Chapter VI: Part 6

Perhaps all this was part of what my friend meant by lack of breeding in the traditional sense: the social _laissez-aller_ in extraordinary (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) combination with moral purity. But I suspect that she referred, as well, to another aspect of Miss Alcott’s environment: to the unmistakable lack of the greater and lesser amenities of life. The plain living is quite as prominent as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the March girls’ lives is a very commonplace fabric. You know that their furniture was bad--and that they did not know it; that their æsthetic sense was untrained and crude--and that they did not care; that the simplicity of their meals, their household service, their dress, their every day manners (in spite of the myth about Amy) was simplicity of the common, not of the intelligent, kind. You really would not want to spend a week in the house of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity in any wise the quality of austerity. Remember the pies that the older March girls carried for muffs (the management whereof was one of the ever unsolved riddles of my childhood).

No: in so far as breeding is a matter of externals, one must admit that there is some sense in calling Miss Alcott’s people underbred. Perhaps we do not choose to call breeding a matter of externals. In that, we should perfectly agree with Miss Alcott’s people themselves; and to that we shall presently come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss Alcott’s work is a genuine document.

I have spoken of the unimpeachable morality of Miss Alcott’s world. Charlie lost Rose for having drunk one glass of champagne too much. That is the worst sin committed in any of the books, so far as I remember. Of course, the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but he had killed his man inevitably, almost helplessly, in self-defence; and besides, the treatment of Dan is purely snobbish, from start to finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, is acutely conscious of the social difference between him and her own kin. The moment he lifts his eyes to Bess--! No: the books are quite snobbish enough, in their way. Nat, foundling and fiddler, is permitted to marry Daisy in the end (though, really, anybody might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though a _parvenu_, is a milk-sop, and is quite able to say that he has never done anything really disgraceful. The fact is that their social distinctions, while they operate socially, are yet all moral in origin. And this is a very “special” note: the bequest, it may well be, of Calvin.

We’re the elect, and you’ll be damned;
Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed
With God’s own reprobates.

The transcendental Mr. March would never have sung it; but he and his knew something akin to those resolute discriminations.

Another point is perhaps even more interesting. There are not, I believe, any other books in the world so blatantly full of morality--of moral issues, and moral tests, and morals passionately abided by--and at the same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted; almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know, in _Little Women_, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna provided for Amy by Aunt March’s Catholic maid. And even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy the quasi-oratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott’s day, people were reading, without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of “escaped” nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright--and that Elsie Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these are documents.

There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modern child ever quite recovers from the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott’s time, German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of reform, too, is hot upon the pages. “Temperance”--remember Charlie’s unlucky glass of champagne, and Laurie’s promise to Meg on her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of lemonade. “Woman Suffrage”--recall the discussions alluded to in “The Pickwick Portfolio,” and the fate of the few scoffers in co-educational Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists; and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more prehistoric than historic.

In the minds of Miss Alcott’s world, there is still a lively distrust of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott’s characters look a little askance at all foreigners--except German professors. There is no prophecy of the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house than go into business, like “Stuffy” and his kind. “I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord”--it would hardly over-emphasize Demi’s so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter desirability of the publisher’s own office, where, as he says, great men go in and out, with respect. And--to complete the evidence--the books do not lack the note of New English austerity, though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or, if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public passion--for philanthropy, for education, and what-not--in the books, after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim with sentiment. Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so empty of emotion.

Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander--a New Englander of the villages, I mean--will admit that the New English are singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after _Little Women_, to any one of Mrs. Ewing’s or Mrs. Molesworth’s stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth’s heroines all were, by Walter Crane! The real “old-fashioned girl” was not Polly Milton, but Griselda, in _The Cuckoo Clock_. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot--as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages is familiar, too, with the passion for “education”; a passion that, I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering with the term “idiomatic.” One or two of Mr. Churchill’s novels have preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family, that a book--“any old” book--is sacred. We scoff heartily at the _parvenu_ whose books are bound without first being printed; but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems to us quite so good.

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for discriminating against some of the playmates their children would ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without indirection, “I do not wish you to play with the butcher’s little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school class makes no difference whatever.” But the real New England mother never does. She must manage it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations would be some sort of proof that butchers’ little girls were apt to be naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott’s books were brought up like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father for religion’s sake. Of course we all had to read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss Alcott’s world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it!

I have not done more than indicate Miss Alcott’s exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if, even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott’s people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for map-makers. These be our own villages.

THE SENSUAL EAR

I have a friend who always calls--when he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes forgets--the Methodist Church building in our village, a “conventicle.” I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome “conventicle,” just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an idea--it is almost a fear--that _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_, is by this time _Gospel Hymns, No. 10_, and that some of the most haunting melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the “Endeavorers” are now chanting _Hymns Ancient and Modern_. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!

When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies has indulged in a new “democratic” vagary; when flour has gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis--then my husband (he, too, of yore an “Endeavorer”) and I are wont to burst, simultaneously, mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are _Gospel Hymns_. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say hardily, “Let’s.” Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing getting a free “revival.” Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning, so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along with the words.

They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They wallow in beat and accent. “A _Shelter_ in the _Time_ of _Storm_.” We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh, how I wish that either of us could remember more than one “verse” of

Well, wife, I’ve found the model church,
And worshipped there to-day;
It made me think of good old times
Before my hair was gray.

I have never heard it sung--I never “belonged” to the Y. P. S. C. E.--but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he has heard “the trundle-bed one.” I do not believe it, though he is a truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page,--

Poking (perhaps it was another verb) ’mid the dust and rafters
There I found my trundle-bed.

A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever _sung_; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in “To the Work, to the Work,” or “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.”

(Mercy-drops round us are _fall_-ing,
But for the _showers_ we plead.)

He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against “God Be with You Till We Meet Again”--perhaps because they always sang it for the last one. But I can usually get him to “oblige” with a solo--“Throw Out the Life-Line”--which I am sure was not in “No. 5,” because we never, never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one “the people of Montreal seemed to like best.” Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke Street, apparently. Well: I am like the people of Montreal. It always “gets” me, in the dissenting marrow of my dissenting soul; and when my husband has “obliged” me with it, I am ready to forget the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies. What _can_ the devil do in the face of “Throw Out the Life-Line,” and its “linked sweetness long drawn out”?

By all of which it is made evident that, in the matter of hymns, mine is the “sensual ear.” (Not so my husband’s: he sings them in the critical spirit, as he might illustrate a violation of rhetoric. He loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line,” even while the chorus makes his voice appeal and yearn in spite of him. As I said, he does it only to oblige.) The church of my choosing, if not of my profession, is the same as that of my friend who talks of “conventicles.” There I sing _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ (or that American corruption thereof, the _Hymnal_) with the most conforming. And certainly, except for a few time-honored chants which they share with all Dissenters, their hymns are to me “ditties of no tone.” My husband disagrees with me; but he is not, equally with me, the predestined prey of the brass band. He is better educated than I; has listened oftener at twilight to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the non-committal melodies of the _Hymnal_ far, far better than the sentimental _parti pris_ of _Gospel Hymns_.

I know as well as he does that the sentimental quality is of a sort that ought not to be there at all. I know that the music of “Throw Out the Life-Line” belongs morally with the music of “Old Black Joe,” and “Oh, Promise Me,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night.” I know that the appeal of that tune is sensuous and emotional and personal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize that, for church, Gregorian is the only wear; and that the less you diverge therefrom, the more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and Palestrina, and, for congregational singing, the oldest Latin hymns you can get. I can even see that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican “hymn-tunes” are more dignified, and more to the purpose, than the plangent and catchy refrains by which Sankey lured “wandering boys” back to be safe-folded with “the ninety and nine.” And yet, when my husband (by request) croons “Throw Out the Life-Line,” I cannot resist. I am evangelized.

True, I perceived this perniciousness early. Perhaps the white light dawned on me when, in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who was in love) confided to me that the words of a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to her not altogether reverent: they could so easily be applied to a human love-affair. She was quite right, I think. Some of us have felt the same about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though the words were, in all conscience, carnal enough, I believe it was the tune that did the trick and set her dreaming of her young hero.

For I am his, and he is mine,
Forever and forever.

Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and honeyed and melancholy as “My Old Kentucky Home” or “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River”! Musically, doubtless, not so good; but musically of the same school, and suggestive--it, too--of plantations and moonlight and banjos and rich, heart-rending negro voices. My friend was right: they are not in the best tradition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey hymns. And yet--here’s the rub--why do we remember them, when all but the most universal of the hymns we sang in church and sang much oftener than these, have gone beyond recapturing? My husband resents remembering them; he would far rather remember more worthy things. But I do not: I would not, for anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which is my mind. I am not sure I would not rather lose certain stanzas from the Greek Anthology, which come to my lips in much the same unvolitional fashion. From those refrains I reconstruct a whole moral and social world, even as Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You remember what the “Evening Hymn” did for Mottram and Lowndes in “The End of the Passage”? Just that “I Know that My Redeemer Lives” does for me. And--this is the point--“Rock of Ages” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” do not do it; though I knew these even earlier, and am still, on occasion, singing them. So it is not all a question of association and the power of youthful memories. It is the very quality of the music--the words were negligible, when they were not atrocious--that touched in me, and can still touch, something popular, emotional, vulgar; something very low-brow and democratic, not to say mobbish. “The sensual ear.”

Even in youth, I had the sense to differentiate. “Jerusalem the Golden,” discovered in another hymn-book than our own, was for many years my favorite hymn--even during those years when I was singing “Beulah Land” and “Wonderful Words of Life.” I knew it was better; I knew I liked it better; I knew that it had more to do with religion than all the “Beulah Lands” ever written. True, the words helped; and the words of the Gospel Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my soul recognized the validity, the reality of the music. “Jerusalem the Golden” remained my favorite until “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” succeeded it in my affections; always to be, until I die, my very favorite. And even while we sang--

And view the shining glory shore,
My heaven, my home, for evermore.

I had memories of something still better than “Jerusalem the Golden”: memories of an interval in a French convent where we chanted the Magnificat to its proper plain-song; Though, even there--but I shall come to that later.

Not long ago, we had a friend staying with us who was bred a Romanist. How Moody and Sankey got mentioned, I do not know--but they did; and our friend insisted that Moody and Sankey could not conceivably be so bad as the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; she reaffirmed. There was nothing for it but to put the burning question to the proof. Quietly, by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang our Gospel Hymns; and she--well, she sang dreadful things. There was in particular a hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities.... No, I think her “exhibit” was really worse than ours. It had the rag-time flatness without the rag-time catchiness, or the crooning negro quality. Bred up in part on such modern by-products of the Holy Catholic Church, no wonder that she succumbed utterly to my husband’s rendition of “Throw Out the Life-Line.” “I think it’s lovely,” she said; siding with me, to his great chagrin. How I wished that our friend of the “conventicles” were there to decide between us--he who in his youth was forbidden to accompany his friends to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have been forbidden to go to dime-museums. But he has no ear--“sensual” or other. Perhaps he could not have helped.

Our Catholic friend’s exhibit gave me pause. I knew that in France they sing, nowadays, hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so many years ago, in a beautiful French cathedral which I was by way of frequenting, I heard the children of some sodality or con-fraternity pouring forth as poor a piece of holy rag-time as any conventicle has ever echoed. It jerked me back into the past, violently, as Hassan’s carpet must have jerked its fortunate owner through space.

Vierge, notre espérance,
Étends sur nous ton bras.
Sauve, sauve la France,
Ne l’abandonne pas,
Ne l’abandonne pas.

So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, in happier days, each with a veil and a candle, winding in and out among the green alleys of the convent park. But the young Tourangeaux went on to sing worse things: songs less catholic, more evangelical, with words more bitter and tones more shrill. I escaped, to return only at the hour of Benediction, when I knew that the “O Salutaris Hostia” and “Tantum Ergo” would mount again with the incense towards the rich mediæval windows.

I fear it is true, as our Catholic friend said, that the Church has fallen musically, as it has done architecturally, on evil days. Well: these shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent for our Moody and Sankey. Even in conventicles, we have more dignified hymn-books for use in “church” as opposed to Sunday-school or Y. P. S. C. E., and the like. And as our Primary Department (of the Sunday-school) was handed over to the works of Fanny Crosby (did she write

Roses in bloom,
Filling the room.
With perfume rich and rare.

I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), so the young Catholics in both France and America are handed over to the musical divagations of ill-educated priests. It is a pity; for they have a tradition that cannot be bettered. _My_ ancestors sang lustily out of the old _Bay Psalm Book_:

Ye monsters of the mighty deep,
Your Maker’s praises spout;
Up from the sands ye codlings peep.
And wag your tails about.

But, at the same period, _their_ ancestors were singing the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages in undegenerate solemnity. It is natural enough, perhaps, that I should have emerged on “There’s a Light in the Valley for Me”; but why should they have emerged on “Souvenez-vous, Jésus,” and the Mariolatrous wailing of “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late”? Take as fine a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have inherited--“O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Its tune is, to my thinking, bad: difficult to sing and monotonous to hear. But in the very church that these poor French infants are innocently desecrating, a few hours, more or less, see a whole congregation chanting, with passionless and awful reverence,

Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nec in æternum irascaris nobis.

Whoever has heard that welling slowly from crowded choir, nave, and transept, the coifed peasant and the trained _séminariste_ singing in unison (no staginess of part-singing there!), and has joined his voice to the multitudinous supplication, will not cease to regret that modern vulgarity is as Catholic as it is Protestant.

It was the most delightful of Huysmans’s perversities to contend, in all seriousness, that the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt of his own near Lourdes by the advent in that spot of the Blessed Virgin, took his sullen revenge on the æsthetic sense of her priests. He could no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths there; but he could and did bewitch the clergy into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their taste went wrong with everything they touched in Lourdes; and while Satan could not prevent the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he could still bring it about that the faithful should be healed amid the most hideous architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans would have credited the modern Catholic music unhesitatingly to the devil.

But certainly Moody and Sankey were not clerics of Lourdes. Nor could the Presbyterians who first sang the rhymed version of the Twenty-Third Psalm to the air of “So bin ich vergessen, vergessen bin ich” be suspected of any part in the Devil’s private feuds with the Virgin. Indeed, the particular Presbyterians whom I have heard sing it thus had not, I fancy, much more reverence for the one than for the other.

I do not think that we can account for _Gospel Hymns No. 5_ by the Huysmans formula. Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities, is, I believe, mere modern pandering to the uncultured majority: revivalism in essence, like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army and Billy Sunday. But at least the Catholics have this advantage: that though they too have indulged in operatic music and have even sunk to “Vierge, notre espérance,” they still hear from their choirs the ancient music and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities and confraternities when you hear once more the familiar “Tantum Ergo” (I do not mean the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in Paris, and elsewhere); the new vulgarity is forgotten, as many vulgarities have been touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her time.

I used to think that the worst of our bad Protestant hymns was their ignoring of the human intelligence.

Many giants great and tall,
Stalking through the land,
Headlong to the earth would fall
If met by Daniel’s Band.

(My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) But even that, while it could have a religious meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal intelligence, is not a deliberate and explicit defiance of the intellect of man.

Verbum caro, panem verum
Verbo camera efficit:
Fitque sanguis Christi merum;
Et si sensus deficit,
Ad firmandum cor sincerum
Sola fides sufficit.

Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui,
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Præstet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, thus to state, in one supreme utterance, the whole case against the Higher Criticism.

No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn counts so much. The mediæval “Ave Maris Stella” has not much more to recommend it, philosophically speaking, than the hymn with the “Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late” refrain. A poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry or bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” is a silly poem, and “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” is a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote both. But the permanent superiority of the latter is in the music to which it is set. One Presbyterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the Psalms--rather unfortunately metricized, to be sure--and their church singing is the dreariest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated high. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” gets its appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not from the author. I do not believe that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” would have been the favorite hymn of the late President McKinley were it not for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs only a little quickening to be an excellent waltz, with all the emotional appeal of good waltz music.

On the whole, _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ are far better, from the point of view of poetry, than _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_--but they have not converted half so many people. The elect, the high-brows, may say what they like: if you are doing your evangelizing on the grand scale, the “sensual ear” must be pleased. I do not believe that the music I have referred to, of the “Tantum Ergo” or the “Parce, Domine,” would ever convert the crowd in a tent or a tabernacle--even if D. L. Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to it. But if you let a grammar-school pupil hack words out of the New Testament and set them to the tune of “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground”--well, it would be strange if some one were not converted. You may be very sure that the Roman Catholic Church has not taken to vulgar and catchy hymns without a set purpose of winning souls.

At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light
And the burden of my sin rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.

The last line might almost have been lifted bodily from one of Stephen Foster’s negro-melodies. It has the very lilt of

My old Kentucky home far away.

And it is only one of many in _Gospel Hymns, No. 5_. That is why my husband remembers them, in spite of himself. He may contemn them, but he cannot forget. There is hardly one of them that would not consort happily with the right kind of brass band. They connote crowds and the “emotion of multitude.” So, to me, does the “Parce, Domine” connote crowds--but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, and in no mood for stimulation by a cornet accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference. The success of almost any Gospel Hymn depends on an emotional appeal very like that of Kipling’s banjo:

And the tunes that mean so much to you alone--
Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan--
I can rip your very heartstrings out with those.

Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti and good Gregorian do to you--well, it is not that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn gets you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. There is the revivalistic essence in all of them. And when the Catholics wish to be revivalistic, they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant “hymn-tune.”

Most of my friends are so truly high-brow that they cannot be “got” in the banjo way. They do not like cornet solos; and brass bands playing negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. They honestly prefer the Kniesel Quartet or a Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite æstheticism rejects these low appeals. Did I not say that my husband loathes “Throw Out the Life-Line” even while he is reducing me to an emotional crumple? I refuse to admit that I am incapable of that same arid and exquisite æstheticism; but the lower appeal reaches me too. I do weep, over the brass bands. I do choke over the flag appropriately carried. I do fall in love (if I am careful to shut my eyes) with a good tenor voice. And while there are, luckily, a great many people like my husband, there must be millions more like me. He remembers the Gospel Hymns; but I like them.

Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then I fancy the hymns of the tabernacle are less good than they used to be. I do not know the tune of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Though my six-year-old son has learned it from the cook, I do not believe he has the tune right. He cannot have it right: if it were right, there would be no sawdust trail. Nor do I know the music of “The Brewer’s Big Horses Cannot Roll Over Me.” But I have a suspicion that Billy Sunday’s hymns are nothing like so good as Moody and Sankey. The dance music of the day always has its effect on popular airs of every kind, even religious. I venture to say (_pace_ the shade of Lord Byron) that the waltz, throughout the nineteenth century, had a strong religious influence. Every one knows that good waltz music, if played slowly enough, is the saddest thing in the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz music well played is blood-brother to the emotion aroused by “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” and “For You I Am Praying, I’m Praying for You.” Waltzes and Gospel Hymns reinforce each other--which is probably why the unco’ guid object to dancing. But with all due allowances for mob-emotion and the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopation serves the Lord. People’s eyes do not grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does nothing to bring forth that melting sense of universal love which the old popular music did. All waltz music was in essence melancholy; and all sentimental melancholies meet together somewhere in the recesses of the vulgar heart. Yes: when popular composers were writing good waltzes, it was easier for the Sankeys and Blisses to write good hymns. The Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with the young people who were singing “Marguerite,” than it has now with the young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball.” I have a notion that the young people who are singing “At the Garbage Gentlemen’s Ball” do not go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at all. Well, you see, those who sang “Marguerite” did.

Those who know say that we are growing more vulgar all the time. Perhaps the difference between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday is a good index of that degeneration. Certainly the silly young things who wept while they sang “God Be with You Till We Meet Again” would not have pretended to call Christ up on the telephone--or have permitted any one else to do it in their presence. But, thank Heaven, the conventicles are like to outlast the tabernacle.

At all events, I am sure of one thing: that my husband will not be persuaded, twenty years hence, to “oblige” with “The Brewer’s Big Horses.” But I hope he will continue at intervals to oblige with “Throw Out the Life-Line.” For, so long as he does, I shall continue to be evangelized.

BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD.

I was reading a novel, the other day; had got about half-way through it. The novel in question was by one of the younger English authors. It was very odd, I thought to myself as I perused it, that I should not (for I read a great deal of fiction) have read before anything by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had always meant to, but his work had, for some reason or other, not come my way. And I was glad I was reading it. I ought to have done D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told me he was “different.” He was not so different as all that; still, there was something fresh about him. Perhaps one could differentiate within that group, though I had long since despaired of doing so. I would certainly get something else of D. H. Lawrence’s. At that point I decided to go to bed, and shut the book up smartly. The cover revealed to me that the author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever thought it was D. H. Lawrence, I do not know. Some false association of ideas at the moment of borrowing it, probably.

The joke is on me, as the younger generation would say. And yet, there is something to be said on my side. The fact is that I had not expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit different from Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and W. L. George. I found, I thought, a little difference: not much, but enough to give one hope. To be sure, the hope would have ebbed, in any case, before the book was finished. My only gain was the knowledge that Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob Stahl. I have yet to experience D. H. Lawrence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish between one author and another, you are satisfied with so tiny a difference in style as appears between two works by the same man, it means that differences in style within that particular group are not very startling. One would never have read half of _Tess_ and taken it for the work of Henry James; or half of _Nostromo_ and taken that for the work of Meredith. One would have been brought up standing at the first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. Lawrence is going to be to me, some day, a revelation of individuality. But the reviews do not give one much hope of that.

Now, there are three authors in England who stand a little away from this larger group, though they are not precisely contemporaries of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy have some individuality of style. A chapter of Mr. Wells is “different.” A chapter of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is different. Or let me put it in this way. You would not get through half of any one of Mr. Wells’s later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosophical reflection on the scheme of things. You would not read so far in any book by Mr. Arnold Bennett without meeting and recognizing his peculiar kind of humor: semi-grin, semi-farcical. And I am sure that you would not get through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy novel without hearing a bird calling to its mate--not if there were a human love-affair going on. I do not think you could comfortably sit down with any one of them for half an evening and think that you were reading D. H. Lawrence. You would know whom you were reading.

These three gentlemen have, of course, been writing longer than the aforesaid younger group. They are, one might say, the elder brothers of the brood. If any one of them has served as model to the younger fry, it is Mr. Wells. None of the younger fry has ever approached the technical excellence of _Kipps_; but, on the other hand, almost any one of them could have written _Ann Veronica_. Mr. Wells has certainly led them all astray in his time. But there is another equally important thing to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later phases, he stands quite apart from them all. _The Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ are perfectly individual: they are not, and never could have been, the product of a syndicate. Time was when Wells and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each other, _Tono-Bungay_ is Bennett-ish in spots; and _Bealby_ is, superficially, almost straight Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe, has always been interested in the social scheme. The most important thing in _Tono-Bungay_ is Bladesover and Bladesover’s moral effect; and even in the ridiculous _Bealby_ there is more than an echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells is interested in moral values. Sometimes he has had very queer notions about them; but his reward for having been perpetually pre-occupied with them is to have won through to _The Research Magnificent_ and _Mr. Britling_. You may not agree with the hero of either book; but at least he is a person for whom you have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, even if it is not the moral reaction you would have preferred. He is a serious person, envisaging his relations to the world in a serious temper.

One does not see Mr. Bennett’s characters thus envisaging the world; not, at all events, since _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And even in _The Old Wives’ Tale_ you feel rather the deterministic net in which the characters are caught, than any personal decisions of their own. The moral of the book is that heredity is more powerful than environment, if these two come to grips. In the later books, when they are not, like _Denry the Audacious_ and _Buried Alive_, delicious bits of fooling, you get men and women of a monstrous egotism, of whom it cannot be discerned that either heredity or environment explicitly controls them against their will. An acute critic, who has incidentally had his own say about Wells and Bennett, told me the other day that he thought Bennett’s people had “character.” I should have said rather that they were “characters,” in the colloquial sense. They have self-assertiveness; like Aunty Hamps, they may subjugate their world. But “character”? No: that is a finer, more complicated possession. They want things, sometimes good things and sometimes bad; but they are (especially the women) blond beasts as to their methods. If there is, on the whole, a less decent creature in modern fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic one than Audrey Moze, I have still to encounter her. They invoke their gods

By the hunger of change and emotion,
By the thirst of unbearable things.

Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is not true to life: she is a nice girl who proceeds to have reactions that a nice girl does not have without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is never a nice girl; she is a monster from the start and to the finish. As for Audrey--_pace_ Mr. Bennett--she is a “moron,” or very near it. Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female than on his male characters. He began with the evident intention of “doing” young Clayhanger. But poor Clayhanger eventually turned into Hilda’s daily bread. He exists only to be masticated by her. She lifts her head from that “fiero pasto,” immitigable as Ugolino.

Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Bennett’s admirers, of a belated Victorianism, because I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras and Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac’s Valérie Marneffe; yet surely _La Cousine Bette_ is one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. Henry James, some years ago, drew a distinction between Thackeray and Balzac in their treatment of unpleasant characters; insisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair chance. “Balzac loved his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky,” said Mr. James. However much Balzac loved his Valérie, he did not love her to the point of trying to make us think her delightful. The love he bore her was a love as impersonal as the right hand of Rhadamanthus: a love that consented to be just. Balzac may have loved his Valérie as Thackeray did not love his Becky; but he did not love his Valérie as Mr. Bennett loves his Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, in a quite different sense. Mr. Bennett positively seems to think that Hilda is as decent as any one else, and more interesting than most people. If he does not really think so, then his method is at fault, and his books belie him. His method is not at fault in _Denry_, because there is no implication anywhere that Denry exists in a moral sense: he is a “card,” and only a “card.” It is never hinted that we ought to take him seriously. He is merely funny; the humor of him is the moral equivalent of an obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig.

If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his Denrys! For in the realm of extravaganza he is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of the Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer convincingness. But he must stick to concrete detail. He must not deal with the human soul, for when he comes to moral reactions, he shows that he has no conception of differences. Mr. Bennett’s world, frankly, seems to me like the world of the dead as described by the poet:

Outside of all the worlds and ages,
There where the fool is as the sage is,
There where the slayer is clean of blood;
No end, no passage, no beginning,
There where the sinner leaves off sinning,
There where the good man is not good.

There is not one thing with another,
But Evil saith to Good: My brother,
My brother, I am one with thee.

His world is a world where Evil saith to Good: “My brother, I am one with thee.” If he cannot write us another _Old Wives’ Tale_, we must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick to Denry and Alice Challis. _The Lion’s Share_ does not give much promise that he will do a second _Old Wives’ Tale_. He has a positive fondness for mean people; people who walk blind through a world with beauty in it; people who think their own emotions supremely valuable simply because they are their own.

The realists, I know, have always contended that an author should be impersonal; that he should not have an “attitude”; that he should record life as it is, without comment. Into the possibility or impossibility of that feat (the old technical controversy) we need not go, here and now. The general opinion is that you can tell where an author stands, in spite of him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not impersonal; he does have an attitude. Not in any of the permitted ways (comment of other characters, logical and retributive results of committed acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of his people’s real natures, or disapproving of their odiousness. If he were only scourging, satirist-fashion, the egotism of man-kind, one could bear it. But no: Mr. Bennett seems to love his Yahoos. If he does not love them, then, as I say, his methods are at fault.

Another author who has gone dwindling is Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous hopes of him and of our permanent joy in him, we had when _The Man of Property_ appeared. And, of course, one knows people who stick to him for his “style.” One does not quite know why: as style, it cannot touch either Mr. Wells’s or Mr. Bennett’s style. I fancy it is because there will always be a perceptible number of people who are reverent before long descriptions of nature. Nature, when it gets into a book, is somehow sacred. Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s fault. Literary pieties die hard. Anyhow, there always are long descriptions of nature in Mr. Galsworthy’s novels, and if they are delicately confused with mating animals and human sex impulses, and all the connotation of stirring sap and swelling buds and the like, that will certainly not make them any less popular. Yet the fact is that Mr. Galsworthy has gone on, from book to book, steadily becoming more sentimental and more flabby. I am speaking here of his novels. His _Five Tales_ hold their own with _The Man of Property_. His work cannot be called rich in situations, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat (I think I am not mistaken) the same situation: a man in love with some woman he has no legal right to be in love with. Often, that is a very interesting situation; but it is not the only source of drama in life, and one does get tired of it. And I do not think that Mr. Galsworthy makes it any more interesting or sympathetic by constantly involving the vegetable world, or by punctuating every declaration of unlawful love with the calls of mating birds. One is tempted to assure him that “The flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have nothing to do with the case.” But the sanity of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us.

With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the reality of this intrusion of external nature; because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. Dawson) has said, his people are children of the soil in no trite sense. They are akin to the landscape in which they move; they seem, that is, to have a personal relation to Gaia, like mortals in an old myth; to be half man, half rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the power of natural environment. But Mr. Galsworthy’s civilized people run down from town to hold hands amid the bracken because they feel that they are somehow justified by the fact of sap. It is all vague, of course; anything of that sort is bound to be vague. And if you are going to lean heavily on the cosmos, you want first to be sure that your _point d’appui_ is not a spot where the cosmic force has chosen to manifest itself in vapor.

Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the least what he thinks about life. That state of maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive soul, but it does not make for style. Besides, Mr. Galsworthy is old enough to have some idea as to what he does think about life. As far as one can make out, he thinks that most people are sensual, that everybody ought to be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction for sex emotion in the fauna and flora of England. I do not know what Mr. Galsworthy’s totem is; but it should be some small, defenceless bird. The snipe, perhaps.

_Justice_ is said to have had a profound effect on English officials. Of that, one is glad; but one’s quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy is that he will never think anything out. He inveighs against solitary confinement, which is a good thing to do; but he does not offer any substitute solution, which would be an even better thing to do. He sentimentalizes over dead pheasants and dead everything; but he gives you no suggestions as to what kind of laws to pass. He objects to existing divorce laws, but he does not come out into the open and say just what divorce laws, if any, he would propose to enact. It is not, apparently, either cowardice or expediency on his part; it is sheer inability to think constructively in any way. That is characteristic of many modern reformers: they want the bars let down here or there, but they never tell you in what spot the bars ought to be set up again. Beyond their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. It comes, I suppose, of trying to do your thinking with your heart instead of with your head. And in Mr. Galsworthy’s case, the vagueness has permeated to the last recesses of his style. It is rhetorically accurate--“the English of a gentleman”--but it is jejune and spineless. It has become, you might say, a purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivorous should read the later Galsworthy. And he will not rid himself of that fault by being increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In fact, that never was his game.

I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that I feel some bitterness. For I admired _The Man of Property_ exceedingly, and looked to Mr. Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition of fiction. Instead of which, he has gone on backing, backing--farther and farther away from the Presence. Some people, I know, gave him up with _The Patrician_ because, they said, it was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave him up forever with _The Freelands_ because it was bad Mrs. Humphrey Ward; in fact, _The Coryston Family_ was much better.