The Copeland Reader

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the use of the copyrighted material in The Copeland Reader, all rights in which are reserved by the holders of the copyrights, permission has been obtained from the following publishers and authors:

Boni & Liveright, Inc.: "And in the Hanging Gardens" from "Priapus and the Pool" by Conrad Aiken; “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" from "In the Midst of Life" and "The Damned Thing" from "Can Such Things Be?" by Ambrose Bierce. Copyright 1918, 1925, by Boni & Liveright, Inc. Dodd, Mead & Company: "The Great Lover" and "The Soldier" from "Poems" by Rupert Brooke; "Ethandune: The Last Charge" from "The Ballad of the White Horse" by Gilbert Keith Chesterton; "The Roman Road" and "The Burglars" from "The Golden Age" by Kenneth Grahame; "Madeline of the Movies" from "Further Foolishness" and "My Financial Career" from "Literary Lapses" by Stephen Leacock; "Wordsworth's Grave" from "Poems" by William Watson. Copyright 1892, 1893, 1911, 1916, by Dodd, Mead & Company. Doubleday Page & Company: "Youth" by Joseph Conrad; "A Municipal Record" from "Strictly Business," "Calloway's Code" from "Whirligigs," "The Gift of the Magi" and "Memoirs of a Yellow Dog" from "The Four Million," "Roads of Destiny," and "Thimble, Thimble" from "Options," by O. Henry; "The Bell Buoy," "Chant-Pagan," "The 'Eathen," "The Last Chantey," "Mandalay" and "The Truce of the Bear" from "Rudyard Kipling's Verse, Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918" by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 1903, 1906, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1926, by Doubleday Page & Company.

Harcourt, Brace & Company: "The Fifty-First Dragon" from "Seeing Things at Night" by Heywood Broun; "Into Battle" by Julian Grenfel, from "Some Soldier Poets" collected by Sturge Moore. Copyright 1920, 1921 by Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Harper & Brothers: "Wanted: an Income Taximeter" by Harper's Magazine, by Frederick Lewis Allen; Chapter I from "The Mayor of Casterbridge," and "The Darkling Thrush" from "Poems," by Thomas Hardy; "The Philosophy of Ceilings" from Harper's Magazine, by David Watson McCord; "A Daring Deed" and "A Pilot's Needs" from "Life on the Mississippi," "The Yankee's Fight with the Knights" from "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," by Mark Twain; "A Village Singer," "A Kitchen Colonel" and "The Revolt of 'Mother'," from "A New England Nun and Other Stories" by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Copyright 1883, 1886, 1889, 1920, 1926 by Harper & Brothers. Henry Holt & Company: "Christmas Afternoon" from "Of All things" by Robert Charles Benchley; "After Apple-Picking," "The Runaway" and "The WoodPile" from "North of Boston" by Robert Frost; "The Listeners," "The Sleeper" and "Winter Dusk" from "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare. Copyright 1915, 1916, 1921 by Henry Holt & Company.

Houghton Mifflin Company: "Sargent's Portrait of Edwin Booth at "The Players' " and "An Ode on the Unveiling of the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common" from "Poems" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich; "The Army of France" from "Zut and

Other Parisians" by Guy Wetmore Carryl; "Miggles," "Tennessee's Partner," "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" from "The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales" by Francis Bret Harte; "My Last Walk with the Schoolmistress" from "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," and "The Broomstick Train," "The Chambered Nautilus," and "The Last Leaf," from "Poetical Works" by Oliver Wendell Holmes; "The Town Poor" and "A Winter Courtship" by Sara Orne Jewett; "The High Woods" from "Admiral's Light" by Henry Milner Rideout. Copyright 1870, 1885, 1903, 1907, 1925 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: "The Burial in England" and "Gates of Damascus" from "Poems" by James Elroy Flecker.

Little, Brown & Company: "Harvard College in the War" from "Speeches" by Oliver Wendell Holmes II; "The Known Soldier," "The Sailor-Man" and "Spring on the Land" from "The Known Soldier" by Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe. Copyright 1913 by Little, Brown & Company.

The Macmillan Company: "An Old Woman of the Roads" from "Wild Earth" by Padraic Colum; "Devil's Edge," "Flannan Isle" and "The Hare" from "Poems" by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson; "Eve" and "Time, you Old Gipsy Man" from "Poems" by Ralph Hodgson; "The Western Islands" from "A Mainsail Haul," "Cargoes" and "O little self, within whose smallness lies" from "Collected Poems," by John Masefield; "Old King Cole" from "Poems" by Edwin Arlington Robinson; "The Snare" from "Poems" by James Stephens; "Immortality" from "The Seven Ages of Washington" and "Lee's Surrender" from "Ulysses S. Grant" by Owen Wister; "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from "Poems" and a part of the play: "Cathleen ni Hoolihan" by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1900, 1905, 1907, 1913, 1916, 1917, 1921, 1922, by The Macmillan Company. The Modern Library, Inc.: Chapter I from "American Literature" by John Macy. Copyright 1918 by The Modern Library, Inc.

The Neale Publishing Company: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" from "In the Midst of Life" and "The Damned Thing" from "Can Such Things Be?" by Ambrose Bierce. Copyright 1909 by The Neale Publishing Company. G. P. Putnam's Sons: "Bernhardt" from "Enchanted Aisles" by Alexander Woollcott. Copyright 1924 by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Small, Maynard & Company: "Mr. Booth off the Stage" from "Edwin Booth" by Charles Townsend Copeland; "On New Years' Resolutions," and "Rudyard Kipling" from "Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Countrymen" by Finley Peter Dunne. Copyright 1899, 1901 by Small, Maynard & Company.

William Stanley Braithwaite: "Sandy Star" and "Twenty Stars to Match His Face."

Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe: "The Known Soldier," "The Sailor-Man" and "Spring on the Land" from "The Known Soldier."

Rudyard Kipling: "The Bell Buoy," "Chant-Pagan," "The 'Eathen," "The Last Chantey," "Mandalay" and "The Truce of the Bear" from "Rudyard Kipling's Verse, Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918." Copyright 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919 by Rudyard Kipling.

Gretchen Warren: "The Garden."

INTRODUCTION

The title of this anthology to a great degree expresses its composition and purpose. Wide as is its range, the selection includes only what I have read aloud during thirty-four years of teaching, lecturing, and reading.

Many of the pieces I have used with classes and audiences in Harvard University and Radcliffe College, many in excursions to other colleges and to schools, many with a surprising variety of clubs and societies,— chief among them the Harvard Club of New York, which for twentyone years has made me thrice welcome and thrice grateful. I remember with particular pleasure two visits, professional and social, to Bowdoin College, the best college in my own state, one of the few best in all the states. My own bright and beautiful town, flouting the proverb, has often encouraged native talent to do its best. As for Christmas Eve, it won't seem like itself if Mrs. Lowell stops allowing me to bring my book, to add a bit to genial, truly hospitable parties. Each year these parties, for a "two hours traffic," make crowds of young men forget that they are away from home and kin.

As to many good schools, as to groups, coteries, the patient family circle, and single victims, all these must wait for their places in a big book of recollections and opinions, promised and some day to be written.

I shall soon take a year off, and after a rest, and with more leisure, I know I shall have the wish and I think I shall have the energy to write reminiscences. Let me set down here one memory of a single victim,exquisite poet, renowned wit, and best of all talkers. I had been reading to him certain of his own poems when suddenly he exclaimed: "Come, Copeland, give us some of that fool woman's poetry." My friend used the word poetry with full intention, for much as he detested the lady's rhymes and the lack of them, not all his conservatism kept him from recognizing her genius. Why, by the way, did this wise American woman speak in a letter published many years after her death, of red as the most frequent color in New England wild flowers? How about yellow? Or even pink?

I had intended, following the good example of the editors of "The Golden Treasury," "The Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics," and indeed of most anthologists, to make my introduction or preface very brief and purely explanatory. According to this intention it remains only to

be stated that, although I do not always read the best literature-audiences are great choosers-I almost never, for any audience, choose either verse or prose that is not literature. So that, however the collection may be lacking in method, it will seldom be found to lack quality.

With this explanation I had thought to be done. But my invaluable colleague, Dr. Hood, my publisher, Mr. Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, and other friends whose advice is not to be gainsaid, have suggested that certain unpublished addresses and essays of mine would be welcome to many former students who remember them, and especially welcome to teachers. Although I have been cherishing these papers to make a volume, with additions, I gladly offer here some of the briefer and more appropriate. Teachers may like to use such material as I constantly use it, to introduce, explain, and praise authors from whom I am about to read.

"Bacon as an Essayist" was read at the Boston Public Library in observance of the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Lord Bacon. Professor R. B. Perry, I remember, on "Bacon as a Philosopher," and Professor R. B. Merriman on "Bacon as an Historian," were among my fellow speakers and readers on a curiously interesting occasion. "Not 'Poor Charles Lamb'" is a fragment from an address in aid of the Radcliffe Fund three years ago. "Hawthorne's Inheritance and His Art" is a part of an anniversary discourse at Concord. "Dickens: His Best Book?" was written for the Harvard Club of New York. "Tennyson and Browning as Religious Poets" is taken from a college lecture, spoken, not written. "As to Margaret Ogilvy" is a bit from a lecture on Sir James Barrie to the Harvard Summer School. Here follow these addresses and other papers, in the order named.

BACON AS AN ESSAYIST

In Bacon's Essay, "Of Discourse," one of the brief original ten, printed in 1597, the author says: "To use too many circumstances ere one come to the matter, is wearisome; to use none at all is blunt." When a ten-minute speech is the matter in hand, one must be blunt. And so I abruptly inform the few unlettered persons in this great company that Bacon's Essays, like the lion in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," are not what they call themselves. They are not essays at all, in our acceptation of the word. The modern essay, from Addison to Stevenson, derives from Montaigne; the Baconian essay derives from the epigrammatic aphorism of antiquity. "The Tatler" and all its successors, even to this latest day, conform in general to Dr. Johnson's definition,—“A loose sally of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece." So, wherever

and whenever we encounter the typical essayist, he is found to be a tatler, a spectator, a rambler, a lounger, and, in the best sense, a citizen of the world. But Bacon's intention, so richly fulfilled, was "to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays; the word is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed Meditations."

What Bacon intended, that he did. The final result is the wisest book of its size in the world, in its form much closer kin to Pascal than to Montaigne. By it and it alone is Bacon, mighty philosopher and man of science though he was, a part of existing literature. Whatever he may mean to scholars and men of letters, to the general mind of man he is bound up in this one weighty little volume. "Significantly" set down, indeed, are those rounded thoughts, these close-set maxims,-significantly, and far more "curiously" (that is, carefully) than the author was willing to admit. Curiosa felicitas, in truth, is the sign manual of Bacon's Essays, as it is of almost every enduring masterpiece in any art. I do not mean that Bacon's style is external, or niggling, or precious. No, it is the terse finality of a determination to say the thing he meant, and none other, in the fewest, most precise, and most expressive words. Nor is rhetorical intention absent, Bacon was too much the orator celebrated by Ben Jonson not to have his audience in mind; and even a tyro can see that his beginnings, to speak of those alone, were intended to waylay and grip the reader. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice," "men fear death as children fear to go in the dark," "he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune," these and at least a dozen other openings of essays are famous wherever English is spoken. They deserve their fame. Can any man believe that they came by chance?

Thus arresting attention in the sixteenth century, Bacon holds it in the twentieth. That is why you and I are here tonight. The little book is still current. We quote from it, not always knowing whom we quote. And many a golden phrase of Bacon's coinage still rings and shines in our dull, common speech.

How much the priceless volume contains! How much it lacks! There is no moral enthusiasm in the Essays, no passion or emotion of any kind. No laughter; no tears. None of the humor of the age Bacon lived in; none of its strongly marked melancholy. In Bacon's essays there is no imagination, and no religion save that of formal reverence. He quotes scripture for his purpose, to be sure, with all the skill attributed to a certain powerful personage. And yet his purpose is not of hell any more than it is of heaven. His purpose and his teaching are of this immediate world. Although Bacon has been truly called Machiavellian,

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