Chapter II: Part 2

In real life this admirable reticence is a thing of the past; but the novelist, for the most part, holds his peace, leaving his readers a prey to melancholy doubts and misgivings.

The English-speaking novelist only. In French fiction, as Mr. Lang points out, “love comes after marriage punctually enough, but it is always love for another.” The inevitableness of the issue startles and dismays an English reader, accustomed to yawn gently over the innocent prenuptial dallyings of Saxon man and maid. The French story-writer cannot and does not ignore his social code which urbanely limits courtship. When he describes a girl’s dawning sentiment, he does so often with exquisite grace and delicacy; but he reserves his portrayal of the master passion until maturity gives it strength, and circumstances render it unlawful. His conception of his art imposes no scruple which can impede analysis. If an English novelist ventures to treat of illicit love, the impression he gives is of a blind, almost mechanical force, operating against rather than in unison with natural laws. Those normal but most repellent aspects of the case, which the Frenchman treats openly and exhaustively, the Englishman ignores or rejects. His theory of civilization is built up largely--and wisely--on suppression.

But why should the sentiment or passion of love be the chosen theme of story-writers, to the practical exclusion of other interests? Why should it be the central point around which their tales revolve? When we look about us in the world we know, we cannot think that love is taking up much time and attention in people’s lives. It dominates gloriously for a brief period,--or for brief periods,--and then makes way for other engrossing influences. Its might and authority are recognized; but the recognition does not imply constant concern. The atmosphere of life is not surcharged with emotion, as is the atmosphere of fiction. Society is not composed of young men and women falling madly but virtuously in love with one another, nor of married men and women doing the same thing on less legitimate lines.

To these rational arguments, which have been urged by restless critics before now, M. Paul Bourget makes answer that novelists deal with love because, under its white heat, all characteristics become more vividly alive, and are brought more actively and more luminously into play. Man is never so self-revealing as when consumed by passion. We see into his heart, only when it is lit by the flame of desire. Moreover, love being natural, and in a manner inevitable, there is not in treating of it that suggestion of artifice which chills our faith in most of the incidents of fiction.

But is the man whom we see revealed by the light of love the real man? Can we, after this transient illumination, say safely to ourselves, “We know him well”? Is it his true and human self, _son naturel_, to use an admirable old French phrase, which is both quickened and betrayed by passion? Putting cynicism aside, rejecting Lord Bacon’s dictum, “Love is a nuisance, and an impediment to important action,” we are still doubtful as to the value of traits studied under these powerful but perishable conditions. It is not what a man does when he is in love, but what he does when he is out of love (Philip drunk to Philip sober) which counts for characterization. That pleasant old romancer, Maistro Rusticiano di Pisa, tells us that a courtier once asked Charlemagne whether he held King Meliadus or his son Tristan to be the better man. To this question the Emperor made wise reply: “King Meliadus was the better man, and I will tell you why. As far as I can see, everything that Tristan did was done for love, and his great feats would never have been done, save under the constraint of love, which was his spur and goad. Now this same thing can never be said of King Meliadus. For what deeds he did, he did them, not by dint of love, but by dint of his strong right arm. Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not by constraint of love.”

It is this element of coercion which gives us pause. Not out of his own goodness, nor out of his own badness, does the lover act; but goaded onward by a force too impetuous for resistance. When this force is spent, then we can test the might of his “strong right arm.” Who that has read it can forget the matchless paragraph of adjectives in which the Ettrick Shepherd contrasts the glowing deceits of courtship with the sober sincerities of married life? “Love,” he sighs, “is a saft, sweet, bright, balmy, triumphant, and glorious lie, in place of which nature offers us in mockery during a’ the rest o’ our lives the puir, paltry, pitiful, faded, fushionless, cauldrified, and chittering substitute, truth.”

Small wonder that novelists content themselves with making matches, and refrain from examining too closely the result of their handiwork. They would have more conscience about it, if it were not so easy for them to withdraw. They are almost as irresponsible as poets, who delight in yoking unequal mates, as proof of the power of love. Poetry weds King Cophetua to the beggar maid, and smilingly retires from any further contemplation of the catastrophe. Shakespeare gives Celia--Celia, with her sweet brown beauty, her true heart, her nimble wit, her grace of exquisite companionship--to that unnatural sinner, Oliver; and the only excuse he offers is that Oliver says he is sorry for his sins. So I suppose Helen of Troy said she regretted her indiscretion, and this facile repentance reinstated her in happy domesticity. But the novelist is not at play in the Forest of Arden. He is presumably grappling with the dismal realities of earth. Nothing could be less like a fairy playground than the village of Thrums (“If the Auld-Licht parishioners ever get to heaven,” said Dr. Chalmers, “they will live on the north side of it”); yet it is in Thrums that Mr. Barrie marries Babbie to the Little Minister,--marries her with a smile and a blessing, as though he had solved, rather than complicated, the mysterious problem of life.

The occasional and deliberate effort of the novelist to arrange an unhappy union in order to emphasize contrasts of character is an advance toward realism; but the temporary nature of such tragedies (which is well understood) robs the situation of its power. In the typical instance of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon, George Eliot deemed it necessary to offer careful explanation of her conduct,--or of Dorothea’s,--and she rather ungenerously threw the blame upon Middlemarch society, which was guiltless before high Heaven, and upon the then prevalent “modes of education, which made a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance.” In reality, Dorothea was alone responsible; and it is hard not to sympathize with Mr. Casaubon, who was digging contentedly enough in his little dry mythological dust-heaps when she dazzled him into matrimony. It is hard for the unregenerate heart not to sympathize occasionally with Rosamond Vincy and with Tito Melema, whom George Eliot married to Lydgate and to Romola, in order that she might with more efficacy heap shame and scorn upon their heads. The moral in all these cases is pointed as unwaveringly as the compass needle points to the North Star. This is what happens when noble and ignoble natures are linked together. This is what happens when the sons of God wed with the daughters of men. We are not to suppose that it was poor Mr. Casaubon’s failure to write his “Key to all Mythologies,” nor even his ignorance of German, which alienated his wife’s affection; but rather his selfish determination to sacrifice her youth and strength on the altar of his vanity,--a vanity to which her early homage, be it remembered, had given fresh impetus and life.

The pointing of morals is not, however, the particular function of married life. The problem it presents is a purely natural one, and its ethical value is not so easily ascertained. For the most part the sons of men wed with the daughters of men. They do not offer the contrast of processional virtues and of deep debasement; but the far wider contrast of manhood and of womanhood, of human creatures whose minds and hearts and tastes and instincts are radically unlike; who differ in all essentials from the very foundations of their being. “Our idea of honour is not their idea of honour,” says Mr. Lang, speaking for men, and of women; “our notions of justice and of humour are not their notions of justice and of humour; nor can we at all discover a common calculus of the relative importance of things.”

This is precisely why we wish that novelists would not neglect their opportunities, and shirk their responsibilities, by escaping at the church door. What did really happen when Babbie married the little Minister, and added to the ordinary difficulties of wedlock the extraordinary complications of birth and training, habits and character, irreconcilably at variance with the traditions of the Auld-Licht rectory? We know how the mother of John Wesley,--and incidentally of eighteen other children,--a dour, stern, pious parson’s wife, refused to say amen to her husband’s prayer for King William, and dwelt apart from her reverend spouse and master for twelve long months, rather than relinquish a sentiment of loyalty for the rightful sovereign of the land. Such incidents stand in our way when we are told musically that--

Love will still be lord of all.

Mrs. Wesley loved her husband, and she did not love the banished and papistical James; yet it was only King William’s death (a happy and unforeseen solution of the difficulty) which brought her back to submission and conjugal joys.

For one of the most ill-assorted marriages in fiction Miss Austen must be held to blame. It was this lady’s firm conviction (founded on Heaven knows what careful and continued observation) that clever men are wont for the most part to marry foolish or stupid women. We see in nearly all her books the net results of such seemingly inexplicable alliances. In what moment of madness did Mr. Bennet ask Mrs. Bennet to be his wife? Nothing can explain such an enigma; but Miss Austen’s philosophy, and her knowledge of that commonplace middle-class English life, which the eighteenth century had stripped bare of all superfluous emotions, enabled her to prove--to her own satisfaction at least--that Mr. Bennet was tolerably content with the situation. It is not too much to say that he enjoys his wife’s absurdities. Only in his few earnest words to Elizabeth, when Darcy has asked for her hand: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing _you_ unable to respect your partner in life,” do we catch a glimpse of the Valley of Humiliation which he has trodden for twenty-four years. A still more emphatic illustration of Miss Austen’s point of view is afforded us in “Sense and Sensibility,” when Eleanor Dashwood decides that Mrs. Palmer’s surpassing foolishness cannot sufficiently account for Mr. Palmer’s rudeness and discontent. “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that, through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman; but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.”

Fortified by such philosophy, convinced that the natural order of things, though mysterious and unpleasant, does not entail unhappiness, Miss Austen deliberately marries Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland; marries them after an engagement long enough to have opened the bridegroom’s eyes, were it not for the seventy merciful miles which lie between Northanger Abbey and the rectory of Fullerton. With an acute and delicate cynicism, so gently spoken that we hardly feel its sting, she proves to us, in a succession of conversations, that “a good-looking girl with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” When Catherine delivers her priceless views upon the unprofitable labour of historians, we know that Mr. Tilney’s fate is sealed.

“You are fond of history!--and so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable. At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate. And though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”

To be told that history is made admirable because you read it, is flattering indeed. Mr. Tilney is satisfied that Catherine has “a great deal of natural taste,”--an impression which her artless admiration for his talents deepens into agreeable certainty. When he asks her hand in marriage, Miss Austen reminds us with dispassionate candour that his attachment originated in gratitude. “A persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of his giving her a serious thought.” There is a final jest about beginning “perfect happiness” at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, and the curtain is rung down upon a lifetime of irrational ennui.

The world of the novelist is full of such strange mishaps, and our sense of inquietude corresponds with our conviction of their reality. Mrs. Ward probably does not expect us to believe that Jacob Delafield and Julie Le Breton lived happily and harmoniously together. There is something as radically inharmonious in their marriage as in the union of conflicting elements. It is not a question of taking chances of happiness, as Sophia Western takes them with Tom Jones (very good chances, to my way of thinking); it is a question of unalterable laws by which the gods limit our human joy. But there is no sharp sense of disappointment awakened in our hearts when we read “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” as when more powerful currents of emotion turn awry. That Henry Esmond should have married Lady Castlewood, or rather, that he should not have married Beatrix, I count one of the permanent sorrows of life.

In an exceedingly clever and ruthlessly disagreeable novel by Mr. Bernard Shaw, “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” there is a brief, clear exposition of that precise phase of life which novelists, as a rule, decline to elucidate. Cashel Byron is a prize-fighter, a champion light-weight, well-born (though he does not know it) and of cleanly life; but nevertheless a prize-fighter, with the instincts, habits, and vocabulary of his class. A young woman, rich, refined, bookish, brought up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere which has starved her healthy sentiment to danger point, falls helplessly in love with his beauty and his strength, and marries him, in mute desperate defiance of social laws. The story closes at this point, but the author adds a brief commentary, designed to explain the limited possibilities of happiness that exist for the ex-pugilist and his wife.

“Cashel’s admiration for Lydia survived the ardour of his first love for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her children inherited her acuteness and refinement, with their father’s robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent, had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother principally by running to her when they were in difficulties.... The care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her little time to think about herself, or about the fact that, when the illusion of her love passed away, Cashel fell in her estimation. But the children were a success, and she soon came to regard him as one of them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.”

Here are conditions which, if presented at length and with sufficient skill, might hold us spellbound. Here is an opportunity to force conviction, were the novelist disposed to grapple with his real work. As it is, Mr. Shaw contents himself with adding one more to the marital failures of fiction. Dr. Johnson said that most marriages would turn out as well if the Lord Chancellor made them. The Lord Chancellor would assuredly make them better than that blundering expert, the novelist.

OUR BELIEF IN BOOKS

What pleasantness of teaching there is in books,--how easy, how
secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to
books, without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct
us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or
money. If you come to them, they are not asleep; if you ask and
inquire of them, they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide
if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant.
O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask
of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.--RICHARD DE
BURY, Bishop of Durham, A. D. 1459.

Enough has been written in praise of books to fill a library. It is not always so eloquently worded as is the Bishop of Durham’s benediction; but the same general truths--or fallacies--are repeated with more or less pride and persuasiveness. At the same time, a lesser library might be compiled of the warnings uttered by the anxious ones who hold that the power of books is more potent than benign, and that if one half of the world’s readers are being led gloriously to high and noble truths, the other half is being vitiated by an influence which makes for paltriness and degradation. Under all circumstances, we are asked to believe that we are dominated by the printed page. It is this conviction which induces so much of austerity--not to say of censoriousness--in our counsellors, whose upbraidings are but the echoes of those sterner protests with which church and state were wont in earlier days to direct the reading courses of the public. That books have always been deemed formidable antagonists is proven by their frequent condemnation. The fires that were kindled for sorcerers and for heretics flamed just as fiercely for the stubborn volumes which passed the border-land of orthodoxy. Calvin burned all the pamphlets and manuscripts of Servetus at the same time that he burned their author; in consequence of which thoroughness, “Christianismi Restitutio” is said to be one of the rarest dissertations in the world.

For some books that perished at the stake the antiquarian can never mourn enough. An act passed in the short reign of King Edward VI commanded the wholesale destruction of all “antiphones, myssales, scrayles, processionales, manuelles, legendes, pyes, prymars in Lattyn or Inglishe, cowchers, journales, ordinales, or other books or writings whatsoever, heretofore used for the service of the churche, written or prynted in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue.” Owners of these precious volumes were commanded to give them up (heavy fines being exacted for disobedience), that they might be “openlye brent, or otherways defaced and destroied.” None were spared, save the “Prymars in the Inglishe or Lattyn tongue set forthe by the late Kinge of famous memorie, Kinge Henrie the eight;” and even from such hallowed pages all “invocations or prayers to saintes” were to be “blotted or clerelye put out.” Orthodoxy is a costly indulgence. What treasures were lost to the world, what--

Small rare volumes, dark with tarnished gold,

shrivelled into ashes, that the Book of Common Prayer might rule in undisputed authority and right!

Queen Elizabeth was strenuously opposed to “schismatical” works, as well as to those of a political or diplomatic character. With broad-minded impartiality she burned _all_ books and pamphlets which presumed to deal--no matter in what spirit--with subjects she did not wish discussed. Like the old Tory lady who objected to her Tory butler’s sentiments, seeing no reason why butlers should have sentiments at all, Elizabeth punished the too effusive piety and patriotism of her subjects as severely as she punished their discontent. The hall kitchen of the Stationers’ Company witnessed many a bonfire of books during her reign; and many an incautious author discovered with poor Peter Wentworth that “the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even as the messenger of Death.” James I favoured St. Paul’s churchyard as a spot singularly suitable for the cremation of books; and Oxford and Cambridge had their own exclusive _auto-da-fés_ for two centuries and more. Edinburgh, with fine national feeling, burned Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica,” because its English tone offended Scottish pride; and England burned the Rev. Arthur Bury’s “Naked Gospel” in 1690, because she conceived that a rector of Exeter should veil his truths more decently from the eyes of the feeble and profane. The last book to achieve such unmerited distinction in Great Britain was a copy of Mr. Froude’s “Nemesis of Faith,” which, being discovered in the possession of an Oxford student, was publicly burned by the Rev. William Sewell, Dean of Exeter, in the college hall, on the twenty-seventh of February, 1849. “Oxford,” says Mr. James Anson Farrer, “has always tempered her love for learning with a dislike for inquiry.” The incident, being at best unusual, gave such a healthy impetus to the sale of Mr. Froude’s work--which had won no wide hearing--that it went into a second edition, and became an object of keen, though temporary, solicitude. Well might the Marquis de Langle say that burning was as a blue ribbon to any book, inspiring interest, and insuring sales. There are those who affirm that the “Index Expurgatorius,” by which the Roman Catholic church still seeks to restrain the reading of her children, is a similar spur to curiosity. This I do not believe, having never in my life met a Roman Catholic who knew what works were or were not upon the “Index,” or who had been incautious enough to inquire.

The decline of church discipline and the enfeeblement of law permit books now to die a natural death; but the conviction of their powerful and perilous authority still lingers in the teacher’s heart. If he knows, as is often the case, much of letters and little of life, he magnifies this authority until it seems the dominant influence of the world. A writer in one of the British quarterlies assures us with almost incredible seriousness that we are at the mercy of the authors whom we read.

“We take a silent, innocent-seeming volume into our hands, and, when we put it down, we shall never again be what we were before.... St. Augustine opened the book, and one single sentence changed him from the brilliant, godless, self-satisfied rhetorician into a powerful religious force. Here, on the other hand, is a youth who opens a mere magazine article written against his faith. He throws off the early influence of home like a mantle, and plunges thenceforward into the ‘sunless gulf of doubt,’ with the unspeakable morasses at the bottom.”

This is a little like the man who left the Unitarian church because “somebody told him it wasn’t true.” How is a soul so sensitive to be kept in--or out of--any fold? A religion which dissolves before the persuasions of a magazine article must necessarily be as short-lived as the love--“the slight, thin sort of inclination”--which is starved, so Elizabeth Bennett tells us, by a sonnet. “Ten thousand difficulties,” says Cardinal Newman nobly, “do not make one doubt;” but the thinker who cannot surmount the first and feeblest of the difficulties should never have essayed the perilous pathway of the alphabet. Neither was St. Augustine’s inspiration a flashlight upon darkness. The “self-satisfied rhetorician” was not converted, like Harlequin, in one dazzling moment. There had been a long and bitter struggle between the forces of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, before the word of St. Paul penetrated with overwhelming sweetness into a soul cleared by hard thinking, and cleansed by a passion for perfection.

Man may be an unstable creature,--we have been told so until we believe it,--but he parts reluctantly from his convictions, and is slow to break the habits of a lifetime. Hear what Robert Burton has to say about the obstinate perversity of heretics.

“Single out the most ignorant of them. Convince his understanding. Show him his errors. Prove to him the grossness and absurdities of his sect. He will not be persuaded.”

He will not, indeed, whether persuasion take the form of a sermon, a magazine article, or the stake. Luther said that the more he read the Fathers of the early Church, the more he found himself offended; which proves the strength of a mental attitude to resist the most penetrating of influences. Neither are political heretics any easier to enlighten. “Who,” asks Lord Coleridge, “ever convinced an antagonist by a speech?” On the contrary, there is a natural and healthy sentiment of revolt when views we do not share are set forth with unbroken continuity and insistence. In the give and take of conversation, in the advance and retreat of argument, in the swift intrusion of the spoken word, made overpowering by the charm of personality, we encounter a force too subtle and personal to be resisted. Unconsciously we yield at some point to the insidious attack of thoughts and ideas so presented as to weaken our individual opposition, and adroitly force an entrance to our souls. But books, like sermons, fail by reason of the smoothness of their current; because there is no backwater to stir the eddies, and whirl us into conflict and submission. We feel that, could we have spent our “mornings in Florence” with Mr. Ruskin, have looked with him at frescoes, tombs, and pavements, and have disputed at every point his magnificent assumption of authority, we might have ended by accepting his most unreasonable and intolerant verdicts. Could we free our souls by expressing to Mr. John Morley our sentiments concerning Mr. Gladstone, we might in return be impelled to share the enthusiasm of the enlightened biographer. But neither Mr. Buskin nor Mr. Morley has the same power of persuasiveness in print. The simple process of leaving out whatever is antagonistic makes demonstration easy, but inconclusive. Sometimes the robust directness of the method inclines us peremptorily to resistance. It is hard for a generous heart not to sympathize with the exiled Stewarts, after reading Lord Macaulay’s “History of England.” Mr. Froude must be held responsible for much of the extravagant enthusiasm professed for the Queen of Scots. And I once knew an intelligent girl who had been driven by Mr. Prescott into worshipping Philip II as a hero.

People who have contracted the habit of writing books are naturally prone to exaggerate their importance. It is this sentiment which has provoked the attitude of fault-finding, of continuous grumbling at readers, which is so marked a characteristic of modern criticism. The public is reproached, admonished, warned by Mr. Frederic Harrison that if it feels contumacious--which is not infrequently the case--it should pray for a “cleanlier and quieter spirit.” Whenever a handful of books is presented to a community, addresses are made to show, on the one hand, that reading and writing are better than meat and drink, and, on the other, that the people who read and write are on the brink of abysmal destruction. I have heard a lecturer upon one of these august occasions gloomily prophesy that many of the volumes waiting to be perused would “deprave the taste, irritate the vanity, exaggerate the egotism, and vitiate the curiosity of their readers.” This seemed an unfortunate result for philanthropy to achieve; but the speaker went on to excite the godless interest of his audience by warning them that romance--of which the new library was reasonably full--would exercise a “bewildering and blinding effect” upon their minds, “filling them with false hopes and enervating dreams.” He then defined a good novel as one which should “stimulate a healthy imagination, a sober ambition, a modest ardour, an eager humility, a love of what is truly great;” and left us oppressed with the conviction that the usefulness of our earthly careers and the salvation of our immortal souls depended upon the fiction that we read.

“There is no harm,” says Mr. Birrell sweetly, “in talking about books, still less in reading them; but it is folly to pretend to worship them.” It is folly to exaggerate their controlling influence in our lives. We are not more modestly ardent after reading “Vanity Fair,” nor more eagerly humble after spending long and happy hours with “Emma.” No sober ambition stirs chastely in our souls when we lay down, with a sigh of content, “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Guy Mannering,” or “Henry Esmond,” or “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even “Anna Karénina” fails to inspire us with “false hopes and enervating dreams;” and while we are often bewildered by Mr. Henry James’s masterpieces, we have never been blinded by any. As for the ordinary novels that tumble headlong from the press, it is impossible to imagine them as inspiring either ardour or ambition, egotism or humility. They may perhaps be trusted to weaken our literary instincts, and to induce mental inertia,--“the surest way of having no thoughts of our own,” says Schopenhauer, “is to take up a book every time we have nothing to do,”--but they are not, as their writers and their critics fearfully assert, the arbiters of our destinies.

A belief in the overpowering influence of books was part of Carlyle’s gospel. He had a curious modesty about giving advice, even when it was sought; and--born dictator though he was--he realized that his own literary needs were not necessarily the literary needs of other men. He said as much quite simply and sincerely when people asked him what they should read, holding always, with Dr. Johnson, that inclination must prompt the choice. To be sure, like Dr. Johnson, and like Emerson, he presupposed inclination to be of an austere and seemly order. Emerson never wearied of saying that people should read what they liked; but he plainly expected them to like only what was good. Carlyle was firmly convinced that authorship carried with it responsibilities too serious for trifling. He reverenced the printed page, and he expressed this reverence, this confession of faith, in the most explicit and comprehensive assertion.

“The writer of a book is he not a preacher, preaching, not to this parish or that, but to all men in all times and places? Not the wretchedest circulating library novel which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls.”

More than this it would be impossible to say, and few of us, I hope, would be willing to say as much. The idea is too oppressive to be borne. Only authors and critics can afford to take this view of life. Personally I believe that a foolish girl is more influenced by another foolish girl, to say nothing of a foolish boy, than by all the novels on the library shelves. Companionship and propinquity are forces to be reckoned with. Mind touches mind like an electric current. The contagion of folly is spread, like other forms of contagion, by personal contact. Books may, as Carlyle says, preach to all men, in all times and places; but it is precisely their lack of reticence, the universality of their message, their chill publicity of tone which reduces their readers to the level of an audience or of a congregation. If we recall the disclosures with which we have been favoured from time to time by distinguished people who consented to tell the world what books had influenced their lives, we cannot fail to remember the perfunctory nature of these revelations. It was as though the speakers had first marshalled in order the most enduring masterpieces of literature, and had then fitted their own sentiments and experiences into appropriate grooves. This reversal of a natural law is much in favour when what are called epoch-making books come under public discussion. There are enthusiasts who appear to think that Rousseau evoked the French Revolution, and that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was responsible for the Civil War. When the impetus of a profound and powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in literature,--or at least in letters,--the writer’s mind speeds like a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. It does not create the sentiment, it does not appreciably intensify it; but it enables people to perceive more clearly the nature of the course to which they stand committed. These sympathetic triumphs are sometimes mistaken for literary triumphs. They are often thought to lead the chase they follow.

If, on the other hand, we ask ourselves soberly what books have helped to mould our characters or to control our energies, we shall not find the list an imposing one. There will be little or nothing to tell a listening world. Rather may we incline to the open skepticism of Lord Byron: “Who was ever altered by a poem?” Even presuming that we are happy enough to detach ourselves from contemporary criticism, and to read for human delight; even presuming that, after a lifetime of effort, we have learned to recognize perfection in literary art, and to turn of our own free will to those lonely works which “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, should be, and forever remain, essentially unpopular;” even then it does not follow that we are mastered by the books we love. There still remains to us that painful and unconquerable originality, which is not defiant, but only helplessly incapable of submission. “Giving a reason for a thing,” says Dr. Johnson, “does not make it right.” Let us hope that being unable to give a reason for a thing does not prove us wrong. The Rev. Mark Pattison, who was the most unflinching reader of his day, who looked upon money only as a substance convertible by some happy alchemy into leather-bound volumes, and upon time only as a possession which could be exchanged for a wider acquaintance with literature, understood better than any scholar in England the limitations and futilities of print. He did not say with Hobbes, “If I had read as much as other men, I should doubtless have shared their ignorance,” because he had read more than other men, and was very widely informed; but he pointed out with startling lucidity that a flexible mind fortifies itself rather by conversation, which is the gift of the few, than by reading, which is the resource of the many. “Books,” he said, “are written in response to a demand for recreation by minds roused to intelligence, but not to intellectual activity.” There is something pathetic in his frankly envious admiration of the French, who can and do convey their thoughts to one another in a language wrought up to be “the perfect medium of wit and wisdom,--the wisdom of the serpent,--the incisive medium of the practical intelligence.” He quoted with melancholy appreciation Lord Houghton’s story of the Italian who, after submitting to the heavy hospitality of an English country-house, drew a newly arrived Frenchman into a corner with the eager request: “Viens donc causer. Je n’ai pas causé pour quinze jours.”

Mr. Lang is responsible for the statement--spoken, let us hope, in the enjoyment of a sardonic mood rather than after dispassionate observation--that the average Englishman or Englishwoman would as soon think of buying a boa-constrictor as buying a book. He or she depends for intellectual sustenance upon that happy lottery system which has been devised by circulating libraries, and with which Americans are so well acquainted,--a system which enables us to put in a request for Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and draw out the Rev. W. Profeit’s “Creation of Matter;” to put in a request for “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” and draw out “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.” It is evident that reading conducted on this basis is as sure a path to cultivation as a roulette table is to wealth. It has all the charm of uncertainty, and all the value of speculation. It eliminates selection, detaches quantity from quality, and replaces the elusive balancing of results by the unchallenged roll-call of statistics. It expresses that unshaken belief which is the gospel of the librarian,--namely, that the number of books taken from his shelves within a given time has something to do with the educational efficiency of his library.

Our power of self-deception--without which we should shrivel into humility--is never so comfortable nor so resourceful as in the matter of reading. We are capable of believing, not only that we love books which we do not love, but that we have read books which we have not read. A lifelong intimacy with their titles, a partial acquaintance with modern criticism, a lively recollection of many familiar quotations,--these things come in time to be mistaken for a knowledge of the books themselves. Perhaps in youth it was our ambitious purpose to storm certain bulwarks of literature, but we were deterred by their unpardonable length. It is a melancholy truth, which may as well be acknowledged in the start, that many of the books best worth reading are very, very long, and that they cannot, without mortal hurt, be shortened. Nothing less than shipwreck on a desert island in company with Froissart’s “Chronicles” would give us leisure to peruse this glorious narrative, and it is useless to hope for such a happy combination of chances. We might indeed be wrecked,--that is always a possibility,--but the volume saved dripping from the deep would be “Soldiers of Fortune,” or “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”

It is at least curious that if people love books--as we are perpetually assured they do--they should need so much persuasion to read them. Societies are formed for mutual encouragement and support in this engaging but arduous pursuit. Optimistic counsellors cheer a shrinking public to its task by recommending minute quantities of intellectual nourishment to be taken twenty-four hours apart. They urge us to read something “solid” for fifteen minutes a day, until we get used to it, and they promise us that--mental invalids though we be--we can assimilate great masterpieces in doses so homœopathic that we need hardly know we are taking them. But this is not the spirit in which we pursue other pleasures. We do not make an earnest effort to enjoy our friends by admitting one for fifteen minutes’ conversation every morning. If we like a thing at all, we are apt to like a good deal of it; and if we are working _con amore_, we are wont to work very hard. To turn to books, as Jeremy Collier counsels us, when we are weary alike of solitude and companionship, to value them, as he did, because they help us to forget “the crossness of men and things,” is to pay a sincere, but not an ardent, tribute to their worth. Even the Bishop of Durham praised his library, which he truly loved, because it soothed his unquiet soul. The friendly volumes forbore, as he gratefully noted, either to chide his errors or to mock at his ignorance; and there were contemporaries--like Petrarch--who affirmed that, for so ardent a bibliophile, the good Bishop had no great store of learning. His words echo pleasantly through the centuries, breathing the secret of quiet hours stolen from stormy times; and we repeat them, wondering less at their eloquence than at their moderation. “O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully.”

THE BEGGAR’S POUCH

Just Heaven! for what wise reasons hast thou ordered it that
beggary and urbanity, which are at such variance in other
countries, should find a way to be at unity in this?--STERNE.

A rich American, with a kind heart and a lively sense of humour, was heard to remark as he crossed the Italian frontier, _en route_ for Switzerland: “_Now_, if there be any one in the length and breadth of Italy who has not yet begged from me, this is his time to come forward.”

It was a genial invitation, betokening that tolerance of mind rarely found in the travelling Saxon, who is fortified against beggars, as against many other foreign institutions, by a petition-proof armour of finely welded principle and prejudice. He disapproves of mendicancy in general. He believes--or he says he believes--that you wrong and degrade your fellow men by giving them money. He has the assurance of his guide-book that the corps of ragged veterans who mount guard over every church door in Rome are unworthy of alms, being themselves capitalists on no ignoble scale. His irritation, when sore beset, is natural and pardonable. His arguments are not easily answered. He can be vaguely statistical,--real figures are hard to come by in Italy,--he can be earnestly philosophical, he can quote Mr. Augustus Hare. In the end, he leaves you perplexed in spirit and dull of heart, with sixpence saved in your pocket, and the memory of pinched old faces--which do not look at all like the faces of capitalists at home--spoiling your appetite for dinner.

This may be right, but it is a melancholy attitude to adopt in a land where beggary is an ancient and not dishonourable profession. All art, all legend, all tradition, tell for the beggar. The splendid background against which he stands gives colour and dignity to his part. We see him sheltered by St. Julian,--ah, beautiful young beggar of the Pitti!--fed by St. Elizabeth, clothed by St. Martin, warmed by the fagots which St. Francesca Romano gathered for him in the wintry woods. What heavenly blessings have followed the charity shown to his needs! What evils have followed thick and fast where he has been rejected! I remember these things when I meet his piteous face and outstretched palm to-day. It is true that the Italian beggar almost always takes a courteous, or even an impatient denial in wonderfully good part; but, should he feel disposed to be malevolent, I am not one to be indifferent to his malevolence. I do not like to hear a shaken old voice wish that I may die unshriven. There are too many possibilities involved.

So sang a withered Sibyl energetical,
And banned the ungiving door with lips prophetical.

Mr. Henry James is of the opinion (and one envies him his ability to hold it) that “the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less than the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That people should thank you, with a smile of enchanting sweetness, for the gift of twopence is a proof certainly of an extreme and constant destitution; but--keeping in mind the sweetness--it is also a proof of a fortunate ability not to be depressed by circumstances.” This is a comforting faith to foster, and more credible than the theory of secreted wealth within the beggar’s pouch. It takes a great many pennies to build up a substantial fortune, and the competition in mendicancy is too keen to permit of the profits being large. The business, like other roads to fortune, is “not what it once was.” A particularly good post, long held and undisputed, an imposingly venerable and patriarchal appearance, a total absence of legs or arms,--these things may lead to modest competency; but these things are rare equipments. My belief in the affluence of beggars, a belief I was cherishing carefully for the sake of my own peace of mind, received a rude shock when I beheld a crippled old woman, whose post was in the Piazza S. Claudio, tucked into a doorway one cold December midnight, her idle crutches lying on her knees. If she had had a comfortable or even an uncomfortable home to go to, why should she have stayed to shiver and freeze in the deserted Roman streets?

The latitude extended by the Italian Church to beggars, the patronage shown them, never ceases to vex the tourist mind. An American cannot reconcile himself to marching up the church steps between two rows of mendicants, each provided with a chair, a little _scaldino_, and a tin cup, in which a penny rattles lustily. There is nothing casual about the appearance of these freeholders. They make no pretence--as do beggars at home--of sudden emergency or frustrated hopes. They are following their daily avocation,--the only one for which they are equipped,--and following it in a spirit of acute and healthy rivalry. To give to one and not to all is to arouse such a clamorous wail that it seems, on the whole, less stony-hearted to refuse altogether. Once inside the sacred walls, we find a small and well-selected body of practitioners hovering around the portals, waiting to exact their tiny toll when we are ready to depart. “Exact” is not too strong a word to use, for I have had a lame but comely young woman, dressed in decent black, with a black veil framing her expressive face, hold the door of the Aracœli firmly barred with one arm, while she swept the other toward me in a gesture so fine, so full of mingled entreaty and command, that it was worth double the fee she asked. Occasionally--not often--an intrepid beggar steals around during Mass, and, touching each member of the congregation on the shoulder, gently implores an alms. This is a practice frowned upon as a rule, save in Sicily, where a “plentiful poverty” doth so abide that no device for moving compassion can be too rigidly condemned. I have been present at a high Mass in Palermo, when a ragged woman with a baby in her arms moved slowly after the sacristan, who was taking up the offertory collection, and took up a second collection of her own, quite as though she were an authorized official. It was a scandalous sight to Western eyes,--in our well-ordered churches at home such a proceeding would be as impossible as a trapeze performance in the aisle,--but what depths of friendly tolerance it displayed, what gentle, if inert, compassion for the beggar’s desperate needs!

For in Italy, as in Spain, there is no gulf set between the rich and poor. What these lands lack in practical philanthropy is atoned for by a sweet and universal friendliness of demeanour, and by a prompt recognition of rights. It would be hard to find in England or in America such tattered rags, such gaunt faces and hungry eyes; but it would be impossible to find in Italy or in Spain a church where rags are relegated to some inconspicuous and appropriate background. The Roman beggar jostles--but jostles urbanely--the Roman prince; the noblest and the lowliest kneel side by side in the Cathedral of Seville. I have heard much all my life about the spirit of equality, and I have listened to fluent sermons, designed to prove that Christians, impelled by supernatural grace, love this equality with especial fervour; but I have never seen its practical workings, save in the churches of southern Europe. There tired mothers hush their babies to sleep, and wan children play at ease in their Father’s house. There I have been privileged to stand for hours, during long and beautiful services, because the only available chairs had been appropriated by forlorn creatures who would not have been permitted to intrude into the guarded pews at home.

It has been always thus. We have the evidence of writers who give it with reluctant sincerity; of Borrow, for example, who firmly believed he hated many things for which he had a natural and visible affinity. “To the honour of Spain be it spoken,” he writes in “The Bible in Spain,” “that it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt. Even at an inn the poor man is never spurned from the door, and, if not harboured, is at least dismissed with fair words, and consigned to the mercies of God and His Mother.”

The more ribald Nash, writing centuries earlier, finds no words too warm in which to praise the charities of Catholic Rome. “The bravest Ladies, in gownes of beaten gold, washing pilgrims’ and poor soldiours’ feete.... This I must say to the shame of us English; if good workes may merit Heaven, they doe them, we talk about them.”

The Roman ladies “doe them” still; not so picturesquely as they did three hundred years ago, but in the same noble and delicate spirit. Their means and their methods are far below the means and methods of charitable organizations in England and America. They cannot find work where there is no work to be done. They cannot lift the hopeless burden of want which is the inevitable portion of the Italian poor. They can at best give only the scanty loaf which keeps starvation from the door. They cannot educate the children, nor make the swarming populace of Rome “self-respecting,” by which we mean self-supporting. But they can and do respect the poverty they alleviate. Their mental attitude is simpler than ours. They know well that it is never the wretchedly poor who “fear fate and cheat nature,” and they see, with more equanimity than we can muster, the ever recurring tragedy of birth. The hope, so dear to our Western hearts, of ultimately raising the whole standard of humanity shines very dimly on their horizon; but if they plan less for the race, they draw closer to the individual. They would probably, if questioned, say frankly with Sir Thomas Browne: “I give no alms only to satisfy the hunger of my Brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the Will and Command of my God.” And if the “Religio Medici” be somewhat out of date,--superseded, we are told, by a finer altruism which rejects the system of reward,--we may still remember Mr. Pater’s half rueful admission that it was all “pure profit” to its holder.

When Charles Lamb lamented, with innate perversity, the decay of beggars, he merely withdrew his mind from actualities,--which always annoyed him,--and set it to contemplate those more agreeable figures which were not suffering under the disadvantage of existence. It was the beggar of romance, of the ballads, of the countryside, of the merry old songs, whose departure he professed to regret. The outcast of the London streets could not have been--even in Lamb’s time--a desirable feature. To-day we find him the most depressing object in the civilized world; and the fact that he is what is called, in the language of the philanthropist, “unworthy,” makes him no whit more cheerful of contemplation. The ragged creature who rushes out of the darkness to cover the wheel of your hansom with his tattered sleeve manages to convey to your mind a sense of degraded wretchedness, calculated to lessen the happiness of living. His figure haunts you miserably, when you want to forget him and be light of heart. By his side, the venerable, white-bearded old humbugs who lift the leather curtains of Roman and Venetian churches stand forth as cheerful embodiments of self-respecting mendicancy. They, at least, are no pariahs, but recognized features of the social system. They are the Lord’s poor, whose prayers are fertile in blessings. It is kind to drop a coin into the outstretched hand, and to run the risk--not so appalling as we seem to think--of its being unworthily bestowed. “Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a half-penny;” but remember, rather, the ever-ready alms of Dr. Johnson, who pitied most those who were least deserving of compassion. Little doubt that he was often imposed upon. The fallen women went on their way, sinning as before. The “old struggler” probably spent his hard-earned shilling for gin. The sick beggar whom he carried on his back should by rights have been languishing in the poorhouse. But the human quality of his kindness made it a vital force, incapable of waste. It warmed sad hearts in his unhappy time, as it warms our sad hearts now. Like the human kindness of St. Martin, it still remains--a priceless heritage--to enrich us poor beggars in sentiment to-day.