the kind of criticism that quoted. He would even go so far as to say
that there was no just and honest criticism without quotation. The
critic was bound to make out his case, or else abdicate his function,
and he could not make out his case, either for or against an author,
without calling him to testify. Therefore, he was in favor of
quotational criticism, for fairness' sake, as well as for his pleasure;
and it was for the extension of it that he now contended. He was not
sure that he wished to send the reader to the authors quoted in all
cases. The reader could get through the passages cited a pretty good
notion of the authors' quality, and as for their quantity, that was
often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the case of the old poets,
and most of the English classics, there was a great deal of filth which
the reader would be better for not taking into his mind and which the
most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer him. If any one
said that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of those
authors, he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that without
the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of themselves,
yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their
dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them
from living at periods when manners were foul.
XXIII
READING FOR A GRANDFATHER
A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had the
real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a Christmas
present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She thought,
only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the finest cigars,
of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling
embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house
shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did not
smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he went
to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her grandmother,
very short and very scant (according to her notion at the chance moments
when she had surprised him in it), from which neither love nor money
could part him; the others she rejected for the reason already assigned.
Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, and she was
glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected,
she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at
least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it.
As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over
again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world
of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about
books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across the
afternoon tea-cups whether she had seen this or that new book, and
scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact
that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the
person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old
gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she
plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would
delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to
inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those new books.
"Now, grandfather," she began, "you know I always give you a Christmas
present."
"Yes, my dear," the old gentleman patiently assented, "I know you do.
You are very thoughtful."
"Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being thoughtful. What I
like is being spontaneous."
"Well, then, my dear, I don't mind saying you are very spontaneous."
"And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make a lasting enemy of
me, let him surprise me. So I am going to tell you now what I am going
to give you. Do you like that?"
"I like everything you do, my child."
"Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I am going to give
you books. And in order not to disappoint you by giving you books that
you have read before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you mind
it?"
"Oh no, but I'm afraid you won't find me very frank."
"I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there is no fun in not
surprising you, or in not giving you books that you have read."
"There is something in that," her grandfather assented. "But now,
instead of finding out what I have read, or what I like, why not tell me
what I ought to read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of
advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn't the girls turn the
tables and advise their elders? I often feel the need of advice from
girls on all sorts of subjects, and you would find me very grateful, I
believe."
The girl's eyes sparkled and then softened toward this docile ancestor.
"Do you really mean it, grandfather? It would be fun if you did."
"But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I should be glad if your
good counsel could include the whole conduct of life, for I am sensible
sometimes of a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am sure you
could help me to combat."
"Oh, grandfather," said the girl, tenderly, "you know that isn't true!"
"Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn't. My difficulty in
regard to reading remains, and there you certainly could help me. At
moments it seems to me that I have come to the end of my line."
The old gentleman's voice fell, and she could no longer suspect him of
joking. So she began, "Why, what have you been reading last?"
"Well, my dear, I have been looking into the _Spectator_ a little."
"The London _Spectator_? Jim says they have it at the club, and he
swears by it. But I mean, what books; and that's a weekly newspaper, or
a kind of review, isn't it?"
"The _Spectator_ I mean was a London newspaper, and it was a kind of
review, but it was a daily. Is it possible that you've never heard of
it?" The young girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully, but upon
the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any important thing in
literature had escaped her. "But you've heard of Addison, and Steele,
and Pope, and Swift?"
"Oh yes, we had them at school, when we were reading _Henry Esmond_;
they all came into that. And I remember, now: Colonel Esmond wrote a
number of the _Spectator_ for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought it
was all a make-up."
"And you don't know about Sir Roger de Coverley?"
"Of course I do! It's what the English call the Virginia Reel. But why
do you ask? I thought we were talking about your reading. I don't see
how you could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it amuses
you! _Is_ it so amusing?"
"It's charming, but after one has read it as often as I have one begins
to know it a little too well."
"Yes; and what else have you been reading?"
"Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues the old essayist
tradition, and he is gently delightful."
"Never heard of him!" the girl frankly declared.
"He was a poet, too, and he wrote the _Story of Rimini_--about Paolo and
Francesca, you know."
"Oh, there you're away off, grandfather! Mr. Philips wrote about _them_;
and that horrid D'Annunzio. Why, Duse gave D'Annunzio's play last
winter! What are you thinking of?"
"Perhaps I am wandering a little," the grandfather meekly submitted, and
the girl had to make him go on.
"Do you read poetry a great deal?" she asked, and she thought if his
taste was mainly for poetry, it would simplify the difficulty of
choosing the books for her present.
"Well, I'm rather returning to it. I've been looking into Crabbe of
late, and I have found him full of a quaint charm."
"Crabbe? I never heard of him!" she owned as boldly as before, for if he
had been worth hearing of, she knew that she would have heard of him.
"Don't you like Kipling?"
"Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer William Watson among your
very modern moderns."
"Why, is _he_ living yet? I thought he wrote ten or fifteen years ago!
You don't call _him_ modern! You like Stevenson, don't you? He's a great
stylist; everybody says he is, and so is George Meredith. You must like
_him_?"
"He's a great intellect, but a little of him goes almost as long a way
as a little of Browning. I think I prefer Henry James."
"Oh yes, he's just coming up. He's the one that has distinction. But the
people who write _like_ him are a great deal more popular. They have all
his distinction, and they don't tax your mind so much. But don't let's
get off on novelists or there's no end to it. Who are really your
favorite poets?"
"Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read Dante by fits and
starts; and I do not mind Milton from time to time. I like Wordsworth,
and I like Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take up
Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself going back to Pope with
real relish. And Byron; yes, Byron! But I shouldn't advise your reading
_Don Juan_."
"That's an opera, isn't it? What they call 'Don Giovanni.' I never heard
of any such poem."
"That shows how careful you have been of your reading."
"Oh, we read everything nowadays--if it's up to date; and if _Don Juan_
had been, you may be sure I would have heard of it. I suppose you like
Tennyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those _old_ poets?"
"Are they old? They used to be so new! Yes, I like them, and I like
Whittier and some things of Bryant's."
At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she said: "Oh yes, I
suppose so. And I suppose you like the old dramatists?"
"Some of them--Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their plays.
But I can't stand most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben Jonson at
all."
"Oh yes--'Rasselas.' I can't stand him either, grandfather. I'm quite
with you about Ben Jonson. 'Too much Johnson,' you know."
The grandfather looked rather blank. "Too _different_ Johnsons, I think,
my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean
the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty
well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer
Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his _Vicar of Wakefield_, and his poems
to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very
best. Shakespeare's are the only plays that one _wants_ to read."
The young girl held up her charming chin, with the air of keeping it
above water too deep for her. "And Ibsen?" she suggested. "I hope you
despise Ibsen as much as I do. He's clear gone out now, thank goodness!
Don't you think _Ghosts_ was horrid?"
"It's dreadful, my dear; but I shouldn't say it was horrid. No, I don't
despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero's plays good reading."
"Oh," the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. "'The Gay Lord
Quex'; Miss Vanbrugh was _great_ in that. But now don't get off on the
theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the old,
_old_ poets--before Burns or Shelley even--do you like?"
"Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked him very much; and
the other day when I was looking over Leigh Hunt's essays, I found a
number of them about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I
don't know when I've found greater pleasure in poetry. If I must have a
favorite among the old poets, I will take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser is
rather more modern."
"Yes, but I can't bear his agnosticism, can you? And I hate metaphysics,
anyway."
The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, "Now, I'm afraid we are
getting too much Spenser."
The girl went off at a tangent. "Don't you just _love_ Mr. Gillette in
'Sherlock Holmes'? There's a play I should think you would like to read!
They say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I could get hold of
it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!"
"No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you think you've
catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very
old-fashioned."
"No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always laughing
at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and
Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I should
say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in fiction,
grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels."
"Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I----"
"Tell me what novels you have read," she broke in upon him
imperatively. "The ones you consider the greatest."
The grandfather had to think. "It is rather a long list--so long that
I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd better mention only the very greatest,
like _Don Quixote_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Wilhelm Meister_, and _The
Vicar of Wakefield_, and _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Emma_, and _Pride and
Prejudice_, and _The Bride of Lammermoor_, and _I Promessi Sposi_, and
_Belinda_, and _Frankenstein_, and _Chartreuse de Parme_, and _Cesar
Birotteau_, and _The Last Days of Pompeii_, and _David Copperfield_, and
_Pendennis_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, and _Blithedale Romance_, and
_The Cloister and the Hearth_, and _Middlemarch_, and _Smoke_, and
_Fathers and Sons_, and _A Nest of Nobles_, and _War and Peace_, and
_Anna Karenina_, and _Resurrection_, and _Dona Perfecta_, and _Marta y
Maria_, and _I Malavoglia_, and _The Return of the Native_, and
_L'Assomoir_, and _Madame Bovary_, and _The Awkward Age_, and _The
Grandissimes_--and most of the other books of the same authors. Of
course, I've read many more perhaps as great as these, that I can't
think of at the moment."
The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile ancestor
in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of which she
did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she believed to
be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply moralized,
denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or the authors.
Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession which his
reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than ever the
necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his reform, in
respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give him books
for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas for good
resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn over a new
leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it.
She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm him too much, and
said she had never been so much interested as in knowing what books he
really liked. But as he had read all those he named--
"Oh, dozens of times!" he broke in.
--Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an entirely new list
for him, so that he could have something freshly entertaining; she did
not like to say more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and
taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed him on his bald
head and ran away to take the matter under immediate advisement. Her
notion then was to look over several lists of the world's best hundred
books which she had been keeping by her, but when she came to compare
them, she found that they contained most of the books he had mentioned,
besides many others. It would never do to give him any one of these
libraries of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the reason
that a hundred books would cost more of her grandfather's money than she
felt justified in spending on him at a season when she had to make so
many other presents.
Just when she was at her wit's end, a sudden inspiration seized her. She
pinned on her hat, and put on her new winter jacket, and went out and
bought the last number of _The Bookworm_. At the end of this periodical
she had often got suggestions for her own reading, and she was sure that
she should find there the means of helping her poor grandfather to a
better taste in literature than he seemed to have. So she took the
different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Cincinnati, New
Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and up-town and
down-town in New York, giving the best-selling books of the month in all
those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them, which she gave to
her bookseller with orders to get them as nearly of the same sizes and
colors as possible. He followed her instructions with a great deal of
taste and allowed her twenty-five per cent. off, which she applied
toward a wedding-present she would have to give shortly. In this way she
was able to provide her grandfather for the new year with reading that
everybody was talking about, and that brought him up to date with a
round turn.
XXIV
SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE
Among the many letters which the Easy Chair has received after its
conference on the state of poetry, one of most decided note was from a
writer confessing herself of the contrary-minded. "I love some children,
but not childhood in general merely because it is childhood. So I love
some poems rather than poetry in general just because it is poetry.... I
object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a
Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete
thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain,
there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious
effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do
this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms
in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life
and more or less the common thought of the day, then more of the common
people will read it."
There were other things in this letter which seemed to us of so much
importance that we submitted it as a whole to a Woman's Club of our
acquaintance. The nine ladies composing the club were not all literary,
but they were all of aesthetic pursuits, and together they brought a good
deal of culture to bear on the main points of the letter. They were not
quite of one mind, but they were so far agreed that what they had to say
might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We will not attempt
to report their remarks at any length--they ran to all lengths--but in
offering a resume of what they variously said to a sole effect, we will
do what we can to further the cause they joined in defending.
The Muses--for we will no longer conceal that this Woman's Club was
composed of the tuneful Nine--acknowledged that there was a great deal
in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one
bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her
place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in
all its established forms, they thought themselves bound to direct her
attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had apparently
overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to take her own
part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it _was_ ridiculous for
poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it apart and put it
together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or
in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses
wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention,
or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you
looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest
thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance,
there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of
shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and
singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and trills, or
even expressing yourself in _recitativo secco_, it would simply set
people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had to make
believe that things two inches high were life-size, and that there were
relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that
colors which were really like nothing in nature were natural. As for
sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether you took it in
bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or three-quarters out,
or in groups with people in eternal action; or in single figures,
standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if they were
not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors bareheaded where
they would take their deaths of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up
rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without a
stitch of clothes on.
All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the
contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so
handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to them
perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of poetry
_not_ to conform to "the mental tone and spirit of the times"; and
though it might very well reflect the life, it must not reflect "the
common thought of the day" upon pain of vulgarizing and annulling
itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its business was the
interpretation of enduring beauty and eternal veracity. If it stooped in
submission to any such expectation as that expressed, and dedicated
itself to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions and
opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had its law, and its
law was distinction of ideal and elevation of tendency, no matter what
material it dealt with. It might deal with the commonest, the cheapest
material, but always in such a way as to dignify and beautify the
material.
Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge all
those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty
syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the
ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what
our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as
nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it
certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its
true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun;
shunning those silly elisions like _ne'er_ and _o'er_, and, above all,
avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite article. Of the
tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded sister meant the
rhyme, they said they could very well remember when there was no such
thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on perfectly well without
it, and even those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that
though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their
greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns
managed very well with blank verse.
The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both because
they were really great authorities and because it is always best to
agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite
the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view of their
sister's contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In short, the
Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very intimate occasion
as this, when it could impart them without wounding the susceptibilities
of others, or risking a painful snub for itself. But it appeared to the
Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough in justifying the
convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. They
could easily have proved that much of the mystical charm which
differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its syntactical
acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a
man inverting his head and looking at the landscape between his legs
gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so literature
forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really achieves something
richly strange by the novel and surprising postures permissible in
verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps lingering
in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually full of these
licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little proved as
denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly to
the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which is a sort
of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him.