Chapter I: AM an historiographer; and being desirous and assiduous of accuracy (1)

in my statements, I am given to recourse to first sources of authority, to the fountain springs of great events; I am a scientifically historical Gradgrind; I build up my histories inductively from facts by the most approved scientific processes. And I can say with feeling and with emphasis, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne: “Sure, a great deal of conscience goes into the making of a history.”

A few days ago the need of exact knowledge upon a certain point in the criminal history of the colonies determined me to seek my information in the most unerring and unimpeachable historical records we have, those of the Criminal Court. Those I sought were of a large city, I might say of Chicago, only she has no colonial records; so I frankly reveal that I wished to search the records of the criminal courts of New Amsterdam.

Now I had read a score of times, and heard a score of times more in the glibly-rounded sentences of elegant historical lectures, patriotic addresses, commemorative “papers” of patriotic-hereditary societies, that to the municipal honor of that very large frog in a puddle, viz.: New York, which grew out of the pollywog New Amsterdam, all records of colonial times of that city were still preserved, were cherished as sacred script in that fitting cabinet, the venerable Hall of Records in the City Hall Park. Thus introduced, I ventured to its gates.

It is an ancient, dingy building, whose opening portals thrust you upon a cage-like partition strongly suggestive of a menagerie, and also olfactorily suggestive of the menageries’ accompaniment, “an ancient and a fish-like”—nay, more, a bird- and beast-like smell.

A doorway on either side of the cage lead to various desks and rooms, and enclosures and closets, all labelled with well-worn signs; and as I glanced bewildered from placard to placard, from sign to sign, there approached that blessed and gallant metropolitan engine for the succor of feminine ignorance, incapacity, and weakness—a policeman. Gladly did I follow in his sturdy wake to the office of the Clerk of Records, who would know all about it. Alas! he was out. A callow, inky youth, his deputy, had never heard of any Dutch records, and didn’t believe there were any in New York. My policeman had vanished. The youth leaned out of his latticed window, pointed round a corner to an enclosed office: “Go ask _him_, he can tell you.” I went and asked him; for a third time I told my tale, already rehearsed to policeman and youth. “I wish to see the colonial records of the criminal courts in New York in the seventeenth century. Part are in Dutch. I hear they have been translated, and that the English translation is here, for the use of the public. If this is not so, I wish to see the original Dutch and English records from the year 1650 to 1700.”

It is impossible to overstate the expression of blank surprise and incredulity with which this inquiry was greeted. The official vouchsafed one curt answer: “I never heard of such a thing as a Dutch trial in the criminal courts of New York, and I don’t believe there ever was one. If so, _he_ will know.”

“He” was a haven, for his office was labelled Satisfaction—and he was satisfactory. After a fourth explanation of my desires, he answered me with the elaborately patient and compassionate politeness usually employed by men in business and public offices to a woman’s apparently useless inquiries. He said gently: “Only deeds and transfers are here in the Hall of Records; those records you wish to see are all in the County Clerk’s office, over there.”

Over there was the court-house of Tweed’s inglorious fame. Within the said office four transfers, from book-keeper to messenger, to civil clerk, to County Clerk, found me, after four more dogged repetitions, encaged myself in a dingy wire prison, surrounded by millions of compartments with papers and deeds, and flanked by scores of spittoons. Errand boys, messengers, aged porters, young attorneys, came and went, papers were given and received with mechanical rapidity and precision by the monarch of the cage, an elderly Irishman, smooth-shaven, massive-featured, inscrutable, blank of expression, who finally turned to me with civil indifference. But this was not the right place for me to come; those records were at the court-house at Ninth Street, where the criminal courts were held. I patiently prepared to assail the Ninth Street abode of Themis, not without an unworthy suspicion that this Hibernian Sphinx sent me there to get rid of me. But a gentleman-like and eavesdropping bystander proffered his advice: “Those records you want are in the office of the Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, in the third story of this building.” And he thrust me with speed in the ascending elevator. The room pointed out to me as my goal proved to be the Supreme Court, a scene of peaceful dignity, but, alas, there was no such officer anywhere as the Clerk of the Court of Common Pleas. Gloomily turning to the Surrogate’s office to examine the will of this Dutch criminal whom I was running to earth, mine eyes encountered this sign: Office of the Court of Common Pleas. Certainly this was the office and the records were here, though the clerk was not. Other clerks there were; to the most urbane for the tenth time I told my tale, and finally was shown the records. “These are in Dutch,” I said; “will you show me the English translation?” “Are they in Dutch?” he answered with some animation. “I never knew that. I have been here twenty years, and no one has ever asked to see them before.”

Of course there was no English translation. I can read and translate printed Dutch with ease; but seventeenth century Dutch differs more from modern Dutch than does old French from the French of to-day. Add to this the unique variations in spelling of the Dutch clerks, the curious chirography, the faded ink, and no antiquary will be surprised to learn that an hour had passed ere I had read enough of those records to learn that they were wholly civil cases, boundary disputes, adjustment cases, etc. I wearily rose to leave, when a newly-arrived person of authority said airily: “I can tell you all about those old Criminal Court records. They are all over in the City Hall, in the office of the Superintendent of City Affairs.” I trust I showed becoming credulity and gratitude.

I walked out into the beautiful little park, aglow with beds of radiant scarlet and yellow tulips, that remembered and significantly commemorated their Holland ancestors and the old Dutch-American town, even if the city’s servants knew them not; and I strolled under the trees and breathed with delight the fresh air of heaven; for wherever men congregate in offices, there ventilation is as naught.

I sought the Superintendent’s office. To him, ignominiously but cheerfully ensconced in the cellar-like basement, I descended, where glimmered a light so dim, so humid, that I had a sense of being in subaqueous rather than subterranean depths, and I was struck with the civic humor that placed the Superintendent _subter omnia_.

He really knew nothing about these records, but there was a man in the Library who would know. Through underground tunnels and cemented passages and up a narrow staircase, I reached the noble aboveground abode of our municipal corporation.

Here all was radiant with prosperity. No lean and hungry race filled those corridors and chambers; jocund and ruddy were all, as were our city fathers of yore who drank vast tuns of sack-posset and ale. Well may we say when on those men and on these we gaze: Nobly wert thou named Manhattan!—_the place where all drank together_!

Mighty is Manhattan and great even the reflection of her power. Neither poverty-stricken nor meagre of flesh am I, but I shrank into humble insignificance before those well-fed aggrandizations of the city’s glory and prosperity who bourgeoned through the corridors of our modern Stadt Huys; and I fain would have saluted them with respectful mien and words as of yore as “Most Worshipful, Most Prudent, and Very Discreet, their High Mightinesses,”—not Burgomasters and Schepens, but Aldermen and Councilmen,—but the tame conventionalities of modern life kept me silent.

In the Library the sought-for man sent me to the Clerk of the Common Council, who in turn bade me be seated while he lured from an adjoining “closet,” as old Pepys called his office, one who would be glad to tell me all about everything relating to those ancient days.

Here was something tangible. Glad to tell me! In truth he was. Never have I seen such a passion for talking. Forth poured a flood of elaborate Milesian eloquence, in which intricate suggestions, noble patriotic sentiments, ardent historical interest, warm sympathy in my researches, and unbounded satisfaction and glowing pride over New York’s honorable preservation of the records of her ancestors all joined. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, when I ran my fat but sly and agile political fox to earth, and made him answer me directly, I simmered down merely this one solid fact: “If ye go to Mr. De Lancy’s office in the Vanderbilt Building, he can tell ye where thim ricords is, an’ no one ilse in this city can.”

I tendered as floriated and declamatory a farewell expression of gratitude as my dull tongue could command to my city authority, who was, I am led to believe from the tablet on the office from which he emerged, a common councilman, but who might have been a score of glorious aldermen distilled and expressed and condensed into one, so rotund, so ruby-colored, so shining, so truly grand was he, so elegant, albeit loose, of attire, so glittering with gold and precious stones. As I thanked him in phrases sadly etiolated in comparison with his own glowing pauses, “Madam,” said he, “are you satisfied, and may I ask your name and residence?” “You may,” said I, “I came to study history, and I was sent to the Satisfaction Clerk, and I found satisfaction, though not in the wonted legal form.” “But ye haven’t told me yer name,” said he. “I have not,” said I; “good day.”

The Bureau of Literary Revision

_By_ Alice Morse Earle

THE BUREAU OF LITERARY REVISION

OUR beloved friend Charles Lamb once wrote of his Essays of Elia:—

“One of these professors, on my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me on the method by which the young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.”

When, with the solemn thoughts brought to each soul at the “turn of the year,” we recount to ourselves our many mercies, let us never fail to remember with gratitude that the magnanimous offer of that seminary professor was never accepted.

We do not have to wait to-day for chance offers from solemn professors of instruction and revision in literary composition; “the method by which young gentlemen in the seminary are taught to compose” is thrust upon us at every hand. “Bureaus of revision” and “Offices of literary criticism” abound and thrive and become opulent through examining, correcting, and revising the work of confiding authors. We are told with pride that in one bureau alone three thousand manuscripts a year were thus revised. Among those three thousand young fledglings of authors there may _not_ have been a Charles Lamb, but the lamentable thought also will arise that there _may_ have been a Charles Lamb, and that his unmethodical little “sketches” may have been pruned or amplified, or arranged and revised till they proved true “English themes.”

There is a wearying monotony in the make-up of many of our periodicals, some of those even of large circulation. There is a lack of literary color, a precise and proper formation of each sentence, and a regularity of ensemble which is certainly grammatical but is fully as uninteresting as grammar. A surfeit of these exactly formal “English themes” has made the gasping public turn to some of our literary freaks and comets with a sensation as if seeking an inspiration of fresh air after mental smothering.

I attribute this too frequent monotony, and even stultification of composition, to the “literary reviser”—the trail of the serpent is over all our press.

And what does this literary revision offer for the large fees paid? One alleged benefit is the correction of punctuation. It certainly performs this service; but the editor and proofreader in any responsible publishing-house will, as a duty, correct with precision the punctuation of any paper or book printed by the house. A benefit alleged by one circular is “a pruning of too riotous imagination.” I groaned aloud as I read this threat. Too riotous imagination to-day! when we long for imagination and long in vain; when a wooden realism thrusts its angular outlines in our faces from every printed page. “To curb the use of adjectives” is another of the reviser’s duties. The meagre style too often seen of late may arise from this curbing.

The most astonishing aspect of this bureau of revision is shown in the patience with which authors endure its devastations. They confidingly send into this machine the tenderly nourished children of their brains, dressed with natural affection in all the frills and ruffles of rhetoric, and receive them home again with ornaments torn away, laid in a strait-jacket which has been cut with rigid uniformity, and made with mathematical precision—and yet they kiss the rod that turned the natural children of their brains into wretched little automatons.

I would not judge all revision bureaus by one; but I must give my experience at the hands of a very reputable one. I had written four books of more than average sale, and had been ever commended by the press for my grammatical construction, when I sent to a bureau for criticism a short magazine-paper. It was returned to me full of very large and legible corrections—or rather alterations such as these: Where I wrote of my heroine being _dressed in_, etc., my reviser placed _gowned in_; where I wrote _the little child_, the reviser altered to _the young babe_; where I said _nothing happened after this_, to my horror, in heroic blue-pencilled letters, I read my pet aversion, _nothing transpired_. Where a compound sentence contained several clauses with verbs in the past tense, all dependent clauses were made participial in form; not always to the advantage in elegance, never of moment or indeed of real difference in grammatical construction.

I must confess that I did not send to this bureau my real name, as palpably too well known to men of literary ilk. My three dollars’ worth of advice was contained in a single sentence: “Your style is fair, but commonplace; if you practise literary composition you may succeed; but this article is, in our judgment, not salable.”

I had the pleasure of sending the paper immediately to a well-known magazine and receiving therefrom in payment a check for fifty dollars.

Mr. Meredith and his Aminta

_By_ Lewis E. Gates

MR. MEREDITH AND HIS AMINTA

IN his latest book the choppiness of Mr. Meredith’s style and the restless tacking of his method are as great as ever, and those worthy people who delight in the smooth seas and the steady zephyrs of ordinary English fiction will find their experience of “Lord Ormont and his Aminta” very much of a stormy channel-passage. But to people with sound nerves and adventurous spirits the experience is sure to be bracing and exhilarating. Perhaps the most surprising single effect that you get from “Lord Ormont” is that of the tingling vitality of the author. You can hardly realize while reading the book that you have to do with a writer who has been for forty years a tireless worker in literature, and who published his first venture in fiction two years before George Eliot’s first story. The style in “Lord Ormont” has all the audacity of a first rebellion against tradition and convention; the sentences rush forward in all possible rhythms except the languorous ones of the dilettante or the “faultily faultless” ones of the precisian or pedant; the imagination is restlessly self-assertive in its embodiment of every abstract idea in an image for eye or for ear; the tone is almost boisterous in its hilarity or brusqueness; and finally the book sounds everywhere the note of the future, and prophesies change and new social conditions without a touch of misgiving or regret. Perhaps in no earlier work has Mr. Meredith been so aggressive and, at the same time, so confident and buoyant.

As for Mr. Meredith’s technique, it remains in the new book substantially what it has always been, and many of the general effects he produces are familiar to his admirers and delightful in their recurrence. Where save in Mr. Meredith’s fiction can there be found such brilliance of surface? such vividness of dramatic portrayal? Or at any rate where is vividness so reconciled with suggestiveness of interpretation? concrete beauty with abstract truth? In all his novels he sends our imaginations flashing over the surface of some portion of life; he calls up before us this portion of life in all its fine contrasts of color and form, of storm and sunshine, of mid-day and moonlight; and yet at the same time he constrains us to pierce below the surface and to understand intuitively why the drama moves this way or that, what forces are in conflict, what passions are flushing or blanching the cheek, what fancies or ideals are making the eyes dream on a distant goal.

More nearly than any other living novelist, Mr. Meredith succeeds in overcoming the difficulties forced on the writer of fiction by the double appeal of life. Life is a pageant and life is a problem; it smites on the senses and allures the imagination, but it also challenges the intellect; it has power and beauty, but it has also significance. Now most writers of fiction who reveal to us the inner meaning of life allow its beauty and power to fade into shadowy vagueness; and those who give us the dramatic value of life too often lack penetration and philosophic insight. One of Mr. Meredith’s greatest claims to distinction lies in the fact that he, better than any other English novelist, has reconciled this conflict between vividness of portrayal and depth of interpretation. He has grasped English life in all its enormous range and mass and complexity; he has flashed it before us in all its splendid vividness for eye and ear and imagination; and at the same time he has made it suggestive to thought, has comprehended it through and through in its subtlest relations, and in portraying it has breathed into it the breath of a philosophical spirit.

If we analyze Mr. Meredith’s pages carefully, we find very few of those long disquisitions on character with which the pages of a psychological novelist are covered. He deals almost as constantly with acts, with dialogue, with what meets the senses, the eye and the ear, as the elder Dumas. It is a mimic world of images he gives, not a globe of the earth with scientific terms and black marks on yellow pasteboard. He is always primarily an artist, not a psychologist or a descriptive sociologist. Too often when we finish one of George Eliot’s stories we feel that she has explained her characters so exhaustively that we should not know them if we met them on the street. We have had so much to do with their ganglia and their nervous systems, and with the ashes of their ancestors, that we have little notion of the characters as actual living people. If a psychological novelist were to write out a professional analysis of one’s best friend, it may fairly be doubted whether one would recognize the description. In fact, in real life it is only criminals whom we are expected to recognize by anthropometric memoranda,—by the length of the index finger, the breadth of the ear, the distance between the eyes, and by the lines on the finger-tips.

Now Mr. Meredith avoids all anthropometric statistics and chemical analysis, and gives us the very counterfeit presentment of men and women as in actual life they go visibly and audibly past us; and yet he so seizes his moments for portraiture that the soul, the inner life, the character, photographs itself on the retina of a sensitive on-looker like a composite picture. He makes all his characters and scenes, and all the life he portrays, instinct with truth; and yet this truth is implicit; the author very rarely indulges in pretentious talk on these topics. For the most part, he is apparently busy putting before us the picturesque aspects of life and its dramatic moments.

This fondness of his for brilliance of surface, for vividness of portrayal, accounts for many peculiarities of Mr. Meredith’s method,—among them for the use of what may be termed _Meredith mosaic_. His opening chapters are nearly always curious composites, made up of dozens of little speeches, little acts, little scenes, collected from a series of years, and fitted together into a more or less homogeneous whole. He dislikes formal exposition; he instinctively shrinks from discoursing through wearisome pages on the early lives of the actors in his story, on the formative influences, for example, which had moulded the characters of Aminta and Weyburn up to the moment when the continuous action of “Lord Ormont” begins. Yet the “fuller portraiture” requires that this knowledge be in some way ensured to his readers. Hence he puts before us such skilfully chosen bits of Aminta’s and Weyburn’s early lives, that while our imaginations are always kept busy with words and tones and acts and looks, we are at the same time inveigled into a knowledge of minds and hearts and motives. Chapters constructed on this plan are curiously without continuity of action, and often seem puzzling in their fragmentariness. But they combine, in an unusual degree, vividness of portrayal with suggestiveness of interpretation.

Another means by which Mr. Meredith secures his brilliance of surface, his glowing color, is through his lavish use of figures. Mr. Meredith is a poet subdued by the spirit of his age to work in its most popular form, the novel; but even in prose his imagination will not be gainsaid, and everywhere we find in his style the sensuous concreteness and symbolism of poetry. “Absent or present, she was round him like the hills of a valley. She was round his thoughts—caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were conscious of her.” . . . “Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of sea where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.” In no other contemporary English fiction do we come upon passages like these, and realize with a sudden pang of delight that we are in the region of poetry where imaginative beauty is an end in itself.

Very often, of old, it was Nature that enticed Mr. Meredith into these ravishing escapades; in “Lord Ormont” he seems pretty nearly to have broken with Nature. Yet, now and then, he puts before us a bit of the outside world with a compression of phrase, a brilliance of technique, and an imaginative atmosphere, not easily to be matched.

“A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of
leaves, the river darkened the patch of wrinkles,
the bordering flags amid the reed-blades dipped and
streamed. . . .

“The trees were bending, the water hissing, the grasses
all this way and that, like the hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. . . .

“Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes.
Bee-note and woodside blackbird, and meadow cow, and
the leap of the fish of the silver rolling rings,
composed the music.”

But often as Mr. Meredith’s imagination seeks and realizes the beautiful, it still more often works in the grotesque, and decks out his subject with arabesque detail. His satirical comment on the life he portrays finds its way to the reader through the constant innuendoes of figurative language.

“She probably regarded the wedding by law as the end
a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting;
one flash of success and then extinction, like a boy’s
cracker on the pavement. . . .

“Thither he walked, a few minutes after noon, prepared
for cattishness. . . . He would have to crush her if she
humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it
gently. . . . Lady Charlotte put on her hump of the feline
defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers
barked back on him.”

That Mr. Meredith often overworks these grotesque figures even his warmest admirers must admit. There is a passage in the opening chapter of “Beauchamp’s Career,” where for two pages he describes the creation of an artificial war-panic under the figure of “a deliberate saddling of our ancient nightmare of Invasion.” Before Mr. Meredith consents to have done with this figure, even his most obsequious admirers must be desolated at his persistence. One is tempted to borrow the figure, and to call this kind of writing Mr. Meredith’s nightmare style, when a figure like a nightmare gets the bit in its teeth and goes racing across country with the author madly grimacing on its back.

In point of fact, the imaginative or figurative quality of his style is probably what costs Mr. Meredith most readers. His perpetually shifting brilliances prove very wearisome to certain eyes. He is too much of a flash-light, or has too much of the flourish of a Roman candle, for those who pride themselves on their devotion to the steady effulgence of the petroleum evening-lamp. Hazlitt used to tell people who objected to Spenser’s “Faery Queen” on the ground of the allegory, that, after all, the poetry was good poetry and the allegory would not bite them. But if you similarly urge upon the objectors to Mr. Meredith’s style, that a story of his is too great to be neglected because of mere questions of phrasing, they are very likely to tell you that they cannot see the story for the glare of the style; just there lies their point.

Undoubtedly, at times, Mr. Meredith seems glaringly wilful in his rejection of ordinary rhetorical canons; there is something, too, of a flourish in his eccentricity; and often, apparently out of sheer bravado, he inserts in his stories rollickingly grotesque passages, or throws at the critics long sentences full of the clash of metaphors. One may fancy his exclaiming with Browning,—

“Well, British public, ye that like me not,
(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.”

But after all, isn’t he right in maintaining his individuality against all-comers? Can any one who understands the true nature of an individual style and its self-revealing power, wish Mr. Meredith’s style less racy, less figurative, less original? Surely, words and phrases that bear the impress of a nature like Mr. Meredith’s are better worth while than those that have become smooth and shiny with conventional use,—always providing that the metal be twenty-carats fine. The intimacy of the relation that Mr. Meredith’s style makes possible between ordinary folk and a great and original personality is something that cannot be too highly prized in these days of conventionality and democratic averages. The words of most writers now-a-days give us no clew to their individualities. “Tête-à-tête with Lady Duberly?” exclaims the man in the play. “Nay, sir, tête-à-tête with ten-thousand people.” Private ownership in words and phrases seems in danger of becoming, even more speedily than private ownership in land, a thing of the past. The distinction of Mr. Meredith’s style is something to be devoutly grateful for. One would infinitely rather have a notion of the world as it gives an account of itself in Mr. Meredith’s mind, than a conventional scheme of things drawn out in the stereotyped phrases of the rhetorician.

Possibly, however, there is one sound reason for wishing that Mr. Meredith would be just a little less insistent on differences, and would now and then “mitigate the rancor of his tongue;” that reason is based on the fear that in this stupid world of ours compromise and conventionality are needed to secure any adequate hearing. It seems a great pity that so many people should be frightened away from Mr. Meredith’s work by its mannerism, and should be oblivious to some of the most suggestive current criticism of modern life. To Americans it seems specially to be regretted that English people should be so little receptive of the ideas of the most comprehensive and the least insular of their novelists. Mr. Meredith has grasped English life in its whole range and in all its vast complexity. He has dealt with the high and the low, with rustic and cockney, with plebeian and aristocrat, with the world of letters and the world of art and the world of fashion, with the modern “conquerors” of social power and position, and with the hereditarily great. All this vast range of life he has portrayed with equal vividness and with the same unfailing sympathy and insight; and yet his point of view is always curiously beyond the radius of the British Isles, and many of his implications are by no means favorable to the present organization of English social and political life. Of course, it may be this very lack of insularity that prevents a better understanding between him and his public. Detachment on his part may make attachment on their part impossible. And yet this ought not to be so; for despite his occasional severities and the all-pervading independence and individuality of his tone, no one has loved English life more heartily, studied it more painstakingly, or represented it more patriotically. Indeed, certain of its important aspects can be found adequately portrayed only in Mr. Meredith’s pages; for example, the genuine irresponsibleness of the most brilliant English life. No other novels offer us such pictures of the world of the luxuriously idle and systematically frivolous, of the habits and homes of the people who have never been wont to give an account of themselves to others, who have made idling into a fine art, and feel that the land exists for them to shoot over, and the sea for them to sail on in yachts. The so-called society-novelist succeeds admirably with the gowns and the etiquette of this region, but gives us for its inhabitants a lamentable lot of insipidities. But Mr. Meredith’s aristocrats have brains as well as deportment and decorations; they have the mental and moral idiom, the wit and the culture and the weight of men of birth and position, their prejudices, too, and perversities. That some wildness and even rankness of style should keep the British public from enjoying Mr. Meredith’s vigorous and sympathetic studies of its idolized “upper classes” seems strange; and even more regrettable than strange it seems to those who find running all through Mr. Meredith’s patriotic portrayal subtle insinuations of a criticism of English life most uninsular in its tenor and most salutary in its drift.

As to the precise value of the lesson latent in “Lord Ormont,” there is, of course, much dubious questioning possible. The points at issue, however, are of a kind on which perhaps only the Ulysses of the matrimonial ocean, “much-experienced men” in the storms and sunshine of married life, are in a condition to pronounce. Nevertheless ordinary people may at least admire the conscientious care with which Mr. Meredith has safeguarded his dangerous advice and his somewhat revolutionary plea for the freedom of woman. His preceding novel, “One of our Conquerors,” was from first to last a strenuously faithful study of the penalties that follow infringement of social conventions in the matter of marriage. The book might have been named “Mrs. Burman’s Revenge.” Mrs. Burman concentrated in her unprepossessing person all the mighty forces of prejudice which the society of the western world puts into play to protect one of its sacred institutions, marriage. Poor Nataly, who had ventured after happiness outside of conventional limits, lost happiness and finally life itself solely through her agonizingly persistent consciousness of her false adjustment to her social environment. She had built her house below the level of the dikes, to use Weyburn’s metaphor, and the ever-present danger wore upon her and sapped her life.

Having thus set forth with the elaborateness of a three-volume novel, and with the utmost power of his imagination, the almost resistless might of social conventions, their importance, and the danger of defying them, Mr. Meredith in his last book ventures to plead for the individual against society, and to assert the right of the individual occasionally to rebel against a blindly tyrannizing convention. “Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage’s old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.”

The case of immolation that Mr. Meredith studies is meant, despite some very special features, to be typical. The veteran Lord Ormont stands as the representative, the most polished and prepossessing representative possible, of the class of men for whom woman is still merely the daintiest, the most exquisite toy that a benevolent Providence has created for the delectation of the sons of Adam. Weyburn is the ideal modern man of “spiritual valiancy,” every whit as vigorous and virile as Lord Ormont, but mentally and morally of immeasurably greater flexibility, and keenly alive to the needs of his time and the signs of social change. He, too, is doubtless meant to be a type,—so far as Mr. Meredith allows himself in character-drawing the somewhat dangerous luxury of types; he is to be taken as the most efficient possible member of a modern social organization, where the standards of individual excellence are fixed, not primarily by the organism’s need of defence against external foes, but by what is requisite for the inner expansion and peaceful evolution of society. Aminta, “the most beautiful woman of her time,” has been half-secretly married to Lord Ormont in the Spanish legation at Madrid, after a few weeks of travelling courtship; forthwith she has become in his eyes _his_ Aminta, his lovely Xarifa, his beautiful slave, whom his soul delighteth to honor,—with ever a due sense of the make-believe character of her sovereignty and with a changelessly cynical conviction of the essential inferiority of the feminine nature. From his “knightly amatory” adulation, from the caressing glances of his “old-world eye upon women,” from his “massive selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion,” Aminta finally revolts, and takes refuge with Weyburn because with him she finds “comprehension,” “encouragement,” “life and air,” freedom to “use her qualities.” “His need and her need rushed together somewhere down the skies.”

Doubtless, all this seems dangerously near the old doctrine of elective affinities, on which organized society has never looked kindly. But once more we cannot but admire the care with which Mr. Meredith has limited his acceptance and recommendation of the principle. If it is to be operative only in a society in which a schoolmaster of spiritual valiancy is the popular hero, the ideal of manhood, and in which the most beautiful women of their time desert famous military leaders to become part-owners in boarding-schools, Mr. Meredith can hardly be accused of recommending very serious or far-reaching changes in the present state of the marriage contract.

Whatever one may think of the special moral of the book, the nobly optimistic tone of the whole is inspiriting. Mr. Meredith’s vigorous optimism and his suggestion of endless vistas of social progress contrast curiously with Mr. Hardy’s harping on the age of the earth, Druidical ruins, and the irony of a cruel Nature. Mr. Meredith, like his own Weyburn, is “one of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features,” or, we may add, the eccentricity of their style. He is one of those who “have a cold morning on their foreheads,” and whose “gaze is to the front in hungry animation.” His optimism is doubly grateful because it is not the optimism of untempered youth, but, like Browning’s, the optimism of a man who has sounded and tried life in all its shallows and depths, has sailed far and wide over its surface, and yet possesses a genuine Ulysses-like hunger for achievement and belief in its worth. In this age when the decadents like the Philistines be upon us, and when the weariness of much learning and of much feeling weighs down so many eyelids, it seems strange that the virility and vigor and courage of Mr. Meredith do not find welcome everywhere among the sane-minded.

The Popularity of Poetry

_By_ Edmund Gosse

THE POPULARITY OF POETRY.

IS the commercial standard of literary success to be extended to poetry? This is a question that is raised by the peculiar conditions which have developed during the last two years, and it is one which it is important to attempt to solve. If poetry is to be judged by the extent to which it is sold, and especially in relation to the sales of prose fiction, then it must be admitted at once to be in a very sad quandary indeed. If, on the other hand, the status of poetry is to be discovered by a consideration of the degree to which it is talked about and written about, then no branch of contemporary literature would seem to be more flourishing. It is desirable to attempt to define what literary popularity is, and then to see how far the poets of to-day enjoy a share of it.

In its original meaning “popularity” signifies a courting of the popular favor; it is only in its modern and secondary use that the word takes the sense of a gaining of that good-will. Our old writers employed the word with a certain flavor of obsequiousness hanging about it. Among the Elizabethans to be “popular” was to have resigned something of the dignity of independent judgment. We have lost all that in these democratic days, and he is held the most honorable man who has contrived to please the largest number of individual voters, and that book the most successful which has appealed to the largest number of readers. Yet, even with us, literary popularity has not quite come to be synonymous with largeness of sales. We are not so mechanically statistical, even in the matter of our novels, and there are writers whose works sell in vast masses, who enjoy a kind of blind, contemptuous success, and who yet are scarcely to be called “popular.” There are writers, too, of comic or sentimental verse, who are never mentioned among the poets, whose sales, nevertheless, by far exceed those of Mr. Swinburne. I remember how once, in the sacred Lodge of Trinity, and to the face of its fastidious master, the late Lord Houghton contended that the most prominent living poet of England was the writer of a song called “The Old Obadiah and the Young Obadiah.”

At the moment when this whimsical theory was put forth, England possessed a poet of unsurpassed popularity. The case of Tennyson was a singular and, for future generations, a disturbing one. As we look down the history of our country, we may be surprised to see how few of our greatest bards have enjoyed wide popular favor in their life-time. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, neither Shelley nor Keats, had any experience of general public acceptance. Dryden and Ben Jonson were illustrious,—they were scarcely popular. Among our really ambitious writers in verse, Cowley and Pope, Burns and Byron, and in his latest years Robert Browning, have alone enjoyed great popularity at all approaching that of Tennyson; and of these Burns is the most remarkable in this respect. Tennyson and Burns, a couple strangely assorted,—these are the two great names in poetry which have achieved, by purely poetic qualities, a lasting approbation from the people of Great Britain.

In the case of Burns, as in that of Béranger in France, the charm of the pure, natural lyric, uttered in the quintessence of its naïveté may be allowed to account for much of the popular acceptation. The universality of Tennyson is a more difficult problem, and one on which criticism has expended much speculation. The main thing at this moment is to admit and to note that popularity, and to see whether it is likely to be continued to later writers. In the first place, it is highly important to recognize that in the history of our poetry, now extending over at least six centuries, it has by no means been the rule that what was ultimately to be found incomparable received any special attention at the time of its production. Some poets have been mildly admired for a portion of their writings which we now regret that they should have produced, and have not been admired at all for their masterpieces. There is evidence to show that the exquisite lyrics of Herrick were not valued during his lifetime for any of the qualities which we now universally discern in them. Moore was greatly preferred to Shelley, not merely until the death of Shelley, but until long after the death of Moore. Much poetry becomes good, because public taste develops in the direction in which it was written; still more ceases to please, because the order of its thoughts and images is no longer in fashion. Criticism likes to conceive that its dicta are final, and talks familiarly about “immortality.” But, as a matter of fact, there are certain even of the old masters who are still on their probation, and a great social crisis might dethrone half Parnassus.

The death of Tennyson, following so closely on those of Browning and Matthew Arnold, produced a violent and disturbing crisis in our poetical history. At the first moment, in the agitation caused by the disappearance of these extremely dignified figures, and particularly by the extinction of Tennyson, the critics rashly asserted that poetry had ceased to develop; that it would henceforward be the pastime of children; and that it could no longer form a vital branch of our literature. Almost immediately it was perceived that whatever might happen, a neglect of verse was not imminent. We had long served under a gerantocracy, a tyranny by very old men. These venerable figures once removed, attention became fixed on men of the youngest generation. When all the ancient trees have fallen in the forest, the sturdiest saplings have room to expand. Of these some may be oaks and some may be alders, but all have a chance at last. We have seen no visible increase of public interest in the poets who already held high second or third rank (although the extreme respect with which the announcement of Christina Rossetti’s death was received points to an understratum of appreciation for these), but we have certainly seen a sudden access of reputation among writers between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age. The pendulum of taste is ever swinging, and from the opinion that no one under eighty was worth reading, we have come to regard no one over thirty as deserving our attention.

It will be unfortunate, I think, if the poets allow themselves to be disturbed by the conditions of crisis through which we are now passing. I deprecate the use of phrases such as hail one or two young versemen as: “Swans emerging from the ruck of geese.” A swan may once have been an ugly duckling; he has never been a goose, and exaggerations of this kind tend to encourage what is by far the most dangerous tendency of the literature of to-day, its commercial greediness. Coleridge, in his old age, told a friend of mine, who was then young, that he had never been one shilling the better off for all the verse he had ever printed. Mr. Dykes Campbell will tell us that this was an error of memory, but practically speaking it was true. In our own century, surrounded by admirers, living long past maturity, here was one of the truest poets of England confessing that poetry had been not so much a failure to him as a bankruptcy. Browning, to the very end of his days, through the period of his splendid late celebrity, could never have lived, however modestly, on what his poetry put into his pocket. These are the instances which the poet should bear in mind, nor allow himself to be dazzled by the almost inexplicable and entirely exceptional success of the career of Tennyson.

We are told that this is not a poetical age, nor ours a poetical country. No country and no age is poetical. If England is badly off, I have yet to learn that France or America, Italy or Germany, is in a more fortunate condition. In one of these countries, in Italy, as in England, it is true that attention is concentrated on certain young men of the latest generation. It is in Italy only, I think, that our youngest poets meet with rivals of their own value. Gabriele d’Annunzio and Rudyard Kipling are probably the most gifted persons under the age of thirty now writing verses in any part of the world. The Italians loudly praise the author of “Elegie Romane,” but if they buy his volumes to any appreciable extent, I am greatly misinformed. He is what Carducci and Panzacchi were before him, distinguished and illustrious, but not successful as the “female fictionist” understands success. No Italian poet, I think, in this day of the revival of Italian poetry, makes what could be called an appreciable income by his verse.

It would be indecorous to push the inquiry so far as to speculate how the increased interest in verse affects the pockets of our own younger poets. One hopes that they are fed with the flour of returns as well as with the honey of renown. But one doubts whether their pretty “limited editions,” their choruses of praise, their various celebrity, are symptoms of more than a very moderate popularity. They would think it unkind if one were to say that one wished them no more pudding than their great forefathers enjoyed. In point of fact, one wishes for every true artist the maximum of practical appreciation of his art. But if they break their hearts because they are not Tennyson, they will be silly fellows. A poet need feel no sense of failure because his books do not lie on every parlor-table in Brompton, or because no movement is made towards his being called up into the House of Lords. Success in poetry has not been, and we may hope that it never will be, a matter in which income-tax collectors can take an interest.

More, perhaps, than any other species of literature, poetry ought to be its own exceeding great reward. The verseman should write his verse with no other thought in his mind than that of relieving his heart of metrical pangs too acutely delicious to be borne. The verse being written, and then printed, the poet has done his work. He ought to have no further solicitude. He has adventured in a kind of writing in which less than in any other the element of ephemeral interest exists. If his stanzas are of true excellence, they will be as much admired in 1945 as in 1895, and perhaps more so. The best poetry does not grow old-fashioned. The poet should consider that he is not engaged in the timid coasting-trade of the novelist; he has put out on the vast seas, and if the risks of sinking are great, there is the chance of reaching the Golden Isles. He works, we will not say for immortality, since that is a vague and uncertain phrase, but for the future, and he ought to be content to miss the more facile successes of the immediate present. Poetry, after all, is not a democratic art. It appeals to the few, it “makes great music,” as Keats puts it, “for a little clan,” and it can by no means be sure, in the wild hurly-burly of our life, immediately to win the attention of those elect ears. But good verse, once printed, is never lost; sooner or later it is discovered, and fixed, like a jewel, into its proper drawer in the cabinet of the ages. To last forever, as a specimen, by the side of Lovelace or of Wolfe, should be better worth working for than to earn five thousand pounds as the author of a deciduous novel about the “New Woman.” At all events, the poet had better try to think so, for the financial prosperity can by no possible chance be his.

Concerning Me and the Metropolis

_By_ Louise Imogen Guiney

CONCERNING ME AND THE METROPOLIS.

IT is my wish to make a confession, an extraordinary one for an American, to wit: I am no lover of Paris. This is putting it mildly. I had never misery elsewhere of which I could not get, and hold, the upper hand. Now we were there under pleasantest conditions, at good headquarters, within reach of things I profess to love: the crowd, the studios, the concerts and cafés, the lights of the Place de la Concorde, the parks, the Louvre, the river-boats, the circuses, the old schools, the National Library. We had sweet weather; we had health, youth, leisure; we had a menu; O shade of Angry Cat! (which, you must know, is French for the best of kings, Henry of Navarre) what a menu we did have! But over me and my hitherto unperturbed jollity there fell a deadly melancholy. My family shopped and sported, while I stood amid a thousand wheels in the Carrefour Montmartre, or in the lee of Molière’s fountained house-wall, with tears bursting down these indignant and constitutionally arid cheeks. All day I wandered about alone, like a lunatic or a lover; by night I slept little, and had visions weird and gory. This lasted an entire autumn, which I count as lost out of my life, and during which I never once could lay salt on the tail of what had been myself. Something in that nervous latitude knocked out my congenital stoicism; I began to have all manner of unmanageable emotions, like an eighteenth-century heroine with the spleen or the vapors; I was more sentient, more intelligent, more humanistic, more capable of vast virtues and vices than would have seemed credible to the New England which bred me upon her sacred bean. A violent quarrelsomeness possessed me; whatever I saw and heard was an irritation; I believe I could have offered, in all soberness, to reform the Comédie Française, to unbuild the Tour Saint-Jacques, and to fight the Immortals, man by man. The bearing and gesture of the polite wee police were odious in my eyes, and the parlous Parisian nurslings appeared insufferably like goblins. Frequently, I would fall literally on the neck of that dear little bronze Faun tiptoeing at the entrance to the Gardens of the Luxembourg, on the side of the Boule-Miche, scolding him fiercely for being able to live and smile and dance in fatal Paris!

And the unwonted behavior of me, the upside-downing and inside-outing of whatever I had fondly supposed to be my “ways”! It is to be desired, in general, that I were a less unspiritual creature; but there, at least, I haunted the great churches, especially Saint-Sulpice, with its solemn evensong borne on six hundred voices of seminarian men and boys. Whereas I had ever the relish of a genuine antiquary for tombs and epitaphs, I bolted incontinently from the beaded wreaths of Père-la-Chaise, and paid with a fit of shuddering for my propinquity to historic ashes in Saint-Denis. It would confound any of my acquaintances to be told that I was a misanthrope or a royalist; yet I used to look after the ominous, noisy, big-hatted, blue-chinned, whip-cracking cabbies, and grind my teeth at them as at the whole incarnate Revolution, which they instantly bring to mind. As for the Louvre, it gave me no comfort; I crossed its threshold but seldom, for it tore me in pieces with the unbearable glory on its walls.

In fine, Paris had about driven me mad. While I strolled the Quarter, I had for company, step for step, now Abelard, now Jacques de Molay and his Templars, now the Maid, now Coligny or Guise, now the Girondists and André Chénier: the long procession of the wronging and the wronged, the disillusioned, the slain, which belongs to those altered and brightened streets. Strange theories inhabited me; I was no crass optimist any more. My head hummed with the tragic warning of Bossuet, which Persius uttered before him, that at the bottom of every knowable thing was nothingness. And all this with a bun in one fist, and in the other a gem of a duodecimo, bought at the quays for three sous, with a cloudless sky above, and every incentive, including poverty, towards fullest content and exhilaration.