yet even Mr. Harrison would hardly go to the length of declaring that it is also commercially unprofitable. The artificial apartment-house romance is one expression of the revolt against the duller elements in our civilization; and as has often been pointed out, the novel of psychological horrors is another expression.

There are a few men, however, whose work is not accounted for by saying that they love theatrical pomp and glitter for its own sake, or that they write fiction as a protest against the times in which they live. Stevenson was of this number. He was an adventurer by inheritance and by practice. He came of a race of adventurers, adventurers who built lighthouses and fought with that bold outlaw, the Sea. He himself honestly loved, and in a measure lived, a wild life. There is no truer touch of nature than in the scene where St. Ives tells the boy Rowley that he is a hunted fugitive with a price set upon his head, and then enjoys the tragic astonishment depicted in the lad’s face.

Rowley ‘had a high sense of romance and a secret cultus for all soldiers and criminals. His traveling library consisted of a chap-book life of Wallace, and some sixpenny parts of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers; … and the choice depicts his character to a hair. You can imagine how his new prospects brightened on a boy of this disposition. To be the servant and companion of a fugitive, a soldier, and a murderer rolled in one—to live by stratagems, disguises, and false names, in an atmosphere of midnight and mystery so thick that you could cut it with a knife—was really, I believe, more dear to him than his meals, though he was a great trencher-man and something of a glutton besides. For myself, as the peg by which all this romantic business hung, I was simply idolized from that moment; and he would rather have sacrificed his hand than surrendered the privilege of serving me.’

One can believe that Stevenson was a boy with tastes and ambitions like Rowley. But for that matter Rowley stands for universal boy-nature.

Criticism of St. Ives becomes both easy and difficult by reason of the fact that we know so much about the book from the author’s point of view. He wrote it in trying circumstances, and never completed it; the last six chapters are from the pen of a practiced story-teller, who follows the author’s known scheme of events. Stevenson was almost too severe in his comment upon his book. He says of St. Ives:—

‘It is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in themselves, I believe, but none of them bildende, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics, and all out of drawing. Here and there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it’s not…. If it has a merit to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. ’Tis my most prosaic book.’

One must remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an ‘advance notice.’ Still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless affirmation that St. Ives is ‘a rudderless hulk.’ ‘It’s a pagoda,’ says Stevenson in a letter dated September, 1894, ‘and you can just feel—or I can feel—that it might have been a pleasant story if it had only been blessed at baptism.’

He had to rewrite portions of it in consequence of having received what Dr. Johnson would have called ‘a large accession of new ideas.’ The ideas were historical. The first five chapters describe the experiences of French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle. St. Ives was the only ‘gentleman’ among them, the only man with ancestors and a right to the ‘particle.’ He suffered less from ill treatment than from the sense of being made ridiculous. The prisoners were dressed in uniform,—‘jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton.’ St. Ives thought that ‘some malignant genius had found his masterpiece of irony in that dress.’ So much is made of this point that one reads with unusual interest the letter in which Stevenson bewails his ‘miserable luck’ with St. Ives; for he was halfway through it when a book, which he had ordered six months before, arrived, upsetting all his previous notions of how the prisoners were cared for. Now he must change the thing from top to bottom. ‘How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week?’ All his points had been made on the idea that they were ‘unshaved and clothed anyhow.’ He welcomes the new matter, however, in spite of the labor it entails. And it is easy to see how he has enriched the earlier chapters by accentuating St. Ives’s disgust and mortification over his hideous dress and stubby chin.

The book has a light-hearted note, as a romance of the road should have. The events take place in 1813; they might have occurred fifty or seventy-five years earlier. For the book lacks that convincing something which fastens a story immovably within certain chronological limits. It is the effect which Thomas Hardy has so wonderfully produced in that little tale describing Napoleon’s night-time visit to the coast of England; the effect which Stevenson himself was equally happy in making when he wrote the piece called A Lodging for a Night.

St. Ives has plenty of good romantic stuff in it, though on the whole it is romance of the conventional sort. It is too well bred, let us say too observant of the forms and customs which one has learned to expect in a novel of the road. There is an escape from the castle in the sixth chapter, a flight in the darkness towards the cottage of the lady-love in the seventh chapter, an appeal to the generosity of the lady-love’s aunt, a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, in the ninth chapter. And so on. We would not imply that all this is lacking in distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which Stevenson could give to his work. Ought one to look for it in a book confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a book which was left incomplete?

There is a pretty account of the first meeting between St. Ives and Flora. One naturally compares it with the scene in which David Balfour describes his sensations and emotions when the spell of Catriona’s beauty came upon him. Says David:—

‘There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man’s mind and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted.’

This is quite perfect, and in admirable keeping with the genuine simplicity of David’s character:—

‘She had wonderful bright eyes like stars; … and whatever was the cause, I stood there staring like a fool.’

This is more concise than St. Ives’s description of Flora; but St. Ives was a man of the world who had read books, and knew how to compare the young Scotch beauty to Diana:—

‘As I saw her standing, her lips parted, a divine trouble in her eyes, I could have clapped my hands in applause, and was ready to acclaim her a genuine daughter of the winds.’

The account of the meeting with Walter Scott and his daughter on the moors does not have the touch of reality in it that one would like. Here was an opportunity, however, of the author’s own making.

There are flashes of humor, as when St. Ives found himself locked in the poultry-house ‘alone with half a dozen sitting hens. In the twilight of the place all fixed their eyes on me severely, and seemed to upbraid me with some crying impropriety.’

There are sentences in which, after Stevenson’s own manner, real insight is combined with felicitous expression. St. Ives is commenting upon the fact that he has done a thing which most men learned in the wisdom of this world would have pronounced absurd; he has ‘made a confidant of a boy in his teens and positively smelling of the nursery.’ But he has no cause to repent it. ‘There is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties like mine. To the beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the child’s imagination.’

Men have been known to thank God when certain authors died,—not because they bore the slightest personal ill-will, but because they knew that as long as the authors lived nothing could prevent them from writing. In thinking of Stevenson, however, one cannot tell whether he experiences the more a feeling of personal or of literary loss, whether he laments chiefly the man or the author. It is not possible to separate the various cords of love, admiration, and gratitude which bind us to this man. He had a multitude of friends. He appealed to a wider audience than he knew. He himself said that he was read by journalists, by his fellow novelists, and by boys. Envious admiration might prompt a less successful writer to exclaim, ‘Well, isn’t that enough?’ No, for to be truly blest one must have women among one’s readers. And there are elect ladies not a few who know Stevenson’s novels; yet it is a question whether he has reached the great mass of female novel-readers. Certainly he is not well known in that circle of fashionable maidens and young matrons which justly prides itself upon an acquaintance with Van Bibber. And we can hardly think he is a familiar name to that vast and not fashionable constituency which battens upon the romances of Marie Corelli under the impression that it is perusing literature, while he offers no comfort whatever to that type of reader who prefers that a novel shall be filled with hard thinking, with social riddles, theological problems, and ‘sexual theorems.’ Stevenson was happy with his journalists and boys. Among all modern British men of letters he was in many ways the most highly blest; and his career was entirely picturesque and interesting. Other men have been more talked about, but the one thing which he did not lack was discriminating praise from those who sit in high critical places.

He was prosperous, too, though not grossly prosperous. It is no new fact that the sales of his books were small in proportion to the magnitude of his contemporary fame. People praised him tremendously, but paid their dollars for entertainment of another quality than that supplied by his fine gifts. An Inland Voyage has never been as popular as Three Men in a Boat, nor Treasure Island and Kidnapped as King Solomon’s Mines; while The Black Arrow, which Mr. Lang does not like, and Professor Saintsbury insists is ‘a wonderfully good story,’ has not met a wide public favor at all. Travels with a Donkey, which came out in 1879, had only reached its sixth English edition in 1887. Perhaps that is good for a book so entirely virtuous in a literary way, but it was not a success to keep a man awake nights.

We have been told that it is wrong to admire Jekyll and Hyde, that the story is ‘coarse,’ an ‘outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive,’ and several other things; nay, it is even hinted that this popular tale is evidence of a morbid strain in the author’s nature. Rather than dispute the point it is a temptation to urge upon the critic that he is not radical enough, for in Stevenson’s opinion all literature might be only a ‘morbid secretion.’

The critics, however, agree in allowing us to admire without stint those smaller works in which his characteristic gifts displayed themselves at the best. Thrawn Janet is one of these, and the story of Tod Lapraik, told by Andie Dale in Catriona, is another. Stevenson himself declared that if he had never written anything except these two stories he would still have been a writer. We hope that there would be votes cast for Will o’ the Mill, which is a lovely bit of literary workmanship. And there are a dozen besides these.

He was an artist of undoubted gifts, but he was an artist in small literary forms. His longest good novels are after all little books. When he attempted a large canvas he seemed not perfectly in command of his materials, though he could use those materials as they could have been used by no other artist. There is nothing in his books akin to that broad and massive treatment which may be felt in a novel like Rhoda Fleming or in a tragedy like Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Andrew Lang was right when he said of Stevenson: He is a ‘Little Master,’ but of the Little Masters the most perfect and delightful.

The Riverside Press

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