Chapter II (3)

What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement, during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them that it was not Artzibashev's "power of psychological analysis" that attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more honest men.

But this most desirable course has not the virtue of practicality. Perhaps some of the more or less recent activities of American publishers will so educate the public that they will no longer be impressed by critics whose acquaintance with Russian literature is confined to "Sanine" and some of Gorky's plays. Not long ago was published Stephen Graham's admirable translation of Gogol's "Dead Souls," a novel which in its rich humor and sympathetic realism suggests "Pickwick Papers," while its whimsical romanticism brings to mind some parts of "Don Quixote." It is one of the world's classics; no one who has not read it has a right to an opinion on Russian literature. About the same time appeared Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," a book of short stories by the great novelist, half genius and half mountebank, who wasted his genuine talent in developing a new religion, which is merely a grotesque parody of Christianity. The stories in this book are compelling, in spite of their somewhat mad philosophy, for they faithfully reflect Russian manners and certain picturesque phases of Russian idealism. Another volume issued at about this period is Maurice Baring's "Russian Literature," the best one-volume work on the subject in existence. And it is to be hoped that other publishers will publish those Russian novels which really belong to literature, rather than those which are of interest chiefly to the pathologist and alienist.

But meanwhile the market is flooded with viciously sensational works which are tolerated only because their exotic quality gives them a certain distinction in the eyes of the provincial. Here, for example, is Maxim Gorky's "Submerged." Mr. Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor Back," and Charles Rand Kennedy's "The Servant in the House" were sentimental, but on the whole, effective treatments of a very dangerous theme: that of the miraculous reformation of certain phases of modern society or groups of individuals through the appearance on earth of a man possessing Divine attributes. Gorky's plan has a similar plot, but, of course, he differs from the two English writers in making vice triumph in the end. The poor wretches who have endeavored to regain a little of their lost decency are thrust back into the slime. The people who make up this typical Gorky offering are drunkards, thieves, depraved creatures of every kind. They are utterly lost and the author seems to gloat over their depravity and misery. But then what else is he to do? He must live up to his name. Gorky, you know, is a pen name meaning "bitter," and Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov feels that he must justify the title he has so proudly assumed. But ridiculous affectation it is! It is as if Matthew Arnold had called himself "Matthew Sweetness and Light."

And there is a translation of Leonidas Andreiev, "The Red Laugh." This was an attempt to flash upon the astonished world the novel idea that war is a very, very unpleasant thing. Mr. Andreiev spills gore on every page, and the publisher assists him by making the title of the book blood red on a black ground. All the characters in the book go mad, and the author's utter inaptitude for literature turns what might have been passable third-rate melodrama into a farce. As a contribution to letters, and as a piece of pacifist propaganda "The Red Laugh" is inferior to "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."

And then there is Artzibashev: so much boomed and press-agented; praised by the radical magazines for his "assault on ordinary morality" and his "desperately poignant artistry"; long-haired young men with large eyes have told the women's clubs all about him. Well, of course, "desperately poignant artistry" means nothing at all, and "artistry" is meaningless when used in connection with a man like the author of "The Millionaire." He doesn't write novels, he merely throws something evil-smelling into the reader's face.

If the scene of "The Millionaire" and "Nina" were laid in the United States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the literary snob. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous bestiality of the Russian criminal class, they reflect the life of people who have added to their native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture of the Russian people as something at once bestial and human, a monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.

ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an illustrative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death, among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney--and, by the way, Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story--"Do you know, I have found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read it to you." Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:

Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara!

Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the phrase, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," and had hastily copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's manuscript at some meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith, attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.

Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic critic, Miss Katherine Bregy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Bregy's interpretative appreciations of the "sculptural beauty" of Dowson's religious poems. But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called "decadent" wrote.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine "decadents." That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worse appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member, it will be remembered, of that little band of "esthetic" poets which was called the Rhymers' Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the Cheshire Cheese and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted crust of the magnificent pigeon-pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.

Of course it is true--more's the pity!--that in the melancholy years just before his death he drank absinthe in places where it is terribly fitting to drink absinthe. But this does not destroy the splendid symbolism of his act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and in his prose-sketches are always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.

He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaimed: "Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said, "I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed. He imitated, even less successfully than Oscar Wilde, the unpleasant prose poems of Baudelaire, and he made the very worst of all English versions of Paul Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental."

When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends. I do not think that he convinced them that he was that supposedly romantic character, an habitual user of the drug. The hashish, so to speak, in his poems is similarly incongruous and unconvincing. He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so, in his best-known poem, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his over-mastering thought--very different from the over-mastering thought of, say, Mr. Arthur Symons in similar circumstances--is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.

He could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond about whom Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Victor Plarr have written, but the man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and chastity," who "was faithful" in his pathetic, ineffective fashion, but who knew at least the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Miss Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed this bruised soul with her pitiful, asperging prayers."

JAPANESE LACQUER

What was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else--not even Yone Noguchi--put into English so clear a revelation of Japan's soul. Yet after an hour with "Kwaidan" or "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.

Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic, and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such aversion. Is it because Hearn's style is too rich, exquisite and precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with delight by Hearn's enemies. Is it because of Hearn's ridiculous religious prejudices--his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No, Hearn's hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy's impudence toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow's fiery, romantic passion against the "Man in Black." And Borrow's "Lavengro" and "Romany Rye" were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.

No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.

Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had thoroughly the materialistic attitude toward life; he could see only the dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally credulous that he believed that Japan contained greater wonders than Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," blames many of his dead friend's faults on his defective vision. But Hearn's myopia was spiritual as well as physical: he could not see the soul.

What terrible results came from this spiritual myopia! Of course, its worst result was the unspeakable tragedy of Hearn's rejection of Christianity for that cruel burlesque on religion called Buddhism. But the minor results were many and dreadful ... chief among them was the loss to the world of a great writer.

Lafcadio Hearn might have been a great writer. If proof of this were needed, it would be found in a posthumously published book of singular interest--"Fantastics and Other Fancies." This is a collection of Hearn's earliest writings, resurrected from the brittle yellow pages of old New Orleans newspapers by Charles Woodward Hutson.

The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are--unlike his later work--imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization.

The literary value of Hearn's work is not to be questioned. No living writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans _Daily Item_; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a structure of enduring loveliness.

It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags, persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans _Item_, to give him work. He was called "assistant editor," but it may be supposed that the "assistant editor" of this little two-page paper did most of the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased. These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought together in this volume of real charm and value.

Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy office, he wrote the exquisite "Idyl of a French Snuffbox." Riding to work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a Japanese fan of paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, "A River Reverie."

He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those tales of the grotesque and arabesque, "The Black Cupid" and "The One Pill Box." Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parnassian Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.

But no Frenchman of his time could match the tender humor of "The Post Office," nor were Poe and Coleridge standing at his elbow when he wrote "Hiouen-Thrang." These were written by Lafcadio Hearn himself, by that strange nomad who called no one race his own, who looked at life with huge and perilous curiosity, who gave to most un-English thoughts a splendidly English dress, who just missed being a poet, who just missed being a mystic, who just missed being happy.

Already, the "Fantastics" show, Hearn was hearing the Orient's alluring voice. New Orleans, that brave old bright-colored Latin city, struggling with the aftermath of war and pestilence, was just the place for a man of his exotic tastes. "I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this dead South is," he wrote. "It has fascinated me." But not the venerable splendors of New Orleans, not the picturesque shores of Grand Isle, could take the place of the radiant East, to which he continually referred, of which clairvoyantly he seemed to know himself already a citizen.

There are sketches in this extraordinary little book, notably "Les Coulisses" and "The Undying One," which remind the reader, strangely enough, of certain prose fancies of another son of Ushaw, Francis Thompson. A healthier Lafcadio Hearn, with a broader vision and a tradition more clearly English, might have written "Finis Coronat Opus." And the thought makes one, perhaps, a little regretful that Hearn was so sincerely a gypsy, that he was drawn away from the scenes of his young manhood to a lovely but wholly alien land. Of course, he wrote beautifully of Japan. But these youthful sketches show that Japan was not necessary to his artistic expression. And to take on that strange new culture he had to give up some heritages of thought and belief that he could ill spare, the loss of which, it may be, is the cause of that melancholy, shading sometimes into despair, which permeates even his richest and most sympathetic Japanese studies.

Hearn did not ruin himself as a writer by writing about Japan. He ruined himself by trying to be a Japanese. Now, one can write about Japan without being a Japanese, just as one can write about hell without being damned. But Hearn was not sufficiently imaginative to perceive this.

So he gave up European civilization for that of Japan. His Irish father's faith held all that was noble of his Greek mother's pagan tradition, but Hearn chose the novelties of Buddhism. He went to Japan: he devoted the gifts that God had given him, and the technical skill that the Jesuits had taught him, to the celebration of anti-Christian legends and ceremonials. But cherry-blossoms bloom only for a season--unlike Sharon's rose. And the tragic letters published after Hearn's death show that this fantastic adventurer learned at last that he had forsaken the splendid adventure first appointed for him. His bitter revilings of the people and customs of the land he had spent years in praising show that within Nippon's golden apples, too, are ashes.

Hearn has been held up by the sentimentalists as a shining example of humanity's cruelty to great artists. He is instead a shining example of the minor artist's cruelty to humanity. He was not rejected of men. His was not "divine discontent," his was the pernicious "desire for new things." Therefore he became merely the maker of fair and futile decorations, and he who might have been a poet, a creator, became a clever wordsmith.

The essays in this little book of Hearn's earliest work show a strange resemblance to the prose of Francis Thompson. What a contrast the lives of the two men present! Both were vagabonds, both were physically handicapped. But Francis Thompson was imaginative enough to be himself, so he wrote "The Hound of Heaven." And Lafcadio Hearn was so lacking in imagination as to want to be somebody else--so he wrote "Gleanings in Buddha Fields."

It is not for a mere journalist to point out the moral significance of the tragedy of Lafcadio Hearn. But I venture to suggest that the young American and English poets who are kissing the silken hem of Mr. Rabindranath Tagore's garment might profitably read Lafcadio Hearn's later correspondence. Fame and happiness are not always the reward of him who gives up the Occident for the Orient. Orientalism has its own truths, its own splendors. But the writers whose words we cherish, whose names are graven on our hearts, the makers of our literature, did anyone of these sell his birthright for a mess of--rice?

SAPPHO REDIVIVA

Out of the dust of Egypt comes the voice of Sappho, as clear and sweet as when she sang in Lesbos by the sea, 600 years before the birth of Christ. The picks and spades of Arab workmen, directed by Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt of the Egypt Exploration Fund, have given the world a hitherto unknown poem by the greatest woman poet of all time.

Of course it is not a complete and legible manuscript, this buried treasure unearthed at sunburnt Oxyrhyncus. It is a little pile of fragments of papyrus, fifty-six in all. And on one of them is the tantalizing inscription, "The First Book of the Lyrics of Sappho, 1,332 lines."

To piece these fragments together has been a task more delicate and arduous than to dig them out of the earth. Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt succeeded in combining some twenty shreds of papyrus, and thus in showing the nature of the original manuscript. And the chief product of their labor and skill was a poem of six stanzas in the form to which Sappho's name is given, a poem, however, from which two entire lines and many words were missing.

Then it was that J. M. Edmonds, an eminent Hellenist of Cambridge University, gave his attention to the matter. He studied the possible relationship of the words, parsing and analyzing as diligently as any youth whom only the implacable Homer separates from a strip of parchment marked with the university's seal and his own name parodied in Latin.

"Anactoria," he saw, was vocative--and that was greatly significant. He added accents, syllables, words, and finally he supplied--it was pure guesswork, of course--two entire lines. And the result is undoubtedly a close approximation of the original lyric, more nearly complete, indeed, than most of the poems which have made critics call Sappho "the Tenth Muse."

For Sappho is known only by two brief odes and a few lyric fragments--"two small brilliants and a handful of star dust," they have been called. She wrote, it is believed, at least nine books of odes, together with epithalamia, epigrams, elegies, and monodies.

To account for the disappearance of all this poetry several theories have been advanced. One, which is largely accepted, is that Sappho's poems were burned at Byzantium in the year A. D. 380 by command of Gregory Nazianzen, who desired that his own poems might be studied in their stead, for the improvement of the morals of his people.

J. M. Edmonds has contributed to an issue of _The Classical Review_ his amended version of the poem. He gives also the following prose translation:

The fairest thing in all the world some say is a host of horsemen,
and some a host of foot, and some, again, a navy of ships; but to
me, 'tis my heart's beloved, and 'tis easy to make this understood
by any.

When Helen surveyed much mortal beauty, she chose for the best the
destroyer of all the honor of Troy, and thought not so much either
of child or parent dear, but was led astray by love to bestow her
heart afar; for woman is ever easy to be bent when she thinks
lightly of what is near and dear.

Even so you to-day, my Anactoria, remember not, it seems, when she
is with you one of whom I would rather have the sweet sound of her
footfall and the sight of the brightness of her beaming face than
all the chariots and armored footmen of Lydia.

Know that in this world man cannot have the best; yet to pray for a
share in what was once shared is better than to forget it.

I have roughly rendered the poem into English verse as follows:

Unto some a troop of triumphant horsemen,
Or a radiant fleet, or a marching legion,
Is the fairest sight--but to me the fairest
Is my beloved.

Every lover must understand my wisdom,
For when Helen looked on the whole world's beauty
What she chose as best was a man, her loved one,
Who shamed Troy's honor.

Then her little child was to her as nothing.
Not her mother's tears nor her father's pleading
Moved her. At Love's word, meekly she surrendered
Unto this stranger.

So does woman yield, valuing but little
Things, however fair, that she looks at daily.
So you now, Anactoria, forget her,
Her, who is with you,

Her, to see whose face, fairer than the sunlight,
Her, to hear whose step ringing on the threshold,
I'd forego the sight of the Lydian army,
Bowmen and chariots.

Never in this world is the best our portion,
Yet there is a vague pleasure in remembrance,
And to long for joy that has passed is better
Than to forget it.

No one would venture to criticize Mr. Edmonds's treatment of the Greek text; his ingenious additions are a distinguished, scholarly achievement. Nor can any fault be found with his prose translation of the poem. But to readers of poetry who have not that peculiar literal-mindedness which characterizes scholars his interpretation of the translated poem, his explanation of Sappho's meaning, is anything but satisfactory.

It gives "point" to the piece, he says, if we imagine Anactoria to have fallen in love with a soldier. Sappho, he explains, clearly is away in exile. Anactoria and the other woman are living in the same town, presumably Mitylene. He gives this interpretation of Sappho's supposed address to Anactoria:

You, who are lucky enough to be with her still, have forgotten, it
seems, a friend whom I would give anything to see again. For you
have fallen in love. And yet it is natural enough; and I cannot
blame you. But O, that I might have the joy you are throwing away! I
know it is no use wishing; but still, past delights are better
missed than forgotten.

Now, it is the scholars that have brought the poets into disrepute. They insist on interpreting them and in being at once too literal and too imaginative. Take, for instance, the obvious example of Shakespeare. Plays and poems written for the entertainment of the world have been twisted and tortured by erudite commentators who have seen in them supernatural prophecies, scientific treatises, political tracts, and--what is in this connection especially important--personal confessions. Mankind cannot be restrained, it seems, from the attempt to interpret all poetry as rhymed autobiography.

Why, it is respectfully asked, does it give "point to the piece" to imagine that Anactoria has fallen in love with a soldier? Why drag in the soldier? Surely a poet may mention the panoply of war without having in mind any particular fighting man. The poem is simple and direct; it may be taken at its face value without the addition of any love affair other than that which primarily it celebrates.

Mr. Edmonds is, it may be objected, too imaginative when he supplies Anactoria with a mysterious military lover. He is perhaps too literal minded in the very essence of his interpretation. Strangely enough, he seems for the moment to forget that a poet is not compelled always to speak in propria persona.

Why should we believe that Sappho meant this poem as a personal message to a friend named Anactoria? Why is it not possible--even probable--that Sappho meant the poem as the utterance of someone else, of someone who existed only in her own splendid imagination?

If this were so the case would really not be without precedent. "My mother bore me in the southern wild; And I am black, but O, my soul is white," was not (as scholars of A. D. 2,000 may gravely state) the outcry of a little colored boy, but the work of an elderly English gentleman. Walter Savage Landor's "Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel," was not a personal expression--Mr. Landor, as his mother was well aware, had no wheel to mind. Shelley was not the daughter of Earth and Water and Browning never choked a young woman named Porphyria with her own hair.

No, in spite of the excellent advice that has been given them, poets refuse to look exclusively into their own hearts and write. They refuse to be consistently subjective, they insist on voicing the thoughts of others. Therefore, not all the scholars in Christendom and heathenry need keep us from regarding Sappho's newly found poem as anything but what, on the surface, it appears to be, the address of a rejected lover to a friend or sister of his lady.

If Mr. Edmonds's admirable prose translation be regarded in this light--which surely is the light of nature--what is there about it to perplex? That Sappho used the name "Anactoria" in other poems does not prove that in that shadowy school on Lesbos there was a girl so named. It is a good rhythmical name, fitting excellently into the middle of a lesser Sapphic strophe; why should not Sappho use it? Was Pompilia among Browning's acquaintances, or does E. A. Robinson write letters to Fleming Helphenstine and Minniver Cheevy?

Even if, because of the ode which Longinus praised and because of other references, we believe that Sappho really had an Anactoria, among her friends or pupils, we are under no obligation to believe that this poem was meant for her. Leigh Hunt--not to speak of Rossetti!--knew many Jennies, but none of them ever sued him for libel.

Sappho, whom a contemporary called "the flower of the Graces," suffered first from her enemies and then from her friends. That "small, dark woman" who wrote immortal lyrics and counted among her disciples such famous singers as Erinna of Telos and Damophyla of Pamphylia, was, after her death, grossly calumniated by the ribald writers of Athenian comedy. Those who believe in the anecdotes of her which fill those scurrilous but entertaining pages cannot consistently refuse to credit also Aristophanes's interpretation of the character of Socrates.

If we are to take any of Sappho's poems as genuine personal expressions, certainly we cannot pass by her ode to her brother Charaxus, in which, in the most strict, not to say puritanical, fashion she rebukes him for yielding to the charms of the courtesan Doricha.

Nor can her correspondence with that Alceus, that "fluent poet of fluctuating moods," as E. B. Osborn calls him, be neglected. Alceus wrote to her, in an ode of which a fragment is preserved: "Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I wish to say somewhat, but shame hinders me." And Sappho answered, primly enough, in another ode: "Hadst thou desire of aught good or fair, shame would not have touched thine eyes, but thou wouldst have spoken openly thereof."

The famous story of Sappho's vain pursuit of Phaon, and her death by leaping into the sea from the Leucadian promontory, were, it may safely be stated, inventions of the comic poets. Charles G. D. Roberts, in his introduction to Bliss Carman's exquisite reconstruction of Sappho's lyrics, suggests that the Phaon story is perhaps merely an echo of the legend of Aphrodite and Adonis--who is, indeed, called Phaon in some versions.

But the modern admirers of Sappho have not hesitated to accept as authentic such stories as that of her love for the mythical Phaon, in spite of the fact that they originated 200 years after her death. The Phaon myth, however, Sappho herself might forgive, because of the literature it has begotten--Ovid's immortal epistle and Addison's fantasy, to mention only two examples. But it is too doubtful whether she would appreciate the eloquent but somewhat perfervid hysterical dithyrambs of the late Algernon Charles Swinburne and his followers. The "pure sweet-smiling" poet who scolded her naughty brother and snubbed the ardent Alceus was not:

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.

But she was a great poet. If it was not already known, the splendid strophes recovered at Oxyrhyncus would prove it. E. B. Osborn, writing in the London _Morning Post_, has called attention to their resemblance to the Canticle of Canticles, to the way in which, as he says, Love makes Lesbos and land-locked Sharon provinces in one principality. There is a close kinship between the ideas expressed in the first and third stanzas of Sappho's poem and those of these lines:

"I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots. (I., 9.)

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" (V., 10.)

Lesbos is on the sea, so the picture of the white-winged ships came naturally to the mind of Sappho. But the poet of Sharon thought only of Pharaoh's shining cavalry and of (magic phrase!) an "army with banners."

The world cannot be too grateful to Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt for their literary mining, and to Mr. Edmonds for his marvelously ingenious work of reconstruction. We may object to scholars and commentators, we may regret their interpretations, but in this instance men of this sometimes irritating class have made the world's literature their debtor. They have recovered, they have almost recreated, one of the greatest poems of the greatest poet of the greatest age of lyric poetry. It is already a classic, this little song, whose liquid Greek syllables echo the music of undying passion. It is a poem not unworthy of her whom the amazed world called "the miracle"; of whom in our own time that true poet and wise critic, the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, wrote:

Never before these songs were sung, and never since did the human
soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers, and,
from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in
that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the
artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of
second.

THE POETRY OF GERARD HOPKINS

That Gerard Hopkins is to-day little known, even among rhymers, is an inevitable result of his manner of life and work. He was a priest of the Catholic Church and a member of the Society of Jesus. His faith was the source of his poetry, but his arduous labors in its service left him little time for celebrating it in verse, and made him so indifferent to applause that he never published. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put his "The Starlight Night" in the "Oxford Book of Victorian Verse," and he is represented in Orby Shipley's "Carmina Mariana" and H. C. Beeching's "Lyra Sacra." Several of his poems are included in Volume VIII of "Poets and Poetry of the Century" with a critique by his friend Robert Bridges, and Miss Katherine Bregy has made him the subject of an illuminative essay in her admirable book "The Poet's Chantry." A scant bibliography indeed for a genuinely inspired poet, the most scrupulous word-artist of the nineteenth century!

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.

These opening lines of a sonnet illustrate clearly Gerard Hopkins' spirit and method. Like that other Jesuit, Robert Southwell, he was a Catholic poet: for him to write a poem on a secular theme was difficult, almost impossible. He sang "the grandeur of God," and for his song he used a language which in its curious perfection is exclusively his own.

One may search his writings in vain for a figure that is not novel and true. He took from his own experience those comparisons that are the material of poetry, and rejected, it seems, such of them as already bore marks of use. For him, the grandeur of God flames out from the world not like light from stars, but like "shining from shook foil." He writes not of soft hands, nor of velvety hands, but of "feel-of-primrose hands." He writes not that thrush's eggs are blue as the sky, but that they "look little low heavens." The starry skies of a winter night are "the dim woods quick with diamond wells," or "the gray lawns cold where quaking gold-dew lies." In Spring "the blue is all in a rush with richness," and Summer "plashes amid the billowy apple-trees his lusty hands."

Now, it may be that these exquisite figures would not entitle their maker to high praise if they were isolated bits of splendor, if (like the economical verse-makers of our own day) he had made each one the excuse for a poem. But they come in bewildering profusion. Gerard Hopkins' poems are successions of lovely images, each a poem in itself.

This statement may give its reader the idea that of Gerard Hopkins' poetry may be said, as Charles Ricketts said of Charles Conder's pictures, "There are too many roses." No one who reads his poems, however, will make this criticism. The roses are there of right--all of them. They are, it may be said, necessary roses. They are the cunningly placed elements of an elaborate pattern, a pattern of which roses are the appropriate material. And the red and white of their petals come from the blood and tears that nourished their roots.

It is the overwhelming greatness of this theme that justifies the lavishness of his method. The word "mystic" is nowadays applied so wantonly to every gossiper about things supernatural that it is to most people meaningless. For the benefit of those who know the difference between Saint Theresa and Miss Evelyn Underhill, however, it may be stated that Gerard Hopkins was more nearly a true mystic than either Francis Thompson or Lionel Johnson. The desire, at any rate, for the mystical union with God is evident in every line he wrote, and even more than his friend Coventry Patmore he knew the "dark night of the soul."

This being the case, his theme being God and his writing being an act of adoration, it is profitless to criticize him, as Mr. Robert Bridges has done, for "sacrificing simplicity" and violating those mysterious things, the "canons of taste." A sane editor of a popular magazine would reject everything he wrote. A verse-writer who does not know that "The Habit of Perfection" is true poetry is not a poet. Here it is:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear;
Pipe me to pastures still, and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shelled, eyes, with double dark,
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend
Upon the stir and keep of pride,
What relish shall the censers send
Along the sanctuary side!

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street,
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-colored clothes provide
Your spouse, not labored-at, nor spun.

Walter Pater, Gerard Hopkins' tutor at Balliol, had no keener sensitivity to the color and music of language. Gerard Hopkins' purpose--a purpose impossible of fulfillment but not therefore less worth the effort--was "to arrange words like so many separate gems to compose a whole expression of thought, in which the force of grammar and the beauty of rhythm absolutely correspond."

There will always be those who dislike the wealth of imagery which characterizes Gerard Hopkins' poetry, because they do not understand his mental and spiritual attitude. Perhaps for some critics an altar cloth may be too richly embroidered and a chalice too golden. Ointment of spikenard is "very costly."

PHILOSOPHICAL TENDENCIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Why do people write poems, stories and plays? The obvious and cynical answer is that people write because they are paid for their writing; the poet makes a poem for the same reason that the carpenter makes a bench, and the dramatist has no motive other than that of the bootmaker. There is some truth in this; if people do not begin to write because they consider writing a means of livelihood they often continue to write for that reason. Certainly it is easy to think of contemporary authors of whom it may safely be said that they have no inspiration save the desire for money.

But the existence of literature is not thus easily to be explained. There are so many trades and professions easier and more profitable than that of letters that he would be a very stupid person indeed who selected it with nothing to influence him in that direction but the desire to make money. There is something else beside the perfectly legitimate desire to make a livelihood in the mind of the writer; there is something that makes him undergo poverty and other tribulations for the sake of his craft.

What is this influence? What is it that makes writers write? It is no one thing. The will to write is related to nearly all the passions, ambitions and desires of mankind; it is the result of instincts immemorial and unchanging. There are those who hold a peculiar inspirational theory about writing, who believe that an author is merely the instrument used by some creative power. In so far as this theory coincides with the truth that God is the source of all energy it is, of course, sound. But those who hold it generally base it on some fantastic idea of genius as a magic, unknowable power, irresponsibly wandering through the world and selecting at random the men and women who are to be through its mysterious spell creative artists. It is a fascinating theory, but untrue, being supported only by the citation of numerous particular cases, which cannot in logic establish a general rule.

A careful examination of the nature of genius would here be out of place. It is sufficient for our purposes to consider genius as extraordinary talent, and to know that it is by no means the inevitable companion of the will to write. The great majority of writers, those who are without skill and those who produce some interesting and even important work, are without genius. Yet they have the will to write. And there have been instances of men and women of undoubted genius so lazy that they seemed absolutely to lack the creative urge present in the minds of their less gifted brothers and sisters.

There would be writers if there were no such thing as genius just as there would be writers if it were impossible to make money by writing. Consider the earliest days when first by means of crude symbols chiseled on a rock or by means of rough combinations of sounds a man endeavored to convey to his fellows some message not necessitated by the ordinary conditions of life--some message important for its own sake alone. What caused this man to carve, to chant, to express ideas so that they would be intelligible to his fellows? If we understand the motives for this man's conduct, if we find out what made him a creative artist, we shall understand why modern man writes. For the motives, emotions, essential habits of mankind do not greatly change with the passing of the ages; the soul of man has the changelessness of immortal things.

Motives are hard to trace and they are usually found in combination. We cannot be sure that the first writer had only one motive, but we can imagine many motives, any one of which would have been sufficient to cause his literary adventure. These may be indicated as the urge to chronicle, the urge to attract, the urge to worship, and the urge to create. And all these are related to and possibly included by the need of self-expression.

Among the simplest and least literary people, events that greatly disturb the routine of life--wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes--seem to develop writers automatically. The great thing has happened and must have a record safer than man's fickle memory. So inevitably come the chronicler and his chronicle. The demand creates the supply. But the desire to ensure remembrance of events is not in itself sufficient to ensure the existence of literature. There is also what I have termed the urge to attract. The savage warrior may carve on stone or paint upon a strip of pale bark a record of his own brave victory or ingenious escape. This he does to attract the attention and admiration of his public, such as it is, to his courage and intelligence. And also the mere making of the record is in itself an achievement certain to bring to its maker the wonder and esteem of those lacking this strange power. And this sort of admiration, he finds, comes to him even when the things about which he writes are not his own doings. So subjective art comes into existence. Man writes because of the urge to worship to-day, as he has always done. He utters prayers that have been provided for his needs by divinely constituted authorities, and to the unspoken ejaculation of his heart he silently gives the best literary form possible to him--the directness and passionate simplicity proper to great literature. He repeats, when he prays in accordance with the forms prescribed by the Church, great literature which came into existence originally in response to the urge to worship. And in all languages the writings of most enduring loveliness, even apart from those divinely inspired, are those which relate most closely to worship--those writings made immortal by the love of God. So writers may fulfill the purpose for which they are made by writing--may know God better by writing about Him, increase their love of Him by expressing it in beautiful words, serve Him in this world by means of their best talent, and because of this service and His mercy be happy with Him forever in Heaven.

There is also the motive which perhaps gives rise to the common and fallacious idea of the writer's inspiration--the motive which I have designated as the urge to create. Of course the only true creator is God, and for a creature to seem to create may be a perilous thing, savoring of blasphemy. Certainly the evil egotism of some writers, using their talent for the destruction of their souls and those of others, is a blasphemous thing. This is a matter better suited for discussion by a moral theologian than by a critic, but surely it is possible for the writer to assay his task of creating a work of art the more humbly and the more joyfully because it is done in reverent imitation of the Maker or Poet of the universe.

Now, a writer does not analyze or separate his motives. They all are related to and possibly included by the need of self-expression. There is an idea in the writer's brain which he wishes to put into words and on paper. He does so, without bothering to try to discover why he has this impulse.

The existence of these motives, in various combinations, is evident in all literature. The novelist wishes to create a thing of beauty, to chronicle certain actual or possible events, to attract admiration to himself and perhaps to a certain class or race of men. If he is a great writer he has also, even if he be not thoroughly conscious of it, the desire to worship--he uses his talent honestly and skillfully, for God's sake, making an acceptable offering. He may write a drama of modern life, a story of pioneer days in the Far West, a sonnet to a buttercup, a pamphlet in favor of improved tenement houses, a history of the Spanish-American War. Whatever he may write, his desire is to chronicle, attract, and to create. And if he be a great writer his desire also is to worship.

The power and desire to influence thought possessed by skillful writers has caused the world sometimes to regard them as actually the leaders of mankind's spiritual and intellectual endeavors. Writers themselves are quick to take this point of view; we have in America hundreds of popular novelists who have no hesitation in advising humanity about all its moral problems, thousands of minor poets who will answer the questions of the ages in a sonnet or a handful of free verse. There are some reasons for the writers to be justly considered leaders of popular thought. As a class, they understand humanity, and sympathize with it. They have the passions and hopes and loves of the rest of the world, intensified. Also they have a sense of artistic, or, as it is called, poetic justice, and poetic justice usually is Christian justice.

But writers are unfitted to be leaders of popular thought by many disqualifications inseparable from their craft. Interested as they are in the rest of humanity, they inevitably are set apart from it by reason of their exceptional gift. They show their sense of this separation, even when they do not openly admit it, by dressing and talking and living in a manner different from that common to their fellow-citizens. The velvet jacket, the long hair, the flowing necktie, the Bohemian studio, the defiance of custom and sometimes of law--these things are indications of that separation from mankind which makes the writer an unsafe leader of popular thought. There is also the danger that the writer will, if he become a leader of thought, grow intoxicated with power, and lead thought irresponsibly, foolishly, wickedly, having in mind not the welfare of humanity but the delight of leadership. To this temptation all leaders of thought--politicians, educators, investigators--are liable, but the writers most of all.

The proper function of the writer is rather to interpret than to lead the thought of his time. Seldom does a writer actually give the world a new idea. What he does is to give expression to an idea which has lain dormant in the mind of the people awaiting his revealing and quickening touch. There is a hope or a fear in the minds of men--it finds expression in deeds and simultaneously in words. The events in a nation's history and the intellectual and spiritual causes of those events are revealed to later generations by the poets and story-tellers. The historical development of nations is clear to the students of the world's literature. Take the American Civil War for an example--we find the soul of the North revealed in "Marching Through Georgia" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the soul of the South in "Dixie" and in "Maryland, My Maryland." No volumes of history give us a clearer understanding of the feelings of our fathers than do these poems. So also I believe that the awakening to a sense of the evil of the so-called Reformation, that awakening which is historically recorded by the events associated with the Oxford Movement, found literary expression in the poetry of Rossetti and Patmore and the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.