Maurice Francis Egan

“ France was to pay her debts and Russia to be the way of an inexpensive road to the East. Her methods in peace cost her too much; a short war would save her credit. To our regret, perhaps remorse, we have been forced by her to fight her Devil with his own fire; and now we hope for a process of reconstruction in this great and populous country based on our own ideals; but we cannot change the aspirations or the hearts of the Germans. We can only take care that they keep the laws made by nations who have well-directed consciences,—this lesson I have learned near to their border. ”

“ You Americans call yourselves Christians,' he broke out, 'and yet your bombs from Bethlehem have shattered my son's leg and they killed thousands of our children. Your nation is Protestant. You ought to be with us against impious France and idolatrous Italy—I spit on Italy—the cocotte of the nations, the handmaid of the Papish prostitute of Rome! And yet you say that our most Christian nation is not Christian! How can you say it? We are not at war, yet you treat us as enemies!'
'We shall soon be at war. The Ambassador of the United States at Berlin is sending Americans out of that city. ”

“ There is no book that ought to give the judicious such quiet pleasure or more food for thought or for stimulating conversation than Mr. Mencken's "The American Language," except Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Boswell's "Johnson," the "Devout Life" of Saint Francis de Sales, Pepys's "Diary," the "Letters" of Madame de Sévigné, Beveridge's "Life" of Marshall, and the "Memoirs" of Gouverneur Morris! It is a book for odd moments; yet it is a temptation to continuous reading; and a precious treasure is its bibliography! And how pleasant it is to verify the quotations in a library ”

“ Good women have never made successful rulers, as a rather cynical Russian said to me, à propos of the Empress Catherine. The nobility disliked her because she kept aloof from them. The glitter and the pomp of court life which the Russian aristocracy loved, the consideration which monarchs are expected to show for the social predilections of their subjects were disregarded by her. Living in perpetual fear, her nerves were shattered. All her interests centred in her family and in the unbending conviction of a German princess that the divine right of kings is a dogma. ”

“ If I thought that any words of mine would deprive anybody of the gaiety which Mark Twain has added to life, I should not write these words; but as this little volume is a book of impressions, and sincere impressions, I may be frank in the full understanding that the average American reader will not take seriously what I say of Mark Twain, since he has become an integral part of American literature. There may perhaps come a time when his works will be sold in sets, carefully arranged on all self-respecting bookshelves, pointed to with pride as a proof of culture, and never read. ”

“ After Maurice de Guérin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guérin, and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!
My dear friend, Edward Roth—whom James Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"—named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is too hard to read—even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. ”

“ That is why the Kaiser would not send any ambassador not of a great family to you. All Americans who come to Berlin desire to be presented at court. It is a sign that you will come to our way of thinking some day. We are not so far apart. You who write must tell your people that we are calumniated, we are not despots. That woman, the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, married to a friend of mine, does us harm. But most Americans see Germany in a mellow light. We are akin in our aspirations—Frederick the Great understood that. ”

“ Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring." ”

“ The Balkan situation was always burning; it was the Etna and Vesuvius of the diplomatic world; wise men might predict eruptions, but they were always unexpected. To most people in the United States the Balkans seemed very far off; Bulgaria with her eyes on Macedonia, the Tsar Ferdinand and his attempt to put his son, Boris, under the greater Tsar, him of Russia; Rumania and her ambitions for more freedom and more territory; Serbia, with her fears and aspirations, appeared to be of no importance—of less interest, perhaps, than other petty kingdoms. ”

“ Whatever may be the opinion of other people, mine is that the reading of the New Testament in the simplicity of childhood, with the flower of intuition not yet blighted, is one of the most beautiful of mental experiences. In my own case, it gave a glow to life; it caused me to distinguish between truth and fairy tales, between fact and fiction—and this is often very difficult for an imaginative child.
This kind of reading implies leisure and the absence of distraction. Unhappily, much leisure does not seem to be left for the modern child. ”

“ To the Danes it was almost as if Holger Dansker, who, as everybody knows, is waiting in the vaults of Hamlet's castle at Elsinore to protect Denmark, had burst into the light.
From the European point of view, which took no account of our home politics, ex-President Roosevelt was not only the most important figure in America, but in the world, and the most picturesque. Even under the New Democracy, men will probably count more than nations in the minds of our brethren across the sea. ”

“ There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms. ”

“ There must be a broad law for the Christian divine; a narrow one for the humble believer. We may not accept miracles, we of the learned, but we may not disturb the belief of the people in them. Culture must come from the top. The Catholics among us still accept the miracles, but they are most retrograde of the Germans. We are gaining upon them. It is the Zeitgeist; when we have conquered, with their help, we shall teach them the real lesson of Christianity! The German God will not brook idolatry. Our scientists disprove myths, but we work in the line of Luther still. ”

“ This autobiography never seems to me to be merely a book made to encourage authors to be industrious and hard-working. It is more than that. It is the expression of the life of an unusual man, who did an unusual thing, and who writes about himself so well and so sincerely that he gives us an insight into a phase of English character which none of his novels ever elaborated.
What Trollope did may be done again, but hardly in the American atmosphere, with the restless American nerves and that lack of doggedness which characterizes us. ”

“ And, when one thinks of the Swedish aristocrat, one almost says, as Talleyrand said of the talons rouges, 'when the old order changes, much of the charm of life will disappear.' Under a monarchy, life is very delightful—for the upper classes. It is no wonder that they do not want to let go of it. It must be remembered, in dealing with European questions, that the Swede and the Spaniard are probably the proudest people on the earth. Another thing must not be forgotten: the educated classes are imperial-minded. And of this quality German intrigue makes the most. ”

“ Its only fault is that it comes too near to being prose poetry; and discriminating readers who ponder over it will find some epithets possible only to a writer who was an artist in lines and pigments before he began to paint with the pen.
Ruskin opened our eyes rather violently to some aspects of life which we, the young, did not know; for the young after all learn very little by intuition. They must be taught things. This is perhaps an excuse for those vagaries in youth, those seemingly inexplicable adventures which shock the old who have forgotten what it is to be young. ”

“ You may call it "constructive Socialism," but I call it Social Degeneracy. We, following the sacred principles of Marx and Bakounine, different as they were, must destroy before we can construct. In the future, every honest man will drive in his own car, and the best hospitals will not be for those that pay, but for those who cannot pay. Cagliostro said we must crush the lily, meaning the Bourbons; we must crush all that stands in the way of the perfect rule which will make all men equal. We must destroy all governments as they are conducted at present ”

“ Forget, as poets do, his pain in song.
No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. ”

“ The Socialists can never explain this away. His prestige, as the apostle of peace and good-will, is gone; he is no longer international; he is out of count as an altruist. The Social Democrat is in a better position; he never claimed all the attributes of universal benignity; he was still feared in Germany, but in that harmless debating society, the Reichstag, with the flower of the German manhood made dumb in the trenches, he could only threaten in vain.
In our country, pure Socialism is misunderstood. ”

“ It is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Cæsar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human he becomes. ”

“ German propaganda had little influence in Norway, but German methods have been used to an almost unbelievable extent in the attempt to lower the morale of this self-respecting and independent people. The German propaganda could get little hold on a nation that cared only to be sufficient for itself in an entirely legitimate way. The Norwegian can neither be laughed, argued, nor coerced out of an opinion that he believes to be founded on a principle, and he looks on all questions from the point of view of a free man thinking his own thoughts. ”

“ In finishing the book with those lovely Thackerayan cadences, my mother said severely, "That is what always happens to bad people!" But in my heart I did not believe that Becky Sharp was a bad person at all.
For a time I returned to Dickens, to "Nicholas Nickleby," to "David Copperfield." I respected Thackeray. He had gripped me in some way that I could not explain. But Dickens I loved. Later—it was on one June afternoon I think—when the news of Dickens's death arrived, it seemed to me that for a while all delight in life had ended. ”

“ There is such a wide difference between the gentler impulses of a man and the rude part ambition causes him to play in life! A rôle partly self-chosen, it is true, and not wholly thrust upon him. A soul accursed by one, great, wrong idea, and the purposes, passions, and resolutions generated by it. A mind distorted, led into captivity, and condemned to crime by the obsession that God has but one people, and they are his people; that the people have but one will, and that is his will ”

“ He had been in Washington only a few months. I suffered as to prestige in the beginning only, as every American minister and ambassador suffers from our present system of appointing envoys. No representative of the United States is at first taken seriously by a foreign country. He must earn his spurs, and, by the time he earns them, they are, as a rule, ruthlessly hacked off!
Each ambassador is supposed by the Foreign Offices to be appointed for the same reason that so many peerages have been conferred by the British Government. ”

“ Neither had the splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of Saint John and the poems of Saint Teresa and of Saint John of the Cross, which we find in Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern poets pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson. ”

“ When Norway threatened to secede, its attitude very largely due to the bad management of the very charming and indolent King Oscar, the Swedish army began to mobilise. The Swedes—that is the minority of Swedes, the governing body—would not brook the thought that Norway might become a real nation. 'We must fight!' Young Sweden said. The Young Sweden, intolerant and imperious, did not realise that it had Old and Young Norwegians to contend with. Now, if the Spaniard and the Swede are the proudest folk in Europe, the Norwegian and the Icelandic are the most stiff-necked. ”

“ Similarly, a man who knows the Scriptures is fitted with allusions that clarify and illuminate the ordinary speech. He may not have any technical knowledge, or his technical knowledge may be so great as to debar him from meeting other men in conversation on equal grounds; but his reading of the Bible gives his speech or writing a background, a colour, a metaphorical strength, which illuminate even the commonplace. Strike the Bible from the sphere of any man's experience and he is in a measure left out of much of that conversation which helps to make life endurable. ”

“ We were told that the Kaiser loved Mark Twain. To love Mark Twain was to be American. To be sure he turned his back very pointedly on Mark on one occasion because Mark had dared to criticise the pension system of the United States. Pensions for the army should not be criticised, even if their administration were defective. All soldiers must be taken care of. This was the first duty of a nation, and Mark Twain forgot himself when he censured any system that put money into the pockets of the old soldiers, even of the wives of the soldiers of 1812! ”

“ Henry Adams's lesson, however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; it is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of Cardinal Newman! ”

“ Queen Louise, the wife of Christian IX., new king of an old line, was not born in the purple, though her blood was the bluest in Europe. The beautiful princesses, her three daughters, later the Empress of Russia, Dagmar, the Queen of England, Alexandra, and the Duchess of Cumberland, Thyra, made their frocks and were taught all the household arts—for their father, royal by blood as he was, was a poor officer.
These princesses hold lovingly in remembrance the time of their poverty; these princesses love the old times. ”

“ Much affectionate reading of poetry—and poetry [Pg 111] read in any other way is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day—leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions, and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. ”

“ Neither art, literature nor music has been Germanised in Norway. Art, of later years, has been touched by the French ultra-impressionists. There is no humble home in the mountains that does not know Grieg. And why? When you know Grieg and know Norway, you know that Grieg is Norway.
Norway is the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no fear that German ideas would control it, and the Prussians knew this. What is good in German methods of education the Norwegians adopt, but they first make them Norwegian. ”

“ Each of us will make his own shelf of books. The book for me is the book that delights, attracts, soothes, or uplifts me. Let those critics go hang whose criticisms are not literature! Sainte-Beuve makes literature when he exercises his critical vocation; Brunetière has too heavy a hand; Francisque Sarcey has some touches of inspiration that give delight. There are no really good French critics to-day, probably because they have so little material to work on. Our own Mencken, with all his vagaries, is worth while, and Brander Matthews knows his line and the value of background and perspective ”