Imah. It. Lib.

$19-1923

INTRODUCTION.

I HAVE occasionally amused my fancy by feigning the existence of a future state for books—a whole phantasmal world inhabited by the ghosts of dead and gone epics, dramas, romances, and where all the characters of fiction glide murmuring by, veritable shadows of shades. Over the portico would be inscribed "Habent sua fata libelli ;" and the three kingdoms would all be thronged. In the infernal regions proper, we should look to find Heine and Swift and all the swarm of gross and profane writers, and with them whatever in literature is trite or dull or insincere, for in art these are among the cardinal sins. That which is not good in literature is bad; there is no mean or borderland. Neither gods nor men nor birds of the air can endure an indifferent bard. Yet better a quavering note than a false one; and for your dissembling poet the deepest dungeons are in store. Many a sonnet that in its day was greatly praised, resembling with its mincing gait and affected phrase some fine coquette, now lies "quite chapfallen," spite of all its airs and graces and "paint an inch thick." For a lie is in its nature mortal and vulnerable; your glass and plaster will sooner or later crack and crumble, how bravely soever they flaunt it in robes of silver or bronze; that which a man but half feels, but half believes, is forever at war with itself, and will die self-slain. False taste of a certain sort we call meretricious; the phrase implies a harsh censure, but a just one. A fair and honest thought will never be over-dressed. A noble conception, a fine fancy, however it may suffer in effectiveness or grace when clothed in other language, will still retain some power to thrill or charm, for beauty is unchangeable in its essence; but how woefully the poverty of many a pompous phrase is exposed by stripping it of its rhetoric! "One that wraps the drapery of his couch about him does but tuck himself up in his bed-clothes; and if the latter is not a striking or poetical image, then neither is the former. But take such an image as this:

"I lose it, as we lose the lark in heaven,

O damsel, in the light of your blue eyes,"

and try to degrade it by substituting any equivalent phrase, and you will have your labor for your pains.

There are literary sins, nowever, which are of a more venial type than affectation or tediousness, and for such offences we should expect to find a purgatory prepared. Here might suffer and repent, not without hope, such works as were crude or flawed or ill-regulated; the monuments of misdirected energy, novels with

a mission, philo-Baconian Shakespeare commentaries, anu such-like towers of Babel, would fitly be consigned to purgatory. Here, too, would be found all merely imitative literature; not in the lowest depth, for imitation demands a certain sincerity, a certain appreciation of the thing imitated; ay, and sometimes there is a grace in the mimicry that goes far to excuse it. But unless the writer puts something of himself into his work-something good and admirable—your copyist is but an echo, and must share the fate of that disembodied nymph. Purgatory should be a populous place, recruited as it is from so large a class. How much of our early American literature has vanished thither! Well-meaning books, many of them; ay, and useful too, in their own day and among their own audience, for not a few of us prefer good to best, mock turtle to real. "All claret would be port if it could," said Dr. Johnson; and for my part I find it hard to blame an unrealized aspiration. There is respectable society in purgatory, and the book that arrives there might easily have gone further and fared worse. Many an early work of a great writer has its home there, and plumes itself, no doubt, on its relationship to the nobility. Parodies and burlesques are sins against the light, and must be sought in a lower sphere.

Needless to pursue the fancy further; the Elysian Fields of literature are familiar ground. Indeed, it scarcely seems a metaphor to speak of the soul of a noble book, so marked and characteristic is the impression which it leaves. Some books are like lovely ladies or charming children some like gallant knights, pious priests, lovers, gipsies. There are poems which resemble an exquisite violin-solo, a porcelain vase, a cup of ivory curiously carved; others are like a trumpet call, a cataract, a tempest; others are akin to the mountain, the forest, the starlit skies. "Hamlet" is like the wailing of the winter wind; "As You Like It" is a mountain brook; "Kubla Khan" is a frost-picture on a window-pane; "Childe Harold" 18 a ruin tinged with moonlight; "In Memoriam" a rainbow. Your song or story may be a cigarette, or a butterfly, or a peach, or a game of chess; jasmine, violets, a nightingale, a kiss; a splendid robe, a flying carpet, a spyglass, an altar; strong wine, sweet milk, pure water, salt air. And then the characters of drama and fiction, the heroes of ballad and epic, what a goodly host they make, and what a wonderful world they inhabit! Though for the matter of that, had we but eyes to see, this actual world of ours is far more strange and fair than any the poets feign, howsoever the "light that never was on sea or land" may illumine it. But it is Art's mission to teach us to see and hear and feel; to find the immortal hidden in the mortal. And hence it is that our friends in fiction are better known to us, almost more real to us, than our own kinsmen and companions. We believe in Colonel Newcome, although we never knew his like; we recognize Rosalind at a glance; Falstaff and Iago, Margaret and Becky Sharp, Pecksniff and Uncle Toby, how vividly we remember them all! And here let the Comic Muse claim her rightful place. If beauty is immortal, then wit is equally so. If, as the familiar verse of Keats affirms, the persistence of its power to please is the test of beauty, the same thing is true of wit. Your quibbles and far-fetched pleasantries, indeed, soon pall on the palate,

and a stale joke is even flatter than a stale moral. But a genuine piece of sound. humor outlasts the ages, braving translator and commentator alike. Old Aristophanes can tickle us yet; Dogberry's charge to the watch and M. Jourdain's delight in his native talent for prose are a joy forever. If Shakespeare's allusions were modernized for the reader, as would be done with a foreign classical author, we should earn many a laugh that our ignorance makes us lose. And indeed a sweet laugh is pure music, pleasant alike to laugher and listener. Critics might come to prescribe the canons of wit and formulate its principles; nay, jests might be constructed by line and level;" observing the approved intervals and modulations, the laws of consonance and dissonance, as correctly as your mathematician's music. But it would be a sorry task to dissect a joke as though it were a syllogism, to weigh Puck in the scales and brush the bloom off Punchinello's grapes. We want to laugh, not to see the working of the showman's wires; and after all it takes genius to create, no less in the realm of Humor than elsewhere. All hail then to "Jest and Youthful Jollity," whom even the singer of "Paradise Lost" was fain to invoke.

The fancy upon which I played awhile ago ought not to be deemed in any wise irreverent. For if the best books are those which make the best men, how high a calling is that of the writer! How heinous an offender is he who dishonors his gift! The feeling of an honest literary craftsman in regard to his work is akin to that of the old monkish transcribers over their illuminated missals; we spare not ourselves, for the work is worthy. Let it be pardoned me, then, if I return for a moment to my original thought. Anthologies and compilations, such as the present volume, somewhat resemble my fabled Paradise of Books. There are the Dii Majorum Gentium, the high-caste gods of literature, "aloft in awful state;" then come the lesser deities, and then the nymphs and fauns and translated heroes. Or let us rather liken it to a gathering of old friends, a Christmas company assembled under one roof a company where none is dull, or trite, or profane; where every one earns his welcome, and stories new and old go round with the wine. So be it then · and Prosit!

EDWARD J. HARDING.