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The reception given by the Authors' Club to Mr. Stedman on December 6th was designed to celebrate the completion of the "American Anthology," the fourth volume in the series of critical works to which the author has devoted so much time and work. The occasion was marked by the presence of many men distinguished in literature, and the eulogies spoken by Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard, Dr. Moncure D. Conway and Mr. William Winter were excellent examples of what such speeches ought to be; Mr. Stedman's own remarks were as pleasant to listen to as his conversation always is. Referring to a rumor that he proposed to stop writing, he smilingly denied the charge, and said:

"And, indeed, which of us is too old, what one too young, not to feel in his heart of hearts that, although health and wealth and even hope may come and go, though the eyes dim or the hand be stricken, though friends may fail and love be a memory-more, though even that reputation, dear and fickle jade, after which we all at times have striven (because, as Landor confesses, there is a something of summer even in the hum of insects), though even that be not his help in time of trouble -which of us toilers of the pen, if born with the art to write, does not know that it is at the last analysis his love, his wealth, his religion, his solace, and that to it he must return, for better or worse, again and again, so long as breath is in him. So it is with all the arts, with every craft, that come to man, as Dogberry said, by Nature. Yet among them all I, for one, know none other more sufficient and compensating to its votaries-nor is it in their own volition to cease from its pursuit."

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Poems written for the occasion were read by James Whitcomb Riley, "John Paul," and Stephen Thayer, and Mr. William Winter closed his address with the following lines:

"Comrade and friend, what tribute shall I render? Roses and lilies bloom no more for me, And naught remains of Fancy's squandered splendor

Save marish flowers that fringe the sombre

sea.

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THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT

HEN Mr. Barrie speculates as to why Grizel always loved Tommy, Grizel, who saw through him so well, and who demanded so much of men, he remembers the look that was wont to come into her face when she bent over a little child. And he sums up Tommy's whole character for us when he says, "I see that all that was wrong with him was that he could not always be a boy."

are.

From morning to night the child lives in a world of illusions. His whole life consists in playing that people and things are not what they are. The pleasure of the game does not consist even in playing that they are better and grander than they It is sufficient that they be different from what they are. "Have a different name from your real name," said a child of three," because it isn't any fun to have the same name that you really have." Because this world of illusion may be entered without money and without price, the children of the hovel are as happy as the children of the palace.

In this realm of the imagination the artist lives to the close of his life. We all of us, when we are children, dream of Thrums. But comparatively few of us, even as children, can put our dreams into words. And after awhile we cease even to dream. The artist is the child who becomes more and more of a child as the years go on, with more and more power to make the rest of us children. Dreaming more vividly every year, he gains more and more power to express his dreams. More and more is he able to carry us back to the days when we dreamed ourselves.

To this grown-up child, too, it is not necessary that things be better and grander than they are, in order that they be interesting. The one essential to him, too, is that they be different. "This is my birth

day," writes Sonya Kovalevsky, "and I am thirty-one years old." In a foot-note her biographer says: "It was not her birthday, and that was not her age." The youthful Shelley was in the habit of writing letters to people under assumed names. The young Goethe loved to go about the country incognito, and this, too, before he attained a reputation, which might subject him to inconvenience in traveling. There was no object in it. It was simply that he might be something that he was not; that he might continue the game which he had begun as a child.

To the perfect actor the play is much more real than the reality. "I am sorry that you felt so badly," said the little girl to the big brother, who, by an oratorical effort, had moved some of his auditors to tears. "I didn't feel badly," was the indignant reply. "I only wanted to make other people feel badly." That boy was not a perfect artist. The perfect artist feels badly himself, or thinks that he does. Indeed, perhaps the only criterion by which the supreme artist can distinguish between the world of his imagination and the world of sense, is in the fact that the former is more real to him than the latter. Wordsworth had, at times, to convince himself of the existence of the external world, by clasping a tree or anything else that happened to be near him. Shelley had a period in which he doubted the existence of the You.

But it is not only the existence of the You that is doubtful. The existence of the I is even more dubious. There is not one of the various selves that the child or the artist imagines himself to be, that is not more real than the self that appears to the world. "There is a deal of Hartleys," said the five-year old Hartley Coleridge: "there is Picture Hartley, and

Shadow Hartley, and there's Echo Hartley, and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley." And there is a "deal" of persons in every child. The difference is that the deal of Hartleys and of Tommies are persistent. Character-formation is a narrowing as well as a deepening process. We all of us probably have, at the beginning, the material for more than one person. Training, environment, the force of our own will, determine which one of the numerous persons that are born in us shall prevail. That one gradually destroys the others, and strengthens himself. Experience, we say, is broadening. Perhaps it would be just as correct to say that it is narrowing. For to have experienced one thing very deeply-so deeply that it has become part and parcel of the being a motive-force in the life shuts out the possibility of experiencing certain other things.

The true Tommy refuses to experience anything in such a way as to exclude the possibility of any other experience. He lives "with the world's life," not so much because he has "renounced his own," as because he has no life of his own to renounce. With abounding child-life, he has no grown-up life, in order that he may be free to live in turn the grown-up lives of everyone of the rest of us. And be cause he lives not one life but many, he understands the lives of everyone of us better than we understand them ourselves. He understands the individual life, because he understands life itself. We say that it is through experience that we come to know life. But experience often closes the eyes to the deeper meanings of life.

Not that the man of artistic temperament does not feel. On the contrary he feels much more violently than other men do, just as the child feels more violently than the man. There is no joy equal to the violent joy of the child. Nor is there

any despair equal to the despair of the imaginative child. For the child who is very much a child, self-control, in either joy or sorrow, is almost or quite an impossibility. The man knows that nothing is important enough to lose himself over. But if the child's feeling is more violent than the man's, it is less intense and less lasting.

The greater violence and the shorter duration of the child's emotion spring from the same cause. He is violent because, for the time being, he gives himself wholly to one feeling. There is no other to interfere with, or modify it. But the emotion does not last, because just as soon as another emotion arises, it takes complete possession, even as the former did. In the child's case, the former disappears. In the case of the artist, pure and simple, it remains to be enshrined as a work of art. In a sense he continues to feel it always, but it is no longer the original feeling that predominates. It is rather the feeling that he has felt. In the artist's case, as in the child's, this often gets the better of the real feeling, even while the real feeling lasts. I have sometimes wondered whether it was altogether because of the inadequacy of language, that Tennyson "sometimes held it half a sin, to put in words the grief he felt." Did not the sin lie partly in the fact that in clothing grief in beautiful words, admiration for the sorrow became stronger than the sorrow itself? Yet to be very conscious that one is feeling-even to get so far as not to be able to distinguish between the real feeling and the consciousness of it-does not exclude real feeling.

Joy and Sorrow in the abstract impress the child, and the child-man more than joy and sorrow in the concrete. The thought of Death in the abstract is uplifting and ennobling-something to be dwelt upon. Death, in the concrete, is something to be banished from the mind. A four-year-old girl, who had heard of a

mother who had lost her child, said to her own mother, "Does she ever laugh now?" Being told that she did, she said in a shocked voice: "Mother! how can she?" Yet if the dead child had been in her own house, there is no doubt that she would have been interested in her play long before the funeral. The impression which the abstract makes upon the mind is, at the same time deeper and less deep than that made by the concrete. It is more awe-inspiring, but less life-determining.

The loves of the poets have generally been numerous. Why is it that they who enshrine love for us, are themselves such inconstant lovers? Is it because lovemaking is for them just the most delightful of all plays? Like all the other plays, it is very real while it lasts. And it is as far removed from intentional cruelty as any play could possibly be. If only everyone had understood with Corp that Tommy's love-making was "just another o' his ploys," no harm would have been done by it. With marriage the play ends. The realities of life, from which the artist shrinks, crowd upon him as never before. It becomes less and less possible to live so exclusively in the spirit. When Levine in "Anna Karenina" looked forward to the bliss of married life, he did not take into consideration the fact that his wife must work. The realization of this was, for a time, a considerable drawback to his happiness.

The progress of the lover in Plato's Symposium is from the concrete to the abstract. From love of the beautiful in his beloved, he passes onward to the love. of Beauty Absolute. But the progress of the artist-lover is from the abstract to the concrete. He loves his mistress because he thinks he sees in her the concrete form in which the Absolute Beauty, whose he is, and whom he serves, embodies itself. Emerson would say, it is not the beloved one whom he loves, but her radiance. Com

As

ing too close to her, the radiance is dispelled.

For such a nature an unrequited love is more lasting than love requited. So long as there is any hope, the game continues. And there is more pleasure in struggle than in possession. "Man loves to conquer," says Goethe; "likes not to feel secure." When all hope is gone, the pleasures of melancholy remain. And for the head of the beloved there is an immortal halo. The pain of disenchantment can never come to the lover. Beatrice, the mistress of Dante's home, would probably have become prosaic, tiresome, even irritating. Beatrice, the unattained and unattainable, was to the poet, life below and star above.

The child does not originate his games. They are all suggested to him. He merely adopts and elaborates. He plays that he is some one whom he knows-some one of whom he has heard. So with Tommy. He did not originate Mildred. She was suggested to him. He did not originate his sprained ankle. That, too, was a suggestion. He did not even originate his own nobility of character. When the child, Tommy, spent a shilling for a picture for his mother, it was that he might give her pleasure. It was after she praised his nobility that he discovered that "there ain't many as noble as I is." The man, Tommy, who had rescued the boy from drowning, "lay on his face shivering, not from cold, not from shock, but in a horror of himself. It was not water that he tried to shake fiercely from him when he rose; it was the monstrous part of him that had done this deed." It was when Grizel admired his heroism and his modesty, that he again admired himself. As it was easy to make him believe himself noble, so, too, it was easy to make him believe himself base. He was always ill at ease and selfdistrustful with people who did not ad

mire him.

Originality, we are accustomed to say, is the mark of genius. But perhaps it would be as true to say that the man of genius is the least original of all men. He is the impressionable man-the man whose soul lies open to all impressions, as the child's soul does-the man who can combine these impressions, and then impress them back upon those who have impressed them upon him. He is but the medium through whom all men find utterance, voiceless men as well as those with voices.

Where it is so difficult to distinguish between the internal and the external world, where personal identity even is so uncertain, it is not possible that the line between Truth and Falsehood should be sharply drawn. There is no deliberate deception. It is the artist himself who is deceived. "One lies more to one's self than to anyone else," Byron wrote in his diary. And that is what makes the case almost hopeless. For the lying to one's self is unconscious. Conscious lying may be corrected. But how correct unconscious lying? "I don't know what my Heavenly Father is going to do about me," said the four-year-old, who had been reproved for what his parents considered too active an imagination. "I tell so many stories, I suppose my Heavenly Father will have to put a stop to it somehow. But I don't see how He is going to begin." Yes, that is the trouble. How put a stop to Tommy's story-telling, without clipping his wings? And is it possible to clip his wings, even if it be desirable?

In the world of illusions in which the child lives, he is himself the central figure. For him, and by him, this world has been created. He has indeed created it for his own glory. And that part of the external world which he knows exists almost as much for him, as does his own internal world. For him his father earns money; for him his mother toils. God, he is told, has made the world so beauti

ful, in order that he may be happy. Thus every child is an egotist.

The discipline of life takes the egotism of childhood out of many men, but rarely out of the artist. For while other men succeed largely in proportion to their ability to repress themselves, the artist succeeds in proportion to his ability to express himself. "Obliterate yourself," was Pym's advice to Tommy. But the artist who really obliterated himself would be an absolute failure. For the artist has nothing to give the world but himself, and succeeds just in proportion as he is able to give himself. It is the writer who brings his reader into closest contact with himself who writes for all time. To do this, it is necessary not exactly that he think about himself, but that he completely identify himself with the objects. of thought. Scherer says of Byron, "He has treated hardly any subject but onehimself"-while Scott maintains of the same poet that "he has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones." Are not both statements true, and true not only of Byron, but of every writer who can be called great? For the great writer is he who understands and writes of every topic of human life, every passion of the human heart, and at the same time imparts his own personality to all that he writes.

To the making of an artist, both society and solitude are necessary - society in which to observe the lives of others, solitude in which to discover the motivepower of those lives. To do the latter it is necessary to put oneself in everybody else's place, and then to commune with one's own heart.

The proportion in which Society and Solitude should mingle vary with the nature of the genius. To Shakespeare, one fancies that society was more necessary

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