Mr. Mabie's Latest Book

URBANITY of manner, breadth of view, tolerance of temper, and a kindly, easy, genial attitude toward life, — these are the qualities ascribed to Irving in the latest book by Mr. Mabie. Fortunate is the man of letters who possesses them ; they account in part for the charm of Backgrounds of Literature,¹ but they also serve to explain the ungracious and perhaps illogical irritation with which some of Mr. Mabie’s readers will close the pages of his attractive volume.

There is no question of Mr. Mabie’s competency for commenting upon the natural and social surroundings which have affected the work of these seven well-known, although quite unrelated authors. He is a man of wide reading, of swift and sympathetic observation. A long row of popular books already bears witness to his facility of expression. In the present volume, the easiest task was to describe the Lorna Doone country, and the most difficult was to analyze the American spirit in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Both papers are extraordinarily well done. The constructive criticism of Whitman is quite as skillful in its complex workmanship as is the essentially slight but pleasing record of the obvious emotions of a sentimental tourist in the Doone valley. Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, Irving, and Emerson are the subjects of the other papers. That they are graceful and well-informed goes without saying. The better one knows Weimar and Edinburgh and Concord the better one realizes how admirable these essays are up to a certain point; but the greater also is one’s regret that Mr. Mabie so rarely chooses to go beyond the bounds which he has set for himself.

An author’s choice of company is of course his own affair ; as far as conscious election plays a part in it he may write for posterity or for “antiquity” as he prefers. Mr. Mabie early chose the modest and useful part of preaching the gospel of culture to the half-cultivated. He has talked long and well to the Christian Endeavorers of literature. He has earned the right of addressing himself more directly to the saints. No American writer of our day has done more “ good,” in the simple sense of that word ; but he has been gradually educating the more thoughtful portion of his large audience away from those mellifluous commonplaces in which he seems to think that the greatest good for the greatest number is still to be found. Many excellent missionaries have, through long and fluent preaching in a foreign tongue, forgotten how to use English. Danger lurks in Mr. Mabie’s hierophantic manner of chanting the eternal truths of literature. Those rich cadences may please the ear without leaving any trace upon the memory. His is not, in its characteristic features, a style that “ bites,” but rather one of smoothly woven periods, produced by words thrown deftly back and forth upon a welloiled shuttle, reversing automatically at every “but ” or “yet,” and then, as the arithmetics used to say, “ proceeding as before.”

Our quarrel, it will be perceived, is not with one of the most genial and gifted of our writers, but with that missionary spirit which keeps him so frequently in Macedonia when he ought to be preaching to the Athenians on Mars’ hill. No man reasons more persuasively concerning righteousness and temperance in letters, yet he might, we think, say more than he does about the judgment sure to come upon faulty theory and slovenly practice. Mr. Mabie uses every word in a critic’s vocabulary except that one indispensable word “ damn.” His public does not like this expression, and all publishers unite in thinking it very bad form. Mr. Mabie courteously refrains from its use. This is a pity, for we have few men who care more sincerely for excellence, and who might say with greater authority to our generation : —

If any proof of this were needed, it may be found in the essay on America in Whitman’s Poetry in the present volume. Here is discriminating criticism, expressed with vigor and precision. For penetration, steady grasp of a complicated matter, and luminous statement, it is the best critique of Whitman thus far written in England or America. B. P.