Imaginary obligations

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IMAGINARY
OBLIGATIONS

By
FRANK MOORE COLBY

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

1904

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* COPY B

Copyright, 1904
By DoDD, Mead and Company

Published September, 1904

PREFACE

I PRESUME it will not be denied that the Anglo-
Saxon conscience is apt to encroach on the zone
of moral indifference. We are a hortatory peo-
ple, forever laying down the law in a region
where diversity is most desirable. Apparently
we would rather teach than live ; we count votes
even in our dreams ; and we suppress nine-tenths
of our thoughts for fear of seeming incorrect.
We are sometimes frank in private, but coram
populo our souls are not our own. In proof
whereof see any magazine or newspaper or almost
any current book or play, and mark especially
the amazing difference between public speeches
and private thoughts. There are the romantics
of politics, and the self -concealment of debate,
and the duty to the crowd, and the duty to the
coterie, and the duty to the time of day, and the

PREFACE

constraint of success, and the fear of being mis-
understood, and the care of the universe, and the
hundred other anxieties that make up our chief
imaginary obHgation to seem something different
from what we are — something wiser or more
sententious or more brilliant or more reasonable
and educational, something far less human and
infinitely less absurd. We cannot even see a man
with a book without worrying over the effect it
may have on him, and we would turn every critic
into a sort of literary legislator. We try to
compel good taste and the harmless word "cul-
ture" has already acquired a grim and horrid
sound. On the lightest of matters we lay the
heaviest of hands. At every point our indefati-
gable instructors would substitute a formula for
a vital process. Our fancied obligations to these
little formulas are for the most part the subject
of this book, which is made up of certain news-
paper and magazine articles, edited and rear-
ranged. The topics discussed are transitory,
but they are bound to recur, and the writings
quoted are evanescent but they are of a kind that

PREFACE

often return. I have written about them because
I enjoyed their absurdity, but incidentally they
may show why so many of us grow old rigidly or
develop an alarming spiritual pomposity in our
middle age.

CONTENTS

I

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

I BOOKS WE haven't READ 1

II A PROBLEM OF CULTURE 7

III LITERARY BURROWING 13

IV THE DIFFERENCE OF PRINT 17

V THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE 25
VI THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT 33

II

THE CROWDED FORUM

I THE NATIONAL ANGLE 40

II "AMERICANISM*' 49

ni CONCERNING HEROES 54

IV A "remarkable" man 60

V OLD AND NEW DEBATERS 64
VI ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING 70

VII MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTA-
TION 77
VIII DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY 83

III

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

I SETTING THE PACE gg

II THE WALK UPTOWN 95

CONTENTS

III THE READING PUBLIC 99

IV REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS 109

IV
ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

I ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS 118

II THE SPAN OF THE STAGE 128

III ON CERTAIN "pROBLEm" PLAYS 134

IV CONVENTIONAL PLAYS 145

V PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED CRITI-

CISM 151

V
RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

I BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 167

n THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN 172

ni THE CO-EDUCATION SCARE 178

IV THE TRAINED WOMAN 182

V EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS 189
VI INNER CIRCLES 194

VI

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

I THE DRIER CRITICISM 200

n PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY 205

m THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE 210

IV NOTHING NEW 216

V LITERARY ANALYSIS 221
VI OUTDOOR PEDANTRY 226

Vn A POPULARIZER 234

CONTENTS

VII
MINOR OPPRESSIONS

I THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT 239

n THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR 244

HI THE CHEERFUL GIVER 249

IV THE SERIOUS WOMAN 254

V MUSIC AT MEALS 260

VIII
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

I LITERARY REPUTATIONS 265

II THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS 271 ^^

III THE PHASEMAKER 279 » \

IV THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR 284

V THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS 289
VI THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS 295

VII RUNNING AN ORACLE 301

VIII FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME 306

IX ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE 315

X IN DARKEST JAMES 321

PART I

ON LITERARY COMPUL-
SION

BOOKS WE HAVEN'T READ

A WRITER on French literature contrasts the cul-
tivated Frenchman's definite knowledge of his
own classics with the miscellaneous reading of the
Anglo-Saxon of the same class. In France there
are certain things that people with a taste for
reading are supposed to know, and do know.
With us there is no safety in this assumption.
The greater variety of our literature and the
flexibility of our standards account in his opinion
for the difference. It is a comfortable way of
putting the thing, and we need the suggestion,
for we are always setting up standards in this
1

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

matter and tormenting ourselves and others for
non-conformity. The truth is there are nine and
sixty ways of reading our tribal lays as well
as of making them. There is no path in reading
which we can safely advise another grown-up
Anglo-Saxon person to follow, and there is no
single book for not reading which he can de-
servedly be brought to shame. Yet, for certain
neglects of this sort we actually persecute. It
is a mild form of persecution, but it causes
needless suffering and, what is worse, it begets
lies.

Pride of reading is a terrible thing. There
are certain literary sets in which the book is an
instrument of tyranny. If you have not read
it you are made to feel unspeakably abject, for
the book you have not read is always the one
book in the world that you should have read.
It is the sole test of literary insight, good taste
and mental worth. To confess that you have
not read it is to expose yourself as an illiterate
person. It is like admitting that you have
never eaten with a fork. Now, when this social

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

pressure is brought to bear upon a man, what
happens? This depends on his moral character.
If there is a flaw in it anywhere, it breaks down.
Weak, sensitive persons will invariably stammer
out a lie. The temptation to escape the ignom-
iny is irresistible. The have-reads are hard, in-
solent and cruelly triumphant. The haven't-
reads feel that they must either tell lies or slink
away. Then there are all sorts of miserable
compromises. Without actually saying that he
has read one of the obligatory books, a weak
character will act as if he had. He ven-
tures a few of those vague, universal com-
ments which he knows are bound to be true of
anything, anywhere. But it is a wretched piece
of business, and most harrowing to the nerves.
The awful fidgetiness of a poor baited unread
man, when he thinks he is being cornered, is
pitiful to see. Next comes the stage of involun-
tary deceit. By talking about books as if he had
read them he comes to think that he has. He
uses third-hand quotations as if they were his
own. At this point humbug enters the heart;

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

the mind, as you might say, becomes encrusted
with its own pretence. Finally, there is literary
second childishness, oblivion and death. Some
choose the more virtuous course by reading books
just to say they have read them, thereby saving
their souls, perhaps, but certainly swamping
their intellects.

All this in a field where you can do and say
exactly what you please, where there is even a
premium on a whim. Where is the sanction for
these grim obligations ? How big a bibliography
goes to make a man of culture ? What course of
summer reading would have been equally suitable
for Carlyle and Charles Lamb? A list of our
unread books torments some of us like a list of
murders. Yet it is not they but the books we
have read that will accuse us. Just here we find
a consolation. Frankly confessed ignorance of
a book never bores any one and does no harm.
Ignorance of books is not infectious, but sham
knowledge of them is. The real offence is read-
ing in such a way that it leaves you the worse for
it. One would rather hear some men talk about
4

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

the vegetables they had eaten than the books they
had read. They put more real feeling into it. A
small vitality may be smothered by much read-
ing, and the book-talk of these people is the
author's deadliest foe. The books we have not
read may be another way of saying the authors
we have not injured. The reader is so often un-
worthy of the book.

We need all the comfort we can get. Small
literary ambitions trip up many of us every day.
Many a man lives beyond his literary income
from an absurd kind of book pride. Why should
we not own up like Darwin — change the subject
to earthworms if they interest us more? There
was more "literary merit" in what he said of
earthworms than in what most of us say about
belles-lettres. It is not the topic that gives the
literary quality. And we never can finish our
course of reading. We shall all be tucked
away in our graves with a long list of good
things still unread. But if we have not lied
about these or humbugged ourselves about the
others or staled any good man's memory by
5

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

feeble-minded repetitions, we may be saved.
Otherwise we shall be snubbed by every author
across the Styx. And if the only thing a multi-
tude of books have done for a man is to enable
him to mention them and quote them and appear
to be in the "literary swim," he is no fit person
for the company of honest authors. He does not
belong in Arcadia at all, but behind the counter
in a retail book-shop, where there is a good busi-
ness reason for plaguing other people about the
books they haven't read. By these and kindred
reflections we may console ourselves in part for
our deficiencies and ward off the temptation of
the sham.

\

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

II

A PROBLEM OF **CULTURE"

Every little while there appears an article on
current American literature that takes all the
hope and self-confidence out of you — that is, if
you had any idea of keeping up with the times.
There are so many authors that the writer knows
and you do not. Sometimes you never heard their
names at all. Sometimes you have heard their
names and nothing more. Then comes this ter-
ribly well-informed person implying in every-
thing he says that greatness in a dozen different
fields has wholly escaped your notice. Poets
piping the sweetest kind of things at your very
doors, and you never hear them. Stupendous
"local color" work going on at every railway
junction, and you heed it not. I have been read-
ing an article of this kind in one of our most
serious magazines. It deals with the progress of
literature in the southern states, and though the
writer says he leaves out many names of equal
importance with those mentioned, he goes far

7

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

enough to convince you that you must always
remain illiterate. There is no chance of catch-
ing up now.

Here, for example, is a mere fraction of the
literature that is waiting for you in the several
states. In Kentucky there is a school of lyric
poetry, "quite unique, with Mr. Lane, Mr. Cox,
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Perkins as its chief lyrists."
Do you know them all? Why not.? "In Ten-
nessee Mr. Withers and Mr. B. F. Boole are writ-
ing creditable verse." To skip Withers and
Boole is to cut out the very heart of culture.
Then there is Mr. Bowles of Arkansas, who is
doing wonders for that state. Bowles of Arkan-
sas has "a polish that suggests some subtle con-
nection between cypress groves and the classics."
Professor Slope is doing even more for North
Carolina, where he is not only "publishing credit-
able poetry," but spreading fiction. And "pass-
ing softly over South Carolina (very softly, for
fear of waking up J. Gordon Coogler of Colum-
bia) we find Georgia illuminated by the talent of
Mr. Hodges and Mr. Norris." Some of them
8

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

you will know, of course. It is not likely, for
instance, that Professor Slope's work in North
Carolina has been unnoticed, or that you are
wholly ignorant of what Miss Beatrice Sim-
mons is doing in Alabama. But did you know
that Texas had its Bagby.'^

If the list were exhaustive one would not feel
so much abashed at his ignorance of a part of it,
but these are only a few of the very greatest
names, and with these the writer feels it safe to
assume that every educated person is familiar.
He has a hundred others in reserve. A short
time before this article was printed, a professor
of literature had counted up contemporary Amer-
ican novelists, including only those whose work
had real significance and was sure to live forever.
There were sixty-six of them. In no other class
of men do you find such indomitable energy as in
these writers on American literature. It is a life
of heroic sacrifice and incessant toil, for no man
could possibly be so thorough in this field unless
he confined himself strictly to it and labored day
and night. With sixty-six American novelists

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

to be conscientiously studied and appraised, he
cannot fritter away his time with the classics, and
if he turns his attention for one instant to what
is going on abroad he is bound to skip some one
in Nebraska or Oregon. For say what you will,
a man's reading power is limited, and thorough-
ness nowadays is to be had only by concentration.
I do not deny that a man may read occasionally
in Shelley or Heine or Browning and at the same
time keep his eye on Bowles of Arkansas and
Slope of North Carolina. But I do argue that
it is a dangerous business to divide his time in
this way if he aims at thoroughness. For it is
not as if there were merely Slopes and Bowleses.
There are Lanes, Booles, Witherses and Bagbys
by the dozen, and the mind that shall grasp all
these and retain them permanently must not be
distracted.

In regard to "creditable verse" I go even fur-
ther. It is safer in this field to specialize by
states. No one should try and keep track of the
"creditable verse" in the whole country. Unless
he has a very remarkable mind he will surely be
10

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

superficial and very likely unjust. There are
no statistics of "creditable verse," but from com-
mon observation I know there is not a state in the
Union that does not raise enough of it to take
all one man's time measuring it off and ticketing
it. And any one who sets himself the task of
reading all of it has no right to expect any time
to spare for verse that is more than creditable.
That is the puzzling thing about these articles on
contemporary writers. They present problems
of specialization in their most baffling form.
Those robust and even-tempered people seem not
to be aware of them. Signs of increasing liter-
ary activity fill them with the most amazing
cheerfulness. There is a poet out in Arizona
now, they will say, and he is turning out reason-
ably good verse quite rapidly. They speak of
him as if he were a new water- works. To our
weaker or more indolent minds that discovery
would be an embarrassment. It is tantalizing
to hear of another fairly good poet. What is
to be done with him? There are very few of us
who have finished with the other kind of poets.
11

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

You must cut somewhere, for life is short. In
the long run the choice will narrow down to this
alternative: Either you will seek culture by a
;ourse of reading under the direction of these
writers and give up your life to it ; or you will
grow so callous that the setting up of a new and
serviceable poet in a western town will excite
you no more than the opening of a new cigar
shop.

12

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

III

LITERARY BURROWING

The Iliad is a great symbolical poem, accord-
ing to a certain critic, because Homer makes a
group of old men, on seeing Helen pass by, re-
mark : "After all, she was worth it," or words to
that effect. This, according to our commenta-
tor, proves that the Iliad contains a great moral
idea; in other words, is symbolical. Now,
Homer was the most utterly unsymbolical person
(if he was a person) that ever enjoyed good
health. He never had anything of that kind the
matter with him, and his poems are as free from
it as they are from germs. The way our sophis-
ticated modern critic will read complex innuen-
does into what is elemental is enough to wear
one's patience to the bone. Must poor old
Homer father a lot of esoteric things? Is the
Iliad to have four or five layers of meaning, one
below the other, like a pile of sandwiches? This
digging up of unsuspected meanings goes too
far. It spoils a poem to be all the time spading
IS

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

it or boring through its imagery with a steam
drill. These critics spend too much of their time
underground, and they look pale and unwhole-
some when they come up. And it often happens
that what they bring up is something they have
dropped themselves. There are commentators
who have been digging all their lives and come
up with their own pocket handkerchief. They
expect you to be glad about it. They think a
poet, like a dog, no sooner happens on a good
thing than he wants to bury it.

A few years ago an inmate of one of our state
asylums was taken out for a walk in a pleasant
park. As soon as his keeper's back was turned
he jumped down a manhole and ran along a sewer
main. When dug up at great expense he com-
plained of the interference, saying he was "keep-
ing store" down there. So of a symbolist when
you let him into a poem. One would think
Homer might have escaped this. The meaning
of the Iliad is so accessible it seems foolish to
try and enter it through a gopher hole. But if
we must, we must. Helen is divine beauty;
14

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

Menelaus is the soul ; Paris the heart of human-
ity; Nestor the onlooking, judging thought;
Thersites the ego, and Achilles the personification
of world energy. And whenever one of them
does anything it means six or eight other things,
and they never can take a step without leaving a
footnote. Then it will amount to something to
say you understand Homer. It will rank you
among the seven deepest thinkers in the world,
and even in regard to the other six you may rea-
sonably entertain suspicions.

That is really the ambitious motive at the root
of this kind of criticism. Below every great
poem there is a little subterranean aristocracy
where rank is measured by its distance from the
surface. Each is aiming at the point furthest
down. A few years ago a Shakespearian critic
showed that when Falstaff was made to babble of
green fields he was really quoting from one of the
psalms. This proved that he had received a re-
ligious education, and was probably a choir boy
in his youth. The man who hit upon this illumi-
nating thought was for weeks a marvel among
15

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

critics. Since then they have no doubt found
FalstafF to be nine different kinds of an allegory ;
so rapidly does the work advance. Why need
every honest poet be suspected of leading a quad-
ruple life ? Sometimes the second or third mean-
ing is less interesting than the first, and the only
really difficult thing about a poem is the critic's
explanation of it. But active minds must find
employment, and if you cannot burrow how can
you be deep? And if you are not deep you are
that wretched, vulgar thing, a casual reader, and
will be snubbed to the end of your days by these
haughty troglodytes. So when one of them
comes along, never let him see you feeding on the
surface of a poem. Dive to the bottom like a
loon. You can bring up queer things from be-
low as well as he. Swear you got them from the
deepest part. Then he will feel degraded and
superficial and blush awkwardly like a casual
reader.

16

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

IV

THE DIFFIDENCE OF PRINT

The moralists who are forever discussing the
behaviour of newspapers pay no attention to the
reader's main complaint. You might think from
the criticism of newspapers that it was all a mat-
ter of tall headlines, slander and sensation. Start
a reform movement, and that is the sort of thing
it aims at. But why not own up? Our main
grudge is against the most respectable. What
if the people you met talked like a newspaper —
never made an admission or saw but one side,
never retracted except on compulsion or paused
in the praise of themselves ? Suppose their cause
is a good one, do you like them for licking its
boots ? Consider that awful thing they call "the
policy." There is nothing more amazing to the
reader than the way a mind can be wrapped in a
"policy." Many a decorous newspaper is edited
by a moral papoose. In private life "the policy"
would make you talk in epitaphs of last year's
opinions, hook your fancy to a foregone conclu-
17

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

sion, turn your mind into a bare card catalogue
of the things you used to think. But being a
man and not a newspaper, you can blame a work-
ingman to-day and a capitalist to-morrow. Rules
are good, but an exception is no sacrilege, and
there is no fact on earth that a grown man need
hide from and no cause in Heaven that is worth
his cheating for.

So it might be with newspapers, but they
seem by nature secretive. Are you for Our
President? Behold, we are at his feet. Are
you against him, kind reader .?* Here, then,
are ten more Philippine atrocities of which
nine rest on no evidence, but we count them in for
the good of the cause. Do the facts seem against
us this morning.'^ Then here goes for "Rug-
weaving in Armenia," or, "Does a College Educa-
tion Pay.?" We trust it will not be suspected
that we are dodging the point. Here is the for-
lorn little editor, so afraid of things as they are
that he is doomed for months to total irrelevancy ;
and there is the praiser of corporations who dares
not stop ; and this is Mr. Pecksniff's paper with
18

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

the luxuriant moral and the little meannesses that
destroy the vines. The types are familiar in
every large city. Where are the people who like
them? Yet they are clean and respectable, and,
like most of our pet aversions, are safely within
the law. Criticism in private takes these lines.
Public criticism — the kind that comes from the
pulpit or is engrossed in resolutions — aims only
at what is gross and palpable. It blames the
license of the press, when our main grievance is
its strange constraints and silences. In spite of
the great improvement in the news columns, the
comment that gives personal character has in the
past fifteen years grown so feeble that many talk
of giving it up altogether and leaving us alone
with the reporters.

It is a loss to American letters. No matter
how well news is gathered or how accurately told,
the time will never come when we are content with
bare narration. Those frank and inspiriting little
newspaper essays were about the best things
Americans ever did with their pen, but what with
the death of some men and the deliquescence of

19

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

others, they are now on the level with our books.
It is not a matter of premises or principles or
morals in the conventional degree. We are
friendly and inquisitive little animals, and the
man is the main thing, after all, and there is
never a moment when we would not rather meet
a real one than look at a panorama of world
politics or see a gas-tank explode. The newest
thing in the world is a new way of looking at an
old one, and the greatest thing that ever hap-
pened is what somebody happened to think.
People read newspapers more for company than
for guidance; and their criticism is nine-tenths
epicurean. Virtue is safe, but the mind feels
lonesome in most things that we read. A re-
former never seems to miss anything not men-
tioned in a moral code, but it is not so with the
rest of us.

Here we read: "Another saddening proof
of the havoc the war spirit has wrought
among us is afforded by the shocking scandals in
the Jonesville post-office. 'War is hell,' says
Burke. It was indeed to be expected that the
20

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

poison would spread from the heart to the mem-
bers. The government that sanctions a selfish
and unholy war cannot avoid the logical conse-
quences, and from rapine and torture in the
Philippines it is an easy step to knavery at home.
'Corrupt the morality at the centre,' said Mil-
ton, 'and the devil will ramp on the perimeter.'
The return of the proconsul laden with booty
affords his fellow-citizen no safer example than
he did in the days of Tacitus, and the warning
that Sallust sounded to the venal city soon to
perish (mature perituram) might well have been
meant for us." Academic and in a sense con-
scientious, but where is the man on the premises?
Or again, let the poor old Job of a public hearken
unto the son of Barachel the Buzite : "Once more
with characteristic vigor and common sense Presi-
dent Roosevelt has utterly confounded the as-
sailants of the Administration and vindicated the
honor of the nation. Not a shred remains of
the charges against the army or the government.
No one can now doubt that the headquarters of
the Philippine revolt were in Boston, and fresh
21

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

reports from Manila daily confirm the belief that
but for treachery in this country the insurrection
would not have lasted a day. President Roose-
velt is not the man to shirk responsibility. As
he said in his address to the Yale students, 'What
this country needs is men that can bite.' Wise,
statesmanlike and courageous, he has the people
with him. 'Breathe hard,' said he at the Seattle
Young Ladies' Seminary, waving a Rough Rider
flag, 'play hard, rest hard, work hard ; up and
at it, no matter what it is.' Nothing could bet-
ter express his own spirit and that of the Amer-
ican people." This is the way men divide in
print, but there is nothing like it in nature. No-
body's private opinions ever take this form. It
is the monochrome of party and the stage neces-
sity of debate, the twang of the pen and the
hypocrisy of the ink-bottle which make the differ-
ence between men and editors. It is not an affair
of the heart.

Men are never so prim and starchy, so deeply
dyed and terribly committed in real Hf e. Many
an honest fellow-being, full of earnest whims and

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

pleasing foibles, variegated, complex, alive and
charming, goes down into print as into a sar-
cophagus, and when jou mourn his loss thinks you
are trifling with the sound moral sentiment en-
graved on the tomb. Perhaps it comes from
hearing so much about bringing things "to the
bar of public opinion" and all that. Perhaps
it is due to an embarrassed sense of the
presence of Tom, Dick and Harry. Lowell's
theory of it was that the soul had done
something in a pre-existent state it was now
ashamed of. But the basis of criticism is nega-
tive— not the sins committed but the pleasures
withheld — and the pleasure of being talked to as
an equal is the main thing the readers miss.
Suppose somebody does misunderstand, or a few
fat gentlemen fall by the wayside or a spinster
or two is frightened away, is the thing so grave ?
Must one feel as pompous as Cicero? Will his
country come to him in a dream and say, "Mar-
cus TuUius, what are you doing.?" Let the great
mind go crashing forth; the casualties will be
surprisingly small. That is the proper advice

i

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

to give to any American writer. The question
before the man is what to do in his neutral in-
tervals, in the holidays of his virtues and the
pauses of his sin, for there are days and days
when the moral character needs nothing done to
it and the politics are all in place, when life may
be merely lived and the country merely looked at,
— a time of secular cravings, a permissibly
mundane time, the days of the devil's siesta, the
reformer's Saturday nights. But an editor sel-
dom knows such intervals, for human nature is
a different thing from print. Pen in hand, he
believes we do all our thinking in majorities, en-
joy by popular consent, make friends on prin-
ciple,— doubts if there is even the larva of an
imagination or a latent power of pleasant dreams,
or a tender side toward any mental temptation in
this exceedingly business-like land.

24

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

THE WRITER WHO DOES NOT CARE

There is no sign in Kipling's writings that he
has ever learned anything from his critics or
made any concessions to his public's demands.
Take it or leave it, has been his attitude from the
first. In his own good time, after people had de-
spaired of him, he wrote Kim. We then told
him distinctly that was the kind of thing we
wanted of him, and asked him to do it again ;
whereupon he undertook the conduct of the Brit-
ish Government through the agency of bad verse.
The Islanders may be true and statesmanlike,
and rifle clubs may be founded on the strength
of it, and cricketers may hang their heads for
shame. Some say poetry is as poetry does ; but
not if it save the British Empire shall we ever
admit the goodness of this poem or that it is a
poem at all. It will be classed in the long run
with Kipling's rhymed journalism, eff'ective but
transitory, a matter of a few fiery phrases, much
overstraining and many flat lines. As mere
^5

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

literary pleasure-lovers, his readers have a right
to complain. Bother his prophecies and devil
take his reforms and all those ballads with a pur-
pose, and letters on South Africa, and allegories
on steam engines, and monodies on quartermas-
ter's supplies. That is the way they feel
about it, blaming not so much the subjects
as Kipling's way with them. Critics who
praise Kipling's faculty of throwing himself
into a subject forget that one unfortunate
result has been his total disappearance in it.
He paints himself in with his local color. It
has happened again and again. A man-
among men, but also a piston-rod among pis-
ton-rods. Other writers have at one time or
another paid some attention to criticism. There
was George Meredith, for instance, whom no one
would accuse of pliancy. He was swerved en-
tirely from his early course by adverse criticism.
And Thomas Hardy, the only other living novel-
ist of Kipling's rank, was influenced by it to his
own and our advantage. But from Kipling, as
from a Tammany water main, we must take

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

things as they come, knowing that protests are in
vain.

He will not repent, or conform, or edit himself,
or study how to please. But there is about him a
sort of surly sincerity even at his worst. He
at least is interested if you are not. He is
pleased with each sudden new intimacy and ex-
asperatingly glib in its jargon and would as lief
lose readers as not. Bridge-building or what-
ever it may be — down he goes in it with a horrid
splash of terminology and remains defiantly unin-
teresting for months at a time. It is not as if he
tried to please and failed. It is his mood, not
yours. He is merely muttering to himself the
technicalities of his hobby, and criticism cannot
shake it out of him. In the intervals of some-
thing like genius he is merely a pig-headed man.
But the course has some advantages. He never
does what is expected of him, but he sometimes
does more. Whatever his sins are, they are not
sins of subservience, and meanwhile he lives his
own life. Not that his unliterary activities have
any value in themselves. Beyond stirring up

n

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

rows and coming some quotable phrases, what
has he done for poHtics these last few years?
But looked at as a form of diversion, politics
have done something for him.

At all events, he has escaped some of the fatal
consequences of a literary success. Success is
usually the result of a sharpened sense of what is
wanted. As a general rule, the successful writer,
especially the successful American writer, is a
man who is disciplined by demand. The vagaries
of self-expression may do for a few privileged
characters, but the steady, substantial incomes
are for those who do what is expected of them.
Taking it altogether, it is the line of least resist-
ance, the happy level and the golden average,
and the best rule for the greatest number, and the
only safe course a 'priori if you have a family to
support. Not that they say one thing when they
particularly want to say another. There is no
deliberate heterophemy about it. But people who
get on in the world have developed a sort of
market nerve and can feel it throbbing in the
back of the brain. Of many thoughts it auto-

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

matically thrusts forward the one that is most
presentable, and by an instinctive arithmetic
counts votes on every sentence before it is written
down. This is the general law of successful liter-
ary composition, though not so stated in the
books. The uniformity of American fiction,
about which so many lose their temper, merely
shows that our writers have never felt like risking
much for self-expression, and there is no good
reason why they should. Sic vos non vohis is
the motto of all efficient public entertainers. If
they had any big peculiar ideas, they would prob-
ably let us have a peep at them. Nothing very
great is being hidden, we believe. Yet every
little while a critic attacks them on the ground
that they ought to do better, and that the best
selling books are not literature. Aim higher and
sell less, he says. It is the theory of concealed
gGnius. Kipling's contemptuous non-conform-
ity would carry most men straight to the
poor-house. Nor does it follow that posterity
will like any better the things that the
present rejects. The ferocious onslaughts on

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

recent American novels are both illogical and
unfair.

Still, people have their harmless little peculiar-
ities, and it has often been noted by observers that
American writers of fiction are not nearly so much
alike as their books. Natural diversities linger
though tucked out of sight by the pen. But it
has happened often that once in the public favor
they are never quite the same men again. Suc-
cess, like a flat-iron, smoothes out the little ir-
regularities that might just as well have been
left in, and there are whimsicalities about the
people that we are apt to miss in their books.
Caution and self -repression to the extent of hold-
ing back certain matters that might with perfect
safety be let go certainly do seem a little over-
developed in our writers. What with wondering
whether the editor will like it, and whether
the public will take to it, and whether the
critics will see through it, there is little chance
for merely personal preferences of their own.
And by the time the habit of pleasing everybody
is formed, the soul has caught a color that will

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

not come out in the wash. Our current literature
is a literature of suppressed inclinations, some-
times to our loss. The saddest thing about
our young authors is the exchange of pos-
sibilities for dead certainties after they have
struck their pace. With Kipling, politics serve
the purpose of a rotation of crops. But here, if
a writer is silent after his third romantic novel,
we always know he is working like a beaver on
his fourth. Something to do during the unin-
spired intervals is the great need of the calling.
Even Shakespeare's nature felt the want of it —
"subdued to what it works in," as he says. Kip-
ling goes in for prophecy and empire-building
as a horse goes to pasture, and comes back
greatly refreshed. If it had not been for the
intervening years of foolishness he might never
have given us Kim. That is a cheering thought
that ought to come to any one who reads The
Islanders and wonders why such things need be.
Years ago he gave fair warning he would not
work with an eye to his public, and he never has.
Not caring at all how we liked it, he has blundered
31

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

into many things — sometimes a tinker, sometimes
a counsellor of nations, always certain beyond
human certainty, and almost always wrong. But
rested by his many irrelevances and exhilarated
years of impudence, he comes back to his work
finally, like Kim from his illicit wanderings, and
does it better than before.

ON LITERARY COMPULSION
VI

THE LITERARY TEMPERAMENT

The young heio of Mr. Howell's Letters Home
is so literary that he can dine gloriously at a
fifty-cent table d'hote, where on Fridays he mis-
takes clam chowder for houillabaisse and feels
like Thackeray when he is eating it. Every one
he meets is a "type" and every emotion is "ma-
terial." When consumed by passion he is not too
preoccupied to note how that passion would look
in print, and when attacked by the influenza he
turns his delirium into "copy" that no magazine
would refuse. He is not especially gifted. He
has the temperament without the gifts. A
genius writes in the overflow of life and seems
to forget he is writing, but our hero could never
do that. With him the phrase must always come
first ; his mind is book-bitten and he is doomed to
edit his life in advance. Hence he never will
altogether live. People of the literary tempera-
ment seldom do quite live. They are impeded by
a too persistent pen-consciousness which is the

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

spiritual form of writer's cramp, and while others
may merely feel, they must be making phrases as
well as feeling. So by dividing the mind they
lower the pulse, and they are always a little below
their vital capacity. If it is a love affair, a part
of the creature is taking notes and down goes his
temperature ; if it is an agony he must see to it
that it bring forth fruit meet for publication.
"I was as miserable," says this Wallace Ardith in
Letters Home, "as a guilty wretch can be and
be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded
mind kept taking notes of the situation and in a
hideous way rejoicing in it as material." Mr.
Howells meant him for a young man, but he
might be as old as Mr. Howells himself. He
comes from a town in Iowa, but he might as well
have been born in Thrums. The essential thing
is his ingrained literosity.

We should have liked to see him hanged in the
end like Sentimental Tommy, but Mr. Howells
seemed rather fond of him. He showed the clem-
ency of introspection. Few authors wish to
hang their Sentimental Tommies after confess-
34

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

ing them. Mr. Barrie is the only Brutus among
noveHsts, and you cannot read that book of his
without hearing his self-love groan aloud. To
the unliterary reader Tommy is merely a vain
young man, who might even be a hero if the
author would let him alone, but whenever he is
most heroic Mr. Barrie is most incredulous. It
was a grand deed, to be sure, he will say, but
Tommy would never have done it if there
had been no women around; and had there been
no public, there would have been no Tommy at
all, for he could do nothing for its own sake — not
even draw a natural breath — but only for the
sake of having it known that Tommy did it.
Straightforward inartistic folk cannot make
out what all this sarcasm is about, but the liter-
ary temperament blushes up to the roots of its
hair when it reads it. The book was never ade-
quately reviewed. It was too brutally intimate
and indelicately true, too terribly authorish for
any other author to deal with frankly and retain
his self-esteem, and for any one not an author or
an observer of authors to understand. Tommy
35

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

is practically thrown away on any reader who
has not at least a literary temperament in the
family.

The trouble with Tommy was simply that he
had no private life. Every motive was forked
like the devil's tail and he did nothing without
reference to a bystander. The eternal bystander
is the peculiar gift of the literary temperament.
Stevenson's fancy would have peopled a desert
isle, not that he might look at them but that they
might see Stevenson. Alone under the sky
the literary temperament still hopes it may
be discovered, and fancies itself discovered
when it has given up hope. In the fifth
century a.d. Tommy would have been a
pillar saint and stood on one leg and let the
other rot off, not at all in the fear of the Lord,
but in the sense of the crowd below and the high
hope that some day there would be a Saint
Thomas of Thrums. If there had been no crowd
below, Tommy would have invented one.

The loss of the private life is the chief danger
of the literary temperament. Even Shakespeare
36

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

feared it when he wrote that his nature was sub-
dued to what it worked in Hke the dyer's hand.
"The world is too much with us," said Words-
worth suddenly aware that the public had grown
into him and that his soul had no songs without
words and that the primrose on the river's brim
a four-line stanza was to him and nothing more.
Had it not been for that he would have had
glimpses, standing on that pleasant lea, that
would have made him less forlorn. But writers
of this class are in no real danger. The risk is
run on the lower plane, where life, like a maga-
zine poem, is written before it is felt and
thoughts are tried on like hats to see if they are
becoming and the land is only local color and the
sea is made of ink. That is where the Tommies
are, among the best-selling heroes of the week,
the impersonal ghosts of current literature, each
trying to pick out a soul that the reading public
would like the look of.

"Now you're looking holy again," said the
exasperated Aaron when Tommy was planning
some conspicuous nobility and resolving in his
37

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

mind to look the part and seeing it all in type
and hearing the reader's comments on it. The
private life of the two Carlyles must have been
full of these little calamities, and it certainly
was not genius that made the pair so uncomfort-
able. We all love the illusion of spontaneity
and like to believe that the poet's eye doth
actually glance from Heaven to earth instead of
glancing sidewise at the onlooker. It is not
pleasant to ascertain that Poe's Raven would
not have been written if he had not happened to
observe that "Nevermore" would make a musical
refrain and "Lenore" rhymed with it and that he
brought in the raven only because nothing but a
raven would be at all likely to ejaculate "never-
more" at regular intervals, except possibly a
parrot, and a parrot would not rhyme with Le-
nore. Poe's description of his processes set
many minor poets working wrong-end-to. Nor
do we like to read how Burke generously tinkered
poor Crabbe's poem and Johnson lent his heavy
hand and Crabbe accepted everything as more
likely to beguile the public, forgetting by that

ON LITERARY COMPULSION

time that he had started out with anything of
his own. But while the most gifted sometimes
sink to it, the merely clever never rise above it,
and they leave you wondering whether there is
anything in them that the public did not put
there. That is why Miss Emily Dickinson ex-
claimed that she liked a look of agony because
she knew it was real and why Kingsley advised
everybody to be only good and "let who will be
clever," and why Hotspur called poetry the
"forced gait of a shuffling nag" and why some-
times after a brilliant literary meeting where
authors read their papers our heart goes out to
the simple and spontaneous, natural and single-
minded cow who never flourishes her tail for our
sakes, but to remove from her actual haunches an
authenticated fly. The literary emotions are so
seldom authenticated in the secondary ranges of
art.

PART II

THE CROWDED FORUM

I

THE NATIONAL ANGLE

People who think we are, as a nation, no longer
sensitive to criticism, should have followed the
comments upon a certain little volume of essays
on American traits dealing with our faults of
character in an entertaining way. The author
was a German who for several years had been a
professor in one of our universities. It is writ-
ten, the author tells us, "from a German point of
view," though there was not the least need of his
mentioning it, and it was not what you would call
a serious contribution to political science, but
was, perhaps, the better reading on that account.
40

THE CROWDED FORUM

Like most of these comparative race studies, it
drew its material mainly from the writer's pa-
triotic heart. He likes his own land better, and
emphatically tells us why, as if anybody could
not give reasons for a thing like that. It was
matter for toasts, poems, flag-raisings, and hochs
— a sheer animal preference for one's own; yet
critics took it as seriously as if it were an at-
tempt in pure philosophy. They blamed him
for not having a judicial mind; though why an
expatriated gentleman, terribly homesick, no
doubt, should be expected to have one, it is not
easy to make out. Yet they argued it out with
him painfully, as if there were some logical proc-
ess for rebutting his German blood. We are still
very touchy, and these comparisons of foreigners
do still most unaccountably flutter us, and there
is invariably a little chorus of tu quoques and a
sort of patriotic huff and a long ingenuous
wrangle over things no more debatable than a
taste in wives and children. No visitor can take
notes on us, even now, without starting one of
these queer controversies, and (self-esteem being
41

THE CROWDED FORUM

the most voluble of the emotions) there is no
small amount of printed matter taken up with
them first and last. Great masses of mankind
are weighed one against one another, as in the
hand of Allah, and "these to Heaven and I care
not, and those to Hell and I care not ;" and the
nativity of the umpire determines which is which.
German ideals, says the Professor, without the
least tremor of indecision, are higher than Amer-
ican ideals ; to which an American writer retorts
excitedly, "But you must admit in common fair-
ness that American ideals are broader at the
base." No one knows what they mean exactly, or
how they found it out. But we all do know
where their hearts are — honest folk, perched
each on his national angle and crowing with all
his might. Not to say a word against the national
angle. Prceter omnes angulus ridet — or ought
to, whosoever it is. But why this solemn show of
reasons for things that were bred in the bone?

It is a most beatific bias, and a man ought to
be proud of it ; and for my part, were I ever to
embark in such a controversy, I should go in

THE CROWDED FORUM

singing the battle-cry of freedom, knowing per-
fectly well I could never be quite fair-minded to-
ward other people's fatherlands, no matter how
hard I tried. Nor would I disguise the fisticuffs
of self -vindication under any show of compara-
tive philosophy ; and in reply to the man who
sized up our country in a sentence, I should dis-
pose of Germany in four scorching words — that
is, if I did anything about it at all, which, on
second thoughts, is doubtful. There may be
philosophers who fish all their patriotism out of
comparative statistics ; but it is not the usual
way, and most of our foreign observers bring
their conclusions with them as part of their racial
physique. So it was with the Professor, whose
mind sweeps all history and forms of government
and spans two continents in a flash. His book is
a series of lover's comparisons, and we are the
other girls. Very telling comparisons, some of
them. "Whenever a genius is needed, democracy
appoints a committee," says he. Ach Gott! the
land where geniuses are as common as committees.
Liebf Heimat land; liehf Heimat land!
43

THE CROWDED FORUM

Were the writings on America stripped of all
national prejudices and personal whims, they
would be about as lively as a school atlas ; and for
all our anger at Dickens fifty years ago, we
know if he had written fairly we should not have
read him at all. A man cannot always be in a
battle mood about his country. There is some
fun to be had at her expense. The heights of
oratorical tradition are not for every-day use,
though we can climb up to them after dinner
when there is a big enough crowd. They are
chiefly for the people who have some vested in-
terest in bombast, and it often happens that the
gran(^est public tributes are saluted with private
grins. Foreigners never make allowance for the
great, fatuous platform-change that comes over
certain of our people whenever they rise to speak.
"Builfl, build," said a Western Senator ; build
and expand and plant the flag on all the archi-
pelagoes and seize all the canals in this hemi-
sphere and turn the Pacific Ocean into an Amer-
ican lake. "This," he concluded, "is not enthu-
siauth; it is geography." Being used to the
44

THE CROWDED FORUM

thing, we know, of course, it was neither, but
the mere chest notes of a Senator, a harmless,
hyperbolical Senator, in a mood of the utmost
publicity, in a pause of his private faculties, try-
ing his best to please. "We must be cracked up,
sir," said Mr. Hannibal Chollop, "this
country must be cracked up," and Sen-
ators still live in the Chollop tradition.
Nor is Mr. Chollop the only type in Martin
Chuzzlewit that recent speeches recall. Neither
General Choke nor the Hon. Lafayette Kettle
could have outdone that speech in Congress, on
the occasion of Prince Henry's visit, with
its reference to the German prince as "that little
Dutchman," and to the "truckle-ency" of foreign
courts. It was the very language of Dickens's
burlesque Americans. Foreigners judge us by it
— all of us. "We have heard," says our latest
observer, "through the whole scale, from the edi-
torials of the yellow press to the orations of lead-
ing Senators, the voice of that aggressive tem-
per which waits for an opportunity to show
American superiority to the world by battles and
45

THE CROWDED FORUM

not by arbitration." He notes among our char-
acteristics "a bumptious oratory, a flippant
superficiality of style, a lack of aesthetic refine-
ment ... a constant exploitation on the part of
immature young men with loud newspaper
voices," and so forth. And he bears down on it
all with argument, page after page of it, to
prove that Columbia is not really the gem of the
ocean and the only land of the free. It is like
rebuking a brass band. That is the way with
foreigners. They are forever trying to knock
the wind out of the national superlative — a thing
that the gods could not do.

Thence come these absurd discussions with a
class of people that the rest of us know better
than ever to reason with. Private thinking sel-
dom takes this line. One's personal friends
neither talk like editorials nor feel like Senators,
and one may travel all day long without meeting
the "typical" American who figures in the books.
Foreigners do not realize that the great liturgy
of buncombe stops at the private door, and that
even its high priests are none too serious about it
46

THE CROWDED FORUM

after the reporters go. We see the flag too
often to be stirred by every flap of it, and we
meet too many fellow-citizens to be sentimental
about them all, and the Pilgrim Fathers are
rarely mentioned, and the guns of Manila never
boom in private conversation, and nobody con-
gratulates you on freedom of worship, trial by
jury, or the mounting exports of steel, and you
go to sleep without dreaming of island empires,
and you wake up without disparaging Germany.
These awful burdens are borne only by public
characters aiming at the lowest wit of the great-
est number, as practical statesmen will, and under-
shooting it often, we are bound to say. Public-
ity exacts of them a show of more emotion than
they ever privately feel. They must keep their
love of country at honeymoon heat, poor things !
And never was a land so complimented down to
the last detail. Hosanna to the American po-
tato! it is forging ahead each year. Yet it is
wasteful to write a serious book against it, for
the people who would be likely to read it do not
need the reproof. And it is a great mistake to
47

THE CROWDED FORUM

rouse those tedious patriots who let drive at the
writer's country in revenge. And, finally, how
do the pundits in race traits manage to gather
so quickly the souls of all the peoples in the hol-
low of their hands, and why is it that the con-
clusions of such detached philosophers invariably
follow the flag? It is a whimsical sort of writ-
ing, the more whimsical the better, and ought
never to be measured by its approach to absolute
truth.

48

THE CROWDED FORUM

II

"AMERICANISM"

After all, the crowd certainly likes it — ^the
kind of speech that a Senator once made at a
public dinner, which I happen to recall, and if a
man wants quick returns from bursts of elo-
quence this is the kind of burst he should carry
in his manuscript notes. The five hundred din-
ers received it "with great enthusiasm," and he
could scarce go on for the "cheers and hand-
clapping." With any crowd it would have been
the same. The touch of nature.? Not exactly.
Only the touch of crowd nature, which rubs off
when you are alone. In the meanwhile what has
the man been saying.'' Why, that something or
other is epoch making; that the situation is in-
tense ; that the spirit of Puritanism bids us reach
forth, expand, blow up, roar, and, above all,
brag that we are God's only this and a heaven-
born that till the word Americanism sets the
whole world grinning. "The Pacific is the Amer-
ican Ocean. The Gulf is an American lake.

THE CROWDED FORUM

. . . Our flag floats over the Antilles. . . . And
when the Stars and Stripes is hauled down in
Cuba, let it hang awhile at half-mast in mourning
for the people of Cuba abandoned and the duty
of the United States deserted. These are epochal
facts. The future of the world is in our hands."
This is no one man's view. It is crowd language.
It is the echo of that lower harmony, that vulgar
confluence of egotisms by which we tell the crowd
whether it is washed or unwashed, at a New Eng-
land dinner or at an Australian korroboree. Why
call it American? Huxley describes the natives
of one of the islands visited by the Rattlesnake
as trying to impress the strangers by galloping
along the shore, "prancing just as boys do when
playing horse." It is not peculiar to American
senators.

"The Puritan," said the Senator, "had the
logic of geography, and we his children must
have it, too. . . . All Atlantic and Pacific canals
and the future of Central America so far as af-
fected thereby are American questions — we can-
not permit a concert of powers in solving them."
50

THE CROWDED FORUM

But since the greater includes the less, why talk
of the future of Central America? It was the
future of the world just now. Are we not going
to have the whole thing then — we, the God's onlys
and the heaven-sent, and the Je suis moi's and the
Egomet ipse*s? Only a hemisphere after all?
Take care or some other Senator will outflap you.
There may be a bigger dinner and a bigger in-
spiration and a lower barrier of common sense,
and some one who will know how to take advan-
tage of the collective mental slump. There is
always that danger in these lower appeals. Talk
of islands and isthmuses, and the next man may
bid continents. Begin with planetary systems,
not canals. And though we despise it in private,
you are quite apt to find that a herd of us will
first endure, then pity, then hooray.

"There has come a new turn in the world
drama," says another orator. "We have taken the
centre of the stage. . . . We see the faces of the
nations half sneering, half fearing. . . . The
world has grown intensely conscious of America."
This is no new turn. There has never been a
51

THE CROWDED FORUM

moment when a world was not watching us, when
a continent or two was not amazed by us or a
hemisphere provoked, when an orator was not
saying just what Europe thought of us, how
Asia wondered and Africa winked ; and that man
is no true patriot who imphes that even for an
instant we were not the centre of the stage. Nor
is it a mere matter of nations. It is a cosmic
affair, with gosgip going on in the Zodiac and a
rumpus in the Milky Way, Mars sneering, and
Saturn thunderstruck and an uneasy smile on the
face of the firmament that ill conceals its fear.
We hate a cautious patriot who talks like a plum
when he feels like a pumpkin. It is a generous
emotion, and why not let it go.? In this mood a
world is not enough for us ; we bump our heads
against the sky.

But the chief danger is the collapse of the
emotions when the word American has ceased
thrilling through the orator's nose. How in the
world can we keep it up? It is not a solitaire
game. None of us can go on like that all by
himself under the stars. The heavens are too

THE CROWDED FORUM

sarcastic. We are soon feeling uncomfortable
and hoping nobody heard. Somebody always
does hear. That is the worst of it. Dickens
heard, and he gave us Martin Chuzzlewit. A
few jeer at it as your true Americanism. A few,
who are deadly serious, prophesy the end of all
things, inhaling odors from their moral vinai-
grette. The rest of us understand the oratorical
traditions and know that patriotism is not de-
stroyed by burlesque.

THE CROWDED FORUM

III

CONCERNING HEROES

It was interesting to see how the heroes of the
South African war weathered the flattery that
fell upon them. It was a rather hard test of
character. Lord Roberts came through it with
all his wits about him and with all his moral
qualities in trim working order. So, probably,
did some others ; but, reasoning from precedents,
it would be surprising if the majority of
those heroes were not somewhat damaged.
The odds were against them. By the time the
public has regained its senses the hero has lost
his. It is the usual way the story ends, and there
is no means of insuring him against it. You
cannot make people moderate toward their heroes
just for fear of spoiling them. When a gener-
ous emotion is at high tide and the bands are
playing and the boys are bellowing through the
megaphone, and the variously distorted features
of the idol are displayed from every house front,
it is not always creditable to be judicious. "He
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that hath not a dram of folly in his composition
hath pounds of a worse material." A man may
hold himself in check at such a time and say only
what is wise. It may be that his wisdom domi-
nates his impulses. But perhaps he lacks the
impulses. It may be that he has a heart like a
cash register and a pulse like a cold-boiled ham.
We cannot admire him until we know. So far
as he himself is concerned, no man need be
ashamed of the foolish things he said to or about
heroes when the fit was on him. As well regret
the intemperate language of his honeymoon.

Such regret as one feels should be all on the
hero's account. He is apt to be in a bad state
when we are through with him. The majority
of heroes are not praise-proof. It is nothing
against a hero that he is not praise-proof. When
a whole people set out to spoil a man, he is not to
blame if they succeed. We who are not heroes
cannot estimate the difficulty of resistance, but
we can come somewhere near it by multiplying
our own experience. We know how we feel when
we are praised. The mind totters under a very
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moderate amount of it. It must be a rock-
bound kind of person that remains unmoved when
a pleasant warm gush of flattery is playing on
him. The best of us suspend all critical self-
examination at such a moment, and Heaven
knows what would happen if the thing lasted.
It is a joy that fuddles. Fancy it raised to hero-
power and lasting for twelve months ! Would it
leave us as it found us.? The chances are we
should be no fit company for any man. No one
knows how he would turn out — whether like
Major GoHath O'Grady Gahagan or like Tour-
gueniefF's man who forever afterward had "the
air of his own statue done in bronze and set up
by national subscription" — ^but something queer,
you may be sure, and in all probability ridiculous.
For, as the satirist said of poverty, the worst
thing about it is that it makes men ridiculous.
These things have been freshly brought to mind,
and just now the average man one knows would
as lief not be a hero.

What a terrible onslaught was made on those
heroic men in khaki. Everything was done to
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shatter their minds and undermine their charac-
ters. If they were modest about what they had
done, it only added to the demoralizing din. They
could not disclaim without redoubling the ap-
plause. What disgusts at first becomes grad-
ually endurable, then pleasant, then indispens-
able, then the hero is lost. The small poets begin
on him immediately, and the air is soon buzzing
with little odes. He shakes off the small poet at
first with some annoyance. When an unspoiled
warrior is put for the first time into minor verse
he hates it. It makes him feel like a pressed
pansy. No living man is a fit subject for
poetry, and as soon as he feels at home in it that
is the end of him. Nothing so saps a hero as
persistent odes, and it is to the credit of the Amer-
ican people that in spite of their inconsiderate
waste of heroes they spared them this. Then
there are the kissing women and the flapping
orators and the town hall speeches and the free-
dom of the city and the comparisons with Beli-
sarius, Caesar, Nelson, any of which, if prolonged,
will ruin the average hero. It is a cruel thing.
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The only hope is to do as Kitchener did, or Mar-
chand or our own Lawton — treat the whole thing
as a foolish love affair and go back to work.
The hero should leave the instant he begins to
take it seriously, if possible before the wind dies.
A becalmed hero waiting around for more wind is
in a bad way. So is one who has contracted the
platform habit. A hero has begun to go to
pieces when he has learned to like what he ought
never to have heard.

A man does a fine thing that takes our fancy,
so we reward him by denying him the privilege
of hearing a word of sense for months at a time.
Then comes a reaction, and we wonder what is
the matter with him. It was all our fault, and
the least we can do is to be sorrowfully patient
with our handiwork. There may be a way of
repairing the heroes we have damaged, though, as
Carlyle points out, it is no easy task: "The
resuscitation of a soul that has gone to asphyxia
is no momentary or pleasant process, but a long
and terrible one." A mind ravaged by applause
deserves charity from the ravagers, and one
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should know beforehand that it is as hard to keep
a hero from spoiling on your hands as to keep
cream through a thunderstorm.

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IV

A **REMARKABLE" MAN

The mention of the Defeated Candidate's name
in the newspapers sets some old memories to stir-
ring. So there was such a man, and what a turn
he gave some of us in the dark days of a certain
November an age or two ago. It makes one feel
safe to see the name now; also a little foolish,
for was there ever a political contest in which the
enemy seemed only life size.? He is no longer
"in the public eye," as the magazines say, and
for that reason it is no doubt improper to speak
of him, which is a pity on some accounts. When
a man of this sort is "in the public eye" there is
no telling anything about his true dimensions.
He is in there like a cinder and seems stupendous
till you get him out. Why mention him now?
To attack him? No more of that. The neces-
sity of being serious about him was the worst
hardship of the whole campaign. All that heavy
moral artillery and handsome political invective
just for him! No doubt the language was appro-
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priate to the occasion, but it was not to the man.
Napoleon at St. Helena, Boulanger in Belgium —
get the man as far away as possible from the
occasion if you would se^him as he is. There
were some "character studies" of him written be-
fore he was defeated, and very queer things they
now seem, — mere allegories for the most part, as-
suming that he was an incarnate Principle, which
no man ever is. It was a time when realism was
unsafe. Some would say he compelled the ad-
miration even of his foes ; for several of the lat-
ter, while duly disapproving of him, pronounced
him a "remarkable" man. Publicity always has
its flunkeys, deferential to anything that has a
crowd behind it. It is the optimism of a democ-
racy. The man who carries several states must
be great, or at least exceptional in some way.
There is no allowance made for accidents in this
domain of success. Does the two-spot never
come uppermost when a big crowd shuffles the
pack ?

So it chances that there is nothing in all that
has been said of the Candidate that in the least

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applies to the Defeated Candidate, who happens
to be publishing a newspaper somewhere in the
west. A page of that publication is worth more
than all the estimates on either side. In the first
place the paper does not suggest any moral issue
at all. The editor may be a good man or a bad
man — it is hard to realize that it matters which.
The main point is that he is not a man who would
arrest attention for one instant. It is a school-
boy mind that drives that paper, no matter what
the political writers say. Call him a brilliant
demagogue, an Orson of the young Democracy,
an Alcibiades, or whatever you like. His politics
may be those of Lucifer, but his mind is of the
age of innocence, whether it is innocent or not.
That is the striking lesson of it — the amazing
exiguity of this public man. How did the coun-
try happen to find him ? And when intellects like
that are detected, what risks of greatness we all
run.

He has put his whole soul into that paper.
He has struck his natural pace. If any man has
a partisan grudge against him let him read a
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page. Begin, say, with "Not every emperor
wears a crown," and end with the passage : "Un-
like Julius Caesar and George Washington, Mr.
McKinley did not reject the offer of a throne."
If you were going to mend this man where would
you begin.? Not with his morals, surely, nor
even with his politics. What George Eliot called
the "taint of commonness," hard to describe as
the odor of onions but just as clearly perceived
— hangs over the character of this "remarkable"
man. That he should have run for president
shows how we let things slide. After that no one
need despair. Let him push and there is a
chance that the crowd will let him through. A
commonplace speech at a hospitable moment may
be enough for a start, and he, too, may become a
personage with a career and with people to invent
a character to account for it. And though he
may have a hundred thousand duplicates, he will
be a "remarkable" man till he winds ua,like Bou-
langer in Belgium or publishing a "remarkable"
newspaper somewhere in the west.

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OLD AND NEW DEBATERS

During the last few years we have plunged
from one hot debate into another, and if for a
moment the excitement has subsided over here,
some other country has been sure to keep our
feelings busy. Never in their lives have the gen-
eration born since the civil war seen the civilized
man so rampant in controversy. One aspect of
the thing is rather remarkable. This time of
stress has not produced in the United States or
England or France a single speech or bit of writ-
ing above the ordinary. For all the training of
these great debates there have been no great
debaters. Other crises have left a legacy of elo-
quence, but the man who can recall a single elo-
quent passage in all that has been said on the
most absorbing topics of the last two years must
have a memory like a bonded warehouse. To
most of us it is a mere reminiscence of confused
noise, the greater part of it inarticulate. The
occasion has found its men of action but not of
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speech. The lions that have come up out of
Judah have not been very impressive in their
roars. It is not due to any lack of sincerity or
force of feeling. The blowing up of the
Maine, the Rennes court-martial, the Boer ulti-
matum, even the small tempest of the Puerto
Rican tariff have been stirring enough. It is
only the art of arguing that has fallen on evil
days.

The arguing man assumes as a rule that any-
thing will do if it seems to be travelling his way.
He commits himself to all sorts of non-essential
points. As a Boer sympathizer, for instance, he
found it his duty to show the trail of the serpent
in England's entire South African experience
since 1814, when fifteen years of black iniquity
would serve his turn as well as eighty-five. So
he offends the common sense of neutrals. Again,
he would have free trade in Puerto Rico, let us
say. Instead of merely pointing out that it is
preferable, he straightway tells you any course
but this is hellish inhumanity. So, when you ner-
vously look up the facts and find nothing in them
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to bear out comparisons with the Black Death or
St. Bartholomew's Day, you are very likely to
dismiss the whole thing from your mind. That
is the trouble with our latter-day debaters. They
breed distrust in the honest doubters. What is
the use of raising one's whole vocabulary to the
tenth power? It simply inflates the verbal cur-
rency. Other people involuntarily extract the
tenth root of everything you say. The "traitor"
and "tyrant" of our Philippine discussions have
weakened debate and lessened the reserve strength
of the English language. These things become
merely conventional. They go through the same
process as profanity, which, as we know, is
hardly emphatic on the lips of the habitually
profane. It is a most inartistic kind of arguing
that gives the impression that you are either talk-
ing for eff^ect or a little "hipped" on the subject.
Many a good soul throws his chance away by
forgetting this.

The old debaters, whether contending for a
good cause or a bad, appreciated the value of
mere plausibility. They counterfeited candor

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and sanity if they had them not. Above all, they
tried to ingratiate by admissions, and they never
encumbered themselves with big, awkward as-
sumptions of incredible villainy. Running
through all the great controversial speeches and
writings there is a vein of reasonableness and self-
restraint. Whether it was Lincoln or Burke, or
a Greek general, or Beelzebub in Paradise Lost,
or one of Shakespeare's villains, they gave no
impression of hypocrisy or hysteria. But the
maladroit debater will somehow give this im-
pression even though he is as sound in head
and heart as one could wish. Stirring oratory
is not that in which every sentence has a hectic
flush.

But apart from mere ignorance of the art, a
reason for the failure of our present debaters
may be their distrust of the public. The public
is not thought worthy of being talked to sensibly.
There is a mortal terror of giving one's case
away. A truth must be swaddled with overstate-
ments when it walks abroad. You will find plenty
of men who will talk more reasonably in private
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than they would think of doing for the press or
platform. Intelligent men do not as a rule as-
sume, in talking with us privately, that all wis-
dom and all virtue are with them. They
agree with us in some points, and they try to
understand our point of view. But in addressing
us collectively they will show the most shocking
cynicism as to what we can understand. They
prejudge us as altogether foolish, and talk to
us accordingly. Many a thought will be held
back because it is supposed to be too big for us.
Yet, when has the public ever been hurt by
breadth of view, and who ever delivered a signifi-
cant message when he was tortured every minute
by the dread of being misunderstood ? The truth
is, the public can stand from any man the best
there is in him. No man ever made a deep im-
pression who tried to do all his thinking in
majorities. Our current controversies are for
this reason needlessly dull. One cannot suppress
the fanatic. He will be on hand to do his worst
for every cause. But it is possible to take a
kindlier view of popular intelligence and to aim
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a little higher in one's style of arguments. For
after all, the good debater, like the good work-
man in any other art, finds when he has made his
masterpiece, that he has made his public, too.

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VI

ASPERITIES OF PEACEMAKING

Is IT because we are jingoes that we are so
little stirred by the sort of things certain earnest
writers are saying against war? That is what
they would maintain. Goldwin Smith has been
attacking the idea that a nation can cure itself
of its vices by going to war with another nation.
Tolstoi's well-known views have appeared in an
English translation, and several other eminent
writers have recently denounced war at some
length. It has also become what is known as a
"timely topic," which means that almost any-
thing any one chooses to say about it finds its
way into print. So it happens that many grown-
up persons have published compositions on the
relative merits of love and hate and the impro-
priety of bloodshed. With Tolstoi it is only a
part of a pretty comprehensive gospel. He
would turn us all at once into something pure and
primitive and sweet, and, as regards art
matters, into something exceedingly stupid,
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getting rid of certain intellectual vices
by abolishing intellect altogether, it would
seem. But there is a holy flame in the
old man, and he is really beyond us, and not at
all to blame if we never catch up, and it is a pity
if literature is to have nothing to do with the
things that are not. He is an idealist through
and through, and hates war no more than he hates
every other curse that our sins bring down on
us. The peace advocates of the newspapers are
not usually of that stamp. I do not presume to
question their motives, but the fine idealism they
reveal on that subject does not seem to extend to
other things. Truth, for example, is as good a
thing as peace, and is needful even in advocating
peace. They have steadily assumed that if you
do not fall in with them you are an enemy to the
cause. Does that follow?

What is the matter with us that, in spite of a
longing for universal peace quite as strong as
theirs, they no sooner begin to preach than we
hunt for arguments on the other side.^* It may
be our weak and sinful natures. It may be some-
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thing in the way they do it. One has a right to
consider before setting himself down as a mur-
derous old war-dog just because he does not en-
joy the average peace harangue. In the first
place, they make the case too plain. It is an
artificial and insincere simplicity, with all the
perplexing things left out. Surely there are some
perplexing things about man. With the reform-
er's man it is always a naked choice between
heaven and hell. With God's man it is different.
Nine times out of ten the poor devil does not know
which is which, for the good and evil have been
jumbled together and the colors have run, and
even when he really wants to be an angel the re-
sults are mixed. How can you prescribe for him,
if you do not know what he is like.? It is a bad
philosophy that is founded on omissions. Yet the
peace talkers expurgate history for this purpose,
as the temperance orator expurgates science, feel-
ing that somehow the whole truth would hurt us
and that the way to save souls is to go sneaking
around the facts. And they treat us all as if we
belonged to that class of warlike rhapsodists who
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regard war as a sentimental tonic — quinine for
our bad malarious morals. Not a word for those
who are so far gone.

"War," said the late Dean Farrar, "is a
fraction of that Armageddon struggle described
in the Apocalypse," and so on in a poetic strain
very flattering to war. To which Goldwin
Smith retorted that the dean "would touch less
lightly on dread of the horrors of war
as a motive for avoiding it if he had seen the
wreck of a battlefield, the contents of a field hos-
pital after a battle, or even the burning farms
of the Transvaal, with the women and children
turned adrift, as an eye-witness describes them,
and desperately trying to rescue something from
their homes." So he would, no doubt, and his
present language is quite absurd; but the peace
enthusiast would "touch less lightly" on the dif-
ficulties of keeping out of war if he took more
pains to know men as they are. It would be
easy enough to put the world to rights if there
were so little in it. Preaching against blood-
thirstiness in general does not seem to fit when
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you are tormented by the circumstances of some
particular case, and wondering if war is the
worse alternative. But the average reformer will
have nothing to do with circumstance. He
snubs it, acts as if he had never met it; if he
"disapproves of Asia, Asia is no more."

More of us are with the peace people in their
premises than they seem to think. We do not
enjoy butchery, and are not gloating over Fili-
pino bones or South African ashes. Theirs is not
a voice crying in the wilderness. On the ele-
ments of morals we are agreed, and we dare go
as far as the South Carolina poet :

The man who thinks God is too iind

To punish actions vile,
Is bad at heart, of unsound mind.

Or very juvenile.

Only, one does not feel like saying it very
often, because it seems as if people must know.
But we are with them at heart — these sparrows
on the housetops — and they must make room for
us by their side. It is foolish to go on living like
a moral hermit when there is no need of it. But
perhaps they enjoy it, and we may be de trop.
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The chief ob j ection is to the method employed.
If the world is already so bad, what is the use of
keeping it? If this country is hopelessly cor-
rupt and democracy a failure, and conscience
dried up, and commercialism rampant, and virtue
all gone, why not leave us to go to our own place,
like Judas? And what better route is there than
war? The truth is, when a man begins to
prophesy ruin because his country goes to war,
he is apt before long, particularly if he is a little
undersized, to pray for what he prophesies, just
to punish the country and bring her to her senses
— and vindicate him. And he counts up his dead
compatriots with an enthusiasm that is not ex-
actly pious, and he accepts defeat with a com-
placency that is not merely altruistic, and almost
any degree of patriotism strikes him as exces-
sive, and any kind of national rejoicing as vul-
gar. One may see this in him and still be peace-
loving, and one may dislike it without being a
war-dog. It often happens that what a man of
this type sets down as lust for blood on your part
is after all only a harmless hankering for com-
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mon sense. It is a bad way to grow old. The
memoirs of old men are so often full of it — the
world winding up in darkness because their light
fails. If we discount it a little now and then, it
does not follow that we are cutthroats or even
lukewarm in the interests of peace.

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VII

MEASURING AN AMERICAN REPUTATION

Some years ago an enterprising American col-
lege president conceived the notion of a Hall of
Fame for great Americans, with a hundred
judges to decide who should be glorified. Where-
upon a serious-minded writer declared that to
decide the question of fame by the majority vote
of a hundred wise men was in some sort impious,
because it left "the divine will out of the matter
altogether." When people are enjoying them-
selves someone with a swollen conscience is sure
to come along and complain about it. As if we
were going to make Providence feel de trop by
guessing about our great men. It is as good a
game of chance as was ever thought of. It re-
quires skill and knowledge and some searching of
the heart, and the subject matter is intensely in-
teresting. The results are surprising to the
judges themselves and to everybody else. Every
group of a hundred men, wise or foolish, would
decide differently, and the same group would
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change its mind in a month if its members were
ordinarily progressive. For the longer you think
and the further you read, the more reputations
you discover, and some of the new are sure to
crowd out the old ones. George Washington
and a few others are fixtures, but the lesser names
go in and out of your mind constantly, and how
many you can find there and who they are will
depend on what time of day it is. As to names
like Elias Howe, your memory merely flirts with
them. You have found twenty-nine great men
and must have one more. William Morris Hunt
is in, and so is Gilbert Stuart. Poe will not do,
because he drank, and, besides, poetry is well
enough represented as it is. Soldiers are not in
your line, and they should be kept down anyhow
for fear of militarism. A useful person is needed
— an inventor. A sewing machine buzzes in the
next room, and Elias Howe comes to mind, and
you take him. There is a broad zone of indif-
ference where you are lucky if you can find even
a whim. In this haphazard region the best and
wisest of men is no better than a mob.
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What is the unit of measure — the foot-pound,
ohm, volt or square milhmeter of glory? Take
one of the simpler problems. Here are Hunt,
Howe, Stuart and Poe waiting to be graded.
First find the common denominator of ? sewing
machine and the Lenox Lyceum. This will en-
able you to compare the inventive genius of Howe
with Hunt's skill as an architect. Then see how
many times the answer will go into Poe's Raven
and Stuart's paintings of the presidents. Sub-
tract five from Poe because he was so dissipated.
Add two to Howe because, though he was reduced
for years to driving an engine, he never took to
drink. Be honest with yourself, but bear in mind
that you alone cannot make a reputation. You
must consider the point of view of other men and
also of the angels. If you have no preference
yourself, find one and take its measure. Do not
forget that you are to decide not merely where
glory is, but where it ought to be. When you
have made up your mind do not touch it, but
treat an opinion as if you had married it. Find
out what you yourself think, what you think
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other people are thinking, how the thing is looked
at in heaven, and what sort of an influence it
may have on the young. Out of it all must come
a decision fit to be carved on imperishable stone.
It is matter for flashlights and bulletins. But
we do not commemorate our dead in that man-
ner. To correspond with actual conditions there
should be a thousand halls of fame, and in each
one a biographical dictionary on a whirligig.
It would not do to have the same biographical
dictionary. Reputations go up and down like
stocks, whether men have been ten years dead or
fifty. Yet if you come out with a list of your
forty favorites caught on the fly you are charged
with departing from absolute truth. There has
never yet been a biographical compendium whose
editor has not been blamed for leaving out names
far more important than those he put in. Never-
theless it will be a bad thing for the honored
dead if the time ever comes when we agree about
them. Settle once and for all their order of
merit and hundreds would never be heard of.
Now, there is Elias Howe, who has at last got
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what he deserved — a decent talking about. It is
queer material for carving on stone, but no
queerer than much that we put there. There are
signs that the city of New York can be pretty
frivolous even in bronze. The discussion is the
main thing. Gossip responds to a human need,
and gossip about dead men cannot hurt them.
It clearly shows the stuff that reputations below
a certain grade are made of. Many of the
smaller glories owe their longevity to the lazy-
mindedness of the survivors, for who can afford
to be painstaking about such trifles .?

How tell which is the greater of two men when
neither is great at all.? The best way is to shut
your eyes and guess at it. If it were James K.
Polk and Julius Caesar it would be one thing.
But it is James K. Polk and E. P. Roe, and
Hunt, and Howe, and Dolly Madison. Guess,
and think no more about it. If you were the
editor of a biographical dictionary, part of the
work would consist in this very thing. Some one
would write in and complain that half a page was
given to Jones and Brown was left out alto-
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gether. Yet if you aim at the Jones point of
thoroughness you should logically include not
only Brown, but a hundred others. The grave-
yards are choked with men of the Jones degree.
It is no doubt true. But what is the harm in
guessing Jones? Oblivion will get them all in
the long run; the final marks will not be ready
till the day of judgment, and in the meanwhile
why should we not discuss our taste in dead men ?

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VIII

DEMOCRATIC GENTILITY

A PRETTY row is sure to follow any public refer-
ence to good breeding, especially to an alleged
criterion or condition precedent of good breed-
ing. An Anglo-Saxon community cannot stand
it. Once, when an eminent naval officer opposed
the promotion of warrant officers on the ground
that they lacked social qualifications, a United
States senator all aglow with the spirit of Jean
Jacques and Robert Burns and the Declaration
called him a "snob" and a "coward" and a "con-
ceited ass." I am not now concerned with the
merits of the case, but only with the heat of the
language. There are terrible passions in this
field, and they lie very near the surface.

In England it is about the same, or possibly
worse. A few years ago the best behaved of
British weeklies quoted with approval in one of
its book reviews the remark that a gentleman was
a "man who played the game;" that is to say,
fitted in well with the company he was thrown
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with, did not cheat or interfere or insist on play-
ing his own game or the wrong game at the
wrong time. That set things going. Gentle-
men who felt that this left them out wanted an-
other definition. Correspondents squabbled with
one another and with the editor, and exchanged
volleys of quotations from the dictionary and
the Bible and the Elizabethan poets and the
Herald's College. Some said it all depended on
the great-grandfather's occupation, which, of
course, shocked the great-grandfatherless and
brought out in rebuttal a host of proverbs on the
order of "handsome is as handsome does." The
writers sometimes reinforced their arguments by
giving their addresses at highly respectable
clubs, and one of them crushed his adversary by
sheer weight of personal dignity. "Being my-
self in business," he said, "albeit a descendant of
the princes of Wales of the old race as well as a
descendant of that more modern stock, the Nor-
man and Plantagenet kings and their alliances,
I feel Mr. C.'s definition as a species of insult;
but, thank the gods ! the term 'gentleman' is de-
84*

THE CROWDED FORUM

rived rather from a man's conduct toward others
than from any fictitious virtue of ancestry."

The real cause of these disturbances is the
odious nature of the facts themselves. One side
says that there are such things as social dis-
tinctions; the other side, which is always the
more numerous, says that such distinctions are
wrong, and it does not want to have them men-
tioned. The champion of the "plain people" in-
variably has the advantage. He knows that the
plain people have a rooted aversion to plain
truths, and that each branch of our race has one
social code for private use and another for public
exhibition. You will never catch him in the in-
discretion of a public allusion to social qualifi-
cations, though in private he may grade men ac-
cording to the kind of cuffs they wear or snub
the pure in heart merely because they chew
tobacco. Everybody knows that manners, fam-
ily, habits, clothes and like irrelevancies down to
the smallest details of toothpick and napkin man-
agement are the chief bonds or barriers between
men and between nations ; that snobbery in one
85

I

THE CROWDED FORUM

form or another is eternal and omnipotent, and
bigger than humanity itself. Not a herd of
cattle without its "consciousness of kind," which
implies a certain social hauteur toward every
other kind. But it is not a subject to go before
the crowd with. It is a principle on which we
shape our whole lives, but when we speak above
a whisper let us only say : "A man's a man for a'
that." The crowd would rather be ill-served
than admit for a moment that a man could be
socially disqualified for his job, no matter what
his job might be.

Once in a while we hear grumblings from
abroad about the characters of our diplomatic
representatives. Some one has said that many of
them in the past had been "socially impossible."
This may be absolutely untrue, but the point is
that if it were clearly shown that American rep-
resentatives were so regarded and that as a result
the service suffered, we should make no open at-
tempt to mend matters. A lesson might be
learned and changes might be made from behind
the scenes, but of one thing we are positive : An
86

THE CROWDED FORUM

American statesman would rise sublimely on the
floor of the Senate in the full view of the plain
people and say that if a good American was not
good enough for a European power that power
was a "snob," "coward" and "conceited ass," or
words to that effect.

87

PART III

THE FRIGHTENED
MINORITY

SETTING THE PACE

A FEARLESS preacher once reproved the Newport
gentry for their worldly ways, and the subject
was solemnly discussed in the newspapers for
two solid weeks. It was a sort of court sermon.
Though uncompromising toward sin, he did not
for a minute forget the social position of the sin-
ners. In fact, the size of the sin seemed to be in
proportion to the importance of that social posi-
tion, so there was no doubt a sweet side to the sor-
row at the bigness of it. A rebuke like that is
always reassuring to an aristocracy that is a little
new at the business and, therefore, a little doubt-
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

f ul of itself. The eyes of fifty million American
citizens are upon you, so take care what you do,
said he. It is a hard heart that this would not
touch. And there is no class of people in the
world that needs such recognition more than this
aristocracy of ours, and they were grateful even
for this polite untruth. The most discourag-
ing thing about our fashionable society is that
so few people know of it. If there were only a
bigger crowd peering over the railing it would
be more fun to be inside. Where is the good of
being exclusive when so few realize that they are
shut out.? It takes something of a specialist to
keep track even of their names. There is a fringe
of socially ambitious people who know, and there
are sporadic cases of an abnormal kind of interest
in dry society data on the part of persons who
have never met any of the participants and do
not expect to meet them. But except for a half
dozen or so of egregious persons, and these egre-
gious mainly by their wealth, the names of our
local leaders of fashion are to the average man
as the names of Hindoo gods.

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

We have no loyal peasantry or deferential
tradespeople or awestruck middle class. There
is no common standard of fashionable values.
Social distinctions assume a hundred thousand
forms. There are about as many peerages as
there are men. What is a leader of a cotillon to
the average citizen compared to the Royal Arch.
Something of his particular lodge? And there
are mighty honors almost within his reach. May
he not hope some day to be the Supreme Secre-
tary of his order of the Hidden Sanctuary, and
wear twelve badges and a red fez ? The cards of
invitation which our young Pendennis sticks in
his looking glass do not even dazzle his landlady.
Social triumphs are too esoteric over here. In
general our dollared gentry are envied only for
their dollars. Specialists in fashionable matters
assume a range of information that does not exist.
The details of the society columns are cabalistic
to all but a few, and the good or bad effects of
what is technically called fashionable example
may not reach across the street. And yet there
is always some one watching nervously to see if
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

they drink more than they used to or play for
higher stakes, or if the women are taking to cock-
tails or smoking cigarettes. If they find out
anything they pass the word along, and straight-
way a flurried moralist will ask if there is any
virtue left among our leisure classes. "Wealth
and luxury have changed greatly the atmosphere
of American life." We are all in immediate dan-
ger of divorcing our wives and floating sinward
on a flood of dry champagne.

By the cockfights of our ancestors I protest
against the doctrine that such things are new.
What past date have these people in mind? Was
it when England's greatest jurist said an occa-
sional booze expanded the emotions and mellowed
the manners of her growing youth? Or was it
when the leading statesmen of the century lived
their whole lives out without getting even with
their gambling debts? This among a class of
people that might well have set the pace. Be-
labor us as much as you like, but why let our
forefathers off so easily? Making demi-gods of
forefathers is an old practice. You would sup-
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

pose that people who wished to prove us worse
than they would be at some pains to show us what
manner of folk they were. As a rule they skip
all that. They pass over our forefathers with
gentle generalities. With us they are terribly
concrete. There is no fair basis of comparison.
They talk of forefathers as if they were a first
wife. The second wife may be just as good, but
she happens to be on hand. That is the trouble
with us. We are blamed just because we are not
dead.

It is not fair to compare the eighteenth cen-
tury as seen in Henry Esmond with the twentieth
century as seen on Fourteenth Street. Some-
thing should be allowed for stained-glass effects.
We have chosen to fit up the past as a playroom
for our imaginations. We arrange it pictu-
resquely and throw out the things we do not like.
It is a good place for a rainy day, but how about
spending our whole lives in it? Ruffs and pow-
dered periwigs and very low bows, even profanity
delighting by the quaintness of it — no better
place for an aristocratic outlook on this mean
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

generation. But the sponging house and the
eternal drunkenness and the mean servility of
dependent classes, and the polite breakfast on the
occasion of the hanging, and the omnipresent
illiteracy — why not mention these things and
others, if only to show that the real eighteenth
century is what you have in mind? As the world
moves along there are a lot of people in every
generation who are sorry they came. They are
instinctive partisans of any kind of forefather.

But to return to our fashionable exemplars.
The truth of the matter is there is no social circle
that could stand the scrutiny that is brought to
bear upon what society reporters call the elite.
There are scandals in Cornville just as bad. Peo-
ple write of our fashionable society with a lot of
Ouidaesque notions at the back of their heads.
Cynical, worldly, epigrammatic and blase —
where are all those characters of Mrs. Burton
Harrison and the others who have followed her in
a troop ? Whatever our aristocracy may be, it is
not effete. The novelty of external things has
not worn off. In point of simplicity it compares

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

well with any other class, for simplicity is not a
matter of cost. Some very expensive pleasures
may be almost heartrending in their simplicity.
A complex person would soon go mad, and there
is nothing in them even for a corrupt heart. But
people do not like to write of it as it is (even
when they know) for fear of being dull.

There has grown up a fiction about the morals
of this class and about the force of its example.
We are badly in need of some one who will em-
phasize the unromantic truth. The thing that is
ground into a candid mind, making its observa-
tions at first hand, is that the morals of those peo-
ple are by no means their weakest spot. Like
most classes of men and women, they are not so
bad as they are painted, and a good deal stupider.
And as to the example, he will have discovered
this : He may travel fifty miles up and down and
across Manhattan Island without meeting a sin-
gle person who knows what that example is.

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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

II

THE WALK UPTOWN

Shall we New Yorkers be damned in the next
world if we pause one instant in our warfare with
municipal iniquity and take in the view? Is it
the sin of Lot's wife for us ever to look around?
Surely it is pardonable sometimes to take a vaca-
tion from reform and to be frankly pleased with
things that are morally indifferent. Corruption
will not get away. You will find it waiting to be
belabored at the same old place when you come
back. One ought not to be bruising the serpent
all the time. The most vivacious snake-bruiser
sometimes needs a rest. He works the better for
it. Some say New Yorkers with the moral aim
take too much rest. It is not true. Their hearts
are always throbbing with political wrath. Cor-
ruption is their constant daily thought. They do
not act, it is true, but they think and they talk
and they expose without a pause. They never
give their city a good word. That is their atone-
ment for their ineffectiveness. That much they
95

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

are willing to do for reform's sake. They can
at least abuse.

There is no queerer thing in the world than a
good New Yorker's conscience. How would he
define his city? As the cheerfullest, hopefullest,
most vitalizing big spot in a hemisphere or two,
which it is in spite of everything.'^ He would like
to, but civic duty will not let him. Conscience re-
quires that he shall define it as a long, narrow and
very corrupt strip of land provided with insuffi-
cient facilities for rapid transit, and once the
home of the Tweed ring ; bounded on the east by
a river over which a set of rascals are planning to
build a bridge when what is needed is a tunnel, and
on the west by a line of viciously administered
docks ; on the south lies New York bay opening
widely to let in the scum of foreign races and
Richard Croker when he returns from Europe.
Conscience insists on accuracy of definition and
on infinity of talk, but on not much more,
as is shown on election day. A man must
swell with rage over municipal corruption
day and night, but it is quite proper for
96

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

him to dodge jury duty and to stay away from
primaries.

The moral indignation is a good thing, since
in time it may lead to action, but there is no rea-
son why it should monopolize the soul and be-
numb all the faculties. You can fight evil with-
out snubbing all the good things in life, and
there are some of these good things in New York.
Is it the part of a reactionary to say so.'' The
New York of the better class of newspapers and
of the conversation of its most loyal citizens is
about the blackest place under the sun. The old
lady who went through St. Louis with a rope tied
around her and her six children lest the wicked
should grab them would not venture New York
in an armored train. It is not that the press says
a word too much about our vices, but it never says
anything about the other things. Yet who has
ever been hurt by seeing more than one side of the
truth? Can't a man work for improvement with-
out being lopsided or wearing blinders? One
would think that for a New Yorker to speak up
for his city was to pitch his tent toward Tam-
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

many or Sodom, and that the only way to cure
evil was to acknowledge no good.

It does not look much like Sodom as you walk
uptown. There are street corners where the sin
of a little cheerfulness is almost pardonable.
Lexow and Mazet revelations and Ramapo and
Croker would all roll off the mind for the mo-
ment if you would let them. At the risk of moral
laxity I say this does no harm. It is not likely
the devil could do much in the few minutes you
were off guard. It is legitimate sometimes to
look down a side street straight to the sunset at
the other end without counting the number of
gin-mills to the block. Do not confound material
well-being with political health, as Mr. Godkin
justly warned. But the sky is not upholstered
with ward politics, and Tammany Hall is not yet
a sign of the zodiac.

98

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III

THE READING PUBLIC

As THE autumn freshet of books comes down
upon us the usual discussion of their superfluity
promptly recurs. One writer says this century
will be known as the century that was always
reading about itself, and taunts the present gen-
eration with even putting the letters of the alpha-
bet in their soup. Another lectures the whole
tribe of publishers for giving the public what
they want instead of what in the opinion of the
lecturer they ought to have, and somebody else
lectures him for not suggesting the proper rem-
edy. And so it goes until there is a huge pile of
printed matter all to the effect that printed mat-
ter is in excess. The present century may be
known as the one that became panic-stricken at
the sight of its own abundance.

When you come to think of it, there is no more

reason why we should excite ourselves over the

superabundance of printed words than over the

increase in the amount of conversation. Inven-

99

l.ofC

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

tions have enabled us to print a part of that
which used to be spoken and which perished in
the saying. We have always heard that talk was
cheap, and printed matter has become almost as
inexpensive. Because we read a good deal of our
talk now and throw it afterward in the waste
basket, it does not follow that we are intellectu-
ally going to the dogs. The superfluous book is
sometimes annoying, but so is the superfluous
man. Every improvement in communication
makes the bore more terrible. Nowadays he can
get himself published as easily as at one time
he could get himself invited out to dinner. So
you meet him more frequently in print. But you
meet everybody and everything more frequently
in print. It is rather absurd to quarrel with
print on that account or to blame the publishers
exclusively. The more food there is in the world
the more fools will be fed. It is not the fault of
the food or the food producers.

When a dull book meets with great suc-
cess some one always has a fling at the pub-
lishers. Of course, it would be better if
100

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

they maintained a high standard. But they
are no more to be blamed than you or
I for taking the world as they find it. And what
would the dull man be doing if he were not por-
ing over the dull page ? Would he be drinking in
some brilliant table talk, or studying art, or read-
ing the Elizabethan dramatists? There is noth-
ing in what we know of the dull man's daily life
to make us think that he has been tempted to his
ruin. Before dull books were printed dull men
were probably duller yet. They may keep him
from reading the average book, but he would
then be doing some other thing equally average.
Averageness is a quality we must put up with.
And, after all, why is a poor, tawdry piece of
writing so much worse than cheap chromos or
crude, gaudy ornaments, or the thousand and
one other things that machinery multiplies as
we all travel up from barbarism? Men march
toward civilization in column formation, and by
the time the van has learned to admire the mas-
ters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from
the totem pole. Anywhere in the middle you may
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find a veneration for China pug dogs or an en-
thusiasm for Marie Corelli — still an advance.
Literary people seem to think that every time a
volume of Hall Caine is sold Shakespeare is to
that extent neglected. It merely means that
some semi-savage has reached the Hall Cainc
stage, and we should wish him godspeed on his
way to Shakespeare. It is only when a pretended
Shakespeare man lapses into Hall-Cainery that
one need be excited.

As usual in these equinoctial debates, the line
is neatly drawn between the hostile camps of the
Scornful Few and the literary Democrats. "As
for this vast new reading public," says one of
our leading novelists, "it is the vast 'old reading
public with more means in its pocket of satisfy-
ing its crude, childish taste. Its head is the same
empty head." Another, heart and soul with the
party of hauteur, and a Coriolanus to the plain
people assails the "mechanical reader," meaning
by that the person "who makes it a rule to read,"
whose head no book can fertilize, who borrows
his opinions of literature. "To the mechanical
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

reader, books once read are not like growing
things that strike root and intertwine branches,
but Hke fossils ticketed and put away in the
drawers of a geologist's cabinet; or rather, like
prisoners condemned to life-long solitary im-
prisonment. In such a mind books never talk to
each other."

On the opposing side there is the complacency^
of numbers and a boundless faith in the average
American — the familiar belief that in the long
run the people are just about right. "Healthy
optimism," I believe, is the technical term — ^land
of promise and the goose hangs high, warm
hearts and paper collars, beautiful thoughts in
frowsy heads, and what is best is also simplest,
and "you can't fool the people all the time," and
the throbbing pulse of common humanity,
and the sterling worth of the man in the
street, and the divine right of the thing that
gets the votes, for whatever is greatest
gets them. It seems as if never a day had
passed without a whirl of these rousing senti-
ments.

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Now, I too once fought (as a private of
course) on the side of the Scornful and har-
pooned the public with all my might, but some-
how or other the old hippopotamus never felt it.
I too not doubting that I was a first cabin pas-
senger stood proudly among the few and let drive
at mechanical readers and writers and critics and
multitudes and blamed everybody for not being
like somebody, and somebody for not being like
me, and thought mediocrity would know itself
from my description and feel ashamed and per-
haps die, and was particularly devastating
among fools and could have wept when they did
not know it and took me for one of themselves.
But the pleasure of it passes and there is never
any profit in it to anybody. Of course people
are a little exasperating when they talk about
books — which seem to go through the mind for
the most part like beans through a tube — and so
uniform are they and so gregarious, forty feed-
ing as one, that it seems as if Nature turned out
men's souls as from a waffle-iron. And it is the
more disturbing because we know Nature does
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

nothing of the sort but gives them personal
preferences in clothes and food and cigars. Each
swears in different language at his toothache and
takes a different woman for his wife. Pinch a
member of the reading public and you will
find that he is real. But his personal taste
in books is harder to get at than his secret
vices.

But why need one be so bitter about it.? Be-
cause a reader is inarticulate and cannot prove
that green things with twining branches grow
in his fertilized head, it does not follow that he
is mechanical. And suppose he is mechanical
and bears the needless burden of other people's
tastes and potters away at self-improvement
when he has nothing to improve, there is nothing
in it so very dreadful. Literary people are for-
ever judging the quality of the mind by the turn
of expression. Such sniffs at the banal remark
and the empty sentence, such holy wrath at un-
productive reading; the minute a poor wretch
swallows an epic they look at his tongue for a
sign. They expect things of people as readers
105

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

that they do not expect of them as men. To
most men the platitude is as natural as the bark
to a dog, and if feeling were measured by elo-
quence there would be no family ties. The dull
man is not only entitled to his dull book but is
privileged to talk of masterpieces in his dull way,
and there is no more reason for railing at him in
his relation to books than in his relation to his
government, and his God, and his green grocer,
and his friends, whom perhaps he bores most
frightfully, and who therefore have a greater
grievance than true literature can complain of.
Taking people as they are, considering whom
they marry, and what they eat and how they live
and what they say and how they say it, we must
in common sense conclude that their literary taste
is the least thing that is the matter with them.
But literary-mindedness sees only the one thing ;
it would reduce the universe to a coterie, control
the birthrate of this sphere and breed only
Browning-readers. The question is not literary
but biological. It is not a humane view of us
ex-barbarians. Give us time, and meanwhile
106

THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

thank Heaven that for the present we are at
least tailless.

It is one side of a larger problem, which is
rather complex. Another part of it is preying
on the vitals of the political economists, and over
still another an enthusiastic group of sociolog-
ists are rapidly growing mad. If we could tell
what the millions ought to have we should be in
a fair way to settle the world's future offhand.
Nor is there any hope of a general reaction. The
society of the future is sure to be more tempted
and embarrassed by the multude of its opportun-
ities than we are now.

Critics seem often ill at ease in the bad com-
pany of this every-day world. They find no
pleasure in what is merely crude and laughable
and have only harsh words for a stage of develop-
ment. You might as well lampoon a hemisphere.
They do not sneer at children with their primers,
but for the average man with the average book
they have no mercy. Their real grievance is
with the number of people there are in the world,
but for my part I believe that were it not for the
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

presence of the unwashed and the half -educated,
the formless, queer and incomplete, the un-
reasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the
delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not
wear so broad a grin.

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IV

REFORMERS AND BROOMSTICKS

A FEW years ago a number of our protectors in
the press were greatly alarmed by reports of
brutal hazing at West Point. Cadets had been
made to stand upon their heads, sing songs, ride
on broomsticks, and eat tabasco sauce. Congress
appointed a committee of inquiry, and finding
the reports in part true very properly took steps
to improve the discipline, which happy consum-
mation would in all likelihood have come about
had our moral guardians scared us less. For
after all nothing very horrible was disclosed by
the inquiry. If those cadets deserve pity, we do,
too. Most of us have eaten worse things than
tabasco sauce. There was, for example, a cer-
tain compound of vinegar and wheel grease which
— but that is a fraternal secret. Though not
trained for warriors, we, too, have eaten soap.
Some of us may not have stood on our heads in
bath tubs — bath tubs are not always convenient
at the time — but we know from experience of the
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higher education that pretty effective things can
be done with a pump. And there was a long,
hard board in the hands of a strong man — ^hard-
est board, strongest man we have ever known —
which must have been as well adapted to its pur-
pose as anything they had at West Point.
Brutal? We thought so then, decidedly. "In-
human man, curse on thy barbarous art, and
blasted be thy murder-aiming eye." That was
the thought that struck us when the board did.
It was not the way young Emerson was treated.
The other boys seemed to know by instinct that
he was going to be a great thinker when he grew
up. Of heroes, statesmen and philosophers there
are a plenty who never passed through any such
ordeal in youth. It was clear to us even then
that man may be great without it. On the other
hand, there have been many cases of serious and
lasting damage done to beings of a fine but
fragile mould. Our tormentors, therefore, ran
a great risk. In banging us around they might
have thumped out a strain of real poetry in us
or spoiled us for the ambassadorship at St. James.
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But did they? Ask our guardian angels. We
only know — and there are some millions of us
survivors — that if this blessed land has lost a few
frail poets in the process, it has been saved from
a far greater number of prigs. Few men who
have been through it will tell you it is altogether
bad.

This does not argue any indifference toward
the extreme forms of hazing. Nor does any
rational veteran feel that all the hardships of his
own experience are strictly necessary to those
who come later to the test. You can teach man-
ners without taking the skin off. To be keel-
hauled like the young man in Snarleyow is not
the only cure for conceit. But the standard in
the matter is not an old man's standard. Nor
is it a standard of little French boys with their
governesses, or of flabby, contemplative Ger-
man youths. We fogies who write for the papers
may as well remember that. Each generation of
Anglo-Saxons is in an absurd hurry to stretch
itself on the rack of this tough world. They must
be at self-government from the very start. They
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constitute vigilance committees on the frontiers
of life to apply lynch law to vices in the germ.
It is not thorough, for see what slips through;
and it is not just in a nice, respectable sense, but
it is not altogether bad for the race, and prob-
ably saves more souls than it damns.

And if it is sometimes carried to excess it is
still oftener withheld by lack of early advantages
from the people who need it most — the men who
cannot take a joke, who must be shielded from
reality and double-barred against plain speech.
To criticize is to wound; to laugh is to make
enemies for life. So you must tiptoe as in a
sick room lest some small vanity may take alarm.
Meeting them now, we are too late. Middle age
is the conventional garden where the little pom-
posities are allowed to bloom. Youth is the time
for weeding out the little pomposities so that they
will not grow again. Caught then and badgered
and guyed and "roasted," something might have
been done, and with little risk of a broken spirit,
for most of us start with a large enough stock
of egotism to last through the seige. The
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time comes soon enough when people have to
keep then' hands off and sneer behind our backs.
There should be a season consecrated to the frank
and primitive method. Otherwise we might grow
up to scratch and bite like French deputies or
pull hair like respectable members of the Aus-
trian reichstag in their middle age.

It seems that the committee did not take all
the goings on at West Point with equal serious-
ness, as the newspapers did. The report admits
that "Many of the things done by the upper
classmen were boyish pranks." At the same time,
in view of the consternation this might cause our
nursery governesses, it went on to say that even
these boyish pranks "are frequently conducted
in such a way as to outrage the noblest feelings
of the human heart," and cited as an instance the
fact that the son of a distinguished soldier had
been compelled to ride a broomstick up and down
the company street. It was determined to pre-
vent the repetition of these indignities.

So far so good; but the spirit that prompted
the broomstick atrocity is likely to persist, and
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without laying a hand on this young gentleman
they might have made him just as miserable.
That is where the power of the state breaks
down. Nothing can save our self-esteem from a
coat of tar and feathers, and it gets it frequently.
Noble feelings have been outraged even in Con-
gress. One legislator has been known to imply
that another did not speak the truth. Yet a be-
lief that he is not a liar is one of the noblest feel-
ings in the breast of a Congressman. He would
as lief ride a broomstick as be robbed of it. As
a matter of fact, the conditions of this boisterous
planet are hopelessly unfit for any soul that could
not stand the equivalent of that broomstick test
in the days of his lusty youth. If Congress could
only hedge him in completely, what a blessed
little bijou of a man he would grow up to be.

But Congress will not hedge him in. Both the
committee and the cadets acted with good sense
and brought the affair to a reasonable ending.
The moral of it has nothing to do with either of
these but with us outsiders. How we take on
about such matters, we the professional croakers,
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

who have but one note in our register, the same
old solemn bull-frog note for everything that
happens. When things are really very bad what
shall we have to say to them?

Our language is rich enough in disapproving
adjectives, and it is a pity to use the same set for
crimes and trifles. Yet in the apoplexy of our
discontent we waste the fiercest of them on some
assassin with a crooked pin or tyrant with a
broomstick. A case for discipline; young men
had broken the rules of an institution and fought
and badgered one another and immediately there
arose a chorus of Did you evers, and a wagging
of fungus heads all over the country. A small
but very serious group argued in favor of it,
holding that it was part of a scientific plan for
the making of officers and gentlemen. Precisely
that degree of scuffling and violation of rules was
necessary to develop true courage. The rest of
us saw in it the impending smash-up of young
manhood, and for weeks there was a pest of great
moral owls, worse than a plague of Egypt.

Whether or not a moral can be drawn depends
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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

wholly on the drawer. It is like the rabbit in the
juggler's hat. Smoking hot shapes from Tar-
tarus were ramping about this country wherever
we looked. That West Point affair was not, as
you might think, a mere instance of stupid horse-
play, calling, perhaps, for the prompt expulsion
of the offenders. It was a sign of the times, and
a devil's footprint, and it showed how the curse
of an unrighteous federal policy has tainted
everything. Corrupt the morality at the centre,
and this is what you get. Pollute the flag in the
Philippines, and our sons shall constrain their
schoolmates to ride the contumelious broomstick.
And the end of it was just what it would have
been if we had not lost a single night's sleep.
Such are the blessings of a tutelary and meticu-
lous press. But everything has its sermon, and
the text of this is to be found not in the doings
of the young, but in the comments of their elders.
It is, as I take it, that if there is one thing
worse than the savagery of youth, it is the
pompous rigidity of middle age as exhibited in
this discussion.

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THE FRIGHTENED MINORITY

But is it not what the people want, and might
they not misunderstand any other course? The
chances are that they would endure more common
sense than we dare to give them. After all it is
not a lachrymose people, whatever you may say.
You can tell that from their faces and from the
air they breathe. A fairly cheerful race, and
not without a certain sense of a modus in rebus,
it does not require the moral of every small event
to be hammered in with a pile-driver. One set
of words for the ruin of the state, another for
the i:udeness of our children — that is what they
expect from us, and even though we should
be misunderstood we shall not burn for it.

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PART IV

ADVENTURES OF A PLAY-
GOER

ON SEEING TEN BAD PLAYS

Had I an artist's soul I should be somewhat
soured by what I have gone through. As it is,
I have fought down all bitterness of heart by the
aid of a little philosophy. A man needs philos-
ophy more for the commonplaces of this world
than he does for its miseries, ennui being a stead-
ier foe than pain. I therefore offer my phi-
losophy of the commonplace in the American
drama and literature. It is not deep, but it is at
least bland, and it may help to allay irritation
in certain moods. There is enough of polished
sarcasm, and of cynicism there is already too
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much. What we need is something that will aid
us in matters of routine.

In the first place I swear by all that is holiest
in democracy — by the boiled onions of the plain
people, by their even plainer wives, by the fire-
sides of Tom, Dick and Harry, by the sanctity
of the bigger figure, by the sacred whoops of the
majority — ^that the usual man is not to blame for
wanting the usual thing. Hallcainery has its
place in the world. Indeed, I believe it alto-
gether healthy, hopeful, and respectable, and if I
thought otherwise I should lose all faith in repre-
sentative institutions. There are a few who never
weary of saying spiteful things about literary
mediocrity. They have no patience with devel-
opment or kindliness for beginnings ; they would
condemn every tadpole as a sort of apostate frog.
Why are they so petulant with majorities.? Hu-
manity would pine away on masterpieces; yet
many would have you think that the journey
from savagery to high art must be made in total
silence, with nothing to read on the way. Our
plays are relatively good, being no further below
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the drama than they are above tomtoms and hu-
man sacrifice. Blessed is vulgar "reading-mat-
ter," for without it people might eat one another.
No race ever sinks from Hallcainery into barbar-
ism; it rises from barbarism to Hallcainery,
whence in time it may emerge.

And who shall say that our plays are not as
good as our politics, or our writers as our Sen-
ators? Do we expect brilliancy in our states-
men? We are thankful enough in this country
for a good candidate, let who will be clever. If
a large city can, after intense intellectual ef-
forts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will
not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the
suffrage. So moderate are our expectations in
this field that if ordinary intelligence be super-
added, it seems a piece of luck. We are over-
joyed at any sign that the nation's choice is up
to the nation's average ; and time and again you
hear a thing called statesmanlike, which in pri-
vate life would be just on the safe side of sanity.
Mr. McKinley's refusal of a third term was re-
garded as a masterstroke of wisdom, and we have
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all read praises of Mr. Roosevelt's achievements
which are deserved as well by anybody we ever
knew. Nobody praises us when we come home
sober of an evening, or speak a good average sen-
tence, or draw a good average breath ; and sturdy
virtues that keep us out of the police court for
weeks at a time are not even mentioned by the
family. But by these negative signs you can
often tell a statesman, for politics is a place of
humble hopes and strangely modest requirements,
where all are good who are not criminal and all
are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise. Any
one who is used to the accidents of majorities
should acquire this habit of mind. But the liter-
ary and artistic people persist in the most exorbi-
tant demands at a point where the least should
be logically expected, that is, the tastes of a
crowd. And if the majority is against them,
they scold it and the thing it chooses, and having
lost their tempers and tired their friends, and
troubled a number of honest creatures who have
not the least idea what it is all about, they feel
that they have been doing wonders for what they
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call artistic standards. Right enough views, but
the wrong occasion. We expect only peace in a
cable car; for ectasies we must look somewhere
else.

If high art deserves its ecstasies, low art de-
serves its consolations ; and if there is any way of
making better terms with humdrum and escaping
the spasms of reform, it is our plain business to
find it. St. Paul said, keep the body under. I
say unto you, keep the mind under on seeing
American plays. Be "contentit wi' little and
canty wi' mair;" smile though the smile looks
sometimes like a rictus ; get the point of view of
the original erect ape-man (pithecanthropus
erectus) ; and if at any time you are afflicted by
a play that is particularly bad and popular, con-
sider the growth of our manufactures and sing
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee." To express one's
own tastes is reasonable, but to worry too much
over other people's leads to a useless violence.
Some wish to murder Hall Caine. I believe it
would be inexpedient to do so, and possibly
wrong. I believe Mr. Clyde Fitch as truly repre-
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sents New York as Senator PefFer did Kansas or
Mr. Bryan the West ; and the more I see of
audiences the surer I am that to massacre is the
only way to reform.

Unwilling to be dependent longer on the
bounty of her rich guardian the high-spirited
ingenue in light blue leaves her luxurious home
to teach school in a distant village. Being very
much of a lady she is obliged to walk as if the
stage floor were red hot, and to speak in a high
trilling voice with a foreign accent — a course
that instantly wins for her the love of every one
she meets. But the guardian comes to urge her
to return to what, as a gentleman of wealth and
refinement, he is obliged to call "me home." They
are talking alone, but as soon as she begins to ex-
plain that self-respect will not permit her to re-
main with him, now that she knows the fortune is
not really hers, the violins play softly and from
every door and alley the villagers come pouring
in. A sentimental conversation between people
they barely know will draw villagers to the spot
for miles around. So when the heroine and her
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

guardian are at their saddest everybody is punc-
tually in place. It is all very exasperating, and
the superior person, who has no business to be
there, will ask you if it is Art. It is not Art, but
the stout lady in the seat behind you is nearly
bursting with sobs, and a large number of pocket
handkerchiefs are fluttering in the aisles. With
this particular audience Art could do nothing at
all. Then comes humor in its more awful forms.
Thrice-explained humor, with long waits for the
effects; humor accompanied by the hilarious
roars of the man who made it. And for half an
hour there is as genuine enjoyment as you ever
saw, and at the very heaviest of horse-plays the
stout lady behind you says, "Isn't that rich.?"
Elevate the stage? Perhaps you can, but it will
be a good many generations before those people
will be ready for it. A quarter of an inch eleva-
tion would spoil the whole thing for them.

There is plenty of room for a good theatre,
but there is no use in hoping that it will draw
away the crowds from the class of plays that are
now successful. These plays will continue, or

ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

others just as bad. They are wonderfully
adapted to the people who go to see them, and as
time goes on this element of the population is
bound to increase. There are more below than
above them. It is absurd for the superior per-
son to ask them if it is Art. He would not take
on like that about a ball game or a merry-go-
round. And at a country fair or sociable or
"sugar eat" he would not be so savage about bad
taste. But a simple, hearty New York audience
abandoning itself to the innocent, if rude, pleas-
ures of the average play has no mercy from him
for the amazing reason that it is not Art. As if
simplicity required a background of hen roosts
and apple orchards and all primitive men tucked
their trousers in their boots. He is a child of
nature, the New York playgoer, even if he is not
picturesque, and he has an honest and wholesome
regard for whatever is atrocious in art. Put him
on the diet of the superior person and he would
soon starve.

There must be bad plays. You cannot civilize
the whole crowd of us at once, and those hideous
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early stages of artistic appreciation cannot be
skipped. There is much cheerless writing on a
subject that from certain points of view is almost
cheerful. Compare the worst successful New
York play with a war dance or with certain Zulu
sports. Things have greatly improved. How
did the same class use to amuse themselves.? As
to moral lessons, the poorest of successful plays
is remarkably vigorous and insistent. No sign of
decay there. In fact, the worse the art the more
blatant the moral. No New York playgoer is
likely to forget for one moment that virtue is an
admirable thing. Is it not cheerful to think of
the big audiences going night after night to
have the same elementary moral lessons pounded
in.? You want your moral lesson served artistic-
ally or you will not take it at all. Perhaps you
would as lief see the wicked triumph for a
change. But these people are content with vir-
tue in the raw. They are not after new ideas,
but want some one to say a good word for those
they have already. On no account must you
meddle with their minds.
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

The moral of all this is that one ought to try
and see the bright side of the situation, if such
a thing is to be found, and suppress those mur-
derous feelings toward what after all is a worthy
class of citizens and good building material for
the state. In spite of artistic merit and intelli-
gence good plays may succeed, and some day
the experiment will be tried on a large scale ; but
in the meanwhile all the philosophy that you can
summon and patience with those who like the
plays they have. The undiscriminating benig-
nity of audiences almost drives you mad. Why do
they not rise from their places and burn and
slay.? How easy to lynch the manager, if they
only knew. But they are having a good time for
all your splutter about Art, and if you can see
any signs of demoralization in their pleasant
moon faces you are a cynic at heart. For what-
ever our stage is, it supplies the unseasoned food
that is relished in the lusty infancy of Art.

1£7

ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

II

THE SPAN OF THE STAGE

Ages ago when we were all young and went to
evening parties, there was always, it will be re-
called, at least one blase guest who entered with
a look of pain and remained with conscious cyni-
cism. So the world is still at it, he seemed to
say, as if from centuries of experience (most
of it dark), looking more bored than mortal man
could ever feel — as bored perhaps as Satan might
be at an afternoon tea with cherubs. But he
went home no earlier than any one else and had
you at any time felt his pulse you would have
found it pumping away as cheerfully as other
people's. It was only that he would not confess
his indefensible emotions. It is the same way
with some of us playgoers. We profess to enjoy
only as we judge, but night after night we can
fold up our judgment like an opera hat and con-
tentedly sit with it under the seat, though we
damn the play with it afterwards. It is just
this lenient play-going mood that makes stage
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

criticism seem unreal. The intellect is detach-
able. Sometimes you are happier if you keep
it on ; sometimes you feel better without it ; at a
certain kind of conventional play it is simply
poisonous.

I have been reading some inappropriately in-
telligent remarks on a simple melodrama of In-
dian fights and primitive valor, wherein the hero
is a Western scout, a noble, athletic creature, a
child of nature and of the Leatherstocking Tales,
who is full of the moon and stars and the Great
Spirit, and does not know how heroic he is when
he saves a regiment at the risk of his life. The
critic says the character is not life-like, as if it
mattered, and adds that he is beneath the stand-
ard of Broadway, as if there were one. This hero
belongs to the juvenilia of our stage, and if you
kill him you will find yourself embarked on a
career of slaughter. There have been a dozen
like him this year and last. There is no reason
why criticism should straighten itself up with
this sudden dignity and let the other eleven go
through. Classify him and let him alone; enjoy
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

the moment if you can ; forget your age and edu-
cation and everything else; feel on the top of
your bald head for sunny curls, and try and won-
der how the play will turn out. Will the Indians
get him ? It may be his gun will go off and shoot
the orchestra. There is always something to
wonder at. Where there's a will, there's a way.
A play may be seen with two standards: The
standard of what you have previously seen or
read or studied, and the standard of what you
would have been doing if you had stayed at home
that evening. The average play does not com-
pete with Shakespeare but with the evening
papers or a game of cards or the bosom of the
average family.

Despise not the raw virtue, black vice and
scalping knives of casual melodrama unless you
are ready to despise the society hodge-podge and
the merely spectacular historical play. The
common defect is the unrealized men and women.
We reverse the practice of the Elizabethans and
label characters instead of scenery. They asked
their audience to believe that this was a wall and
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

that a gate-post. We do the wall and
post to the life, but say, will you please believe
that these jumping- jacks are human beings.
Yet our audience is well trained, ready to take
the will for the deed, and in no hurry to argue
itself out of a place to spend its evenings. If
you think coolly of the playwright's work, you
will turn the stage into a solitude. In a month
of play going I found only one play that met the
tests of afterthought, but there were very few
that did not suffice for the moment.

We think of the theatre as a great, grinding
machine for expressing the obvious, a show-place
for large adventures of body and soul, unsuited
as a bass-drum to lighter arguments. Some say
the theatre can take nothing up till the other
arts are through with it. Then a play like Old
Heidelberg comes along and succeeds where
many poets fail through sheer clumsiness. It is
by no means a great play, and it deals with the
lightest of themes. An unheroic young prince
whom the restraints of a petty court hardly per-
mit to draw a natural breath, suddenly finds him-
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

self free to lead his own life at the university.
For the first time he meets people on a common
footing and can be foolish and spontaneous and
undignified and young, and make a noise and
fall genuinely in love with his landlord's pretty
daughter. So he comes to life and after his first
bewilderment does all these things with a zest that
is good to see and resolves to keep on doing them
for ever more, but in the midst of it all he is sum-
moned back to the court to assume the regency.
Being as I have said an utterly unheroic person,
he obeys, and takes leave of his sweetheart and
his friends in a way that makes you pity all com-
monplace human princes. Later he revisits the
university thinking to find everything the same,
but he has changed and so have the students.
Somehow no one can unbend and the meeting is
absurdly ceremonious, empty and forlorn. Then
the final parting with his sweetheart, for his mar-
riage, of course, is an affair of state, and so his
holiday ends. After all there was nothing in it
worth losing a kingdom for. There was no
great sorrow here, nothing tempestuous to wreck
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a life. His royal middle age will find it a choice
reasonably made. But an epicure of emotion
could probably show that the best seasoning for
a delightful regret is a prosaic preference for
the thing you chose. The imagination has bet-
ter sport with what is a little beyond the range
of real desire, and I daresay Prince Heinrich's
grief was the most agreeable shade of the blues
imaginable.

So the same old stage that plays the passions
on a steam piano can be as delicately reminiscent
as a violin, and this playwright can make a light
regret for outgrown things more poignant than
D'Annunzio could the pain of an amputation.

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III

ON CERTAIN **PROBLEM" PLAYS

D'Annunzio in his English translation seems a
monotonous and unsmiling young man of re-
stricted interests, who, failing in the effects of
art, falls back upon the merely horrible. With
murder or mutilation or incest in the wind, you
will stay on to the end, and there is never a
moment when it is not in the wind. Portents and
premonitions, fever fits and chills keep the doom
incessantly impending, and the unfortunate
characters are not human beings at all, but
merely foregone conclusions. It fixes the atten-
tion as surely as the gong of an ambulance. It
is the interest of deferred brutality, the common
device of those who seek a short cut to strong
writing, for people will often confound the
sources of their emotion and define a primitive
animal zest in complicated art terms. In an early
chapter of one of Zola's novels, a young girl
comes to a horrible death from an explosion, and
in the remainder of the book he recurs at short
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

intervals to the mangled body of the fair young
girl ripped open by dynamite. A fascinated re-
viewer described the expedient as a wonderfully
skilful use of the Wagnerian leit mot'w. If the
kind of interest does not matter, it should be easy
to start a thrill, for people of artistic tempera-
ment are as likely as not to mistake their back-
bones for their souls, and once a-quiver, they are
as indifferent as jelly-bags to the cause of it.
The cheats of the artistic temper are seldom
caught by self -analysis, and few of d'Annunzio's
admirers know how they came by their goose-
flesh. In the Dead City the fictitious element of
mere ghastliness is so nearly the whole thing that
there is nothing left for art to do. In this unin-
spired following of the Oedipus, ancient Greek
seemliness gives way to modern Latin unreserve,
and Nemesis becomes a buzzard, and a little man
bustles officiously among horrors which only a
genius could discreetly deal with.

The offence of the plays is not in their sub-
jects but in their methods, and the offended part
of us is not our morals but our taste. The irk-
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

some continuity of the passions, the fewness and
fixity of the ideas, the unauthenticated emotions,
the fatal absence of humor leave us with
the sense of humanity unrealized and a
world shut out. While there are afflicted people
like those in the Dead City, it is cheerful to think
that there are at least sanitariums with kind at-
tendants and capable house physicians, and that
one encounters them singly in the outside world,
never a whole troop of them at once. D'An-
nunzio measures tragedy by the mere bulk of
suffering. If murder is to be done in the end, he
sprinkles blood in the first act, gouges out an
eye in the second, cuts off a head in the third.
He supplements adultery by the amputation of a
woman's hands, and enhances incest by a most
pathetic case of total blindness and a final drown-
ing scene. Not that this is the whole story.
There is symbolism, and there are the Herculean
efforts of a minor poet to rise to the height of his
great argument. And it is well known that
minor poetry is of all things the most perishable.
Truth may traverse many languages and laugh-
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

ter may drift around the world, but minor poetry
dies on the frontier of its own barnyard. It is a
field of endeavor wherein the taste of the words
makes all the difference. But Ibsen can hold up
his head in English, and so can Sudermann, and
it is hard to believe that d'Annunzio, as a play-
wright, would so ignominiously disappear if there
had been more of him to start with.

Sudermann's Joy of Living profits greatly
by comparison. Those who called it the highest
peak of the intellectual drama in modern times
were probably measuring Sudermann in units of
Mr. Clyde Fitch, but they might safely have
said it was one of the largest toads in the sea-
son's dramatic puddle. It was certainly the
most "literary," the most "psychological," the
best presented, and, above all, the most debated.
The ancient story of the unfaithful wife and
her excuses, the trusting husband who is unde-
ceived, the disloyal friend, despair, atonement,
suicide, is told again, but in a modern, analytical
way. The wife's sin sprang from her higher
nature. Her soul, it seems, was fit for better
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

company. The other man was on her spiritual
plane, while her husband, though amiable and
worthy, was intellectually several pegs below her.
Should she not taste the joy of living? Better to
have soared and suffered than never to have
soared at all. So Beata soared away from the
marriage tie at the behest of the joy of living.
But only for a little while, and the three short
years of sin were followed by twelve of atone-
ment. She made her husband happy, and Rich-
ard, her former lover, became his closest friend.
She induced her husband to resign his seat in
Parliament in order that Richard's brilliant gifts
might have a fair field. Michael, the husband,
loyal and unsuspicious, and believing with her in
Richard's genius, threw himself into the canvass
heart and soul. Richard was elected, but in a
campaign pamphlet allusion was made to a scan-
dal involving Michael's honor, and upon ques-
tioning his wife and Richard he learned the
truth. All three being of noble birth, it was clear
that in these circumstances somebody must die;
but a duel would bring public disgrace upon two
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

families. Richard therefore resolved on suicide.
Bombardinian was hit and Hononchroton-
thologos must die. One may not see the logic of
it, quite; but it is undoubtedly the rule of aris-
tocracy or stagecraft. In their last interview
Beata reads his intention in his face and makes
up her mind to kill herself that he may live. Her
sudden death will seem more plausible, for she
has heart disease. At a luncheon given by her
husband to the chiefs of the party, ostensi-
bly in honor of Richard's success, but really
to quiet suspicion, she makes an ironical
speech in praise of the joy of living and takes
poison. After her death the two men read a
letter she has left saying that Richard now
must live. He agrees to live, and the play is
ended.

Shall we fly to our hearthstones, like the good
old-fashioned critic of the stage, and with purple
cheeks burst into alliterative wrath and call it a
"fetid phantasy".'^ Must we be fierce as fogies
and tear the language all to smithereens trying
to find things bad enough to say of "tainted
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talent" and of "putrid plays" and all the "slith-
ering slime" of "poisoned pruriency"? Or dare
we at this late day be less robustious? To con-
demn the play, as many have done, on the
strength of the theme alone would commit one to
a ruthless policy. The world has gone too far;
too many novels and poems and plays are framed
on it ; the classics are still too fresh in our minds ;
books are too accessible, even to the young, for
any such spinster censorship. The main defect
of the play is its limitation of interest. The
"problem" that has lately usurped the stage — the
only problem, they would have us think, that of
husband and wife and a tertium quid, whether
male or female — is becoming wearisome even to
those who are firmly convinced that monogamy
will last of itself though they strike no blow for
it. Clever as Sudermann is, he has failed to sug-
gest in his naked souls the least variety. He
catches a single emotion from life and isolates it.
Beata lives and dies with it. You would never
guess it was part of her higher life if he did not
tell you so. Nor is there anything in Richard
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ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

to explain why she is drawn to him. It is taken
for granted that they are spiritual mates, and a
great deal results from it. Somehow or other
we are to assume that the angels contrived it, and
if human institutions stand in the way, they must
be swept aside by a noble sin. Their souls are
endowed with heavenly humps of the same pat-
tern. It is intellectually bare, purely emotional,
the mechanics of unlawful love, and though it is
most skilfully devised, you watch it only as a
game and think what a tight and narrow little
place the present stage is. Why should we be so
mercilessly confined.? A man is larger than his
largest passion ; a woman is better than her love,
and souls that run like tram-cars on their rails
make for the madhouse in the outside world. But
the poor starvelings of the stage must shiver
always in their moral barebones, and because
their maker could not give them flesh we say.
How searching his "psychology"! Those who
have a birthright to their art always suggest com-
plexity. From them you guess a world of many
things, however simple their means may seem.
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They never keep you staring stupidly at any
single pinwheel of passion.

Nor do they, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, aim
merely to prove something. It is well known that
Mr. Shaw does not wish to be regarded as merely
brilliant. He demands a fair judgment on the
truth of what he has to say apart from his man-
ner of saying it. He professes a message and he
is not satisfied with a smile of intellectual pleas-
ure or a stare of astonishment. Like most sensi-
tive and clever men, he hates an attempt to classi-
fy him, and he would try to squirm out of any
adjective that is at all definite. At a public
meeting not long ago, some one having intro-
duced him with the remark that his only fault
was that he was too talented, he rose and said that
his talents were but ordinary and that his strong
point had always been his character. But
though a very clever man, Mr. Shaw does not
understand some of the simplest laws of human
nature. He is not even aware of the danger of
being amusing. People learn while they laugh,
but very few of them know that they are learn-
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ing. When the midriff resumes its former place
the mind pretty generally goes on as before, per-
haps a little repentant. True prophets have
sometimes been great humorists (witness Job),
but their fame as prophets, I believe, was mainly
posthumous. Cervantes laughed Spain's chi-
valry away, but meanwhile Cervantes died. If
]\Ir. Shaw were always right, his manner before
the world would be sadly against him. The world
expects from its serious men a certain degree of
dulness.

Compared with most of our playwrights, Mr.
Shaw is not only far more entertaining than
they, but sounder. It is only when we compare
him (as he expressly demands) with the best of
all time, that he goes to pieces. All great play-
wrights have seen that every man was something
more than a leading motive. They have never
used him merely as a pawn; that is, to prove
something. They have suggested a thousand ir-
relevant things. At times they have almost
seemed to forget their purpose. In any true
comedy man is a small figure dancing against the
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sky — temporal antics on a background of ulti-
mate facts, birth and death and eternity. That
is the only joke, and every great writer has per-
ceived it. Not one of them has ever been a mere
debater of propositions. No writer ever created
a man without suggesting a mystery. The
plain man has this in common with Shake-
speare : He too is aware of unknown things, makes
guesses, and is quite unreasonable. His mys-
teries begin too soon, but he has them. From
merely clever people you might suppose there
was no mystery at all. They make things so
clear to you.

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IV

CONVENTIONAL PLAYS

On seeing a succession of conventional plays I
have often blessed my stars that I was not a
technical critic of the stage. For months at a
time the condition of the American drama is such
that it would seem desirable for any grown-up,
serious man to drop the subject altogether. If
he went to the theatre during that interval it was
simply a frivolous mistake. Surely it is not
worth while to express one's self very solemnly
about it. That is where the natural man has a
great advantage over critics. He may stop
talking, if he likes, as soon as his thought ceases,
whereas by the strange compulsion of the press
they must keep straight on, not only when they
prefer not to do so themselves, but when others
prefer not to have them. It is a fancied obliga-
tion, arising from some sort of a social misunder-
standing ; and every one is the worse for it. For
truthful comment on ordinary books and plays,
give me the private monosyllable, the sigh of a
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personal friend, the look of the latest victim —
anything, in fact, but the reluctant fluency
of professionals. Not that this miserably
didactic group of men are in any sense to blame
for it. It should not be forgotten that most
dramatic criticism is written by persons who
would rather be in bed. It is a thought that dis-
poses one to charity. It is an inhuman system
that requires a man to talk like an Act of Con-
gress about every little thing that comes along.
Sometimes, like Troilus, in the play, he should
be permitted to say: "I cannot fight upon this
argument. It is too starved a subject for my
sword." Little do we outsiders know of that
awful scramble for edifying words on the eve of
publication, or those barbarous contracts where-
by critics, like hydraulic pumps, are constrained
to continuous expression. They account, no
doubt, for many things that puzzle us — for the
amazing difference between what we see and what
we read about, between the living and the writ-
ing man. Why this grim little set of duties?
Surely one may take his private ease at the play-
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house without bothering about teaching people
what they ought to Hke or elevating anything.
The tastes have no ambassadors, and sometimes
the main use of criticism is in showing what man-
ner of man the critic is. An attempt at conver-
sion in this field is an impertinence. It was in the
hope that we should remain in some respects un-
like that Nature made so many of us and put us
up in separate packages. Yet for one man who
expresses his own taste we have a hundred mis-
sionaries to other people's.

When we simple-minded heathen read the
elaborate critical reviews of certain society
plays we begin to wonder if there is anything on
the stage quite so artificial as this criticism.
They are harmless little conventional plays, and
every one who sees them knows he is more or less
pleasantly wasting his time. No one but a critic
with a public duty to perform would dream of
looking at them in that solemn way. They van-
ish upon analysis ; they are built on patterns, and
not on plots, and nobody either likes or dislikes
them for the important reasons the critics give.

ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

On the other hand, there are a hundred small
matters of vital importance to us which these
guardians of public morals and tastes take no
account of.

No man, unless he were thinking for publica-
tion, would give a moment's reflection to the
moral effects of the typically wicked little so-
ciety play wherein we try to imitate the French
from a distance. If he shudders all the way
through, it is not a moral shudder. It is only
distaste for sheer coarseness. The result of an
Anglo-Saxon determination to be French is
usually coarseness. Critics confound their re-
pugnance for this kind of thing with moral in-
dignation. It has no higher source than the dis-
like of celluloid cuffs and large paste diamonds.
It is the characterstic of the so-called sinful
American play that the devil himself has lost
all his devilish graces. Why bother our heads
about the morals of an enchantress, in the pres-
ence of the cold, hard fact that she does not en-
chant ?

It is one of the ironies of this world that we
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dislike people most for the qualities they cannot
help, and if you were required honestly to select
the nine persons whom you would most willingly
see hanged, I venture to say that nine entirely
blameless lives would be sacrificed. Thence comes
it that the admirable objective reasons the critics
give for approving or disapproving things on
the stage are so unsatisfying. We are the most
violent when there is no reason at all, but only a
personal distinction. Abstract justice is beyond
us, and we may as well frankly admit that we are
biased on the subject of every play we have ever
seen.

In all things below the range of genius it is
foolish to talk in universal terms. Whim is a
just enough god for the small matters of every
day, and life has large areas of licensed anarchy
where truth cannot reach as far as your next-
door neighbor. Yet we approach these subjects
with a gravity which has always been the angels'
greatest joke — the sort of gravity that the
Frenchman meant when he called it "a mystery
of the body invented to conceal the failings of
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the soul." We are forever laying down the law
where there is no law, and setting up a model
when it is the greatest of Heaven's mercies to
allow all models to be departed from. We Amer-
icans are imaginative in business (where our
heart is), but businesslike in our imagination.
The aim of American playwrights is to be in-
stantly comprehensible to every member of a
miscellaneous crowd, and criticism, which on cer-
tain occasions ought to be merely a matter of
good-tempered self -revelation, seeks always to
establish a constitution and by-laws for the art of
pleasing. That is why the unedited American is
so much more delightful than his cautious broth-
er with the pen, and why the best things that
life has to offer are not yet either printed or
staged. But taking it all in all, the critics do
not come so near the stage as the stage comes to
reality. I can recall several passages in Amer-
ican plays, but not one word of the criticism.

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PRIVATE TASTES AND PRINTED
CRITICISM

After reading many pages of dramatic criti-
cism, some of it quite serious and bearing a good
French stamp, I am still harassed by doubts as
to the limits of the personal equation. Why that
air of more than personal certainty? Where is
the table of weights and measures by which plays
and players are so surely gauged? Many a critic
is so sure of his ground that he seems more like a
committee framing resolutions than a man writ-
ing down what he thinks, and he usually wishes
to save or elevate the public, direct, sanctify, and
govern it, or hold it on his knee. One of them re-
cently remarked that after laboring in the vine-
yard for fifteen years without effecting the least
improvement in other people's tastes, he had
abandoned his didactic mission with a sinking
heart. A trained and technical public taster,
and yet without a single convert, he now lives as
a private person, lonesome but correct. Most
critics believe that technical experience gives
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them a certain authority, and the worst of their
worries is the presumption of discordant and
haphazard persons like you and me, who feel
that there is a broad zone of dramatic matters
where it is unsafe for a minute to take the word
of another unless we know his birth, breeding,
family history, associations in early life, the
books he reads, his manners at table, and the
sort of wife he enjoys. What is the foot-pound
of gentility and where is the trigonometry of
grace, and why take a man's word for the charm
of the leading lady unless we know the man? It
is delightful to express one's views on these points
but preposterous for others to accept them. It
is pleasant to argue but hideous to convince, and
for my part I should loathe a convert in this field
the moment I had made him, as a mere tedious
duplicate when one of us was enough.

Current criticism seems largely an effort to
speak impersonally on purely personal affairs.
In a region of licensed disorder people still ask
for a rule. So the stage critic becomes a priest
of prejudice, a little Moses on a Sinai of whim,
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absolute where everything is relative, sure of a
right way and a wrong way where either way
will send you fast asleep, a specialist in things
that do not matter, and a moral guide through
nonsense where the deadly sins seem silly and the
devil feels too depressed to tempt. Nothing on
the stage is so far removed from human nature as
the things we read about it, and the world is not a
whit more pompous behind footlights than it is
when it takes up its pen. That is why I pause
here in a paroxysm of humility to remark that
any commentary of mine is not true for any
other person under the sun but reports things as
they seem exclusively to my round and artless
eyes, that I mean to be a mother to no man, that
sic vos non vohis is no motto for me but for
sheep, bees, pedagogues, and preachers, the Em-
peror William, the evening newspaper, and the
United States Supreme Court.

Principles may be had for the asking, but in

spite of the large population of this planet men

and women remain to-day the most inaccessible

things on it. Plays may be true to every drama-

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tic principle, run like clockwork, have a good
idea behind them, fit the audience like an old
coat, lack nothing in short that you could give
a name to. The playwright may be so clever
that you can suggest in him no possible improve-
ment except that he be born again. There are
dozens of negatively admirable plays and irre-
proachable pipy Wrights. They lack only the qual-
ities for which there is no formula to make them
Shakespearos, every one. It cannot even be ex-
plained what makes the difference between such
a play as Whitewashing Julia by Mr. Jones, and
The Admirable Crichton by Mr. Barrie. Were
I writing its prospectus I could make White-
washing Julia look the better of the two, or at
least the more novel. Mr. Jones takes the prov-
erb, The pot calls the kettle black, and by means
of it saves Julia from her enemies, but he departs
from dramatic usage by leaving us certain that
the pot told the truth. The fact that Julia is not
whitewashed and that he lets us see her to a final
triumph over worse sinners, who are also less at-
tractive, than herself makes the play essentially
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plausible and new. Besides that, it is, as the
critics say, "well built," which means that the
playwright has graciously supplied every effect
with a cause, believing that the human reason in
a debased form may still perdure even in a play-
goer.

Therein also the play is unusual. Contrast it,
for instance, with this excellent example of good,
every-day dramatic merchandise, where the main
point is whether the situations are amusing and
not how they came about: A nice woman di-
vorces a worthless husband and a nice man
divorces a worthless wife. It would be cheerful,
thinks the playwright, to make the two good
ones pair off, so in comes coincidence, like a fairy
godmother, and the thing is done. Though at
present unaware of each other's identity, it
seems that they have known and loved each
other long ago — coincidence No. 1. It seems
also that the worthless husband of the one has
been misconducting himself with the worthless
wife of the other — coincidence No. S. And so
from many minor surprises, assumed names, and
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mistaken identities, there results the typical
"comedy of manners," derived from nothing ever
seen outside the theatre, but shrewdly based on
long acquaintance with the audience within. No
one can say whether it is comedy half -drunk or
farce half-sober, and nobody cares, except the
clever people who are always waking up at the
wrong time. Several critics fretted because the
worthless husband shammed fits which they called
a low trick for the benefit of the gallery. But
there is a gallery, is there not.^^ And it has just
as good a right to its fits as the orchestra stalls
to their jovial divorces. Something for every-
body is the kindly democratic motto of a good
market play. If by chance an idiot should stray
into the family circle, even he must not be coldly
ignored.

On this plane let us make no class dis-
tinctions, and above all let us not be invidiously
thoughtful. It is the typical comedy; and the
typical comedy is the blindman's bluff of the
understanding, and the clever people are the hor-
rid little wretches who peep. If we join in the
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game let us regard the rules. If we stand
apart as public enlighteners, then let us be con-
sistently vigilant. Uproot the platitude wherever
found. Crucify the comic weekly papers.
Perish the political speech and the afternoon tea
and the latest novel and the woman's hat. Let
there be a total silence to be broken only by bril-
liant remarks. "The existing popular drama
of the day," says Mr. Bernard Shaw, "is quite
out of the question for cultivated people who are
accustomed to use their brains." The existing
popular anything is also out of the question. In
fact, the population itself is no fit company for
the clever people. If they ever saw things in
their actual relations, what a lot there would be
for them to do !

But Whitewashing Julia belongs to another
class of plays, because it bears traces of the
author's effort to set down what is in his own
head instead of what he finds ready-made in the
heads of his audience. Mr. Jones meant to be
artistic. He wished to handle an old theme in a
light, graceful, and novel manner. There is,
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however, no recipe for that manner, and though
the dialogue was strewn with his good intentions
we did not see any sign of fulfillment. It was as
good a play in outline as any presented during
the season, and as well acted. Its construction is
undeniably good, and the construction of some of
Shakespeare's plays is, as critics have often
proven, undeniably bad. But Mr. Jones has a
heavy English middle-class way with him and if
he steps lightly his joints crack. He has no
special pleasure in living, but he is grimly deter-
mined that you shall think he knows life. He
never knew an individual, but he can gather types.
Like the blind man in the Bible, he sees men as
trees walking ; and he has learned their botanical
names. With a good point he is a little too em-
phatic. His amusing things are a little too pro-
longed. He is the sort of man about whom you
feel instinctively. How like he is to everybody
else. It is a deep internal little trouble — no one
to blame but Mother Nature — a private matter,
a mere accident of birth.

The elements of The Admirable Crichton are
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not all amazing. ]Mr. Barrie merely happened
to notice that people have an amusing way of
mistaking their luck for their merits, confound-
ing circumstances with native gifts, and caste
with personal differences. So he wrecked a half-
dozen of them on an island and made new cir-
cumstances to make new men not to prove any-
thing that we did not know before, but just for
the pleasure of seeing an old truth freshly. It
is a series of elementary propositions. Deduct
from a pompous old earl what society gives him
and there may be only enough of him left to play
on an accordeon. Banish the second son of a
peer from his environment and he may just
barely make of himself an indifferent carpenter.
Lady Agatha may be by natural gifts a fish-
woman and Lady Mary just clever enough to
wait at table, and it may be that the only person
whom nature has well endowed is the butler. And
should that distinguished household be stranded
on a lonely island its members would soon shake
down into their natural places, leaving the butler
at the top. On this simple and sure foundation
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there would inevitably rise in that lonely isle a
butler-monarchy, wherein the subject class would
consist of worn-out lords and useless mistresses,
who would be as servile under the new conditions
as they were pretentious under the old. Then if
suddenly restored to their own community, they
would fall at once into their old grooves and de-
spise the butler and try to forget ; and the butler
being a man of sense would expect to be despised,
for he knows them by this time for ordinary
people, that is to say, inert, custom-made crea-
tures, who move only as they are pushed. The
idea is as common as air, and many social phi-
losophers have made books of it, weighing as
much as ten pounds each. If it seems new, that
is where the art comes in. The fancy takes its
fun with just these familiar things which it car-
ries out into little concrete surprises, proving
that human nature has no end, and the world no
commonplace. Art has no horror of an old fact,
but of an old mind to see it with.

For any artistic enterprise to prosper it must
receive a subsidy from on high, and Mr. Barrie
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starts with an unfair advantage over Mr. Jones.
With him "the httle gods" cooperated, and so he
"found a way." That is the thing that makes
the difference — the only thing that really mat-
ters— and I defy any man to explain.

These considerations (and a dozen other con-
crete instances would serve as well or better)
should impel critics now and again to lay aside
judicial airs and paternal manners and confess
that they are quite ignorant of other people's
truth, that the best things are always the least
definable, that art fails in proportion as we can
state its formulas and that the world is a play
that would not be worth the seeing if we knew the
plot. And when it comes to the conventional
drama, the cheese and garlic in the windmill,
mere social peanuts and popcorn, his emotions
are not very important. They are for the most
part harmless little circus feelings which no
words in the critical vocabulary seem to fit. And
this, as I take it, is a good safe rule for any
critic : No matter how many the swans were in his
youth, if he would grow old decently he must cul-
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tivate a friendly willingness toward a widening
circle of geese. Otherwise he will become that
saddest of barnyard reformers, the crusader
against commonplace, and the world will squeak
as it turns on its axis, and he may find himself
too serious a person even for the angels when he
dies.

All of which sounds rather devil-may-care,
but it is not. It holds true in larger matters
than the present stage. There are things on
which we ought all to agree : The Binomial For-
mula, that kind hearts are more than coronets,
the law of diminishing returns, monogamy, the
exiguity of American literature, the Ten Com-
mandments, and that Shakespeare is greater than
Alexander Pope. There are things in which it
is desirable forever to disagree : The meaning of
life, the proper way to boil an egg, choosing a
wife, which of Shakespeare's plays is the best,
and the real reason for disliking Jones and ad-
miring a sunset. No critic whose work has en-
dured ever wished to impose on others the precise
hierarchy of his enjoyments. He never was
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mainly a fisher of men, and if now and then he
seems to land some of them body and soul, they
are mostly the little ones. John Ruskin, bent
on rescue though he was, knew in his heart that
he would never have made people think at all if
he had not made them think differently. Had he
ever met his spiritual twin he would certainly
have trumped up some excuse for a fight with
him. Every true critic is academic, impression-
istic, a hermit, a leader of men, an epicure, a
missionary, and at the last analysis a human be-
ing more in need of company than disciples. He
expounds the law and loves the diversity within
the law ; writes sometimes for the good of men
and sometimes for the fun of it. And if he is
not all this, and a good deal more, his books are
buried with him. We lesser folks are not to
blame if we betray an equal laxity.

Whenever an academic writer reads a book he
thinks at once of his duty to man and hunts for
a useful lesson. When a phrasemaker reads it, he
thinks, Here is my chance for a perfectly stun-
ning stage entrance. One weighs a ton and the

ADVENTURES OF A PLAYGOER

other weighs nothing at all. The critics of the
chair, prosectors in literary anatomy, Casaubons,
commentators, biologists of books divide the field
with the harlequins. Neither class shows any lik-
ing for the thing itself. They sweat with pur-
pose and descant on pleasure with a gritting of
teeth. Mr. Bernard Shaw would die of shame if
caught with a platitude upon him. Professor
Junk would die of fear if caught without one.
Mr. Shaw, hot on the trail of paradox, will show
that Shakespeare never conceived a human char-
acter. Professor Junk, author of "Hybridisa-
tion of Fiction Forms," classifies all novels by
their "central thoughts," counts the nouns in
"Paradise Lost," shows how Poe's "Raven" was
anticipated twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the
Chinaman. In a solemn voice they bid you
choose, like Hercules at the road-forks. Are you
academic? Then you must never smoke your
pipe except for what it teaches. Are you "im-
pressionistic" ? Then you will never light a pipe
when there are Roman candles.

After living for a while among these old der-
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ricks of the academic world you grow very tired
of the uplift. Is there to be no talk among
equals? When you meet a man must you im-
mediately heave yourself up alongside and try
to hoist him? Pen and ink and a sleepless pur-
pose either to instruct or amaze, vigilant self-
omission, the habit of talking down, a close
reckoning on the public (how high this sentence
will hft it, how much it will be tickled by that),
give to our critical writings the look of a steam
roller flattening out the angle of variation. A
good deal of the work should be transferred to
the government at Washington, where it could
easily fit in under the Secretary of Agriculture,
be attached perhaps to the Bureau of Animal In-
dustry. Leave out the man and the rest is as easy
as crop reports. Leave the man in and there is
not only the danger of deviation, but of a guilty
pleasure in other people's diversity. For in
private life we allow ourselves great unconcern
and many irrelevances. We are never exclusively
gymnasts, wits, anti-imperialists, or crowbars of
the higher plane. There is a large region wherein
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we are glad to see our neighbors going their
own way. In private life we insist on having
our own latch key and dying a separate death.
It is only in print that people are less than their
propaganda and that the desire of making a
proselyte underlies every word. Print is the only
place where men are merely pattern-makers, and
where, if you say that patterns are not your
sole interest night and day, you are set down as
a debauchee, careless how many rascals may es-
cape between your sentences.

But if you cannot guide the public aright,
why address it.? It is like saying. If you can-
not reform a man, why speak to him.'' Somehow
or other, the words must come out and when a
man has more to say than people will submit to
face to face, it is customary now to print it.
Should the day ever come when the world will
neither listen nor read, there will still be a roar
of soliloquies. Strike us dumb and we shall carve
our thoughts upon the trees or tattoo our bodies
with them.

166

PART V

RIGOURS OF THE HIGHER
EDUCATION

BACCALAUREATE SERMONS

In the month of roses the newspapers are full of
unwise quotations from the baccalaureate ser-
mons which have been given in various parts of
the country. The quotations are unwise because,
when unaided by the voice or presence of the
speaker, a random passage from a pulpit oration
is apt to seem ineffective. And when you see a
dozen such passages in parallel columns, you suf-
fer a little from a sense of uniformity. It would
be indelicate to say weariness, for you know those
exhorters to be good men and true, and you honor
their motives and respect the occasion and the
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

practice. Your doubts have to do with the style
of the address and that only. It is the extreme
usualness of this style that is most striking. To
be sure, the speakers are addressing the same
class of men on the same sort of an occasion, and
you would not expect any great variations in
essentials. Nor is a usual style necessarily a bad
style. Witness the liturgies. Still there is a
limit beyond which the same phrase or turn of
thought will not serve, in spite of the vast store
of moral earnestness behind it.

Now the graduates addressed are very young
men, and most gloriously blessed with inexpe-
rience, but they have as a rule gone far enough in
their lives to have made the acquaintance of the
obvious. There are some things which a bacca-
laureate sermon should take for granted. It is
indiscreet, for instance, to tell the young grad-
uates that they stand on the threshold of life in
the presence of golden opportunities. The truth
of that statement is unimpeachable, but the time
has now come when it should be conveyed in some
other way. It can never reach any human mind
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

in its original package. Besides, there is no risk
in assuming that the young graduate knows he is
standing on the threshold of life or is in a fair
way to guess at it. Youth is very simple and
beautiful, but the mind is not a virgin forest
even at twenty-one. And the "moral uplift"
parts of the baccalaureate sermon are in especial
need of revision. The "battle of life" should
be approached with caution by the speaker as
well as by the graduate. When he turns solemnly
on him and makes his voice shake and says,
"Young man, gird on the armor of righteousness
and go forth. Go forward and not back ; up and
not down ; choose the better instead of the worse ;
aim high and not low," there is no young man's
mind within range. Moral uplift is a splendid
thing, but this particular derrick is worn out.
That is all.

A common feature of baccalaureate sermons is
the advice to go forth and purify politics. It
is rarely any more specific than this. Carry high
ideals into public life and purge away iniquity.
Is there a young man living who does not know
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

he ought to do it? They would wake up ivith a
start if the speaker told them how to do it, but
he never does. Perhaps it is too much to expect
that a man should specify. But he can at least
omit the generalities, for they do no good.
"Gentlemen of the graduating class," said a
baccalaureate speaker, "I sympathize with you
in the problems that are facing you. Choose
well, choose wisely, choose conscientiously, live
under the influence of high ideals. Live, my
brothers, an unselfish life." It will never do.
It is a case of youth, not of arrested development.
There are specific shams to be peeled off and
specific lies to be nailed, and they know it. Hack-
neyism is hackneyism, whether it is the work of
saint or sinner, and the eff^ect of it is to put to
sleep every particle of truth that it touches.

It should be assumed that a college student
knows in a general way that a high moral plane
is preferable to a low moral plane. If he goes
wrong it will not be from ignorance of this broad
truth. When he steps across the threshold he is
not likely to meet any one who will tell him in so
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many words that the low ideal is the better.
Every one is most deferential to the high moral
principle. In politics he will find purifiers every-
where. So long as he confines himself to the gen-
eral principle he will have the whole world with
him. In "the battle of life" both sides have the
same moral war whoop. That is a troublesome
point about which baccalaureate sermons are not
explicit.

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II

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRESHMEN

Now THAT September has come again freshmen
are the fruit in season, and the colleges through-
out the land are fast gathering in the crop.
Within the next few days the returns will all be
in and the seven hundred and ninety odd institu-
tions that divide the harvest will be drawing les-
sons of hope or discouragement from their re-
spective shares. Meanwhile the palpitating
freshman takes his last desperate dig at the
"horse" quite as if he were not the most coveted
of objects. Nor is it likely that you could con-
vince him that he is so yearned after. He is
prone rather to believe that he is the victim of a
discriminating exclusiveness. Did he know that
out of those same seven hundred and ninety odd
institutions in these United States a probable two
hundred would not have the heart to reject him
for anything short of dementia or debauchery, he
might take courage. For there is in certain
quarters a most unappeasable hankering after

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freshmen, as our commissioner of education well
knows. Freshmen must be had on any terms.
With a falling off in freshmen down goes the
pulse of the institution, down go the president's
reputation and the treasurer's receipts and the
professor's salaries, and the alumni's hopes and
about everything else that it is the purpose of
the institution to keep up. This being so, is it
not better that the bars at the entrance should go
down instead? Thus reason a fair number of
the seven hundred and ninety at the behest of
self-preservation in the stress of competition.

Does the rejected and discomfited freshman
think nobody loves him? Let him listen to this:
"One of the most discouraging features in our
system of higher education is the lack of any
definite, or, in fact, in a large number of states,
the lack of any requirements or conditions ex-
acted of institutions when authorized to confer
degrees." It is our commissioner of education
who says it. He calls it discouraging. That is
his way of looking at it. When a commissioner
of education is discouraged, the unfortunate
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freshman may come by his own. Discouraging,
indeed! It means the warmest and most wide-
spread hospitality to freshmen of every shade of
incapacity, a very carnival of licensed flunking.
There are scores of colleges that are fairly starv-
ing for the sight of them.

So those apparently irrelevant figures showing
the size of the freshman class as compared with
last year and the year before, and the year before
that have quite a dramatic import in certain
cases. In these cases the criterion of the presi-
dent's policy is the size of the freshman class.
If larger than last year, it is taken to mean the
progress of the college, more gifts for dormi-
tories and athletic fields ; in other words, physical
growth, and that is the only kind of growth that
a good many of the seven hundred and ninety
really care for. To ask what kind of freshmen
they are, whether they are well qualified students
or belated children, argues a suspicious mind.
In these cases it is taken as the index figure of
advancing culture. It is the result of a well-
planned and well-advertised campaign for fresh-
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men ; and if the beaming president can rise at
the alumni dinner and report the number bigger
than last year, there is joy intense and men will
tell you he is a "hustler and no mistake." And
under present conditions to be pronounced a
"hustler" by members of the alumni is for cer-
tain of our college presidents not merely a matter
of pride and pleasure but a sine qua non of their
official life.

He is a familiar figure, this educational
"hustler." You will find him in the last report of
the Commissioner of Education slightly exagger-
ating the figures of attendance for his own par-
ticular university. You will see him again in the
newspapers next summer when extracts from the
baccalaureate addresses begin to trickle in.
"Young men, you are standing on the threshold.
Go forward and not back." That is he, gentle-
men of the alumni, and you will meet him at your
annual dinner, where he will urge you to "keep in
touch" with university ideals, and congratulate
you on the completion of the new grand stand
and on the size of the entering class. Great
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things have happened under him — an era of ex-
pansion, he will say — as you can see from any
recent catalogue. Twice as many students as
last year and half as much Latin and Greek, and
but for him there would be no summer school of
horseshoeing, no butter class or dental depart-
ment, no marble natatorium, brownstone dormi-
tory, fish-hatchery or cremation plant. It was
he who said the other day that the university
should aim at nothing but the training of special-
ists. On no other plan can the university grow
big so fast, and rapid bigness is of course the
key to him and the key to educational progress —
the football key — and why the trustees keep him
and the papers print him and the millionaires en-
dow him, and the faculty waits for a chance to
prick him, which sometimes comes. Then down
he goes, but not for long. It is a land of blessed
chances with many things waiting for expansion.
Out of nearly eight hundred universities surely
some would like to swell. And the popularis aura
is always blowing somewhere (and is especially
fresh upon the prairies ) and to all punctured and
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deflated "hustlers" democracy is kind. He will
rise again if only to run for Congress.

All of which contains a moral for any one that
wants it. The freshman crop per se has no more
to do with the higher education than the water-
melon or the pumpkin crop. In the case of a
well-established college, able to hold to its stand-
ards through thick and thin, a large freshman
class is a hopeful sign for the college and the
community and the freshmen. But wherever the
big class is due to methods appropriate to the ex-
ploitation of certain brands of soap or cigarettes
there is no comfort in it at all. It is a mere rally-
ing of customers and can be done any time by
marking down the goods. The commercial test
applied to things of the spirit does not hold, and
a boom in freshmen taken by itself is sadly am-
biguous. For the freshman, like truth and good
fortune and human happiness, is altogether a
relative matter.

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III

THE COEDUCATION SCARE

Protests of certain college students against the
spread of coeducation have for some reason
aroused very little sympathy outside those insti-
tutions, and there has not been a single serious
attempt to rescue those beleaguered young men.
It is no longer possible to stir people up about
this matter. If it means that the male sex is go-
ing to be dashed to pieces, it cannot be helped.
The great majority of American men are fatal-
ists in all that regards the woman's movement.
They have no sex-patriotism, and they feel noth-
ing but an idle curiosity when they see a brother
struggling against odds. Such of our universi-
ties as have let young women in must take the
consequences. Whether the men organize and
fight, or take to the woods, or stay and fraternize
with the enemy to the eternal undoing of their
manly characters, makes not the slightest dif-
ference to the community at large. Things have
come to such a pass that not one of us would lift
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a finger on their behalf. It was not so very long
ago that a good many of us were seriously
alarmed. What has so brutalized us ?

Recently, when a university professor began
to bleat most piteously over the danger to his
manliness from the fact that there were so many
women near him, the comments of the press
were not only unsympathetic ; they were actually
derisive. Their general tone was, Let his virility
go. Who cares .f^ It sounds unfeeling, but it
fairly expresses the views of most people toward
this side of the coeducation question to-day. No
one wants to see the undergraduate courses of
all men's or women's colleges thrown open to
both sexes, but in those which are already co-
educational the male students will never touch
our hard hearts by referring to their endangered
manhood. You cannot make a man by hiding
him from women; and supposing you did suc-
ceed in keeping a small flame of manly vigor in
him, what good would it do? As soon as you let
him go, along would come some rough and bois-
terous female and blow it out.
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

This is too hard a life with too many calls on
our energies for us to be forever chaperoning our
own sex. If a man says he does not want women
in the room with him when he recites at a quiz
or listens to a lecture, let him plead shyness or
savagery, or the decay of college spirit, or any-
thing under the sun except this matter of im-
perilled manhood. Even if it were frankly said
that it was unpleasant to have women outranking
the men in scholarship or carrying off the class
honors, there would be a better chance
of gaining sympathy. Every one can under-
stand the feeling. But you might suppose
from certain appeals that as soon as women
broke into a college the men all took to piling
up fruits and flowers and birds on their hat
brims. Damaging as woman is, she is not
contagious. And sooner or later she must
be encountered as she steams along. It may
be a good thing ,for the male to see the
woman's movement at close range when he is
very young, so that he will become used to it —
like a colt to a railway train. For life has no
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

safeguards in this matter, and the world is not
adjusted to its softest denizens.

It is these considerations mainly that have
made us so indifferent toward those of our
brothers who are afraid of becoming our sisters.
Of this much we may be certain : The true con-
servative is not the man whose teeth take to chat-
tering at every change. And as to the danger of
feminization either in college or out, there are a
thousand and one worse things to worry over.
The system will never be given up out of regard
for the jeopardized male. The important thing
is its effect on the women themselves, but that is
another story.

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IV

THE TRAINED WOMAN

"No LONGER a debatable question," said the new
president of a woman's college in an inaugural
address on the propriety of a college education
for women. Nevertheless they were debating it.
Indeed only a short time before a writer on the
womanly woman had inquired fiercely, "Are wo-
men to be flowers or vegetables ?" and for months
afterwards had his eye on the sex, bursting out
in print at short intervals. Is woman growing
gentler, sweeter.? he kept asking. Or will she spoil
on our hands ? He watched her as if she were a
watermelon. And even now, debatable or not,
a debate is going on somewhere at every hour
of the day or night. Still most of us have quieted
down, believing that thought is not intrinsically
bad for women though it may seem at present
a trifle bizarre. The only trouble with college
women is their pioneering air. It seems queer
that such a commonplace thing as a college edu-
cation should confer any sense of intellectual at-
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tainment, but there are still some strange beings
with whom the consciousness of graduation en-
dures through life. As well expect Stanley to
forget that he had been to Africa. But this is
fast diminishing, and soon a girl will be able to
go to college without the risk of thinking that
she is doing anything remarkable. That sense
of being remarkable when she really was not is
what did the mischief a few years ago.

The issue between peach-bloom and the higher
education does not seem vitally important when
we look back on it now. Either extreme was dis-
agreeable, but taking them all in all there was
not much choice between the portentous new wo-
man and the fussy old man — the sort of man who
trembled for the peach-bloom every time a woman
left her house, and piped away at the sad old
warning, No charm, no husband. It must
have been exasperating to a woman to hear his
constant, "Steady there, not too rough. Be sweet
if you would be married," when she was doing
nothing worse than working for a baccalaureate
degree, one of the most moderate of human
183

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

achievements. The man who urged women to be
flowers, not vegetables, feared for some reason a
reversion to the feminine type of ancient Gaul,
and quoted Motley's description as showing how
hard it must be to manage her, "especially when
she begins gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen,
brandishing her vast and snowy arms, and kick-
ing with her heels, to deliver her fisticuffs, like
bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult."
Women of this sort, he said, "are never womanly,
and certainly not delightfully feminine." It was
a voluminous body of writing, and as serious as
anything we ever had. There was a cartography
of woman's sphere and a metric system for
feminine charm and a lot of men were doing
picket duty on the frontiers of their own sex for
fear women would steal their beards ; and when-
ever an old dry twig of a convention snapped
they said it was the breaking down of nature's
wall. It carried the "problem" into places where
it did not belong, and by meeting absurdity with
absurdity encouraged the queer leaders of the
"movement" to be queerer yet, and meanwhile it
184

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

would have had us all huddled together in mortal
dread of an irruption of unsexed giantesses.

Since then most of these timid protestants
have perished, crushed to death by their huge
wives, some say (and I hope it is true), and the
prevailing mood nowadays is not only acquies-
cent but patronizing.

Under cultivation, they will say, women often
show uncommon presence of mind and sagacity.
Feats of this nature are recorded with great care
in the leading periodicals as proof that the ex-
periment was worth making. The following is
not only typical of its class, but is so significant
in itself that I must present it at some length.
Two trained women were talking about the con-
tinuous advancement of a mutual friend, when
one of them remarked that the reason why she
succeeded was "because she is always prepared
for emergencies however great "

"Or small," I added.

"You are thinking of the magnet," was the
quick reply.

"The magnet.?" I questioned.

"Yes," my acquaintance explained. "One day

185

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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

at college, one of the other girls dropped her eye-
glasses in a narrow opening between two walls.
She couldn't reach them, and had very nearly
decided that they must remain permanently out
of reach."

"But they didn't.?" I asked with interest.

"No," answered my acquaintance. "Our suc-
cessful friend happened to remember that their
frame was made of steel. She went to the phy-
sical laboratory, borrowed a magnet, tied a string
to it, and lowering it carefully into the opening,
gravely drew up the eye-glasses."

Happily, this delicious story was recounted
to me before, in the course of my investigation,
I had visited any colleges. At each one of the
many girls' colleges in all parts of the country
to which I went during the winter and spring, I
repeated it to some person connected with the
particular institution; and invariably that per-
son exclaimed, "How exactly like a college girl !"

The significant thing, of course, is the writer's
surprise at it, and this undercurrent of cynical
astonishment runs all through that large and
peculiar portion of the press which is devoted to
women's interests. Groups of women who un-
aided have earned enough to pay their board,
who can support themselves by their pen, who
have weathered education without loss of good
186

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

looks, who have sat on platforms, but are now
sitting in charming homes, who hold offices in
clubs, successful mothers, and efficient wives,
who can write novels nevertheless, women who
have led "the literary life" and still are by no
means shattered, form a necessary part of any
illustrated periodical. It would seem that intelli-
gence had never come to beings who less ex-
pected it. How must they have rated themselves
in the past? When a woman achieves an3i:hing
nowadays, the others seem to v/rite of her as if she
were a gorilla eating with a spoon. Yet I could
tell tales of cunning far ahead of the anecdote
above quoted — deeds of the barbarous and un-
trained, deeds of the woman with pins between her
teeth, deeds of any woman, things done with a
man, with a hat, with an income, with no income,
proving that if this college girl was remarkable,
the doings of every other girl are almost incredi-
ble. It is held, and rightly held, that this useful
friend to man should be educated, but that is no
reason for disparaging what nature had already
done all by herself. Sex patriots should remem-
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

ber that even at the very start she was human,
cephalic index 77 to 88, cranial capacity consid-
erable, mistress of herself, and feeling more or
less at home with the law of gravitation.

188

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONS

The discussion of educational topics in the press
presents some interesting contrasts. Here, for
example, are two college presidents who simul-
taneously express their views as to the present
state of the higher education in this country.
One sees nothing but progress and the other noth-
ing but decline, and each makes out a pretty
good case for his own temperament. Toward the
close of the last century, says the buoyant one,
there were only nine colleges, and now we can
scarcely count them. Though some of them are
small, "most of them are eager and enthusiastic
to serve humanity." There are fifteen million
students in school and college and half a million
teachers. Millions upon millions of dollars are
spent each year in education. Studies are now
pursued that were never heard of in the old times.
Everywhere you turn there is something to glory
in, and the "bare recitals of the barest facts are
full of meaning." Put in your thumb and pull
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

out a plumb and spend the rest of your days in
hurrahing. The other man soon puts a stop to
chat. Things are worse than ever, he says. Col-
lege education is on the wrong track and only
breeds athletes and spendthrifts. Literary am-
bitions are no longer entertained. "Academic
distinction has become a matter of brawn and
bulldog courage rather than Greek and calculus."
"Harvard freshmen cannot write English, and
every college president meditates an article on
the growing illiteracy of the college student."
"You can hardly pick up a paper without finding
items headed 'College Ruffianism,' 'Academic
Sluggers,' etc." "College luxury is parasitic and
non-educational." "The undergraduate who
cannot be made to pay for good instruction is
lodged like a prince, indulges in expensive pleas-
ures and wastes far more than would suffice to
give his instructor the livelihood which he de-
serves." In the meanwhile, "the full professor
in a New York State college gets an average
salary equal to that of a railroad engineer; an
assistant professor the same as a fireman, while
190

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

an instructor is rewarded equally with a brake-
man."

The greater part of what has been published
on educational subjects for some time past is of
this character, and we outsiders who would like to
get at the truth are having a bad time of it.
But this much we know: Whatever the system
may be, if it is responsible for making men talk
like this there is something the matter with it.
There is little to choose between these two views.
It is not good for a generation's health to think
too much about its enormous strides. For whose
sake are we advertising ? The educator is apt to
catch this trick from the writer on industrial
progress. He counts up heads as if they were
steel rails for export, and computes the cost of
plant to tickle us with the sound of millions.
While under his spell we forget that it makes the
least difference what kind of heads they are or
what they are filled with. A larger entering
class than ever before, gentlemen of the alumni,
and a new endowment for the swimming tank,
to be known as the John Henry Jones swimming
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

tank. What can these preoccupied persons do
for education? They lead nowhere. They are
behind with the band reporting progress on a big
trombone. If there were a dead silence on these
points for the next ten years the higher educa-
tion would not slow up in the least. There are
other ways of growing than of growing fat, and
the over-emphasis on mere size has been carried to
absurd lengths.

But if wealth and numbers are no fair test in
this matter of outdoing ancestors, it is just as
unwise to spread the belief that we are breeding
out into illiterate prize-fighters and luxurious
parasites. The questions of college athletics
will never be answered by a man who sees items
on "College Ruffianism, etc.," in almost every
newspaper he takes up, for these items are very
rare. It is a strictly personal hallucination.
And as for luxury, the man who has money to
spend will spend it at college. There is no reason
why social differences should stop at the college
grounds. We impose no vows of poverty. It is
just as well that the college should not be too
192

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

unlike the world, since the graduate is bound to
go there. If we would make it a monastery we
should not let him out. And were the universities
of sixty years ago so very different? Men had
less to spend, but they let fly what they had, and
from the sad tales of Oxford which date from that
time, did the princeliest kind of things on credit.
Talking along these respective lines is not help-
ful. It is less the result of thought than of two
sets of antithetic emotions. With one class of
writers the human being is lost in the machinery.
The others merely feel badly and pick out a few
things to account for it.

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VI

INNER CIRCLES

There was an inner circle, I understand, within
which the late Professor Max Miiller was re-
garded as a very cheap person. Your truly
learned man looked on him as an epicure might
look on a quick-lunch counter. No doubt his
critics have taken the right measure of him.
Truth for its own sake was not always the
master of his motives. Yet he was to blame
not for popularizing but for sometimes popu-
larizing in the wrong way. Inner circles
often lose sight of this difference, and
throw out a member the minute they catch him
meeting the world half way. Huxley is not
thought much of in some inner circles, though
the stimulus he gave probably did more for
science in the long run than the labors of the
very inmost and least intelligent drudge that
ever snubbed a layman. It is well enough to
distrust the general run of popularizers — the
men who no sooner learn a commonplace of
194

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

science than they dilute it and pass it around —
but to taboo a man merely because he has a word
for us outsiders is hardly fair. People who have
had anything to do with inner circles know them
to be beset with awful spiritual dangers, of
which a certain unworldly snobbery is not the
least. "Here's to Mathematics ; may she never
be prostituted to any human use." Shall a man
dig all his days and still be in plain sight of the
crowd? It is not for the like of us to hobnob
with a scientist on the suface. It is enough to
stand reverently at the mouth of the hole and
know that Professor So-and-so went down thirty
years ago and has never since been seen, or at
most put an ear to the ground on the chance of
hearing him root. It may be a necessary isola-
tion, but sometimes it is not. That is the dark
side of this question of the inner circle.

There are degrees of technicality, and within
certain limits there is a choice. Some of the least
important members of the inner circle are the
greatest sticklers for exclusiveness. They want
to make the profanum vulgus scuttle at the sight
195

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

of them, and if they ever throw a word to a poor
ignorant outside body it almost fells him to the
earth. A recent writer on criminology, for ex-
ample, has some common-sense ideas on the sub-
ject of Lombroso's criminal type, holding that
what Lombroso cited as marks of the criminal
temperament were merely characteristics of the
race and the social class to which the criminal
belongs. But this is how the critic states his
conclusion: "Thus each exceptional subject ac-
centuates himself along lines of transmissible race
eccentricities to which he alone proves true, and
not to any exceptionally vague physio-psycholog-
ical archetype." An enterprising sociologist
will take the simplest kind of a notion, and so pile
on the socio-politico, psycho-physico, zoo-biolog-
ico, pseudo-scientific adjectives that no one will
dare look for it. Scientific terms there must be,
but why use them in speaking of familiar mat-
ters for which plain words will do as well.?
Whenever you can turn one of these tremendous
socio-bio-psychical passages back into simple
phrases without sacrificing the sense, it is a
196

RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

pretty sure sign that science is not to blame for
it, but the vices of the inner circle. To give
another illustration from the science of crim-
inology. Historical criminology, the writer tells
us, "is bio-zoological in inception and detail, and
historical as to data and outline, allying itself
with predisposing causes inherent in the race and
linking itself with primal conditions through a
long chain of antecedent biological and anthro-
pological sequences, following the well-known
law of homogeneous to heterogeneous, but with
ever-increasing distinctness."

It is not science that makes a man write like
this. It is the hauteur of the inner circle. The
thought does not come to him in that way, and
there is not the least need of these terrible words.
Science puts up no barriers of preciosity. It
is not the object of science that thought should
baffle its pursuers, even though these pursuers be
of low degree. It is the same old thing that
Shakespeare and Moliere used to joke about. We
hear little of it now, chiefly because there are no
Shakespeares or Molieres to see the diff*erence
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RIGOURS OF EDUCATION

between truth for truth's sake and technicahty
for the sake of the inner circle. It would do no
harm if members of an inner circle were a little
more tactful in dealing with the outsider. There
are times when common humanity requires that
a tomato shall be called a tomato, and not a
Lycopersicum esculentum. That is all we mean,
and it is no insult to science to say so. Mr.
Darwin acted on that principle without losing
caste. To that extent he was a popularizer,
though he was as far removed from Professor
Max Miiller as he was from the snobs of the
arcanum or the ordinary young Eleusinian dude.
Not to breathe a word against those good men
who have worked so hard and specialized so long
that they have forgotten the language. They
have planted telegraph stations on the frontiers
of science, but the wires are down and they can
only make signs to their brethren. That is a
matter of natural limitations, not of professional
pedantry. But inner circles abound in euphuists
who use words as if they were insignia of rank,
queer little masters of ceremonies and court eti-
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quette whose services to science are not worth the
price of their humanity. They should take a
course in Mother Goose. Bigger men than they
have been quite generally understood. The
native idiom is worth any man's while, and it is
a mistake to assume that it is intended for liars
alone. As to the popularizer, a democracy must
have him ; but any neo-bio-psychical person who
has never sinned against simpHcity is entitled to
throw the first stone.

199

PART VI

ON CERTAIN FORMS OF
PEDANTRY

THE DRIER CRITICISM

There is a certain unfortunate class of persons
who, whenever a new novel of any importance
comes out, must fall to and examine it for germs
and seeds and variations, and classify it accord-
ing to purpose, structure and philosophic trend.
Five or six of them broke out all at once not long
ago, some of them writing books and others
magazine articles. As a usual thing they have a
theory of development to prove. One of them
will tell you the exact relation between the modern
novel and the mediaeval fabliaux, on what date
the novel of purpose started, and how romanti-
^00

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cism and realism alternately rose and fell. An-
other proves by a hundred instances that the
development of the novel follows the usual law
of human expression, proceeding from the simple
to the complex, the physical and external to the
spiritual and invisible. A third says the whole
thing is a department of biology, and is very
enthusiastic about the study of hybridization and
"that blending of slightly divergent individual-
ities which takes place whenever a new genera-
tion is launched." By these means, he says, you
can explain Landor, Heine and Rossetti. Fancy
leaving those three men unexplained. A fourth,
who, though a woman, is made of the same stern
stuff, has studied a thousand novels in which the
story is told in the first person — "I-novels" she
calls them, on the authority of Spielhagen's Ich-
Roman — and is thus able to make some perfectly
trustworthy generalizations. Her conclusion is
that the structural importance of the narrator is
a most noteworthy characteristic of the I-novel.
This is what is known as the objective or
scientific literary criticism. The dryness of it is
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the dry light of truth. No ordinary man dare
question the facts or principles that it sets forth,
for the learning and industry that go to make it
are beyond all doubt. But there is one thing
about it that must strike any one who now and
then takes pleasure in a book. These people
lose a good deal of fun. Perhaps they were never
the kind of people to have fun ; but if they
started with a capacity for it it certainly is all
gone now. Books to them are not the means of
enjoyment as we understand the term. They are
just so much material to tabulate and classify.
A new book, if it is good for anything, is merely
a new job, and they are overworked already.
They cannot simply read it, but must wearily in-
quire (1) "What relation does it bear to other
forms of human expression.''" (S) "What are its
specific claims to eminence.?" and (3) "What
tendencies does it markedly reveal.?" Where we
common folk may go a-fishing they have to
hold some kind of an ichthyological inquest.
I do not mean that the scientific interest neces-
sarily shuts out the other kind. Some men are
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big enough for both. But it happens that a good
many of these scientific novel readers are not.

You cannot attribute it altogether to the
method. If a man's work leaves him with no more
bowels than a logarithm it is likely he was not
very well endowed at the start. Taine chased
theories of development and betrayed the scien-
tific motive in many ways. Yet his writings
bore on them the distinctive marks of an indi-
vidual mind. He had enthusiasm, prejudices and
other human flaws. He caught the spirit of what
he wrote about, and he was ten times as literary
as he was biological. So he wrote literary criti-
cism. You need not be an expert in structure,
descent and hybridization to be a judge of books
any more than you need be an anthropologist to
be a judge of human nature. In the school of
drier criticism anything like a pleasant intimacy
with a book is unknown. It is as if one should
come near enough to his friends only to ascertain
what their facial angles were and whether they
were dolichocephalic. And when you think over
the books you like you will find that what these
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scholiasts note in them are precisely the things
that do not count. They are pleased (if we may
apply the term pleasure to their scholarly emo-
tion) by the resemblances, while it is the unlike-
nesses that fascinate you, unless, perhaps, you
mean to make your doctor's degree by a disserta-
tion on the structural unity of the Ich-Roman.
Yet it is a safe bit of practical advice to any man
that if he has in his possession a book whose ele-
ments can all be thoroughly classified and traced
to their sources he should at once burn it.

How does it happen that these men are on such
formal, even strained relations with literature.?
Perhaps there was a time when they liked it, but
they had to teach it or show their knowledge of it,
and a grim pedagogical sense of duty now drives
them to their task. They bother with no ele-
ment of it which they cannot thoroughly ex-
plain. It is only the obvious that they are after.
They are bound forever to the abominable drudg-
ery of establishing an inductive basis for the well
known. And literary criticism is not literary at
all. It is compounded of science and system and
evolution and ennui.

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II

PAINSTAKING ILLITERACY

We are careless enough in our use of words,
Heaven knows, but the efforts of a recent writer
to set us right only make us hug our sins the
tighter. He is a sarcastic person who is alter-
nately amused and dismayed by the slips of other
people. Here are some of the things that he
considers slips. Speaking of someone who used
a wrong word on a certain occasion, he says:
"The incident occurred in a 'suburbs' of a large
Pennsylvania city, but the people out there are
calling it a 'suburb' yet." Again, on running
across the expression "a case of horse sense" in a
newspaper, he said he tried "to think of some
instance where horse sense had ever been put up
in a crate, box or other package that is usually
understood to be a 'case.' " Another newspaper
said something about the responsibility of editors
in the conduct of their journals. Their conduct
would be improved, he thought, if the editors
"were more cautious in conduct-ing them." "The
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government of the tongue" was another expres-
sion that puzzled him, but after reading down
the page he found that the author referred to
the *^ govern-ing^' of the tongue. In conclusion,
he says he has a notebook full of similar in-
stances.

There is no need of mentioning the man's
name. He bore traces of respectability, and may
have been already punished enough by a return-
ing sense of shame. But could anything be
worse? "Suburb" has been in good standing for
hundreds of years before and since Milton wrote
of "the suburb of their straw-built citadel." The
pedant cannot forget his Latin primer and that
"s" in "^^r&s." The race has chosen to forget.
The race is always doing things to shock the
pedant. As to "conduct" and "case," you would
not suppose the long-established ambiguities of
those two words could come as a surprise to any
one. But here is an instance of it, and it finds its
way into print. Suddenly it dawns on this man
that "conduct" sometimes means something be-
sides behavior, and that "case" does not always
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refer to a packing box. He is ready at any time
to crush a lawyer who speaks of his "conduct of
a case" with a satirical inquiry as to whether he
has in mind the demeanor of twenty-four bottles
of beer. And why not "government of the
tongue" as well as "government of colonial de-
pendencies," or anything else? It would be ab-
surd to say anything about this foolish matter if
it did not represent the attitude of a rather for-
midable class of persons. The fine flagrancy of
this particular instance is, to be sure, somewhat
exceptional in print, unless it be among the let-
ters to the editor. But it is not at all unusual
in conversation. In fact, nothing speaks so well
for the kindly forbearance of the race as the
number of these people and the large proportion
of them that die natural deaths.

If in talking with a man like this you said
something about a "standpoint," he would ask
you if you meant a "point of view." If you
asked, "Is to-morrow Tuesday?" he would say,
"To-morrow will he Tuesday." Some members
of his family would probably pronounce "pretty"
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to rhyme with "petty." All would no doubt take
infinite pains to make "tyoors" of all their
"tures," and if any of them were colloquial
enough to say, "Don't you know," the "t" in
"don't" would be spat out so earnestly that you
would dodge. But "don't" and "can't" are con-
cessions to the lax manners of the Anglo-Saxon
race. "Do not you" is the thing for true refine-
ment. It is a very gold toothpick of a phrase, a
sort of literary pocket comb.

The incorrect pedantries of conversation
would fill many volumes. They are not the least
among the numerous annoyances of education.
For the verbal prig is something of a tyrant,
and the triple-plate armor of his self-compla-
cency makes him assassin-proof. There is no con-
vincing him that his is a special case of illiteracy,
all the worse for being so deliberately wrought
out. His quarrel is with the luxuriance of the
language. He hates the liberality of our en-
dowment. The activities of words must be cur-
tailed. They must be disembowelled, salted,
skinned and dried. And if we unbend a little in
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pronunciation or elide our words, as did the
Greeks, or fall in with the sanctioned careless-
ness of the leaders of our race, he is for keeping
us in after school. He is a cold-blooded disin-
heritor of words, an apostle of rigidity and a
traitor to the best traditions a people has. The
language needs no beadle — not even on the Bow-
ery. Order is not maintained by these trivial re-
straints. They incite, rather, to open rebellion
aU along the line.

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

III

THE HAND OF PROVIDENCE

Here is a thoughtful and apparently pious
writer who is disturbed by what he calls the
naturalistic method of interpreting history,
meaning by this the reference of great historical
movements to natural causes. It seems to him
that Providence is not receiving his fair share of
credit for what has come to pass. "Has the bark
of human civilization sailed so swiftly and pros-
perously without a steersman?" he asks. He in-
stances the Greeks. Suppose they had been
placed in Scandinavia or Iceland, "would not
their genius have been wholly wasted.?" and
Rome — placed "just in the precise situation
where it had the greatest scope for the exercise
of its gifts." Then the timeliness of certain men
and things. Philip and Alexander "appeared
precisely at the fitting moment in Greek and
Macedonian history" ; Rome's power developed at
exactly the right time, late enough to avoid in-
terfering with the original culture of Greece,
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early enough to be on hand for the administra-
tion of the east; the fall of the eastern empire
"was timed with the nicety of clockwork, to take
place at the very hour when it could unfailingly
give rise" to certain momentous consequences ;
and race after race were constantly appearing
on the stage at the "precise period when they
were required." There is much more to the same
effect.

What can a man be thinking of to tax his-
torians or anybody else with remissness in this
respect ? As if we lacked for human explanation
of the plans of Providence ! It is about the most
copious thing in the language. Our school books
on history are full of it, and as to the hand of
Providence in current politics, there is hardly an
orator who is not versed in this colossal palmis-
try. If Mr. Bryan had been elected, would there
not have been hundreds to show the hand of
Providence running through all creation with a
Populistic plan ? If the better class of historians
to-day say less about the hand of Providence
than their predecessors it is a thing to be thank-
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

ful for. It argues a becoming modesty and a
kindlier view of the intelligence of their readers.
The method followed by the writer I have quoted
is common enough. Great Britain and Russia,
he says, are to be the main channels through
which the civilization of Europe is to be spread
over most of the world. This was in the plan,
and if anything in the past had turned out
differently it would have spoilt the whole scheme.
Under other conditions England could never
have become the powerful state she is. He adds :

"Familiar facts are always liable to be taken
as matters of course, and the fact that England
is an island is one of these. But if we consider
the physical causes which have made the island,
we shall perceive how easily everything might
have been other than it is. The narrow strait
that separates France and England is geologi-
cally of recent origin, and it is not, so to speak,
a permanent feature. . . . The elevation of the
land is very moderate and ... a slight further
depression would leave only a few scattered
mountain islets of these kingdoms. Again the
situation was exactly the right one. Farther
south, off the coast of Spain or north or west in
the Atlantic, the history must have been wholly
different."

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There is no stopping these people when the
wondering fit is on them. Providence, to their
minds, is always having hairbreadth escapes.
Suppose Remus had killed Romulus. Remus, be-
ing a difFerent sort of man, might not have
founded the city. There would have been no
Roman empire, and the face of history would
have been changed. The thing is endless. The
best way is not to begin, or if there must be
speculation about what would have changed the
face of history, to do it all up at once by suppos-
ing there were no human race at all. Why try
and catalogue all the things that did not happen?
Surely Providence was no more thoughtful when
he made Great Britain of just the right size and
shape than when he made men right side up.
Yet writers who would never think of marvelling
at the beneficent design that kept us from going
through hfe head downwards feel the deepest
emotion because the Angles and Saxons did not
take ship for Patagonia, and the Greeks were
not exposed to a set of influences that would have
turned them out Dutchmen. Some writers go
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

almost as deep in this philosophy as their Mother
Goose prototype — "if the moon were made of
green cheese, and the sea were made of ink." It
is almost an automatic philosophy and the least
shove makes its wheels go round. For what is it
but the proclamation of the present as the
product of the past and the damnation of a lot
of might-have-beens that you invent yourself?

Besides, it is bad manners to be constantly
praising Providence because he knew what he
was about. Some things should be taken for
granted. It was meant that man should walk,
but he need not be forever thanking Heaven for
putting legs on him, though these legs are ad-
justed "with the nicety of clockwork" and are
as neat an adaptation of means to end as the
appearance of Julius Cffisar just in the nick of
time and the planting of the Phoenicians by the
seashore. There is no sense in selecting just one
set of things to compliment. Nor does the plan
need any apologists. And it is a merciful thing
that we know less than they do about the plot,
since we are bound to read the story. The moon
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was still there, though the donkey drank it up in
the puddle. And it is the same way with the
mystery when it has been all cleared up or cut
and dried by the people who know about Provi-
dence.

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IV

NOTHING NEW

A YOUNG literary student, rushing bravely along
a well-worn path, has referred in a learned essay
to the great antiquity of new ideas, quoting, of
course, the proverb about the lack of novelty
under the sun and citing, like all the rest, his
modern instances. What did Darwin do but un-
fold the thought of the ancient Heraclitus, and
what would John Stuart Mill have been without
Hippias of Keos? Nietzsche's philosophy came
straight from oriental antiquity via Aristotle
and Carlyle, and Poe's "Raven" was written
twenty centuries ago by Kia Yi, the Chinaman,
and Ruskin spoke up for the manual arts because
St. Paul was a tentmaker. Every respectable
thought, like every valuable trotting horse, has
its pedigree. And yet readers still persist in
looking for novelty and writers are apparently
able to supply it. Why is this? asked the stu-
dious writer, the veins on his young brow standing
out like whipcords. It is to be explained, he
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

thinks, by the fact that the ideas, though old, are
often forgotten. This quest for originality, he
concludes, is not a bad thing, and the French
critic who called it the "worst disease of our
time" was wrong.

Now the ins and outs of this matter do not con-
cern us every-day people at all. It is essentially
the collegiate view of literature, and springs from
the necessity of saying to young men the sort
of things that they could pass an examination in.
Passing an examination in the pedigree of the
central thoughts of great authors seems a hid-
eous thing to most of us alumni. To be learned
in literature is such a different thing from liking
it. It is characteristic of these discussions to
leave out the one thing we care about ; that is,
the distinctive, personal marks by which we can
tell men apart. "A writer must know how to
write. This is in a sense the very first condition
of success. But so far as the present discussion
is concerned, this phase of the question must be
left entirely aside," etc. And, mercy on us, what
remains? Why, a grouping of great central
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

ideas, whereby Darwin looks like the twin brother
of Heraclitus and Kia Yi and Poe are indistin-
guishable, and St. Paul is mixed up with Ruskin,
and Plato leads Marie Corelli by the hand. For
literary purposes it is better to classify men by
their noses than by their great central ideas.

Apply this test of novelty to Tolstoi's message
to the American people during the war with
Spain. The thoughts on the nationalization of
land are Henry George's ; the doctrine that prop-
erty is robbery is Proudhon's ; the plea for the
socialization of the means of production is an
echo of commonplace socialist manifestoes; and
every one of these notions is not only familiar
but flattened out and dog-eared by thousands of
ilHterate thumbs. Then there is his reference
to the paganization of Christianity, which is
fully described in the books, and his appeal to
the primitive and uncorrupted Christianity,
which is the foundation stone of about every new
sect that is started and the substance of more
sermons than you could count. Not much would
be left of the originality of Tolstoi after a text
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

book of the drier criticism had duly classified
his thoughts. Yet somehow he is new enough to
startle and true enough to make you forget his
errors and impossibilities and the genealogy of
his general notion is the last thing you care
about. This is for the scholars of the drier crit-
icism, who of all the chapters of inspiration like
best the first of Matthew: "And Zorobabel be-
gat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and
Eliakim begat Azor ; and Azor begat Sadoc."

The blessed thing about this world is that,
however old the general notions may be, some of
the people in it are new, and they have a way of
saying and doing things the like of which you
would swear you never saw before. And you
never did. For no formula ever yet told the
whole story, and no man ever yet felt and spoke
the truth without creating it, and no work of art
that was worth anything could ever help being
novel. What a disagreeable job it must be, this
classifying of books according to a principle by
which you cannot even tell whether they are real
books or not. How much of Zola can be found
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

in Zoroaster? — compare the good and evil of
Zola's trilogy with Ahriman and Ormuzd. It is
a terrible industry. Why not own up that
books, like people, do not make friends in this
way? Powerfully disagreeable people may have
your own general notion, and if a man and his
wife stood on precisely the same platform of
principle they would be a most wonderful and un-
comfortable pair. By the time literature is made
ready for the classroom, with all its elements ex-
plained, what is left of it? The lecturer has
descended upon his subject like the tortoise that
the eagle dropped on iEschylus's bald head.

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LITERARY ANALYSIS

An author, like a bicycle, ought not to be taken
to pieces by people that do not understand the
business. In a recent paper an American novel-
ist is analyzed by a French critic, and when the
thing is done all the king's horses and all the
king's men couldn't put that novelist together
again. His most admiring friends would not
recognize these colossal sections as fragments of
his being. There is a good deal of this kind of
analysis going on in the literary journals, and it
is sometimes as irritating as certain jointed fish-
ing rods in wet weather. It is a common thing to
take some minor literary man and divide him up
as neatly as if he were a stick of chewing gum
already half cut through with grooves and then
give his qualities such big names that when re-
combined they would build Julius Caesar. There
is a lavishness of language at these times that
leaves nothing over against the day when the
critic may run across a man of real significance.
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Besides "virile fascination," the critic finds in
this harmless novelist philosophies and trends of
thought and social dogmas and Zeitgeists beyond
all count or measure.

Now, the truth is the philosophy of this au-
thor, or of any other literary man of equal rank,
matters very little, and if we had a label and a
pigeon-hole for every section of his intellect we
should be none the richer. The great point is
how well he knows his art. One reason why lit-
erary criticism is so unfruitful in this day is that
it insists on grubbing among these irrelevant
matters. It does not say of a man. Granting his
premises, is the thing well done.'' but What are
his premises? For what great principles does
he stand .f' I have known a poem to be con-
demned because its political economy was wrong,
and a novel to be placed on a pinnacle because its
author was a Populist at heart. What has this
to do with literary analysis? Chemical analysis
would be as much in place. This is the spirit
that makes such dreary schoolmen of our critics.
They ransack an author for his moral purpose.

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

They rattle off his qualities as a palmist tells
jour character. They weigh his work by politi-
cal science, psychology and social economics.
They could grade each part of him on the scale
of ten like a schoolboy's recitation. And they
think this scientific thumbing is literary analysis.
The man's power to please, his skill in that cu-
rious magic we call art, the only thing that mat-
ters, is left out.

There was poor old Ruskin. Suppose we
judged him by this standard, what would be left
of him? No man could count the blunders that
he made. He built on false premises, reasoned
like a child, painted as if he were a political
economist, taught political economy as if he were
a painter. Yet on that cracked and battered in-
strument of his he somehow managed to play a
tune that will sing in men's ears so long as there
is leisure left for music. Our Alexandrians know
this, too ; but a man has to be dead or shelved for
many years before they act on it. For living
authors they have a different test. They judge
them by their creeds or schools or party plat-

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

forms, by anything except their power to write.
They would have us believe that it is a matter of
supreme importance what Mr. Kipling thinks of
England's imperial mission, what are M. Zola's
views of heredity, where Mr. Howells stands on
social questions, and whether Mrs. Humphry
Ward is sound in economics, and they go on an-
alyzing deeper and deeper, like a dog at an
empty woodchuck hole. And when it is all said
and done we merely learn that in addition to
some artistic work that gives us pleasure these
writers have produced some text-book matter of
an indifferent sort. Some superfluous didactic
stuff that we do not much care for has been
thrown in, and this is what the analyst fishes out
as if it were the one precious thing. Perhaps
the authors think so, too, but notoriously they
love their worst works best.

A man may be almost crazy and still write
well. Some excellent ones have been, in fact,
maniacal. He may be the soundest, sanest, best-
informed of all his race and fail completely. He
may have all the gifts or just this one. Scoun-

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

drels and saints and sages, sometimes fools, have
all contributed to literature. It is with the qual-
ity which they have in common that literary
analysis is alone concerned. And if you would
see a writer at his worst take him when his phi-
losophy is uppermost. The worst thing that M.
Zola ever wrote is Dr. Pascal, which gave a mas-
terly summing up of his philosophy. The dark-
est days of Mr. Kipling have been those on which
purpose got the better of him. One sleeps most
soundly when the social philosopher in Mr. How-
ells is most wide awake. Yet all this is the
special field of current literary analysis. The
chief harm it does is in misleading the subject of
the analysis. The author is encouraged to chase
strange gods. As for the rest of us, if there
were nothing more in literature than these men
dream of, we should be reading text-books if we
read at all.

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VI

OUTDOOR PEDANTRY

Nature-lovers have found their way into print
with rather unusual frequency of late and every
little while a reviewer has had to dispose of a
dozen volumes or so of their publications all at
once. The success of this kind of writing is a
healthy sign and ought to be a comfort to the
prophets of decay as indicating that there are a
few sound spots left in us. A people cannot be
far removed from innocence when books of this
sort are widely read and when even the daily
newspapers drop wars and politics, as they some-
times do, for a wholly irrelevant editorial rhap-
sody on cock-robin or autumn leaves. The Lon-
don papers, especially, are given to these rustic
interludes. Some time ago one of our magazines
gathered up the names of our outdoor writers
and published an article on them. It is a good
showing so far as numbers are concerned. There
are more "rambles" and "bird-notes" than you
would ever have supposed, and, if reviewers are
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ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

to be believed, they are all written in the most
charming style. But reviewers are not to be
believed. No one ought to take time for many of
these books if there are passages of Thoreau
which he has not yet learned by heart. These
writers are serviceable only when they give infor-
mation. As interpreters they are of no use. For
this business we must still rely on the masters,
and how few of them there are! The real gift
was imparted to a handful so that we should not
be tied to our indoor libraries. Providence or-
dained that most of their works should fit into a
knapsack.

A clergyman goes a-fishing and comes home
well browned and ten pounds fatter. So he sits
down and writes a book full of trite compliments
to nature interspersed with a good deal of self-
congratulation. He lays claim to the most re-
fined and exquisite emotion you ever heard of —
not one particle of which he succeeds in passing
along. He says he found "sermons in stones,
books in the running brooks" (it is a pity Shake-
speare ever wrote the thing), but you get no ink-
%%1

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

ling of what they were. And because it is a good
sort of thing for a clergyman to do and shows
a fine appetite for wholesome fare the critics are
absurdly easy on him. "Such a subtle sym-
pathy with nature in her varying moods," they
say. How do they know he has it? Just because
he swears he has. So they run him in with a
dozen others whom they are praising and tell us
we must not "neglect the lessons that are to be
gained from so charming an assortment of books
as have been provided for summer instruction and
entertainment." There is no question of the
man's sincerity or of the worth of what he writes
about, but unfortunately these two are not the
only elements of good writing. Here is a beau-
tiful object, and there a genuine admirer. Yet
the net result of bringing them together may be
merely twaddle so far as a third person is con-
cerned. The critics forget this. All the world
loves a lover, but it usually runs away from him
when he talks. And so it is with some of the
people who make such an ado about nestling in
nature's bosom.

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

It is a rare man who can be agreeably articu-
late in these matters. They are hardly more com-
municable in speech than music is. Yet there
are many who will bully you for not making the
attempt or for not being deeply interested in the
attempts of others. Some of these books are full
of a sort of outdoor snobbishness, an air of hav-
ing an especially fine make of soul and being
proud of it. The writer will pity people who
do not penetrate this or that of nature's secrets
or participate in certain intimate joys. As if a
few banalities about a rhododendron were an evi-
dence of spiritual good form ! And he will tell
you what these things do for him — how they
strengthen him and uplift him and keep his
heart pure and his mind clear. "I am a part of
nature and nature is a part of me. Tear us
apart, and nature is robbed and I am ruined."
It may be true, but there should be some other
evidence than his word for it. It is indelicate to
be forever harping on nature's partiality for
you. To the open-air pharisee, half the fun of
it is in the feeling that there are so few like him.
229

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

You cannot fancy his enjoying a thing quietly
and for itself, but taking notes on each emotion
in order to write it up afterward ostentatiously.
How much of it is delight in objective nature and
how much is satisfaction with the trim little in-
tellectual outfit he surveys her with? Yet if
there is one lesson she is supposed to din into
every one who comes close enough it is humility.
In England there are signs that in certain
highly respectable magazines and newspapers
Nature is even worse treated than with us. Ap-
parently they have a staff correspondent whom
they never let indoors — a literary bird-dog for
whom the house is no place. If they catch him
in the ofBce they shoo him out with the broom to
flush some small game for the next number. I
gather from one of them that "the winter wind,
unlike the entrancing night breezes of summer,
is one of the few sounds that please even more
when listened to indoors than out. ... It
sighs in the chimney, it moans round the walls ;
it whistles sometimes, at others it roars." From
another I have learned that as a result of the bad
230

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

weather of the week before the birds were "thor-
oughly worn out and uncomfortable," and "went
to bed an hour before their time," though some
of the partridges may have sat up somewhat
longer. Some say it is the Englishman's love of
nature, and would have you think it spontaneous.
It is nothing of the sort. It is a clear case of
compulsion. The wretches hate what they write
of in nine cases out of ten. You can tell that
from their style, and it is a pity they should be
so tormented. Why try and squeeze a great,
wild, forest joy out of a little cockney heart.?

How the sense of obligation in this matter has
increased. You could follow Thackeray's fancy
in a cab. Dickens, though the sense of locality
was as strong in him as in a cat, used nature only
to emphasize pathos or punctuate joy. To Bul-
wer all outdoors was only stage carpentry and
paint. Nowadays the least essay or short story
must be trimmed with conventionalized scraps of
nature, like a woman's hat. Once if a writer did
not wish to do it he did not have to try ; but there
is no getting out of it in these days, and the
231

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

rarest gift of the generations is aped by every
one who writes. We, too, have our hypocrites
who go and live among the pine trees in order
that they may afterward lie about the thoughts
they had there — Fourteenth Street imaginations
struggling with the great north woods. But
venal Yankees though we are, we have not yet
established outdoor clerkships like these British
magazines. To be sure, in the pages of most of
our novelists the sunrise is a memory of insomnia,
and Pan wears a high hat, but the feeling for
nature is not so dead in us that we turn her over
to regular correspondents for the daily press.
As countrymen of Thoreau, it will be some time
before we are ready for those weekly letters about
the "wren so full of jollity and the redbreast so
companionable to man." Occasionally, per-
haps ; once a month if we go on sinking ; but not
once a week, unless we have a crop of geniuses.
For you might as well require a weekly epic
or a weekly tragedy in blank verse. There is no
middle class in this kind of writing, and no pos-
sibility of making over the unfit. Only queer

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

effects come from the attempt, such as those of
a serious young romancer of Indiana who de-
scribed a yellow sunset in terms of custard pie.
Better an equal quantity of zoology or botany
with all the technical terms than this constrained
recourse to nature with poetical intent. The
man of whom it was written:

Primroses on the river's brim.
Dicotyledons were to him,
And they were nothing more,

was at least honest, and might have done better
at natural description than any literary man of
merely secondary inspiration. The writers above
quoted should, if they behave themselves, be al-
lowed indoors, for that is evidently where their
heart is, and not in the highlands a-chasing the
deer.

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

VII

A POPULARIZER

The Life and Letters of Huxley show clearly the
worry and grief that he caused his friends by
pausing so often in the search for truth to spread
the knowledge of it. Stick to pure science, dig
deeper, let the world alone, and, above all, keep
out of rows — ^that was the spirit of most of their
advice to him. But having rather more than his
share of human nature, and having also a mind
which he justly described as "constructed on the
high-pressure tubular-boiler principle," he kept
bobbing up on the surface of the earth to set
matters straight there. By thus dividing his
time he may have spoiled his chance as a special-
ist, whose post mortem nimbus, I understand, is
not apt to last unless the man is sunk in the
monograph. They say he will be forgotten be-
cause he tried to do two things for truth — first
find it and then get it accepted. Had he tried
only one thing we might remember him, as long,
say, as Charles the Fat or Didius Julianus. But

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

whatever trick time may play on him — and we
know very well that some of the silliest names live
the longest — it does not seem now as if his
friends need have worried so. For the present
at least we believe he did as much for the world
as the best of them.

In a specialist's heaven he may not have a high
seat. Some of the brief biological reviews of the
century barely noticed him, and one of them ig-
nores altogether the work with which his name is
identified. But measuring greatness by depth
of research is not wholly satisfactory, since there
are other ways of serving the truth than by dig-
ging for it. If a man can popularize without
cheapening, if he can find for the law and the
cause precisely the words for them, it is hard to
see why he should be shut out from the best so-
ciety in our graveyards. And that was where
Huxley's talent lay — not in cutting the truth to
fit current demands nor in diluting it, but in
stripping it for action that it might the sooner
prevail. He was for hurrying things up, and he
did hurry them up, perhaps, by a generation. An

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

impatient propounder is sometimes as good for
the health of the world as a patient investiga-
tor. He believed that the better the cause the
better should be the expression of it, so he pegged
away till he found the words that would carry it
farthest. Thus he became a popularizer, but in
a different sense from the type of man who makes
little journeys into science in order to peddle
what he finds there, different even from the late
Max Miiller, if we may trust the critics, since
that worthy man seems sometimes to have con-
founded truth with confectionery. But the
specialists are very severe, and likely as not they
will dock a man's glory for the time he lost in
fighting their battles for them. It seems a pity
in Huxley's case. It was such a splendid and
honorable truancy. He may have served
science as well by living among men as if he
had spent his whole life among the Labyrintho-
donts.

Most popularizers being of the other sort, the
whole breed bears a bad name among specialists,
as if the knowledge of things must be forever
236

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

divorced from the ability to say them. Mr. Mor-
ley was censured not long ago for writing a
readable work on history. It was true and well
done, said his critic, but it wasted time that should
have been spent in searching for facts. Just how
much of the man must be filed away in making
the specialist.? Huxley or Bagehot, or even
Macaulay, is a better example for a democratic
age than Dr. Casaubon. For while the learned
are gathering their private hoards, a lot of de-
based coin is circulating. Suppose economic
science to-day should find its Huxley. He would
carry it as far as the doctrines of Henry George
or the Marxists. As much has been done in the
last fifty years as in the fifty before them, but
Smith and Ricardo and Bastiat and Mill knew
how to state it. We have as many good reser-
voirs of thought, but less irrigation. A man may
be a Bryanite with ridiculous impunity ; yet evo-
lution should be no easier to teach than common
sense about the currency. For that reason the
artistic clubbing that Huxley gave the enemy
may place him as high in the world's esteem
237

ON CERTAIN PEDANTRIES

as if he had stayed in his laboratory, there
being a need of the very part he accused himself
of playing, that "of something between maid-of-
all-work and gladiator-general for Science."

PART VII

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

I

THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT

The family will soon be coming back, and there
is about an even chance that the head of it will
announce her firm determination never to go to
that place again. Trying new places is a matter
of hazard save for the rich, whose choice is un-
restricted, and the fatuous, who are happy any-
where. The rest are likely to blunder in and out
of summer places, engaging prison cells in ad-
vance and facing dreadful odds in the matter of
food. There is naturally a large proportion of
failures. The unlucky ones may, as the seasons
roll past, exchange discomforts at the seaside for
2Sd

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

pain among the hills, but while there are degrees
of failure, they seldom report anything like a
positive success. Wounds heal in the winter and
hope springs up again in May, showing itself
first in a conviction that there "must be nice
places if you only knew," and later in a willing-
ness to believe lies. And the lies gather thick
and fast, coming not only from their natural
sources, but from people with whom your rela-
tions had been of the kindest and from friends
whom you had always supposed stanch and true.
Their worst treachery is in that matter of the
food. The lies about the people do not matter
so much, because as time goes on one learns the
ratio of "charming people" to the rest of the
population. Buoyant natures find nests of them
wherever they go, but experience has chastened
most of us into a reasoned calculation of chances
and we know how seldom "charming people" are
found in coveys, the keenest sportsman being
lucky if he can flush two of them in a year. But
the hope of good food constantly renews itself.
The mind is eager to believe, and the beginning
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MINOR OPPRESSIONS

of each season finds us as trustful as a little child.
Not a great variety, says the betrayer, but on the
whole an excellent table; good, plain, sensible,
simple, hearty, wholesome, nourishing things,
and plenty of them, at which the castigated pulse
gives the same old foolish wallop every year.
Good meats and vegetables, fresh eggs and fault-
less butter, the full menu of a fool's paradise,
and under the spur of an excited imagination the
contract is signed. Shall we never learn the
worthlessness of other people's views of food?
There is no authoritative body of comment on
food. Like all the deeper personal problems of
life, you must face it alone. A chance acquaint-
ance is no more fitted to decide for you a ques-
tion of butter than to pick you out a wife. It is
not a matter of absolute merit, but an intimate
and personal affair, and the butter which in-
vites him daily for three months may seem to
you to breathe a curse. It no more supplies a
universal criterion than mother's love, the worst
case of butter ever known being no doubt some-
body's darling, as you might say.
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MINOR OPPRESSIONS

Lying on the one hand, and credulity and a
total disregard of personal equations on the
other, account for many failures in experimental
summering. To be sure, there is Nature, and we
admit that the life is more than food and the
body than raiment, but even a poet would be bet-
ter if he had better things inside him — "so might
he, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpses
that would make him less forlorn." And the
family must take a different view of Nature from
either the poet or the woodsman and place a limit
on her compensations. If it did not, it would not
live to grow up. Hardships go with a wild, free
life, hunting grizzlies and the like of that, but
the family are doing nothing of the sort. So it
seems illogical that they should fare like moose-
hunters in the mountain boarding-house or be
treated like old salts in the hotel by the sea.
They argue with a show of reason that they
ought not to be pelted with all the hardships of
the wild, free life when they are not leading it.
But landlords often reason differently, holding
that where Nature does so much for the family

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

less is required of the bill of fare. These are
some of the things that sometimes bring back the
family after the summer experiment with stern
lines showing beneath the tan.

US

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

II

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR

Outwardly you may be on friendly terms with
the people next door, but, if the truth were
known, you do not think much of them. Their
ways may be well enough, but they are not your
ways. It is not hatred, far less envy ; neither is
it contempt exactly. Only you do not under-
stand why they live as they do. You account
for some things by the differences in social
traditions. They were not brought up
as you were — not that they are to blame
for that, but certain advantages that you
had were denied them. Rude noises come from
that house next door that you would not expect
from people in their station. There is nothing
that so reveals the breeding of the inmates as the
noises that come from a house. Laughter late
at night, when you want to sleep — how coarse it
sounds! That is what the strong writer prob-
ably means by ribald laughter. Then there is
that young woman who sings. What voices the
244

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

people next door always have, and what a reper-
toire of songs! Why do they never try a new
one? There must be new songs from time to
time within the means of any one, but you never
hear them next door. Years after a song is for-
gotten elsewhere it goes on next door. A popular
song never dies. The people next door rescue it
after it is hounded off the street and warm it into
eternal life. Girls begin on it in their teens and
worry it away on into womanhood. Even after
they are married off they do not get over it, and
when they come home to visit you hear it again —
"Eyes so balloo and tender," or whatever it may
be. Fancy the kind of people that would let a
young woman sing "Eyes so balloo and tender"
all through life, even if she wanted to. It must
injure her mind.

And so it goes. Everything they do shows
just what sort of people they are. Look at the
things they hang out in their back yard — and
is there ever a day when some of their old traps
are not hanging out or standing around there.?
If your things looked like that you would at
^45

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

least keep them indoors. It is not that they are
so old, though for the matter of that you should
think they would be afraid of germs, but they
were chosen with such monstrously bad taste in
the first place. What in the world do people want
to furnish a house with things like that for?
They must have cost enough, too, and for that
amount of money they could have bought — but
what is the use of talking? There are distinc-
tions that you never can make people feel.

That cook of theirs you would not have in
your house five minutes. It must surely be un-
safe to eat what a person like that would cook.
A certain degree of neatness is indispensable,
and people who were used to things would insist
upon it. That is the trouble with the people
next door — ^they are not used to things. It is
easy enough to put a stop to certain matters if
you take them in hand, such, for instance, as
those awful Irish whoops that issue every even-
ing from their kitchen windows. But the people
next door do not mind — that is the sum of it —
they simply do not mind things that would drive
246

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

you stark mad. They can sleep through their
own hideous noise, eat their own ill-prepared
food, put up with anything, just because it is
theirs. Content is a good thing and family af-
fection is laudable, but in this particular case
each goes too far. It annoys you to think of the
narrow basis on which it subsists. What can the
wife see in the husband or the husband in the
wife, or either of them in those young ones ?

Yesterday a correspondent wrote to a news-
paper complaining of the carpet beating that
went on next door. Hitherto he had thought
those people were gentlefolk. He doubts it now.
The people next door are always doing things
that enable you to "size them up." You size
them up ten or fifteen times a day. The women
in your family size them up much of tener. That
doubt of next-door gentility is universal. It is
no accident that brings that kind of people next
door to you. It is the working of a mighty so-
cial law. You are charitable in the matter. You
admit their virtues — that is, the big ones, which
nobody uses more than once a year. They are

U7

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

respectable people and well-intentioned. But
they always lack one indefinable thing which you
have, whatever may be your faults. It is very
important. The social plane always slants down
toward the people next door. One should not be
snobbish about it, but the slant is there, neverthe-
less, and you cannot help knowing it. If we
created a nobility over here the people next door
could never get in. If you ever mention these
things you do so with the utmost delicacy and
you explain over and over again that you do not
mean anything against the people. You would
not for the world let them know you felt as you
do. This is all wasted. This is the land of sub-
jective aristocracy.

248

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

III

THE CHEERFUL GIVER

The "economic man," that bloodless hero of
scientific fiction, will drop out of sight in a few
days, and personal property will be flying about
in wild disregard of the ordinary laws of ex-
change. Christmas must have been a bad time
for the old school of economists. It must have
struck them as a sort of saturnalia of benevo-
lence, a period of economic anarchy when capital
flowed into pendent stockings instead of its most
productive channels, and enlightened self-inter-
est was not admitted into decent society. It took
the starch out of logic and scandalized some very
respectable premises. It was an annual reminder
of the world's complexity and the difficulty of
putting all humanity into a few neat proposi-
tions. Most of this particular group of doctrin-
aires have since died off*, some of them of a broken
heart, it is said. The suspension of the economic
law of grab and the suspicion that that cheer-
ful philosophy is not always applicable does not
249

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

trouble us any more. In fact, in our reaction
against it, at this season we think it is a virtue to
suspend common sense and to treat givers as if
they were above all laws of reason. This is a mis-
take. The superb ethical position of the giver
may be abused. The adages in regard to him
need revision. That one about looking the gift
horse in the mouth makes him careless and some-
times injurious, and the statement that the Lord
loves a cheerful giver needs qualification. Peo-
ple will do idiotic things in the cheerf uUest kind
of way.

The gaucheries of givers are very saddening,
and say what you will, gratitude is the most
practical minded of all the virtues. A few years
ago Lord Kitchener gave the queen an iron-gray
donkey twelve hands high and with ears a foot
long, and the Duchess of Cumberland received
from him a like token of regard at the same time,
though, as befitted her lower station, her donkey
was much smaller than the queen's. Lord Kitche-
ner is a blunt, soldierlike person, and nothing of
a ladies' man, and the Soudan is a wretched place
^50

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

to shop in. But there would be no excuse even
for him if he were in London within range of
feminine counsel and should allow his Christmas
good will to take the form of sending donkeys
to all the women of his acquaintance. Yet that
is just the sort of thing some people are always
doing, and we are told that it is a sin not to beam
on them afterward. Think of their warm hearts ?
You can't do it — at least not until your first fine
rage is spent. Take the silver-plated ice pitcher
abuse for example. It is not very common now,
but there was a time when groups of benevolent
persons organized behind a man's back and gave
him a great gleaming water tank that would
yield its contents only to the mighty. Corporate
kindness always took the forms of an ice pitcher
or a gold-headed cane. No one ever thought of
anything else. This was because givers were
not taught to think at all. They had only to be
cheerful. The recipient did the thinking in
these instances — a hard, blighted kind of think-
ing about the exchange power of ice pitchers and
gold-headed canes in general.
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MINOR OPPRESSIONS

The golden rule is a false guide in giving.
Observe the motto about putting yourself in
his place, but in applying this don't project all
your peculiar whims into people whom they can-
not fit. Here is a man with a penchant for taxi-
dermy, and his way of doing as he would be done
by is to give the stuffed carcass of a great golden
eagle with wings outspread to a young couple
living in a small way in an uptown flat. Out of
regard for this cheerful giver it hangs over the
centre table, drawing bugs and scaring strangers
till gratitude relaxes its grip on the conscience.
Then it goes into the junk room. Givers have
things too much their own way and receive too
delicate consideration. They are bolstered up
by partisan proverbs in a belief that they have
no responsibilities and can do no wrong. The
harm they often work is none the less for the
polite concealment of the victims. They can fill
a man's house with abominations and secret
misery. There are ironies of benevolence beyond
all dictates of courtesy or sentiment. Sentiment
must not be allowed to wreck the home life. A
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MINOR OPPRESSIONS

man is not to be blamed for not wishing to live
amid burlesque surroundings, and that is what
it would amount to if givers persist in treating
him as if he were the curator of a museum or
lived in the rotunda of a national capitol. In
time there may be text books on the art of giving,
but in the meanwhile observe the following prov-
erbs as amended:

( 1 ) The Lord loveth a cheerful and intelligent
giver.

(2) A gift horse may not be looked in the
mouth, but don't lose your temper if he is stabled
in the attic.

253

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

IV

THE SERIOUS WOMAN

If women are really anxious for equal oppor-
tunities with men they should not make such
terrifying threats as to what they will do when
they get them. At an important meeting of the
Woman's Society for the Promotion of Politi-
cal Conversation, not long ago, one of
the arguments for coeducation was that
under present conditions the average girl is
apt to see a halo around the head of a young
man with a blond moustache, and that if
she were associated with him in classroom work
the halo would not be there. This is bad
strategy, and yet women are always practising
it, whether their aim is coeducation or the right
to vote or equality of opportunity in the profes-
sions. They always talk as if, when they had
gained these things, there was going to be a
general searching into man, to detect the creature
as he really is and then expose him.

Is this politic ? Is a man likely to stir himself
254i

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

in their behalf if by so doing he stands to lose
all the safeguards of his self-complacency ? This
practice of referring to the emancipation time as
a sort of judgment day for the other sex is no
way to help it on even in half -won fields like co-
education. The blond man's halo is no great
matter, of course, because blond men are com-
paratively rare, but it is typical of all sorts of
little halos that it would be pleasant to keep. It
is not easy to keep them, as things are, and when
women begin to look at them in that steely way
they will be as rare as the tall white hat.

Cold-blooded remarks like this do more to keep
history from opening its woman's page than is
commonly supposed. It is a cry of no quarter
to a struggling self-esteem, and makes it des-
perate. It hurst awfully to lose a halo, and if
women mean to abolish them they had better say
nothing about it.

Then there is the woman's club movement. If

there is any man left who is disposed to take a

light view of it he should be made to read, as I

have done, the official organ of the Cause. It will

255

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

prove to him at once that this movement is the
most serious thing on earth. The most striking
feature of it is the immense amount of purpose
that a woman must have about her when she joins
a club. "What is your aim to be in club life
this winter?" asks the editor of the official organ.
And here are a few of the questions that each
member is supposed to ask herself : "What is the
club going to be to me this winter?" "Shall we
enter the club to seek and perhaps find an
office? To dawdle the time away? To work
ourselves to death ?" "Or shall we enter our club
life once more with the determination to take
things calmly and not overwork or overworry in
the matter?" It is almost sacramental. Along
with intense exaltation of spirit must go perfect
self-control. Cool, steady hands are what they
need for this grim business — none of your alarm-
clock women that buzz for a little and then run
down. No man's club ever saw the like of it.
Cromwell's Ironsides are the nearest thing to it in
history. It is a gigantic but not necessarily a
hostile force. "And then let us try to make the
^56

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

average man see the value of the club movement.
He will if he does not have to eat too many cheer-
less dinners and spend too many lonely evenings
in consequence of it." Toss a word to the lonely,
red-eyed husband now and then.

Finally there is that insistent question, What
shall we do about woman? Some of us shirk it
from sloth, and others dodge it from cowardice,
but there is a grim little band of women that
neither flag nor flinch. And there is no end to
the number of the problems or their complexity.
"There is not space," said one of them, "in the
course of this present article to make out a com-
plete list of the problems which woman will help
to solve," but she had such a list in mind, and
knew that if she once could publish it, it would
greatly enhance the value of this already service-
able sex. "Marriage," she said, "is a problem in
the solution of which woman must assist," and
this was only one among many. "The relatively
minor but still most important problems of
motherhood are so interwoven with those of
fatherhood," she went on, "that the former can-
257

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

not be solved without a parallel solution of the
latter." Up, nevertheless, and at them, as they
come out in the magazines. But for us the prob-
lem of problems, the question that bums and
baffles, the damnably difficult rebus, the great
corrosive conundrum is, Why do they talk like
this.?

What shall we do about woman? Need we do
anything just now.? The hardest thing about
the woman problem is to realize that it exists.
Is there any serious danger that she will not suc-
ceed as a sex.? Apart from this slight risk it
would seem in most cases to be a mere human-
being problem after all. People are so used to
this large, loose language that nothing seems to
amaze them, and when a woman exclaims, "Come
let us solve motherhood and then expose father-
hood, clearing up the marriage question en
passant, ^^ it is taken as a matter of course. I
hold that intrinsically it is supremely queer, and
that age cannot wither or custom stale its infinite
absurdity. And may the time never come when
there will not be a plenty to answer these ques-
258

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

tions ofFhand, with the stars all winking above
them, and the horizon grinning around them,
and underfoot that ancient, ironical planet which
loves each new snapshot at its mystery as the
best of its little old jokes.

259

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

MUSIC AT MEALS

There seems to be an increase in the number of
our hotels and restaurants that provide music at
meals. Bands are playing where they never
played before, and the new places are pretty sure
to open with an orchestra. During the past ten
years the city's restaurants have prospered ex-
ceedingly, but no more than they ought. What-
ever may be said of public morals, cooking has
certainly advanced, and it has been the ideal form
of progress, affecting all ranks ; for not only
have the best improved, but, what is more im-
portant, hundreds once sunk in savagery now
show rudiments of art. Hence it happens that
the pilgrim may stop by the wayside at unwonted
places at far less risk. The zone of edible steaks
has widened with the progress of the suns. But
the music — ^that is a more doubtful matter. No
one ought to dogmatize about it, but whether
the spread of it is for good or evil is a question
to be calmly reasoned out.
^60

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

To judge from appearances, the majority of
those who eat to music are in no wise embarrassed
by this combination of their joys. Soups and
sonatas, mutton and nocturnes strike them less
as rival candidates for notice than as fellow min-
ist rants to wants. And there is warrant for it
among the most musical people in the world,
many of whom will absorb the most spiritual
music and the largest sausage at the same mo-
ment and with perfect ease. But the Germans
have nothing to teach us in the art of dining,
and it is that, not music, that is in question. For
men fall obviously into the two groups of
the eaters and the diners. The eater can
divide his attention with almost anything
at dinner. He can read, write, watch a dog-
fight through the window, or foot up his ex-
pense account for the week. If he had a nose-
bag, like a truckman's horses, he would not at
meal time lay down his golf clubs or his pen. It
is a mere mechanical process like whittHng or
folding an umbrella. On the other hand the far
smaller class of diners have learned by experience
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MINOR OPPRESSIONS

or tradition that it is an independent art, and
though they may not practise it proficiently they
recognize its existence and respect its rules. The
least epicurean among them is hurt by certain in-
congruities. He does not want his favorite poem
with his roast. It is no time for a high spiritual
appeal. Charles Lamb went so far as to object
even to saying grace at a good dinner, holding
that it suited only a meagre or precarious meal.
If not a poem, why a musical composition.?
The more distractingly beautiful it is, the worse
it is for the business in hand. It is a ridiculous
sort of person that wants much sentiment at
meals. Joseph Sedley is the type. All this is
on the assumption that the music and the cookery
are both good. The man who would serve both
masters either closes his ears and eats merely or
spills things and half chews, to say nothing of
the various accessories of dining which are neg-
lected or botched.

But if the music is bad, which at present is

generally the case, then there is no defence save

that old one of giving the public what it wants,

262

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

and this has nothing to do either with morals or
with the principles of art. Things have come
to a pretty pass if there is to be no more talking
at meals. People do it better then than at any
other time, and even if they do not do it well
you can stand more from them. It could be ar-
ranged easily enough, if the restaurants pro-
vided one or two muffled or sound-proof rooms.
At present the blasts of the band not only domi-
nate every nook and corner, but they have a
devilish way of concealing the thing so that you
are as likely as not to sit down in its very jaws.
Henceforth the intimacies of private conversation
must compete with merciless things in rag-time
accentuated by a horn, for some restaurants have
introduced wind instruments, though as yet there
are no drums. These may come in time, along
with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery and
dulcimer, if nothing is done.

Not to imply that the combination of music
with dining is theoretically impossible, but com-
posers have not had that in view. They
have applied their genius to love, war, re-
263

MINOR OPPRESSIONS

ligion, seafaring and the dance, but as yet
there is nothing that can be called distinctively
meal music. It comes to us, therefore, re-
plete with other associations which are necessa-
rily out of place. It is as absurd to eat to a war
song as to dance to a requiem mass. Simple, un-
obtrusive meal songs are what we need, a little
potato cantata, say, or a fugue that will go with
the beans.

264

PART VIII

THE BUSINESS OF WRIT-
ING, AND ITS GLORY

LITERARY REPUTATIONS

I ONCE read an article on "Disappearing Au-
thors" chiefly because the title caught me, but to
my disappointment I found that the writer had
nothing to say beyond a mere expression of won-
der at the disappearance of certain authors
from the popular view. A genuine attempt to
find out why certain once popular authors have
disappeared would be most interesting, but there
is a line of inquiry which is still better worth
while.

Suppose a man of rich literary experience
would frankly tell what he knows about the non-
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

disappearance of certain authors who really
ought to disappear. How do they keep from
disappearing? There's a thing worth knowing.
How to make a reputation work for you and
pay your coal bills and seat you high in pleasant
places where you don't belong ; how to create the
illusion of importance and keep it up at the least
cost — that is a royal art whose secrets are worth
digging for. For some reason we moralize about
such cases, and, having caught an author at the
trick, we feel it our duty to be indignant or at
least contemptuous. We take this duty too se-
riously.

We sneer at a certain type of author because
he keeps himself before the public as if he were
a soap. But why in the world should he not.f*
Why is it so much worse to work directly on a
reputation than to work indirectly for it? We
have no right to blame people just because they
have not an ascetic ideal and are not bound up in
their art, with no grosser earthly wish than a
faint hope of some day having a handsome tomb.
To take a spindling reputation, and by watering
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

it and spading the roots and killing the bugs on
the vines, turn it into a fat garden esculent for
the nourishment of yourself and family, is some-
thing of a feat. There is no use in affecting to
despise it. The man who can do it has a rare
skill and a certain hardiness of character that
appeal to one's respect. They are not literary
qualities, but they are mighty in their way, and
the rewards are fairly won. To coddle a young
reputation is one of the most tiresome and ex-
acting jobs in the whole world. A man with a
real fondness for his work will not bother with it.
Any one who does bother with it surely earns his
pay. Think what it means.

A literary reputation without much to go
upon — and that is the kind I have in mind — is
the most rickety, balky, ill-balanced thing im-
aginable. It needs incessant care to keep it from
running down or falling over or having holes
punched in it by the critics. A man must live
with every sense on the stretch for opportunities
to advance it. No means are too humble or labo-
rious or remote. Do you suppose it is pleasant
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

always to be delivering addresses on birds before
distant kindergartners' meetings or travelling
through the middle west of a hot June in order
to figure on commencement platforms and ad-
dress graduating classes on the superiority of
high ideals over low ideals? That is a part of
the work. So is the reading from your own books
and the being interviewed about the influences
that made you the man you are, and the com-
mittee work, and the secretaryships, and the long
talk at the ladies' afternoon club, and the insti-
gation of the paragraph, and the praise of
kindly reviewers, and the heading ofl^ of critics,
and the writing of timely letters to the press,
and the admiring of other people's books so that
they will admire yours. A man does not do all
this for the fun of the thing or for the mere
gratification of conceit. It is business — a grim,
inexorable business — and precisely the kind that
is most irksome to the man of literary tastes.
The artist in publicity has no easy time.

Why, then, begrudge him what he earns .f*
There is nothing more unreasonable than the tone
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

of bitterness with which men with some real gift
for their calling refer to the successful persons
of this class. As well grow angry at the success
of a green grocer. Yet from Virgil to Pope, and
from Pope to Byron, there is an unbroken chain
of sarcasms about these exasperatingly indus-
trious people who have earned good wages and
filled unmarked graves. And nowadays it is the
commonest thing in the world to hear people say
with an aggrieved air, "Look at So-and-so.
There is absolutely nothing in him. Yet
see how he keeps himself before the public, and
see how he gets on." As if the fact that there
isn't anything in him didn't make it all the more
wonderful and interesting that he should get on.
The acrimonious comments upon the methods of
Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. Hall Caine and who-
ever may be their analogues for the moment over
here are absurdly out of place. People like that
are not toiling for literary ends, and they do not
have the pleasure of their craft. To them the
dull grind of literary work is never alleviated by
the consciousness that the work is good. As a

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

compensation they should be allowed to possess
in peace the objects that they seek by such as-
siduous and irksome methods. The man who likes
to write has no quarrel with them. On the other
hand, the curious art that these people have mas-
tered is worthy of his dispassionate study.

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II

THE PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS

The queerest kind of writing we have nowadays
is that of the men who burst out every httle while
and say sweet things about every living Amer-
ican writer they can think of. I have read an
account in a magazine of an imaginary journey
from Indiana to the gulf, in which the writer
pays a compliment to every local colorist on
either side of the railway. "I kiss my hand to
the whole genial and lovable lot," he says, as he
takes leave of some district where the tracks of
minor writers are particularly fresh and thick.
And here is J. L. Jones's land, and there shines
R. B. Smithson's country, and yonder loom the
mountains sacred to J. Cox, Jr., and this valley
is where W. T. Smiles "blows his flute-tunes."
Beyond the sky-line is the home of a magazine,
while far to the southward the young author of
certain wondrous stories "lives quietly unspoilt
by sudden and well-deserved fortune." And
"dear Uncle Remus" peeps at him from Atlanta,
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

and S. M. Pike warbles at him from Tuskaloosa,
and here is a nest of "low-country geniuses," and
there is where he met a "charming poet" years
ago, then "a bright-eyed boy full of dreams and
rhymes." This sort of thing happens, as I said
before, every little while. No matter how minute
the bard or how imponderable the novelist, his
greatness is found out.

Some say it is a kind of bribery, a lie for a
lie and a gush for a gush. This theory, like that
of most motive-diggers, goes too deep. It is
oftener a mere outburst of miscellaneous affec-
tion, the writer actually having a heart in which
everybody is made welcome like the lobby of an
American hotel. And the chances are that he
would tell you that he is encouraging literature,
as if literary appreciation consisted in swallow-
ing everything whole. Of course there is noth-
ing bad about it, but the American reader is apt
to feel as he does when he sees Frenchmen kiss
each other. And it is not good for any class of
men to have too much of it, even when they like
it, least of all writers, who become idiotic under

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

flattery sooner than any other set of people in
the world. Probably they do not care so much
about it as is generally supposed, for one does
not value even a dog if he wags his tail for every-
body, and it is the same way with a critic. But
it is not a safe practice in the present state of the
arts. We see the effects of it in the number of
American writers who reach a certain level of
attainment and then stop. Why should they go
on when there are hundreds telling them that they
have reached the top ? Should not a writer take
it easy when he is already "superb" ? There is a
long stretch in a writer's career where the mo-
mentum of his past successes will carry him
along. His muse is coasting, as you might say.
That is the time when the critic should do any-
thing to wake him up — throw stones at him and
make him pedal. It looks unfeeling, but it is
really for his good. There are so many ways of
capitalizing a reputation that the temptation to
knock off work is almost irresistible. When a
man reaches the point at which he can live hand-
somely by reading from his poems or signing

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

advertisements for soap, gentle treatment will not
suffice. The old-fashioned rawhide of Macaulay
or Jeffreys may be the only thing that can save
him from himself. Mistaken softness, like that
of the writer quoted, is bad for us and for them.
Sixty-five living American novelists all destined
for posterity, said a critic not long ago; hardly
a state in the Union without a superb poet, said
another; every corner of the country provided
with a gifted local colorist, said a third. And
each was a respectable, middle-aged person with
private preference in the matter of friends, wives,
tobacco and a host of other things. It is a
strange habit of mind.

There must be a point beyond which the praise
of an author cannot go without making him
doubt the truth of it or the worth of it. In
defiance of many great authorities on human
nature I hold that most men do discern a divid-
ing line between appreciation and gush and feel
vaguely uncomfortable when that line is passed.
The limit may be indefinitely remote, but there
is a limit. Present literary usage ignores it alto-
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

gether. It is in thorough accord with this usage
that a hterary journal will say of a new book
that even before opening the covers you may be
sure one of the wonders of the world awaits you.
"Here will be no blurred or slighted words. . . .
Here will be the finest and best of which the au-
thor is capable. Nature herself will be here.
Here will be supreme artistry of style, little
miracles of observation," and so forth. You may
parallel it in almost any column of literary com-
ment. It is the way the literary people lay it
on nowadays when they like a man. They some-
times do it just because they like his publishers.
In this instance the subject happens to be a
writer who deserves well of us, but that only
makes the matter worse. The intelligence that
fits him for the work he does must sharpen his
disgust at this absurd overrating of it. It is no
compliment to an author to throw away all stand-
ards and abrogate all common sense in talking of
him, and whatever we may think of literary van-
ity the most self-esteemed of writers does make
distinctions as to the source of praise. He values
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

most the kind that is accompanied by some evi-
dence of a sound mind.

It is probable that sense persists in an author
longer than it is supposed to be. I do not share
in that low view of authors which is so prevalent
in the literary periodicals. It is seldom that an
author shows his claws and spits when you stroke
him, but it does not follow that he is totally in-
different to the personality of the stroker or to
the kind of stroking. That is where he differs
from other kinds of pets. A cat would as lief
be fondled by an idiot boy if he were good to it.
An author would not. This may sound elemen-
tary, but it is a fact that is utterly unknown to
hundreds of contributors to current literary com-
ment. We sometimes hear the matter discussed
from the point of view of the reader who may be
disappointed or misled, and may complain that
criticism has fallen on evil days. But no one
opposes it for the author's sake. He is supposed
to be pleased by it. He is a man and a brother,
and we have no right to assume that he is not
above it. When we write of him as if he were a
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

new make of motor car and we owned stock in the
company, it does not always make him happy.

If possible one should rid himself of that
cynical view of human nature as always and
everywhere at the mercy of the flatterer, however
unskilful he may be. Tell any plain friend of
yours that his beauty makes you glad and he
will lose patience with you. Compliment any
cross-eyed girl on her lovely orbs and she will
fly out at you. To a certain extent this rule ap-
plies to authors, though the limits are more elas-
tic and it is rare that they openly revolt. Here
and there an honest author is made to feel very
sheepish by those gorgeous offerings of praise.
"Supreme artistry of style," "miracles of obser-
vation," "rapture," and "pure dehght" must give
modest merit something of a turn. What is left
over for the out-and-out divinities? One should
keep a few hosannas for the next world. Au-
thors are not all Bunthornes, and they have some
sense of relative values. They know the differ-
ence between the critic with a standard of his
own and the reviewer whose sole outfit is a vocabu-
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

lary like a billboard. They know it, and many
of them suffer under certain kinds of eulogy.
But the pity of it is that they suffer in silence.
They reply to their critics often enough, but to
the men who praise them foohshly they say
never a word. If they would burst out on some
rapturous appreciator once in a while and shake
him in the full public gaze, it would be a good
thing all around. It would help to remove some
misconceptions.

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III

THE PHRASEMAKER

An admirer of M. Emile Faguet quotes a string
of his phrases to illustrate his epigrammatic
style. Some of them are worth repeating as
types of what are sometimes considered spark-
ling or incisive sayings. Of Gautier, M. Faguet
says, "He sets out from nowhere and just there
he arrives ;" of Voltaire, "The prince of wits be-
came the god of imbeciles ;" of Balzac, "He has
no wit at all." It is especially hard to see why
the last one should have been picked out, but it
appears to be highly prized by connoisseurs,
and, for that matter, none of them will seem won-
derful to the ordinary mind. There is a queer
standard for quotable sayings just now among
critics, and the simplest sort of statement may
turn out to be an epigram. France has always
been apt to sacrifice too much to her guilty love
of phrases, but of late these phrases seem to have
deteriorated like her alcoholic drinks. A couple
of phrases still intoxicate a Frenchman, as
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

Chateaubriand complained in his day, but he is
content with a cheaper brand. And ever since
a knot of English playwrights and authors be-
gan some years ago to imitate this trick of
Frenchmen at their worst, the phrasemaker has
done considerable damage over here. Many
honest reviewers have been set gaping by simple
little verbal shifts that should be as easy to learn
as punctuation. Any writer who turns out a fair
number of brief cynical sentences, chiefly about
love and marriage, is sure to be pointed out as
the possessor of a brilliant style.

Why is it that the phrasemaker so often miser-
ably fails of eff'ect? He is an industrious per-
son, and industry ought to tell here as well as
anywhere else. You cannot explain exactly that
impression of artificiality, but it is as unmis-
takable as blondined hair. For one thing, the
phrasemaker betrays an undue consciousness of
words, which is quite as fatal as an undue con-
sciousness of clothes. When a well-known writer,
lecturing on the stage, said that the modern play
was a compound of "devil, drivel and snivel,"
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

everybody knew that he worked like a Trojan
for that phrase and valued it very highly, and
hoped it would be noticed and perhaps envied a
little by other phrasemakers who had not said it.
For any one who has seen much of phrasemakers
knows how they smack their lips over their own
good things and how a shade of regret passes
over their faces before they give the successful
rival his deserved applause. One knows, too, that
those airy little cynicisms that are tossed off on
the spur of the moment have been hammered out
most painfully long before.

But the labor spent on them is not the main
thing. It is the fact that something about them
lets you know the labor has been spent. You can
not cherish any illusion of spontaneity. Yet that
is just what one wants to do with a work of art.
It may be that a man of real gifts as a writer
will toil four days and a night for a fit word ; but
that does not mean a fit word for his audience,
but only for his own idea. This process the
phrasemaker exactly inverts. He does not care
a rap for the thought or the fact or the real look
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

of the thing he is trying to describe. He will
sacrifice any part of it to a phrase that sounds
well. So every sentence is a sort of compromise,
and never really means all it seems to. He is con-
stantly changing his mental route in order to
take in catchy phrases. Then the best half of
his mind is always on the public, wondering if
this or that thing will not strike them as being
pretty good. Worse than that, he stores up in
his head a lot of little antithetical jingles or in-
verted truisms, thinking he will some time use
them as impromptus, and he does use them, too,
the cold-blooded old humbug.

It is the most insidious vice of the literary
temperament, and critics generally do not suffi-
ciently warn people of the danger. Mr. How-
ells makes one of his heroes jot down his happy
phrases in a note book in the hope that they will
figure in some future work of his as literary
gems. Mr. Barrie makes one of his characters
do the same. Neither of these people ended
badly, as they ought to have if the writers had
been conscientious. They were represented as

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

merely taking a legitimate step in their literary
career, and they were fairly successful. It was a
bad moral. Outside books they would have be-
come phrasemakers and would have attained no
higher place than that which Oliver Wendell
Holmes sank to a few times in an otherwise blame-
less life. What a difference between the phrase-
maker and the man whose thought insists on the
words and gets them and who has no clot of ink
on his brain.

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

IV

THE PURSUIT OF HUMOR

While we Americans can never have too much
humor, we can hear too much about it. I once
followed a long controversy on the subject in the
newspapers, especially on the question whether
women ever possess this quality in their own
right. It was a very solemn affair and a little
tedious. Running through it all was an under-
current of irritability, for these people would
insist on citing cases in point, and just as soon
as any one is rash enough to illustrate what he
means by humor all hope of a peaceful discus-
sion is gone. It is a rule alike for man and au-
thor never to illustrate in this matter. Disap-
pointment is sure to follow, and sometimes hate.
Even George Meredith becomes an object of
scorn when he gives us samples of Diana's jokes.
A definite promise of humor is always irredeem-
able. Then there was an extreme jealousy among
the disputants lest any one should seem to be
claiming more than his share. First one would
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

come out with a scientific definition of it and a
general air of mastership. Then another would
show him up as an impostor, and in so doing try
and give the impression that he had a rather neat
turn for it himself. Like all discussions of hu-
mor, it was strenuous and was accompanied by
the sound of heavy blows.

Now it is the commonest thing in the world to
hear people call the absence of a sense of humor
the one fatal defect. No matter how owlish a
man is, he will tell you that. It is a miserable
falsehood, and it does incalculable harm. A life
without humor is like a life without legs. You
are haunted by a sense of incompleteness, and
you cannot go where your friends go. You are
also somewhat of a burden. But the only really
fatal thing is the shamming of humor when you
have it not. We have praised it so much that
we have started an insincere cult, and there are
many who think they must glorify it when they
hate it from the bottom of their hearts. False
humor-worship is the deadliest of social sins, and
one of the commonest. People without a grain
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

of humor in their composition will eulogize it by
the hour. Men will confess to treason, murder,
arson, false teeth or a wig. How many of them
will own up to a lack of humor.? The courage
that could draw this confession from a man would
atone for everything. No good can come from
the mad attempts to define humor, but there
might be some advantage in determining how
people should behave toward it. The first law is
that humor is never overtaken when chased, or
propitiated when praised. It is the one valuable
thing which it is worth no man's while to work
for. If this could only be learned, one of the
gloomiest and most nefarious of industries would
be banished from the world.

So, whether it is a man or a woman, or a
weekly paper or a department of a magazine, the
best advice in case of a deliberate attempt in this
field is to give it up altogether. No one with any
tenderness of heart wants to be the witness of that
awful struggle. When the laborers in this vine-
yard take pains they always give them. That
is the unhappy result of these discussions and of
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

our indiscriminate praise. Heavy-footed per-
sons start off in pursuit and the underbrush of
light literature is always crashing with the noise
of their unwieldy bodies. What is gained by
these periodical battues? No one ever bags any-
thing, and the frightened little animal is more
seldom seen than ever. People should be more
cautious in what they say about humor. If there
were less said about it there might be more of
the thing itself, for the anxious seeker ransacks
these discussions for guiding principles and
starts grimly off on the trail. He becomes a
quasi-humorist with a system. Is there any-
thing worse? In spite of the service which real
humor renders, one may honestly doubt whether
it offsets the injuries committed in its name.
There are people whom nature meant to be
solemn from their cradle to their grave. They
are under bonds to remain so. In so far as they
are true to themselves they are safe company for
any one; but outside their proper field they are
terrible. Solemnity is relatively a blessing, and
the man who was born with it should never be
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

encouraged to wrench himself away. A solemn
mind out of joint — that is what happens when
the humorous ambition o'erleaps itself. It is the
commonest of accidents in this hunting field.

And another rule worth observing is that
humor never works well when harnessed to a
grudge. A writer tried to put it to this use only
the other day. His resolute attempt to make fun
of his political enemies took the form of mention-
ing them one by one and remarking in each case
that they were "positively funny." People often
refer to others as "positively funny" when what
they really want to do is to garrote them ; as if a
thing conceived in darkness and shapen in malig-
nity became humor by the invocation of the name.
This is worse than the ordinary style of pursuit.
It is the press-gang method.

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V

THE TEMPTATION OF AUTHORS

The devil does not have to take the author to
any mountain top in order to tempt him. It is
much simpler. He merely sends around a smooth
agent with orders to make a contract with that
author on any terms — on no account to come
away without the promise of an article or a book.
We seldom hear what really goes on at these in-
terviews, but their general results appear plainly
enough from the publishers' lists and the files of
the magazines. It does not seem as if the success-
ful American author could refuse many jobs.
The bulk of what he writes and the nature of the
topics he writes on indicate that by the proper
means he can be urged to a pretty smart pace in
the matter of turning out copy. The beginner
always dreams of the blessed day when the pub-
lisher will have to seek him, not he the publishers,
and he usually pictures himself as repelling
many of them with some sternness, for of what
use is success if it does not enable you to choose
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your own time and your own subjects and break
away from the odious bondage to the pot-boiler?
Obscure merit glows all over at this view of him-
self repulsing great crowds of publishers and
editors with a few trenchant words about his ar-
tistic integrity. The chances are he has quite
a collection of polite sarcasms stored up
against that day — things which would look
rather well in print in case the newspapers
should report them, as they undoubtedly
would, in spite of his reticence about the
affair.

But the temptation is too subtle and too many
good men have succumbed to it to warrant this
high confidence. The constant draining of our
well-known authors is one of the saddest things
in current literature. Apparently there is no
age and no degree of success that is safe from it.
You might think that toward the close of a long
and honorable literary career a man would feel
entitled to the luxury of writing only when and
what he pleased. Yet no sooner does he reach
that point than he pours out a perfect flood of
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articles and interviews on subjects that it must
bore him to death to think of. You find him dis-
coursing in any kind of newspaper or magazine
about things that no unfettered human mind
would linger on for five minutes. The success-
ful author is like the department store. There
is no corner of periodical literature where you do
not see his delivery wagon, and there is no end
to the variety of goods delivered. Sin, free sil-
ver, mother's love and the books that helped him,
success, football and the fear of death — any-
thing under the sun seems successively to at-
tract that serviceable mind. That he really
would write on those things if left to himself few
are so cynical as to believe. Good authors are
not by nature rapid-firing. If they become so,
you may be sure somebody has been tampering
with them. An author is like a clock. Let an
editor fool with him and set him to striking all
the hours at once and he is out of order forever
afterward.

An enterprising editor once took it into his
head that the public would be much interested in
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reading the answers of a number of persons, each
eminent in his line, to the question, What do you
fear most? So he arranged a "symposium" of
milHonaires, dancers, actresses, railway mag-
nates, politicians, authors and other worthies,
each of whom contributed an essay or an inter-
view on this subject. Thus the eager public had
a chance to compare the fears of the successful
politician with the fears of the man who had
made his fortune in steel. The author who took
part in this brilliant affair — and he was one of
the best we have — supplied an essay to the ef-
fect that young people feared death more than
old people, and that old people feared the loss
of money more than young people, and that fear
was an attitude of mind that tended to produce
cowardice. What did it mean.^^ Merely that
something had to be written. No mind, how-
ever strong it may have been at the start, can
hold out when it is treated like that. A man's
whole soul is in danger of being waterlogged
when he dilutes his thoughts to that ex-
tent.

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The danger in spreading one's self thin is that
the time surely comes when it is done uncon-
sciously. A man thinks it is his thought that is
flowing on like that when it is only his ink.
There are few people to warn him because there
are few that know the diff*erence. People gen-
erally do not realize that authors are deliquescent
and should be kept in a dry place. Then the
temptation to the author assumes such virtuous
form. There is thrift, for instance. It is a vir-
tue which we humble folk may safely strive for.
But thrift ruins more authors than all the vices
put together. As a man he may have as hand-
some a set of private morals as you ever saw,
and yet as an author be going to the dogs at
lightning speed. Journeywork does the thing
oftener than either opium or absinthe. Can the
"muse" fill orders every day? If it does, how
does it differ from that despised thing, jour-
nalism.? That the majority of writers should
do this sort of thing implies no waste at all. If
they waited all their lives probably nothing bet-
ter would occur to them. But that the mind of
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an estimable author should be for rent for every
purpose is a wicked and incongruous thing. It
is like the chartering of a United States battle-
ship for every clam bake.

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VI

THE JOURNALIST AND HIS BETTERS

How FOND people are of trying to define the
boundary between journalism and literature.
There is never a time when some writer is not
pegging away at it. Failure cannot discourage
or reiteration stale, and we may as well expect
to see the same thing tried in almost the same
language every day for the rest of our lives.
In one of the recent attempts the investigator
decides that the difference between journalism
and hterature is that, while journalistic work is
done with the expectation that it will soon perish,
literary work is done "in the high hope that it
might be eternal." This definition has the merit
of perfect clearness as well as ease of applica-
tion by squarely dividing the two according to
the self-confidence of the writer. If he is the
kind of man who is tolerably sure that he and
eternity were made for each other, he is a literary
person. If he suspects that the eternal may have
no use for him, he is a journalist. Now, there is
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no use in a newspaper man's trying to debate this
matter. He is bound to get the worst of it. It
is a reckless thing to stand up against a man
who knows he is eternal and all that. Still there
are a good many light literary characters who
may have some misgivings about their eternity,
and these he dares address, though, of course,
with deference, for he cannot conceive of any-
thing nearer eternity in his own case than the
intervals between stations on the elevated road.

To these literary persons he feels drawn by the
consciousness of a common destiny. Apart from
the natural enthusiasm of their respective widows,
oblivion in each case will set in about four days
after death. There are no class distinctions in
the land of the forgotten. As between the lum-
ber room and the waste basket there is little
choice. But while the doom is precisely the same
for the majority of each profession, the news-
paper man has this great advantage. He knows
what this doom will be, and is ready for it, and be-
does not waste five minutes of his life in worrying
about it one way or the other. At least he is not

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laying up for himself a disappointed ghosthood,
and it is pretty certain that the shades of some
exceedingly literary persons will be terribly an-
noyed by what is going to happen to their works
after death. And there is another burden that
the newspaper man is free from. He does not
have to talk in such a very large way about his
work as art, or to feel oppressed with that sense
of responsibility for nature's priceless gifts. Be-
ing without worries of this kind, he has more
chance to meet people on equal and agreeable
terms. That is the great thing about being un-
literary and uneternal. You do not have any of
those dreadfully serious duties toward yourself.
You are not obliged to sing psalms to the holy
things inside you or to act as if you were a special
little ark of the covenant for something that no
one but yourself knows the value of. That leaves
you leisure and a light heart — a low level, but
with its humble joys. A newspaper man does not
envy the general run of authors. He would be
scared to death by the consciousness of all that
talent. Indeed, if he should ever feel inside him
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what certain literary characters sometimes call
their "muse," he would see a doctor and take
something for it.

For if there is one thing in the world that
would embarrass an honest journalist it is the
obligation to exhibit a handsome diction with
never a single fact or thought to hang it on —
to keep a sort of show window of word millinery
as a sign that first-rate literary work is done
inside. But people who say they have the
"muses" do not seem to mind this sort of thing
in the least. Thought is only a clothes-line to
them, anyhow. It is not wise for the people who
are just across the border to sniff so at the news-
paper man, lowly though he be. What is the
use in their rigging things out for eternity when
they cannot reach the middle of next week.''
The newspaper man cannot make his words sing,
as Stevenson said, but at least he is spared the
awkwardness of being the only person who
knows that they are singing. And since words
will not always sing, why is it not a good plan
even in light literature to have an idea or two
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to fall back upon ? And if you have not an idea,
find a fact. Literature should not be so light that
you do not feel it. Surely there are many au-
thors who are merely journalists of a slower
breed. The journalist is not as a rule sensitive,
but he does not believe that there is an aristocracy
of failure. What has eternity to do with the rank
and file of either class.?

When the two professions have so much in
common it seems foolish to be bothering about
boundaries. It would be better to unite against
the common enemy of both. There is a kind of
man who has no business in either. He is the
man with the inveterate vice of having nothing
to say. He is superfluous even in a Sunday issue.
He confounds tenuity with refinement, and pub-
lishes a volume on the strength of one etiolated
idea. Say what you will about style, mere gram-
mar will not make an author, even if the gram-
mar is superb. A literary aspirant once wrote to
a publisher that she could write well if she only
had ideas. This idea of style is as injurious in
what is classed as literature as in the daily papers.

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Those smoothly rounded sentences, each one the
assassin of a thought, those pastels in prose
which are nothing but prose, and those extremely
emaciated essays are neither journalism nor
literature. Dilution is the one thing that is
fatal, whether it is "literary" or not, and a high
hoping for the eternal only makes it worse. No
matter where the line be drawn, it should not in-
clude this, for things perish quicker for lack
of substance than for lack of form. The real
dread of the honest followers of either craft
should be the dread of spreading themselves thin,
and if the year's production of books could be
piled up alongside its periodicals it would be hard
to say which class had sinned the more. But this
thing is certain. No member of either would be
a whit the worse for the good qualities of the
other.

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VII

RUNNING AN ORACLE

One of the pleasantest lines of newspaper work
is the composition of those editorial articles on
foreign politics which unmask the designs of the
great powers and explain what is known as a
"world movement." It is work that confers dig-
nity on the writer from the impressive nature of
the material with which it deals. It is not scruti-
nized as sharply as other kinds of work, because
it takes one's breath away at the start. Very few
people, for example, distinguished between the
articles on the Chinese situation which the news-
papers were obliged to publish every other day.
They like to see such articles on an editorial page
as a sign that the paper is keeping up with the
times ; but so long as they all have the air of cer-
tainty they are all equally able and authoritative.
The man who can speak familiarly as to what the
"Russian Colossus" is up to, and what France
thinks about it, has everything in his own
hands. Nobody thinks of checking him off. That
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familiar tone does the business. World politics
afford the one sinecure in the newspaper profes-
sion. In general these articles conform to one of
two types. There is the solemnly judicious ar-
ticle, which, though masterly, is found, on analy-
sis, to be somewhat non-committal. And there is
the article of mysterious sources.

Here is a model article of the former type
on the future of China. "It looks very much
indeed as if an acute crisis were impending in
China," says the writer in the sure, firm style
with which these experts approach their subjects.
But the true spirit of this kind of writing ap-
pears in the following sentence: "Anything may
happen in China in the next six months, or noth-
ing may happen." That shows the practiced
hand. The soundest editorial articles on world
politics are built on these imperishable founda-
tions. What, then, is China's future.? That will
depend on the issue of the next six months. If
nothing happens, there is no reason to expect any
very radical changes. If, on the other hand,
things do happen, then changes of the deepest
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and most far-reaching importance are almost
certain to occur. These things being so, the
writer says : "It may be well to look dispassion-
ately at general conditions and at future pros-
pects." What do we find? We notice first that
the forces at work in China "are both internal
and external;" there is a force that makes for
progress and a force that does not. The rest is in
keeping with this. The significant thing about
it is permanence and universality. It will apply
as well to the future of Austria-Hungary and
the German empire when the occasion arises. The
result of its success is the saying of obvious
things with the air of having all the powers at
the other end of a private wire.

To run these oracles all any one needs is a
war rumor and a copy of the Statesman's Year
Book and a solemn manner. If the news is true,
then it is indeed serious. There are some aspects
of the situation which you cannot but view with
grave anxiety. Will the Russian bear show his
claws .f* "It is not generally known that" and
"People who look beneath the surface of things

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say" are good and well-tried expressions. You
should also own a few "undercurrents of political
opinion." These are to be found at any time in
a single article in a foreign review, but it is
wiser not to quote the author, as it sounds better
to say, "In certain quarters the view is held."
The quickest way to get at the very core of
world politics is through the pages of one of
these articles. Some of the weightiest inside in-
formation articles, whose writer you might sup-
pose had been hiding under the table at every
cabinet meeting in Europe, are made in this way.
We have, of course, men who are well versed in
these subjects, and who put their own brains into
their work. But the point is that these qualifica-
tions are not necesary for the running of an
oracle on foreign politics. With the weighty
manner one fares quite as well. The man who
says "Anything may happen in China in the next
six months, or nothing may happen" has as large
an audience. He is respected and liked. It is
a comfortable and an honorable life, and in spite
of competition the earnings are enormous in pro-
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portion to the labor involved. As a people we
may be suspicious about some things and not bad
hands at a bargain, but the man who runs an
oracle is apt to find us a good thing.

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VIII

FOR WOMAN AND THE HOME

An article published some time ago in an im-
portant London magazine shows what a serious-
minded British editor sometimes thinks of his
public. The writer tells us that woman should
be womanly, that she should be intelligent and at
the same time kind; that, "above all, nothing
should be done to diminish the immense fund of
affection stored up in women's hearts." "We
might possibly spare science and philosophy,"
says he ; "we might certainly spare many inven-
tions, but we could not spare from the world a
mother's love." And lest some of his readers may
still be unconvinced, he adds that while it is bet-
ter that woman should know "how to cook an
appetizing dinner for the tired husband than
how to chatter about Shelley," she ought not to
be entirely untaught. He is radical on that
point, arguing with much earnestness against
leaving her in her wild native state, for she "is
not likely to love husband, brother or child the
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more because she is ignorant and helpless." But
he advises caution in applying this principle.
The wild woman who cooks may lose something
in transition, just as strawberries lose flavor when
cultivated, or gallinaceous birds when domesti-
cated. How domesticate the partridge without
diminishing the gamy flavor; how teach woman
to read Shelley without loss of true womanhood?
That is the problem. While opposed to any-
thing like overeducation,he believes that the mind
of woman should receive some attention for two
reasons : First, she is a companion to man. He
approves of this and thinks it ought to be en-
couraged. "Let the idea of companionship be-
tween man and woman prevail more," he says.
Secondly, her education will be useful to the
children. On this point, and in finally summing
up, he says :

"Nothing could be more delightful, more help-
ful, both to mother and child, than a common
interest in things of the mind. The children
should not look on the mother as a kind of house-
hold slave who looks after the dinner and who
packs them off to school; nor should the mother

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think of the children as so many little faces and
hands to be washed or so many little mouths to be
fed. . . . Indeed, we suggest that a new and
brighter meaning might be given to home by a
judicious education and a wise liberty to her by
whose loving activity and goodness home is
made."

The article is unsigned, but it was probably
written by a man. Most of this kind of writing
is done by men, and there is a great deal of it.
The significance of this particular case is that
the thing appears in a magazine meant for full-
grown men and women of this world, not for a
constituency of apple-cheeked cherubs. But
there is this much to be said for the writer: Of
all subjects in current literature woman is the
one that draws out the worst there is in man. An
odd change comes over him when woman is his
theme — a sort of sea-change, judged by the
wateriness of the results. And does it please wo-
man.? Does the mother heart glow at the sight
of the strong man simpering in his beard, and is
there no mother head to take offense at him.'^
Surely more things might be taken for granted
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by the writer on women and the home. Let him
try talking hke this to her face and see what hap-
pens. That is a fair test. One thing that makes
man write of woman as he does is the knowledge
that she cannot get at him. Certainly you may
read your Shelley, and even a little thinking will
not hurt, but not too much, mind, and do not for-
get to beam on the tired husband. Heat his slip-
pers for him, wash the children, cook the din-
ner ; then crouch behind the storm door to spring
out and beam the minute you hear him scuffling
on the door mat. Beam thoroughly, then out
with a blast of Shelley at him. There you have
the true woman, though educated: mother heart
true as steel, affections sound, husband fed, chil-
dren washed, and yet the savage bride now reads
light literature. Thus is the sex problem solved
and civilization may go on with perfect confi-
dence.

Woman is unfortunate in her advisers. What

a time of it we should have if she deliberately set

out to make home happy by the rules laid down

for her. What with the routine beaming and the

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scheduled companionship and the memorized
home thoughts, where would the tired husband
be? You would find that haggard refugee nest-
ing in a tree-top. But there is no danger of it.
The only serious question is that of journalistic
standards. Why do we dedicate to woman and
the home the most demented portions of our
periodicals ?

Not in a spirit of chivalry, but of common
fairness, I hold that there is no such intellectual
disparity between the sexes as would appear from
these writings. The women one ordinarily meets
are not at the level of the usual woman's page
or of the average magazine for women. Women
read these things, of course, but chiefly for tech-
nical information, for suggestions as to pickles
or finger bowls, or things to put on hats — which
occult and complicated matters have as much
right to a literature of their own as entomology
— and no one can despise the intellect that follows
them in all their abstruse windings. But what
I have in mind are the non-technical articles in
regard to which man and woman are on an equal
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footing. Why write so very far down just be-
cause you are writing for women? And why do
women not resent the practice?

Here is a typical passage from a typical lit-
erary article in a woman's magazine. The writer
explains for the benefit of women's clubs how
Browning should be studied and what blessings
result from the study. He says : "When one has
mastered Browning's conception of the nature of
love and of the ends of art and its spiritual sig-
nificance, he is well on the way to the poet's view
of life." Fancy a string of similar passages run-
ning through three or four pages, and you have a
fair picture of what the woman of culture is sup-
posed to like. It is true with the truth of the first
spelling book. It is as irreproachable as regular
breathing. But why are women thought to need
it? That is the baffling part of the thing. Do
not women know that the way to study a poet is
to read his poems thoughtfully, and are there any
of them that need be told that art has its inner
meaning, Hfe its deeper joys? Take this, for
example: "Browning is primarily a poet and
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should be approached as a poet." Why tell a
woman that? Could she not guess it? Would
she be likely to approach him as a plumber?
And this suggests the general question that
always troubles the male reader of these articles :
If adult human beings who have had a fair
chance in life still remain at the stage which this
kind of writing implies, why bother with them at
all? You cannot save them, certainly not by
these means, for if they had in them a spark of
affection for books they would rebel against this
way of writing about books. That is the trouble
with the woman's writer. There is nothing left
of a good thing when he has once adapted it.
And where is the benefit in knowing about books
when you do not care for what is inside them?
It is meritorious only in a librarian. It is no
one's duty to be literary.

It seems a waste of time to blame people for
writing platitudes, but that is not the point.
The platitude must always be. What I protest
against is that it should be so unevenly distri-
buted between the sexes by our periodicals. And
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why pretend that reading this kind of an article
does anything to the mind? As well advise peo-
ple to sleep with a volume of poems under their
pillow in order to wake up "cultured" in the
morning.

Women, of course, are themselves in part to
blame for the woman's writer. They take him
more seriously than men do, and when they do
not take him seriously they are more patient with
him than men would be. There is no doubt that
those molluscous writers who fasten themselves to
the reputations of dead geniuses, and say amiable
things about books which they do not understand,
have a disproportionately large feminine con-
stituency. By merely praising Homer, Plato,
Dante and Shakespeare, and by laying claim to
certain large, vague sensations when they read
them, it is possible to establish a literary stand-
ing. If they follow this up with an occasional
good word for high ideals and the ends of art
and the true conception of life, they may attain
quite a high place in contemporary estimation.
The thing has been done. And though the
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woman's writer may have known at the start that
what he said did not mean anything, this self-
knowledge does not last. In his final stage he
believes in himself. That is the last and lowest
point he reaches.

After all, is he not harmless and even useful
as an educator? There is this much harm in him :
In so far as people read him they are kept from
doing other things. That of itself is bad. They
reach those absurd, straggling suburbs of litera-
ture, and there they stop. They read articles
about books which describe other books, and so
cultivate a sort of third cousinship to literature.
Then the woman's writer is an awful example of
what literature may do to a man. If association
with masterpieces all his days leaves him in such
a state, it must scare people away from master-
pieces. There are dangers involved in his exist-
ence from whatever point you view him, though
I admit that at first thoughts there is nothing in
all nature that seems more innocuous than he.

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IX

ON BEHALF OF OBSCURE VERSE

It is a tame little affair, to be sure — the average
poem of the magazines, and when I say average
poem, I mean almost every poem that appears
in them, for rarely does one venture to differ
much from every other one. But it is easy to be
too pessimistic about them, and if anyone will
take the trouble to run through the old files he
will arise feeling fairly cheerful in regard to the
minor verse of his own generation. It is better
than it used to be because it has a larger supply
of antecedent verse to draw upon for imitation.
It is a fuller and more composite echo. There is
more of it than there used to be, but there is noth-
ing depressing in that, because it has not outrun
the increase in population. Another consoling
thought is that a large part of the humdrum
verse of to-day affords more training to the
reader's wits. As between the commonplace verse
that is perfectly intelligible and the commonplace
verse that is obscure, the latter has this disciplin-
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ary advantage. At least you work your minii,
and even if you find nothing, the exercise has
done you good. The mere value of a metrical
rebus, you will say. Well, even that is some-
thing.

And this leads to the point I wish to empha-
size. So long as the kernel of magazine verse re-
mains what it is, I would not have it easier to be
got at. I put in a plea for the continuance of
this obscurity, and I do so with the more haste
and earnestness because I have lately noticed a
tendency to complain of it. "Now what in the
world does she mean by that?" asks a reviewer
with bitterness as he quotes two complicated sen-
tences without verbs addressed by a young lady
to one of her emotions. Mercy on us! The
meaning is just what was meant to be withheld.
Such a question ignores the rules of the game.
If reviewers begin to act like that, they will soon
destroy the industry altogether. The composi-
tion of this kind of magazine verse consists in
this very secretiveness as to meanings. The per-
former takes a fairly simple and fairly obvious
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thought and first writes it down in direct, cold
prose. This done, it is carefully examined to see
how well it lends itself to verbal entanglements.
If it seems to have possibilities in this respect,
the work of ensnarling is begun. Words are
wound around it phrase by phrase till just the
faintest suggestion of the thought peeps out
through a crack in the verbiage. Then it is the
reader's turn to guess what is inside. If it takes
a good deal of time and worry, so much the bet-
ter. He feels something of a sportsman's zest.
He is rather glad to get it, even if it does not
amount to much. To illustrate, let us take a
concrete case. You want to say something about
the dread of separation — whether of the soul
from the body or the lover from his mistress, it
matters not what. Take just that one situation.
You snatch at many paraphrases and discard
them one by one for lack of subtlety. Finally,
after mousing around among words and mutter-
ing things like "foregleam of the ache of ab-
sence" and "ill-seeming shade of otherwhere"
(which you see at a glance would never do in the
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world as synonyms for incipient bereavement),
let us suppose you hit on something rather queer,
such, for example as "the germ of alibi." It
sounds foolish at first, but upon consideration
may seem worth while, for it is an unusual col-
location of words and hides the thought almost
beyond chance of detection. Now if for every
other simple phrase you can find so successful a
substitute, if every turn of your thought can be
made to twist itself into such remotely suggestive,
such slenderly related language, you may pro-
duce a poem in the modern magazine manner.
But it means work.

The "germ of alibi" may not be a very con-
vincing illustration, though I may say in pass-
ing that it is taken from the collected verses of
an excellent and very, very serious writer. Still
in a measure it represents the aspiration of maga-
zine verse. It betokens an eagerness for enig-
matic charm. It is an elaborate tucking away
of the humdrum, an obscuration of the insignifi-
cant, and that I believe is the characteristic of
this sort of verse. And in saying so I wish to reg-
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ister my hearty approval. Obscurity of style
in these cases is a merciful thing. Not only that,
but it gives a positive pleasure to two classes of
readers. First, there are those who find excite-
ment in the difficulties of the quest, who like to
track the elusive thought to its lair. Secondly,
there is the larger class that love the vague merely
because it is vague and looks the bigger for its
vagueness.

Therefore I am disturbed by the brutal stand-
and-deliver attitude of certain reviewers who are
forever holding up poems and demanding their
meanings. And there is a special savagery in the
prevailing practice of reviewing six or seven little
volumes of collected magazine poems all in a
bunch under the title of "Some Recent Verse."
A review like that is a potter's field of poets.
Again and again you will find a half dozen poets
huddled together under a collective title and dis-
posed of all at once, as a housemaid might kill
flies with a twisted newspaper. Obscure maga-
zine verse is not rightly appreciated. Review-
ers do not remark the stress and strain that go to
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its production. It represents fierce and unre-
mitting toil, and its murkiness is not accidental,
but deliberately and painfully wrought. A
magazine versifier of to-day would never write :

** I saw the hole myself," he cried.

** 'Twas four feet long and two feet Made."

He would never exclaim:

** Twelve, didst thou say ? Curse on those dozen
villains."

He would never fall with Wordsworth into
such lines as:

O mercy, to myself I said.
What if Lucy should be dead ?

He is more likely to reproduce the melody

of Meredith's much-quoted line :

The friable, and the grumous, dizzards both.

And for my part I prefer the latter model,
for at least it stirs the curiosity.

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IN DARKEST JAMES

Some time ago, when Henry James wrote an
essay on women that brought to my cheek the hot,
rebelhous blush, I said nothing about it, thinking
that perhaps, after all, the man's style was his
sufficient fig-leaf, and that few would see how
shocking he really was. And, indeed, it had been
a long time since the pubhc knew what Henry
James was up to behind that verbal hedge of his,
though half-suspecting that he meant no good,
because a style like that seemed just the place for
guilty secrets. But those of us who had formed
the habit of him early could make him out even
then, our eyes having grown so used to the deep-
ening shadows of his later language that they
could see in the dark, as you might say. I say this
not to brag of it, but merely to show that there
were people who partly understood him even in
The Sacred Fount, and he was clearer in his es-
says, especially in that wicked one on "George
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Sand : The New Life," published in an American
magazine.

Here he was as bold as brass, telling women
to go ahead and do and dare, and praising the
fine old hearty goings-on at the court of Augus-
tus the Strong, and showing how they could be
brought back again if women would only try.
His impunity was due to the sheer laziness of the
expurgators. They would not read him, and
they did not believe anybody else could. They
justified themselves, perhaps, by recalling pas-
sages like these in the Awkward Age:

"What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless
strangely irrelevant "

*'But she fixed him with her weary penetration. ..."

"He jumped up at this, as if he couldn't bear it, pre-
senting as he walked across the room a large, foolish,
fugitive back, on which her eyes rested as on a proof of
her penetration "

"My poor child, you're of a profundity "

"He spoke almost uneasily, but she was not too much
alarmed to continue lucid."

"You're of a limpidity, dear man ! "

"Don't you think that's rather a back seat for one's
best?"

" 'A back seat ? ' she wondered, with a purity."

"Your aunt didn't leave me with you to teach you the
slang of the day."

" 'The slang?' she spotlessly speculated."

Arguing from this that he was bent more on

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eluding pursuit than on making converts, they
let things pass that in other writers would have
been immediately rebuked. He had, in fact,
written furiously against the proprieties for sev-
eral years. "There is only one propriety," he
said, "that the painter of life can ask of a sub-
ject : Does it or does it not belong to life?" He
charged our Anglo-Saxon writers with "a con-
spiracy of silence," and taunted them with the
fact that the women were more improper than the
men. "Emancipations are in the air," said he,
"but it is to women writers that we owe them."
The men were cowards, rarely venturing a single
coarse expression, but already in England there
were pages upon pages of women's work so
strong and rich and horrifying and free that a
man could hardly read them. Halcyon days,
they seemed to him, and woman the harbinger of
a powerful Babylonish time when the impro-
prieties should sing together like the morning
stars. Not an enthusiastic person generally, he
always warmed to this particular theme with
generous emotion.

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His essay on George Sand discussing what he
calls the "new life," cited the heart history of
that author as "having given her sex for its new
evolution and transformation the real standard
and measure of change." It was all recorded in
Mme. Karenine's biography, and Mme. Karenine,
being a Russian with an "admirable Slav super-
iority to prejudice," was able to treat the matter
in a "large, free way." A life so amorously pro-
fuse was sure to set an encouraging example,
he thought. Her heart was like an hotel, occu-
pied, he said, by "many more or less greasy
males" in quick succession. He hoped the time
would come when other women's hearts would be
as miscellaneous:

"In this direction their aim has been, as yet,
comparatively modest and their emulation low;
the challenge they have hitherto picked up is but
the challenge of the average male. The approxi-
mation of the extraordinary woman has been,
practically, in other words, to the ordinary man.
Madame Sand's service is that she planted the
flag much higher; her own approximation, at
least, was to the extraordinary. She reached
him, she surpassed him, and she showed how, with

324

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

native, dispositions, the thing could be done.
These new records will live as the precious text-
book, so far as we have got, of the business."

This was plain enough. Any other man would
have been suppressed. In a literature so well
policed as ours, the position of Henry James was
anomalous. He was the only writer of the day
whose unconventional notions did not matter. His
dissolute and complicated Muse might say just
what she chose. Perhaps this was because it
would have been so difficult to expose him.
Never did so much "vice" go with such sheltering
vagueness. Whatever else may be said of James
at this time, he was no tempter, and though the
novels of this period deal only with unlawful
passions, they make but chilly reading on the
whole. It is a land where the vices have no bodies
and the passions no blood, where nobody sins be-
cause nobody has anything to sin with. Why
should we worry when a spook goes wrong ? For
years James did not create one shadow-casting
character. His love affairs, illicit though they
be, are so stripped to their motives that they seem
325

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

no more enticing than a diagram. A wraith
proves faithless to her marriage vow, elopes with
a bogie in a cloud of words. Six phantoms meet
and dine, three male, three female, with two
thoughts apiece, and, after elaborate geometry
of the heart, adultery follows like a Q. E. D.
Shocking it ought to be, but yet it is not.
Ghastly, tantalising, queer, but never near
enough human to be either good or bad. To be
a sinner, even in the books you need some carnal
attributes — lungs, liver, tastes, at least a pair of
legs. Even the fiends have palpable tails ; wise
men have so depicted them. No flesh, no frailty ;
that may be why our sternest moralists licensed
Henry James to write his wickedest. They saw
that whatever the moral purport of these books,
they might be left wide open in the nursery.

To those who never liked him he is the same
in these writings as in those before and since.
They complain that even at his best he is too apt
to think that when he has made a motive he has
made a man. Nevertheless, though the world of
his better novels is small, it is always credible —

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humanity run through a sieve, but still humanity.
During this dark period his interests seemed to
drop off one by one, leaving him shut in with his
single theme — the rag, the bone and the hank of
hair, the complicated amours of skeletons. They
called it his later manner, but the truth is, it was
a change in the man himself. He saw fewer
things in this spacious world than he used to see,
and the people were growing more meagre and
queer and monotonous, and it was harder and
harder to break away from the stump his fancy
was tied to.

In The Wings of the Dove there were signs
of a partial recovery. There were people who
saw no difference between it and The Sacred
Fount or The Awkward Age, but they were no
friends of his. By what vice of introspection he
got himself lashed to that fixed idea it is impossi-
ble to say, but it was clear that neither of those
books was the work of a mind entirely free. In
one aspect it was ridiculous ; but if one laughed,
it was with compunctions, for in another aspect it
was exceedingly painful. This only from the
327

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

point of view of his admirers. It is not forgotten
that there is the larger class (for whom this world
in the main was made) to whom he is merely ridic-
ulous. They do not see why thoughts so unwill-
ing to come out need be extracted.

To be sure in The Wings of the Dove there is
the same absorption in the machinery of motive
and in mental processes the most minute.
Through page after page he surveys a mind as a
sick man looks at his counterpane, busy with little
ridges and grooves and undulations. There are
chapters like wonderful games of solitaire,
broken by no human sound save his own chuckle
when he takes some mysterious trick or makes a
move that he says is "beautiful." He has a way
of saying "There you are" that is most exasper-
ating, for it is always at the precise moment at
which you know you have utterly lost yourself.
There is no doubt that James's style is often too
puffed up with its secrets. Despite its air of im-
mense significance, the dark, unfathomed cave of
his ocean contain sometimes only the same sort
of gravel you could have picked up on the shore.
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THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

I have that from deep sea thinkers who have been
down with him. But though this unsociable way
of writing continues through The Wings of the
'Dove, it came nearer than any other novel that
he had pubHshed for some years to the quality of
his earlier work. It deals with conditions as well
as with people. Instead of merely souls any-
where, we have men and women living in describa-
ble homes. It would be hard to find in those other
novels anything in the spirit of the following
passage, which is fairly typical of much in
this:

"It was after the children's dinner
and the two young women were still in the pres-
ence of the crumpled tablecloth, the dispersed
pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering odour
of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony,
if she might put up a window a little, and Mrs.
Condrip had replied, without it, that she might
do as she liked. She often received such inquiries
as if they reflected in a manner on the pure
essence of her little ones. . . . Their mother
had become for Kate — who took it just for the
effect of being their mother — quite a different
thing from the mild Marian of the past; Mr.
Condrip's widow expansively obscured that im-

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

age. She was little more than a ragged relic,
a plain prosa^'c result of him, as if she had some-
how been pulled through him as through an ob-
stinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and
useless and with nothing in her but what he
accounted for."

Not that the passage shows him at his best, but
it shows him as at least concerned with the set-
ting of his characters.

It is not worth while to attempt an outline of
the story. Those who have done so have disa-
greed in essentials. It is impossible to hit off in
a few words characters that James has picked out
for their very complexity ; and the story counts
for little with him as against the business of
recording the play of mind. One does not
take a watch to pieces merely to tell the
time of day ; and with James analysis is the end in
itself.

If the obscurity of the language were due to
the idea itself, and if while he tugs at an obsti-
nate thought you could be sure it was worth the
trouble, there would be no fault to find, but to
him one thing seems as good as another when he

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is mousing around in a mind. It is a form of
self-indulgence. He is as pleased with the mo-
tives that lead nowhere as with anything else.
It is his even emphasis that most misleads. He
writes a staccato chronicle of things both great
and small, like a constitutional history half made
up of the measures that never passed. And in
one respect he does not play fairly. He makes
his characters read each other's minds from clues
that he keeps to himself. To invent an irreverent
instance, suppose I were a distinguished author
with a psychological bent and wished to represent
two young people as preternaturally acute. I
might place them alone together and make them
talk like this:

"If " she sparkled.

"If!" he asked. He had lurched from the meaning
for a moment.

"I might" she repHed abundantly.

His eye had eaten the meaning — "Me !" he gloriously
burst.

"Precisely," she thrilled. "How splendidly you do
understand."

I, the distinguished author, versed in my own
psychology — ^the springs of my own marionettes
331

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

— I understand it perfectly. For me there are
words a-plenty. But is it fair to you, the
reader?

Nevertheless — and this is the main point about
Henry James — by indefinable means and in spite
of wearisome prolixity he often succeeds in his
darkest books in producing very strange and
powerful effects. It is a lucky man who can find
a word for them. Things you had supposed in-
communicable certainly come your way. These
are the times when we are grateful to him for
pottering away in his nebulous workshop among
the things that are hard to express. Even when
he fails we like him for making the attempt. We
like him for going his own gait, though he leaves
us straggling miles behind. We cannot afford at
this time to blame any writer who is a little reck-
less of the average mind.

Consider the case of Browning and all that
his lusty independence has done for us. Brown-
ing was quite careless of the average mind; he
would as lief wreck it. He was careless of any-
body else's mind, so bent was he on indulging his

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own. His question was not, What will you have ?
but What do I feel like doing? and readers had
to take their chances, some to give him up as too
deep, and others to beat their brains for inner
meanings where there were none. He liked life
so well that he prized its most vapid moments
and expressed his mind at its best and at its
worst, wrote sometimes as other men drum on win-
dow-panes, catalogued a lot of objects he liked
the look of, relaxed in verse, ate in it, sometimes
slept in it, used it, in short, for so many strange
little personal purposes, that reading it some-
times seems an intrusion. Hence, he is quite as
much a puzzle to the too thoughtful as he is to
those who prefer not to think, for a great man's
nonsense is sure to drive his commentators mad
looking for a message. Browning differed from
others not so much in the greatness of his mind as
in the fact that he showed more of it. He seems
obscure sometimes because people are unprepared
for that degree of confidence. Then, there are
certain preconceived notions as to the limits of
literature, an expectation of large, plain things,
333

THE BUSINESS OF WRITING

of truth with a door-knob, of smooth, symmetri-
cal thoughts, not at all in the shape they come to
the mind, but neatly trimmed for others to see
when they leave it. No living man understands
Browning ; but for that matter, few men under-
stand their wives. It is not fatal to enjoyment.
People who are perfectly clear to each other are
simply keeping things back. Any man would be
a mystery if you could see him from the inside,
and Browning puzzles us chiefly because we are
not accustomed to seeing a mind exposed to view.
It is the man's presence, not his message, that we
care for in Browning's books ; his zest for every-
thing, his best foot and his worst foot, his deep-
est feelings and his foolishness, and the tag-ends
of his dreams. They are not the greatest poems
in the world, but there was the greatest pleasure
in the making of them. It is just the place for
a writer to go and forget his minor literary
duties, the sense of his demanding public, the
obligation of the shining phrase, the need of mak-
ing editorial cats jump, the standing orders for a
jeu d^esprit.

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It is also the place for a reader to go who is
a little weary of the books which are written
with such patient regard for the spiritual limita-
tions of the public. And part of the obscurity of
Henry James springs from the same pleasing
and honorable egotism.

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