Front matter

BY

ROBERT STURGIS INGERSOLL

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1916

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

Walled In

An Open Door

Reading Fiction with an Eye on Life

History and Your Vote

Clio's Vintage

The Poet and the Reader

The Children of Pan

Men Behind Books

Keeping up with Life

OPEN THAT DOOR!

CHAPTER I

WALLED IN

The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.—CERVANTES

An author is of necessity a rather egotistical sort of a fellow, or else he would not trumpet abroad his name upon the title-page of a book. If we should measure this egotism by the size of the audience to which he hopes to appeal, we fear that the sponsor of this little book should make humble apologies in behalf of his phrenological egocentric bump. He who writes upon how to grow fat, modestly limits his audience to those who, from pride of appearance, or upon doctor's orders, desire to add to their avoirdupois. There is a similar modesty upon the part of those who limit their audiences by writing cook-books for the cooks, temperance appeals for the drunkards, novels for the seminary ladies, war books for the valiant, peace books for the pacificists. We (notwithstanding the fact that he fears to call himself "I" in the first chapter) acknowledge no such modesty. Every one wants to get the best of life. This general statement is as true as the more specific ones that every one wants to enjoy his dinner, his work, his family, and his friends. The desire to obtain satisfaction through the passing of the years is the prime motive in the actions of the male and the female, the fat and the thin, the long and the short, the stupid and the wise, the railroad president and the ditch digger. It is for this cosmopolitan, democratic crowd of you and myself and every one else that there is, or is not, a message in the following pages.

One of the most stimulating thoughts to which mankind is heir is the realization of the handicaps under which we are all laboring. This is a great thought in that it is so universal, so levelling, so powerful in making us truly appreciate that we are all brothers one unto another. The millionaire is a slave to his money; another man is embittered by poverty, a third carries the burden of an unsound body, a fourth of a selfish nature, a fifth of an unhappy family life, a sixth is overwhelmed by his own stupidity, a seventh by his sense of duty towards others, an eighth by a sense of duty towards himself, and so it goes through the rank and file, the humble and the mighty. How many of us take the bit in our teeth, and have a glorious revel in enjoying every furlong of life's race-course? To run such a race is a hard task, as there is always some handicap hanging on our shoulders. We are afraid to knock it off. Oftentimes the burden is terrifically hard for the man who carries it to define, and yet, when you look into your inmost self you realize that the precious hours of life are slipping by without your cramming into them all the good things that you feel should be offered by a world in which there is the romance of other people's lives, the blue of the sky, the play of the sunlight, the success of your rivals. There seems too often a wall between ourselves and that romance, that sky, that sunlight and that success. There is indeed this wall between us and our ideal. If we break through it, there is another one that dares our courage to the assault and capture of our greater, enlarged ideal. This is stimulating and comforting, as each man and woman has to make his own assault; there is no one so lucky as to get the prizes of life without a fight, and no one so unlucky as to be without the desire, no matter how deeply it may be buried in his nature, to make that fight.

In what direction are you going, and what are you going to do when you get there? Are you plugging against an impassable barrier, or is there a way through for the man who does his best? Some lie down in the traces and quit. They have three satisfactory meals a day, work that is not too arduous, a warm bed at night, and, taking it all in all, that is sufficient; at any rate, they think it better than the attempt to break down any more walls. Perhaps they bruised their knuckles at the first: "George Washington, Thomas Edison, and the other heroes were not afraid of the blows at the first or at the score that followed, but we all cannot be great, and I am willing to subside with what is already my portion." Yes, that is the attitude of the slackers. They are in every walk of life—the stupidly content.

There are many others who say that if they could only lift the mortgage off their house, or buy an automobile, or get into society, or get promoted, they could pass untouched through the barrier that crushes them, and be ready to tackle the second with unheard-of power. They are sadly suffering under an illusion. When you take the spur from a laggard steed, you do not make him a thoroughbred.

Two thousand years ago Christ told us that unless we become as little children we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a tremendous statement, and one of infinite truth. To find the reasons for our struggles and the means of carrying our burdens we must go to the boy of ten.

He is having a splendid time! Are you? From the moment he leaves his bed with a whoop and a hurrah, until the evening when he sinks to sleep exhausted but happy, he has lived in a turmoil of adventure, wild dreams, and imaginings. The world has been a magic pleasure dome from which there were countless doors to be opened and beckoning passages to be explored. We have our troubles and sulk under their weight, he longs for them and so invents the game of Cowboys and Indians and glories in the battle; we become bored with a routine existence, he scorns such an attitude and fears that he will miss a great excitement if he but close an eye. If rainy weather or a particular mother prevents him from organizing a military campaign, fraught with danger and hardship, against the enemies in the next block, he stays at home and reads of battling with dragons. The world is forever a thing of wonder, a tremendous feast from which he is forever called before he has had sufficient courses. Hungry for life, he cannot find within the twenty-four half enough hours to fulfil his demands. A fishing-rod in his eyes is a magic thing with an incarnate life and power of its own; the dark pool contains a possible catfish, and what, by all the stars, could be more wonderful, more inexplicable, more mysterious and awe inspiring than a bearded catfish! Every new friend, old or young, is a peculiar individual of which he must ask a thousand questions to find out whether he be an engineer, a policeman, or a fireman, or whether he can spin a top or owns a collection of postage stamps.

What a lesson in the way of life is a lad of ten! He sees in life an opportunity, a vast opportunity for everything. No specialist is he—within the month he decides that his career shall lie in any one of a dozen, from that of the man upon the back of the ice wagon, to that of the President of the United States.

Why are the young so superior to their elders? Why, indeed, do we have to cast off our years to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Ponce de Leon, in search of the Fountain of Youth, journeyed from Spain to the New World, and, weary of the quest, left his body to rot in the American wilderness. He need not have gone so far upon his travels, as in the point of view of the last boy whom he met before embarking from the shores of Spain there was this very Fountain which he sought. To break down all the barriers which hedge us in, to open a thousand doors entering upon undiscovered countries of ambition and delight, to forget time, to forget everything but the joy of living, to experience the thrill of carrying heavy burdens and the overcoming of obstacles, all we have to do is to see the world through the eyes of the boy of ten. It is the youth's relation to the world as he finds it that makes him superior to, and a more worthy inheritor of the Kingdom than is his father. The former's outlook is that of perpetual wonderment, of endless romance, of intensive interest, and wide horizons; the latter's too often is that of a blind man in a picture gallery. A lad lives acutely, never lets an hour "slip by," is ever willing for an assault against any battlement, and in that lies the secret of life.

Most things, to be sure, are "easier said than done," but after having found that the proper door to open is that which leads to the world of fervid expectancies, experienced by the boy, we may at least attempt to find the key that fits the lock. Perhaps you have already found it! This is a good personal test—do you feel that your mind is a-tingle with the music that is played by the world in which you live?

It has been said that you can tell a man by the company he keeps—but there are far better methods! Find out his experiences when he walks along a city street, rubbing elbows with the crowd, dodging motors at the crossings, with every step he takes passing faces, human faces, passing windows behind which are woven the webs of human happiness and grief. What are his innermost sensations? Does he feel the throbbing pulse of men and women, or is his heart and soul dead and forbidding? Or else go with him upon a walk into the country—Spring or Fall—Winter or Summer—his talk and expression will show the stuff that is in him. Is he alive to the multifarious beauties of color, life, and movement that are about him, or is he the same gnarled, twisted parody of man who, when in the office, always thinks himself imposed upon, or in his home appears a misfit, uncomfortable piece of furniture?

Yes, there is a sublime religion in the joy of jostling your fellows in the workaday streets, there is a sublime possibility of growth in the soul of him who, when upon a journey in the country, breathes a deep and lasting draught of the joyousness of life. And yet, why does this religion slip from us, why at times do we refuse to grow? Why do we lose the tingle of living which is the very essence of the boy's sense of life?

One man will tell you that he is in a rut. He has worked until his youth is passed, and there is no further chance of promotion. A second has lost his money, and he is bitter against the world that took it from him. A third misses the companions whom he used to know, and with them went the color and the value of the world. A fourth has gambled with life's good things: has wasted his body and mind in his lust for women, wine, or food, or in his greed for gold. Perhaps, although not admitted, with the satisfaction of his desires women have lost their beauty, wine and food their taste, and gold has proved tarnished metal.

What is, at bottom, the matter with them all? And what is the matter with the men and women who have had worldly success, who have had all the exterior things that life could give them, and yet feel that this Earth is an unsatisfactory sort of pasture in which to graze? Why should there be sighs of discontent when above us the sky is blue, and in the world about us children are born of women, heroic deeds are accomplished, and tragedies met and defeated by the courage and love of our human kind?

The answer is in the fact that many of us lose the blessed heritage that was part of our youth: our sense of wonderment, our breadth of sympathy. To the youth, every moment of every day meant an awakening to new things, an introduction to strange, exciting mysteries, whereas there are no such awakenings for the man who finds not the wonder in the windows bordering and the faces passing on the crowded city streets, or feels not, in the country, the subtle magic of Nature's workings.

You say the world grows stale; it is not the world grown stale that takes the lustre from life, it is your own sleepiness, the profound drunkenness of the lazy and the cold heart. It is the loss of a personal sympathy with God and man.

A loss of sympathy is a horrible thing. The loss of that sympathy which holds your heart engripped, and makes you feel part and parcel of this great, moving, turbulent, sorrowing thing we call the World, is as grievous a loss as can befall any man. It is worse than a separation from money, friends or family—it is the loss of an individual's personal stake in the world. And yet, we see men who have lost and are losing it. In them we see die that spark of life which has made them an integral part of all that lives. We see smothered the divine fire of humanity and godliness. If we consider Nature, including man, as one great spirit, we feel that those who have lost an embracing sympathy are apart from that great spirit, are drifting off into the barren deserts of bewilderment and decay. If we consider men as individual souls plotting their own destinies, we must see in those who have lost their intimate touch with the surge of their fellows' labors, and their sympathy to the power of beauty, pariahs, true outcasts, apart and alone.

How great is your appetite for life? How great is your willingness to break the shell of your prison and liquidate your heart? What prevents you from throwing open your arms to the universe, accepting and welcoming the embrace? The embrace of humanity is a glorious thing! It is the nectar of the gods. Be one with the world, be not a pariah; be part of the great wave, be not a stagnant pool.

But one hears answers, "I can't," "I don't want to," "I'm apart and will not mingle." Why can't you? Why won't you? Why are you apart? Is it because you are old and mummified? Have you lost your vision, have you lost your heart, has the world beaten you back, and does life roll too fast a pace? Has your understanding become blunted? Are you a snob upon a pedestal of derision? Are your eyes blind to the colors, your ears deaf to the music, your voice bitter in your companions' hearing?

Ah, let there be a way out of the prison—there is a door that will lead you to your youth. Within a man there is always the spark that can be made to brighten and to break into living flame. There is no understanding so dense, no spirit so sordid that it cannot be stirred to awaken to that sympathy for man and nature that is the pass word to the Kingdom of Life.

"The Kingdom of Life." Those are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet how many of us seem to be the inheritors of the Kingdom of Death. Live bodies find no value in dead souls, so let us make our souls aflame and attain to a realization of life. Where is the match to strike the light, the key to open the door?

Through all the ages there has been a medium through which the hearts of men have been revealed. There has been one cauldron into which the riches of our richest and most godlike minds have been poured. It is the melting pot that has purified the sorrows and joys of men, since man had wit enough to know his pangs and jubilations. There is a vehicle which will bring us to a universal sympathy, if not an understanding, of our human kindred. There is a powerful tool, welded by man, with which we can awaken ourselves to an appreciation of our universe, from which we can obtain consolation in our difficulties, stimulus for our ambitions, tonic for our depressions. The medium, the cauldron, the vehicle, the tool is Literature.

Some men are afraid of books, and some are afraid of life; some do not understand books, and some do not sympathize with, nor care to understand life. Literature is the key to the door of life for those who wish to open! There is no wall cramping the ambitions, blinding the eyes, deafening the ears of those who seek their nutriment in the spiritual messages and solemn understandings of the greatest minds of the ages. The symbol of a man walking down the street with no heart to feel, nor mind to understand the happenings about him, is the relationship between two stones. To our knowledge there is no known communication between one and the other. Literature is the great communicator, the powerful disseminator of sympathies, the magnificent doorway through which we can pass to other men's hearts, and obtain warmth for our own in case ours are cold and comfortless.

God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Perhaps there is not enough, for we all walk in partial darkness, but the tremendous sunburst that is here to lighten and revive is the lasting, printed word, handed on from generation to generation.

CHAPTER II

AN OPEN DOOR

This world's no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

There is the Rub! Of how many of us can it be said that the World "means intensely and means good"? Do we unsatisfactorily stutter, and stumble, and barely exist through the three score years and ten that is our portion, or do we find in life a splendid activity that gladdens our heart and fills us full of the thorough-going ecstasy of living?

I have a friend who is a great athlete,—an oarsman, mountain climber, big game hunter. He exults in a life of action, of doing big things, and yet withal, he is a tremendous reader and one of exquisite taste and wide knowledge in books and authors. I asked him of the value of reading.

"Every time I read a great book," he answered, "I feel as if I had punched a hole through the wall," and so saying he crashed his large fist against a buttress of reinforced concrete. "I feel that my world has been made larger; where before I had only seen a blank space, now I see a new world, the world in which the author lived. I am that much more alive to my own."

He applied his reading to his daily life, and the world became for him a richer, more exciting place in which to live. No one wants to plod through the world in a blind, sleepy fashion. We all want to live as keenly, as vitally as possible. The roots of the present are buried deep in the past—to appreciate and have understanding of the present you must appreciate and have understanding of the past—to realize how small and one-sided is your own point of view, you must appreciate the thousand and one viewpoints that have appeared through the ages to the eyes of other men and women.

In beginning to form the habit of reading, the first thing to be realized is that books are intimately connected with the world in which we live. Their true value does not come from the pleasure you experience during the actual hours in which you are turning the pages, but (and this point cannot too vividly be borne in mind) in the reaction of you upon the world and the world upon you after having read them. If a book does not influence your point of view towards God, your fellow men, and your daily tasks and ambitions, you may feel assured either that the book is one of little worth, or that you have not absorbed its true meaning. When you hear someone say that reading is an excellent way to pass the time, you may feel sure that he knows little about books. The poem, the novel, the history, the philosophy are not to pass the time, they are to make more vital the hours of life. A book that is a book becomes part and parcel of your being, and you must of necessity make it part of your life.

Authors are not for the library, they are for the street, the railroad train, the office, the open fields. Read them in the library, or even in bed, but live them in the city thoroughfares, or country roads or workaday places in which you make your life. No man can read the Journals of that mystic, nature lover, Henry David Thoreau, without having his next trip to the country one of greater pleasure. The colors and the sounds of the fields, the woodlands and the brooks will bring a new joy to his spirit. No man can read the novels of some great gobbler of life, such as eighteenth century Tobias Smollett, without finding the city life of our twentieth century more human, more satisfying, more exciting. No man can seriously read a religious poet such as Whitman or Wordsworth without becoming more deeply religious, more keenly conscious of the wonders of God and Man. And the Bible—surely no one can read the magic beauty and truth in the Prophecies of the Old Testament without feeling that he has met and talked with giants. These books bear directly on life—they make us think, love and experience in a way that we have never done before. The world becomes more thoroughly a magic place in which there are a thousand things to make life one glorious escapade, through which we may be thankful for the opportunity of living.

As some people believe reading to be a pleasant method of passing the time (without realizing that time is in truth passing them), so others believe that being "well read" is some sort of a social advantage. It is difficult to determine which is the more stupid and superficial point of view, that of regarding books as time-killers or as useful topics of conversation. The latter is probably the worst, as, in addition to its superficial aspect, there is its insincerity. The man or woman who reads a great book because it is "the thing to do" is not only a weak follower of fashion but a waster of valuable time. It is far better never to have read a book than to have read it stupidly and begrudgingly with the thought in mind that it will be a feather in your cap to be able to boast of having read it. Needless as it may seem to make a point of this, it is, nevertheless, the idea in the mind of many a man in college, and many a woman who joins a reading circle.

Some misguided supporters of the study of the ancient classics use as a plea that "every gentleman should read Greek." The insincerity of this defence can only be compared to the sighs of the woman who attempts to convince her neighbors that the beauty of a sunset appeals to her as it does to no one else, or the ecstatic murmurings of the young man at the art exhibition, who is arousing within himself a false enthusiasm, for some artistic cult that in truth means nothing to him.

We see this type of man or woman all too often. They are usually gushing about their latest emotional experience, when in fact they are incapable of having any. It is an insincere attempt to be the highest of the high-brows. Let us have none of this! Let us realize that education and culture are splendid things to be highly prized, but only in that they make the individual who possesses them a richer, deeper, more sympathetic person.

A hobby, which has to-day become a fashion, is bird study. Far be it from me to disparage the movement seemingly alive in all our suburban districts, but let us make short shift with those who ogle knowingly through field glasses, when the motive behind the action is that in select company it is considered "the thing."

It is a safe warning never to read a book because it is fashionable. Never read a book because you think it will form an engaging topic of conversation; always read because you want to derive a sincere inspiration, an enlarged point of view. Within a library is encased the soul of the past, the meaning of the present, the promise of the future. From it we derive the entire tradition of which we are inheritors, the deeper movements of which we are a part, the prophecies of the future in which we and ours will live. This treasure is more worthy of respect than to be treated as the devourer of an idle hour, or the means whereby to keep "in the swim."

The cultured man is a man of broad understanding, of deep sympathies. A fisherman who knows his boat, his line and the bay in which he makes his livelihood may be a cultured man. He may have derived from his way of life and the tools of his trade the solemn truths that give him an understanding of the ways of men and the needs of the human heart; but another man who has gone through the University, "machinely made, machinely crammed," may be totally without culture in that he has never drunk at those well-springs of living which teach the mind the great underlying sentiments that rule the world. One may well be educated and yet uncultured, "well-read" and yet without the vision that may be derived from books. It is not the word but the spirit of the word that must be taken to heart and lived.

Matthew Arnold defined culture as a knowledge of the best that has been done and said by man—but the one who opens that door must have more than that knowledge. It is not enough to cram away facts in the corners of your brain. These facts must have a direct bearing upon your life. To have knowledge of the best that has been written, you must not only read a great poem but you must allow the thought or fancy to sink into and become part of your personality; of the best that has been done you must not only have knowledge of the courage and wisdom of the early Americans who broke the yoke of Great Britain, but you must apply their courage and wisdom to your daily life; of the best that has been said you must not only read one of Abraham Lincoln's great speeches, but absorb the quiet spirituality of the man who uttered them, and allow his personality to become part of yours.

Farcical moving-picture shows and talking-machine rag-time surely have their place, but can they enter the soul of man as can "the best that has been written, done and said"? The plays of Euripides and the words of Marcus Aurelius have for many centuries given deeper understandings and wider horizons to a multitude of readers, and it is probable that the intensity with which they have acted upon the individual is commensurate with the length of time that they have acted upon the mass. We do not believe that this can be said of the time-killing "movie" or the rag-time song of yesterday.

Let us enter the world of living through the world of books. It is from the printed page that we can best equip ourselves for a rich life of value to ourselves, our family and our neighbors. If you do not believe it, read some book that the world has acknowledged great. Having read it, live it in your eternal self, and you will have passed through the Open Door.

It is a rainy day at the seashore; I am writing in the reading room of a summer hotel. Without, the rain is sweeping across the bathing beach, the tennis courts are flooded, the golf course, without a doubt, is a swampy morass. It is a dreary sight for one who looks through the window pane. Our little world is upon a vacation, and all but the few who wish to tramp the beach in raincoats and gum boots must stay in-doors. And yet there is happiness, and I believe greater promise of the morrow. In one corner of the room there is a stripling of about thirteen, curled in a chair, absorbed in his book, which from the cover I know to be "Treasure Island." He is with Old Pew, John Silver, and the cut-throat buccaneers. On the morrow the sand-dunes for that boy will be places of mystery where weird and exciting fairy deeds might have been accomplished. The commonplace bathing beach will have new mysteries, as the waters that splash at his feet are the same that surround some sunbaked, South Sea Treasure Isle.

At the desk opposite me, a student with furrowed brow reads a calf-skin volume. I have noted the title: "The Speeches of Henry Clay." Perhaps this fellow is a young lawyer or an aspiring politician. He wishes to absorb the ideas of the silver-tongued "Harry of the West," the popular idol of seventy years ago, and to consider their bearing upon the tariff questions of to-day. He must agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: "Read and reflect on history; it is the only true philosophy." And there is a girl reading the poetry of Alfred Noyes, and a bespectacled, bearded old man with a volume of Pope. They have both turned to poetry to find the beauty and truth those poets have seen. How much will their spirits be affected, the one by the lyric note of our contemporary singer, the other by the didactic moralizing of the philosopher wit?

So it goes! The boy sees visions of pirates and adventure, the old man dreams dreams and seeks new truth; the young man desires armor for his life's battle, the girl finds beauty, a refreshing and invigorating draught. It rains to-day but they will all be more richly endowed to welcome the sun and sea breezes of the morrow.

CHAPTER III

READING FICTION WITH AN EYE ON LIFE

The world and life's too big to pass for a dream,

* * * * *

you've seen the world—

The beauty and the wonder and the power,

The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,

Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

Our good Brother, Lippo Lippi, has started off two of my chapters, and it is well that he should, as no artist had a keener appetite for life than had he. He grasped all there was of the best in life—color, love, work—and he enjoyed it.

Librarians, booksellers, and blatant advertisements assure us that we are a novel-reading public. The number of copies sold of this and that best seller are at first sight staggering, and even more so after having read the book! A certain novel becomes the fashion in the same inconsequential manner as does an especially uncomfortable type of collar—another season both are forgotten and something new is taken up. The writing, publishing and advertising of such books have become a purely commercialized art upon the part of the authors and booksellers. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" sighed François Villon, "Where are the masterpieces of last summer?" sighs the meditative consumer of fiction. Almost every novel which has those qualities which publishers believe will appeal to an idle, amusement-loving populace is proclaimed in display advertising as "the greatest novel of the decade," "the great American novel," or in some other equally false manner. The author, the publisher, and even the readers know that such statements are utter falsities and yet the sale goes up into the hundreds of thousands. I often wonder what has become of the stupendous number of copies of a certain book the World was reading some ten years ago. It is never mentioned; it is never read; it is seldom seen on anyone's bookshelves, yet the material volumes must be lying about somewhere. Perhaps such books are indeed as "the snows of yesteryear" and melt away when their day is done. One who wishes seriously to acquire the riches there are in books might well make it a rule never to read a novel until it has stood the test of time. What, bye the bye, is the use of reading, unless you mean to get the best out of it? Walking is better exercise, conversation more sociable, gambling more risky and therefore more full of zest! Any story worth reading this summer must surely be worth reading five years from now. Life is too short, there are too many great books that are eminently worth reading, to spend our time wading through the ruck of tastefully bound, hurriedly illustrated, widely advertised novels that greet us every season. I repeat—Do not read a book that you may be in the swing of up-to-date conversation. If you do, you prove yourselves the gull of everyone concerned. Let time do your winnowing, and if after five years the people of taste are still talking of the book, you may turn to it and probably find something of true merit. You may say that with such a plan you will read but few modern novels. Quite true, there will be but few that stand the test of even five years, but how much better it is to conserve your energies and time for reading the great works of fiction that have stood the test of generations.

As in all other reading, novels should awaken you to a new life. You should choose those that have the truest effect upon your goings and comings after you have put them aside. You must agree that those treating of an impossible, untrue social condition, as some money-grabbing manufacturer of stories pretends to see it, will not have this effect. Neither will those of untrue chivalry and sentiment in which untrue ladies weep unnatural tears, and untrue heroes do impossible deeds. Such trivial falsities merely chew up the all too few hours allotted mortals upon this good ship, the Earth. Which then are those novels that are to be read not for the purpose of passing the time, but of holding up the time, and of making every minute more real, more full of meaning,—for that is the function of all great books?

There is a poem of John Keats beginning,

Lo—I must tell a tale of chivalry;

For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.

Perhaps these lines to every one do not carry the same magic beauty and promise of long-dreamed-of things that they do to me. The poem was never finished, and I, for one, deeply regret it, as surely we would have had a tale to set our hearts afire with the clangor of the mediæval tournament, or the lone quest of a golden armored knight.

Sir Walter Scott told such tales in prose and his novels are of the greatest in literature. Honoré de Balzac told stories of French life in which there is nothing specially chivalric, nothing in that sense bewitching, and yet his tales, too, are of the greatest in literature. The terms Realism and Romanticism are used to describe two different aspects of art, music and literature. We will use them in considering the relation of novels to life.

Balzac is considered the father of modern realism. This is partly due to the fact that he presented in a forceful manner the principles upon which he worked. He desired to put the life of France, city, provincial, military and official, within the covers of his books. It is interesting to remember that he wrote at a period in which men were perhaps more interested in the reason and purpose of human life than they had ever been before. Those scientific discoveries, which were finally to lead the way to our present theories of evolution, were bringing men to a realization that the religious dogmas upon which they had founded their faith were weakening. It was difficult for a thinking man to believe that the world had been made out of whole cloth, but a few thousand years before. Science was in the air; faiths were shattered. Balzac turned to man to determine anew his nature. His was the huge task of presenting man in all his loves and hates, purposes and motives, works and joys. He attempted it, and there has been a great army of writers following in his footsteps. Their aim has been to give a realistic cross section of certain aspects of life, allowing the reader to draw inferences as to its meaning and his personal relation to it.

This is realism. It is most unfortunate that in our country the word has become synonymous with books of a sordid and erotic nature. Realism in literature should show us life as it is, and as life is neither all sordid nor all erotic, neither should literature present only those aspects. The function of this type of literature is a great and important one.

The supreme realist has a God-given power of seeing and feeling the forces and emotions that make up human living. He sees and examines life as if under a microscope, and with this peculiar power he must have the faculty of expression. You may ask how we can apply the words contained in such a novel to our own life? We all feel that there is a great advantage in "understanding life." We try to analyze our own and our friends' ways of living. Let us go to great novels and see what we find there.

Was it a child who said, when going through the British Museum, that he liked the sculpture better than the paintings because he could walk around the sculpture? He spoke more wisely than he knew. The same simile may be applied to the realistic novel. In reading it we may walk about and examine life. From day to day, as we live things happen so rapidly, the world is passing before us so fast that, unless you have a supreme intellect, it is impossible to examine the pageant but from one point of view. You can but look at the front of the picture. It is flat, there is but little perspective.

The genius with the gift for fiction such as had Tolstoy, Balzac or Smollett can encase civilization within the covers of a book. You may read and understand. There is something static. You live a thousand lives by proxy, you enter a hundred homes and have converse with the hearts of men and women. Instead of seeing but the front of things, we walk behind and take in life from every angle. The characters in the drama of life are under a microscope through which we are privileged to look. Tolstoy presents life as it was in Russia forty years ago, but human hearts that are cosmopolitan and eternal, Balzac, the France of the forties, Smollett, England of the eighteenth century. We learn the ideals, the struggles, the way of life of different civilizations, of different ages.

We find that our point of view is a narrow one, that our place in the Sun is perhaps a very small corner, and our hearts and minds are enlarged to a deeper sympathy with all men, a finer understanding of all ideals and practices.

Instead of living in the little village of our own outlook, instead of weighing all experience and action by our own, we arrive at a higher, more cosmopolitan point of view. Whereas we might think that ours is the only century in which people flock to the cities and live material lives of rush and money-grabbing, we find the same thing true of Smollett's England of one hundred and fifty years ago; instead of condemning the woman who cannot get along with her husband we have a broader sympathy for having followed the career of the splendid Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel of that name. We break the shell of our petty selves which has made for so many misunderstandings and prejudices. We must not pride ourselves upon our own motives and civilization, until we have at least made an attempt to understand those of others.

Since the days when Nathaniel Hawthorne condensed the spiritual aspects of New England in his immortal "Scarlet Letter," there has been a scarcity of American novels of any high realistic calibre. Ernest Poole has recently done brilliant work in "The Harbor," in which he presents the ideals that have guided a young man of our day and generation. Yet, here we are, in a strange world indeed—the greatest spirits hurling themselves into the strife of ninety-mile-an-hour living, only to be tossed aside to make way for younger and harder workers, more efficient thinkers. The strange growling beast of a great American city, the wide acres of efficient irrigated farming, with the workers in each, have yet even partially to be interpreted by the genius of fiction. When it has been done by the great seers, we will find answered many questions which puzzle us to-day. Not the mirror but the cosmic microscope must be used as the tool. It will not be done by one man; it will take a literary army—let the advance guard come with our generation!

And of Romance—what will we say of the tales which take us away from the dusty world of every-day duties and responsibilities, into a magic turmoil of brave deeds and devoted lovers? We must not forever be muddling about in the mundane sphere in which we make our bread and butter—we must at times for wealth and happiness gaze through

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

We of the Anglo-Saxon race have a glorious heritage in the Waverley Novels. Sometimes, we are told that Sir Walter Scott is becoming a memory, and that of the past generation; but many feel, and I am of that number, that the author of "Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward" and the score of other yarns which have charmed youth and age for now well-nigh a century has a permanent place in our literature, perhaps only surpassed by William Shakespeare. Lucky is the boy or girl who has grown up, and the older persons who still sojourn with the Knights and Ladies, the Kings and Queens, the Highland Fairies, the human serfs who march in an endless, enduring procession through the pages of the Prince of story tellers. For such readers the Past is hallowed with a magic circle that defies tawdriness. How pleasant it is for one who lives in a roaring city to be able by reaching to the book-shelf to forget the affairs of the day and to live in the pomp and pageantry, the heroics and devotions of the Past. The lover of Romance may well say to the reader of modern realism, "Why read of slums, of offices, and city suburbs when you may ride out with Prosper l'Gai in Hewlett's 'Forest Lovers' or be partner in countless intrigues of love and swordsmanship through a dozen of Alexander Dumas' yarns'?" Why indeed?—we sometimes wonder.

It is a marvellous gift, that of the man who can look back into the past and make it alive and breathing for the readers of the present. It is dangerous to take Dumas and Scott for our guides to true history, as they have too often twisted the facts in order to spin a good tale, but as revealers of the atmosphere of history, they are unsurpassed even by the greatest historians, and if we have the atmosphere we have a rich and splendid background in which to place the facts. We may sojourn in ancient Carthage by reading Flaubert's "Salammbo," in Rome by Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis," in Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii," in early England by Scott's "Ivanhoe." Even those scornful individuals who pride themselves upon being "men of the world" have something to learn if they have only studied their own time as it goes fleeting past. For facts let us turn to the scientific historians, but for life to the historic romances.

Let us find justification of each tale, not in its historical accuracy, but in the fact that "it helps the ear to listen when the horns of Elf-land blow." It is for this that we will read them,—that we may awake refreshed as from a plunge in the springs of Mount Olympus. If they do not revivify our jaded senses, and awake our tired vision to the beauties of character and nature of the world in which we live, we may lay them aside and be sure that the author does not measure up to the proper standard. The love of a story is deeply ingrained in the human heart. The baby, before he can read, listens, fascinated, to the paraphrase of some classic fairy tale related by his mother; the minnesinger of old in the mediæval castle charmed the tired fighters with tales of greater love and chivalry; the medicine man recounted to the savage tribe the sagas of their ancestral struggles and triumphs; we all love to hear the man talk who has been to strange lands and seen strange peoples. It is the cry of human nature for accounts of the doings of men in worlds in which we live not that makes the tremendous demand for the novels of the day. Let us remember, however, that the old story tellers, the medicine men and the mothers with their infants at their knees told tales that really fed souls in warming the hearts and awakening the intellects of their eager listeners. The plumed knight buckled on his armor with more vigor, and attempted, the next day, to outdo the deeds of the minnesinger's hero; the child lived in fairyland and found a background for his playing and dreaming; the savage warrior felt more keen to go upon the warpath to uphold the tradition of his ancestors who were watching him from their places in the Happy Hunting Ground.

These stories were of the staff of life to their hearers. How many of the novels you read bring nothing but the means of wasting an hour? Grown people to-day must find their stories in books: there do not frequently come in our way travellers who have been overcome with the mystery of far-off places; we have no longer medicine men who sing of the glories of our ancestors; we perforce must turn for our minnesinger to the printed page.

Let that page be worth while! Insist upon reading a story that means something; either that gives you a more sympathetic understanding of your fellow men, or an inspiration and refreshment by allowing a glimpse through that "magic casement" which opens to the world of Kings and Princes, Castles and Feudal Keeps, or to the mountain where dwelt the Giant or to the seas upon which sailed the Pirates of your boyhood.

When novels reveal unknown vistas of beauty and delight, or present ideas that jog our thoughtless complacency, they are of the stuff that intensifies and glorifies existence. They keep a man's mind from being commonplace and mongrel. Let us all be Kentucky thoroughbreds in the way we look upon the world. Chafe at your bit, stamp the ground and be eager to get away at the front when the barrier goes up. Anyone can be an "also ran." A good story is often tonic enough to turn an "also ran" into a winner!

CHAPTER IV

HISTORY AND YOUR VOTE

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.—BACON

One of the greatest evils into which a democracy may inadvertently slide is an indifference upon the part of the populace to the political issues of the day. We have upon several occasions in our history passed through periods of almost unlimited commercial prosperity during which everyone has been too much absorbed in the pursuit of power and riches to give a thought to the affairs of government, with the result that our state and national affairs have lapsed into disgraceful conditions of inefficiency and moral laxity. Such periods have paved the way to corrupt boss rule and throttling machine politics.

Ignorance, which always comes with indifference, and yet is most pernicious when most active, is another extreme and vital danger. It must be evident to every thinking man or woman, that a nation whose political destinies are in the hands of the people with their almost universal franchise should be made up of voters who are alive and thinking. "Read and reflect on history; it is the only true philosophy," wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in his instructions pertaining to the education of his only son, the King of Rome. The great Emperor must have realized that his phenomenal success in ruling men and establishing law had as an important part of its foundation his knowledge of the affairs of men in the past. Without suggesting that we should all be Napoleons, it seems true that our political fabric would be infinitely more stable, if the rank and file of American citizens should feel it a duty "to read and reflect on history."

With our ever-increasing number of ignorant Southern European immigrants, who have come from countries where republican forms of government are practically unknown, it seems that our inherited tradition of a republican democracy will be undermined through ignorance, unless, indeed, these new citizens be given an understanding of our history and the meaning of our systems.

To-day many specious types of radicalism, that are for the most part pleasant Utopian dreams of the future, standing upon no foundation and drawing no nutriment from the past, are thundered about most seriously. In life and in statecraft there is one great teacher,—Experience. A man weighs the advisability of a certain step by his past experience, and this must be the basis of thought when determining matters of political science. A reader of American History may find food for thought in comparing the manner in which the half-baked political theorists of to-day come to their conclusions with that of the great American statesmen of the past. To-day we are opportunists. Instead of weighing experience and testing the future, we jump helter-skelter at what seems of temporary value. In dreaming of the future you must remember the past or your dreams are futile. Emerson somewhere tells us, that when you are drawn into an argument upon moral values, you should always ask your opponent whether he has carefully digested his Plato. If he has not, you may placidly refuse to continue the altercation, as he to whom Plato is unknown is unfit to talk with a thinking man upon problems of higher morality. I believe that in like manner we could close the mouths of many trumpeters of social uplift through sumptuary legislation. Ask them if they have carefully read their histories. If they have not, and probably the accent will be on the "not," you may safely snub them, by insisting that they turn to the past, before they have the right to ask people to listen to their talk of the present and the future.

At the time of the founding of our Republic, in Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton we had three supreme students of government. Perhaps more than to any other one cause the success of our "American Experiment" is due to the profound knowledge and scholarly attainment of those three men. Upon them rested the responsibility of founding a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" that would neither be subverted by the wiles of a demagogue or the power of an oligarchy, nor become chaotic through the unrestrained influences of the proletarian populace. To Jefferson we owe the Declaration of Independence, to Madison a great part of the thought and the wording of the Constitution, to Hamilton the body of the Federalist Papers. Their thought was not the thought of the minute, but of all time. In all their writings we can see their thorough grasp of the faults and virtues of the governments of almost every nation in past ages. They knew, as too few of our public men know, that the future cannot be made out of whole cloth, but must evolve from the past. They had studied men and the political needs and powers of men. The result has been the establishment of a government that has stood the shock of almost a century and a half, a period during which almost all other civilized governments have been the prey not to peaceful but to violent evolution. Upon the passing of the great Revolutionary triumvirate we were fortunate in having men of the intellectual calibre of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. They were thinkers as well as great orators, students of the past as well as guardians of the present.

It is a profitable study to read of the youth of great statesmen. Almost invariably you will find them as young men such as would to-day be sneered at as "book-worms." Napoleon, Pitt, Gladstone, Cavour, Mirabeau, the great Americans and many, many others before they entered public life were profound followers of the goddess of learning. It is not surprising to find that many of them obtained wisdom and enthusiasm from the pages of Plutarch's "Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans." It was in Greece and Rome that we find the origins of most of our laws and institutions, and in the lives of the men who helped to establish them we may read of the tests and needs in their development. Considering the studies of great men it is always amusing to read the calendar which, upon the request of Mr. Madison, Senior, it is said, Jefferson arranged for the working hours of James Madison, Junior. Please note that Madison's health broke down from overstudy while at Princeton, and it is not to be wondered at, for here is the schedule: until eight in the morning he should confine himself to natural philosophy, morals and religion; from eight until twelve, read law and condense cases, "never using two words where one will do"; from twelve to one, read politics in Montesquieu, Locke, Priestley, Malthus, and the Parliamentary Debates; in the afternoon relieve his mind with history, and when the evening closes in, regale himself with literature, criticism, rhetoric, and oratory.

In those days they indeed believed in thoroughly equipping themselves for public life!

A few years ago there was an agitation afoot in favor of establishing the systems of the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall. In the North, the South, the East, and the West it was hailed by the spellbinders as the cure-all for corrupt legislation and undesirable laws. It was argued that citizens, who did not have enough political acumen to elect honest and efficient representatives, would have enough to become their own law-makers. In the height of the political campaign Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University, published a small book entitled "Why Should We Change Our Form of Government?" The author presented the hazardous risk that our profoundly important representative system would run of being subverted into a chaotic absolute democracy by instituting laws that would deprive the executive, legislative, and judicial departments of their independence and prestige. The republican forms would lapse back two thousand years to those democratic systems of the Grecian states that too invariably paved the way to the despotism of tyrants or the chaos of mob rule.

The title of the essay was rather startling to those who had been advocating the new measures without having thoroughly analyzed their true meaning and import. The distinguished scholar brought clear thinking to bear upon the situation, whereas before it had been befogged in the spread-eagle oratory of demagogues, and the catch-as-catch-can subtleties of ignorant theorists. Clear thinking, President Butler's and that of others, won the day and the measures are now well-nigh forgotten. I mention this as but an instance of the value to our nation of men who have political and historical knowledge with the ability to think clearly upon the important points of our social progress.

I heard President Wilson, some months before he entered upon his distinguished political career, address in an informal manner a group of University students. He said in part (my quotation is rather a paraphrase, as I would not dare to transcribe from memory the words of the most perfect stylist of our time): "Gentlemen, in many European countries in times of national crises and disturbances the nation looks to the Universities and the question is asked, 'What do the young men of the Universities think?' In America unfortunately this question is rarely asked, as all realize that the men at the Universities do not think."

This is a bitter arraignment of the intellectual life at our universities, and if the speaker's conclusion was correct the same must to a great degree be said of the intellectual life of our nation. The public's antipathy to broad political matters is the most dangerous vice that can undermine a republic, and it is the one that is most seriously affecting ours. It would be extraordinary, if it were not so pathetic, the way in which, without taking toll of the experience of the past, without drawing analogies nor seeking wisdom, we go muddling, blundering on into the future.

That there is nothing new under the sun is perhaps more true in matters pertaining to political problems than in any other branch of affairs. History repeats itself, repeats itself, repeats itself, as if it never grew tired of begging the world to learn true lessons. In proportion as the number of our citizens appreciate that truism and sincerely pursue its corollaries, we will have a sound political condition.

When Aristotle, a wise man in his generation, said that it was in the nature of human institutions to decay, he knew whereof he spoke. It is painfully apparent to the student of history and governments. What were the seeds of decay that smouldered and finally undermined the Grecian democracies, the power of Carthage and of Tyre, the world-embracing Roman Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, proud Spain of Charles V, and France of the seventeenth century? Has the English Empire run its course to make way for the more vital power of the Germanic People? In each and every one of these decadences, if we wish our national life to retain its pristine spirit, there are lessons to be learned by the United States of America. Our experiment has not necessarily met the test of time. Our nation is not liable to be the exception from those that have slid down the path to ruin. There is a Germany, despotic yet powerful, that perhaps must some day be met in mortal combat; if the danger lies not there, perhaps it will be another. In any case our loins must be girt with power and strength, our citizenship must be hardy, our political fabric solid.

To retain our virtues, to preserve our national life from decay, is the responsibility upon the shoulders of our generation. It is for this that we must "read and reflect on history" and apply it directly to life. What an analogy may be drawn between the Roman Usurpers in the time of the Empire's decadence throwing money at the street crowds to obtain their support, and our modern politicians bidding for the old soldier vote by passing absurdly extravagant pension bills! This mulct of the treasury is now on the wane, but is the new power in politics, the labor unions, going to obtain legislation and favors because it can poll a large vote upon election day? Such things are signs of decadence. Must we not learn from the French Revolution that its failure as a constructive force was due to an attempt to legislate morality into existence—and yet we continue to pass as laws measures that have truly been dubbed "amendments to the Ten Commandments." How many of the great nations and institutions have had their backs broken through too excessive centralization, yet, to-day there are but few individuals and no political party that stand in opposition to our ever-increasing tendency towards federalism, in contradistinction to community government. Until the outbreak of the World War, England, Germany and Russia each had a terrible internal problem: England attempting to Anglicize Ireland, Russia to Russianize Poland, Germany to Germanize Alsace and Lorraine. There was this thorn in the side of each nation: by brute force they were trying to denationalize another country. England was failing after three hundred years of wasted men and resources, Russia was covering a volcano that had smouldered for generations, after over forty years Germany had as ugly a wound to nurse as in the beginning. Yet with these examples, good Americans, with confident smiles, for three years have been laughing at the Democratic administration on account of their Mexican policy. "Conquer Mexico," the wiseacres say. Yes, conquer Mexico the way England has tried and failed to conquer Ireland!

The political value of history lies in its disclosures of the defects that have brought on decay, and the stumbling blocks that make trouble. In reading history we must keep our eyes on the present. It is unreasonable to believe that our government is an infallible one, or that our national existence, maintained with the most stable governmental authority, combined with the widest possible latitude for the liberty of men, is any more infallible than the many other systems that have met with disaster in the past. The reading of history is valuable, in that it enables us to have those visions of the future that will be fruitful in that they are moulded by our experiences in the past. Such visions, inculcating power of judgment, are never more requisite than in these days in which the blind pacifist, the quack reformer, the misguided theorist, and the wide-promising demagogue are abroad in the land. We must study our lessons of the past that we may spurn those governmental cure-alls evolved, according to Alexander Hamilton, "in the reveries of those political doctors, whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction."

American history properly forms the most fruitful subject of study for Americans, and yet one must have a wide background to obtain the proper crop. One must soon be led to the investigation of our legislative, executive and judicial functions as they developed through the evolution of constitutional government in England. The democratic models traced to the Grecian states, the seeds of "sans-culotte" philosophy that Jefferson and Tom Paine brought from France, the thought of political scientists such as Plato, Machiavel, Locke, and Montesquieu open fields in which every reader may learn lessons that will guide his judgment in the ever-important problems of the day.

A citizenship educated to a knowledge of the past is a bulwark that will defend the integrity of our nation. Such a citizenship is in truth an ideal in that it is unobtainable, but it is a splendid ideal and one that should be our guiding star. In a government such as ours it is intolerable that an educated man should cast his vote by habit, and yet how often do we hear the opinion expressed that such and such a man would vote the straight Democratic or Republican ticket no matter what the platform, no matter who the candidate? This study of political parties is itself fruitful. One hundred years ago the Democratic party was the party of decentralization and "laissez-faire," but to-day, since the Bryan influence has had such sway, it eclipses the Republican party as the exponent of centralization and paternalism. There are, however, thousands of voters who continue to vote the straight Democratic ticket, believing that the party stands for the same principles as it did when their fathers first voted. This is but an incident of man becoming an indifferent, incapable political animal. Too much of such indifference is a fatal disease to a country of universal franchise.

History has no business in the closet! "History and your Vote," gentlemen,—and now, in several states, you of the fairer sex,—is a phrase worth remembering upon election day.

CHAPTER V

CLIO'S VINTAGE

History after all is the true poetry.—CARLYLE

To the one who drinks of the wisdom of Clio, the Muse of history, there will come manifold riches other than the accrued satisfaction of well-weighed political judgment. A knowledge of history, in its broadest sense, may well be said to be the essential foundation of all cultural education. The movements in science, philosophy, music, literature and the plastic arts are all inseparably intertwined, and they have as their controlling background the political actions of men and the economic forces that move peoples.

It is as impossible to thoroughly understand the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley or Byron without having an appreciation of the political and economic events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, as it is to conceive of the Epics of Homer without the Trojan War. The music of Bach and Haydn has as its foundation the reasonableness in religion, philosophy and political thought of the eighteenth century, as the music of Wagner and Chopin the unreason and rampant individualism of the early nineteenth. The books of the Cromwellian period reflect the illiberality and severity of the Puritan parliaments: the books of the Restoration reflect the French upbringing of Charles II. Wars and rumors of war, famine and years of plenty, new discoveries and great invasions make up the life of the world, and it is of this life that literature and music are made. We could indefinitely cite instances of the influence that history has had upon the arts, but in this chapter let us consider history as an art, history as literature.

No historian who deserves the name should write "dry" histories. The greatest historian is he who has an inspired passion for delving into the past, and the ability to interpret it in its living, human aspects. The "scientific" student who considers his mission that of arriving at the precise facts is not an historian but a "dry-as-dust" recorder. He is useful, however, in providing the material that will enable the true historian to cast illuminating spotlights upon the centuries that have gone before. Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, one of the most distinguished of our American historical writers, tells us that "Hi'story'—let us not forget—is five-sevenths story." The historians whom we want to read are those who tell us the dramatic story of the past. Two-sevenths of their ability should, perhaps, be their infinite patience and intellectual honesty in gathering, sorting and weighing documents and other sources of information, but the other five-sevenths must be that ability which is the genius of the story teller. Someone has said that every historian must be his own "dry-as-dust," his own bespectacled investigator of authentic facts,—if the rest of him is an impassioned teller of tales we have a supreme historian. Gibbon, before the days of elaborately prepared source books, before the days of thoroughly indexed libraries, ransacked the learned treasuries of Europe and Asia Minor for information; to this infinite patience there was added in his character the gifts of the artist and the dreamer. The result, after ceaseless labor, was the monumental, yet fascinating and comparatively reliable, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," a book that is acknowledged the acme of historical perfection.

A few months ago, a woman of intellect, a wide traveller, an omnivorous reader, a mother of a large family, an efficient manager in whatever she undertook, was asked the name of the book that had made the most impression upon her life. Without a moment's hesitation she replied, Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution." Upon questioning her, we found that she had read the two large volumes three times, and with each rereading there had awakened in her the sentiments aroused by the greatest dramatic tragedy, the most intense human story.

Carlyle was not a scientific historian, he did not write histories for other historians; he wrote as one whom God directed to put upon pages of flame the characters, the drama, the magnificent incidents, the cruelties, the braveries, the cowardices, the heroisms of "the truth that is stranger than fiction." It is indeed more interesting to read of what men have done as depicted by the historian, than what they might have done as depicted by the second-rate novelist!

If you have not read the "French Revolution," read it at once! The author has taken the most dramatic period in modern times and he has treated it as it deserves. It has the power of tragedy, whose mission is, according to Aristotle, "to purify the soul through fear and terror." Your soul will be enlightened, you will be made to feel, as all great history makes you feel, that life is played upon a wondrous highway, and that the sights and works upon the way are of the sort to make you live in a trembling condition of wonder and expectancy. The city crowds will have new meaning: men and women, for having once been participants in the terrible cataclysm of one hundred and twenty year ago, are still of the stuff to accomplish strange deeds, and to fulfil undreamed-of destinies.

Has it occurred to you what a relatively small and insignificant number of familiar acquaintances we are able in our daily life to have? How many men and women do you know who have guided the destinies of nations, led great armies into the field, or are to meet death in their attempts to overthrow the tyranny of a despot or a bigot? In history we may meet them, and become acquainted with their problems and struggles. The past is a select drawing-room into which we all may enter. We may derive inspiration from the same wells that prompted the Crusaders to set out time after time in their well-nigh fatal effort to drive the Moslems from Jerusalem; we may absorb the spirit that moved Cromwell's Ironsides; we may appreciate the pettiness of our own weaknesses and vexations in comparison with the odds against which some of History's heroes have fought and conquered. It is pleasant to live in the court of Louis XIV and to talk with kings and princes through the pages of St. Simon's "Memoirs"; it is a spiritual tonic and excitement to follow the careers of the Indian Missionaries through Parkman's glowing pages! It is in truth more downright "fun" than doing most things!

Undoubtedly it is true that Napoleon's ruthless ambition brought devastation to the lands that he conquered, and sorrow to the nation whose young men he led to the cannon's mouth, and yet I sometimes think that greater than the Code Napoleon, which he instituted, is the inspiration that his career has been to the young men of all countries. How many boys have dreamed their vision of the future when following the work of the little Corsican, who at the age of twenty-seven led the armies of France across the Alps to crumple in a series of whirlwind campaigns the proud power of Austria. And there was William Pitt, the Younger, who at twenty-four became Prime Minister of England, one-armed and half-blind Nelson at Trafalgar Bay, Lincoln, the rail-splitting President, Olive, Garibaldi, Hampden, and how many another has been a light that beckons our future soldiers and statesmen?

In every epoch of history we will find new horizons opened that will enrich and broaden our daily life; in every vital struggle we will find individuals and peoples who have acted in such a way that we should hope to be guided by them in our struggles and ambitions; in the failures of the past we may obtain moral lessons for the present and the future; in coördinating our forces and forming our judgments we will obtain a training for our minds which will be of use to every man in carrying out the enterprises in which he is engaged.

Dr. Johnson well said that the traveller brings from his journeys that which he brings to them. It is indeed pitiful to be in Paris and to see countless American tourists rushing about "seeing Paris." What a difference there is between those who bring to the storied city on the Seine a familiarity with her past, and those who bring nothing but time and money to spend. For the first, there are human dramas lurking in the shadows of Notre Dame; Quasimodo, the strange dwarf in Hugo's great romance, still swings on the bells of the belfry; the narrow streets and turbulent cafes may still contain the instigators of the Reign of Terror and their shouting mobs of "sans culottes"; Camille Desmoulins may still be visualized in the Café Royal plucking the leaves to make his tricolor cockade. At every turn, in every ancient building, there are rich historic memories that may feed the traveller who has prepared himself.

And the others, to whom history is a closed book! How barren and incompetent are their wanderings in Paris, London, Vienna, or any other old world city! To think that one can appreciate the historic gathering places of the human race without having knowledge of their past is as absurd as to believe one knows the woods when one cannot appreciate the beauty and wonder of the wild life that makes of the woods its dwelling place. Go among the trees some day with one who has studied and absorbed "the woodnotes varied"! Wander about the Quais of Paris, or the Temple Inns of London, with a man who has read history with a human interpretation, and consider upon your return the increased wealth, you carry in your mind!

We cannot all be travellers, but it is always safe to store up material against a possible future; although I have never read far into the history of China, and though there is little possibility of my ever visiting the land of ancient civilizations, I am sure I could derive much pleasure and obtain a better understanding of our Occident if I followed a course of reading upon the varied fortunes of the different dynasties that have ruled the richly storied Eastern nation.

Our history books teach us valuable lessons in the art of living,—and this is assuredly the most important of the arts! As a man who brings something upon his travels besides his pocket-book and luggage comes home with rich experiences and memories, so does the man who approaches life with something more than a hungry stomach obtain from life more than he otherwise would. The greater variety of experiences we have, the more we know of the affairs of men, the richer our understanding of the forces that have ruled the world, the more replete with ecstatic living is our daily life. If the best of life is to be won by living in the world keen and alive to everything that moves, or thinks, or glitters, a great share of riches must go to the man who has studied and thought in other realms than those which immediately surround his own dwelling house.

In Philadelphia I sometimes watch the hurrying crowds of business men go scurrying underneath the shadow of Independence Hall. I wonder if these crowds are in any true sense aware of the important and heroic deeds that were accomplished in that building. I am sure that if they did their movements beneath that shadow would be rich in living experience. At political conventions, I sometimes wonder whether the delegates are aware of the vast consequence of the long governmental tradition which they, as delegates, have been called upon to uphold, and I feel sure that those who do, fulfil their responsibilities with a quickened sense of their weight and human moment.

On the observation car of a twentieth-century flyer the road-bed is so smooth, the rails so even, the power so terrific, that the past as an industrial development that has cast aside the stage coach, the prairie schooner, the pony express, makes one alive to the romance of the present. Down on the beach of a popular New Jersey summer resort when the water is dotted black with bobbing civilized bathers, look out over the waves and wonder at the change of but four hundred years. In a moment your mind can travel back to the Spanish castle and see Columbus begging the gold that would enable him to equip his ships to sail westward into the unknown sea. Romance cannot be dead so long as men work, and strive, and play.

There is an art in reading history as there is an art in writing it. The writer who tells us of a battle with the same lack of imagination as the recorder who prepares mortality statistics must be compared to the reader who crams his mind full of dates and uncoördinated facts without drawing from them the riches and lessons of experience. The true historian and the proper reader of history must find in the past a world of enlightenment, an enrichment that magnifies, clarifies, and makes living the present. It is better to have studied a minute epoch, the history of your county or town, with a human understanding than to have unintelligently digested the careers of a hundred heroes, the military movements in fifty campaigns.

Do not turn from the eight bulky volumes of Gibbon's masterpiece with the fear that they are dry and useless, but begin them with the determination of finding an enlightenment to your vision of inestimable value in "the art of living." The dates of battles, the names of individuals, the data about which life revolved, are only of value in that they are the framework upon which you can hang the true meaning of the past—the evolving germ of the present. The Song of Solomon is not to be read because it is the Bible, but rather because it is a love song of which the world can never grow weary; Motley's "History of the Dutch Republic" is not to be read because it is recommended in the schools and colleges, but because in it you will find the unrolling of a human drama that will quicken your pulse and strengthen your faith in men.

Read the record of the past with the desire of obtaining a deeper understanding, an enlarged vision, an inspired ideal, a rich experience, and you will have become proficient in the art of reading history. You must have often thought upon the difficulty of determining exactly what you want. What do you desire life and your exertions to give you? In reading history perhaps you will be helped by finding out what Christ wanted when he died upon the cross, what the Pilgrims wanted when they left comfort and sailed to strange lands, what Stanley wanted when he buried himself in darkest Africa. Clio has had many wooers, from Thucydides to Carlyle and George Trevelyan, and their offerings form a treasure trove which must not be neglected.

CHAPTER VI

THE POET AND THE READER

I myself but write one or two indicative words for

the future,

I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry

back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully

stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face,

Leaving it to you to prove and define it,

Expecting the main things from you.

WALT WHITMAN

What is poetry to you or me, as we rush to make the trolley car or suburban train? To get to the office on time seems the main chance, and yet returning home in the evening are we so tired that the funny page of the evening paper fulfils our entire intellectual and spiritual need? In asking this let me ask another question. Day in and day out, in work and play, in sorrow and anxiety, in pleasure and enthusiasm, what is life worth to you and me? We Americans are not much given to philosophizing about life, we prefer to live it. Whereas the intelligent Russian argues about the reason for and the meaning of action, Americans are prone without thought to throw themselves into the mill of violent living, to go at top speed until the gears break down, and then sometimes to say with Kipling's Galley Slave,

—whate'er comes after, I have lived and toiled with Men!

Our answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is simply "The living of it." "Work while you work, and play while you play" may be considered our national motto. In short, for every minute of our existence we want to have "sixty seconds' worth of distance run." To live acutely is our pleasure, to work our hearts out and revel in the doing of it is our end. It is thus, to use an expressive phrase of the vernacular, that "we prove something." And it is this fact which strengthens the paradox that the American, the man of action and bustle, must draw his greatest source of living in the realization of the spirit of singers.

The poet is he who has drunk more deeply at the well of experience than has his fellow men. Many a profound poet never writes a verse, for when a man of temperament is deeply moved he writes a poem within his own heart. It is for some to transcribe their emotions into words whereby their feelings may be communicated from one man to another; but it is for others to be without the gift of verbal expression and the poems must remain within. How many times in life is your soul afire with enthusiasm, drunk with beauty, stricken with sadness, or overflowing with the meaning or portent of experience? At those times you are a poet, whether or not you transcribe the reflection of your heart upon the written page. The man who sings within is a singer whether or not he gives his song verbal utterance. These hours of poetic ecstasy make life a thing to be cherished. The sources of such ecstasy are manifold—the love of man and woman, or parent and children, religious communion with the Spirit, comradeship, work, pursuance of duty, speed, health, beauty, the joy of the builder or artist, attainment to a higher understanding, sadness, hope,—from such springs come the bubbles of the wine of life, heartening the cherished hours. Our greatest poems are those that have never been written—true experience is poetry, and experience is an open door to life.

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

The poetry found in books is experience, directly or indirectly, through the agency of verbal expression, transferred to the printed page. The great writers of poems are those who have undergone spiritual experiences of greater intensity than those which come within the range of us lesser mortals. In their poems we partake of their life, of their ecstasy in the presence of beauty, of the richness of their imaginings, of the depth of their spiritual natures.

You and I, when we hear the wood thrush sing, are moved with the music of the notes, and are possibly carried away into the bosky woods where the richly patterned bird in his evening song pours his heart to Heaven; but when Keats hears the melody of the nightingale, his nature so acutely attuned to the harmony, the message of peace and solitude, is swept away in such an ecstasy of heartfelt longing for that same peace, that same solitude, that his own heart pours forth his song, in words no less musical, in cadences no less rich than the notes of the feathered songster. His experience is preserved for us in "The Ode to a Nightingale" and we may read and derive the same fascination that he felt.

Matthew Arnold somewhere tells us that all great poetry has one or both of two attributes: "Natural Magic" and "Moral Profundity." Whatever these two phrases may mean upon first sight, after examining their true import it will be appreciated that the greatest English critic did not consider poetry a thing for the closet, or sentimental matter only to be read by the melancholy lovelorn to his sentimental maid. The effect of the natural magic of a summer's night, of the sea breaking upon the wind-swept coast, of the sea gull's flight, is apparent and valued by everyone. What are most holidays other than periods during which we absorb appearances and sensations, that enter our personalities and remain part of ourselves during the succeeding year of work? "Natural Magic" is that which acts upon us as a holiday influence, compounded perhaps of beauty, mystery, fear or sentiment, which for the moment or for eternity gives our minds entrance into a realm of new and pleasurable things. Read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and you will find the essence of natural magic. You enter a realm, indeed, of magic and witchery, for

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Do those lines charm you? They charm most of us and the cadence of the words, the confused picture of Xanadu, have become our own,—riches with which we would not care to part.

Every time I read them the blunt edge of life is worn off, living regains its sharpness, I have to an extent experienced an ecstasy, taken a holiday.

It is hard to define the exhilaration of a canter across the meadows upon a crisp October day, or the impulse that surges through you as you look to the ocean breathing the sea breeze, or the sense of religious comradeship that grips you when in the midst of a crowd, great with a single purpose,—but this is all of the true stuff of Natural Magic. Your sensations are not of the minute, but of all time, as they have vivified your soul and become part and parcel of your personality.

It is so with the poets who sing you a song or breathe a sentiment that is not oral, not didactic, not purposeful, but of the stuff that thrills the spirit of man,—their charm is impossible to define, it must be felt, and for having felt it, your spirit is of a color different from what it was before. As Corot's landscapes painted in the forest of Fontainebleau are said to express the emotion of the painter when in the presence of nature, so does the lyric poet of magical gift express his feelings, lay bare his soul with its emotions and vacillations. The sadness and sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, the marvellous ability of Tennyson to fit the most exquisite words to the most subtle incantations of beauty, the thrill of romance in Shakespearean England as depicted by our contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite for sensuous delights of Keats, the tuneful, heartfelt songs of the Cavalier poets—these are of natural magic, of delight to the human soul, of the spirit of art.

When Shakespeare wrote,

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:

In a cowslip's bell I lie,

he had no moral to expound, he merely sung from his heart with the beauties of nature and the ways of fairy-land as an open book before him. If we wish (and there is no rightful reason why we should not) to drain the very dregs of living for the richest drops of wine, let us enrich, make more virile our enjoyment by seeking nourishing draughts of experience from the poets who have expressed those sweetest joys on earth in poems that have cleansed the souls of men for generation upon generation.

There is the other phrase of Matthew Arnold, "Moral Profundity." It is when we seek wisdom from the poets that we find this attribute. When the greatest of them give us their innermost thought, not the record of experiences, but the essential deductions from all their experiences, we have their true wisdom. When Wordsworth in "The Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." wrote the words,

Therefore am I still

.....well pleased to recognize,

In Nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian, of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being;

or when, in his "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," he wrote,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

and when Shelley wrote,

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

or when Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall," wrote,

This is truth the poet sings,

That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

those men formulated in exquisite language truths that have never been more intensively expressed.

Probably most readers of poetry have already considered these two phrases, and those who have, I feel sure, will agree that they are useful in making for a clearer understanding in our estimation of values. To read intelligently, to get the most out of our books, we should certainly attempt to formulate the various aspects of life the different poets represent, their relation to the time in which they live, and their excellencies when they stand before the bar of the reader's judgment.

Very few great poets produce poetry of but a single aspect. Shakespeare wrote the magical fairy jingles and yet created the stupendously profound character of "woe-entangled Hamlet"; Tennyson composed many a lilting tune in words, yet as a moralist he presented the most sincere thought of his generation. When we feel philosophic and thoughtful, we turn to the poems containing solemn truths; when weary, jaded, and off color, we turn to the honey of romance, the witcheries of sensuous beauty,—and regain our lost edge.

A single phrase may have natural magic, and yet may express a thought for which during years of our life we have been vainly groping. The poetry of thoughtful content is probably that which has meant the most to men, as upon the philosophy of such religious poets as Dante or Whitman many a man has braced his faith; yet we must remember that much of the wisdom of sages is expressed in as magical language as we have in our cherished heritage.

Let us not, however, be academic about our poets, let us not balance one against the other, let us not be carping about metre, subject matter and critical phrases, let us go to them for what they can give towards making this world a more marvellous place in which to dwell.

If Kipling makes you feel the glory of work, of the hard, terrific work in which we rejoice, if he gives you the call of the road, the wanderlust, and you hear,

—the song—how long! how long!

Pull out on the trail again!

if Bobbie Burns with his songs of Scotia gives you a human sympathy with mankind, an appreciation that for all his foibles and impossibilities "a man's a man for a' that"; if Byron fills your heart with the divine discontent that in a sweep of glory lands you above and beyond the commonplaces of every-day existence; if Wordsworth makes you see Nature as you have never seen her before, if he makes a meadow of buttercups appear in a new light, with unsuspected meaning, with hitherto unseen color and grace; if Keats attunes your heart to a deeper appreciation of a form, a fragrance, a musical harmony; if Milton's solemn cadences inspire you with the depth of that great Puritan's spirit; if Shakespeare unbares your own character in revealing the inner springs of his eternal heroes; if Longfellow in "My Lost Youth" brings back to you the home of your boyhood, and you see again

The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,

And islands that were the Hesperides

Of all my boyish dreams;—

if you can say with Walt Whitman,

Logic and sermons never convince;

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul;

or if there is a man unknown except for one poem that still stirs you with the sentiments that you love and honor—if these, I say, have thus met your requirements, each and all of them are great poets to you, they have opened a door to a life richer in content, deeper in import, more vastly worth living.

There is no danger that the poets will ever be in need of readers. The musical expression of thought or sentiment is as old and fundamental as is human nature. The sailors singing their chants as they pull in their anchor, the negro laborers whom we have seen singing a song as they unload the railroad ties, or put the heavy rails in place, the Western range rider calming the steers, and quieting his own nerves through the lone night watches, the sagas and harvest songs of simple people in all lands, are facts that establish the part that poetry plays in the workings of the human heart. In reading poetry you will obtain no credit for upholding a tradition, as the tradition will stand of its own vitality; but in not reading it you will miss one of the most bounteous sources of inspiration, you will pass by the richest treasure house, you will neglect the supreme opportunity for a thorough life that the art of man has put within your reach. When you do read, do it for all time, not for a moment. If the muse is to give you of her best, you must feel after sharing her store as did Wordsworth when he heard the Highland Reaper singing,

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago: