Yes, he's a Bishop. And there was his wife,
(A big fat monster of a wife) and then
There was a little wizened-looking thing,
A sort of curate. Well, I looked at them
And laughed to see them tremble in their shoes.
"Good e'en, my Lord," says I, and doffed my hat.
"How do you like the Royal Mail?" Says he:
"O good Sir Highwayman, pray let me go,
Our coach broke down at York, and so we took
This public carrier, this dreadful thing,
This Royal Mail. O will you let us pass?
I must get into Hull by dawn, and sleep,
For I confirm an hundred souls at noon."
I listened to him, Kate, and did not see
The old fox slip a pistol up to Dick.
But, bang! Hell's fury! Down fell Monmouth, dead.
And off I stumbled in the ditch! Well, Kate,
Dick aimed for me, you see, and got the horse.
And I got Dick. I got him through the head.
And then I joined the Bishop once again.
"Come out, my Lord, and strip!" says I. "What, strip?"
Says he, and let his jaw fall on his chest.
"Yes, strip!" says I, and pulls his great-coat off:
"Yes, strip!" says I, and throws his wig away:
"Yes, strip!" says I, and pulls his breeches off:
And there he stands and shivers, pink and fat.
"Now, Madame Bishopess," says I, "pray do
Poor Captain Thunder so much courtesy
As to ride by him on the way to town."
She screamed and fought. I took her in my arms
And heaved her up into the seat. "Now strip!"
I shouted to the curate. "Yes," says he,
"I'll strip," and strip he did. "Inside!" says I;
They stumbled headlong in, I cracked my whip
And, whoop! the Mail went rumbling on to Hull!
Well, just at dawn we passed the Southern Gate;
We galloped down the street and made a halt
Beside the Close. "Here's the Cathedral, dame!"
Says I, and helped the lady to the ground.
"Unbar the door, and help his Lordship out
And don't forget the curate!" How I laughed
To see the Bishop and the curate run
Stark naked, screaming, to the Chapter House!
Well, I was off at once and out of Hull
And never stopped to breathe the nags till now.
LITTLE GIRL
But, Captain Thunder! Captain! Are you mad?
They'll have the country after you! Be quick!
You can't make cover in a coach and four
As on a horse!
ASHMAN
Nay, Kate, rest easy now.
Red Will is out, and Davy Doublesword,
And Hieland Jock, and Dan the Drum and Ned,
And twenty gallant gentlemen beside.
And they have sworn to keep the roadway clear
By setting all the lobsters such a chase
Will scatter them till night. And Ned will blow
His bugle when the way is safe. Then, whoop!
I'll rattle off again and fill the coach
With gentlemen of fortune, comrades true,
And own the road from here to London town.
(_A horn is heard and a cry of "Fish, fish, fish, fine fresh fish!"_)
LITTLE GIRL
Down, Captain, loose the horses! There's the call!
(_The ASHMAN gets down, takes off the horse's
nosebag and unhitches the horse from the post._)
ASHMAN (_getting back on his seat_)
Now, Kate, we'll gallop off to Arcady.
POLICEMAN (_suddenly entering_)
Hello there, Ashes, who you talking to?
ASHMAN
Kate of the Greenwood.
POLICEMAN
Kate? You poor old boob!
You're crazy in the head. There's no one there!
ASHMAN (_driving off_)
Make way there, constable. (_Cracks his whip and sings._)
Come all ye jolly rovers
As wants to hear a tale
Will make your hearts as merry
As a bellyful of ale.
I'll sing of Captain Thunder,
And his dashing slashing way,
How he kissed the queen and he cuffed the king,
And threw the crown away!
(_Exit_)
POLICEMAN
Well, I'll be damned!
THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN
It would be a relief to meet a man who would tell honestly why he likes
Artzibashev and some of the rest of the modern Russian realists. It
would be a relief to have some young radical say: "Yes, I know Chekhov
is dull and prolix, but then the atmosphere of his work is delightfully
unwholesome, and every now and then there is something pleasantly
morbid, like the man with phosphorous poisoning in 'The Steppe,' and his
agreeable custom of eating live fish. And then there's dear Michael
Artzibashev. Of course his style is no better than that of Laura Jean
Libbey, and his plots are cheap melodrama, but you can't deny that he is
consistently nasty. And I do like to read about sexual depravity."
But the young radical of this sort is hard to meet. Instead we find the
lofty-foreheaded young man who praises Artzibashev's psychological
insight, Gorky's sympathy with humanity, and--actually!--Chekhov's
humor! Of course he does not mean what he says. He likes "Sanine" for
the same reason that he likes "Three Weeks." But he would not dare to
confess a liking for "Three Weeks" because that book is English trash.
And "Sanine" is Russian trash. And from the point of view of
intellectual snobbery, there's all the difference in the world between
these two sorts of trash.
Now, it would of course be absurd to condemn all modern Russian fiction,
or to characterize all admirers of contemporary Russian novelists as
hypocrites and sensualists. Americans and Englishmen who know almost by
heart the great poems and stories of Pushkin, who know Lermontov as they
know Byron, and Gogol as they know Dickens, who were brought up on the
novels of Turgenieff, have every right in the world to seek for new
delight among the outpourings of the presses of Petrograd and Moscow.
But the sort of person who is feverishly enthusiastic over Gorky and
Artzibashev has discovered Russian literature, in all probability,
during the few years which have passed since his graduation from
Harvard. His most serious offense is not that he prefers that which is
evil to that which is good, and praises untrue and inartistic work
because the worst part of his nature responds to its salacious appeal.
His most serious offense is that he thinks that the Hall Caines and
Marie Corellis of Russia really are representative writers, and that he
insults a race of great romanticists and great realists by calling works
that are thoroughly morbid and vile "very Russian."
What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to
pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who
think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a
pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement,
during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly
expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them
that it was not Artzibashev's "power of psychological analysis" that
attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more
honest men.
But this most desirable course has not the virtue of practicality.
Perhaps some of the more or less recent activities of American
publishers will so educate the public that they will no longer be
impressed by critics whose acquaintance with Russian literature is
confined to "Sanine" and some of Gorky's plays. Not long ago was
published Stephen Graham's admirable translation of Gogol's "Dead
Souls," a novel which in its rich humor and sympathetic realism
suggests "Pickwick Papers," while its whimsical romanticism brings to
mind some parts of "Don Quixote." It is one of the world's classics; no
one who has not read it has a right to an opinion on Russian literature.
About the same time appeared Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," a
book of short stories by the great novelist, half genius and half
mountebank, who wasted his genuine talent in developing a new religion,
which is merely a grotesque parody of Christianity. The stories in this
book are compelling, in spite of their somewhat mad philosophy, for they
faithfully reflect Russian manners and certain picturesque phases of
Russian idealism. Another volume issued at about this period is Maurice
Baring's "Russian Literature," the best one-volume work on the subject
in existence. And it is to be hoped that other publishers will publish
those Russian novels which really belong to literature, rather than
those which are of interest chiefly to the pathologist and alienist.
But meanwhile the market is flooded with viciously sensational works
which are tolerated only because their exotic quality gives them a
certain distinction in the eyes of the provincial. Here, for example, is
Maxim Gorky's "Submerged." Mr. Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor
Back," and Charles Rand Kennedy's "The Servant in the House" were
sentimental, but on the whole, effective treatments of a very dangerous
theme: that of the miraculous reformation of certain phases of modern
society or groups of individuals through the appearance on earth of a
man possessing Divine attributes. Gorky's plan has a similar plot, but,
of course, he differs from the two English writers in making vice
triumph in the end. The poor wretches who have endeavored to regain a
little of their lost decency are thrust back into the slime. The people
who make up this typical Gorky offering are drunkards, thieves, depraved
creatures of every kind. They are utterly lost and the author seems to
gloat over their depravity and misery. But then what else is he to do?
He must live up to his name. Gorky, you know, is a pen name meaning
"bitter," and Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov feels that he must justify the
title he has so proudly assumed. But ridiculous affectation it is! It is
as if Matthew Arnold had called himself "Matthew Sweetness and Light."
And there is a translation of Leonidas Andreiev, "The Red Laugh." This
was an attempt to flash upon the astonished world the novel idea that
war is a very, very unpleasant thing. Mr. Andreiev spills gore on every
page, and the publisher assists him by making the title of the book
blood red on a black ground. All the characters in the book go mad, and
the author's utter inaptitude for literature turns what might have been
passable third-rate melodrama into a farce. As a contribution to
letters, and as a piece of pacifist propaganda "The Red Laugh" is
inferior to "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."
And then there is Artzibashev: so much boomed and press-agented; praised
by the radical magazines for his "assault on ordinary morality" and his
"desperately poignant artistry"; long-haired young men with large eyes
have told the women's clubs all about him. Well, of course, "desperately
poignant artistry" means nothing at all, and "artistry" is meaningless
when used in connection with a man like the author of "The Millionaire."
He doesn't write novels, he merely throws something evil-smelling into
the reader's face.
If the scene of "The Millionaire" and "Nina" were laid in the United
States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without
literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness
makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the
literary snob. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia
grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian
life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish
reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous bestiality of the Russian
criminal class, they reflect the life of people who have added to their
native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture
of the Russian people as something at once bestial and human, a
monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind
when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.
ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE
Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following
anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an
illustrative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently
had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death,
among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it
memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts
of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of
prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said
to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney--and, by the way,
Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story--"Do you know, I have
found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very
beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read
it to you." Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:
Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara!
Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had
felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the
phrase, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," and had hastily
copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's manuscript at some
meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the
publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith,
attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme
Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in
tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.
Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic
critic, Miss Katherine Bregy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which
resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She
has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and
made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion
seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It
would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Bregy's interpretative
appreciations of the "sculptural beauty" of Dowson's religious poems.
But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find
indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity,
wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called
"decadent" wrote.
There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the
world, genuine "decadents." That is, there have been writers who have
devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have
consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously
endeavored to make the worse appear the better cause. But every poet who
lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of
immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often
he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous
saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in
making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.
Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member,
it will be remembered, of that little band of "esthetic" poets which was
called the Rhymers' Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the
Cheshire Cheese and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and
symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the
beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the
pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of
musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted
crust of the magnificent pigeon-pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.
Of course it is true--more's the pity!--that in the melancholy years
just before his death he drank absinthe in places where it is terribly
fitting to drink absinthe. But this does not destroy the splendid
symbolism of his act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The
wickedness in his poems and in his prose-sketches are always as affected
and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.
He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaimed:
"Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of
thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever
wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said, "I go where the wind
blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can
fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed. He
imitated, even less successfully than Oscar Wilde, the unpleasant prose
poems of Baudelaire, and he made the very worst of all English versions
of Paul Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental."
When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons
tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends. I do not
think that he convinced them that he was that supposedly romantic
character, an habitual user of the drug. The hashish, so to speak, in
his poems is similarly incongruous and unconvincing. He was an
accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius,
but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so,
in his best-known poem, he uses all the pagan properties, all the
splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his over-mastering
thought--very different from the over-mastering thought of, say, Mr.
Arthur Symons in similar circumstances--is a soul-shaking lament for his
stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.
He could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true
decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had his
foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is
the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it
successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond
about whom Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Victor Plarr have written, but the
man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and
chastity," who "was faithful" in his pathetic, ineffective fashion, but
who knew at least the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Miss
Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and
followed this bruised soul with her pitiful, asperging prayers."
JAPANESE LACQUER
What was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose
more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else--not
even Yone Noguchi--put into English so clear a revelation of Japan's
soul. Yet after an hour with "Kwaidan" or "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"
the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the
erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.
Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic,
and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is
partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such
aversion. Is it because Hearn's style is too rich, exquisite and
precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with
delight by Hearn's enemies. Is it because of Hearn's ridiculous
religious prejudices--his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No,
Hearn's hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy's impudence
toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow's fiery, romantic
passion against the "Man in Black." And Borrow's "Lavengro" and "Romany
Rye" were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.
No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn
failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not
because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.
Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had
thoroughly the materialistic attitude toward life; he could see only the
dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man
would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have
realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic
profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no
mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only
the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally
credulous that he believed that Japan contained greater wonders than
Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work,
"Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," blames many of his dead friend's faults on
his defective vision. But Hearn's myopia was spiritual as well as
physical: he could not see the soul.
What terrible results came from this spiritual myopia! Of course, its
worst result was the unspeakable tragedy of Hearn's rejection of
Christianity for that cruel burlesque on religion called Buddhism. But
the minor results were many and dreadful ... chief among them was the
loss to the world of a great writer.
Lafcadio Hearn might have been a great writer. If proof of this were
needed, it would be found in a posthumously published book of singular
interest--"Fantastics and Other Fancies." This is a collection of
Hearn's earliest writings, resurrected from the brittle yellow pages of
old New Orleans newspapers by Charles Woodward Hutson.
The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this
master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are--unlike his later
work--imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations
of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the
artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet
deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He
still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization.
The literary value of Hearn's work is not to be questioned. No living
writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an
imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans _Daily
Item_; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly
the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a
structure of enduring loveliness.
It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags,
persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans _Item_, to
give him work. He was called "assistant editor," but it may be supposed
that the "assistant editor" of this little two-page paper did most of
the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news
columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page
appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some
whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased.
These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New
Orleans _Times-Democrat_, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought
together in this volume of real charm and value.
Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or
legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would
furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some
antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden
case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy
office, he wrote the exquisite "Idyl of a French Snuffbox." Riding to
work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a Japanese fan of
paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in
such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result
was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, "A River
Reverie."
He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius
was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he
remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those
tales of the grotesque and arabesque, "The Black Cupid" and "The One
Pill Box." Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parnassian
Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.
But no Frenchman of his time could match the tender humor of "The Post
Office," nor were Poe and Coleridge standing at his elbow when he wrote
"Hiouen-Thrang." These were written by Lafcadio Hearn himself, by that
strange nomad who called no one race his own, who looked at life with
huge and perilous curiosity, who gave to most un-English thoughts a
splendidly English dress, who just missed being a poet, who just missed
being a mystic, who just missed being happy.
Already, the "Fantastics" show, Hearn was hearing the Orient's alluring
voice. New Orleans, that brave old bright-colored Latin city, struggling
with the aftermath of war and pestilence, was just the place for a man
of his exotic tastes. "I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this
dead South is," he wrote. "It has fascinated me." But not the venerable
splendors of New Orleans, not the picturesque shores of Grand Isle,
could take the place of the radiant East, to which he continually
referred, of which clairvoyantly he seemed to know himself already a
citizen.