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COMPROMISES

COMPROMISES

BY
AGNES REPPLIER, Litt. D.

“On court, hélas! après la vérité;

Ah! croyez moi, l’erreur a son mérite.”

Voltaire

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1905

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1904

To C. F.

CONTENTS

COMPROMISES

THE LUXURY OF CONVERSATION

Of indoor entertainments, the truest and most human is conversation.—Mark Pattison.

In an age when everybody is writing Reminiscences, and when nothing is left untold, we hear a great deal about the wit and brilliancy of former days and former conversations. Elderly gentlemen, conscious of an ever increasing dulness in life, would fain have us believe that its more vivacious characteristics vanished with their youth, and can never be tempted to return. Mournful prophecies anent the gradual decay of social gifts assail us on every side. Mr. Justin McCarthy, recalling with a sigh the group of semi-distinguished men who were wont to grace George Eliot’s Sunday afternoons, can “only hope that the art of talking is not destined to die out with the art of letter-writing.” Mr. George W. E. Russell entertains similar misgivings. He found his ideal talker in Mr. Matthew Arnold, “a man of the world without being frivolous, and a man of letters without being pedantic;” and he considers this admirable combination as necessary as it is rare. American chroniclers point back to a little gleaming band of Northern lights, and assure us sadly that if we never heard these men in their prime, we must live and die uncheered by wit or wisdom. We are born in a barren day.

But conversation, the luxury of conversation, as De Quincey happily phrases it, does not depend upon one or two able talkers. It is not, and never has been, a question of stars, but of a good stock company. Neither can it decay like the art—or the habit—of letter-writing. The conditions are totally different. Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure. Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity. “God has given us tongues,” writes Heine, “wherewith we may say pleasant things to our neighbours.” To refuse a service so light, so sweet, so fruitful, is to be unworthy of the inheritance of the ages.

It is claimed again, by critics disposed to be pessimistic, that our modern development of “specialism” is prejudicial to good conversation. A man devoted to one subject can seldom talk well upon any other. Unless his companions share his tastes and his knowledge, he must—a sad alternative—either lecture or be still. There are people endowed with such a laudable thirst for information that they relish lectures,—professional and gratuitous. They enjoy themselves most when they are being instructed. They are eager to form an audience. Such were the men and women who experienced constant disappointment because Mr. Browning, a specialist of high standing, declined to discuss his specialty. No side-lights upon “Sordello” could be extracted from him. We realize how far the spirit of the lecture had intruded upon the spirit of conversation forty years ago, when Mr. Bagehot admitted that, with good modern talkers, “the effect seems to be produced by that which is stated, and not by the manner in which it is stated,”—a reversal of ancient rules. We are aware of its still further encroachment when we see a little book by M. Charles Rozan, characteristically christened “Petites Ignorances de la Conversation,” and find it full of odds and ends of information, of phrases, allusions, quotations, facts,—all the minute details which are presumably embodied in the talk of educated men. The world to-day devoutly believes that everything can be taught and learned. When we have been shown how a thing is done, we can of course do it. There are even little manuals composed with serious simplicity, the object of which is to enable us to meet specialists on their own grounds; to discuss art with artists, literature with authors, politics with politicians, science with scientists,—the last, surely, a dangerous experiment. “Conversation,” I read in one of these enchanting primers, “cannot be entirely learned from books,”—a generous admission in a day given over to the worship of print.

But in good truth, the contagious ardour, the urbane freedom of the spoken word lift it immeasurably from the regions of pen and ink. Those “shy revelations of affinity,” which now and then open to the reader sweet vistas of familiarity and friendship, are frequent, alluring, persuasive, in well-ordered speech. It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought. It is the opening of our mental pores, and the stimulus of marshaling our ideas in words, of setting them forth as gallantly and as graciously as we can. “A language long employed by a delicate and critical society,” says Mr. Bagehot, “is a treasure of dexterous felicities;” and the recognition of these felicities, the grading of terms, the enlarging of a narrow and stupid vocabulary make the charm of civilized social contact. Discussion without asperity, sympathy without fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another,—these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.

So much has been said about good talkers,—brilliant soloists for the most part,—and so little about good talk! So much has been said about good listeners, and so little about the interchange of thought! “Silent people never spoil company,” remarked Lord Chesterfield; but even this negative praise was probably due to the type of silence with which he was best acquainted,—a habit of sparing speech, not the muffled stillness of genuine and hopeless incapacity. A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas. Sainte-Beuve says of Fontenelle that, while he had neither tears nor laughter, he smiled at wit, never interrupted, was never excited, nor ever in a hurry to speak. These are endearing traits. They embody much of the art of conversation. But they are as remote from unadorned silence as from unconsidered loquacity.

The same distinction may be drawn between the amenity which forbids bickering, and the flabbiness which has neither principles to uphold, nor arguments with which to uphold them. Hazlitt’s counsel, “You should prefer the opinion of the company to your own,” is good in the main, but it can easily be pushed too far. Proffered by a man who bristled with opinions which he never wearied of defending, it is perhaps more interesting than persuasive. If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety. “Unison is a quality altogether obnoxious in conversation,” said Montaigne, who was at least as tolerant as Hazlitt was combative, but who dearly loved stout words from honest men. Dr. Johnson, we know, was of a similar way of thinking. He scorned polite tepidity; he hated chatter; he loved that unfeeling logic which drives mercilessly to its goal. No man knew better than he the unconvincing nature of argument. He had too often thrust his friends from the fortress of sound reason which they were not strong enough to hold. But his talk, for all its aggressiveness, and for all its tendency to negation, was real talk; not—as with Coleridge—a monologue, nor—as with Macaulay—a lecture. He did not infringe upon other people’s conversational freeholds, and he was not, be it always remembered, anecdotal. The man who lived upon “potted stories” inspired him with righteous antipathy.

Perhaps the saddest proof of intellectual inertia, of our failure to meet one another with ease and understanding, is the tendency to replace conversation by story-telling. It is no uncommon thing to hear a man praised as a good talker, when he is really a good raconteur. People will speak complacently of a “brilliant dinner,” at which strings of anecdotes, disconnected and illegitimate, have usurped the field, to the total exclusion of ideas. After an entertainment of this order—like a feast of buns and barley sugar—we retire with mental indigestion for a fortnight. That it should be relished betrays the crudeness of social conditions. “Of all the bores,” writes De Quincey with unwonted ill-temper, “whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate his species, the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.” This is a hard saying. The story, like its second cousin the lie, has a sphere of usefulness. It is a help in moments of emergency, and it serves admirably to illustrate a text. But it is not, and never can be, a substitute for conversation. People equipped with reason, sentiment, and a vocabulary should have something to talk about, some common ground on which they can meet, and penetrate into one another’s minds. The exquisite pleasure of interchanging ideas, of awakening to suggestions, of finding sympathy and companionship, is as remote from the languid amusement yielded by story-telling as a good play is remote from the bald diversion of the music hall.

Something to talk about appears to be the first consideration. The choice of a topic, or rather the possession of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation. We cannot go far along a stony track. Diderot observed that whenever he was in the company of men and women who were reading Richardson’s books, either privately or aloud, the talk was sure to be animated and interesting. Some secret springs of emotion were let loose by this great master of sentiment. Our ancestors allowed themselves a wider field of discussion than we are now in the habit of conceding; but after all, as Stevenson reminds us, “it is not over the virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people are abashed into high resolutions.” We may not covet Socratic discourses at the dinner table, but neither can we long sustain what has been sadly and significantly called “the burden of conversation” on the lines adopted by William the Fourth, who, when he felt the absolute necessity of saying something, asked the Duke of Devonshire where he meant to be buried.

The most perfect and pitiful pictures of intercourse stripped bare of interest have been given us in Miss Austen’s novels. Reading them, we grow sick at heart to think what depths of experience they reflect, what hours of ennui lie back of every page. The conversation of the ladies after Mrs. John Dashwood’s dinner must stand forever as a perfect example of sustained stupidity, of that almost miraculous dulness which can be achieved only by “want of sense, want of elegance, want of spirits, and want of temper.” Equal to it in its way is the brief description of Lady Middleton’s first call upon the Dashwoods.

“Conversation was not lacking, for Sir John was very chatty, and Lady Middleton had taken the wise precaution of bringing with her their eldest child, a fine little boy about six years old. By this means there was one subject always to be recurred to by the ladies in case of extremity, for they had to enquire his name and age, admire his beauty, and ask him questions which his mother answered for him, while he hung about her and held down his head, to the great surprise of her ladyship, who wondered at his being so shy before company, as he could make noise enough at home. On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse. In the present case, it took up ten minutes to determine whether the boy were most like his father or mother, and in what particular he resembled either, for of course everybody differed, and everybody was astonished at the opinion of the others.”

How real it is! How many of us have lived through similar half-hours, veiling with decent melancholy the impetuous protest of our souls!

Charles Greville is responsible for the rather unusual statement that a dinner at which all the guests are fools is apt to be as agreeable as a dinner at which all the guests are clever men. The fools, he says, are tolerably sure to be gay, and the clever men are perfectly sure to be heavy. How far the gayety of fools is an engaging trait it might be difficult to decide (there is a text which throws some doubt upon the subject), but Greville appears to have suffered a good deal from the ponderous society of the learned. We are struck in the first place by the very serious topics which made the table-talk of his day. Do people now discuss primogeniture in ancient Rome over their fish and game? It sounds almost as onerous as the Socratic discourses. Then again it was his special hardship to listen to the dissertations of Macaulay, and he resented this infliction with all the ardour of a vain and accomplished man. “Macaulay’s astonishing knowledge is every moment exhibited,” he writes in his Memoirs, “but he is not agreeable. He has none of the graces of conversation, none of the exquisite tact and refinement which are the result of a felicitous intuition, or of a long acquaintance with good society.... His information is more than society requires.”

The last line is a master-stroke of criticism. It embodies all that goes before and all that follows,—for Greville airs his grievance at length,—and it is admirably illustrated in his account of that famous evening at Holland House, when Lady Holland, in captious mood, rebelled against a course of instruction. Somebody having chanced to mention Sir Thomas Munro, the hostess rashly admitted that she had never heard of him, whereupon Macaulay “explained all he had said, done, written, or thought, and vindicated his claim to the title of a great man, till Lady Holland, getting bored, said she had had enough of Sir Thomas, and would hear no more. This might have dashed and silenced an ordinary talker; but to Macaulay it was no more than replacing a book upon the shelf, and he was just as ready as ever to open on any other topic.” The Fathers of the Church were next discussed (it was not a frivolous company), and Macaulay at once called to mind a sermon of Saint Chrysostom’s in praise of the Bishop of Antioch. “He proceeded to give us the substance of this sermon till Lady Holland got tired of the Fathers, and put her extinguisher on Chrysostom as she had done on Munro. Then with a sort of derision, and as if to have the pleasure of puzzling Macaulay, she turned to him and said: ‘Pray what was the origin of a doll? When were dolls first mentioned in history?’ Macaulay, however, was just as much up in dolls as in the Fathers, and instantly replied that the Roman children had their dolls, which they offered to Venus when they grew older. He quoted Persius,—

‘Veneri donatae a virgine puppae,’

and I have not the least doubt that if he had been allowed to proceed, he would have told us who was the Chenevix of ancient Rome, and the name of the first baby that ever handled a doll.”

This was indeed more information than society required. It is not surprising that Sydney Smith, perhaps the most charming talker of his day, was quickly silenced by such an avalanche of words, and sat mute and limp in the historian’s company. Upon one occasion Greville went to visit the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood, and found Macaulay among the guests. “It was wonderful how quiet the house seemed after he had gone,” comments the diarist grimly, “and it was not less agreeable.”

That a rude invasion of the field is fatal to the enjoyment of intercourse we know from the sentiment of revolt expressed on every side. How little the people who heard Mme. de Staël’s brilliant conversation appear to have relished the privilege! Mackintosh admitted that she was agreeable in a tête-à-tête, but too much for a general assembly. Heine hated her, as a hurricane in petticoats. “She hears but little, and never the truth, because she is always talking.” Byron, who felt a genuine admiration for her cleverness, and was grateful for her steadfast friendship, confessed ruefully that she overwhelmed him with words, buried him beneath glittering snow and nonsense. The art of being amusing in a lovable way was not hers; yet this is essentially the art which lifted French conversation to its highest level, which made it famous three hundred years ago, and which has preserved it ever since as a rational and engaging occupation. A page of history lies revealed and elucidated in Saint-Simon’s little sentence anent Mme. de Maintenon’s fashion of speech. “Her language was gentle, exact, well chosen, and naturally eloquent and brief.”

No wonder she reigned long. Eloquent and brief! What a magnificent “blend”! How persuasive the “well-chosen” words, immaculately free from harsh emphasis and the feminine fault of iteration! Who would not be influenced by a woman who talked always well, and never too much; who, knowing the value of flattery, administered it with tact and moderation; and who shrank instinctively from the exaggerated terms which destroy balance and invite defeat? From the reign of Louis the Fourteenth to the Revolution, conversation was cultivated in France with intelligent assiduity. Its place in the fabric of civilization was clearly understood. No time was begrudged to its development, no labour was spared to its perfecting. Mr. Henry James is of the opinion that it flowered brilliantly in the middle of the eighteenth century. “This was surely,” he says, “in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the right people made haste to be born in time. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age of fireside talk, and of those amenities that are due to the presence of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The women of that period were, above all, good company. The fact is attested in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the liquid murmur of the Cher.”

“Joyous discourse” is a beguiling phrase. It carries with it the echo of laughter long since silenced,—light laughter following the light words, so swiftly spoken, yet so surely placed. The time was coming fast when this smooth graciousness of speech would inspire singular mistrust, and when Rousseau—ardently embracing nature—would write of the “fine and delicate irony called politeness, which gives so much ease and pliability to the intercourse of civilized man, enabling him to assume the appearance of every virtue without the reality of one.” Later on, illusions being dispelled, the painful discovery was made that the absence of politeness does not necessarily imply the presence of virtue, and that taciturnity may be wholly disassociated with the truth. We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation. It can never languish in an age like ours, teeming with new interests widely shared, and with new wonders widely known. We must talk, because we have so much to talk about; and we ought to talk well, because our inspirations are of a noble order. Each new discovery made by science, each fresh emotion awakened by contemporaneous history, each successive pleasure yielded by literature or by art is a spur to rational speech. These things are our common heritage, and we share them in common, through the medium of the aptly spoken word.

THE GAYETY OF LIFE

Grief is the sister of doubt and ill-temper, and, beyond all spirits, destroyeth man.—Shepherd of Hermas.

In the beginning of the last century an ingenious gentleman, Mr. James Beresford, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, diverted himself and—let us hope—his friends, by drawing up and publishing an exhaustive list of the minor miseries of life. It is a formidable document, realistic in character, and ill calculated to promote the spirit of content. No one would ever imagine that so many disagreeable things could happen in the ordinary course of existence, until the possibilities of each and every one are plainly and pitilessly defined. Some of these possibilities have passed away in the hundred years that lie between King George’s day and ours; but others remain for our better discipline and subjection. Political discussions at the dinner-table rank high among Mr. Beresford’s grievances; also weak tea,—“an infusion of balm, sage, and rosemary,” he calls it,—and “being expected to be interested in a baby.”

A great deal of modern literature, and not a little modern conversation, closely resemble this unhappy gentleman’s “black list.” There is the same earnest desire to point out what we would rather not observe. Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worth while to call one another’s attention to their presence. People who do this thing on a more imposing scale than Mr. Beresford are spoken of respectfully as “unfaltering disciples of truth,” or as “incapable of childish self-delusion,” or as “looking with clear eyes into life’s bitter mysteries;” whereas in reality they are merely dwelling on the obvious, and the obvious is the one thing not worth consideration. We are all painfully aware of the seamy side, because we are scratched by the seams. What we want to contemplate is the beauty and the smoothness of that well-ordered plan which it is so difficult for us to discern. When Burke counselled a grave and anxious gentleman to “live pleasant,” he was turning him aside from the ordinary aspects of existence.

There is a charming and gracious dogma of Roman Catholicism which would have us believe that all good deeds and holy prayers make up a spiritual treasury, a public fund, from which are drawn consolation for the church suffering, and strength for the church militant. A similar treasury (be it reverently spoken) holds for us all the stored-up laughter of the world, and from it comes human help in hours of black dejection. Whoever enriches this exchequer should be held a benefactor of his race. Whoever robs it—no matter what heroic motives he may advance in extenuation of the deed—has sinned heavily against his fellow men. For the gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need,—there is barely enough to go round. If we waste our little share, if we extinguish our little light, the treasury is that much poorer, and our neighbour walks in gloom.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be the guardians of the world’s mirth; but thinking is a sorry business, and a period of critical reflection, following a period of vigorous and engrossing activity, is apt to breed the “plaintive pessimist,” whose self-satisfaction is disproportionate to his worth. Literature, we are assured by its practitioners, “exists to please;” but it has some doubtful methods of imparting pleasure. If, indeed, we sit down to read books on degeneracy and kindred topics, we have no reason to complain of what we find in them. It is not through such gates as these that we seek an escape from mortality. But why should poets and essayists and novelists be so determinedly depressing? Why should “the earnest prophetic souls who tear the veil from our illusory national prosperity”—I quote from a recent review—be so warmly praised for their vandalism? Heaven knows they are always tearing the veil from something, until there is hardly a rag left for decency. Yet there are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth. Granted that our habit of exaggerating the advantages of modern civilization and of modern culture does occasionally provoke and excuse plain speaking, there is no need of a too merciless exposure, a too insulting refutation of these agreeable fallacies. If we think ourselves well off, we are well off. If, dancing in chains, we believe ourselves free, we are free, and he is not our benefactor who weighs our shackles. Reformers have unswervingly and unpityingly decreased the world’s content that they might better the world’s condition. The first part of their task is quickly done. The second halts betimes. Count Tolstoi has, with the noblest intentions, made many a light step heavy, and many a gay heart sad.

As for poets and novelists, their sin is unprovoked and unpardonable. Story-telling is not a painful duty. It is an art which, in its best development, adds immeasurably to the conscious pleasure of life. It is an anodyne in hours of suffering, a rest in hours of weariness, and a stimulus in hours of health and joyous activity. It can be made a vehicle for imparting instruction, for destroying illusions, and for dampening high spirits; but these results, though well thought of in our day, are not essential to success. Want and disease are mighty factors in life; but they have never yet inspired a work of art. The late Professor Boyesen has indeed recorded his unqualified delight at the skill with which Russian novelists describe the most unpleasant maladies. He said enthusiastically that, after reading one of these masterpieces, he felt himself developing some of the very symptoms which had been so accurately portrayed; but to many readers this would be scant recommendation. It is not symptoms we seek in stories. The dullest of us have imagination enough to invent them for ourselves.

“Poverty,” said old Robert Burton, “is a most odious calling,” and it has not grown any more enjoyable in the past three hundred years. Nothing is less worth while than to idealize its discomforts, unless it be to sourly exaggerate them. There is no life so hard as to be without compensations, especially for those who take short views; and the view of poverty seldom goes beyond the needs of the hour and their fulfilment. But there has arisen of late years a school of writers—for the most part English, though we have our representatives—who paint realistically the squalor and wretchedness of penury, without admitting into their pictures one ray of the sunshine that must sometimes gild the dreariest hovel or the meanest street. A notable example of this black art was Mr. George Gissing, whose novels are too powerful to be ignored, and too depressing to be forgotten. The London of the poor is not a cheerful place; it is perhaps the most cheerless place in Christendom; but this is the way it appeared in Mr. Gissing’s eyes when he was compelled to take a suburban train:—

“Over the pest-stricken region of East London, sweltering in sunlight which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal,—the train made its way at length beyond the outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of hedges and trees, of crops and cattle.”

Surely this is a trifle strained. The “nameless populace” would be not a little surprised to hear itself described with such dark eloquence. I remember once encountering in a third-class English railway carriage a butcher-boy—he confided to me his rank and profession—who waxed boastful over the size and wealth of London. “It’s the biggest city in the world, that’s wot it is; it’s got five millions of people in it, that’s wot it’s got; and I’m a Londoner, that’s wot I am,” he said, glowing with pride that was not without merit in one of mean estate. The “city of the damned” appeared a city of the gods to this young son of poverty.

Such books sin against the gayety of life.

All the earth round,

If a man bear to have it so,

Things which might vex him shall be found;

and there is no form of sadness more wasteful than that which is bred of a too steadfast consideration of pain. It is not generosity of spirit which feeds this mood. The sorrowful acceptance of life’s tragedies is of value only when it prompts us to guard more jealously, or to impart more freely, life’s manifold benefactions. Mr. Pater has subtly defined the mental attitude which is often mistaken for sympathy, but which is a mere ineffectual yielding to depression over the sunless scenes of earth.

“He”—Carl of Rosenmold—“had fits of the gloom of other people, their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals, which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet, at such times, outward things would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadows about him.”

This is precisely the temper which finds expression in much modern verse. Its perpetrators seem wrapped in endless contemplation of other people’s gloom, until, having absorbed all they can hold, they relieve their oppressed souls by unloading it in song. Women are especially prone to mournful measures, and I am not without sympathy for that petulant English critic who declined to read their poetry on the plea that it was “all dirges.” But men can be mourners, too, and—

In all the endless road you tread

There’s nothing but the night,

is too often the burden of their verse, the unsolicited assurance with which they cheer us on our way. We do not believe them, of course, except in moments of dejection; but these are just the moments in which we would like to hear something different. When our share of gayety is running pitifully low, and the sparks of joy are dying on life’s hearth, we have no courage to laugh down the voices of those who, “wilfully living in sadness, speak but the truths thereof.”

Hazlitt, who was none too happy, but who strove manfully for happiness, used to say that he felt a deeper obligation to Northcote than to any of his other friends who had done him far greater service, because Northcote’s conversation was invariably gay and agreeable. “I never ate nor drank with him; but I have lived on his words with undiminished relish ever since I can remember; and when I leave him, I come out into the street with feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.” Here is a debt of friendship worth recording, and blither hearts than Hazlitt’s have treasured similar benefactions. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson gladly acknowledged his gratitude to people who set him smiling when they came his way, or who smiled themselves from sheer cheerfulness of heart. They never knew—not posing as philanthropists—how far they helped him on his road; but he knew, and has thanked them in words not easily forgotten:—

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.... A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.”

There is little doubt that the somewhat indiscriminate admiration lavished upon Mr. Stevenson himself was due less to his literary than to his personal qualities. People loved him, not because he was an admirable writer, but because he was a cheerful consumptive. There has been far too much said about his ill health, and nothing is so painful to contemplate as the lack of reserve on the part of relatives and executors which thrusts every detail of a man’s life before the public eye. It provokes maudlin sentiment on the one side, and ungracious asperity on the other. But, in Mr. Stevenson’s case, silence is hard to keep. He was a sufferer who for many years increased the gayety of life.

Genius alone can do this on a large scale; but everybody can do it on a little one. Our safest guide is the realization of a hard truth,—that we are not privileged to share our troubles with other people. If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world’s good-humour. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it. I have read that “the most objectionable thing in the American manner is excessive cheerfulness,” and I would like to believe that so pardonable a fault is the worst we have to show. It is not our mission to depress, and one recalls with some satisfaction Saint-Simon’s remark anent Madame de Maintenon, whom he certainly did not love. Courtiers less astute wondered at the enduring charm which this middle-aged woman, neither handsome nor witty, had for her royal husband. Saint-Simon held the clue. It was her “decorous gayety” which soothed Louis’s tired heart. “She so governed her humours that, at all times and under all circumstances, she preserved her cheerfulness of demeanour.”

There is little profit in asking ourselves or others whether life be a desirable possession. It is thrust upon us, without concurrence on our part. Unless we can abolish compulsory birth, our relish for the situation is not a controlling force. “Every child,” we are told, “is sent to school a hundred years before he is born;” but he can neither profit by his schooling nor refuse his degree. Here we are in a world which holds much pain and many pleasures, oceans of tears and echoes of laughter. Our position is not without dignity, because we can endure; and not without enjoyment, because we can be merry. Gayety, to be sure, requires as much courage as endurance; but without courage the battle of life is lost. “To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death,—this is to be afraid of Pan.”

THE POINT OF VIEW

Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of things.—Sir Thomas Browne.

Fiction is the only field in which women started abreast with men, and have not lagged far behind. Their success, though in no wise brilliant, has been sufficiently assured to call forth a vast deal of explanation from male critics, who deem it necessary to offer reasons for what is not out of reason, to elucidate what can never be a mystery. Not very many years ago a contributor to the “Westminster Review” asserted seriously that “the greater affectionateness” of women enabled them to write stories, and that “the domestic experiences, which form the bulk of their knowledge, find an appropriate place in novels. The very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which befits the feminine mind.”

It is not easy, however, to account for Miss Austen and Miss Brontë, for George Eliot and George Sand, on the score of “affectionateness” and domesticity. The quality of their work has won for them and for their successors the privilege of being judged by men’s standards, and of being forever exempt from that fatal word, “considering.” All that is left of the half-gallant, half-condescending tone with which critics indulgently praised “Evelina” is a well-defined and clearly expressed sentiment in favour of women’s heroines, and a corresponding reluctance—on the part of men at least—to tolerate their heroes. Mr. Henley voiced the convictions of his sex when he declared his readiness to accept, “with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner’s gratitude,” all of George Eliot’s women, “from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet” (up to Mrs. Pullet, one would rather say), and his lively mistrust of the “governesses in revolt,” whom it has pleased her to call men. Heroes of the divided skirt, every one of them, was his verdict. Deronda, an incarnation of woman’s rights. Tito, an improper female in breeches. Silas Marner, a good, perplexed old maid. Lydgate alone has “aught of the true male principle about him.”

This is a matter worthy of regard, because the charm of a novel is based largely upon the attraction its hero has for women, and its heroine for men. Incident, dialogue, the development of minor characters,—these things have power to please; but the enduring triumph of a story depends upon the depth of our infatuation for somebody that figures in it, and here, as elsewhere, the instinct of sex reigns supreme. Why is it impossible for a man, who is not an artist or an art-critic, to acknowledge that the great portraits of the world are men’s portraits? Because he has given his heart to Mona Lisa, or to Rembrandt’s Saskia, or to some other beauty, dead and gone. Why do we find in the Roman Catholic Church that it is invariably a man who expounds the glory of Saint Theresa, and a woman who piously supplicates Saint Anthony? The same rule holds good in fiction. Clarissa Harlowe has been loved as ardently as Helen of Troy. Mr. Saintsbury gives charming expression to this truth in his preface to “Pride and Prejudice.”

“In the novels of the last hundred years,” he says, “there are vast numbers of young ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana and Barbara Grant. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth.”

This choice little literary seraglio is by no means the only one selected with infinite care by critics too large-minded for monogamy, while passions more exclusive burn with intenser flame. Of Beatrix Esmond it might be said that Thackeray was the only man who never succumbed to her charms. Women have been less wont to confess their infatuations,—perhaps for lack of opportunity,—but they have cherished in their hearts a long succession of fictitious heroes, most of them eminently unworthy of regard. We know how they puzzled and distressed poor Richardson by their preference for that unpardonable villain, Lovelace, whom honest men loathe. Even in these chill and seemly days they seek some semblance of brutality. The noble, self-abnegating hero has little chance with them. The perplexed hero has even less. It is a significant circumstance that, of all the characters upon whom Mrs. Humphry Ward has lavished her careful art, Helbeck of Bannisdale, who doesn’t know the meaning of perplexity, and who has no weak tolerance for other people’s views, makes the sharpest appeal to feminine taste. But masculine taste rejects him.

Rejects him, not more sharply, perhaps, than it is wont to reject any type of manhood put forward urgently by a woman. There was a time when Rochester was much in vogue, and girls young enough to cherish illusions wove them radiantly around that masterful lover who wooed in the fashion of the Conqueror. But men looked ever askance upon his volcanic energies and emotions. They failed to see any charm in his rudeness, and they resented his lack of retenue. Robust candour is a quality which civilization—working in the interests of both sexes—has wisely thought fit to discard. Even Mr. Birrell, who is disposed to leniency where Charlotte Brontë’s art is concerned, admits that while Rochester is undeniably masculine, and not a governess in revolt, he is yet “man described by woman,” studied from the outside by one who could only surmise. And of the fierce and adorable little professor, the “sallow tiger” who is the crowning achievement of “Villette,” he has still more serious doubts. “Some good critics there are who stick to it that in his heart of hearts Paul Emanuel was a woman.”

Does this mean that femininity, backed by genius, cannot grasp the impalpable something which is the soul and essence of masculinity? Because then it follows that masculinity, backed by genius, cannot grasp the impalpable something which is the soul and essence of femininity. Such a limitation has never yet been recognized and deplored. On the contrary, there are novelists, like Mr. Hardy, and Mr. George Meredith, and Mr. Henry James, who are considered to know a great deal more about women than women know about themselves, and to be able to give the sex some valuable points for its own enlightenment. Just as Luini and Leonardo da Vinci are believed to have grasped the subtleties hidden deep in the female heart, and to have betrayed them upon their imperishable canvases in a lurking smile or a gleam from half-shut eyes, so Mr. Meredith and Mr. James are believed to have betrayed these feminine secrets in the ruthless pages of their novels. Mr. Boyesen, for example, did not hesitate to say that no woman could have drawn a character like Diana of the Crossways, and endowed her with “that nameless charm,” because “the sentiment that feels and perceives it is wholly masculine.” Why should not this rule work both ways, and a nameless charm be given to some complex and veracious hero, because the sentiment that feels and perceives it is wholly feminine? Mrs. Humphry Ward strove for just such a triumph in her portrait of Edward Manisty, but she strove in vain. Yet if the attraction of one sex for the other be mutual, why should it enlighten the man and confuse the woman? Or is this enlightenment less penetrating than it appears? Perhaps a rare perfection in recognizing and reproducing detail may be mistaken for a firm grasp upon the whole.

Certain it is that if men have looked with skepticism at the types of manhood presented with so much ardour by female novelists,—if they have voted Rochester a brute, and Mr. Knightley a prig, and Robert Elsmere a bore, and Deronda “an intolerable kind of Grandison,”—women in their turn have evinced resentment, or at least impatience, at the attitude of heroines so sweetly glorified by men. Lady Castlewood is a notable example. How kindly Thackeray—who is not always kind—treats this “tender matron,” this “fair mistress” of the admirable Esmond! What pleasant adjectives, “gentlest,” “truest,” “loveliest,” he has ever ready at her service! How frankly he forgives faults more endearing than virtues to the masculine mind! “It takes a man,” we are told, “to forgive Lady Castlewood.” She is the finest and most reverent incarnation of what men conceive to be purely feminine traits. In a world that belongs to its masters, she is an exquisite appurtenance, a possession justly prized. In a world shared—albeit somewhat unevenly—by men and women, she seems less good and gracious. “I always said I was alone,” cries Beatrix sternly. “You were jealous of me from the time I sat on my father’s knee.” And the child’s eyes saw the truth.

It has been claimed, and perhaps with justice, that the irritation provoked by Thackeray’s virtuous heroines is born of wounded vanity. Mr. Lang observes that women easily pardon Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory, but never Amelia Sedley nor Laura Pendennis. For the matter of that, men easily pardon Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton. They do more than pardon, they delight in these incomparable clerics, and they adore Miss Austen for having created them. Mr. Saintsbury vows that Mr. Collins is worthy of Fielding or Swift. But their sentiments towards the excellent Edmund Bertram, who is all that a parson should be, are not wholly unlike the sentiments of women towards Amelia Sedley, who is all that a wife and a mother should be; nor are they ready to admit that Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley are worthy of Elizabeth and Emma. Lord Brabourne has recorded a distinct prejudice against Mr. Knightley, on the ground that he interferes too much; yet it is plain that Miss Austen considered this interference as a masculine prerogative, exercised with judgment and discretion. He is what women call “a thorough man,” just as Amelia is what men call “a thorough woman.” Mr. Lang bravely confesses his affection for her on this very score: “She is such a thorough woman.” It evidently does not occur to him to doubt Thackeray’s knowledge, or his own knowledge, of the sex.

Around Fielding’s heroines the battle has raged for years. These kind-hearted, sweet-tempered creatures have been very charming in men’s eyes. Scott loved Sophia Western as if she had been his own daughter,—he would have treated her differently,—and took especial pleasure in her music, in the way she soothed her father to sleep after dinner with “Saint George, he is for England.” Sir Walter and Squire Western had a stirring taste in songs. Dr. Johnson gave his allegiance without reserve to Fielding’s Amelia. He read the inordinately long novel which bears her name at a single sitting, and he always honoured her as the best and loveliest of her sex,—this, too, at a time when Clarissa held the hearts of Christendom in her keeping. Amelia Booth, like Amelia Sedley, is a “thorough woman;” that is, she embodies all the characteristics which the straightforward vice of the eighteenth century conceived to be virtues in her sex, and which provoke the envious admiration of our own less candid age. “Fair, and kind, and good,” so runs the verdict. “What more can be desired?” And the impatient retort of the feminine reader, “No more, but possibly a little less,” offends the critic’s ear. “Where can you find among the genteel writers of this age,” asks Mr. Lang hotly, “a figure more beautiful, tender, devoted, and, in all good ways, womanly, than Sophia Western?” “The adorable Sophia,” Mr. Austin Dobson calls her,—“pure and womanly, in spite of her unfavourable surroundings.” Womanliness is the one trait about which they are all cock-sure. It is the question at issue, and cannot be lightly begged. But Sophia’s strongest plea is the love Sir Walter gave her.

For Scott, though most of his young heroines are drawn in a perfunctory and indifferent fashion—mere incentives to enterprise or rewards of valour—knew something of the quicksands beyond. He made little boast of this knowledge, frankly preferring the ways of men, about whom there was plenty to be told, and whose motives never needed a too assiduous analysis. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, pronounced all the women of the Waverley Novels to be finer than the men; but he was arguing on purely ethical grounds. He liked the women better because they were better, not because their goodness was truer to life. He was incapable of judging any work, literary or artistic, by purely critical standards. He had praise for Rose Bradwardine, and Catherine Seyton, and Alice Lee, because they are such well-behaved young ladies; he excluded from his list of heroines Lucy Ashton, who stands forever as a proof of her author’s power to probe a woman’s soul. Scott did not care to do this thing. The experiment was too painful for his hands. But critics who talk about the subtleties of modern novelists, as compared with Sir Walter’s “frank simplicity,”—patronizing phrase!—have forgotten “The Bride of Lammermoor.” There is nothing more artistic within the whole range of fiction than our introduction to Lucy Ashton, when the doomed girl—as yet unseen—is heard singing those curious and haunting lines which reveal to us at once the struggle that awaits her, and her helplessness to meet and conquer fate.

There are fashions in novel-writing, as in all things else, and a determined effort to be analytic is imposing enough to mislead. We usually detect this effort when men are writing of women, and when women are writing of men. The former seek to be subtle; the latter seek to be strong. Both are determined to reveal something which is not always a recognizable revelation. In the earlier “novels of character” there is none of this delicate surgery. Fielding took his material as he found it, and so did Miss Austen. She painted her portraits with absolute truthfulness, but she never struggled for insight; above all she never struggled for insight into masculinity. She knew her men as well as any author needs to know them; but her moments of illumination, of absolute intimacy, were for women. It is in such a moment that Emma Woodhouse realizes, “with the speed of an arrow,” that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.

There is nothing “subtle” in this; nothing that at all resembles Mr. Hardy’s careful explorations into the intricacies of a character like Eustacia Vye, in “The Return of the Native.” There is nothing of Mr. James’s artfulness, nothing of Mr. Meredith’s daring. These two eminent novelists are past masters of their craft. They present their heroines as interesting puzzles to which they alone hold the key. They keep us in a state of suspense from chapter to chapter, and they too often baffle our curiosity in the end. The treatment of Miriam Rooth, in “The Tragic Muse,” is a triumph of ingenuity. “What do you think of her?” “What can you make out of her?” “What is she now, and what is she going to be?” are the unasked, and certainly unanswerable, questions suggested by every phase of this young woman’s development. The bewildered reader, unable to formulate a theory, unable to make even a feeble conjecture, is much impressed by the problem laid before him, and by the acuteness of the author who deciphers it. If to evolve a sphinx and to answer her riddle is to interpret femininity, then there are modern novelists who have entered upon their kingdom. But one remembers Rochefoucauld’s wise words: “The greatest mistake of penetration is, not to have fallen short, but to have gone too far.”

MARRIAGE IN FICTION

They fought bitter and regular, like man and wife.

Since the days of Richardson and Fielding, English novelists have devoted themselves with tireless energy to the pleasant task of match-making. They have held this duty to be of such paramount importance that much of their work has practically no other raison d’être. They write their stories—so far as we can see—solely and entirely that they may bring two wavering young people to the altar; and they leave us stranded at the church doors in lamentable ignorance of all that is to follow. Thackeray once asked Alexandre Dumas why he did not take up the real history of other people’s heroes and heroines, and tell the world what their married lives were like.

It would have been a perilous enterprise, for, notwithstanding two centuries of practice, novelists are astonishingly bad match-makers. We know what happened when Thackeray himself undertook to continue the tale of Ivanhoe and Rowena, whom Scott abandoned to their fate, with merely a gentle hint of some mental deviations on the bridegroom’s part. Sir Walter, indeed, always shook hands with his young couples on their wedding-day, and left them to pull through as best they could. Their courtships and their marriages interested him less than other things he wanted to write about,—sieges and tournaments, criminal trials, and sour Scottish saints. He had lived his own life bravely and happily without his heart’s desire; he believed that it was the fate of most men to do the same; and he clung stoutly to Dryden’s axiom:—

Secrets of marriage still are sacred held,

Their sweet and bitter from the world concealed.

In real life this admirable reticence is a thing of the past; but the novelist, for the most part, holds his peace, leaving his readers a prey to melancholy doubts and misgivings.

The English-speaking novelist only. In French fiction, as Mr. Lang points out, “love comes after marriage punctually enough, but it is always love for another.” The inevitableness of the issue startles and dismays an English reader, accustomed to yawn gently over the innocent prenuptial dallyings of Saxon man and maid. The French story-writer cannot and does not ignore his social code which urbanely limits courtship. When he describes a girl’s dawning sentiment, he does so often with exquisite grace and delicacy; but he reserves his portrayal of the master passion until maturity gives it strength, and circumstances render it unlawful. His conception of his art imposes no scruple which can impede analysis. If an English novelist ventures to treat of illicit love, the impression he gives is of a blind, almost mechanical force, operating against rather than in unison with natural laws. Those normal but most repellent aspects of the case, which the Frenchman treats openly and exhaustively, the Englishman ignores or rejects. His theory of civilization is built up largely—and wisely—on suppression.

But why should the sentiment or passion of love be the chosen theme of story-writers, to the practical exclusion of other interests? Why should it be the central point around which their tales revolve? When we look about us in the world we know, we cannot think that love is taking up much time and attention in people’s lives. It dominates gloriously for a brief period,—or for brief periods,—and then makes way for other engrossing influences. Its might and authority are recognized; but the recognition does not imply constant concern. The atmosphere of life is not surcharged with emotion, as is the atmosphere of fiction. Society is not composed of young men and women falling madly but virtuously in love with one another, nor of married men and women doing the same thing on less legitimate lines.

To these rational arguments, which have been urged by restless critics before now, M. Paul Bourget makes answer that novelists deal with love because, under its white heat, all characteristics become more vividly alive, and are brought more actively and more luminously into play. Man is never so self-revealing as when consumed by passion. We see into his heart, only when it is lit by the flame of desire. Moreover, love being natural, and in a manner inevitable, there is not in treating of it that suggestion of artifice which chills our faith in most of the incidents of fiction.

But is the man whom we see revealed by the light of love the real man? Can we, after this transient illumination, say safely to ourselves, “We know him well”? Is it his true and human self, son naturel, to use an admirable old French phrase, which is both quickened and betrayed by passion? Putting cynicism aside, rejecting Lord Bacon’s dictum, “Love is a nuisance, and an impediment to important action,” we are still doubtful as to the value of traits studied under these powerful but perishable conditions. It is not what a man does when he is in love, but what he does when he is out of love (Philip drunk to Philip sober) which counts for characterization. That pleasant old romancer, Maistro Rusticiano di Pisa, tells us that a courtier once asked Charlemagne whether he held King Meliadus or his son Tristan to be the better man. To this question the Emperor made wise reply: “King Meliadus was the better man, and I will tell you why. As far as I can see, everything that Tristan did was done for love, and his great feats would never have been done, save under the constraint of love, which was his spur and goad. Now this same thing can never be said of King Meliadus. For what deeds he did, he did them, not by dint of love, but by dint of his strong right arm. Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not by constraint of love.”

It is this element of coercion which gives us pause. Not out of his own goodness, nor out of his own badness, does the lover act; but goaded onward by a force too impetuous for resistance. When this force is spent, then we can test the might of his “strong right arm.” Who that has read it can forget the matchless paragraph of adjectives in which the Ettrick Shepherd contrasts the glowing deceits of courtship with the sober sincerities of married life? “Love,” he sighs, “is a saft, sweet, bright, balmy, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which nature offers us in mockery during a’ the rest o’ our lives the puir, paltry, pitiful, faded, fushionless, cauldrified, and chittering substitute, truth.”

Small wonder that novelists content themselves with making matches, and refrain from examining too closely the result of their handiwork. They would have more conscience about it, if it were not so easy for them to withdraw. They are almost as irresponsible as poets, who delight in yoking unequal mates, as proof of the power of love. Poetry weds King Cophetua to the beggar maid, and smilingly retires from any further contemplation of the catastrophe. Shakespeare gives Celia—Celia, with her sweet brown beauty, her true heart, her nimble wit, her grace of exquisite companionship—to that unnatural sinner, Oliver; and the only excuse he offers is that Oliver says he is sorry for his sins. So I suppose Helen of Troy said she regretted her indiscretion, and this facile repentance reinstated her in happy domesticity. But the novelist is not at play in the Forest of Arden. He is presumably grappling with the dismal realities of earth. Nothing could be less like a fairy playground than the village of Thrums (“If the Auld-Licht parishioners ever get to heaven,” said Dr. Chalmers, “they will live on the north side of it”); yet it is in Thrums that Mr. Barrie marries Babbie to the Little Minister,—marries her with a smile and a blessing, as though he had solved, rather than complicated, the mysterious problem of life.

The occasional and deliberate effort of the novelist to arrange an unhappy union in order to emphasize contrasts of character is an advance toward realism; but the temporary nature of such tragedies (which is well understood) robs the situation of its power. In the typical instance of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon, George Eliot deemed it necessary to offer careful explanation of her conduct,—or of Dorothea’s,—and she rather ungenerously threw the blame upon Middlemarch society, which was guiltless before high Heaven, and upon the then prevalent “modes of education, which made a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance.” In reality, Dorothea was alone responsible; and it is hard not to sympathize with Mr. Casaubon, who was digging contentedly enough in his little dry mythological dust-heaps when she dazzled him into matrimony. It is hard for the unregenerate heart not to sympathize occasionally with Rosamond Vincy and with Tito Melema, whom George Eliot married to Lydgate and to Romola, in order that she might with more efficacy heap shame and scorn upon their heads. The moral in all these cases is pointed as unwaveringly as the compass needle points to the North Star. This is what happens when noble and ignoble natures are linked together. This is what happens when the sons of God wed with the daughters of men. We are not to suppose that it was poor Mr. Casaubon’s failure to write his “Key to all Mythologies,” nor even his ignorance of German, which alienated his wife’s affection; but rather his selfish determination to sacrifice her youth and strength on the altar of his vanity,—a vanity to which her early homage, be it remembered, had given fresh impetus and life.

The pointing of morals is not, however, the particular function of married life. The problem it presents is a purely natural one, and its ethical value is not so easily ascertained. For the most part the sons of men wed with the daughters of men. They do not offer the contrast of processional virtues and of deep debasement; but the far wider contrast of manhood and of womanhood, of human creatures whose minds and hearts and tastes and instincts are radically unlike; who differ in all essentials from the very foundations of their being. “Our idea of honour is not their idea of honour,” says Mr. Lang, speaking for men, and of women; “our notions of justice and of humour are not their notions of justice and of humour; nor can we at all discover a common calculus of the relative importance of things.”

This is precisely why we wish that novelists would not neglect their opportunities, and shirk their responsibilities, by escaping at the church door. What did really happen when Babbie married the little Minister, and added to the ordinary difficulties of wedlock the extraordinary complications of birth and training, habits and character, irreconcilably at variance with the traditions of the Auld-Licht rectory? We know how the mother of John Wesley,—and incidentally of eighteen other children,—a dour, stern, pious parson’s wife, refused to say amen to her husband’s prayer for King William, and dwelt apart from her reverend spouse and master for twelve long months, rather than relinquish a sentiment of loyalty for the rightful sovereign of the land. Such incidents stand in our way when we are told musically that—

Love will still be lord of all.

Mrs. Wesley loved her husband, and she did not love the banished and papistical James; yet it was only King William’s death (a happy and unforeseen solution of the difficulty) which brought her back to submission and conjugal joys.

For one of the most ill-assorted marriages in fiction Miss Austen must be held to blame. It was this lady’s firm conviction (founded on Heaven knows what careful and continued observation) that clever men are wont for the most part to marry foolish or stupid women. We see in nearly all her books the net results of such seemingly inexplicable alliances. In what moment of madness did Mr. Bennet ask Mrs. Bennet to be his wife? Nothing can explain such an enigma; but Miss Austen’s philosophy, and her knowledge of that commonplace middle-class English life, which the eighteenth century had stripped bare of all superfluous emotions, enabled her to prove—to her own satisfaction at least—that Mr. Bennet was tolerably content with the situation. It is not too much to say that he enjoys his wife’s absurdities. Only in his few earnest words to Elizabeth, when Darcy has asked for her hand: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life,” do we catch a glimpse of the Valley of Humiliation which he has trodden for twenty-four years. A still more emphatic illustration of Miss Austen’s point of view is afforded us in “Sense and Sensibility,” when Eleanor Dashwood decides that Mrs. Palmer’s surpassing foolishness cannot sufficiently account for Mr. Palmer’s rudeness and discontent. “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that, through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman; but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.”

Fortified by such philosophy, convinced that the natural order of things, though mysterious and unpleasant, does not entail unhappiness, Miss Austen deliberately marries Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland; marries them after an engagement long enough to have opened the bridegroom’s eyes, were it not for the seventy merciful miles which lie between Northanger Abbey and the rectory of Fullerton. With an acute and delicate cynicism, so gently spoken that we hardly feel its sting, she proves to us, in a succession of conversations, that “a good-looking girl with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” When Catherine delivers her priceless views upon the unprofitable labour of historians, we know that Mr. Tilney’s fate is sealed.

“You are fond of history!—and so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable. At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate. And though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”

To be told that history is made admirable because you read it, is flattering indeed. Mr. Tilney is satisfied that Catherine has “a great deal of natural taste,”—an impression which her artless admiration for his talents deepens into agreeable certainty. When he asks her hand in marriage, Miss Austen reminds us with dispassionate candour that his attachment originated in gratitude. “A persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of his giving her a serious thought.” There is a final jest about beginning “perfect happiness” at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, and the curtain is rung down upon a lifetime of irrational ennui.

The world of the novelist is full of such strange mishaps, and our sense of inquietude corresponds with our conviction of their reality. Mrs. Ward probably does not expect us to believe that Jacob Delafield and Julie Le Breton lived happily and harmoniously together. There is something as radically inharmonious in their marriage as in the union of conflicting elements. It is not a question of taking chances of happiness, as Sophia Western takes them with Tom Jones (very good chances, to my way of thinking); it is a question of unalterable laws by which the gods limit our human joy. But there is no sharp sense of disappointment awakened in our hearts when we read “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” as when more powerful currents of emotion turn awry. That Henry Esmond should have married Lady Castlewood, or rather, that he should not have married Beatrix, I count one of the permanent sorrows of life.

In an exceedingly clever and ruthlessly disagreeable novel by Mr. Bernard Shaw, “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” there is a brief, clear exposition of that precise phase of life which novelists, as a rule, decline to elucidate. Cashel Byron is a prize-fighter, a champion light-weight, well-born (though he does not know it) and of cleanly life; but nevertheless a prize-fighter, with the instincts, habits, and vocabulary of his class. A young woman, rich, refined, bookish, brought up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere which has starved her healthy sentiment to danger point, falls helplessly in love with his beauty and his strength, and marries him, in mute desperate defiance of social laws. The story closes at this point, but the author adds a brief commentary, designed to explain the limited possibilities of happiness that exist for the ex-pugilist and his wife.

“Cashel’s admiration for Lydia survived the ardour of his first love for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her children inherited her acuteness and refinement, with their father’s robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent, had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother principally by running to her when they were in difficulties.... The care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her little time to think about herself, or about the fact that, when the illusion of her love passed away, Cashel fell in her estimation. But the children were a success, and she soon came to regard him as one of them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.”

Here are conditions which, if presented at length and with sufficient skill, might hold us spellbound. Here is an opportunity to force conviction, were the novelist disposed to grapple with his real work. As it is, Mr. Shaw contents himself with adding one more to the marital failures of fiction. Dr. Johnson said that most marriages would turn out as well if the Lord Chancellor made them. The Lord Chancellor would assuredly make them better than that blundering expert, the novelist.

OUR BELIEF IN BOOKS

What pleasantness of teaching there is in books,—how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books, without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.—Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, A. D. 1459.

Enough has been written in praise of books to fill a library. It is not always so eloquently worded as is the Bishop of Durham’s benediction; but the same general truths—or fallacies—are repeated with more or less pride and persuasiveness. At the same time, a lesser library might be compiled of the warnings uttered by the anxious ones who hold that the power of books is more potent than benign, and that if one half of the world’s readers are being led gloriously to high and noble truths, the other half is being vitiated by an influence which makes for paltriness and degradation. Under all circumstances, we are asked to believe that we are dominated by the printed page. It is this conviction which induces so much of austerity—not to say of censoriousness—in our counsellors, whose upbraidings are but the echoes of those sterner protests with which church and state were wont in earlier days to direct the reading courses of the public. That books have always been deemed formidable antagonists is proven by their frequent condemnation. The fires that were kindled for sorcerers and for heretics flamed just as fiercely for the stubborn volumes which passed the border-land of orthodoxy. Calvin burned all the pamphlets and manuscripts of Servetus at the same time that he burned their author; in consequence of which thoroughness, “Christianismi Restitutio” is said to be one of the rarest dissertations in the world.

For some books that perished at the stake the antiquarian can never mourn enough. An act passed in the short reign of King Edward VI commanded the wholesale destruction of all “antiphones, myssales, scrayles, processionales, manuelles, legendes, pyes, prymars in Lattyn or Inglishe, cowchers, journales, ordinales, or other books or writings whatsoever, heretofore used for the service of the churche, written or prynted in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue.” Owners of these precious volumes were commanded to give them up (heavy fines being exacted for disobedience), that they might be “openlye brent, or otherways defaced and destroied.” None were spared, save the “Prymars in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue set forthe by the late Kinge of famous memorie, Kinge Henrie the eight;” and even from such hallowed pages all “invocations or prayers to saintes” were to be “blotted or clerelye put out.” Orthodoxy is a costly indulgence. What treasures were lost to the world, what—

Small rare volumes, dark with tarnished gold,

shrivelled into ashes, that the Book of Common Prayer might rule in undisputed authority and right!

Queen Elizabeth was strenuously opposed to “schismatical” works, as well as to those of a political or diplomatic character. With broad-minded impartiality she burned all books and pamphlets which presumed to deal—no matter in what spirit—with subjects she did not wish discussed. Like the old Tory lady who objected to her Tory butler’s sentiments, seeing no reason why butlers should have sentiments at all, Elizabeth punished the too effusive piety and patriotism of her subjects as severely as she punished their discontent. The hall kitchen of the Stationers’ Company witnessed many a bonfire of books during her reign; and many an incautious author discovered with poor Peter Wentworth that “the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even as the messenger of Death.” James I favoured St. Paul’s churchyard as a spot singularly suitable for the cremation of books; and Oxford and Cambridge had their own exclusive auto-da-fés for two centuries and more. Edinburgh, with fine national feeling, burned Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica,” because its English tone offended Scottish pride; and England burned the Rev. Arthur Bury’s “Naked Gospel” in 1690, because she conceived that a rector of Exeter should veil his truths more decently from the eyes of the feeble and profane. The last book to achieve such unmerited distinction in Great Britain was a copy of Mr. Froude’s “Nemesis of Faith,” which, being discovered in the possession of an Oxford student, was publicly burned by the Rev. William Sewell, Dean of Exeter, in the college hall, on the twenty-seventh of February, 1849. “Oxford,” says Mr. James Anson Farrer, “has always tempered her love for learning with a dislike for inquiry.” The incident, being at best unusual, gave such a healthy impetus to the sale of Mr. Froude’s work—which had won no wide hearing—that it went into a second edition, and became an object of keen, though temporary, solicitude. Well might the Marquis de Langle say that burning was as a blue ribbon to any book, inspiring interest, and insuring sales. There are those who affirm that the “Index Expurgatorius,” by which the Roman Catholic church still seeks to restrain the reading of her children, is a similar spur to curiosity. This I do not believe, having never in my life met a Roman Catholic who knew what works were or were not upon the “Index,” or who had been incautious enough to inquire.

The decline of church discipline and the enfeeblement of law permit books now to die a natural death; but the conviction of their powerful and perilous authority still lingers in the teacher’s heart. If he knows, as is often the case, much of letters and little of life, he magnifies this authority until it seems the dominant influence of the world. A writer in one of the British quarterlies assures us with almost incredible seriousness that we are at the mercy of the authors whom we read.

“We take a silent, innocent-seeming volume into our hands, and, when we put it down, we shall never again be what we were before.... St. Augustine opened the book, and one single sentence changed him from the brilliant, godless, self-satisfied rhetorician into a powerful religious force. Here, on the other hand, is a youth who opens a mere magazine article written against his faith. He throws off the early influence of home like a mantle, and plunges thenceforward into the ‘sunless gulf of doubt,’ with the unspeakable morasses at the bottom.”

This is a little like the man who left the Unitarian church because “somebody told him it wasn’t true.” How is a soul so sensitive to be kept in—or out of—any fold? A religion which dissolves before the persuasions of a magazine article must necessarily be as short-lived as the love—“the slight, thin sort of inclination”—which is starved, so Elizabeth Bennett tells us, by a sonnet. “Ten thousand difficulties,” says Cardinal Newman nobly, “do not make one doubt;” but the thinker who cannot surmount the first and feeblest of the difficulties should never have essayed the perilous pathway of the alphabet. Neither was St. Augustine’s inspiration a flashlight upon darkness. The “self-satisfied rhetorician” was not converted, like Harlequin, in one dazzling moment. There had been a long and bitter struggle between the forces of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, before the word of St. Paul penetrated with overwhelming sweetness into a soul cleared by hard thinking, and cleansed by a passion for perfection.

Man may be an unstable creature,—we have been told so until we believe it,—but he parts reluctantly from his convictions, and is slow to break the habits of a lifetime. Hear what Robert Burton has to say about the obstinate perversity of heretics.

“Single out the most ignorant of them. Convince his understanding. Show him his errors. Prove to him the grossness and absurdities of his sect. He will not be persuaded.”

He will not, indeed, whether persuasion take the form of a sermon, a magazine article, or the stake. Luther said that the more he read the Fathers of the early Church, the more he found himself offended; which proves the strength of a mental attitude to resist the most penetrating of influences. Neither are political heretics any easier to enlighten. “Who,” asks Lord Coleridge, “ever convinced an antagonist by a speech?” On the contrary, there is a natural and healthy sentiment of revolt when views we do not share are set forth with unbroken continuity and insistence. In the give and take of conversation, in the advance and retreat of argument, in the swift intrusion of the spoken word, made overpowering by the charm of personality, we encounter a force too subtle and personal to be resisted. Unconsciously we yield at some point to the insidious attack of thoughts and ideas so presented as to weaken our individual opposition, and adroitly force an entrance to our souls. But books, like sermons, fail by reason of the smoothness of their current; because there is no backwater to stir the eddies, and whirl us into conflict and submission. We feel that, could we have spent our “mornings in Florence” with Mr. Ruskin, have looked with him at frescoes, tombs, and pavements, and have disputed at every point his magnificent assumption of authority, we might have ended by accepting his most unreasonable and intolerant verdicts. Could we free our souls by expressing to Mr. John Morley our sentiments concerning Mr. Gladstone, we might in return be impelled to share the enthusiasm of the enlightened biographer. But neither Mr. Buskin nor Mr. Morley has the same power of persuasiveness in print. The simple process of leaving out whatever is antagonistic makes demonstration easy, but inconclusive. Sometimes the robust directness of the method inclines us peremptorily to resistance. It is hard for a generous heart not to sympathize with the exiled Stewarts, after reading Lord Macaulay’s “History of England.” Mr. Froude must be held responsible for much of the extravagant enthusiasm professed for the Queen of Scots. And I once knew an intelligent girl who had been driven by Mr. Prescott into worshipping Philip II as a hero.

People who have contracted the habit of writing books are naturally prone to exaggerate their importance. It is this sentiment which has provoked the attitude of fault-finding, of continuous grumbling at readers, which is so marked a characteristic of modern criticism. The public is reproached, admonished, warned by Mr. Frederic Harrison that if it feels contumacious—which is not infrequently the case—it should pray for a “cleanlier and quieter spirit.” Whenever a handful of books is presented to a community, addresses are made to show, on the one hand, that reading and writing are better than meat and drink, and, on the other, that the people who read and write are on the brink of abysmal destruction. I have heard a lecturer upon one of these august occasions gloomily prophesy that many of the volumes waiting to be perused would “deprave the taste, irritate the vanity, exaggerate the egotism, and vitiate the curiosity of their readers.” This seemed an unfortunate result for philanthropy to achieve; but the speaker went on to excite the godless interest of his audience by warning them that romance—of which the new library was reasonably full—would exercise a “bewildering and blinding effect” upon their minds, “filling them with false hopes and enervating dreams.” He then defined a good novel as one which should “stimulate a healthy imagination, a sober ambition, a modest ardour, an eager humility, a love of what is truly great;” and left us oppressed with the conviction that the usefulness of our earthly careers and the salvation of our immortal souls depended upon the fiction that we read.

“There is no harm,” says Mr. Birrell sweetly, “in talking about books, still less in reading them; but it is folly to pretend to worship them.” It is folly to exaggerate their controlling influence in our lives. We are not more modestly ardent after reading “Vanity Fair,” nor more eagerly humble after spending long and happy hours with “Emma.” No sober ambition stirs chastely in our souls when we lay down, with a sigh of content, “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Guy Mannering,” or “Henry Esmond,” or “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even “Anna Karénina” fails to inspire us with “false hopes and enervating dreams;” and while we are often bewildered by Mr. Henry James’s masterpieces, we have never been blinded by any. As for the ordinary novels that tumble headlong from the press, it is impossible to imagine them as inspiring either ardour or ambition, egotism or humility. They may perhaps be trusted to weaken our literary instincts, and to induce mental inertia,—“the surest way of having no thoughts of our own,” says Schopenhauer, “is to take up a book every time we have nothing to do,”—but they are not, as their writers and their critics fearfully assert, the arbiters of our destinies.

A belief in the overpowering influence of books was part of Carlyle’s gospel. He had a curious modesty about giving advice, even when it was sought; and—born dictator though he was—he realized that his own literary needs were not necessarily the literary needs of other men. He said as much quite simply and sincerely when people asked him what they should read, holding always, with Dr. Johnson, that inclination must prompt the choice. To be sure, like Dr. Johnson, and like Emerson, he presupposed inclination to be of an austere and seemly order. Emerson never wearied of saying that people should read what they liked; but he plainly expected them to like only what was good. Carlyle was firmly convinced that authorship carried with it responsibilities too serious for trifling. He reverenced the printed page, and he expressed this reverence, this confession of faith, in the most explicit and comprehensive assertion.

“The writer of a book is he not a preacher, preaching, not to this parish or that, but to all men in all times and places? Not the wretchedest circulating library novel which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls.”

More than this it would be impossible to say, and few of us, I hope, would be willing to say as much. The idea is too oppressive to be borne. Only authors and critics can afford to take this view of life. Personally I believe that a foolish girl is more influenced by another foolish girl, to say nothing of a foolish boy, than by all the novels on the library shelves. Companionship and propinquity are forces to be reckoned with. Mind touches mind like an electric current. The contagion of folly is spread, like other forms of contagion, by personal contact. Books may, as Carlyle says, preach to all men, in all times and places; but it is precisely their lack of reticence, the universality of their message, their chill publicity of tone which reduces their readers to the level of an audience or of a congregation. If we recall the disclosures with which we have been favoured from time to time by distinguished people who consented to tell the world what books had influenced their lives, we cannot fail to remember the perfunctory nature of these revelations. It was as though the speakers had first marshalled in order the most enduring masterpieces of literature, and had then fitted their own sentiments and experiences into appropriate grooves. This reversal of a natural law is much in favour when what are called epoch-making books come under public discussion. There are enthusiasts who appear to think that Rousseau evoked the French Revolution, and that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was responsible for the Civil War. When the impetus of a profound and powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in literature,—or at least in letters,—the writer’s mind speeds like a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. It does not create the sentiment, it does not appreciably intensify it; but it enables people to perceive more clearly the nature of the course to which they stand committed. These sympathetic triumphs are sometimes mistaken for literary triumphs. They are often thought to lead the chase they follow.

If, on the other hand, we ask ourselves soberly what books have helped to mould our characters or to control our energies, we shall not find the list an imposing one. There will be little or nothing to tell a listening world. Rather may we incline to the open skepticism of Lord Byron: “Who was ever altered by a poem?” Even presuming that we are happy enough to detach ourselves from contemporary criticism, and to read for human delight; even presuming that, after a lifetime of effort, we have learned to recognize perfection in literary art, and to turn of our own free will to those lonely works which “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, should be, and forever remain, essentially unpopular;” even then it does not follow that we are mastered by the books we love. There still remains to us that painful and unconquerable originality, which is not defiant, but only helplessly incapable of submission. “Giving a reason for a thing,” says Dr. Johnson, “does not make it right.” Let us hope that being unable to give a reason for a thing does not prove us wrong. The Rev. Mark Pattison, who was the most unflinching reader of his day, who looked upon money only as a substance convertible by some happy alchemy into leather-bound volumes, and upon time only as a possession which could be exchanged for a wider acquaintance with literature, understood better than any scholar in England the limitations and futilities of print. He did not say with Hobbes, “If I had read as much as other men, I should doubtless have shared their ignorance,” because he had read more than other men, and was very widely informed; but he pointed out with startling lucidity that a flexible mind fortifies itself rather by conversation, which is the gift of the few, than by reading, which is the resource of the many. “Books,” he said, “are written in response to a demand for recreation by minds roused to intelligence, but not to intellectual activity.” There is something pathetic in his frankly envious admiration of the French, who can and do convey their thoughts to one another in a language wrought up to be “the perfect medium of wit and wisdom,—the wisdom of the serpent,—the incisive medium of the practical intelligence.” He quoted with melancholy appreciation Lord Houghton’s story of the Italian who, after submitting to the heavy hospitality of an English country-house, drew a newly arrived Frenchman into a corner with the eager request: “Viens donc causer. Je n’ai pas causé pour quinze jours.”

Mr. Lang is responsible for the statement—spoken, let us hope, in the enjoyment of a sardonic mood rather than after dispassionate observation—that the average Englishman or Englishwoman would as soon think of buying a boa-constrictor as buying a book. He or she depends for intellectual sustenance upon that happy lottery system which has been devised by circulating libraries, and with which Americans are so well acquainted,—a system which enables us to put in a request for Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and draw out the Rev. W. Profeit’s “Creation of Matter;” to put in a request for “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” and draw out “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.” It is evident that reading conducted on this basis is as sure a path to cultivation as a roulette table is to wealth. It has all the charm of uncertainty, and all the value of speculation. It eliminates selection, detaches quantity from quality, and replaces the elusive balancing of results by the unchallenged roll-call of statistics. It expresses that unshaken belief which is the gospel of the librarian,—namely, that the number of books taken from his shelves within a given time has something to do with the educational efficiency of his library.

Our power of self-deception—without which we should shrivel into humility—is never so comfortable nor so resourceful as in the matter of reading. We are capable of believing, not only that we love books which we do not love, but that we have read books which we have not read. A lifelong intimacy with their titles, a partial acquaintance with modern criticism, a lively recollection of many familiar quotations,—these things come in time to be mistaken for a knowledge of the books themselves. Perhaps in youth it was our ambitious purpose to storm certain bulwarks of literature, but we were deterred by their unpardonable length. It is a melancholy truth, which may as well be acknowledged in the start, that many of the books best worth reading are very, very long, and that they cannot, without mortal hurt, be shortened. Nothing less than shipwreck on a desert island in company with Froissart’s “Chronicles” would give us leisure to peruse this glorious narrative, and it is useless to hope for such a happy combination of chances. We might indeed be wrecked,—that is always a possibility,—but the volume saved dripping from the deep would be “Soldiers of Fortune,” or “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”

It is at least curious that if people love books—as we are perpetually assured they do—they should need so much persuasion to read them. Societies are formed for mutual encouragement and support in this engaging but arduous pursuit. Optimistic counsellors cheer a shrinking public to its task by recommending minute quantities of intellectual nourishment to be taken twenty-four hours apart. They urge us to read something “solid” for fifteen minutes a day, until we get used to it, and they promise us that—mental invalids though we be—we can assimilate great masterpieces in doses so homœopathic that we need hardly know we are taking them. But this is not the spirit in which we pursue other pleasures. We do not make an earnest effort to enjoy our friends by admitting one for fifteen minutes’ conversation every morning. If we like a thing at all, we are apt to like a good deal of it; and if we are working con amore, we are wont to work very hard. To turn to books, as Jeremy Collier counsels us, when we are weary alike of solitude and companionship, to value them, as he did, because they help us to forget “the crossness of men and things,” is to pay a sincere, but not an ardent, tribute to their worth. Even the Bishop of Durham praised his library, which he truly loved, because it soothed his unquiet soul. The friendly volumes forbore, as he gratefully noted, either to chide his errors or to mock at his ignorance; and there were contemporaries—like Petrarch—who affirmed that, for so ardent a bibliophile, the good Bishop had no great store of learning. His words echo pleasantly through the centuries, breathing the secret of quiet hours stolen from stormy times; and we repeat them, wondering less at their eloquence than at their moderation. “O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.”

THE BEGGAR’S POUCH

Just Heaven! for what wise reasons hast thou ordered it that beggary and urbanity, which are at such variance in other countries, should find a way to be at unity in this?—Sterne.

A rich American, with a kind heart and a lively sense of humour, was heard to remark as he crossed the Italian frontier, en route for Switzerland: “Now, if there be any one in the length and breadth of Italy who has not yet begged from me, this is his time to come forward.”

It was a genial invitation, betokening that tolerance of mind rarely found in the travelling Saxon, who is fortified against beggars, as against many other foreign institutions, by a petition-proof armour of finely welded principle and prejudice. He disapproves of mendicancy in general. He believes—or he says he believes—that you wrong and degrade your fellow men by giving them money. He has the assurance of his guide-book that the corps of ragged veterans who mount guard over every church door in Rome are unworthy of alms, being themselves capitalists on no ignoble scale. His irritation, when sore beset, is natural and pardonable. His arguments are not easily answered. He can be vaguely statistical,—real figures are hard to come by in Italy,—he can be earnestly philosophical, he can quote Mr. Augustus Hare. In the end, he leaves you perplexed in spirit and dull of heart, with sixpence saved in your pocket, and the memory of pinched old faces—which do not look at all like the faces of capitalists at home—spoiling your appetite for dinner.

This may be right, but it is a melancholy attitude to adopt in a land where beggary is an ancient and not dishonourable profession. All art, all legend, all tradition, tell for the beggar. The splendid background against which he stands gives colour and dignity to his part. We see him sheltered by St. Julian,—ah, beautiful young beggar of the Pitti!—fed by St. Elizabeth, clothed by St. Martin, warmed by the fagots which St. Francesca Romano gathered for him in the wintry woods. What heavenly blessings have followed the charity shown to his needs! What evils have followed thick and fast where he has been rejected! I remember these things when I meet his piteous face and outstretched palm to-day. It is true that the Italian beggar almost always takes a courteous, or even an impatient denial in wonderfully good part; but, should he feel disposed to be malevolent, I am not one to be indifferent to his malevolence. I do not like to hear a shaken old voice wish that I may die unshriven. There are too many possibilities involved.

So sang a withered Sibyl energetical,

And banned the ungiving door with lips prophetical.

Mr. Henry James is of the opinion (and one envies him his ability to hold it) that “the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should thank you, with a smile of enchanting sweetness, for the gift of twopence is a proof certainly of an extreme and constant destitution; but—keeping in mind the sweetness—it is also a proof of a fortunate ability not to be depressed by circumstances.” This is a comforting faith to foster, and more credible than the theory of secreted wealth within the beggar’s pouch. It takes a great many pennies to build up a substantial fortune, and the competition in mendicancy is too keen to permit of the profits being large. The business, like other roads to fortune, is “not what it once was.” A particularly good post, long held and undisputed, an imposingly venerable and patriarchal appearance, a total absence of legs or arms,—these things may lead to modest competency; but these things are rare equipments. My belief in the affluence of beggars, a belief I was cherishing carefully for the sake of my own peace of mind, received a rude shock when I beheld a crippled old woman, whose post was in the Piazza S. Claudio, tucked into a doorway one cold December midnight, her idle crutches lying on her knees. If she had had a comfortable or even an uncomfortable home to go to, why should she have stayed to shiver and freeze in the deserted Roman streets?

The latitude extended by the Italian Church to beggars, the patronage shown them, never ceases to vex the tourist mind. An American cannot reconcile himself to marching up the church steps between two rows of mendicants, each provided with a chair, a little scaldino, and a tin cup, in which a penny rattles lustily. There is nothing casual about the appearance of these freeholders. They make no pretence—as do beggars at home—of sudden emergency or frustrated hopes. They are following their daily avocation,—the only one for which they are equipped,—and following it in a spirit of acute and healthy rivalry. To give to one and not to all is to arouse such a clamorous wail that it seems, on the whole, less stony-hearted to refuse altogether. Once inside the sacred walls, we find a small and well-selected body of practitioners hovering around the portals, waiting to exact their tiny toll when we are ready to depart. “Exact” is not too strong a word to use, for I have had a lame but comely young woman, dressed in decent black, with a black veil framing her expressive face, hold the door of the Aracœli firmly barred with one arm, while she swept the other toward me in a gesture so fine, so full of mingled entreaty and command, that it was worth double the fee she asked. Occasionally—not often—an intrepid beggar steals around during Mass, and, touching each member of the congregation on the shoulder, gently implores an alms. This is a practice frowned upon as a rule, save in Sicily, where a “plentiful poverty” doth so abide that no device for moving compassion can be too rigidly condemned. I have been present at a high Mass in Palermo, when a ragged woman with a baby in her arms moved slowly after the sacristan, who was taking up the offertory collection, and took up a second collection of her own, quite as though she were an authorized official. It was a scandalous sight to Western eyes,—in our well-ordered churches at home such a proceeding would be as impossible as a trapeze performance in the aisle,—but what depths of friendly tolerance it displayed, what gentle, if inert, compassion for the beggar’s desperate needs!

For in Italy, as in Spain, there is no gulf set between the rich and poor. What these lands lack in practical philanthropy is atoned for by a sweet and universal friendliness of demeanour, and by a prompt recognition of rights. It would be hard to find in England or in America such tattered rags, such gaunt faces and hungry eyes; but it would be impossible to find in Italy or in Spain a church where rags are relegated to some inconspicuous and appropriate background. The Roman beggar jostles—but jostles urbanely—the Roman prince; the noblest and the lowliest kneel side by side in the Cathedral of Seville. I have heard much all my life about the spirit of equality, and I have listened to fluent sermons, designed to prove that Christians, impelled by supernatural grace, love this equality with especial fervour; but I have never seen its practical workings, save in the churches of southern Europe. There tired mothers hush their babies to sleep, and wan children play at ease in their Father’s house. There I have been privileged to stand for hours, during long and beautiful services, because the only available chairs had been appropriated by forlorn creatures who would not have been permitted to intrude into the guarded pews at home.

It has been always thus. We have the evidence of writers who give it with reluctant sincerity; of Borrow, for example, who firmly believed he hated many things for which he had a natural and visible affinity. “To the honour of Spain be it spoken,” he writes in “The Bible in Spain,” “that it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt. Even at an inn the poor man is never spurned from the door, and, if not harboured, is at least dismissed with fair words, and consigned to the mercies of God and His Mother.”

The more ribald Nash, writing centuries earlier, finds no words too warm in which to praise the charities of Catholic Rome. “The bravest Ladies, in gownes of beaten gold, washing pilgrims’ and poor soldiours’ feete.... This I must say to the shame of us English; if good workes may merit Heaven, they doe them, we talk about them.”

The Roman ladies “doe them” still; not so picturesquely as they did three hundred years ago, but in the same noble and delicate spirit. Their means and their methods are far below the means and methods of charitable organizations in England and America. They cannot find work where there is no work to be done. They cannot lift the hopeless burden of want which is the inevitable portion of the Italian poor. They can at best give only the scanty loaf which keeps starvation from the door. They cannot educate the children, nor make the swarming populace of Rome “self-respecting,” by which we mean self-supporting. But they can and do respect the poverty they alleviate. Their mental attitude is simpler than ours. They know well that it is never the wretchedly poor who “fear fate and cheat nature,” and they see, with more equanimity than we can muster, the ever recurring tragedy of birth. The hope, so dear to our Western hearts, of ultimately raising the whole standard of humanity shines very dimly on their horizon; but if they plan less for the race, they draw closer to the individual. They would probably, if questioned, say frankly with Sir Thomas Browne: “I give no alms only to satisfy the hunger of my Brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the Will and Command of my God.” And if the “Religio Medici” be somewhat out of date,—superseded, we are told, by a finer altruism which rejects the system of reward,—we may still remember Mr. Pater’s half rueful admission that it was all “pure profit” to its holder.

When Charles Lamb lamented, with innate perversity, the decay of beggars, he merely withdrew his mind from actualities,—which always annoyed him,—and set it to contemplate those more agreeable figures which were not suffering under the disadvantage of existence. It was the beggar of romance, of the ballads, of the countryside, of the merry old songs, whose departure he professed to regret. The outcast of the London streets could not have been—even in Lamb’s time—a desirable feature. To-day we find him the most depressing object in the civilized world; and the fact that he is what is called, in the language of the philanthropist, “unworthy,” makes him no whit more cheerful of contemplation. The ragged creature who rushes out of the darkness to cover the wheel of your hansom with his tattered sleeve manages to convey to your mind a sense of degraded wretchedness, calculated to lessen the happiness of living. His figure haunts you miserably, when you want to forget him and be light of heart. By his side, the venerable, white-bearded old humbugs who lift the leather curtains of Roman and Venetian churches stand forth as cheerful embodiments of self-respecting mendicancy. They, at least, are no pariahs, but recognized features of the social system. They are the Lord’s poor, whose prayers are fertile in blessings. It is kind to drop a coin into the outstretched hand, and to run the risk—not so appalling as we seem to think—of its being unworthily bestowed. “Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a half-penny;” but remember, rather, the ever-ready alms of Dr. Johnson, who pitied most those who were least deserving of compassion. Little doubt that he was often imposed upon. The fallen women went on their way, sinning as before. The “old struggler” probably spent his hard-earned shilling for gin. The sick beggar whom he carried on his back should by rights have been languishing in the poorhouse. But the human quality of his kindness made it a vital force, incapable of waste. It warmed sad hearts in his unhappy time, as it warms our sad hearts now. Like the human kindness of St. Martin, it still remains—a priceless heritage—to enrich us poor beggars in sentiment to-day.

And this reminds me to ask—without hope of answer—if the blessed St. Martin can be held responsible for the number of beggars in Tours? The town is not pinched and hunger-bitten like the sombre old cities of Italy, but possesses rather an air of comfort and gracious prosperity. It is in the heart of a province where cruel poverty is unknown, and where “thrift and success present themselves as matters of good taste.” Yet we cannot walk half an hour in Tours without meeting a number of highly respectable beggars, engrossed in their professional duties. They do not sin against the harmony of their surroundings by any revolting demonstration of raggedness or penury. On the contrary, they are always neat and decent; and on Sundays have an aspect of such unobtrusive well-being that one would never suspect them of mendicancy. When a clean, comfortably dressed old gentleman, with a broad straw hat, and a rosebud in his buttonhole, crosses the street to affably ask an alms, I own I am surprised, until I remember St. Martin, who, fifteen hundred years ago, shared his mantle with the beggar shivering by the way. It was at Amiens that the incident occurred, but the soldier saint became in time the apostle and bishop of Tours; wherefore it is in Tours, and not in Amiens, that beggars do plentifully abound to-day; it is in Tours, and not in Amiens, that the charming old tale moves us to sympathy with their not very obvious needs. They are an inheritance bequeathed us by the saint. They are in strict accord with the traditions of the place. I am told that giving sous to old men at church doors is not a practical form of benevolence; but neither was it practical to cut a military cloak in two. Something must be allowed to impulse, something to the generous unreason of humanity.

And, after all, it is not begging, but only the beggar who has forfeited favour with the elect. We are begged from on an arrogantly large scale all our lives, and we are at liberty to beg from others. It may be wrong to give ten cents to a legless man at a street corner; but it is right, and even praiseworthy, to send ten tickets for some dismal entertainment to our dearest friend, who must either purchase the dreaded things or harass her friends in turn. If we go to church, we are confronted by a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side. Mr. John Richard Green, the historian, was wont to maintain that the begging friar of the pre-reform period, “who at any rate had the honesty to sing for his supper, and preach a merry sermon from the portable pulpit he carried round,” had been far outstripped by a “finer mendicant,” the begging rector of to-day. A hospital nurse once told me that she was often too tired to go to church—when free—on Sundays. “But it doesn’t matter whether I go or not,” she said with serious simplicity, “because in our church we have the envelope system.” When asked what the system was which thus lifted church-going from the number of Christian obligations, she explained that envelopes marked with each Sunday’s date were distributed to the congregation, and duly returned with a quarter inclosed. When she stayed at home, she sent the envelope to represent her. The collecting of the quarters being the pivotal feature of the Sunday’s service, her duty was fulfilled.

With this, and many similar recollections in my mind, I own I am disposed to think leniently of Italy’s church-door mendicants. How moderate their demands, how disproportionate their gratitude, how numberless their disappointments, how unfailing their courtesy! I can push back a leather curtain for myself, I can ring a sacristan’s bell. But the patriarch who relieves me of these duties has some dim, mysterious right to stand in my way,—a right I cannot fathom, but will not pretend to dispute. He is, after all, a less insistent beggar than are the official guardians of galleries and museums, who relieve the unutterable weariness of their idle days by following me from room to room with exasperating explanations, until I pay them to go away. I have heard tourists protest harshly against the ever-recurring obligation of giving pennies to the old men who, in Venice, draw their gondolas to shore, and push them out again. They say—what is perfectly true—that it is an extortion to be compelled to pay for unasked and unnecessary services, and they generally add something about not minding the money. It is the principle of the thing to which they are opposed. But these picturesque accessories of Venetian life are, for the most part, worn-out gondoliers, whose days of activity are over, and who are saved from starvation, only by the semblance of service they perform. Their successors connive at their pretence of usefulness, knowing that some day they, too, must drop their oars, and stand patiently waiting, hook in hand, for the chance coin that is so grudgingly bestowed. That it should be begrudged—even on principle—seems strange to those whose love for Venice precludes the possibility of fault-finding. The graybeards sunning themselves on the marble steps are as much a part of the beautiful city as are the gondoliers silhouetted against the sky, or the brown boys paddling in the water. Such old age is meagre, but not wholly forlorn. A little food keeps body and soul together, and life yields sweetness to the end. “It takes a great deal to make a successful American,” confesses Mr. James; “but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility.... Not the misery of Italians, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination.”

THE PILGRIM’S STAFF

Thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge strem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,

At Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne;

She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.

Chaucer.

The spirit that animated the Crusader animated the pilgrim. Piety, curiosity, the love of God and the love of adventure, the natural sentiment which makes one spot of ground more hallowed than another,—a sentiment as old as religion,—the natural restlessness of the human heart,—a restlessness as old as humanity. With the decay of the Crusades began the passion for pilgrimages, which reached its height in the fourteenth century, but which at a much earlier period had begun to send men wandering from land to land, and from sea to sea, broadening their outlook, sharpening their intelligence, uniting them in a common bond of faith and sympathy, teaching them to observe the virtues of hospitality, courtesy, and kindness. Much has been urged against the pilgrim, even the genuine pilgrim; but it counts for little when contrasted with his merits. His was not the wisdom of Franklin. He spent time, strength, and money with reckless prodigality. He neglected duties near at hand; he ran sharp risks of shipwreck, robbers, and pestilence. But he was lifted, for a time at least, out of the common round of life; he aspired, however lamely, after spiritual growth; and he assisted the slow progress of civilization by breaking through the barriers which divided nation from nation in the remoteness of the Middle Ages.

The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth. Pious Egyptians speeding along the waterways to the temple of Bubastis; pious Hindoos following from hermitage to hermitage the footsteps of the exiled Rama; pious Moslems making their painful journey to Mecca; pious Christians turning their rapt faces to Palestine,—from the dawn of history to the present day we see the long procession of pilgrims moving to and fro over the little earth, linking shore to shore and century to century. Never without disaster, never without privations, never without the echoes of disparagement, never wholly discouraged nor abashed, the procession winds brokenly along. The pilgrims who visit Lourdes in this year of grace are not mere victims of a spasmodic enthusiasm. They are the inheritors of the world’s traditions and of the world’s emotions.

Alexander, Bishop of Cappadocia, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the year 202. He was by no means the first ecclesiastic to undertake the journey, but the records that survive from this period of limited authorship are few and far between. It was not until a century later that the Empress Helena stirred the hearts of Christendom, and gave the impetus that sent thousands of pilgrims to follow the footsteps of the Redeemer. Many who could not reach Palestine travelled as far as Rome, to pray at the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. From time to time the church gently checked an enthusiasm which overstepped the bounds of reason. Women, then condemned to much staying at home, showed an ardour for pilgrimage as natural as it was disconcerting. Nuns joyously welcomed the opportunity to leave, without broken vows, their convent walls, and tread for a time the beaten paths of earth. They found shelter on the road in other houses of religion, where all such devout wanderers were lodged and generously entertained.

For the virtues which blossomed most fairly along the pilgrim’s track were chivalry and hospitality. For him a brotherhood of knights guarded the robber-haunted forests of Germany. For him the Spanish nobles kept watch and ward over their mountain passes. For him the galleys of St. John swept the Mediterranean in search of Algerine pirates. For him the Hospitalers built their first asylum. For him rang out the Templar’s battle-cry, “Beauceant! Beauceant!” as the dreaded banner of black and white bore down into the fray. The pilgrim paid no tithes nor tolls. Monasteries opened to him their gates. In every seaport, and in many a royal burgh, houses were erected and maintained for his accommodation. In Calais stood the old Maison Dieu, with its wide, hospitable doors. Coventry was the first of English towns to provide a similar shelter. These houses were either endowed by pious benefactors or were supported by the strong and wealthy guilds. In Lincoln, the Guild of the Resurrection, founded in 1374, had the following rule: “If any brother wishes to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to Saint James of Galicia, or to the Holy Land, he shall forewarn the Guild; and all the members shall go with him to the city gate, and each shall give him at least a half-penny.” Other guilds lent weightier service. Turn where we may, we see on every side the animosities of nations softened and the self-seeking of the human heart subdued by the force of that esprit de corps which bound hard-fighting Christendom together.

Rivalry there was in plenty, as shrine after shrine rose into fame and fortune. Palestine lay far away, and the journey thither was beset by difficulties and dangers. Rome held the great relics which from earliest years had drawn thousands of pilgrims to worship at her altars. Spain came next in degree, with the famous shrine of Compostella in Galicia, where lay the bones of her patron, St. James. So popular was this pilgrimage that in the year 1434 no less than 2460 licenses were granted in England to travellers bound for Compostella. Cologne claimed the relics of the Magi; France, the Holy Coat of Trèves, the shrine of St. Martin of Tours, and the beautiful pilgrimage churches of Boulogne and Rocamadour. The last, fair still in its decay, was one of the most celebrated in Europe. Great kings and greater soldiers, Simon de Montfort among them, had come as penitents to its rock-built sanctuary; and so many English were counted among its visitors that we find that arch-grumbler, Piers Plowman, bitterly conjuring his countrymen to stay away.

Right so, if thou be Religious, renne thou never ferther

To Rome ne to Rochemadore.

In good truth there were shrines in plenty at home. Glastonbury, the resting-place of Joseph of Arimathea, where grew the holy thorn-tree; Bury Saint Edmunds, where all might see the standard of the martyred king, and where, to keep it company, Cœur de Lion sent the captured banner of the king of Cyprus; Waltham, or Holy Cross Abbey, founded by that devout and warlike Dane, Tovi, to guard the mysterious cross of black marble, of which none knew the history; Edward the Confessor’s tomb at Westminster; Our Lady of Walsingham, the best-loved church in England; and the ever-famous shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. “Optimus aegrorum medicus fit Thomas Bonorum,” was the motto engraved on the little pewter flasks brought back by Canterbury pilgrims. “For good people who are ill, Thomas is the best of physicians.”

Miracles apart, it was well to take the open road, and to live for a few days, or for a few weeks, in rain and sunshine. It was well to escape the dreadful ministrations of doctors, and trust to St. Thomas, who at all events would not bleed and purge his patient’s life away. It was well to quit the foulness of the towns, to push aside the engrossing cares of life, and to see the fair face of an English summer.

I think the long ride in the open air,

That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,

In the miracle must come in for a share!

Many a cure was wrought before the shrine was gained, and a hopeful heart is ever a tonic for body and soul together. The most constant and the most curious reproach cast by reformers at the pilgrims is that they were cheerful, even merry, and that they went their way in what seems to have been an irritating spirit of enjoyment. One Master William Thorpe, a sour and godly man, protested sternly in 1407 against the number of “men and women that go on pilgrimages to Canterbury, to Beverley, to Karlington, to Walsinghame, or to any such other places”! His accusations were three in number. The pilgrims spent “their goodes in waste,”—which was true. They boasted, not always truthfully, of what they had seen,—a reprehensible habit of travellers since man first roamed the earth. And, worst of all, they sang, rang little bells,—the Canterbury bells,—and made a joyous clatter on the road. To this, Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, deeming light hearts as near to grace as sad ones, stoutly replied that pilgrims did well to sing and be as cheerful as the hardships of the way permitted. If a man’s foot were cut and bleeding, it were better for him to sing than to be silent, “for with soche solace the travell and wearinesse of pylgremes is lightely and merily broughte forthe.”

Not all pilgrimages, however, were undertaken in this jocund spirit. Figures terrible and tragic loom up in the darkness of history. Fulk Nerra, the black Count of Anjou, driven like Orestes by the stings of conscience, wandered from shrine to shrine, seeking pardon for nameless crimes. By his own command he was dragged barefooted through the streets of Jerusalem, his blood running down beneath the pitiless strokes of the scourge. From Guyenne to Picardy walked two noble Breton brothers, their heavy chains eating into their flesh, their heavier hearts burdened with unendurable remorse. Even less sinful men were sometimes inclined to penitence. The Lord of Joinville, before setting forth with St. Louis on the Seventh Crusade, walked in his shirt to every shrine within twenty leagues of his castle, imploring strength of arm and grace of soul. In blither mood, the Viscount De Werchin, Seneschal of Hainault, started upon a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella. The journey was long, and by way of diversifying it, the good Seneschal despatched messengers announcing his readiness to meet any knight, French, English, or Spanish, who would engage with him in a friendly passage of arms. That none who coveted this distinction might be so unfortunate as to lose it, he gave his itinerary with great care, and even offered to turn aside from his road as far as twenty leagues, for the felicity of a little fighting. Surely St. James, the patron of soldiers, who has himself turned the tide of more than one hard-fought battle, must have smiled kindly upon that brave and pious pilgrim, when he knelt in his battered armour before the glittering shrine.

Kings and princes frequently went upon pilgrimages. The sprig of broom, the planta genistae, destined to give its name to a great and royal line, was worn by Geoffrey of Anjou—some said in token of humility—when he journeyed to the Holy Land. Henry the Second of England travelled piously to Rocamadour, and four English Edwards knelt in turn at the feet of Our Lady of Walsingham. Jusserand tells us that the royal fee on such occasions was seven shillings; the ordinances of Edward the Second make especial mention of the sum. It does not seem munificent, when we remember that Canute took off his crown and laid it on St. Edmund’s shrine; but there were occasions when even seven shillings were notably lacking. The Chronicles of Jocelin of Brakelond, quoted by Carlyle in “Past and Present,” relate minutely how King John came to St. Edmundsbury with a large retinue, how he gave the abbot thirteen pence, beseeching in return a Mass, and presented to the shrine a silken cloak, which was carried promptly away by one of his followers, so that the monks beheld it no more. When Henry the Eighth and Catharine of Aragon visited Walsingham, the king hung around the statue’s neck a string of pearls and golden beads, and perhaps was not unmoved subsequently by a desire to have it back again.

“Of all our Ladyes, I love best our Lady of Walsyngham,” says Sir Thomas More in one of his “Dyalogues,” reflecting the common sentiment of the past three hundred years, and defending the ancient custom of pilgrimages from the raillery of Erasmus. The road to Walsingham, like the road to Canterbury, was called the “Pilgrims’ Way;” the town was full of inns and lodgings for the accommodation of the devout, and “manye faire myracles” were witnessed at the shrine. When the Norman knight, Sir Raaf de Boitetourt, fled from his burning castle, he sought refuge at Walsingham, where for seven years he had kept vigil on the eve of Epiphany. Hard pressed, he reached the doors, and the Virgin, mindful of faithful service, opened them with her own hands, and drew him swiftly and gently within her blessed walls.

Frequent mention is made of Walsingham in state papers and in family chronicles. The Paston letters contain numerous allusions to this popular shrine. John Paston’s wife, troubled by the news of her husband’s illness, writes to him lovingly: “My mother behested [vowed] another image of wax of the weight of you to our Lady of Walsingham; and she sent four nobles to the four orders of friars at Norwich to pray for you; and I have behested a pilgrimage to Walsingham and to St. Leonards for you.” Again, Justice Yelverton thanks John Paston, “especially for that ye do much for our Lady’s house at Walsingham, which I trust verily ye do the rather for the great love that ye deem I have thereto; for truly if I be drawn to any worship or welfare, and discharge of mine enemies’ danger, I ascribe it unto our Lady.”

In proportion to the piety of the pilgrim flames the wrath of the reformer. Denunciations from poets of a radical turn, like Langland and Skelton, echo shrilly through English letters.

Pylgrimis and palmers plyghten hem togederes,

To seken seint James and seintes at Rome,

Wenten forth in hure way with many unwyse tales,

And haven leve to lyen alle hure lyf-tyme.

This sounds like the bitterness of the stay-at-home, resenting with his whole soul the allurement of travellers’ tales,—tales to which Chaucer lent a tolerant ear. A century and a half later, when reform had had its way, when the relics of St. Thomas had been scattered to the winds, when our Lady’s image had been flung from its altar into the nearest well, and Cranmer in his “Catechism” had alluded to vows and pilgrimages as half-forgotten errors, one poor faithful soul was accused in 1542 of going to Walsingham,—not blithely, indeed, with song and ringing of bells, but sad, fearful, and forlorn, to pray at the defaced and empty shrine.

There was a little chapel built on one of the eastern piers of old London Bridge, and dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket. Hither came the pilgrims bound for Canterbury, or for the far-off shrines of Compostella and Rocamadour, to beg a blessing on their journey; and many were the curious eyes that watched them faring forth. To-day, when no spot is remote, and nothing is unknown, it is hard to understand the interest which once attached itself to the wanderer, or to realize his importance as a link in the human chain. At a time when the mass of mankind learned orally what it learned at all, when news crept slowly over the country-side, and rumour passed from one village ale-house to another, people were preserved from mental stagnation by the “unwyse tales” which Langland found so reprehensible. They heard how a fair and famous courtesan, smitten with blindness, travelled to Rocamadour, beseeching a cure, and how, kneeling outside the walls, she was withheld by an invisible power from entering the sanctuary. Then, confessing her sins with tears and lamentations, she cut off her beautiful hair,—

A net

Wherein no more shall souls be snared and slain,

and offered it to the Virgin in token of amendment. This being done, the barrier was lifted, she hastened into the church, “giving praise to the Mother of God,” and sight was restored to her eyes.

Many were the miracles related by pilgrims, and bewildering were the wonders they described. The zeal for relics having far outrun discretion, a vast hoard of heterogeneous and apocryphal objects had been collected in every church, and were reverenced indiscriminately by the devout. They were less grisly, but hardly less marvellous than the weapons which Christian found in the house of Prudence, Piety, and Charity, when these benevolent ladies exhibited to their guest the “engines with which God’s servants had done wonderful things.” Christian’s delight over the hammer and nail with which Jael killed Sisera, the sling and stone with which David killed Goliath, the jaw bone of an ass with which Samson killed the Philistines, and the ox goad with which Shamgar killed six hundred of his enemies, is but the reflection of a gentler sentiment which stirred the pilgrim’s heart. Our ancestors were not wont to reason very distinctly on these or on other matters; the abnormal offered no obstacle to their credulity; and the complete absence of an historic background annihilated for them a dozen and more intervening centuries. The Holy Coat carried them in spirit to Nazareth, the Veil of Veronica led them to the foot of the Cross. When told that the head of St. John the Baptist reposed in a church at Amiens, they neither calculated the probabilities of the case nor inquired into ways and means. When a few far-travelled pilgrims heard that the same relic was claimed by a church in Constantinople, they either became partisans—a natural sentiment—or argued with the simple sagacity of Sir John Mandeville. Which was the true head he could not tell. “I wot nere but God knowethe; but in what wyse that men worschippen it, the blessed seynte John holt him a-payd.”

This is the pith and marrow of the argument. Pilgrims, reaching back dimly into a shrouded past, grasped at the relic which bridged for them the chasm, and felt the mysterious blessedness of association. If it were not what it was believed to be, the saints, well aware both of men’s fallibility and of their good faith, would undoubtedly “holt them a-payd.” The same sentiment hallowed countless shrines, and found expression in the sygnys or medals which then, as now, played a prominent part in pilgrimages. We know how little such customs change when we read of the fourteenth-century pilgrims at Rocamadour, and see the twentieth-century pilgrims at Lourdes. The Rocamadour medals were made of pewter, stamped with an image of the Virgin, and pierced with holes so that they could be sewn to the cap or dress. The right to make and sell them belonged exclusively to the family of De Valon, and had been granted by the crown in return for military service. So large were the sales, and so comfortable the profits, that the thrifty townspeople constantly infringed upon the seignorial privilege, and flooded the market, in defiance of all authority, with contraband medals,—a pardonable offence, not without parallel in every age and land.

The Canterbury sygnys were in the shape of little flasks; at Compostella they were minute cockle-shells; at Amiens they bore the head of St. John the Baptist: “Ecce signum faciei beati Johannis Baptistae.” So pleased were pilgrims with these devices, and so proud to wear the mementoes of their piety,—as the Moslem, returned from Mecca, wears his green turban,—that we find Erasmus mocking at their appearance “clothyd with cockle-schelles, and laden on every side with bunches of lead and tynne.” There is not a shrine in Europe to-day unprovided with similar tokens. At Auray, medals of St. Anne; at Padua, medals of St. Anthony; at Avila, medals of St. Theresa; at Prague, medals of the Holy Infant; at Loretto, medals of the Santa Casa; at Genazzana, medals of Our Lady of Good Counsel; at Paray-le-Monial, medals of the Sacred Heart; at the charming old pilgrimage church of Maria Plain near Salzburg, medals of the Blessed Virgin uncovering the Divine Child; at Lourdes, more medals and rosaries than one can imagine all Catholic Christendom buying in the next three hundred years.

Yet bought they are, and could Erasmus behold the pilgrims leaving Lourdes, he would deem himself once more on the Walsingham way. It is well to watch the French country people, laden with the heavy baskets which hold their supply of food, grasping the inevitable umbrellas, as big and bulky as folded tents, and burdened furthermore with an assortment of pious souvenirs that require the utmost care in handling. They move slowly in little groups from image to image in the lower church. Some scholar of the party spells out the name of each saint, and then all softly rub their miscellaneous treasures—beads, scapulars, medals, bénitiers—up and down the statue’s robe and feet. Some old, old, misty notion of the blessedness of touch dwells confusedly in every mind. Their contentment is beautiful to behold. They alone know by what sacrifices and privations these days of pilgrimage were made possible; but we know how much they have gained. New sensations; the sudden opening of the world’s closed doors, revealing to them a little corner amid wide mysterious spaces; the stirring of the heart in the presence of sacred things; one keen experience in a monotonously bucolic life; one deep breath of a diviner air; something desired, achieved, and ever to be remembered,—what generous mind doubts that all this is better than sensibly staying at home? No observer could have stood at the doors of St. Peter’s in the spring of 1900, when the pilgrims of every land thronged up the sunlit steps, without learning once for all the value of emotions. The crowd stared, jostled, chattered, as it swept along, and then, entering those vast, harmonious aisles, fell silent, while there came into every face a look that could never be mistaken nor forgotten. It was the leaping of the human soul to the ideal. It was an inarticulate nunc dimittis, as the pilgrim entered upon the inheritance of ages.

A QUAKER DIARY

De tous ces titres, celui que j’aime le mieux est celui de Philadelphien, ami des frères. Il y a bien des sortes de vanité, mais la plus belle est celle qui, ne s’arrogeant aucun titre, rend presque tous les autres ridicules.—Voltaire.

It is well for us who are interested in colonial days and colonial ways that their leisure gave men and women ample opportunity to keep diaries, and that a modesty now quite unknown made them willing to spend long hours in writing pages not destined for publication. There is something very charming about this old-fashioned, long-discarded reticence, this deliberate withholding of trivial incidents and fleeting impressions from the wide-mouthed curiosity of the crowd. Even when the Revolution had awakened that restless spirit of change which scorned the sobriety of the past, there lingered still in people’s hearts an inherited instinct of reserve. Men breakfasted with Washington, dined with John Adams, fought by the side of La Fayette, and never dreamed of communicating these details to the world. Women danced at the redcoat balls, or curtsied and yawned at Mrs. Washington’s receptions, and then went home and confided their experiences either to their friends, in long, gossiping letters, or to the secret pages of their diaries. It was a lamentable waste of “copy,” but a saving of dignity and self-respect.

As for the earlier, easier days, when the infant colonies waxed fat on beef and ale, literary aspirations had not then begun to afflict the hearts of men. It is delightful to think how well little Philadelphia, like New York, got along without so much as a printing press, when she had starved out her only printer, Bradford,—a most troublesome and seditious person,—and sent him over to little Boston, which even then had more patience than her neighbours with books. Yet all this time, honest citizens were transcribing in letters and in journals whatever was of daily interest or importance to them; and it is by help of these letters and these journals that we now look back upon that placid past, and realize the every-day existence of ordinary people, nearly two centuries ago. We know through them, and through them only, what manner of lives our forefathers led in Puritan New England, in comfortable Dutch New York, in demure Quaker Pennsylvania, before the sharp individuality of each colony was merged into the common tide, and with the birth of a nation—“a respectable nation,” to use the words of Washington, who was averse to glittering superlatives—the old order passed away forever from the land.

“It is to the pages of Judge Sewall’s diary,” writes Alice Morse Earle, “that we must turn for any definite or extended contemporary picture of colonial life in New England;” just as we turn for the corresponding picture of old England to the diaries of John Evelyn and of Mr. Samuel Pepys. Mrs. Earle does not add, though she well might, that it is better discipline to read Judge Sewall’s records than those of all the other diarists in Christendom; for, by contrast with the bleak cheerlessness of those godly days, our own age seems flooded with sunshine, and warm with the joy of life. And not our own age only. If we pass from ice-bound Massachusetts to colonies less chilly and austere, we step at once into a different world, a tranquil and very comfortable world; not intellectual nor anxiously religious, but full of eating and drinking, and the mildest of mild amusements, and general prosperity and content. Even the Pennsylvania Quakers, though not permitted to dally openly with flaunting and conspicuous pleasures, with blue ribbons, coloured waistcoats, or the shows of itinerant mummers, enjoyed a fair share of purely mundane delights. If Judge Sewall’s journal tells us plainly and pitilessly the story of Puritanism, what it really meant in those early uncompromising days, what virtues it nourished, what sadness it endured, the diary of a Philadelphia Friend gives us a correspondingly clear insight into that old-time Quakerism, gentle, silent, tenacious, inflexible, which is now little more than a tradition in the land, yet which has left its impress forever upon the city it founded and sustained.

Elizabeth Sandwith, better known as Elizabeth Drinker,—though even that name has an unfamiliar sound, save to her descendants and to a few students of local history,—was born in Philadelphia in 1735. She was the daughter of wealthy Friends, and her education, liberal for those days, would not be deemed much amiss even in our own. It included a fair knowledge of French and a very admirable familiarity with English. She read books that were worth the reading, and she wrote with ease, conciseness, and subdued humour. Her diary, begun in 1758, was continued without interruption for forty-nine years. It is valuable, not only as a human document, and as a clear, graphic, unemotional narrative of the most troubled and triumphant period in our country’s history, but because it contains a careful record of events which—of the utmost importance to the local historian—may be searched for in vain elsewhere. The entries are for the most part brief, and to this brevity, no doubt, we owe the persevering character of the work. It is the enthusiasm with which the young diarist usually sets about her task that threatens its premature collapse. She begins by being unduly confidential, and ends by having nothing to confide.

Not so this Quaker girl, reticent even with herself; avoiding, even in the secret pages of her journal, all gossip about her own soul, all spiritual outpourings, all the dear and inexhaustible delights of egotism. She notes down, indeed, every time she goes to meeting, and also the date on which she begins to work “a large worsted Bible cover,”—which Bible cover is in the possession of her great-great-grandchildren to-day; but neither the meetings nor the worsted work betray her into a complacent piety, and she is just as careful to say when she has been drinking tea, or spending the afternoon with any of her young friends. As a matter of fact, tea-drinking and kindred frivolities are evidently more to her liking, though she will not confess it, than serious and improving occupations. Philadelphia, dazzled by Franklin’s discoveries, was pleased to think herself scientific in those days; and young men and women were in the habit of attending learned lectures,—or what were then thought learned lectures,—and pretending they understood and enjoyed them,—a mental attitude not wholly unfamiliar to us now. So keen was the thirst for knowledge that men paid four shillings for the privilege of looking at a skeleton and some anatomical models in the Pennsylvania Hospital. Our Quaker Elizabeth, however, will have none of these dreary pastimes. To electricity and to skeletons she is alike indifferent; but she pays two shillings cheerfully to see a lioness, exhibited by some enterprising showman, and she records without a scruple that she and her family gave the really exorbitant sum of six shillings and sixpence for a glimpse at a strange creature which was carried about in a barrel, and which its owner said was half man and half beast, but which turned out to be a young baboon, very sick and sad. “I felt sorry for the poor thing, and wished it back in its own country,” says the gentle-hearted Quakeress, who has always a pitying word for beasts.

The fidelity with which this delightful journal is kept enables us to know what sober diversions fell to the lot of strict Friends, to whom the famous Philadelphia Dancing Assemblies and the equally famous old Southwark Theatre were alike forbidden joys; who never witnessed the glories of the Mischianza, nor the gay routs of the redcoat winter; who, though loyal to the crown, shared in none of the festivities of the king’s birthday; who were too circumspect even to join the little group of Quaker ladies for whom M. de Luzerne prepared a separate apartment at the beautiful fête du Dauphin, and who, wistful and invisible, watched through a gauze curtain the brilliant scene in which they had no share.

None of these dallyings with the world, the flesh, and the devil, no glimpses into the fast-growing dissipation of the gayest and most extravagant city in the colonies, find a record in Elizabeth Drinker’s diary. Her utmost limit of frivolity is reached in a sleighing party on a winter afternoon; in tea-drinking on winter evenings; in listening to a wonderful musical clock, which cost a thousand guineas in Europe and played twenty tunes; and in gazing at a panorama of London, which most Philadelphians considered almost as good as visiting the metropolis itself. When she is well advanced in years, she is beguiled by her insatiable curiosity into going to see an elephant, which is kept in a “small ordinary room,” in a not very reputable alley. In fact, she is a little frightened, and more than a little ashamed, at finding herself in such a place, until she encounters a friend, Abigail Griffitts, who has come to gratify her curiosity under pretence of showing the elephant to her grandchildren; and the two women are so sustained by each other’s company that they forget their confusion, and proceed to examine the mammoth together. “It is an innocent, good-natured, ugly Beast,” comments Elizabeth Drinker, “which I need not undertake to describe; only to say it is indeed a marvel to most who see it,—one of the kind never having been in this part of the world before. I could not help pitying the poor creature, whom they keep in constant agitation, and often give it rum or brandy to drink. I think they will finish it before long.” The presence of an elephant in a small room, like one of the family, seems an uncomfortable arrangement, even if the “innocent beast” were of temperate habits; but an elephant in a state of unseemly “agitation” must have been—at such close quarters—a disagreeable and dangerous companion.

One pastime there is which dates from the days of Eden, which no creed forbids and no civilization forswears. Elizabeth Sandwith has not recorded many little events in her diary before Henry Drinker looms upon the scene, though it is only by the inexpressible demureness of her allusions to her lover that we have any insight into the state of her affections. Quaker training does not encourage the easy unfurling of emotions, and Elizabeth’s heart, like her soul, was a guarded fortress which no one was invited to inspect. There is a good deal of tea-drinking, however, and sometimes an indiscreet lingering after tea until “unseasonable hours,” eleven o’clock or thereabouts. Finally, on the 28th of November, 1760, appears the following entry: “Went to monthly meeting this morning, A. Warner and Sister with me. Declared my intentions of marriage with my Friend H. D. Sarah Sansom and Sarah Morris accompanied us to ye Men’s meeting.” Four weeks later this formidable ordeal is repeated. She announces in the December monthly meeting that she continues her intentions of marriage with her friend H. D. In January the wedding is celebrated; and then, and then only, H. D. expands into “my dear Henry,” and assumes a regular, though never a very prominent, place in the diary.

After this, the entries grow longer, less personal, and full of allusions to public matters. We learn how sharply justice was administered in the Quaker city; for Benjamin Ardey, being convicted of stealing goods out of a shop where he was employed, is whipped for two successive Saturdays,—“once at ye cart’s tail, and once at ye post.” We learn all about the delights of travelling in those primitive days; for the young wife accompanies her husband on several journeys he is compelled to make to the little townships of the province, and gives us a lively account of the roads and inns,—of the Manatawny Tavern, for example, and the indignation of the old Dutch landlady on being asked for clean sheets. Such a notion as changing sheets for every fresh traveller has never dawned upon her mind before, and, with the conservative instincts of her class, she takes very unkindly to the suggestion. She is willing to dampen and press the bed linen, since these fastidious guests dislike to see it rumpled; but that is the full extent of her complaisance. If people want clean sheets, they had better bring them along.

Most interesting of all, we find in this faithful, accurate, unemotional diary a very clear and graphic picture of Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution and after the Declaration of Independence, when deepening discontent and the sharp strife of opposing factions had forever destroyed the old placid, prosperous colonial life. Every one knows how stubborn was the opposition offered by the Quakers to the war; how they were hurled from their high estate by the impetuosity of a patriotism which would brook no delay; and how, with the passing away of the Assembly, they lost all vestige of political power. Scant mercy was shown them after their downfall by the triumphant Whigs, and scant justice has been done them since by historians who find it easier to be eloquent than impartial. There appears to have been something peculiarly maddening in the passive resistance of the Friends, and in their absolute inability to share the emotions of the hour. The same quiet antagonism which they had manifested to the Stamp Act, to the three-penny duty on tea, and to all unconstitutional measures on the part of England, they offered in turn to the mandates of Congress, and to the exactions of the Executive Council. They would not renounce their allegiance to the crown; they would not fight for king or country; they would not pay the new state tax levied for the support of the troops; they would not lift their hands when the tax collector carried off their goods and chattels in default of payment; they would not hide their valuables from the collector’s eyes; they would not run away when General Howe’s army entered Philadelphia in the autumn of 1777, nor when the American troops took possession the following June. They would not do anything at all,—not even talk; and perhaps silence was their most absolutely irritating characteristic, at a time when other men found pulpit and platform insufficient for the loud-voiced eloquence of strife.

In reading Elizabeth Drinker’s journal, we cannot but be struck with the absence of invective, and, for the most part, of comment. Anxiety and irritation are alike powerless to overcome the lifelong habit of restraint. Her husband appears to have been a stubborn and consistent Tory, though the restrictions of his creed compelled him to play an idle part, and to suffer for a lost cause without striking a blow in its behalf. He was one of forty gentlemen, nearly all Friends, who were banished from Philadelphia in the summer of 1777; and his wife, with two young children, was left unprotected, to face the discomforts and dangers of the times. She was more than equal to the task. There is as little evidence of timidity as of rancour in the quiet pages of her diary. She describes the excitement and confusion which the news of General Howe’s approach awakened in Philadelphia, and on the 26th of September writes: “Well! here are ye English in earnest. About two or three thousand came in through Second Street, without opposition or interruption,—no plundering on ye one side or ye other. What a satisfaction would it be to our dear absent friends,”—of whom one was her absent husband,—“could they but be informed of it.”

From this time, all public events are recorded with admirable brevity and accuracy (Cæsar would have respected Elizabeth Drinker): the battle of Germantown, the difficulty of finding shelter for the wounded soldiers, the bombardment and destruction of the three forts which guarded Franklin’s chevaux de frise and separated General Howe from the fleet, the alarming scarcity of provisions before the three forts fell. Despite her Tory sympathies and her husband’s banishment, Elizabeth sends coffee and wine whey daily to the wounded American prisoners; rightly thinking that the English ran a better chance of being looked after in the hospitals than did her own countrymen. She suffers no molestation save once, when, as she writes, “a soldier came to demand Blankets, which I did not in any wise agree to. Notwithstanding my refusal, he went upstairs and took one, and with good nature begged I would excuse his borrowing it, as it was by General Howe’s orders.”

Annoyances and alarms were common enough in a town overrun by redcoats, who were not infrequently drunk. Elizabeth, descending one night to her kitchen, found a tipsy sergeant making ardent and irresistible love to her neat maidservant, Ann. On being told to go away, the man grew bellicose, flourished his sword, and used the forcible language of the camp. He had reckoned without his host, however, when he thought to have matters all to his own liking under that quiet Quaker roof. A middle-aged neighbour,—a Friend,—hearing the tumult, came swiftly to the rescue, collared the rascal, and wrenched the sword out of his hand; whereupon Elizabeth, with delightful sense and caution, carried the carnal weapon into the parlour, and deliberately locked it up in a drawer. This sobered the warrior, and brought him to his senses. To go back to his barracks without his sword would be to court unpleasant consequences. So after trying what some emphasized profanity would do to help him, and finding it did nothing at all, he grew humble, said he had only yielded up his arms “out of pure good nature,” and announced his willingness to drink a glass of wine with such peaceable and friendly folk. No liquor was produced in response to this cordial condescension, but he was conducted carefully to the step, the sword returned to him, and the door shut in his face; upon which poor foolish Ann, being refused permission to follow, climbed the back fence in pursuit of her lover, and returned to her duties no more.

Of the brilliant gayety which marked this memorable winter, of the dinners and balls, of the plays at the old Southwark Theatre, of the reckless extravagance and dissipation which filled the lives of the fair Tory dames who danced the merry nights away, there is not the faintest reflection in the pages of this diary. Even the Mischianza—that marvellous combination of ball, banquet, and tournament—is dismissed in a few brief sentences. “Ye scenes of Vanity and Folly,” says the home-staying Quaker wife, though still without any rancorous disapprobation of the worldly pleasures in which she has no share. To withstand steadfastly the allurements of life, yet pass no censure upon those who yield to them, denotes a gentle breadth of character, far removed from the complacent self-esteem of the “unco guid.” When a young English officer, whom Elizabeth Drinker is compelled to receive under her roof, gives an evening concert in his rooms, and the quiet house rings for the first time with music and loud voices, her only comment on the entertainment is that it was “carried on with as much soberness and good order as the nature of the thing admitted.” And when he invites a dozen friends to dine with him, she merely records that “they made very little noise, and went away timeously.” It is a good tonic to read any pages so free from complaints and repining.

The diary bears witness to the sad distress of careless merrymakers when the British army prepared to take the field, to the departure of many prominent Tories with Admiral Howe’s fleet, and to the wonderful speed and silence with which Sir Henry Clinton withdrew his forces from Philadelphia. “Last night,” writes Elizabeth on the 18th of June, 1778, “there were nine thousand of ye British Troops left in Town, and eleven thousand in ye Jerseys. This morning, when we arose, there was not one Red-Coat to be seen in Town, and ye Encampment in ye Jerseys had vanished.”

With the return of Congress a new era of discomfort began for the persecuted Friends, whose houses were always liable to be searched, whose doors were battered down, and whose windows were broken by the vivacious mob; while the repeated seizures of household effects for unpaid war taxes soon left rigid members of the society—bound at any cost to obey the dictates of their uncompromising consciences—without a vestige of furniture in their pillaged homes. “George Schlosser and a young man with him came to inquire what stores we have,” is a characteristic entry in the journal. “Looked into ye middle room and cellar. Behaved complaisant. Their authority, the Populace.” And again: “We have taxes at a great rate almost daily coming upon us. Yesterday was seized a walnut Dining Table, five walnut Chairs, and a pair of large End-Irons, as our part of a tax for sending two men out in the Militia.” This experience is repeated over and over again, varied occasionally by some livelier demonstrations on the part of the “populace,” which had matters all its own way during those wild years of misrule. When word came to Philadelphia that Lord Cornwallis had surrendered, the mob promptly expressed its satisfaction by wrecking the houses of Friends and Tory sympathizers. “We had seventy panes of glass broken,” writes Elizabeth calmly, “ye sash lights and two panels of the front Parlour broke in pieces; ye Door cracked and violently burst open, when they threw stones into ye House for some time, but did not enter. Some fared better, some worse. Some Houses, after breaking ye door, they entered, and destroyed the Furniture. Many women and children were frightened into fits, and ’tis a mercy no lives were lost.”

When peace was restored and the federal government firmly established, these disorders came to an end; a new security reigned in place of the old placid content; and a new prosperity, more buoyant but less solid than that of colonial days, gave to Philadelphia, as to other towns, an air of gayety, and habits of increased extravagance. We hear no more of the men who went with clubs from shop to shop, “obliging ye people to lower their prices,”—a proceeding so manifestly absurd that “Tommy Redman, the Doctor’s apprentice, was put in prison for laughing as ye Regulators passed by.” We hear no more of houses searched or furniture carted away. Elizabeth Drinker’s diary begins to deal with other matters, and we learn to our delight that this sedate Quakeress was passionately fond of reading romances;—those alluring, long-winded, sentimental, impossible romances, dear to our great-grandmothers’ hearts. It is true she does not wholly approve of such self-indulgence, and has ever ready some word of excuse for her own weakness; but none the less “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and its sister stories thrill her with delicious emotions of pity and alarm. “I have read a foolish romance called ‘The Haunted Priory; or the Fortunes of the House of Rayo,’” she writes on one occasion; “but I have also finished knitting a pair of large cotton stockings, bound a petticoat, and made a batch of gingerbread. This I mention to show that I have not spent the whole day reading.” Again she confesses to completing two thick volumes entitled “The Victim of Magical Illusions; or the Mystery of the Revolution of P—— L——,” which claimed to be a “magico-political tale, founded on historic fact.” “It may seem strange,” she muses, “that I should begin the year, reading romances. ’Tis a practice I by no means highly approve, yet I trust I have not sinned, as I read a little of most things.”

She does indeed, for we find her after a time dipping into—of all books in the world—Rabelais, and retiring hastily from the experiment. “I expected something very sensible and clever,” she says sadly, “but on looking over the volumes I was ashamed I had sent for them.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” pleases her infinitely better; though she is unwilling to go so far as the impetuous Englishwoman, in whom reasonableness was never a predominant trait. Unrestricted freedom, that curbless wandering through doubtful paths which end in social pitfalls, offered no allurement to the Quaker wife in whom self-restraint had become second nature; but her own intelligence and her practical capacity for affairs made her respect both the attainments and the prerogatives of her sex. In fact, she appears to have had exceedingly clear and definite opinions upon most matters which came within her ken, and she expresses them in her diary without diffidence or hesitation. The idol of the Revolutionary period was Tom Paine; and when we had established our own republic, the enthusiasm we felt for republican France predisposed us still to believe that Paine’s turbulent eloquence embodied all wisdom, all justice, and all truth. In Philadelphia the French craze assumed more dangerous and absurd proportions than in any other city of the Union. Her once decorous Quaker streets were ornamented with liberty-poles and flower-strewn altars to freedom, around which men and women, girls and boys, danced the carmagnole, and shrieked wild nonsense about tyrants and the guillotine. The once quiet nights were made hideous with echoes of “Ça ira” and the Marseillaise. Citizens, once sober and sensible, wore the bonnet rouge, exchanged fraternal embraces, recited mad odes at dinners, and played tricks fantastic enough to plunge the whole hierarchy of heaven into tears,—or laughter. “If angels have any fun in them,” says Horace Walpole, “how we must divert them!” Naturally, amid this popular excitation, “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason” were the best-read books of the day, and people talked about them with that fierce fervour which forbade doubt or denial.

Now Elizabeth Drinker was never fervent. Hers was that critical attitude which unconsciously, but inevitably, weighs, measures, and preserves a finely adjusted mental balance. She read “The Age of Reason,” and she read “The Rights of Man,” and then she read Addison’s “Evidences of the Christian Religion,” by way of putting her mind in order, and then she sat down and wrote:—

“Those who are capable of much wickedness are, if their minds take a right turn, capable of much good; and we must allow that Tom Paine has the knack of writing, or putting his thoughts and words into method. Were he rightly inclined, he could, I doubt not, say ten times as much in favour of the Christian religion as he has advanced against it. And if Lewis ye 17^th were set up as King of France, and a sufficient party in his favour, and Paine highly bribed or flattered, he would write more for a monarchical government than he has ever written on the other side.”

Yet orthodoxy alone, unsupported by intellect, had scant charm for this devout Quakeress. She wanted, as she expresses it, thoughts and words put into method. Of a most orthodox and pious little book, which enjoyed the approbation of her contemporaries, she writes as follows: “Read a pamphlet entitled ‘Rewards and Punishments; or Satan’s Kingdom Aristocratical,’ written by John Cox, a Philadelphian, in verse. Not much to the credit of J. C. as a poet, nor to the credit of Philadelphia; tho’ the young man may mean well, and might perhaps have done better in prose.”

“Pilgrim’s Progress,” however, she confesses she has read three times, and finds that, “tho’ little thought of by some,” she likes it better and better with each fresh reading. Lavater she admires as a deep and original thinker, while mistrusting that he has “too good a conceit” of his own theories and abilities; and the “Morals” of Confucius she pronounces “a sweet little piece,” and finer than most things produced by a more enlightened age.

This is not a bad showing for those easy old days, when the higher education of women had not yet dawned as a remote possibility upon any mind; and when, in truth, the education of men had fallen to a lower level than in earlier colonial times. Philadelphia was sinking into a stagnant mediocrity, her college had been robbed of its charter, and the scholarly ambitions (they were never more than ambitions) of Franklin’s time were fading fast away. Even Franklin, while writing admirable prose, had failed to discover any difference between good and bad verse. His own verse is as cheerfully and comprehensively bad as any to be found, and he always maintained that men should practise the art of poetry, only that they might improve their prose. This purely utilitarian view of the poet’s office was not conducive to high thinking or fine criticism; and Elizabeth Drinker was doubtless in a very small minority when she objected to “Satan’s Kingdom Aristocratical,” on the score of its halting measures.

The most striking characteristic of our Quaker diarist is precisely this clear, cold, unbiased judgment, this sanity of a well-ordered mind. What she lacks, what the journal lacks from beginning to end, is some touch of human and ill-repressed emotion, some word of pleasant folly, some weakness left undisguised and unrepented. The attitude maintained throughout is too judicial, the repose of heart and soul too absolute to be endearing. Here is a significant entry, illustrating as well as any other this nicely balanced nature, which gave to all just what was due, and nothing more:—

“There has been a disorder lately among ye cats. Our poor old Puss, who has been for some time past unwell, died this morning, in ye 13th year of her age. Peter dug a grave two feet deep on ye bank in our garden, under ye stable window, where E. S., Peter and I saw her decently interred. I had as good a regard for her as was necessary.”

Was ever affection meted out like this? Was there ever such Quaker-like precision of esteem? For thirteen years that cat had been Elizabeth Drinker’s companion, and she had acquired for her just as good a regard as was necessary, and no more. It was not thus Sir Walter spoke, when Hinse of Hinsdale lay dead beneath the windows of Abbotsford, slain by the great staghound, Nimrod. It was not thus that M. Gautier lamented the consumptive Pierrot. It is not thus that the heart mourns, when a little figure, friendly and familiar, sits no longer by our desolate hearth.

FRENCH LOVE-SONGS

Quand on est coquette, il faut être sage;

L’oiseau de passage

Qui vole à plein cœur

Ne dort pas en l’air comme une hirondelle,

Et peut, d’un coup d’aile,

Briser une fleur.

—Alfred de Musset.

The literature of a nation is rooted in national characteristics. Foreign influences may dominate it for a time; but that which is born of the soil is imperishable, and must, by virtue of tenacity, conquer in the end. England, after the Restoration, tried very hard to be French, and the “happy and unreflecting wantonness” of her earlier song was chilled into sobriety by the measured cadences of Gallic verse; yet the painful and perverse effort to adjust herself to strange conditions left her more triumphantly English than before. We are tethered to our kind, and the wisest of all wise limitations is that which holds us well within the sphere of natural and harmonious development.

It is true, however, that nationality betrays itself less in lyrics, and, above all, less in love lyrics, than in any other form of literature. Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients; and though love-songs—like battle-songs and drinking-songs—are seldom legitimate offsprings of experience, they are efforts to express in words that sweet and transient pain. “Les âmes bien nées”—without regard to birthplace—clearly of their passion, and seek their “petit coin de bonheur” under Southern and Northern skies. The Latin races have, indeed, depths of reserve underlying their apparent frankness, and the Saxons have a genius for self-revelation underlying their apparent reticence; but these traits count for little in the refined duplicity of the love-song.

Garde bien ta belle folie!

has been its burden ever since it was first chanted by minstrel lips.

M. Brunetière frankly admits the inferiority of the French lyric, an inferiority which he attributes to the predominance of social characteristics in the literature, as in the life of France. When poetry is compelled to fulfil a social function, to express social conditions and social truths, to emphasize fundamental principles and balance contrasted forces, the founts of lyrical inspiration are early dried. Individualism is their source,—the sharp, clear striking of the personal note; and the English, says M. Brunetière, excel in this regard. “To Lucasta. Going to the Warres,” has no perfect counterpart in the love-songs of other lands.

Even the eager desire of the Frenchman to be always intelligible (“That which is not lucid is not French”) militates against the perfection of the lyric. So too does his exquisite and inborn sense of proportion. “Measure,” says Mr. Brownell, “is a French passion;” but it is a passion that refuses to lend itself to rapturous sentiment.

Et veut que l’on soit sage avec sobriété

is hardly a maxim to which the genius of the love-song gives willing ear. Rather is she the La Belle Dame sans Merci, or the Elfin Lady who rode through the forests of ancient France.

My sire is the nightingale,

That sings, making his wail,

In the wild wood, clear;

The mermaid is mother to me,

That sings in the salt sea,

In the ocean mere.

“What,” asks Mr. Brownell hopelessly, “has become of this Celtic strain in the French nature?”—a strain which found vent in the “poésie courtoise,” playful, amorous, laden with delicate subtleties and fond conceits. This poesie—once the delight of Christendom—echoes still in Petrarch’s sonnets and in Shakespeare’s madrigals; but it is difficult to link its sweet extravagances with the chiselled verse of later days, and critics forget the past in their careful contemplation of the present. “French poetry,” says Mr. Zangwill, “has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical,—in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn.”

But long before Boileau lay in his urn—or in his cradle—the poets of France, like the poets of Albion, sang with facile grace of love, and dalliance, and the glory of youth and spring. The fact that Boileau ignored and despised their song, and taught his obedient followers to ignore and despise it also, cannot silence those early notes. When he descended frigidly to his grave, Euterpe tucked up her loosened hair, and sandalled her bare white feet, and girdled her disordered robes into decent folds. Perhaps it was high time for these reforms. Nothing is less seductive in middle age than the careless gayety of youth. But once France was young, and Euterpe a slip of a girl, and no grim shadow of that classic urn rested on the golden days when Aucassin—model of defiant and conquering lovers—followed Nicolette into the deep, mysterious woods.

Jeunesse sur moy a puissance,

Mais Vieillesse fait son effort

De m’avoir en sa gouvernance,

sang Charles d’Orléans, embodying in three lines the whole history of man and song. Youth was lusty and folly riotous when Ronsard’s mistress woke in the morning, and found Apollo waiting patiently to fill his quiver with arrows from her eyes; or when Jacques Tahureau watched the stars of heaven grow dim before his lady’s brightness; or when Vauquelin de la Fresnaye saw Philis sleeping on a bed of lilies, regardless of discomfort, and surrounded by infant Loves.

J’admirois toutes ces beautez

Égalles à mes loyautez,

Quand l’esprit me dist en l’oreille:

Fol, que fais-tu? Le temps perdu

Souvent est chèrement vendu;

S’on le recouvre, c’est merveille.

Alors, je m’abbaissai tout bas,

Sans bruit je marchai pas à pas,

Et baisai ses lèvres pourprines:

Savourant un tel bien, je dis

Que tel est dans le Paradis

Le plaisir des âmes divines.

With just such sweet absurdities, such pardonable insincerities, the poets of Elizabeth’s England fill their amorous verse. George Gascoigne “swims in heaven” if his mistress smiles upon him; John Lyly unhesitatingly asserts that Daphne’s voice “tunes all the spheres;” and Lodge exhausts the resources of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms in searching for comparisons by which to set forth the beauties of Rosalind. The philosophy of love is alike on both sides of the Channel, and expressed in much the same terms of soft insistence. Carpe diem is, and has always been, the lover’s maxim; and the irresistible eloquence of the lyric resolves itself finally into these two words of warning, whether urged by Celt or Saxon. Herrick is well aware of their supreme significance when he sings:—

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

You may forever tarry.

Ronsard, pleading with his mistress, strikes the same relentless note:—

Donc, si vous me croyez, Mignonne,

Tandis que vostre âge fleuronne

En sa plus vert nouveauté,

Cueillez, cueillez vostre jeunesse;

Comme à cette fleur, la vieillesse

Fera ternir vostre beauté.

May-day comes alike in England and in France. Herrick and Jean Passerat, poets of Devonshire and of Champagne, are equally determined that two fair sluggards, who love their pillows better than the dewy grass, shall rise from bed, and share with them the sparkling rapture of the early dawn. Herrick’s verse, laden with the freshness of the Spring, rings imperatively in Corinna’s sleepy ears:—

Get up, get up, for shame! The blooming Morn

Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.

See how Aurora throws her fair

Fresh-quilted colours through the air.

Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see

The dew bespangling herb and tree.

And then—across the gayety of the song—the deepening note of persuasion strikes a familiar chord:—

Come, let us go, while we are in our prime;

And take the harmless folly of the time!

We shall grow old apace, and die

Before we know our liberty.

Passerat is no less insistent. The suitors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have dedicated the chill hours of early morning to their courtship. Nor was the custom purely pastoral and poetic. When Lovelace makes his appointments with Clarissa Harlowe at five A. M., the modern reader—if Richardson has a modern reader—is wont to think the hour an unpropitious one; but to Herrick and to the Pléiade it would have seemed rational enough.

Laissons le lit et le sommeil

Ceste journée:

Pour nous, l’Aurore au front vermeil

Est desjà née

sings the French poet beneath his lady’s window; adding, to overcome her coyness—or her sleepiness—the old dominant argument:—

Ce vieillard, contraire aus amans,

Des aisles porte,

Et en fuyant, nos meilleurs ans

Bien loing emporte.

Quand ridée un jour tu seras,

Mélancholique, tu diras:

J’estoy peu sage,

Qui n’usoy point de la beauté

Que si tost le temps a osté