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Title: Unforgotten Years
Author: Smith, Logan Pearsall (1865-1946)
Date of first publication: 1938
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Boston: Little, Brown, 1939
   [Atlantic Monthly Press Books]
Date first posted: 18 October 2014
Date last updated: 18 October 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1210

This ebook was produced by Marcia Brooks,
Mardi Desjardins, Alex White, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected;
inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained.

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.






                     Books by Logan Pearsall Smith


                           Unforgotten Years
        The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories of Oxford Life
                                 Trivia
                The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton
                          The English Language
                            Words and Idioms
                         On Reading Shakespeare
                     Reperusals and Re-collections





                           UNFORGOTTEN YEARS

                          Logan Pearsall Smith





                                CONTENTS

                        Boyhood and Youth
                        First Visit to Europe
                        Walt Whitman
                        Harvard
                        Business and Release
                        Oxford
                        Paris
                        Sussex
                        Hunting for Manuscripts
                        The Expatriates




                           UNFORGOTTEN YEARS




                                   1
                            Boyhood and Youth


We are anchored at Phalerum; how can I spend the morning better than in
beginning to write my reminiscences?  My hostess is, I believe, writing
hers in her stateroom above; I think I shall follow her example.  Hers
will sell by the thousands, for she is a famous writer; I cannot hope
for an interest like this in mine, but there may be people who will like
to look at them, and I shall enjoy calling back the past.  Certainly I
shan't read them to my friendly but extremely critical companions
on this cruise.  For one thing there won't be time; our days are
spent in looking at the gean Islands, or in seeing sights on shore.
In the evening we sit on deck and talk; or, if the wind is blowing, we
listen in the cabin to Robert Norton's reading of Butcher and
Lang's translation of the _Odyssey_, and beautifully he reads
it.

So with this brief preface I begin the record of my boyhood and youth,
to which I may add, if the spirit moves me, a few of the experiences of
my later years.

                 *        *        *        *        *

It is the custom of good Americans to bestow, somewhat in the Chinese
fashion, a kind of posthumous nobility upon their ancestors; to
transform the farmers and small tradesmen from whom they are almost all
descended into scions of great, historic English houses. This innocent
exercise of the fancy produces a good deal of blameless satisfaction,
since there is indeed, I believe, a more abiding sense of noble birth to
be derived from false than from authentic pedigrees; and plebeian blood
flows with a more consciously aristocratic thrill through the veins of
those who have dyed it in the azure of their own imaginations.

It is not for me, at least, to reprobate such delusions, for was I not
nourished in my youth upon them? Had not certain elderly and imaginative
members of my family succeeded, after long meditation, in adorning the
mediocrity of their circumstances with at least one escutcheon, in
tracing one portion of their line to aristocratic sources?

Of the plebeian lineage and name of Smith they could indeed make little;
the Smiths were only too plainly a race of Yorkshire yeoman farmers,
who, becoming Quakers, had emigrated to New Jersey in the time of
William Penn, and, settling in the quiet town of Burlington on the
Delaware, had engaged in commerce with the West Indies, watching the
broad river for the arrival of small brigantines or "snows," which
sailed thither, laden with the products of the South. But one of them in
the eighteenth century, my grandfather's grandfather, with the
respectable name of John Smith, had married a daughter of the secretary
whom William Penn had brought to Pennsylvania and left there as his
representative.

This secretary, James Logan, was, so history says, the son of a
schoolmaster of Scottish descent at Lurgan in the north of Ireland. When
the troubles of the civil war drove the family to Bristol, young Logan
was apprenticed to a linen draper, but became afterwards a master in the
school his father started there. This father belonged to a respectable
Scottish family and neither he nor his son claimed a nobler derivation.
In the creative imagination of their descendants in America, however,
they became members of a noble and famous race, the Logans of Restalrig,
and owners of that Fast Castle which was described by Scott in _The
Bride of Lammermoor_ as the house of Ravenswood. One of the Logans had
gone to Palestine as a Crusader, to convey thither the heart of Robert
Bruce, and another had been hanged, centuries later, for his
participation in the Gowrie Conspiracy.

This background of crusades and crimes, with imaginary castles and
gallows in the distance, shed a kind of glamour on the lives of these
mild Quakers, who, in spite of the Quaker ban on worldly fiction, must,
it appears, have been reading _Waverley Novels_ on the sly. And was it
not for them all perfectly authentic? Had not one of them crossed the
Atlantic and made a special pilgrimage to Scotland, and there, on the
spot, when visiting the estate of this famous family, been overcome by a
profound conviction of its truth? Was not the heart of Bruce which
adorned the arms of the Restalrig family (arms which James Logan had
never dreamt of assuming)--was not this bleeding heart splashed upon the
note paper and engraved upon the silver of the family in Philadelphia?
What genealogist could demand, what documents could provide, more
convincing evidence than this?

These imagined glories rather obscured in the eyes of his descendants
their ancestor's real distinction; for William Penn's secretary had
become the most remarkable inhabitant of the English colonies during the
first half of the eighteenth century. Remaining in Pennsylvania as the
agent for William Penn and his sons, he held in turn every important
office in that commonwealth. He was the master of many languages, and an
authority also on mathematics and astronomy, and as a botanist he made
an important contribution to the theory of the sexuality of plants. He
corresponded with learned men all over Europe, and collected the finest
library in America, containing all the best books on history, on art and
geography, of the time, as well as all the Latin and Greek classics,
including Bentley's editions. He transformed Philadelphia in fact into
the Athens of America, as it was called; and it was thither that
Benjamin Franklin fled in his youth from a less cultivated Boston. Of
Franklin and his printing press he was one of the earliest patrons, and
Franklin printed for him two of his translations from Cicero, in one of
which, described as the first translation made in America from the
classics, the young printer expressed a hope that "this first
translation of a classic in the Western world might be a happy omen that
Philadelphia shall become the seat of the Muses." This hope, I may note
in passing, has not been yet fulfilled, though my ancestor did his best
to prepare for the advent of the Nine to the Quaker city, by bequeathing
his books to the Philadelphia Library which Benjamin Franklin founded
there.

In the meantime his son-in-law, the John Smith I have mentioned,
occupied himself in a prosperous commerce with the West Indies,
exchanging grain, lumber, and other products of the North for sugar,
rum, and molasses from the South. These were transported in his own
vessels, built in his own shipyard at Burlington, and sailing from the
wharf there which he owned. After publishing in Philadelphia, where he
dwelt, a pamphlet in defense of the pacifist principles of the Quakers,
he had retired to the family home at Burlington, up the river, and spent
the rest of his life in reading and, as his grandson, my grandfather,
put it, in "copying into commonplace books those sentiments and
sententious remarks of favorite authors which he approved." This taste
for copying out was shared by his family and descendants. His brother,
Samuel Smith, compiled from many documents a history of New Jersey which
is still, I believe, cited by those who are interested in that subject;
his son, who inherited the name of John Smith, inherited this taste also
and filled several volumes with the lives and memorable sayings of New
Jersey Quakers; his grandson, who was my grandfather, published many
colonial documents; and I too, with the various documents and
anthologies I have published, have not failed in carrying on this family
tradition.

I like to think of that lot of quiet and bookish old forbears, among
whom was at least one minor poet, settled on the banks of the Delaware
among the wigwams and papooses of the Indians, thinking their mild
Quaker thoughts in their meetinghouses, or listening to the preaching of
John Woolman, who also lived at Burlington, and was their friend and
neighbor. They seem to have been content to spend their lives in this
Quaker Arcadia, fishing in the broad river which flowed past their
farms, or reading the books which trickled over to them across the
Atlantic, and copying out sententious extracts from those
eighteenth-century volumes.

My grandfather, however, John Jay Smith, left Burlington as a boy, and
sailing down the Delaware to Philadelphia, establishing himself there
first as a chemist's assistant, soon began to engage in other
activities. Among the stipulations which James Logan had made in
bequeathing his books to the Philadelphia Library was one to the effect
that his eldest son should be the librarian, and his eldest grandson in
the male line should succeed; and should the male line fail, the
position should be offered to the eldest of the female line. To my
grandfather this appointment was given; he occupied it many years, and
was succeeded in it by one of my uncles. James Logan's will was, I
believe, invalid; the position thus dubiously bequeathed was a modest
one; but since it was held for more than fifty years by members of our
family, our claim to this humble librarianship came to be regarded, at
least by ourselves, as conferring a kind of dim distinction; and it was
originally intended that I should succeed my uncle (who had no son) in
this, as we imaginatively designated it, the only hereditary office in
America.

It was from this old Philadelphia Library, an eighteenth-century
building in the neighborhood of Independence Square, with its air of
venerable antiquity,--for the few old buildings found in a new country
seem to possess a more antique aspect than anything in Europe,--it was
in this old library, long since destroyed, with its dim interior and old
folios and bewigged portraits, that I received my first bookish
impressions, being often taken there as a little boy, and given a book
to read by my uncle who presided over the silence of that unfrequented
institution. Thus in my earliest years I became familiar with the
atmosphere of old libraries, and the dim light that dwells in them, and
fell under the spell which they cast upon those who haunt their
precincts--that quietness, that hush of the human spirit in the ghostly
presence of its own immortality, stored up in rows of ancient volumes
and great folios of the classics.

But I anticipate, perhaps, my more romantic impressions of this kind. It
was in this library at least that, encouraged by my librarian uncle, I
first formed the habit of reading. What that habit might grow into was
impressed upon me by my occasional visits to the aged ex-librarian, my
grandfather, at the house to which he had retired in the Quaker suburb
of Germantown, where he lived to a great old age, spending his days in
his study upstairs, with his gouty toe on a cushion, reading and reading
all day long. "I believe it may be safely said," he wrote of himself
towards the end of his life, "that for forty years, eight hours of every
day, or nearly so, have been employed in reading of the most
miscellaneous character, often the best books, but too often the lighter
kind." When I happened, not long ago, upon this sentence in my
grandfather's _Recollections_, I was struck by the accurate description
it gave of my own existence, which for the last forty years or so has
been spent, like his, in miscellaneous reading, and often too, like his,
"of the lighter kind." The analogy was a curious one; indeed, I found it
more curious than pleasing; for recalling my visits to that old
gentleman, I turned my eyes on my elderly self, where I sat reading
upstairs, and saw myself for a disconcerting moment. And then I went on
reading.

It might have increased my awe of my grandfather had I known, as I now
know, that he had every right to the designation of a retired pirate,
since a large portion of his earlier years had been spent in the
occupation of pirating the works of famous English writers. Indeed, he
has some claim to be the earliest of these pirates, since, as the
_Dictionary of American Biography_ states, he suggested in 1832 to Adam
Waldie, a Philadelphia printer, the republication, in the absence of
international copyright, of important foreign books, and became the
editor of _Waldie's Select Circulating Library_, in which many English
books were reprinted for American readers, without any thought of
remunerating their authors. This became finally an international crime
and scandal; and if I cannot boast of descent from any Scottish
criminals, I may at least claim that my grandfather was the first of
American literary pirates. But he incurred no blame among his
contemporaries, and writes freely of these activities in his printed
_Recollections_. The thing, however, which was the subject of
reprobation in his lifetime, and which, reaching my ears in dark
references and whispers, much increased the terror of my visits to him,
was the dreadful fact that he was an "Unbeliever." What exactly an
Unbeliever was, and what he disbelieved in, I had not the dimmest
notion, but I knew that his future was thereby involved in the most
dreadful consequences; and I remember a sense of the removal of an
impending calamity when it was generally agreed that, by a deathbed
conversion, this dark cloud had been lifted from the old gentleman's
prospects in the future world.

More definite and more terrifying is the memory of one dreadful occasion
when, not long before his death, my grandfather, who seldom left his
study, hobbled downstairs and, establishing himself in his drawing-room,
began to denounce the age, uttering sentiments of a kind that sounded
incredible in my ears. The theme of his discourse--it is a theme which
is familiar, perhaps too familiar, to me now--was a general castigation
of the time in which he found himself, and a diatribe in especial
against America, against the conditions of life and the democratic
institutions of our land of freedom. Although his invective seemed to
have no relation to life in America as I knew it, yet it went on for
long reverberating beneath all the optimisms and enthusiasms and
patriotic beliefs of my boyish years.

Thus to children at odd moments come, as through windows left
unexpectedly ajar, intimations of the unknown aspects of the world they
live in. In my grandfather's house there was another half-open window,
through which I would sometimes peep with wondering eyes.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The life of the Quakers in Philadelphia, where we lived as children, was
that of a secluded community, carefully entrenched and guarded from all
contact with what we called the "World"--that dangerous world of
wickedness which, we vaguely knew, lay all about us. With that world and
its guilty splendors we had no contact; of the fashionable American
aristocracy (and every population has its aristocracy and fashion) we
were not members; and I can make no claim, as Americans abroad are apt
to claim, that I belong to one of what are called America's first
families. With members of this greater world, like Edith Wharton and
Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, I became acquainted only after I had come to live
in Europe.

No, we spent our youth amid the evangelical plainness and the simple
ways of living of the stricter Philadelphia Friends. And yet, those
richly carved and velvet-covered chairs which adorned my grandfather's
drawing-room at Germantown, those antlers which hung on the walls of his
suburban residence--these seemed to tell a tale of richer experience,
and tinged for me with gayer colors the past history and the European
expeditions of the old gentleman who sat reading upstairs.

The theme of the American abroad has given rise to a considerable
literature in recent years; its earlier documents are less well known,
and it was with a good deal of interest that I recently read my
grandfather's account of his experiences in Europe, and the authentic
history of those trophies which had so impressed me as a boy. In my
grandfather a tendency, which he bequeathed to his descendants,
manifested itself at an early date, to make "jaunts," as he called them,
to Europe; and in 1845 he had gone to England on a sailing packet,
accompanied by my father. On his return he published in two volumes,
under the title of _A Summer's Jaunt across the Waters_, an account of
this journey. To boast of the distinguished acquaintances they have made
abroad is one of the most legitimate satisfactions of returned
Americans, and this was plainly one of the motives which inspired the
composition of my grandfather's volumes.

The Philadelphia Quakers had always kept up a connection with the
members of their sect in England, and this connection was frequently
renewed by the visits of English Friends on holy missions. Some of these
visiting Friends belonged to the highest sphere of the Quaker world--for
all religious communities, however holy, are stratified in social layers
of increasing splendor--and the impressiveness of their doctrine was
much augmented by a sense of the plain yet brilliant world in which they
lived, a world of Barclays and Gurneys and other rich English Quaker
families which, like a Quaker Versailles, holy and yet splendid, shone
for us across the Atlantic with a kind of glory--a glory which, to tell
the truth, has never completely faded from my eyes.

My grandfather, though not interested in their doctrines, was by no
means indifferent to the country houses and opulent tables of these
English Quakers; he tells of dining with Samuel Gurney at Ham House, of
meeting Elizabeth Fry, and of hearing her, in her feeble but honored old
age, make a beautiful prayer from her large mahogany armchair in the
meeting she attended. He tells also of being welcomed among a company of
English Friends by a fellow Philadelphian and youthful acquaintance,
Eliza P. Kirkbride, who had married, as his third wife, the eminent and
opulent Joseph John Gurney.

But the great glory of this jaunt abroad of my grandfather was his visit
to Stoke Park, then the residence of Granville Penn, William Penn's
great-grandson and heir. Granville Penn, learning, according to my
grandfather's account,--and I dare say by a note from my grandfather
himself,--that a descendant of William Penn's secretary had come from
Pennsylvania to England, sent him an invitation to Stoke Poges, which
was accepted with alacrity. He relates how an elegant family carriage
with liveried servants met him at the station; how he was conducted to
the noble family mansion of the Penn family, where he spent some days,
and in whose deer park he shot the buck of which the antlers afterwards
adorned his suburban home; how his host drove him about the neighborhood
in a coach with four horses, and took him to Oxford, where they dined at
a raised table in the hall of Christ Church, and where, he tells with
undisguised elation, all the guests except Mr. Penn and himself were
lords.

These were indeed rich experiences; encouraged by them, my grandfather,
five years after his return to America, started out on a still more
glorious jaunt abroad. The great Crystal Palace Exhibition was then in
preparation, and he had the happy idea of traveling to Europe as a sort
of self-appointed and unofficial envoy to arrange, if possible, for the
transport of this exhibition, or a portion of it, across the Atlantic
after it had run its course in England. His purpose, as he states in his
memoirs, was in part at least the utility to America of this plan, but
his main intention, as he frankly admits, was to gain by this means "an
introduction to men of mark abroad, and a sight of foreign life behind
the scenes." Though the public part of his scheme came to no fruition,
his private aim was brilliantly successful. Procuring a letter of
recommendation from the Secretary of State at Washington, he proceeded
to London, where he was received by Lord Granville and made the
acquaintance of a certain General Gray, whom he describes as "a most
elegant and portly gentleman." In London also he was privileged to
witness the Duchess of Sutherland purchase a rug, which was indeed a
sight of foreign life behind the scenes. He sat at tables, he tells his
descendants, "of the most _recherch_ character"; and once when the
royal box at the Opera had been lent to someone of his acquaintance, and
he was invited to share it, he had reason to believe, he tells us, that
he was mistaken by some of the opera-goers for a foreign prince who was
then on a visit to England.

Most "gratifying" of all his experiences ("gratifying" and "elegant" are
favorite words in his vocabulary) was his reception by Queen Victoria's
uncle, King Leopold, in Belgium. The King of the Belgians, who was much
interested in the proposed London Exhibition, wished to discuss the
project of its transference to America; but that thrifty monarch seems
on this occasion to have done a good bit of business on his own account,
since he induced my grandfather to purchase from a workshop of his own
two expensive and elaborately carved chairs, facsimiles of the chair in
which the King was wont to seat his own royal person. These splendid
chairs, reeking with the bad taste of the Louis-Philippe period, my
grandfather conveyed home with him in great triumph on the new steamer,
the _Atlantic_, on which steamer one of the fellow passengers was the
singer Jenny Lind, who "was most affable, and danced and sang the whole
trip, the weather being admirable."

                 *        *        *        *        *

The echo of these glories, the sight of these antlers and royal chairs,
must have seemed evidences of a "gayness" they could not but deplore to
the stricter Quakers of Philadelphia, to whom my mother's family
belonged, and among whom my sisters and I spent our childish years. But
into the hearts of these most unspotted of the Chosen People had not the
spirit of the world found an entrance, though unsuspected by themselves?
No dreams, indeed, of dining with lords, of opera boxes, or of being
mistaken for foreign princes, troubled, I am sure, their meditations in
their silent Meetings; but when some opulent Friend from England came to
preach the gospel to them, was not the impressiveness of his or her
doctrine tinged and deepened by a sense of the sanctified splendor of
such English Friends? Had they not indeed among them a living
representative of that splendor in the Eliza Kirkbride who had reigned
at Earlham, and with whom my grandfather had dined in England, and who,
after the decease of her husband,--that eminent evangelist, Joseph John
Gurney,--had returned to her native city, where, preaching with great
acceptance, she now reigned as a kind of Quaker queen, with many
courtiers to listen to her holy boastings? Among these courtiers, one of
the most assiduous was my mother's mother, Friend Mary Whitall, who was
in our childhood always holding up before us the figure of Friend Gurney
as the glass of Quaker fashion, and the very mould of form among the
stricter Friends.

Thus into my boyish heart the spirit of the World found its entrance in
various disguises, and intimations were also not wanting of those other
enemies of our souls, the Flesh and the Devil.

It has become of late the fashion to speak with great frankness on sex
matters, and many eminent authors dwell with especial emphasis on the
first awakenings in them of a consciousness of this kind. Why should I
not follow their example? These awakenings often come to innocent youth
in troubled ways, and my first awareness of the allurements of what we
call the Flesh was derived from circumstances of an unusual nature.
Barnum's Circus came to Philadelphia in my boyhood, rousing considerable
excitement in the youth of that quiet city; and among the Quakers the
question was much debated whether their children should be allowed to
witness this entertainment. While it was admitted on the one hand that
the sight of the elephants and the other exotic animals would help to
enhance their conception of the wonders of creation, there were grave
fears on the other hand that the spectacle of the scantily clad female
acrobats on the tightropes might sully the innocence of their childish
minds. The compromise finally arrived at, at least in our family, was
that the children should be taken to the circus and allowed to see the
animals, but should sit with closed eyes while the acrobats were
performing.

So there we sat, a row of Quaker children, staring with all our eyes at
the performing elephants, but with our organs of vision closed and our
hands before them during the less seemly interludes. But one little
Quaker boy permitted himself a guilty peep through his fingers, and
gazed on a show of muscular limbs moving, slowly moving, in pink tights.
What he was gazing at was, he knew, the spectacle of Sin; and so
striking was the impression that his concept of that word became colored
in his imagination for a long time with the pinkness of those slowly
moving legs. It was only long afterwards that he came to understand why
he had been forbidden to gaze upon them, and the grave danger he might
have thereby incurred.

While notions of the World and the Flesh reached me in hints that I
hardly comprehended, I had no doubts about the Devil: his activities
were present to my apprehension in visible forms, about which there
could be no mistake. The godly community of Philadelphia Quakers, going
their ways and attending to their affairs in peace and quietness, would,
to an observer from outside, have seemed a uniform community of pious
people, all dressed in the same garb, all speaking the same language,
all living in the same houses, all sitting in the same meditative
silence, or listening to the same doctrines in the same square,
unadorned meetinghouses. To such a superficial observer, William Penn's
ideal of brotherly love, which he had expressed in the name of the city
he had founded, would indeed have seemed to have been realized among
them. As a matter of fact, however, this pious folk was divided into two
bitterly hostile races, each of which regarded the other with holy
abhorrence. There were two sets of meetinghouses, two sets of burial
places, two orders of preachers of the Quaker faith; and between the
adherents of one sect and those of another no relations could ever
occur. This gulf was the result of a doctrinal earthquake which early in
the nineteenth century had shaken the foundations of Quakerism in
America and split it into two bodies--the orthodox sect on one side of
the gulf, who clung to the stricter Trinitarian theology, and on the
other the followers of Elias Hicks. Elias Hicks seems to have been much
more like one of the primitive Quakers than their respectable and
orthodox successors. The decorums, or even ceremonies they had adopted
as they grew in worldly prosperity, he rejected, along with the orthodox
doctrines which had come to prevail among them. The true Christian
religion, the old man preached (he lived to be nearly ninety), consisted
in neither rites nor sermons nor Sundays, but in the love of God and of
our neighbors, in the Inner Light, and the ideal aspirations of the
soul. The blood of Christ which cleanses us from sin was, he declared,
not His material blood. At the great Yearly Meeting of Philadelphia in
which the schism originated, he made use of these words, "The blood of
Christ--the blood of Christ, why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ
in itself is no more effectual than the blood of bulls and goats--not a
bit more, not a bit." These words were followed by a great tumult.
Hundreds rose to their feet, canes were pounded on the floor. Many left
the meeting, more remained with flushed faces and angry eyes. This was
the definite beginning of the great split and separation--the yawning of
that gulf which opened between the orthodox Quakers, who accepted the
statement of the Bible, "It is the blood that maketh an atonement for
the soul," and the followers of Elias Hicks, who took a more allegorical
and therefore Socinian view. At the time of the division these two
factions fought each other like Quaker demons, quarreling over their
meetinghouses and burial places, and digging up their dead to save them
from pollution, and these quarrels had left behind them a legacy of
undying hate.

Both my father's and my mother's families were adherents of the orthodox
or conservative party, and Hicksite Quakers were to my boyish
apprehensions undoubtedly nothing less than children of the Devil. Even
now, when I see my friend John Balderston, I shudder a little at the
thought that though Samuel Kite, one of the most orthodox of the
preachers in Germantown Meeting, was his grandfather, he himself played
as a child with Hicksite boys in the street. But he was a bad boy, I
fear, from his birth, and that he should end up at Hollywood need not
surprise us. I remember climbing the wall that surrounded one of the
Hicksite meetinghouses, and gazing in on those precincts with all the
horror of one who gazes into Hell. Never since have I looked upon any
object with such feelings of abomination.

This theological horror was accompanied, among the orthodox at least, by
an immense sense of social superiority: ours were the high places, we
felt, in this world as well as in the next. This feeling that the
Hicksites were outcasts and untouchables and social pariahs, though it
had no foundation in fact, for they were as well off and as
well-descended as we were, and probably a more enlightened and
cultivated set of people--this sense of social superiority is the main
religious feeling which I still retain; and even now, when, as sometimes
happens, I meet in London Philadelphians with the taint in their veins
of Hicksite blood, I seem to know them at once, as by a kind of
instinct, by a subtly mingled sense of theological and social
repugnance, which I find it extremely difficult to overcome.

                 *        *        *        *        *

My grandfather had married a Rachel Pearsall, of a Quaker family in Long
Island, and my father, Robert Pearsall Smith, was, by his marriage in
1851 to my mother, Hannah Whitall, introduced into surroundings and
circumstances different from those of his own family. His wife's father,
John Whitall, was descended from another, more pious and less bookish
line of New Jersey Quakers, being the grandson of that rather terrific
Ann Whitall, of whose old religious journal I have written elsewhere. He
had run away to sea as a boy, and, sailing before the mast on East
Indian voyages, had become the captain of a merchantman at the age of
twenty-four. On retiring from the sea he purchased a glass factory in
New Jersey, and founded a manufacturing business which, owing to the
admirable output of glass bottles, had prospered with the years, and
indeed still prospers. My father, after several unsuccessful business
adventures, had, owing to his marriage to my mother, been given a
partnership in this firm.

My father was a man of fine presence, and of a sanguine, enthusiastic
temperament, too impulsive to manage his own affairs by himself;
however, being restrained by the caution of his cautious partners, his
gifts of imagination were made to contribute to the firm's prosperity.
He was, above all, a magnificent salesman; and traveling all over the
United States, and offering the firm's wares to the chemists of the
rapidly expanding Republic, he exercised upon those apothecaries the
gifts of persuasion and blandishment, almost of hypnotization, which
were destined later, in European and more exalted spheres, to produce
some startling results. However, before he undertook these journeys, he
had been placed for some years in charge of the glass factories in New
Jersey; and it was in a small New Jersey town, with the romantic name of
Millville, that I was born in 1865.

My earliest recollections are tinged with the gleam of those great fiery
furnaces which I used to gaze at from a distance. To my infant
apprehensions the whole alarming picture, with the half-naked glass
blowers moving like devils among the flames, presented a vivid image of
what I believed might very likely be my future fate. For partly owing to
the more serious religious tone of my mother's family, but still more
(for the darker aspects of Christian doctrine were not much dwelt on by
good Quakers) to the lava stream of evangelical revivalism into which my
parents were swept away, the notion of Hell formed a fiery background to
my childish thoughts; I was always expecting, half in terror, half in
thrilled anticipation, to hear the blast of the Last Trumpet, to see the
earth and heavens collapse and the sinners led off to their abodes of
Eternal Torment.

The old doctrines of the corruption of man and his inevitable doom
unless he finds salvation in the conviction of sin, the gift of grace,
and a sudden catastrophic, miraculous conversion--this evangelical
theology, though I was nourished on it in my youth, and tasted its joys
and terrors, has now become utterly alien and strange to me. I cannot
reconstruct in imagination that melodramatic world of hopes and terrors.
I know, of course, that this body of convictions has an important place
in religious history, and that, as a scheme of salvation, millions have
fervently believed in it.

My parents, dissatisfied with what they considered the spiritual
deadness of Quaker doctrine, welcomed the new outburst in America of
revivalism, into which they plunged as into a great flood of life-giving
water; and their evangelical activities formed for many years the
absorbing interest of their lives. They went to revivalist meetings,
they preached, they both wrote innumerable tracts, they converted souls,
they lived in constant expectation of the Day of Judgment; and this
highly colored world, with the heights of Heaven above them and the
abysses of Hell beneath--this, and not their commonplace and commercial
surroundings, formed the environment in which they lived with such
feverish excitement. We children naturally caught the infection of this
excitement; and were encouraged to embark in our tender years upon these
spiritual adventures.

                 *        *        *        *        *

There can be no doubt that I was born a vessel of wrath, full to the
brim of that Original Sin we all inherit from that crude apple that
diverted Eve. I was, as my mother's letters of the time bear witness,
greedy, given to fits of temper, and, as she expressed it, a gorilla for
screaming. Against this old Adam in me one of the kindest and the best
of mothers strove with all her strength, but strove in vain. "Logan and
I," she writes when I was four months old, "had our first regular battle
to-day, and he came off conqueror, though I don't think he knew it. I
whipped him till he was actually black and blue, and until I _could not_
whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch." In this state
of sin I remained till I was four years old, when, however, I was
rescued from it by my elder sister, now Mrs. Bernard Berenson, who, at
the age of six, following the example of our parents, began the career
of an evangelist, which she has since abandoned. I, who was then two
years younger than herself, was the first object of her holy zeal. One
memorable day she and a like-minded maiden named Fanny Potts led me to
our bathroom, and there they prayed and wrestled with my carnal nature,
until the great miracle of Conversion was accomplished in me.

"O Lord," prayed the future Mrs. Berenson, "please make little Logan a
good boy; and don't let him tell any more lies!"

And then little Fanny Potts also lifted up her voice in prayer. "Lord,
please give Logan a new heart."

Their prayer was granted, and a new heart was bestowed upon little
Logan. But this heart, though purged of all former sin, was by no means
immune from temptation in the future. He had in fact reached on this
occasion the state of Justification only, not that of Sanctification,
which, according to evangelical theology, renders us immune from sin.
Again and again Satan would enter into his heart, and he would fall into
sin again. In vain were his efforts to keep good by the force of his own
will alone; and it was only after three years of spiritual struggle,
lasting from the age of four to that of seven, that he renounced these
Pelagian attempts to conquer Sin and Satan by his own carnal struggles,
and realized that only by Grace, and unmerited Grace alone, and by no
"deadly doing," could he attain the conquest that he sought.

All these facts I learn from a tract of my father's which I recently
found among some old papers. The history of my struggle and salvation I
had half forgotten, though I could still remember my infant agonies.
This tract had an unusually large circulation, and, penetrating to the
Western districts of America, made a powerful impression on the
remaining tribes of Red Indians, who were converted by it in their
thousands. Such, at least, was our family legend; and I remember the
pride I took in the conversions thus accomplished; and believing, as I
then believed, that each of us should wear as stars in our diadems in
Heaven the souls which we had saved on earth, I took a holy delight in
the prospect of shining in the courts of Heaven with the radiance of
these rubies of the West.

I sometimes wonder if the children I see to-day playing about partake of
the rich experiences of my childhood. Do they feel that they are
disporting themselves on a thin crust above the flames of Hell; and when
they are taken home do their mothers beat them black and blue to drive
out the old Adam from within their tender skins? Do they strive, as we
used to strive, to keep out Satan from their hearts, and pass their
young years tormented as I was by the grim fact of sin and the dire
necessity of grace? If not, many pains are no doubt spared them, but
many joys and exaltations also. The glorious certainty that they are
sanctified among millions doomed to Eternal Torment can never fill their
hearts with holy pride, nor can they rejoice--as all my life I have
rejoiced--in the consciousness that they can commit no wrong. I may do,
I have undoubtedly done, things that were foolish, tactless and
dishonest, and what the world would consider wrong, but since I attained
the state of Sanctification at the age of seven I have never felt the
slightest twinge of conscience, never experienced for one second the
sense of sin.




                                   2
                          First Visit to Europe


Not long after the memorable event of my conversion, our family went to
Europe.  My father's health had been affected by his combined
mercantile and evangelical exertions; a period of rest and change was
recommended by his doctors, and it was thought that this rest and change
could be best procured in England.  So in 1872 we embarked, my sisters
and I, with our handsome florid father and our beautiful straightforward
Quaker mother.

Both our parents were quite without any anticipation of the
extraordinary experiences which awaited them. It is not my purpose to
tell in any detail the story of these experiences. Let it suffice to say
that news had already reached England of my father's gifts and successes
as an evangelist; my mother's fame had also spread abroad, and when they
arrived in London they were received with an interest which soon became
enthusiasm, and finally almost a frenzy, in that strange world of
evangelicals which was once so important, but which has now almost
disappeared. It was a world, as I remember it, of large, opulent, ruddy
aristocrats, living in great London mansions or country houses, and much
given to immense collations and extempore prayers and the propagation of
innumerable children. These personages often drove up to the house my
father rented at Stoke Newington in the London suburbs, and my sisters
and I would peep out through the windows at their fine carriages and
horses, and would sometimes be presented to some large, friendly,
red-faced man or woman whom we would be summoned to meet in the
drawing-room. Often too, while our parents were rapt away to earnest
conferences, we would be deposited in some country house, either with
the Barclays at Monkhams in Essex (Mrs. Barclay was by birth one of the
Gurneys of Earlham, and we thus became acquainted with the world of
which we had heard so much from Friend Gurney in Philadelphia), or else
at Broadlands in Hampshire, the home of our parents' friends, the Cowper
Temples.

When our parents had first arrived in England, they had been invited to
a drawing-room meeting of leading Evangelicals, which was summoned to
judge whether their doctrine was perfectly sound according to the
strictest standards. All was well save on one point, about which there
were dreadful whispers. From something my mother had said or written, it
had come to be suspected that she was not altogether sound on the
doctrine of Eternal Torment.

Hell, it was known, she believed in, but did she hold that its torments
were destined to endure forever? As a matter of fact, she didn't; and
although my father and her friends besought her to conceal this heresy,
when the crisis came and the question was put plainly to her in that
London drawing-room, with that large company gravely waiting for her
answer, a sudden impulse came upon her to tell the truth. She knew that
her own and perhaps her husband's career as expositors of the Gospel
might be ruined by this avowal; she had agreed that it would be wiser to
give evasive answers on this point; but she suddenly felt that if she
was questioned she must say what she thought, whatever might be the
consequences; and if she had been capable of using such a profane
expression she would have told herself that she didn't care a damn.

She could not, she avowed to the assembled company, believe that the God
she worshiped as a God of love was capable of such awful cruelty;
sinners, of course, He punished, but that He had decreed that their
torments should be unending was to her a horrible belief. Her auditors
were inexpressibly dismayed by this declaration; the myrtle, in Keats's
phrase, "sickened in a thousand wreaths"; the company was on the point
of breaking up in confusion when from the depths of that great
drawing-room there floated forward, swathed in rich Victorian draperies
and laces, a tall and stately lady, who kissed my mother, and said, "My
dear, I don't believe it either."

This dramatic moment was, perhaps, a turning point in my life, since, if
it had not occurred, our family would no doubt have soon returned to
America, and the ties and friendships which drew us all back again to
England would never have been formed. For this lady who thus intervened
and took my mother under her protection was, as it were, the queen of
evangelical Christians; and her acceptance, afterwards confirmed by that
of her husband, William Cowper Temple, silenced all opposition and no
further objections were suggested.

The Cowper Temples, owing to their great wealth and high position, were
by far the most important people in the world in which my parents were,
so to speak, on trial. Cowper Temple was in law the son of Earl Cowper,
but said to be the son of Lord Palmerston, who had long been Lady
Cowper's friend, and who married her when Lord Cowper died. Their son
had inherited Lord Palmerston's estates and great house at Broadlands;
and the problem of this double paternity, if I may put it so, which was
the gossip of the time (gossip which sounded strangely in our
Philadelphian ears), had been successfully regulated by the young
William Cowper's adding Lord Palmerston's family name of Temple to that
of Cowper in a double appellation. After acting as secretary to his
unavowed father, he served in several posts in the governments of the
time and was raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple in 1880. His
wife, who had corroborated my mother's view of Hell, is known in the
history of art as the friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, and above all as
the Egeria of Ruskin, who describes in his _Praeterita_ how, when in
Rome in 1840, he had first seen the beautiful Miss Tollemache (as she
was then), and how, though he never met her, he had haunted the Roman
churches on the chance of catching a glimpse of her sweet and statuesque
beauty--a kind of beauty which had hitherto been only a dream to
him--and how the thought of seeing her, if but in the distance, became,
he tells us, the hope and solace of his Roman sojourn. It was only
fourteen years later that he was introduced to her in London and became
her friend.

Her friendship with my mother lasted till her death in extreme old age.
She became a beautiful old saint, in whose character my mother could
find only one flaw, if flaw it could indeed be called. Lady Mount Temple
could never grasp the difference between right and wrong; when no
cruelty was involved she couldn't see why people should not do what they
liked. My mother would try to explain moral distinctions to her, and
though Lady Mount Temple would say at the moment that she understood
them, they soon faded from her mind.

When Oscar Wilde was out on bail between his two trials, she wrote him a
friendly letter, inviting him to pay her a visit, by which letter, Oscar
Wilde tells us, he was greatly touched. Her family, the Tollemaches,
were a wild family, much given to misbehavior, and when one or another
got in disgrace she would invite the offender to her home and would
often send for my mother, as one familiar with right and wrong, to come
and help the erring one back to the righteous path. I remember my
mother's telling of one occasion when a Tollemache, married to a foreign
prince, had run away from him with a lover, and then had been placed
under Lady Mount Temple's roof to be made to realize the impropriety of
her conduct. My mother was as usual summoned, and arrived in her Quaker
garb and with her Bible, to help in this work of moral reformation. The
Bible was read, there were prayers and exhortations, and all seemed to
be going on in a most satisfactory manner, till one day, entering the
old lady's writing room, my mother noticed that she was trying to
conceal a piece of paper, and, when questioned, she confessed that she
was composing a telegram for the lover of the erring lady to come and
join them, since, as she put it, she felt that Matilda was feeling so
lonely without him.

In her old age, Lady Mount Temple fell under the almost intolerable
domination of a pious cook, and my mother was appealed to by the family
to try to free her from this tyrant. But when my mother informed her of
the fact (which she had ascertained) that this holy woman was the mother
of a large family of illegitimate children, the only answer she received
was, "My dear, I am so glad poor Sarah has had some fun." My mother,
seeing that a charge of misconduct made no impression, thereupon visited
the eldest of this irregular family, and suggested to him that as his
mother must have saved a large sum of money, it might be wise to remove
her to his home, and thus probably inherit her savings when she died.
The son saw the wisdom of this suggestion, and Lady Mount Temple was
made free at last.

                 *        *        *        *        *

But all this happened years after the occasion of which I have been
writing, on which occasion we were promptly invited to come to
Broadlands, whither we soon proceeded, my mother, my father, my two
sisters, and myself. Broadlands became thenceforward almost our home in
England, and in its ample halls were gathered innumerable guests, to
listen to the glad tidings of salvation which had reached the shores of
England from across the Atlantic Ocean.

My mother and father had more than once attended camp meetings in
America, where, amid primeval forests or by the shore of some mountain
lake, evangelicals had been accustomed to gather for holy jubilations
(not always unaccompanied by hysterical outbursts in which the Chosen
People would scream and dance and roll upon the earth); and as they
often described to their hosts these outpourings of the spirit, it
occurred to the good Cowper Temples to inaugurate a series of such
meetings in their park upon the banks of the Test in England, and this
project was successfully carried out. My father was an acceptable
preacher at these meetings; but my sincere simple-minded mother,
beautiful in her Quaker dress, with her candid gaze and golden hair, was
given the name of "the Angel of the Churches," and her expositions of
the Gospels, delivered in the great beautiful eighteenth-century
orangery in the Park at Broadlands, attracted the largest audiences, and
made those gatherings famous in the religious world.

They were unattended, however, by any of the wilder phenomena of the
American camp meetings, with which my mother had no sympathy, and I
cannot recall the spectacle of any English aristocrats foaming at the
mouth or rolling in holy ecstasy upon those Hampshire lawns.

It is odd to me now to reflect that while these meetings were going on
at Broadlands, quite possibly Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also in the
house in person (while in spirit such immeasurable miles away), for he
often, I believe, stayed at Broadlands, and painted some of his pictures
and wrote some of his poems there. But on us, if we saw him (and we may
have seen him), he made, and could have made, no impression at all.

The beauty of Broadlands, with its park and shining river and the great
house, full of history and portraits, and crowded with eminent people
earnestly seeking Salvation for their souls, had a great effect upon my
childish imagination; and when I now recall this period of our lives I
cannot but regard as a fantastic adventure this sudden transference of a
family of plain-living, middle-class Philadelphia Quakers into
circumstances and surroundings so different from what they had been
accustomed to. As a proud little American boy, I treasured up at
Broadlands boasts with which to impress the boys at home; I remember
especially the glory of one week, when there was a horse show in
Broadlands park, and a special box was provided for the Cowper Temples
and their guests. They were too busy of course in their search for
Salvation to occupy this box, but I loved to sit there all by myself, in
the gaze of the whole assembled county, with my little heart almost
bursting, even at that early age, with emotions for which the word
"snobbish" is, I fear, the only appropriate name. But there were
humiliations, as well as glories, for an American boy in those great
houses--above all the wise exclusion of children from the evening
dinners, an exclusion unheard of in our American world. When, on our
first visit to the Barclays at Monkhams, I was summoned to supper with
the Barclay children in the nursery, I bitterly declined the invitation;
said I had no appetite, and sat weeping in hungry pride in my bedroom.
In the stately halls of Broadlands there was no such interdict; my elder
sister dressed herself up as a young lady and went in to dinner with the
rest, but in the crowd of guests I was occasionally overlooked; and I
remember one occasion, almost worthy of a page in Proust, when the
stately procession swept along to the dining room, and I was left
behind. My little heart was full of bitterness and my eyes of tears,
when the Duchess of Sutherland, a Duchess famous for her beauty, who had
noticed my plight as she passed me, considerately left the dining room
and returned and took me by the hand and arranged a seat for me at her
side. I should like to think that this was the same Duchess of
Sutherland whom my grandfather, in his anxiety for a sight of foreign
life behind the scenes, had seen purchasing a rug so many years before.
I am afraid, however, that chronology forbids.

There are few human beings more detestable to me than spoiled American
children, who, full of their own importance, demand continual attention,
and are the ruin of all rational talk among grown-up people. But my
hatred of these noisy little monsters is--or at least it ought to
be--tempered by the recollection that I was in my childhood one of them
myself, and must have been at Broadlands a nuisance, which my American
parents would, of course, have done nothing to abate.

That the five of us, my father, my mother, my two sisters, and myself,
should be invited to stay for weeks and even months in these English
country houses gives one an enlarged conception of the hospitality of
those times. We children shared governesses with the immense populations
of their nurseries, and sometimes attended little local schools in their
company. The boys of my own age were naturally my companions; they were
for the most part Etonians. Anyone seeking for the home of unspotted
purity would probably not pause in his search at an English public
school; but the behavior and conversation of these polite Etonians,
though they would have interested Proust, could not have been expected
to reveal to the holy little Samuel of Philadelphia anything that was
not innocent and pure. I remember one of these boys taking me up into a
walnut tree in his father's park, and treating me to a display which,
though it had no interest for me at the time, yet I felt, as a mark of
friendliness from an English to an American boy, was a demonstration of
international good will.

                 *        *        *        *        *

My mother paid little attention to all the unaccustomed circumstances in
which she found herself at Broadlands; those to whom she preached were
in her eyes little more than souls she hoped she could help to a true
knowledge of the gospel truths; but my father was immensely delighted by
his sanctified success among the great ones of this earth. If his head
was turned by it, one can hardly blame him; though a little worldly
wisdom (but what chance had he ever had of acquiring worldly wisdom?)
might have given him some notion of the fantastic character of this
adventure. Even the presence at Broadlands of a large black evangelical
negress from America, named Amanda Smith, who would also expound the
Scriptures to the earnest but indiscriminating ears of the assembled
company--even the concurrence of this holy negress (whom my mother came
to like and made a friend of) and the necessity of sharing his triumphs
with this dusky rival, though no doubt extremely repugnant to him, did
not in the least warn my father of the sandy basis upon which his fairy
castle was being built. Indeed, as its airy pinnacles rose higher and
higher in the sky, he became incapable of listening to the warnings my
mother gave him of the risks he ran.

How could he listen? Ruddy, handsome, with the fine whiskers so admired
at that date, rich from the proceeds of the bottle factory at home, and,
unlike other evangelists, paying his own way in a lordly fashion, he
became, as his fame spread from Broadlands, more or less the rage in
religious circles. His photograph adorned the windows of the London
shops; immense crowds flocked to his ministrations; his thrilling voice
held audiences of thousands in rapt attention. Soon his reputation as a
preacher crossed the Channel; he was invited to Paris, where he held
many meetings; the wives of monarchs in Belgium and Holland welcomed him
to those countries, and discussed the state of their royal souls with
him in private interviews. In the churches thousands listened spellbound
to the doctrines he proclaimed. I have already spoken of the two steps
of my conversion, the first that of Justification, by which all my sins
committed in the past were washed away, and the second step, that of
Sanctification, which rendered me immune to sin in the future. The
doctrine of the separation, as by different operations of the Spirit,
between Justification and Sanctification was widely held by the
Wesleyans, who found much authority for it, they thought, in the
Scriptures. It was very prevalent in America when my father began to
preach it to the "miserable sinners" of England. To believe that, by an
act of faith, they had become "dead to sin," as Saint Paul expressed it,
was received as the most glorious of good tidings. Proclaimed first by
my father in 1873, and then at Broadlands, it was decided to hold a
great meeting at Oxford in the autumn of 1874, and the university city
was filled with earnest Christians of almost all denominations, and many
ecclesiastical dignitaries. Professor Warfield of Princeton has
published, under the title of _Perfectionism_ (Oxford Press, 1931), an
admirable and scholarly account of the whole movement, and the part
played in it by my father. The effect of the Oxford meeting was, he
says, nothing less than amazing. Many foreign as well as English
Christians were assembled there, and, above all, German theologians, who
insisted that my father should come and proclaim the good news to that
country. To Germany he went, therefore, in 1875, where he met with an
almost royal reception. The Emperor lent him a church, he was granted an
interview with the Empress Augusta, and the most distinguished
theologians attended his sermons. My father knew no German, but the
necessity of translation seemed only to increase his evangelical power.
The old Pietist associations were revived, and the divine glow seemed to
illuminate all Germany, where a religious sect was formed which, I am
told, still exists with thousands of adherents.

To England my father returned for further triumphs. "There is nothing
more dramatic in the history of modern Christianity," Professor Warfield
writes, "than the record of this 'Higher Life' Movement," as it was
called. Brighton was occupied with even more earnest Christians than was
Oxford, more church dignitaries, and more famous foreign preachers; the
Dome was filled to overflowing, and the sermons had to be repeated in
the Com Exchange. "All Europe is at my feet," Professor Warfield records
my poor father as exclaiming when he stood on the platform of the Dome.
But almost immediately an announcement appeared in the papers that he
had been compelled to cancel all his engagements and to return almost at
once to America. It was suggested that a fall from a horse some years
before had led to the return of certain distressing symptoms which
rendered absolute rest necessary. I must say that in the family we
didn't believe in that horse; at least I am certain that my mother
didn't. I don't think she ever referred to it at all, which made people
suspicious, and so universal became the gossip that my father's friends
felt it necessary to issue a further explanation. It had come to their
ears, they stated, that my father had inculcated doctrines that were
most dangerous and unscriptural, and that there had been conduct on his
part which, though it was free, they were convinced, from all evil
intention, had rendered it necessary for him to abstain from public
work, and take the complete rest rendered necessary by the fall from his
horse. That the doctrine of Sanctification and Deadness to Sin might
lead to dangerous forms of Antinomianism was well known from the history
of the past; whether it was an unscriptural doctrine has been much
discussed by theologians. But this was not the doctrinal quadruped from
which my father slipped at Brighton. It was a much more mysterious beast
which he had also brought from America, so mysterious that even the
learned and profound Professor Warfield seems never to have guessed at
its existence. But my mother knew it well; she was constantly warning my
father against it, and in her old age she wrote a book to tell the world
of its dreadfully dangerous character (_Religious Fanaticism_, Faber and
Gwyer, 1928[1]). So strongly was she convinced of its prevalence that
she said there ought to be a preacher stationed on the top of every
steeple, to warn Christian worshipers against it.

What exactly was the nature of this doctrine? I cannot find that it has
a name, so for convenience I shall call it the doctrine of
"Loving-kindness." It is one of the most ancient of heresies; it seems
to have existed from the beginning of Christianity, and it is based
moreover on a sound psychological basis--on the fact, namely, that
nature, in one of her grossest economies, has placed the seats of
spiritual and amorous rapture so close to each other that one of them is
very likely to arouse the other. Even the holiest of saints and most
devoted of nuns--so exactly do these two forms of ecstasy feel
alike--have sometimes found it extremely difficult to distinguish
between them. From this fact it was only too easy to form the heretical
belief that this heightening of religious experience, due to the
mingling of the sexes, was God's own way (and His ways were mysterious
and not to be questioned by carnal reason) of bestowing His blessing
upon them. When a holy preacher sat near a sanctified sister, or a
female penitent close to her confessor, they became more conscious of
the Baptism of the Spirit; and, as my mother sardonically expressed it,
the nearer to each other they sat, the deeper and richer this
consciousness became. To describe this experience in carnal terms,
indeed in any spoken words, was impossible; it could only find
expression in holy endearments. That the love feasts of the early
Christians were followed by such endearments was the universal view of
the most enlightened pagans: we should recoil with horror, Gibbon says,
from such a notion, did not the documents show that every sect of
Christians brought this accusation against every other sect.

"Salute one another with a holy kiss," Paul enjoined upon the Romans;
and it has taken Christianity centuries to eliminate from its
proceedings this holy kiss--if indeed it has succeeded in doing so
completely. Certainly in my father's time this exquisite, secret
doctrine was extremely prevalent in America; and my father, in spite of
my mother's almost desperate warnings, would expound it to select
gatherings mostly composed of spinsters of a certain age. Unluckily one
of these grew jealous of another, and let the great beautiful cat out of
the bag, to the scandal of the righteous, and the extreme joy of the
unholy, whose jokes about the "Higher Life," as it was called, made my
father feel that it would be wise for him to cease his ministrations.

My mother naturally speaks harshly of this cat, which had brought such
trouble into her life and that of so many of her friends. Whether this
grimalkin has again pussyfooted its way across the Atlantic, and is
playing its pranks among certain groups of earnest Christians, I cannot
say.

As people grow old, it becomes very hard for them to keep clear in their
minds the important distinction between Right and Wrong--outlines become
dim and one thing fades into another. Certainly it is extremely
difficult, especially for her unsanctified descendants, not to detect a
touch of amusement in my mother's book; a kind of--what shall I call
it?--well, a kind of holy fun in her descriptions of the pranks played
by this amazing animal in the abodes of the "dear, deluded saints," as
she calls them, who made it their pet.

At the time, however, my father found it wise, as I have said, to cease
his ministrations; though to the Cowper Temples, I think,--certainly to
Mrs. Cowper Temple,--all this fuss seemed incomprehensible and silly. If
these good people wanted to kiss each other, what, she wondered, could
be the harm in that?

In sackcloth and ashes my father recrossed the Atlantic, not, like his
father, with song and dancing; no staghorns, no royal chairs, were among
his luggage. However,--and these coincidences are perhaps worth
noting,--my mother brought with her a haunch of venison from Dunrobin
Castle, where she had been on a visit, which haunch, given her by the
Duke of Sutherland, was consumed immediately on our return to
Philadelphia by ourselves and our relations with more snobbish than
gastronomical delight.

The toughness, the lack of savor, of this ducal haunch still linger on
my palate, as my first taste--there have been others--of the vanity and
insipidity of worldly things.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Then we settled down again in our Philadelphia suburb. In August 1876,
Dr. Cullis of Boston, a friend and fellow evangelist of my father's,
determined to get up a great meeting to reinstate in the eyes of the
Church and the world this preacher whose reputation had been somewhat
damaged by gossip from England. Neither my father nor my mother wanted
this "scamp meeting," as Dr. Cullis wittily called it, but he said "it
was of the Lord," and forced them to attend it. They both hated, my
mother writes to a friend, the whole performance, and had no belief in
it. The meetings were a bore; the work, my mother writes, was like a
treadmill, and they counted the hours till it should be over; "and all
pious chroniclers," she adds, "and church historians would have been
compelled by the force of Christian logic to have added to this record
'and no wonder the meeting was an utter failure.' But to give a plain,
unvarnished statement of fact, I am compelled to add that the meeting
was a perfect success. There was just the same power and blessing as at
Oxford, and every sign of the presence of the Spirit. Souls were
converted, backsliders restored, Christians sanctified, and all present
seemed to receive definite blessings. And it really was a good meeting,
even I, uninterested as I was, could see that. There was just the same
apparent wave of blessing as swept over our English meetings. And Robert
and I never worked more effectually. He had all his old power in
preaching and leading meetings, and the self-same _atmosphere_ of the
spirit. As for me, thee knows I am not much given to tell of my own
successes, but in this case, in order that thee may have all the
_facts_, I shall have to tell thee that I was decidedly 'favoured,' as
Friends say. And the fuss made over me was a little more than even in
England. The preachers fairly sat at my feet, figuratively speaking, and
_constantly_ there kept coming to me testimonies of definite blessings
received while I spoke. The second time I spoke a Democratic editor was
converted and consecrated on the spot; and I could scarcely get a minute
to myself for the enquirers who fairly overwhelmed me.

"And now what does thee think of it all? I think one of two things. But
which one I think I don't know. Perhaps thee can tell me. Either I am
awfully wicked in the whole matter, and God was not in it anywhere, and
all the success was by natural gifts and talents. Or else I was awfully
good, so good as to have lost sight of self to such a degree as to be
only a straw wafted on the wings of the Spirit, and so consecrated as
not to be able to form a desire even, except that the will of God might
be fully done. I waver about myself continually. Sometimes I feel that I
have progressed wonderfully, and that my present sphinx-like calm and
indifference to everything whether inward or outward except the will of
God is very grand. And then again I think I am utterly irreligious and a
lazy fatalist, with not a spark of the divine in me. I do wish I could
find out _which_ I am. But at all events my _orthodoxy_ has fled to the
winds. I am Broad, Broader, Broadest!"

After this "scamp meeting," and the disillusion it brought, in spite of
its success, my father became more sympathetic to my grandfather's want
of faith; and this feeling was much increased by the daily companionship
of his brother Lloyd, with whom he used to drive every morning behind a
fine pair of horses (my father had a passion for fine horses) to the not
distant city of Philadelphia.

I wish I knew more of this uncle of mine, Lloyd Pearsall Smith. I
remember the abstracted look of his bookish eyes in his handsome face; I
remember his distantly polite manner with his nieces and nephews, whom
he faintly recognized, but whose names he could seldom remember; and I
was allowed to visit the library over which, in succession to his
father, he now presided with much dignity. The _Dictionary of American
Biography_ informs me that he was regarded as a most scholarly man and
as better acquainted with library management than anyone else of his
time. I imagine him as a disappointed, somewhat tragic figure, a true
Smith of our line of Smiths, an immense reader and a writer, but without
talent, to whom had never been vouchsafed any glorious jaunt across the
Atlantic. His life had been broken, so gossip said, by an unhappy
passion from which he had never recovered; he shared in none of the
optimisms and beliefs of our little community, and I remember only one
expression of his feelings, when he too, like my grandfather, opened his
usually silent lips to a condemnation of America, and of the age he
lived in--a condemnation more quietly expressed but much more bitterly
contemptuous, and founded on a far more desolating analysis, than my
grandfather's outburst, which had sounded so strangely in my ears.

Of an older brother of these two, named Albanus Smith, who died in his
twentieth year in 1843, I have just found a pathetic little memoir,
privately printed at his death. This forgotten uncle of mine, whose name
I never heard of in my youth, was plainly one of our race of bookish
spirits, who had heard from across the Atlantic the voices of the Muses,
and wished also, though in vain, to become a man of letters like myself.
Like me, he made an anthology of seventeenth-century writers, but his
compilation of fine prose was never printed, and after a passionate
recital of "Mazeppa" before a society of like-minded youths, he fell ill
and died. He now joins for me that family group of dim and thwarted
ghosts whose wishes and literary ambitions never found, as mine have
found, some slightly more fortunate fulfillment. This uncle made a most
pious, Christian, edifying end; some semblance of such a decease had
been hastily improvised for my grandfather by my religious aunt with
whom he lived; but when my other uncle died, it was not possible to
improvise for him an edifying departure. He took his disbelief with him
to the grave, and with it the secret of his thwarted life; and, as I was
destined to a brighter career in the world of glittering glass bottles,
the vacant and, as we fondly boasted, hereditary librarianship was
filled by a stranger.

My father in the meantime, discussing, as I have said, the dark
perplexities of religion as he drove daily with this irreligious brother
to and from his office, had begun to lose his faith in the whole scheme
of Salvation which he had so fervently advocated, and by means of which
he had converted so many thousands of earnest souls. His situation was
thus an awkward one; he had still a reputation in the religious world,
he still possessed the hypnotic power of swaying great audiences, and
many calls were made upon him to address meetings and administer
religious instruction to souls in trouble. Invitations to preach he
could avoid on the grounds of health, but the religious inquirers who
called at the house, coming sometimes as far as from Russia, were the
source of greater embarrassment; and I remember how desperately he would
try to keep one or the other of his children in the room to avoid the
necessity of a spiritual dialogue, and how quite heartlessly we would
escape from it, leaving him to grapple alone with these spiritual
inquirers. This we thought great fun.

Perhaps unconsciously affected by my father's loss of faith, or because
the good seed in my case had fallen on extremely shallow ground, my
early religious feelings began before long to fade away. They had
remained with me for some years after my conversion, which had
transformed me into an infant evangelist who would distribute religious
tracts in the Philadelphia horsecars, and who, profoundly impressed by
the necessity of doing something each day before the sun went down to
save some human soul, would often hurry out towards evening to perform
this godly task before it was too late. This zeal was maintained during
our sojourn in England, and indeed increased by the holy excitement of
that period; and I recall in especial one hot summer day, when, driving
with my parents across the Isle of Wight, I was filled with an ineffable
consciousness of Sanctification and exemption from the fear of Hell and
the fate of others, which filled my little heart with a sensation of
felicitous vanity more exquisite than any I have experienced since. The
scent and taste of ripe peaches plucked from a sunny wall in August? No,
I have felt nothing in my life which I can compare with that holy joy.

Leslie Stephen, in his essay on Jonathan Edwards, mentions the story, so
similar to my own, of the redemption of little Phebe Bartlet, of
Northampton, Massachusetts, who was, like me, converted at the age of
four, and also made efforts to save the souls of others. The account of
Phebe he describes as "the grotesque story of this detestable infant,"
or words to that effect. Such a detestable infant I must have been, no
doubt; yet I was, after all, no Phebe Bartlet, but a healthy schoolboy;
and the usual schoolboy interests and occupations began to fill my mind
with more seasonable thoughts. Finally, one Sunday afternoon in June,
when I was up in a cherry tree picking cherries, the whole super-natural
scheme of things seemed to fade away into the blue sky, never to return.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Our summer holidays from school came more and more to be spent, as we
grew older, in camping expeditions, first in the Adirondacks, or the
Maine forests, and then amid the Rocky or the Californian mountains; and
these delightful fishing and shooting trips, though they stored my mind
with infinite forest and mountain memories which are still vivid and
delightful, aroused in me a passion for wild life in the open air which
obliterated not only my religious sentiments, but also my early taste
for reading, and retarded whatever tendency there was in me towards the
development of my mind. I became in my school days nothing more than an
ordinary healthy boy, fond of games and sports, and above all of camping
trips and fishing and shooting among wild lakes and mountains.

Not long ago, when I was reading Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, the
memory came back of these old hunting days in the Rocky Mountains, the
delicious fatigue felt through all the body on my return to camp with
the game I had shot or the trout I had fished for (for I was game
purveyor to the camp), and the nights spent in the open on pine boughs
in the cool night wind, under the mountain stars. Then the dawns of
those long-ago days brightened for me, and I remembered the preparations
for another day of shooting, the proceeding forth with my rifle, the
climbs and scrambles through virgin forests, the excitement and hush of
the unseen presence of deer or elk or bear, then the heat and thirst in
the midday sun, and the finding of bubbling streams among the mountains
and the slaking of my over-powering thirst.

When we were not on camping expeditions, we often went to Newport--not
to the fashionable part of that fashionable watering place, but to the
town on the harbor, where my uncle, James Whitall, and several
Philadelphia Quakers owned old-fashioned houses, in which their summers
were quietly spent; and memories of these sojourns amid a band of happy
cousins often return to me now, and fill the background of my mind: the
sailing in little boats, the sounds of guitars and youthful voices, the
wind on starlit nights and the splash of the dark waters; the sight of
the great steamers that passed like furnaces of light, and my departure
at last in one of them, watching with tears and smiles the lanterns
waved by cousins and friends from my uncle's wharf. To tuck a happy
childhood under a child's jacket was the principle which my mother's
kindly father often preached as the best preparation for happiness in
future years, and such a childhood was certainly the provision which was
made for us, adding greatly to the future felicity of our lives.

-----

Footnote 1:

Reprinted in 1934 by Faber & Faber under the title of _Group Movements
of the Past_, with a preface by the Bishop of Durham.




                                   3
                              Walt Whitman


From the Quaker Penn Charter School in Philadelphia I went at the age of
sixteen to the near-by Quaker college at Haverford, and began to undergo
that vague, diffused kind of intellectual varnishing and plastering over
which was then regarded in the United States, and is, I believe, still
regarded, as an adequate collegiate education.  The scheme of teaching
in this small Quaker college, though rather sounder, I believe, than
that in some of the larger universities, had but little influence on me:
no stirring of the mind resulted from those instructions; I played
games; I spent my summers in shooting and fishing expeditions; I and my
companions were simply enjoying our brief, irresponsible hour in the
sun, before we should all take up that business career to which we were
destined.  That every American should make money, that even those who
already possessed it should devote their lives to making more, that all
of them without exception should betake themselves every morning to
their offices and spend all the hours of sunlight in these great
business buildings--this was the universally accepted and grotesque
ideal of life in the world we lived in.  We were, it is true, for the
most part Quakers, but the unworldliness of this unworldly sect had not
long been able to curb the pecuniary ardor which had soon taken
possession of its members; and although my mother's father, the
original founder of the family business, had put before himself a modest
measure of permissible gain--limiting his ideal to the maintenance
of a house in town and a house in the country, and a carriage and a pair
of fat horses for his wife--and, when this had been attained, had
religiously resigned all further profits to his partners, no such
scruples troubled his successors in the business.  As this business was
now growing in importance and prosperity, glass furnace being added to
furnace, and the output of glass bottles greatly increasing year by
year, while my father drew an ever-increasing income from this source,
it was taken for granted that I, his only surviving son, should, when
the time came for him to retire, succeed him in this lucrative
occupation.  It was a golden chance and a dazzling prospect that quite
obliterated all thought of the librarianship, with its meagre income, to
which I had been originally destined.

In the meantime, raw college boy as I was, absorbed in outdoor sports,
and glass manufacturer as I hoped to be in the future, I became
nevertheless dimly conscious of certain vague stirrings in what, for
want of a better term, I must call my mind. Haverford College had been
built in a pleasant rural situation, with slopes and hills and a little
lake, and many groves of trees. Amid one of these groves a little
college library had been placed. I began to haunt this rustic and almost
unfrequented little building; and the love of reading, early awakened in
me by my visits to the old library in Philadelphia, began to take hold
of me again.

And then, as I passed beyond the years of childhood, another impulse
stirred within me, and contributed its energy to the dim awakening of my
intellectual life. I became vaguely aware of Culture, not indeed as a
thing of value in itself, but as bestowing a kind of distinction upon
its possessors, a distinction superior in some mysterious way to that of
a big-game killer which had hitherto been my ambition and my dream. The
revelation to me of this ideal I owed to that elder sister who had
converted me in my boyhood, and in whose footsteps, as she climbed one
height after another, I followed with clumsy feet for many years.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Young American women, before they settle down to domestic felicity,
permit themselves, and by the custom of the country are permitted, an
unreproved period of fascination, a prenuptial flight as it were, on
which they are pursued by such swarms as they can provoke--and they are
allowed almost every license in provoking them--of admirers, suitors,
beaux, and would-be lovers. This subjugation, this victimization and
leading captive of susceptible young males, is--or at least was--the
privilege and indeed the glory of every attractive young American
female; and is, as I have said, a kind of prenuptial flight less
dangerous after all than that of bees, for the hearts of the rejected in
that sphere, though easily broken, are not difficult to mend, and the
chosen mate or husband is not deprived of life when he has performed his
duty to the race.

My sister had now begun to soar upward on shining pinions, followed by
an unusual train of male admirers (for she was a great beauty), and it
was into high realms of poetry and culture that she winged her flight.
Thus to me, seated on the dull earth, there began to echo downward, as
from a heaven of larks above, the most fascinating talk of literature
and poetry. Oh, I thought, to be initiated into those refinements, to
have read the right books, to be able to quote the fashionable poets, to
shine, like my sister's admirers, in literary conversation! Was it
possible that I, too, might one day learn to take my part in the
discourse of these exalted regions? I shyly began to ask my sister about
books, and she recommended me to read the fashionable prophets of the
day, Carlyle and Emerson and Ruskin. These I found in the little college
library among the trees, and I turned over their pages as if they were
books of magic, from which some intimations of their real meaning began
slowly to dawn upon me. The rhetoric of _Sartor Resartus_ awoke in me a
dim sense that my soul was somehow in a prison, and in Emerson's pages I
caught faint glimpses of the free and starry life which might be
possible to the emancipated spirit. Most potent of all was the influence
of Ruskin upon me, and I remember in especial one vivid moment, when,
lying out of doors in the grass one late summer afternoon, reading in
_Modern Painters_ about the clouds, I happened to look up from my book
and saw above me the blue sky and the golden architecture of the
unmoving summer clouds. I had seen many beautiful landscapes on my
shooting and fishing expeditions; but this moment, when I gazed up at
the sky and drank in its beauty, I have been wont to regard as my first
experience of conscious sthetic enjoyment. The dispositions, however,
of which we become more aware as we grow older are deeply implanted in
us, and are, indeed, part of our native endowment; and the other day, in
reading a letter written by my mother before I was three years old, I
found that she had noted at that early age how no object that pleased my
eyes, no flower of autumn leaf or gay bit of rag, escaped my attention,
and how "the perverse little mortal," as she described me, loved to sit
and gaze up at bright-colored clouds. "I wish they would come down
here," she once heard me exclaim, "and let me see how pink they are. I
want," the pious infant added, "to show them to Jesus."

Soon after my reading of Ruskin I began to ask my sister about poetry
and the poets. Poetry, I had always maintained, was all rot and
nonsense, but I had become dimly aware of the part it played in that
exchange of sentiments and gallantries which was the main interest and
the great romantic preoccupation of the youth of our community. This
part was indeed important; the flights of the young females and their
adorers were musical with song; it was with the strains of the
fashionable poets, of Tennyson and Longfellow and Swinburne and the
Brownings, on their lips that the pursued and the pursuers soared upward
into the blue; and my sister, who was foremost in these things among her
aspiring companions, was accustomed to make the most effective use of
this method of fascination. She knew the whole of _In Memoriam_ by
heart; she could chant pages of Swinburne and Mrs. Browning by the hour,
which she says she still cannot forget; but there were certain poems of
Poe which were perhaps her favorites, and her singing of "Annabel Lee"
in the twilight to soft piano accompaniment was well known to be
extraordinarily effective.

           But our love it was stronger by far than the love
           Of those who were older than we--
           Of many far wiser than we--
           And neither the angels in heaven above,
           Nor the demons down under the sea,
           Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
           Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

The sound of these strains faintly reaching our ears long ago was a
warning to us all of the presence in the drawing-room of some youth to
whom "Annabel Lee" thus sung in the twilight was almost invariably
fatal. We took it as a warning that we must certainly not intrude. How
far away and innocent seems to me now that way of life in our
Philadelphia suburb--the thoughts we thought, the songs we sang, the
things we talked about in our ugly house, with its imitation
stained-glass windows and Landseer engravings!

However, to resume my tale. I had by this time become dimly aware of the
prestige to be acquired by some knowledge of the poets, and by the
ability to pronounce their names in a knowing way and to murmur their
musical lines in the moonlight, and I began, in my conversations with my
sister, to introduce shyly, as I have said, the subject of poetry. Yes,
there was poetry, my sister answered, musing, and smiling to herself as
she mused; and then with a pitying consciousness of my rudimentary
culture, and a feeling, no doubt, that I was unworthy as yet of the
higher initiations,--that Tennyson and Swinburne and Browning were still
far beyond my scope,--she recommended me to read Macaulay's _Lays_,
which I did read in the little library among the trees on my return to
college--read with real excitement, although I hardly found in these
heroic lays many tender lines suitable for quotation in the moonlight.
More to my purpose was another book of poems which I found for myself
upon those shelves,--Owen Meredith's _Lucile_,--which shoddy stuff I
read with passion, finding in it the delineation of all that I thought
most elegant and distinguished, all that in my most romantic moods I
should have liked to be.

In the meantime, however, almost unknown to me, or vaguely apprehended,
something had happened in another branch of my maternal family which,
though I had at the time no notion of it, was destined to have a
decisive effect upon my fate and fortunes. My mother's youngest sister
had married a Baltimore physician; they were the parents of nine
children, and in the eldest of these peculiar symptoms were beginning to
alarm her family. This daughter had made friends with another Baltimore
young girl, in whose house they had discovered and read with rapture the
writings of a poet called by the name, hitherto unknown to them, of
Shelley; Shelley had led them on to Godwin, whose writings they had also
unearthed. They had adopted with enthusiasm all the doctrines of these
two writers, their atheism, their belief in Free Love (exactly what Free
Love was these maidens hardly knew, but they believed in it with
passion); and my cousin, thus aware of larger horizons, had made up her
mind to wider explorations of this intellectual world.

She had determined, in fact, to achieve a college education, which was
then for women most unusual in America, and quite unheard of in our
Quaker world. After a terrific struggle she made her way to Cornell
University, one of the few colleges then open to women students, and,
graduating there, she and her friend had determined to go abroad to
complete their education in Germany--the country then the ideal and goal
of all studious Americans. The struggle to obtain this freedom for
herself and for her friend had shaken Baltimore like an earthquake--a
determination to devote themselves to lives of ill-repute could hardly
have created a greater scandal; but at last, after threats of suicide,
hunger strikes, and other forms of awful defiance, they had achieved
their purpose: they had gone, they were actually students at a German
university. This was a turning toward Europe of a more serious kind than
that of my grandfather, or than my father's brief participations in the
religious circles abroad. The world of European learning, European
scholarship, and German universities was what my intrepid cousin aimed
at, and into which, to the unspeakable horror of Baltimore, she and her
friend disappeared. In the great family conflict which had preceded this
departure, my mother, who had always bitterly regretted that no
opportunity for real education had been available for women in her
youth, took passionately the side of her ambitious niece. Indeed, to the
astonishment of everyone, her strict and disapproving mother, Friend
Mary Whitall, the devotee of the correct Friend Gurney, expressed her
approval of this wild project of her grandchild, and, when other
supplies were all stopped, gave her the money for the voyage, calmly
remarking, "I should have liked myself to have gone abroad to study."

Thus was diffused among us a dim apprehension of a world of study and
scholarly ambitions centred in Germany, but with offshoots in England,
and even possibly in America at Harvard, but remote, incredibly far away
from our dull provincial Quaker community--indeed almost unheard of
until this window in Baltimore had been so dramatically, so
tempestuously, opened. I was destined later on to be decisively involved
in the after-effects of this upheaval, but during my first two years at
Haverford, of this I had no notion, set apart as I was to be a willing
victim to the great Moloch and fiery furnace of our family business.

                 *        *        *        *        *

This was the point at which I had arrived when, in 1882, returning home
again for the Easter holidays, I was told important news by my sister
Mary, when she too arrived for her holidays from Smith College (for the
ban on the college education of girls was now removed). There was a
poet, she informed me and the rest of our family, a great American poet
and prophet,--though most Americans were not at all aware of his
greatness,--now living in poverty and neglect among us in America,
living actually not far from our neighborhood, and it was her purpose,
she informed us, to go without delay and offer him a due tribute of
praise and admiration. How had she heard of this poet? her perturbed
relatives inquired. A lady lecturer, she replied, had come from Boston
to Smith College, and had praised his works, which she had herself
immediately ordered from Boston, and which had revealed to her a message
of tremendous import, and the purpose of her intended visit was to
discuss this message. Consternation fell upon us all, and my father at
once forbade it. He vaguely knew the name of the poet, which was by no
means a name of good repute in Philadelphia; the district in which he
lived was a district not visited by people who respected their own
position; no daughter of his, he peremptorily declared, should, while
she lived under his roof, be allowed to take so unseemly a step.

My father's refusal to permit this indecorum though impressive as the
poor man could make it, had no effect whatsoever upon my sister. She
thought of going, she said, on the following Thursday; and my father,
being in his heart well aware of the powerlessness of American parents
in their dealings with their daughters, and convinced, as he was, that
if my sister meant to go on Thursday, on Thursday she would go, wisely,
if unheroically, decided that the best thing under the circumstances was
for him to accompany her, and thus lend an air of propriety to the
visit. I was invited to join the party, and so on Thursday afternoon,
off we started from our home in Germantown, behind my father's fine pair
of horses. We flashed along through Fairmount Park, we drove across
Philadelphia, we embarked in the ferry and crossed the Delaware, and
dashed up before the little two-story wooden house in Camden to which we
had been directed. An elderly woman who answered the doorbell ushered us
into a little parlor and shouted upstairs, "Walt, here's some carriage
folk come to see you." We heard a stirring above us as of a slow and
unwieldy person, and soon through the open door we saw two large feet in
carpet slippers slowly descending the stairs, and then the bulky form of
the old man appeared before us. Walt Whitman greeted us with friendly
simplicity; he had no notion who we were, and we had no introduction to
him, but the unannounced appearance of these "carriage folk" from across
the river--this portly and opulent-looking gentleman with his tall son
and beautiful tall daughter--did not seem to surprise him in the least.
My sister informed him that our name was Smith, that she had read his
_Leaves of Grass_, and had come to express her immense admiration for
that volume, and this explanation was received with great complacency;
we were all invited to follow him upstairs to his den, where we sat down
on what chairs could be hastily provided, and were soon engaged in
lively talk.

My father, who at first held himself aloof in the most disapproving
manner, soon, to the surprise of my sister and myself, began to join in
this friendly conversation, and we were still more surprised, when we
got up to take our departure, to hear our impulsive parent invite the
object of his grave disapprobation to drive back with us to Germantown
and spend the night. The afternoon was, he urged, a fine one, the drive
across the Park would be pleasant, and it would be a pity to bring to a
premature end so agreeable a confabulation. "No, Mr. Smith, I think I
won't come," the poet answered; but when he had hobbled to the window
and seen, waiting in the street outside, my father's equipage, he said
that he thought he might as well come after all, and, hastily putting a
nightshirt and a few other objects in a little bag, he hobbled
downstairs and we all drove off together. It was, as my father had said,
a pleasant afternoon; we crossed again the ferry, we drove through
Philadelphia and through the Park to our home in Germantown, where Walt
Whitman remained with us for a month, and whither he would often
afterwards return. He became indeed a familiar and friendly inmate of
the house, whose genial presence, even when we did not see him, could
hardly pass unnoticed, for he had the habit of singing "Old Jim Crow"
when not occupied in conversation, and his loud and cheerful voice could
be heard echoing every morning from the bathroom or the water closet.
His arrivals were always unannounced; he would appear when he liked,
stay as long as he liked; and then one morning we would find at
breakfast a penciled note to say that he had departed early, having had
for the present enough of our society.

The reputation which the author of the _Leaves of Grass_ had acquired by
that daring and not decent publication was a dubious one in America at
that time; this reputation had reached our Quaker suburb, and our
neighbors and relations avoided our house, and forbade their children to
visit it, when it was known that Walt Whitman was staying with us. There
was, indeed, a grave charge which could have been brought against him,
and which would have greatly shocked us all, if we had known (as we
fortunately did not) anything about it. There can be no doubt, I fear,
that from his boyhood Walt Whitman had associated with Hicksite Quakers,
that his father and mother had been followers of this prophet, and that
he himself had in his youth heard him preach. Indeed, in his old age he
wrote a eulogy of this aged Quaker in which he described the long life
of piety and benevolence of the saintly old man, and quoted without the
least disapproval his doctrine that true religion consisted, not in
sermons and ceremonials, but in spirituality, purity, and the love of
God and man.

This eulogy of Elias Hicks was written perhaps by the naughty old poet
while he was staying under our roof. But, as I say, one's sense of wrong
grows weaker with the years, and the other day I read Walt Whitman's
account of Elias Hicks with no overwhelming moral condemnation. Indeed
it was difficult at any time for anyone to retain a prejudice against
Walt Whitman for long. His manners were grand and primeval, like those
of the old patriarchs and bards in a picture of Blake's; he treated all
people with the same politeness, and only on one occasion did we notice
in him any sense of times and occasions and the demands of social
etiquette. He had arrived on a visit in a knitted vest, and, when told
that a number of people were coming that evening to dinner, the thought
occurred to him that probably he ought to put on a coat for the
occasion, and after some meditation he appeared at dinner time a
consummate man of the world in his overcoat, thus sacrificing his
comfort, for the night was hot, to the demands of the occasion.

Almost every afternoon my father would take Walt Whitman driving in the
Park; it was an unfailing interest to them to drive as close as they
could behind buggies in which pairs of lovers were seated, and observe
the degree of slope towards each other, or "buggy-angle," as they called
it, of these couples; and if ever they saw this angle of approximation
narrowed to an embrace, my father and Walt Whitman, who had ever honored
that joy-giving power of nature symbolized under the name of Venus,
would return home with happy hearts.

My acquaintanceship with this great and famous poet,--for Walt Whitman
had already become famous in England, and his glory had flashed back
across the Atlantic to Boston, and thence, as I have described, to where
we sat in Germantown in darkness,--the familiar presence of this poet in
our house, must have had an influence upon me which was more powerful
than anything that I was aware of at the time. He was, as John Burroughs
has well described him, "large and picturesque of figure, slow of
movement, tolerant, receptive, democratic and full of charity and good
will towards all. His life was a poet's life from first to last--free,
unworldly, unhurried, unconventional, unselfish, and was contentedly and
joyously lived." He was already old and half-paralyzed when we made his
acquaintance, but of the disabilities of age he never spoke, although
their shadows are not absent from his poems of this period. In one of
these, for instance, "Queries to My Seventieth Year," which was written
just when we came to know him, he thus addresses the oncoming year:--

   Approaching, nearing curious,
   Thou dim, uncertain spectre--bringest thou life or death?
   Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
   Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
   Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
   Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack'd voice harping, screeching?

It was, however, the calm serenity of age, its placid skies and sun,
which diffused about him that atmosphere of peace and leisure which made
his companionship so genial, and our endless conversations with him so
great a pleasure. He was fond of talking with young people, and would
listen with the utmost good nature to our crude notions; and when he was
not with us, my sisters and I would often visit him in Camden, where on
summer days we would find him seated at his window, fanning himself with
a large palm-leaf fan, and gazing out on the lazy sunshine that filled
his little street. Not infrequently during our visits he would recognize
some workingman of his acquaintance as he passed, and call out, "Come
up, Bill, and meet some friends of mine," and the workingman would come
in, or the passing postman, or the driver of an express wagon, and we
would all share an improvised meal together.

The floor of the room upstairs in which he lived was covered to the
depth of a foot or so with a sea of papers, and now and then he would
stir this pool with his stick and fish up a letter from an English
admirer--Tennyson perhaps, or Symonds, or Edward Dowden--or some
newspaper article about "the Good Grey Poet." Walt Whitman, who had been
himself so long a newspaper writer, was curiously fond of newspaper
publicity; his floor was strewn with press cuttings in which his name
was mentioned, and he would even, I believe, now and then, write
anonymous articles about himself for insertion in the local papers.
Otherwise he was quite free from literary vanity, and never spoke of his
writings unless we questioned him. Then, however, he would answer with
great simplicity and frankness.

My sister Mary (whom he called his "bright, particular star") recalls
how once, when she was on the Camden ferry, she saw an Englishman also
on the boat. He must, she rightly concluded, be on a pilgrimage like
herself to visit Walt Whitman, for how otherwise account for the
presence of that Englishman? She, therefore, accosted the correct and
dapper figure, who confessed, with some surprise, that this was in fact
his purpose. My sister offered to show him the way to Walt Whitman's
house, and they proceeded thither, to find, however, that the door was
locked and they could get no answer to their knockings. "I'm sure he's
upstairs," my sister said; "he always is, so the best thing is for me to
boost you up to the window, which you can open, and then come down and
let me in." Edmund Gosse (for the Englishman was Edmund Gosse) seemed
considerably surprised, my sister says, by the unconventionality of this
proposal, but as he had come a long way to visit Walt Whitman, and did
not wish to be baffled in his object, he finally allowed my sister to
boost him up; and then he descended to open the front door to her, and
they found Walt Whitman as usual in his study, and their visit was a
satisfactory one in every way. It is only fair, however, to add that
when, thirty or forty years after, I arranged for Mrs. Berenson and Sir
Edmund Gosse to meet at luncheon, the latter, though admitting that he
had met my sister at Walt Whitman's, angrily denied the boosting and his
informal entrance. Knowing both Gosse and my sister to be endowed with
more picturesque than accurate memories, I have never been able to
decide which of them was telling the truth.

I remember once speaking to Walt Whitman about his poem, "With
husky-haughty lips, O sea!" which had just been published, and he told
me, sitting one summer evening on our porch in Germantown, of the way he
had come to write it; how always, from the days of his boyhood on the
Long Island coasts, he had tried and tried again to seize the meaning
which the voice of the ocean was always whispering in his ears; how
often by day, and more often by night, he had sat or lain amid the
sandhills on its margin, listening in a kind of torment of attention to
that great voice--some voice--in what words could he best describe it?

. . . some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers.

This notion of receptivity to experience, and of a complete surrender to
it, combined with a patient effort to grasp its deepest meaning and to
embody that meaning in significant words--this account of the old man's
poetic method, as he told it one summer evening, was deeply impressive
to his boyish listener, although that listener had then no thought of
attempting to coin his own experience into enduring metal. To melt
material sand into salable glass bottles--this, he believed, was to be
his destiny; and the idea that all such massy unmetaphorical gold might
be gladly bartered--as Walt Whitman would gladly have bartered it--for
the ability to embody in words some one of Nature's aspects,--the sea's
voice, for instance, or the breath of its salt fragrance, or even, as he
himself had said, "the undulation of one wave,"--the idea of so mad a
preference would have seemed to his youthful listener at that date
fantastic indeed.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Thus I listened to the impressive talk of the old poet, and though I had
no notion of following his example, the effect upon me of his poems, as
I read and reread that strange volume, the _Leaves of Grass_--how can I
adequately describe it? There are books which come to us like
revelations, which, as Emerson says, "take rank in our lives with
parents and lovers and passionate experiences," and to come on such a
book to which one can yield oneself in absolute surrender--there is no
intellectual enjoyment, I believe, no joy of the mind greater in youth
than this. Books of this kind should be contemporary books, written by
the living for the living; and should present us with a picture of life
as we ourselves know it and feel it. And they should above all reveal us
to ourselves, should hold up a looking glass before our eyes in which we
see our own faces. Much that was suppressed in the young people of my
generation found a frank avowal in the _Leaves of Grass_; feelings and
affections for each other, which we had been ashamed of, thoughts which
we had hidden as unutterable, we found printed in its pages, discovering
that they were not, as we had believed, the thoughts and feelings of
young, guilty, half-crazy goblins, but portions of the Kingdom of Truth
and the sane experience of mankind. It was above all Walt Whitman's
rejoicing in his flesh and blood,--"there is so much of me," he sang,
"and all so luscious,"--his delight in his own body and the bodies of
his friends, which seemed a revelation and gave the _Leaves of Grass_ so
strong a hold upon a generation born of puritans who had ignored, or
treated as shameful, those habitations of the spirit. Then, too, Walt
Whitman's affection for his fellow human beings,--for he was one of
those rare spirits who really love the human race,--his feeling that all
men and women, of whatever race or class and in whatever state of
degradation, were all of them not worthless and of no account, but
lovable and mysterious and divine--this seemed to fill for us the
many-peopled world with innumerable creatures, all dear and infinitely
precious. These were the streams of life which flowed from that
fountain; and catching also from its pages the fervor of his exultant
pride in Democracy, in America and the age we lived in, and moved also
by the splendid passages here and there of great poetry, it is no wonder
that we came to regard as a sacred book the vast printed chaos of the
_Leaves of Grass_. It gave us ears, it gave us eyes, it revealed to us
the miracle of our own existence, and for me, at least, with my meagre
ideals of borrowed culture, it seemed to open a great shining window in
my narrow house of life.




                                   4
                                 Harvard


At this time I was still an undergraduate at Haverford; but in 1884,
when I was nineteen years old, I went to Harvard from that small Quaker
college.  In this translation, I was still following in the footsteps of
my aspiring elder sister, who had awakened my taste for literature, who
had brought Walt Whitman to our house, and who had now decided to leave
Smith College for the superior feminine institution which had recently
been founded in the shade of America's oldest and most famous
university.  My sister's upward flights, though never unaccompanied
by swarms of wooers, were inspired by a genuine ardor for intellectual
things, and she was bent on applying her excellent young mind to the
study of philosophy.

This philosophic interest had been, I will not say awakened, but
certainly enhanced by an incident which happened in the summer of 1883,
and which was destined to have a considerable influence on her life, and
on that of all our family, including my own. In the summer of this year
the British Association met in Canada, and many of its members toured
the United States, and came in due course to Philadelphia, whose
citizens were requested to open their houses for the entertainment of
these visitors from abroad. Five of them were allotted by the local
committee to us, and came to stay at our house in Germantown, and of
these five, three fell at once in love with my sister.

One of them was a professor of some distinction at an Irish university,
and one a don at Christ Church. The third was a young London barrister
of Irish origin, a Balliol graduate and favorite pupil of Benjamin
Jowett's. Though a fervent Roman Catholic, he had somehow reconciled his
beliefs with the Hegelianism then current at Oxford. Much would he talk
of Balliol College and of its revered Master, Benjamin Jowett, who had
prophesied for him a shining future; of T. H. Green, and Arnold Toynbee
and Toynbee Hall and its new philanthropy; of English Liberalism and its
great leader Gladstone; and of the great radical, Joe Chamberlain, under
whose banner it was his hope and purpose to march to triumph for the
great causes he had espoused. This triumph was, we were given to
understand, to be accompanied by fame and beneficent power for himself.
These great names, the names of T. H. Green, and Jowett, of Arnold
Toynbee and Gladstone and Joe Chamberlain, awake somewhat ironic echoes
as I now repeat them; but then, at least in our remote Philadelphia
environment, they sounded like the names of heroes shouted from afar.

It is no wonder, therefore, that to this music my aspiring sister would
seriously incline her ears--ears which afterwards she came to think of
as having been at that time somewhat gullible organs of audition. The
middle-aged professor, the middle-aged don from Christ Church, had no
spells like these to weave; they soon faded away across the Atlantic;
but the aspiring barrister's suggestion, which he urged with passionate
eloquence upon my sister, that she should become his partner and fellow
fighter in this great contemporary effort to bring the Kingdom of Heaven
down to earth, in England--this shining prospect began more and more to
engage her grave attention. What impressed her most, and struck her as
indeed momentous and imposing, was the broad and deep foundations upon
which this proposed New Jerusalem was to be founded, this splendid
castle of his evocation, on whose high towers she was thus invited to
build with him their eagle's nest.

Nothing less fundamental could have satisfied her. Modern philosophy and
modern science had shaken, she felt, her belief in the old evangelical
explanation of the universe; but now to be assured, to be half-convinced
by this accomplished dialectician, that on the very philosophy, the very
science, which had daunted her, they could, by sounding to the darkest
abysses, build up together the great edifice of Faith, and thus restore
again those great watchwords, "God," "Duty," and "Immortality," which
were, he added, requisite for her salvation and the salvation of the
human race; that they would moreover prove all this--O marvelous!--to be
eternally riveted on the firm basis of the ancient and Catholic
universal Church--this was indeed a high-flying courtship and a splendid
wooing, and she was profoundly impressed (how could it be otherwise?) by
the prospect.

To soar, however, into so exalted a region it would be necessary, she
felt, for her to expand her intellectual wings; she must, in fact, study
philosophy with more attention; and for that study Harvard, with its
famous philosophers, Royce and William James and Professor Palmer, was
obviously the place. So from Smith College my sister transferred herself
to Cambridge, and, as I have said, I followed in her train. This
migration was the more easily effected owing to William James's
friendship with my parents. He was an admirer of my mother's religious
writings; he had enlisted my father's assistance in the formation of an
American Society for Psychical Research, and had more than once stayed
with us in Germantown when he came to Philadelphia in connection with
this work. It was, I think, by his arrangement that lodgings were found
for my sister and myself in the comfortable home of two elderly
Cambridge maiden ladies; and a new chapter in our lives began.

Though my sister and I lodged together, we led our lives in complete
disassociation. She began at once her philosophic studies; and at once,
for it was her fate, the only professor who was willing to instruct her
joined himself in a headlong fashion to the band of her wooers, and
began to endeavor, by displaying another metaphysic, to replace in her
thoughts, and ultimately at the matrimonial altar, the London barrister
with whom, as he knew, she was engaged at that time in a correspondence
which much occupied her mind. While this philosophic and yet passionate
drama (in which I did not take the slightest interest) was proceeding,
was in fact, I may say, raging,--and the word is not too strong, for the
professor's eager courtship of a young woman who attended his lectures
did more honor to his temperament than credit to the chair he
occupied,--while all this was going on, I became more and more absorbed
in the pleasant social life of Harvard.

                 *        *        *        *        *

My father had given me a generous allowance. I had already a few
acquaintances who belonged to what was considered a good set among the
undergraduates, and was elected a member of several of those societies
and fraternities which play, or played, so important a part in Harvard
life. I have now forgotten the names of these foolish associations, but
my pleasure at my election to them I can still recall. It was in the
essence a snobbish pleasure; why should I boggle at the word? Indeed the
atmosphere of Harvard was at that time--whether it has changed since
then, I do not know--richly colored by the sense of social differences.
The prestige possessed by members of the most exclusive clubs, the
delight of being seen in their company, and the hope of being admitted
into their select circles--these were the animating motives of life at
Harvard as I knew it; and the democratic principles I had learned from
Walt Whitman were of little avail against this atmosphere of social
aspiration. That there was an intellectual set at Harvard of much
greater interest than the foolish world in which I was, after all,
little more than an outsider; that there were young men of intelligence
and high promise among my contemporaries, I had not the slightest
notion. I was indeed hardly worthy at that time of the notice of
intellectuals like Santayana and Berenson, who were at Harvard with me,
though I did not know them, and with whom I became acquainted only in
after years.

I actually sat beside my present brother-in-law, Berenson, at a course
of William James's lectures, but no communication passed between us, and
it was not till long afterwards, when he had married my elder sister,
that we began that series of confabulations to which I owe so much. For
my parents' sake William James did, however, befriend their callow
offspring, and I was often invited to his hospitable house. I need not
try to describe the charm of the most charming man I ever met; Ralph
Perry has performed that task in his admirable biography, but I may
perhaps add a touch to his account of that free and spontaneous spirit
by repeating an anecdote he related to me one night, telling me that I
might repeat it anywhere but in Cambridge.

He had gone, he told me, by tram that afternoon to Boston; and as he sat
and meditated in the Cambridge horsecar two strains of thought had
occupied his mind. One of these was the notion, which Mrs. James had
recently derived from the perusal of Kipling's writings, that our civil
order, that all the graces and amenities of our social life, had for
their ultimate sanction nothing but force, however much we might
disguise it--the naked fist, in fact, the blow of the sword, the crack
of the pistol, or the smoke and roar of guns. Superimposed upon this
meditation began to recur, with greater and greater persistence, the
memory of certain remarks of his brother Henry, who, on a recent visit
to America, had indignantly protested against the outrageous pertness of
the American child and the meek pusillanimity with which the older
generation suffered the behavior of their children without protest.

It was not long, William James said, before he became aware of what had
aroused this second line of thought; it was the droning sound which
filled the horsecar--the voice, in fact, of an American child, who was
squeaking over and over again an endless, shrill, monotonous singsong.
Growing more and more irritated by this squeaking, William James
resolved that he at least would not suffer it without protest; so,
addressing the mother of the vocal infant, he said politely, "I think,
madam, you can hardly be aware that your child's song is a cause of
annoyance to the rest of us in this car." The lady thus addressed paid
no attention; but a gallant American, who heard it, turned on him and
said with great indignation, "How dare you, sir, address a lady in this
ungentlemanly fashion!" At this insult William James, recalling the
doctrine of naked force which his wife had impressed upon him, replied
with manly promptness, "Sir, if you repeat that remark, I shall slap
your face." The remark, to his consternation, was repeated, and the
professor was compelled to make good his word. The slap was
conscientiously administered; the occupants of the horsecar arose in
indignation, pressing their cards upon the victim of the assault, and
protesting their willingness to be witnesses at any legal proceedings
which might ensue. Then they all sat down; and as the car clattered
along through the dust towards Boston, with the child still shrilly
singing, the grave burden of the public disapproval which William James
had encountered became almost more, he said, than he could bear.

He looked from hostile face to hostile face, longing for some sign of
sympathy and comprehension, and fixed at last all his hopes on a lady
who had taken no part in the uproar, and whose appearance suggested
foreign travel perhaps, or at any rate a wider point of view. He felt
that she at least understood the motive of his action; and so great was
his longing for sympathy that when at last the car reached Boston and
they all got out he committed the error of trying to make sure of her
approbation. "You, madam," he said, addressing her, "you, I feel sure,
will understand . . ." Thereupon the lady drew back from him and
exclaimed, "You brute!"

I may add here another anecdote of William James, for when I name that
enchanting person it is difficult to dismiss him with no further
mention. Some years later, when our family was at last established
abroad, he came to stay with us in Sussex, and declared his desire to
spend a summer in England and experience the joys of English country
life. My father thereupon obtained a list of country houses to be let in
our neighborhood, and orders to view them, and drove William James to
see one after the other. This inspection he carried on with the utmost
care, examining each house from attic to cellar, allotting the various
rooms to be occupied by the various members of his family. When this
process was over, and the gardens and even the stables had been
examined, and he returned to our house to dinner, he genially remarked,
"I can't tell you how grateful I am for all the trouble you have taken;
I have had my summer in England, and now we go abroad."

                 *        *        *        *        *

While we were at Harvard, Edmund Gosse came to Boston to deliver the
Lowell Lectures; my sister and many of the Harvard intellectuals went
religiously to listen to the utterance of this English writer, whose
name was familiar to us all. Of these lectures I have forgotten
everything except one pregnant sentence, in which the name of Botticelli
first echoed in our ears. "Botticelli," the lecturer said, in that
cultivated "English accent" which was music to us, "Botticelli,"--and
with what unction he slowly reiterated those syllables!--"Botticelli,
that name which is an open sesame to the most select, the most
distinguished, the most exclusive circles of European culture." The
effect of these words upon us was magical. What longings it aroused in
us, what delicious provincial aspirations for a world fairer than the
world we lived in--for exquisite, remote, European things! It was the
song the Syrens sang, it was the voice of the Muses that Thamyris heard
among the Theban mountains, it was almost the voice that summoned Saint
Paul to a higher life as he journeyed to Damascus. Would Fate, we
deliciously wondered, ever vouchsafe to us to enunciate those syllables
of sweet magic and thus win admission to those far-away bright circles
of European culture, circles as heavenly in our provincial eyes as those
circling rings of angels seen in great Italian pictures? Among that
audience, although my sister and I did not know him at the time, was the
future art critic, Bernard Berenson, who, he has told us since, went at
once and bought himself a reproduction of Botticelli's "Primavera."

Life is an ironic thing, and when years afterwards I recalled to Sir
Edmund Gosse the words which he had pronounced long ago in Boston, he
told me that his principal association with the name of Botticelli at
that time was connected with the family cat, Beneder, which was then by
its mewings causing considerable annoyance in his household. There had
been a joke in _Punch_ about an sthete who, when shown a picture
attributed to Botticelli, had denied its authenticity on the ground that
he was always dumb in the presence of a work of that master. So the
Gosses had purchased a photograph of an unquestioned picture by
Botticelli, and pinned it up by the basket of Beneder, in the hope,
which proved a vain one, of silencing its voice.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I have spoken of the effect upon me of Walt Whitman's poems; I fell at
Harvard (for my time there was not utterly wasted) under the influence
of another living writer, Matthew Arnold. When I now think of Matthew
Arnold, it makes me rather sad. The exquisite poet who so soon abandoned
poetry; the supreme critic whose best criticism is so scanty; the great
writer who wasted the energy of his best years in dull official routine;
the advocate of Hellenism and sweet reasonableness who soon gave himself
up to angry recrimination, and who, whether owing to exasperation with
his contemporaries or to some arrogant streak in his own nature, more
and more abandoned that serene aloofness from contemporary conflicts
which had been his ideal, and adopted a pose of aggressive,
self-satisfied contempt, and a harsh browbeating style full of derisive
catchwords.

When I read again the best writings of Matthew Arnold I find in them the
expression of the most truly enlightened spirit among the great
Victorians, the most humane, the most European and least provincial of
all English authors, whose outlook is still our outlook, who still
speaks to us with contemporary accents. But fifty years ago it was that
more controversial Matthew Arnold who aroused my young enthusiasm. His
aggressive warfare with the Philistines delighted me; I rejoiced in his
ridicule of the evangelical religion and dissent in which I had been
nourished, and what delighted me most of all was his attribution of an
arrogant superiority, an exclusive kind of distinction to that culture,
that sweetness and light, which now for the flimsiest reasons I believed
that I had attained. But it was not only the attainment of culture for
oneself, but the diffusion of it, which Matthew Arnold preached, and
this part of his doctrine was most of all an inspiration to me.

I belonged by family traditions to the philanthropic world; from the
American atmosphere and from the conversations and the writings of Walt
Whitman I had absorbed democratic principles which floated vaguely--as
such principles can easily float without conflict--side by side with my
more exclusive proclivities, and above all with an ideal of cultural
uplift, as it would now be called. I found that I could gild with a
finer gold than that of dollars my future commercial prospects. I
imagined myself as returning, when I entered the family business, to my
birthplace amid its furnaces in New Jersey, to diffuse among those raw
and illiberal workmen a love of beauty, a passion for things of the mind
and a desire to learn the best that is known and thought in the world. I
saw myself a picturesque, a somewhat pathetic figure (for the children
of light are lonely in this world and are almost always persecuted by
it), awakening in these unenlightened employees of my family their more
delicate and spiritual perceptions, and by a most happy combination of
circumstances drawing all the while a large income from my activities
among them.

Thus Matthew Arnold's oft-repeated watchwords of "sweetness and light"
and "warfare against the Philistines" were words of enchantment in my
ears; and another doctrine of his, that of "many-sided culture," served
usefully also to justify and ennoble the extremely many-sided, not to
say miscellaneous studies--if they may be called studies--which engaged
a small part of my attention during my sojourn at Harvard.

Following the example and enjoying the companionship of my gay and
unstudious companions, I had fallen in with the strange custom which
then prevailed at that university (things are changed now for the
better, I believe) of attending miscellaneous and perfectly unrelated
lecture courses--courses recommended more for what was called their
"softness" than for any other reason; going to lectures, for instance,
at the same time on Dante and Meteorology, on Homer and on the practice
of philanthropy, and other unconnected subjects. If this was a strange
method of acquiring the many-sided culture Matthew Arnold recommended,
its strangeness never occurred to me, nor was it ever suggested by any
of my instructors.

I perceive that I got almost nothing of intellectual value from Harvard
University. It was my fault, no doubt; if I had been a real student, I
should have found genuine instruction. But, for all my assumption of
superiority, the crudeness of my mind at the age of twenty wakens
amazement in me. Though I read the works of Matthew Arnold, I gave equal
or perhaps more serious attention to the literature of Theosophy, and
was inclined to believe that the key to the problem of existence was to
be found, if I could only grasp it, in a little book of Rosicrucian
doctrine over which I used to pore for hours. My sister, with her
superior philosophic light, scorned my Rosicrucian speculations, but she
herself visited at this time, with the intention of studying her
doctrine, the famous female prophet, Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy; nor was she
much better able than I to discriminate between all the various
names--Botticelli and Benjamin Jowett and Mrs. Eddy and Matthew Arnold
and Gladstone and William James and the Rosy Cross--which sounded in our
ears.

I detect in myself a tendency to sentimentalize over these early years
of my existence. It is not that I wish to recall my youth. It is rather
that I feel a kind of impatient pity for that half-baked young fool of
an American boy about whom I have been writing. No, I have no regrets
for youth. Gladly would I go on living at my present age, and with my
present interests, for uncounted years. To become young again would seem
to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can only
be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

The debt of our civilization to the ancient Greeks is of course beyond
all calculation, but in one respect we have no cause to thank them.
Their adoration of the youthful human form, in contrast to the Eastern
idealization of venerable age, has put a kind of blight on human life;
our progress, as we grow older, in wisdom and humanity is thought of in
terms of the physical decay which accompanies that luminous advance. We
feel ashamed, instead of feeling proud like the Chinese, of our
accumulating years; we are always trying in vain to seem younger than we
really are; and in our Western world it is by no means a compliment, as
it is in the wise East, to attribute to others a greater age than their
appearance might suggest. When I think of that brother and sister fifty
years ago at Harvard,--endowed, it may be, with the grace of youth, but
full otherwise of ignorance and folly,--I cannot but prize more highly
our present state. Our bones are ripening, it is true, for their
ultimate repose, but how small a price, after all, is that to pay for
the knowledge we have acquired of the world and men, for the splendid
panorama of literature and the arts which years of travel and study have
unrolled before us, and above all for those adequate conceptions in
whose possession, according to Spinoza's wisdom, true felicity consists.




                                   5
                          Business and Release


In this state of ignorance and folly my sister and I finished our year
at Harvard, and joined the rest of our family, my father and my mother
and my younger sister, in another jaunt abroad.  My elder sister was now
about to end her high prenuptial flight; the image of the Harvard
professor had been dimmed by that of the English barrister, with his
grandiose scheme of bringing heaven to earth under the leadership of
Gladstone and Joe Chamberlain, and beneath a banner inscribed with the
great watchwords of Hegelian logic, and yet bearing the authentic papal
seal.  She was to be married in Oxford to this son of Balliol, and the
unprecedented glory was to be hers of a wedding breakfast in that
college hall, over which the great Benjamin Jowett himself was to
preside.  I was to be present at this ceremony, and then to be allowed a
year of grace in Europe, to finish my education by spending the winter
at a German university, and thus acquire some tincture of that German
learning which was considered by Americans in the eighties as the flower
and crown of culture.

After this European jaunt (there was a taste in my family, as I have
said, for these jaunts abroad), I was to return to that bottle business
in Philadelphia which I regarded as my fate.

This programme was punctually carried out: my sister was married in
Oxford to Benjamin Costelloe; there was a big wedding breakfast in the
Hall at Balliol; the Master presided and made a speech, and to these
festivities my parents invited their evangelical and especially their
Quaker friends, who most of them had condoned, if they had not
forgotten, the scandal of my father's adventures with his feminine
disciples. At this gathering I became aware of one curious phenomenon
which at the time I failed to understand. The English Quakers who were
our guests seemed unwilling to mix together, and they separated into
little clans, and it was only later that I came to realize that these
"Friends," as they were called, were divided among themselves by not
very friendly distinctions, each group keeping aloof from the class
which in wealth or social position it considered inferior to itself. The
same hierarchical divisions exist, I have since discovered, among the
English Jews--another race, like the Quakers, who live separated from
the world, and yet in whom the worldly spirit of caste is especially
acute.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I went in the following autumn to Berlin, where I lodged with a German
family, and attended the lectures of some of the famous professors in
that university, and heard many concerts and operas, for I had been
caught by the fashionable craze for Wagner, and was an enthusiastic
though ignorant admirer of his music. Save for the German I learned, and
the German books I read, I drew no real profit from my sojourn there,
and only one encounter of that winter stands out in my memory with any
great distinctness. In my Wagner enthusiasm I used to go sometimes to
Dresden, where the great operas were performed with especial clat, and
on one of these week-end visits I happened to find in my hotel a Russian
family whose acquaintance I had previously made in traveling. I joined
them in the hotel dining room, and they informed me with much amusement,
for they were keen observers of characters and types, that there was
staying in the hotel a genuine English "dog," as they called him--a
"snob," a "sportsman" of the true authentic breed. The door soon opened;
"There he is!" they cried, as a tall figure in a suit of large checks,
and with a broad face and black whiskers, marched in with the jaunty air
of an English schoolmaster who, in traveling abroad, assumes what he
considers a man-of-the-world deportment.

My amazement (indeed horror is not too strong a word for my feelings)
can be imagined when this whiskered face began to display the features
of my revered poet and prophet--features which I knew well from
photographs. So this was the author of the _Strayed Reveller_ and
_Thyrsis_ and many poems I knew by heart--the exquisite apostle of that
doctrine of sweetness and light which I had made my own! Matthew Arnold
(for it really was Matthew Arnold) approached the table at which we sat,
and, slapping down a pair of big tan gloves before those Russian ladies,
began to entertain them with an account of the very favorable reception
he had received at the Saxon Court from certain dear princesses who were
his especial friends. I looked at this large, cheerful figure, I
listened to his boastful conversation, with dismay. What I had expected
Matthew Arnold to be like, what Apollonian aspect I had imagined for his
face, and what divine discourse I had hoped to hear from his lips I
hardly knew, but this was certainly not what I should have looked for,
and my disillusion (I was only twenty) was almost overwhelming.

But at this time men of letters like Matthew Arnold, like Browning, and
like the younger Henry James, had formed the habit of wearing masks,
which saved them no doubt from much impertinence and tiresome gush about
their writings; and as the world, with its standards of good form and
deportment, was then taken more seriously than anyone takes it now, the
masks they assumed were worldly ones.

During my stay at Dresden I often heard Matthew Arnold impress the table
d'hte with his tales of the Saxon Court. "Not here, O Apollo, are
haunts meet for thee," I murmured to myself; but I never dared to speak
to him of literature, or of my passionate love for his writings. He
treated me, however, with jolly kindness, and invited me to come and
stay with him in England; but either because he died not long after, or
because I was afraid of further disillusion, I never saw him again. Of
course he did not want to talk of literature with the rather
insufferable young prig he had met by chance in a Dresden hotel, and I
dare say the impression of him that remains in my memory is a false one.
But he certainly was a very different kind of poet from Walt Whitman.

I specially remember how shocked I was when, after sitting in ecstatic
reverence at a splendid performance of the _Valkyrie_, I ventured to ask
him, as we walked back together to the hotel, what impression the music
had made upon him. "Oh, I had to go," he said in his offhand manner,
"but I only went because my wife and daughters would have scoffed at me
if I hadn't. But if you ask me what I thought of it--well, it seemed to
me--like--what shall I say?--it seemed to me the sort of thing that I
should have composed myself if I happened to try my hand at composing
music." "Oh, Matthew Arnold," I murmured to myself, "is this the way you
strive for a many-sided perfection; is it thus that you listen with
particular heed to those voices of foreign culture which are especially
likely to escape us in our provincial Anglo-Saxon darkness?"

In the autumn of 1886, I returned with my mother and father and younger
sister to America, leaving my elder sister settled in London to engage
with her barrister husband in that reminting, by means of Hegelian
philosophy, of the three great religious watchwords, "God," "Duty," and
"Immortality," under whose auspices, and that of the Catholic Church,
Jerusalem was to be planted in England. These processes of reminting and
Jerusalem-building seemed somehow to our uninitiated eyes to have been
for the moment postponed to the exigencies of our new relative's career
at the bar and in politics.

The Master of his College, Benjamin Jowett, the inspirer and guide of
generations of able and ambitious young Balliol men, had formed the
useful habit of pronouncing before each of his favorites as they
departed some pregnant word or sentence suited to their character and
prospects--a kind of apophthegm or maxim to be their watchword in their
careers; and at his parting with my brother-in-law he had sententiously
remarked, "It is most important in this world, Costelloe, to be pushing;
but," he added, after a pregnant pause, "it is fatal to seem so." The
earlier part of this wise saying my new brother-in-law seemed to have
appropriated to himself with enthusiasm, but somewhat, it was said by
those who did not like him, to the neglect of the hint implied in the
second clause. However that might be, the newly married couple were
almost lost to us in a rush of political and social engagements, into
which my sister seemed to enter with enthusiasm and the highest hopes,
while we returned from our jaunt across the Atlantic, and I prepared
with some reluctance to begin my business career.

I say "with some reluctance," for though I did not doubt the validity of
the great principle on which I was acting, or question the golden nature
of my prospects, my jaunt to Europe, my wanderings about the Continent,
had given me a taste for life abroad which caused a certain repining;
and above all I remembered having been present at a service in an Oxford
chapel, and feeling, as one of the white-robed scholars read the evening
lesson, a pang of regret that no such pleasant college life could ever
be enjoyed by me. These, however, were but vague regrets; the thought
would have seemed insane of abandoning the golden plum which hung ripe
for my grasp upon the family tree. If my dream of being an apostle of
enlightenment amid the family furnaces and diffusing culture among those
glass blowers had, owing to my advance in age, and perhaps to my unhappy
meeting with Matthew Arnold, grown somewhat dimmer, I had replaced it by
the more practicable if less exalted ideal of retiring from business
early--after, say, twenty years, when I had acquired a modest
sufficiency of this world's goods which would allow me to live a life of
cultured leisure. Not in Europe, however, but in some more cultivated
American corner, for I was a good patriot, and my condemnation and
contempt were great for those Americans who abandoned their country to
lead idle and probably corrupt lives in foreign parts.

I have already mentioned my Baltimore cousin, Carey Thomas, who had gone
to study abroad and had opened for us a window on the truer, more
scholarly culture of European learning. Miss Thomas had now returned,
and was busy in applying her ideals to the modeling of that new-founded
Quaker college for women which has since become famous under the name of
Bryn Mawr College. Miss Thomas had apparently not lost, amid this
constructive work, her taste for smashing windows to let in new light;
and, though extremely busy, she summoned me to an interview at Bryn
Mawr. I did not know my cousin well; she was nine years older than
myself, at an age when nine years makes a tremendous difference, and the
half-legendary tales of her academic success had produced in me an
immense awe and respect for her person and opinions. I approached this
interview with some trepidation, which was, however, nothing compared to
what it would have been had I known the awful words she had determined
to pronounce.

"So thee is going into the family business?" she abruptly began.

"Why, certainly, of course," I replied. "How could I dream of anything
else?"

"Well," said my cousin, "I'd rather shoot myself."

Was it possible that I had heard her rightly, or had my distinguished
relative suddenly gone mad? "But Carey," I protested, "it's a most
splendid chance--a chance in ten thousand, to take my father's place in
a great expanding business."

"I'd rather shoot myself," the awful woman repeated, and this time I
could not doubt the words I heard.

"But," I protested, "it may be a chance to make a fortune!"

"Why make a fortune?" was the answer.

"But Carey--" I protested.

"What's the good of money?" she interrupted. "Look at our cousins who
have gone into the business; they've all become dull old men before
their time. What good has their money done them? What on earth do they
get out of it? Is thee really going to sacrifice thy life to become one
of them?"

In my need to argue with this mad, misguided cousin, I fell back on my
old ideal--which, though it had somewhat faded, I had not completely
abandoned--of entering the family business to spread among those glass
blowers the ideal of a many-sided culture. "Bosh!" was, if I remember
rightly, my cousin's answer on this occasion, and to this energetic
monosyllable I found I had no reply. My second ideal, of making a modest
but sufficient income and retiring after, say, twenty years, seemed
irrefutable, and was now put forward.

"But why waste those twenty years?" my cousin queried. "The best, the
most important, the most pleasant years of life. Wait twenty years and
it'll be too late. Too late," she ominously repeated.

"But Carey," I almost bleated, "I haven't any money."

"Thee needs very little money," she answered. "I lived abroad on five
hundred dollars a year. Make thy father give thee that--he can easily
give thee more."

"And abandon my country?" I asked. "Go abroad and give up America, with
its need for culture and cultivated people?"

"Bosh!" again answered my cousin.

"But what should I do abroad?" I querulously inquired.

"Thee might take up writing," Miss Thomas suggested.

"But I have no talent, not the slightest gleam of talent for writing," I
protested.

"Then go and live at Monte Carlo and enjoy thyself," was the advice of
this eminent Quaker to her young Quaker cousin of twenty-one; whereupon
I was dismissed, and went away indignant and amazed. What? To give up
and madly throw away the prospect of a fortune, and go and live abroad
on a pittance in some shabby pension; to desert my country, and break
the heart of my father, who, as he had often reiterated, had only been
sustained in his toils and travails by the thought that I, his only son,
should succeed him and reap the benefit of his sacrifices! All this
seemed something dreadful, portentous, inexplicable--the result,
perhaps, of a temporary aberration, or of some perversion my cousin had
contracted abroad.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Putting aside, therefore, the memory of this interview, and trying to
forget it, I cheerfully entered the temple of Mammon, and its iron gates
clanged behind me. My parents had gone abroad again, and it had been
conceded, since New York was more a centre of culture than Philadelphia,
that I should be attached to the New York branch of the family business.
I was to enter that office at the bottom, working like the humblest
clerk, and being paid the most modest wage. So to New York I went, and
engaged a couple of rooms high up in one of its apartment buildings.
These rooms I adorned with photographs of the "Mona Lisa" and a few
other famous pictures; I had my books, my Matthew Arnold, my Balzac, my
Blake reproductions; and then my business life began.

I cannot honestly say that I was unhappy during my year in New York.
Most human beings are born for harness and are melancholy when out of it
too long. Like Wordsworth, they feel the weight of chance desires; the
definite routine, the daily necessary task, eliminates the need for
self-imposed activity, and they are freed from that irresolution, that
temptation to postponement, that degrading sophistry of laziness which
is the curse of those whose tasks are voluntary and can be performed at
any time. My hours of work were long, but absolutely regular: I was at
the warehouse at eight o'clock; I departed at six or seven, healthily
fatigued, and ready to enjoy an evening of reading, music, or other
pleasant relaxation. I was naturally industrious, and not, I think,
devoid of business talent; my tasks, though uninteresting, were not
difficult, and I enjoyed fulfilling them with efficiency.

If I had no favor owing to my family connections, I was aware of no
jealousy on the part of my fellow clerks, and I suffered no kind of
persecution from them. My modest wages, the dollar notes which I
received every Saturday, were precious to me from the fact that I had
honestly earned them. They seemed more valuable, more authentic, more
like real money than any of the bestowed currency which had ever before
got into my pocket. And I certainly tasted one joy during this year of
business which I have never tasted since--the joy of Sunday, of that
precious day of golden leisure, the memory of which, and the prospect of
its sure recurrence, sweetened all the intervening days of work. Now all
my days are Sundays; no one of them stands out among the others to
bestow a special felicity, or shines with an illumination of its own.
Thus I underwent my apprenticeship, learning my task better and better,
and apparently beginning, under the best auspices, a prosperous business
career.

I have read somewhere of men who receive a wound which they hardly
notice, and often carry on for a long time their ordinary activities,
quite unaware that they have been stricken in a vital part. That was
really my condition, although I didn't know it, all that winter: a kind
of ominous suppressed questioning, a mysterious unending argument,
seemed to be going on in my unconscious self, and reverberations from it
would rise every now and then into my thoughts. "It's ridiculous," I
would catch myself asserting, "to say that money is no good--she knows
absolutely nothing of the world." I began a determined process of trying
to idealize money, to convince myself that I did want fine houses,
opulence, and good food. Above all I tried to fix my mind on the
satisfaction, so much enjoyed by my father, of dashing along with the
gleam and rattle of harness behind a pair of fine horses. And yet to
sacrifice one's life for this, to toil day after day, year after year,
till youth was over? How was my gold grown dim, my fine gold tarnished!

I read and reread Henry James's stories of Americans abroad; pictures of
my foreign travels would shine and fade in the background of my mind,
and more persistently of all, perhaps, the memory of that afternoon at
Oxford when I had seen a handsome white-robed youth read the lesson in
his college chapel. I began to wonder if all the wealth the world could
give would compensate for the deprivation of the pleasures which Europe
offered; and little by little the longing for a life of cultivated
leisure, or at least of vague sthetic experience, grew upon me. But I
was still the dupe of that cleverest of the Devil's sophisms, which
alleges that one can comply with his behests for a limited period in
order safely to defy him afterwards. Little by little, however, I began
to lessen the tale of years to be spent in Mammon's service, and to
antedate my happy emancipation from business and New York.

Two circumstances did much to hasten this process towards my release.
Although, as I have said, I was not made unhappy by the work in our
family warehouse, the atmosphere of that office itself grew more and
more disagreeable to me. My mother's father, John Whitall, who had
founded the family firm, was, outside of business, a genial, kindly old
Quaker saint, the joy of his family, the dearest and kindest parent and
grandparent, and one of the most public-spirited and philanthropic of
the citizens of Philadelphia. But he had been, as I have said, the
captain of an American sailing ship, and these captains were not famous
for any excess of benevolence. Although precluded by his Quaker scruples
from swearing at his men, he seems to have ruled them by other methods
which had rendered blasphemy superfluous. When he left the sea, he
brought with him his sea severity into that world of American business
where harshness and cruelty and a slave-driving spirit were almost
universal.

To these Christians, to these Quaker saints,--and saints they often
were,--the notion seems never to have occurred of applying the
principles of their religion to the treatment of their employees.
Business was business; it was a world apart, without the slightest
relation to the Heavenly Kingdom; and this merciless tradition filled
the warehouse where I worked with an atmosphere which little by little I
found almost stifling. Every one of the employees lived in the fear of
instant dismissal, and in the hope of profiting by the disgrace of
others. A heavy, blustering bully was the tyrant of the warehouse; he
reigned in a glass-enclosed apartment, whither any wretch who had been
caught in error was immediately summoned and subjected to a
vituperation, a vilification, which reverberated loudly through the
office, and was listened to by the other wretches with malignant joy and
hope. "And it's in this ogre's kingdom," my soul would whisper, "that
you mean to go on living! And the success you hope for is to be changed
into some such ogre yourself!"

Thus the sense of malease grew, and has indeed remained with me so
vividly that I never meet a rich, successful business American without
some slight speculation about the bones he has crushed and the wretches
he has eaten. These experiences have given me a certain dislike for the
whole iron economic system upon which our civilization is founded--a
dislike, however, which I must admit is by no means strong enough to
make me forgo any of the pecuniary advantages which I derive from it.
And anyhow I quiet my conscience--how honestly or dishonestly it would
be difficult for me to say--by the reflection that I cannot think out
any other economic scheme of things that would allow the human spirit to
put forth fairer blossoms. The only alternatives to it seem to be
Fascism and Communism, and of the prospects these offer it would be
difficult to say which is the more ghastly. But that these blossoms of
capitalism are nourished by something as ugly as manure seems plain
enough to me when I think (as I try not to think) of our present social
system, and the questionable gold which the world keeps on putting into
my pockets.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The old Quakers had in their vocabulary several terms which vividly
described their spiritual experiences; and among these the word
"unbottoming" is one of the most picturesque. An unbottoming is the
slipping away and removal of the firm basis on which the solid Quaker
soul is seated; and now for me an experience of this kind was rapidly
approaching. This unbottoming of mine--or, to change my metaphor, this
drifting away of my soul from its familiar moorings--was not due so much
to the evils of the capitalist system, for to those I was accustomed, as
to something unrelated to socialism and almost incompatible with it. I
became aware of a tiny breeze, a faint inspiration, a dappling of the
surface of my mind by cat's-paws and tiny ripples, which took the form
of the desire to write--an impulse, inherited perhaps from my dim
frustrated ancestors, or a desire caught perhaps from my talks with old
Walt Whitman, to endure the delicate torture of trying to express in
words what I felt and saw.

To sift the sands of life for another kind of gold than the gold I was
earning at the bottle warehouse began to seem to me a delicious
occupation, and after my long days of work I began to spend my evenings
in writing an account of a sailing expedition which I had undertaken the
previous summer in a small boat from Newport to New Bedford. This I sent
to the _Evening Post_, then the most literary of the New York journals,
and to my amazement it was printed in its pages. I next began to write a
story which was full of crude pathos, and did not possess, I now
believe, the slightest literary merit. But I thought it a wonderful
story, and these stolen secret joys, this foretaste of what has been
since the delight and torture of my life, made me turn away with more
persistence from the den of business to peep through that window which
my cousin had smashed before my panic-stricken eyes. Outside was Europe,
and golden leisure, long tranquil days of writing, while inside, my
business stool seemed to be slipping away beneath me, and even the
partners' seat, which had been the object of my ambition, began to seem
a dull and cruel throne.

In the summer of 1887 my father and mother and younger sister returned
from Europe, where they had spent the winter, and where at least the
female members of my family had been haunted at times, I think, by a
certain pity for my fate, imprisoned as I was in that New York
workhouse, while they were enjoying themselves abroad. To them on their
return I revealed the desire for freedom which had grown upon me; they
were shocked at first, but soon joined in sympathy with my aspirations,
and we began to plot together against my father, for without money from
his pocket my emancipation could be nothing beyond a dream. But in every
family that I have known the men are no match for the female members,
who have learned how to lead these unreasonable tyrants by the nose. My
mother was altogether on my side. Indeed, throughout her life she had
held the conviction that what people really wanted to do was what they
ought to do. When in her later life she came to be a sort of
mother-confessor to the many people who used to come to her for advice
in their perplexities, her advice was always, she told us, for them to
do the thing they really and seriously wanted to do.

This advice she justified by the Bible text, "It is God that worketh in
you both to will and to do," and "will" should be interpreted as "want,"
she contended, in this context. "But surely, Mother," we sometimes
protested, "this is dangerous advice to give to people!" "Well," she
would answer, "our Heavenly Father knows the kind of advice I give, so
if He sends people to me it must be because He wants them given this
advice. Besides, children," she would add, "people always in the end do
what they want to do, and they might as well do it with a good
conscience."

I remember once when she was full of years, and famous for her religious
teachings, that a party of schoolgirls from some pious school in
Philadelphia visited Oxford, and the teacher who conducted the party
wrote to my mother, who was then living at Iffley, to say that it would
be a privilege for the little flock of maidens to have a sight of this
venerable Quaker saint, and hear from her own lips a few pious words.
The permission was granted; the schoolgirls assembled on the spacious
lawn outside our house, and I wheeled my mother out in her bath chair to
address them. The spectacle of all these good young girls, being
prepared, as my mother knew, for lives of self-sacrifice as daughters,
or as wives of American business husbands--somehow this spectacle
banished from the old lady's mind the admonition she had intended for
them, and when she opened her lips I was considerably surprised to hear
her say, "Girls, don't be too unselfish."

"Surely, Mother," I remonstrated with her afterwards, "when those girls
go home their pious relations will be dreadfully shocked by what thee
said."

"Yes," she replied gayly, "yes, I dare say it will make them grind their
teeth."

My mother, therefore, believing as she did that people should do the
thing on which their hearts were really set, was completely on my side
in my desire to leave the family business. My younger sister proved a
useful ally, and steps therefore were taken to circumvent my father. The
ground was carefully prepared. My father's grievances against his
partners in the management of the family business were artfully
exploited, and at last a careful trap was laid. My father was encouraged
to expatiate on the hopes he had been forced to sacrifice when entering
on his own business career; much sympathy was shown for the indignities
to which he felt he had been subjected by his partners; his dislike of
the harsh traditions of the firm was called up to his recollection; I
was asked to describe my experiences in the New York warehouse, my
subjection to its bullying manager was dwelt on, the years in which I
must remain in that subjection dismally calculated; the sadness of
spending my youth thus alone, thus enslaved, thus separated from my
family was touched on, and then, as by a sudden impulse, I was asked to
read my story. My poor father was moved by its crude pathos; his vanity
and pride in his children made him perceive in it a quite nonexistent
literary merit; and then when he was thus moved, thus worked on, thus
stirred like a puppet by familiar strings, the great project of my
leaving the business and devoting myself to literature was, in all its
horror and splendor, finally disclosed.

My father took on as all fathers do and should do on like occasions.
What? To throw away this golden plum ready for my plucking, to abandon
the opportunity of making a fortune, to go and live in poverty abroad
when I might be making money in my native country, was a piece of folly,
a kind of midsummer madness to which he could never, never (my mother
smiled at this familiar word) give his paternal assent. Next he took up
the theme of pathos: had he not toiled and travailed and indeed
sacrificed his life for my future? Had not that been the one
consolation, the one hope, which had cheered him? And was it now to be
brutally suggested that this was to be taken from him, and this bright
star to be dimmed forever? Was he, the indefatigable toiler of the
family, to be left desolate and disappointed, with no fair expectation
to cheer his declining years?

My father was possessed, as I have said, of an extraordinary gift of
eloquence; I myself was really moved by this outburst, and almost
persuaded to abandon so cruel a project; but my mother, who had long
since learned to deafen her ears to my father's periods, soon brought us
back to a truer sense of things. The business, she said, was after all
the business of _her_ family; it was owing to his marriage to her that
my father had been made a partner in it: if I wished to abandon it, it
was principally her concern. Should her brother and her nephews feel
that I had put an affront upon them by abandoning the family business,
she, as well as my father, must bear the blame.

This was the deft pulling of a potent string, for my father had no love
for my mother's family, who had ignored what he considered his immense
services to the firm, and who always treated him, he thought, as an
outsider. Now, when it was his intention to retire from the business, to
withdraw at the same time his son as if worthy of a nobler fate--this
began to dawn upon his dramatic imagination as a splendid gesture. He
was, moreover, to do him justice, an affectionate father, and full of
kindly impulses; and thus caught, thus entrapped, he soon yielded,
declaring that if I wanted to play the fool he would not oppose
me--would indeed assist me by providing the necessary funds. He offered
me a good allowance, or, if I preferred it, the meagre sum of
twenty-five thousand dollars, with which I could buy an annuity that
would last me all my life.

Inspired either by some premature knowledge of human nature, or more
likely by a hint from my mother, I chose the capital sum. The more
generous allowance offered by my father he would certainly sooner or
later have felt himself forced to withdraw. Being of an impulsive and
sanguine nature, he plunged into speculations in which the fortune he
had acquired in business entirely disappeared. The canny Philadelphia
Quakers unloaded on him a mass of shares in worthless silver mines which
never paid a penny; and, when he was reduced to live upon the fortune
inherited from his own father, of which, being trust money, only the
life income was his, the fact that he could not lay his hands on my
annuity became to him the source of a very grave grievance, but to me of
unmitigated freedom. It carried me through Oxford, it enabled me to
spend years in Paris, in Italy, and in an old house in Sussex. I lived
on it, in fact, very happily, for nearly thirty years.

In the choice then presented for my decision between slavery in an
office with the prospect of ultimate wealth, and poverty with immediate
freedom, any other decision than the one I made would, it seems to me
now, have been real madness, nor have I ever once, for the fraction of a
minute, felt for it the least regret. For money I by no means profess a
reckless disregard. But while I think it almost impossible to exaggerate
the misery of pennilessness, and the degradation it involves, my
experience of life has taught me to believe that, with the firm
foundation of a small fixed income, money in excess of this is
peculiarly subject to the law of diminishing returns. I have been both
poor and comparatively rich in the course of my existence; I have
associated with both poor and rich people; but, given the satisfaction
of one's simple needs, I have found that, from the point of view of
human happiness, the possession or absence of wealth makes very little
difference--that, in fact, my poor acquaintances have been, on the
whole, happier than the rich ones.

If, however, the good things of this world which wealth can purchase
have come my way, I have enjoyed them, as I have enjoyed such little
scraps of literary or worldly success as fate has allotted to me. But my
motto has always been the wise one of Aristippus of Cyrene,
[Greek: echo, ouk echomai], _habeo, non habeor_, or, to translate it
into idiomatic English, "I am taken by these things, but they do not
take me in," and to sacrifice one's life for them seems to me absurd.

But if my choice of poverty on this occasion was, I feel, a wise one, I
also feel that it was something like madness for my father to offer it
to me as he did. I had shown no particular love of study, no
intellectual brilliance of any kind; my mental development was slow and
backward, and the one story I had written, though it moved my father,
was surely a most flimsy basis on which to build any hopes for literary
success.

Nevertheless I left the New York warehouse without misgivings, and after
a few months in Philadelphia we all sailed for Europe and the unknown.
This was for both my father and myself our ultimate jaunt across the
Atlantic. Our family had been gazing for long across the ocean. They had
crossed it for religious motives; and when those motives ceased to
exist, they had no reason for remaining in a land in which they were
essentially aliens. Like so many English families settled on the Eastern
coast of America, they had really remained in England all the time. The
Burlington families were almost all Royalists, and I think we sailed
with the ghostly blessings of all those other book-loving,
poverty-stricken Smiths from an America to which they had been exiled
for so long.




                                   6
                                 Oxford


My flight from America occurred in 1888.  My sister Mary was by that
time married and settled in London, and her barrister husband insisted
with great emphasis that I should be transferred without delay to what
was, in his opinion, the only nursing home of reasonable thought and
noble ambition--in fact, to Balliol College.  There the spirit of T.
H. Green and of Arnold Toynbee was still potent, and there the great
Benjamin Jowett still lived and reigned.  This had all been happily
arranged, and the change from America to England, from a New York
countinghouse to Oxford, seemed to me a piece of flawless good fortune.
But there is a flaw, unluckily, as Emerson pointed out, in everything
God has made; and I am inclined to believe now, as I muse in retrospect
on these events of fifty years ago, that two slight incidents, though I
saw no significance in them at the time, might without superstition be
regarded as the first faint foreshadowings of the tiny rift which was
destined to flaw a little the felicity of my residence in England.

Both are trivial matters, both absurd in character, the first hardly
worth mentioning at all. I had reached London in advance of my luggage;
my father and I were to dine the evening of our arrival with Lord and
Lady Mount Temple in their great house in Stanhope Gate, and I appeared
in those stately halls, at what was my first London dinner party, in
dress clothes hired for the evening. My second false step was one the
gravity of which Oxford men will appreciate--indeed, I shrink from
mentioning it, even at the distance of fifty years. I was to travel to
Oxford the next day to interview Benjamin Jowett, and I performed the
journey by the London-Midland railway from Euston Station with a change
of trains at Bletchley--an unheardof method of approach, which is
nevertheless given in the railway guide as an alternative to the swift
and direct journey by the Great Western from Paddington. Since the
distances and prices were almost identical, how was I to know the
gigantic error of the route I chose?

The great Jowett, who had of course no notion that I came from Euston,
received me kindly; the entrance examination to Balliol was, I must
think, made easy for me, and I was taken at once into the pleasant
household of A. L. Smith, later the Master of Balliol, to prepare for
that examination to the University, or "Smalls," which no personal favor
could modify or make easy. The little smattering of Latin and Greek
which I acquired in America had faded from my mind; I was forced to
begin again with the Greek alphabet. But I was anxious to learn, my
tutor had a real genius for teaching, and in about three months' time I
acquired that minimum of classical learning which was then necessary for
admission to the University, and took up my residence in Balliol. I see
myself as being at that time an easy, pleasant, well-meaning, plausible
youth, older in years than my English comrades (for I was twenty-three),
but in mind and education much cruder than almost any of them, though
they were young and crude enough. I was the only or almost the only
American in Oxford; for it was long before the great invasion had begun.
I was liked, or at any rate I was kindly tolerated.

Jowett, as is well known, was the victim all his life of an absurd
social shyness, a shyness he diffused about him like a kind of terror.
To this I was, however, immune. I claim no credit for my lack of
becoming awe; it was part of my American simplicity, and I can recall
with a kind of amazement those dinner parties of his to which he would
ask a few undergraduates to meet the distinguished guests who so often
stayed with him. There, with their wives, were Cabinet Ministers who
could face a howling House of Commons but could not face the Master;
famous travelers who had looked on danger with unflinching eyes but who
now were paralyzed with shyness: all were as frightened of the Master as
he was terrified of them, all sat tongue-tied as in a nightmare. It was
very odd; but what seems to me now the oddest feature of these occasions
is the fact that I was there, an undergraduate, a clerk released not
many months before from a New York office, monopolizing the
conversation. Among all those eminent people the only words which were
heard were often spoken in my transatlantic accent. But being young, and
inexperienced in the world, I regarded situations as simple which were
full in fact of complications; hating to see people uncomfortable and
embarrassed, I wanted to help them to feel at ease. My host must have
been grateful to me, as he kept asking me to his parties. I remember
once how, when I stood looking across the chasm which yawned in his
drawing-room between his London guests and the undergraduates invited in
after dinner, I saw some London acquaintances of mine and stepped across
the gulf to greet them, and how the Master gave little me a pat on the
back and murmured, "That's a brave young gentleman."

But the state of society I am now describing must, I think, have
vanished long ago. Eminent Englishmen now meet (except, perhaps, in
royal circles) without undue embarrassment or shyness; since the death
of Lord Kitchener I doubt if there is anyone who can make them shake in
their shoes; and certainly the American accent is familiar, if not too
familiar, to them all.

Who were the eminent personages I met at the Master's dinner parties?
That they were large and shy is almost all I remember about them; I was
too ignorant of contemporary life in England to attach much meaning to
their names. They have faded from my memory with the exception of Lord
Dufferin, of whom Harold Nicolson has just written a delightful
portrait. I have a reason, somewhat beneath the dignity of history, to
remember this ex-Viceroy of India, this ex-Governor-General of Canada,
who was at the time, I believe, British Ambassador in France. On
arriving at the Master's I was presented to him and to his wife, who
happened to make a gesture which struck me as rather odd. I paid,
however, but little attention to it, as the Marquis immediately drew me
apart and began talking to me in that manner full of fascination for
which he was justly famous. I was naturally flattered by the way I had
been singled out and drawn aside from the company upon which he turned
his back, until I noticed that while he talked he was busy adjusting his
costume. The odd gesture of the Marchioness had plainly been an agreed
signal of a misplaced ambassadorial button which it was her high concern
to put right.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Jowett not only asked me to his dinner parties, but invited me also to
stay with him in his Malvern cottage. I only knew him, of course, in his
old age; his work was over, he was enjoying a deserved repose after the
efforts and battles of his earlier career, and the worldly,
disillusioned old man was by no means an inspiration to earnest youth.
He had known so many idealists; he had been an idealist himself, and the
gospel he preached had changed by now into a gospel of wet blanket.
Aspirations expressed in his hearing met with no encouragement. "People
are seldom better employed than in earning their own living" was a
favorite aphorism of his. I remember the experience of a Balliol
contemporary of mine whose ambition it was to devote himself to the
pursuit of Truth. His mother, perplexed by this odd notion of her
offspring, came to Oxford and took her son with her to consult the
Master on the project. The youth stammered out with the enthusiasm of
youth this ideal of a dedicated life, like Spinoza's. Jowett listened,
looking like an old pink and white parrot. There was then a pause, in
which mother and son waited anxiously for his verdict, which was: "You
can get it up to 900 a year, perhaps, but no more than that."

Taking essays to read to Jowett, as in groups of two or three we used to
take them, was a terrifying but also a most amusing experience. He would
listen with his head cocked on one side, ready to peck at any fine
sentiments or fine writing; and it was his favorite device to pretend
that he had not heard the offending passage. "Read that again," he would
request, in his squeaky voice; and then would come his comment. I
remember once, when Macaulay was the subject of the week's essay,
hearing a Scottish scholar of the college begin with a strong Scottish
accent, "It is strange that anyone should have read so much and thought
so little. It is strange that anyone should have done so much and lived
so little." I thought this beginning full of promise, but Jowett, after
insisting on its being read twice again, squeaked, "That sentence has no
meaning; I must ask you to write your essay again from the very
beginning." But once, rumor said, the Master had been completely
nonplused; an undergraduate had begun his essay with the sentence, "All
social reformers, from Socrates and Jesus Christ to Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant" (best known at that time as advocates of atheism and birth
control). "Read that again," snapped Jowett; it was read again, it was
read three times, and then--the Master said nothing.

I grew really fond of Jowett, though he fell far short of my priggish
approbation. Any earnest student who made the slightest slip was
severely punished by him, while the drunken escapade of some rowdy
aristocrat would meet with the mildest of reproofs. It was perhaps part
of this mellow naughtiness of his that he seemed inclined to encourage
my avowed intention of devoting myself to the fine art of writing. It
was an aspiration he had never before encountered; he had perhaps--who
knows?--a secret sympathy with it, for he was a writer of admirable
prose himself. Anyhow, he knew that such an ideal was absolutely not
catching, and I dare say he was aware that the Balliol dons who were
entrusted with my education would be annoyed by any such notion; and
Jowett did not in the least mind annoying the Dons of Balliol.

But these Dons of Balliol, these "Greats" tutors who supervised my work
for the Schools, though they were infinitely courteous and painstaking,
had much more serious reasons for disliking me (as I am sure they did
dislike me) than any fantastic desire of mine to be a writer. My mind,
though they may have dimly hoped at first that it could be coached to
win First-Class honors for the college, must have seemed to them sadly
lacking, as indeed it was, in discipline and training. I think that by a
kind of instinct they realized that I had come to Oxford from Euston,
and that no subsequent drilling could repair the error of this Midland
journey.

Sir Walter Raleigh describes in one of his letters a paper read in his
research class at Oxford by a Rhodes Scholar. "It was empty,
magniloquent, abstract, flatulent, pretentious, confused, and sub-human.
I could have wept salt tears. But I couldn't do anything else; the young
man wanted a clean heart and a new spirit, not a little top-dressing."
All these adjectives would, I am sure, apply to the essays I used to
read to these long-suffering tutors. They must have felt acutely my need
of the clean heart and a new spirit; and so conscientiously did they
attempt to supply me with them that now for the very first time in my
life I was, as we say, "up against it"--this was my first contact with
real education, with the standards of real scholarship and thought.

The Oxford School of _Litterae humaniores_--or "Greats," as it is
called--seems to my mature judgment the best scheme of education that I
have ever heard of. It is based upon an accurate knowledge of Greek and
Latin texts, especially the texts of Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides
and Tacitus, and the subjects studied in it are the eternal problems of
thought, of conduct, and of social organization. These are discussed,
not by means of contemporary catchwords, but by translating them back
into another world and another language. Nor could anything be more
profitable from the pupil's point of view than the way in which this
scheme of education was carried on. The student would prepare a paper on
some special subject, and go with it, generally alone, and read it to
his tutor, who would then discuss it and criticize it at length; or a
group of two or three would meet in the tutor's room for a kind of
Socratic discussion of some special point. These discussions were
carried on much in the spirit of the Socratic dialogues; and the
Socratic irony and assumed ignorance of the instructors, their
deferential questions, as if the pupil were the teacher and they the
learners, was a method which I found it hard at first to understand.

I remember, for instance, in reading a paper to Nettleship, I mentioned
the distinction between form and matter. "Excuse me for interrupting
you," Nettleship said, "but this distinction you make, though it is no
doubt most important, is one that I find a little difficult to grasp. If
it is not troubling you too much, it would be a real kindness if you
would try to explain it to me."

"Oh, it's quite simple," I answered patronizingly. "There's the idea,
say, in a poem, and there's the way in which it is expressed."

Nettleship still seemed puzzled. "Could you give me an instance?" he
pleaded.

"Oh, nothing easier," I answered. "Take the lines, for instance, when
Lovelace says,

                 I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
                 Loved I not Honour more.

Now he might have said, 'I couldn't be nearly so fond of you, my dear,
if I didn't care still more for my reputation.' The form, you see, is
very different in both these sentences, but the subject of them--what
they mean--is exactly the same."

Nettleship seemed greatly discouraged. "I'm afraid," he said, "I can't
see that the meaning of the two sentences is the same. I'm afraid I'm
very stupid; but to me they seem to say quite different things."

He was, I thought, curiously stupid; but in my patient attempt to make
my meaning clearer to him a dim suspicion began to waken in me that
perhaps it was not Nettleship but I myself who was playing the part of
the fool in this dialogue.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The Oxford School of Greats, and the Oxford tutorial system, which had
been perfected by Jowett, and was seen at its very best in Balliol
College, were exactly what I needed to knock out of me my pretentious
superficiality; and if I have to any degree attained a "clean heart and
new spirit," I owe it to these years of careful tuition and personal
guidance at Balliol. Yet I cannot but feel that this system of personal
tuition involved an intolerable waste of fine material, and that it was
a fantastic, almost a wicked thing that hours and hours of the time of
men like Nettleship and Abbott and the other Greats tutors should have
been devoted to the culture of an intellect so raw and crude as mine.

Nor can I believe that this patient, persistent instruction and
spoon-feeding of individuals is the proper function of university
teachers, or that, to the best minds already well grounded at school,
such additional schoolmastering can be really beneficial. Universities
should, it seems to me, be organized, not for the purpose of educating
the second-rate and stupid, for transforming at infinite expense of
labor the ears of sows into some poor semblance of silk purses, but for
the enlightenment and development of the keenest intelligences, for the
encouragement by example of original research. Daring and original minds
are cramped and injured by being always led in strings and fed on pap
which has been carefully prepared for them. They should be allowed to
make their profitable mistakes; and, above all, their spirits should be
kindled by contact with original scholars and masters of first-hand
learning.

To any such ideal the hard-worked college tutor, who had generally begun
tutoring the moment he ceased to be a pupil, could have, of course, no
chance of attaining. Naturally he tended to depreciate those who
attempted to achieve this ideal, and he had not far to look for them.
There existed at Oxford, in a kind of shadowy world, a whole body of
university professors, men of original learning and research, who were
generally appointed from outside, and who lectured on the same subjects
as the college tutors. But of all this I had not the slightest notion.
My only intimation of it was when I was calling one day on the Regius
Professor of Modern History (whom I had met traveling in Sicily) and
heard him tell his parlormaid to run over to his lecture room across St.
Giles and see if there were any auditors assembled. In this case, the
Professor told me, he would be compelled to attend himself. The maid
soon brought back the accustomed news that the lecture room was
completely empty, and so we were enabled to have our tea in peace.

My host's predecessor, the great historian Stubbs, had undergone much
the same neglect when he came to lecture in Oxford. The trouble was that
professors would lecture on things that interested them, rather than
provide information which might prove useful in those examinations in
which the colleges competed fiercely with each other, and no college
more fiercely than my own. Indeed, it might have easily happened in
Oxford at this period (I don't know how it would be now) that the
greatest authority in the world might give a lecture on his special
subject, and not one of those tutors who taught that subject, or those
undergraduates who were engaged in its study, would find it worth his
while to attend the lecture. Certainly any desire to do so would have
been seriously frowned upon in Balliol, as being likely to interfere
with that triumph of Balliol over other colleges which was held before
our eyes as the highest and noblest of university aims.

Balliol College, drunk with its triumph in the university examinations,
had made success of this kind its glory and ideal, and the immense
importance of gaining a First and thus helping to defeat and disconcert
and keep down all rival colleges was continually impressed upon us. I
remember receiving a dim impression of this passion when I read an essay
on some special point in Roman history to my tutor. I had taken an
unusual interest in this subject, which I had chosen for myself, and I
had read and thought with special thoroughness about it. I was proud of
my essay, and my tutor gave it unusual praise, in which praise I was
conscious of the mingling of a curious malease. "Yes," he said, "this is
an excellent piece of work, the best work of yours I have seen; if all
your work were of this quality you might get a First, and do honor to
your college. But I'm afraid that, after all, your time has been wasted.
That question was asked by the examiners last year."

This ideal of winning Firsts in examinations for the glory of Balliol
was so impressed upon me that, though I have little college patriotism
remaining, and an Oxford First has lost all its glory in my eyes, I
still study in _The Times_ the examination lists and count up the Firsts
achieved by the various colleges, and rejoice when, as almost always
happens, I find that Balliol still maintains its old preminence.

All the same, this spirit of competition between one college and another
seems to me now more schoolboyish and absurd than most forms of
patriotic sentiment, and I find it difficult to understand how serious
and noble men like the Balliol dons could have been inspired by such
childish ambitions, and done all they could--and they could do much--to
inspire others with them. Of course the rational, judicious hatred I
entertain for our rival university, Cambridge, being founded on reason
and free from prejudice of any kind, is quite another matter, and should
not be so much as mentioned here.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The other ideal strongly impressed upon Balliol undergraduates was the
duty of getting on in the world; and indeed triumph in examinations was
above all praised as the first step on the path to more important
triumphs. It has been said of Jowett that he united with high moral and
religious seriousness the plain determination that his pupils should not
fail of mundane distinction; and, naughty as he may have become in other
ways, at worldly success he never mocked. There was much glorification
on college occasions of the Balliol men who had achieved high honors and
positions. College gaudies were gaudy indeed with the litany of glorious
names recited on these occasions--names of viceroys, archbishops,
cabinet ministers, even prime ministers who were sons of Balliol, and
who not infrequently would return as grateful sons to their Alma Mater
and shed their lustre upon the college whence they had first winged
their flights. To tell the truth, I came in the end to find these
entertainments rather cloying to my taste; and though the roll call of
Balliol names has grown with the years even more illustrious, I am
inspired with no desire to listen to it. I am glad that members of my
college have performed noble services in the world, and have been nobly
rewarded by a grateful nation; but loud proclamations of these
achievements and reiterated college boastings I find, to tell the truth,
rather boring. I should more joyfully attend a gaudy for the black sheep
of the college, the scapegraces and ne'er-do-wells; and if men of
literary distinction like Matthew Arnold or Swinburne, or others famous
for scholarly research, had been praised on these occasions (which never
happened), I should have listened with greater interest.

The word "Research" as a university ideal had, indeed, been ominously
spoken in Oxford by that extremely cantankerous person, Mark Pattison,
some years ago; but the notion of this ideal, threatening as it did to
discredit the whole tutorial and examinational system which was making
Oxford into the highest of high schools for boys, was received there
with anger and contempt. In Balliol, the birthplace and most illustrious
home of this great system, it was regarded with especial scorn. If the
prize fellowships and the fellowships at All Souls were to be no longer
regarded as the legitimate reward of those who had won First Classes in
the Schools; if the means they provided were not to be spent in helping
ambitious young men on the first rungs of the ladder of worldly success,
but used, as Mark Pattison's ill-mannered supporters suggested, in the
maintenance of researchers, ambitious of the fame of scholars, would not
the whole tutorial system be deprived of one of its important features,
and the university endowments be seriously abused? This ideal of
endowment for research was particularly shocking to Benjamin Jowett, the
great inventor of the tutorial system which it threatened. I remember
once, when staying with him at Malvern, inadvertently pronouncing the
ill-omened word. "Research!" the Master exclaimed. "Research!" he said.
"A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never
achieve, any results of the slightest value." At this sweeping statement
I protested, whereupon I was peremptorily told, if I knew of any such
results of value, to name them without delay. My ideas on the subject
were by no means profound, and anyhow it is difficult to give definite
instances of a general proposition at a moment's notice. The only thing
that came into my head was the recent discovery, of which I had read
somewhere, that on striking a patient's kneecap sharply he would give an
involuntary kick, and that by the vigor or lack of vigor of this "knee
jerk," as it is called, a judgment could be formed of his general state
of health.

"I don't believe a word of it," Jowett replied. "Just give my knee a
tap."

I was extremely reluctant to perform this irreverent act upon his
person, but the Master angrily insisted, and the undergraduate could do
nothing but obey. The little leg reacted with a vigor which almost
alarmed me, and must, I think, have considerably disconcerted that
elderly and eminent opponent of research.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I fear that I have succumbed to my love of irony in writing of the
tutorial system and Balliol and the Balliol dons. In all sincerity,
however, I feel that I cannot be too grateful to Nettleship, to Strachan
Davidson, to Forbes and Abbott, for the unstinted trouble they took to
give me the new heart I needed. For all the purposes they cared for, I
was almost certainly useless: I could not be expected to add to the
glory of Balliol either in the Schools or in the world of great affairs;
and yet hour after hour they tutored me and listened, I will not say
unweariedly, but at any rate without any manifestation of weariness, to
my essays. Though I feel sure they did not like me, no sign of this ever
appeared in the beautiful courtesy with which I was always treated by
them.

Balliol gave me much, gave me some elements of real education, some
tincture of the classics; from the spirit of high endeavor fostered in
the college I was stimulated to feel that life was an opportunity for
achievement, that there were laurels to be gathered and garlands to be
run for. But the civic garlands which were prized in Balliol were not
really objects of my ambition; I still wished to cultivate the art of
letters, and no such notion was encouraged in that college. Indeed, save
for a mild appreciation of music, there was at that time no interest in
any of the arts in Balliol. The Master and Fellows had destroyed almost
all the antique beauty of the college, building upon its ruins a hideous
castle of the Philistines; and it was in this castle, where young
Philistines were being trained to go forth and conquer and rule the
kingdoms of the world, it was in this castle that I dwelt--high up, in
fact, in one of its battlemented towers.

But to me, dwelling thus among the children of this world, and toiling
with them for that success which leads to worldly advancement; to me,
enmeshed as I was in all the social, political, and philanthropic
interests of my companions, there floated through the Oxford air, there
drifted over the college walls, a voice, whispering, as in the delicate
cadences of the Oxford bells, enchantments very unlike anything I heard
in the college lecture rooms or chapel. If you would save your soul, the
voice seemed to whisper, if you would discover that personal and
peculiar sense of life which is your most precious endowment, you must
practise and perfect a habit of discrimination; amid all you hear and
see you must choose whatever is relevant and significant to you, and
only that, rejecting with equal sincerity everything that is not really
yours--all the interests you catch from others, all the standards and
beliefs and feelings which are imposed on you by the society and the age
you live in. Watch above all, the voice admonished me in its grave
accents, for those special moments of illumination within, or of visible
delight from the world around you, which seem to set free the spirit for
a moment. Not to discriminate these visitations of beauty, not thus to
respond to them, is, the voice admonished me, on this short day of frost
and sunshine, to sleep before evening.

Thus from not far off in space, but across a whole world, as it were, of
thought, the voice of Walter Pater reached me, reached me perhaps alone
among my companions. It was, however, only through his books that I knew
him, for I never met this famous author, who was by no means famous in
Oxford at this time, being disregarded there and held of no account.
Edmund Gosse once told me that when the memorial to Shelley was
installed in University College, and a great gathering of the famous
writers and eminent intellectuals of the land were assembled to be
present at the unveiling of this monument, he himself had gone to Oxford
and had suggested that Walter Pater should give him luncheon. Pater
entertained him with his usual grave amenity; and when luncheon was
finished, and Gosse suggested that it was time to join the others who
were to be present at the ceremony, Pater told him where to go, but said
that he himself could not accompany him as he was not among those who
had received an invitation to attend.

In Balliol, indeed, the name of Pater was known, but it was only
mentioned with contempt. Pater had been an early pupil of Jowett's; they
had read Plato together; and I have always believed, though I have no
proofs to give, that it was Jowett who had advised Pater to give up the
writing of verse, to which he was greatly addicted, and try to become a
writer of good prose. But when this effort resulted in the publication
of Pater's _Renaissance_, Jowett took alarm at once.

    While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any
    exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems
    by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any
    stirring of the senses, strange dyes, and curious odours, or
    work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. . . .

    To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this
    ecstasy, is success in life.

So Pater chanted from Brasenose in his magic rhythms, but his view of
things was not acceptable in Balliol. To maintain an ecstasy, to burn
with a hard gemlike flame, was by no means the Balliol conception of
triumphant achievement. To beat New College in the Schools, to maintain
a good place on the river, to win All Souls Fellowships and brilliant
places in the Civil Service and high official honors, was more consonant
with their ideal. No doubt this was the wiser view; no doubt the
efficiency, wisdom, and justice which on the whole rule the counsels of
the British Empire are in no inconsiderable part due to the moral, manly
influence of Balliol.

It is not surprising, therefore, that not long before I went to Balliol
the Master had felt himself called upon to mark, in an almost public
manner, his disapprobation of Pater and all his ways; and it was only
much later, when Pater published his wise and beautiful book on _Plato
and Platonism_, that Jowett modified the harshness of his earlier
judgment.

                 *        *        *        *        *

For the rest, I shared in that Oxford life which, in its setting of old
colleges and gardens and little rivers, is surely the happiest and most
enchanting life that is possible to young mortals. A taste of Paradise,
a bit of the old golden world--so it seemed to me after my emancipation
from that ogre's den in America. I had not known that life could hold
such happiness, such enchanting talks and friendships, such kindness and
good-fellowship; and I drank to the full from the enchanted cup. My
literary ambitions, if they could be called ambitions, though not
forgotten, were in abeyance for the time; my business was to get an
education; and though I was acquainted with the budding authors who were
at Oxford with me,--Lionel Johnson, Laurence Binyon, and Max
Beerbohm,--I did not become intimate with any of them; I was contented
with the society I found in my own college. This society was made up,
for the most part, of young men who belonged to the Whig political
families, the Russells, the Carlisle Howards, and the Peels, who were
destined to careers in the world of politics. I too became engaged in
political activities; I used to speak at village meetings and work for
Liberal candidates at by-elections; I joined the Oxford Charity
Organization Committee; I organized meetings for temperance and social
propaganda; and I think I was best known in Oxford as belonging to the
not very estimable type of social reformer who combines extreme
democratic views with no very pronounced dislike of the society of
lords. In the dim anecdotal atmosphere of old-fashioned Oxford common
rooms, where stories are elaborately related over the port wine and the
walnuts, I have reason to believe that dialogues were invented between
me and two American young ladies who were supposed to be studying in
Oxford, in which perambulators were referred to as "push-buggies," and
spittoons were much discussed under the name of "cuspidors."

My political activities gave rise to at least one story which I should
like to think still survives--I know that it did survive till very
recently. During the election of 1892 a Balliol acquaintance of mine
contested for Parliament and won the Woodstock division of Oxfordshire;
and I, with several other enthusiastic Balliol Liberals, took lodgings
in that rural district and canvassed and held meetings for our
candidate. His opponent was an older Balliol man, Lyttelton Gell by
name, who had rooms in the college (in what capacity I don't remember)
and also a handsome residence on Headington Hill, above Oxford, where he
dwelt in some state with his wife, a niece of George Brodrick, the
Warden of Merton, and daughter of the Lord Midleton of the time. They
were at home to Balliol men on Sundays, the first Sunday of the term
being devoted (so the mocking Russells used to say) to members of the
aristocracy, the second Sunday to the sons of gentlemen, and the third
to Americans and Jews. On these third Sundays, I was sometimes a guest.
The Lyttelton Gells were friendly if somewhat pompous persons; the
connection of Mrs. Gell with the peerage was, perhaps, a little
overstressed in a place like Oxford, where such relationships are not
frequent. Above all, her title of "Honourable," always a difficult title
for the uninitiated to handle,--or rather to let alone,--presented
certain possibilities of error into which I was supposed to have fallen.
During the election it was related that I was seen in glimpses like the
Scholar Gypsy wandering through the landscape at the head of a band of
Balliol radicals, bearing a banner with the strange device:--

                       To Hell, to Hell
                       With the Honourable Gell.

Dining in Oxford not long ago, I heard this anecdote told by an elderly
don who had no notion that I was the hero of it; and if this ghost of my
undergraduate days still, like the Scholar Gypsy, survives, may I not
boast _non omnis moriar_? Should this story still run through Oxford
halls, I shall owe to it, even without the aid of the grave Glanvill and
the elegiac Matthew Arnold, a more enduring remembrance than any I might
earn by a feat I had been long contemplating. I had reached Oxford by
the untraveled route from Euston; my ambition all along had not been to
win the rewards it offered--not to conquer Oxford, but to write a book
about it.




                                   7
                                  Paris


To write about Oxford!  But first of all I must learn to write--that
was now the task before me.  Oxford had been celebrated by Matthew
Arnold in "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar Gypsy"; Bablock
Hythe, the river above Godstow, Cumnor and Fyfield and the road to
Hinksey, the skirts of Bagley Wood--all had won their place, and I
believe their permanent place, in poetry.

But what had been written of Oxford in prose that one cared to remember?
There was Lamb's essay on "Oxford in the Vacation"; there was Matthew
Arnold's famous passage about the home of "lost causes, and forsaken
beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties," and his
description of the sight of Newman gliding into the pulpit of St.
Mary's, and then breaking the silence in "the most entrancing of
voices." Then there was Newman's own mention of the snapdragon growing
on the walls of Trinity College, and of the spires of Oxford, seen after
many years as he traveled in the train to Birmingham. These passages
lingered in my imagination, but they were brief and casual; why
shouldn't I try to repay my debt to Oxford by attempting to write a
longer book about it? Wouldn't it be pleasant even to fail in such an
attempt? But the art of writing such a book as it should be written was
not to be learned at Oxford. The _Cursus honorum_ that led upwards from
one academic and worldly success to another was not the way that led to
any achievement of this kind. The example of my prophet, however, seemed
to justify the hope that somewhere, somehow, I might possibly create for
myself the talent necessary for my purpose. For Pater's accomplishment
was in no way due to what we call genius, but to perfected talent--was
indeed a classical example of such a talent, created by almost infinite
artifice and pains. It was talent, moreover, for writing prose; and with
my delight in the beauty of English prose,--the "fine writing," as it is
derisively called, of our older authors,--I welcomed his declaration
that to limit prose to mere lucidity was no more than a narrow and
puritanical restriction. It was and could be, he said, an instrument of
many stops, musical, picturesque, intimate, and fervid; and, thus
conceived, it was the appropriate and most promising medium for the
rendering of modern life. All this was to me the most precious gospel,
and when I heard that, in a group of young men who were discussing
poetry, Pater had said his ambition was to shine as a writer of good
prose, I rejoiced the more, since I believed that this suggestion had
come from the lips of the commander of that castle of the Philistines in
which I then happened to be dwelling.

Pater, deep-buried among the aborigines of Brasenose, could pursue in
that uncomprehending solitude whatever moral or sthetic purpose pleased
his fancy--no one there would have the slightest inkling of his purpose.
But in Balliol they were cleverer than that; they knew that I had openly
professed my ambition to be a writer, that I had mocked at the
examination system, declaring that none of the Oxford authors who had
become famous, not Matthew Arnold or Newman or Walter Pater or Robert
Bridges, had achieved First Classes in its Schools, while those stamps
of mediocrity had been bestowed upon Frederic Harrison and Oscar Wilde.
They knew, moreover, that I had persuaded more than one of my
contemporaries to decline the membership of clubs, advantageous from a
worldly point of view, to which they had been elected. Jowett was dead;
rebels and mockers had no longer a patron in the college, and it was
felt, and rightfully felt, that it would be well for me to betake myself
elsewhere with my volumes of Pater, my French novels, and above all,
perhaps, with the oil painting by Blake which I had acquired, and which
was regarded by the Dons of Balliol with considerable suspicion.

Whither should I go? There was, of course, but one answer. In all the
inhabited world there exists, and has existed, only one centre of
disinterested artistic interest. Paris welcomes would-be artists with
its urbane, heartless grace; it provides them with every facility for
learning the art they will never learn to practise; it appropriates with
a charming smile the savings they have brought with them, and with the
same smile it watches them fade away or perish, knowing that new
generations will soon appear to occupy their little hotels and lodgings.
All are doomed, as Paris knows, to inevitable failure, but it goes on
with its own business, remunerated and undisturbed.

Every year these art students arrive out of the darkness like flights of
birds; they rejoice for brief or longer periods in the Paris sunshine,
and then they disappear, and what becomes of them no one knows or cares.
Do they return to their original homes, to teach art in provincial art
schools and to paint the portraits of local magnates, or do they simply
moulder away and die? Nobody, as I say, knows or cares.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The immense forgathering, as if drawn by some irresistible magnet, of
sthetic Americans in Paris was remarkable as a mass phenomenon; but the
individuals who composed that mass, though I lived among them for a
while, I did not find interesting. They had come to Paris from almost
every region of my native country, at who knows what sacrifice to
themselves and to their parents, to study art; but in art itself they
seemed to take hardly any interest--they almost never visited the
Louvre, nor did they discuss any of the great masterpieces of European
painting. Their talk was all of their own or each other's pictures and
of the little twopenny shows where they were to be seen on exhibition.
These pictures, painted with elaborate pains, were all alike, all
imitative of each other; the narrow space of their little shows was
filled with a vast, an almost intolerable monotony. Most interesting
among these American students I found the indomitable old ladies who,
released by the happy demise of their husbands and the maturity of their
children, had escaped at last, at the age of seventy, perhaps, or even
eighty, to realize their dreams of studying art in Paris. But these old
ladies, whom one would see seated in their prim bonnets in the art
schools, industriously making drawings of huge and naked males, all
painted the same picture as their young contemporaries; it was not
possible to distinguish among them. And yet no generalization is ever
absolutely true. From among the thousands of indistinguishable art
students of our race had emerged the American Whistler, the Englishman
Sickert, and the Australian Charles Conder. Of these Whistler and Conder
were then living in Paris.

On leaving Oxford, I had rented for twenty pounds a year a charming
apartment--three rooms looking on a great cherry tree in a little
garden--in the curious, shabby, provincial, yet cosmopolitan,
Montparnasse quarter of Paris, with its little shops, its vast
mysterious convents, its broad boulevards close by. It so happened that
Whistler had his studio almost round the corner, and I often saw him
either at this studio or at the charming pavilion where he lived with
his English wife in the garden of an aristocratic hotel not far off.
Whistler was then engaged in what was for him the almost interminable
process of painting a portrait--the subject was the Comte de
Montesquieu. This nobleman (whom Proust afterwards made famous) was
depicted in an aristocratic pose, standing with a fur coat on his arm,
and could not be expected to give the almost innumerable sessions which
Whistler demanded of his subjects; but I could be easily called in to
act as his substitute in certain aspects of his appearance. I was, like
him, tall and slim, and could competently stand there with what was the
principal feature of the picture, the fur coat, flung across the arm. I
was pleased to oblige the great painter, I was delighted to enjoy his
company and watch him paint; but the task was one of the most arduous I
have ever undertaken. Whistler had not the slightest pity for his
subjects; art was something sacred, and the sufferings of those in its
service were a matter of complete indifference to him. If, when he had
finished his portraits of his sitters, they should all perish, what
could that have mattered to the world? From the point of view of
eternity, there is much to be said for this attitude of the artist. Of
what interest or importance to us now are all their models? They are now
all dust, and, as Donne would have pointed out, dust that is no longer
even capable of emitting an evil odor. Why should we bother ourselves
about them?

But to die in the effort to make immortal the fur coat of a stranger
seemed to me a somewhat excessive sacrifice; and when I had stood until
I felt I should die if I stood there longer, and would beg for a little
rest or some change of position, "In a moment, in just a moment,"
Whistler would cheerfully answer, and then would go on painting. His
method, as I observed it, was first of all to arrange his subject with
incredible pains and care, so that every detail was to his liking, and
to paint it with infinite touches and retouches; and then, when it
seemed finished and perfect in execution, to stand back, gaze at it, and
cry "Ha!" and rush at it in a kind of fury and paint the whole thing
out. It was like an actor rehearsing a part over and over again till he
gets it perfect; the final performance, which may take a minute, has
been preceded by many hours of rehearsal. This was the case, I think,
even with Whistler's life-size portraits. The actual painting of each,
as we now see it, was performed in the briefest of periods, but these
had been preceded by an almost infinite number of rehearsals.

Such at least were my reflections as I stood till I almost dropped,
bearing on my arm the Count's fur coat, which would be painted again and
again with exquisite care in every detail, then again and again be
painted out. But all things have an end, and at last respite would come.
Whistler would abandon his brushes, and we would sit down to an
entertainment which consisted not only in a delicious luncheon, but in
talk as amusing as any I have ever heard. Whistler was not only
incomparable as a wit (his _Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ is proof
enough of that), but he had accumulated (and I think repolished by
frequent repetition) a long series of anecdotes concerning his life in
England, in which every person of distinction, every institution of
importance with which he had come into contact in that country, was made
more ridiculous than words can say.

Self-important people, who take themselves seriously, have always worn
for me a slightly comic aspect, and Whistler's mockery of the official
side of English institutions I found extremely amusing. Outside of his
art I did not regard him as a person deserving of much estimation. The
record of his quarrels is more funny than edifying, and he was too fond
of publicity and self-advertisement for my taste. But these failings
hardly matter in a painter who, with regard to his painting, possessed a
conscience of the utmost delicacy, and a sense of honor surpassing all I
have ever known or heard of in what is after all perhaps the most
honorable of all the arts. To do anything second-rate for money, or any
kind of personal or social advantage, would never have been possible to
Whistler; and though at times there was a touch in him of the loud,
bar-frequenting American, his taste in matters of art was infallible and
exquisite; he loved his paintings, and I think he could have told at any
moment in what gallery or private collection even the most insignificant
of them could be found. The paint brush was his appropriate weapon, and
I remember once, when he was writing a series of outrageous letters,
Mrs. Whistler's remarking that Jimmy would be all right if he could only
be kept from the inkpot.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Whistler I came to know through the means of three Irish-American young
women who were devoted friends of his. They were rich, were lovely, and
all as good as gold. Both their parents dying suddenly, they had come to
finish their education (for they were Roman Catholics) at the Sacr-Coeur
in Paris, and had then stayed on vaguely month by month, year by year,
in France. They lived in a charming manner, either in their Paris
apartment or in a house in the noble landscape of the lower Seine, first
at Giverny (where Monet lived) and then in the little town of Vtheuil,
not far off. Giverny was a village situated on a little brimming
tributary of the Seine; Vtheuil stood on the banks of that noble stream
itself. In each village there were enchanting little inns, and these
inns were largely populated, especially in the springtime, by the young
artists and writers. We all adored these ladies, who, though they were
not averse to the admiration they excited, preferred to live in the
freedom of maiden meditation. They were willing, however, to sit
endlessly for their portraits and no better subjects could be found. The
second Miss Kinsella was, I think, with her blonde beauty, her golden
hair, and her expression of gentle softness, the most lovely human being
I have ever seen; and Charles Conder, the quiet, handsome, and silent
Australian artist, who had not the strength to resist the temptations of
Paris, was invited (at my suggestion) to Giverny, and, falling in love
with her at once, never really painted any other human being. She died
too soon, but she still lives in the pictures he made of her amid the
apple blossoms of Vtheuil, and in Whistler's portrait of her, where she
stands, somewhat startled, like a forgotten princess, gazing at a fte
in which she has no part.

Do I exaggerate the charm of these ladies? To prove that they are not
creatures of my imagination, I will quote a letter written by Sir Walter
Raleigh, after a visit they had paid to England:--

    My wife and I are agreed--you do not care for us a bit. The
    plaguy part of the business is that we dote on you, so farewell
    to all hope of preserving dignity of attitude. May you never be
    crossed in love. Meanwhile how can we prevent your shameful
    escape to France?

    And us with a beautiful house at that emporium of elegance and
    culture, Oxford, and never a day's pleasure to be had out of it,
    but breaking the furniture and all, because you are in a hateful
    little packet boat that plies for hire between Dover and Calais.
    O worthless world, O transitory things. And you laughing at us.
    Of all the ladies I have ever loved you display the least
    pretence of reciprocity. It was not a sincere petition of that
    Prince of Insincerity, Mr. Robert Burns:

                    If love for love ye will not gie
                    At least be pity on me shown--

    but it _has_ been customary nevertheless to drop a pennyworth of
    pity into the hat that was taken off for love's sake.

    If only I knew what string to pull, to agitate your hearts. And
    if only I could reach it. However dark or high, it must
    exist. . . . But there it is--we breakfast on it, lunch on it,
    dine on it, see it in the glass, and in the papers; get thin on
    it, pray on it, and swear on it: you don't care for us.

    P.S. You know quite well we can't bear it. Tell us what to do.

The Raleighs came afterwards to Vtheuil, joining our little community
there. Thither came also D. S. MacColl, as well as other writers and
painters I might mention, and one or two of my chosen Balliol friends.
One day I was lunching in a little restaurant in Paris and happened to
sit by two young Englishmen with whom I soon fell into conversation. We
talked for a long time together and agreed to meet again. One was Roger
Fry, with whom I formed a friendship that lasted till his death. The
other was Lowes Dickinson. They represented the purest strain of
Cambridge Apostles, and thus was begun a relation with the Cambridge
intellectuals which was much strengthened by the marriage, some years
later, of Bertrand Russell to my younger sister. In the meantime,
however, I told Roger Fry and Dickinson of the charms of Vtheuil and
took them thither--at least I took Roger Fry, who fell (and fell badly)
under the spell of that place and of those ladies.

I turn to a text from Homer: Why, Apollo asks of the great Earth-shaker,
why should we concern ourselves with human beings who flourish only as
the leaves flourish, and then fall forgotten to the earth? Of those who
frequented Vtheuil forty years ago almost all have perished. But to be
remembered, or at least to save the places and people one has cared for
from being utterly forgotten, is not the least unworthy of human
desires. Perhaps someone may read these pages when I am no longer
living; more probably those April-blossoming days at Vtheuil will
survive in Conder's pictures. I should be sorry if their petals were
mingled in the unremembered dust.

                 *        *        *        *        *

All this time I was working, either at Vtheuil or in my apartment in
Paris, at my book about Oxford. Youth must find its nourishment in the
work of its contemporaries. Of my contemporaries Whitman had died in
1892, Pater two years later, while Matthew Arnold had preceded Pater by
six years. But Flaubert, martyr as he was of the art of writing, though
he had died before I went to Paris, was my saint and hero. The four
volumes of his letters were like a Bible to me, and now, when I look
again at the texts I marked, the old flames illuminate those pages. The
true writer is a kind of priest, he says, his devotion makes him proud,
and we are none of us proud enough. "But when I think of my solitude and
my agonies I ask myself whether I am an idiot or a saint. But without
fanaticism we can accomplish nothing worth while, and folly for folly
why not choose the noblest among them?

"Genius is a gift of the Gods, but Talent is our affair; and with
untiring patience one can acquire talent in the end. But why should one
publish? I write for my own pleasure, as a bourgeois in his garret turns
out napkin rings on his lathe. . . . The wine of art is the cause of an
intoxication that knows no end. . . . Speaking with all sincerity
everything is ignominy here below but art."

These are some of the sentences I copied out from Flaubert's letters. I
believed them all (and, idiotic as it may seem, I still believe them).

From Flaubert's letters I turned to the writings of his nephew and
disciple, Guy de Maupassant, who died when I was in Paris, and whose
short stories seemed to me just the hard, poignant, accomplished
masterpieces I should have liked to produce myself. To these influences
must be added the thrill of beautiful modernity (and than that can
anything be more thrilling?) produced by the high noon of impressionism
which was just then revealing to our young, astonished eyes a new,
fresh-painted world of bright sunlight and mauve trees and blue grass
and blue shadows which we had never seen before.

The inevitable product of all this was a volume of short stories about
Oxford, impressionist in their coloring, and matching in form the neat,
accomplished construction of Maupassant. This labored, imitative, rather
lifeless book was published in 1895, and of course it fell completely
flat. On rereading it the other day, however, I felt that it was not
entirely devoid of merit, and that probably if it were published now,
when attention is somewhat more alert in these matters, it might perhaps
win at least enough success to encourage its author to proceed in a way
of writing for which he had no natural vocation. If I had had a gift for
writing stories no one failure would have stifled it. Still, I liked my
little book, and was disappointed that it had no interest for the
public. It brought me two friends, one of whom was Robert Bridges, who
after reading it asked me to come to see him at Yattendon, where he was
then living; the other was Phelps, the Dean of Oriel, who later became
the Provost of that most charming of the little colleges in Oxford.
Bridges and Phelps remained my friends till their death years later; and
the other day I heard, after forty years of oblivion, my book of short
stories mentioned with appreciation. It occurs to me now that this was a
success more to be valued, after all, than the sale of numerous
editions.

But was there not then a great lion in my path with whom it was folly to
think of competing? It was just about this period that my fellow
expatriate, Henry James, was writing his best short stories; and in the
year my little book was published appeared the volume called
_Terminations_, in which are contained three at least of his
masterpieces, the "Death of the Lion," the "Coxon Fund," and the "Altar
of the Dead." I sent this master, with whom I was slightly acquainted,
my little book; he mislaid it in the Underground, and after some weeks
he wrote a letter full of apologies in which he told me that he had
procured another copy, and asked me to come and see him and talk the
book over. Of course I went. Henry James was to me then but a revered
master, not the friend he became afterwards, and I listened with
reverent ears to what he said about my stories. His praise was kindly
but tepid; I think he saw the gift for story writing was not my gift;
and, as he said in another connection, although one may lie about
anything else, about matters of art one doesn't lie. About the
profession of letters in general, the desire to do the best one could
with one's pen,--and this I confessed was my ambition,--he made one
remark which I have never forgotten. "My young friend," he said, "and I
call you young,--you are disgustingly and, if I may be allowed to say
so, nauseatingly young,--there is one thing that, if you really intend
to follow the course you indicate, I cannot too emphatically insist on.
There is one word--let me impress upon you--which you must inscribe upon
your banner, and that," he added after an impressive pause, "that word
is _Loneliness_."




                                   8
                                 Sussex


I returned to Paris, and found that my little flat had been let to a
young married couple, and the study where I had labored at my stories
was now being transformed into the nursery for birth of a more normal
type.  The ladies at Vtheuil had also ceased to inhabit that
enchanted region; Whistler had gone--who knows whither?  Conder was
no longer to be found in his habitual haunts; his half-imaginary
engagement to the lady of Vtheuil had come to an end as vague as
its beginning.  In fact our little group, as always happens to such
little groups, had melted away.

It so happened that at just this time an old house fell vacant not far
distant from my father's house in Sussex--a gray, eighteenth-century
farmhouse in a quiet place under high hills, and among great trees and
meadows. It had been, years ago, the home of one of the ironmasters who
had smelted the iron in the soil of that district. They had achieved
modest fortunes by this process; but the exhaustion of the oak forests
around them, and still more the discovery of coal and iron ore almost
side by side in Northern England, had led to the decay of this Sussex
industry. Heaps of slag buried in new-grown forests, and a few beautiful
old houses, once the habitations of these vanished ironmasters, were all
that that old industry had left behind it.

Such a house was High Buildings. It had become a farmhouse; the farmer
was now leaving, and it was to let, with its fields and gardens, for
only ten pounds more than I had been paying for my rooms in Paris.

I decided to take this house. I could live there for almost nothing; a
woman from the village would come daily for my modest housekeeping; the
garden I could attend to myself. For the next ten years, therefore, this
was my home. I had a few pleasant neighbors, and my father's house near
by was full of guests all the summer. I have just been looking at one of
those graveyards, the visitors' book of a house in the country, and
found this book of Friday's Hill, where I generally spent my summers,
full, as such books always are, of the names of persons who have died,
or at least have faded from one's life.

In addition to our guests, other of our friends and acquaintances would
rent cottages for the summer, or take lodgings for a month or two in the
neighborhood. I remember the Michael Fields thus settled, and the Alfred
Whiteheads, and one year a large black contingent of Steins would darken
our drive, led by the great Gertrude herself.

All these would settle like a flock of birds on our terrace, where tea
was provided and the talk was free. This talk must have sounded
extremely silly to my mother when that amused old lady sat writing her
religious books at a table just inside the open window.

We were many of us authors, but my mother was, I think, the only one of
us whose books would sell, and they would sell in thousands.
Occasionally she would receive what we thought meagre checks from her
publishers; but when we suggested that she should ask for better terms,
she showed (what she seldom showed) a certain annoyance with us.

"My publishers," she would say, "are deeply religious men; they write me
the most beautiful Christian letters, and I am sure they send me for my
books all they can conveniently afford. I don't write my books for
money, and I don't like thinking or talking of money in connection with
them."

The crowning glory of these Fernhurst seasons was the reception given
once a year by the wife of the village doctor. Those of us who were
invited would sit on uncomfortable chairs in the little garden of her
red brick villa, and talk of the aristocracy. The imagination of our
hostess shed such an air of grandeur over these assemblies that, though
I have had occasional glimpses since then of what the world calls
greatness, all of them have seemed in comparison somehow shabby and
second-rate, and not quite the thing.

With the autumn all these glories would fade away, and I would return to
the solitude of High Buildings.

                 *        *        *        *        *

"_O solitudo, sola beatitudo_," Santayana quotes from Saint Bernard,
adding that this saint of a great mind and a great heart had accepted as
true the verdict which antiquity had passed, after a long and brilliant
experience of it, on society--that it was essentially a moral failure.
Saint Bernard had meant, Santayana explained, that happiness lies, not
in absolute solitude, but in the substitution of an ideal for a natural
society, in converse with thoughts rather than with things. Such a
substitution, he adds, is normal, and a mark of moral vigor.

"To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is," he says,
"simply to live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in
its truth and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with
practical urgency. It is the sole path of happiness for the intellectual
man, because the intellectual man cannot be satisfied with a world of
perpetual change, defeat, and imperfection." The world, he adds, regards
this way of living as rather ghostly and poor. But the solitary "usually
congratulates himself upon it at the end; and of those who persevere
some become saints and some poets and some philosophers."

I cannot pretend that this sublime doctrine of solitude was what led me
to live alone at High Buildings. But it was a cheap way of living, and
the word _Loneliness_, which Henry James said I must inscribe on my
banner, had not, and has never had, any terrors for me. I liked living
by myself; some of my happiest moments had come to me in solitude, and
what unlimited hours had been mine for reading! Besides, according to my
notion, the youth of every generation paints the same picture or writes
much the same kind of prose or poetry. Then little by little, or
sometimes suddenly, those few who are fated to do so find their
originality, their special note or vision--their "virtue," as we say of
a herb or jewel, the thing that they, and they alone, can do. A secret
door seems to open for them into a realm of imagination which is theirs
alone.

Such things don't happen to prophets seated in their family circles, or
to poets in society. Prophets retire to the desert to meditate their
message, and it is generally to poets when they are alone that these
secret doors open. Certainly, in the social life I had led in Paris,
nothing of the kind had happened to me. Given an American who had been
at Oxford, and who wanted to write a book about it, might it not have
been foretold that he would write a book very much like the one I had
written? But making the assumption, which was very unlikely, yet natural
enough for me to make, that I was something more than a mere product of
the ideas and influences of my time, might it not be possible that in a
long spell of solitude something might come to the top that was
authentically my own? So I settled down to continue practising the art
of writing; and with Pater still as my model. In many ways I could not
have chosen a worse one. Pater had elaborated for himself a style suited
to render his own somewhat remote and sophisticated sense of life; but
the more appropriate it was for the expression of his own sensibility,
the more inappropriate and insincere it became in the hands of others.
It was moreover also extremely imitable; but the delicate music of his
phrasing became, in those who copied him, a kind of melancholy bleat--a
cooing, as of lugubrious doves moaning under depressing circumstances a
muffled kind of monotonous singsong. "The yellowing leaves of the lime
trees, the creeper that flushed to so deep a crimson against the old
grey walls, the chrysanthemums that shed so prodigally their petals on
the smooth green lawn--all these things, beautiful and wonderful as they
were, were somehow a little melancholy also, as being signs of the
year's decay." Thus Max Beerbohm parodies the prose of one of Pater's
imitators.

I have just been reading with some amusement, mingled with a touch of
pathos, four volumes of a journal in which, during this period, I noted
down my moods and impressions. It is a curious record, the record of an
attempt to see things elegantly and nobly in the Paterian spirit, and to
find for each chosen impression its perfect and melodious phrase. These
old journals are almost intolerable reading, for their author was not
after all any more than Pater himself, an Imaginary Portrait, and their
pages are tainted with sentimentality, insincerity, and pose. And yet at
moments, as I read, the memory of that lost mood has for me a certain
beauty. I seem to hear the sound, as it were, of church bells in the
distance recalling me to that long Sabbath of the soul. I don't regret
this infatuation which held me under its enchantment so long. It was the
happiest period of my life; and are not the joys of vanity delicious?
What mortal is happier after all than the complacent, self-satisfied,
self-applauding prig?

But seriously I do not think I could have spent these years in a more
profitable fashion. I was free at any rate from cheap aims and mean
ambitions; I did not associate with second-rate or dull people; I loved
reading, I was still only half-educated, and there is a kind of charm, a
dreamlike quality of life, which grows as one spends one day after
another by oneself. That I found in my solitude anything original to
write, that a door opened for me into a realm of my own, would be too
much to claim; but along with Pater's volumes I had with me a volume of
Baudelaire's, which I read with equal enthusiasm and, I like to think,
with more profit. What writer, he asked in this little volume of Prose
Poems, has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamt of a prose, musical
without rhythm or rhyme, supple and abrupt enough to express the sudden
joys of the spirit, the undulations of our reveries, the ups and downs
of our moods? Such a book of prose might be composed, like a book of
verses, of loosely connected or disconnected fragments; they could be
cut in pieces, but each piece would have a life of its own, and some of
them life enough to amuse the reader.

Studying this little book, it occurred to me that the separate page or
paragraph of prose had not been adequately exploited. Every aspect of
existence I believed could find its best expression in some special
literary form. But in the experience of each of us were there not moods,
brief impressions, and modern ways of feeling for which no exactly
appropriate way of expression was at hand?

This was the notion that began to haunt me in odd moments. Something
like Baudelaire in style was what I dreamed of; but a style more
idiomatic, more colloquial, yet capable of rising to the heights of
poetic English prose. But what was it exactly that wanted to find
expression in the little book I meditated? They were not things that lay
on the surface of consciousness, ready to be put into words. The world
is full of conscious thoughts, which have found adequate expression; but
I was haunted now and then by intimations which seemed to have a
significance which I could not understand. The things that seemed to
want to be said were latent meanings which no one had yet put into
words; which would have to find the words themselves for their
expression. In a sentence overheard in conversation, or in something
which, often to my surprise, I would hear myself saying, or in the
memory of an exaltation or humiliation or grotesque encounter, there
would seem to lie a meaning, an ironic, grotesque, perhaps a profound
significance. I became more and more haunted by a sense of the oddity of
existence, of the fact that, as Plato hinted, this universe is not one
which should be taken too seriously, or that our personal affairs were
not worthy of the care and anxiety that the ignominy of our existence
forced us to bestow upon them.

"No, no!" my subconscious mind would peevishly exclaim, when I tried to
write down one of these odd bits of reverie or meditation or of wanton
thought. "No! That isn't in the least what I want to say!" So I would
try again and yet again; and once in a while the voice would grudgingly
remark, "Well, yes, I think that that will have to do."

                 *        *        *        *        *

At last I inserted a few of these experiments in a pretentious little
review which the Berensons and I printed privately at Fiesole in 1897.
We called it the _Golden Urn_. It contained also a list of the best, and
only the best, Italian pictures in galleries and private collections,
and anthologies of what we thought the finest lines in Shakespeare,
Milton, and Keats.

I have always been fond of anthologizing. I think it a dainty occupation
for a person of leisure and literary tastes. I have published several of
these volumes; but the anthology in which I took the greatest pride is
my _Little Essays from the Writings of George Santayana_, since the
works of that wise and beautiful writer were at that time almost unknown
to the English public.

In 1902 I felt that my own book of prose was polished to a point beyond
which I could not make it better. No publisher would of course accept so
odd a book, but I printed it in a small edition, and perhaps thirty
copies were sold. It was regarded, I think, as a discreditable failure,
especially by my Cambridge friends.

From Oxford came a gleam of appreciation, for Robert Bridges wrote me a
set of verses in which, though he felt he must express his disapproval
of the idle life I seemed to be living, he could not help praising the
"hallowed leisure, the music and peace of the soul," which that way of
living seemed to provide.

It was not till sixteen years later that I found to my astonishment that
this little book was not altogether dead. My friend Desmond MacCarthy
drew one day a copy from his pocket and told me that he often read from
it to certain people who seemed to like it, and he asked me for more of
the same kind of thing to print in the _New Statesman_, of which he was
then the literary editor. I was of course delighted to comply with his
request, and finally in 1918 all this material was made into a book, for
which I borrowed from Gay the title of _Trivia_. It was published and it
sold, and has gone on steadily selling ever since. Translations of it
were made into several foreign languages, and the book has had a larger
circulation, I believe, in France than in England. This circumstance has
an inclination to make me feel that across the Channel there is more
appreciation than on this side of originality in writing.

Among the letters about the book which have been sent me, I highly prize
an indignant one from a Mormon in Salt Lake City, who demanded by what
right I had presumed to put into print his private thoughts and
feelings. And now that I have begun boasting (and surely there is
nothing pleasanter in the world than boasting), I shall permit myself to
quote a letter, not from Salt Lake City, but from Rome, in which George
Santayana writes of _Trivia_: "The whole makes a picture of the
self-consciousness of the modern man which is not only delightfully
vivid and humorous, but a document of importance as well. For although
it represents only one side of yourself or of any of us, it is just the
side which the age has made conspicuous. Men have always been the
victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable, and passionate,
and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily
texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals; whereas with us
the intervals are all, and that is what you have painted."

He found it delightful, he said, to live in a world such as I had
painted, full of pictures and incidental _divertissements_ and amiable
absurdities. When Robert Bridges said to him that I had written the most
immoral book in the world, though every word could be read in any
drawing-room, he had replied that the book was not in his opinion at all
immoral; it was meant to be light and irresponsible, not complete and
ultimate. "And why," he asked, "should not things be largely absurd,
futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and we and they go
very well together."

Santayana felt it incumbent on him, however, to reprove me for a
technical heresy touching the separation of the soul and the body, which
he said neither he nor Aristotle would admit, in this world any more
than in the other. This heresy involves of course the doctrine of the
Resurrection of the Body--that fundamental teaching of the Christian
faith. I had already received a letter from an aged and opulent aunt in
America, reproving me sharply for the same heretical opinion. I have
never yet discovered on which page of _Trivia_ Santayana and my maiden
aunt detected this error, but I have always believed that it cost me a
fortune, as my aunt, who had regarded me, I had always thought, as her
favorite nephew, bequeathed the wealth I had expected from her to
another heir.

But this is enough, or too much, about the costly little book born in
the solitude of the Sussex woods.




                                   9
                         Hunting for Manuscripts


England has become the home of sport for many Americans, who come
annually to this island for deer stalking, for fishing, and for the
hunting of foxes.  But there is another form of hunting which has
occupied a good deal of my English leisure--the hunting, namely, for
manuscripts of literary interest in English archives and old English
country houses.  I acquired my taste for this form of sport when I began
to write the life of the old poet and ambassador and Provost of Eton,
Sir Henry Wotton; and I spent some years in collecting his unpublished
letters.  The archives of the Record Office, the British Museum, and the
Bodleian Library are easily accessible, and there are officials at these
institutions ready and even eager to assist students in their labors.
But I soon became aware that distinguished biographers preferred to make
use of printed sources rather than to pursue their researches among
unpublished papers.  I found that since Walton's biography at least
seven sketches, portraits, and lives of Wotton had been written by
scholars of distinction, including Adolphus Ward and Sir Sidney Lee, but
that none of these had looked at his dispatches, of which at least five
hundred were preserved unread in the Record Office, or at his letters to
be found in the British Museum.  All these were, of course, easily
accessible; one had only to ask for the packet which might contain a
document of interest, and the packet would be brought to one's
reading desk by a polite official.

When, however, I wished to pursue my hunting into the archives of
private houses, I found that a much more elaborate method of procedure
was required. It is quite useless, in my experience, to write out of the
blue, so to speak, to great personages and ask permission to examine
their muniments rooms and inherited manuscripts. Either they will not
reply, or they will send curt refusals. I think that they do not know
themselves (not being literate people) what treasures they possess; or
if they do, they regard an unknown inquirer as a thief or gangster, with
robbery as the object of his visit. I found it necessary, therefore, to
procure some kind of personal introduction before writing to them. The
plan I adopted was that of inquiring among the people I happened to meet
if any of them knew, or knew anything about, the magnate whose
manuscripts I wanted to examine; and once a personal relation of this
kind was formed, however tenuous, all difficulties would at once vanish.

The world allots but meagre rewards to researchers; it allows them in
recompense, however, the privilege of describing the discoveries they
have made, and thus of enjoying what is one of the least reprehensible
forms of human vanity--a form of self-glory not very amiably denominated
by the inglorious term of "boasting." Undeterred, however, by that
epithet, I shall avail myself of the scholar's license--a license also
shared by anglers--by mentioning a few of my successes in this special
sport.

                 *        *        *        *        *

In examining the Seventh Report of the Historical Manuscripts
Commission, I found a note by A. J. Horwood, who had been sent in 1878
to examine the manuscripts at a great mansion near Oakham, of a
manuscript volume which contained "copies of letters seemingly by and to
Sir Henry Wotton." I found that this house was in the possession of a
certain elderly colonel, and I began inquiring among the people I met if
any of them knew him. At last I met an old lady who was his cousin, and
who kindly said that I might write to him and make use of her name as an
introduction. I therefore wrote, and received a most courteous answer
from the colonel, saying that he knew nothing of the manuscript book,
and did not believe he possessed it, but that he was quite willing for
me to come and look for it myself.

I thereupon went to Oakham, and took a cab up to an immense Italian
villa, which is one of the biggest houses in England, if not the
biggest. I drove into a great colonnaded courtyard of about twenty acres
(larger, I believe, than the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge),
and up to the splendid steps of the mansion--steps partially broken and
partially overgrown with weeds, for the whole place looked ill-kept and
considerably out of repair, as if funds were not abundant on that
hilltop. I rang the great resounding front-door bell, and the stately
portal was opened by an old gentleman in a shawl, who reminded me of the
Duke of Wellington in his appearance. I introduced myself, and mentioned
his cousin, of whom we talked awhile, and then I stated my errand, at
which he gave a somewhat malicious chuckle and showed me into an immense
library, which occupied one wing of the great house and looked about a
mile long. It was full of dbris, pictures without frames, frames
without pictures, old rocking-horses without heads, and was lined with
immense old bookshelves, reaching to ceilings that seemed to touch the
sky. "Now you can have a look, and you must let me give you luncheon
later," he said, and then he disappeared.

It was a cold day in November; the library was unheated, and I felt the
beginnings of a violent cold upon me. My despair at the gigantic search
in prospect (which would have required weeks at least for its
satisfactory performance) can be imagined; but still I felt that, having
come so far, I must take at least a look. While I was doing this, I
happened to see the colonel with two maiden ladies (whom I afterwards
found to be his daughters) staring at me through an immense window from
the terrace outside. By great good fortune I found within half an hour
the book I was looking for, and saw at once that it was of even greater
interest than I had hoped, as it contained copies of many of Wotton's
unpublished letters, a number of documents concerning his first embassy
at Venice (1604-1610), and a large collection of notes of "table talk,"
kept by someone in his household at Venice during that period, with many
anecdotes about Queen Elizabeth, James I, Henry IV, Bacon and Essex, and
various personages of the time, as well as a number of poems by Donne
and others, a copy of Donne's _Paradoxes_, with a long unpublished
letter which Donne sent with them, and a number of other early,
unpublished letters by Donne, some signed and some unsigned, all of
which had escaped Horwood's notice when he examined the manuscript.

I took the book to the colonel's study, where there was a good fire, and
where the old gentleman sat reading _The Times_. Occasionally I caught
his eye, staring at me over its pages as if he were asking himself what
sort of creature I could be to take so great an interest in old papers.

When at last I hinted that it would take me more than an afternoon to
master and copy out the contents of this volume, he most kindly asked me
to come and pay him a visit for this purpose. I was, of course,
delighted to accept this invitation, and spent several days in this
great seventeenth-century palace, whose wide terraces overlooked perhaps
the most famous of English hunting countries. I had my meals with the
colonel and his daughters, and attended divine service with them in the
chapel of the house. They all treated me with the perfect courtesy of
their class, and made no attempt to find out who I was, or what motive
had induced me to engage in this (to them) so incomprehensible a form of
sport. They were much too polite to ask any questions.

When I found that the period of my visit was insufficient for an
adequate study of the contents of this book, I arranged for the Oxford
Press to purchase its copyright, and to have the volume sent to Oxford
for careful copies to be made. Sir Herbert Grierson came to Oxford to
examine the poems, which he afterwards published in his masterly edition
of Donne's poems. I remember that when he and I were shut up together to
examine this volume in a big room at the top of the Clarendon Press,
Satan tempted me to make the suggestion that it would be rather fun to
insert among these perfectly unknown notes of table talk some chance
remark about Bacon as a playwright which might set the Baconians agog;
and I remember Grierson's expression of horror at this suggestion, which
it is indeed lucky we didn't carry out, since, shortly after the volume
was returned to the place where I had found it, the house was burnt down
and the manuscript destroyed.

I published the letters of Wotton and the table talk (with which, I need
hardly say, I did not tamper) in my Life of Wotton. The letters of Donne
(which were of great interest) were published by Mrs. Simpson in her
_Study of the Prose Works of John Donne_, and reprinted by John Hayward
in the Nonesuch Donne.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Some years later, when Mrs. Toynbee was editing Horace Walpole's
letters, and I happened to be specially interested in Walpole at the
time, I wrote to her (although I did not know her) saying that I hoped
she would print more of Walpole's letters to Madame du Deffand, since
the extracts from them published by Miss Berry seemed to me of such
interest and merit. She replied that she would gladly do so, but that
the box containing the Walpole-du-Deffand correspondence had not been
traced since its sale at Strawberry Hill in 1842, and that no one knew
where it was. Encouraged, I suppose, by a series of other successes in
hunting for manuscripts in country houses, I replied with a rashness
which now seems to me preposterous that I would find that box for her if
she would tell me all she knew about it. She replied that it was
supposed to have been bought at Strawberry Hill by a man of Asiatic
origin named Dyce-Sombre, and that nothing had been heard of it since.

I looked up the history of the purchaser of this box, and found that it
was an extraordinary one. His great-grandfather was a German carpenter,
who went to India in 1754, and, becoming a soldier in the service of
several native princes, acquired the appellation of Sombre--from his
serious cast of countenance--instead of his German name Reinhard, and
was given by the emperor of Delhi the principality of Sirdhama. This
passed on his death to his wife, a dancing girl, who became the Begum of
that state. Sombre in the meantime had begotten by a concubine a son
called Zuffer yah Khan. Zuffer Khan died, leaving a daughter, who
married George Alexander Dyce, the commandant of the Begum's forces. The
son by this marriage inherited half a million sterling from the Begum at
her decease, and added the name of Sombre to that of Dyce. He became a
Roman Catholic, and was created by the Pope a chevalier of the Order of
Christ, in consideration of the very large gifts the Begum had made to
His Holiness.

In 1838, Dyce-Sombre came to England, where he married the daughter of
an English peer. He entered Parliament and then a lunatic asylum, and
died in 1851; and his wife, from whom he had been long separated,
married a man of fortune who was afterwards created a peer under the
title of Lord F. His title and estate were inherited by his son.

It was with this Begum's money that the desired box had been purchased;
and I had a feeling, what is called a "hunch," that the box was now in
the possession, and reposed in the country house, of Lord F.

I cannot account for this hunch, but it amounted to so strong a
conviction that I began again my tedious process of trying to establish
some sort of relation with this backwoods peer, who lived in
Staffordshire, and of whom no one I met seemed to have ever heard. At
last I met in Florence a young man who told me that this Lord F. was the
intimate friend of his cousin, the Dean of York, and suggested that I
should write to the Dean, saying that he had told me I might do so. This
suggestion I adopted; and after making inquiries as to how a letter to a
Dean should be properly addressed, I sent a polite epistle to the Very
Reverend gentleman (who I found was himself a man of letters, having
written a book on _The Heraldry of York Minster)_. I received a most
courteous reply from the Dean, who said yes, Lord F. was his friend, and
that I had better write to him, telling him that he (the Dean) had told
me to do so. I thereupon wrote to Lord F., delicately suggesting that
the Dean of York was a great pal of mine, and asking him if he happened
to possess among his archives this box from Strawberry Hill.

Thereupon I waited for some weeks, perhaps a month or two, but received
no answer. Then came a letter from Mrs. Toynbee, reminding me that I had
agreed to find these letters, and telling me that she was holding up her
edition of Walpole for them; and well, so to speak, what about it? I sat
down and wrote a letter of apology to the irritated lady, saying that I
had been far too presumptuous in making this promise, in which I
regretted to say that I had completely failed.

I was living at High Buildings at the time, and used to walk to the
village post office every day to get my letters. Before dropping my
letter to Mrs. Toynbee in the box, I opened one addressed to me, which
turned out to be from Lord F. himself, in which he wrote, with many
apologies, to say that he had mislaid my note and had only come on it
that morning; whereupon he had gone up to his attic and had found there
the box about which I had written, and which he had had no notion that
he possessed. It would be, he feared, of no interest to me, as he had
found, on examining the letters in it, that some autograph collector had
cut off the signatures from them. However, he politely added, if I cared
to come to Staffordshire he would put the box at my disposal, to make
any use I wished of its contents. He ended with messages of regard to
our common friend, the Dean of York. I tore up my first letter,
therefore, to Mrs. Toynbee, and went home to write another to her, in
which I said that, having promised to find this box, I had, of course,
done so, and that it was now in Lord F.'s attic in Staffordshire, and if
she would write to him, mentioning my name and that of the Dean of York,
he would no doubt put it at her disposal.

Thereupon Mrs. Toynbee (with, I think, her husband, Paget Toynbee) went
leaping up to Staffordshire, and found that the box contained even
greater treasures than she could have hoped for--hundreds and hundreds
of unpublished letters from Madame du Deffand, who was only second in
fame as a letter writer to Madame de Svign. They were all annotated
(evidently for publication) by Horace Walpole himself, and among them
were a certain number of Walpole's own letters, though he seems to have
destroyed most of these on account of the bad French in which he
believed that they had been written. Mrs. Toynbee spent some years in
preparing a scholarly edition of these manuscripts, and this edition was
published in three big volumes, after her death, by her husband.

I confess that my angler's vanity was a little hurt by the fact that no
copy of this book was sent to me, and that my share in this catch was
not referred to. This, however, may have been due to the fact that Mrs.
Toynbee was dead when her husband brought out the book.

                 *        *        *        *        *

My last experience of this sport I should like to put on record--not
that I have any grievance to air, but because I think it may prove one
day of interest to literary historians. I happened to see last year in
David Alec Wilson's portentous life of Carlyle a statement that
Carlyle's letters to the second Lord Ashburton were in the possession of
a certain noble marquis, now deceased. Again that voice told me that his
son had somewhere in his possession the whole Carlyle-Ashburton
correspondence. So I began trying to find someone who was acquainted
with him; and at last a lady who was a friend of mine told me that she
knew him and his wife very well, and promised to ask them when she next
saw them whether they had these letters. Not long after she wrote to say
that she had inquired, and that they said they didn't have them and knew
nothing about them. I replied that I thought her noble friends might do
well to have another look, as one letter at least had been seen not long
ago by Carlyle's biographer. Shortly afterwards I received a note which
I first thought was the rudest, and then saw was one of the kindest, I
had ever received from one of these noble but unlettered personages who
so curiously combine incivility to strangers with generosity and
courtesy to anyone who may seem to have some connection with anyone of
their class.

The letter was addressed to "Mr. (or Mrs.) L. P. Smith," and, beginning
"Dear Sir or Madam," stated that the writer had received two scrawls
from my friend, neither of which he could read, and so thought it better
to write to me direct. He had, he said, the Carlyle letters, but they
were of a distinctly personal nature, being addressed to members of his
family now deceased. He had looked at them, but could not see that they
possessed any interest; however, he would be delighted to lend me
typewritten copies of them, if I would undertake to submit to him any
extracts from them before I made use of them for publication.

I of course answered that I should be very glad to see these copies, and
I offered to pay to have them made. No notice was taken of this offer;
and in a few months I received a heap of typewritten copies of the
Carlyle correspondence--256 letters of Carlyle's, 27 of Mrs. Carlyle's,
and other documents concerning the relations of the Carlyles and the
Ashburtons, all of them unpublished. Of Carlyle's letters 121 were to
the first Lady Ashburton (Lady Harriet Baring), 94 to the second, and 41
to Lord Ashburton, the whole correspondence covering a period of
thirty-four years.

I found them very interesting reading--Carlyle being to my mind one of
the best of letter writers, and Mrs. Carlyle, of course, always
fascinating. Carlyle was at his best in writing to the Barings. The
letters to Lady Harriet show that he was considerably bewitched by this
great lady, and that Mrs. Carlyle had some reason to be jealous. Her
successor, Louisa, Lady Ashburton, was of a very different character,
and proved herself to be the good angel of Carlyle, and also of Mrs.
Carlyle, with whom she formed a most devoted friendship. She too was a
clever woman, who, after the death of her husband, became engaged to
Robert Browning. But she broke off the engagement, to his great
indignation, and he is supposed to have written the famous lines to
her:--

              Would it were I had been false, not you!
                  I that am nothing, not you that are all:
              I, never the worse for a touch or two
                  On my speckled hide--

The owner of these letters wrote me that I could take extracts from
them, but that he would reserve the right of refusing, even at the last
moment, to allow any extract to be printed. The whole correspondence he
would not permit to be published, as he didn't want to have anyone
making money out of the friendships of his relations. I did not feel
like undertaking any publication under the supervision of this kind, but
arbitrary and unlettered nobleman. I therefore returned them to him,
with due thanks for letting me see them, and they are still in his
possession. I feel that a book ought sometime to be made of them, since
the friendship of the Carlyles with the Ashburtons was the most
important friendship of their lives, and in writing to all three of them
both the Carlyles wrote their best. Through friends and relations of the
owner of these manuscripts I have made several attempts to obtain
permission for such a volume to be edited and published by some
competent person, but so far my efforts have been in vain. But one day
no doubt these letters will see the light. They will make a volume full
of good reading and of important literary interest.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Only the other day I had a queer experience, and thought for a moment
that I had heard that plaguy voice again. I was sitting at luncheon by a
lady who is a scholar of repute, and, speaking of manuscripts, she told
me that her first job was to catalogue the manuscripts and books at
Gorhambury for the Lord Verulam of the time. She said that in poking
about, somewhat indiscreetly, in an old cupboard, she had found, under a
heap of rubbish, a number of old playbills of Shakespeare's plays. She
found that in fact her search had been an indiscretion; Lord Verulam did
not want anything to be known about these playbills, as he had been much
bothered by Baconian cranks and did not care to have them after him
again.

Playbills of Shakespeare's age are, I believe, unknown, and that bills
of some of Shakespeare's plays should be found in the home of Bacon's
heir seemed to me a suggestion full of disagreeable possibilities, but
one which perhaps it was my duty as a scholar to follow up. On writing,
however, to the lady in question, I received the following reassuring
reply.

    Yes, I really did say we found Shakespearean playbills at
    Gorhambury in 1911 or thereabouts--but while old they were far
    from being contemporary. They would be waste of a scholar's
    time--if they still exist--but would in those days have provided
    a lot of healthy exercise for a Baconian Heretic.

In this sport of hunting for manuscripts in English country houses,
either I have had extraordinary luck, or else such houses are full of
treasures for those who will take the trouble to hunt for them. But it
is necessary to acquire the technique of pursuing this form of chase--a
form, to my mind, superior in interest to that of fishing for big fish
or of hunting foxes. And there are not only letters to reward the
hunters. In the last year or two a manuscript of the first literary
importance has been discovered in an old country house, _The Book of
Marjorie Kempe_, a frank autobiography written in the most vivid and
enchanting style, and full of incredible avowals. It is by centuries the
earliest autobiography in English, and indeed a great open window into
the life of the early fifteenth century.

Commonplace books full of contemporary verse abound also in old
libraries, which have never been examined by persons with a taste for
poetry of merit. Many Elizabethans wrote beautiful poems which they
never thought of printing, but circulated among their friends, who made
copies of them. I have already mentioned the beautiful unpublished
verses in the volume of Wotton's letters which I found, some of which
have appeared in recent anthologies. The only other volume I know of
which has been examined from the point of view of literary merit is the
volume, now famous, in the Christ Church library, in which poems were
found of surpassing beauty that have become permanent additions to our
treasure of Elizabethan poetry.




                                   10
                             The Expatriates


The Cruise on the gean, during which I have worked almost every
morning in writing my reminiscences, is almost over; after visiting
Cyprus, Crete, and Egypt, we have crossed the Mediterranean and reach
this afternoon the harbor of Hyres, where we take leave of each
other.  We have spent ten weeks of perfect weather in perfect accord;
and I don't remember more than one serious dispute among us.  The
subject of this argument was that of peonies.  Edith Wharton, our
hostess, declared that the peony was a plant indigenous to the East; it
had been introduced into Europe, she affirmed, from China and Japan.  I
said the plant was native to Europe also, where it grew wild in various
regions.  My opponent knew a great deal more about plants and gardens
than I did, but on this point it happened that I was right.  I think she
would have liked to have beaten me till I was black and blue, as my
mother had done when she attempted to beat the Old Adam out of me as a
baby.  But again, as in that early encounter, I did not yield an inch.
She grew still more exasperated when I quoted at her Spratt's
_Travels and Researches in Crete_, which we happened to have on
board, and in which the author speaks of the wild peonies he had found
on that island.  She expressed the greatest contempt for Spratt; Spratt
couldn't, as his book proved, see what was before his eyes, and
would certainly not have known a peony if he had come into a wilderness
of them.  Mrs.  Winthrop Chanler and the two other members of our party
gazed at the view and wisely said nothing.

                 *        *        *        *        *

Edith Wharton was an extraordinarily shy person; meeting strangers
frightened her, and to protect herself against them she would assume the
air and manner of the aristocratic New Yorker she had happened to be
born. This assumption of a great lady's manner was unfortunate, as it
tended to terrify the people of whom she herself stood in terror. But at
a gleam of sympathy and consideration there would emerge, as from some
prickly carapace, one of the most intelligent, witty, and freest of
human beings I have ever known, and one of the most tender and loyal of
friends. She loved good conversation and ribaldry and laughter, and with
her, as with Walt Whitman, one could sit and talk with the wildest
freedom all day, and on every subject--except perhaps the original
habitat of peonies.

It may be of interest to recall my first meeting with her. I was staying
a good many years ago with the Berensons near Florence. B.B., as we all
called him, who had been present thirty years earlier at that lecture of
Gosse's which I have described, had now achieved a European reputation
as an authority on the painters of Italy, and Botticelli among them. He
had married my elder sister after the death of her first husband, and it
so happened that we were all three invited to luncheon at a neighboring
villa to meet Mrs. Wharton. We gladly accepted the invitation, expecting
to derive much pleasure from making the acquaintance of a cultivated and
clever woman of whom we had heard a great deal. Disconcerting, however,
was our experience when we found ourselves treated by this American
writer with what seemed a mingling of intellectual and social contempt.
Berenson, accustomed as he was to much consideration, even deference,
grew more and more indignant. My sister didn't like it either, and to
tell the truth, I by no means found it pleasant to be rolled, as we all
felt we were rolled, in the mud on this occasion.

We drove away full of indignation, and Berenson, who took things much
more hardly than my sister and myself, resolved never again to meet Mrs.
Wharton. When, some months later, he was in Paris, he would accept no
invitation without stipulating that he should not find himself in her
company. This caused much amusement, but more inconvenience in the
cosmopolitan society which they both frequented; and finally Henry
Adams, who was a friend equally of the Berensons and Mrs. Wharton,
arranged a tea party in which the company sat in the semi-darkness of
firelight. Berenson found himself in conversation with a voice beside
him (the speaker he could not see); and the wit and sensitiveness of his
unseen neighbor, the freedom of her spirit, her reading, and her sense
of fun, made him, as the phrase now is, fall for her in the completest
sense of this modern term. Then the lights were turned on and he saw
that his interlocutor was Edith Wharton, whom he hated. But, alas! it
was now too late; they were united as by a hoop of steel in a friendship
that endured till Mrs. Wharton's death.

She often visited the Berensons and they loved to stay with her. They
all three became companions and in every way the best of friends. When
they once discussed their first disastrous meeting Mrs. Wharton would
not admit her haughtiness towards us; of this failing she was absolutely
unconscious, but the cause of it, her terror at the thought of meeting
the Berensons, and her shyness when she met them, she vividly described.

I have said that nothing shocked Edith Wharton, but to this statement
one qualification must be made. Her worldly carapace was not completely
detachable; there were breaches of Knickerbocker etiquette which she
didn't like at all. If, as I am afraid sometimes happened, I carelessly
sat down on her right at the luncheon table when some older or more
distinguished man was present, she was definitely put out. Again, to be
referred to in the press as "Mrs. Edith Wharton" annoyed her very much.
The use of "Mrs." before the Christian name of a married woman is
something which, for some reason I fail to understand, makes people of
social position shudder; and unluckily this solecism would not
infrequently occur in the columns of that review which Mrs. Wharton read
with special interest, the Literary Supplement of _The Times_. Knowing
how much it annoyed her, I finally protested to the editor of this
publication, who was a friend of mine. He replied to my letter with many
apologies; it was a pure mischance; the last instance had occurred when
he was away; it should certainly not occur again. But it did recur;
there was a fatality about it, and editors fight against compositors in
vain.

                 *        *        *        *        *

But there was another matter to me of much graver consequence,
concerning which I did try to save Mrs. Wharton from ignominy, though
fruitlessly once more. Of etiquette on land I possess no special
knowledge, but to me, as a yachtsman, the stately snobbery of the sea is
not a laughing matter. I cannot regard burgees with indifference, or
mock at the membership of yachting clubs they imply. I find that marine
splendors are exempt from the great law proclaimed by the Bible, that
all is vanity beneath the sun. To sail into a harbor full of yachts
under the burgee of the Royal Yacht Squadron, and in a boat flying the
white ensign of the Royal Navy,--a privilege granted alone to that most
exclusive of all the clubs of this universe,--to gaze with contempt at
all the other vessels, even from another person's yacht, is a glory
which I feel no saint, however heavenly-minded, could decently despise.

When I embarked as Mrs. Wharton's guest on the great white yacht she had
chartered from England for our Mediterranean cruise, I told her that
she, as charterer of the yacht, would have difficulties to cope with
which she must face both with courage and with knowledge of yachting
etiquette. She had hired the yacht with skipper, crew, and cook
complete, and it was for her to pay all their wages, as well as tip them
generously when the cruise was over. To treat them, therefore, merely as
her hired servants, paid to carry out her orders, would be, unless she
was extremely careful, to bring disgrace upon herself and on us all. To
seamen the landlubber is an object of infinite contempt; to treat him
with every courtesy, and at the same time to make him into a
laughingstock among the knowing, is their legitimate delight. By this
sentiment, I told her, the skipper of the _Osprey_ would certainly be
animated, and he would also desire to carry on the cruise to his own
convenience and take things as easy as he could. He knew himself to be a
person of great importance, empowered by law to put us all, if
necessary, in irons; and between such a potentate and the despised,
landlubbery American lady from whom he deigned to take his wages, a
conflict was certain to arise. If she wished the cruise to be hers,
rather than the skipper's, it was of the highest importance to gain the
upper hand in their first encounter. She must not, however, allow the
clash of wills to occur on some technical point--the exact course to be
pursued, the place to anchor, or the weather in which to set sail again.
On all such technical points, her knowledge could not cope with his, and
she would certainly be defeated. "Choose, therefore," I advised her,
"some point of mere convenience, where nothing but your own comfort is
concerned. There is, for instance," I added, "a smart motor launch in
the davits, in which we ought to dash ashore with our ensign flying, and
amid the admiration of all beholders. But to lower this launch is a
bother, while the rowing boat is always ready. To save himself and his
men trouble, the skipper will want to have us rowed ashore. But if you
say firmly, 'Skipper, we will have the launch,' he will be obliged to
obey your orders."

This crisis soon arose. Mrs. Wharton, accustomed to unquestioned
obedience from butler, footmen, gardeners, and chauffeurs on land, lost
her spirit on the terrifying sea. The words I had suggested trembled on
her lips, but they trembled there unspoken; the launch remained in the
davits, and we were rowed ashore. I knew at once that the cruise was to
be the skipper's cruise, not Mrs. Wharton's. Being a man of kindly
nature, and hoping, moreover, for a handsome tip when our voyage was
over, the skipper was always willing to consider her wishes, but they
were to him no more than wishes; he never put out to sea but when the
weather was to his liking; being a strict Presbyterian from Paisley, he
always stopped our voyage, wherever we might be, to enable himself and
the crew to observe the strictest Scottish Sabbath; and he would always
anchor, as skippers love to anchor, as far as possible from the shore.
Thither we would be conveyed in a rowing boat. Sometimes, indeed, he
would forget even to send a rowing boat to fetch us back on board, and
we would be forced to hire a local boat for our return.

The disgrace of going aboard or leaving a yacht or vessel of the navy in
a boat hired from the shore is not understood by people who do not
frequent the sea. I remember once discussing with a naval man the famous
_Dreadnaught_ incident, when a party of intellectuals from Bloomsbury,
including Virginia Woolf, dressed themselves up as Abyssinian princes
and paid a state visit to the _Dreadnaught_, inflicting thereby in
nautical opinion an insult on the British navy which many thought should
be punished by legal action. What would have happened, I asked my naval
acquaintance, if, while the party were being officially received aboard
the _Dreadnaught_, it had been discovered that they were frauds, and
that one of the supposed princes was a woman? He looked at me gravely,
and replied that they would have been sent off the _Dreadnaught_ in a
shore boat, thereby incurring a degradation of which not one of the
party would have been in the least aware.

In omitting to send even a rowing boat to take us to the yacht, the
skipper, while providing joy to the little port where we were anchored,
inflicted a slight on Mrs. Wharton of which he knew she would never have
an inkling. To see this stately lady, conscious from birth of her
dignity and position, and a little over-anxious, in my opinion, to
assert them, placed in a position from which all dignity was absent was
a hardship which I was capable of bearing. A slight touch of friendly
malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affection for them,
I find, from becoming flat.

But I must put an end to my reflections and pack up my books and papers,
since we leave the _Osprey_ in a few hours. On this occasion I hope we
shall be allowed the motor launch for our departure.

                 *        *        *        *        *

We were allowed the launch when we landed about ten years ago. And now
our hostess, who treated us with such kindness, and whom we loved, and
loved all the more for her little weaknesses, has gone her ways, and I
must follow soon. We are indeed leaves that perish, as Homer told us
long ago. I do not find that a fate to be regretted; to ask for a
greater length of years would be to solicit the almost certainty of many
miseries; and for any other form of being I feel no longing. All that I
have read about what happens in a future existence makes the life beyond
the grave seem an uncomfortable adventure. I have no desire for eternal
bliss. And in the meantime I am able to enjoy, and I much enjoy, what
Walt Whitman described as "old age flowing free, with the delicious
near-by assurance of Death."

The record of my youth and boyhood which I took ashore with me from the
_Osprey_ I more or less forgot. One evening, however, years afterwards,
when staying with my sister, Mrs. Berenson, at Florence, I fished it out
and read aloud to the company some of the pages, which they liked. It
was suggested that I should send them to the _Atlantic Monthly_, which
Mr. Berenson, who reads everything, declared to be, with the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, one of the two best reviews which are now published. This
suggestion lingered in my mind; and finally, on what occasion I have
forgotten, or for what reason, I did send them to Boston. The editor of
the _Atlantic_ printed them, but asked me to continue my story a little
further, and tell what did actually happen after I had left New York. I
have been glad to obey his request; I find it pleasant to look back
along the retrospect of life; each incident of the past is clothed, as
Hazlitt says of Wordsworth's recollections, with the haze of imagination
and has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream.

I went the other day to Paddington, which is to me the most romantic of
all railway stations, and whose atmosphere is enriched with memories of
the valleys and streams and woods which were my haunt for so many years.
What places one can reach from Paddington, and what delightful people I
have met on these platforms! Here, when he was old and not very strong,
I have sometimes conducted Robert Bridges, to put him in his train after
a day in London; and in the immense Great Western Hotel which adjoins
the station, after bidding all his London friends good-bye, Max Beerbohm
would sometimes linger unaccountably for weeks, and I, who knew his
secret, would sometimes meet him there.

Oxford was my destination that particular morning. I passed the
stretches of the river on which I had often sailed, I saw the gardens
stretching to the walls of the old house at Iffley in which I used to
live, and then that view from the train of the towers and domes of
Oxford which for beauty is unequaled in the world. I got out at Oxford
station (a perfect station, as everything is perfect, in my opinion, on
the Great Western Railway). I drove across Oxford to a little room under
Magdalen tower where I was lunching; I had a glimpse of Balliol, my old
college; I passed the examination buildings, the bestowal place of
honors, and the lodgings of the friends I had loved. My Oxford friends
were all dead or changed beyond my recognition; of college honors or
university distinctions I had not the slightest thought or prospect. I
felt the truth of the saying that there is no enchantment like that of
disenchantment, for how enchanting was the beauty of Oxford and the
journey thither, when I gazed on it all with the freedom, the
indifference, the universal derision, of those who have outlived their
personal desires.

I shall not preach the ephemeral nothingness which Bossuet found beneath
all hope and joy: the world may be an empty bubble, as the moralists
tell us; but to me, as fear and hope, desire and belief, depart, the
iridescence of that bubble grows lovelier every year.

I don't know how it is with other people, but in the background of my
mind little scenes from the past often shine for no reason, and then for
no reason they fade away. Most of the pictures on this moving panorama
are insignificant enough--a heap of old stones, a gate, the forgotten
turning of a road. Others are memories of more interest, and among these
there shines a remembered moment when, standing on the deck of that
swaying steamer in which I left New York in 1888 (all the rest of that
voyage I have forgotten), I was pleasantly excited by the thought of the
fate that was awaiting me beneath the ocean's eastern rim. Then I
remember what did really happen, the places I went to, the friends I
made during the long years of that golden age before the War: years
which I spent--or, if you like, misspent--in the practice of the lovely
art of writing.

Americans who go to live abroad are sometimes troubled by the word
"expatriation"; they give much anxious thought to the question as to
whether it is expedient, and above all whether it is right, for them to
change their skies. An Englishman or other European who settles in
America incurs no kind of moral blame, either in the land he has
deserted or in his new-adopted home; he is supposed to have had his
reasons, and it is taken for granted that they are good ones. But to
desert America is somehow regarded as a kind of treachery, as if America
were more than a country, were a sort of cause, and its Stars and
Stripes the banner of a crusading army which it is dishonorable to
desert. But is this sound doctrine? Are there not times when good
citizens should change their country? Philosophy was invented after all
by Ionian expatriates, Christianity developed by the Jews who left
Jerusalem; the duty of any inhabitant of any country is moreover surely
his duty to his own spirit; in a world which seems to be growing darker
every year, he must seek the light wherever it happens to be shining.
His talent, if he has a talent, must be planted in the soil and under
the skies most favorable to it. Perhaps it is only such exiles and
refugees, in an age where nationalism grows yearly more savage, who will
keep the life of the spirit still alive.

But all that I write of expatriation is possibly out of date. It is
after all fifty years since I left America, and during that period
things have no doubt greatly changed. All I can say is that among my own
contemporaries, those Americans who have made their home in
Europe--Whistler and Henry James, Sargent and Mary Cassatt and Mrs.
Wharton--are, in my opinion, more likely to be remembered than those who
stayed at home.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I was told this year by an Italian friend who is now a lecturer at
Harvard that there is in America a new generation of scholars and men of
letters, vigorous, independent, self-reliant, original and daring in
their outlook, who far surpass our older race of European scholars, and
who will soon become the leaders of Western civilization. America, he
says, is rapidly becoming what Germany was one hundred and fifty years
ago, the centre of scholarship and thought. I should like to believe
this, but there is a saying in the Bible, "By their fruits ye shall know
them," which tends to make me hesitate.

If America has flowered, as it once flowered, into a mellow
civilization, surely from its laden boughs should have fallen at least a
few good books--books like Emerson's _Essays_ or _The Scarlet Letter_ or
the _Leaves of Grass_, which would remain as permanent contributions to
the literature of the world--books, I mean, of enduring fame and value,
which, though born of an age, are destined to survive it. And with these
would have appeared whole constellations of books of permanent, if not
quite the same, value. Now since the death of William James (who may be
regarded as the last blossom on the old New England tree), what books of
this enduring quality has America produced?

When after thirty-three years abroad I did return to the United States
for an operation under the hands of one of the most expert surgeons in
the world, for a complaint of which I was then the victim, though most
of my time was spent in the immense red building of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital devoted to one of the least glorious of our human organs, I saw
enough of my native country to note the disappearance of the old
provincial America of my boyhood, and its replacement by the efficient
civilization of the United States. This civilization did not seem to me
likely to bear any of the fruits of culture which I could taste with
pleasure, and I wrote a letter on the subject to the wisest man I know,
who, though not an American by birth, had spent many years in the
country. He wisely answered:--

                                               Rome, _Dec._ 2, 1921

    In Florence they told me that you were in America having an
    operation, and I am glad to hear, in spite of the delicate or
    indelicate character of it, you are on the way to a complete
    recovery. I hardly expect to be in Florence again this winter,
    having settled down in the sort of vulgar town hotel which I
    like--the Marini--to solitude in a crowd, and steady work.

    This taste of mine for living in the midst of a noisy, vulgar
    rush of people, most of them ugly, with whom I have nothing to
    do, will perhaps hint to you why I am not altogether in sympathy
    with your judgement on America. Not that I disagree with your
    characterization of it; they say it has changed even in these
    last ten years, but not essentially. I could perfectly
    recognize, though the genteel tradition may then have been
    stronger, that America had "no interest for the life of the
    mind," was "without a head," and "alien." But why do you call
    this condition "lying fallow" and "deterioration"? Isn't the
    judgement of the American people rather the opposite, namely
    that its condition is constantly improving, and its labours
    splendidly fruitful? Not for the "mind," which in our lips
    means, I suppose, the liberal or aristocratic life, the mind
    turned to pure reflection and pure expression and pure pleasure.
    But why need all the tribes of men sacrifice at our altar? I
    agree that it is barbarous and tragic to strain after merely
    conventional ends, by attaining which nobody is the happier, but
    everyone is sacrificed to some fetish. But isn't America happy?
    The old genteel America was not happy; it was eager to know the
    truth, and to be "cultured," and to love "art," and to miss
    nothing that made other nations interesting or distinguished;
    and it was terribly and constitutionally unhappy, because with
    its handicap and its meagreness of soul and its thinness of
    temper and its paucity of talent, it _could_ not attain, nor
    even approach, any of those ideals. But is the new America
    unhappy? Does it feel that it is living in a desert, and
    thirsting for the gardens and the treasure-houses of the Arabian
    Nights? I think not: it wants simply the sort of life it has,
    only more of it. It wants comfort and speed and good cheer; it
    wants health and spirits, and a round of weddings, football
    games, campaigns, outings, and cheerful funerals; and it is
    getting them. In the midst of this, as a sort of joke (and you
    may make a business of joking) there is a patter of sophomoric
    art and lady-like religion--never mind what, if only it is new
    and funny. Why not? When I was at Harvard, from my freshman days
    on, I "belonged" to the _Lampoon_: and that seems to me a sort
    of symbol or oracle: I belonged to the _Lampoon_ just as much in
    the philosophical faculty as I did in the _Lampoon_ "sanctum."
    It was all a pleasant hard-working exuberance _by the way_;
    there was not, and could not be, anything serious or substantial
    in it. But notice: _all_ learning and all "mind" in America is
    not of this ineffectual sophomoric sort. There is your surgeon
    at Baltimore who is a great expert, and _really knows how to do
    things_: and you will find that, in the service of material
    life, all the arts and sciences are prosperous in America. But
    it must be in the service of material life; because it is
    material life (of course with the hygiene, morality, and
    international good order that can minister to material life)
    that America has and wants to have and may perhaps bring to
    perfection. Think of that! If material life could be made
    perfect, as (in a very small way) it was perhaps for a moment
    among the Greeks, would not that of itself be a most admirable
    achievement, like the creation of a new and superior mammal, who
    would instinctively suck only the bottle? Imagine a race
    perfectly adapted to elevated railroads and aeroplanes and
    submarines, with a regular percentage of a neutral sex to serve
    as "schoolmarms," and not the least dissatisfaction with the
    extremes of the weather, the pains of childbirth or toothache
    (all pains being eliminated), or English as she is spoke by
    three hundred million Americans! I submit that such a race would
    be as well worth having and as precious in its own eyes (and any
    other criterion is irrelevant) as ever were the Chinese or the
    Egyptians or the Jews. And possibly on that basis of perfected
    material life, a new art and philosophy would grow unawares, not
    similar to what we call by those names, but having the same
    relation to the life beneath which art and philosophy amongst us
    ought to have had, but never have had actually. You see, I am
    content to let the past bury its dead. It does not seem to me
    that we can impose on America the task of imitating Europe. The
    more different it can come to be, the better: and we must let it
    take its own course, going a long way round, perhaps, before it
    can shake off the last trammels of alien tradition, and learn to
    express itself simply, not apologetically, after its own heart.
    Of course, I don't mean that I feel confident that America will
    ever produce a true civilisation of a new sort; it may all come
    to nothing, as almost all experiments in nature do; but while
    the experiment is going on it seems only fair to give it a
    chance, and to watch it sympathetically.

To tell the truth, however, it is my imagination, much more than my
social conscience, which is interested in the Americans who make Europe
their home. Just as conquistadors set out, centuries ago, to conquer
America, America now sends out conquistadors to conquer Europe: they are
the true adventurers of our modern age. They have made their way and won
their place in almost every country in Europe, and of every special
group of artists and musicians some American is a welcome member. And
among men of letters, too, they have their place. Was not Henry James a
kind of king in the world of letters, and is it not to the American T.
S. Eliot that our younger poets pay the sincerest praise of discipleship
and admiration?

And the American women! In what capital of Europe are they not to be
found reigning, if not as queens, at least as princesses? They wear
ducal coronets in England, they preside at English and other embassies
abroad, they are the hostesses in many Italian palaces. Seeing thus some
American girl, some local Mamie or Maud or Mildred, upon her social
throne in Europe, and picturing to oneself her original starting place,
some main-street house perhaps where she used to sit with her beaux upon
the wooden piazza or pay visits with them to the ice-cream-soda fountain
round the corner, one cannot but wonder at the journey she has traveled,
the transformation she has undergone, and the marvelous tact she has
displayed in adjusting herself to the circumstances, the ways and
manners, of that once far-away kingdom of romance which her quick
intelligence has enabled her to conquer. But is not all this written in
the book of Henry James?

There is of course nothing that I should like better than to write
something which posterity will read. But my hope of doing so is not at
all based on the various books I have already written, but rather on the
books I shall write in the next twenty or thirty years. I still see
myself, young and full of promise, on the threshold of a great career--I
feel that the books of reference which make out that I am over seventy
have made a serious mistake. But if the younger generations treat me as
an old fogey I shall enjoy the privilege of the years thus bestowed upon
me by denouncing them all. I am not one of those elderly sycophants and
time-servers who pretend to like the young. I dislike them in many ways
and disapprove of them in more. Wide and various are the themes on which
I might expatiate, but as the art of letters has always been my hobby, I
shall confine my diatribe to the way they write. My view is that they
can't write at all. When they have scribbled down a page of newspaper
English, they take no further trouble.

Modern writing is mushroom writing; modern books are written for the
day, and perish with it; and even while the day lasts how readily they
drop from one's hands! The thought of purchasing such a book and keeping
it to look at again occurs to no one, and who would dream of reading the
best-seller of last year?

The truth is that almost all that makes the reading of old books
delightful is neglected by those who wield their steel nibs in this age
of steel. There were arts, there were blandishments, there were even
tricks, which were intended to beguile the older generations, and which
have succeeded in beguiling subsequent generations as well. In the first
place good prose used to be written, not, as it is written to-day, for
the eye alone, but also for the ear. "Write so wisely as we may," Landor
makes Horne Tooke remark, "we cannot fix the minds of men upon our
writings unless we take them gently by the ear." There must be
suspensions, parentheses, pauses now and then for taking breath. If the
writer puts down one word after another without regard to any
consideration but that of saying somehow what he wants to say, the
effect will be very much like that of the sentence itself--we cannot
read for long such piece-of-string sentences without boredom and
fatigue.

But not only must the respiration be considered; the ear is pleased in
good writing by variety and grace of cadence, and above all by that
personal rhythm, that song which in a great writer is the sound of his
voice and the essence of his style. But the lack of any rhythm in their
writing is not the only fault I find with the prose of our modern
authors. Their diction is quite as undistinguished; they all seem to
take their vocabulary from a common dust bin. Our older writers were
lovers of language; they were fine gentlemen, even dandies sometimes in
their use of words; they read old books and studied dictionaries in
their search for apt expressions, and now and then on their pages we
would be pleased to see some ancient, primitive word appear with its
face washed and its eyes again shining. Or again there might be some
lovely, new-minted term to express a meaning which had not yet found
expression. One might also come on one of those unexpected encounters of
familiar words in which Emerson said the art of writing consisted, or be
enchanted by those longer phrases which possess a kind of magic--phrases
either written with care and deliberation as by Sir Thomas Browne, or
Pater, or sparkling sometimes unexpectedly like those waves which break
into little gleams of foam on the ripple of Thackeray's easy prose. But
can one imagine any one of the younger literary lions polishing a phrase
to make it perfect, or searching dictionaries for the word he wants?
They are much too busy setting the world to rights and earning
comfortable incomes as they do so.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The need for money, and plenty of it, is, I think, one of the main
reasons that the younger generation write so badly. They no longer find
the charm, pure as a mountain spring, as Proust describes it, of being
poor. I don't, however, pretend to despise money; indeed without the
unfailing fountain of my little annuity how could I have ever lived? And
now that I am better off, I have found it pleasant to travel in the most
expensive way. Curiously enough I learnt this lesson from my cousin,
Miss Thomas, who first preached to me the scorn of wealth but who,
inheriting herself a large fortune at the age of sixty, spent a portion
of it in expensive journeys.

She loved money, as few people I have known loved it, but the doctrine
she preached to me in my youth, that it is a waste of one's life to
spend it in procuring that commodity, I have never abandoned. But I no
longer preach this gospel; if there is a struggle in the mind of a
literary aspirant between God and Mammon, I advise that the service of
the god of money should be followed--as it certainly will be followed in
any case.

The pursuit of perfection is a kind of vocation, and no alternative must
exist. I don't, it is true, like to see real talent prostituted, or the
Muses walking the streets. When people commercialize their gifts, or
make of them steppingstones to honor and success, I wish them all
prosperity, but I do not find my life a blank when I am deprived of
their society. If lovers of perfection cannot be found, I prefer those
(but they too are a rapidly decreasing number) who have the power of
sitting down morning after morning to a piece of scholarly work, done
for the love of it and with no thought of immediate remuneration. But
this power of self-imposed toil, and of working out of harness, seems to
be denied to the younger generation. I have known a few who have tried
it, but after a period of wretched idleness and self-contempt they have
all returned to office stools. Birds which have tried to live on the
bough in freedom, they have found their happiness at last in going back
to the cage.

Having thus survived a generation which cared for the things I care for,
I find that I now prefer the company of idlers and ne'er-do-wells and
scalawags. I like the people who look on at life rather than those who
take an active part in its business and affairs. They have plenty of
leisure, and no axes to grind, which is pleasant. They don't preach at
me, which is still more pleasant; and if they read at all, they read
mostly old-fashioned books of the kind I like.

A Protestant controversialist of the seventeenth century once reproved
the Catholics for their love of venial sins; they liked, he said, to
warm themselves at fantastic fires and to dance in the light of
glowworms.

This taste I share with the unreformed, at least in the idle sin of
reading. I too like to dance in the light of glowworms, and the earnest
and hastily written books of our modern authors are of no interest to
me. So I suppose I am an old fogey, after all.






[End of Unforgotten Years, by Logan Pearsall Smith]
