of gossip. To this day, a window of geraniums will give me an unpleasant feeling of being watched.

My facts are not all in yet, but from such as come to me I form the conclusion that those who get on best with plants find it, as a rule, rather difficult to keep on good terms with the highest forms of organic matter. You can snip geraniums and they will not protest, but human beings on the whole, while confessing many useless elements in themselves, prefer to part with them in a manner less peremptory than would satisfy your flower expert. Is it just possible that some folks take to plants as the only living thing that never seems to answer back?

but I re

Something of tartness certainly flavors the communion of the average horticulturist with his kind. A boy falls enraptured of all kinds of people, hostlers, sailors, carpenters, or tramps, call only one instance of a boy forming an intimacy with a gardener, while even that instance now lies so dimly in my mind that I cannot vouch for it. I recall that in my boyhood the citizens of our neighborhood who had gardens, and worked in them evenings, were always connected in my mind with something acrid and suspicious. In all this I am not unmindful of Professor Child and his roses, and I still celebrate in my soul the memory of one plant-lover in our village, whose gift to our household was always that of heliotrope and cream, a gift the remembrance of which softens all my reflections of plant experts, making me still hopeful of them no matter how much I may suffer from them. But these are exceptions.

If I were to put in a general law the result of my experiences, I could not do so better than by imitating Charles Kingsley's famous summing up of John Henry Newman's attitude toward truth, and saying "that amiability is not and on the whole ought not to be a prime requisite of people who are devoted to flowers."

Of all people, I should have looked to

garden folks as those from whom a genial and encouraging humanity was most to be expected. But all this belongs back in my deductive days. Now I might approach the office of a capitalist with reasonable expectations of a natural and human half-hour, or the sanctum of a scholar or high ecclesiastic without undue awe, or even the neighborhood of a statesman and yet feel calmly about it, as if he were nothing but a human being raised to a slightly higher power; but I should keep an appointment with one who had had success with small fruits or hardy plants (and written a book about it) with most of my natural emotions in full retreat inward. Not even the scientific expert would produce in me the same dread. True, he knows enough to overwhelm me; but there is usually something so delightfully dunderheaded about the scientific expert! I feel as a rule so sorry for him to think that, with so much greater materials at hand than I ever have, he can draw such limited conclusions from it all! Though he would love to make a great broadchested affirmation he never quite does it, and thus he appeals to my sympathy. I sort of love him and like to be with him.

Perhaps these doubts are corroding my moral nature in thus making me skeptical toward the goodness which once I was so willing to take on trust. Once you get started with distrust, it reaches out into regions where you never dreamed it would go, for here am I after years of familiarity with the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, in which it never occurred to me to feel anything but disgust at that brute of a monk who went about snipping the blooms from Brother Lawrence's plants, here am I trying to find excuses for the irate brother, and asking myself whether it was not just possible that plants were only Brother Lawrence's way of being disagreeable in the cloister.

Let no one suppose that I hate plants. I am trying my best to dare to love

them. What I rebel against is the hope less feeling of inferiority begotten in me by these minor nature-lovers in connection with the very things which I hoped would make me feel equal and open and genial. A little crabbed by nature, I had looked toward gardens and garden books as a freeing influence, perhaps the last one left to me, and I am disappointed. I do not carry a chip on my shoulder in this world, but have been willing to be inferior in a hundred different ways. The capitalist does but represent to me the doctrine of election in a way to which I am accustomed, and I never complain of unequal wealth. The four hundred rather interest me than otherwise. But when any one tries to make me feel inferior by means of mignonette and roses and lilacs, I rise up in indignation. There's Elizabeth, to wit, and her German Garden. When have I ever felt so much like a worm and no man, so scornfully rejected as unfit for the fellowship of flowers, — and pretty nearly everything else, as after reading that? I could readily believe that part of her story in which her gardener himself appeared one day on the scene, gone stark mad, and I thought of what a well-known historical scholar had told me of the French Revolution, that it was not so much poverty and taxes as it was scorn which brought on the final disaster. A thousand minor French Revolutions burned in my breast. Supposing, in a general way, that I had some affinity for flowers, here was my right called in question by the One Only Lover of Plants and Gardens. Between the temptation to assert my rights and the inclination to turn a floral anarchist, and never again to believe in any one who loved plants, my being was divided against itself. For sheer superciliousness, the kind that brought on the French Revolution, commend me not to the plutocrat, nor the critic, nor the four hundred, but to the lover of plants.

Much of this ardor for flowers seems

to me of the sort spoken of by Amiel when, describing some delight, he says, "when once the taste for it is set up the mind takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it

Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d'autrui, and it is pleasant to one's vanity not to be of the same opinion as the common herd."

woman

But my earlier assumption comes back to me. The lovers of gardens ought to be lovely, and perhaps there is a way, after all. In spite of the fact that on those evenings when we as a family feel particularly superior to the rest of the world we always select for reading aloud one of the recent volumes on gardens, I say to myself that the soul of man - and has a long time to run, and may yet grow so accustomed to the glory of the plant as to dare to become more agreeable about it. Then, with a new tenderness running through my soul I say also, "Who knows what has driven these people to horticulture? If we knew all we might forgive all." Mr. Birrell has told us how despair of ever settling such difficult matters as Apostolical Succession and the influence of Newman have driven some men to collecting butterflies and beetles. If we but knew what unkindlier and more difficult issues they had fled from we might forgive all to these caustic brothers and sisters who own gardens and have had success with small fruits. Let us lift up our heads, then, all of us who have for the past five years felt so inferior just because we could boast of nothing but an old-fashioned, easy-going love for plants, or could say nothing of Wild Animals Who Have Helped Us. Let us be grateful that life has been so normal with us that we have never been driven to such devices as these.

THE tribulations of the woman lecturer Confessions are many; and the first is Why should she

of a Woman

Lecturer. her pursuit.

speak in public, if she dislikes the occu

pation? asks the Sensible Reader. Sensible Reader, the answer would carry us far afield into psychological mysteries. Suffice it to say that even a woman may be so interested in the subjects of her love that she cannot refrain from telling other people about them. Moreover, so extraordinarily prevalent in this queer country of ours is the desire of being lectured to, that the many women beset by appeals to speak may almost say, in the immortal words of Lady Laura Etchingham, "It is expected of us." Be these things as they may, one may shudder, yet accept; one may long for the Ingle and the Stocking, yet be fated to the Platform, the Glass of Water, the Floral Tribute, and the Attentive Throng.

Dim reports I have indeed heard from regions afar of "platform women" who gloried in their shame. There are other women, perhaps a number of them, who yearn toward platform and publicity as toward an unattained Paradise. One such I met once, a large lady, of sonorous voice. "I know," she said to me, with resonant emphasis, "that my proper sphere would be the Platform. Why else did the Lord give me such an organ? I could fill a hall of ten thousand people with this organ. The only trouble with me is". she sighed with deep regret "I think and I think, and I cannot seem to find anything in particular that I could say." "Would that all public speakers, men and women, were so dowered with self-knowledge!" I ex claimed inwardly; but I mused in sadness on the perversity of the little imps who withheld the longed for joy from this deep-throated lady, while they forced my shrinking self before the footlights! One, at least, of these feminine victims or tyrants of the public, whichever you choose to consider them, -suffers unspeakable things when she lectures, from the constant presence of a certain Auditor. Whether she face a Woman's Club or a College audience, a Charity Conference, or a University Ex

though "Sir,

tension meeting, this Auditor is there. He is a burly man, of not ungenial aspect, in brown coat of antiquated cut, and a snuffy, crooked wig. At one point or another of the address she catches sight of him; terribly often it is when an emotional climax has been reached, and the flushed lecturer, pausing in her flow of words, feels a little tingle return upon her from the hushed, vibrating audience. At such a sweet moment as this - for that the Woman Lecturer has her sweet moments I attempt not to deny — that Auditor rises; his gruff if ghostly tones break in familiar words upon the silence : "Sir," he always remarks, sometimes no Sirs are present, a woman speaking in public is like a dog standing upon its hind legs; the thing is very badly done, but the wonder is that it is done at all." Shall I confess further? I am tormented on the platform-doubtless from the hypnotic suggestion conveyed in these words - by the phantom presence of the little dog to whom my Auditor refers. He is always a black and tan, with one yellow ear. The inevitable desk and frequent floral decorations conceal him from the audience; but I see him. He presses close to my skirts, he rears his tiny figure with mincing grace, he dances precariously about, accenting my periods, and occasionally when my eloquence flags I behold him with horror dropping crestfallen upon his hind feet. Worst of all, miserable and disconcerting fact, his little red jaws follow the motions of my Tell me, O my sister lecturers, are you similarly afflicted? Tell me, O Sensible Reader, may not this be called a tribulation?

own.

In the presence of this ghostly accompaniment all minor inconveniences fade away. Yet they are many. Would you learn to know human nature, O ye who do not lecture, put yourselves as speakers at the disposal of a Cause. Not that the knowledge you acquire will be wholly unpleasant. Kindly arrangements will

often be made for your comfort; you will even, I admit, gain as lecturer a hidden joy in a singularly happy sense of fellowship with your brother men. Yet, if I mistake not, you will have occasion greatly to marvel at the expectations of the public. Hold yourself ready to attend a Federation five hundred miles away, expenses paid one way, no other perquisites, for the privilege of occupying fifteen minutes in presenting your world-wide theme, — I have even known the limit to be ten. "In order to secure variety," says the note of invitation, "the other addresses of the evening will be upon the Theory of Mental Healing, and the Best Novels of the Past Six Weeks."

Or, it may be, you will be asked to betake yourself in midwinter to a distant village on the Northern seacoast, where a Woman's Club has just been formed: "The Club is not able to offer any fees, but the ladies do so much want to hear you. They wonder if the offer of a week's board at Mrs. Brown's would not be acceptable to you? That would be a very nice arrangement for them, as the lecture has sometimes to be deferred two or three days, since the Club does not try to meet in stormy weather."

But why continue? Many a tribulation turns into joy when one has a sense of humor. And then, there are the compensating Tributes! Space forbids. me to cull from my choice collection more than two: "I don't know how to

thank you for your lecture," said an effusive hearer to me once. "It was simply the most eloquent mosaic I ever listened to." Better than this, best and most heartening of all, was my experience with a Lady who lives forever in the family annals as my Disciple from Nebraska. She was portly and of majestic mien, and throughout my talk she fixed me with her eye. The lecture over, I remember that it was a lecture on Shelley, - she made her impressive way through the circle of sympathetic people who always press up to

-

the speaker with comment and question. The circle opened before her; with large gesture she clasped my hand, and gazed on me in silence. A tear welled up in her eye. I returned her gaze, spellbound; the others waited; would she never speak? At last the words came, slow and loud:

"In the name of your suffering sisters of Nebraska, I give you thanks," she said.

I gasped. I know now that I might have said, "Thank Shelley," but at the time this did not occur to me. Beside, she was going on.

"And now," she continued with fervor, "still in the name of your sisters, I ask you a further favor. I ask you for data.”

The lecturer is accustomed to be asked for anything and everything in the way of intellectual wares: "I shall be happy if I have any that can be of service," I replied obligingly. "Data on what?"

My Disciple paused, glancing at the listening group:

"Data on any subject which you can give will be a boon, indeed, to your sisters in Nebraska."

I caught a twinkle in the eye of a friend, and was lost. Hastily composing my features, I gave the lady from Nebraska an appointment, she would n't go without one, and escaped.

I was reminded of these strange contradictions by reading, in a recent At lantic, a review of certain books of verse; or, rather, by reading certain generalizations to which the critic's subject leads him. With all the world's masterpieces of poetry to work with, that reviewer's mind evolves a conclusion which satisfies him as logical and just; and here is my humbly anonymous intellect producing, with exactly the same materials, a diametrically opposite result.

He has been dealing with certain "contrasting experiments in poetic drama." The theme of one of these dramas, he says, "has the inestimable advantage of possessing already a hold upon the imagination of the general; an advantage which great dramatic poets from Eschylus to Shakespeare have sedulously pursued, and which the best of their successors down to Mr. Stephen Phillips have continued to pursue;" whereas the author of the other play "is actually trying to interpret the present moment in blank verse," - an effort which compels the bewildered critic "to think there is a real incongruity between their substance and their form." And at last we find him laying down the law thus:

"No great dramatic poetry, no great epical poetry, has ever dealt with contemporary conditions. Only the austere processes of time can precipitate the multitude of immediate facts into the priceless residuum of universal truth.

The great dramatists have turned to the past for their materials, not of choice, but of necessity. Here and there in the dark backward and abysm of time, some human figure, some human episode, is seen to have weathered the years, and to have taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth; and upon this foundation the massive structure of heroic poetry is builded."

But surely the contemporaneousness of all great art is a truth too important to be at the mercy of any one's experiments. The masterpieces of every art I venture to generalize even more broadly than the reviewer have been the complete, the ultimate expression of the age which produced them, never in any sense an echo of any other. They express the universal truth through the medium of the thought, the feeling of their own time, and they owe nothing to the past except the basic materials, the stones and mortar, the words and the singing voice, the vast background of nature and human nature, the dreams, the faith, the aspirations, which belong to all the ages, though they take widely varying forms in their progress through the centuries.

Of course, his protest is obvious: "However expressive of its age the masterpiece may be," he will say, "it turns to the past for its themes." I answer that in a restricted and superficial sense it does sometimes, and sometimes not, but that in a larger and deeper sense it never does. He will confront me then with instances: What of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear? What of Edipus, the Prometheus Bound, Faust? What of Paradise Lost, yea, of the Iliad itself, whose heroes lived and fought centuries before Homer sang?

But in every one of these instances, I contend, the theme was strictly contemporaneous, and the characters were the imaginative embodiments of the feeling of the poet's time. Milton's theme was the Puritan faith, and his God, Satan, Adam and Eve were most wonderfully