Chapter I: AM an historiographer; and being desirous and assiduous of accuracy (2)

In London I had been happy, and “clad in complete steel” against such alien moods as these. And to London, eventually, I had to go back, although M. S., who lives for art and Chicago, and who always knows what’s what, compared me to a spook with no stomach for Paradise, whimpering for Hades and the sooty company thereof. But in London I was calm, normal, free, as by some eternal paradox.

One door in Paris I regretted to leave, for I went almost daily, like Little Billee and his cheerful colleagues, to the Morgue. I should have become a great novelist, had I taken my chances there a bit longer! Next to the Morgue, I was loath to part with the bridges, over which goes so much laughing and shining life, under which so much mystery is forever being fished up by aid of the torch and the prong. Ah, those men and women, stung, from the beginning, by the scorpions in that smooth, clean, treacherous air, and asking of the Seine water that it should quench immaterial fires!

So long as I have an eye to my own longevity and peace, I shall never put foot in Paris. Moreover, the place is painful, as having shaken to the base my smug opinion of myself. It taught me my moral ticklishness, and shrunk me into less than a cosmopolite; though I make puns again, I do so humbly, and out of a psychic experience. Nor must the item go unrecorded that I had a French ancestor, an unimportant personage remembered not then so much as since. He was born on the borders of Provence; what Paris was to him, or whether he ever beheld it, I know not. It is possible that he may have burned his fingers there, and that his bullying spirit imposed upon mine this fantastic attraction of repulsion, this irrational hatred of what I knew all the time to be the most animated, the most consistent, and the most beautiful city in the world.

“Trilby”

_By_ Louise Imogen Guiney

“TRILBY”

“TRILBY” is two things. It is a little, simple, light-hearted story, lop-sided, discursive, having breaks and patches; and it is also already a masterpiece _hors concours_, so that when you come before it, the only sage remark you can make is dumb-show: that is, you may with great propriety take off your hat. Its background is so treated that it takes rank as a new thing in English fiction. Others since Mürger have attempted to draw the life of the Quarter, but none with this blitheness and winning charm, not even Mr. Henry Harland (Sidney Luska) in his idyllic “Land of Love,” which deserves to be better known. The spirit of “Trilby” is the very essence of the best old English humor, as if Fielding, Steele, and Thackeray had collaborated upon it in Paradise (forgetting just a little the rules of their mundane grammar, the conditions of their mundane style!) and transfused into it their robust manly gayety and their understanding tenderness of heart. Indeed, its every page seems to breathe forth Thackeray’s darling axiom: “Fun is good; Truth is better; Love is best of all.” It is a capital illustration of the capital French thesis that a subject counts for nothing, but that the treatment of a subject counts for everything. Let the average readeress, a person of conventions, go through “Trilby” from cover to cover. Her attitude at the end is Mrs. Bagot’s own: affectionate and bewildered surrender. “Trilby” itself is what its heroine ingenuously calls the “altogether.” It is an elemental human book, staged without costumes, attractive for no spurious attribute, but only through its gentleness and candor. It constrains talk, only because it has so strengthened feeling.

As for the tone of it, it has escaped mysticism, by great good fortune. Hypnotism, apprehended and faintly feared from the first, is used with an exquisitely abstinent touch. There is nowhere too much of it, and therefore it becomes credible and tragic. Svengali’s evil influence hangs over the victim whom it glorifies, like a premonition of the Greeks, formless, having no precisely indicated end or beginning. His soul passes; and the music in her forsakes her on the instant, and passes with him. You are not told this; you gather it. The tale is crowded with these inferences, and the dullest or cleverest reader is alike flattered at finding them. So with the relationship of Little Billee and his stricken Trilby, fading away among the cheery and loyal painters who take pleasure yet in her perfections: there is not, in the written record, so much as a private look or sigh between the two any more; only Trilby’s saddened confession to a third person that her girlish bosom had subdued itself at last to a meek, motherly yearning over her wild little worshipper, who nearly won her at the nineteenth asking.

The final chapters are out of proportion; chance, or weariness, led the author to hurry his thoroughly interesting hero off the scene in a few nervous paragraphs. But even this is no serious defect, for the general impression must be maintained; a prolonged soft orchestral strain for Little Billee would be mere sentiment, and episodic, the significance of “Trilby” having ended in Trilby’s dying with the wrong name upon her lips. Every part of the wonderful story is unconsciously managed with artistic reference to the whole; its incidents are as rich in meaning as you care to consider them. Trilby opens her heart to the Laird, and is most lover-like with him who is most brotherly. Her mother, poor lass, was an aristocrat with the bar sinister; her clerical father, a bibulous character enchantingly outlined, was her only authority for her disbelief in dogma. No stress is laid on these characteristics and conditions; but they tell. Taffy preserves an English silence when Gecko speaks his soulful and spills over. You half resent the hearty postlude, through your own too acute memory of what is past. Yet the book was bound to end in a _tempo primo_, in a strain of peace and hope as like as possible to what was hushed forever, the jocund dance-measure of art and friendship and Latin-Quarter youth. For “Trilby” is comedy, after all, genuine comedy, and it is so to be named, albeit with a scandalous lump in the throat. As it is, we take it; we covet it; we will pay any price for it; we cannot get along without it. “_Je prong!_”

Mr. Du Maurier is not the first artist in England who has come over the border into literature with victorious results. Opie and Fuseli were among the most suggestive of thinkers and talkers; Sir Joshua lectured with academic vigor and graceful persuasiveness; Haydon had an almost unequalled eye for character, and a racy, biting, individual manner with his pen. But no artist has so endowed the world of romance. Mr. Du Maurier’s achievement is not of malice prepense. As Dian stole to Endymion sleeping, so has immortal luck come upon him, chiefly because he did not, like the misguided Imlac in “Rasselas,” “determine to become”—a classic. “Trilby,” born of leisure and pastime, is vagrant; heedless of means to the end; profoundly modest and simple; told for what it is worth, as if it were, at least, something real and dear to the teller. Out of this easy, pleasure-giving mood, from one who is no trained expert, who has no idea to broach of disturbance or reform, out of genial genius, in short, which hates the niggardly hand and scatters roses, comes a gift of unique beauty. It crowns the publishers’ year, as do “Lord Ormont and his Aminta,” “Perleycross,” and “The Jungle Book.” With these great works of great writers, it stands, oddly enough, as tall as any; fresh, wide, healthful, curative, like them; and like them, a terrible punch on the head to a hundred little puling contemporaneous novels, with their crude and cowardly theories of life.

The “Trilby” pictures, haphazard and effectual as is their text, can bear no more direct praise than that they are verily Mr. Du Maurier’s. The masterly grouping, the multitude of fine lines, the spirited perspective, are here as of old. Some of these illustrations, not necessarily the best, stay on the retina; among such, surely, is the ludicrous, dripping funeral procession of the landlady’s vernacular lie; that huge procession filing up-street, with one belated, civic infant on the reviewing-stand! Hardly second to it as a spectacle is the high-born rogue of a Zouave, enacting the trussed fowl at midnight on the studio floor, or the companion gem, set in the dubious out-of-doors of the great original Parisian Carry-hatide. Of the serious drawings, there is a memorable one among the three of Trilby singing, with her delicately advanced foot, and falling hair, and the luminous Ellen-Terry-like look in her kind eyes. Above all, who can forget the pathetic, pleading figure of the little boy Jeannot, in his pretty Palm Sunday clothes, losing his holiday, losing faith in his sister; and of Trilby over him, revoking her promise, and compassing what was in very truth the “meanest and lowest deed” of her brief, unselfish life? She cried herself to sleep often, remembering it, but to Mrs. Bagot it was monstrous trivial: “the putting-off of a small child.” Her too typical phrase, “wrong with the intense wrongness of a right-minded person,” as Ruskin says, gives you a pang. So does the inscription under the last glimpse we have of Little Billee, poignant enough without the “_Quae nunc abibis in loca_,” which rushes its sweet pagan heart-break into the Rector’s mind. In these casual intolerable thrusts deep into the nerve of laughter or of tears, Mr. Du Maurier demonstrates his right of authorship; these, and not vain verbal felicities, constitute his literary style.

Modern Laodicea

_By_ Norman Hapgood

MODERN LAODICEA

FOR centuries the word Laodicean was a reproach; to-day it is beginning to carry with it a suggestion of nobility. It was Saint John who, in making the unknown city famous, covered it with obloquy:

“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: . . .

“‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

“‘So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’”

Among the moderns who have suggested that to be neither hot nor cold is to be well, Mr. Thomas Hardy is prominent, as he gave the title of “A Laodicean” to a novel of which the heroine is attractive. She is a girl who loves both the old and the new where they are most in conflict. She liked ruins and she liked restorations. She had half a mind to marry a picturesque noble, De Stancy, with no brains, no character, and an atmosphere of old-world romance, and she did marry a hard-headed modern. At the end of the book, she remarks: “‘We’ll build a new house beside the ruin, and show the modern spirit forevermore . . . but, George, I wish—’ And Paula repressed a sigh.

“‘Well?’

“‘I wish my castle was not burned; and I wish you were a De Stancy.’”

At Harvard University, a few years ago, there was started a society intended to represent the true spirit of the Neo-Laodiceans. It held that lukewarmness was the most admirable condition obtainable by man. Moral heat or cold in the heart of any applicant for election was reason for his rejection. “Nothing in excess” was suggested as a motto, but the word “but” was thought to be a more subtle suggestion that something could always be said on either side. In the end no motto was chosen, because this matter, like all other matters, was not pressed. For refreshments, lukewarm tea and sweet California wine were served. Conversation was neither encouraged nor discouraged. Serious argument was as freely tolerated as genuine trifling. A well-known man in college, who thought himself worthy of the club, was rejected because he was believed to be hostile to seriousness. Another was kept out because, although he said nothing against frivolity, it bored him.

The society had no secrets. The members sought no proselytes, but gave full answers to all inquiries. The Harvard students smiled and were interested. The young women at the Harvard Annex tried to laugh, but thought it wasn’t right. They said the young men were posing. The most magnanimous said that under the seemingly erroneous spirit was a really ardent search for truth. The Annex held but one girl who was ever mentioned for membership, and she was defeated by a close vote on the ground that, although her Laodiceanism seemed perfect, as she was a woman it was axiomatic that a thorough knowledge of her would reveal some ethical prejudice.

The founder of the society, naturally enough, was the most imperfect member. At one time there was serious thought of accepting his resignation. Instead of being lukewarm he was alternately hot and cold, being one of the ablest moral speakers as well as one of the most inspired jesters at morality. He himself did not know whether reverence or blasphemy was strongest in him. It was the perfection of this doubt about himself which induced the club to forgive his unstable equilibrium.

“Doing is a deadly thing; doing ends in death.” One member was expelled because he quoted with approval this Antinomian hymn. That statement is as far from improved Laodiceanism as is the fury for doing things. Action is well enough if it be within bounds, as is rest. The Laodicean must see the advantages of all opposites, else he is unworthy of his name.

In contrast to the founder was the elected head of the society, the most fully developed specimen, a model of intellectual and temperamental moderation. He was mild in study, in exercise, in personal relations. He had more wisdom than most men and more knowledge, but he had acquired his knowledge, not by effort, but by putting his attention, when he chose to give attention to the acquisition of facts, to those of permanent importance. He had never wasted any strength on hobbies; he had never been enthusiastic. Yet he had always been interested. He knew nothing that was not worth knowing. His easy intellectual spirit was combined with æsthetic fineness and sensuous delicacy. He spent much of his time in the sunshine, amusing himself with the passing events of the hour. His friends were chosen for their dispositions, not for their acquirements. He preferred a small mind, simple and harmonious, to a large one distorted or turbulent. He spent a few hours of the day in severe study, a few in strolling in the air, a few in chatting and drinking tea, a few in reading poetry or other imaginative literature. He was fond of conversation, but not of dispute. He was loyal to reason and cared little for reasoning.

Between these two types lay the other five members, Laodiceans of varying degrees. One was looked upon as of doubtful standing on account of his temperament, which seemed to belong to the land of Far Niente, with which we had no desire to be allied. He was lazy, and he kept his membership only because of his intellectual fairness. His organs were partial to rest, but his mind was judicial and regretted the defect of his temperament. As his approval was distributed impartially among the alert and the sleepy, the faithful and the unbelieving, we let his ideas atone for his instincts.

The others, who were not especially distinct types, were good average examples of the species. In addition, we had seven honorary members. There was a rule that no man in his lifetime could be an honorary member, but there was one living man so deserving of the honor that we did all we could within the letter of the rule: we voted that Arthur James Balfour should acquire a membership immediately upon his death. He was the only man who received this tribute. Among the dead, Omar Khayyam was elected, with one dissent, on the ground that the Persian poet was injudiciously opposed to virtue; and Socrates, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, and Molière passed without challenge. Over Lucretia Borgia, who was proposed by the founder, there was a long fight, with the same objections that had been made against him. On the plea that she was as fond of virtue as of vice we admitted her, though with regret.

Since the second gathering, though two years have passed, the club has not met, simply because no one has suggested a meeting. This is thought to be in keeping with its principles. I have gone thus fully into its history because it is the only organized representation of the principles of the new sect. These principles, though not yet exactly defined, are shadowed forth in the belief of these seven youths. They were confident, at the time, that the true Laodicea would grow in size and in respect. It could never number many, because by the nature of its creed it was an intellectual aristocracy; but it would grow slowly larger as the course of evolution brought the world gradually nearer to the summit of development. Whether most of us persist in this belief, I do not know. Nor do I know whether most of us believe still that in a world where almost everybody is vociferously supporting one side of every question it is a pleasant thing to sit in the shade, to drink lukewarm nourishment, and to say sweetly that there is some good on either side. There may be a better course than this—and there may not.

The Intellectual Parvenu

_By_ Norman Hapgood

THE INTELLECTUAL PARVENU

AT a time when so many new ideas about the humanities are flooding America it is not surprising that among our ambitious and intelligent young men of the first generation of culture are many whose intellectual methods show more eagerness than measure. With no traditions behind them they do not realize how necessary are humility, repose, and care to sound ripening of the perceptions and the judgment. As their fathers struggled for academic education and for material ease, the sons make a struggle and an excitement of ideas on art. They over-emphasize what they get hold of, from a deficient sense of permanent values. Though this spectacle has been seen at other times, probably never before was so large a mass of new ideas thrown to so hungry a public.

The men of whom I speak are more occupied with the idea of enlightenment than with the things which give light. Americans give too much importance to intellectual things, it is frequently said. Riper intelligence puts less emphasis on itself. When we first see beyond others about us we are dazzled by the idea of our own advancement. Because we have discarded some errors or removed some ignorance we rejoice in our grasp of truth. This often makes us set ourselves up as enemies of the Philistines and of all their ways. Seeing the futility of their labor we assume opinions on subjects over which we have not labored. Seeing the uselessness of much acquired fact we are content with superficial knowledge. We smile in satisfaction over the radicalness of our point of view, and because we know the deadness of some conventions we think that a thing is true because it is new. The established is commonplace. What is known to all or felt by all is unimportant. Distinction consists in seeing and believing novel things.

“I the heir of all the ages
In the foremost files of time.”

Most often these victims of their own progress are our college men. Indeed in a confused way the mass of our half-educated people who distrust the influences of our colleges have such products in their minds. Of course, however, the fault is not with our institutions, but with a hasty civilization. In an American college to-day altogether too much interest is taken in shallow modernity, but our colleges, on the whole, send their students away with less of the bigotry of new knowledge than they had on entrance. Steadily assertion of intellectual heterodoxy, contempt for the conventional, is becoming less a source of general interest in our educational institution; steadily it is coming to be seen as a crudity. So many youths have flaunted end-of-the-century banners that the device is already almost worthless, and it is not so much the graduate of to-morrow as the graduate of ten years ago, who is the centre of the admiring little circle which pins its faith in an enlightened life on some arbitrary and confident preacher of new things. The gospel of the prophet may be Japanese art; it may be the necessity of living in Europe; or it may be the futility of thinking anything is better than anything else. This American phenomenon is found in abundance in all of our cities, but if he can get away he lives in an European art centre, an essential part of no life except that of his apostles.

That these persons may be regarded as a class is proved by their surprising agreement of opinion. For instance, of the young art prophets whom I know, all Americans, some living in Europe, some by necessity in America, every one thinks that the others are so shallow that what influence they have is surprising; each thinks that the only art of to-day is French or Japanese; that there has never been any art in England; that the most advanced literature of the world is the realism of the younger men in Paris; that Oscar Wilde is the most intelligent of British writers; that the admiration of Shakespeare is a superstition; that there is much less beauty in nature than in art; that work in any unartistic employment is a waste of life; and that it is impossible for an intelligent man to be contented in America. When so many radical ideas are held in common there must be some way of generalizing about the individuals holding them. They are alike, also, not only in their opinions, but in their fields of ignorance. They are fond of talking about atavism, for instance, and cannot state exactly any one of the conflicting theories of heredity. They ostensibly treat art scientifically, psychologically, and do not know the simplest facts of experimental physiological psychology. They generalize about movements and periods after reading a few books about each. The saying that the French would be the best cooks in Europe if they had any butcher’s meat, modified by Mr. Bagehot into the aphorism that they would be the best writers of the day if they had anything to say, applies also to these critics who make such striking theories out of so little. They accuse of ignorance all who lack knowledge in their fields; all knowledge outside of their field they look upon as pedantry.

Salient, however, as are the weaknesses of these unformed prophets they do have their attractive side. They have enthusiasm about things of the mind, they have indignation for what they deem Philistinism, and with their love of prominence in the world of ideas is mixed some genuine respect for truth. Are our American workers in the world of ideas to be permanently open to the charge of over-emphasis, of lacking distinction, finish, wholeness? Most of us believe not. We believe that the prominence of cleverness, rather than of soundness, just now is a temporary thing, like our social crudities, from which later the powers of a race will free themselves.

In the meantime, we have in an impressive form the first crop of the literature of the future. Journals are founded all over the country which, in an average life of a few months, express the opinions and reveal the art of a few young men who think they are ahead of their times. Just now the main characteristic of this literature is that it suggests as often as it can the art of painting. It calls itself by the name of a color—yellow, green, purple, gray. Constant use is made of the slang of art. Indeed their only way of appearing artistic seems to be to make their writing as far as possible remind the reader of the plastic arts. Art is ostentatiously opposed to everything else, especially to scholarship, morality, and industry. The idea seems to be that art is made by talking about art, or by talking about life in terms of art. Equally noticeable is the instinct that in making one special quality conspicuous by neglecting others, they are showing originality. They do not see that in an artist great enough to give a large man the feeling of life there are too many elements for any detail to be conspicuous. The work of this artist will be life-like; commonplace, unless seen by an eye to which common life reveals its interests. Edmond de Goncourt can see nothing in “The Scandinavian Hamlet.” He prefers Père Goriot, who is newer, he thinks, and more real. Edmond de Goncourt is an admirable example of the attitude of a few men in Paris who have largely influenced some of our tawdry literature. In one of his journals he remarks sadly that in a certain conversation about abstract things, general human points of view, he failed to shine, and he asks plaintively why it is that men who “on all other subjects” find original things to say are in these generalities on a footing with the rest of the world,—which means to him, flat. Readers of the eight volumes of the journal may smile at the “all other subjects,” but it is at least true that on certain narrow topics of which few persons know anything he could feel more profound than he could on subjects of universal human interest. His test of Shakespeare, by the way, is an apt one. It does not condemn a man that he does not find Hamlet interesting. Many intelligent men do not. Any man however, who infers, from his lack of appreciation that Shakespeare is not a great artist is deficient in critical intelligence and in understanding of the value of evidence. And when a man remarks that Raphael, Beethoven, or Shakespeare, was a great man in his time, but that the world has progressed, and that, as we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, the Balzac of this century sees more than the Shakespeare of two centuries earlier, we have a subject for comedy. Artists, except the very highest, are likely to be as critics arbitrary and intolerant, though often acute and original, and these hangers-on of the art-world have the arbitrariness without the compensating exact knowledge.

That any critic who seriously treats with contempt any man or any institution that has a high place in the general world of ideas is shallow, an avoider and not a solver of questions which confront a man of mature culture and broad mind, is almost axiomatic. When we hear so many critics to-day expressing scorn of whole nations, saying of England, perhaps, that she has no art, of Germany, that she has only dull learning, of America that she is Philistine; when we see these critics surrounded by groups of followers, do we not wish, with some reason, that we had a Molière to-day? What a play he could make of “Les Critiques Ridicules;” or of “L’Ecole des Aesthètes,” or of “L’Amèricain Malgré Lui.” The poems of Mr. Gilbert and of Punch are pleasing within their range, but the subject deserves to be treated in one of the world’s comedies. The scientific art criticism of men who know of art and science nothing except the jargon makes one sometimes doubt the value of the general spread of ideas. Lombroso, Nordau, even parts of Spencer, not to speak of the mass of inferior generalizing of wide scope, would have brought a sad smile to the face of the real scientist who spent seven years studying earth-worms alone.

The School of Jingoes

_By_ Thomas Wentworth Higginson

THE SCHOOL OF JINGOES

IN a certain colored regiment there was a chaplain who was habitually called by the negroes, with their usual gift at lucky misnomers, “Mr. Chapman.” He was very fond of risky adventures, and one of the negroes once said: “Woffor Mas’ Chapman made preacher fo’? He’s de fightin’est mos’ Yankee I ebber see in all my days!” It is impossible not to read this in reading what is written by these friends of peace, who are constantly using the olive branch for a war club and hammering away at those who think differently. The excellent Mr. Angell, in the last number of “Our Dark Friends,” announces in one column that the object of his paper is “the humane education of the millions,” and in another column that it is to be wished “that England had not only Venezuela, but every other Spanish-speaking colony on the face of the earth.” In this manner, more prosaically, do Mr. Edward Atkinson and Mr. Edward D. Mead hold it up as the highest desideratum for every part of Spanish and Portuguese America to pass into English hands. Grant the force of all their arguments, can this be regarded as the gospel of serenity and brotherly love? It rather recalls Heine’s glowing description of one of his early teachers, one Schramm, who had written a book on Universal Peace, and in whose classes the boys pommelled each other with especial vigor.

If jingoism there be on earth, where are its headquarters, its normal school, its university extension system? Where, pray, but in the example of England? No one who has watched the course of things at Washington can help seeing the influence of that vast object-lesson. Seeley’s book, “The Expansion of England,” is of itself enough to demoralize a whole generation of Congressmen. It is the trophies of Great Britain which will not allow Lodge and Roosevelt to sleep. Logically, they have the right of it. If it be a great and beneficent thing for England to annex, by hook or crook, every desirable harbor or island on the globe; to secure Gibraltar by a trick, India by a lucky disobedience of orders, Egypt by a temporary occupation of which the other end never arrives,—why not follow the example? This impulse lay behind the whole Hawaiian negotiation; it asserts itself in all the Venezuela interference, in all the Cuban imbroglio. Moreover, it is absolutely consistent and defensible, if England is, as we are constantly assured, the great, beneficent, and civilizing power on the earth. If so, let us also be beneficent; let us proceed to civilize; let us, too, say, especially to all Spanish-speaking peoples, “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue!”

If there ever was a Church Militant, surely England is the Nation Militant. While we debate a gunboat, she equips a fleet; while we introduce a bill for an earth-work, and refer it to a committee, she forwards ten additional guns to Puget Sound. “Her march is o’er the mountain wave,” as Campbell long since boasted; and yet, whenever the youngest statesman asks why we should not be allowed to take a faltering step after her, he is treated as if he had violated the traditions of the human race and had indeed brought death into the world and all our woe. Let us at heart be consistent. To me, I confess, the old tradition of “an unarmed nation”—about which that good soldier, Gen. F. A. Walker, once made so fine an address—still seems the better thing. But the unarmed nation is the condemnation of England; if defencelessness is right, then England is all wrong, and we should say so. We can by no possible combination be English and pacific at the same time.

Above all, it seems to me an absolute abandonment of the whole principle of republican institutions to say that they are for one nation alone, and for only those who speak one language. If deserving means anything, it means that sooner or later all will grow up to it. Nobody doubts that the Romans governed well and were the best road-builders on this planet; but all now admit that it helped human progress when they took themselves out of England and left those warring tribes to work themselves out of their dark condition into such self-government as they now possess. There was a time on this continent when Mexico was such a scene of chaos that the very word “to Mexicanize” carried a meaning of disorder. Yet what State of the Union has shown more definite and encouraging progress than has been accomplished in Mexico within the last ten years? What Mexico is, every Spanish-American or Portuguese-American state may yet be, only give it time and a fair chance. If we believe that the principle of self-government is unavailable for those who speak Spanish, we might as well have allowed Maximilian to set up his little empire undisturbed. No one ever doubted that Louis Napoleon knew how to build good roads and to shoot straight; and perhaps he might have taught the same arts to his representative. Whatever injury we may before have done to Mexico, we repaid it liberally when we said to Europe, “Hands off,” and secured to that Spanish-American state its splendid career of self-development out of chaos. What Mexico has done the states of South America may yet imitate.

The Uses of Perversity

_By_ Laurence Jerrold

THE USES OF PERVERSITY.

HERE French must lend its subtler and more penetrating aroma. A stronger spice must brace the good old English toned-down flavor. The word must be supposed invigorated, for the thing it is to mean is forcible. Waywardness is not the humor of this perversity, and it has more of the perverted than of the perverse. Surface hits at cussedness, facile thrusts at contrariness, leave it unscathed; for it goes deeper than whimsicality and underlies the quaintness sharp wit picks out of little things gone wrong. Perversity, thus for a space restored to its unemasculated meaning, is a twisted distortion of root and branch, not a gentle deflection of airy twigs. To paint a French thing the word must assume a Gallic hue, and as the thing is deep-dyed, so the word must borrow for the nonce a fuller tone.

Words, indeed, are but things. The names on which French thought has thrived have been true tokens of its moods, and word-changes have meant revolutions of fact, for the facts here are the words. Realism worsting Romanticism, the newest Decadence undoing Realism, are evolutions in speech which cover a progression in life. The sentimentality of Art meant gush in practice and the attitudes of literature were struck in reality. Dissection in fiction argued an actual habit of analysis, and materiality was most lived for when it was most written about. The reaction in words has ushered in a revolution of fact, or, what comes to the same, the new literature has sprung from the new life. From paroxysm to anti-climax has been the way of this parallel progression, as it is of every change. The pendulum has swayed from Realism and struck the opposite beam. But the earth turned while we swung, and we have landed, not on Romance again, whence we had leaped to Realism, but on Perversity, whence a lucky spring may eventually set us down on something wiser and better. Yet there are books in the running brooks, and there may be sermons in even the troubled streams that water this new land of our discovery. The inner reaction in men and things which the outer anti-climax of names and words betokens is no barren waste, and yields experience a plentiful harvest. The fruits are not seldom ill-flavored, but the flavor is strong, and the uses of this new perversity are not insipid, though they be but bittersweet.

Idealism is our perversion, and the Soul depraves us. We are drinking the dregs of the immaterial and have touched the dingiest bottoms of purity. The relativity of the object has turned our heads, and we are soul-mad. Apotheosis of soul and annihilation of body, the only seemly pegs on which well-thinking “jeunes” can now hang their periods, which once the bait-hook of “analytical observation” alone could catch, are the principles of our disintegration. Their work is swift, for the fear of lagging in the race for modernity speeds it, and it is wholesale. Nature and common-sense crumble, and sincerity has long since withered away. Cabaret conversations are of the stupidity of sex, and small-talk in drawing-rooms runs on the idiocy of love. Mating is a platitude, begetting an absurdity, and motherhood has the quaintness of things obsolete. The abolition of sex is the new crusade, and the last religion is of the future, when the aristocracy of the intellect shall, Jupiter-like, eschew animality, and engender its children in a thought. Literature foretells the time, and art paints the soul with daring straightforwardness on canvas, using microscopic brushes dipped in gold and devoting years to the task, for psychic delineation is minute and precious.

Soul gives form, and the ethereal must take outward shape. Hence the new attitude. A virginal appearance and the candor of an “enfant de chœur” are its necessary conditions. The hair, dark for women, preferably golden for men, is long, forlorn, and parted. Complexions are of wax when feminine; when masculine, of pale peach-blossom! A cherub’s smile plays on the lips, and eyes must, within the bounds of feasibility, show the vacuity of an infant’s. In voice and gesture, being more easily practised, is the new puerility most felicitously expressed. The secret lies in the suppression of both. The voice must be “white,” and every accent, every shade of tone that gives but the faint image of a color, is a flaw. A still grosser imperfection would be aught of hasty or unmeasured in gesture or movement. In small-talk anent the Soul, as in the impressive elocution of nursery rhymes, carnal oblivion must be insured by immovableness of limb, and further than the uplifting of a finger the soulful do not venture. The golden-haired youth, lisping with the “voix blanche” of white-robed “premières communiantes,” pictures the perversion of purity.

As at once a sign of health and a stigma of decay there comes amid this struggling for a Soul the fitful yet eventual triumph of the flesh. The trampled body turns and fells its oppressors, and this is Nature’s victory, claiming, after all, her own. But it is also Nature’s revenge, for she bestows not of her best on those who have spurned the boon, and her gifts are cruel to her prodigal sons. Passion is vouchsafed generously anew to some few who abjured it, but it has to pay its penalty. The actress who (not for respectability’s sake—this care is unknown in her Bohemia—but as a tribute to the new perversion) had renounced the flesh, and the poet who had made dying all the rage and relegated mere living to the lumber-room, have to screen the simplest of idyls, not from the stare of the Puritan, but from the prying of the last decadence. More often a yet heavier penalty is paid. The flesh will out, and, stifled by the perversion of purity, breaks impurely forth. The fat little Marseillais poet who may be heard of an evening in his popular part of the prophet of the new renunciation anathematizing the scurrility of sex and execrating the ugliness of love, the golden-haired painter whose boast is his choir-boy appearance, are rivals in innuendo and salaciousness when the work of life is over and play-hours begin. In the day-time even the test of a bottle of champagne or of but a half pint of beer is one the new purity will hardly stand. The slender youth whom you have heard preaching the gospel of asceticism amid a circle of amused and half-deceived ladies goes with you to sip a “quart” at the Café de la Place Blanche, upstairs, and shows surprising intimacy with the feminine element of that particular world, and no little experience of fleshly doctrines.

The uses of perversity wander wide in seriousness and in theory, and return to Nature in practice and at play. But the return is by a yet muddier way than the digression, and a cleaner and wholesomer path must be opened up before the straight line can be struck again.

A Comment on Some Recent Books

_By_ Hamilton Wright Mabie

A COMMENT ON SOME RECENT BOOKS

SITTING in slippered ease before the fire, in that ripe hour when the violence of flame has given place to a calm and penetrating glow, one hears the wind without as if it were a tumult in some other world. The great waves of sound follow each other in swift succession, but they break and wreck themselves on a shore so remote that one meditates unconcerned in the warmth of the wide-throated chimney. The sense of repose and ease within is too deep to be disturbed by the roar that fills the wintry night without. And yet how fragile are the walls that guard our glowing comfort from the storm of the vast world, and how small a space of light and heat is ours in the great sweep of elemental forces!

The policing of the world and the suppression of the cut-throat and the savage secure, at times, an order so pervasive and so stable that we forgot the possibilities of revolt and tragedy which underlie human society in its most serene as in its most agitated moments. The elemental forces which plant the seeds of tragedy in every human life, play as freely and powerfully through society to-day as in those turbulent periods when strong natures made laws for themselves and gave full vent to individual impulse. As a rule, these forces expend themselves in well-defined and orderly channels; but they have lost nothing of their old destructiveness if for any reason they leave these channels or overflow their narrow courses. Conventions are more rigidly enforced and more widely accepted to-day than ever before; but the tide of life is as deep and full and swift as of old, and when its current is set it sweeps conventions before it as fragile piers are torn up and washed out by furious seas.

In our slippered ease, protected by orderly government, by written constitutions, by a police who are always in evidence, we sometimes forget of what perilous stuff we are made, and how inseparable from human life are those elements of tragedy which from time to time startle us in our repose, and make us aware that the most awful pages of history may be rewritten in the record of our own day. It will be a dull day if the time ever comes when uncertainty and peril are banished from the life of men. When the seas are no longer tossed by storms, the joy and the training of eye, hand, and heart in seamanship will go out. The antique virtues of courage, endurance, and high-hearted sacrifice cannot perish without the loss of that which makes it worth while to live; but these qualities, which give heroic fibre to character, cannot be developed if danger and uncertainty are to be banished from human experience. A stable world is essential to progress, but a world without the element of peril would comfort the body and destroy the soul. In some form the temper of the adventurer, the explorer, the sailor, and the soldier must be preserved in an orderly and peaceful society; that sluggish stability for which business interests are always praying would make money abundant, but impoverish the money-getters. There would be nothing worth buying in a community in which men were no longer tempted and life had no longer that interest which grows out of its dramatic possibilities.

That order ought to grow, and will grow, is the conviction of all who believe in progress; but society will be preserved from stagnation by the fact that every man who comes into the world brings with him all the possibilities which the first man brought. For men are born, not made, in spite of all our superior mechanism; and although a man is born to-day into conditions more favorable to acceptance and growth than to rejection and revolt, he must still solve his personal problem as in the stormier ages, and make his own adjustment to his time. And in the making of that adjustment lie all the elements of the human tragedy. The policing of the world will grow more complete from age to age, but every man born into this established order will bring with him the perilous stuff of revolt and revolution. Without this background of tragic possibility life would lose that perpetual spell which it casts upon the artistic spirit in every generation; it would cease to be the drama to which a thousand pens have striven to give form, before which a thousand thousand spectators have sat in a silence more affecting than the most rapturous tumult of applause.

In these “piping times of peace” perhaps the artist renders no greater service to his kind than by keeping the tragic background of life in clear view. Men sorely need to be reminded of the immeasurable space which surrounds them and the bottomless gulfs which open beneath them. In this trafficking age, when so many slowly or swiftly coin strength, time, and joy into money, the constant vision of the human drama, with its deep and fruitful suggestiveness, is a necessity, and it can hardly be a matter of coincidence that the tragic side of the drama has so strongly appealed to men of artistic temper in recent years. Whatever may be said about the sanity of view and of art of Flaubert, Zola, and De Maupassant; of Ibsen and Maeterlinck; of George Moore, William Sharp, and the group of younger writers who, with varying degrees of success, are breaking from the beaten paths, it is certain that they have laid bare the primitive elements in the human problem. The dramas of Ibsen and Maeterlinck have brought not peace but a sword into recent discussion of the province and nature of art; but whatever may be our judgment of the truth and quality of these end-of-the-century readings and renderings of the great drama, there is no question about their departure from the conventional point of view. They may be partial, even misleading, in the interpretation of life and its meaning which they suggest, but they disturb and agitate us; they make us realize how fragile are the structures which so many men and women build over the abysses. If they do nothing more than irritate us, they render us a service; for irritation is better than the repose of unconsciousness; it brings us back to the sense of life; it makes us aware of the deeper realities.

Mr. Sharp’s “Vistas” seems at first reading a book out of another century, so dominant is its tragic note, so remote its themes, so elemental its consciousness. It is a book of glimpses only; but these glimpses open up the recesses and obscurities where destiny is swiftly or slowly shaped. Lawmaking and the police seem very superficial assurances and guardians of order in a world in which, beyond their ken or reach, such tremendous forces of good and evil are slumbering; traffic and finance seem matters of secondary interest or occupation when such passions are stirring and striving. And yet “Vistas” is peculiarly a book of our time; it registers the revolt which the man of insight and artistic temper always makes when conventions begin to cut to the quick, and the air becomes close and heavy. The human spirit must have room and sweep; it must feel continually the great forces which play through it; it must carry with it the continual consciousness of its possibilities of good and evil. And the more orderly society becomes the greater will be the need of keeping alive the sense of peril and uncertainty from forces which may be quiescent but which are never dead; of remembering that there must be freedom as well as restraint, and that the policeman must represent an order which is accepted as well as enforced.

The dramatists and the novelists continually shatter our sense of security by reminding us that if Arthur Dimmesdale is dead, Philip Christian survives; that if Isolde has perished, Anna Karenina still lives; that if Francesca da Rimini is no longer swept by the relentless blasts, Tess is not less tragically borne on to her doom. The commonplace man sees the commonplace so constantly that he needs in every age his kinsman of keener sight and finer spirit to remind him that life is not in things; and that neither peace for traffic nor order for quietness of mind is its supreme end. And, after all, the singing of the open fire is the sweeter for the tumult beyond the walls.

One Word More

_By_ Hamilton Wright Mabie

ONE WORD MORE

THE contemporary writing which is commonly called “decadent” has one quality which is likely to be fatal to its permanence,—it wears out the reader’s interest. On the first reading it has a certain newness of manner, a certain unconventionality of form and idea, which catch the attention; but these qualities catch the attention, they do not hold it; with each successive reading the spell weakens until it is largely spent. We discover that the manner which caught us, so to speak, at the start, is either self-conscious or tricky; and both qualities are fatal to permanence. There is nothing so inimical to the highest success in art as self-consciousness, and nothing is so soon discovered as a trick of style. It is, of course, both unintelligent and idle to characterize a considerable mass of writing in general terms; but, even with such differences of insight and ability as the decadent literature reveals, it has certain characteristics in common, and these characteristics disclose its essential qualities. They are significant enough to furnish a basis for a dispassionate opinion.

With the revolt against the conventional and the commonplace, especially on the part of the youngest men, every lover of sound writing must be heartily in sympathy. In a time when Edwin Arnold, Alfred Austin, and Lewis Morris are gravely brought forward as fit candidates for the laureateship which Wordsworth and Tennyson held in succession, it is not surprising that young men with a real feeling for literature fall to cursing and take refuge in eccentricity of all kinds. It must frankly be confessed that a great deal of current writing, while uncommonly good as regards form and taste, is devoid of anything approaching freshness of feeling or originality of idea. Its prime characteristic is well-bred, well-dressed, and well-mannered mediocrity; of contact with life it gives no faintest evidence; of imagination, passion, and feeling—those prime qualities out of which great literature is compounded—it is as innocent as the average Sunday-School publication. It is not without form, but it is utterly void.

That men who are conscious, even in a blind way, of the tragic elements of life should revolt against this widespread dominion of the commonplace is matter neither for astonishment nor regret; if they have blood in their veins and vitality in their brains, they cannot do otherwise. The responsibility for excesses and eccentricities generally rests with the conditions which have set the reaction in motion. When men begin to suffocate, windows are likely to be broken as well as opened; when Philistia waxes prosperous and boastful, Bohemia receives sudden and notable accessions of population.

Among English-speaking people at least, it is chiefly as a reaction that decadent literature is significant. It is an attempt to get away from the mortal dulness of the mass of contemporary writing,—an effort to see life anew and feel it afresh. In many cases, it is, however, mistaken not only in morals, but in method: it confuses mannerism with originality, and unconventionality with power. A manner may be novel and, at the same time, bad; one may be unconventional and, at the same time, essentially weak. In moments of hot and righteous indignation a little cursing of the right sort may be pardonable; but cursing has no lasting quality.

A revolt against too many clothes, or against a deadly uniformity of cut and style, is always justifiable; but nudity is not the only alternative; there is an intermediate position in which one may be both clothed _and_ in his right mind.