| I
was lately struck by the appearance which a volume of
Montaigne's Essays, which had been a wanderer from a
public library fro some time, presented when it came
into my hands through possibly hundreds of others. It
seemed to support a proposition that I have heard defended
many times and with much spirit, that these old books
lived by the uncleanliness which was in them, for as
I looked at the pages of the closed book there was a
discolored streak down the centre, and these pages had,
by reason of much thumbing, become loosened from the
back and had protruded themselves slightly in advance
of their fellows, as if petitioning to be read before
their betters or wholly to the exclusion of them. It
was a comment on a peculiarity of human nature that
these pages had been oftener used than any others in
the book, and they contained what Montaigne would perhaps
not be complete without, but what is a valueless portion
of this incomparable work. I was led to think that hundreds
of people had read these pages to their own destruction,
and had been led to the great essayist from no desire
to profit from his genuine spirit, by his animated sayings,
by his inexhaustible knowledge of human nature, but
by the very small portion of his work which deals with
baser things. Montaigne's work, as I have said before,
would be incomplete without the chapters which are pervaded
by a license which is inadmissible in our own day. They
enable us to see more clearly what manner of man Montaigne
was, and they throw a distinct light on the customs
of the age in which he lived; but they are not Montaigne
in the sense in which one uses the name when one thinks
of the force he can be in the modern world, and when
one associates it with those stores of wit and human
kindliness and rare wisdom which make him forever the
refuge of minds which can be touched and won by such
qualities. Anyone who reads the old authors out of pruriency,
for the delight of what is unclean in them, takes them
at a mean and disgraceful disadvantage. If they had
provided a table of obscenity and invited the world
to partake, theirs would have been the blame; but when
they load the board with all manner of wholesome food
it is an act of monstrous ill-breeding for a guest to
satiate his unnatural appetite with some special dish,
and not to refresh himself with the plain and vigorous
fare spread before him. We will always find men who
will match what is unclean in themselves with the uncleanliness
of the old authors, but these worthies are like eagles
who soar away from their befouled nests into their natural
element, the clean, universal air. Happy is the man
who can follow them, who can enjoy the depth of their
wisdom and the penetration of their wit, and who refuses
to be misled by the belief that they exist for, and
are perpetuated by, those portions of their works which
appeal to the baser qualities of human nature. The readers
who perused only the discolored pages of the Montaigne
to which I have referred had not communed with him at
all, they had left him without a shadow of an idea of
what a fine, companionable fellow he was, and will never
know until they discover for themselves those qualities
which made Emerson include him as one of the world's
representative men.
S.
Some
fortunate persons have been given the pleasure in recent
years of reading two remarkable poems called "The
Lost Island" and "Nestorius," printed
and bound in two very thin little books. The author
is Mr. E.T. Fletcher, a writer I believe, as a poet,
almost unknown to fame. These poems, written in stanzas
full of musical and imaginative power, the first printed
in 1888 and the second in 1892, treat of old-world subjects,
and are similar in tone and coloring. In both the writer
has succeeded admirably in enveloping his theme in that
brooding and mysterious splendor which associates itself
in our imaginations with the enormous memorials of far-off
antiquity.
"The
Lost Island" is a story of Atlantis. A pestilence
rages upon the island, and is removed by Sanadon, a
Marut, or lord of the winds, who put on human nature
in order that he may be united to the island queen,
Evanoe, whom he loves. Afterward, when the doom falls
upon Atlantis, he sacrifices himself for the safety
of the people, who escape in a fleet which he has taught
them to build. Evanoe and her two adopted children,
Eiridion and Thya, voluntarily share his fate. The description
of the journeys upon which Sanadon carries the two children
over the whole earth for the purposes of their education
affords Mr. Fletcher an opportunity for the exercise
of the Miltonic picturesqueness of his imagination:
Such
were the lessons which the Marut taught,
Lessons of pity and of hardihood.
Then rose the four from that green solitude
And floated westward over Hadramaut,
Region of death; and passed Canopus hoar,
Fresh as a vision of the morning then, and sought
The silence of the lonely western sea
Unknown and vast, with wild waves rolling free,
Beyond Pyrene and the sunset shore.
Through
the dim shadows of the moonlit night
What phantom comes? The winds have sunk to sleep,
There is no sound or motion on the deep;
Wrapt, as a bride, in veil of gauzy light,
What galley, slow and ghostlike, parts the foam
With laboring oars and shredded sails of white,
Battered with storms? "Behold," said Sanadon,
"Girt with his friends, Ulysses wanders on,
Adventurous, forgetful of his home!"
The
large-browed chieftains from Scamander's plain,
Sages and warriors, kings of oldest time,
Sitting as gods—Ulysses with the rime
Of years upon his beard—the sails—the vane—
Were seen a moment through the gloom; then passed
Beyond their ken, and all was night again.
In
the poem "Nestorius" a young Arab girl comes
to the aged and banished patriarch, as he broods by
the bank of the Nile, and devotes her life to him. The
two go forth into the desert, and after many days reach
an oasis which had once been the retiring place of the
Mizrite Pharaohs, and the last refuge of the worship
of the ancient deities. Nestorius exorcises and banishes
the spectres of the old religion forever. On their returning
journey his little companion starts from her sleep to
defend the old man from the threatened attack of a lion,
and, in consequence of the shock, she sickens and dies.
The return and death of Nestorius are recorded. The
poem is not very strong as to "motif," but
the descriptions of the desert, the oasis, the strange,
forsaken palaces, the ghostly throng within them, and
the vision of the ancient deities and their worshippers,
all lend themselves to that gift of high imagination
and sonorous and beautiful versification which Mr. Fletcher
certainly possesses. How rich this versification is
my readers may judge from the following stanzas:—
And
down the highway, like the ceaseless course
Of some majestic river, swept along
A multitude past numbering, a throng
Of strange-clad, many-nationed worshippers;
Priests in rich panther skins and robes of white,
Princes uraeus-crowned—and sceptred queens.
Brown Abyssinian girls, with tambourines,
Slaves, warriors in cohorts infinite,
Bejewelled Khita, and wild Hagarines.
Far
in the van, King Ramses Miamon,
The lord of victory, the eagle-eyed—
A tawny lion stalking by his side—
Stood in his car, and seemed to lea them on;
Still in his hand he held the mighty bow,
Which none but he might bend, of mortal men;
The quiver still he bore, whose arrowy rain
Showered death, like Amun's lightning, and laid low
The hosts of Syria on Khadesh plain.
It
will be a surprise to my readers—those of them
who do not know Mr. Fletcher personally—to know
that he is an old man, more than 70 years of age. He
was born an Englishman, came to this country when very
young, and was an architect and surveyor in the service
of the crown lands department at Quebec until his superannuation
some years ago. Since that time he has lived in British
Columbia, where one of his sons is post-office inspector.
Among his friends he is distinguished as an excellent
scholar and accomplished man.
It seems strange that amid the numerous company of verse-makers
whom our reviewers delight to honor with sounding paragraphs,
and whose work is, much of it, such very indifferent
stuff, a writer capable of "The Lost Island"
and "Nestorius" should have reached old age
almost unknown as a poet beyond a limited circle of
sympathetic friends. Let us do honor to such a poet,
who has maintained a reserve so fine and so unusual,
who has run so far counter to the clamorous custom of
his age as to live out a long life in the tranquil life
of books, wisdom and poetry, without caring whether
the public buy his photograph or the reviewers blow
all their penny whistles in his praise.
L.
The
New York Critic of Jan. 7 is an especially interesting
number and contains over half a dozen able reviews of
important timely books. A notice of Lowell's "Old
English Dramatists" heads the list. This collection
of essays, which has been edited since the author's
death by Prof. Elliot Norton of Harvard college, is
ranked by The Critic as even superior to that of Lamb
on the subject. The reviewer says:—"In these
lectures the American shows himself the more charming
idealist of the two, unlocking the chambers of poetry
with a golden key, and turning them into delightful
whispering galleries for the spirit." These essays,
outside of their perennial charm and value, are interesting
to us as an example of Lowell's personality in his latter
days, as shown in his work. The young Lowell was great
as an American, who was both a poet and a patriot. But
the man was fated to outlive the era and its dreams
for which he wrote and struggled. He lived to change
his mind, and with the death of his old enthusiasms
his foreign residence toned him down into a delightful
cosmopolitan man of letters. Though Lowell never ceased
as an American to live in the present, yet it was not
the fiery Lowell of 1843 who penned those delightful
essays.
The next review
is a long and appreciative one of the late Sir Daniel
Wilson's "The Lost Atlantis." The Critic says
with regard to this work, which ought to be of especial
interest to Canadians and graduates of Toronto university,
"The most striking quality of the essays which
make up this volume is what may be called their judicial
quality. They are the productions of a clear-sighted
and conscientious instructor." This review, I should
not doubt, has been contributed by a Canadian. The late
Sir Daniel Wilson has done much in his "Prehistoric
Man" and his later works for the study of ethnology.
But while he was a hard and close student and a man
of eminence, he was too conservative to be a genuine
discoverer in any field. Then he was too old a man to
come into touch with the growth of science during the
last two decades. As a classifier and as a collector
of knowledge he has done his part like many other able
and painstaking students. But when it comes to a large
sweep of the intellect, unclouded and unbiased for the
purpose of free comparison, a broader and more modern
type of mind is necessary. There are many men in the
world to-day whose minds are storehouses of knowledge
in detail, but who have never grasped the whole at a
quick sweep, so as to really own it for themselves or
others. This is one of the grave weaknesses of our modern
life; a man is regarded as an authority on a subject
merely because he has got a lot of technical knowledge
with regard to it. I do not say that the author of "Prehistoric
Man" was not a scholar of large calibre, or was
not a thinker. He was a thinker, but he thought within
certain limitations. I rather think that if Dr. Wilson
had been born thirty or forty years later he might have
done more for the advancement of science than he has
done.
Another interesting
review is on Sidney's "Social Life in England,
1660-1690." Such a work should be of the greatest
importance to all students of our own times. We are,
the most of us, too much inclined to live in a mist
of tradition as regards the past, and we have a foolish
idea that we are much advanced as social beings. After
all, when we come down to solid reality, this age is
just as sordid and brutal as any that has preceded it.
We fancy that all the misery of our time is relegated
to the Siberian mines and the poor of London. But if
we only want to look we will find enough at our own
doors. As for the immoralities, so-called, of Charles
II's reign, the less we say of them the better. Idle
wealth will produce such a condition in any age or country,
and the form of government or of religion does not matter
one iota. It is a well-known fact that there is as much
vice to-day in high-class society, so-called, of New
York, London or Paris as there was in the worst days
of the Roman empire. The revelations of Stead and others
in London alone are revolting in the extreme. Any man
who wants to get good reading and who can afford to
buy good books, should take The New York Critic for
a year, and buy the books, or a part of them, that are
reviewed in its columns, and if at the end of that time
he had not gained in knowledge of the thought and culture
of his own times, it would not be the fault of that
excellent paper.
C.
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