Chapter I: AM an historiographer; and being desirous and assiduous of accuracy (4)

Cervantes might sneer in vain at this rich new bloom of knighthood. What would Sidney or Bayard have counted for at sixteen beside her in the burning imagination of the Midi? One of our American poets, a woman who sings of divine right, truly says—

“There is no sex in courage and in pain.”

Louise Labé had courage of the first order. Helmet and breastplate, steel boot and clinking spur decorated an embodied defiance when she rode down to the beleaguered stronghold. Captain Loys represented a revolt of girlhood against the sugar-coated sex-slavery of the times.

My cynical friend had some good ground for citing _La Belle Cordière_ as an example of disaster. Her campaign came to nothing; she returned to Lyons, married a rich rope-man, and went into the business of writing erotic verse. But why do so many women, and over and over again, commit this blighting mistake in the course of their battle for liberty? Must the New Woman inevitably get herself entangled in the meshes of the illicit? I think not. Good mothers, faithful wives, and healthy-minded sweethearts are not to be crowded out of the army of progress and reform; they are in to stay; but the Louise Labés are also a persistent element, and unfortunately the noisiest and apparently most influential, especially in the field of literature.

Woman must come to her own; she must have full freedom; would that to-morrow were the day of it; but not if she is to be like the wife in the “Heavenly Twins,” not if she must take pattern by a “Yellow Aster” heroine, a “Key-Notes” woman, a “Daughter of Music,” or any of the still worse models set up by the latest female propagandists of social and domestic reform. These writers of polemical fiction favoring the new order of social license are at present more in evidence than the rest of them. Man, brutal Man, would be quite justified in appealing to his superior muscle to prevent the arrival of this New Woman, or to hale her to prison, as an enemy of the race, should she prove clever enough to break through the masculine guard. One laughs, nevertheless, thinking how justly and effectively these decadent women might retort by wondering what manner of government and civilization we should have were the Tolstois, the Hardys, the Maupassants, the George Moores, the Zolas, the Ibsens, and the Hall Caines given the law-making and law-executing powers! A beautiful suggestion. I can think of no political absurdity so deep, no domestic calamity so comprehensively terrible. Perhaps our bluff American senator was inspired when he objected to “them literary fellers” being recognized as political possibilities, and I can fully realize the untainted unction with which the English judge sent a certain be-sunflowered æsthete to hard prison labor upon a recent occasion. The general principle is that an unsexed woman and an emasculate man ought to be considered as outlaws.

When Captain Loys rode down to Perpignan on her glorious war-horse, she doubtless sang many an amazonian battle-song foretasting from afar the triumph of the New Woman when she should mount to the bastion coping and fling out the banner of France. Some months later, riding homeward up the fertile valley of the Rhone, she changed her tune to a plaintive, backward-going wail for a lost lover who had proved untrue. Farewell to Roussillon, to dreams of military glory, to all the fierce throbs of war—and good-by to the stalwart, fickle soldier who broke her heart!

It is Captain Loys no longer; the lance lies back yonder somewhere under the curtain of Perpignan’s fort; the helmet is too heavy; the steel boots have tired the dainty feet, and the embossed shield is gone from the girl’s left arm. Pretty Louise Labé sits sidewise on a palfrey pacing gently up to Lyons; she is going home to marry, forlorn and loveless, an easy-going and rich _cordier_ with a luxurious home and a garden by the Rhone. The New Woman has tried to be a man, and a man has, by the ancient test, shown her the folly of it.

To a lusty youth a thing of that sort is filliped aside and forgotten; the girl lays it deep in her heart. He and she have met; he goes on his way whistling a troubadour catch, she loses faith in every soul under heaven; and likely enough the worst that passed between them was a tender word or two, possibly a kiss. You see God built us for different tasks; and the true New Woman knows it; she would like to be rid of the Labés. Yet somehow these Yellow Book Girls make all the noise, lead the van and get most of the attention.

“There is our weak point,” said a noble woman to me; she is one of the fine, strong spirits in the work of lifting her sex to true freedom; “there is our chief obstacle. The divorced women, or ‘grass widows,’ the drunkards’ wives, and the disappointed old maids, are assuming leadership, taking it by vulgar force. This sets the men against us and gives them that irresistible weapon, ridicule. The women we most need for leaders and followers are the happy wives and mothers. We want the women who have not lost faith in men, marriage, and maternity, the three great M’s. Not that we have no sympathy with our unfortunate and unhappy sisters; but the woman with a grievance, a moan of woe in her throat, and a score to settle with Fate, is not a vote-maker. She irritates the men, and they tell her that she should have had better luck. She seems to forget that it is from the men that our boom must come, and that they will never grant it while our dyspeptics are to the fore. Who, indeed, cares a straw for what an unsuccessful person screams to possess?”

Now, this good woman may have been too hard upon the class she was talking at, I dare say she was; but there was excellent political wisdom in her words. The Louise Labés are naturally somewhat jaundiced and hysterical; when the adventures of Captain Loys are over the next thing is a career against Fate and the limits of sex. But it is to those who already have plenty and to spare that fortune tumbles down her largest gifts, not to the empty-handed and greedy-eyed failures who have nothing but a song of dole to sing.

Louise Labé went the common road of the irresponsible New Woman in literature, the road so very popular to-day, which is paved with erotic poetry and the fiction of free love and marital infidelity, beginning her new life by posing as a victim bound in loveless marriage-chains on the altar of monstrous social injustice. Her poetry was super-Sapphic and addressed to the other man, not her husband, a man who presumably was above the trade of a _cordier_, and therefore irresistible to the low-born poetess.

We must distinctly agree with Sainte-Beuve, who chivalrously acquits Louise Labé of actual personal dishonor. This thing of dressing up a literary effigy and labelling it with the lyrical egotism as self-expression is an old poetic ruse, a fiction of the Muses. Louise was good enough for her time and place. She imagined herself a sociologist, and somehow got it in mind that the only purpose of sociology is by hook or crook to get rid of the sanctity of the marriage relation. Indeed, if we may judge the New Woman, from Louise’s time to now, by her poems and fictions, we must inevitably conclude that she would define sociology as the science of making the social evil appear harmlessly attractive; or that, like some of our contemporaries, she would travel all the way to Russia to get the pattern of Tolstoi’s trousers, having in mind a stunning new bicycle suit, or a lecture upon dress-reform. She is not humorous; but she makes a good deal of fun for the men.

After all it may be that the New Woman is a recurring decimal, as the arithmeticians would say, appearing at certain intervals with a constantly shifting value to civilization. If she persists in being rather ornamental than useful, taken as a noun of multitude, we are all the more her debtor on the side of romance, which—

“Loves to nod and sing,”

and which, if it cannot always get “sweetness and light” to charm itself withal, gladly accepts sweetness and chic instead. Half way between a grotesque gargoyle and a dainty flower-ornament of our social and domestic structure, there is, perhaps, a mean at which the New Woman is aiming; at all events she means to be decorative, as she always has been, and down the ages ahead of us she will doubtless continue to charm, amuse, and marry man, proving herself to him a great luxury, but notably expensive.

The Return of the Girl

_By_ Maurice Thompson

THE RETURN OF THE GIRL

ταδε νυν ἑταἱραις
ταἱς εμαισι τερπνα καλως ἁεἱσω
—SAPPHO, _Frag. II._

[Greek: tade nyn hetairais
tais emaisi terpna kalôs haeisô.]

TO begin with, a girl is, generally speaking, an interesting organism, and a perfect specimen finds prompt welcome in any cabinet. The type is not paleozoic; at all events no fossil remains have yet been discovered in any of the rocks; but Jane Austen may serve in that stead, duly pinned and labelled archeparthenos.

Not of grizzled spinsters dully staring, in the mummy stage of existence, out of vitreous eyes furnished by the taxidermist, but of plump, sound, hearty young girls do we now wish some scientific notes. Let the withered type-specimens remain in their glass cases for the benefit of Professor Shelfdust and the English novelists: our heroine is yet under twenty years of age; she has never heard of sociology and is marvellously ignorant of the ethics of elopement; but she is as clever as she is fascinating.

Sappho knew the value of her sex in the bud, when perfect girl nature was just beginning to let go its charming essentials upon the air.

“τἱς δ’ αγροιωτἱς τοι θἑλγει νοον
ουκ επισταμενα τα βρακε’ εγκην επι των σφνρων?”

“[Greek: tis d’ agroiôtis toi thelgei noon
ouk epistamena ta brake’ enkên epi tôn sphyrôn?]”

“What rustic lass can win your heart
Without a touch of girlish art?”

Or literally: “What rustic maiden, even, can captivate your mind, if she is not clever at drawing her skirts around her ankles?” There shows the brush of genius, a fine stroke, like the circle of Giotto, projecting a complete figure; and it is warm with life. The girl is pretty, brown as a berry, smiling, and lissomely graceful. Her sophistication is altogether hereditary. Sidney had her in mind when he wrote:—

“Gay hair, more gay than straw when harvest lies,
Lips red and plump as cherries’ ruddy side,
Eyes fair and great, like fair great ox’s eyes, . . .
. . . Flesh as soft as wool new dressed,
And yet as hard as brawn made hard by art.”

Like a bird in a bush, the strong, healthy girl shows her decorations with enthusiastic willingness, yet shyly, flitting betimes and keeping quite out of reach, while apparently not thinking of danger. Even the wild lass, saucing Daphnis from the doorway of her cave, knew perfectly well that he would hang his head and pass by. She was σὑνοφρυς κὁρα [Greek: synophrys kora]; that is, her eyebrows ran together across her nose, which was not as unfortunate as Herrick’s sort of girl, who was—

“One of those
That an acre hath of nose.”

Why will the thought of berries come up? Dear old Suckling gave vent to it thus:—

“No grape that’s kindly ripe could be
So round, so plump, so soft as she,
Nor half so full of juice.”

No wonder that it has been a persistent dream of masculine poets to—

“Journey along
With an armful of girl and a heart full of song!”

We older folk, who were brought up and educated in the sweet provincial ways, can see that it has been the atrabilious old maids and the matronly flirts who have banished the dear, delicious girl from artistic consideration. The woman of thirty, and upwards, by persistent manœuvring, has got between us and sweet sixteen. What we have to show for the change is the feminine novel of nasty morals. Of course many of these flabby romances about over-mature heroines are written by men; but they are mostly men of a beardless style with much complaint to make against their ancestors. A sound man naturally loves a healthy young girl and wants to be her father, her brother, or her lover, according to propriety. He is, moreover, lenient towards the elderly unmarried females, when they do not insist upon the superiority of an Isabella-colored complexion; but at best they are not girls; in which they differ from happily married women, who keep to themselves a girlish charm late into life.

We all have our misfortunes for which we are not in the least to blame. The single woman whose bloom is gone is interesting as an embodied pathos, but not thrilling as a sweetheart; she looks dry as a heroine of romance; she spoils a love-song. No wonder that the realists cannot fit their art to girlhood while their theory of life excludes sweetness and health. It is a pursuit of love within discouraging limitations when some middle-aged man, with gray in his whiskers, limps rheumatically on the track of a stout lady in her thirties, and with a picture of such a race is pessimism best represented.

But the healthy and natural girl, apple-cheeked and merry-eyed, sweet-voiced—παρθενον αδυφονον [Greek: parthenon adyphonon]—a girl of girls, is what charms mankind in life and literature. Her ways are like thistledown in a summer breeze; they suggest idyllic dreams and make us believe in all manner of delightful human happiness. We are all poets when she engages our imagination; we are all young when she loves us; we are all good in her presence,—holy-minded at thought of her.

Perhaps the surest sign of decadence in art is the appearance of the dame in the space naturally occupied by the lass; for it proves that taste is no longer an elemental impulse, but rather a matter of fashion, or of illicit influence. We do not find Madame Bovary appealing to the ever-fresh wells of our manhood. We could not be glad of having her for mother, wife, daughter, sister, or sweetheart. She poisons our imagination and repels our interest. It is a delight to turn away from her to the blushing young heroine who loves purely and with all her heart,—a girl as fresh and sound as a May strawberry.

Of all unnatural things none can seem quite so unjust as ill health falling upon a girl. Balzac, in one of his hideously interesting romances, pictures to the minutest line a poor child stricken with disease and robbed of her season of bud and bloom. I have always felt that the story was an unpardonable piece of writing. We sometimes see such pitiful and appealing objects in the street, or at some country place; but why should they be put into books written for our delectation?

Once upon a time a friend and I, upon archery intent, tramped together for a fortnight among the hills of North Carolina, in a region given over to the race of mountaineers. It was saddening to observe the lean, vacant, bloodless faces of the girls in the cabins. As a rule, however, activity of body and a certain limberness go with these desiccated-looking countenances, and now and again you find a flower of rustic loveliness wasting its sweetness and ignorance on the mountain air. An instance comes to mind. We were having luncheon at a spring under the hill, upon which an ancient cabin nestled amid its peach-trees.

Down a zig-zag path worn into the brick-yellow clay and rotten slate of the declivity came a maiden bearing on her head a cedar noggin. She stepped briskly and nimbly, not deigning to touch the noggin with her hand, but with scarcely perceptible head-movements kept it at perfect equilibrium on her crown. Barefooted, her coarse blue petticoat very scant and short, a wonderful brush of pale gold hair crinkling over her perfect shoulders, her arms half bare, a throat like a bird’s, and a face-flower full of happy lights, she made just that sudden impression of æsthetic surprise which comes with the poet’s rarest phrase and most unexpected rhyme.

It turned out that this strong young thing was as ignorant and empty as she was beautiful and healthy; but when she spoke to us her voice had the _timbre_ of a hermit thrush’s and she gave us a glimpse of teeth incomparably white and even. She was not timid, not bold, but natural. Took hold of my yew bow, which rested against a tree, and inquired about it, fingered my arrows and quiver, asked my companion whither we were going. All this time the cedar noggin on her sunny head wagged gently, but kept its place, until presently she took it off, and, with a melodious souse in the spring, filled it, replaced it aloft and walked back up the hill, hands down and absolutely sure of foot.

“Well,” said my companion, in a breathless tone, “if I didn’t think for a moment that you meant to shoot her! A regular wood nymph.”

As for myself I did not like the term wood nymph applied to a girl like that. She was as pretty, as pure, and as ignorant as a wild blue violet, and evidently as happy as a lark in a meadow. I felt the better for having seen her, and, as we trudged on, there was a new fragrance in my imagination.

The streets and suburban lanes of our little Western towns and cities offer great facilities for the study of happy girlhood, large thanks to the bicycle. During my summer walks and drives I meet whisps and flocks and bevies of lasses, or they pass me at scorching speed. They put the “bicycle-face” to shame with their rippling countenances and merry chatter. I shall never, I hope, forget one little maid of fifteen who drove her wheel as straight and steady as a flying quail, with her arms folded on her breast, and her lithe body poised inimitably. She looked at me with big round eyes, as if to say: “Do you see how I can do this?”

Indeed, my enjoyment of the frank sweetness in the air where girls are at play would be perfect were it not for the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” so often in evidence; but for him, all becurled and beruffled, I have a supreme and stony aversion. If some ruddy, ragged urchin, of the true Adamic race, would but down him and bedaub him with mud! If some girl would spank him and send him home; but the girl seems actually to like the self-conscious and unnatural little scamp. She smoothes his collar and pulls down his velvet jacket, hugs him and calls him pet names. He is the fellow who will grow up to be gun-shy, and inclined to marry a double-divorced actress, much to the girl’s disgust.

It was Madame de Staël, I believe, who said: “Let my children be not girls; for a woman’s life is so sad.” Even she, however, did not find girlhood unhappy, and the preventive to be used against the misery of womanhood would be to hold on to girlish simplicity, faith, and sanity as long as possible. We grow like what we contemplate, and the question is, do we now-a-days give adequate contemplation to the true, the beautiful, and the good, whose symbol and measure is the heart of a healthy girl? Our civilization must luxuriate in what maidenhood can safely assimilate, or it must grovel at the feet of the yellow woman, tough and _passée_.

There is encouraging evidence, visible just now, of a desire on the public’s part to get rid of Old Mrs. Woman, and take up once more with her granddaughter, the not wholly unsophisticated, but yet quite innocent and undesigning maiden. Men of the right sort have always felt that the happy married woman should be sheltered from publicity, and that the unhappy wife’s sorrows are sacred; but the love of a youth and a maid, that is something for the delight of the whole world. We are tired of this rank immorality tricked out in the toggery of love,—and the lovers married to other folk,—this rank immorality of the old blasé hero and the adroit, conscienceless and time-battered heroine.

A return to the insipid pastoral of the early centuries would be tolerable, if no better shift can be had, as breach full and wide with the feminine party of faded spinsterhood and preposterous sociology, of tirades against marriage and of the sainthood of grass widows. Let in the young girl of sound body and merry heart; give her another chance; the whole world is ready to welcome her. Her smile will banish the yellow dust of the faded asters; her presence will hush even the whisper of brutalities.

The other day I wrote to a distant friend and put to him Horace’s light question:—

“Quæ circumvolitas agilis thyma?”

Back came the answer: “I am running races with my three little girls. What is there better to do?” A man of gravity and distinction playing with his little daughters has what a politician would call a “pull” upon the gods for the highest joy of existence. From that play-ground he bears away the nectar of incomparable flowers, and the pollen on his thighs will freshen the whole hive of the world.

We may be sure that there is something wrong when we hear it growled around that young maidenhood is insipid in art, and that virility—a murrain seize the word—demands a Harriet Martineau, or the like, for a good, substantial feast of the imagination. Not assuming to know a great deal about virile women, I can venture the statement that truly virile men adore the young girl. She is the heroine of the iron-willed, vastly capable, boy-hearted fellows who make the world move. There is always a love of simple, elemental pleasures in great masculine natures. Precious little they care for artificial cheeks and pencilled eyebrows. Better a healthy, dewy-lipped milkmaid, singing behind the hedge, than a bediamonded old heiress whose teeth have ground luxuries some three dozen long years.

At all events my own preference for the blushing young heroine is unalterable, and I am eager to see her come back, garlanded and happy, to take her rightful place in both life and romance. I long to read yet one more book wherein the sound-hearted story-teller gives full run to that quintessential joy of loving which only the young girl can inspire. I am tired of bacon and potatoes; give me some of old Gervase Markham’s simples—

“The king-cup, the pansy with the violet,
The rose that loves the shower,
The wholesome gilliflower.”

The Art of Saying Nothing Well

_By_ Maurice Thompson

THE ART OF SAYING NOTHING WELL

La simplicité divine de la pensée et du style.
—PAUL VERLAINE.

IN our day, as it now flies, there are fine films of distinction to be considered, notably in literary art. The merest gossamer of verbal indication must be respected in the behalf of style, lest a shade of meaning, no matter how vague, be lost from paragraph or phrase. The thing to be said is of no importance, we are told; but how it is said, that is the great matter.

If the title of the present paper be seriously studied it will prove puzzling to the average critic. It is a charming sentence, rich in possibilities of meaning. The last two words, like the tail of a bee, bear honey and poison on the same spike, or in sacs close by. Which shall you receive, a sweet drop or an enraging prick? What, indeed, does “saying nothing” mean? And nothing well said, does that mean a well-said nothing? or shall we understand that anything has been poorly said?

Behold how easily a pen slips into hopeless obscurities of mere ink! I see that I am gone wool-gathering, and that my verbal distinctions just attempted do not distinguish. Was it Horace who said this?—

“Non in caro nidore voluptas summa, sed in te ipso est.”

The “precious smack,” however, goes a long ways when there is nothing else to be had. The art of saying nothing well is the art of the bore or the art of the decadent, as you may interpret it. But a voice at my elbow quietly suggests that the distinction is still without a difference. The decadent, being always a bore, whether he has a precious smack or a smack of preciousness, has the art of saying nothing well and everything ill.

The good old days, when men who wrote were impressed with the value of original thought, were hard on brains, but easy on dictionaries. A tremendous idea was set for all time in a few words grabbed at random from a scant vocabulary. Even after “art for art’s sake” had come to stay, the great early poets were stingy in their verbal dealings with art. It is surprising to note how meagre is the vocabulary of Sappho, or of Theocritus, or of Pindar. And yet what incomparable riches of expression! The masters were in a flux of imagination, and to them a word had no value beyond its fitness to stand as a perfect sign of what the brain originated. But not so with us; we chase the word for the word’s sake. We imagine that there is something precious in verbal style quite independent of what it may be used upon. A cheese, although rotten, is made sweet enough, we think, by being wrapped in an artistic poster.

We are quite familiar with the phrase “good literature,” which has come to mean nothing and that wordy, or a good thing and that well written, according to the individual taste of the critic deciding the matter. But most generally we now take for granted that there is really nothing worth saying on account of its intrinsic value. As a new woman said of her kind the other day, “Oh, the female form is but a clothes-horse nowadays. A woman is suggested, not seen, by what she wears,” we may well say of thought: it is a mere word-rack, a peg upon which to hang attractive diction. Not unfrequently the thought is quite dispensed with and the phrasing hangs upon nothing.

If you have nothing to write, of course write it well. Good literature, like Homer’s and Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, was well enough before Théophile Gautier invented style; but since then there has come a change, and now we demand, not new matter, but always a new manner. As for durability, we are satisfied with a season’s run; permanency is not desirable. Fame, which once was a thing to die for, has taken on the form of a spring jacket or summer cravat; you wear it till the next change in the weather. The art of saying nothing well is as fickle as the moon; for nothing and woman pride themselves upon varying their fashions; and what is good literature now but woman and nothing? Aminta and her George Meredith strut before us as if they owned the earth; but to-morrow there will be another woman and a new nothing.

The happiest literary folk in all the world must be those in Paris, who actually took Paul Verlaine seriously, and are now making obeisance to Stéphane Mallarmé. They seem to be, if we leave out certain provençal dialect writers and our own American critics, the only _litterateurs_ upon earth who would heroically die rather than be right. M. Mallarmé expresses perfectly in a single phrase the whole ambition of his literary flock: “d’abord et toujours et irrésistiblement Verlaine.” But how charming a thing literature is in the hands of these _poêtes maudits_, as Verlaine styled them! To be sure, it is naught but nothing well said. Verlaine may have been right when he wrote his eulogy: “Absolus par l’imagination, absolus par l’expression, absolus comme les Reys Netos des meilleurs siècles;” there is much to be said about nothing, and more about such writers as Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, who have served to amuse a blasé crowd of the best fellows that ever lived, the Alexandrian Greek poets doubtfully excepted.

What Sir Walter Scott called “the big bow-wow” is not suited to the perfect expression of nothing. Browning’s diction gets on better at a pinch, when the poet has to resort to a dazzling display of blank verbal cartridges; for sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish a meaningless whiff of word-wind from a whizzing bullet of thought. We dodge with delight when either clips too near us. The other day I was auditing the book-bills of “Narcissus,” and found myself delicately and deliciously charmed by what under different circumstances would have been a mere lack of assets to back the paper. Style never went further nor came back with a more fragrant and savory load of nothing. From paragraph to paragraph one glides over a meandering smoothness. It is like bicycling on imaginary asphalt between immaterial clover fields. One hears bumblebees and sheep and kine; but never is there any visible or tangible matter of delectation: only a lulling composite noise; _vox et præterea nihil_. This voice of the hollow sphere and this dripping of melodious word-showers, to change the figures, combine to high perfection in the latest good literature. Think of what a fascination a style can have, when a young girl fresh from Vassar flings down a volume by William Sharp, or one by I. Zangwill, and rapturously exclaims: “Shakespeare and Scott are not in it for a minute longer!” How delightful to do good that evil may come!

It would be hardly fair to wring into this paper a consideration of the art of writing nothing ill. Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane have given practical demonstrations of what may be done at a venture in that field. Here again my own style persists in obscurity. Nothing to write and the poorest imaginable style, is not exactly the same with plenty to write and not a sentence ill written. The art of writing nothing and writing it ill might, however, be admirable in the hands of a master. For example, there is Andrew Lang’s eulogy of H. Rider Haggard’s stories, which I might cite in any part of this essay with perfect propriety and unqualified approval, as being strictly in point. When Mr. Lang has absolutely nothing for subject he is alluringly objective and revels in good literature. He is singularly expert in writing nothing ill.

But the art of writing nothing well, of writing so that nothing is well said, or whatever I mean, offers difficulties not readily foreseen by the ambitious candidate for authorhood. Nothing must ever be dressed up to look like a great something with an honorable ancestry and a congenital lease upon posterity, unless we accept the other interpretation of my caption. What could, on the other hand, be reasonably described as the bloomer-costume style of writing, by which effeminate imaginings are made to masquerade as virile and of the major origin, demands serious and exhaustive study. To achieve it William Watson has, we hope, a long life of self-reform before him; but some are born to it. Austin Dobson would not, apparently, give a penny to have it, albeit some of his best work neatly grazes the goal. Happy accident has done much on this score for Henry James, reading whose latest work one might exclaim with Mr. Sherburne Hardy: “But yet a woman!” And Mr. Howells should never go near a Shaker village if he has any regard for what old friends think of his style. It makes him say nothing with unusual delight.

When I get back to my Greek, as I usually do at the earliest moment, an essay like Aristotle’s on poetry makes me wonder how it has lived so long and kept so well, seeing that it says something without regard, at any point, to “lightness of touch” or to preciousness of phrasing. It is not good literature, measured by the standard of Robert Louis Stevenson’s style; but in its gnarls of diction are thoughts hard bound with fibres that are indestructible. Aristotle was too busy inside of his brain to have much respect for exterior frills; but where shall we find solider phrases than he snatched out of his stinted vocabulary? It is tough reading, almost as bad as Browning’s best, and the words grate together like teeth with sand between them; still, something is said. You remember his turns of diction by associating them with his thoughts; but you never dream of regarding him as a writer with a style-charm. His fascination comes from deep down, as if sent up by roots squeezed between bowlders.

And it is true that a permanent fascination of style is always due to something more than nothing well said. The attempt has been made in American criticism to stow a poem like Poe’s “Raven” away in the lumber garret as a mere word-trick; but there is something tremendously human in the spiritual adumbration by which that great poem sustains itself. Style is there, superb style; and the clutch of grim sorrow, the pang of despair, and the helplessness of a soul in the presence of fate, are there as well. Poe could not command Stevenson’s nimble diction, nor could he even understand what humor like Lowell’s was. The power in his work came from behind his lines out of a wellspring hidden in a strange and original mind. He “played with dictionaries” and feigned abstruse learning; but he said new and impressive things in a new and impressive style.

The deepest truth connected with the permanency of art is that there must be style, which does not stand for the same thing as diction, nor for the same thing as characteristic stroke, manner, or tone. Mere deftness with the brush, mere cleverness with the fiddle-bow, mere facility in the doing of word-jugglery, cannot pass into permanent art, and this is the lesson we need to-day. We take verbal style too seriously when we reckon with it as of more importance than fresh thought and enlarged ideals. It is not the art of saying nothing well that wins in the long run; it is the art of saying a great thing with a simple charm of style which does most to enrich literature. Indeed, great things are themselves simple, the greatest the simplest. Nothing is well said when nothing is said.

THE END

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October, 1896. _Established May, 1896._ Number 1.

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_To be had of all Booksellers, or will be sent postpaid on receipt of price by the Publishers._

HENRY JAMES.

=WHAT MAISIE KNEW;= a novelette. 16mo. $1.25.

The announcement of a new book by Mr. James is in itself an event of no slight literary importance. The present volume represents his latest work and is worthy the attention of all persons interested in English and American letters.

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE.

=PROSE FANCIES;= second series, by the author of “The
Book-bills of Narcissus,” etc., with a cover designed
by Frank Hazenplug. 16mo. $1.25.

“In these days of Beardsley pictures and decadent
novels, it is good to find a book as sweet, as pure, as
delicate as Mr. Le Gallienne’s.”—NEW ORLEANS PICAYUNE.

“PROSE FANCIES ought to be in everyone’s summer
library, for it is just the kind of a book one loves
to take to some secluded spot to read and dream
over.”—KANSAS CITY TIMES.

“There are witty bits of sayings by the score, and
sometimes whole paragraphs of nothing but wit.
Somewhere there is a little skit about ‘Scotland,
the country that takes its name from the whisky made
there,’ and the transposed proverb like: ‘It is an
ill wind for the shorn lamb,’ and ‘Many rise on
the stepping stones of their dead relations,’ are
brilliant. ‘Most of us would never be heard of were it
not for our enemies,’ is a capital epigram.”—CHICAGO
TIMES-HERALD.

“Mr. Le Gallienne is first of all a poet, and these
little essays, which savor somewhat of Lamb, of
Montaigne, of Lang, and of Birrell, are larded with
verse of exquisite grace. He rarely ventures into the
grotesque, but his fancy follows fair paths; a certain
quaintness of expression and the idyllic atmosphere
of the book charm one at the beginning and carry one
through the nineteen ‘fancies’ that comprise the
volume.”—CHICAGO RECORD.

MARIA LOUISE POOL.

=IN BUNCOMBE COUNTY.= 16mo. $1.25.

A volume of connected sketches of country life in the South. It is on the order of Miss Pool’s recent book entitled “In a Dike Shanty” which received such favorable comment. It is not sensational; it is not exciting; it is merely peaceful and pleasing, with a quiet current of delightful humor running all through.

MARTIN J. PRITCHARD.

=WITHOUT SIN;= a novel. 12mo. $1.25. Second edition.

The NEW YORK JOURNAL gave a half-page review of the book and proclaimed it “the most startling novel yet.”

“Abounds in situations of thrilling interest. A unique
and daring book.”—REVIEW OF REVIEWS (London).

“One is hardly likely to go far wrong in predicting
that WITHOUT SIN will attract abundant notice. Too
much can scarcely be said in praise of Mr. Pritchard’s
treatment of his subject.”—ACADEMY (London).

“The very ingenious way in which improbable incidents
are made to appear natural, the ingenious manner in
which the story is sustained to the end, the undoubted
fascination of the writing, and the convincing charm
of the principal characters, are just what make
this novel so deeply dangerous while so intensely
interesting.”—THE WORLD (London).

=CHAP-BOOK STORIES;= a volume of Reprints from the
Chap-Book, by OCTAVE THANET, GRACE ELLERY CHANNING,
MARIA LOUISE POOL, AND OTHERS. 16mo. $1.25.

The authors of this volume are all American. Beside the well-known names, there are some which were seen in the Chap-Book for the first time. The volume is bound in an entirely new and startling fashion.

=CHAP-BOOK ESSAYS=, by T. W. HIGGINSON, LOUISE CHANDLER
MOULTON, H. H. BOYESEN, H. W. MABIE, AND OTHERS. 16mo.
$1.25.

Essays, by the most distinguished living writers, which it has been judged worth preserving in more permanent form than the issues of the Chap-Book could give.

ALBERT KINROSS.

=THE FEARSOME ISLAND;= being a Modern rendering of
the narrative of one Silas Fordred, Master Mariner
of Hythe, whose shipwreck and subsequent adventures
are herein set forth. Also an appendix accounting in
a rational manner for the seeming marvels that Silas
Fordred encountered during his sojourn on the fearsome
island of Don Diego Rodriguez. With a cover designed by
Frank Hazenplug. 16mo. $1.25.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO.

=EPISCOPO AND COMPANY.= Translated by Myrta Leonora
Jones. 16mo. $1.25.

Gabriele d’Annunzio is the best known and most gifted of modern Italian novelists. His work is making a great sensation at present in all literary circles. The translation now offered gives the first opportunity English-speaking readers have had to know him in their own language.

ARTHUR MORRISON.

=A CHILD OF THE JAGO;= a novel of the East End of London,
by the author of “Tales of Mean Streets.” 12mo. $1.50.

Mr. Morrison is recognized the world over as the most capable man at slum life stories. His “Tales of Mean Streets” was one of the best received books of 1894-95, and the present volume has occupied his time ever since. It is of great force and continuous interest; a book that, once begun, must be finished, and one that will figure as a sensation for a long time to come.

JULIA MAGRUDER.

=MISS AYR OF VIRGINIA AND OTHER STORIES.= 16mo. $1.25.

Critics have always united in saying of Miss Magruder’s work that it was interesting. In addition to this her new volume is noticeable for its grace and beauty, real sentiment where it is needed, and strength as well. It will be welcomed by the many who enjoyed “The Princess Sonia” and “The Violet.”

HENRY M. BLOSSOM, JR.

=CHECKERS;= a Hard-Luck Story, by the author of “The
Documents in Evidence.” 16mo. $1.25. Third edition.

“Abounds in the most racy and picturesque slang.”—N. Y.
RECORDER.

“CHECKERS is an interesting and entertaining chap, a
distinct type, with a separate tongue and a way of
saying things that is oddly humorous.”—CHICAGO RECORD.

“If I had to ride from New York to Chicago on a slow
train, I should like half a dozen books as gladsome
as CHECKERS, and I could laugh at the trip.”—N. Y.
COMMERCIAL ADVERTISER.

ALICE MORSE EARLE.

=CURIOUS PUNISHMENTS OF BYGONE DAYS;= by the author
of “Sabbath in Puritan New England,” etc., with many
quaint pictures by Frank Hazenplug. 12mo. $1.50.

Mrs. Earle dedicates her book, in the language of an old-time writer, to “All curious and ingenious gentlemen and gentlewomen who can gain from acts of the past a delight in the present days of virtue, wisdom and the humanities.”

H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR.

=THE LAND OF THE CASTANET;= Spanish Sketches, by the
author of “Two Women and a Fool,” with twenty-five
full-page illustrations. 16mo. $1.25.

A collection of rambling sketches of Spanish people and places. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor has written frankly and entertainingly of the most striking features of “The Land of the Castanet.” The volume does not pretend to be exhaustive; in no sense is it a guide book—it is intended rather for the person who does not expect to visit Spain than for the traveller.