LETTERS, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS
Some of us have acquired a state of mind which helps us to believe that
whenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. In
a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. It
is true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not
very narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of the
most pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all his
life is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, or
to preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommend
unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature have
undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools
of critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; and
the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval and
condemnation. That lets me out, I feel.
One of my most cherished books is the "Letters to People in the World,"
by Saint Francis de Sales. I have known people who have declared that it
is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a
book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint
Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the
relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of
pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this
charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal ch[^a]teau, he
never allowed the peasants on the domain to perform their usual duty,
which was to stay up all night and beat the waters of the ponds, or
perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his
friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could
not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that
the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back
to him; he could not see the old ch[^a]teau and the water in the moonlight,
or conceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved of their duty. I
can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as
I read the "Letters" of Madame de S['e]vign['e] or the "Memoirs" of the Duc
de Saint Simon.
I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English
translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors--the
interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces--you must like Saint Simon.
Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I
think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to
become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic
author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without
the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture
of Mademoiselle de la Valli[`e]re looking hopelessly out of the window of
her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the
chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly,
holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis
XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?
But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simon
and Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modern
and ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has his
pet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age who
gives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and
"Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believe
that? He dislikes Miss Austen's novels and sneers at Miss Farrar's
"Marriage." He has never been able to read Miss Edgeworth's book; and he
considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard to
exist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in a
number of the _Atlantic Monthly_ not so long ago there is a vivid,
pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portion
of the Diurnal of Mrs Eliz^th Pepys" by E. Barrington.
If anybody asks me why I like Pepys, I do not feel obliged to reply. I
might incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a direct
question about books, one does incriminate oneself.
However, to return to what I was saying--while I love the "Memoirs of
Cardinal de Retz," I adore--to be a little extravagant--the "Letters of
Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does not know the real story of the
life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the
brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really
fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real
reformer in the France of his time.
Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of
Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the
contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the
Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the
worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good
peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He
earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de S['e]vign['e], for
which any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a
lifetime. But even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he
gives a picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is
shamelessly true. No living man to-day in political office, although he
might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so
interestingly shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if
you read him in French, you discover that he knew how to make
literature.
The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so
penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not
have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations.
But one must remember that the confessors of his period--the period of
the founding of the French Academy--had a great respect for mere
literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni,
General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy
Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the
Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the
reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one.
Give me leave, madame [Cardinal de Retz says] to reflect a little
here upon the nature of the mind of man. I believe that there was
not in the world a man of an uprighter heart than my father, and I
may say that he was stampt in the very mold of virtue. Yet my duels
and love-intrigues did not hinder the good man from doing all he
could to tye to the Church, the soul in the world perhaps the least
ecclesiastical. His predilection for his eldest son, and the view
of the archbishoprick of Paris for me, were the true causes of his
acting thus; though he neither believed it, nor felt it. I dare say
that he thought, nay would have sworn, that he was led in all this
by no other motive than the spiritual good of my soul, and the fear
of the danger to which it might be exposed in another profession.
So true it is that nothing is more subject to delusion than piety.
All manner of errors creep and hide themselves under that vail.
Piety takes for sacred all her imaginations, of what sort soever;
but the best intention in the world is not enough to keep it in
that respect free from irregularity. In fine, after all that I have
related I remained a churchman; but certainly I had not long
continued so, if an accident had not happened which I am now to
acquaint you with.
This is not at all what is called "edifying," but, from the moral point
of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in
the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to
an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where
"livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the
clergymen highly placed were neither so intellectual nor so romantic.
It must be admitted that Cardinal de Retz, like a later French prelate,
Talleyrand, made no pretense of being fitted for the Church.
Talleyrand's only qualification was that he was lame; and, as a younger
son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his
faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his
best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with
Bassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois de
Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the
Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my
duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the
utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's
destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."
The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The
Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less
diffuse, and, not writing _feuilletons_, are not forced to be diffuse.
The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can
hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go
directly to the sources of his romances.
Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of
Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There
were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more
about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through
certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that
I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could
be found. That autobiography is one of the gems of American history,
though it does not reveal the whole man. If he had been as frank as
Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but,
then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has
never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood
that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is
sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it
should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time
the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim
the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a
young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a
pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's
translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _[`a] la
mode de_ Madame de Sta[:e]l.
For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive,
but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time before
and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this,
is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best
One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five
books.
In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country
efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to
France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French
people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his
memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time.
He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded,
cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with a
venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of
contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the
aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.
His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of
the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called
"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in
that class of systematic _rou['e]s_" who were astonished at the virtue of
the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in
that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have
not yet found them.
In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
and Philippe ['E]galit['e] were the most fascinating characters of the
French Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy
who was listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to
exclaim suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about
Judas!"
To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quote
a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness,"
said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of
Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the
pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of human
nature."
This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for
enlightening us as to the paternity of a son of Madame de Flahaut.
Morris, for a time that condoned the amourettes of Benjamin Franklin,
was virtuous. Madame de Flahaut, afterward Madame de Souza, gave Morris
a hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "I
may, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is the
father of her child, and it would be unjust." In this noble moment Mr.
Morris chivalrously forgets the existence of the Count de Flahaut!
In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic verses to Madame de
Flahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelity
of the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; De
Launey's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered
men lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is not
disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock,
to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock
the Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in the
belief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day,
he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He is
corroborated in his opinion that Madame de Beauharnais is a poetess by
a very narrow escape from some rancid butter of which the cook had
been very liberal.
But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth beneath. It seems to
me that there is no more interesting and useful book on the French
Revolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near De
Tocqueville's "Ancient R['e]gime" and "Democracy in America."
On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the general opinion that Mr.
Jefferson was considered a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would be
chosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of the
House of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic,
just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all the
cold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles of
government which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against
Burr, because, Morris writes,
Virginia can not bear to see any other than a Virginian in the
President's chair!
John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson vice-President, in 1800.
It is edifying for us who look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profound
reverence, to see them at close range in Gouverneur Morris's pages.
Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette not nearly so well:
one could not expect the blast of a trumpet from a whistle.
But, then, Morris had had money transactions with the Lafayettes. Morris
believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as
Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on
the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?
I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many
times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the
Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the
kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This
autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage
authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is
the expression of the life of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing,
and who writes about himself so well and so sincerely that he gives us
an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels
ever elaborated.
What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American
atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of
doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself
as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his
caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of
self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he
wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew
he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of
literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public
servant.
As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt.
Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained
leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the
same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of
sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashion
in our day to declare that society is against us when we have to work
unremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing,
and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as applied
to him--inspiring!
In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice against
Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans," as we were all
taught to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all softened toward
Dickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told story
of the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his mother
without believing that the recording angel in no way holds her
responsible for her rather vulgar book.
How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of the
books written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! How
he managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tell
us. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of the
pious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray," and
although paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly because
there was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "The
Warden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aught
in malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very good
reading. As the sailor once said of a piece of rather solid beef,
"There's a great deal of chaw in it."
I pause a moment to reflect on a letter which I have just received from
a young college woman who has so far read the manuscript of this book.
She writes that it is really not a book so far for professing
Christians.
My mother and I had expected of you something more edifying,
something that would lead us to the reading of good and elevating
books. At college I looked on literature as something apart. Since
I have come home to Georgia, I find that it is better for me to
submit myself to the direction of our good Baptist clergyman, and
have no books on our library shelves that I cannot read aloud to
the young. One of your favourites, Madame de S['e]vign['e], shocks
me by the cruelty of her description of the death of the famous
poisoner, Madame de Brinvilliers. And I do not think that the pages
of the Duc de Saint-Simon should be read by young people.
This is an example of what a refined atmosphere may do to a Georgia
girl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a little
volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find
life rather duller if I had not the Duc de Saint-Simon at hand. Besides,
I do not think that there is a single young person of my acquaintance
who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!
Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens
to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de
S['e]vign['e] when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad
books ought to be preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost
better for the young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is
to gauge the value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity,
after all, is not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a
certain age is very desirable.
While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and
value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper
into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the
subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main
Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn
from their lack of gaiety to find a reason why art should not be gloomy,
and here it is, from Coventry Patmore's "Cheerfulness in Life and Art."
"Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice," says one of the highest
authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in
psychological science writes, "A cheerful heart is what the Muses
love."
Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his
own interior gaiety--of which a word by and by--is so interior, and
its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to
have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a
representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace,
and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it
is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave
heart is always gay in this sense: that, although it may be
afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others,
it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency; and
thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own
afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence infer at
least a probability of such cause in cases where it cannot be
discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows,
it is not overtroubled by those of others, however tender and
helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for
that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and when we
see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small
misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt
for its cowardice.
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 assume that neither Mr. Wright nor
Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to
assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
had no value. They pleased exactly the same class 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 S['e]vign['e] 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 passages
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 God 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 noble, 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 noble 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 noble 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 ships
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 circumstances 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 S['e]vign['e]. 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 circumstances of life, and
regarding each circumstance 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 God 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 God, in fact, God
Himself.
Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in
a personal God. 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'Assisi:
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 assassination 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 Assisi 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 Assistant Professor of
1874 was due to the astonishing 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 analyzed 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 fashion. Biographies are the fashion,
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 assume 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 platitude.
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 passage:
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 succumbed.
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 attitude 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 assumes, 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 passages! Books
to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small space 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; Bruneti[`e]re 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 constitute 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 passion; 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."
"It appears that I must have possessed imagination after all," said
Francis.
"If you will allow me to say it," said Caesar in his most suave
tones, and turning his heavy black eyes upon the king's face, "you
had too much. Had you possessed less imagination and more judgment,
you might many times have destroyed the Emperor Charles. To
challenge him to fight a duel was a gratuitous and very imaginative
piece of civility; to let him escape as you did more than once when
you could easily have forced an engagement on terms advantageous to
yourself, was unpardonable."
"I know it," said Francis, bitterly. "I was not Caesar."
"No, sir," said Johnson in loud, harsh tones, "nor were you happy
in your marriages--"
"I adore learned men," whispered Francis to Lady Brenda. He had at
once recovered his good humour.
"A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element of judgment
is necessary in the selection of a wife," continued the doctor.
"I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall in love
with each other," said Lady Brenda.
"Intuition, madam," replied Johnson, "means the mental view; as
you use it you mean a very quick and accurate mental view, followed
immediately by an unconscious but correct process of deduction. The
combination of the two, when they are nicely adjusted, constitutes
a kind of judgment which, though it be not always so correct in its
conclusions, as that exercised by ordinary logic, has nevertheless
the advantage of quickness combined with tolerable precision. For,
in matters of love, it is necessary to be quick."
"Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon," said Francis,
laughing.
"And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his house clean,"
returned the doctor.
"Do you believe that people always fall in love very quickly?"
asked Lady Brenda.
"Frequently, though not always. Love dominates quite as much
because its attacks are sudden and unexpected, as because most
persons believe that to be in love is a desirable state."
"Love," said Caesar, "is a great general and a great strategist, for
he rarely fails to surprise the enemy if he can, but he never
refuses an open engagement when necessary."
[1]
"_Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto
mi fur moetrati gli spiriti magni
che del verderli in me stesso 'n esalto_"
--INFERNO.
Strange as it may appear, it does not seem to be so much of a descent,
or of a break in the chain of continuity, to turn to hear William James
speak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the very
beginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of the
little circle about him. The conversation goes on--Mr. James never loses
sight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the second
part--and you are not made to feel as an eavesdropper.
Standing on the ladder, unhappily a rather shaky ladder, to put back
"With the Immortals" on the shelf, I pass Wells's great novel of
"Marriage," which I would clutch to read again, if I had not already
begun this Letter of James--written to his wife:
I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character
would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in
which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and
intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside
which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" And afterwards,
considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and
noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst
others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to
prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and
where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this
characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active
tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things
to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without
any _guaranty_ that they will. Make it a guaranty--and the attitude
immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless.
Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am _[:u]berhaupt_ in
vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter
willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself
physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't
smile at this--it is to me an essential element of the whole
thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which
I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the
deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I
possess....
Personal expression is, after all, what we long for in literature.
Cardinal Newman tells us, I think, in his "Idea of a University," that
it _is_ the very essence of literature. _Scientia_ is truth, or
conclusions stated as truths which stand irrespective of the personality
of the speaker or writer. But literature, to be literature, must be
personal. It is good literature when it is expressed plastically, and in
accordance with a good usage of its time. A reader like myself does not,
perhaps, trouble himself sufficiently with the philosophy of William
James as represented in these "Letters." One has a languid interest in
knowing what he thought of Bergson and Nietzsche or even of Hegel; but
for the constant reader his detachment or attachment to Aristotle and
St. Thomas Aquinas is not nearly so important as his personal
impressions of both the little things and the big things of our
contemporary life. Whether you are pragmatic or not, you must, if you
are at all in love with life, become a Jamesonian after you have read
the "Letters"! And his son, Mr. Henry James, who, we may hope, may
resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself
so tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether young
Henry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most understanding human being.
The only way to read these "Letters" is to dip into them here and there,
as the only way to make a good salad is to pour the vinegar on drop by
drop. To use an oriental metaphor, the oil of appreciation is stimulated
by the acid of wit, the salt of wisdom, and the pepper of humour.
Frankly, since I discovered William James as a human being I have begun
to read him for the same reason that I read Pepys--for pure enjoyment!
A friend of mine, feeling that I had taken the "Letters of William
James" too frivolously, told me that I ought to go to Mr. Wells to
counteract my mediaeval philosophy and too cheerful view of life. Just as
if I had not struggled with Mr. Wells, and irritated myself into a
temperature in trying to get through his latest preachments! I am not
quite sure what I said of Mr. Wells, but I find, in an article by Mr.
Desmond MacCarthy in the "New Statesman," just what I ought to have
said.
This doctrine of the inspired priesthood of authors is exaggerated
and dangerous. Neither has it, you see, prevented him from writing
"The Wonderful Visit." Artists should feel, and if necessary be
told, that they are on their honour to do their best. That will do.
If they flatter themselves that they are messengers from the Father
of Light whenever they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any
emotional hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has
been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a short time
afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in a quite different
direction. Sincerity of the moment is not sincerity; those who have
watched England's prime minister know that.
William James helped me to wash the bad taste of Mr. Wells's god out of
my mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man of
talent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man of
genius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potent
Deity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; but
Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an education
such as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians,
are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms
seriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us that
the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not
begin with--_Qui fit, Maecenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authors
of fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_,"--who
insist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
might have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much good
taste and too much knowledge of man in the world to attempt it.
The more one reads of the very moderns, the more one falls in love with
the ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do you
think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if he
insisted that we should "sit under him" and assumed a pulpit manner?
This is as near as he ever comes to teaching us anything:
_Lenit albescens animos capillus
Litium et rixae cupidos protervae;
Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa,
Consule Planco._
Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved himself very much, showed in
his translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
something as well as himself. It does not become me to recommend
books--everybody to his own taste!--but I should like to say that for
those whose Latin has become only a faint perfume of attar of roses,
like that which is said to cling faintly to one of the desks of Marie
Antoinette at Versailles, the translations of our dear Horatius by Lord
Lytton is a very precious aid to a knowledge of one of the most charming
and most wise of pagan poets.
Horace says:
Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us,
Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles,
Nor old age imminent,
Nor the indomitable hand of Death.
We might have, in spite of the awful examples of Mr. Wells and the other
preachers, who ought to confine themselves to finer things, desired that
Horace should have gone further and told us what kind of books we ought
to read in our old age. His choice was naturally limited; it was
impossible for him to buy a book every week, or every month. The
publishers were not so active in those days. But he might have indicated
the kind of book that old age might read, in order to renew its youth. I
have tried "Robinson Crusoe,"--the unequalled--and "Swiss Family
Robinson"; but they seem too grown up for me now. I have taken to "King
Solomon's Mines" and "Treasure Island" and that perfect gem of
excitement and illusion, "The Mutineers," by Charles Boardman Hawes. I
read it, and I'm young again. I trust that some enterprising bookseller
will unblushingly compile a library for the old, and begin it with "The
Mutineers!" The main difficulty with the Old or the Near Old is that the
fear of shocking the Young makes them such hypocrites. They pretend that
they like Mr. Wells and the other preachers; they express intense
interest in new and ponderous books, in the presence of Youth--when they
ought to yawn frankly and bury themselves in romances. But if the Old
really want to save their faces, and at the same time enjoy glimpses of
that fountain of youth which we long for at every age, let them acquire
two books--Clifford Smyth's "The Gilded Man" and "The Quest of El
Dorado," by Dr. J. A. Zahm, whose _nom de plume_ was H. J. Mozans. There
you have the real stuff. Together, these two books are a combination of
just what the Old need to found dreams on. If a man does not smoke he
cannot dream with any facility when he grows old; and if he has not
possessed himself of these two volumes, he cannot have acquired that
basis for dreams which the energetic Aged greatly need. "The Gilded Man"
is frankly a romance, and yet, strangely enough, a romance of facts, and
"The Quest of El Dorado" is the only volume in the English language when
it deals with the El Dorado; it has all the most attractive qualities of
a romance.
But they are not enough. To them I add, "Bob, Son of Battle," which the
author of "Alice For Short," discovered late in life. It is the greatest
animal-human story ever written, for Owd Bob is nobly human, and the
Black Killer devilishly human, and yet they are dogs; not fabulous dogs,
invented by clever writers. A great book! It is too thrilling; it
reminds of "Wuthering Heights"; I shall, therefore, read this evening
some of Henry Van Dyke's Canadian stories, and end the day with "Pride
and Prejudice."