Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 9

There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.

Gene Stratton-Porter, but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which is not quite the real thing. It is too sentimental and rather too laboured.

These two authors, who, if the value of a writer could really depend on the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of cheerfulness.

Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs.

Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be real he must be joyless--in the United States, at least--is perhaps because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters.

But it would be a serious mistake to a.s.sume that neither Mr. Wright nor Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to a.s.sume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth had no value. They pleased exactly the same cla.s.s of people, in their day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher philosophical aspirations, like the author of "The Age of Innocence,"

and "Blind Mice," and "Zell," and "Main Street," continue to write, there is no danger that the general crowd of American readers will be shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or of the Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from the responsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors of the description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted by Madame de Sevigne or to revel among the groups of Italians who range through the scenes drawn by Benvenuto Cellini.

While Pepys is always near at hand, I treat his contemporary, Evelyn, with very distant politeness and respect. Now Evelyn should not be treated in that way. He is always so edifying and so very correct, except when he moralizes about the Church of Rome, that he ought to be read nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as a model of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy, literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such pa.s.sages as this, which Pepys writes on October 19, 1662 (Lord's day):

Put on my first new lace-band: and so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more. I am sorry to hear that the news of the selling of Dunkirk is taken so generally ill, as I find it is among the merchants; and other things, as removal of officers at Court, good for worse; and all things else made much worse in their report among people than they are. And this night, I know not upon what ground, the gates of the City ordered to be all shut, and double guards everywhere. Indeed I do find everybody's spirit very full of trouble: and the things of the Court and Council very ill taken; so as to be apt to appear in bad colours, if there should ever be a beginning of trouble, which G.o.d forbid!

Or,

29th (Lord's day).

This morning I put on my best black cloth suit, trimmed with scarlet ribbon, very neat, with my cloak lined with velvet, and a new beaver, which altogether is very n.o.ble, with my black silk knit canons I bought a month ago.

Evelyn never condescends to such weaknesses as we find in our beloved Pepys!

One wonders whether, if the n.o.ble Mr. Evelyn had been able to decipher some of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have written this tribute, under the date of May 26, 1703:

This day died Mr. Sam Pepys, a very worthy, industrious and curious person.... He lived at Clapham with his partner, Mr. Hewer, formerly his clerk, in a very n.o.ble house and sweete place, where he enjoyed the fruite of his labours in greate prosperity. He was universally belov'd, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skill'd in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of s.h.i.+ps especially.... Mr. Pepys had been for neere 40 years so much my particular friend, that Mr. Jackson sent me compleat mourning, desiring me to be one to hold up the pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hindered me from doing him this last office.

All the teachings of the histories of our student days force us to look on Charles II. as one of the weakest of English kings; but when we come to enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is much to be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England under difficult circ.u.mstances than conventional history has given him credit for.

It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed to me as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you what formal history never does; he takes you into the heart of his time, and introduces you into the centre of his mind and heart. In literature, in poetry and prose, the reader hopes that the roofs of houses or the tops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with an understanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, though it may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody finds in gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us know our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves--but perhaps more clearly--can never be rooted out of normal human nature.

I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and I sat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, and by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there was always Madame de Sevigne. Much was hoped from the long-promised "Memoirs of Talleyrand." They came; they were disappointing.

Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in a way with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. And this is "The Education of Henry Adams," and almost contemporaneously the "Letters of William James." It is easy to understand the delight with which intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams."

Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--that education consists in putting value on the circ.u.mstances of life, and regarding each circ.u.mstance as a step either forward or backward in one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which Samuel Smiles beat into the heads of the English. Henry Adams's lesson, however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of Cardinal Newman!

There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--but intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of G.o.d that troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a personal Christ should be equal in divinity with G.o.d, in fact, G.o.d Himself.

Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in a personal G.o.d. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without understanding the spirit of Saint Francis d'a.s.sisi:

Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history, as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar with political a.s.sa.s.sination as though they had lived under Nero.

The climax of empire could be seen approaching, year after year, as though Sulla were a President or McKinley a Consul.

Nothing annoyed America more than to be told this simple and obvious--in no way unpleasant--truth; therefore one sat silent as ever on the Capitol; but, by way of completing the lesson, the Lodges added a pilgrimage to a.s.sisi and an interview with St.

Francis, whose solution of historical riddles seemed the most satisfactory--or sufficient--ever offered; worth fully forty years'

more study, and better worth it than Gibbon himself, or even St.

Augustine, St. Ambrose, or St. Jerome. The most bewildering effect of all these fresh crosslights on the old a.s.sistant Professor of 1874 was due to the astonis.h.i.+ng contrast between what he had taught them and what he found himself confusedly trying to learn five-and-twenty years afterwards--between the twelfth century of his thirtieth and that of his sixtieth years. At Harvard College, weary of spirit in the wastes of Anglo-Saxon law, he had occasionally given way to outbursts of derision at shedding his life-blood for the sublime truths of Sac and Soc:--

Hic Jacet Homunculus Scriptor Doctor Barbaricus Henricus Adams Adae Filius et Evae Primo Explicuit Socnam

The Latin was as twelfth century as the law, and he meant as satire the claim that he had been first to explain the legal meaning of Sac and Soc, although any German professor would have scorned it as a shameless and presumptuous bid for immortality; but the whole point of view had vanished in 1900. Not he, but Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph Sohm, were the parents or creators of Sac and Soc.

Convinced that the clue of religion led to nothing, and that politics led to chaos, one had turned to the law, as one's scholars turned to the Law School, because one could see no other path to a profession.

The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any case it no longer mattered.

After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of that very great American John Burroughs. It is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our political history as a.n.a.lyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no other man that make his book supremely interesting.

The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a "best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply due to a fas.h.i.+on. Biographies are the fas.h.i.+on, and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed with a scornful wave of the hand.

When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not a.s.sume an air of pathos when he read my review in _Scribner's Monthly_--before it became the _Century_--of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.

Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful.

Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no man more pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men are free, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does not always take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities of his book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with him, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the power of using wings, whether he uses them or not.

There are many reasons for the success of his book. The chapters on "Diplomacy," on "Friends and Foes," on "Political Morality," and on "The Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More than that, they elucidate conditions of mind which are generally wrapped up, for motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical verbiage.

Some of the reviewers found "The Education" egotistical. This is too strong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were not egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit or self-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public, "The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himself without writing about himself. This seems very much like a plat.i.tude.

And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. If anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took a tone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below the average of the real Henry Adams.

Here, for instance, is a good pa.s.sage:

Swinburne tested him [Henry Adams] then and there by one of his favourite tests--Victor Hugo; for to him the test of Victor Hugo was the surest and quickest of standards. French poetry is at best a severe exercise for foreigners; it requires extraordinary knowledge of the language and rare refinement of ear to appreciate even the recitation of French verse; but unless a poet has both, he lacks something of poetry. Adams had neither. To the end of his life he never listened to a French recitation with pleasure, or felt a sense of majesty in French verse; but he did not care to proclaim his weakness, and he tried to evade Swinburne's vehement insistence by parading an affection for Alfred de Musset. Swinburne would have none of it; De Musset was unequal; he did not sustain himself on the wing.

Adams would have given a world or two, if he owned one, to sustain himself on the wing like De Musset, or even like Hugo; but his education as well as his ear was at fault, and he succ.u.mbed.

Swinburne tried him again on Walter Savage Landor. In truth the test was the same, for Swinburne admired in Landor's English the qualities that he felt in Hugo's French; and Adams's failure was equally gross, for, when forced to despair, he had to admit that both Hugo and Landor bored him. Nothing more was needed. One who could feel neither Hugo nor Landor was lost.

The sentence was just and Adams never appealed from it. He knew his inferiority in taste as he might know it in smell. Keenly mortified by the dullness of his senses and instincts, he knew he was no companion for Swinburne; probably he could be only an annoyance; no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance.

Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France is the att.i.tude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendours of Hugo and Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private secretary in personal contact with them. Ten years afterwards Adams met him at the Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with delight at a call he had made on Hugo; "I was shown into a large room," he said, "with women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly, and uttered the words: "Quant a moi, je crois en Dieu!" Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if in deep meditation: "Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit en Dieu!"

The _Chose sublime_ is an Adamesque touch! It gives the last delicate tint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions and such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! He is the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the discoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the real architecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song of Roland." How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem in comparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are so laboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glance with which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He has his limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects on the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, the half-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and English who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help giving grateful thanks for having found Henry Adams.

To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems to be that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the military architecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with the beauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he a.s.sumes, is more receptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would have discovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture and the cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, have profited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that Henry Adams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize that he would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, and which many of them are sincerely grateful for.

The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best pa.s.sages! Books to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small s.p.a.ce on any shelf, and not many of them, in my opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his critical vocation; Brunetiere has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood.

Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!

It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories; but the _Atlantic Monthly_ has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour of New England. That Boston which in the _Atlantic_ had always been a state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.

In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe--leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I always found detestable--to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is always "The House of the Seven Gables!"

But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten pages of Mrs.

Stowe with great pleasure, something she said reminded me of Walter Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same.

Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's few pages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader--by a loving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books.

You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento where Lady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bring back to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius Caesar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together with that group of semi-happy souls who live on the "enamelled green" of Dante, spiritism might have more to say for itself!

"'I call a cat a cat,' as Boileau put it," remarked Heine. "I would like to know how many men in a hundred are disappointed in the women they marry."

"Just as many as have too much imagination," said Augustus.

"No," said Johnson, shaking his head violently and speaking suddenly in an excited tone. "No. Those who are disappointed are such as are possessed of imagination without judgment; but a man whose imagination does not outrun his judgment is seldom deceived in the realisation of his hopes. I suspect that the same thing is true in the art of poetry, of which Herr Heine is at once a master and a judge. For the qualities that const.i.tute genius are invention, imagination and judgment; invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed; imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind, and enables him to convey to the reader the various form of nature, incidents of life and energies of pa.s.sion; and judgment, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality. A man who possesses invention and imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of possibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, however, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may attribute the small number of poets who have flourished in the world, and the great number of happy marriages among civilised mankind."