1. Apply Bagehot's criticism of the effects of a democratic average to the fate of Socrates, Jesus, Columbus, Galileo, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln. Do your results justify Bagehot's statements? 2. If Bagehot's theory is true, how do you account for any advance in a democracy, for woman suffrage, for example, or the election of senators by popular vote, or the inaugurating of an income tax? 3. Apply his remarks about literary men to the career of Thomas Carlyle, Heine, Galsworthy, and others who have criticized their times. 4. Does the Christian religion tend to make a man act on his own original ideas? XVII. Do you believe the following statement by a well-known musical critic? If the statement is true, how far is it possible to extend it, to how many forms of art or business? While the lover of music may often be in doubt as to the merit of a composition, he need never be so in regard to that of a performance. Here we stand on safe and sure ground, for the qualities that make excellence in performance are all well known, and it is necessary only that the ear shall be able to detect them. There may, of course, be some difference of opinion about the reading of a sonata or the interpretation of a symphony; but even these differences should be rare. Differences of judgment about the technical qualities of a musical performance should never exist. Whether a person plays the piano or sings well or ill is not a question of opinion, but of fact. The critic who is acquainted with the technics of the art can pronounce judgment upon a performance with absolute certainty, and there is no reason in the world why every lover of music should not do the same thing. There should not be any room for such talk as this: "I think Mrs. Blank sang very well, did n't you?" "Well, I did n't like it much." And there should be no room for the indiscriminate applause of bad performances which so often grieve the hearts of judicious listeners. Bad orchestral playing, bad piano playing, bad singing are applauded every day in the course of the musical season by people who think they have a right to an opinion. I repeat that it is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact; and a person might just as well express the belief that a short fat man was finely proportioned as to say that an ill-balanced orchestra was a good one, and he might as well say that in his opinion a fireengine whistle was music as to say that a throaty voice-production was good singing.1 I W. H. Henderson: What is Good Music? By courtesy of the publishers, Charles Scrib. mer's Sons, New York City. Copyright, 1898. G CHAPTER VII THE INFORMAL ESSAY It is a fine thing to be serious, to draw one's self up to a formal task of explaining a machine or analyzing an idea or criticizing a novel; and it is just as fine, and often more pleasurable, to banish the grim seriousness of business and take on pliancy, smile at Life-even though there be tears and chuckle at Care. Life is more than mere toil; there are the days of high feast and carnival, the days of excursion, and then the calm quiet days of peaceful meditation, sometimes even the days of gray sadness shot through with the crimson thread of sacrifice and sorrow. Often in the least noisy days we see most clearly, with most balance, and with the keenest humor, the finest courage. Like an athlete who cannot be forever in the life of stern rigor but must stray at times into the ways of the drawing-room and the library, so we at times take our ways into the realm of whim and sparkle and laughter, of brooding contemplation, of warm peace of soul. "I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters," says Hazlitt, and, "Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner and then to thinking!" In such moods we look for a good friend to talk with, and when the friend is not at hand why, we may write informal essays to make record of our thoughts and feelings. For the Informal Essay is the transcript of a personal reaction to some phase or fact of life, personal because the author does not regard life with the cold eye of the scientific thinker, and because he does not, on the other hand, insist, as does the reformer, that others than himself accept the views he sets forth. He will not force his belief upon others, will not even hold it too feverishly himself, but, if we cannot accept, will even smile urbanely though he may think we are quite wrongand bow, and go his own way. The greatest charm of the informal essay is its personal nature. There is little, if indeed anything, personal about the analysis of problems or situations, slight revelation of the author in a treatise on dietetics or party politics or bridge building. This kind of writing is essentially the writing of our business. "But what need of ceremony among friends?" Lamb asks, and hits the heart of the informal essay. We are with friends, and with them, if the mood is on us, we chat about the delights of munching apples on snappy October mornings, or the humor of the scramble for public office, or the romance of spanning a stream in the hills, or, at times, the mysteries of life and death. And then the chat is thoroughly personal, we feel no grim duty, but only the quiet pleasure of uttering whatever we may think or feel, about things in which we find our personal interests aroused. It is as the counterpart in literature of such talk in living that the informal essay reveals the personal note, is really the lyric of prose. For the informal essay does not affirm, "This must be done!" or, "I will defend this with my life!" or, "This is undeniable truth!" Rather it says, "This is how I feel about things to-day," and if the essayist be aware that he has not always felt thus, that he may even feel differently again, he is unabashed. He will make you his confidant, will tell you what he thinks and how he feels, will banish the cold front of business, and will not be secretive and niggardly of himself, but only duly reticent. 66 As soon as we turn to informal essays we find this personal note. Here is Cowley's essay "Of Myself," frankly telling of his life. Our eye falls upon Hazlitt's words, "I never was in a better place or humor than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my sup per, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good before me, and therefore I will attempt it." Such intimacy, such personal contact is to be found only in the informal essay. Only in a form of writing that we frankly acknowledge as familiar would Samuel Johnson write "The Scholar's Complaint of His Own Bashfulness." And once in the writing, the author cannot keep himself out. Steele, not Addison, wrote the words, "He is said to be the first that made Love by squeezing the Hand"— honest, jovial, garrulous Dick Steele, thinking, perhaps, of his "Darling Prue." If, then, you have some random ideas that interest you, if the memory of your kite-flying days comes strong upon you, or of your early ambitions to be a sailor or a prima donna, if you can see the humor of rushing for trains or eluding taxes, or reciting without study, if you feel keenly the joy of climbing mountains, or canoeing, or gardening, or fussing with engines, or making things with hammer and nails or flour and sugar, if you see the beauty in powerful machinery or in the deep woods and streams and flowers, or the patient heroism modest heroism of the men in "Information" booths at railway stations, if you find pathos in the world, or humor, or any personal significance, and are able to understand without being oppressed with seriousness or poignant reality, even of humor, if you remember or see or feel such things, and wish to talk quite openly about them as they appeal to you, write an informal essay. Now you can write a personal essay that will be enjoyable only if your personality is attractive. And you cannot draw a reader to you unless you have a keen reaction to the facts of life. Writing informal essays is impossible for the man whose life is neutral, who goes unseeing, unhearing through the world; it is most natural to the man who touches life at many points and touches with pleasure. Those magic initials, R. L. S., which the world, especially the young world, loves, mean to us a personality that reveled in playing with lead soldiers, in hacking a way through the tropical forests of Samoa, in pursuing streams to their sources, in cleaning "crystal," in talking with all living men, in reading all living books, in whiling the hours with his flageolet. "I have," says Lamb, "an almost feminine partiality for old china." We think, perhaps, of Bacon as a cold austere figure, until we know him, but is he cold when, writing of wild thyme and water mints he says, "Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread" of sniffing their sweet fragrance? And is a man uninterested who writes, "I grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey; and that is what one shall have for supper when we get to our inn at night"? When we consider the loves of that bright flower of English young manhood, Rupert Brooke, we can the more keenly feel the loss that the essay, as well as poetry, had in his untimely death. These have I loved: White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faëry dust; And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, |