France—Of Maurice de Guérin

In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. These were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eugénie and her coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.

One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile Library—now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as to its shelves—had an excellent collection of volumes in French.

How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided by the critics of the period. I found Amédée Achard as interesting as Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even "La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending her for her "vitality." I found Madame de Gérardin's "La Femme qui Déteste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by Octave Feuillet—"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seiglière," by Jules Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of their predecessors.

At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte de Chambord—Henry V., as a few of us preferred to call him. And this reminds me of my partisanship in things English—if I may turn for the moment from things French—and of a little incident not without humour. I was ardently devoted to the cause of the Stuarts, and was for a time attached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in England invariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, to indicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small and frugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host—he was an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant—insisted on waving his glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water—whoever he might be—and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutal Hanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, might be still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of Mary Stuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary of Scotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!

Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were not above reproach—notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so admirably correct.

Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus" seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far—still it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were mentioned with rapt admiration.

But to come to the poets!

It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve that I discovered Maurice de Guérin. He almost drove my beloved Keats from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Guérin on the ground of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old Testament at times.

Keats and Maurice de Guérin will be always associated in my mind. I discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value what ever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Guérin.

I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister Eugénie. The "Journal" ought never to be allowed to go out of fashion, and probably it is only out of fashion in those circles which Mr. Mencken so scorns, that devote themselves to imitations of Marie Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the calm life of Eugénie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to understand the allusions, to plunge again into the journals, letters, and poems of Maurice de Guérin. Thus it happened that I had fallen upon "Le Centaure" first. It is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me the most appealing poem I had ever read.

Keats's Greece seems somehow to be a Greece too full of modern colour, too unclassical. This was a mistake, of course, due to the fact that all my Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not occur to me then—at least I did not know it—that the great Greek statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure" seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with human emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of the opening? Says the Centaur:

After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the writings of Eugénie de Guérin and her brother—I inevitably think of this brother and sister together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read the Journals of the De Guérins, I had leisure. A period of ill health stopped my work—I had begun to study law—and there were long days that could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing the impression that Maurice de Guérin made. It was a great surprise to find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt Whitman, who very rarely quoted any verse.

I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which Hamerton had corroborated, in Eugénie de Guérin's little sketches of outdoor scenery—sketches which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be able to enjoy nature for itself—nature unrelieved or unimproved by human figures—had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.

As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eugénie de Guérin had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on Maurice de Guérin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her piety should be sentimental, if Eugénie's sentiment can be characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.

The beloved home of Eugénie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugénie, being less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more sensitive perception of the meaning of nature—though, when it comes to sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape charm of Eugénie de Guérin, and yet the picture in this case is not a landscape, but the interior of a room:

And again:

Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite beauties in a little space—untold joys within a day—and he asks us to take short outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in this; but Eugénie de Guérin exemplifies its value much more than any other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real joie de vivre which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent amusements.

The devotion of Eugénie de Guérin to her brother resembles that of Madame de Sévigné for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De Guérin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now probably forgotten, and to go back to Keats.

After Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guérin, and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!

My dear friend, Edward Roth—whom James Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"—named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is too hard to read—even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for the French poets of a certain genre to call themselves symbolists. When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word. The thing itself coloured the word—and Keats, working hard in a verbal laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done—though one cannot have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected after his best verse had been written.

Maurice de Guérin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director, Père de Lamennais—the "M. Féli" of the little paradise of la Chénie. To the delight of some of the more independent and emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost equally adored, and this gave Eugénie great pain, although it did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.

De Guérin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guérin somewhat too unusual. Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate talk." Eugénie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Trébutien's "Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guérin." It would be folly for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of Eugénie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most beautiful of all love songs—"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so imitative—and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre. Tennyson, like De Guérin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice de Guérin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical, the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this!—Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, Keats, Madame de Sévigné, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion—and yet they are all related.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.

The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr. Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!

The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guérin's "Centaure," to read joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourguéneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that, when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which he had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":

No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.

But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Guérin lead us! Here is another link—José de Herédia, and his jewelled and chiselled sonnets—the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."

A translation of which reads:

I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends enragé of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted prairie.

Dante

A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told. "A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of reading, and, as for the good old books—nobody reads them any more." On the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."

Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the winter is the time for reading—I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's "Winter Hour" when I think of this—and the motor car, especially in country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever. Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.

The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its height, there were found many people in our country who were quite capable of asking why Dante should be read.

Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for, perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the "Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic tours de force .

In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy,"

Gollancz says:

Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two years after Virgil's death and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the green enamel" ( verde smalto ) in this place of quiet leisure which was the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the "Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that all children unbaptized by material water are doomed:

And then remembering the innocence of the little children Dante turns to that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in this world.

And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant, among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the Voltairean mauvais mot , that all the people worth meeting are in Hell! And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time, is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents of Constantine's donation were mediæval forgeries. Dante believed, however, that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being of the spirit, could not accept temporal power. This he asserts in his "De Monarchia," which was for a time on the "Index." Times have changed, and "De Monarchia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are no longer in the "Index," though Balzac and Dumas, in French, are. But many of the Faithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as in the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book, suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?

Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the poet's faith—

If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to other books, so much the better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No—that is going too far!—the musical comparison fails. "If thou should'st never see my face again, pray for my soul," is King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of Pope Gregory that saved Trajan.

When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The "Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For instance, there is the case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti. Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his address is hardly tactful. He is evidently surprised to find that Nino is not in Hell,

Nino begs that his innocent daughter, Giovanna, may be asked by Dante, on his return to earth, to pray for him. He is not pleased that his widow should desire to marry

He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as she has discarded her "white wimples," which, if she marries this inferior person, she may long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one may mightily well

One must admit that there is an element of humour—not for the victim—in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he says,

But for consolation, there is no great poem so good as the "Paradiso."

English and American Verse

Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled the youths of his generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott," with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace into something very beautiful, was new.

We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were not especially struck by those mediæval lay figures which he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because they are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean, let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." He is writing of the Bible, which is never old:

Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidly becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs. Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked the reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any "newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer," could he have made it more splendid and appealing?

The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature—in life itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti were new; or who scorns Browning—the best of Browning—lacks the first requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty is beyond the touch of time. The women in François Villon's "Ballade of Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This beauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in vers libre ; its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that it was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and perhaps eternal.

Much affectionate reading of poetry—and poetry read in any other way is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day—leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions, and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in age, talking of themselves as discoverers—brave or audacious discoverers—as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de León; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous revolutionists.

The truth is that vers libre has its place, and it ought to have a high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and even splendid. But there are others!

It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read Coventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House" which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as the proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and Sleep," one of the most musical poems in our language.

Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime, it is plain—as the form of poetry appeals to the ear—that the rime is a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each stanza. The real musical charm of the poem—only one stanza, of four, is given here—lies in the management of the rhythm.

says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law,"

Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" is merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely accessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in

There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms.

The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas Campion—Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs, masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen—as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use of what is to-day called vers libre resembled somewhat Carlyle's Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of the thought.

But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor her naturally good ear, should imagine that vers libre means the throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.

It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best vers libre has freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied charm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings, without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in the opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's "Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is not vers libre . If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.

Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable—that is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York of his time—looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn Eagle on that eminently important body.

The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the time that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that "Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?

And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a devout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions, carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said, Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitate him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes carved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals. We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance. There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, though they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great passages—there are very many—and the noble complete poems—there are a few—of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.

Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.

Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And there was William Morris and "The Earthly Paradise!"

The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of "new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginning to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of their aftermath, the æsthetic poets, really got more colour and amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blasé and cynical and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too many amusing and delightful things in the world—as there are now.

Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the English—that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.

I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert Underwood Johnson—whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can never be forgotten—and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But les jeunes prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that "free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's "Childhood" is a very typical example of vers libre . It is also an Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful trifle!

Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only sometimes musical, but he hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans, Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the New.

When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully examined the vers librists , with the aid of a catalogue and explanations, one turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la Mare. Come, now! Listen to this:

It is difficult for the simple minded to understand why Walter de la Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about an old-fashioned aëroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the centre of something interesting.

The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the principle of liberty. But why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical, if it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in terms that appeal to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings of the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!

José de Herédia, in "Les Trophées," is both an Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and angry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality. There are others, however, who may not be imitators of Robert Frost, but who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as an example of Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. Eliot's "Cousin Nancy":

The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of character might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all, when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist, and the vers librist , one swims into the splendours of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring." And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is demodé because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediæval knights cut out of pasteboard.

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies—by modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"—do not bear the test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and others new— chacun à son goût —I feel that by comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection. Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful, sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than Shakespeare, in "Julius Cæsar," could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project themselves.

If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the originals; they are not even paraphrases—to turn again from painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of the pulsations of the hearts of others.

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.

Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be united with God—you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope. They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.

Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of Saint John and the poems of Saint Teresa and of Saint John of the Cross, which we find in Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern poets pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.

To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real; and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satis factory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their lives.

The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any god that pleased them did not add to the joy of life. The poet, then, who misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who does not desire to be united to an absolute Perfection, who is sad by profession, cannot be, according to my canons, a true poet. I speak, not as a critic, but as a man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.

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