Maurice Francis Egan

Some of us have acquired a state of mind which helps us to believe that whenever a man mentions a book he either condemns or approves of it. In a word, the mere naming a book means a criticism of the book at once. It is true that books are criticisms of life, and that life, if it is not very narrow and limited, is a good criticism of books; but one of the most pleasant qualities of a reader who has lived among books all his life is that he does not attempt always to recommend books to others, or to preach about them. Besides, it is too dangerous to recommend unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly. The teachers of literature have undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools of critics who spend their time in approving of them for the old; and the "Index" at Rome assumes the difficult task of disapproval and condemnation. That lets me out, I feel.

One of my most cherished books is the "Letters to People in the World," by Saint Francis de Sales. I have known people who have declared that it is entirely exotic and has no meaning whatever for them. For me, it is a book of edification and a guide to life; and the "Letters" of Saint Francis himself, not entirely concerned with spiritual matters or the relations of spiritual matters to life, are to me a constant source of pleasure. I remember reading aloud to a friend the passage in which this charming Bishop writes that, when he slept at his paternal chÂteau, he never allowed the peasants on the domain to perform their usual duty, which was to stay up all night and beat the waters of the ponds, or perhaps of the moat, around the castle, so that the seigneur and his friends might sleep peacefully. My friend was very much bored and could not see that it represented a social point of view, which showed that the Saint was much ahead of his time! It did not bring old France back to him; he could not see the old chÂteau and the water in the moonlight, or conceive how glad the peasants were to be relieved of their duty. I can read the "Letters" of Saint Francis de Sales over and over again, as I read the "Letters" of Madame de SÉvignÉ or the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint Simon.

I think I first made acquaintance of Saint Simon in an English translation by Bayle St. John. If you have an interest in interiors—the interiors of rooms, of gardens, of palaces—you must like Saint Simon. Most people to-day read these "Memoirs" in little "collections"; but I think it is worth while taking the trouble to learn French in order to become an understanding companion of this malicious but very graphic author. To me the Palace of Versailles would be an empty desert without the "Memoirs" of Saint Simon. Else, how could anybody realize a picture of Mademoiselle de la ValliÈre looking hopelessly out of the window of her little room just before the birth of her child? Or what would the chapel be without a memory of those devout ladies who knelt regularly, holding candles to their faces, at the exercises in Lent, after Louis XIV. had become devout, in order that he might see them?

But because I love to linger in the society of the Duc de Saint Simon and Cardinal de Retz, it does not follow that I mean to introduce modern and ingenuous youth to the society of these gentlemen. Each man has his pet book. I still retain a great affection for a man of my own age who gives on birthdays and great feasts copies of "The Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy" to his grandchildren and their friends! Could you believe that? He dislikes Miss Austen's novels and sneers at Miss Farrar's "Marriage." He has never been able to read Miss Edgeworth's book; and he considers Pepys's "Diary" an immoral book! Now, I find it very hard to exist without at least a weekly peep into Pepys. And, by the way, in a number of the Atlantic Monthly not so long ago there is a vivid, pathetic, and excellently written piece of literature. It is "A Portion of the Diurnal of Mrs Eliz^th Pepys" by E. Barrington.

If anybody asks me why I like Pepys, I do not feel obliged to reply. I might incriminate myself. Very often, indeed, by answering a direct question about books, one does incriminate oneself.

However, to return to what I was saying—while I love the "Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz," I adore—to be a little extravagant—the "Letters of Saint Vincent de Paul." The man that does not know the real story of the life of Saint Vincent de Paul knows nothing of the evolution of the brotherhood of man in the seventeenth century. This Frenchman really fought with beasts for the life of children, and was the only real reformer in the France of his time.

Now it is not because Saint Vincent was for a time the preceptor of Cardinal de Retz that I find the Cardinal so delightful! On the contrary! I enjoy the Cardinal, famous coadjutor of his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, because he is a true type of the polite, the worldly, and the intriguing gentleman of his time. He died a good peaceful death, as all the gay and the gallant did at his time. He earned the deepest affection and respect of Madame de SÉvignÉ, for which any discerning man might have been willing to spend half a lifetime. But even that is beside the point. He lives for me because he gives a picture of the French ruling classes of his time which is shamelessly true. No living man to-day in political office, although he might be as great an intriguer as the Cardinal, would dare to be so interestingly shameless. That is a great charm in itself. And, then, if you read him in French, you discover that he knew how to make literature.

The only wonder in my mind has always been how a man who became so penitent during the last years of his life as Paul de Gondi should not have been forced by his confessor to destroy his book of revelations. But one must remember that the confessors of his period—the period of the founding of the French Academy—had a great respect for mere literature. His father was Philip Emanuel de Gondi, Count de Joigni, General of the Gallies of France, and Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost; who retired in the year 1640, to live among the Fathers of the Oratory. There he entered into holy orders, and there he died, with the reputation of a mightily pious man, on June 29, 1662, aged eighty-one.

Give me leave, madame [Cardinal de Retz says] to reflect a little here upon the nature of the mind of man. I believe that there was not in the world a man of an uprighter heart than my father, and I may say that he was stampt in the very mold of virtue. Yet my duels and love-intrigues did not hinder the good man from doing all he could to tye to the Church, the soul in the world perhaps the least ecclesiastical. His predilection for his eldest son, and the view of the archbishoprick of Paris for me, were the true causes of his acting thus; though he neither believed it, nor felt it. I dare say that he thought, nay would have sworn, that he was led in all this by no other motive than the spiritual good of my soul, and the fear of the danger to which it might be exposed in another profession. So true it is that nothing is more subject to delusion than piety. All manner of errors creep and hide themselves under that vail. Piety takes for sacred all her imaginations, of what sort soever; but the best intention in the world is not enough to keep it in that respect free from irregularity. In fine, after all that I have related I remained a churchman; but certainly I had not long continued so, if an accident had not happened which I am now to acquaint you with.

This is not at all what is called "edifying," but, from the moral point of view, it shows what Saint Vincent de Paul had to struggle against in the Church of France; and the position of Paul de Gondi in relation to an established church was just as common in contemporary England, where "livings" were matters of barter and sale but where the methods of the clergymen highly placed were neither so intellectual nor so romantic.

It must be admitted that Cardinal de Retz, like a later French prelate, Talleyrand, made no pretense of being fitted for the Church. Talleyrand's only qualification was that he was lame; and, as a younger son, he had to be provided for. But Cardinal de Retz, with all his faults, had a saving grace in spite of many unsaving graces. He did his best to escape the priesthood. He fought his first duel with Bassompierre behind the Convent of the Minims, in the Bois de Vincennes; but it was of no use. His friends stopped the inquiry of the Attorney General, "and so I remained in my cassock notwithstanding my duel." His next duel was with Praslin. He tried his best to give it the utmost publicity, but, he says, "there's no use in opposing one's destiny; nobody took the slightest notice of the scandal."

The elder Dumas has probably had his day, though "Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers" are still read. The newer romance writers are less diffuse, and, not writing feuilletons, are not forced to be diffuse. The constant reader of French memoirs of the seventeenth century can hardly help wondering why anybody should read Dumas who could go directly to the sources of his romances.

Speaking of the relation of books to books, it was the "Memoirs" of Madame Campan that took me into the society of Benjamin Franklin. There were legends about him in Philadelphia, where we thought we knew more about this distinguished American than anybody else; but it was through certain passages in the "Memoirs on Marie Antoinette and her Court" that I turned to his autobiography, and then to such letters of his as could be found. That autobiography is one of the gems of American history, though it does not reveal the whole man. If he had been as frank as Cardinal de Retz, his autobiography would have been suppressed; but, then, no Philadelphian could ever be quite frank in his memoirs. It has never been done! Even the seemingly reckless James Huneker understood that thoroughly. But the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sufficiently frank. It is of its own time, and it seems to me that it should be read just after one has finished for the second or third time the memoirs of Gouverneur Morris. Everybody feels it his duty to acclaim the charm of the confessions of Benvenuto Cellini, and I have known a young woman who read them reverently in the holy service of culture as a pendant to a textbook on the Renascence, and followed him by Jowett's translation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce À la mode de Madame de StaËl.

For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive, but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time before and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this, is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five books.

In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time. He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded, cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with a venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.

His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called "exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in that class of systematic rouÉs" who were astonished at the virtue of the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have not yet found them.

In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand and Philippe ÉgalitÉ were the most fascinating characters of the French Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy who was listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to exclaim suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about Judas!"

To persons who might censure Gouverneur Morris's frankness one may quote a short passage from Boswell's "Johnson." "To discover such weakness," said Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, speaking of the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald, "exposes a man when he is gone." "Nay," said the pious and great lexicographer, "it is an honest picture of human nature."

This, then, excuses the clever and wise Gouverneur Morris for enlightening us as to the paternity of a son of Madame de Flahaut. Morris, for a time that condoned the amourettes of Benjamin Franklin, was virtuous. Madame de Flahaut, afterward Madame de Souza, gave Morris a hint that he might easily supplant Talleyrand in her affection. "I may, if I please, wean her from all regard toward him, but he is the father of her child, and it would be unjust." In this noble moment Mr. Morris chivalrously forgets the existence of the Count de Flahaut!

In 1789, Mr. Morris continues to write platonic verses to Madame de Flahaut; the Queen's circle at Versailles is worried about the fidelity of the troops; the Count d'Artois holds high revelry in the Orangery; De Launey's head is carried on a pipe in the streets of Paris, and murdered men lie in the gutters. But the fashionable life of Paris is not disturbed. Mr. Morris goes to dinner. He is invited for three o'clock, to the house of Madame la Comtesse de Beauharnais. Toward five o'clock the Countess herself came to announce dinner. Morris is happy in the belief that his hunger will be equal to the delayed feast. For this day, he thinks he will be free from his enemy, indigestion. He is corroborated in his opinion that Madame de Beauharnais is a poetess by

But this is froth, and yet indicative of the depth beneath. It seems to me that there is no more interesting and useful book on the French Revolution than this autobiography. It ought to be placed near De Tocqueville's "Ancient RÉgime" and "Democracy in America."

On December 2, 1800, he believed it to be the general opinion that Mr. Jefferson was considered a demagogue, and that Aaron Burr would be chosen President by the House of Representatives. The gentlemen of the House of Representatives believed that Burr was vigorous, energetic, just, and generous, and that Mr. Jefferson was "afflicted with all the cold-blooded vices, and particularly dangerous from false principles of government which he had imbibed." Virginia would be, of course, against Burr, because, Morris writes,

John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson vice-President, in 1800. It is edifying for us who look on the "demigods" of 1787 with profound reverence, to see them at close range in Gouverneur Morris's pages.

Washington fares well at his hands, Lafayette not nearly so well:

But, then, Morris had had money transactions with the Lafayettes. Morris believed that no man ever existed who controlled himself so well as Washington. Shall we put the "Diary" just after the "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," not far from Beveridge's "Marshall" and at least on the same shelf with the perennial Boswell?

I read the confessions of Cardinal de Retz and of Gouverneur Morris many times with a dip now and then, by way of a change, into the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This is rather a change from the kickshaws of France to the roast beef of old England. This autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is the expression of the life of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing, and who writes about himself so well and so sincerely that he gives us an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels ever elaborated.

What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of literature as an avocation did not prevent him from being a good public servant.

As a typical Englishman brought up in the country, he liked to hunt. Hunting is a prerogative of the leisurely and the rich. He obtained leisure at a great sacrifice, and he became fairly rich through the same sacrifice. He tells us of all this with a manliness and lack of sentimentalism which endears this book to me. It is so much the fashion in our day to declare that society is against us when we have to work unremittingly for what we want, that Trollope's honesty is refreshing, and, though most readers will consider the word rather absurd as applied to him—inspiring!

In earlier days every American was brought up with a prejudice against Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans," as we were all taught to hate "American Notes," by Dickens. We all softened toward Dickens later, and it would be difficult to read the simply told story of the heroic devotion and courage which Trollope relates of his mother without believing that the recording angel in no way holds her responsible for her rather vulgar book.

How fascinating to the budding author is the record of sales of the books written by Trollope as he ascended the ladder of popularity! How he managed to cajole the publishers in the beginning he does not tell us. They are not so easily managed now. And there is the story of the pious editor who began the serial publication of "Rachel Ray," and although paying Trollope his honorarium, stopped it abruptly because there was a dancing party in the story! In all this the author of "The Warden" and "Barchester Towers" nothing extenuates nor puts down aught in malice. And I must say that for me this autobiography is very good reading. As the sailor once said of a piece of rather solid beef, "There's a great deal of chaw in it."

I pause a moment to reflect on a letter which I have just received from a young college woman who has so far read the manuscript of this book. She writes that it is really not a book so far for professing Christians.

This is an example of what a refined atmosphere may do to a Georgia girl! I have written to her by way of an apology that this is a little volume of impressions and confessions, and that personally I should find life rather duller if I had not the Duc de Saint-Simon at hand. Besides, I do not think that there is a single young person of my acquaintance who would allow me to read any of his pages to him or her!

Most young persons prefer "Main Street" or any other novel that happens to be the vogue. As I have said, I do not agree with Madame de SÉvignÉ when she says, writing of her granddaughter, that bad books ought to be preferred to no books at all. But it would be almost better for the young not to begin to read until they are old, if one is to gauge the value of books by the unfledged taste of youth. Purity, after all, is not ignorance, though a certain amount of ignorance at a certain age is very desirable.

While I write this, I have in mind a little essay of great charm and value by Coventry Patmore on "Modern Ideas of Purity," which goes deeper into the fundamentals of morality than any other modern work on the subject. And, by the way, having read "The Age of Innocence," "Main Street," "Moon Calf," "Miss Lulu Bett," and several other novels, I turn from their lack of gaiety to find a reason why art should not be gloomy, and here it is, from Coventry Patmore's "Cheerfulness in Life and Art."

There may be gaiety and joy in the novels of Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, but it seems to me to be a cheerfulness which is not quite the real thing. It is too sentimental and rather too laboured. These two authors, who, if the value of a writer could really depend on the majority of the votes cast for him, would, with the goldenrod, be our national flowers, seem to work too hard in the pursuit of cheerfulness.

Once I remember asking a scornful Englishman what supported the pleasant town of Stratford-on-Avon. He replied at once, "The Shakespearian industry!" Now the cheerfulness of both Mr. Harold Bell Wright and Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be real he must be joyless—in the United States, at least—is perhaps because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. Wright nor Mrs. Porter has a gleam of value. It is just as serious a mistake as to assume that the late Mary Jane Holmes and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth had no value. They pleased exactly the same class of people, in their day, which delights in Mr. Wright and Mrs. Porter in ours. They answered to the demand of a public that is moral and religious, that needs to be taken into countries which savoured something of Fairyland, and yet which are framed by reality. However, as long as Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, and novelists of higher philosophical aspirations, like the author of "The Age of Innocence," and "Blind Mice," and "Zell," and "Main Street," continue to write, there is no danger that the general crowd of American readers will be shocked or corrupted by the "Memoirs" of the Duc de Saint-Simon or of the Comtesse de Boigne. So I feel that I am absolved from the responsibility of misleading any young reader to sup on the horrors of the description of the death of Madame de Brinvilliers as painted by Madame de SÉvignÉ or to revel among the groups of Italians who range through the scenes drawn by Benvenuto Cellini.

While Pepys is always near at hand, I treat his contemporary, Evelyn, with very distant politeness and respect. Now Evelyn should not be treated in that way. He is always so edifying and so very correct, except when he moralizes about the Church of Rome, that he ought to be read nearly every day by the serious as an example of propriety and as a model of the expression of the finest sentiments on morals, philosophy, literature, and art. But I do not find in his "Diary" any such passages as this, which Pepys writes on October 19, 1662 (Lord's day):

Or,

Evelyn never condescends to such weaknesses as we find in our beloved Pepys!

One wonders whether, if the noble Mr. Evelyn had been able to decipher some of the hidden things in Mr. Pepys's "Diary," he would have written this tribute, under the date of May 26, 1703:

All the teachings of the histories of our student days force us to look on Charles II. as one of the weakest of English kings; but when we come to enjoy Pepys and to revere Evelyn, we begin to see that there is much to be said for him as a monarch, and that he did more for England under difficult circumstances than conventional history has given him credit for.

It took many years for me to find any diary or memoir that appealed to me as much as that of Pepys. His great charm is that he does for you what formal history never does; he takes you into the heart of his time, and introduces you into the centre of his mind and heart. In literature, in poetry and prose, the reader hopes that the roofs of houses or the tops of heads might be taken off, so that we could see with an understanding eye what goes on. The interest of the human race, though it may be disguised rhetorically, is the interest that everybody finds in gossip. Malicious gossip is one thing; but that gossip that makes us know our fellow men and women somewhat as we know ourselves—but perhaps more clearly—can never be rooted out of normal human nature.

I read and re-read favourite parts of Pepys's "Diary" many times, and I sat myself down in many cozy corners, on hills, on valleys, by land, and by sea, to dip into the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon"; and then there was always Madame de SÉvignÉ. Much was hoped from the long-promised "Memoirs of Talleyrand." They came; they were disappointing.

Suddenly arrived a very complete and egoistical book that compares in a way with the perennial favourites of mine I have been writing about. And this is "The Education of Henry Adams," and almost contemporaneously the "Letters of William James." It is easy to understand the delight with which intelligent people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams." Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way—that education consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, and regarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward in one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which Samuel Smiles beat into the heads of the English. Henry Adams's lesson, however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of Cardinal Newman!

There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it, Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent—but intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God that troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a personal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, God Himself.

Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in a personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without understanding the spirit of Saint Francis d'Assisi:

Hic Jacet
Homunculus Scriptor
Doctor Barbaricus
Henricus Adams
Adae Filius et Evae
Primo Explicuit
Socnam

After all, the speculations of Henry Adams, his thrusts at philosophy, seem as futile as those of that very great American John Burroughs. It is the facts of life as seen through his personality, the changes in our political history as analyzed so skilfully by him after the manner of no other man that make his book supremely interesting.

The real man is not hidden in "The Education of Henry Adams." We can no longer talk of the degeneracy of American literary taste when we know that this very American, characteristic, and illuminating book was a "best seller" in our country for several months. Some who like to bewail the degeneracy of our art and literature and of our drama, declare that its popularity is simply due to a fashion. Biographies are the fashion, and therefore it is the transitory habit of the illiterate book buyer to purchase, if he does not read, biographies. This view may be dismissed with a scornful wave of the hand.

When I took up "The Education of Henry Adams," I was informed that it was "pathetic." Personally, it has never struck me that Henry Adams, as far as I know him, is at all pathetic. He did not assume an air of pathos when he read my review in Scribner's Monthly—before it became the Century—of the novel "Democracy." Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.

Mr. Henry Adams's book, in my opinion, has no element of pathos. Adams lived a rare and interesting life. He loved beauty, and was so prepared by tradition and education that he knew how to appreciate beauty wherever he found it, and to give reasons for its being beautiful. Against the rough material obstacles in life, which are supposed to be good for a man, but are not at all good, since they absorb a great deal of energy that is subtracted from his later life, he was not obliged to struggle. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest of all modern Americans, who was a man of letters in love with life, Adams was not compelled to look up to social strata above him, and, whatever the enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle of friends, no man more pleasant surrounding. He was free in a way that few other men are free, and to my mind it is this sense of freedom, of which he does not always take advantage, that is one of the most appealing qualities of his book. It is a great relief to meet a man and to be intimate with him, as we are with Henry Adams, who has the power of using wings, whether he uses them or not.

There are many reasons for the success of his book. The chapters on "Diplomacy," on "Friends and Foes," on "Political Morality," and on "The Battle of the Rams" are new contributions to our history. More than that, they elucidate conditions of mind which are generally wrapped up, for motives of policy, in misty and often hypocritical verbiage.

Some of the reviewers found "The Education" egotistical. This is too strong a term. These memoirs would have no value if they were not egotistical; and if the term "egotistical" implies conceit or self-complacency or the desire to show one's better side to the public, "The Education" does not deserve it. A man cannot write about himself without writing about himself. This seems very much like a platitude. And Henry Adams writes about himself with no affectation of modesty. If anything, he underrates himself, as in conversation he sometimes took a tone which made him appear to those who knew him slightly as below the average of the real Henry Adams.

Here, for instance, is a good passage:

The Chose sublime is an Adamesque touch! It gives the last delicate tint to the impression. Page after page gleams with such impressions and such touches. He looks deep, and he sees clearly. But he lacks faith! He is the discoverer of the twelfth century; and, in a lesser sense, the discoverer of the real meaning of the nineteenth. He perceived the real architecture of both the Cathedral of Chartres and of "The Song of Roland." How useless all the tomes of the learned Teutons seem in comparison with his volume on Chartres, and their conclusions are so laboured and ineffective in comparison with the lightning-like glance with which he pierces the real meaning of the twelfth century. He has his limitations, and he is not unaware of them. But when one reflects on the hideous self-complacency, the eighteenth-century ignorance, the half-educated vulgarity of most of the writers in German and English who pretend to interpret the Middle Ages, one cannot help giving grateful thanks for having found Henry Adams.

To be sure, he does not respect Harvard, and one of his reasons seems to be that the Harvard man, though capable of valuing the military architecture of the walls of Constantinople, cannot sympathize with the beauties of Chartres or Sancta Sophia. Yale, he assumes, is more receptive. However, Henry Adams, if he were alive to-day, would have discovered that both Yale and Harvard, both seekers after culture and the cultivated, the hitherto prejudiced and self-opinionated, have profited greatly by the education he has given them. It seems that Henry Adams fancied that he had failed as an educator. He did not realize that he would give his countrymen an education which they greatly lacked, and which many of them are sincerely grateful for.

The man that cannot read his chapter on "Eccentricity" over and over again is incapable of appreciating some of Pepys's best passages! Books to be read and re-read ought to occupy only a small space on any shelf, and not many of them, in my opinion, are among the One Hundred Best Books listed by the late Sir John Lubbock. Each of us will make his own shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his critical vocation; BrunetiÈre has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background and perspective; William Lyon Phelps has a light hand; but there are many leaves in our forests of critical writing and not much wood. Literary criticism is becoming a lost art with our English brethren, who once claimed Saintsbury and George Lewes. The admitted existence of cliques and claques in London makes us distrustful. You were worked into great enthusiasm for Stephen Phillips's "Herod" until you found that half a score of notices of this tragedy were written by the same hand!

It seems almost impossible that "The Letters of William James" should appear shortly after "The Education of Henry Adams," and, though the Jameses were New Yorkers, they are certainly redolent of New England. We had begun to forget our debt to the writers of New England. Mrs. Freeman and Mr. Lincoln hold up their heads as writers of modern folk stories; but the Atlantic Monthly has become eclectic. It has lost the flavour of New England. That Boston which in the Atlantic had always been a state of mind has become different from the real old Boston.

In truth, Indiana had begun to blot out the whole of New England, and Miss Agnes Repplier had begun to stain our map of culture with the modulated tints of Philadelphia. For myself, I had returned to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe—leaving out "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which I always found detestable—to "Elsie Venner" and to "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in the hope that the flavour of New England, which I found to my horror was growing faint in me, might be retained. There is always "The House of the Seven Gables!"

But, while I was lingering over some almost forgotten pages of Mrs. Stowe with great pleasure, something she said reminded me of Walter Savage Landor, and I turned to the only work of Landor which had ever attracted me, "The Imaginary Conversations." There was an interlude of enjoyment and exasperation. He shows himself so malicious, so bigoted, so narrow, and so incapable of comprehending some of the historical persons he presents to us. But there are compensations, all the same. Whatever one may think of the animus of Landor, one cannot get on without an occasional dip into "The Imaginary Conversations." Suddenly Landor reminded me of Marion Crawford's "With the Immortals," and I rediscovered Marion Crawford's Heinrich Heine! To have discovered Heine in Zangwill's "In a Mattress Grave" was worth a long search through many magazines. Like Stevenson's "Lodging for the Night," Zangwill's few pages can never be obliterated from the heart of a loving reader—by a loving reader I mean a reader who loves men a little more than books.

You will remember that Crawford's Immortals appear at Sorrento where Lady Brenda and Augustus and Gwendolyn Chard are enjoying the fine flower of life. If Sir Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge could only bring back to life, or induce to come back to life, King Francis I. and Julius CÆsar and Heinrich Heine and Doctor Johnson,[1] together with that group of semi-happy souls who live on the "enamelled green" of Dante, spiritism might have more to say for itself!

Strange as it may appear, it does not seem to be so much of a descent, or of a break in the chain of continuity, to turn to hear William James speak in letters, which have the effect of conversation. From the very beginning of his precious book I somehow feel that I am part of the little circle about him. The conversation goes on—Mr. James never loses sight of the point of view and sympathies of the party of the second part—and you are not made to feel as an eavesdropper.

Standing on the ladder, unhappily a rather shaky ladder, to put back "With the Immortals" on the shelf, I pass Wells's great novel of "Marriage," which I would clutch to read again, if I had not already begun this Letter of James—written to his wife:

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!" And afterwards, considering the circumstances in which the man is placed, and noting how some of them are fitted to evoke this attitude, whilst others do not call for it, an outside observer may be able to prophesy where the man may fail, where succeed, where be happy and where miserable. Now as well as I can describe it, this characteristic attitude in me always involves an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any guaranty that they will. Make it a guaranty—and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am Überhaupt in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything, which translates itself physically by a kind of stinging pain inside my breast-bone (don't smile at this—it is to me an essential element of the whole thing!), and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess....