VOL. XXX

NO. 1

THERE are times when the Presi

dent seems to ride the thunder clouds of righteous anger. No man has seen him capriciously angry; some men have not only sighted the lightning, but felt the heat of his indignation. "I have the greatest respect for President Roosevelt," said a well-known local official, "but I do not think I care to see him again-at least in that mood!" The "mood" was the result of an attempt made by this official and other men to induce the President to interfere in behalf of a teacher who had-the court decideddistributed a bad book to young people. The President met them, and looked at the book. Then he glanced at the committee, misguided by local feeling. Then he spoke. His words have not been recorded, "they actually blazed," the hearers said. The utmost limit of legal punishments was narrow for an offence like this. That men with children of their own could ask that this horror should be condoned was more than the President could endure. And the words with which he resented the plea "burnt" in. It is quite probable that some member of this committee may at a future time ask the President to pardon a murderer or shorten the prison term of a forgerbut never will he suggest that the circulator of evil books be treated with clemency!

If the President hates the degrading book and all who purvey it, he loves even with more force good books and makers of good books. It is one thing to say that a man is well read; another to say that he has read well. The President is both well read and he has read well. A good book to him is a sacred thing, and logically he hates to see life and literature debased, even when this debasement is done in an exquisite style,-"lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." The descriptions made of him by a friend and admirer "a man of letters in love with life" seems very apt when one hears him talk about books. He reads them in their relation to life. Poetry he likes for its stimulating, inspiriting, ethical qualities, and seldom for its academic or artistic value. In talking to a writer of rather technical sonnets, he expressed his regard for their ethical value, but disclaimed all knowledge of their metrical delicacies. "I don't pretend to know that sort of thing," he said, "Mrs. Roosevelt really knows,-if I said I knew it, it would only be pretense." It is curious that the President, who enjoys greatly the swing and flow of rhythm and ryme, does not in any poem lose sight of the application to life. He does not quote the poets who sing merely for the sake of making music. He enjoys Milton's "Paradise Lost" in parts, and admires Dante; Spenser

seems somewhat too remote for him and the "Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer he likes because of its sociological interest. It is, after all is said, the most exact picture extant of daily life in England in the fourteenth century. Nothing modern that uplifts, that has the note of aspiration, escapes him.

He seems to read by paragraph, not by sentences, and he manages to consume the essence of every good thing printed in the magazines, and to make it fit into a place in life. Lately he hunted out a story dealing with the problem of the future of the races in this country; before, as the author says, he had time to call the President's attention to it, the President had discovered what he meant, and "gave it dignity by showing me how broad the field. is, and how well I might make myself useful in it. I never expected him to discover either my story or its meaning, but he did, and he illuminated it for me." "Many things we strive about,-the tariff; the trusts; the questions of currency," he said, "will be settled with ease in comparison of the great problem of the future of the various races in our country." I do not quote the exact words of the President, but this is their substance. It was not the art of the story that appealed to him particularly; it was its bearing on the welfare of the nation.

"Culture," he once said, "in which word I include, of course, a familiar knowledge of great books, cannot, as a foundation of character, take the place of religion, nor can it supply the vital quality that guards the development of character; but an early knowledge of books, which is the beginning of culture, is a great help in the adjusting of ourselves to the demands of life."

"In the education of the sons of some rich men, who live luxurious and indolent lives-what is the main lack?" he was asked. "I do not admit that an idle

man is innocuous," he said. "One ought not to praise a man for being harmless, a great need in the education of the 'leisure class,' if you put it that way is the art of knowing good books and using them the art of converting their spirits into action." The President was brought up among good books, and his children are brought up among good books-and these books are not all new.

It is evident that the President, while in sympathy with athletics, does not believe that athletics are to be permitted to drive out the uses of books. Accent has been put on the fact that he is an omniverous reader, but this accent is in the wrong place; he reads carefully only the important things. For instance, he read enough of the "Neblungen Lied," to absorb the spirit of that wonderful collection of sagas-it may be said, too, of Froissart's "Chronicle" and of Milton's "Paradise Lost," that he absorbed what interested and stimulated him; he did not need to read the rest. He declares that much of his reading is "purely for enjoyment." To those who listen, this seems to be true, but true in the sense in which a man with a good appetite takes his roast beef. He enjoys the eating of the beef and it feeds him. It gives color to his blood and vitality to his brain.

Any important book you may mention has been or will be read by the President. If he has not read the book which you consider worth reading, he whips out his pencil and takes the title at once. There is no pretense of pedantry about him.

A small boy-his teacher is the authority for it - once defined a friend as a chap who knows all about you and yet likes you! The President is quite willing that the American people should know all about him, and he has often remarked that he was gratified that his own folk continue to like him, in spite of the misrepresentations of the caricaturists. There is no

pretense about his knowledge and love of books. He does not expect you to believe that he has read all Shakespeare, though he dwells with constant delight on the passages he likes in "Macbeth" and "Twelfth Night." While he reads German and French with ease, he does not object to a good English translation, when he can find one. He admits that, though he likes Longfellow's poems, he prefers the "Inferno" in Carlyle's prose translation rather than in the more beautiful, but less exact, interpretation of the first of American poets. Parts of Plutarch, of the Politics of Aristotle, of Aeschylus and all of Polybius, he has read in translation. No one ever hears of his boasting that he prefers to read books in the "original." He has been known, with a twinkle in his eyes, to translate at sight a letter in German, when his secretary, who has Teutonic blood in his veins, rather hesitated. As a rule, he reads those volumes in the original which he cannot secure in English. And, probably, if he came across a very desirable book in Italian, of which he could find no translation, he would attack it at once with the help of a lexicon, and master it. It does not seem as if any obstacle could prevent him from getting at the heart of a good book.

The President once said that a man may accomplish much for mankind when he refuses to leave the stronger, manlier qualities to be availed of only in the interest of evil. John Wesley himself asked on a certain occasion, "Why should the devil have all the best times?" Similarly, the President does not see why the fine art of the novelist should not, in giving delight, be the means of furthering the interests of the home and the State. A "preaching" novel he can endure no more than Thackeray could the gilt-edged, sugar-coated "pious" stories of his day; but a story. that reflects life, that shows what life may be, that smiles and weeps, like

John Fox's "Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come," Garland's "Captain of the Gray Horse Troop," Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," or, perhaps, not so whole-heartedly, Jack London's "Sea Wolf" and Bret Harte's earlier tales. He has no reserves about Octave Thanet's sociological stories, or Joel Chandler Harris' "Uncle Remus," to which he recurs with unceasing enthusiasm. It is a great pleasure to those who fear that modern method of "intensive" study and the developing tendency to "hustle" even through poetry, may put the great authors "on the shelf," to hear the President "talk Dickens." He seems to know his Dickens as well as Secretary Bonaparte. He quotes, of late, from "Martin Chuzzlewit"-not carefully read until 1907he takes this amusing caricature, not always with approbation, but certainly with pure "enjoyment;" and Thackeray's humor and his love for the poor, the simple and the afflicted, appeal to the President. If Thackeray is cynical the President does not see it,-in the great book it is the constructive force he likes, and cynicism and pessimism are, in his opinion, evil flowers of materialism.

The "muck-raking," psychological novel is not on the President's list; the novel, or the story of hopelessness, no matter how disguised by scientific phrases, he seems to pass by. As he likes only those sports in which men take an active part, he esteems only those books in which there is no languor, no mere drawling of the dilettante. Phrase making, analysis for the sake of analysis, has no charm for him. Poems with the truth in them, no matter where or when written, appeal to him. Some of Bliss Carman's nature-songs delight him, and, with the help of his son Kermet, he discovered Robinson, and wrote about him in a way that made several poets happy. When he finds an uplifting book, he passes it on. The poems of Robinson, the author of "The Chil

dren of the Night," and those of Emily Lawless, the Irish author of "Songs of the Wild Geese," have little in common, except intense feeling; the moment he discovered the Wild Geese poems, he seemed a-fire until he had other people enjoying them. The test of his valuation of a new book is when he says, "I will show it to Mrs. Roosevelt." Only the best goes to her; "I read and enjoy books," he once said, "but she knows." His children know, too, by heart, his favorite characters of fact and fiction. It may be the fire-drake in the Beowulf, the Leprachauns in Celtic folk lore, the gnomes of the Catskill, or one of Laura Richard or Alice Hegan Rice or Kate Dougless Wiggins' people-whichever it is the President introduces it and his own young people receive him or her humorously or seriously as an old friend. A book, like the "Jungle" may interest him because he sees construction behind it; but the "muck-raker" in fact and fiction who gets to the condition where he enjoys analyzing the result of his researches for the pleasure of the process is not for the President.

For essayists that merely speculate, the President seems to have little regard. "The Simple Life" of Pastor Wagner, now so famous, attracted his attention; not because of style, or refinement of metaphysics, but because it gave in a straightforward, manly way the lessons of temperance and simplicity, with a spiritual basis which every intelligent man or woman could understand. The doctrine of the simple life was taught long before Pastor Wagner taught it; it was taught in the parables; by the saint lately "re-canonized" by the world, Francis d'Assisi; by the Brook-Farmers; and Emerson tried to teach it without the spirituality of St. Francis, but Wagner brought it within the scope of the average man of to-day. "Remember," the President has said, "that in popular government we must rely on

the people themselves, alike for the punishment and reformation." This cannot be, if the springs of life are, as it were, colored with aniline dyes of vanity, of luxury, of envy. The book that teaches the old and the young that the amount of money spent is not the real test of the value of the pleasures of life; the book that shows what a human being may get out of the simple gifts of God, always awakens the enthusiasm of the President. This is the secret of his admiration for John Burrough's work. Always an admirer of those fundamental stories that show the early color of national life, he discovered some time ago the Celtic sagas. Asked on one occasion what was their principal charm, he paused and then answered-"They are so unpagan in their attitude towards romantic love-in them I am attracted by the idealism-so unusual in preChristian sagas, of the relation of lovers." At the root of his admiration for a book, there is, as a rule, an ethical or a sociological reason.

"The Gentle Reader" is among his newest favorite volumes of essays. The humor, the wit, the insight of Mr. Samuel McCord Crothers appeal to him. "A book," the author of "The Gentle Reader" says, speaking of the days of "Clarissa," "was something to tie to. No one could say jauntily, 'I have read "Sir Charles Grandison," but only, 'I am reading. The characters of fiction were not treated as transient guests, but as lifelong companions destined to be a solace of old age." The President, who never forgets a printed page he has once seen, treats the persons created by Thackeray, Dickens and Scott as "lifelong companions." The personages in "Martin Chuzzlewit" became, in his talk, valuable illustrations of the change in manners and in the American point of view, and the group about "Quentin Durward" takes new light in the atmosphere of the twentieth century. The President's quotations from "The Gen