Such as he knows I cannot choose but hear:
"I owe Secundus twenty thousand clear,
I owe Philetas, thirty thousand more,
And then there's Phœbus-that's another four,
Besides, there's interest due on each amount,—
And not one farthing on my bank account!"
Oh strategem profound of my old friend!
'Tis hard refusing when you're asked to lend;
But to refuse before you're asked displays

Inventive genius worthy of the bays!

Of a fascinating but moody friend Martial says (xii, 47, translated by Addison):

In all thy humours whether grave or mellow

Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,

Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee or without thee.

It is high time, however, for me to bring this imperfect sketch of Martial and his work to a close. I have said nothing of the history, form, and style of the antique epigram. One should be well acquainted with them in order really to understand and appreciate Martial. I have also said nothing of his supreme position in the later history of his department. His influence on the English poets is a large chapter by itself. So, too, a few of his happy phrases still linger in cultivated speech. But, so far as I know, only one of his epigrams, as such, has penetrated our popular consciousness. This is i, 32:

Non amo te Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare:
Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te.

An epigram which through some anonymous translator of the seventeenth century is responsible for the proverbial jingle:

I do not love thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell :
But this I'm sure I know full well,
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell.

I have also said nothing of Martial's occasional tenderness, of his frequent touches of real poetry, and of many other important matters. I trust, however, that I have succeeded in giving some idea of the scope and character of his genius.

Not altogether a pleasant period, those evil days of Domitian. It is always saddening to watch the long senescence of a great

nation. But after dwelling in the gloom of Tacitus, after being dazzled by the lightning of Juvenal's rhetoric, it is well for us that we can see that age in the broad sunlight of Martial's genius, that we can use the keen and penetrating yet just and kindly eyes of one who saw it as it really was. And bad as it may have been, there was at least a large reading public which was highly cultivated, and the great traditions of literary form and style were still intact. Patronage was unpleasant enough, but I fancy that one could find authors in this age who would prefer the slavery of patronage to the slavery of the modern descendant of Scott's "Gentle Reader."

However that may be, the genius of Martial was the genius of one who knew how to write for time, and time has justified his methods. As he himself said, "his page has the true relish of human life." And in its essentials human life is unchangeable. Thus it was that the first and last great poet whom the Provinces gave to the literature of Imperial Rome could also take his place among the few who have written for all men and for all time. KIRBY FLOWER SMITH.

Johns Hopkins University.

WHY MARLOW?

"A man who sat apart from others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested, and clear." So Marlow first appears to Lord Jim, and to readers of Conrad. And those who have known the narrator of Lord Jim, of Youth, of Heart of Darkness, and last, of Chance, have felt the spell of that "veiled glance" of his, akin to the glittering eyes of another Ancient Mariner. For Marlow's hearers, too, are not only compelled, but compelled even against their will; like the Wedding Guest, they "cannot choose but hear."

Marlow, then, the teller of strange tales, may well stand for that baffling charm that Conrad exercises over those who love him. Primarily he stands for Conrad's unique, zigzag method of tale within tale, and teller upon teller.

Zigzag, indeed! Think of the climax of Lord Jim, told in an "explanatory letter from Marlow, with three distinct enclosures"; of those episodes in Chance, story within story, Marlow saying what Mrs. Fyne said Flora said the governess said, where quotation marks utterly fail to keep pace with the narrators. Think of young Powell, appearing in the first thirty pages of Chance, disappearing until the 230th; or of Captain Brierly and the Frenchman, mere onlookers at the tragedy of Jim, depicted in vivid digression, only to vanish forever. Such are the passages that have evoked the critics' most trenchant epithets and ingenious comparisons: from Henry James's famous image of a series of aëroplanes, "the principal aëroplane causing another to depend from it, and that one still another,"1 to Mr. F. T. Cooper's happy likeness to a spider's web, begun, apparently, at random, evolved into perfect symmetry. The writer's memory insists on recalling that childhood enigma -a picture-book depicting on its cover a child absorbed in a book depicted on its cover-and so on to infinity. Never, it seems, did teller of tales devise a method more baffling, more circuitous, more accidental, than the method of Marlow. Yet through all

1Notes on Novelists.

Some English Story-Tellers.

his meanderings and moralizings he holds us fascinated. Nay, we feel the power that is Conrad more strongly in the wanderings of Marlow than in the swift, unswerving onrush of Victory. Here, surely, is no accident nor amateurism of method. Conrad, master equally of a method the most direct and the most oblique, is everywhere the conscious, deliberate artist. Indeed it is only by his own insistence on the significance of method that he challenges us to our questioning of the method of Marlow. In that most strangely revealing of autobiographies, A Personal Record, he says: "And in this matter of life and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness, as the How. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind."]

So it is Conrad's own suggestion that we are following when we ask: Does not the oblique manner of Marlow body forth some "inner truth" of his creator's personality, some hint of his unique contribution to fiction?

It is the personality of Marlow himself that first challenges our scrutiny. There is no other of the tale-tellers of fiction whom we know so well as this "lanky, loose" old sea-dog, with his "sunken cheeks, yellow complexion, straight back, and ascetic aspect." Lord Jim, Youth, and Heart of Darkness are saturated with his unique blend of sympathetic skepticism; but in these, his first appearances, he is the narrator subdued to his story. It is in Chance that he stands out the conscious artist, dexterously interweaving half-hinted and fleeting glimpses of men and things with his own reflections and imaginings in the full fabric of Flora de Barral's destiny. "He existed for me, and, after all, it is only through me that he exists for you❞— there speaks not the teller only, but the creator.

It is the life of the sea, that "isolated, seabound existence," that has moulded Marlow's philosophy of pity and of mirth. "The men of the sea," observes Marlow's friend, "understand each other very well in their view of earthly things, for simplicity is a good counsellor, and isolation not a bad educator. A turn of mind composed of innocence and skepticism is common to them all, with the addition of an unexpected insight into

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motives, as of a disinterested onlooker at a game. Marlow, then, traces his unswerving curiosity to that same "fellowship of the craft" that first prompted Conrad himself "to render in words assembled with conscientious care, the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived."

But to take Marlow, as have some critics, as the mere mouthpiece of his maker, would be as stupid as is always the attempt to identify fiction with fact, character with author. One almost suspects Conrad of foreseeing this fallacy, and of protecting himself against it by insisting on Marlow's semi-seriousness, "that peculiar manner between jest and earnestness."

66 'Do you really mean what you have said?' I asked, meaning no offence, because with Marlow one could never be sure.

"Only on certain days of the year,' said Marlow, readily, with a malicious smile."

For to know Marlow we must listen to him as he tells us tales such as never a seaman told. From the farthest East, from the very heart of darkness, he has brought the sailors' strange adventures, of ships aflame in mid-ocean, of midnight plots and perils. But little does he reck of these; for him the real adventures are of the spirit-the flaming hopes of youth, the creeping disillusions, the stifling despairs. The voyages of the Patna and the Ferndale are the voyages of the souls of Jim, Flora, and Anthony. Every episode, every climax, is in its reality psychic.

One can cite only a few of the evidences. Of the spectators of Jim's trial, Marlow says: "Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them there was purely psychological-the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions."

Hear him, this time before the breathless climax scene of Chance: "Each situation, created either by folly or wisdom, has its psychological moment. . . . . I believe that just then the tension of the false situation was at its highest."

No scene could better illustrate the aim and the interest of Marlow. For out of poison, treachery, suicide-mere stuff of melodrama-he has wrought the reconciliation of two tortured

lives.