Inn of Casterbridge, singing of his ain contree with a pathos quite
unknown in that part of the world. The worthies who frequent the place
are deeply moved. 'Danged if our country down here is worth singing
about like that,' says Billy Wills, the glazier,--while the literal
Christopher Coney inquires, 'What did ye come away from yer own
country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?' Then it
occurs to him that it wasn't worth Farfrae's while to leave the fair
face and the home of which he had been singing to come among such as
they. 'We be bruckle folk here--the best o' us hardly honest
sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and
God-a'mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill 'em
with. We don't think about flowers and fair faces, not we--except in
the shape of cauliflowers and pigs' chaps.'

I should like to see the man who sat to Artist Hardy for the portrait
of Corporal Tullidge in _The Trumpet-Major_. This worthy, who was deaf
and talked in an uncompromisingly loud voice, had been struck in the
head by a piece of shell at Valenciennes in '93. His left arm had been
smashed. Time and Nature had done what they could, and under their
beneficent influences the arm had become a sort of anatomical
rattle-box. People interested in Corp'el Tullidge were allowed to see
his head and hear his arm. The corp'el gave these private views at any
time, and was quite willing to show off, though the exhibition was apt
to bore him a little. His fellows displayed him much as one would a
'freak' in a dime museum.

'You have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven't ye, corp'el?'
said Anthony Cripplestraw. 'I have heard that the way they mortised
yer skull was a beautiful piece of workmanship. Perhaps the young
woman would like to see the place.'

The young woman was Anne Garland, the sweet heroine of the story; and
Anne didn't want to see the silver plate, the thought of which made
her almost faint. Nor could she be tempted by being told that one
couldn't see such a 'wownd' every day. Then Cripplestraw, earnest to
please her, suggested that Tullidge rattle his arm, which Tullidge
did, to Anne's great distress.

'Oh, it don't hurt him, bless ye. Do it, corp'el?' said Cripplestraw.

'Not a bit,' said the corporal, still working his arm with great
energy. There was, however, a perfunctoriness in his manner 'as if the
glory of exhibition had lost somewhat of its novelty, though he was
still willing to oblige.' Anne resisted all entreaties to convince
herself by feeling of the corporal's arm that the bones were 'as loose
as a bag of ninepins,' and displayed an anxiety to escape. Whereupon
the corporal, 'with a sense that his time was getting wasted,'
inquired: 'Do she want to see or hear any more, or don't she?'

This is but a single detail in the account of a party which Miller
Loveday gave to soldier guests in honor of his son John,--a
description the sustained vivacity of which can only be appreciated
through a reading of those brilliant early chapters of the story.

Half the mirth that is in these men comes from the frankness with
which they confess their actual thoughts. Ask a man of average morals
and average attainments why he doesn't go to church. You won't know
any better after he has given you his answer. Ask Nat Chapman, of the
novel entitled _Two on a Tower_, and you will not be troubled with
ambiguities. He doesn't like to go because Mr. Torkingham's sermons
make him think of soul-saving and other bewildering and uncomfortable
topics. So when the son of Torkingham's predecessor asks Nat how it
goes with him, that tiller of the soil answers promptly: 'Pa'son
Tarkenham do tease a feller's conscience that much, that church is no
holler-day at all to the limbs, as it was in yer reverent father's
time!'

The unswerving honesty with which they assign utilitarian motives for
a particular line of conduct is delightful. Three men discuss a
wedding, which took place not at the home of the bride but in a
neighboring parish, and was therefore very private. The first doesn't
blame the new married pair, because 'a wedding at home means five and
six handed reels by the hour, and they do a man's legs no good when
he's over forty.' A second corroborates the remark and says: 'True.
Once at the woman's house you can hardly say nay to being one in a
jig, knowing all the time that you be expected to make yourself worth
your victuals.'

The third puts the whole matter beyond the need of further discussion
by adding: 'For my part, I like a good hearty funeral as well as
anything. You've as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties,
and even better. And it don't wear your legs to stumps in talking over
a poor fellow's ways as it do to stand up in hornpipes.'

Beings who talk like this know their minds,--a rather unwonted
circumstance among the sons of men,--and knowing them, they do the
next most natural thing in the world, which is to speak the minds they
have.

There is yet another phase of Hardy's humor to be noted: that humor,
sometimes defiant, sometimes philosophic, which concerns death and its
accompaniments. It cannot be thought morbid. Hardy is too fond of
Nature ever to degenerate into mere morbidity. He has lived much in
the open air, which always corrects a tendency to 'vapors.' He takes
little pleasure in the gruesome, a statement in support of which one
may cite all his works up to 1892, the date of the appearance of
_Tess_. This paper includes no comment in detail upon the later books;
but so far as _Tess_ is concerned it would be critical folly to speak
of it as morbid. It is sad, it is terrible, as _Lear_ is terrible, or
as any one of the great tragedies, written by men we call 'masters,'
is terrible. _Jude_ is psychologically gruesome, no doubt; but not
absolutely indefensible. Even if it were as black a book as some
critics have painted it, the general truth of the statement as to the
healthfulness of Hardy's work would not be impaired. This work judged
as a whole is sound and invigorating. He cannot be accused of
over-fondness for charnel-houses or ghosts. He does not discourse of
graves and vaults in order to arouse that terror which the thought of
death inspires. It is not for the purpose of making the reader
uncomfortable. If the grave interests him, it is because of the
reflections awakened. 'Man, proud man,' needs that jog to his memory
which the pomp of interments and aspect of tombstones give. Hardy has
keen perception of that humor which glows in the presence of death and
on the edge of the grave. The living have such a tremendous advantage
over the dead, that they can neither help feeling it nor avoid a
display of the feeling. When the lion is buried the dogs crack jokes
at the funeral. They do it in a subdued manner, no doubt, and with a
sense of proprieties, but nevertheless they do it. Their immense
superiority is never so apparent as at just this moment.

This humor, which one notes in Hardy, is akin to the humor of the
grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, but not so grim. I have heard a country
undertaker describe the details of the least attractive branch of his
uncomfortable business with a pride and self-satisfaction that would
have been farcical had not the subject been so depressing. This would
have been matter for Hardy's pen. There are few scenes in his books
more telling than that which shows the operations in the family vault
of the Luxellians, when John Smith, Martin Cannister, and old Simeon
prepare the place for Lady Luxellian's coffin. It seems hardly wise to
pronounce this episode as good as the grave-diggers' scene in
_Hamlet_; that would shock some one and gain for the writer the
reputation of being enthusiastic rather than critical. But I profess
that I enjoy the talk of old Simeon and Martin Cannister quite as much
as the talk of the first and second grave-diggers.

Simeon, the shriveled mason, was 'a marvelously old man, whose skin
seemed so much too large for his body that it would not stay in
position.' He talked of the various great dead whose coffins filled
the family vault. Here was the stately and irascible Lord George:--

'Ah, poor Lord George,' said the mason, looking contemplatively at the
huge coffin; 'he and I were as bitter enemies once as any could be
when one is a lord and t'other only a mortal man. Poor fellow! He'd
clap his hand upon my shoulder and cuss me as familiar and neighborly
as if he'd been a common chap. Ay, 'a cussed me up hill and 'a cussed
me down; and then 'a would rave out again and the goold clamps of his
fine new teeth would glisten in the sun like fetters of brass, while
I, being a small man and poor, was fain to say nothing at all. Such a
strappen fine gentleman as he was too! Yes, I rather liken en
sometimes. But once now and then, when I looked at his towering
height, I'd think in my inside, "What a weight you'll be, my lord, for
our arms to lower under the inside of Endelstow church some day!"'

'And was he?' inquired a young laborer.

'He was. He was five hundred weight if 'a were a pound. What with his
lead, and his oak, and his handles, and his one thing and t'other'--here
the ancient man slapped his hand upon the cover with a force that
caused a rattle among the bones inside--'he half broke my back when I
took his feet to lower en down the steps there. "Ah," saith I to John
there--didn't I, John?--"that ever one man's glory should be such a
weight upon another man!" But there, I liked my Lord George
sometimes.'

It may be observed that as Hardy grows older his humor becomes more
subtle or quite dies away, as if serious matters pressed upon his
mind, and there was no time for being jocular. Some day, perhaps, if
he should rise to the dignity of an English classic, this will be
spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the
elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is
characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' and 'unhealthy.'

That he is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little
question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not
a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair
exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people
escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much religion or
much work. Many who have not taken up permanent residence beneath the
roof of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann are occasional guests. Then there
is that great mass of pessimism which is the result, not of thought,
but of mere discomfort, physical and super-physical. One may have
attacks of pessimism from a variety of small causes. A bad stomach
will produce it. Financial difficulties will produce it. The
light-minded get it from changes in the weather.

That note of melancholy which we detect in many of Hardy's novels is
as it should be. For no man can apprehend life aright and still look
upon it as a carnival. He may attain serenity in respect to it, but he
can never be jaunty and flippant. He can never slap life upon the back
and call it by familiar names. He may hold that the world is
indisputably growing better, but he will need to admit that the world
is having a hard time in so doing.

Hardy would be sure of a reputation for pessimism in some quarters if
only because of his attitude, or what people think is his attitude,
toward marriage. He has devoted many pages and not a little thought to
the problems of the relations between men and women. He is
considerably interested in questions of 'matrimonial divergence.' He
recognizes that most obvious of all obvious truths, that marriage is
not always a success; nay, more than this, that it is often a
makeshift, an apology, a pretense. But he professes to undertake
nothing beyond a statement of the facts. It rests with the public to
lay his statement beside their experience and observation, and thus
take measure of the fidelity of his art.

He notes the variety of motives by which people are actuated in the
choice of husbands and wives. In the novel called _The Woodlanders_,
Grace Melbury, the daughter of a rich though humbly-born yeoman, has
unusual opportunities for a girl of her class, and is educated to a
point of physical and intellectual daintiness which make her seem
superior to her home environment. Her father has hoped that she will
marry her rustic lover, Giles Winterbourne, who, by the way, is a man
in every fibre of his being. Grace is quite unspoiled by her life at a
fashionable boarding school, but after her return her father feels
(and Hardy makes the reader feel) that in marrying Giles she will
sacrifice herself. She marries Dr. Fitzspiers, a brilliant young
physician, recently come into the neighborhood, and in so doing she
chooses for the worse. The character of Dr. Fitzspiers is summarized
in a statement he once made (presumably to a male friend) that 'on one
occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct
infatuations at the same time.'

His flagrant infidelities bring about a temporary separation; Grace is
not able to comprehend 'such double and treble-barreled hearts.' When
finally they are reunited the life-problem of each still awaits an
adequate solution. For the motive which brings the girl back to her
husband is only a more complex phase of the same motive which chiefly
prompted her to marry him. Hardy says that Fitzspiers as a lover acted
upon Grace 'like a dram.' His presence 'threw her into an atmosphere
which biased her doings until the influence was over.' Afterward she
felt 'something of the nature of regret for the mood she had
experienced.'

But this same story contains two other characters who are unmatched in
fiction as the incarnation of pure love and self-forgetfulness. Giles
Winterbourne, whose devotion to Grace is without wish for happiness
which shall not imply a greater happiness for her, dies that no breath
of suspicion may fall upon her. He in turn is loved by Marty South
with a completeness which destroys all thought of self. She enjoys no
measure of reward while Winterbourne lives. He never knows of Marty's
love. But in that last fine paragraph of this remarkable book, when
the poor girl places the flowers upon his grave she utters a little
lament which for beauty, pathos, and realistic simplicity is without
parallel in modern fiction. Hardy was never more of an artist than
when writing the last chapter of _The Woodlanders_.

After all, a book in which unselfish love is described in terms at
once just and noble cannot be dangerously pessimistic, even if it also
takes cognizance of such hopeless cases as a man with a chronic
tendency to fluctuations of the heart.

The matter may be put briefly thus: In Hardy's novels one sees the
artistic result of an effort to paint life as it is, with much of its
joy and a deal of its sorrow, with its good people and its selfish
people, its positive characters and its Laodiceans, its men and women
who dominate circumstances, and its unhappy ones who are submerged.
These books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous,
sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of
things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them;
and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as
irony God has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of
concealing that fact either. He is of such ample intellectual frame
that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear
foolish. I find a measure of Hardy's mind in passages which set forth
his conception of the preciousness of life, no matter what the form in
which life expresses itself. He is peculiarly tender toward brute
creation. In that paragraph which describes Tess discovering the
wounded pheasants in the wood, Hardy suggests the thought, quite new
to many people, that chivalry is not confined to the relations of man
to man or of man to woman. There are still weaker fellow-creatures in
Nature's teeming family. What if we are unmannerly or unchivalrous
toward them?

He abounds in all manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of
them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is
to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being
dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.' Such
books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed
to be given away at holiday time to acquaintances who are too
important to be put off with Christmas cards, and not important enough
to be supplied with gifts of a calculable value.

One must praise the immense spirit and vivacity of scenes where
something in the nature of a struggle, a moral duel, goes on. In such
passages every power at the writer's command is needed; unerring
directness of thought, and words which clothe this thought as an
athlete's garments fit the body. Everything must count, and the
movement of the narrative must be sustained to the utmost. The
chess-playing scene between Elfride and Knight in _A Pair of Blue
Eyes_ is an illustration. Sergeant Troy displaying his skill in
handling the sword--weaving his spell about Bathsheba in true snake
fashion, is another example. Still more brilliant is the gambling
scene in _The Return of the Native_, where Wildeve and Diggory Venn,
out on the heath in the night, throw dice by the light of a lantern
for Thomasin's money. Venn, the reddleman, in the Mephistophelian garb
of his profession, is the incarnation of a good spirit, and wins the
guineas from the clutch of the spendthrift husband. The scene is
immensely dramatic, with its accompaniments of blackness and silence,
Wildeve's haggard face, the circle of ponies, known as heath-croppers,
which are attracted by the light, the death's-head moth which
extinguishes the candle, and the finish of the game by the light of
glow-worms. It is a glorious bit of writing in true bravura style.

His books have a quality which I shall venture to call 'spaciousness,'
in the hope that the word conveys the meaning I try to express. It is
obvious that there is a difference between books which are large and
books which are merely long. The one epithet refers to atmosphere, the
other to number of pages. Hardy writes large books. There is room in
them for the reader to expand his mind. They are distinctly
out-of-door books, 'not smacking of the cloister or the library.' In
reading them one has a feeling that the vault of heaven is very high,
and that the earth stretches away to interminable distances upon all
sides. This quality of largeness is not dependent upon number of
pages; nor is length absolute as applied to books. A book may contain
one hundred pages and still be ninety-nine pages too long, for the
reason that its truth, its lesson, its literary virtue, are not
greater than might be expressed in a single page.

Spaciousness is in even less degree dependent upon miles. The
narrowness, geographically speaking, of Hardy's range of expression is
notable. There is much contrast between him and Stevenson in this
respect. The Scotchman has embodied in his fine books the experiences
of life in a dozen different quarters of the globe. Hardy, with more
robust health, has traveled from Portland to Bath, and from
'Wintoncester' to 'Exonbury,'--journeys hardly more serious than from
the blue bed to the brown. And it is better thus. No reader of _The
Return of the Native_ would have been content that Eustacia Vye should
persuade her husband back to Paris. Rather than the boulevards one
prefers Egdon heath, as Hardy paints it, 'the great inviolate place,'
the 'untamable Ishmaelitish thing' which its arch-enemy, Civilization,
could not subdue.

He is without question one of the best writers of our time, whether
for comedy or for tragedy; and for extravaganza, too, as witness his
lively farce called _The Hand of Ethelberta_. He can write dialogue or
description. He is so excellent in either that either, as you read it,
appears to make for your highest pleasure. If his characters talk, you
would gladly have them talk to the end of the book. If he, the author,
speaks, you would not wish to interrupt. More than most skillful
writers, he preserves that just balance between narrative and
colloquy.

His best novels prior to the appearance of _Tess_, are _The
Woodlanders_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_, _The Return of the
Native_, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. These four are the bulwarks
of his reputation, while a separate and great fame might be based
alone on that powerful tragedy called by its author _Tess of the
D'Urbervilles_.

Criticism which glorifies any one book of a given author at the
expense of all his other books is profitless, if not dangerous.
Moreover, it is dangerous to have a favorite author as well as a
favorite book of that favorite author. A man's choice of books, like
his choice of friends, is usually inexplicable to everybody but
himself. However, the chief object in recommending books is to make
converts to the gospel of literature according to the writer of these
books. For which legitimate purpose I would recommend to the reader
who has hitherto denied himself the pleasure of an acquaintance with
Thomas Hardy, the two volumes known as _The Woodlanders_ and _The
Return of the Native_. The first of these is the more genial because
it presents a more genial side of Nature. But the other is a noble
piece of literary workmanship, a powerful book, ingeniously framed,
with every detail strongly realized; a book which is dramatic,
humorous, sincere in its pathos, rich in its word-coloring, eloquent
in its descriptive passages; a book which embodies so much of life and
poetry that one has a feeling of mental exaltation as he reads.

Surely it is not wise in the critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to
lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of
the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well,
as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the
meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work
of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most
influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the
idols of the reading world, it would seem that the office of public
Jeremiah should be continued rather from courtesy than from an
overwhelming sense of the needs of the hour.

A READING IN THE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS

One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats
does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It
is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that
respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock.
Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his
poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in
his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of
virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,--his
poetry surely could not make this impression,--but rather that the
popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary
Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley's
preface to the _Adonais_, the Keats whose story is written large in
the world's book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted
with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes.
Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having
pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain
terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow)
alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his
patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader,
with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to
his first dip into the letters.

The legendary Keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that
when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of
legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when
the sentence was first penned, that 'a mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure.' Among the many readers of good books, there will always be
some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the
facts of Keats's history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think
that the poet's sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words
than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when
they are tired of reading _Endymion_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve of St.
Agnes_ in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new
reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very
robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing.

The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore
their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their
utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn
there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are
carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a
little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch
glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been
called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and
have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of
reality, for example, does one get in reading that 'Wordsworth went
rather huff'd out of town'! One is not in the habit of thinking of
Wordsworth as capable of being 'huffed,' but the writer of the letters
feared that he was. All of Keats's petty anxieties and small doings,
as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here
in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the
man. One learns how he 'went to Hazlitt's lecture on Poetry, and got
there just as they were coming out;' how he was insulted at the
theatre, and wouldn't tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the
Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like
her father, only 'her father had more color than the engraving;' how
he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting
the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window, 'and had just begun on
the jellies;' how indignant he was at being spoken of as 'quite the
little poet;' how he sat in a hatter's shop in the Poultry while Mr.
Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron's 'last flash poem,' _Don
Juan_; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he
'had been measured for it;' how he dined with Horace Smith and his
brothers and some other young gentlemen of fashion, and thought them
all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know
about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value
than all the 'recollections' of all his friends put together. In their
breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the
impression one gets of him in Haydon's account, 'lying in a white bed
with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and
wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life
with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him
to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he
would destroy himself.' This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well
enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him,
but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to
the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty
miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told
Fanny Keats, 'when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe
and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I
get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like
Larks to me.... I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily
as a Pen'orth of Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that
when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an
acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of
Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest
mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all
sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.'

Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they
exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a
temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man's
weaknesses--if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have
given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving
actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that
was quite universally sung to this actor's virtues, acquiesced by
saying amiably, 'Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't
spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile
follower of the 'monster Conventionality' even in his spelling, while
in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He
sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though
at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he
would spell Romeo with a small _r_, Irishman with a small _i_, and God
with a small _g_.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a
touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class
bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which
he proposes to have bound 'in Gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much
as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature
or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections
would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.'

One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats's genuine and natural
horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more
unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' The
necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid
was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh
Hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently
methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and
in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolishing
receipts.'

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that
in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the
blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention:
'Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put
on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings
neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out--then all clean
and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest
relief.' The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it
remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general
_adonizing_ could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is
better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it
prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a
whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's
literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They
gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see
authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to
pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and
our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less
content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual
process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's manuscript.
By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a
little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he
died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of
twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one
must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in
particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to
have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the
first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he
must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it.
Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would
naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting
to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He
seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all
allusions to his processes of work. 'I read and write about eight
hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats's Oxford
friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after
breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon.
He was then writing _Endymion_. His stint was about 'fifty lines a
day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as
much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his
allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But
he never forced himself.' Bailey quotes, in connection with this,
Keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at
all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' Whether
this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other
poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved
Tom Nash's sneer at those writers who can only produce by 'sleeping
betwixt every sentence.' Keats had in no small degree the 'fine
extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.'

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the
case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite
hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the
receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat
and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about
it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's
lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would
be spoken. 'Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in
Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which
shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare
was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular
passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the
splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'I find I cannot
exist without Poetry,--without eternal Poetry; half the day will not
do,--the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a
leviathan.' He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate,
that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he
could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out
ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of
little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life
were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of
masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare's
sonnets. He rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' We
are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for
these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may
be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment.
Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses.
He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than
mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force
in literature. Keats's ambition trembled in the presence of Keats's
conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'I have asked myself
so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great
a thing it is.' Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking
him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work
good,--better even than that of a certain other great name in English
literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with
which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies
entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view
from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own
poetry, and when _Endymion_ was spoken of as 'slipshod' Keats could
reply, 'That it is so is no fault of mine.... The Genius of Poetry
must work out its own salvation in a man.... That which is creative
must create itself. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and
thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the
quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore,
and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was
never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the
greatest.'

Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry
not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire
to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life
none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don't win the
prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so
thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is
making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the
canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns
excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to
himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of
his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. Keats, with all
his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power
which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another.
Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. 'There is no
greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one's self into an
idea of being a great Poet.'

Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in
February, 1818, had little expectation that his _Endymion_ was going
to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair
treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as
'Johnny,' or of getting recommendations to return to his 'plasters,
pills, and ointment boxes.' In fact, he looked upon the issue as
entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that
in _Endymion_ he had but moved into the go-cart from the
leading-strings. 'If _Endymion_ serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I
ought to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand
Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if
I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than
pride,--to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to
bitterness that I am not appreciated.' And for evidence of any
especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search
the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his
morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he
had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one
administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad,
can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater
terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John
Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could
say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain
without comparison beyond what _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could
possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their
malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly
have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother,
George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode
freely, says that he has been urged to publish his _Pot of Basil_ as a
reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by
abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a
serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, 'I think I shall be
among the English Poets after my death!'

Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in
Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of
the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their
graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint.
But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before
Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats's attitude
towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the
fact that he applauded Reynolds's _Peter Bell_, and inquired almost
petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth's 'Matthew with a
bough of wilding in his hand.' But it is also impossible that his
sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in
Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, 'Every man has
his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them
till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by
the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed
at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical
words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use
of simple means in his art, he says, 'I think that poetry should
surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike
the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost
a remembrance.'

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... Poetry should
be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and
does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' Or
as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'Entirely
first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute
over it.'

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of
Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical
contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total
abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of
the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of
going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was
shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables.
Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he
cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed
his humble origin; nevertheless, the constitution of English society
would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride
which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though
outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing
mental attitude.

Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The
man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding
friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man
is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may
not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young
thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the
idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take
this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more
interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women.
This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the
normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship
to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question
be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with
men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant
circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often
so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging
their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest
of what is noblest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a
theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words
seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal
relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the
letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from
each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered
by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his
attitude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats's
sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'The Idea of your sending
it to Wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what Reverence I
would send my well wishes to him.'

But interesting as a chapter on Keats's friendships with men would be,
we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale
when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance
with Fanny Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume
of Buxton Forman's edition of _Keats's Works_ tell the story of this
affair of a poet's heart. These are the letters which Mr. William
Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall
ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have
been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on
his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of
'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just
illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of
being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the
infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive
a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an
editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not
listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public,
the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open.
Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would
not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish
than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar
who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and
Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of
Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius
whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an
indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish
largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called,
and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have
any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so
desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even
a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very
clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great
passion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with
respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'Nothing,' he
says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.
A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even
when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst
out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.'
Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters
described in the _Spectator_, and says that it would please him more
'to scrape together a party of lovers.' If this letter be genuine and
the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he
had succumbed to the attractions of Fanny Brawne. Perhaps he was
trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment.

In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but
nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes
and fine manners and a 'rich Eastern look.' He discovers that he can
talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. 'I am too much
occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble.... She kept me
awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do.... I don't cry to take
the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind
me.' But he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two
pages on the subject of this dark beauty. She was a friend of the
Reynolds family. She crosses the stage of the Keats drama in a very
impressive manner, and then disappears.

The most extraordinary passage to be met with in relation to the
poet's attitude towards women is in a letter written to Benjamin
Bailey in July, 1818. As a partial hint towards its full meaning I
would take two phrases in _Daniel Deronda_. George Eliot says of
Gwendolen Harleth that there was 'a certain fierceness of maidenhood
in her,' which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl's
feeling towards men as described a little later, when Rex Gascoigne
attempted to tell her his love. Gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of
fury that was surprising to herself. The author's interpretative
comment is, '_The life of passion had begun negatively in her._'

So one might say of Keats that the life of passion began negatively in
him. He was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. 'I am
certain I have not a right feeling toward women--at this moment I am
striving to be just to them, but I cannot.' He certainly started with
a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he
thought a fair woman a pure goddess. And now he is disappointed at
finding women only the equals of men. This disappointment helps to
give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as
George Eliot's phrase throws light upon it. He thinks that he insults
women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. 'Is it not
extraordinary,' he exclaims, 'when among men I have no evil thoughts,
no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; ... I am
free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I
have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am
full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry
to be gone.' He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of
it as a prejudice produced from 'a gordian complication of feelings,
which must take time to unravel.' And then, with a good-humored,
characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, 'After all, I do
think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John
Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.'

Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his
friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or
November, 1818. Keats's description of Fanny is hardly flattering, and
not even vivid. What is one to make of the colorless expression 'a
fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort'? But she was fair to
him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. We look
at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which
ensnared Keats. But if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so
entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day passed for
dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the
artistic capabilities of a silhouette. Not infrequently is it true
that the style of dress seems to disfigure. But we have learned, in
course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however
much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them.

It is easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover.
Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of
heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could
possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably
so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he
misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called 'the
world,' and so did he when he was well; but looking through the
discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. For
these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to
being documents in love-madness. Many a line in them gives sharp pain,
as a record of heart-suffering must always do. You may read Richard
Steele's love letters for pleasure, and have it. The love letters of
Keats scorch and sting; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid
reflecting upon the transitory character of such a passion. Withering
young love like this does not last. It may burn itself out, or, what
is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. But in its
earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last; a man would die under
it. Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly
extinct.

These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and
it is wonderful to see how Keats's elastic nature would rebound the
instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times
almost gay. The singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural
epistolary voice: 'There's the Thrush again--I can't afford it--he'll
run me up a pretty Bill for Music--besides he ought to know I deal at
Clementi's.' And in the letter which he wrote to Mrs. Brawne from
Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that 'it's
misery to have an intellect in splints.' He was never strong enough to
write again to Fanny, or even to read her letters.

I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter
written to Reynolds in February, 1818. Keats says: 'I had an idea that
a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a
certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and
let him wander with it, and muse upon it, ... and prophesy upon it,
and dream upon it, until it becomes stale--but when will it do so?
Never! When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one
grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all
the "two-and-thirty Palaces." How happy is such a voyage of
conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!... Nor will this
sparing touch of noble Books be any irreverence to their Writers--for
perhaps the honors paid by Man to Man are trifles in comparison to the
Benefit done by great Works to the Spirit and pulse of good by their
mere passive existence.'

May we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be
able to be read in the manner here indicated? As Keats read, so did he
write. His own work was

              'accomplished in repose
    Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.'

AN ELIZABETHAN NOVELIST

The fathers in English literature were not a little given to writing
books which they called 'anatomies.' Thomas Nash, for example, wrote
an _Anatomy of Absurdities_, and Stubbes an _Anatomy of Abuses_.
Greene, the novelist, entitled one of his romances _Arbasto, the
Anatomy of Fortune_. The most famous book which bears a title of this
kind is the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, by Robert Burton. It is notable,
first, for its inordinate length; second, for its readableness,
considering the length and the depth of it; third, for its prodigal
and barbaric display of learning; and last, because it is said to have
had the effect of making the most indolent man of letters of the
eighteenth century get up betimes in the morning. Why Dr. Johnson
needed to get up in order to read the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ will
always be an enigma to some. Perhaps he did not get up. Perhaps he
merely sat up and reached for the book, which would have been placed
conveniently near the bed. For the virtue of the act resided in the
circumstance of his being awake and reading a good book two hours
ahead of his wonted time for beginning his day. If he colored his
remark so as to make us think he got up and dressed before reading, he
may be forgiven. It was innocently spoken. Just as a man who lives in
one room will somehow involuntarily fall into the habit of speaking of
that one room in the plural, so the doctor added a touch which would
render him heroic in the eyes of those who knew him. I should like a
pictorial book-plate representing Dr. Johnson, in gown and nightcap,
sitting up in bed reading the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, with Hodge, the
cat, curled up contentedly at his feet.

It would be interesting to know whether Johnson ever read, in bed or
out, a book called _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_. It was published in
the spring of 1579 by Gabriel Cawood, 'dwelling in Paules Churchyard,'
and was followed one year later by a second part, _Euphues and his
England_. These books were the work of John Lyly, a young Oxford
Master of Arts. According to the easy orthography of that time (if the
word orthography may be applied to a practice by virtue of which every
man spelled as seemed right in his own eyes), Lyly's name is found in
at least six forms: Lilye, Lylie, Lilly, Lyllie, Lyly, and Lylly.
Remembering the willingness of _i_ and _y_ to bear one another's
burdens, we may still exclaim, with Dr. Ingleby, 'Great is the mystery
of archaic spelling!' Great indeed when a man sometimes had more suits
of letters to his name than suits of clothes to his back. That the
name of this young author was pronounced as was the name of the
flower, lily, seems the obvious inference from Henry Upchear's verses,
which contain punning allusions to Lyly and Robert Greene:--

    'Of all the flowers a Lillie once I lov'd
    Whose laboring beautie brancht itself abroad,' etc.

Original editions of the _Anatomy of Wit_ and its fellow are very
rare. Probably there is not a copy of either book in the United
States. This statement is ventured in good faith, and may have the
effect of bringing to light a hitherto neglected copy.[1] Strange it
is that princely collectors of yore appear not to have cared for
_Euphues_. Surely one would not venture to affirm that John, Duke of
Roxburghe, might not have had it if he had wanted it. The book is not
to be found in his sale catalogue; he had Lyly's plays in quarto,
seven of them each marked 'rare,' and he had two copies of a
well-known book called _Euphues Golden Legacie_, written by Thomas
Nash. The Perkins Sale catalogue shows neither of Lyly's novels. List
after list of the spoils of mighty book-hunters has only a blank where
the _Anatomy of Wit_ ought to be. From this we may argue great
scarcity, or great indifference, or both. In the compact little
reprint made by Professor Arber one may read this moral tale, which
was fashionable when Shakespeare was a youth of sixteen. For
convenience it will be advisable to speak of it as a single work in
two parts, for such it practically is.

    [1] The writer of this paper once sent to that fine scholar
        and gracious gentleman, Professor Edward Arber, to inquire
        whether in his opinion one might hope to buy at a modest
        price a copy of either the first or the second part of
        _Euphues_. Professor Arber's reply was amusingly emphatic:
        'You might as well try to purchase one of Mahomet's old
        slippers.' But in July of 1896 there were four copies of
        this old novel on sale at one New York bookstore. One of
        the copies was of great beauty, consisting of the two
        parts of the story bound up together in a really sumptuous
        fashion. The price was not large as prices of such books
        go, but on the other hand ''a was not small.'

To pronounce upon this romance is not easy. We read a dozen or two of
pages, and say, 'This is very fantastical humours.' We read further,
and are tempted to follow Sir Hugh to the extent of declaring, 'This
is lunatics.' One may venture the not profound remark that it takes
all sorts of books to make a literature. _Euphues_ is one of the books
that would prompt to that very remark. For he who first said that it
takes all sorts of people to make a world was markedly impressed with
the differences between those people and himself. He had in mind
eccentric folk, types which deviate from the normal and the sane. So
_Euphues_ is a very Malvolio among books, cross-gartered and wreathed
as to its countenance with set smiles. The curious in literary history
will always enjoy such a production. The verdict of that part of the
reading world which keeps a book alive by calling for fresh copies of
it after the old copies are worn out is against _Euphues_. It had a
vivacious existence between 1579 and 1636, and then went into a
literary retirement lasting two hundred and thirty-six years. When it
again came before the public it was introduced as 'a great
bibliographical rarity.' Its fatal old-fashionedness hangs like a
millstone about its neck. In the poems of Chaucer and the dramas of
Shakespeare are a thousand touches which make the reader feel that
Chaucer and Shakespeare are his contemporaries, that they have written
in his own time, and published but yesterday. Read _Euphues_, and you
will say to yourself, 'That book must have been written three hundred
years ago, and it looks its age.' Yet it has its virtues. One may not
say of it, as Johnson said of the _Rehearsal_, that it 'has not wit
enough to keep it sweet.' Neither may he, upon second thought,
conclude that 'it has not vitality enough to preserve it from
putrefaction.' It has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had
Malvolio. It is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what
passed for wit among many readers of that day. Often the wit is of a
tawdry and spectacular sort,--mere verbal wit, the use of a given word
not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because
the author wants a word beginning with the letter G, or the letter M,
or the letter F, as the case may be. On the second page of Greene's
_Arbasto_ is this sentence: 'He did not so much as vouchsafe to give
an _eare_ to my _parle_, or an _eye_ to my _person_.' Greene learned
this trick from Lyly, who was a master of the art. The sentence
represents one of the common forms in _Euphues_, such as this: 'To the
stomach _quatted_ with _dainties_ all _delicates_ seem _queasie_.'
Sometimes the balance is preserved by three words on a side. For
example, the companions whom Euphues found in Naples practiced arts
'whereby they might either _soake_ his _purse_ to reape _commodotie_,
or _sooth_ his _person_ to winne _credite_.' Other illustrations are
these: I can neither '_remember_ our _miseries_ without _griefe_, nor
_redresse_ our _mishaps_ without _grones_.' 'If the _wasting_ of our
_money_ might not _dehort_ us, yet the _wounding_ of our _mindes_
should _deterre_ us.' This next sentence, with its combination of K
sounds, clatters like a pair of castanets: 'Though Curio bee as hot as
a toast, yet Euphues is as cold as a clocke, though hee bee a cocke of
the game, yet Euphues is content to bee craven and crye creake.'

Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly's style.
That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in
such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration
and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance. In
truth, one does not know which to admire the more, the ingenuity of
the man who constructed the book, or the ingenuity of the scholars who
have explained how he did it. Between Lyly on the one hand, and the
grammarians on the other, the reader is almost tempted to ask if this
be literature or mathematics. Whether Lyly got his style from Pettie
or Guevara is an important question, but he made it emphatically his
own, and it will never be called by any other name than Euphuism. The
making of a book on this plan is largely the result of astonishing
mental gymnastics. It commands respect in no small degree, because
Lyly was able to keep it up so long. To walk from New York to Albany,
as did the venerable Weston not so very long since, is a great test of
human endurance. But walking is the employment of one's legs and body
in God's appointed way of getting over the ground. Suppose a man were
to undertake to hop on one leg from New York to Albany, the utility or
the æsthetic value of the performance would be less obvious. The most
successful artist in hopping could hardly expect applause from the
right-minded. He would excite attention because he was able to hop so
far, and not because he was the exponent of a praiseworthy method of
locomotion. Lyly gained eminence by doing to a greater extent than any
man a thing that was not worth doing at all. One is more astonished at
Lyly's power of endurance as author than at his own power of endurance
as reader. For the volume is actually readable even at this day. Did
Lyly not grow wearied of perpetually riding these alliterative
trick-ponies? Apparently not. The book is 'executed' with a vivacity,
a dash, a 'go,' that will captivate any reader who is willing to meet
the author halfway. _Euphues_ became the rage, and its literary style
the fashion. How or why must be left to him to explain who can tell
why sleeves grow small and then grow big, why skirts are at one time
only two and a half yards around and at another time five and a half
or eight yards around. An Elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to
dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff
starched. Lyly's style bristles with extravagances of the starched
ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual
deficiencies in the matter of doublet and hose.

Of plot or story there is but little. The hero, Euphues, who gives the
title to the romance, is a young, clever, and rich Athenian. He visits
Naples, where his money and wit attract many to his side. By his
careless, pleasure-seeking mode of life he wakens the fatherly
interest of a wise old gentleman, Eubulus, who calls upon him to warn
him of his danger. The conversation between the two is the first and
not the least amusing illustration of the courtly verbal fencing with
which the book is filled. The advice of the old man only provokes
Euphues into making the sophistical plea that his style of living is
right because nature prompts him to it; and he leaves Eubulus 'in a
great quandary' and in tears. Nevertheless, the old gentleman has the
righteous energy which prompts him to say to the departing Euphues,
already out of hearing, 'Seeing thou wilt not buy counsel at the first
hand good cheap, thou shalt buy repentance at the second hand, at such
unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban
thy hard heart.' Euphues takes to himself a new sworn brother, one
Philautus, who carries him to visit his lady-love, Lucilla. Lucilla is
rude at first, but becomes enamored of Euphues's conversational power,
and finally of himself. In fact, she unceremoniously throws over her
former lover, and tells her father that she will either marry Euphues
or else lead apes in hell. This causes a break in the friendship
between Euphues and Philautus, and there is an exchange of formidably
worded letters, in which Philautus reminds Euphues that all Greeks are
liars, and Euphues quotes Euripides to the effect that all is lawful
in love. Lucilla, who is fickle, suddenly dismisses her new cavalier
for yet a third, while Euphues and Philautus, in the light of their
common misfortune, fall upon each other's necks and are reconciled.
Both profess themselves to have been fools, while Euphues, as the
greater and more recent fool, composes a pamphlet against love. This
he calls a 'cooling-card.' It is addressed primarily to Philautus, but
contains general advice for 'all fond lovers.' Euphues's own cure was
radical, for he says, 'Now do I give a farewell to the world, meaning
rather to macerate myself with melancholy, than pine in folly, rather
choosing to die in my study amidst my books than to court it in Italy
in the company of ladies.' He returns to Athens, applies himself to
the study of philosophy, becomes public reader in the University, and,
as crowning evidence that he has finished sowing his wild oats,
produces three volumes of lectures. Realizing how much of his own
youth has been wasted, he writes a pamphlet on the education of the
young, a dialogue with an atheist, and these, with a bundle of
letters, make up the first part of the _Anatomy of Wit_. From one of
the letters we learn that Lucilla was as frail as she was beautiful,
and that she died in evil report. The story, including the diatribe
against love, is about as long as _The Vicar of Wakefield_. It begins
as a romance and ends as a sermon.

The continuation of the novel, _Euphues and his England_, is a little
over a third longer than Part One. The two friends carry out their
project of visiting England. After a wearisome voyage they reach
Dover, view the cliffs and the castle, and then proceed to Canterbury.
Between Canterbury and London they stop for a while with a 'comely
olde gentleman,' Fidus, who keeps bees and tells good stories. He also
gives sound advice as to the way in which strangers should conduct
themselves. A lively bit of writing is the account which Fidus gives
of his commonwealth of bees. It is not according to Lubbock, but is
none the less amusing. In London the two travelers become favorites at
the court. Philautus falls in love, to the great annoyance of Euphues,
who argues mightily with him against such folly. The two gentlemen
expend vast resources of stationery and language upon the subject.
They quarrel violently, and Euphues becomes so irritated that he must
needs go and rent new lodgings, 'which by good friends he quickly got,
and there fell to his _Pater noster_, where awhile,' says Lyly
innocently, 'I will not trouble him in his prayers.' They are
reconciled later, and Philautus obtains permission to love; but he has
discovered in the mean time that the lady will not have him. The
account of his passion, how it 'boiled and bubbled,' of his visit to
the soothsayer to purchase love charms, his stately declamations to
Camilla and her elaborate replies to him, of his love letter concealed
in a pomegranate, and her answer stitched into a copy of Petrarch,--is
all very lively reading, much more so than that dreary love-making
between Pyrocles and Philoclea, or between any other pair of the many
exceedingly tiresome folk in Sidney's _Arcadia_. Grant that it is
deliciously absurd. It is not to be supposed that a clever
eighteen-year-old girl, replying to a declaration of love, will talk
in the language of a trained nurse, and say: 'Green sores are to be
dressed roughly lest they fester, tettars are to be drawn in the
beginning lest they spread, Ringworms to be anointed when they first
appear lest they compass the whole body, and the assaults of love to
be beaten back at the first siege lest they undermine at the second.'
Was ever suitor in this fashion rejected! It makes one think of some
of the passages in the _History of John Buncle_, where the hero pours
out a torrent of passionate phrases, and the 'glorious' Miss Noel, in
reply, begs that they may take up some rational topic of conversation;
for example, what is _his_ view of that opinion which ascribes
'primævity and sacred prerogatives' to the Hebrew language.

But Philautus does not break his heart over Camilla's rejection. He is
consoled with the love of another fair maiden, marries her, and
settles in England. Euphues goes back to Athens, and presently retires
to the country, where he follows the calling of one whose profession
is melancholy. Like most hermits of culture, he leaves his address
with his banker. We assume this, for he was very rich; it is not
difficult to be a hermit on a large income. The book closes with a
section called 'Euphues Glasse for Europe,' a thirty-page panegyric on
England and the Queen.

They say that this novel was very popular, and certain causes of its
popularity are not difficult to come at. A large measure of the
success that _Euphues_ had is due to the commonplaceness of its
observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this
respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of
'miscellany thoughts,' and he cheerfully parted with them. His book
succeeded as Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ and Watts' _On the Mind_
succeeded. People believed that they were getting ideas, and people
like what they suppose to be ideas if no great effort is required in
the getting of them. It is astonishing how often the world needs to be
advised of the brevity of time. Yet every person who can wade in the
shallows of his own mind and not wet his shoe-tops finds a sweet
melancholy and a stimulating freshness in the thought that time is
short. John Lyly said, 'There is nothing more swifter than time,
nothing more sweeter,'--and countless Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies
underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace
books,--if they had such painful aids to culture,--and were comforted
and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made. This
glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb
and the 'old said saw,' is a marked characteristic of the work. It
emphasizes the youth of its author. We learn what could not have been
new even in 1579, that 'in misery it is a great comfort to have a
companion;' that 'a new broom sweepeth clean;' that 'delays breed
dangers;' that 'nothing is so perilous as procrastination;' that 'a
burnt child dreadeth the fire;' that it is well not to make
comparisons 'lest comparisons should seem odious;' that 'it is too
late to shut the stable door when the steed is stolen;' that 'many
things fall between the cup and the lip;' and that 'marriages are made
in heaven, though consummated on earth.' With these old friends come
others, not altogether familiar of countenance, and quaintly archaic
in their dress: 'It must be a wily mouse that shall breed in the cat's
ear;' 'It is a mad hare that will be caught with a tabor, and a
foolish bird that stayeth the laying salt on her tail, and a blind
goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.' Lyly would sometimes translate
a proverb; he does not tell us that fine words butter no parsnips, but
says, 'Fair words fat few,'--which is delightfully alliterative, but
hardly to be accounted an improvement. Expressions that are
surprisingly modern turn up now and then. One American street urchin
taunts another by telling him that he doesn't know enough to come in
when it rains. The saying is at least three hundred years old, for
Lyly says, in a dyspeptic moment, 'So much wit is sufficient for a
woman as when she is in the rain can warn her to come out of it.'

Another cause of the popularity of _Euphues_ is its sermonizing. The
world loves to hear good advice. The world is not nervously anxious to
follow the advice, but it understands the edification that comes by
preaching. With many persons, to have heard a sermon is almost
equivalent to having practiced the virtues taught in the sermon.
Churches are generally accepted as evidences of civilization. A man
who is exploiting the interests of a new Western town will invariably
tell you that it has so many churches. Also, an opera-house. The
English world above all other worlds loves to hear good advice.
England is the natural home of the sermon. Jusserand notes, almost
with wonder, that in the annual statistics of the London publishers
the highest numbers indicate the output of sermons and theological
works. Then come novels. John Lyly was ingenious; he combined good
advice and storytelling. Not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively
talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to
moralize as long as he would. He shows no timidity, even declares upon
one of his title-pages that in this volume 'there is small offense by
lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered
to the wanton.' Such courage in this day would be apt seriously to
injure the sale of a novel. Did not Ruskin declare that Miss Edgeworth
had made virtue so obnoxious that since her time one hardly dared
express the slightest bias in favor of the Ten Commandments? Lyly knew
the public for which he acted as literary caterer. They liked sermons,
and sermons they should have. Nearly every character in the book
preaches, and Euphues is the most gifted of them all. Even that old
gentleman of Naples who came first to Euphues because his heart bled
to see so noble a youth given to loose living has the tables turned
upon him, for Euphues preaches to the preacher upon the sovereign duty
of resignation to the will of God.

A noteworthy characteristic is the frequency of Lyly's classical
allusions. If the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and
ostentatious display of learning,' I question if we may dismiss Lyly's
wealth of classical lore with the word 'pedantry.' He was fresh from
his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he
must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little
else was studied. Young men and their staid tutors were compelled to
know ancient history and mythology. Like Heine, they may have taken a
'real delight in the mob of gods and goddesses who ran so jolly naked
about the world.' In the first three pages of the _Anatomy of Wit_
there are twenty classical names, ten of them coupled each with an
allusion. Nobody begins a speech without a reference of this nature
within calling distance. Euphues and Philautus fill their talk with
evidences of a classical training. The ladies are provided with apt
remarks drawn from the experiences of Helen, of Cornelia, of Venus, of
Diana, and Vesta. Even the master of the ship which conveyed Euphues
from Naples to England declaims about Ulysses and Julius Cæsar. This
naturally destroys all dramatic effect. Everybody speaks Euphuism,
though classical allusion alone is not essentially Euphuistic. John
Lyly would be the last man to merit any portion of that fine praise
bestowed by Hazlitt upon Shakespeare when he said that Shakespeare's
genius 'consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into
whatever he chose.' Lyly's genius was the opposite of this; it
consisted in the faculty of transforming everybody into a
reduplication of himself. There is no change in style when the
narrative parts end and the dialogue begins. All the persons of the
drama utter one strange tongue. They are no better than the characters
in a Punch and Judy show, where one concealed manipulator furnishes
voice for each of the figures. But in Lyly's novel there is not even
an attempt at the most rudimentary ventriloquism.

What makes the book still less a reflection of life is that the
speakers indulge in interminably long harangues. No man (unless he
were a Coleridge) would be tolerated who talked in society at such
inordinate length. When the characters can't talk to one another they
retire to their chambers and declaim to themselves. They polish their
language with the same care, open the classical dictionary, and have
at themselves in good set terms. Philautus, inflamed with love of
Camilla, goes to his room and pronounces a ten-minute discourse on the
pangs of love, having only himself for auditor. They are amazingly
patient under the verbal inflictions of one another. Euphues, angry
with Philautus for having allowed himself to fall in love, takes him
to task in a single speech containing four thousand words. If Lyly had
set out with the end in view of constructing a story by putting into
it alone 'what is not life,' his product would have been what we find
it now. One could easily believe the whole affair to have been
intended for a tremendous joke were it not that the tone is so
serious. We are accustomed to think of youth as light-hearted: but
look at a serious child,--there is nothing more serious in the world.
Lyly was twenty-six years when he first published. Much of the
seriousness in his romance is the burden of twenty-six years'
experience of life, a burden greater perhaps than he ever afterward
carried.

Being, as we take it, an unmarried man, Lyly gives directions for
managing a wife. He believes in the wholesome doctrine that a man
should select his own wife. 'Made marriages by friends' are dangerous.
'I had as lief another should take measure by his back of my apparel
as appoint what wife I shall have by his mind.' He prefers in a wife
'beauty before riches, and virtue before blood.' He holds to the
radical English doctrine of wifely submission; there is no swerving
from the position that the man is the woman's 'earthly master,'[2] but
in taming a wife no violence is to be employed. Wives are to be
subdued with kindness. 'If their husbands with great threatenings,
with jars, with brawls, seek to make them tractable, or bend their
knees, the more stiff they make them in the joints, the oftener they
go about by force to rule them, the more froward they find them; but
using mild words, gentle persuasions, familiar counsel, entreaty,
submission, they shall not only make them to bow their knees, but to
hold up their hands, not only cause them to honor them, but to stand
in awe of them.' By such methods will that supremest good of an
English home be brought about, namely, that the wife shall stand in
awe of her husband.

    [2] Lady Burton's Dedication of her husband's
        biography,--'To my earthly master,' etc.

The young author admits that some wives have the domineering instinct,
and that way danger lies. A man must look out for himself. If he is
not to make a slave of his wife, he is also not to be too submissive;
'that will cause her to disdain thee.' Moreover, he must have an eye
to the expenditure. She may keep the keys, but he will control the
pocket-book. The model wife in Ecclesiastes had greater privileges;
she could not only consider a piece of ground, but she could buy it if
she liked it. Not so this well-trained wife of Lyly's novel. 'Let all
the keys hang at her girdle, but the purse at thine, so shalt thou
know what thou dost spend, and how she can spare.' But in setting
forth his theory for being happy though married, Lyly, methinks,
preaches a dangerous doctrine in this respect: he hints at the
possibility of a man's wanting, in vulgar parlance, to go on a spree,
expresses no question as to the propriety of his so doing, but says
that if a man does let himself loose in this fashion his wife must not
know it. 'Imitate the kings of Persia, who when they were given to
riot kept no company with their wives, but when they used good order
had their queens even at the table.' In short, the wife was to
duplicate the moods of her husband. 'Thou must be a glass to thy wife,
for in thy face must she see her own; for if when thou laughest she
weep, when thou mournest she giggle, the one is a manifest sign she
delighteth in others, the other a token she despiseth thee.' John Lyly
was a wise youth. He struck the keynote of the mode in which most
incompatible marriages are played when he said that it was a bad sign
if one's wife giggled when one was disposed to be melancholy.

An interesting study is the author's attitude toward foreign travel.
It would appear to have been the fashion of the time to indulge in
much invective against foreign travel, but nevertheless--to travel.
Many men believed with young Valentine that 'home keeping youth have
ever homely wits,' while others were rather of Ascham's mind when he
said, 'I was once in Italy, but I thank God my stay there was only
nine days.' Lyly came of a nation of travelers. Then as now it was
true that there was no accessible spot of the globe upon which the
Englishman had not set his foot. Nomadic England went abroad;
sedentary England stayed at home to rail at him for so doing. Aside
from that prejudice which declared that all foreigners were fools,
there was a well-founded objection to the sort of traveling usually
described as seeing the world. Young men went upon the continent to
see questionable forms of pleasure, perhaps to practice them. Whether
justly or not, common report named Italy as the higher school of
pleasurable vices, and Naples as the city where one's doctorate was to
be obtained. Gluttony and licentiousness are the sins of Naples.
Eubulus tells Euphues that in that city are those who 'sleep with meat
in their mouths, with sin in their hearts, and with shame in their
houses.' There is no limit to the inconveniences of traveling. 'Thou
must have the back of an ass to bear all, and the snout of a swine to
say nothing.... Travelers must sleep with their eyes open lest they be
slain in their beds, and wake with their eyes shut lest they be
suspected by their looks.' Journeys by the fireside are better. 'If
thou covet to travel strange countries, search the maps, there shalt
thou see much with great pleasure and small pains, if to be conversant
in all courts, read histories, where thou shalt understand both what
the men have been and what their manners are, and methinketh there
must be much delight where there is no danger.' Perhaps Lyly intended
to condemn traveling with character unformed. A boy returned with more
vices than he went forth with pence, and was able to sin both by
experience and authority. Lest he should be thought to speak with
uncertain voice upon this matter Lyly gives Euphues a story to tell in
which the chief character describes the effect of traveling upon
himself. 'There was no crime so barbarous, no murder so bloody, no
oath so blasphemous, no vice so execrable, but that I could readily
recite where I learned it, and by rote repeat the peculiar crime of
every particular country, city, town, village, house, or chamber.'
Here, indeed, is no lack of plain speech.

In the section called 'Euphues and his Ephoebus' twenty-nine pages are
devoted to the question of the education of youth. It is largely taken
from Plutarch. Some of the points are these: that a mother shall
herself nurse her child, that the child shall be early framed to
manners, 'for as the steele is imprinted in the soft waxe, so learning
is engraven in ye minde of an young Impe.' He is not to hear 'fonde
fables or filthy tales.' He is to learn to pronounce distinctly and to
be kept from 'barbarous talk,' that is, no dialect and no slang. He is
to become expert in martial affairs, in shooting and darting, and he
must hunt and hawk for his 'honest recreation.' If he will not study,
he is not to be 'scourged with stripes, but threatened with words, not
_dulled with blows_, like servants, the which, the more they are
beaten the better they bear it, and the less they care for it.' In
taking this position Lyly is said to be only following Ascham. Ascham
was not the first in his own time to preach such doctrine. Forty years
before the publication of _The Schoolmaster_, Sir Thomas Elyot, in his
book called _The Governour_, raised his voice against the barbarity of
teachers 'by whom the wits of children be dulled,'--almost the very
words of John Lyly.

_Euphues_, besides being a treatise on love and education, is a sort
of Tudor tract upon animated nature. It should be a source of joy
unspeakable to the general reader if only for what it teaches him in
the way of natural history. How much of what is most gravely stated
here did John Lyly actually believe? It is easy to grant so orthodox a
statement of physical fact as that 'the Sunne doth harden the durte,
and melte the waxe;' but ere the sentence be finished, the author
calls upon us to believe that 'Perfumes doth refresh the Dove and kill
the Betill.' The same reckless extravagance of remark is to be noted
whenever bird, beast, or reptile is mentioned. The crocodile of
Shakespeare's time must have been a very contortionist among beasts,
for, says Lyly, 'when one approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth
up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him,
stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.' Perhaps the fame of
this creature's powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from
the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Thames. The ostrich was
human in its vanity according to Lyly; men and women sometimes pull
out their white hairs, but 'the Estritch, that taketh the greatest
pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth
them.' Nay, more than that, being in 'great haste she pricketh none
but hirselfe which causeth hir to runne when she would rest.' We shall
presently expect to hear that ostriches wear boots by the straps of
which they lift themselves over ten-foot woven-wire fences. But Lyly
used the conventional natural history that was at hand, and troubled
himself in no respect to inquire about its truth or falsity.

There is yet another cause of the popularity of this book in its own
time, which has been too little emphasized. It is that trumpet blast
of patriotism with which the volume ends. We feel, as we read the
thirty pages devoted to the praise of England and the Queen, that this
is right, fitting, artistic, and we hope that it is tolerably sincere.
Flattery came easily to men in those days, and there was small hope of
advancement for one who did not master the art. But there is a glow of
earnestness in these paragraphs rather convincing to the skeptic. Nor
would the book be complete without this eulogy. We have had everything
else; a story for who wanted a story, theories upon the education of
children, a body of mythological divinity, a discussion of methods of
public speaking, advice for men who are about to marry, a theological
sparring match, in which a man of straw is set up to be knocked down,
and _is_ knocked down, a thousand illustrations of wit and curious
reading, and now, as a thing that all men could understand, the author
tells Englishmen of their own good fortune in being Englishmen, and is
finely outspoken in praise of what he calls 'the blessed Island.'

This is an old-fashioned vein, to be sure,--the _ad captandum_ trick
of a popular orator bent upon making a success. It is not looked upon
in all places with approval. 'Our unrivaled prosperity' was a phrase
which greatly irritated Matthew Arnold. Here in America, are we not
taught by a highly fastidious journal that we may be patriotic if we
choose, but we must be careful how we let people know it? We mustn't
make a fuss about it. We mustn't be blatant. The star-spangled banner
on the public schools is at best a cheap and vulgar expression of
patriotism. But somehow even this sort of patriotism goes with the
people, and perhaps these instincts of the common folk are not
entirely to be despised. Many a reader of _Euphues_, who cared but
little for its elaborated style, who was not moved by its orthodoxy,
who didn't read books simply because they were fashionable, must have
felt his pulse stirred by Lyly's chant of England's greatness. For
Euphues is John Lyly, and John Lyly's creed was substantially that of
the well-known hero of a now forgotten comic opera, 'I am an
Englishman.'

In the thin disguise of the chief character of his story the author
describes the happy island, its brave gentlemen and rich merchants,
its fair ladies and its noble Queen. The glories of London, which he
calls the storehouse and mart of all Europe, and the excellence of
English universities, 'out of which do daily proceed men of great
wisdom,' are alike celebrated. England's material wealth in mines and
quarries is amply set forth, also the fine qualities of the breed of
cattle, and the virtues of English spaniels, hounds, and mastiffs; for
these constitute a sort of good that all could appreciate. He is
satirical at the expense of his countrymen's dress,--'there is nothing
in England more constant than the inconstancie of attire,'--but
praises their silence and gravity at their meals. They have wise
ministers in the court, and devout guardians of the true religion and
of the church. 'O thrice happy England, where such councilors are,
where such people live, where such virtue springeth.'

In the paragraphs relating to the queen, Lyly grows positively
eloquent. He praises her matchless beauty, her mercy, patience, and
moderation, and emphasizes the fact of her virginity to a degree that
would have satisfied the imperial votaress herself if but once she had
considered her admirer's words: 'O fortunate England that hath such a
Queen; ungratefull, if thou pray not for her; wicked, if thou do not
love her; miserable, if thou lose her.' He calls down Heaven's
blessings upon her that she may be 'triumphant in victories like the
Palm tree, fruitful in her age like the Vine, in all ages prosperous,
to all men gracious, in all places glorious: so that there be no end
of her praise, until the end of all flesh.'

With passages such as these, this interesting book draws to a
conclusion. A most singular and original book, worthy to be read,
unless, indeed, the reading of these out-of-the-way volumes were found
to encroach upon time belonging by right of eminent intellectual
domain to Chaucer and to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Milton. That
_Euphues_ is in no exact sense a novel admits of little question. It
is also a brilliant illustration of how not to write English.
Nevertheless it is very amusing, and its disappearance would be a
misfortune, since it would eclipse the innocent gayety of many a man
who loves to bask in that golden sunshine which streams from the pages
of old English books.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FAIR-MINDED MAN

It is by no means necessary that one be a man of letters in order to
write a good book. Some very admirable books have been written by men
who gave no especial thought to literature as an art. They wrote
because they were so fortunate as to find themselves in possession of
ideas, and not because they had determined to become authors.
Literature as such implies sophistication, and people who devote
themselves to literature do so from a variety of motives. But these
writers of whom I now speak have a less complex thought back of their
work. They do not, for example, propose pleasure to the reader as an
object in writing. Their aim is single. They recount an experience, or
plead a cause. Literature with them is always a means to an end. They
are like pedestrians who never look upon walking as other than a
rational process for reaching a given place. It does not occur to them
that walking makes for health and pleasure, and that it is also an
exercise for displaying a graceful carriage, the set of the shoulders,
the poise of the head.

To be sure one runs the risk of being deceived in this matter. The
actress who plays the part of an unaffected young girl, for aught that
the spectator knows to the contrary may be a pronounced woman of the
world. Not every author who says to the public 'excuse my untaught
manner' is on this account to be regarded as a literary ingénu. His
simplicity awakens distrust. The fact that he professes to be a layman
is a reason for suspecting him. He is probably an adept, a master of
the wiles by which readers are snared.

But aside from the cases in which deception is practiced, or at least
attempted, there is in the world a respectable body of literature
which is not the work of literary men. Its chief characteristic is
sincerity. The writers of these books are so busy in telling the truth
that they have no time to think of literature.

Among the more readable of these pieces is that unpretentious volume
in which Dr. Joseph Priestley relates the story of his life. For in
classing this book with the writings of authors who are not men of
letters one surely does not go wide of the mark. There is a sense in
which it is entirely proper to say that Priestley was not a literary
man. He produced twenty-five volumes of 'works,' but they were for use
rather than for art. He wrote on science, on grammar, on theology, on
law. He published controversial tracts: 'Did So-and-So believe
so-and-so or something quite different?' and then a discussion of the
'grounds' of this belief. He made 'rejoinders,' 'defenses,'
'animadversions,' and printed the details of his _Experiments on
Different Kinds of Air_. This is distinctly uninviting. Let me propose
an off-hand test by which to determine whether or no a given book is
literature. _Can you imagine Charles Lamb in the act of reading that
book?_ If you can; it's literature; if you can't, it isn't. I find it
difficult to conceive of Charles Lamb as mentally immersed in the
_Letter to an Anti-pædobaptist_ or the _Doctrine of Phlogiston
Established_, but it is natural to think of him turning the pages of
Priestley's Memoir, reading each page with honest satisfaction and
pronouncing the volume to be worthy the title of A BOOK.

It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by
the practice of which authors please their public. There is no
eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three
really dramatic events in Priestley's career are not handled with a
view to producing dramatic effect. There are places where the author
might easily have become impassioned. But he did not become
impassioned. Not a few paragraphs contain unwritten poems. The
simple-hearted Priestley was unconscious of this, or if conscious,
then too modest to make capital of it. He had never aspired to the
reputation of a clever writer, but rather of a useful one. His aim was
quite as simple when he wrote the Memoir as when he wrote his various
philosophical reports. He never deviated into brilliancy. He set down
plain statements about events which had happened to him, and people
whom he had known. Nevertheless the narrative is charming, and the
reasons of its charm are in part these:--

In the first place the book belongs to that department of literature
known as autobiography. Autobiography has peculiar virtues. The
poorest of it is not without some flavor of life, and at its best it
is transcendent. A notable value lies in its power to stimulate. This
power is very marked in Priestley's case, where the self-delineated
portrait is of a man who met and overcame enormous difficulties. He
knew poverty and calumny, both brutal things. He had a thorn in the
flesh,--for so he himself characterized that impediment in his speech
which he tried more or less unsuccessfully all his life to cure. He
found his scientific usefulness impaired by religious and political
antagonisms. He tasted the bitterness of mob violence; his house was
sacked, his philosophical instruments destroyed, his manuscripts and
books scattered along the highway. But as he looked back upon these
things he was not moved to impatience. There is a high serenity in his
narrative as becomes a man who has learned to distinguish between the
ephemeral and the permanent elements of life.

Yet it is not impossible that autobiography of this sort has an effect
the reverse of stimulating upon some people. It is pleasanter to read
of heroes than to be a hero oneself. The story of conquest is
inspiring, but the actual process is apt to be tedious. One's nerves
are tuned to a fine energy in reading of Priestley's efforts to
accomplish a given task. 'I spent the latter part of every week with
Mr. Thomas, a Baptist minister, ... who had no liberal education. Him
I instructed in Hebrew, and by that means made myself a considerable
proficient in that language. At the same time I learned Chaldee and
Syriac and just began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling,
but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process.
Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous
alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a
mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and
tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually
toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an
illustration his experience in keeping school.

He had pronounced objections to this business, and he registered his
protest. But suppose the alternative is to teach school or to starve.
A man will then teach school. I don't know that this was quite the
situation in which Priestley found himself, though he needed money. He
may have hesitated to enter a profession which in his time required a
more extensive muscular equipment than he was able to furnish. The old
English schoolmasters were 'bruisers.' They had thick skins, hard
heads, and solid fists. The symbols of their office were a Greek
grammar and a flexible rod. They were skillful either with the book or
the birch. It has taken many years to convince the world that the
short road to the moods and tenses does not necessarily lie through
the valley of the shadow of flogging. Perhaps Priestley objected to
school-mastering because it was laborious. It was indeed laborious as
he practiced it. One marvels at his endurance. His school consisted of
about thirty boys, and he had a separate room for about half-a-dozen
young ladies. 'Thus I was employed from seven in the morning until
four in the afternoon, without any interval except one hour for
dinner; and I never gave a holiday on any consideration, the red
letter days excepted. Immediately after this employment in my own
school-rooms I went to teach in the family of Mr. Tomkinson, an
eminent attorney, ... and here I continued until seven in the
evening.' Twelve consecutive hours of teaching, less one hour for
dinner! It was hardly necessary for Priestley to add that he had 'but
little leisure for reading.'

He laid up no money from teaching, but like a true man of genius spent
it upon books, a small air-pump, an electrical machine. By training
his advanced pupils to manipulate these he 'extended the reputation'
of his school. This was playing at science. Several years were yet to
elapse before he should acquire fame as an original investigator.

This autobiography is valuable because it illustrates the events of a
remarkable time. He who cares about the history of theological
opinion, the history of chemical science, the history of liberty, will
read these pages with keen interest. Priestley was active in each of
these fields. Men famous for their connection with the great movements
of the period were among his friends and acquaintance. He knew
Franklin and Richard Price. John Canton, who was the first man in
England to verify Franklin's experiments, was a friend of Priestley.
So too were Smeaton the engineer, James Watt, Boulton, Josiah
Wedgewood, and Erasmus Darwin. He knew Kippis, Lardner, Parr, and had
met Porson and Dr. Johnson. His closest friend for many years was
Theophilus Lindsey. One might also mention the great Lavoisier,
Magellan the Jesuit philosopher, and a dozen other scientific,
ecclesiastical, and political celebrities. The Memoir, however, is
almost as remarkable for what it does not tell concerning these people
as for what it does. Priestley was not anecdotal. And he is only a
little less reticent about himself than he is about others. He does
indeed describe his early struggles as a dissenting minister, but the
reader would like a little more expansiveness in the account of his
friendships and his chemical discoveries. These discoveries were made
during the time that he was minister at the Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds.
Here he began the serious study of chemistry. And that without
training in the science as it was then understood. At Warrington he
had heard a series of chemical lectures by Dr. Turner of Liverpool, a
gentleman whom Americans ought to regard with amused interest, for he
was the man who congratulated his fellows in a Liverpool debating
society that while they had just lost the _terra firma_ of thirteen
colonies in America, they had gained, under the generalship of Dr.
Herschel, a _terra incognita_ of much greater extent _in nubibus_.
Priestley not only began his experiments without any great store of
knowledge, but also without apparatus save what he devised for himself
of the cheapest materials. In 1772 he published his first important
scientific tract, 'a small pamphlet on the method of impregnating
water with fixed air.' For this he received the Copley medal from the
Royal Society. On the first of August, 1774, he discovered oxygen.
Nobody in Leeds troubled particularly to inquire what this dissenting
minister was about with his vials and tubes, his mice and his plants.
Priestley says that the only person who took 'much interest' was Mr.
Hey, a surgeon. Mr. Hey was a 'zealous Methodist' and wrote answers to
Priestley's theological papers. Arminian and Socinian were at peace if
science was the theme. When Priestley departed from Leeds, Hey begged
of him the 'earthen trough' in which all his experiments had been
made. This earthen trough was nothing more nor less than a washtub of
the sort in common local use. So independent is genius of the
elaborate appliances with which talent must produce results.

The discoveries brought fame, especially upon the Continent, and led
Lord Shelburne to invite Priestley to become his 'literary companion.'
Dr. Price was the intermediary in effecting this arrangement.
Priestley's nominal post was that of 'librarian,' and he now and then
officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne's
guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to
have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be.
Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius
thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It
was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because
the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed to it. On the
other hand, Shelburne appears to have treated the philosopher with
kindness and delicacy, and the situation was not without difficulties
for his lordship.

Among obvious advantages which Priestley derived from this residence
were freedom from financial worry, time for writing and experimenting,
a tour on the Continent, and the privilege of spending the winter
season of each year in London.

It was during these London visits that he renewed his acquaintance
with Dr. Franklin. They were members of a club of 'philosophical
gentlemen' which met at stated times at the London Coffee House,
Ludgate Hill. There were few days upon which the Father of Pneumatic
Chemistry and the Father of Electrical Science did not meet. When
their talk was not of dephlogisticated air and like matters it was
pretty certain to be political. The war between England and America
was imminent. Franklin dreaded it. He often said to Priestley that 'if
the difference should come to an open rupture, it would be a war of
_ten years_, and he should not live to see the end of it.' He had no
doubt as to the issue. 'The English may take all our great towns, but
that will not give them possession of the country,' he used to say.
Franklin's last day in England was given to Priestley. The two friends
spent much of the time in reading American newspapers, especially
accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in
America, and as Franklin read the addresses to the inhabitants of
Boston, from the places in the neighborhood, 'the tears trickled down
his cheeks.' He wrote to Priestley from Philadelphia just a month
after the battle of Lexington, briefly describing that lively episode,
and mentioning his pleasant six weeks voyage with weather 'so moderate
that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way.' At the
close of his letter he says: 'In coming over I made a valuable
philosophical discovery, which I shall communicate to you when I can
get a little time. At present I am extremely hurried.' In October of
that year, 1775, Franklin wrote to Priestley about the state of
affairs in America. His letter contains one passage which can hardly
be hackneyed from over-quotation. Franklin wants Priestley to tell
'our dear good friend,' Dr. Price, that America is 'determined and
unanimous.' 'Britain at the expense of three millions has killed 150
yankees this campaign, which is 20,000 l. a head; and at Bunker's
Hill, she gained a mile of ground, all of which she lost again, by our
taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children
have been born in America.' From these data Dr. Price is to calculate
'the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer the whole
of our territory.' Then the letter closes with greetings 'to the club
of honest whigs at the London Coffee House.'

Seven years later Franklin's heart was still faithful to the club. He
writes to Priestley from France: 'I love you as much as ever, and I
love all the honest souls that meet at the London Coffee House.... I
labor for peace with more earnestness that I may again be happy in
your sweet society.' Franklin thought that war was folly. In a letter
to Dr. Price, he speaks of the great improvements in natural
philosophy, and then says: 'There is one improvement in moral
philosophy which I wish to see: the discovery of a plan that would
induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first
cutting one another's throats.'

Priestley lamented that a man of Franklin's character and influence
'should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as
much as he did to make others unbelievers.' Franklin acknowledged that
he had not given much attention to the evidences of Christianity, and
asked Priestley to recommend some 'treatises' on the subject 'but not
of great length.' Priestley suggested certain chapters of Hartley's
_Observations on Man_, and also what he himself had written on the
subject in his _Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion_. Franklin
had promised to read whatever books his friend might advise and give
his 'sentiments on them.' 'But the American war breaking out soon
after, I do not believe,' says Priestley, 'that he ever found himself
sufficiently at leisure for the discussion.'

Priestley valued his own scientific reputation not a little for the
weight it gave, among skeptics, to his arguments in support of his
religious belief. He found that all the philosophers in Paris were
unbelievers. They looked at him with mild astonishment when they
learned that he was not of the same mind. They may even have thought
him a phenomenon which required scientific investigation. 'As I chose
on all occasions to appear as a Christian, I was told by some of them
that I was the only person they had ever met with, of whose
understanding they had any opinion, who professed to believe
Christianity.' Priestley began to question them as to what they
supposed Christianity was, and with the usual result,--they were not
posted on the subject.

In 1780 Priestley went to Birmingham. In the summer of 1791 occurred
that remarkable riot, perhaps the most dramatic event in the
philosopher's not unpicturesque career. This storm had long been
gathering, and when it broke, the principal victim of its anger was, I
verily believe, more astonished than frightened. The Dissenters were
making unusual efforts to have some of their civil disabilities
removed. Feeling against them was especially bitter. In Birmingham
this hostility was intensified by the public discourses of Mr. Madan,
'the most respectable clergyman of the town,' says Priestley. He
published 'a very inflammatory sermon ... inveighing against the
Dissenters in general, and myself in particular.' Priestley made a
defense under the title of _Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of
Birmingham_. This produced a 'reply' from Madan, and 'other letters'
from his opponent. Being a conspicuous representative of that body
which was most 'obnoxious to the court' it is not surprising that
Priestley should have been singled out for unwelcome honors. The
feeling of intolerance was unusually strong. It was said--I don't know
how truly--that at a confirmation in Birmingham tracts were
distributed against Socinianism in general and Priestley in
particular. Very reputable men thought they did God service in
inflaming the minds of the rabble against this liberal-minded
gentleman. Priestley's account of the riot in the Memoir is singularly
temperate. It might even be called tame. He was quite incapable of
posing, or of playing martyr to an audience of which a goodly part was
sympathetic and ready to believe his sufferings as great as he chose
to make them appear. One could forgive a slight outburst of
indignation had the doctor chosen so to relieve himself. 'On occasion
of the celebration of the anniversary of the French revolution, on
July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had little
to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first burned the
meeting-house in which I preached, then another meeting-house in the
town, and then my dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus,
and as far as they could everything belonging to me.... Being in some
personal danger on this occasion I went to London.'

A much livelier account from Priestley's own hand and written the next
day after the riot is found in a letter to Theophilus Lindsay. 'The
company were hardly gone from the inn before a drunken mob rushed into
the house and broke all the windows. They then set fire to our
meeting-house and it is burned to the ground. After that they gutted,
and some say burned the old meeting. In the mean time some friends
came to tell me that I and my house were threatened, and another
brought a chaise to convey me and my wife away. I had not presence of
mind to take even my MSS.; and after we were gone the mob came and
demolished everything, household goods, library, and apparatus.' The
letter differs from the Memoir in saying that 'happily no fire could
be got.' Priestley afterwards heard that 'much pains was taken, but
without effect, to get fire from my large electrical machine which
stood in the Library.'

It is rather a curious fact that Priestley was not at the inn where
the anniversary was celebrating. While the company there were chanting
the praises of liberty he was at home playing backgammon with his
wife, a remarkably innocent and untreasonable occupation. Mr. Arthur
Young visited the scene of the riot a few days later and had thoughts
upon it. 'Seeing, as I passed, a house in ruins, on inquiry I found
that it was Dr. Priestley's. I alighted from my horse, and walked over
the ruins of that laboratory which I had left home with the
expectation of reaping instruction in; of that laboratory, the labours
of which have not only illuminated mankind but enlarged the sphere of
science itself; which has carried its master's fame to the remotest
corner of the civilized world; and will now with equal celerity convey
the infamy of its destruction to the disgrace of the age and the
scandal of the British name.' It is not necessary to supplement Arthur
Young's burst of indignation with private bursts of our own. We can
afford to be as philosophic over the matter as Priestley was. That
feeling was hot against him even in London is manifest from the fact
that the day after his arrival a hand-bill was distributed beginning
with the words: 'Dr. Priestley is a damned rascal, an enemy both to
the religious and political constitution of this country, a fellow of
a treasonable mind, consequently a bad Christian.' The 'bad Christian'
thought it showed 'no small degree of courage' in Mr. William Vaughan
to receive him into his house. 'But it showed more in Dr. Price's
congregation at Hackney to invite me to succeed him.' The invitation
was not unanimous, as Priestley with his characteristic passion for
exactness is at pains to tell the reader. Some of the members
withdrew, 'which was not undesirable.'

People generally looked askance at him. If he was upon one side of the
street the respectable part of the world made it convenient to pass by
on the other side. He even found his relations with his philosophical
acquaintance 'much restricted.' 'Most of the members of the Royal
Society shunned him,' he says. This seems amusing and unfortunate.
Apparently one's qualifications as a scientist were of little avail if
one happened to hold heterodox views on the Trinity, or were of
opinion that more liberty than Englishmen then had would be good for
them. Priestley resigned his fellowship in the Royal Society.

One does not need even mildly to anathematize the instigators of that
historic riot. They were unquestionably zealous for what they believed
to be the truth. Moreover, as William Hutton observed at the time,
'It's the right of every Englishman to walk in darkness if he
chooses.' The method employed defeated its own end. Persecution is an
unsafe investment and at best pays a low rate of interest. No
dignified person can afford to indulge in it. There's the danger of
being held up to the laughter of posterity. It has happened so many
times that the unpopular cause has become popular. This ought to teach
zealots to be cautious. What would Madan have thought if he could have
been told that within thirty years one of his own coadjutors in this
affair would have publicly expressed regret for the share he had in
it? Madan has his reward, three quarters of a column in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. But to-day Priestley's statue
stands in a public square of Birmingham opposite the Council House.
Thus do matters get themselves readjusted in this very interesting
world.

Rutt's Life of Priestley (that remarkable illustration of how to make
a very poor book out of the best materials) contains a selection of
the addresses and letters of condolence which were forthcoming at this
time. Some of them are stilted and dull, but they are actual
'documents,' and the words in them are alive with the passion of that
day. They make the transaction very real and close at hand.

Priestley was comparatively at ease in his new home. Yet he could not
entirely escape punishment. There were 'a few personal insults from
the lowest of the rabble.' Anxiety was felt lest he might again
receive the attentions of a mob. He humorously remarked: 'On the 14th
of July, 1792, it was taken for granted by many of my neighbors that
my house was to come down just as at Birmingham the year before.' The
house did not come down, but its occupant grew ill at ease, and within
another two years he had found a new home in the new nation across the
sea.

It is hardly exact to say that he was 'driven' from England, as some
accounts of his life have it. Mere personal unpopularity would not
have sufficed for this. But at sixty-one a man hasn't as much fight in
him as at forty-five. He is not averse to quiet. Priestley's three
sons were going to America because their father thought that they
could not be 'placed' to advantage in a country so 'bigoted' as their
native land was then. 'My own situation, if not hazardous, was become
unpleasant, so that I thought my removal would be of more service to
the cause of truth than my longer stay in England.'

The sons went first and laid the foundations of the home in
Northumberland, Pennsylvania. The word 'Susquehanna' had a magic sound
to Englishmen. On March 30, 1794, Priestley delivered his farewell
discourse. April 6 he passed with his friends the Lindsays in Essex
Street, and a day later went to Gravesend. For the details of the
journey one must go to his correspondence.

His last letters were written from Deal and Falmouth, April 9 and 11.
The vessel was six weeks in making the passage. The weather was bad
and the travelers experienced everything 'but shipwreck and famine.'
There was no lack of entertainment, for the ocean was fantastic and
spectacular. Not alone were there the usual exhibitions of
flying-fish, whales, porpoises, and sharks, but also 'mountains of ice
larger than the captain had ever seen before,'--for thus early had
transatlantic captains learned the art of pronouncing upon the
exceptional character of a particular voyage for the benefit of the
traveler who is making that voyage. They saw water-spouts, 'four at
one time.' The billows were 'mountain-high, and at night appeared to
be all on fire.' They had infinite leisure, and scarcely knew how to
use it. Mrs. Priestley wrote 'thirty-two large pages of paper.' The
doctor read 'the whole of the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Bible as
far as the first book of Samuel.' He also read through Hartley's
second volume, and 'for amusement several books of voyages and Ovid's
Metamorphoses.' 'If I had [had] a Virgil I should have read him
through, too. I read a great deal of Buchanan's poems, and some of
Petrarch's _de remediis_, and Erasmus's Dialogues; also Peter Pindar's
poems, ... which pleased me much more than I expected. He is Paine in
verse.'

On June 1 the ship reached Sandy Hook. Three days later Dr. and Mrs.
Priestley 'landed at the Battery in as private a manner as possible,
and went immediately to Mrs. Loring's lodging-house close by.' The
next morning the principal inhabitants of New York came to pay their
respects and congratulations; among others Governor Clinton, Dr.
Prevoost, bishop of New York; Mr. Osgood, late envoy to Great Britain;
the heads of the college; most of the principal merchants, and many
others; for an account of which amenities one must read Henry Wansey's
_Excursion to the United States in the Summer of 1794_, published by
Salisbury in 1796, a most amusing and delectable volume.

Priestley missed seeing Vice-president John Adams by one day. Adams
had sailed for Boston on the third. But he left word that Boston was
'better calculated' for Priestley than any other part of America, and
that 'he would find himself very well received if he should be
inclined to settle there.'

Mrs. Priestley in a letter home says: 'Dr. P. is wonderfully pleased
with everything, and indeed I think he has great reason from the
attentions paid him.' The good people became almost frivolous with
their dinner-parties, receptions, calls, and so forth. Then there were
the usual addresses from the various organizations,--one from the
Tammany Society, who described themselves as 'a numerous body of
freemen, who associate to cultivate among them the love of liberty,
and the enjoyment of the happy republican government under which they
live.' There was an address from the 'Democratic Society,' one from
the 'Associated Teachers in the City of New York,' one from the
'Republican Natives of Great Britain and Ireland,' one from the
'Medical Society.'

The pleasure was not unmixed. Dr. Priestley the theologian had a less
cordial reception than Dr. Priestley the philosopher and martyr. The
orthodox were considerably disturbed by his coming. 'Nobody asks me to
preach, and I hear there is much jealousy and dread of me.' In
Philadelphia at a Baptist meeting the minister bade his people beware,
for 'a Priestley had entered the land.' But the heretic was very
patient and earnest to do what he might for the cause of 'rational'
Christianity. The widespread infidelity distressed him. He mentioned
it as a thing to be wondered at that in America the lawyers were
almost universally unbelievers. He lost no time in getting to work. On
August 27, when he had been settled in Northumberland only a month, he
wrote to a friend that he had just got Paine's _Age of Reason_, and
thought to answer it. By September 14 he had done so. 'I have
transcribed for the press my answer to Mr. Paine, whose work is the
weakest and most absurd as well as most arrogant of anything I have
yet seen.'

Priestley was fully conscious of the humor of his situation. He was
trying to save the public, including lawyers, from the mentally
debilitating effects of reading Paine's _Age of Reason_, while at the
same time all the orthodox divines were warning their flocks of the
danger consequent upon having anything to do with _him_.

Honors and rumors of honors came to him. He was talked of for the
presidency of colleges yet to be founded, and was invited to
professorships in colleges that actually were. He went occasionally to
Philadelphia, a frightful journey from Northumberland in those days.
Through his influence a Unitarian society was established. He gave
public discourses, and there was considerable curiosity to see and
hear so famous a man. 'I have the use of Mr. Winchester's pulpit every
morning ... and yesterday preached my first sermon.' He was told that
'a great proportion of the members of Congress were present,' and we
know that 'Mr. Vice-President Adams was a regular attendant.'

In company with his friend Mr. Russell, Priestley went to take tea
with President Washington. They stayed two hours 'as in any private
family,' and at leavetaking were invited 'to come at any time without
ceremony.'

About a year later Priestley saw again Washington, who had finished
his second term of office. 'I went to take leave of the late
president. He seemed not to be in very good spirits. He invited me to
Mt. Vernon, and said he thought he should hardly go from home twenty
miles as long as he lived.'

Priestley was not to have the full measure of the rest which he
coveted. He had left England to escape persecution, and persecution
followed him. Cobbett, who had assailed him in a scurrilous pamphlet
at the time of his emigration, continued his attacks. Priestley was
objectionable because he was a friend of France. Moreover he had
opinions about things, some of which he freely expressed,--a habit he
had contracted so early in life as to render it hopeless that he
should ever break himself of it. Cobbett's virulence was so great as
to excite the astonishment of Mr. Adams, who said to Priestley, 'I
wonder why the man abuses you;' when a hint from Adams, Priestley
thought, would have prevented it all. But it was not easy to control
William Cobbett. Adams may have thought that Cobbett was a being
created for the express purpose of being let alone. There are such
beings. Every one knows, or can guess, to what sort of animal Churton
Collins compared Dean Swift, when the Dean was in certain moods.
William Cobbett, too, had his moods.

Yet it is impossible to read Priestley's letters between 1798 and 1801
without indignation against those who preyed upon his peace of mind.
He writes to Lindsay: 'It is nothing but a firm faith in a good
Providence that is my support at present: but it is an effectual one.'
His 'never failing resource' was the 'daily study of the Scriptures.'
In moments of depression he loved to read the introduction to
Hartley's second volume, those noble passages beginning: 'Whatever be
our doubts, fears, or anxieties, whether selfish or social, whether
for time or eternity, our only hope and refuge must be in the infinite
power, knowledge and goodness of God.'

Priestley was indeed a remarkable man. His services to science were
very great. He laid the foundations of notable structures which,
however, other men were to rear. He might have been a greater man had
he been less versatile. And yet his versatility was one source of his
greatness. He clung to old-fashioned notions, defending the doctrine
of 'philogiston' after it had been abandoned by nearly every other
chemist of repute. For this he has been ridiculed. But he was not
ridiculous, he was singularly open-minded. He knew that his reputation
as a philosopher was under a cloud. 'Though all the world is at
present against me, I see no reason to despair of the old system; and
yet, _if I should see reason to change my opinion, I think I should
rather feel a pride in making the most public acknowledgment of it_.'
These are words which Professor Huxley might well have quoted in his
beautiful address on Priestley delivered at Birmingham, for they are
the perfect expression and symbol of the fair-minded man.

He was as modest as he was fair-minded. When it was proposed that he
should accompany Captain Cook's expedition to the South Seas, and the
arrangements were really completed, he was objected to because of his
political and religious opinions. Dr. Reinhold Foster was appointed in
his stead. He was a person 'far better qualified,' said Priestley.