to popular standards, above all the man who sold great numbers of books through a conscious lowering of popular standards by reason of pruriency or false play on the emotions, but at the same time he despised the man who wrote to please himself only, who preferred to cater to a little group of seekers after the unusual rather than say what he had to say to the larger world. He always claimed that, within certain limits, the value of a writer could be estimated by the number of his readers, not inversely to the number of his readers, as is suggested by much literary cant of the day. His own work was too thoughtful to appeal to American readers of novels. It was therefore fortunate that he chose to express his thoughts in other forms, since he thus reached an actually wider and certainly a more intelligent public. Probably not one man in ten, among moderate readers, will admit having read one of Wendell's books, but five out of ten have heard some of his ideas, whether or not they have associated the ideas with his name, have been pleased or irritated but in any case stimulated by his thoughts. The reason for this is that those who have read his books are impelled to talk about them, to discuss what they have to say, with or without reference to the author. The influence of these books has consequently been wider than their author himself realized, far wider than his semiannual royalty checks would have indicated. Most thinking people have been affected consciously or unconsciously by something in "Liberty, Union, and Democracy," or in "The Mystery of Education," or in "The Privileged Classes," and therefore, judged even by the dangerous standard of popularity, their author has succeeded.

As teacher and as author Barrett Wendell made a great place for himself, but it is the man who will live most vividly in the memory of his friends. One had an affection for him that was deep and abiding, that death cannot quench. I could hardly speak or write of him now, so soon after the suffering of the past few years has quietly ended, were it not that the memories of him are so happy. Many years ago, soon after my college days, a woman made a sarcastic remark about

VOL. LXX.-5

him in my hearing. It brought a spontaneous response more vigorous than polite. "Perhaps I was wrong," she said; a man who can inspire such loyalty must have great good in him." He inspired loyalty because he was himself so superbly loyal. One knew that behind one's back he would never say an unkind word about one. He would discuss people, of course, would admit their faults, but always pointed out their good qualities as well. He had a wide charity. Even a dull man can pick flaws in people, and possibly be rather amusing in so doing. It takes a brilliant man to be equally entertaining in exhibiting the lovable qualities of his fellow human beings. Wendell could paint faults and virtues to perfection, but if he was painting the faults one always knew that his last word would portray the good that waits in every human soul for the discerning eye to find. Even in speaking of Germans-and there was little that appealed to him in the German character-he always lauded their sense of discipline. This was before the war. After 1914 he analyzed more clearly the difference between blind obedience and discipline.

Somebody said of him on the day of his funeral: "He was the last great Tory gentleman." The phrase was true-and sad. We need in America, especially since the war, these great Tory gentlemen to link us with the amenities and the graces of the past, to keep us sane in our mad rush after the novelties, intellectual and moral, of the hurried present. He held fast, in his own personality, to the manners of his forefathers. He reminded one, somehow, of the English gentleman of Georgian times, a little brusque, a little intolerant, careless of his dress, fond of good food and good drink, but at the same time kind, insisting on his right to think as he pleased but never demanding acquiescence in his views, too fine to care how he looked, since the dignity of his character made that of no importance, glad to eat lentils and to drink water with men of his own intellectual stature; and withal there never was a sounder or more patriotic American.

As Wendell surveyed literature, greatly and vividly because so calmly, so also he looked at life. He turned instinctively

toward that which is beautiful and away from that which is ugly. But he saw the ugly things and described them, as was fit, with ugly words. He called a spade a spade, and thereby sometimes shocked those who live in terror of intellectual as well as of physical nudity. He used the ugly word consciously, because he wanted to bring out the realization of the repulsiveness of the thing. This never meant, as stupid boys sometimes thought at first, any pleasure in playing with mud. Rather was it the counter expression of an exquisite moral fastidiousness. Hating vulgarity, he never mistook casual vulgarity of expression for vulgarity of soul. He recognized in the loose words of college boys the same thoughtless naïveté that an older and more sophisticated world mistakes for pruriency in the abounding vitality of Greek literature. He made vice and vulgarity as ugly as he made virtue and refinement beautiful. This power of making the nature of things unmistakable grew also out of his wonderful sense of humor. This was no modern wit that delights in jokes. It was deep-lying, a consciousness of the eternal humor in contrasts and similarities; in life, the pageant and the stern reality. The humor was elemental, but it often expressed itself in a delicate play of words and ideas that was worthy of Charles Lamb or of Laurence Sterne-when Sterne was not being consciously dirty. This quality came out best in conversaIn France itself, the home of brilliant talk, there was never more memorable conversation than that at luncheon at the Colonial Club in Cambridge when Wendell and Farlow and Bartlett and Hill-all dead, alas-were at their best. We almost forgot to eat, we little folk; and we spoke only to loose once more that play of wit, that keen discussion of academic or national questions, carried on so lightly, yet, as one looks back on it, so

profoundly. We acquired the virtue then of being good listeners because it was such a joy to listen.

People called Wendell local. A Chicago woman once said to me: "Professor Wendell would never go down in the Middle West." I made the obvious retort that certain people from Chicago would not go down in New England, but that Boston and Chicago were equally American and equally necessary for America. Wendell was local because he was a product of his own time and place, but his New England terminology was used to express fundamental truths. His feet were planted in Boston and the ancestral home in Portsmouth; he spoke the inherited language of New England; his thoughts had the vigor and hardiness that is bred along the rocky shores of Massachusetts Bay; but his vision reached out to include humanity. Ambassador Jusserand said that no American had ever understood the French people as he understood them and explained them in his book, "The France of Today." Yet physically and intellectually Boston and Paris are far apart. It was because he was true to his own traditions that he could appreciate so truly the traditions of others. He was local as all honest men are local; national and international as are those who have high-soaring vision.

In letters and in the hearts of men Barrett Wendell made a lasting place for himself. He was an optimist because he believed unalterably in the good that is in mankind and the sound common sense. He strove to perpetuate in modern days the fine and the beautiful that lies hidden in the past, to hold fast to the principles of evolution as opposed to revolution. He preached justice and charity and reverence and propriety, strove to make progress sane. We who knew him admired him for his courageous insistence on principle; we loved him for the man he was.

I

OLD JOLYON WALKS

WOFOLD impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast: "Let's go up to Lord's!"

"Wanted"-something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down. "Wanted"-too, that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he might lose them any day!

Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had been an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's whim had been that he should be canonized at the greatest possible expense. Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate with a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed without polish in the game of cricket. Old Jolyon would speak quite openly of swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and young Jolyon with the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest his sire should be overheard. Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous, for his father-in Crimean whiskers then-had ever impressed him as the beau ideal. Though never canonized himself, Old Jolyon's natural fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar. How delicious, after howling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the "Disunion" Club, to dine off whitebait, cutlets, and a tart, and go-two "swells," old and young, in lavender kid gloves-to the opera or play. And on Sunday, when the match was over, and his top hat duly broken, down with his father in a special hansom to the "Crown and Sceptre,' and the terrace above the river-the

golden sixties when the world was simple, dandies glamourous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte Melville coming thick and fast.

A generation later, with his own boy Jolly. Harrow-buttonholed with cornflowers-by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonized at a trifle less expense-again Jolyon had experienced the heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most heartbreaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up. Those two days each year he and his son had been alone together in the world, one on each sideand Democracy just born!

And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground. There, beside her in a lawn-colored frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game, and felt the old thrill stir within him.

When Soames passed, the day was spoiled. Irene's face was distorted by compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he said:

"Well, dear, if you've had enough— let's go!"

That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like that passage of the César Franck Sonata-so had been his life with her, a

divine third movement. And now this business of Jon's-this bad business! Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went, and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own; seeming to speak. "Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's only a woman!" Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer "No, I've funked it-funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've funked it." But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at it: "It's your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!" Was it a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his father living on within him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out into the air. Orion's Belt was very bright. He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle. Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast. 'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of her -it's natural!'

And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.

Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote with difficulty and many erasures.

"MY DEAREST BOY,

"You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders to give

themselves away to their young. Especially when-like your mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but young-their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must confess. I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly-people in real life very seldom are, I believe but most persons would say we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out. The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future. Many, very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1885, when she was only twenty-two, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an unhappy marriage-no, not with me, Jon. Without money of her own, and with only a stepmother-closely related to Jezebel -she was very unhappy in her home life. It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte. He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in love with her. Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had made. It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment--her misfortune."

So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject carried him away.

"Jon, I want to explain to you if I can -and it's very hard-how it is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about. You will of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she ever have married him?' You would be quite right if it were not for one or two rather terrible considerations. From this initial mistake of hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make it clear to you if I can. You see, Jon, in those days and even to this day-indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise-most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it. That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the difference