BOOKS AT RANDOM
Among nature books that gave me many happy hours on the banks of the
Delaware--imperial river!--is Charles C. Abbott's "Upland and Meadow."
"Better," Mr. Abbott says, "repeat the twelve labours of Hercules than
attempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the area of an
average ramble!" _Soit!_ And better than that, "to feel that whatever
creature we may meet will prove companionable--that is, no stranger, but
rather an amusing and companionable friend--assures both pleasure and
profit whenever we chance abroad."
Who that has made "Upland and Meadow" his companion can forget the
extracts from the diary of the Ancient Man, dated Ninth Month, 1734, in
the Delaware Valley? Noisy guns had reduced the number of wild ducks and
geese, he says, even then. But, nevertheless, Watson's Creek was often
black with the smaller fowl.
I do seldom see the great swans, but father says that they are not
unusual in the wide stretches of the Delaware.
Happy day! when the wedge-shaped battalions of wild geese were almost as
frequently seen as the spattering sparrows now!
Father allowed me [writes the good Quaker boy, in 1734] to
accompany my Indian friend, Oconio, to Watson's creek, that we may
gather wild fowl after the Indian manner. With great eagerness, I
accompanied Oconio, and thus happened it. We did reach the widest
part of that creek early in the morning, I think the sun was
scarcely an half-hour high. Oconio straightway hid himself in the
tall grass by the water, while I was bidden to lie in the tall
grass at a little distance. With his bow and arrows, Oconio quickly
shot a duck that came near, by swimming within a short distance of
him. I marvelled much with what skill he shot, for his arrow
pierced the head of the duck which gave no alarming cry.... Oconio
now did fashion a circlet of green boughs, and so placed them about
his head and shoulders that I saw not his face; he otherwise
disrobed and walked into the stream. He held in one hand a shotten
duck, so that it swam lustily, and, so equipped, was in the midst
of a cluster of fowl, of which he deftly seized several so quickly
that their fellows took no alarm. These he strangled beneath the
water, and, when he had three of them, came back with caution to
where the thick bushes concealed him. He desired that I should do
the same, and with much hesitation I disrobed and assumed the
disguise Oconio had fashioned; then I put forth boldly towards the
gathered fowl, at which they did arise with a great clamour, and
were gone. I marvel much why this should have been, but Oconio did
not make it clear, and I forbore, through foolish pride, to ask
him. And let it not be borne in mind against me [pleads the good
Quaker boy] that, when I reached my home, I wandered to the barn,
and writing an ugly word upon the door, sat long and gazed at it.
Chagrin doth make me feel very meek, I find, but I set no one an
example by speech or act, in thus soothing my feelings in so
worldly a manner.
This example may be commended to players of golf, who are inclined to be
"worldly." The episode of Oconio at the best is too long to quote; it,
too, has its lesson! One reads Mr. Abbott's defence of the skunk
cabbage, for it harbours at its root
the earliest salamanders, the pretty Maryland yellow throat nests
in the hollows of its broad leaves, and rare beetles find a
congenial home in the shelter it affords.
"Upland and Meadow" gives one occasion for thought on the subject of
raccoons. "Foolish creatures, like opossums, thrive while cunning coons
are forced to quest or die."
For a stroll by the Thames--I mean the New England Thames--there is no
book like Ik Marvel's "Dream Life," but for a day near the
Delaware--imperial river!--give me "Upland and Meadow."
And then with what assurance of satisfaction may one turn for
refreshment to the continual charm of John Burroughs's books, "Riverby"
and "Pepacton." Burroughs's opinions upon the problems of humanity are
more tiresome than John Bunyan's opinions on theology; but to go with
him among the birds and the plants, to hope with him that the soaring
lark of England may find its way down through Canada to our hedges, to
look with him into the nests in the shrubs that border our roads is to
begin to feel that joy in being an American of the soil that no other
author gives. He cured the young New England poets and the singers of
the Berkshire Hills and of the Catskills of celebrating the English
thrush and the nightingale, as if those birds sang on the Palisades.
There is an epithet I should like to apply to John Burroughs, but he
might not like it if he were alive. I recall the case of a pleasant
Englishman who admired two American girls very much, because, as he
said, they were "so homely." In fact, they were rather pretty girls, and
he had not used the term in reference to their looks. It is the word
with which I like to describe John Burroughs. Forty years ago, I met him
at Richard Watson Gilder's. He was young then, and delightfully
"homely" in the sense in which the Englishman used the word. Some of the
refined ladies at Mrs. Gilder's objected to his "crude speech," for even
in the eighties there were still _pr['e]cieuses_. The truth is that his
rural use of the vernacular was part of the charm. It never spoiled his
style; but it gave that touch of homeliness to it which smelt of the
good soil of the country.
Thoreau's "Walden" always reminds me--a far-fetched comparison but I
will not apologize for it--of "As You Like It" played in one way by
Dybwad, the Norwegian actress, and by Julia Marlowe in another. Madame
Dybwad, being nearer to the Elizabethan time in her daily life, gives us
an Elizabethan maiden with a touch of "homeliness"; but Julia Marlowe's,
like Ada Rehan's "Rosalind," has something of the artificial character
of Watteau. "Walden," then, is somewhat too varnished; but "Riverby" and
"Pepacton" are "homely" and "homey."
To return to memoirs for a moment, that most delightful of all mental
dissipations for a leisurely man. In looking for the second volume of
"Walden"--for fear that I should have done Thoreau an injustice--I find
the "Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne." One cannot imagine anything
more unlike Madame de Boigne than Thoreau and John Burroughs! Why is
Madame de Boigne on the same shelf with these two lovers of nature?
Madame de Boigne was never a lover of nature. She loved the world and
the manifestations of the world, and--not to be ungallant--she is more
like an irritated mosquito than like the elegant _camellia japonica_ to
which she would prefer to be compared.
There is a great deal of solid comfort in the revelations of Madame de
Boigne; she is at times so very untruthful that her malice does no real
harm; she is so very clever; and she paints interiors so well; and gives
the atmosphere of French Society before and during the Revolution in a
most fascinating way. She always thinks the worst, of course; but a
writer of memoirs who always thought the best would be as painfully
uninteresting as Froude is when he describes the character of Henry
VIII. But this is a digression.
Mr. John Addington Symonds speaks of the style of Sir Thomas Browne as
displaying a "rich maturity and heavy-scented blossom." Mr. Mencken
cannot accuse any modern Englishman or American of imitating, in his
desire to be academic, Browne's hyperlatinism or his use of Latin words,
like "corpage," "confinium," "angustias," or "Vivacious abominations"
and "congaevous generations."
Mr. Symonds says:
He professes a mixture of the boldest scepticism and the most
puerile credulity. But his scepticism is the prelude to confessions
of impassioned faith, and his credulity is the result of tortuous
reflections on the enigmas of life and revelation. Perhaps the
following paragraph enables us to understand the permanent temper
of his mind most truly:
"As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in
religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they
never stretched the pia mater of mine. Methinks there be not
impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith: the deepest
mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated but
maintained by syllogism and the rule of reason. I love to lose
myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo! 'Tis my
solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved
enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Resurrection.
I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason
with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, _Certum est quia
impossible est_. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest
point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects, is not faith,
but persuasion."
Leaving all question of theology, or criticism of theology, aside, Sir
Thomas lends himself to those moments when a man wants to dip a little
into the interior life. It is a strange thing that nearly all the modern
novelists who describe men seem to think that their interior life is
purely emotional. Even Mr. Hugh Walpole,[2] my favourite among the
writers in the spring of middle age, is inclined to make his heroes, or
his semi-heroes (there are no good real honest villains in fiction now)
lead lives that are not at all interior. And yet every man either leads
an interior life, or longs to lead an interior life, of which he seldom
talks. He wants inarticulately to know something of the art of
meditation; his dissatisfaction with life, even when he is successful,
is largely due to the fact that he has never been taught how to
cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de
Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his
imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a
book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points.
For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the
difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in
this way:
Let us speak like politicians; there is a nobility without
heraldry, a natural dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another
filed before him, according to the quality of his desert and
pre-eminence of his good parts. Though the corruption of these
times and the bias of present practice wheel another way, thus it
was in the first and primitive commonwealths, and is yet in the
integrity and cradle of well-ordered politics: till corruption
getteth ground;--ruder desires labouring after that which wiser
considerations contemn;--every one having a liberty to amass and
heap up riches, and they a license or faculty to do or purchase
anything.
[2] Mr. Walpole has almost forfeited the allegiance of people who
admired his quality of well-bred distinction by writing in "The
Young Enchanted" of George Eliot as a "horse-faced genius."
There are singular beings who have tried to read "Religio Medici"
continuously. Was it Shakespeare, whose works were presented to one of
this class? "How do you like Shakespeare?" the amiable donor asked. "I
can't say yet; I have not finished him!" It seems almost miraculous that
human beings should exist who take this attitude toward Sir Thomas
Browne, his "Urn Burial" or his "Christian Morals." It seems almost more
miraculous that this attitude should be taken toward Montaigne, and that
some folk should prefer the "Essays of Montaigne" in the pleasant,
curtailed edition of John Florio's translation, edited by Justin Huntly
McCarthy! These small books are convenient, no doubt. If you cannot have
the original French, or the leisure to browse over the big volume of
Florio's old book as it was written, Mr. McCarthy's edition is an
agreeable but not satisfactory substitute. It somehow or other reminds
one of that appalling series of cutdown "Classics," so largely
recommended to a public that is seduced to run and read. A condensed
edition of Froissart may do very well for boys; but who can visualize
the kind of mind content with a reduced version of "Vanity Fair"?
Montaigne is a city of refuge from the whirling words of the uplifters.
At times I have been compelled from a sense of duty, a mistaken one, to
read whole pages of Mr. Wells, whose "Marriage" and "The New
Machiavelli" and "Tono-Bungay," will be remembered when "Mr.
Britling"--by the way, what did Mr. Britling see through?--shall be
forgotten. As an antidote, I invariably turn to Montaigne. It amazed me
to hear Montaigne called a skeptic. He is even more reverent toward the
eternal verities than Sir Thomas Browne, and he has fewer superstitions.
It was his humanity and his love for religion that turned him from
Aristotle to Plato, and yet he is no fanatic for Plato. He is a real
amateur of good books. Listen to this:
As for Cicero, I am of the common judgment, that besides learning
there was an exquisite eloquence in him: He was a good citizen, of
an honest, gentle nature, as are commonly fat and burly men: for so
was he. But to speake truly of him, full of ambitious vanity and
remisse niceness. And I know not well how to excuse him, in that he
deemed his Poesie worthy to be published. It is no great
imperfection to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him
that he never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie of his
name. Concerning his eloquence it is beyond all comparison, and I
verily believe that none shall ever equall it.
Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that ever the book written by
Brutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering
that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather know
what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on
the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He
had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that
keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to
hear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpets
that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing
"jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out
the favourite oaths of his province with violence.
"The Romans in their religion," he says, "were wont to say 'Hoc age';
which in ours we say, 'Sursum corda.'"
He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner; he does not care for the
_hors d'oeuvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the
translation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis sive
liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is a
good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar
to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself
in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and
he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute
as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The
discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns
him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to
his contemporaries on the subject.
In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together
in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy
Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.
"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life
than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating
Europe from the Middle Ages."
It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de
Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the
precious sentences of Thomas [`a] Kempis. They are foils; at first sight
there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel
de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with
Thomas [`a] Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being
Montaignes, Thomas [`a] Kempis would have written for God alone. He would
have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had
erected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitely
carved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side
toward the people and not the side toward the Presence of God, it was
entirely plain and unornamented!
The friendship of Thomas [`a] Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson might
easily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last
supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling might
exist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be as
nothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellous
guide to life. The translations of Thomas [`a] Kempis into English vary in
value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of [`A] Kempis in
deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing
Thomas [`a] Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of
his love of Christ limps when the mystical centre of it, the Eucharist,
is cut out. If that meeting in the upper room had not taken place during
the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul
and divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas [`a] Kempis
would never have written "The Following of Christ." The Bible, even the
New Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul's
Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what better interpretation of the
doctrines of Christ as applied to everyday life can there be found than
in this precious little book?
You may talk of Marcus Aurelius and gather what comfort you can from the
philosophy of Thoreau's "Walden"--which might, after all, be more
comfortable if it were more pagan. The Pan of Thoreau was a respectable
Pan, because he was a Unitarian; you may find some comfort in Keble's
"Christian Year" if you can; but [`A] Kempis overtops all! It is strange,
too, what an appeal this great mystic has to the unbelievers in
Christianity. It is a contradiction we meet with every day. And George
Eliot was a remarkable example of this, for, in spite of her habitual
reverence, she cannot be said to have accepted orthodox dogmas. Another
paradox seems to be in the fact that Thomas [`a] Kempis appeals so directly
and consciously to the confirmed mystic and to those who have secluded
themselves from the world. At first, I must confess that I found this a
great obstacle to my joy in having found him.
If Montaigne frequently drove me to [`A] Kempis, [`A] Kempis almost as
frequently in the beginning drove me back to Montaigne. It was not
until I had become more familiar with the New Testament that I began to
see that [`A] Kempis spoke as one soul to another. In this world for him
there were only three Facts--God, his own soul, and the soul to whom he
spoke.
It was a puzzle to me to observe that so many of my friends who looked
on the Last Supper as a mere symbol of love and hospitality, should
cling to "The Following of Christ" with such devotion. Even the example
of an intellectual friend of mine, a Bostonian who had lived much in
Italy, could not make it clear. He often asserted that he did not
believe in God; and yet he was desolate if on a certain day in the year
he did not pay some kind of tribute at the shrine of St. Antony of
Padua!
I have known him to break up a party in the Adirondacks in order to
reach the nearest church where it was possible for him to burn a candle
in honour of his favourite saint on this mysterious anniversary! As long
as he exists, as long as he continues to burn candles--_les chandelles
d'un ath['e]e_--I shall accept without understanding the enthusiasm of so
many lovers of [`A] Kempis, who cut out the mystical longings for the
reception of that divine food which Christ gave out in the upper room.
[`A] Kempis says:
My soul longs to be nourished with Thy body; my heart desires to be
united with Thee.
Give Thyself to me and it is enough; for without Thee no comfort is
available.
Without Thee I cannot subsist; and without Thy visitation I cannot
live.
And, therefore, I must come often to Thee, and receive Thee for the
remedy, and for the health and strength of my soul; lest perhaps I
faint in the way, if I be deprived of this heavenly food.
For so, O most merciful Jesus, Thou wast pleased once to say, when
Thou hadst been preaching to the people, and curing sundry
diseases: "I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in
the way."
Deal now in like manner with me, who has left Thyself in the
sacrament for the comfort of Thy faithful.
For Thou art the most sweet reflection of the soul; and he that
shall eat Thee worthily shall be partaker and heir of everlasting
glory.
To every soul, oppressed and humble, [`A] Kempis speaks more poignantly
than even David, in that great cry of the heart and soul, the De
Profundis:
Behold, then, O Lord, my abjection and frailty [Ps. xxiv. 18],
every way known to Thee.
Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire [Ps. lxviii. 15], that
I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly cast down
forever.
This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in Thy
sight, to find that I am so subject to fall and have so little
strength to resist my passions.
And although I do not altogether consent, yet their assaults are
troublesome and grievous to me, and it is exceedingly irksome to
live thus always in a conflict.
Hence my infirmity is made known to me, because wicked thoughts do
always much more easily rush in upon me than they can be cast out
again.
Oh, that Thou, the most mighty God of Israel, the zealous lover of
faithful souls, wouldst behold the labour and sorrow of Thy
servant, and stand by me in all my undertakings.
Strengthen me with heavenly fortitude, lest the old man, the
miserable flesh, not fully subject to the spirit, prevail and get
the upper hand, against which we must fight as long as we breathe
in this most wretched life.
Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and miseries are
never wanting; where all things are full of snares and enemies.
There is no pessimism here, for Thomas [`a] Kempis gives the remedies, the
only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the
sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect
are worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knew
their hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedy
so effective as that which [`A] Kempis offers.
It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fear
of hurting or offending the Beloved.
The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War and
on their remedy is "The Rebuilding of Europe," by David Jayne Hill.
There we find this quotation from Villari illuminated:
but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work written
in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect expression of an
emancipation from moral restraints far advanced. The
Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared.
The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for
their safety to the nation-state rather than to the solidarity of
Christendom; and the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it,
consisted in absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one
man who should embody its unity, strength, and authority.
Montaigne felt rather than understood the cruelty and brutality of the
state traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriously
combatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versailles
and Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles which
guided the world from the Renascence to the year 1918:
(1) The essence of a State is "sovereignty," defined as "supreme
power." (2) A sovereign State has the right to declare war upon any
other sovereign State for any reason that seems to it sufficient.
(3) An act of conquest by the exercise of superior military force
entitles the conqueror to the possession of the conquered
territory. (4) The population goes with the land and becomes
subject to the will of the conqueror.
What member of the memorable conference, which began at Washington on
November 12, 1921, would have dared to assert these unmoral principles,
accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, in
principle? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholy
novelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life of
the Middle Ages.
There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was kept
alive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's
world, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A better
understanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton less
autocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaire
less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic lately
named a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and of
Catherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the passages in Sir Thomas
Browne and Montaigne sent me, says:
Down to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 the most odious crime ever
committed against a civilized people was, no doubt, the first
partition of Poland; yet at the time not a voice was raised against
it. Louis XV. was "infinitely displeased," but he did not even
reply to the King of Poland's appeal for help. George III. coolly
answered that "justice ought to be the invariable rule of
sovereigns"; but concluded, "I fear, however, misfortunes have
reached the point where redress can be had from the hands of the
Almighty alone." Catherine II. thought justice satisfied when
"everyone takes something." Frederick II. wrote to his brother,
"The partition will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, and
Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the same
consecrated body, which is Poland." Only Maria Theresa felt a
twinge of conscience. She took but she felt the shame of it. She
wrote: "We have by our moderation and fidelity to our engagements
acquired the confidence, I may venture to say the admiration, of
Europe.... One year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to
endure it, and that nothing in the world has cost me more than the
loss of our good name." It is a strange phenomenon that in matters
where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly pronounces
judgment and spontaneously condemns, the solid mass of moral
conviction should count for nothing in affairs of state. Against it
a purely national prejudice has never failed to prevail.
Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons so clearly; nor does Sir
Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the
politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of
either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth
century, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together.
Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and
one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.
This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears
in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told
that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his
family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that
he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is,
therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The
American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in
our universities are those which concern themselves with written and
spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools
and colleges
is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false
inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to
break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim
is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of
us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That
language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has
merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to
the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and
heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably
the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English
parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for
the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by
flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his
ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain
something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of
the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom
encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it,
which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its
artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial
Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks
in it or quite feels it.
Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive; but he is not so
constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into
which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language
which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us
that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true
in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was
fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles
which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal
Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln
himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than
the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten
almost as soon as they are learned.
Personally, in youthful days, I could make nothing out of the "grammar"
of the English language until I had begun to study Latin prosody; and
then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of
English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of
the English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton.
As the English language, spoken everywhere, must depend on good usage,
and the bad usage of to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow,
it is regrettable that no scientific study of the American vocabulary or
of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote
Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with
correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he
read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant
White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The
Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of
writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"
was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or
the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is
not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in
the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and
nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them
with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved
as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a
good deal.
The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of
Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited class of
Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the
matter of pronunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord
Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several
examples of this.
"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's
Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all
its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who
habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as
an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious
over what he called the mispronunciation of "apotheosis," which he said
a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have
known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of
the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "bloody," Mr. Mencken
shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English
convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on
the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I
can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word
"consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in the
First Baptist Church at high noon"!
In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" is
better than "elevator," and "station" better than "d['e]pot." Though these
are departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often when
our critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. I
have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated English
traditions of speech, to shrink in horror at the mention of "flap-jack"
and "ice-cream." He could never find a substitute in _real_ English for
"flap-jack," but he always substituted "ices" for "ice-cream." On one
occasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," for
those "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; and
he spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such composition
really existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seen
approaching with an unmistakable "pie," the kind supposed by the readers
of advertisements to be made by "mothers," and ordered hastily because
of the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest tried
to save the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry as "a tart."
The host shook his head--"a tart," in English, could never be covered!
Mr. Mencken shows us that "flap-jack," "molasses," "home-spun,"
"ice-cream" are old English; that "Bub," which used to shock London
visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that
"muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when
I was young; it would have saved me a bad mark for paraphrasing
"Menelaus and Paris got into a muss over Helen." But probably the use of
"row" to express that little difficulty would not have saved me!
The best judge of Madeira in Philadelphia always said "cheer" for
"chair" and "sasser" for "saucer" and "tay" for "tea" and "obleged" for
"obliged"; and he drank from his saucer, too; and his table was always
provided with little dishes, like butter plates, for the discarded cups.
His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learning
who laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary,
and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an education
in himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when he
came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell from
grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my
search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask
him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape
from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not
lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!
Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in
England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.
Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches
of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "bloody" used by
Mr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion sinks into a pastel tint! Mr.
Mencken says:
The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of James I. and the
Authorized Version, and their descendants of a century later,
inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to be but little changed by
the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during
the early part of the Eighteenth Century.
The Bible won against the prudery of the new English; prudery will go
very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in
Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a
little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was
because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The
little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel
Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus
ventris tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded "more decent"!
Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's revelation that "ante"
came into our language through the Spanish; he says,
cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early Texas
days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later.
It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr. Mencken's judgment in regard
to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he
quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language,
another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our
tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of
strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably
precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this
usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted
at 80,
but in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it falls to 61, in
Anatole France's prose, to 66, in Gabriele d' Annunzio to 49, and
in the poetry of Goethe to 30.
That our language has only five vowels, which have to do duty for more
than a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy French
preacher who, from an English pulpit, pronounced "plough" as "pluff" had
much excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluer
de lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How many
conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!
There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or
more food for thought or for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken's
"The American Language," except Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy,"
Boswell's "Johnson," the "Devout Life" of Saint Francis de Sales,
Pepys's "Diary," the "Letters" of Madame de S['e]vign['e], Beveridge's
"Life" of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book
for odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a
precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify
the quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thick
flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner is
announced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!
It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of English
grammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of view
and of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner in
which Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read Herbert
Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir
Conan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, let
them induce Herbert Spencer to analyze Mr. Mencken's statements on the
growth of the English language! In my time we were expected to take
Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt that
his principles have been repeated by every writer on style, including
Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition," since Mr.
Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principles
reminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he met
Beatrice.
There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as a
science and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while he
provokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in Robert
Louis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications in
style in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.
And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a little
volume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the
terrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It is
Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." And if one wants to know
how to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does not
come by nature--there is "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville, the close
friend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken must
love him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.
Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _fl[^a]neur_--the
chief business of a _fl[^a]neur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in old
Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows;
but the _fl[^a]neur_ among books finds none of his shop-windows
unrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of a
word that sounded something like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every
Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and they
often did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you
should never say "druggist." I trust that it is no breach of confidence
to repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modern
Philadelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languages
in his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for the
boys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire
lad I met the other day. "But you haven't a Yorkshire accent!" "No,
sir," he said, "my parents whipped it out of me." But there is, in New
York City, at least the beginning of one American language--the language
of the street.
* * * * *
In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I have
often asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure and
even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. For
the plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although I
believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to a
really good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Of
memoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Cr['e]quy have
always been very agreeable to me; I have never been so dull or so tired,
that I could not find some solace in the Diary of Mr. Pepys, in the
Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and
even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth
returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so
admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all
atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now
comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries
including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth
living!
I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David
whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies
me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise
Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am
surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its
splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious
visions of truth at a white heat.
Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a
picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the
didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no
great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be
preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never
could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a
great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see
that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a
cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh
the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the
first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's
Funeral"? Or "My Last Duchess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of
the passages in "Pippa Passes"? Who has conceived a better fable for a
poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for
us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the
philosophies of Wordsworth.
To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their
power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own
faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of
raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of gaiety of heart.
As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson once applied to works
of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers
of this consoling art to "_filles de joie_." He doubtless meant that
these goddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave us
visions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without being
sensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels,
like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which are joyous and serious at once. Or
take "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."
Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads
them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say
that only a few of the essayists really amuse me. They are, as a rule,
more witty than humorous, and generally they make one self-conscious,
being self-conscious themselves. There are a hundred different types of
the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found
all the prose works of a fine poet and friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere,
on the shelves of a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. "The result of a
severe sense of duty!" he said.
Madame Roland tried hard for a title of nobility and failed, though she
gained in the end a greater title. Her works are insufferably and
complacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings with
respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her first
volume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress of
Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have been
nourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St.
Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the most
practical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the form
of letters. Next comes F['e]nelon's and--I know that I shall shock those
who regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his power
of stimulation, Emerson.
It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that these
confessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them I
have had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind but
simply of relieving my own, by button-holing the reader who happens to
come my way. I should like to add that what is called the coarseness of
the eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than the
nasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lack
of talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts.
Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common with
the process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles," to use
Charles Reade's phrase.
If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmness
and patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason
for thanking God is that Americans have produced a literature--the
continuation of an older literature with variations, it is true,--that
has added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mention
only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," and I am glad to end my book by
writing the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, or
with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, are
no longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who
writes of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a title to
his discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It
is an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough for
smiles.
It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is
rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature
and assimilating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don
Marquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippingly
as any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is nobody writing in the
daily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they do
it. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention to
what they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Will
they live? Of course not. Is ['E]mile de Girardin alive? Or all the clever
ones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One still
reads the "Portraits de Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was
something more than a "columnist." And these folk will be, too, in time!
At any rate, they are good enough for the present.
Who, writing in French or in any language, _outre-mer_, does better, or
as well, as Holliday? And where is the peer of Charles S. Brooks in
"Hints to Pilgrims"? "Luca Sarto," the best novel of old Italian life by
an American--since Mrs. Wharton's "Valley of Decision"--proved him to be
a fine artist. He perhaps knew his period better psychologically than
Mrs. Wharton, but here there's room for argument. Mrs. Wharton, although
she is an admirable artist, grows indifferent and insular at long
intervals.
"Luca Sarto" dropped like the gentle rain from heaven; and then came
"Hints to Pilgrims." This I wanted to write about in the _Yale Review_,
but the selfish editor, Mr. Cross, said that he preferred to keep it for
himself!
"Hints to Pilgrims" is the essence of the modern essay. Strangely
enough, it sent me back to the "Colour of Life" by the only real
_pr['e]cieuse_ living in our world to-day, Alice Meynell; and I read that
with new delight between certain paragraphs in Brooks's paper "On
Finding a Plot." Why is not "Hints to Pilgrims" in its fourteenth
edition? Or why has it no _claque_? The kind of _claque_ that is so
common now--which opens suddenly like a chorus of cicadas in the "Idylls
of Theocritus"? After all, your education must have been well begun
before you can enjoy "Hints to Pilgrims," while for "Huckleberry Finn"
the less education you have, the better. Mr. Brooks writes:
Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that
ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in Barchester
beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you think,
have cooled her Southern blood? Would she have conformed to the
decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot
colour always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to
live just outside the Cathedral close and walked every morning with
her gay parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's
window.
We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes
on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure
ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The
Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He
must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring
morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A
robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is
wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the
Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely
across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn
modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his
desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It
is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt.
"Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his
spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me!
Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't
remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is
forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the
housemaid, for a fresh neckcloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a
meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.
You do not find delightful fooling like this every day; and there is
much more of it. Take this:
Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley, who
always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern
Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted
its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad
girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even
Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last
a happy wedding--flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano
behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.
Oliver Twist and Nancy--merely acquaintances in the original
story--with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank
holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the
whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone
was drowned except Nancy, Oliver, and perhaps the trombone player
of the ships' band, who had blown himself so full of wind for
fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson
Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely
island--observe the cunning of the plot!--who battles with the
waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a
fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday, and the trombone player
stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates,
with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love
with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth.
Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone
player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck),
is discovered to be a retired clergyman--doubtless a Methodist. The
happy knot is tied. And then--a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy
settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells
along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story
ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear--tea for three,
with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill,
reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the
sunny wall.
When I found Brooks, I felt again the pang of loss, that Theodore
Roosevelt had not read "Hints to Pilgrims," before he passed into "the
other room" and eternal light shone upon him! He would have discovered
"Hints to Pilgrims," and celebrated it as soon as any of us.
How he loved books! And he seemed to have read all the right things in
his youth; you forgot time and kicked Black Care away when he talked
with you about them. He could drop from Dante to Brillat-Savarin (in
whom he had not much interest, since he was a _gourmet_ and did not
regard sausages as the highest form of German art!) and his descents and
ascents from book to book were as smooth as Melba's sliding scales--and
her scales were smoother than Patti's.
Do you remember his "Dante in the Bowery," and "The Ancient Irish
Sagas"? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre";
and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before
Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love.
It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and
how he fought for them, and explained them, and lived with them.
Thinking of him, the most constant of book-lovers, I can only say,
"Farewell and Hail!"
THE END
[Transcriber's notes:
People using this book as a reference should be aware that some of
the spelling and quotations are not necessarily accurate.
Some obvious printing errors were corrected
(gu'une->qu'une p96; natio->nation p223)
Consistent archaic spellings of names of people and times were retained
as is.
Accenting was not 'corrected'.
Some potential printer's errors left as is include:
Gaugain may be Gauguin p237 (Paul Gauguin from context)
Who the Holliday refered to in chapter V p244 was is unknown.
There are a lot of accented characters in this text.
I have put most of such characters in square brackets.
[`x] - grave accent above letter x
['x] - acute accent above letter x
[:x] - umlaut above letter x
[^x] - circumflex above letter x
[c,] - cedilla below c
x mostly being vowels
ae and oe ligatures have been replaced with the letters separately.
PPing temp: Spellcheck complete.]