Welsh rabbit. Yet who would like to think that his mother's tenderness is not her own, but is "the inherited love of numberless millions of dead mothers," or that his own reaction to music is not so much due to his cultivated taste as to "some eddying immeasurable of ancient pleasure and pain."

More is consistent in his criticism, which is "not so much directed at the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies." More enters into the psychology of criticism, the success or failure of which depends, he says,on will. "Any one who looks deeply into his own heart must recognize there two distinct principles governing his life,—the will to act, and,— let us not say the will to renounce, for fear of misinterpretation,—but rather the will to refrain; and on the right understanding of these two faculties depends largely our insight into much that is best and much that is worst in literature." He then analyzes virility, decadence, and mysticism in terms of the predominance of one of these wills, a procedure which lends novelty and vigor to his criticism. A man of prestige, More can but exercise influence on the trend of American criticism. It is pleasant, then, to read in his preface to Aristocracy and Justice, "Peace and loveliness have not left the world; nor has honourable endeavour disappeared from among men, nor the obstinate hope of better things." One of the finest things in this book is in the essay "The Paradox of Oxford," wherein More laments the passing of the secular tradition of the classics, sources of "inexhaustible joy and consolation," and the modern substitu

tion of humanitarianism for "obedience to the will of God." "Humanitarianism, however it may be concerned with human destinies and however it may call upon our emotions, leaves out of account the deep thirst of the soul for the infinite wells of peace; it has forgotten.

'For thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted until it resteth in thee.'" The earnest thinker blessed with the virtue of humility can but see the inadequacy of things human to satisfy the human heart.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In this chapter only a few of the many who deserve consideration have been selected. Space is lacking to mention the work of Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, A. C. Benson, Augustine Birrell, Samuel McChord Crothers, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, R. C. Holliday, Andrew Lang, Richard Le Gallienne, Hamilton Wright Mabie, George Moore, A. A. Milne, Christopher Morley, Leslie Stephen, G. E. Woodberry, H. G. Wells, George Fitch, Burges Johnson, and William Butler Yeats. One of the finest anthologies of essays is that of William M. Tanner, under the title Essays and Essay-Writing, which is a collection of essays published anonymously in the "Contributors' Club" of the Atlantic Monthly. Within its pages the familiar essay is to be seen at its best. The introduction to the book is illuminating in that it defines and classifies ably the various kinds of familiar essays. Another anthology of note is that of Benjamin Heydrick under the title Types of the Essay. The anthology Modern Essays, by Christopher Morley, with its welldiscriminated selection among essayists, its prefatory essay, and its biographical notes is a real treasure to the lover of the contemporary essay. To the essayists named in the fore

going list he adds, and justly, such writers as John Macy, William Allen White, Rupert Brooke, Don Marquis, David W. Bone, William McFee, Joyce Kilmer, Joseph Conrad, A. P. Herbert, O. W. Firkins, William Osler, Harry Morgan Ayers, Thomas Burke, H. M. Tomlinson, Louise Imogen Guiney, Stewart Edward White, Marian Storm, George Santayana, Simeon Strunsky, Bertrand Russell, Philip Guedalla, Robert P. Utter, Logan P. Smith, James Branch Cabell, Harry Esty Dounce, and Heywood Broun. We can but conclude this chapter with some words from Morley's preface, which express the difficulty of selecting from material so abundant: "Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are burdensome. . . . It would be enjoyable (for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally sacrificed for one reason or another."

CHAPTER X

CONCLUSION

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.-OPHELIA

When you have spent a long spring day in the woods, where your every sense has been intoxicated by the riotous glory of the young life about you, and where your soul has learned the peace that abides in the shadow of strong old trees; and when at evening, your arms laden by a profusion of fragile wild flowers and your heart tremulous with the stir of newborn hopes a-wing, you come back to the workaday world, what is there to say? And if, as in the fairy, inconsistent changefulness of dreams, the woods be but a symbol of the cool and mystic depths, of the sun-flecked glades, of the life-giving streams in the realm of literature, and the fragile wild flowers be the blossoms of thought that have had their roots in the hearts of men, then, indeed, what is there to say? Perhaps it were best, now that we have come back from this realm into the garish world, simply to scatter, in their beauty, our blossoms upon the floor of the storehouse of memory and there let them live if they can. Or perhaps we should study them first that we may discover all their beauties, and that by some kindly fate one or two at least of them may take root again in our hearts. In this busy world

of ours the tragedy of books which are forgotten, of books which are never read, is so little recked of. Poets have hymned the pathos of the violet hid beneath a mossy stone, of the desert rose that wastes its beauty unseen by human eye, of the unset gem that shall never lie on the breast of a woman, of the bird which from the top of a tree spills its song upon lonely places, but who shall express the tragedy of a soul's message to an unheeding world, the tragedy of the essay that has no reader? In this heart-hungry world of ours should there not be one lover for every essay?

And what is this essay that is seeking a lover? It is a seashell from the sands of time which shall forever murmur a secret hidden in the ocean of life; it is a beacon light to guide our faltering feet adown the dark and mysterious pathways of the past; it is an urn fragrant with the sweets of all dead summers; it is a voice through which the myriad inaudible whisperings of nature find speech; it is a song of love for man which shall outlive a thousand lovers; it is as the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings were a lute whereon who would might play; it is, being literary art, the one earthly immortality, the one abiding-place which the soul may keep when it has abandoned all things else for Paradise. Love of the beautiful in nature, in man, and in God is the secret of all art; above all, it is the secret of literary art, which is beauty-loving, unchanging humanity's one speech in common. Art is the child that is born of man's love for the beautiful, immortal child of a mortal father, child born in secret because the beautiful ever yields herself with reluctance to a mere creature of