Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 12

but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work written in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect expression of an emanc.i.p.ation from moral restraints far advanced. The Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared.

The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for their safety to the nation-state rather than to the solidarity of Christendom; and the state, as Machiavelli's gospel proclaimed it, consisted in absolute and irresponsible control exercised by one man who should embody its unity, strength, and authority.

Montaigne felt rather than understood the cruelty and brutality of the state traditions of his time; and these traditions were seriously combatted when the United States made brave efforts both at Versailles and Washington. Doctor Hill sums up the essential principles which guided the world from the Renascence to the year 1918:

(1) The essence of a State is "sovereignty," defined as "supreme power." (2) A sovereign State has the right to declare war upon any other sovereign State for any reason that seems to it sufficient.

(3) An act of conquest by the exercise of superior military force ent.i.tles the conqueror to the possession of the conquered territory. (4) The population goes with the land and becomes subject to the will of the conqueror.

What member of the memorable conference, which began at Washington on November 12, 1921, would have dared to a.s.sert these unmoral principles, accepted alike by the Congress of Vienna and the Congress of Berlin, in principle? King John of England looked on their negation as an unholy novelty, though that negation was the leaven of the best of the life of the Middle Ages.

There can be no doubt that the germ of the idea of freedom was kept alive, in the miasma which poisoned "The Prince" and Machiavelli's world, by men like Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne. A better understanding of the principles of these men would have made Milton less autocratic--Lucifer, though a rebel, was not a democrat--and Voltaire less destructive. And yet Voltaire, for whom the French Republic lately named a war vessel, was the friend of Frederick the Great and of Catherine II. Doctor Hill, to whom some of the pa.s.sages in Sir Thomas Browne and Montaigne sent me, says:

Down to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 the most odious crime ever committed against a civilized people was, no doubt, the first part.i.tion of Poland; yet at the time not a voice was raised against it. Louis XV. was "infinitely displeased," but he did not even reply to the King of Poland's appeal for help. George III. coolly answered that "justice ought to be the invariable rule of sovereigns"; but concluded, "I fear, however, misfortunes have reached the point where redress can be had from the hands of the Almighty alone." Catherine II. thought justice satisfied when "everyone takes something." Frederick II. wrote to his brother, "The part.i.tion will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, and Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the same consecrated body, which is Poland." Only Maria Theresa felt a twinge of conscience. She took but she felt the shame of it. She wrote: "We have by our moderation and fidelity to our engagements acquired the confidence, I may venture to say the admiration, of Europe.... One year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to endure it, and that nothing in the world has cost me more than the loss of our good name." It is a strange phenomenon that in matters where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly p.r.o.nounces judgment and spontaneously condemns, the solid ma.s.s of moral conviction should count for nothing in affairs of state. Against it a purely national prejudice has never failed to prevail.

Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons so clearly; nor does Sir Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth century, who tore up the c.o.c.kles and the wheat together.

Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.

This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is, therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in our universities are those which concern themselves with written and spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools and colleges

is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something new for the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.

Mr. Mencken is both instructive and destructive; but he is not so constructive as to build a road through the marsh of confusion into which that conflict of dialects in the English language--a language which is grammarless and dependent upon usage--has left us. He tells us that good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Whether this is true in the case of Howells or not, it must be remembered that Lincoln was fed, through his reading, on the results of those linguistic principles which are with us in English tradition. It is the usage of Cardinal Newman or Hawthorne or Stevenson or Agnes Repplier, or of Lincoln himself, which those who want to write good English follow rather than the elaborate rules of confused English grammar which are forgotten almost as soon as they are learned.

Personally, in youthful days, I could make nothing out of the "grammar"

of the English language until I had begun to study Latin prosody; and then it became clear to me that only a few bones in the structure of English, taken from the Latin practice, were valuable; that the flesh of the English tongue would not fit the whole skeleton.

As the English language, spoken everywhere, must depend on good usage, and the bad usage of to-day often becomes the good usage of to-morrow, it is regrettable that no scientific study of the American vocabulary or of the influences lying at the root of American word-formation--to quote Mr. Mencken--has as yet been made. The elder student was content with correcting the examples of bad English in Blair's "Rhetoric." Later, he read "The Dean's English," very popular at one time, Richard Grant White's "Words and Their Uses," and perhaps a little book called "The Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style"

was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them with variations; but Spencer's method of presenting them is as involved as any method adopted by a philosopher could be--and that is saying a good deal.

The English of the universities hold that Americans are the slave of Webster's Dictionary; and this is true of a certain limited cla.s.s of Americans. The English public speaker allows himself more freedom in the matter of p.r.o.nunciation than very scrupulous Americans do. Lord Balfour's speeches at the Washington Conference offered several examples of this.

"The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that Webster's Dictionary is _the_ American dictionary, and I propose to consider all its decisions as final," said, in hot argument, a New York lawyer who habitually uses "dontcha know" and "I wanta." Shakespeare, he regards as an author whose English ought to be corrected; and he became furious over what he called the misp.r.o.nunciation of "apotheosis," which he said a favourite preacher had not uttered according to Webster. And I have known literary societies in the South to be disrupted over the use of the word "nasty" by a Northern woman; and, as for "b.l.o.o.d.y," Mr. Mencken shows us that one of the outrages committed by Mr. Shaw against English convention was his permitting the heroine of "Pygmalion" to use it on the stage. There is one Americanism, however, against which, as far as I can find, Mr. Mencken does not protest. It is the use of the word "consummated" in a phrase like "the marriage was consummated in the First Baptist Church at high noon"!

In spite of democratic disapproval, some will still hold that "lift" is better than "elevator," and "station" better than "depot." Though these are departures from the current vernacular. We speak English often when our critical friends in England imagine that we are speaking American. I have known a gentleman in New Jersey who has cultivated English traditions of speech, to shrink in horror at the mention of "flap-jack"

and "ice-cream." He could never find a subst.i.tute in _real_ English for "flap-jack," but he always subst.i.tuted "ices" for "ice-cream." On one occasion I heard him inveigh against the horror of the word "pies," for those "detestable messy things sold by the ton to the uncivilized"; and he spent the time of lunch in pointing out that no such composition really existed in polite society; but when his "cook general" was seen approaching with an unmistakable "pie," the kind supposed by the readers of advertis.e.m.e.nts to be made by "mothers," and ordered hastily because of the coming of the unexpected guest, he was cast down. The guest tried to save the situation by speaking of the obnoxious pastry as "a tart."

The host shook his head--"a tart," in English, could never be covered!

Mr. Mencken shows us that "flap-jack," "mola.s.ses," "home-spun,"

"ice-cream" are old English; that "Bub," which used to shock London visitors to Old Philadelphia, is a bit of provincial English; and that "muss" is found in "Antony and Cleopatra." I wish I had known that when I was young; it would have saved me a bad mark for paraphrasing "Menelaus and Paris got into a muss over Helen." But probably the use of "row" to express that little difficulty would not have saved me!

The best judge of Madeira in Philadelphia always said "cheer" for "chair" and "sa.s.ser" for "saucer" and "tay" for "tea" and "obleged" for "obliged"; and he drank from his saucer, too; and his table was always provided with little dishes, like b.u.t.ter plates, for the discarded cups.

His example gave me a profound contempt for those newly rich in learning who laugh without understanding, who are the slaves of the dictionary, and who are so "vastly" meticulous. This old gentleman was an education in himself; he had lived at the "English court"--or near it--and when he came to visit us once a year, we listened enraptured. I once fell from grace; but not from my reverence for him, by making a mistake in my search for knowledge which involved his age. It was very easy to ask him whether Anne Boleyn had asked for a "cheer" but not easy to escape from the family denunciation that followed. It seemed that he had not lived at or near the court of Henry VIII!

Mr. Mencken explains why the use of "sick" for "ill" is taboo in England, except among the very youngest Realists. And, by the way, Mr.

Hugh Walpole in "The Young Enchanted" goes so far in one of the speeches of the atrocious Mrs. Tennsen, that the shocking word "b.l.o.o.d.y" used by Mr. Bernard Shaw on one famous occasion sinks into a pastel tint! Mr.

Mencken says:

The Pilgrims brought over with them the English of James I. and the Authorized Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed the fundamentals to be but little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the Eighteenth Century.

The Bible won against the prudery of the new English; prudery will go very far, and I can recall the objection of an evangelical lady, in Philadelphia, who disliked the nightly saying of the "Ave Maria" by a little Papist relative. This was not on religious grounds; it was because of "blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus," in the prayer. The little Papist had been taught to repeat the salutation of the Angel Gabriel in Latin, so, at bedtime, he changed to "Benedictus fructus ventris tui" and the careful lady thought it sounded "more decent"!

Poker players may be interested in Mr. Mencken's revelation that "ante"

came into our language through the Spanish; he says,

cinch was borrowed from the Spanish "cincha" in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later.

It is pleasant to note the soundness of Mr. Mencken's judgment in regard to that very great philologer, the Dane, Doctor Jespersen, and he quotes, in favour of the clarity and directness of the English language, another great Dane, Doctor Thomson. Doctor Jespersen admits that our tongue has a certain masculine ungainliness. It has rare elements of strength in its simplicity. In English the subject almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows it; even in English poetry this usage is seldom violated. In Tennyson, its observance might be counted at 80,

but in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it falls to 61, in Anatole France's prose, to 66, in Gabriele d' Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30.

That our language has only five vowels, which have to do duty for more than a score of sounds, is a grave fault; and the unhappy French preacher who, from an English pulpit, p.r.o.nounced "plough" as "pluff" had much excuse. But on the other hand, why do the French make us say "fluer de lis," instead of "fleur de lee"? And "Rheims"? How many conversational pitfalls is "Rheims" responsible for!

There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or more food for thought or for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken's "The American Language," except Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy,"

Boswell's "Johnson," the "Devout Life" of Saint Francis de Sales, Pepys's "Diary," the "Letters" of Madame de Sevigne, Beveridge's "Life"

of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book for odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify the quotations in a library; preferably with the snow falling in thick flakes, and an English victim who cannot escape, even after dinner is announced. Mr. Mencken is a benefactor!

It is very remarkable that Mr. Mencken's audacious disregard of English grammar in theory has not impaired the clearness of his point of view and of his own style. If dead authors could write after the manner in which Mr. Andrew Lang has written to them, I should like to read Herbert Spencer's opinions of Mr. Mencken's volumes. If Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle want really to please a small but discriminating public, let them induce Herbert Spencer to a.n.a.lyze Mr. Mencken's statements on the growth of the English language! In my time we were expected to take Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" very seriously. There is no doubt that his principles have been repeated by every writer on style, including Dr. Barrett Wendell in his important "English Composition," since Mr.

Spencer wrote; but the method of Spencer's expression of his principles reminds one of the tangled wood in which Dante languished before he met Beatrice.

There is no doubt that Mr. Spencer makes us think of writing as a science and art; his philosophy of style is right enough. But while he provokes puzzled thought, he does no more. There is more meat in Robert Louis Stevenson's "A College Magazine" than in all the complications in style in the brochure of the idol of the eighties.

And a greater stylist than even Stevenson is the author of a little volume which I keep by my side ever since Mr. Frederick O'Brien and the terrifying Gaugain have turned us to the islands of the Pacific. It is Charles Warren Stoddard's "South Sea Idyls." And if one wants to know how to read for pleasure or comfort--for reading or writing does not come by nature--there is "Moby d.i.c.k," by Herman Melville, the close friend of the Hawthornes and a writer so American that Mr. Mencken must love him. But he ought to be read as a novelist.

Mr. Herbert Spencer and "The South Sea Idyls" bring the _flaneur_--the chief business of a _flaneur_ of the pavements (we were forbidden in old Philadelphia to say "sidewalks") is to look into unrelated shop-windows; but the _flaneur_ among books finds none of his shop-windows unrelated--back to Mr. Mencken, who does not give us the genesis of a word that sounded something like "sadie." It meant "thank you." Every Pennsylvania child used it, until the elegants interfered, and they often did interfere. You might say "apothecary" or "chemist"; but you should never say "druggist." I trust that it is no breach of confidence to repeat that the devout and very distinguished of modern Philadelphians, Mr. John Drew, discovered that there were two languages in his neighbourhood, one for the ears of his parents and one for the boys in the street. One was very much in the position of the Yorkshire lad I met the other day. "But you haven't a Yorkshire accent!" "No, sir," he said, "my parents whipped it out of me." But there is, in New York City, at least the beginning of one American language--the language of the street.

In considering the impression that books have usually made on me, I have often asked myself why they are such an unfailing source of pleasure and even of joy. Every reader has, of course, his own answer to this. For the plots of novels, I have always had very little respect, although I believe, with Anthony Trollope, that a plot is absolutely necessary to a really good novel, and that it is the very soul of a romance. Of memoirs--even the apocryphal writings of the Marquise de Crequy have always been very agreeable to me; I have never been so dull or so tired, that I could not find some solace in the Diary of Mr. Pepys, in the Autobiography of Franklin, in the peerless journal of Mr. Boswell; and even the revelations of Madame Campan, as a last resource, were worth returning to. As for the diary of Madame d'Arblay, it reproduces so admirably the struggles of a bright spirit against the dullest of all atmospheres, that it seems like a new discovery in psychology. And now comes Professor Tinker's "Young Boswell" and those precious diaries including that of Mrs. Pepys by a certain E. Barrington. Life _is_ worth living!

I must confess that I have never found any poet excepting King David whom I liked because he taught me anything. Didactic "poetry" wearies me, probably because it is not poetry at all. When people praise Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," because it is dogmatic, I am surprised--for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its splendour for me. The Apocalypse and "The Hound of Heaven" are glorious visions of truth at a white heat.

Tennyson's "Two Voices" loses all its value when it ceases to be a picture and becomes an important sermon. And as for Spenser, the didactic symbolism of his "Faerie Queen" might be lost forever with no great disadvantage to posterity if his splendid "Epithalamion" could be preserved. Browning's optimism has always left me cold, and I never could quite understand why most of his readers have set him down as a great philosopher. All may be well with the world, but I could never see that Browning's poetry proved it in any way. When the time comes for a cultivated English world--a thoughtful English-speaking world--to weigh the merits of English-speaking poets, Browning will be found among the first. Who has done anything finer in English than "A Grammarian's Funeral"? Or "My Last d.u.c.h.ess," or "A Toccata of Galuppi's" or some of the pa.s.sages in "Pippa Pa.s.ses"? Who has conceived a better fable for a poem than that of "Pippa"? And as for Keats, the world he discovered for us is of greater value to the faculties of the mind than all the philosophies of Wordsworth.

To me, the intense delight I have in novels and poems is due to their power of taking me out of myself, of enlightening me as to my own faults and peculiarities, not by preaching but by example, and of raising me to a higher plane of toleration and of gaiety of heart.

As I grow older, I find that the phrase Stevenson once applied to works of fiction becomes more and more regrettable. He compared the followers of this consoling art to "_filles de joie_." He doubtless meant that these G.o.ddesses--"_les filles de joie_" are always young--gave us visions of the joy of life; that they might be sensuous without being sensual; but his phrase falls far short of the truth. There are novels, like Mrs. Jackson's "Ramona," which are joyous and serious at once. Or take "The Cardinal's Snuff Box" or "Pepita Jiminez."

Every constant reader has his favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say that only a few of the essayists really amuse me. They are, as a rule, more witty than humorous, and generally they make one self-conscious, being self-conscious themselves. There are a hundred different types of the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found all the prose works of a fine poet and friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. "The result of a severe sense of duty!" he said.

Madame Roland tried hard for a t.i.tle of n.o.bility and failed, though she gained in the end a greater t.i.tle. Her works are insufferably and complacently conceited, and yet I always look at their bindings with respect. Mrs. Blashfield, who died too soon, has given us, in her first volume--unfortunately the only one--a new view of this Empress of Didacticism. It is strange indeed that Madame Roland could have been nourished by that most stimulating of all books--"The Devout Life of St.

Francis de Sales." Monseigneur de Sales is, to my mind, the most practical of all the essayists, even when he puts his essays in the form of letters. Next comes Fenelon's and--I know that I shall shock those who regard his philosophy as merely Deistic--next comes, for his power of stimulation, Emerson.

It has certainly occurred to me, perhaps too late, that these confessions may be taken as didactic in themselves; in writing them I have had not the slightest intention of improving anybody's mind but simply of relieving my own, by b.u.t.ton-holing the reader who happens to come my way. I should like to add that what is called the coa.r.s.eness of the eighteenth-century novel and romance is much more healthful than the nasty brutality of a school of our novelists--who make up for their lack of talent and of wide experience by trying to excite animal instincts.

Eroticism may be delicately treated; but art has nothing in common with the process of "cooking stale cabbage over farthing candles," to use Charles Reade's phrase.

If my habit of constant reading had not taught me the value of calmness and patience, I should like to say, with violent emphasis, that a reason for thanking G.o.d is that Americans have produced a literature--the continuation of an older literature with variations, it is true,--that has added to the glory of civilization. To prove this, I need mention only one book, "The Scarlet Letter," and I am glad to end my book by writing the name of Hawthorne. Literary comparisons with England, or with France, Italy, Spain, or any of the other continental nations, are no longer to our disadvantage. It is the fashion of the American who writes of American books to put--in his own mind, at least--a t.i.tle to his discourse that reminds me of Miss Blanche Amory's "Mes Larmes." It is an outworn tradition. American literature is robust enough for smiles.

It can smile and laugh. It can be serious and not self-conscious. It is rapidly taking to itself all the best traditions of the older literature and a.s.similating them. Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun and Don Marquis and Mencken write--at their best--as lightly and as trippingly as any past master of the _feuilleton_. There is n.o.body writing in the daily press in Paris to-day who does the _feuilleton_ as well as they do it. If you ask me whether I, as a constant reader, pay much attention to what they say, I shall answer, No. But their method is the thing. Will they live? Of course not. Is emile de Girardin alive? Or all the clever ones that James Huneker found buried and could not revive? One still reads the "Portraits de Femmes," of Sainte-Beuve; but Sainte-Beuve was something more than a "columnist." And these folk will be, too, in time!

At any rate, they are good enough for the present.