Most of us are probably awarewhether we have commented on the fact or no of a tendency in ourselves or in some or many of our friends, to express our own thoughts in what is avowedly the phraseology of others. A classical example of this tendency is to be found in the immortal Sam Weller, especially in his reference, as a witness, to what "the soldier said when they ordered him three hundred lashes." But it is, we need hardly say, not confined to conversation. We find it with equal frequency in certain kinds of literature. The most remarkable literary example of it is Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," which from beginning to end is a mosaic of recondite and whimsical quotations set, like tesseræ, in the cement of the writer's own caustic prose. It would, no doubt, have considerably astonished Mr. Weller, had he been told that his own easy conversational method resembled the literary method of one of the most learned of English authors; but such is nevertheless the case. In the cockney repartees of the one, and in the scholarly pages of the other, the magic of quotation plays precisely the same part, and communicates to each a certain peculiar charm.

In what, then, does the charm which quotation gives, reside? The uses of quotation are, in many cases, of course, obvious. In controversial works it is essential; sometimes in order to support the views of the writer himself; sometimes in order to convey to his readers a precise idea of the views which he is engaged in refuting. It has sometimes in controversy another function also, in which the useful is united with the pleasurable, and which, from the point of view of the controversialist, whether

he is writer or orator, makes argument the most exhilarating and de lightful exercise in the world. This occurs on those choice, those supreme occasions, when he is able to quote the ipsissima verba of his antagonist, with the result of making his antagonist contradict his own assertions, and thus placing him absurdedly and hopelessly in the wrong. The pleasure thus produced, indeed, is far from being as selfish as it may seem. It is not confined to the victorious controversialist himself; but it is sharedas the experience of the House of Commons shows us-by every member of the party to which he belongs, and not infrequently by many belonging to the party that is opposed to him: so true is the saying of the great Duc de la Rochefoucauld, that there is always something which does not displease us in the misfortunes of our friends. But beyond the pleasures referred to, and beyond these obvious uses, the habit of quotation has something to recommend it which is yet more generally recognized, though it is not generally understood. When people praise an author as being a master of "apt quotation," they do not mean that is a man of such wide and well-digested knowledge that he can always, when occasion requires, fortify his own opinions by citing the authority of other experts in favor of them: nor do they mean that he is constantly providing others with the pleasure of seeing those who disagree with him refuted out of their own mouths. The pleasure of the apt quotation is of quite a different character. In regard to books. The three explanations of it which lie nearest to the surface, are as follows: In the

first place the apt quotation sometimes gives us a pleasure which is analogous to the pleasure of wit. It exhibits to us the words of some wellknown writer adroitly taken from his hands, as though it was a tool or weapon, and applied to some purpose surprisingly different from his own, and yet applied to it with equal, or perhaps even more success. A feat of this kind gives us an agreeable shock by its unexpectedness; it excites our admiration by its skill; and often excites us to laughter by its combination of fitness with incongruity. Another kind of pleasure which an apt quotation gives us, is one derived from the fact that the quoted passage takes up ideas which the writer quoting it has expressed in one way, and in one mood, and exhibits them to us as seen through the medium of another mind illumined by other ideas, and perfumed with other associations. An idea, for example, which has just been expressed in prose, is often greatly enriched by being expressed over again in some other writer's verse, or in the prose of some other writer belonging to a different age. A third kind of pleasure which we derive from apt quotation is as followsonly in this case the quotations must be not apt only but abundant. It consists not in the sense that the ideas of any given author are amplified and elucidated by means of the words of others; but in the sense that we are being brought into contact with, and surrounded by, many minds whose ideas as to the same subjects are different. For example, the moment we dip into Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," we feel not so much as if we were reading the work of one writernamely Burton; but as if Burton were leading us, as Dante led Virgil, into a shadowy world peopled with all the poets and philosophers of the past, who speak to us, indeed, only on the

subject as to which our guide interrogates them, but give us their own opinions about them, instead of merely illustrating his.

But let us turn from quotation, as we are most familiar with it in books, to quotation as we are most familiar with it in our friend's conversation or in our own. Most families have a store of traditional sayings which are entirely cryptic to the profane world at large, but which members of the family constantly employ, in preference to the language which they would naturally use themselves. The family is blessed with recollections of a choleric uncle, by whom any man obnoxious to him was called "a d-d unpleasant fellow;" and his nephews and nieces, when expressing their own antipathies not only to their male, but also their female acquaintances habitually hide them under this privately historical formula. An ancient Scotch greatgrandmother talked about "changing our feet," when she meant changing our shoes. Her descendants do the same, not because it is their natural idiom, but because it is not-because while expressing their meaning it at the same time disguises it. In addition to family sayings, there are others of a semi-public character-sayings uttered by, or attributed to, certain wellknown members of society. A lady, once well-known in the fashionable world of London, was celebrated for her candor in saying boldly what other people only think. She was accustomed, in the matter of entertaining, only to ask those to dine with her, who had asked her to dine with them, or who might be reasonably expected to do so; and she summed up her principle in the phrase "cutlet for cutlet." She had also, from long experience, learnt the important truth that a pleasant ball can be given in spacious rooms only; that rooms are also essential in which dowagers can rest at ease; and

a large enough number of suppertables to allow of their sitting before a quail for three-quarters of an hour at least, without feeling that they are execrated by others wanting their places. This wisdom the lady in question summed up in the pithy statement, "1 never go to a ball in a two-roomed house." Both these sayings have since become proverbial; and are used by people in the happy consciousness that they are quotations, who would never think of uttering them as original observations of their own. There is yet another kind of quotation, which in conversation is more frequent still. This is quotation by persons of a superior class, of phrases current in a class that is greatly or even slightly inferior. Thus some people after dinner, if they want another glass of sherry, are impelled by some subtle influence to ask for some "sherry wine." Others, if they want to say that a watering-place has become fashionable, will say that it has become "what the newspapers would call aristocratic;" whilst if one lady wishes to insinuate that the dearest of her friends is dowdy, she will say that "she is not exactly what the maids call stylish." Again there is the word "genteel," the serious use of which has long become a vulgarism; but which as a quotation from the vulgar has recovered something of its lost station, and made its appearance again in the language of polite society, with its meaning changed only by carrying with it a flavor of irony.

Now what is the significance of quotation, as employed thus in our daily intercourse? Why do we so constantly seek to clothe our meaning in a garment of expression which admittedly The Saturday Review.

was not made for it? The reason is not, in all cases, the same. Sometimes we express our thoughts in the phraseology of other people, because there is something in them of which, though we desire to express it, we are at the same time half ashamed; as when, for example we use the phrase "cutlet for cutlet," and declare that we never will go to a ball in a tworoomed house. We know that the sentiment is wise; yet we do not wholly approve of it; and we are consequently anxious to throw the responsibility of it on another person, and to suggest that we are ideally superior to it, though at the same time it guides our actions. In other cases we make use of quotation because we are the victims of a certain kind of shyness, and desire, whilst avowing our opinions, to do so in a form that will enable us to disavow any part of them that will not commend itself to our audience. Quotation, in fact, in conversation, when it is not a species of wit, a species of illustration, or a species of social satire, is a species of diffidence; it is an armor in which diffidence hides itself. Diffidence in itself is a hindrance to agreeable and polite intercourse. The conventional habit of quotation therefore may be welcomed on two grounds

firstly because it vindicates the nobility of human nature by showing that we are ashamed of many of the sentiments that we express; and secondly because it invests many sentiments which we shrink from uttering with a semblance or a reality of wit, which excuses us for having uttered them, and enables our friends to applaud what they otherwise would have been constrained to condemn.

When a book attains a large circulation one usually says that it succeeds. But the fine books succeed of themselves, by their own virtue, and apart from the acclamatory noises of fame. Immure them in cabinets, cast them into Sahara; still they imperturbably succeed. If on a rare occasion such a book sells by scores of thousands, it is not the book, but the public, which succeeds; it is not the book, but the public, which has emerged splendidly from a trial. Look at this following passage, and say whether the author or his readers are the more to be congratulated on the fact that the book containing it has met with wide popular acceptance:

Poor old schoolhouse, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward dusk! Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against! Poor little bare feet that

could never reach the floor! Poor little droop-headed figures, so sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep! Long, long since, little children of the past, your backs have become straight enough, measured on the same cool bed; sooner or later your feet, wherever wandering, have found their resting-places in the soft earth; and all to your drooping heads have gone sleep on the same dreamless pillow and there are sleeping. And the young schoolmaster, who seemed exempt from frailty while he guarded like sentinel that lone outpost of the alphabet-he, too, has long since joined the choir invisible of the immortal dead. But there is something left of him, though more than a century has passed away; something that has wandered far down the course of time to us like the faint summer fragrance of a young tree long since fallen dead in its wintered forest, like a dim radiance yet

a

travelling onward into space from an orb turned black and cold, like an old melody surviving on and on in the air without any instrument, without any strings.

A fine book is above the populace; if the populace reaches up to it, let us praise the populace. Mr. Allen's novel, "The Choir Invisible," has been bought in America to the extent of two hundred thousand copies. America has succeeded brilliantly; America has, in fact, surpassed England, even assuming that her population is twice ours, for no book of equal merit with Mr. Allen's ever had half such a welcome from ourselves-that is to say, within a similar period of time. The phenomenon of that two hundred thousand must give pause to the facile generalizations of those who are saddened and disgusted by the triumph of mitigated rubbish. It must tend to reinstate the

public in the artist's esteem, to correct an undue pessimism, and to establish a sane and proper belief in the "ultimate decency" of the average man. What, despised average man, you like this, you pay a dollar and a half for this! Miracles, then, have not ceased! But why should the thing be a miracle? Say, not that miracles have not ceased, but that they have never begun. The two hundred thousand which aspired to "The Choir Invisible" did not aspire by chance. They, and perhaps two hundred thousand more, are always alert, longing, anxious to appreciate and ascend towards some nobility above them. Not all nobility is for their eyes, but when their eyes

see their hearts are lifted. And let no one think that these phrases are inappropriate here.

"The Choir Invisible,"

like Mr.

Allen's latest novel, "The Increasing Purpose," is the story of a superb moral struggle; and the action of both books passes chiefly amid rural scenes, close to the earth and to the calm, uncomplaining beasts of the fields. Mr. Allen is the novelist of Kentucky. In reading him one is made conscious of the fact that the United States is not a single country, but several. Kentucky, with its glorious grass, its ancient homesteads and hospitality, its Roman delight in fine roads; Kentucky, which with a population of two millions has only one town of over five thousand inhabitants, seems as unlike the America of our imagination as old middle England itself. Indeed, it is a true offshoot of old England, descended by way of Virginia. And one has a comfortable suspicion that this, and not roaring New York nor Chicago affronting the skies, is the real, valid America. In all Mr. Allen's work you will find two governing ideas, the idea of the beauty of the earth, and the idea of the moral grandeur of human nature. These ideas monopolize his imagination. He does not wilfully ignore ugliness and meanness, nor seek dishonestly to hide them -he has no time to attend to them, being otherwise busy. In "The Choir Invisible" we have a picture of Kentucky while Washington was yet alive. It was less civilized then and less tamed, but more colossal in its solitudes, and not less lovely. The book is a series of rhapsodies upon Kentuckian earth. In such an amphitheatre Mr. Allen places two human beings whose moral strength and moral beauty make them truly heroic-John Gray, the young schoolmaster, and Jessica Falconer, a great lady married to a gentlemanfarmer. These two fall in love: that is all the tragedy. Jessica is Mr. Allen's finest achievement. He has lavished upon her the supreme efforts of an imagination which by instinct turns women into angels. When John

Gray, in a valedictory sermon, exhorts his schoolboys to mend their ways he adds: "As for my little girls, they are good enough as they are." That is the voice of Mr. Allen. As for Jessica, who, by the way, is thirty-eight, her purity is almost passionate; yet she is warm-blooded, she has sex. She might be a composite of Gautier's de Maupin, and one of Christina Rossetti's nuns. High above John Gray and everyone else, she exists as an embodied ideal. The schoolmaster is desolated by his terrible struggles against temptation; but she, victimized by a love perhaps more consuming than his own, knows neither hesitancy nor fear. Fate has no stroke which she cannot bear in dignity and grace, and with inimitable fortitude she draws even from the final disaster a consolation. Jessica is a woman to rouse one's enthusiasm; certainly, she roused her author's; his sympathy with her is so constant, so intense, so righteous and so intimate, that no other could hope to match it; one feels that he alone of all men will ever fully appreciate Jessica.

The cause of the popularity of "The Choir Invisible" is apparent. The book is the expression of a temperament at once kindly, profound and simple, but, above all, simple-a temperament which, while absorbing modern ideas, has retained the charm of ancient ways. Mr. Allen is an ingenuous writer. In technique he has some of the quaint, surprising simplicity of Balzac. No considerations of literary custom, no narrow regard for a superficial realism, will prevent him from arriving in the directest manner that occurs to him. He cares little for the trickeries of the expert penman. In none of his books is there, perhaps, anything so extraordinarily bold as the treatise on Swedenborg in Balzac's "Seraphita;" but again and again 'Mr. Allen abandons his narrative entirely in order to discourse, or make his per