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 own sentiments and opinions, again and again, with remarkable fidelity and completeness. And his ideals and his philosophy as presented in his works are entirely consistent with the conduct for which he was sent to prison.

Wilde was of the smart set, and he wrote for the smart set about the smart set. Now, the smart set has many superbly attractive traits and aspects. It does not, as Mr. Harris observes, habitually employ the coarse and obscene language of guttersnipes. Its hair does not fall over its collar, its heels are not run down, its nails are in order. It bathes frequently, dresses modishly, dines daintily, drinks exhilaratingly, lives easily, conforms with many courteous and agreeable social usages, occupies good seats at the theater, buys pictures, hunts in season, attends races, gives house parties, exchanges amenities, talks of beautiful and diverting objects, cultivates conversation and seeks in a multitude of ways to impart to the ordinary slack intercourse of life the tension of style and, for its own members, to raise the entire depressing and disgusting business of being born, married and buried to the level of a fine art.

In compensation for the arduous task of keeping up a beautiful appearance and conforming to its own code, the smart set demands certain privileges, and it takes them. When Lord Henry Wotton (or Lord Arthur Savile or Lord Goring or Algernon Moncrieff or Lord Darlington or Lord Illingworth) has seen the midday sun breaking through his ivory silk curtains, has had his cup of chocolate served by a flawless valet, has drawn his portière of peach-colored plush, bathed his fair limbs in the moonstone waters of his onyx tub, thrown himself upon his divan of

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 Persian saddlebags and lighted a perfumed cigarette from his jeweled case, he must be allowed to begin the pleasures of the day by tearing up his tradesman's bills, pointing a half-dozen epigrams at the bourgeoisie, making a few assignations, and ruminating on some new and strange and "fiery-colored" sin.

The hero of the smart set, as Wilde conceives him, must be allowed to turn over all responsibility for truth and goodness to the middle class. What is the use of being a hero unless one can be relieved from "the sordid necessity of living for others"? "Unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone." "Industry is the refuge of those who have nothing to do." "Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people." "Life is too important to be taken seriously." "There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about." "The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education." "Sin is the only real color-element left in modern life." "One could never pay too high a price for any sensation." "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." "Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us." "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses."

There is just enough of sharp and piercing truth in these epigrams to carry their maddening poison into the veins of foolish and humorless young men. If one can take the point without the poison, they are worth collecting.

It is absurd to pretend that Wilde's heroes are right-thinking young men. These gilded youths are adored by adolescents, as Byron was adored, for the brilliance and daring of their wickedness. As for

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 "Dorian Gray," our æsthetic jury deals with it as harshly as any moralist could desire. Says Mr. Kernahan: "I found the atmosphere stifling and tainted, and was repelled by the sneers, the cynicism, in a word, by what seemed to me the wickedness by which Lord Henry sought to remove the landmarks of good and evil." Says Walter Pater: "To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely, as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development." Says that eminent authority on the lives and deaths of the heroes of the Yellow Nineties, Mr. Arthur Symons: "Wilde was an extremely typical figure. . . . If he might be supposed for a moment to represent anything for himself he would be the perfect representative of all that is evidently meant by us in our modern use of the word 'Decadence.

It is interesting to observe that critics of Wilde's own school of art for art's sake are beginning to pull his literary accomplishments to pieces, to praise "Intentions" and "De Profundis" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" with reservations, and to grant him but one flawless masterpiece, "The Importance of Being Earnest," which, however, Mr. Shaw says, is "heartless." The line of attack is this: They declare that he originates little or nothing, that his convictions are all second-hand, that his taste and judgment are defective and his knowledge superficial, that he has no assured personal style in either poetry or prose, that his purple passages are full of echoes and mimicry of Ruskin, Whistler, Arnold, Pater, Rossetti, Gautier, Baudelaire. Whistler, who of course

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 was a fountain of malice, charged him outright with plagiarism, and, more venomously, asserted that he was as poor a judge of a coat as of a picture! But that—c'était la guerre. Much more damaging are these cold verdicts of Mr. Arthur Symons who cannot be accused of defective sympathies towards diabolists.

That reaffirms in other words what Pater said about him thirty-five years ago. Oscar Wilde is properly and accurately called a decadent because he degrades the æsthetic movement, lowers its level. The æsthetic movement in its highest phases was the successor of a moribund religious explanation of the world. Along toward the middle of the last century it undertook the task which was falling from the palsied hands of the church: it undertook a fresh, sincere, adequate expression of man's feeling toward the mystery and beauty and terror of life—the whole of it. So Ruskin

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 conceived of it, so Arnold, so Pater, so, somewhat less austerely, did William Morris.

Oscar Wilde will always be of great historical interest because he was the heir of all that the æsthetic movement had achieved up to 1880, and because, attempting to improve his inheritance, he wasted and well-nigh ruined it. He began by throwing out nature, which Ruskin had brought into fresh relationship with art; by throwing out religion, which Arnold had brought into fresh relationship with poetry; by throwing out moral conduct, which Pater had associated with music; by throwing out the social and altruistic feelings and the welfare of the laboring masses, which all the great leaders from Ruskin to Morris had associated with the possibility of an artistically productive epoch.

Wilde was proud of his "improvements." He plumed himself on the divorce which he had effected between art and life. He asked applause for his invention of an art which was a pure protest against life and the strenuous passions of life, an art which was as beautiful and was intended to be as sterile as a collection of blown birds' eggs. He thought his improvements would make the æsthetic movement popular—with the smart set; and they did. But, of course, we shall have nothing but smart-set art as long as the æsthetic movement is conducted by the smart set.

I wish to say a word about what sentimental biographers call "the tragedy of Oscar Wilde." By that phrase sentimental biographers refer to his spending some years in prison and ending his life in disgrace. But surely a man's real tragedy is to fail in what he attempts to perform, and Wilde never attempted, never seriously attempted, to keep out of prison. On the

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 contrary, he applied his brilliant intellect to getting in; so that his imprisonment must be counted among his successes.

Wilde's major life effort was directed to the task of separating art from morality; in that he failed deplorably. That is his tragedy. Far from being an artist pure and undefiled by ethical intention, as he declared that an artist should be, he is himself incessantly a moralist, often a very bad moralist, sometimes unconsciously a very stern and sound moralist, but always his art is inseparable from his morality. In other writers, the story, as we say, carries a moral. In his case the morality carries the story, carries the dazzling critical dialogue, carries the bright flimsy structure of his dining-room comedies. And it is as a moralist that the exponent of art for art's sake has been most influential.

Oscar Wilde's works are in English literature, and they are likely to remain there. He will be revisited by successive generations of pilgrims, chiefly young pilgrims, as the affable, indulgent, sparkling host of a famous and infamous house on the æsthetic turnpike. There are better houses—and worse—farther along the road, but many pilgrims will never ask anything better than Wilde can give them. He has good wine, white and red; he will chant you poetry, not as good as Shelley or Keats but almost as good as FitzGerald and Housman; he will show you lovely pastorals which won't remind you of nature but will recall "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar Gipsy"; and he will show you charming "Hellenic" things which won't feel quite Greek but will remind you of the pictures of Albert Moore and Sir Frederick Leighton.

Didn't some one say truly enough that he is a man

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 with only a third-class ticket, yet with so much appearance of style that he always manages to ride in a first-class compartment? He is, he will remain, the Goethe of undergraduates who can't read German, the Ruskin of art lovers who are bored by nature and great masters, the Arnold of moralists who dislike morality, and the Pater of those who seek culture without cultivation. He will always be "in" when scent and rouge and dyed hair and tinted finger-nails are "in"; for Wilde, if he had not been an author, would have been a dealer in perfumes and cosmetics.

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HERE are two sorts of people in this world: those who enjoy, above everything else, getting home, and those who enjoy, above everything else, getting away from home. One may push the distinction a little further: among those who would enjoy getting home if they could, some have a clear notion what and where home is, but there are others whose sense that somewhere there must be such a haven is engendered only by a vague homesickness, which keeps them wandering and homeless all their lives. And so, since the days of the much-experienced Odysseus, there have been two kinds of sailors on the sea: those who listen to the sirens' song and go ashore on Calypso's isle and, drinking the magic potion, take what shapes the enchantress wills; and those who stop their ears with wax and, lashed to the mast, sail by. This banality may serve as a primary distinction between the two most eloquent sailors of our time: Pierre Loti and Joseph Conrad.

The English sea captain finds the essence of romance in the testing of the hero's resistance to the elemental powers which surround and inhabit him—the power of the storm and the seduction of alien and savage manners, or some cowardice of the flesh, some insidious treachery to his own caste or calling, lurking in his own breast. Whether or not Conrad ever learned

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 to write English—a point about which George Moore and others have raised doubts—certainly he learned to feel like an Englishman the burden of those self-imposed obligations which one carries in order to retain one's own respect. In his austere scrutiny of the point of honor, the ethical scruple, there is something almost "puritan," something that links him with Hawthorne, Henry James and Mrs. Wharton, writers who get their "fun" out of refining and multiplying the more or less artificial problems of life, like the proverbial Englishman who preserves the integrity of the blond Nordic by donning evening clothes and dining in solitary state in the Indian jungle.

Pierre Loti is not in that gallery. Though an officer himself, as a man of letters he has shown little interest in what men do under the stress of code and convention. As an author he is incurious about Occidental society. He wishes to forget all that. His friends and his heroes, for literary purposes, are men of the people, peasants, common sailors, whose ungovernable propensity for drink, brawling, and desertion prevents their ever winning more than a woolen stripe to their sleeves. The crises in their experience are not crises of the will but crises of the emotions. For Loti all the possibilities of romance depend upon the hero's susceptibility to seduction, depend upon his surrendering himself utterly to the deep inebriation of strange loves and lands. "This price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing." Before Loti interprets Tahiti he wishes a Tahitian baptism; before he speaks of Japan he must have a Japanese marriage. Transient unions, but while they last he craves the deepest possible impregnation of his spirit by the spirit which he woos, the utmost expatriation and self-dis-

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 solution. Romance for Loti means an escape from the classical circle of humanity and an adventure outside its law.

How foolishly we say that the French, conceiving Paris as the end of every man's desire, are no travelers. True, they seldom visit us except on business; to the Parisian sense New York is more of the same but not so good. But tell the French of something rich and strange, talk to them of lands where "the cypress and myrtle are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime," and none are so attentive as they. Consider the reflection of Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, China, Japan and the two Indies in their imaginative literature and in their art and you conclude it is near the mark to call the French the discoverers of travel. I speak of travel not as an aspect of commerce but as an aspect of culture. The American visits Paris to confirm his Americanism. The English poet visits Italy to recover his cultural inheritance. The French poet visits Senegambia to get rid of his. They cross the sea to change their minds. They travel precisely because Paris contains everything that a civilized heart desires—except an escape from civility. For a hundred years the French have been contriving fascinating tours and detours for those tired hearts in which the Parisian paradise palls and desire is a burden, and the century moves forward with an ever more listless and monotonous hum.

Pierre Loti is not the first but only the most proficient of the long line of French prose masters who offer travel as something better than hashish or absinthe as an exit from the cul-de-sac of civilization. The man savors contrasts, and on his admission to the Academy he declared that Loti was no reader. But

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 we know well enough what masters turned his steps toward the sea and the desert and the wilderness, taught him the luxury of grief and the exile's accents of anguish, the consolations of nature and the pleasures of a quivering sensibility. As a small boy he declares that he had already a clear prescience that he was to have a life of voyages and adventures, with hours of fabulous splendor and hours of infinite misery. Yes, the Arabian Nights, of course. And then Bernardin de St. Pierre, wafting his chaste lovers to an idyllic West Indian isle. Chateaubriand following his dusky maid into the American forest. Mérimée pursuing his brigands among the rocks of Corsica. Gautier inviting to Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. Flaubert plucking his melancholy harp above the ruins of Carthage. George Sand and her swarthy peasants among the menhirs of Celtic Brittany. The Goncourts pluming themselves on their exploitation of the acrid savors of dark-skinned races and upon their assimilation of Japan. These are the magicians who presented travel to his lips as one of the higher forms of intoxication. He inherits their taste for the exotic as Yves, in "A Tale of Brittany," inherits dipsomania.

A totally flippant person might summarize his work as thirty-five volumes about the good fortunes of a French Academician who was a larking midshipman before he was a captain, and had a sweetheart in every port. And I suppose that Loti, if asked to speak of love, might have replied like Socrates, "I certainly cannot refuse to speak on the only subject of which I profess to have any knowledge." But Loti, it should be said emphatically, is something infinitely more complex than a mere sailor-lover. His vague rich passion invades and envelops him with a ravishing melan-

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 choly, like the music of Chopin and the poetry of Musset, in which his adolescence reveled. It has overtones of almost mystical rapture and undertones of philosophical despair. It is begotten of life poignantly conscious of itself and shuddering wide-eyed before the black gulf of annihilation. The fourteenyear-old islander Rarahu, with the red hibiscus flowers behind her ears, can neither fathom it nor reciprocate it. These little sweethearts, brown and yellow and black, fierce and real as their own passions may be, serve him but as pathetic go-betweens in his affair with "the soul of the land." When dark blood burns hot in the swift tropical spring, when tomtoms beat in the village and mad shouts rise, kinky-haired Fatou-Gaye may fancy it is she that he comes to meet under the baobab tree by the edge of the swamp at the red moonrise; but the mind of the lover wanders in that strange embrace—he has a rendezvous with Africa.

Loti is no simple-hearted sensualist. The specific "carnal sting" is sharply indicated where it is patently present, as in the vernal orgies of the "Roman d'un Spahi"; but it is the least of his preoccupations. Loti is a romanticist and an imperfect lover. He doesn't keep his mind on the object or the subject; it wanders into the moonlight and among flowers and plays with the amulets and the ancestors and the gods of his mistress. The merely fleshly relation between him and Mme. Chrysanthème he does not present as even interesting. That relation, he declares outright, was detestable. He tolerates her only when he regards her as a bit of art in amber-colored flesh, as a translation from a painted fan or a piece of porcelain. Emotionally, they have less in common than a child and a doll. She has not even the heart to be heartbroken

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 when, having paid her wages, he departs for his ship. Returning unexpectedly, he finds her busy with a little hammer testing the lapful of coins he has left.

"An impious hymen," says Anatole France, and suggests that the sadness of Loti is due to his perpetual quest of little thrills and to the impassable racial and cultural abyss which yawns between the Parisian and the Japanese. Yes, Père Anatole, perhaps. A more or less flattering unction to the Occidental soul. But is this spectacle quite so inhuman after all? What about the unfathomable abyss between any two wedded mortals, surveying each other across the coffee cups—between Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who have washed their faces and brushed their hair in considerable intimacy these many years? Have Mr. and Mrs. Jones many more words than Loti and Mme. Chrysanthème, which really pass from heart to heart and make their spirits one? Suppose Jones departs for his ship—dies—to-morrow, as he may, easily enough. Won't there be three good days of mixed grief and mourning show—till Jones is safely out of sight? And then, even in this Western world, won't they pretty calmly go over the will, with the relict, and open the lockbox and tap the securities with their "little hammer" to see if they are sound, and say cheerfully enough, if all is as it should be: "Well, Jones didn't do badly by her." And life will go on much as before, and all the more tolerably because Jones and Mrs. Jones were never so close together as they pretended to be. Loti is sad because he knows that human life is like that, and he can't forget it, even in Nagasaki.

He can't forget it, but by intensifying and varying his sensations he can make almost a rapture out of his consciousness of it. In "The Iceland Fisherman" and

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 "A Tale of Brittany" one is besieged by sensations from the first paragraph to the last; gray clouds, freezing rain, granite rocks, the smell of tar and salt air and steaming woolen and clay pipes, church bells for baptisms and weddings and deaths, the wayside calvaire, the summer flowers, the processions of girls in their white head-dresses, the lovers walking in the deep lanes, then the farewells, the mist and the rain again, the scream of gulls, hot liquor in the throat, cordage slipping through bleeding palms, the fishing, the voyage into the bleak north. And out of this saturation with raw sensations rises a sense of profound sympathy and intimate communion with the "soul" of Brittany and with the spirit of all sailors and of all wives and mothers and sweethearts who wait for ships that will never return from the immense and mournful monotony of the sea.

If I were to select from Loti's collection the six books which have impregnated my memory most indelibly with their color and fragrance I should probably choose "The Iceland Fisherman," "A Tale of Brittany," "A Tale of the Pyrenees," "Le Mariage de Loti," "Le Roman d'un Spahi" and "Madame Chrysanthème." Each of these is equipped with a sweetheart or so—poor little thing, and a sweetheart does unquestionably assist one's impressions and sensations to focus and compose themselves. But the enchantment of most of these tales is only very moderately dependent upon the erotic interest, unless one extends the term to include the sentiment that sailors feel for their mothers and mothers for their sons, and the bond of brotherhood, and the affection which greets the changing loveliness of the seasons, and piety toward the customs of one's ancestors and reverence for all

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 forms of religious faith in all regions of our mother earth. What the reader falls in love with is in each case a milieu, to which he finds himself bound in a kind of sacramental relation—so much of its natural beauty, and so much of its elemental humanity have entered, with such an exquisitely melancholy commentary, into his heart through his thrilled senses.

Let us have one illustration of Loti's white magic, aspersing his pages with the odors of a delicious spring in the Pyrenees, on the soft nights when young Basque smugglers run their contraband over the Spanish border and return in time for early mass:

There certainly is one of Loti's extraordinary achievements: to make each one of nearly two score volumes of which the scenes are wherever a French cruiser calls or the colonial empire has extended—to make each volume stir all the senses and reek of its proper scene as pungently as the jacket of Ramuntcho reeked of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi.

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 Sensation as Loti employs it becomes romantic; it lifts horizons, it stirs racial memories, it stimulates wide-sweeping reveries, it wakens a consciousness of impersonal powers and of unshunnable destiny; and these things are bitter rivals to the affections of a young girl. There is not a love-tryst in the works of Loti to which he goes with any such breathless fullness and expectancy of soul as he takes to Gethsemane in his yearning midnight vigil in "Jerusalem." No honeyed phrase from any of the sailors' sweethearts moves him so deeply as one musical sentence which he chants to himself, standing alone by his window at night, in "Un Pèlerin d'Angkor": "In the depths of the forests of Siam, I have seen the evening star rising above the great ruins of Angkor." And how can one hold by feminine coquetries a philanderer with all nations and all cultures and all gods, who cries out at one moment that Christ is his beloved lost brother, in the next that his soul is half Arab, and Mahomet is his prophet, and lo! a little while, and this homeless pilgrim is lying prostrate at the feet of Buddha?

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ON MARQUIS, you know," Brander Matthews remarked to me the other day, "is essentially a poet." I didn't know it! I doubted it, on general principles. I regretted it, thinking the country overpopulated with essential poets on part-time, Apollos in the pressroom and that sort of thing. Instantly my imagination linked him with the melancholy company of Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood and Mark Twain, three gloomy men who, it is now suspected, secretly yearned to add to the world's woe, yet were hopelessly condemned by chance and circumstance and fatally unwise marriages and the economic theory of history and the depraved state of public taste—were hopelessly condemned to contribute to the sum of human happiness.

Tragic maladjustment!

I don't know—nobody knows—just how it came to be accepted as axiomatic that it is better to be even the worst kind of a poet than even the best kind of a humorist. Probably it is connected in some way with our deep-seated northern European conviction that there is no virtue where there is no suffering. And, confidentially, I think it is nonsense. All the same, when I was told that Don Marquis is essentially a poet I elevated my eyebrows in the conventional way and said, "Alas!"—meaning what a pity that a

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 farmers as rent of the land. As this right, though ostensibly the salary of a sinecure office, was handed down from father to son, the samurai were virtually owners of their land, and the manner in which they acquiesced in the surrender of their revenues to the central government reflects the highest honour on their patriotism. It has been the fashion with many foreigners to bestow a great deal of commiseration on the farmers or, as they may be more accurately styled, farm-labourers. It is probably true that the government does exact from them a higher rent than that with which the former owners were satisfied, but the change of ownership does not affect them to any perceptible fraction of the extent to which it affects their betters. In an old and thickly populated country unskilled labour at a healthy occupation cannot be expected to earn more than will provide the rude necessaries of life, and these the field labourers certainly possess, if the healthy sturdy appearance of themselves and their children may be taken as a criterion.

The climate presents a striking example of the modifications produced by the physical conformation of the country. In winter although snow to the depth of five or six feet lies on the ground from early in December till late in March, yet owing to the protection afforded by the surrounding mountains, the cold is not by any means so trying as that experienced at Tôkiô during the prevalence of the northerly winds. The beat in summer is about equal to that of Tôkiô.

There are several hot springs in the district, those of Onogawa, Akayu and Go-hiki being the most noted. I believe that they all contain more or less iron and sulphur. I have soma bottles of the different waters which I shall be happy to place at the disposal of any gentleman who may desire to analyse them. Their medicinal properties are held in high estimation, each spring being considered a specific for some particular disease. The waters at Go-hiki are under the special protection of whoever in the Japanese mythology may correspond to the goddess Lucina.

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 man who is essentially one thing should be devoting himself, however successfully, to something else.

My curiosity, however, was aroused, for I had sat once within eyeshot of Don Marquis for an hour or so; and having in surreptitious sidelong glances studied his bulk—I like to see letters represented by men and women whom the wind won't blow away—the silvery grizzle of his solid head, his tawny temperamental skin, and a certain gravity of the ensemble—a gravity illumined by occasional lambencies of smoldering eyes—I had wondered then what else he was besides the creator of the aspiring Hermione, the Red-Haired Lady and such Falstaffian poetry as the Old Soak. Something else, I was sure; for he was a visible reminder of George Meredith's discovery that all the great wits have been grave men. Several feet away one could feel that there was some one there. If I had possessed the sang-froid of the representative of the press who interviewed the sanguinary Cleopatra, in "Famous Love Affairs," idly flicking a slave, from time to time, from her roof garden to the crocodiles below as she chatted with the journalist, I might then and there have boldly accosted the daimonic mask and have plucked at the heart of his mystery, saying, "What are you, essentially?"

That sort of pike and cutlass boarding of a personality might have been attempted by Mme de Stael or by the late Amy Lowell; and, of course, if they had attempted it they would have got away with it. But I was deterred by two considerations. In the first place, the natural savage intrepidity of my character has been mollified by contact with belles-lettres: I have read "Hermione," and know what arrows its author has in his quiver for persons who go about

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 inquiring with earnest frivolity into the mysteries of art and into the natures which "we best give the clouds to keep." In the second place, I doubted whether Don Marquis could have answered my question if I had ventured to put it to him, and if he had cared to try.

He interested me, indeed, because he is, I suspect, like most modernized and well sophisticated men, a good bit puzzled himself by what he is. In several of the most striking of his personal poems he exhibits a kind of desperate amusement and bewilderment over the classical task of self-knowledge. Something—what is it?—has knocked our tight, snug little personalities to pieces. We see our fragments strewn all about us; but where is our core? In "Heir and Serf" Don Marquis speaks of his Self as "a chance loose knot in the skein of life where myriad selves combine"; he feels a heart quivering "with hatred not mine own"; he thinks of his Self as a house haunted by old doubts, old faiths, old lusts of the blood, unreconciled, and he ends his rummaging from basement to garret of that ancestral dwelling of spirit and flesh which he inhabits with a blank question—"What is this Self of mine?"

If the occupant of the tenement doesn't know, what should I learn by knocking at his door? Shall I turn to another poem called "The Struggle"? It describes a terrific combat with a spirit in a Dantean "dark valley" under frowning cliffs, a combat terminating in the death of the fell adversary, but—"He that lay upon the ground was—I!" That suggests much. So does the poem called "The Jesters," which speaks of disillusions and acrid tears and numb moments of despair, drowned in "an incorrigible mirth." So does

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 the poem called "A Gentleman of Fifty Soliloquizes," which bids affection stand a little farther off:

We foiled self-seekers, we shattered fragments of personality, have devised ways to conceal our frustration and to keep impertinent curiosity from ascertaining whether the inner chamber of our lives contains a shrine or a tomb, or whether it is merely vacant. As for Don Marquis, he walks habitually in a defensive cloud of the humorous butterflies that his brain gives birth to; behind his whimsy moods and his satirical laughter he is, you will find if you pry into the matter, reticent—for a lyric poet, very reticent—about himself.

The only legitimate way to get at these reticent authors is to sit down before their complete works and read them straight through. It is infinitely better sport than cross-word puzzles, I conjecture, never having tried the latter. It is like big game hunting, when you get a soul at bay. When you have done that, you are in a position to tell the author all sorts of things about himself which he doesn't know—some of which may be true. I have tried this method with Don Marquis, and shall report my discoveries presently. But first let us consider the immediate occasion for subjecting a humorist to treatment so cruel and so unusual.

The occasion is this: Don Marquis has just proved by the severest of tests that he is a poet of very nearly the rarest sort—a dramatic poet. He has published

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 a drama of poignant beauty and memorable reality on the betrayal, trial and crucifixion of Jesus, "The Dark Hours." Whether any other poet in America could have approached his achievement on this theme, I do not know. No one has. He has accomplished what I had thought was impossible: He has thoroughly dramatized the chief narrative of the New Testament, developing with marked originality several of the principal characters, notably Judas, and freely inventing incidents and speeches for subordinate figures, yet—to my sense, which is reasonably sensitive—without striking a note which is not in harmony with the tone and atmosphere of the Gospels. In the case of the central figure, he attempts no interpretation that devi ates a hair's breadth from the Christian tradition. The character and personality of the Son of Man, the Son of God, are left quite inviolate; and this makes the more marvelous the congruity of his own developments. His feeling about the delicate ethical and artistic questions involved in handling this material he discusses with admirable taste and insight.

I have almost nothing strictly parallel to compare with the effect of "The Dark Hours" except a Passion Play which I saw a few years ago solemnly presented in a canyon of southern California, with the Crucifixion dim on the hilltop above it. With its elaborate reproduction of Palestinian dwellings, costumes and scenery, it was pictorially correct, like the colored illustrations in a modern Bible, of which it constantly reminded me, and the lines were gravely and eloquently recited, yet somehow it seemed remote and it left me cold—as cold as a colored picture in a Bible.

"The Dark Hours," on the other hand, even silently read, is of a seizing and transporting reality. Its tre-

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 mendous dramatic stress is intensely felt. It puts one there—in ancient not modern Palestine. I am there—with Judas, with Peter, with Lazarus. I feel within myself the suspicious spleen of the high priest, the impotent deprecation of Pilate, the anguish of Procla, the nonchalance of the Roman soldiers gambling for the seamless garment, all the troubled confusion of blind men, lepers, and possessed men healed, the mocking scoffs and panic blood-lust of the rabble—and the stark solitude of one crying: "It is finished." As for the question whether this was indeed the Son of God who was crucified, at the end of the play one is facing it again with freshly astonished mind and senses, like the centurion standing there aghast at the foot of the cross. I believe this to be a great tragedy, greatly conceived and written with austere sincerity. When it is adequately produced, as I hope it may be, it should affect us as the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles affected the Greeks—religiously.

Socrates argued all night on one occasion to prove that the type of mind best adapted for tragedy is also the type of mind best adapted for comedy. If you reflect just a little about "The Dark Hours" you recover from your first surprise at the thought of its coming out of a mind which had just produced "The Old Soak's History of the World." In a sense which Charles Lamb understood when he shocked Carlyle by expressing regret that the Royalists didn't hang Milton, the Crucifixion, the execution of Socrates—all such incidents in history may be conceived of as tragic and stupendous jokes. In order fully to appreciate them one must be endowed with a comic poet's comprehension of the immensity of human folly, which is the prime source of all tragedy. To put the matter

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 in more familiar terms, no one can adequately know how dreadful the World War was who does not at the same time adequately know how absurd it was, how ridiculous, what an inexhaustible subject for the laughter of gods and men. In Don Marquis the tragi-comic spirit is very strong. He respects gods because he knows fools so well, so intimately; indeed, he knows them so affectionately that, as he suggests somewhere, he will be found fighting on their side "against the millennium" till the Judgment Day.

But it is time we had a little more definite information about the author of this notable religious drama.

Don Marquis is a typical New Yorker—that is to say, he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Ill.—some sixty miles southwest of F. P. A., and three years earlier. Where and when he was educated I do not know. The book with which he seems to be most familiar is the Bible. Next to that, I should say the most obvious influences traceable in his prose and poetical styles and in the form of his humor are Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," the various yarns of Frank Stockton, O. Henry, perhaps H. C. Bunner, the poems of Swinburne, Kipling and Arnold, and an extensive study of prosody.

His first published book, "Danny's Own Story," 1912, is a picturesque narrative with an earthy Mid-Western flavor, Illinoisian, and much in the vein of Huck Finn, whose domain lies in the same rich humor belt, to the south. This is the soft drawling tune of it:

Old Hank mostly was truthful when lickered up, for that matter, and she knowed it, fur he couldn't think up no lies excepting a gineral denial when intoxicated up to the gills. . . . A man has jest natur-

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 ally got to have something to cuss around and boss, so's to keep himself from finding out he don't amount to nothing. Leastways, most men is like that. And Hank, he didn't amount to much, and he kind of knowed it, way down deep in his inmost gizzards, and it were a comfort to him to have me around.

In 1915 Don Marquis made the first collection of his serious poems, under the title "Dreams and Dust." In 1916 he uttered a farcical Stocktonian yarn, "The Cruise of the Jasper B.," which relates the adventures of a romantic journalist attempting to sail his schooner, scow or canal boat—it isn't quite clear which—from her moorings on a brick pier in Long Island. In the same year appeared "Hermione and her Little Group of Serious Thinkers," asking themselves at bedtime many heart-searching questions. In 1919 a volume of "Prefaces"—thirty-two of them, introducing A Check Book, A Cook Book. The Works of Billy Sunday, etc. In 1921 appeared the first records of "The Old Soak"; also a notable collection of short stories, "Carter and Other People," and a volume of humorous verse, "Noah an' Jonah an' Cap'n John Smith." Next year, 1922, a second collection of serious verse, "Poems and Portraits," in which Don Marquis takes the war seriously, and adds thirty-three satires with teeth. In 1922, "The Revolt of the Oyster," containing some capital stories of dogs and boys and the ripe tale of "The Saddest Man"; also "Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady." In 1924, "The Old Soak's History of the World," "The Dark Hours," and, with Christopher Morley, "Pandora Lifts the Lid."

There are some things among these fourteen volumes

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 of a sort which I never read except in the line of duty. With me, a very little Stocktonian extravaganza goes a long way. So does a very little of the ordinary run of humorous verse. Practically all the rest goes very well, including the satires in "Savage Portraits," which are as neat and sharp as those of the Roman masters. But I enjoy Don Marquis most when he is enjoying himself most, and that is obviously when his imagination is at work and he is creating something, if it is only—a prolific cat, a loquacious cockroach, or a special kind of thoroughbred dog: "Any dog can be full of just one kind of thoroughbred blood. That's nothing! But Spot here has got more different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him than any dog you ever saw." I admire the creative energy with which Don Marquis steers his elderly inebriate through his barroom reminiscences; I prefer the Old Soak's gorgeous, glowing historical style in his account of Ancient History to that of Gibbon, Wells or Van Loon, and I admire immensely the masterly poetizing stroke in the invention of "that damn little athyiss, Hennery Withers." That is Shakespearean—no less.

But previous to "The Dark Hours" I suspect the most memorable writing that Don Marquis has done is in eight or ten short stories: "Old Man Murtrie," "Never Say Die," "McDermott," "Looney, the Mutt" and "The Locked Box"—in "Carter and Other People"; and "The Saddest Man" and the dog and boy stories in "The Revolt of the Oyster." In reading this group of stories I have no compunctious feeling that I am enjoying humor by the sacrifice of a poet; for in the wider sense of the word these stories are poetry. Several of them are, I think, the kind of

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 poetry in which Don Marquis expresses himself most adequately, that is, tragi-comic poetry.

Take Old Man Murtrie dying behind his prescription counter in a Brooklyn drug store, with God and the Devil disputing as to which of them has got to take in his miserable soul; first neither of them wants him; then both of them want him, and Death peevishly urges them to settle it somehow—pure poetry! Take the story of the man who, when he has killed his wife out of jealousy set in motion by the Locked Box, finds that it contains only a tender letter to him, marked "Not to be opened till after my death," confessing that now, after five years of marriage, she has begun to love him passionately; she has sealed the confession only because she does not wish him to know there was ever a time when she did not love him. Take the story of "Looney the Mutt": a half-witted tramp who has lost his pal seeks him, seeks him, following false clews, scoffed at, mocked at, fondly, eagerly, hungrily—seeks him as a man seeks a God who forever eludes him.

We are, I think, on the main trail that runs from "The Dark Hours" back to "Dreams and Dust." In 1915, when this volume was published, Don Marquis was both technically and essentially a poet. I am struck by the sort of poet he was then. There is in this first collection little indication of historical passions, little indication of locality, no very particular or specific attachment to "Nature," and no significant love-interest. The dominant note is an almost Arnoldian concern about God and the soul and their relations in a world which has lost faith in supernatural guidance.

Whenever he turns from polishing a rondeau or a

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 triolet, which he does very nicely, to grappling with a theme, he is idealistic and religious. He sounds the silver trumpet to "paladins, paladins, youth, noble-hearted." He scornfully bids farewell to the "lost leader." He sees that man has "at his noblest an air of something more than man." He is the receiver of mystical intimations. He speculates on the mystery of the Self. Disillusioned, he yet sees man as the god-seeker, the god-maker, and he respects man's aspiration, in the face of "the hissing hate of fools, thorns, and the ingrate's scoff"—

The only trouble about bowing down "open-eyed" is that presently you notice every one else has his eyes open, too; and you see such funny things going on around you, that the first thing you know you are conducting a Column. And if you will insist upon giving people a choice between Jesus and the Old Soak—well, you know what people are.

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N the house of letters there are many delightful mansions; but, according to my own taste and judgment, the first competent, comprehensive biography of a great contemporary is the most important and the most stimulating form of current literature. It presents what our society needs above everything else: an objective made visible, an ideal made contagious by realization. If wishing could do it, I would wish "The Life of Sir William Osler" into the hands of every man, woman and child who reads the six best-selling novels.

When one comes to think of it, there are excellent reasons for bringing the layman in at this point. The lay public often fears the lawyers, sometimes shuns the clergy, but, through thick and thin, it clings to the physicians. Year after year we laymen furnish them "laboratory material." We are intensely interested in the outcome of their experiments. In the long run from the cradle to the grave we are certain to have been many times in debt, and indebted, to them.

Furthermore, Dr. Osler, though a most resolute and devoted physician, was much else that interests the laity. In his earlier years he was a passionate student of the fundamental sciences, and as an Oxford professor he was a propagandist for scientific studies

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 in the last refuge of the classics. He was a great teacher and a persuasive speaker on the regimen of the student and on the arts of instruction. He was a medical publicist and statesman with messages of the highest importance to mayors, town meetings and that miscellaneous rabble out of which that noble force known as Public Opinion proceeds. He was a bookman, an enamored bibliographer, a curator of the Bodleian, a director of the Oxford Press, a founder, patron and promoter of libraries in England, Canada and the United States. Besides all this, he was a beautiful and lovable character, completely possessing several great and simple virtues which drew men to him and held them.

As for the medical profession, I fancy not much inviting will be required to bring it to this sumptuous feast. The head of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the author of "The Principles and Practice of Medicine" and "Æquanimitas," touched it at all points. Wherever he touched it, he glorified it. He loved every honest medical man from Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna to his Alabama student, and if he had enjoyed the leisure of Methuselah he would have delivered an address or have erected a monument in honor of every one. Fearful of specialism, he loved the whole range of pathology, and in the laboratory or the clinic or in strategic counsels with his colleagues, he had a hand in the fighting against all the major plagues of mankind. The story of his life must appeal to his old comrades as Grant's "Memoirs" appealed to the veterans of the Civil War. Nor can one conceive of any intelligent and aspiring young physician, surgeon, nurse, trustee of a hospital, or any one earnestly concerned with public health or medical education and

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 research who will not desire to own the book—no owner would lend it long enough to read it through—and repeatedly to make his way through its fourteen hundred inspiring and richly informative pages.

The author, whose name appears on the title-page without any professional identification or display of learned letters, has a record rather strikingly like that of Osler: nine years on the Johns Hopkins staff as associate surgeon, three years of the period with Osler in charge; professor of surgery at Harvard since 1911; in charge of a base hospital and consultant in France during the war, with a colonelcy in the Medical Corps of the U. S. A.; many foreign honors, membership in British and French medical associations, and enormous acquaintance with the history, bibliography and personnel of his profession.

Without using the first personal pronoun, Dr. Cushing keeps his eye on the object from first to last. He has made his imagination work to realize every step of Osler's career from the Canadian backwoods to the Regius professorship.

The prime question about a distinguished man is how he got his start. Introducing Osler in 1909 at a session of the London School of Tropical Medicine, the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, presented the speaker as "a very excellent example of what the States could do with a Canadian when caught young." That was a fair ambassadorial crack, but Dr. Cushing's admirable opening chapters on the birth and upbringing of our physician do not justify it. The States were more indebted to Osler than Osler to the States. What the Johns Hopkins got when it called this Canadian was a physician who had supplemented his training in the best Edinburgh traditions by ac-

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 quaintance with the latest developments on the Continent.

Osler was a good Canadian, a good American, a good Englishman, but of nationality he made little, and he was never an American citizen. His parents were English people out of Cornwall—the father a Saxon, the mother a "black Celt" who, in 1837, crossed the Atlantic to propagate the Gospel in the upper Canadian wilderness. William was born in 1849. You see the sturdy father, a Cambridge University man and a fine mathematical scholar, by the way, riding through the woods on horseback with the baptismal register in his saddlebags, hunting out his youngest parishioners, helping them spiritually into the world. You see the mother of nine children conducting a large Sunday school class and also a big sewing class twice a week, to second her husband's efforts for the civilization of the Canadian backwoods. She is an educated woman and writes charming, affectionate, humorous letters to her boys, when they are at school, which you may be sure they are, and under the best masters, men, English university graduates. This good woman lived to be three months more than a hundred years old. The family reckoned twenty members in the World War. It is English-Canadian, and it is magnificent. William Osler got his start from his parents: black hair and black eyes from his mother, and good blood, brains, character and indomitable energy from both.

As a schoolboy William was at or near the head of his class, he was the best athlete in school and he was a ringleader in mischief—with an inherited leaning toward the ministry. The decisive turn in his career was made at school in Weston, conducted on the Eton plan, including the top hats. Opposite page 33 you

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 may see William Osler, aged sixteen, in his top hat, as head prefect. At Weston he became the favorite pupil of a master with a passion for collecting, labeling and microscopically examining every conceivable specimen of "natural history." The passion was contagious. William caught it, became an infatuated microscopist and soon was so deeply absorbed in fresh-water polyzoa that he neglected his letters to his family. The influence of the master was reinforced by the medical director of the school, James Bovell. In 1868 William bought his first edition of Sir Thomas Browne's works, and began his collecting of the "Religio Medici." Theology waned and medicine waxed. He went to McGill, where he received the best medical education to be had in Canada, and graduated with a special prize for a thesis "greatly distinguished for originality and research."

Perhaps the most significant thing that Osler did immediately after he was graduated was not to get married. Marriage he postponed till his forty-third year, in accordance with his advice to young medical students, that they should put their affections "on ice." Instead of getting married he went abroad for two years and studied with the masters in Europe and England, including seventeen months with John Burton Sanderson, whom thirty-four years later he succeeded as Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. At the age of twenty-four he returned to McGill as Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, which position he held from 1874 to 1884. He was called to the Professorship of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and remained there till 1889. Then he accepted his post at the Johns Hopkins, and held it, in spite of all temptations, till 1905, when Oxford

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 called him. "Stick to your last" was a maxim that he preached and practised.

Dr. Cushing disclaims any attempt at a systematic "appraisal of his professional accomplishments." Osler's name is not identified with any of the great epoch-making discoveries of his period. He cannot be ranked with men like Virchow, Koch, Lister, and Pasteur. He was never, says Dr. Cushing, an "adept in bacteriological technique," and this defect in his training rather precluded his participating in the most important way in the main line of the scientific advance. In his farewell to his American colleagues he himself declared that he had had but two ambitions in his professions: first, to make of himself a good clinical physician, and, second, "to build up a great clinic on Teutonic lines, not on those previously followed here and in England, but on lines which have proved so successful on the Continent and which have placed the scientific medicine of Germany in the forefront of the world." His biographer, who makes some reference to his studies of a third element in the blood, "Osler's disease," etc., inclines to believe that his greatest services were performed as an inseminator of other minds and as a propagandist for public health, perhaps with special reference to his participation in the antituberculosis and antityphoid crusades. To this should be added the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research seems to have been directly inspired by the reading of his "Principles and Practice of Medicine."

Osler himself repeatedly denied that he had attained the objects of his ambition by any extraordinary faculty, and I don't think Dr. Cushing brings any extraordinary faculty to light. What one sees is a

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 young fellow of energetic mind and body who at the age of sixteen or seventeen discovered what he wanted to do with his life and stuck by that with a most consummate doggedness. From his medical student days onward he was a hard, regular and systematic worker. "Work" he gave as the master-word of success in the profession. He had performed more than a thousand autopsies before he left McGill, and that was but an incident in his labors. In another of his addresses, he offered students three master keys: the Art of Detachment, the Virtue of Method and the Quality of Thoroughness. The Art of Detachment he explains as "the faculty of isolating yourselves from the pursuits and pleasures incident to youth." Perhaps he was jesting a little, but so far as the record shows he was master of the Art of Detachment. Till he went to Oxford and let himself out in his bibliographical passions and in society he seems to have sought all his pleasure in his work, in the hospital, in scientific publications, in association meetings, in professional dinners.

There is no indication that getting rich was one of his ambitions. His "Principles and Practice of Medicine," of which he presented the hundred thousandth copy to his son, made him so independent that when fire devastated Baltimore he could offer to turn his salary for a period of five years back fo the Johns Hopkins. Checks for a hundred dollars to needy students or struggling libraries slipped from him easily. But when he took to purchasing first editions, incunabula, and manuscripts, he appreciated a gift of £1,000 from a prosperous brother. Always he looked on medicine as "a calling, not a trade." He refused to become involved in a general practise; he wanted to

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 keep his hands free for science and for clinical instruction.

The highest praise that he could find for one of his masters at McGill was to say that he resembled Thomas Arnold, of Rugby. The molding of the Arnoldian tradition is plainly visible in Osler. It is easy, furthermore, to trace in his writing the influence of Matthew Arnold as a powerful formative influence. Under a photograph of himself with his little son on his back he has written jocosely: "And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid"—which is the last line of Arnold's sonnet "The Good Shepherd with the Kid." He praises Locke for the "sweet reasonableness," which is Arnold's phrase for the master quality of Jesus. When he leaves the United States he applies to himself the lines of Arnold's Empedocles:

He is like Arnold in his love for the Bible and for the classical moralists, and like him in this: Externally gay, affable, full of quips and drolleries, eminently companionable as he was, one recognizes that the groundwork of his character was stoical. Self-mastery, the performance of duty, unmurmuring acceptance of destiny were lessons that he learned early and never forgot.

Shortly before he left this country—to return only for "week-ends," as his friends put it—he made what the newspaper men distorted into his most notorious public utterance: his remarks on the uselessness of men over forty, whence the verb "to Oslerize." As a matter

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 of fact, Osler had not a particle of malice toward old men; he had always, on the contrary, a special fondness for them. Significantly, he praised the French lecturer's habit of constant reference to "my distinguished Master." His remarks about old men had come out of his humility and his quizzical kindness. What he had meant to suggest was that he himself was on the verge of "senility," and that consequently his colleagues would not lose much by his migration to Oxford. He was tenderly trying to temper the wind of his departure to his shorn lambs. He had long been an advocate, however, of a "quinquennial braindusting," and he believed in the "peripatetic" life as a preventative of premature old age. I think it is clear that his growth in the years of his English residence was rather social, historical, and literary than scientific.

He had to take his part as a medical officer in the war, but I find no evidence that his heart was in it. He simply bowed to the inevitable as silently as possible. The entire vast madness lay entirely outside his scheme and philosophy of life. The Stoics whom he loved, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and his adored Sir Thomas Browne, had taught him early to denationalize himself, to think of the human race fraternally, and to cultivate charity toward all men. As a man of science, he knew that he must be a cosmopolitan: there are no national boundaries to the commonwealth of science. And so he went about with tight lips and a stricken heart visiting the hospitals and preparing himself to surrender all that makes life of much account to a man who has done his work. In the second volume Dr. Cushing gives us some captivating glimpses of Osler's notable wife and of his only son, an affectionate boy after his father's own heart, and with his own

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 tastes, a pacific book lover and angler of Izaak Walton's school, soon to be employed in stopping German shrapnel with chest, abdomen and thigh.

Dr. Cushing's conception of his many-sided subject is broad and humane. He is reticent about Osler's intimate personal life during the first forty years, but one suspects that there was not much intimate personal life before his forty-third year. In his English period the sweetness and gentleness of his nature come more and more to the surface, through the rush of professional and social duties, all the way to his own deathbed, on which he jests and takes notes and reads the "Religio Medici." They tell him that he will get well, but he smiles and says to his nurse: "Ah, Sister, we know, don't we?" His chief regret is that he will not be able to see the post-mortem.

The great length of the narrative is partly due to a lax application of the principle of selection among abundant materials, and in so far as that is true it results in a lack of perspective. But the urgent fullness of the work is partly attributable also to Dr. Cushing's brimfulness of every sort of information relevant to the entire life-course of the subject. He knows, for example, for any year you please, the condition of the medical faculty at McGill, Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins, Harvard, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. He seems to know who read the important papers at every meeting of every important medical association. He knows the steps in all the great discoveries: the germ theory of disease, the place of aniline dyes in the detection of the tubercle bacillus, the differentiation of fevers, the development of serum therapy and the conquest of malaria, diphtheria and typhoid, the discovery of the Roentgen ray, the ex-

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 ploitation of the ductless glands, etc. As a consequence, he has almost inevitably made the life of Osler also a history of the revolutionary progress of medical science during his time.

In justice to his performance of this immense "labor of love" one other point should be made. In his modest one-page preface he disclaims having attempted a "final portrait." He calls these records mémoires pour servir. They are extraordinarily substantial and purposeful mémoires. But, on the whole, that characterization of them is just, and more accurate than a description of the book as a brilliant biographical portrait. It is a marvelously thorough piece of spade work. Osler was an artesian well, and Dr. Cushing has dug up the well. All the materials are here and in order, and the huge gusto of a like-minded colleague will find every scrap of them precious.

It is an immense and wonderful book, and it should be made prescribed reading for all those grim, sadeyed conservative killjoys who go about denying "the dogma of progress."

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N keeping house with from two to seven bickering personalities treading on one another's toes within the castle of his bones Mr. Mencken resembles the rest of humankind. For the outside observer, as well as for the beleaguered spirits, the most interesting question about the housekeeping is which one of the inmates is finally going to rule the roost. In this case attention may well center on the long contention between a reckless, callous, two-fisted grobianism and a being with "immortal longings" remotely akin to Heinrich Heine, who enjoined his heirs and assigns to lay on his coffin a sword—"for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity."

I am grateful to Mr. Mencken whenever he reminds me of Heine, and, as a matter of fact, he has done that more than once. If he did not, like Heine, live in mortal terror of betraying his "immortal longings," he would reveal them more frequently. Heine, my dogeared copy of his lyrics, my underscored copy of his travel books, his delicious book, "The Romantic School," his gay war on the professors, the preachers, the princelings of provincial Germany, his intoxicating sentiment, his tenderness toward the old traditions that he mocked—the grandmother sitting by the hearth; his infinite malice, his irony, his heart-breaking wit—Heine, the Jewish nightingale of Düsseldorf, the only

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 German writer who ever thoroughly bewitched and enchanted me, curiously came back into my mind, from the intermittent exile of a quarter of a century, at the bidding of a gesture of Mr. Mencken to his flock and at the penny whistle piping of two or three pages at the end of his fourth series of "Prejudices," headed "Bilder aus schöner Zeit," jottings, merely, of things sweet to his memory, as thus:

When I read these pages I was touched, and I fell to thinking about Heine.

Was it because I too was brought up on the literature of Israel that I never had any difficulty in understanding Heine's humor, was never offended by it, even in its most irreverent sallies, and sympathized in the main heartily with his neo-paganism—his attempt to rediscover the goodness of this earthly life, and with all his efforts to free the Children of Light from Philistia's yoke, from the stodginess of missionary society culture and from the straitjacket of small-town theology?

Heine told me that the Quaker who bought up the loveliest mythological paintings of Giulio Romano in order to burn them deserved to be sent to heaven and whipped there every day for his pains. Heine wakened my apprehension of professors when he told me that

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 the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon had "ended miserably: Castlereagh cut his own throat, Louis XVIII rotted upon his throne and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen." Heine told me that "to Goethe the Cross was as hateful as bugs, tobacco and garlic," and I understand why. Heine had spoken of the Virgin Mary as "the fair dame du comptoir of the Catholic Church, whose customers, especially the barbarians of the North, were attracted and spellbound by her heavenly smile." Heine told me that religion, by inculcating a houndlike humility, the rejection of all earthly goods and the renunciation of innocent pleasures, had "really brought sin and hypocrisy into the world." And I was not wounded by any of these things, because I felt myself to be, in my ethical and religious inheritance and in my sentiment for the history and poetry of the Chosen People, almost as much of a Jew as Heine, and because I was in the same boat with him, voyaging on the open sea of the modern spirit.

There is an obvious parallelism between the present line of Mr. Mencken's effort and the line of Heine, and it has set me to thinking over some of the reasons why when the later iconoclast began his critical jehad he did not bewitch and enchant me as Heine had done.

The first of these reasons Mr. Mencken himself has just given me by stating that he is a white, blond, Protestant Nordic and an excessively pure type of the Anglo-Saxon. I am no sworn lover of the Anglo-Saxon. Though I have occasionally quoted Mr. Dreiser's theorizings on the intolerable moral idealism of the "Anglo-Saxons," though, on due and sufficient provocation, I have twitted various persons for raising Semitic, Celtic and German banners against the Re-

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 public, I have always regarded these ethnological speculations as a morass full of will-o'—the wisps which were not worth chasing. On the one occasion when I did treat the subject respectfully—in a war tract of 1918—I dismissed Anglo-Saxonism as a banner of preposterous absurdity, and argued that the only banner under which the allied nations could possibly unite was the flag of mankind. The pure Anglo-Saxon, the white, blond, Protestant Nordic, has never been an object of my reverence. He never, as such, occupied ten minutes of my attention till I gave a course of lectures to prove my ancient conviction that in English literature at least he does not exist. Mr. Mencken, on the other hand, revels in ethnology, as he proves by his wild ramblings among the Celts and Saxons in this volume; and he does assert the existence among us, in very small numbers, of the pure Anglo-Saxon.

I snatch at this blond Nordicism of his to explain those characteristics of his work which least captivate me. The pure, unmodified Anglo-Saxon cannot be altogether like Heine. As Taine and others describe the Anglo-Saxon, he is a big white bulk of grobianism—a hard fighter, a hard eater, a hard drinker, a hard boaster, reverencing women but keeping them in the kitchen—a man, in short, with no sentiment or nonsense about him. When I first made acquaintance with Mr. Mencken's work, his juvenile addiction to Kipling and the American Navy and his long immersion in Friedrich Nietzsche had brought all his pure, elemental Anglo-Saxonism, including his Ur-Germanic grobianism, to the surface. In those days he uttered little soft stuff about "the civilized minority." His saving remnant was a hunting pack of horny-hearted supermen. He professed himself a Federalist. He was an atheist

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 of the biological type. He celebrated glorious war, like a Prussian professor. He preached the gospel of Herrenmoral. He despitefully assigned women and negroes to the slave class. He emptied dishwater over pretty nearly the whole of American literature, treating with particular ignominy my heroes, the Abolitionists, the Transcendentalists, and the American pioneers of realism. He insulted my grandmother. And I found no compensation for that in his whooping it up for a type of modern German naturalism which had pleased me in my teens but which, when I had found better diet, I had come to loathe.

Mr. Mencken's Fourth Series is still deplorably rich in exulting grobianisms. He rarely faces an adversary, he never argues, he never meets a point, and he never uses one. The only weapons employed by this champion of the civilized minority are bricks and cabbages. But as he hurls these missiles at phantoms and puppets of his own ingenious manufacture, which generally bear no resemblance to the persons whose names he affixes to them, little blood is spilled. Along with these insignificant personal diatribes, he utters much humorous thunder in behalf of universal skepticism and anarchy. In the style with which we have grown quite familiar, he preaches contumacy toward God, the laws, the clergy, the politicians, the courts, the police, the professors, and the farmers; all this as the mark of a civilized minority. He denounces religion, poetry, and romantic love as lies and delusions which can impose on no man of intelligence after the age of thirty. He proclaims the bootlegger the hero of contemporary civilization; and he avows a yearning to see "the whole human race gently stewed," and thereby happy.

Of "cultural progress" in the Mid-West and the

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 South he is somewhat despondent; but in New York City he sees cheering indications that multitudes have quite divested themselves of the fear of hell fire. "Compared to the revels that go on in New York every night," he declares, "the carnalities of the West End of Berlin are trivial and childish, and those of Paris and the Côte d'Azur take on the harmless aspect of a Sunday school picnic." New York contains the hope of a higher culture; it is now an "auction room and a bawdy house." We have now got all the freedom we need. There is no longer any earthly reason why American writers, at last relieved of the moralistic incubus, shouldn't settle down and produce a great literature!

Whether Mr. Mencken takes credit for having produced all these improvements—all this ripened spirit of contumacy and corruption—single-handed, I don't quite make out. It is clear, however, that he reviews with satisfaction his performance in a series of leading reles; some of which he has quite recently assumed. He sees himself, of course, as the principal "truth-seeker" of this generation. He now offers himself as the defender of the American tradition in letters, the tradition which includes Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and Mark Twain—the defender of this tradition as against Mr. Matthews, Mr. Brownell and others of us who wish "to pass over all these men to embrace . . . N. P. Willis, J. G. Holland, Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sweet Singer of Michigan." He sees himself as the blond Nordic assailant of the blond Nordics. He views himself as the one undaunted voice of the civilized minority. He is the emancipator of the young from Mr. Comstock. He is the knight in shining armor going out against

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 the prohibition demon. He is the man midwife of the naturalistic fiction which makes its bed in the parlor window.

There is not space here to extract the kernel of fact from the bushels of what he calls "pishposh" in which he loves to involve and invalidate all his criticism. I will give but a single illustration. On the soberest page of his book, page 285, he congratulates the young American literatus on the freedom which has been won for him since he, Mr. Mencken, assumed the "martyr's shroud" in 1908; and immediately thereafter he sketches the dreadful condition of American authorship in the period immediately preceding his advent. Before his appearance, he declares, "the American novelists most admired by most publishers, by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem almost fabulous."

Now my animadversions against Mr. Mencken as critic and historian of American letters have been evoked chiefly by the quality which is still regnant in the soberest page of this latest book: I mean his wholly uncritical and grobian callousness about the truth. The "fabulousness" of the decade prior to 1908 Mr. Mencken produces by bringing in H. W. Mabie and ignoring James and Howells, who are, of course, the real way-makers of our realistic fiction; and by bringing in Richard Harding Davis and leaving out Crane's "Red Badge of Courage," 1895; James's "What Maisie Knew," 1897; Frederic's "Damnation of Theron Ware," 1896; Norris's "McTeague," 1899, and "The Pit," 1902; Grant's "Unleavened Bread,"

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 1900; Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth," 1905, and "The Fruit of the Tree," 1907; Sinclair's "Jungle," 1906; O. Henry's "Gentle Grafter," 1908; Herrick's "Together," 1908, not to speak of Mr. Mencken's isolated exception, Mr. Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," 1900. As an historian Mr. Mencken is to be viewed with alarm.

I have sworn to myself not to end this review on the note of detraction, but to bring it back to the note of sincere admiration on which it started. Though Mr. Mencken lacks the patience, the discrimination and the "organ for truth" which the critic of a "civilized minority" ought to possess, he has other great talents. He is, as I have said elsewhere, alive. He has been the occasion of life in others. He has a rare gift at stirring people up and making them strike an attitude, and at least start on the long process of becoming intelligent beings. And he is beginning to quote from good authors. He is beginning to quote shyly from the New Testament in the Latin of the Vulgate. What may that bode? No one who has followed his work as carefully and hopefully as I have these many years can have failed to recognize that his obvious calling is to some form of ministry. From the first, he has exhibited the desk-beating proclivities, the overstrained voice, the tumid phrases and the denunciatory fervor which one associates with the popular orator. Years ago I pointed out the absurdity of his presenting himself as chiefly an æsthetic interpreter when every drop of his blood seethes with moral passion and every beat of his heart summons him to moral propaganda. In his Fourth Series, when Mr. Mencken is not a theologian he is a moralist. His book is properly describable as a moral miscellany.

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 In the midst of its grobianism there are glimmers of better things. Mr. Mencken, to be sure, still attacks mob psychology with the weapons of the mob. He roars at the populace in the voice of the populace. He still identifies God with the universe, with nature, with the "cosmic process." And his popularity he has won in great part by a demagogic encouragement of the cosmic process, by hurrahing for the liberation in the populace of its natural grobianism. But his radical skepticism has got him half way out of that Serbonian bog. In a brief theological paragraph, entitled "The Goal," he announces that "the central aim of civilization, it must be plain, is simply to defy and correct the obvious intent of God!" He is right. So long as he defines God as he does, he is right. So long as he identifies God with unimproved Nature, it must be the central aim of civilization "to defy and correct the obvious intent of God." This God is careless, improvident, and lacks a heart.

If he follows that clew, he will inevitably return to the reality of religion, poetry and romantic love and to the sense of their necessity in the culture of a civilized minority. If he follows that clew he may eventually make plain that his faith in science, his allegiance to reason, his passion for music, his devotion to letters and learning and his increasing abomination for mass action and all impositions of brutal force—all the things that he cares most for are the religion, are the poetry of romantic lovers, created by them and held in existence by their fidelity. If Mr. Mencken does that, he will remind me still more of Heine and will strengthen his claim to the sword of a Liberator.

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HE most fascinating aspect of American life to-day is the ascent into articulate self-consciousness of that element of our people which Emerson called "the Jacksonian rabble," and the relative decline toward artistic inexpressiveness of that element which Barrett Wendell called the "better sort." I have been reading two recent biographies which, taken together, give one the personal significance and intimate human meaning of this phenomenon. The first records the rise of a Mid-Western waif to success in business, and then his soul-shattering discovery that he is the typical American of our day, and that he is under a kind of divine obligation to become an artist and to reveal his soul in art. I refer to Sherwood Anderson's "A Story Teller's Story," a beautiful book, moving and significant. The second biography records the rise of a well-derived, well-bred Boston boy to be a professor of English at Harvard, and then his gradually strengthening conviction that he is the last of the New England gentlemen—a sobering and saddening thought, mitigated in his case by his belief that a hundred years hence, if all goes well with the Republic, the typical American will be such a man as he has been. I refer to Mr. Howe's life of Barrett Wendell, which is likewise a beautiful book, moving and significant.

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 I am glad that writing this biography fell to Mr. Howe. He is at the same time the most modest editor and one of the finest masters of the biographic art now practising in America. A New Englander and a Harvard man, full of Latin piety toward the men and mores and institutions which for three hundred years have had their center in his corner of Massachusetts, he has sat up there in Boston for decade after decade, like an infatuated and self-effacing recording angel, editing Beacon Biographies, "The Harvard Alumni Bulletin," "The Harvard Graduates' Magazine," "The Atlantic Monthly," the lives and letters of Phillips Brooks and Charles Eliot Norton, the monumental tomes of "The Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany," "Memories of a Hostess" and the like. In much of this work there has been for Mr. Howe great labor, a beautiful service of commemoration, and a minimum of personal glory. In performing it, however, Mr. Howe has perhaps become the mind of our times most fully and constantly aware of the meaning of Harvard College and New England as elements in the historic, intellectual, literary and social life of the nation. His latest biography proves, moreover, to any discerning eye, proves by all sorts of subtleties in the composition, that he himself has achieved a certain blessed critical detachment from the traditional Boston outlook—or should not one rather say, the traditional Boston inlook—thinking of that rapt and reverent contemplation of the umbilicus which conceivably some colonial Yankee skipper imported from the Orient?

At this point I wish to say a word, by way of sidelighting, about my own feeling for Mr. Howe's subject. I love New England with all my heart, tenderly and

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 sentimentally, and with that protective and jealous passion which resents a slurring word from one who has not so loved her. But since the current mode of contemplating one's grandmother has come in, since several years ago I heard James Harvey Robinson, in the picked diction of Columbia University, characterize all hitherto recorded history as "bunk," I have lain awake night after night foreseeing the devastation which is going to be wrought the moment that it occurs to some young man, bred in Professor Robinson's school, to deal with the "awful majesties" of New England's Great Age as Lytton Strachey and Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm have dealt with the Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites.

If I, or any man who thought of Barrett Wendell merely as a Harvard professor, had attempted to produce his "spitting image," what sort of caricature would our treacherous memories and our still more treacherous "realistic method" have produced? Well, I am afraid we should have seized upon some quite inadequate statement of his idiosyncrasy, trimmed it up in his abundant external eccentricities and thus have made a figure of considerable interest to his former students and perhaps to his colleagues, but of very mild concern to the public at large. To be more specific, it would be easy to make a brilliant caricature of this subject entitled either "A Harvard Professor" or "The Last of the Brahmins"—attenuations of humanity, neither of which could have stirred a deeper emotion in the vast democratic laity than amusement.

Mr. Howe saw both these opportunities. He proved his greatness as a biographer by dismissing them both in favor of a far more difficult task, namely, to show Barrett Wendell attempting to become an honest man,

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 though a professor and a conservative! He has accomplished what he set out to perform. He has consequently produced a far more complex character than most people suspected Barrett Wendell to be—a character far more complex, perhaps, than Barrett Wendell himself thought he was, and certainly far less simple, firm, homogeneous and robust than the impression of himself which in later years he tried to stamp upon his contemporaries.

Mr. Howe's Wendell is no mere glorified schoolmaster but a man rich in humanity, full of temperamental impulses, of humor, of self-questioning, of self-distrust, and, what is most surprising, he abounds in that humility which is one infallible mark of a truly great spirit. I shall perhaps shock some of his friends by this comparison; but I insist upon it as the point of significance in my original juxtaposition of the two names: Barrett Wendell exhibits the same religious humility before his ideal of a good man that Sherwood Anderson exhibits before his ideal of a great artist. The first man's final conclusion is that a respect-worthy human character is the finest work of art. The second man's conclusion is that the finest works of art far transcend in value the most respect-worthy human characters. The conflict between the old times and the new is there. By an adequate and essentially noble presentation of the whole case for the old times, Mr. Howe has made of its representative a figure of almost tragic interest, with an appeal to readers who may never have heard of his, with an appeal to exactly the sense that Sherwood Anderson's narrative so deeply touches—the sense for a high adventure in very difficult circumstances.

In a brief review one cannot even attempt to imitate

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 the delicate art, intricate, lucid, economical, by which Mr. Howe keeps the soft play of life on his subject from his childhood to his old age in a succession of pictures from all points of view, constantly changing yet cohering in effect like those moving screens which exhibit the unfolding of a plant from seed to flower. The essence of his art is motion and the scrupulous avoidance of a stated thesis and a fixed portrait. I am enamored of the skill with which the thing has been done, but when I try to suggest what has been done I fall at once into violations of the principles which govern the art that I admire. I snatch a single picture from the moving series; to correct its incompleteness I snatch another, and juxtapose the two in a glaring contrast; and truth with her infinite gradations escapes me.

As a small boy Barrett Wendell appears to have been a little prig, encouraged at the age of nine, with the other boys in his private school, to write out for their master "our different opinions about gentlemen, and how to distinguish them from other persons." Mr. Howe quietly connects this childish exercise with the question proposed in the famous "English Composition": "What does a man mean, for example, who asserts that another is or is not a gentleman?" The constant recurrence of that question to Wendell's mind might easily be seized upon by a thesis-writer as his complete and adequate "explanation." It might be said, for example, to explain his "Literary History of America," with its tremendous emphasis upon the pure and blameless Harvard gentlemen who produced "the Renaissance of New England," and its dismissive gesture toward the rest of the country as a territory

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 socially yet unborn and therefore possessing, for literature, no significance, or almost none.

Even within the sacred pale of New England, and among Harvard's own graduates, Wendell draws social distinctions like a lady. He anticipates the absurd snippiness of Mrs. Gerould in finding Thoreau and Alcott underbred and distasteful by reason of a vulgar "self-assertiveness," alarming to people "of sagely conservative habit." He asserts that it requires a hundred years to form a genuine American. He traces his own ancestry to the seventeenth century, revels in his connection with the best families of Massachusetts, delights in adorning the walls of his study with pictures of ten generations of his line, and performs a pious pilgrimage to the grave of his Dutch ancestor. He publishes a tract against the usurpations of the workingman, and hotly resents the iniquity of his standing in a street car while a man with a dinner pail occupies two seats. The death of Queen Victoria occasions in him an "overwhelming sense of personal bereavement"; he regards her life as "surely the most noble in modern times." In the midst of a war "to make the world safe for democracy" he rises in Sanders. Theater to deliver as his last message to the Phi Beta Kappa Society his repudiation of the ideal of democracy, his adherence to the ancient, "traditional," aristocratic republicanism. Meeting his colleague, Professor Merriman, he engages in this dialogue:

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 That dialogue suggests pretty well, I imagine, the sort of impression that Barrett Wendell consciously strove to produce: a fastidious, defiantly snobbish and very hard-shelled traditional New England gentleman.

In quite innumerable ways Mr. Howe demonstrates that Wendell was a bigger and better man than that. I don't mean to be paradoxical when I find the most important tokens of Wendell's humanity not in his fortunate and effective and happy external career but in a series of his failures and in the record of impulses which bore little fruit.

The tragedy of his life, and of this he was conscious, was that he became a product of his environment and lacked the initiative, the force, and the courage significantly to alter it. In his early manhood, it is clear that he desired to be a man of his times. At college, perhaps still in a somewhat "cocky" and snobbish fashion, which prevented his attaining the social success achieved there by football captains, he was an iconoclast, an enemy of Philistinism, and, significantly, a founder of "The Harvard Lampoon." Religiously "emancipated," he felt himself as a junior so much out of sympathy with his family that he thought he should "split" if he had to spend his summer vacations with them.

What a young man in that state craves is self-expression and an independent career. His family headed him toward the law, and he humiliatingly failed at the bar examinations. He tried to be a novelist, and he failed. He tried to be a practical dramatist, and he failed. He accepted a Harvard instructorship, and remained in it, because he had been unable to break into the life of his times at any other point, not because he yearned to spend his lifetime teaching boys.

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 I suppose Harvard is as "free" a university as there is in the country, and only men who have worked there can know how unfree the freest university is, how oppressively it constrains all but the most potent spirits to conform to its type. Barrett Wendell, like William James, was, or became, a potent spirit, and both men were indulged rebels in Cambridge. It is the glory of Harvard that, though she laughs at her rebels and lets them understand that rebellion can never be taken seriously, she does indulge them. Wendell shows little of the self-complacency attributed to the don; he is never proud because he is a professor; he is proud only of being himself, though a professor.

From the outset to the end he was quite out of sympathy with the Germanized scholarship regnant during his time at Cambridge. "God knows," he would say, perhaps with veiled reference to Professor Kittredge, "God knows I am no scholar." At Harvard he always had a feeling that he was "academically out of it"; and till he lectured with plaudits at the Sorbonne perhaps he never had the gratifying sense of being taken quite seriously, by a competent audience, as a man of letters. In 1880 he declared to his friend Stimson:

That was the penalty he paid for trying to be a man of letters in a university. In 1881, struggling over the academically unsanctified business of trying to write a novel, he composes as an epitaph for himself "He lacked the courage to do good or evil." Gradually he resigns himself to doing no evil. In 1893 he regrets

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 his doubtful, reactionary temper: "Such moods as mine are not things that literature demands." A few weeks later he unbosoms himself to Mr. Robert Herrick:

Returning from lecturing in France, he develops skepticism about his life work, and an acute distaste for teaching: "Harvard stifles me, more than I expected."

It was at about this time, between 1904 and 1906, that I heard him speak on French life, and attended, as a "listener" his course of lectures on the disintegration of the English national temper in the seventeenth century. Mr. Howe describes him well as he appeared in those years:

He entered the lecture room with a cane, in a cutaway coat and spats, with the air of an Anglicized Boston man of letters who had crossed the Charles to speak to the boys about life. As he proceeded to his desk we noticed that his hair was parted down the back of his head to his collar. He plucked his glasses from their hook, somewhere about his waistcoat, and

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 diddling them on the end of his forefinger, began to speak in his highly mannered voice, with frequent breaks into falsetto, something like this:

The formal dress, decorous aspect and little affectations of the man were in delicious contrast with the opening speech, and, indeed, with the entire point of view in the course. The man's mind was lucid, honest, virile, burly and absolutely untrammeled; his speech likewise. "Literature," he said, "was the meaning of life"; and he was not afraid to face life's meaning or to express it in round terms—so long as he dealt with its meaning in the seventeenth century.

I can suggest the flavor of this series of lectures by a few extracts from my own memoranda: "In 1642 the drama was so dead that it stank in the nostrils of London." "The Puritan thinking himself a sharer in the will of God believes himself required to force his will on others." Occasionally there was an excursus: "Vox populi, vox Dei means that if you can get a majority of trades unions on your side that's just what God wants." Speaking of the central figure in his course, he observed: "It is remarkable that Milton could approach so close to modern culture and still believe literally in the Scriptures. How can you take your Maker and dress him up in pretty verses? I

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 recall, you know, hearing a discourse on Christ's feeling when he rode into Jerusalem on the ass. I have known a man in the Harvard pulpit who tried to enter into the mind of Christ rather, you know, than into that of the ass. . . Heaven knows we could have spent three years on Milton. . . . Now, Hobbes, whatever else the fellow was, you know, was a big, hotblooded Elizabethan. When he gets onto God it's rather funny. You can't get the size of God's finger nails; it's no use trying. Abstract right was as purely a thing of the imagination as the finger nails of God. . . . Now, Baxter gives you, like all these Puritans, you know, an account of all his infernal maladies. They fancied, you know, that prayer and fasting could move their bowels. Baxter tried it. In the morning he was saved. There was another case where God interfered. . . . The Puritans were capable of great junks of attention to godly matters; it was as natural to them as eight hours of sleep are to me. . . . God knows what positive truth is. God knows that the effort to make idealism prevail in this world came to grief."

There speaks Barrett Wendell of the later time, being himself in the. That is the Wendell who said: "The dominant figure in any time is sure to be of it." That is the Wendell who recognized Tolstoy as the greatest realist of the age; Wagner as the greatest artist of modern times; Whitman as a man who could "make you feel for a moment how even the ferryboats plying from New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's eternity"; and "Huckleberry Finn" as "that amazing Odyssey of the Mississippi." That is the Wendell who found our New England literature pallid with our "national inexperience"; who was

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