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Title: Essays in miniature
Author: Agnes Repplier
Release date: September 26, 2024 [eBook #74477]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles L. Webster & Co
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN MINIATURE ***
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE
Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series.
MERRY TALES.
BY MARK TWAIN.
THE GERMAN EMPEROR AND HIS EASTERN NEIGHBORS.
BY POULTNEY BIGELOW.
PADDLES AND POLITICS DOWN THE DANUBE.
BY POULTNEY BIGELOW.
SELECTED POEMS.
BY WALT WHITMAN.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: THE STORY OF A LIFE.
BY WALT WHITMAN.
DON FINIMONDONE: CALABRIAN SKETCHES.
BY ELISABETH CAVAZZA.
THE MASTER OF SILENCE: A ROMANCE.
BY IRVING BACHELLER.
WRITINGS OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
EDITED BY PAUL LEICESTER FORD.
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.
BY AGNES REPPLIER.
MR. BILLY DOWNS AND HIS LIKES.
BY RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON.
Bound in Illuminated Cloth, each, 75 Cents. Complete Set, 10 Volumes, in
Box, $7.50.
⁂ _For Sale by all Booksellers, or sent postpaid, on receipt of price, by
the Publishers_,
CHAS. L. WEBSTER & CO., NEW YORK.
Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series
EDITED BY ARTHUR STEDMAN
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE
BY
AGNES REPPLIER
New York
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.
1892
Copyright, 1892,
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.
(_All rights reserved._)
PRESS OF
JENKINS & MCCOWAN,
NEW YORK.
CONTENTS
PAGE
OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 11
TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 28
THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 45
CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 59
A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 70
A BY-WAY IN FICTION 87
COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 104
MR. WILDE’S _Intentions_ 121
HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 129
CHILDREN IN FICTION 144
THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 157
THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 171
OLD WORLD PETS 182
BATTLE OF THE BABIES 195
THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 207
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE
OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS
There is a short paragraph in Hazlitt’s _Conduct of Life_ that I read
very often, and always with fresh delight. He is offering much good
counsel to a little lad at school, and when he comes to a matter upon
which most counselors are wont to be exceedingly didactic and diffuse—the
choice of books—he condenses all he has to say into a few wise and gentle
words that are well worth taking to heart:
“As to the works you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the
best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar to
you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your power,
and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will
have in life, the one you will think of longest, and repent of least. If
my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much more than
yours, I hope, will be) I would live it over again, my poor little boy,
to have read the books I did in my youth.”
In all literature there is nothing truer or better than this, and its
sad sincerity contrasts strangely with the general tone of the essay,
which is somewhat in the manner of Lord Chesterfield. But here, at least,
Hazlitt speaks with the authority of one whose books had ever been his
friends; who had sat up all night as a child over _Paul and Virginia_,
and to whom the mere sight of an odd volume of some good old English
author, on a street stall, brought back with keen and sudden rapture the
flavor of those early joys which he remembered longest, and repented
least. His words ring consolingly in these different days, when we have
not only ceased reading what is old, but when—a far greater misfortune—we
have forgotten how to read “with all the satisfaction in our power,”
and with a simple surrendering of ourselves to the pleasure which has no
peer. There are so many things to be considered now besides pleasure,
that we have well-nigh abandoned the effort to be pleased. In the first
place, it is necessary to “keep up” with a decent proportion of current
literature, and this means perpetual labor and speed, whereas idleness
and leisure are requisite for the true enjoyment of books. In the second
place, few of us are brave enough to withstand the pressure which
friends, mentors and critics bring to bear upon us, and which effectually
crushes anything like the weak indulgence of our own tastes. The reading
they recommend being generally in the nature of a corrective, it is urged
upon us with little regard to personal inclination; in fact, the less we
like it, the greater our apparent need. There are people in this world
who always insist upon others remodeling their diet on a purely hygienic
basis; who entreat us to avoid sweets or acids, or tea or coffee, or
whatever we chance to particularly like; who tell us persuasively that
cress and dandelions will purify our blood; that celery is an excellent
febrifuge; that shaddocks should be eaten for the sake of their quinine,
and fish for its phosphorus; that stewed fruit is more wholesome than
raw; that rice is more nutritious than potatoes;—who deprive us, in a
word, of that hearty human happiness which should be ours when dining.
Like Mr. Woodhouse, they are capable of having the sweetbreads and
asparagus carried off before our longing eyes, and baked apples provided
as a substitute.
It is in the same benevolent spirit that kind-hearted critics are good
enough to warn us against the books we love, and to prescribe for us
the books we ought to read. With robust assurance they offer to give
our tutelage their own personal supervision, and their disinterested
zeal carries them occasionally beyond the limits of discretion. I have
been both amazed and gratified by the lack of reserve with which these
unknown friends have volunteered to guide my own footsteps through the
perilous paths of literature. They are so urgent, too, not to say
severe, in their manner of proffering assistance: “To Miss Repplier we
would particularly recommend”—and then follows a list of books of which
I dare say I stand in open need; but which I am naturally indisposed to
consider with much kindness, thrust upon me, as they are, like paregoric
or a porous plaster. If there be people who can take their pleasures
medicinally, let them read by prescription and grow fat! But let me
rather keep for my friends those dear and familiar volumes which have
given me a large share of my life’s happiness. If they are somewhat
antiquated and out of date, I have no wish to flout their vigorous age.
A book, Hazlitt reminds us, is not, like a woman, the worse for being
old. If they are new, I do not scorn them for a fault which is common
to all their kind. _Paradise Lost_ was once new, and was regarded as a
somewhat questionable novelty. If they come from afar, or are compatriots
of my own, they are equally well-beloved. There can be no aliens in the
ranks of literature, no national prejudice in an honest enjoyment of
art. The book, after all, and not the date or birthplace of its author,
is of material importance. “It seems ungracious to refuse to be a _terræ
filius_,” says Mr. Arnold; “but England is not all the world.” Neither,
for that matter, is America, nor even Russia. The universe is a little
wider and a little older than we are pleased to think, and to have lived
long and traveled far does not necessarily imply inferiority. The volume
that has crossed the seas, the volume that has survived its generation,
stand side by side with their new-born American brother, and there is no
lack of harmony in such close companionship. Books of every age and of
every nation show a charming adaptability in their daily intercourse;
and, if left to themselves, will set off each other’s merits in the most
amiable and disinterested manner, each one growing better by contact with
its excellent neighbor. It is only when the patriotic critic comes along,
and stirs up dissensions in their midst, that this peaceful atmosphere
is rent with sudden discord; that the English book grows disdainful
and supercilious; the American, aggressive and sarcastic; the French,
malicious and unkind. It is only when we apply to them a test which is
neither wise nor worthy that they show all their bad qualities, and
afford a wrangling ground for the ill-natured reviewers of two continents.
There is a story told of the Russian poet, Pushkin, which I like to
think true, because it is so pretty. When he was carried home fatally
wounded from the duel which cost him his life, his young wife, who had
been the innocent cause of the tragedy, asked him whether there were no
relatives or friends whom he wished to see summoned to his bedside. The
dying man lifted his heavy eyes to the shelf where stood his favorite
books, and murmured faintly in reply, “Farewell, my friends.” When we
remember that Pushkin lived before Russian literature had become a great
and dispiriting power, when we realize that he had never been ordered
by critics to read Turguéneff, never commanded severely to worship
Tolstoi or be an outcast in the land, never even reveled in the dreadful
gloom of Dostoïevsky, it seems incredible to the well-instructed that
he should have loved his books so much. It is absolutely afflicting
to think that many of these same volumes were foreign, were romantic,
perhaps even cheerful in their character; that they were not his mentors,
his disciplinarians, his guides to a higher and sadder life, but only
his “friends.” Why, Hazlitt himself could have used no simpler term of
endearment. Charles Lamb might have uttered the very words when he closed
his patient eyes in the dull little cottage at Edmonton. Sir Walter
Scott might have murmured them on that still September morn when the
clear rippling of the Tweed hushed his tired heart to rest. I think that
Shelley bade some swift, unconscious farewell to all the dear delights of
reading, when he thrust into his pocket the little volume of Keats, with
its cover bent hastily backward, and rose, still dreamy with fairy-land,
to face a sudden death. I think that Montaigne bade farewell to the
fourscore “every-day books” that were his chosen companions, before
turning serenely away from the temperate pleasures of life.
For all these men loved literature, not contentiously, nor austerely,
but simply as their friend. All read with that devout sincerity which
precludes petulance, or display, or lettered asceticism, the most dismal
self-torment in the world. In that delicious dialogue of Landor’s between
Montaigne and Scaliger, the scholar intimates to the philosopher that
his library is somewhat scantily furnished, and that he and his father
between them have written nearly as many volumes as Montaigne possesses
on his shelves. “Ah!” responds the sage with gentle malice, “to write
them is quite another thing; but one reads books without a spur, or even
a pat from our Lady Vanity.”
Could anything be more charming, or more untrue than this? Montaigne,
perched tranquilly on his Guyenne hill-slope, may have escaped the goad;
but we, the victims of our swifter day, know too well how remorselessly
Lady Vanity pricks us round the course. Are we not perpetually showing
our paces at her command, and under the sharp incentive of her heel? Yet
Charles Lamb, in the heart of London, preserved by some fine instinct the
same intellectual freedom that Montaigne cherished in sleepy Gascony. He
too was fain to read for pleasure, and his unswerving sincerity is no
less enviable than the clearness of his literary insight. Indeed, while
many of his favorite authors may have no message for our ears, yet every
line in which he writes his love is pregnant with enjoyment; every word
expresses subtly a delicious sense of satisfaction. The soiled and torn
copies of _Tom Jones_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_ from the circulating
library, which speak eloquently to him of the thousand thumbs that have
turned over each well-worn page; the “kind-hearted play-book” which he
reaches down from some easy shelf; the old _Town and Country Magazine_
which he finds in the window-seat of an inn; the “garrulous, pleasant
history” of Burnet; the “beautiful, bare narrative” of _Robinson Crusoe_;
the antiquated, time-stained edition of “that fantastic old great man,”
Robert Burton; the Folio Beaumont and Fletcher—all these and many more
are Lamb’s tried friends, and he writes of them with lingering affection.
He is even able, through some fine choice of words, to convey to us the
precise degree and quality of pleasure which they yield him, and which
he wins us to share, not by exhortations or reproaches, but gently, with
alluring smiles, and hinted promises of reward. How craftily he holds
each treasured volume before our eyes! How apt the brief, caressing
sentence in which he sings its praises!—“The sweetest names, and which
carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of
Hawthornden, and Cowley.” “Milton almost requires a solemn service of
music to be played before you enter upon him. Who listens, had need
bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.” “Winter evenings—the world
shut out—with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a
season, the _Tempest_, or his own _Winter’s Tale_.”
In fact, the knowledge of when to read a book is almost as valuable
as the knowledge of what book to read, and Lamb, as became a true
lover of literature, realized instinctively that certain hours and
certain places seem created expressly for the supreme enjoyment of an
author, who yields to these harmonious surroundings his best and rarest
gifts. To pick up _The Faerie Queene_ as a stop-gap in the five or six
impatient minutes before dinner, to carry _Candide_ into the “serious
avenues” of a cathedral, to try and skim over Richardson when in the
society of a lively girl—Lamb knew too well that these unholy feats are
the accomplishments of an intellectual acrobat, not of a modest and
simple-hearted reader. Hazlitt also was keenly alive to the influences
of time and place. His greatest delight in poring over the books of his
youth lay in the many recollections they aroused of scenes and moments
rich in vanished joys. He opened a faded, dusty volume, and behold!
the spot where first he read it, the day it was received, the feeling
of the air, the fields, the sky, all returned to him with charming
distinctness, and with them returned his first rapturous impression of
that long-closed, long-neglected romance: “Twenty years are struck off
the list, and I am a child again.” Mr. Pater lays especial emphasis on
the circumstances under which our favorite authors are read. “A book,”
he says, “like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky
in the precise moment of its falling in our way; and often, by some
happy accident, ranks with us for something more than its independent
value.” Thus it is that Marius and Fabian, nestled in the ripened corn
amid the cool brown shadows, receive from the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius
a strange keen pleasure; each lad taking from the story that which he
is best fitted to absorb; each lad as unmindful of the other’s feelings
as of the grosser elements in the tale. For without doubt a book has a
separate message for every reader, and tells him, of good or evil, that
which he is able to hear. Plato, indeed, complains of all books that
they lack reticence or propriety toward different classes of persons,
and his protest embodies the aversion of the flexible Greek mind for the
precision of written literature. A poem or an oration which, crystallized
into characters, speaks to all alike, and reveals itself indiscriminately
to everybody, is of less value to the ancient scholar than the poem or
oration which lingers in the master’s mind, and maintains a delicate
reserve toward the inferior portion of the community. Plato is so far
removed from the modern spirit which seeks to persuade the multitude
to read Shakespeare and Milton, that he practically resents their
peering with rude, but pardonable curiosity, into the stately domains
of genius. We have now grown so insistently generous in these matters
that our unhappy brothers, harassed beyond endurance, may well envy the
plebeian Greeks their merciful limitations; or wish, with the little
girl in _Punch_, that they had lived in the time of Charles II., “for
then education was very much neglected.” But strive as we may, we cannot
coerce great authors into universal complaisance. Plato himself, were he
so unfortunate as to be living now, would recognize and applaud their
manifest reserves. Even to the elect they speak with varying voices, and
it is sometimes difficult to believe that all have read alike. When _Guy
Mannering_ was first given to the public, who awaited it with frantic
eagerness, Wordsworth thoughtfully observed that it was a novel in the
style of Mrs. Radcliffe. Murray, from whom one expects more discernment,
wrote to Hogg that _Meg Merrilies_ was worthy of Shakespeare; “but all
the rest of the novel might have been written by Scott’s brother, or any
other body.” Blackwood, about the same time, wrote to Murray: “If Walter
Scott be the author of _Guy Mannering_, he stands far higher in this line
than in his former walk.” One of these verdicts has been ratified by
time, but who could suppose that Julia Mannering and honest Dandy Dinmont
would ever have whispered such different messages into listening ears!
And it is precisely because of the independence assumed by books, that
we have need to cherish our own independence in return. They will not
all be our friends, and not one of them will give itself freely to us at
the dictation of a peremptory critic. Hazlitt says nobly of a few great
writers, notably Milton and Burke, that “to have lived in the cultivation
of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such
names, is not to have lived in vain.” This is true, yet if we must seek
for companionship in less august circles, there are many milder lights
who shine with a steady radiance. It is not the privilege of every one
to love so great a prose writer as Burke, so great a poet as Milton. “An
appreciation of _Paradise Lost_,” says Mr. Mark Pattison, “is the reward
of exquisite scholarship;” and the number of exquisite scholars is never
very large. To march up to an author as to the cannon’s mouth is at best
but unprofitable heroism. To take our pleasures dutifully is the least
likely way to enjoy them. The laws of Crete, it is said, were set to
music, and sung as alluringly as possible after dinner; but I doubt if
they afforded a really popular pastime. The well-fed guests who listened
to such decorous chants applauded them probably from the standpoint of
citizenship, rather than from any undisguised sentiment of enjoyment, and
a few degenerate souls must have sighed occasionally over the joys of a
rousing and unseemly chorus. We of to-day are so rich in laws, so amply
disciplined at every turn, that we have no need to be reminded at dinner
of our obligations. A kind-hearted English critic once said that reading
was not a duty, and had therefore no business to be made disagreeable;
and that no man was under any obligation to read what another man wrote.
This is an old-fashioned point of view, which has lost favor of late
years, but which is not without compensations of its own. If the office
of literature be to make glad our lives, how shall we seek the joy in
store for us save by following Hazlitt’s simple suggestion, and reading
“with all the satisfaction in our power”? And how shall we insure this
satisfaction, save by ignoring the restrictions imposed upon us, and
cultivating, as far as we can, a sincere and pleasurable intercourse with
our friends, the books?
TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER
In reading the recently published _Memoirs and Correspondence of John
Murray_, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography—albeit
somewhat lengthy for these hurried days—we are forcibly impressed
with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in our
ignorance—namely, that the publisher’s life, like the policeman’s, is
not a happy one, but filled to the brim with vexations peculiarly his
own. It was as much the fashion in Murray’s time as it is in ours to
bewail the hard fate of down-trodden authors, and to hint that he who
prints the book absorbs the praise and profit which belong in justice to
him who writes it. In fact, that trenchant and time-honored jest, “Now
Barabbas was a publisher,” dates from this halcyon period when _Marmion_
was sold for a thousand guineas, and the third canto of _Childe Harold_
for nearly twice that sum. Murray himself possessed such influence in the
literary world that the battle with the public was thought to be half won
when a book appeared armed with the sanction of his name. He was a man of
wealth, too, of social standing, of severe and fastidious tastes; exactly
fitted by circumstances, if not by nature, to play the autocratic _rôle_
popularly assigned to all his craft, to crush the aspiring poet in the
dust, to freeze the budding genius who sought assistance at his hands, to
override with haughty arrogance the wan and needy scholar who waited at
his door. Instead of this, we see him enduring with lamblike gentleness
an amount of provocation which would have hallowed a mediæval saint, and
which seems to our undisciplined spirits as wantonly exasperating and
malign.
In the first place, his Scotch allies, Constable and the ever-sanguine
James Ballantyne, appeared to have looked upon the English firm as an
inexhaustible mine of wealth, from which they could, when convenient,
draw whatever they required. Ballantyne, especially, required so much,
and required that much so often, that Murray was obliged to sever a
connection too costly for his purse. Then his partial ownership of
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ was for years a thorn in his flesh, and there
is something truly pathetic in his miserable attempts to modify the
personalities of that utterly irrepressible journal. “In the name of
God,” he writes vehemently to William Blackwood, “why do you seem to
think it necessary that each number must give pain to some one?” Even
the _Quarterly_, his own literary offspring, and the pride and glory
of his heart, was at times but a fractious child, and cost him, after
the fashion of children, many sleepless nights. Gifford, the editor,
was incurably unbusinesslike in his habits, and never could understand
why subscribers should complain and raise a row because the magazine
chanced to be a month or six weeks late. It was sure to appear some time,
and they had all the pleasure of anticipation. It was a point of honor
with him, also, to conceal the names of his contributors, so that when
offence was given to anybody—which was pretty nearly always—the aggrieved
person immediately attacked Murray in return. There are hosts of letters
in these volumes from indignant authors who express themselves with
true British candor because the _Quarterly_ has assailed their books,
or their friends’ books, or their friends’ friends’ books, or their pet
politicians, or their most cherished political schemes. There are hosts
of other letters which merely record a distinctly unfavorable opinion
of the magazine’s literary qualities, and which lament with pitiless
sincerity that the last number hardly contained a single readable article.
All these annoyances, however, prickly though they appear, are but
trifles in comparison with the extraordinary demands made upon Murray as
a publisher. Impecunious playwrights, like poor Charles Maturin, pelt
him with unsalable dramas and heartrending appeals for help. Impecunious
essayists, like Charles Marsh, send papers to the _Quarterly_, and—before
they are read—request fifteen pounds, “as money on manuscript
deposited.” Impecunious patriots, like Foscolo—that bright particular
star of sentimental Liberals—demand loans of a thousand pounds, to be
repaid with literary work. Impecunious poets, like James Hogg, borrow
fifty pounds with the lofty patronage of sovereigns. It is very amusing
to note the tone assumed by the Ettrick Shepherd in his intercourse with
a man of Murray’s influence and position. When he is in a good humor,
that is, when he has negotiated a successful loan, he writes in this
generous fashion: “Though I have heard some bitter things against you, I
never met with any man whatever who, on so slight an acquaintance, has
behaved to me so much like a gentleman.” Or again, “You may be misled,
and you may be mistaken, my dear Murray, but as long as you tell me
the simple truth as plainly, you and I will be friends.” If things go
haltingly, however, and there is a delay in forwarding cheques, this
magnificent condescension sharpens into angry protest. “What the deuce,”
he writes vehemently, “have you made of my excellent poem,[1] that you
are never publishing it, while I am starving for money, and cannot even
afford a Christmas goose to my friends?” When a new edition of _The
Queen’s Wake_ was printed in Edinburgh, a very handsome quarto selling
for a guinea—which seems a heart-breaking price—Murray with his usual
generosity subscribed for twenty-five copies; whereupon we find Hogg
promptly acknowledging this munificence by begging him to persuade others
to do likewise. “You must make a long pull and a strong pull in London
for subscriptions,” he writes, with enviable composure, “as you and Mr.
Rogers are the principal men I have to rely on.” There is something very
tranquillizing in the gentle art of shifting one’s burdens to other
shoulders. Genius flourishes like the mountain oak when it can strike
root in the money-boxes of less gifted friends.
If tact and patience were both required in soothing Hogg’s petulant
vanity and in providing for his extravagant habits, the task became
harder and more thankless when Leigh Hunt presented himself in the
field. I can imagine few things more delightful than to have had money
transactions with a person of Leigh Hunt’s peculiar and highly original
methods. He was a kind of literary Oliver, crying perpetually for more.
When the _Story of Rimini_ was still uncompleted, it was offered by the
poet to Murray with this diverting assurance:
“Booksellers tell me I ought not to ask less than four hundred and fifty
pounds (which is a sum I happen to want just now), and my friends, not
in the trade, say I ought not to ask less than five hundred, with such a
trifling acknowledgment upon the various editions, after the second and
third, as shall enable me to say that I am still profiting by it.”
Murray, evidently disconcerted by the coolness of this proposal, writes
back with veiled and courteous sarcasm, suggesting that the manuscript
be offered upon these terms to other publishers. Should they refuse to
accept it, he is willing to print a small edition at his own expense,
and divide the profits with the author, to whom the copyright shall be
restored. Rather to our amazement, and perhaps to Murray’s, Leigh Hunt
closes immediately with this very moderate offer; and as soon as the book
appears he writes again, begging to have part of the money advanced to
him. Murray’s reply is eminently characteristic of the man. The poem, he
says, is selling well. Should the entire edition be exhausted, which he
doubts not will be the case, the poet’s share of the profits would amount
to exactly forty-eight pounds and ten shillings. He takes pleasure in
enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds, and only asks that a receipt may
be sent him for the same. The receipt is not sent until ten days are
past, when it arrives accompanied by a long letter in which Leigh Hunt
enlarges upon his pecuniary troubles—concerning these he is as explicit
as Micawber—and proposes that Murray should now purchase the copyright of
_Rimini_ for four hundred and fifty pounds, and let him have the money
at once. Unhappily, the answer to this admirable piece of negotiation
has been lost, but it was evidently too patronizing to please the poet,
who was as sensitive as he was insatiable. The next letter we have from
him sharply reminds Murray that he is not seeking for assistance, but
merely endeavoring to transact a piece of business which would involve no
possible risk for any one. Finally the poor harassed publisher persuades
him with soft words to sell the copyright of _Rimini_ to another firm,
and there must have been a deep breath of relief drawn in Albemarle
Street when the matter was at last adjusted, and the troublesome
correspondence ceased. In fact, there is a letter from Blackwood frankly
congratulating Murray on his escape. “I dare say you are well rid of
Leigh Hunt,” writes this experienced ally to his fellow-sufferer; “and
I really pity you when I think of the difficulty you must often have in
managing with authors, and particularly with the friends of authors whom
you wish to oblige.”
One of those whom Murray wished eagerly to oblige, until he found the
task too costly for his purse, was Madame de Staël. For the English
and French editions of her work on Germany he paid no less than fifteen
hundred pounds, and speedily found himself a loser by the transaction.
Gifford, who had scant liking for the celebrated “hurricane in
petticoats,” writes to him on the occasion with gentle malice, and a
too evident amusement at his discomfiture: “I can venture to assure you
that the hope of keeping her from the press is quite vain. The family
of Œdipus were not more haunted and goaded by the Furies than the
Neckers, father, mother, and daughter, have always been by the demon
of publication. Madame de Staël will therefore write and print without
intermission.” Not without being well paid, however; for three years
later we find the Baron de Staël writing to Murray in his mother’s name,
and demanding four thousand pounds for her three-volume work, _Des Causes
et des Effets de la Révolution Française_. “My mother _insists_ upon four
thousand pounds, besides a credit in books for every new edition,” says
this imperative gentleman, somewhat in the manner of a footpad; to whom
Murray responds with much tranquillity, thanking him for his “obliging
letter,” and intimating that he and Longman together are willing to pay
one thousand pounds for the first French and English editions, and three
hundred and fifty pounds for the second. Madame de Staël indignantly
repudiates this offer, declaring that twenty-five hundred pounds is
the least she can think of taking, and that the book will be a bargain
at such a price. Murray, who knows something about bargains, and who
has been rendered more cautious than usual by his experience with
_L’Allemagne_, declines such palpable risks, and excuses himself from
further negotiations. _La Révolution Française_ did not appear until
after Madame de Staël’s death, when it was published by Messrs. Baldwin
and Cradock, and proved a lamentable failure, people having begun by that
time to grow a trifle weary of such a thrice-told tale.
The most amusing and at the same time most pathetic bit of correspondence
in these two big volumes relates to a translation of _Faust_, which
Coleridge, so eminently qualified for the task, offers to write for
Murray. He unfolds his views in a letter as long as an average essay—or
what we call an essay in these degenerate days—evincing on every page a
superb contempt for the reading public, which was expected to buy the
book, a painful reluctance to “attempt anything of a literary nature
with any motive of pecuniary advantage”—which does not prevent him
from doing some elaborate bargaining later on—and a tendency to plunge
into intellectual abstractions, calculated to chill the heart of the
stoutest publisher in Christendom. There is one incomparable paragraph
which Coleridge alone could have written, and a portion of which—only a
portion—I cannot refrain from quoting:
“Any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed
for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on
language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of Thought with
Thought as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend
days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full foreknowledge
that their admission would not have offended three of all my readers,
and might perhaps be deemed beauties by three hundred—if so many there
were; and this not out of any respect for the public (_i.e._, the
persons who might happen to purchase and look over the book) but from
a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of
Duty. Language is the sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and the
Muses are its especial and vestal priestesses. Though I cannot prevent
the vile drugs and counterfeit Frankincense which render its flames
at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, I would yet be no voluntary
accomplice in the Sacrilege. With the commencement of a Public, commences
the degradation of the Good and the Beautiful—both fade and retire before
the accidentally Agreeable. _Othello_ becomes a hollow lip-worship; and
the _Castle Spectre_, or any more peccant thing of Froth, Noise, and
Impermanence, that may have over-billowed it on the restless sea of
curiosity, is the true Prayer of the Praise and Admiration.”
Fancy the feelings of a poor publisher assailed with this raging torrent
of words! Murray, stemming the tide as best he can, replies in a short,
businesslike note, proposing terms—not very liberal ones—for the desired
translation. Whereupon Coleridge writes a second letter, actually
longer than the first, intimating that a hundred pounds is but scant
remuneration for such a piece of work, “executed as alone I can or dare
do it—that is, to the utmost of my power; for which the intolerable Pain,
nay the far greater Toil and Effort of doing otherwise, is a far safer
Pledge than any solicitude on my part concerning the approbation of the
Public.”
Finally, the undertaking was abandoned, and the English-speaking world
lost its single chance of having _Faust_ adequately translated; lost it,
I truly believe, through the reluctance of even a patient man to stomach
any further correspondence.
Trials of a very different order poured in on Murray through his
connection with Lord Byron, an honor which was not altogether without
thorns. People who thought Byron’s poetry immoral wrote frankly to Murray
to say so. People who did not think Byron’s poetry immoral wrote quite as
frankly to complain of those who did. His noble lordship himself was at
times both petulant and exacting, and there is a ring of true dignity in
the following remonstrance offered by the publisher to the peer, by “Mr.
Bookseller Murray,” as Napier contemptuously calls him, to the poet whose
good qualities he was so quick to understand:
“I assure you,” he writes, “that I take no umbrage at irritability
which will occasionally burst from a mind like yours; but I sometimes
feel a deep regret that in our pretty long intercourse I appear to have
failed to show that a man in my situation may possess the feelings and
principles of a gentleman. Most certainly do I think that, from personal
attachment, I could venture as much in any shape for your service as any
of those who have the good fortune to be ranked amongst your friends.”
In fact, the friends of authors were too often, as Blackwood hinted,
the sources of Murray’s severest trials. Friends are obliging creatures
in their way, and always ready to give with lavish hearts their wealth
of criticism and opinion. There is a delightful letter from the Rev. H.
H. Milman, Dean of St. Paul’s, offering to Murray his sadly unreadable
poem _Belshazzar_, with this timely intimation: “I give you fair warning
that all the friends who have hitherto seen it assure me that I shall
not do myself justice unless I demand a very high price for it.” Murray,
in reply, hints as urbanely as he can that, as it is he and not Mr.
Milman’s friends who is to pay the price, he cannot accept their judgment
in the matter as final; he is compelled to take into consideration his
own chances of profit. Throughout all his correspondence we note this
tone of careful self-repression, of patient and courteous kindness. Now
and then only, particularly trying letters appear to have been left
unanswered, as though the limits of even his endurance had been reached.
When we remember that the _Quarterly_ was the cherished idol of his
life, and that his pride and delight in it knew no bounds, we can dimly
appreciate his feelings on receiving the following lines from Southey,
whose principal income for years had been derived from the magazine’s
most liberal and open-handed payments. “It is a great price,” writes
the author of _Thalaba_, who has just pocketed a comfortable sum, “and
it is very convenient for me to receive it. But I will tell you, with
that frankness which you have always found in my correspondence and
conversation, that I must suspect my time might be more profitably
employed (as I am sure it might be more worthily) than in writing for
your journal, even at that price.”
I am not wont to peer too closely into the secrets of the human heart,
but I would like to know exactly how Murray felt when he read that
letter. “Let me at least be eaten by a lion!” says Epictetus. “Let me
at least be insulted by a genius!” might well have been the publisher’s
lament.
THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES
That innocent nondescript, the average reader, is suffering very sorely
at the present day from what might be justly called the oppression or
tyranny of notes. I hear, indeed, from time to time, bitter complaints
of editorial inaccuracy, of the unscholarly treatment of quite forgotten
masterpieces by the industrious gentlemen who seek to reintroduce them
to the public; but such inaccuracy can wound only the limited number who
know more than the editor, and who in their secret souls are not sorry to
prove him wrong. The average reader, even though he hold himself to be
of moderate intelligence, is happily ignorant of such fine shadings, and
only asks that he may enjoy his books in a moderately intelligent manner;
that he may be helped over hedges and ditches, and allowed to ramble
unmolested where the ground seems tolerably smooth. This is precisely
the privilege, however, which a too liberal editor is disinclined to
allow. He will build you a bridge over a raindrop, put ladders up a
pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpenstocks and
climbing-irons; yet when, perchance, you stumble and hold out a hand for
help, behold, he is never there to grasp it. He merely refers you, with
some coldness, to a remote authority who will give you the assistance
you require when you have reached the end of your journey. Mr. Ritchie,
for example, who has recently edited a volume of Mrs. Carlyle’s early
letters, expects you patiently to search for the information you want in
Mr. Froude’s pages, which is always a disheartening thing to be asked to
do. Yet when Jeanie Welsh, writing cheerfully of an inconstant lover,
says, “_Mais n’importe!_ It is only one more Spanish castle demolished;
another may start up like a mushroom in its place;” an explanatory note
carefully reveals to you that “Spanish castle” really means “château en
Espagne”—a circumstance which even Macaulay’s schoolboy would probably
have deciphered for himself.
If it be hard on the average reader to be referred chillingly to modern
writers who are at least within approachable distance, it is harder still
to be requested to look up classical authorities. If it be hard to be
told occasionally by that prince of good editors, Mr. Alfred Ainger, to
please turn elsewhere for the little bits of information which we think
he might give us about Charles Lamb, it is harder still to have Mr.
Wright refuse to translate for us Edward Fitzgerald’s infrequent lapses
into Greek. What is the use of saying in a note “v. 9” when Fitzgerald
quotes Herodotus? If I can read the quotation for myself, I have no
need to hunt up v. 9; and if I can’t, v. 9 is of no use to me when
found. Even “Hor. Od. I. 4, 14, 15,” is not altogether satisfactory to
the indifferent scholar, for whom Fitzgerald himself had such generous
sympathy, and for whom his translations were avowedly undertaken.
These are merely cases, however, in which notes refuse to be helpful;
they are apt to become absolutely oppressive when accompanying older
writers. A few years ago I bought a little English edition of the
_Religio Medici_, to which are added the _Letter to a Friend_ and
_Christian Morals_. The book is one of Macmillan’s Golden Treasury
Series, and is edited by Mr. W. A. Greenhill, who opens with an “Editor’s
Preface,” eighteen pages long, and fairly bristling with knowledge
points. After this come a “Chronological Table of Dates, Connected
with Sir Thomas Browne,” two pages long; “Note on the Discovery of the
Remains of Sir Thomas Browne in 1840,” two pages; “Brief Notices of
Former Editors of the _Religio Medici_,” four pages; “List of Editions of
_Religio Medici_,” thirteen pages; “Collations of Some Old Editions of
_Religio Medici_,” three pages; “List of Editions of _Letter to a Friend_
and _Christian Morals_,” five pages; “_Addenda et Corrigenda_,” one page.
Having thus laboriously cleared the way, we are at last gladdened by a
sight of the _Religio Medici_ itself, which, together with the _Letter_
and _Christian Morals_, occupies two hundred and thirty pages. Then,
following close, like the mighty luggage of a Persian army, come an
array of “Notes Critical and Explanatory,” eighty-eight pages; and an
Index just sixty-nine pages long. Thus it will be seen that two hundred
and five pages of editorial work are deemed necessary to elucidate two
hundred and thirty pages of Sir Thomas Browne, which seems like an
intolerable deal of sack for such a quantity of bread. To compress all
this into a small volume requires close printing and flimsy paper, and
the ungrateful reader thinks in his hardened heart that he would rather a
little more space had been given to the author, and a little less to the
editor, who is for most of us, after all, a secondary consideration. It
is also manifestly impossible, with such a number of notes, even to refer
to them at the bottom of the page; yet without this guiding finger they
are often practically useless. We are not as a rule aware, when we read,
what information we lack, and it becomes a grievous duty to examine every
few minutes and see if we ought not to be finding something out.
A glance at the notes themselves is very discouraging:
“P. 10, l. 14, directed, A to E, G; direct, F, H to L.
“P. 10, l. 16, rectified, A to I; rectified, J, K, L.
“P. 10, l. 28, consist, A to J; resist, K, L.”
Reading with such helps as these becomes a literary nightmare:
“P. 8, l. 8, distinguished] Chapman (R) and Gardiner (W) read ‘being
distinguished.’
“P. 8, l. 8, distinguished not only] Wilkin (T) read ‘not only
distinguished.’”
And this is weirder still:
“P. 59, l. 4, antimetathesis, C to M; antanaclasis, A, B; transposition
of words, N, O.”
It may easily be surmised that eighty-eight pages of such concentrated
and deadly erudition weigh very heavily on the unscholarly soul. We are
reminded forcibly of the impatience manifested by Mr. E. S. Dallas, in
_The Gay Science_, over Person’s notes on Euripides, from which he had
hoped so much and gleaned so little; which were all about words and less
than words—syllables, letters, accents, punctuation.
“Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, were
ransacked in turn to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in
the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxytone, not
perispomenon; and how, by all the rules of prosody, there should be an
iambus, not a spondee, in this place or that.” The lad who has heard all
his college life about the wonderful supplement to the _Hecuba_ turns to
it with wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key to Greek tragedy.
“Behold, it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural
pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of
enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates
is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer,
has been named the Porsonian—that when the iambic trimeter after a word
of more than one syllable has the cretic termination included either in
one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be an iambus. The young
student throws down the book thus prefaced and supplemented, and wonders
if this be all that giants of Porsonian height can see or care to speak
about in Greek literature.”
But then be it remembered that Euripides, as edited by Porson, was
intended for the use of scholars, and there exists an impression—perhaps
erroneous—that this is the sort of food for which scholars hunger and
thirst. Sir Thomas Browne has, happily, not yet passed out of the hands
of the general reader, whose appetite for intellectual abstraction and
the rigors of precision is distinctly moderate, and in whose behalf I
urge my plea to-day.
After the oppressively erudite notes come those which interpret trifles
with painstaking fidelity, and which reveal to us the meaning of
quite familiar words. In Ferrier’s admirable edition of the _Noctes
Ambrosianæ_, for example, we are told with naïve gravity that “wiselike”
means “judicious,” that “glowering” means “staring,” that “parritch” is
“porridge,” that “guffaw” is a “loud laugh,” that “douce” is “sedate,”
that “gane” is “gone,” and that “in a jiffy” means “immediately.” But
surely the readers of Christopher North do not require information like
this. “Douce” and “parritch” and “guffaw” are not difficult words to
understand, and “in a jiffy” would seem to come within the intellectual
grasp of many who have not yet made the acquaintance of the alphabet.
It may be, however, that there are people who really like to be
instructed in this manner, just as there are people who like to go to
lectures and to organ recitals. It may even be that a taste for notes,
like a taste for gin, or opium, or Dr. Ibsen’s dramas, increases with
what it feeds on. In that tiny volume of _Selected Poems_ by Gray which
Mr. Gosse has edited for the Clarendon Press, there are forty-two pages
of notes to sixty pages of poetry; and while some of them are valuable
and interesting, many more seem strangely superfluous. But Mr. Gosse,
who has his finger on the literary pulse of his generation, is probably
the last man in England to furnish information unless it is desired. He
knows, better than most purveyors of knowledge, what it is that readers
want; he is not prone to waste his precious minutes; he has a saving
sense of humor; and he does not aspire to be a lettered philanthropist
fretting to enlighten mankind. If, then, he finds it necessary to
elucidate that happy trifle, _On the Death of a Favorite Cat_, with no
less than seven notes, which is at the rate of one for every verse,
it must be that he is filling an expressed demand; it must be that he
is aware that modern students of Gray—every one who reads a poet is a
“student” nowadays—like to be told by an editor about Tyrian purple, and
about Arion’s dolphin, and about the difference between a tortoise-shell
and a tabby. As for the seven pages of notes that accompany the _Elegy_,
they carry me back in spirit to the friend of my childhood, Miss
Edgeworth’s Rosamond, who was expected to understand every word of every
poem she studied. What a blessing Mr. Gosse’s notes would have been to
that poor, dear, misguided little girl, who rashly committed the _Elegy_
to memory because, in honest, childish fashion, she loved its pretty
sound! Who can forget the pathetic scene where she attempts to recite it,
and has only finished the first line,
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,”
when Godfrey, whom I always thought, and still think, a very disagreeable
boy, interrupts her ruthlessly.
“‘What is meant by the “curfew”? What is meant by “tolls”? What is a
“knell”? What is meant by “parting day”?’
“‘Godfrey, I cannot tell the meaning of every word, but I know the
general meaning. It means that the day is going, that it is evening, that
it is growing dark. Now let me go on.’
“‘Go on,’ said Godfrey, ‘and let us see what you will do when you come
to “the boast of heraldry,” to “the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,”
to the “village Hampden,” to “some mute inglorious Milton,” and to “some
Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood,” you who have not come to
Cromwell yet, in the history of England.’”
No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of
difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself
comes to grief, a little later, with _The Bard_, and that even the wise
and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,
“If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear.”
“Oaten stop” was a mystery, and “eve” she thought—and was none the worse
for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.
No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary,
well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth’s little
people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a
book framed for their especial joy, like _The Children’s Treasury of
English Song_, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have
found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the _Elegy_,
and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved
it a great deal less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be
forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly comprehend; the music of
words appeals very sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning comes
later—comes often after the first keen unconscious pleasure is past.
I once knew a tiny boy who so delighted in Byron’s description of the
dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over, and over, and over
again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did
not know that it was a statue, and not a real man, described. He had
not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the “Dacian
mother,” or “a Roman holiday.” Historically and geographically, the boy’s
mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent or sagacious in
his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of
strong words, and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts.
But what child who reads Cowper’s pretty remonstrance to his spaniel,
and the spaniel’s neat reply, wants to be told in a succession of dismal
notes that “allures” means “tempts,” that “remedy” means “cure,” that
“killing time” means “wasting time,” that “destined” means “meant for,”
and that “behest” means “command”? Cowper is one of the simplest of
writers, and the little boys and girls who cannot be trusted unarmed
in his company had better confine their reading to _Robinson Crusoe in
Words of One Syllable_, or to the veracious pages of _Mother Goose_.
But perhaps the day is not far distant when even _Mother Goose_ will
afford food for instruction and a fresh industry for authors, and when
the hapless children of the dawning century will be confronted with a
dozen highly abbreviated and unintelligible notes referring them to some
Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the bloody history of the _Three
Blind Mice_.
CONVERSATION IN NOVELS
A great many years ago, when I was a little girl, I used to know a dear,
placid, sunny-tempered old lady who was stone-deaf and an insatiable
novel-reader. She always came to our house bearing a black bag which held
her jointed ear-trumpet, and she always left it with a borrowed novel
under her arm. As she had reached that comfortable period of life when
a book is as easily forgotten as read, our slender library supplied all
her demands, on the same principle of timely reappearance which makes an
imposing stage army out of two dozen elusive supernumeraries. She had a
theory of selection all her own, and to which she implicitly trusted.
She glanced over a story very rapidly, and if it had too many solid,
page-long paragraphs—reflections, descriptions, etc.—she put it sadly
but steadfastly aside. If, on the contrary, it was well broken up into
conversations, which always impart an air of sprightliness to a book, she
said she was sure she would like it, and carried it off in triumph.
Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the
sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist’s
mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his
people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete
word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in
helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really
good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. Thomas Love
Peacock’s inimitable dialogues had indeed been long given to the world;
but quiet people of restricted cultivation knew nothing of them, and
would have found it difficult to realize their loss. I can hardly fancy
our dear old friend reading and enjoying the delicious war of words in
_Crotchet Castle_, and I should be grieved to think of her suddenly
confronted with those scraps of sententious wisdom, in which its author
took a truly impish and reprehensible delight. Such a sentiment as “Men
have been found very easily permutable into ites and onians, avians and
arians,” might have sorely puzzled her benign and tranquil soul.
Yet no one can accuse Peacock of writing his novels in order to express
his own personal convictions. The fact is that, after reading them, we
are often very much in the dark as to what his convictions were. We know
he loved old things better than new ones, and wine better than water; and
that is about as far as we can follow him with security. “The intimate
friends of Mr. Peacock may have understood his political sentiments,”
says Lord Houghton disconsolately, “but it is extremely difficult to
discover them from his work.” His people simply talk in character,
sometimes tiresomely, sometimes with unapproachable keenness and humor,
and the scope of his stories hardly permits any near approach to the
fine gradations, the endless variety, of life. Mr. Chainmail never opens
his lips save in praise of feudalism. Mr. Mac Quedy discusses political
economy only. Even the witty Dr. Folliott, “a fellow of infinite jest,”
seldom gets beyond the dual delights of Greek and dining. It is all
vastly piquant and entertaining, but it is leagues away from the casual
conversation, the little leisurely, veracious gossip in which Jane Austen
reveals to us with merciless distinctness the secret springs that move
a human heart. She has scant need to describe her characters, and she
seldom takes that trouble. They betray themselves at every word, and
stand convicted on their own evidence. We are not warned in advance
against Isabella Thorpe. We meet her precisely as Catherine meets her
in the Pump-room at Bath, where the young lady speedily opens her lips,
and acquaints us in the most vivacious manner with her own callous
folly and selfishness. Every syllable uttered by Mrs. Norris is a new
and luminous revelation; we know her just that much better than we did
before she spoke. Even _Sense and Sensibility_, by no means the best of
Miss Austen’s novels, starts with that admirable discussion between Mr.
John Dashwood and his wife on the subject of his mother’s and sisters’
maintenance. It is a short chapter, the second in the book, and at its
close we are masters of the whole situation. We have sounded the feeble
egotism of Mr. Dashwood, and the adroit meanness of his spouse. We know
precisely what degree of assistance Elinor and Marianne are likely to
receive from them. We foresee the relation these characters will bear to
each other during the progress of the story, and we have been shown with
delicious humor how easy and pleasant is the task of self-deception. That
a girl of nineteen should have been capable of such keenly artistic work
is simply one of the miracles of literature; and the more we think about
it, the more miraculous it grows. The best we can do is to bow our heads,
and pay unqualified homage at its shrine.
Some portion of Jane Austen’s ability for portraying character in
conversation is discernible in at least one of her too numerous
successors in the craft. The authoress of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ and
of _Cecilia de Noël_ has already proven to the world how deft and
skilful is her manipulation of that difficult medium, drawing-room
gossip. It would be unjust and absurd to compare her stories, slight
and unsubstantial as pencil sketches, with the finished masterpieces
of English fiction; but there are touches in these modern tales which
convince even a casual reader of splendid possibilities ahead. The
setting of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ is so fine, the lightly drawn English
people who surround the mysterious governess and her still more
mysterious victim are so real, that we cease to ask ourselves obtrusive
questions concerning the purpose and utility of the crime. Better still
are some of the scenes in _Cecilia de Noël_, where Lady Atherley’s serene
and imperturbable good sense tempers the atmosphere, and gives exactly
the proper effect to her husband’s rather long-winded eloquence, to Mrs.
Mostyn’s amiable and cruel evangelism, and to Mrs. Molyneux’s amusing
eccentricities. All these characters have individuality of their own,
and all reveal themselves through the intricacies of conversation, while
occasionally there is a felicitous touch worthy of Jane Austen’s hand;
as when Lady Atherley listens tranquilly to Mrs. Mostyn’s tirade against
the ritualistic curate, and evolves from it the one judicious conclusion
that he is evidently an Austyn of Temple Leigh, and that it would be
desirable to ask him to dinner.
The real drawback to Lanoe Falconer’s art is, not the brevity of
her work, but the fact that her people cannot develop on purely
natural lines, because they are hampered by the terrible necessity of
illustrating a moral; and even in their most unguarded moments the task
assigned them is never wholly laid aside. It is seldom that a good tract
is a good story too, and all the novelist’s skill is powerless to impart
a vivid semblance of truth to characters who have to “talk up” to a given
subject, and teach a given lesson. The inartistic treatment of material
results, curiously enough, in weakening our sense of reality; yet if the
authoress of _Cecilia de Noël_ would consent, for a few short years,
to abandon social and spiritual problems, to concern herself as little
with Nihilism as with eternal punishment, but to be content, as Jane
Austen was content, with telling a story, perhaps that story might be
no unworthy successor of those matchless tales which are our refuge and
solace in these dark days of ethical and unorthodox fiction.
There is a great deal of charming conversation, which is not as well
known as it should be, in the best novels of Anthony Trollope. He gives
his characters plenty of time and opportunity to talk, without forcing
them into arbitrary channels; and occasionally, as with Mrs. Proudie
and Archdeacon Grantly, and Lady Glencora, he persuades them to let us
know exactly what kind of people they are. Above all, there is such
an air of veracity about his causeries that the most skeptical reader
listens to them without a shadow of doubt. Who can ever forget Bertie
Stanhope intimating to Bishop Proudie that he had once thought of being
a prelate himself, or Lady Glencora’s midnight confidences to Alice, or
that crucial contest between Dr. Tempest and Mrs. Proudie! What pleasant
wrangling goes on in Mrs. Dobbs Broughton’s room over the memorable
picture of Jael, when Dalrymple desires his model to lean forward,
throwing her weight on the nail, and Miss Van Siever not unnaturally
suggests that such an action would probably have awakened Sisera before
the murder was done! It all seems idle enough—this careless, lively
talk—but is by no means purposeless. Life is built up of such moments,
and if we are to live with the people in books, it must be through little
confidences on their parts and sympathy on ours; it must be through
unconscious confidences on their parts and unrestricted sympathy on ours.
Now, if a novelist permits his characters to talk at us, the charm of
unconsciousness is gone. If we feel for a moment they are uttering
his sentiments for our approval or conversion, we cease to sympathize
because we cease to believe. There is a clever and suspiciously opportune
conversation in _David Grieve_ between that sorely tried hero and
an intelligent workingwoman in the Champs Elysées upon the relative
merits of l’Union Légale and l’Union Libre. It is, of course, a highly
dispassionate discussion, intended as an appeal to reason and not to
conscience; therefore the old-fashioned arguments of right and wrong, God
and the Church, are carefully omitted. It fits in neatly with David’s
experiences, and places the whole matter in a singularly lucid light
before the reader’s eyes. Its one serious drawback is that we can never
persuade ourselves to believe that it ever took place. The Frenchwoman is
brought so suddenly up to the mark; she says so plainly that which Mrs.
Humphry Ward thinks she ought to say; she is so charmingly unprejudiced
and convincing, that we lose all faith in her before she has spoken a
dozen words. The correctness of her views counts for nothing. “When we
leave out what we don’t like, we can demonstrate most things,” says the
late Rector of Lincoln; and it is at least doubtful whether men and women
ever live virtuous lives on the strength of an argument. Lady Bertram, of
_Mansfield Park_, remarking placidly from her sofa, “Do not act anything
improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would not like it,” may not exert a
powerful influence for good; but who has any shadow of doubt that those
are her very words? They are spoken—as they should be—to her daughters,
and not to us. They are spoken—as they should be—by Lady Bertram, and not
by Jane Austen. Therefore we listen with content, and take comfort in the
thought that, whatever severities may be inflicted on us by the novelists
of the future, it is not in the power of progress to deprive us of the
past.
A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS
Amid the universal grayness that has settled mistily down upon English
fiction, amid the delicate drab-colored shadings and half-lights which
require, we are told, so fine a skill in handling, the old-fashioned
reader misses, now and then, the vivid coloring of his youth. He misses
the slow unfolding of quite impossible plots, the thrilling incidents
that were wont pleasantly to arouse his apprehension, and, most of all,
two characters once deemed essential to every novel—the hero and the
villain. The heroine is left us still, and her functions are far more
complicated than in the simple days of yore, when little was required of
her save to be beautiful as the stars. She faces now the most intricate
problems of life; and she faces them with conscious self-importance,
a dismal power of analysis, and a robust candor in discussing their
equivocal aspects that would have sent her buried sister blushing to
the wall. There was sometimes a lamentable lack of solid virtue in this
fair dead sister, a pitiful human weakness that led to her undoing;
but she never talked so glibly about sin. As for the hero, he owes his
banishment to the riotous manner in which his masters handled him. Bulwer
strained our endurance and our credulity to the utmost; Disraeli took a
step further, and Lothair, the last of his race, perished amid the cruel
laughter of mankind.
But the villain! Remember what we owe to him in the past. Think how dear
he has become to every rightly constituted mind. And now we are told,
soberly and coldly, by the thin-blooded novelists of the day, that his
absence is one of the crowning triumphs of modern genius, that we have
all grown too discriminating to tolerate in fiction a character who we
feel does not exist in life. Man, we are reminded, is complex, subtle,
unfathomable, made up of good and evil so dexterously intermingled that
no one element predominates coarsely over the rest. He is to be studied
warily and with misgivings, not classified with brutal ease into the
virtuous and bad. It is useless to explain to these analysts that the
pleasure we take in meeting a character in a book does not always depend
on our having known him in the family circle, or encountered him in our
morning paper; though, judged even by this stringent law, the villain
holds his own. Accept Balzac’s rule, and exclude from fiction not only
all which might not really happen, but all which has not really happened
in truth, and we would still have studies enough in total depravity to
darken all the novels in Christendom.
What murder of romance was ever so wanton, so tragic, and so sombre as
that which gave to the Edinburgh highway the name of Gabriel’s Road?
There, in the sweet summer afternoon, fresh with the breath of primroses
and cowslips, the young tutor cut the throats of his two little pupils,
in a mad, inexplicable revenge for their childish tale-bearing. Taken
red-handed in the deed, he met with swift retribution from the furious
populace; and the same hour which witnessed the crime saw his pinioned
corpse dangling from the nearest tree, with the bloody knife hung in
awful mockery around its neck. Thus the murder and its punishment
conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible;
where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys, creepy with fear,
scampered by, breathless, in the dusk; seeing before them always, on
the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood-smeared bodies, and hearing
ever, overhead, the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon’s bones.
The highway, with its unholy associations discreetly perpetuated in its
name, became an education to the good people of Edinburgh, and taught
them the value of emotions. They must have indistinctly felt what Mr.
Louis Stevenson has so well described, the subtle harmony that unites an
evil deed to its location. “Some places,” he says, “speak distinctly.
Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand
to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots,
again, seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable.” And
is all this fine and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing
with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction, merely because, as De
Quincey reluctantly admits, “the majority of murderers are incorrect
characters”? May we not forgive their general incorrectness for the sake
of their literary and artistic value? Shall Charles Lamb’s testimony
count for nothing, when we remember his comfortable allusion to “kind,
light-hearted Wainwright”? And what shall we think of Edward Fitzgerald,
the gentlest and least hurtful of Englishmen, abandoning himself, in the
clear and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, “full of pleasant
atrocity”?
Repentant villains, I must confess, are not greatly to my mind. They
sacrifice their artistic to their ethical value, and must be handled
with consummate skill to escape a suspicious flavor of Sunday-school
romance. The hardened criminal, disarmed and converted by the innocent
attractions of childhood, is a favorite device of poets and story-writers
who cater to the sentiments of maternity; but it is wiser to lay no
stress upon the permanency of such conversions. That swift and sudden
yielding to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, which is one of the
undying traits of humanity, attracts us often by the very force of its
evanescence, by the limitations which prove its truth. But the slow,
stern process of regeneration is not an emotional matter, and cannot be
convincingly portrayed with a few facile touches in the last chapter of
a novel. Thackeray knew better than this, when he showed us Becky Sharp
touched and softened by her good little sister-in-law; heartsick now and
then of her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking inevitably lower and
lower through the weight of overmastering instincts and desires. She can
aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach
it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic
transient glimpses into fallen nature’s brighter side. Where can we see
depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man’s
brutality, after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the fine old
ballad of _Edom O’Gordon_? The young daughter of the house of Rodes is
lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon spears
transfix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her budding girlhood, at the
feet of her father’s foe, and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled
when he looks at her childish face.
“O bonnie, bonnie was hir mouth,
And cherry were hir cheiks,
And clear, clear was hir yellow hair,
Whereon the reid bluid dreips.
“Then wi’ his spear he turned hir owre,
O gin hir face was wan!
He sayd, ‘You are the first that eir
I wisht alive again.’
“He turned hir owre and owre again,
O gin hir skin was whyte!
‘I might hae spared that bonnie face
To hae been sum man’s delyte.’”
It is pleasant to know that the ruthless butcher was promptly pursued
and slain for his crime, but it is finer still to realize that brief
moment of bitterness and shame. I have sometimes thought that Rossetti’s
Sister Helen would have gained in artistic beauty if, after those three
days of awful watching were over, after the glowing fragment of wax had
melted in the flames, and her lover’s soul had passed her, sighing on the
wind, there had come to the stricken girl a pang of supreme regret, an
impulse of mad desire to undo the horror she had wrought. The conscience
of a sinner, to use a striking phrase of Mr. Brownell’s, “is doubtless
readjusted rather than repudiated altogether,” and there is an absolute
truthfulness in these sudden relapses into grace.
For this reason, doubtless, I find Mr. Blackmore’s villains, with all
their fascination and power, a shade too heavily, or at least too
monotonously darkened. Parson Chowne is a veritable devil, and it is only
his occasional humor—manifested grimly in deeds, not words—which enables
us to bear the weight of his insupportable wickedness. The introduction
of the naked savages as an outrage to village propriety; the summons to
church, when he has a mind to fire the ricks of his parishioners,—these
are the life-giving touches which mellow down this overwrought figure,
this black and scowling thunderbolt of humanity. Perhaps, also, Mr.
Blackmore, in his laudable desire for picturesqueness, lays too much
stress on the malignant aspect, the appropriate physical condition of
his sinners. From Parson Chowne’s “wondrous unfathomable face,” which
chills every heart with terror, to the “red glare” in Donovan Bulrag’s
eyes, there is always something exceptional about these worthies, to
indicate to all beholders what manner of men they are. One is reminded
of Charles II. protesting, not unnaturally, against the perpetual
swarthiness of stage villains. “We never see a rogue in a play but we
clap on him a black periwig,” complained the dark-skinned monarch,
with a sense of personal grievance in this forced association between
complexion and crime. It was the same subtle inspiration which prompted
Kean to play Shylock in a red wig that suggested to Wilkie Collins Count
Fosco’s admirable size. The passion for embroidered waistcoats and fruit
tarts, the petted white mice, the sympathetic gift of pastry to the
organ-grinder’s monkey, all the little touches which go to build up
this colossal, tender-hearted, remorseless, irresistible scoundrel are
of interest and value to the portrait, but his fat is as essential as
his knavery. It is one of those master strokes of genius which breaks
away from all accepted traditions to build up a new type, perfect and
unapproachable. We can no more imagine a thin Fosco than a melancholy
Dick Swiveller, or a light-hearted Ravenswood.
Mr. Andrew Lang, who enjoys upon all occasions the courage of his
convictions, has, in one of those pleasant papers, “At the Sign of the
Ship,” given utterance to a sentiment so shockingly at variance with
the prevalent theory of fiction, that the reader is divided between
admiration for his boldness and a vague surprise that a man should
speak such words and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about Mr.
Lang’s heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of his own transgression, that
warms our hearts and weakens our upbraiding. “The old simple scheme,”
he says, “in which you had a real unmitigated villain, a heroine as
pure as snow or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, gave us
more agreeable reading, and reading not, I think, more remote from
truth, than is to be found in Dr. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ or in his _Pillars
of Society_.” Now to support such a statement would be unscrupulous; to
condemn it, dispiriting; but I wonder if the “real unmitigated villain”
is quite so simple a product as Mr. Lang appears to imagine. May not his
absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the
disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be
unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles Overreach
a mere child’s toy in comparison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de
Bois-Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tönnesen and Oswald Alving?
A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He
must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our
fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must
triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the
close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.
Mrs. Pennell has told us the story of some old Venetian witches, who
were converted from their dark ways, and taught the charms of peace and
godliness; but who would desire or credit the conversion of a witch? The
potency of evil lies within her to the end; and when, by a few muttered
words, she can raise a hell storm on the ocean; when her eye’s dim fire
can wither the strength of her enemy; or when, with a lock of hair and
a bit of wax, she can consume him with torturing pain, who will welcome
her neighborly advances? The proper and artistic end of a witch is at
the stake—blue flames curling up to heaven, and a handful of gray ashes
scattered to the wind; or, by the working of a stronger spell, she may
be stiffened into stone, and doomed to stand forever on some desolate
moor, where, underneath starless skies, her evil feet have strayed; or
perhaps that huge black cat, her sinister attendant, has completed his
ninth year of servitude to nine successive witches, and, by virtue of
the power granted him at their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily
on St. John’s Eve, to offer her a living holocaust to Satan. These are
possibilities in strict sympathy with her character and history, if not
with her inclinations; the last is in especial accordance with sound
Italian tradition, and all reveal what Heine calls “the melancholy
pleasurable awe, the dark sweet horror, of Mediæval ghost fancies.” But a
converted witch, walking demurely to vesper service, gossiping with good,
garrulous old women on the doorstep, or holding an innocent child within
her withered arms—the very thought repels us instinctively, and fires us
with a sharp mistrust. Have a care, you foolish young mother, and snatch
your baby to your breast; for even now he waxes paler and paler, as those
cold, malignant heart-throbs chill his breath, and wear his little life
away.
The final disposition of a mere earthly villain should likewise be a
matter of artistic necessity, not a harsh trampling of arrogant virtue
upon prostrate vice. There is no mistake so fatal as that of injustice
to the evil element of a novel or a play. We all know how, when Portia
pushes her triumphant casuistry a step too far, our sympathies veer
obstinately around to Shylock’s side, and refuse to be readjusted before
the curtain falls. Perhaps Shakespeare intended this,—who knows?—and
threw in Gratiano’s last jeers to madden, not the usurer, but the
audience. Or perhaps in Elizabeth’s day, as in King John’s, people had
not grown so finical about the feelings of a Jew, and it is only the
chilly tolerance of our enlightened age which prevents our enjoying
as we should the devout prejudices of our ancestors. But when, in a
modern novel, guiltless of all this picturesque superstition, we see the
sinner treated with a narrow, nagging sort of severity, our unregenerate
nature rebels stoutly against such a manifest lack of balance. Not long
ago, I chanced to read a story which actually dared to have a villain
for a hero, and I promised myself much pleasure from so original and
venturesome a step. But how did the very popular authoress treat her
own creation? In the first place, when rescued from a truly feminine
haze of hints, and dark whispers, and unsubstantiated innuendoes, the
hapless man is proven guilty of but three offences: he takes opium, he
ejects his tenants, and he tries, not very successfully, to mesmerize his
wife. Now, opium-eating is a vice, the punishment for which is borne by
the offender, and which merits as much pity as contempt; rack-renting is
an unpardonable, but not at all a thrilling misdemeanor; and, in these
days of psychological research, there are many excellent men who would
not shrink from making hypnotic experiments on their grandmothers. In
consequence, however, of such feeble atrocities, the hero-villain is
subjected to a species of outlawry at the hands of all the good people in
the book. His virtuous cousin makes open and highly honorable love to his
virtuous wife, who responds with hearty alacrity. His virtuous cousin’s
still more virtuous brother comes within an ace of murdering him in cold
blood, through motives of the purest philanthropy. Finally, one of these
virtuous young men lets loose on him his family ghost, deliberately
unsealing the spectral abiding-place; and, while the virtuous wife clings
around the virtuous cousin’s neck, and forbids him tenderly to go to the
rescue, the accommodating spirit—who seems to have no sort of loyalty
to the connection—slays the villain at his own doorstep, and leaves
the coast free for a second marriage service. Practically, the device
is an admirable one, because, when the ghost retires once more to his
seclusion, nobody can well be convicted of manslaughter, and a great deal
of scandal is saved. But, artistically, there is something repellent in
this open and shameless persecution; in three persons and a hobgoblin
conspiring against one poor man. Our sentiment is diverted from its
proper channel, our emotions are manifestly incorrect.
“How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate
manner,” asks Mr. Vincent Crummles, “if there isn’t a little man
contending against a big one?—unless there’s at least five to one, and
we haven’t hands enough for that business in our company.” What would
the noble-hearted Mr. Crummles have thought of reversing this natural
order of things, and declaring victory for the multitude? How would
human nature, in the provinces, have supported so novel and hazardous an
innovation? Why should human nature, out of the provinces, be assumed
to have outgrown its simple, chivalrous instincts? A good, strong,
designing, despicable villain, or even villainess, a fair start, a stout
fight, an artistic overthrow, and triumphant Virtue smiling modestly
beneath her orange blossoms—shall we ever be too old and world-worn to
love these old and world-worn things?
A BY-WAY IN FICTION
Now and then the wearied and worn novel-reader, sick unto death of books
about people’s beliefs and disbeliefs, their conscientious scruples and
prejudices, their unique aspirations and misgivings, their cumbersome
vices and virtues, is recompensed for much suffering by an hour of placid
but genuine enjoyment. He picks up rather dubiously a little, unknown
volume, and, behold! the writer thereof takes him gently by the hand, and
leads him straightway into a fair country, where the sun is shining, and
men and women smile kindly on him, and nobody talks unorthodox theology,
and everybody seems disposed to allow everybody else the privilege of
being nappy in his own way. When to these admirable qualities are added
humor and an atmosphere of appreciative cultivation, the novel-reader
feels indeed that his lines have been cast in pleasant places, and he is
disposed to linger along in a very contented and uncritical frame of mind.
There has come to us recently a new and beautiful edition of such
a little book, published in America, but born of Italian soil and
sunshine. It has for a title _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, together
with Frequent Allusions to the Prorege of Arcopia_, which, is rather an
unmerciful string of words to describe so gay and easy-going a narrative.
It is the first full-fledged literary venture of its author, Mr. Henry
Fuller, also known as Stanton Page, whose New England grandfather was
a cousin of Margaret Fuller’s. The story, which is not really a story
at all, but a series of detached episodes, rambles backward and forward
in such a bewildering fashion that the chapters might be all rearranged
without materially disturbing its slender thread of continuity. It is
equally guiltless of plot or purpose, of dramatic incidents or realistic
details. The Chevalier may be found now in Pisa, now in Venice, now in
Ostia or Ravenna, never driven by the vulgar spur of necessity, always
wandering of his own free and idle will. He is accompanied sometimes
by his friend Hors-Concours, an Italianized Frenchman from Savoy, and
sometimes by the Prorege of Arcopia, the delightful Prorege, who gives
to the book its best and most distinctive flavor. At once dignified
and urbane, conscious of his exalted position, and convinced that he
fills it with equal grace and correctness, this superb official moves
through the tale in an atmosphere of autocratic reserve, tempered with
the most delicate courtesy. His ministerial views are as unalterable as
the rocks, and as sound; but he listens to the democratic ravings of his
young American _protégé_, Occident, with the good-humored indulgence one
accords to a beloved and precocious child. It must be confessed that
Occident fails to make his arguments very convincing, or to impress his
own personality with any degree of clearness upon the reader’s mind.
He is at best only a convenient listener to the Prorege’s delicious
theories; he is of real value only because the Prorege condescends to
talk to him. When he ventures upon a truly American remark about trying
“to find the time” for something, his august friend reminds him, with
dignity, that “the only man to be envied was the man whose time was in
some degree his own, and the most pitiable object that civilization could
offer was the rich man a slave to his chronometer. Too much had been
said about the dignity of labor, and not enough about the preciousness
of leisure. Civilization in its last outcome was heavily in the debt
of leisure, and the success of any society worth considering was to be
estimated largely by the use to which its _fortunati_ had put their spare
moments. He wrung from Occident the confession that, in the great land
of which Shelby County may be called the centre, activity, considered of
itself and quite apart from its objects and its results, was regarded as
a very meritorious thing; and he learned that the bare figure of leisure,
when exposed to the public gaze, was expected to be decorously draped
in the garment of strenuous endeavor. People were supposed to appear
busy, even if they were not. This gave the Prorege a text for a little
disquisition on the difference between leisure and idleness.”
In fact, a beautiful, cultivated, polished, unmarred, well-spent
inactivity is the keynote of this serene little book; and to understand
its charm and meaning we have but to follow the Chevalier, in the second
chapter, to Pisa—to Pisa the restful, where “life is not strongly
accentuated by positive happenings, where incident is unusual, and drama
quite unknown.” The Chevalier’s windows, we are told, faced the north,
and he sat and looked out of them rather more than active persons would
deem pleasant or profitable. It even happened that the Prorege remarked
this comfortable habit, and demanded of his friend what it was he looked
at, inasmuch as there seemed to be no appreciable change from day to
day. To which the Chevalier, in whom “Quietism was pretty successfully
secularized; who knew how to sit still, and occasionally enjoyed doing
so,” replied with great acumen that what _had_ gone on was quite as
interesting to him as what was going on, and that nothing was more
gratifying, from his point of view, than that very absence of change
which had taken his Excellency’s attention—since any change would be a
change for the worse.
He is destined, as it chances, to prove the truth of his own theories,
for it is in Pisa, of all places, that he is tempted to throw aside
for once his _rôle_ of contemplative philosopher, and to assume that
of an active philanthropist, with very disastrous results. There is an
admirable satire in the description of the two friends, Pensieri-Vani
and Hors-Concours, gravely plotting to insure the success of an operatic
_débutante_, to bring her out in the sunshine of their generous
patronage, and with the direct approval of the Prorege himself, who
kindly consents to sit in the front of a middle box, and to wear a round
half-dozen of his most esteemed decorations. Unhappily, an Italian
audience does not like to have its enthusiasm expressed for it, even
by such noble and consummate critics. As each well-arranged device of
flowers or love-birds in a gilded cage is handed decorously forward, the
house grows colder and more quizzical, until the _débutante_ sees herself
on the extreme verge of failure, and, putting forth all her powers in one
appealing effort, she triumphs by dint of sheer pluck and ability over
the fatal kindness of her friends. The poor Chevalier, who has in the
meantime left the theatre with many bitter self-communings, receives his
lesson in a spirit of touching humility, recognizing at once his manifest
limitations. “He perceived that he was less fitted to play the part of
special providence than he had previously supposed; and he brought from
this experience the immeasurable consolation that comes from knowing that
very frequently in this sadly twisted world, things, if only left to
their own courses, have a way of coming out right in the end.”
The Pisan episode, the delicious journey of the Prorege and Pensieri-Vani
in search of the “Madonna Incognita,” a mysterious and illusive
Perugino which turns out, after all, to be a Sodoma, and the memorable
excursion to Ostia, are the finest and best-told incidents in the book.
The story of the Iron Pot is too broadly farcical, too Pickwickian in
its character, to be in harmony with the rest of the narrative; the
Contessa’s fête at Tusculum is so lightly sketched as to be absolutely
tantalizing; and the practical jokes which that lady and the Prorege
delight in playing upon one another are hardly as subtle and acute as
we would like to find them. Indeed, the Prorege’s conduct on board his
own yacht is so deeply objectionable that I, for one, positively refuse
to believe he was ever guilty of such raw rudeness. It is not kind or
right in Mr. Fuller to wickedly calumniate this charming and high-bred
gentleman whom he has given us for a friend. Neither is the battle of
the Aldines as thrilling as might be expected, probably because it is
impossible to accept the Duke of Avon and Severn upon any terms whatever.
Occident, the American, is misty and ill-defined; but he does not lack
proportion, only vitality. The English duke is a mistake throughout, a
false note that disturbs the atmosphere of serene good temper which is
the principal attraction of the book; an effort on the author’s part to
be severe and cynical, just when we were congratulating ourselves that
severity and cynicism were things far, far remote from his tolerant and
kindly spirit.
The excursion to Ostia, however, is enough to redeem the whole volume
from any charge of ill-nature; for if the Contessa does seize this
opportunity to play one of her dubious tricks upon the Prorege, it is
not until the little group of friends have proved themselves gentle, and
sympathetic, and full of fine and generous instincts. It is a delicious
bit of description throughout. La Nullaniuna has been crowned the day
before at her Tusculum fête as “the new Corinne,” and naturally feels
that her proper cue is that of “genius-blasted fragility,” overpowered
and shattered by her own impassioned burst of song. With her is the
widowed Princess Altissimi, her cherished friend and foil, a sombre
beauty of a grave and chastened demeanor, against whose dark background
the Contessa, “who was fully as flighty, and capricious, and _théâtrale_
as a woman of semi-genius usually finds it necessary to be, posed and
fidgeted to her heart’s content.” The Prorege, sublimely affable as
ever, Pensieri-Vani, and young Occident, eager and radiant, make up the
party; and after the little inn has furnished them with a noonday meal
of unusual profusion and elegance, they visit the adjoining church at
the instigation of the Princess Altissimi, who is anxious to see what
this solitary and humble temple is like. All that follows is so exquisite
that I must quote it as it stands, in proof of the author’s faculty for
delicate and sympathetic delineation:
“They were met on the threshold by the single priest in charge, a dark
and sallow young man of peasant extraction, whose lonely battle with
midsummer malaria had left him wholly gaunt and enervate. He saluted them
with the deference which the Church sometimes shows to the World, though
he was too true an Italian to be awed, or even embarrassed by their rank;
and he brightened up into something almost like eagerness as he offered
to do the honors of his charge. The Prorege indulgently praised the
wretched frescoes which he exhibited so proudly, and the Contessa called
up a flickering smile of pleasure in his emaciated face as she feigned an
enthusiasm for the paltry fripperies of the high altar. This appreciative
interest emboldened him to suggest their ascent to the gallery, where,
from his manner, the great treasure of the church was to be revealed.
The great treasure was a small cabinet organ, and Occident—triumphing
in the ubiquity of the Western genius, yet somewhat taken back by this
new illustration of the incongruities it sometimes precipitated—read
upon it a name familiar to his earliest years. The priest, who evidently
conceived it an impossibility for his beloved instrument to be guilty
of a discord of any kind whatever, pleaded with a mute but unmistakable
pathos that its long silence might now be ended; and the Princess,
motioning Pensieri-Vani to the keyboard, sang this poor solitary a
churchly little air, with such a noble seriousness and such a gracious
simplicity as to move, not only him, but all the others too. Occident, in
particular, who kept within him quite unimpaired his full share of that
fund of sensibility which is one of the best products of Shelby County,
and who would have given half his millions just then to have been able to
sit down and play the simplest tune, implored Pensieri-Vani in looks, if
not in words, to do for him what he himself was so powerless to compass;
and the Cavaliere, who, like a good and true musician, preferred support
from the lowest quarter to indifference in the highest, kept his place
until their poor host, charmed, warmed through and through, attached
again to the great body of humanity, could scarcely trust himself to
voice his thanks. But the Princess whispered in the Cavaliere’s ear, as
his series of plain and simple little tunes came to an end, that he had
not lost since she last heard him.”
There is nothing finer in the story than this, perhaps nothing quite so
good, though all of Pensieri-Vani’s journeys are fruitful in minute
incidents of a pleasant and picturesque quality. It is curious, too, to
see how the Chevalier, who, except for that catlike scratching about the
Aldines, is the gentlest and least hurtful of men, manifests at times
a positive impatience of his own refined and peaceful civilization, a
breathless envy of sterner races and of stormier days. When he discovers
the tomb of the old Etrurian warrior, he is abashed and humbled at the
thought of that fierce spirit summoned from thirty centuries of darkness
to see the light of this invertebrate and sentimental age; requested to
forget his deep draughts of blood and iron, and to contentedly “munch
the dipped toast of a flabby humanitarianism, and sip the weak tea of
brotherly love.” When he stands in the dim cathedral of Anagni, and
contemplates the tombs of the illustrious Gaetani family, and the mosaics
which blazon forth their former splendors, he shrinks with sudden shame
from the contrast between his feeble, forceless will and the rough daring
of that mighty clan. “The stippling technique of his own day seemed
immeasurably poor and paltry compared with the broad, free, sketchy
touch with which these men dashed off their stirring lives; and he stood
confounded before that fiery and robust intensity which, so gloriously
indifferent to the subtilties of the grammarian, the niceties of the
manicure, and the torments of the supersensitive self-analyst, could fix
its intent upon some definite desire, and move forward unswervingly to
its attainment. Poor moderns! he sighed, who with all our wishing never
reach our end, and with all our thinking never know what we really think.”
These unprofitable musings of the Chevalier’s seem to reflect some
recurring discontent, some restless, unchastened yearnings on the part
of the author himself; but they find no echo in the serene breast of the
Prorege. He at least is as remote from envying the hostilities of the
past as he is innocent of aspiring to the progressiveness of the future.
He is fully alive to the merits of his own thrice-favored land, where
the evil devices of a wrong-headed generation have never been suffered
to penetrate: “Arcopia, the gods be praised, was exempt from the
modern curse of bigness. One chimney was not offensive; but a million
made a London. One refuse-heap could be tolerated; but accumulated
thousands produced a New York. A hundred weavers in their own cottages
meant peaceful industry and home content; a hundred hundred, massed in
one great factory, meant vice and squalor and disorder. Society had
never courted failure or bid for misery more ardently than when it had
accepted an urban industrialism for a basis.... Happily the Arcopian
population, except a fraction that followed the arts and another fraction
that followed the sea, was largely agricultural, and exhibited in high
union the chief virtue and the chief grace of civilized society—order
and picturesqueness. The disturbing and ungracious catch-word,
‘Égalité,’ had never crossed the Arcopian sea; if the Prorege had not
been tolerably sure that his mild sway was to be undisturbed by the
clangor of cantankerous boiler-makers and the bickerings of a bumptious,
shopkeeping _bourgeoisie_, he would never have undertaken the task at
all. He regarded himself as a just, humane, and sympathetic ruler, but
he believed that every man should have his own proper place and fill it.”
Such are the views smilingly detailed to the puzzled and outraged
Occident, who, having been nourished in boyhood on the discourses of
rustic theologians, and the forensics of Shelbyville advocates, finds it
difficult to assimilate his own theories of life with a civilization he
so imperfectly understands. He doubts his ability to take the European
attitude, he doubts the propriety of the attitude when taken, and the
struggle ends in the usual manner by his marrying a wife, and going
back to Shelby County to be a good citizen for the rest of his days.
Hors-Concours, mindful of the duties entailed on the proprietor of a
small patrimony and an ancient name, espouses with becoming gravity and
deliberation the Princess Altissimi. The Prorege retires to Arcopia the
blessed, whither we would fain follow him if we could; and Pensieri-Vani,
left desolate and alone, consoles himself with the reflection that life
has many sides, and that Italy has not yet given up to him all she has
to give: “Others might falter; but he was still sufficient unto himself,
still master of his own time and his own actions, and enamored only of
that delightful land whose beauty age cannot wither, and whose infinite
variety custom can never stale.”
COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE
There is no place in the world where human nature is so thoroughly human
or so purely natural as on the New York docks, when a great steamer
load of returning travelers are being put through the _peine forte et
dure_ of the United States custom house. Everybody is striving to play
a part, to assume an air of indifference which he does not feel, and of
innocence which he knows to be fallacious; and, like Mrs. Browning’s
Masker, everybody betrays too plainly in his “smiling face” and “jesting
bold” the anxiety that preys upon his vitals. Packed snugly away in
that wilderness of trunks and boxes are hundreds, nay, thousands, of
pretty trifles, which it is the painful duty of every man, and the proud
ambition of every woman, to carry in unscathed and undetected. The frank,
shameless delight which a woman takes in smuggling has long puzzled the
male moralist, who, following the intricacies of the feminine conscience,
can find no satisfactory explanation of this by-path. He cannot bring her
to understand why, when she has purchased and paid for an article, it
should not be hers to take where she likes, to deal with as she pleases;
and a dozen discourses on political economy and the laws of nations leave
her unshaken in this simple and primitive conception. As the English are
said to argue best in platoons, so a woman argues best in action; and,
while her husband or brother is proving to her in the clearest possible
fashion that a high protective tariff is a blessing to the land, she is
assiduously storing away embroidered table covers, and silk stockings,
and silver spoons, and tortoise-shell combs, and tiny jeweled pins,
and bits of frail Venetian glass, wherever her practiced eye tells her
they will best escape detection. In the abstract, of course, dear Edwin
is right—he always is—but she is far too busy with her task to enter
into abstractions just now. Whatever mental subtlety she possesses is
reserved for a much more important ordeal—that of getting clear, with a
clean conscience, from the searching questions of the inspector. “When
I am asked if I have any presents I always answer no,” said a devout,
church-going woman to me one day, “because I do not consider them
presents until I give them away.”
The grim, perplexed seriousness with which the customs officers play
their part makes a delightful foil (for the spectators) to the nimble,
elusive mental movements of their adversaries; and it is in the conflict
between aggressor and aggrieved, between invader and invaded, that the
humors of our great national institution develop their choicest bloom.
The fortunes of war which recently delayed my own boxes and my hoped-for
escape, gave me, by way of compensation, an easy opportunity of observing
and enjoying the experiences of other people, and I was encouraged in
my diversion by the too evident glee of one of the minor actors in the
strife. She was a very pretty girl, this gay young combatant, not more
than sixteen years old, and she sat kicking her heels on somebody else’s
trunk, while she watched with enviable composure the overhauling of her
own. I had seen her often during the homeward voyage, and had spoken
to her once or twice as she tripped endlessly up and down the deck in
company with every man and boy on board; taking them impartially, one
by one, and seeming to be on the same mysterious terms of intimacy with
all. She had a traveling companion in the shape of a mother who adored
her fretfully, and whom she treated with finely mingled affection and
contempt. She never spoke of this relative without the prefix “poor.”
“Poor mother is awfully sick to-day,” she would say in her shrill,
high-pitched voice, with a laugh which showed all her little white
teeth, and sounded a trifle unsympathetic in our ears. But five minutes
later she was helping “poor mother” to her steamer chair, wrapping her
up skilfully in half a dozen rugs and shawls, bullying the deck steward
to bring her some hot bouillon, bullying her to drink the bouillon when
brought, listening to her manifold complaints with an indulgent smile,
and flatly refusing to obey, when entreated to put on a warmer jacket.
“Poor mother is always worrying about wraps,” was her only acknowledgment
of the maternal solicitude; and even this remark was made, not to her
prostrate parent, but to the youth who was waiting to bear her away.
The pair had been traveling alone all summer, but were met on the docks
by a person whom they both called “cousin Jim,” and who assured them in
a hearty, offhand manner that he would have them safe through the custom
house in five minutes; a miscalculation, as it turned out, of quite
three-quarters of an hour. Malignant fate assigned them an inspector
who settled down to his search like an Indian to the war trail, and who
seemed possessed with the idea that the wealth of the Indies lay secreted
somewhere in those two shabby, travel-worn boxes. Whether this man was
really enamored of his disagreeable task, whether he conscientiously
believed that the United States would be impoverished and her industries
crippled by the contents of that modest luggage, or whether he had been
too pliable on former occasions, and seized this chance to assert his
general incorruptibility, it would be hard to determine; but while older
and less ardent officials lifted out trays and turned over corners in a
purely perfunctory manner, seeing nothing, and seeking to see nothing of
what lay beneath, this red-hot zealot went thoroughly and exhaustively to
work upon the limited materials before him. Now the particular irritation
of the custom house lies, not in the fact of your trunk being searched,
but of your neighbor’s trunk escaping; and the sharpest sting is when
you chance to know that your neighbor is carrying in unmolested ten
times the value of your dutiable articles. If Miss Maisie, kicking her
heels and smiling affably, did not realize the hardship of her position,
Miss Maisie’s mother—she never had any other name, her sole claim to
distinction resting on her daughter—felt it very keenly. She stood,
anxious and angry, by the side of the inspector, protesting fretfully at
each new in-road, and appealing for sympathy to her companions.
“It’s a perfect shame, the way he has rumpled your dresses, Maisie, and
upset that tray you packed so nice and close. You will never be able to
get the things back again in the world, and, if you do, one half of them
will be broken before we reach home. And there’s your new fur cape all
out of fold. I told you to wear it, or carry it in on your arm. No! that
is not a present; at least I think not, is it, Maisie?” as a small brown
paper parcel, carefully tied, was held up by the inspector for scrutiny.
“I can’t tell till I open it,” said the girl, reaching over, and very
deliberately unfastening the string. “You don’t remember what this is,
do you, mother? Oh! I see—a piece of camphor. No, it’s not a present. We
brought it from America. Lasts beautifully, doesn’t it?” returning the
parcel with a smile. “Would you mind wrapping it up again? It’s so very
hard to tie anything in gloves.”
Apparently the inspector did mind, for he jerked the lump of camphor
unwrapped into the trunk, and made a vicious scoop among the layers of
neatly packed clothing. “Is this a present, then?” he asked, drawing
to light a flat oblong white box, and snapping the cord that bound
it. Inside, resting on pink cotton wool, was a small silver-backed
hand-mirror of fine workmanship. “Surely this must be a present?” he
repeated, with the triumphant air of one who has dragged a secret crime
to justice.
Maisie’s mother looked nervous, and fidgeted visibly, but Maisie herself
was imperturbable. “You are mistaken; it is not,” she said, without a
tremor.
The man glanced at her sharply, and shrugged his shoulders. “You keep it
very nicely put away for an article in use,” he hinted, turning over the
box once or twice with manifest doubt and reluctance. “And these—are all
these your own, too?” unearthing from some secret receptacle six little
card-cases of blue leather, and spreading them out jeeringly in a row.
“I told you not to get so many, Maisie, but you would do it,” said her
mother, in the hopeless tone of a convicted criminal.
“They were such bargains, I couldn’t resist them,” answered the girl
sorrowfully. “Yes, they are presents; at least five of them are. I guess
I will keep one for myself, and save that, any way. Just put one of them
back, please. And oh, dear! do you have to lift out that heavy tray?
There are nothing but clothes at the bottom of the trunk.”
“Nothing at all but clothes,” interposed her mother peevishly. “I don’t
see why you have to go through everything in this fashion.”
“Nothing at all but clothes,” repeated cousin Jim, who had hitherto
stood staring silently at the confusion before him. “Can’t you take the
ladies’ word for it, when they assure you there is nothing underneath but
clothes?”
“My dear sir,” said the inspector, exasperated into insolence, “I should
be very glad to take any lady’s word, but I can’t. I’ve learned a great
deal better.”
Maisie’s mother colored hotly, with the righteous indignation of a woman
who lies easily, and is accused of falsehood; but Maisie, screwing
her pretty head on one side, winked at me in shameless enjoyment of
the situation. “He’ll find I’m right this time,” she whispered; “but
wasn’t it lucky he got it into his stupid brain that the glass must be a
present! If he had said ‘commission’ now, I should have been caught, and
the friend I bought it for would be simply furious if I had to pay duty
on it. Poor mother insisted that I should not take a single commission
this summer, so I only have very few; just that glass, and some gloves,
of course, and a feather collar, and half a dozen pairs of stockings, and
a little silk shawl from Rome. One girl did ask me to buy her a dress in
Paris, but I wouldn’t do it; and another wanted a pair of blue slippers,
but fortunately I forgot her size; and another—”
“Maisie, dear, do put back your things now,” interrupted her unhappy
parent, who by this time was on the verge of tears. “The inspector has
finished with your trunk, and is going to mine. And please be careful of
your cape! I wish you had worn it instead—”
“Instead of my old one?” said the girl hastily, smoothing down, as
she spoke, a very handsome and palpably new piece of sealskin on her
shoulders. “Poor mother is so blundering,” she sighed softly in my
ear. “I am wearing this cape for Dr. Hunsdale. He is bringing it home
to his sister, and of course wouldn’t have any shadow of a chance with
it himself. Indeed, he intended to declare it, which would have been a
dreadful shame. So I just offered to pack mine and wear this one. Lots
of girls do, you know. I’ve got a watch here for another man, too,”
lightly touching the châtelaine by her side. “Not a gold one. Only a
little silver thing he bought for _his_ sister, who is a child. Poor
mother doesn’t know about that, or she would be more miserable still;
and she is pretty miserable now, isn’t she?” contemplating her perturbed
relative with gentle disfavor. “You see, she worries so, she makes that
man believe we have something tremendously valuable somewhere, and he is
bent on finding it out. There, he’s after our Roman blankets; but those
are for ourselves, and, what is more,” raising her voice, “we have had
them in use for nearly three months.”
“Three months isn’t long enough,” returned the official surlily. “You
must have had them in use a year, to bring them in free.”
“A year!” echoed Maisie, opening her round eyes with innocent amazement.
“If you knew much about Roman blankets, you wouldn’t expect anybody
to use them for a year, and then think them worth bringing home. What
a thrifty lot the custom-house people must be! Poor mother! She never
expected to pay for those, and it does seem a little hard on her. But
what’s that he’s got now? Oh! _do_ look!” for the inspector had grabbed
something loosely wrapped in white tissue paper, and was holding it aloft
with an exultant shake, and an “I’ve-tracked-you-at-last” expression.
Down fell a rubber shoe, of unmistakable American manufacture, but
richly crusted with layers of foreign mud. It flopped modestly into the
bottom of the trunk, and was greeted with a ringing laugh of genuine,
uncontrolled delight. “That’s a present,” sobbed the girl, literally
choking with mirth, “and very valuable. We brought it from the South
Kensington, and are going to send it to the Metropolitan Museum as soon
as we reach home.”
“Maisie, how can you be so foolish!” protested her mother, roused by
desperation to some faint semblance of authority, and visibly anxious to
propitiate the inspector, who looked ominously angry. “If you will wrap
such absurd things in white tissue paper, naturally people think they are
of some value.”
“But we had so much tissue paper in London, and nothing else to wrap
with,” was the very reasonable reply. “Fifteen sheets the tailor sent
home with my one frock, and I am keeping most of it to use at Christmas
time. Poor old shoe!” lifting it tenderly out of the trunk; “if mud
were a dutiable article—and I only wonder it isn’t—you would come very
expensive just now. Swiss mud, too, I do believe, never brushed off since
that day at Grindelwald, and quite a relic. Don’t you think,” turning
suddenly to me, “don’t you really think all this is fearfully funny?”
In one sense I did, though the fun was of a strictly esoteric character,
not appealing broadly to the crowd. But then Mr. Saintsbury assures us
that real fun seldom does. Poor mother’s sense of humor was plainly
unequal to the demand made upon it; cousin Jim, who had not spoken since
his first repulse, looked more bewildered than amused; and even the
inspector did not seem vastly entertained by the situation. The trunks
had been examined, and their contents sadly disarranged; the handbags
searched, and found to contain only toilet articles and underwear; the
steamer rugs, unrolled, revealed nothing more precious than an old
magazine and four battered French novels. As a result of over half an
hour’s inquisition, the authorities had possessed themselves of two
well-worn Roman blankets, a pretty, inexpensive little fan, painted on
brown linen, a beer mug of Munich ware, and those five blue card-cases
that had been so cheap in Paris. It hardly seemed as if the spoils were
worth the conflict, or as if the three dollars and ninety cents duty
charged on them could be a serious addition to the revenues of the
United States. But the home-coming of one poor woman had been marred, and
no salt-tax of ancient France was ever paid with more manifest reluctance
and ill-will.
“It’s the burning injustice of the thing I mind, Maisie,” was the
vehement protest hurled at the inspector’s back. “There were plenty of
people all around whose trunks were hardly touched. I watched one man
myself, and he never lifted out a single thing—just turned the corners
a little, and smoothed all down again. He was examining the Hardings’s
luggage, too, and I know they have five times as much as we have—really
costly, beautiful things—and they never paid a cent.”
“But we didn’t pay a great deal,” returned the girl cheerfully. She was
down on her knees now, deftly rearranging the disordered trunks. “Think
of all our man might have found, and didn’t.”
“Think of the shameful condition he left our clothes in!” said her angry
mother. “It is an outrage. And those blankets! Everybody brings them,
and nobody but ourselves has to pay. The Hardings had them, I know, and
so did Miss Rebecca Chambers, and Mrs. Starr; and they all came in free.”
“Yes, but Mr. Maitland was charged four dollars duty on a pair he bought
for twenty shillings in London, and he presented them to the custom-house
officers rather than give their value over again,” said Maisie
triumphantly.
“Did he, really?” cried her mother, brightening up wonderfully under the
beneficent influence of other people’s misfortunes. “What a shame! Four
dollars duty on twenty-shilling blankets! I never heard of anything so
preposterous.”
“Yes, and Dr. Carson gave them a silver watch he had brought over for his
little boy, rather than pay the duty on that, it was so high,” continued
Maisie, who seemed to know the fate and fortunes of every passenger on
board.
Her mother’s face relaxed from fretfulness into smiles. “I wonder he
doesn’t sue the government, or something,” she remarked, with feminine
vagueness. “I am sure I should. It is a good thing, Maisie, we had no
watches to bring.”
The girl chuckled softly, and shook the little châtelaine by her side.
“Yes, it _is_ a good thing,” she said, with an air of simple conviction.
“After all, we did get off pretty cheap. And it was almost worth the
money to see the delicious flourish with which that muddy old overshoe
tumbled on the scene. Don’t _you_ think,” turning once more appealingly
to me, “that three dollars and ninety cents was little enough to pay for
such a sight?”
Perhaps I did. A laugh is always worth its price, and in these serious
days grows rare at any figure. Besides, when a great republic condescends
to play an active part in even an indifferent comedy, it is ill-timed to
grumble at the cost.
MR. WILDE’S _INTENTIONS_
Ever since the first printers with misguided zeal dipped an innocent
world in ink, those books have been truly popular which reflected
faithfully and enthusiastically the foibles and delusions of the hour.
This is what is called “keeping abreast with the spirit of the times,”
and we have only to look around us at present to see the principle at
work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling us to the heart, and
sad-voiced novelists entreating us at every turn to try to cultivate
indecorous conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased to be a
medium of delight. Even nihilism, which is the only form of relief that
true earnestness permits, is capable of being overstrained, and some
narrowly conservative people are beginning to ask themselves already
whether this new development of “murder as a fine art” has not been
sufficiently encouraged. Out of the midst of the gloom, out of the
confusion and depression of conflicting forms of seriousness, rises
from London a voice, clear, languid, musical, shaken with laughter, and
speaking in strange, sweet tones of art and beauty, and of that finer
criticism which is one with art and beauty, and claims them forever as
its own. The voice comes from Mr. Oscar Wilde, and few there are who
listen to him, partly because his philosophy is alien to our prevalent
modes of thought, and partly because of the perverse and paradoxical
fashion in which he delights to give it utterance. People are more
impressed by the way a thing is said than by the thing itself. A grave
arrogance of demeanor, a solemn and self-assertive method of reiterating
an opinion until it grows weighty with words, are weapons more convincing
than any subtlety of argument. “As I have before expressed to the still
reverberating discontent of two continents”—this is the mode in which the
public loves to have a statement offered to its ears, that it may gape,
and wonder, and acquiesce.
Nothing can be further from such admirable solidity than Mr. Wilde’s
flashing sword-play, than the glee with which he makes out a case against
himself, and then proceeds valiantly into battle. There are but four
essays in the volume, rather vaguely called _Intentions_, and of these
four only two have real and permanent value. “The Truth of Masks” is a
somewhat trivial paper, inserted apparently to help fill up the book, and
“Pen, Pencil, and Poison” is visibly lacking in sincerity. The author
plays with his subject very much as his subject, “kind, light-hearted
Wainwright,” played with crime, and in both cases there is a subtle
and discordant element of vulgarity. It is not given to our eminently
respectable age to reproduce the sumptuous and horror-laden atmosphere
which lends an artistic glamor to the poisonous court of the Medicis.
This “study in green” contains, however, some brilliant passages, and
at least one sentence—“The domestic virtues are not the true basis of
art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate
artists”—that must make Mr. George Moore pale with envy, when he
reflects that he missed saying it, where it belongs, in his clever,
truthful, ill-natured paper on “Mummer-Worship.”
The significance and the charm of Mr. Wilde’s book are centred in its
opening chapter, “The Decay of Lying,” reprinted from _The Nineteenth
Century_, and in the long two-part essay, entitled “The Critic as
Artist,” which embodies some of his most thoughtful, serious, and
scholarly work. My own ineffable content rests with “The Decay of Lying,”
because, under its transparent mask of cynicism, its wit, its satire,
its languid mocking humor, lies clearly outlined a great truth that is
slipping fast away from us—the absolute independence of art—art nourished
by imagination and revealing beauty. This is the hand that gilds the
grayness of the world; this is the voice that sings in flute tones
through the silence of the ages. To degrade this shining vision into a
handmaid of nature, to maintain that she should give us photographic
pictures of an unlovely life, is a heresy that arouses in Mr. Wilde
an amused scorn which takes the place of anger. “Art,” he says, “never
expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as
Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily
realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far
from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition
to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of
its own progress.” That we should understand this, it is necessary to
understand also the “beautiful untrue things” which exist only in the
world of fancy; the things that are lies, and yet help us to endure
the truth. Mr. Wilde repudiates distinctly and almost energetically
all lying with an object, all sordid trifling with a graceful gift.
The lies of newspapers yield him no pleasure; the lies of politicians
are ostentatiously unconvincing; the lies of lawyers are “briefed by
the prosaic.” He reviews the world of fiction with a swift and caustic
touch; he lingers among the poets; he muses rapturously over those
choice historic masterpieces, from Herodotus to Carlyle, where “facts
are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely
excluded on the general ground of dulness.” He laments with charming
frankness the serious virtues of his age. “Many a young man,” he says,
“starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration, which, if nurtured
in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the
best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But,
as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits
of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the
well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, and in a
short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling,
begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation
in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends
by writing novels that are so like life that no one can possibly believe
in their probability.” Surely this paragraph has but one peer in the
world of letters, and that is the immortal sentence wherein De Quincey
traces the murderer’s gradual downfall to incivility and procrastination.
“The Critic as Artist” affords Mr. Wilde less scope for his humor and
more for his erudition, which, perhaps, is somewhat lavishly displayed.
Here he pleads for the creative powers of criticism, for its fine
restraints, its imposed self-culture, and he couches his plea in words
as rich as music. Now and then, it is true, he seems driven by the
whips of our modern Furies to the verge of things which are not his to
handle—problems, social and spiritual, to which he holds no key. When
this occurs, we can only wait with drooping heads, and what patience
we can muster, until he is pleased to return to his theme; or until he
remembers, laughing, how fatal is the habit of imparting opinions, and
what a terrible ordeal it is to sit at table with the man who has spent
his life in educating others rather than himself. “For the development
of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where
self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is
instantly lowered, and often ultimately lost.” I like to fancy the ghost
of the late Rector of Lincoln, of him who said that an appreciation
of Milton was the reward of consummate scholarship, listening in the
Elysian Fields, and nodding his assent to this much-neglected view of a
much-disputed question. Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has
any time to learn. We are growing rich in lectures, but poor in scholars,
and the triumph of mediocrity is at hand. Mr. Wilde can hardly hope to
become popular by proposing real study to people burning to impart their
ignorance; but the criticism that develops in the mind a more subtle
quality of apprehension and discernment is the criticism that creates the
intellectual atmosphere of the age.
HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY
“There does not, at this blessed moment, breathe on the earth’s surface a
human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures
o’ body or soul.” So speaks the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his
content, contemplating with moist eyes the groaning supper-table, laden
with a comfortable array of solid viands; after which fair and frank
expression of his views we are somewhat pained to hear him denouncing
in no measured terms “the awful and fearsome vice o’ gluttony,” as
evidenced occasionally in women. His companions, too, those magnificent
fellow-feeders, have a great many severe things to say about gudewives
who betray a weakness for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for
gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitatingly affirms that such a one,
“eating for the sake of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in
fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each mouthful virtually breaks
all ten of the commandments.” This is the language of an ascetic rather
than of a _bon vivant_, but we are in some measure reassured when the
same Mr. Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although roast goose
always disagrees with him, yet he never refuses it, believing that
to purchase pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true philosophy;
whereupon the Shepherd, not to be outdone, gives it as his unreserved
opinion that, in winter-time at least, “eating for eating’s sake, and in
oblivion o’ its feenal cause, is the most sacred o’ household duties.”
From these somewhat inharmonious sentiments we reluctantly infer that
gluttony is a vice—or a virtue—for man only, and that woman’s part in
the programme is purely that of a ministering angel. Adam was made to
eat, and Eve to cook for him, although, even in this humble sphere, she
and her daughters have been doomed to rank second in command. Excellent
in all things, but supreme in none, they have never yet scaled the
dazzling heights of culinary fame. The records of antiquity make no
mention of their skill; the middle ages grant them neither praise nor
honor; and even as late as Dr. Johnson’s day they labored hard for scanty
recognition. It is very painful to hear the great sage speaking lightly
of our grandmother’s oracle, Mrs. Glasse, and declaring with robust
contempt that women were fit to spin, but not to write a book of cookery.
Yet for how many years had they modestly held their peace; profiting,
doubtless, in many a roomy kitchen and in many a well-stocked buttery by
the words of wisdom which vainglorious men let fall; and only now and
then giving help and counsel to one another by means of little private
recipe-books, which were circulated among a few noble families, and were
considered as their own exclusive property and pride.
Opulence and a taste for display, upon the one side, and the natural
conservatism of the great Saxon stock, upon the other, fought the battle
of the table from the days of the Black Prince down to those of Anthony
Trollope, and will, in all probability, fight it to the end. “A cod’s
head for fourpence, and nine shillings’ worth of condiments to serve with
it,” was the favorite sarcasm which greeted the growing extravagance of
the rich middle classes. Those costly “subtleties” imported from French
kitchens in the fifteenth century met with a sturdy opposition from
British free-men, who, even while they gaped and marveled, resented such
bewildering innovations. The pelican sheltering her young, and Saint
Catherine, book in hand, disputing with the doctors, which figured among
the dishes at the coronation of Henry V.; the hundred and four “dressed”
peacocks, trailing their plumes gorgeously over the table at the
consecration of Archbishop Neville, affronted more than one beef-eating
gentleman, and exasperated more than one porridge-eating churl. From
France, too, came certain heresies regarding the fitness of food which
Englishmen had for centuries devoured and digested. Queen Elizabeth dined
upon whale; Cardinal Wolsey, who was something of an epicure, and who
first taught us that strawberries and cream were intended by a beneficent
nature to set off each other’s merits, did not disdain to have a young
porpoise served up at one of his banquets. Fish soup was a delicacy, and
we are even assured by antiquarians that the grampus, or sea-wolf, was
freely eaten by our strong-stomached ancestors.
But foreign cooks looked doubtfully upon these national dainties, and,
in place of the old-time gravies, which were simply the broths in which
meat had been boiled, flavored with a little ginger and sugar, delicate
and highly seasoned sauces were devised for the tempting of weary
appetites. Italy sent forks—those curious and uncanny implements—which
were received with scornful indignation, as calculated to destroy the
simplicity and manliness of Great Britain. Spoons and knives were held
in slight esteem, for good soup could be swallowed from the bowl, and
his sacred Majesty, Charles XII. of Sweden, was not the only monarch who
buttered his bread with his royal thumb. But forks were contemptible
affectations. As honest Master Breton observed, he had done no foul
work, and handled no unwholesome thing, and consequently had no need of
an instrument with which to make hay of his food and pitch it into his
mouth. So, too, the time-honored custom of man and wife eating out of
one trencher was falling into rapid disuse, and Walpole tells us that
the old Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were the last couple in England who
retained the fashion of their youth. Meats were growing daintier and
dearer all the while. The ordinary or inn dinner, which in Elizabeth’s
day cost sixpence, had risen to tenpence in the reign of George I., and
soon crept up to a shilling. In every generation there were plenty of
grumblers to lament over the good old times that had fled, and we catch
the echo of this undying cry in the modern protests against unwelcome
fashions. Thackeray and Trollope railed perpetually at that feeble
striving after an impossible elegance which had well-nigh destroyed the
cheery conviviality of their youth; and Peacock, the prince of good
livers, with whom the pleasures of the intellect and the appetite walked
amicably hand in hand, has recorded his still more vehement denunciation:
“I detest and abominate,” says Mr. Macborrowdale, “the idea of a Siberian
dinner, where you just look on fiddle-faddles, while your meal is behind
a screen, and you are served with rations like a pauper.”
The scorn of the true Briton for alien delicacies was repaid with
interest by the Frenchman, who regarded his neighbor’s groaning table
very much as we might regard the doubtful provender of a cannibal chief.
The contempt for frog-eating foreigners, on the one hand, was not greater
than the contempt for beef-eating islanders, on the other; in fact, all
nations, from Egypt down, seem to have cherished a wholesome dislike
and distrust for each other’s food. The British officer who, at the
attack on Cadiz, shouted to his men, “You Englishmen, who are fed upon
beef, don’t surely mean to be beaten by a d—d lot of Spaniards, who live
on oranges!” made a stronger appeal to human nature than did Napoleon
with his famous “forty centuries;” and the reverse of the medal may be
seen in Talleyrand’s description of England, as a land where there were
twenty-four religions and only one sauce. Twenty-four religions would
make but a poor showing in these days, when even a serious novel can
beget a new one; but sauces are not so lightly called into being. Those
“slibber sops” which brought “queesiness to the stomach and disquiet to
the mind” of John Lyly were hard to rout from the field; and they were
still holding their own when Brillat-Savarin, the most serene and kindly
of epicures, first visited Great Britain. With Savarin, eating was more
than a mere vulgar pleasure; it was a solemn and yet exquisite duty which
man owed to himself, and to a generous nature that had yielded him up
her bounties for this purpose. Mr. Birrell says that Burke’s letters on
carrots “tremble with emotion,” and there is a like earnestness about
all of Savarin’s recipes; a pathetic anxiety lest some ingredient should
be omitted or ill-used. For fish he entertains a profound respect; for
game, a manly affection; for pastries, a delicate regard; but truffles
are the beloved darlings of his heart. It contents him greatly to sit
at table with congenial spirits; to watch “the eagerness of desire, the
ecstasy of enjoyment, and, finally, the perfect repose of bliss on every
countenance,” when the noble meal is ended. Surely even the Reign of
Terror might have dealt tenderly with such a man as this, since patriots
are unswerving eaters, and it behooved them to remember that “the
discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the
discovery of a new planet.”
All of Savarin’s apothegms evince the same frank and warm-hearted regard
for the welfare of others; the same unremitting anxiety to teach them
what to eat and how to eat it. He entreats us never to forget that, when
we have invited a man to dine, we have, for a short time at least, his
happiness in our hands. The dinner table, he reminds us, is the only
place where men are not hopelessly bored for the first hour, and during
that hour it is our privilege to make them enamored of life. A cook is,
in his eyes, a true scientist, with mighty capacities for good and evil.
He believes, with Baudelaire, that such a one should have the soul of a
poet, and—like the too fastidious Parisian, who declared that between
Mme. du Deffand’s _chef_ and the Marquise de Brinvilliers “there was only
the difference of intention”—Savarin has no words of reproach strong
enough for those who debase and shame their noble calling. He is prompt
to recognize the exigencies of a slender purse, and unwearying in his
efforts to provide _menus_ fitted to its limitations; but his notions
of economy are somewhat like those of the little French princess, who
said that rather than starve she would live on bread and cheese. The
famous _omelette au thon_, for instance, with all its air of pastoral
simplicity, contains the roes of two carp, a piece of tunny, an eschalot,
twelve eggs, and a number of other ingredients which would hardly
recommend it to a poor country parsonage. As for the Abbé Chevrier’s
spinach, which was warmed up with butter for seven days before it reached
the acme of delicacy, we can only wonder at the admirable patience of
the Abbé’s cook, who would return seven times with unremitting industry
to the consideration of a single dish.
It will be observed, however, how many gastronomical triumphs we owe to
clerical genius, or to the researches of the true philosopher. Lord Bacon
thought it no shame to bend his mighty mind to kitchen problems, and Dr.
Nowel, the learned and pious dean of St. Paul’s, was rightfully proud
of the bottled beer which he first gave to his astonished and grateful
country. The earliest list of recipes in England was the work of an
archbishop. The Jesuits in the seventeenth century carried the turkey
from its native haunts, and introduced it to the best French society, who
received it with the rapture it deserved. The famous _mayonnaise_ is not
the only delicacy which Richelieu bequeathed to the world; Talleyrand
devoted one hour out of every busy day to the exclusive companionship of
his cook; and the Regent Orleans was pleased to give his own name to the
bread of his own baking.
What a kindly spirit of good-fellowship we discern in the frank
epicureanism of Sydney Smith! what generous sympathy for a _bon vivant_
whose lines have led him into desert places! “Luttrell came over for a
day,” he writes, “from whence I know not, but I thought not from good
quarters; at least he had not his usual soup and patti look. There was
a forced smile upon his countenance which seemed to indicate plain
roast and boiled, a sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had
been staying with a clergyman.” How creditable, too, is his anxiety to
please Luttrell, when that amiable sybarite becomes _his_ guest! “Mrs.
Sydney,” he declares, “grows pale with alarm as the rich dishes are
uncovered;” and yet so admirable a housewife might have shared in the
superb confidence of Lord Worcester when cautioned by Sir Henry Halford
to leave all such indiscreet messes alone. “Side dishes,” said the great
physician, “are poison.” “Yours may be,” retorted Lord Worcester; “and I
should never dream of eating them, but mine are a very different story.”
So, too, were Sydney Smith’s, and the celebrated salad which gained for
him nearly as wide a reputation as his wit was only one of many famous
recipes, and probably no greater in its way than the mysterious pudding
whose secret he imparted as an especial favor to the importunate Lady
Holland. Those who had the happiness of sitting at his table rose from it
with tranquil gratitude, “serenely full,” and conscious, let us hope, of
his own graceful sentiment,
“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”
There is one more subject to consider; one more aspect of the case,
fraught with tender and melancholy associations. Like the lost joys of
our youth; like the taste for apple-dumplings, which Lamb recognized
as belonging only to those whose innocence was unimpaired; like the
vanishing of gentle thoughts with a growing distaste for asparagus; so
is the sorrowful blank left in our lives by the recollection of noble
dishes that have been, and that are no longer. What of that lost recipe
of Menander’s for fish sauce—an ambrosial sauce whose fame has flitted
down to us from dim ages, and the eating of which would have filled
to the brim Dr. Johnson’s cup of happiness? And what of its modern
counterpart, now also gone forever, the famous green sauce which La Coste
offered to Sir Thomas Dundas at the Duke of York’s table, whispering to
him with unctuous fervor, “_Avec cette sauce là, on pourrait manger son
grand-père_”? What of the bream-pie that disappeared with the good monks,
driven from British soil, and the mere recollection of which caused
Peacock to bewail in spirit the too rapid dissolution of the monasteries?
And what of sack—_Falstaff’s_ sack—that made England the merry England of
yore, and that took flight, like some old-fashioned genius, before the
sombre days that were to follow? Surely if we knew its secret, we should
learn how to laugh once more.
But alas! this may not be. We have but the memories of past good cheer;
we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen
for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray
ghosts of old-time revelers.
“Still shall this burden their answer bear,
What has become of last year’s snow?”
CHILDREN IN FICTION
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has prefaced his little volume of _Child Stories_
with a modest intimation that he finds the subject almost beyond his
grasp. He says:
“Only women understand children thoroughly; but if a mere man
keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, and refrains
from talking down to his superiors, the children will sometimes
be good to him, and let him see what they think about in
the world. Yet, even after patient investigation and the
condescension of the nursery, it is hard to draw babies.”
This sounds disarming, and at the same time strikes a popular note
respecting these fortunate little people, who, after having been
considered for many years as unworthy of the novelist’s regard, have now
suddenly grown too complex and subtle for him to hope to understand. Mr.
Kipling himself approaches them with great caution, and treats them with
careful conventionality, except in that pitiful bit of realism, “Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep,” where the misery and swift deterioration of a child
are almost too painfully portrayed. Punch, with his dim comprehension of
his own unhappiness, and his pathetic attempts to be friendly and “oblige
everybody;” Punch, swaying alternately from clumsy deception to helpless
rage, badgered into sullenness, and betrayed by the inherent weakness of
his poor, peace-loving little soul, is a picture burdened with bitter
truth, drawn with revengeful fidelity. Once, I am sure, a half-blind,
solitary boy measured those lonely rooms in hand spans: “fifty down the
side, thirty across, and fifty back again—one hundred and eighty-one
exactly from the hall door to the top of the first landing.” Once, I am
sure, he knocked his blundering head against the walls, and upset the
glasses that he tried to grasp, in the gathering gloom of his doubly
darkened life.
But when we turn from the sad sincerity of “Black Sheep” to the
brighter atmosphere of the other tales, we find nothing very genuine
or convincing about the happier children who figure in them. “Drums
of the Fore and Aft” is an exceedingly clever story, and Lew and Jakin
may be typical British drummer boys, but to the uninitiated reader they
seem a trifle over-drawn both for good and evil. They know so much
and talk so marvelously; they are so very bad and so very upright;
and they insert such a bewildering number of “bloomin’s” into their
conversation, that, like the eternal “well” with which Mr. Howells’s
women begin all their sentences, the word loses its _vraisemblance_
through unbearable repetition. “His Majesty the King,” even when we
forgive him his cumbersome title which destroys all good-fellowship at
once, is a child dear to story-writers, and consecrated to their uses
for many years, but so exceedingly rare in every-day-life that he has
to be taken strictly on faith; while “Wee Willie Winkie” is even more
unveracious in his character. These wonderful babes, with their sense
of honor, and chivalry, and manhood, these Bayards in pinafores, these
miniature editions of King Arthur and Sir Launcelot rolled into one, are
picturesque possibilities only when we have forgotten what an earthly
little animal a real boy is. Willie Winkie rides into a forbidden and
dangerous country to protect and rescue a woman nearly old enough to be
his mother. He is keenly and conscientiously distressed because, having
been told to keep within doors, he has thus “bwoken” his “awwest;” but he
feels it his paramount duty to pursue and guard from evil the able-bodied
betrothed of his father’s friend. When Miss Allardyce accommodates
herself to circumstances by promptly wrenching her ankle, and the pair
are surrounded by ruffians of the skulking, cowardly Indian type whom Mr.
Kipling paints with such generous scorn, we are gravely told: “Then rose
from the rock Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race, aged six and
three-quarters, and said briefly and emphatically, ‘_Jao!_’” What “_Jao_”
means is lost to our occidental ignorance, but the effect is magical.
The twenty armed men thus confronted and defied are awed into milder
measures, and finally routed with shame, while the hero of the hour
restores the prostrate heroine unharmed—save for the wrenched ankle—to
her lover’s anxious embraces.
This is very amusing, but a little absurd, and a little vulgar as well.
It strikes that jarring note of provincialism which Matthew Arnold
condemns with all the weight of his critical eloquence in Kinglake’s
“Invasion of the Crimea.” “Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant
Race,” is on a literary level with the description of Marshal St.
Arnaud, cowed by “the majesty of the great Elchi’s Canning brow and
tight, merciless lips;” a style of writing bad enough in newspaper
correspondence, but unpardonable in artistic fiction. How has it
happened that Mr. Kipling, who tells us with such irresistible grace and
simplicity the “Story of Muhammad Din,” should stray into mock heroics
when handling the children of his own nation, the jolly well-bred little
English lads, to whom all picturesque posing is an art unknown.
Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but highly esteemed fallacy that
the child of fiction is expected to be always precocious and sprightly,
to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the sluggish atmosphere about
him. He does this at the expense alike of his sincerity and of his
manners; we cannot accept him as a fact, and we don’t approve of him as a
theory. A few years ago a critic in the _Contemporary Review_ protested
very seriously against such writers as Florence Montgomery, “by whom the
bloom of unconsciousness has been wiped from childhood, and boys and
girls have learned to see themselves, not like old-fashioned children,
as good and naughty, but as picturesque beings, whose naughtiness has
an attractive charm, and whose very imperfections of dialect are worth
accurate record.” Most of us are only too familiar with this kind of
fiction, which for a time enjoyed such great and hurtful popularity.
The patronizing attitude of children to their parents is sufficiently
illustrated by the really nice little boy in “Transformed,” who calls
his father “Puppy,” a most objectionable thing for a nice little boy to
do; while what might be termed the corrective attitude of children to
their parents is still more sharply defined by that unpleasant child,
Nina Middleton, who sees so clearly, and suffers so intensely from the
“careless superficiality” and rigid narrowness of the unfortunate couple
whose painful privilege it was to have given her birth.
One of the latest types, however, to seize and hold the hearts of the
big, sentimental, child-loving public is Mrs. Burnett’s Lord Fauntleroy,
who maybe best described as the good little boy with the clothes. It
is quite impossible to separate him in our minds from his wardrobe,
to divest him of his velvet suits and sashes, his “rich Vandyke lace
collar,” his leggings and neat little Oxford ties. He is always and in
all places “a small copy of the fairy prince,” picturesquely grouped
with a dog, or a cat, or a pony, as circumstances direct. We cannot be
coarse enough to imagine him with cropped hair, and muddy boots, and a
torn jacket, and a hole in his stocking, like so many, many real little
boys who daily break their mothers’ hearts by their profound neglect of
appearances. He is so ready in conversation, too, and pays such charming
compliments to pretty young ladies, instead of hustling into corners and
staring owlishly, after the fashion of those awkward little boys I know.
And he is so very, very good! Not consciously and morbidly virtuous like
that baby prig, Little Saint Elizabeth, who comes from the same hands,
but artlessly and inevitably correct. He gives all his money to pay poor
Michael’s rent, and we rejoice rightly in his generosity, with only one
wistful recollection of that vastly different specimen of boyhood, for
whose misdeeds Mr. Aldrich is responsible, and who spends his funds
gloriously in indigestible treats to his friends. It is very charming
in Lord Fauntleroy to offer his eager plea in behalf of the farmer
Higgins, and probably just what any warm-hearted child would have done
in his place; but we cannot but contrast his wonderful unconsciousness
afterward, “not realizing his own importance in the least,” with the
familiar figure of little Paul Dombey strutting up and down the room
at Brighton, full of the new-blown dignity of being a financier, and
lending young Gay the money for his uncle. It would take the sternest
of moralists to object to Paul’s infantile strut; it would take the most
trusting of sentimentalists to believe that Cedric is quite as innocently
unconscious as he seems.
There is a remarkably nice little girl in that pleasant English novel,
published a few years ago, _Sir Charles Danvers_—a little girl who can
be safely recommended to all child-lovers, who will only wish they could
hear a great deal more about her. Molly Danvers is not particularly
precocious; she is not at all supersensitive, and we are not even told
that she is pretty. There is absolutely no inventory given of her
personal charms; and as to her clothes, “a white frock and two slim black
legs” are casually mentioned on her first introduction, and we never hear
another word about them. “A white frock and two slim black legs!” Could
any description be more meagre? Imagine Little Saint Elizabeth, or Sara
Crewe, reduced ruthlessly to a white frock, and not another allusion
to their wardrobes in the whole course of their histories. But Molly
doesn’t care. I have a suspicion that her white frocks don’t stay white
very long, and that her slim black legs are better distinguished for
activity than for grace. She is anything but heroic, and runs fleetly
away from danger, leaving both her cousin and her donkey to their fate;
but she has a loving little heart, nevertheless, and when her terrier
dies, this heart is as nearly broken as a healthy little girl’s can be.
“‘He is _dead_, Uncle Charles. He was quite well, and eating
Albert biscuits with the dolls this morning, and now’—the rest
was too dreadful, and Molly burst into a flood of tears, and
burrowed with her head against the faithful waistcoat of Uncle
Charles—of Uncle Charles, the friend, the consoler of all the
ills that Molly had so far been heir to.
“‘Vic had a very happy life, Molly,’ said Charles, pressing the
little brown head against his cheek, and vaguely wondering what
it would be like to have any one to turn to in time of trouble.
“‘I always kept trouble from him except that time I shut him in
the door,’ gasped Molly. ‘I never took him out in a string, and
he only wore his collar—that collar you gave him that made him
scratch so—on Sundays.’
“‘And he was not ill a long time? He did not suffer any pain?’
“‘No, Uncle Charles, not much. But, though he did not say
anything, his face looked worse than screaming, and he passed
away very stiff in his hind-legs. Oh!’ (with a fresh outburst)
‘when cook told me that her sister that was in a decline had
gone, I never thought’ (sob, sob!) ‘poor Vic would be the
next.’”
This is not the less heartrending for being amusing, and that short
sentence “his face looked worse than screaming” is a master-stroke of
realistic description. On the whole, for ordinary family purposes, Molly
Danvers is one of the nicest little girls I know; and if we seek—as many
people rightly seek—for the poetry, the beauty of childhood, subtly
transferred to paper, let us turn back a few years, and re-read for
the fifth or the fiftieth time, as it chances, those seven delicious
chapters of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, which describe a single day in the
lives of the three babies, René Jean, Gros Alain, and Georgette. How many
hours must Victor Hugo have watched patiently and gladly the ways of
little children before he could paint them with such minute and charming
truth, and what sheer delight is embodied in every line! They do nothing
remarkable, these tiny French peasants; they say nothing worth noting;
they are clothed in rags; they are alone all day; they are mischievous,
healthy, and natural. They hang enchanted, all three, over a wood-louse,
their curls touching, their breath suspended, their eyes fixed on the
embarrassed insect: and we watch them with a joy and wonder equal to
their own. “It is a she-creature,” announces René Jean, and Georgette
laughs, Georgette who, at twenty months, has not yet acquired the art of
conversation. She utters a single word from time to time, but sentences
lie beyond her scope. She is occupied with grave thoughts, and when she
breathes a soft monosyllable, her brothers pause encouragingly to listen.
A belated bee comes buzzing in the window and departs.
“‘She is going home,’ said René Jean.
“‘It is a beast,’ said Gros Alain. ‘No,’ said René Jean, ‘it is
a fly.’ ‘A f’y,’ said Georgette.”
This is the extent of their conversational powers, and how very limited
it seems. They do not talk, these babies; they act. They lay their
destructive hands on the rare old folio of _Saint Bartholomew_, and
tear out the leaves one by one, solemnly, innocently, conscientiously.
Georgette, who cannot reach the volume, sits on the floor, and tears each
leaf into little pieces with painstaking amiability; and all three are
so happy over their self-appointed task. By the side of their absolute
unconsciousness, the Willie Winkies and Lord Fauntleroys of romance grow
suddenly Utopian and unreal. The chivalry, honor, generosity, loyalty,
picturesqueness, and brilliancy, all the story-book virtues of story-book
children, seem less winning and less dear than the birdlike contentment
of three silent, sleepy little creatures, curled softly together, and
painted by a master’s hand.
THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS
It is a curious fact that three of the most successful and eminent
literary women in England—Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss
Mitford—should have been typical old maids; not merely unmarried through
stress of intervening circumstances—ill health, early disappointment,
or a self-sacrificing devotion to other cares—but women whose lives
were rounded and completed without that element which we are taught to
believe is the main-spring and prime motor of existence. To understand
how thoroughly this was the case, we have but to turn to a later and
very different writer, Charlotte Brontë, who married when she was
thirty-eight, and died one year afterward, and whose whole literary
life was accordingly passed in spinsterhood. Yet if that very grave and
respectable gentleman, the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, had never appeared upon
the scene at all, it would have been impossible to call Miss Brontë a
typical old maid. She had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim
demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic attitude toward the male
sex; but burning in every fibre of her being, and evident in every page
of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that inarticulate, distressful
longing of a woman who craves love. We can easily imagine Elizabeth
Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse,
dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from their lovers’ grasp and
growing into old maids as charming as was Miss Austen herself; but poor
plain Jane Eyre, and that reticent little school-teacher, Lucy Snowe, are
shaken and consumed with the passion of their own desires. Such women
cannot walk from the cradle to the grave, handling their lives with
delicate satisfaction and content; they must find what they need or die.
It is amusing to note how the various critics and biographers of Miss
Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford have debated and fretted
over the painful lack of romance in their careers. Feminine critics,
especially, find it difficult to believe that there is no hidden tale to
tell, no secret and justifiable cause for this otherwise inexplicable
behavior; and much time and patience have been exhausted in dragging
shadowy memories to light. In the case of Miss Mitford, indeed, it
seems quite hopeless to search for even the ghost of a love-story, and,
although she certainly did devote her life with touching unselfishness to
the comfort and support of a very exacting father, it cannot for a moment
be urged that, in so doing, she relinquished any distinct desire or
prospect of matrimony. Perhaps the exasperating qualities of her parent
inclined her unconsciously to remain single; for, with all her unsparing
devotion, she must, in the course of sorely tried years, have grown to
regard men very much as Dolly Winthrop regarded them,—“in the light of
animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome.” Mr.
Mitford, a most genial and handsome old gentleman of the Turveydrop
pattern, managed to keep his daughter’s hands full of work, and her
heart full of love, and left her little chance or disposition for any
wandering fancies. All the exuberant affection of her girlhood, all the
mature attachment of later years, were concentrated upon him alone.
Her youth waned, her freshness faded, her indomitable courage and
cheerfulness quailed a little before the ever-increasing burdens of her
life; but through it all, in joy and sorrow, no shadow of a suitor stands
beckoning by her side. Her serene old age was haunted by no dim voices
crying out of the past for the joy which had slipped from her grasp. She
wrote love-stories by the score, always approaching the subject from the
outside, and treating it with the easy conventionality, the generous yet
imperfect sympathy of a warm-hearted woman not prone to analyze motives.
They are very pleasant stories for the most part, sensible, healthy,
and happy; but they are not convincing. The reader feels that if Polly
did not marry Joe she would be just as well satisfied with William, and
that if Edwin failed to win Angelina he would soon content himself with
Dorothy. This is a comfortable state of affairs, and doubtless true
to life; but it is not precisely the element which makes a successful
love-tale. The fact is, Miss Mitford described things pretty much as she
found them, not seeking to dive below the surface, and always adding a
little sunshine of her own. She was a happy woman, save for some sad
years of overwork, and her life was full of pleasant detail, of cherished
duties, and of felicitous labor; but, from first to last, love had no
part in it, and, fancy free, she never reckoned of her loss.
Miss Edgeworth, too, seems to have been lifted from the sphere of
matrimony by the unusual strength of her family affections. Her devotion
to her father, to her two stepmothers, and to her nineteen brothers and
sisters was of such an absorbing nature as to leave her little leisure or
inclination for mere matters of sentiment. She was so busy too, so full
of pleasant cares, and successful work, and a thousand-and-one delightful
interests; above all, she clung so fondly to her home, and country,
and the familiar faces she had known from baby-hood, that love had no
chance to storm her well-defended walls. When that handsome and earnest
young Swede, he of the “superior understanding and mild manners,” came
to woo, he found, alas! that the lady could not tear her heart away from
Ireland and her beautiful young stepsisters to give it to his keeping.
She acknowledged his merits, both his mildness and his superiority, she
liked and admired him in every way; but marry and go to Sweden!—that she
would not do, either for M. Edelcrantz or any other man. Mrs. Edgeworth,
who was distinctly sentimental, and who would have been delighted to see
her clever stepdaughter happily wedded, says quite touchingly that Maria
was mistaken in the strength of her own feelings; that she really loved
M. Edelcrantz, but refused to marry him because her family could not bear
to part with her, because “she would not have suited his position at the
court of Stockholm,” and because she feared her lack of beauty would one
day lessen his regard. Shadow of shadows! Was there ever a woman who
declined to marry the man she truly loved for such cloud-built reasoning
as this! Maria was doubtless the darling of her own home circle, and
would have been sorely missed had she winged her flight to Sweden; but
there were daughters enough in that overflowing household to admit of
one being spared. As for the other obstacles, it is hardly possible that
they should have been urged seriously by a woman as free from morbid
sentiment as was Miss Edgeworth. There is a sweet humility which is
born of love, and which whispers to most women—and, probably, to some
men—that they are unworthy of the choice which has fallen upon them, of
the jewel which has been flung at their feet. But to push this delicate
emotion so far as to sacrifice happiness at its bidding is not the
impulse of a sound and healthy nature. Miss Edgeworth could never have
been pretty, and had spent most of her life in retirement; but she was by
no means unacquainted with the ways of the world, by no means destitute
of womanly charms, and, above all, by no means without the exhilarating
consciousness of success. In fact, when we read her biography, we are
principally impressed by the amount of adulation she received, by the
extraordinary enthusiasm her pleasant tales aroused. The struggling
novelist is tempted to wish that he also might have lived in those
halcyon days, until he remembers that a far greater writer, Miss Austen,
had no share in this universal and unbounded applause. Miss Edgeworth
was as much the pet of the literary world as of her own household and
friends. She had little need to doubt her powers, or to fear neglect
and indifference. If she really regretted poor M. Edelcrantz—who went
back to Sweden with a sore heart and never married anybody else—she gave
no outward token of repentance, but lived to be eighty-two, the most
cheerful and radiant of old maids, faithful to the last to her family
affections, and happy to die in the midst of those who had made the
sunshine of her life.
It is in the case of Miss Austen, however, that truly strenuous efforts
have been made to cultivate a passable romance upon scanty soil. Miss
Austen was pretty, she was gay, she possessed an indefinable attraction
for men, and she was in turn attracted by them, as a healthy-minded,
happy-hearted girl should be. Her letters to Cassandra are full of
amusing confidences on the subject—confidences far too amusing, in fact,
to give any sign or token of genuine feeling beyond. She writes with
buoyant cheerfulness about Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom she “does not care
sixpence,” yet prefers him to all other competitors, who must have ranked
pitiably low in the scale. “I am almost afraid,” she confesses, “to tell
you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything
most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down
together. I _can_ expose myself, however, _only once more_, because he
leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we _are_ to have
a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking,
pleasant young man, I assure you.”
Not without grave faults, though, it would seem, for a little later
we hear of a morning coat which is much too light to please Jane’s
critical eye. She cannot possibly give her maiden affections to a man
who would wear such a coat, and so, after a while, he disappears from
her pages and her life, to go out into the world, and win much legal
renown, and be Chief Justice of Ireland, and always to remember with
great tenderness the gay young girl at Ashe. Then there appears on the
scene that unnamed friend of Mrs. Lefroy’s, whose love is so sudden and
fervent that Miss Austen feels quite sure it will soon decline into
“sensible indifference,” as, no doubt, it does. Then the suitor who has
“the recommendation of good character, and a good position in life, of
everything in fact except the subtle power of touching my heart”—which
seems to have been the real difficulty with them all. Sir Francis Doyle,
indeed, tells a very pretty and pathetic tale of Jane Austen’s engagement
to a naval officer who, after the peace of 1820, accompanied his
_fiancée_ and her family to Switzerland. Here he started off on foot one
fine morning, promising to meet his friends at Chamouni. He never came,
and they waited and waited with fast-growing fears, only to learn, when
all was over, that the young man had been seized with a sudden fever, and
had died, unknown and scantily cared for, in some poor cottage home. It
is a sad story, but happily does not rest upon any shadow of foundation.
Miss Austen never was engaged, and never was in Switzerland; and although
Sir Francis had the tale from a friend, who had it from a member of
the family, it merely goes to prove that even relatives are not wholly
incapable of weaving romances out of thin air, rather than be, like the
knife-grinder, without a tale to tell.
Mrs. Malden, Jane Austen’s enthusiastic biographer, discredits most
unhesitatingly this particular love-legend, while at the same time she
manifests a lively desire to give form and color to another, scarcely
less intangible. The third chapter in her little volume is enticingly
headed “Her Life’s One Romance,” and in it is narrated at some length the
story of an attractive young clergyman whom Jane and Cassandra Austen
met one summer at a seaside resort in Devonshire. He openly admired the
younger girl, and, when they parted, “impressed strongly on the sisters
his intention of meeting them again.” He died, however, shortly after,
and Jane neither gave any outward token of grief, nor indulged in any
confidences on the subject. Nevertheless, Cassandra, whose own youth
was shadowed by the blight of a lost love, was wont to say, after her
sister’s death, that she believed this to have been her one and only
romance; and Miss Thackeray, in her sympathetic sketch of Miss Austen,
alludes very sweetly and very confidently to the tale.
“Here, too,” she says, “is another sorrowful story. The sisters’ fate
(there is a sad coincidence and similarity in it) was to be undivided;
their life, their experience, was the same. Some one without a name takes
leave of Jane one day, promising to come back. He never comes back: long
afterwards they hear of his death. The story seems even sadder than
Cassandra’s in its silence and uncertainty, for silence and uncertainty
are death in life to some people.”
But if there is one thing more than another to be avoided and ruthlessly
condemned, it is this quiet assumption that a woman has parted with her
heart, when she herself has breathed no word to warrant it. The cheerful
serenity of Jane Austen’s daily life showed no ripple of storm, her lips
told no tale; and why are we to assume that a young man whom she met
for a few idle weeks and never saw again had broken down the barriers
of that self-possessed nature, had overcome the gay indifference which
showed no signs of hurt? As for the popular theory that Anne Elliot’s
gentle enduring love and poor Fanny Price’s hours of bravely borne pain
were imaged from the depth of their author’s experience, we have but to
remember that the same hand gave us Harriet Smith, with her fluctuating,
lightly won affections, and Charlotte Collins, sensible and happy,
enjoying her pleasant home, and enduring—or avoiding—her solemn, pompous,
servile, stupid husband. As well connect one type as another with the
genius that revealed them all.
“Of Jane herself I know no definite love-tale to relate,” says her nephew
and biographer, Mr. Austen Leigh; and this seems about the conclusion of
the matter. “No _man’s_ life could be more entirely free from sentiment,”
admits, very reluctantly, one of her cleverest critics. “If love be a
woman’s chief business, here is a very sweet woman who had no share in
it. It is a want, but we have no right to complain, seeing that she did
not shape her course to please us.”
This is a generous reflection on the critic’s part; but is the want so
painfully apparent as he thinks, or may we not be well content with Jane
Austen as we have her, the central figure of a little loving family
group, the dearest of daughters and sisters, the gayest and brightest of
aunts, the most charming and incomparable of old maids?
THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR
Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in
love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs
from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange
alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before. With
little things as with big ones, this sentiment is the sentiment of our
day. “Unrest,” says Schopenhauer, “is the mark of existence,” and the
many trifling details of ordinary life evince on every side the same
keen relish for novelty, the same careless disregard of the familiar.
Especially is this the case with women, who feel less wistfully than men
the subtle charm of association, and who have less sympathy than men for
the dear, faulty, unlovely, well-loved things of their youth. No woman
could have written those pathetic lines of Mr. Lang’s on St. Andrews:
“A little city, worn and gray,”
the memory of whose rainwashed, desolate streets blots out from his mind
all the beauty and the splendor of Oxford. And—to descend from serious to
frivolous subjects—no woman can wholly appreciate that pleasant sketch of
Mr. Barrie’s, called “My Tobacco Pouch,” which reveals a mental condition
absolutely inexplicable to the most astute feminine apprehension. It
is the instinctive desire of our sex for modernism that keeps rolling
the great ball of trade. Manufacturers and shopkeepers would starve in
common if they catered only to men, who not infrequently have a marked
preference for the archaic. But women, to use the words of Sir Thomas
Browne, are “complexionally propense to innovation.” With wonderful
pliancy and adaptability they fit easily into new surroundings, make
homes out of new houses, fill their rooms with new objects, and grasp
a fair share of happiness in the enjoyment of novelty in every form,
whether of fashion, art, literature, religion or philanthropy.
But what of the unfortunate few who, through some strange moral twist,
are “complexionally propense” to sameness; who feel a passionate regret
for what has been lost, and a passionate reluctance to part with what is
fast slipping away; and who, as the great world rolls relentlessly on its
appointed course, find themselves “forever broken on the wheel of time”?
The journal of that stout old Tory, Sir Francis Doyle, betrays a strong
dislike, not only for political upheavals, which are very uncomfortable
and disturbing things, but for innovations of any kind. “Nothing can
be so good as what is old,” says Mr. Lang; and Mr. Peacock tranquilly
declares that all the really valuable opinions have been uttered a
thousand years ago. Amid the noisy blare with which the trumpets of
progress herald every move, comes thrilling now and then a note of
protest from some malcontent who does not part so easily with the past,
and for whom familiarity lends to every detail of life a merit and beauty
of its own. It almost seems as if two-thirds of mankind were hard at work
improving away the happiness of the remaining third, and bidding them at
intervals to stop grumbling and appreciate the change.
When it chances that these familiar details are associated in the
mind with pleasures, early pleasures especially, the memory of which
lingers with the sweetness of honey, then the pain of parting with
them is utterly disproportioned to their worth. I have never been able
to understand how people can rebind an old book, or reframe an old
picture, if the book or the picture have been in any way dear to them
for years. How strange and unfriendly these objects look in their new
dress! How remote they seem from the recollections hitherto aroused by
their presence! One of the minor grievances of my life is the gradual
disappearance from the theatres of all the old drop-curtains I can
remember since my childish days. Perhaps the new curtains are better
than the old ones—I hear persons say as much occasionally—but to me they
are simply hideous, because their native ugliness is unsoftened by any
gracious memory of those far-off nights when, feverish with delight, I
sat staring at the stretch of painted canvas, and anticipating all the
joys that lay behind. There was no moment of transport equal to that
which saw the slow ascent of the mystic veil, revealing inch by inch
the enchanted scenes beyond; and I still believe that if I could behold
once more those dear, familiar landscapes, some portion of the old, lost
pleasure would return. Three curtains are indelibly associated with
these hours of supreme happiness; and I recall them all three now as the
most beautiful pictures in the world. One—and this, I think, was the
first I ever saw—represented an Italian view, with a lively volcano in
the background, and, in front, a long-legged shepherd lad reclining on
the marble steps of a fountain, while his flock loitered lazily around.
Another displayed four stout and dropsical nymphs preparing for, or
resting from, a hunt; this fact being adroitly intimated by the presence
of some very long bows, and some very lean greyhounds. The third was a
seaport town, with vessels lying in harbor, and a little terrace running
to the water’s edge, on which terrace I have taken many a stroll in
spirit, waiting for the wonders to come. Not that the waits were ever
long in those vanished days. On the contrary, the whole evening flew by
on wings of fire, and the only thought that marred my perfect felicity
was the haunting consciousness that it would too soon be over. And the
theatres were never hot, or stuffy, or draughty, when I was a child; and
the lights were never glaring, but shone with a gentle radiance; and the
chairs were softer than down; and the music was noble and inspiring;
and the actors were men of genius; and the actresses were ravishingly
beautiful; and the scenery was sublime; and the plays were wondrously
witty; and the paste jewels were dazzling; and _ennui_ was unknown; and I
never, never, _never_, wished I had stayed at home. What new drop-curtain
hides from me now the rapturous illusions of my youth?
Another grievance, more palpable because less inevitable than the
replacing of worn-out theatre properties with fresh ones, is the passion
of publishers for altering the covers of their magazines. This is the
strangest act of vandalism that an unholy zest for novelty ever prompted
in the human bosom. Why a magazine cover is selected in the first place,
remains, in most cases, an unfathomed mystery. It is seldom a thing of
beauty, but, once associated with the agreeable visitor that every month
brings some new tidings to our door, it acquires for us all the subtle
charm of familiarity. Nothing can well be more stiff and ungraceful than
the design of _Blackwood_; that wilted, conventional border, and that
wreath of prickly Scotch thistles, defending rather than decorating the
vignette of the founder,
“With eyes severe and beard of formal cut.”
The whole cover seems to say, “Stand off, rash mortal! There is nothing
here for you!” Yet to lose it would be to lose an old, surly, faithful
and long-tried friend. I sometimes feel that _Blackwood_ is not as
readable as it was when I was a girl—it is the privilege of increasing
years to think all magazines were better when we were young—but for that
very reason I am glad to greet the ancient thistles that alone remain
defiant and unchanged.
American publishers, however, are as delighted to offer their readers a
new cover as a new story, and it is occasionally interesting to follow
a magazine through all its outer vicissitudes. There was a time when
_Saint Nicholas_ behaved like Harlequin in the pantomime, slipping into
fresh costumes with bewildering alertness and rapidity. _The Century_
has adopted a plan eminently fitted to confuse and distress people who
are in love with the familiar, and who have barely time to accustom
themselves to one of the picturesque young women on its cover, before
they are confronted with another. The only engaging and comforting thing
about these rival damsels is their strong family resemblance. They are
like the fair daughters of Doris, with faces “neither the same nor
different, but as those of sisters should be.” The wanton alterations
in _Harper’s Magazine_ are none the less heart-breaking for being so
trivial. As well rob us of an old friend altogether as tamper with his
absolute integrity. No one can claim for _Harper_ that its time-honored
cover has any rare artistic quality, any of that subtle and far-reaching
suggestiveness that we prize so wearily to-day. On the contrary, its
little boys scattering roses into nowhere, and its preposterous child
blowing soap bubbles on a globe belong distinctly to the cheerful school
of Philistia, and are not burdened with meanings of any kind. That makes
them so refreshing to our eyes; and besides I have always regarded them
with sincere affection, because of the pleasure they afforded me in
infancy. It was one of the unwritten laws of our nursery that, when a
new magazine arrived, the old one passed into our possession. We painted
all the pictures with water colors, and we cut out the little figures on
the cover for paper dolls. Not the child straddling over the globe! It
was impossible to make anything out of him, owing to his uncomfortable
position. But the lads in tunics we thought extremely pretty, especially
the one in the right-hand corner, whose head was as round as a bullet.
The left-hand boy had a slightly flattened skull, which destroyed his
perfect symmetry, though we occasionally remedied this defect by leaving
him a small portion of his basket, and pretending it was hair. Now,
alas! though the children still mount guard on their flower-wreathed
pedestals, and still scatter their roses in the air, some unkind hand has
wrought radical changes in their aspect. They have grown bigger, stouter,
and their decent little tunics, so nicely drawn up over one shoulder,
have been replaced by those absurd floating draperies which form the
conventional attire of seraphs and sea nymphs all the world over. Never
was there such an unhappy transformation. It is true that on the old
cover of _Bentley’s Magazine_—if we may trust the minute picture of it
on the face of _Littell_—the little figures with baskets were clad, or
unclad, in these same airy rags. But this fact does not reconcile me at
all. I never knew _Bentley’s_ boys, but I have known _Harper’s_ children
all my life, and I cannot bear to see them shivering month after month
in such ridiculous, inadequate sashes. What sort of paper dolls would
they have made for well-bred little girls? And why should they have been
deprived of their only garment to gratify a restless taste for change?
Well, it is useless to complain, for around us on every side people are
fretting, and have fretted for generations over the unloved monotony of
their surroundings. “It is not given to the world to be contented,” says
Goethe; and while life can never hurry on fast enough, or assume phases
new enough to please the majority of mankind, a few dissatisfied souls
will always cling perversely to the things which they have known, and
feel more keenly every year that all the vaunted delights of novelty and
progress are but a poor substitute for the finer charm of the familiar.
OLD WORLD PETS
We have grown to be very narrow-minded, very exclusive, and hopelessly
unimaginative in our choice of domestic pets. We love and cherish the
dog, and we have a sentiment, less universal but far more disinterested,
in favor of the beautiful and cold-hearted cat. We keep canaries in
gilded cages—and there the matter practically ends. A few rabbits in a
hutch—which are never petted—an occasional parrot feared by its master
and hated by its master’s friends; a little song-bird imprisoned now
and then, and slowly dying of despair; these are instances, happily too
infrequent to count very heavily in the scale. As a fact, many people
value the dog and cat for their serviceable qualities alone; exiling the
first to the kennel and the second to the kitchen, and liking both, as
Miss Mitford confessed she liked children, “in their place”—meaning any
place where she was not.
But when we turn back to the past we find, or think we find, a very
different state of affairs; an almost endless variety of little wild
creatures, tamed by luxury and love. The dog still holds his own, and we
need look no further than the _Odyssey_ to see, in the great hound Argus,
the splendid sagacity, the unswerving loyalty, which centuries have not
altered or impaired. I have always wished that Argus could have had Sir
Walter Scott, rather than the crafty Odysseus for a master. There is also
a pathetic dialogue in Theocritus between two old fishermen, who are so
poor they may not even own a watchdog to guard their scanty spoils:
“All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was
their sentinel. They had no neighbor by them, but ever against
their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.”
Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, and probably found such easy
domesticity more to their tastes than the burdensome honors of Egypt. In
fact, when the Egyptian cat was not living in sanctified seclusion as
the friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparently earning a laborious
livelihood as a retriever, if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in
the British Museum, which shows us a magnificent animal carrying no less
than three struggling wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when Puss
at last entered Greece and Rome, about the time of the Christian era, or
perhaps a century or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; and Mr.
Pater in “Marius the Epicurean” describes very charmingly the snow-white
beast brought by one of the guests to a Roman banquet, and purring its
way among the wine-cups in response to caresses and coaxing words. Mrs.
Graham R. Tomson, that most winning chronicler of the cat’s vicissitudes
and triumphs, has also told us in graceful verse the history of a Greek
lover who loses his mistress because he dares not bring her from Egypt
one of these coveted and mysterious creatures:
“A little lion, small and dainty sweet,
(For such there be!)
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet,
She prayed of me.
For this, through lands Egyptian far away
She bade me pass;
But, in an evil hour, I said her nay—
And now, alas!
Far-traveled Nicias hath wooed and won
Arsinoë
With gifts of furry creatures white and dun
From over-sea.”
In the Museum of Antiquities, at Bordeaux, there is a mutilated tomb of
the Gallo-Roman period showing still the indistinct outlines of a young
girl and her two pets; a cat clasped—very uncomfortably—in her arms, and,
at her feet, a dignified cock, which appears to be pecking viciously at
poor pussy’s drooping tail.
The few allusions we find to the cat in later Greek poetry are hardly of
a flattering nature. Theocritus makes the impatient Praxinoë, in his XVth
Idyl, say to her handmaid, “Eunoë, bring the water and put it down in
the middle of the room, lazy creature that you are! Cats like always to
sleep soft,”—quite as if it were disgraceful in them to enjoy their ease.
The same passage is interpreted somewhat differently, and in a still
more uncharitable spirit by Mr. Matthew Arnold: “Eunoë, pick up your
work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again! The
cats find it just the bed they like.” At least we know, by this token,
that Puss was an inmate—understood if not honored—of the Alexandrian
household. There is also a dog; for Praxinoë, on going out, bids Phrygia,
the nurse, “Take the child, and keep him amused; call in the dog, and
shut the street door.”
Perhaps it was the very diversity of pets that so often brought the
cat into disgrace. She is not wont to tolerate divided affections, and
the old primitive, savage instincts are very strong within her little
breast. Consequently, there comes down to us out of the past a bitter
wail of lamentation from foolish mortals who seem to have forgotten what
a natural and wholesome thing it is for one creature to devour another.
Agathias, a poet of the sixth century, has left us two mournful epigrams
upon a favorite partridge ruthlessly done to death by a swift-footed and
hungry cat:
“O my partridge! Poor exile from the rocks and the heath, thy
little willow house possesses thee no longer. No more dost thou
rustle thy wings in the warmth of the rising sun. A cat has
torn off thy head. I seized thy body and rescued it from his
cruel jaws. Let the earth lie not too lightly on thee, lest thy
enemy discover and drag thee from thy quiet grave.”
The second epigram is quite as disconsolate and more vengeful in its tone:
“The domestic cat which has eaten my partridge flatters himself
that he is still to live under my roof. No, dear bird, I will
not leave thee unavenged, but on thy grave will I slay thy
murderer. For thy shade, which roams tormented, cannot be
quieted until I shall have done that which Pyrrhus did upon the
grave of Achilles.”
As if these direful threats were not enough, Damocharis, a disciple of
Agathias, follows up the case with a third epigram in which he bewails
the cruelty of the cat, and compares it with burning eloquence to one
of Aktæon’s hounds, which devoured its own master. “Here is a pretty
pother about a partridge!” protests M. Champfleury, with the pardonable
irritation of one who is wont to deal leniently with the shortcomings
of his favorite animal, and who fails to sympathize with this excess of
grief. Pet partridges, indeed, are hardly in accord with modern taste,
which is apt to regard them from the same simple point of view as did
the cat of Agathias. Neither is the sparrow a popular plaything as in
the days when Lesbia wept inconsolably for her dead bird, and Catullus
sang in silvery strains to soothe her wounded heart. With what generous
sympathy the lover laments and calls on the Loves and Graces, and on all
the fair youths of Rome to lament with him this shocking and irreparable
loss:
“Dead my Lesbia’s sparrow is,
Sparrow that was all her bliss,
Than her very eyes more dear.”
How sombre is the picture he draws of the little petted creature that in
life never strayed from the white bosom of its mistress, and that now
must tread alone the gloomy pathway whence not even a bird may return. It
is really heartrending to listen to his grief:
“Out upon you and your power
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus’ gloomy shades! that e’er
Ye took my Bird that was so fair.
“Ah! the pity of it! Thou
Poor Bird! thy doing ’tis that now
My Loved One’s eyes are swollen and red
With weeping for her darling dead.”[2]
Almost as pathetic, and quite as musical as this melancholy dirge, are
some of the epigrams to be found in that charming volume of translations
from the Greek Anthology, which Lilla Cabot Perry has aptly entitled
_From the Garden of Hellas_. Here we have graceful and tender verses
dedicated to the memory of pet beasts and birds and insects, one of them,
indeed, bewailing the hard fate of a locust and a cicada, which, beloved
by the same mistress, sleep, equally lamented, side by side:
“Unto the locust, nightingale of fields,
And the cicada, who was wont to drowse
Through summer heat amid the oaken boughs,
This common tomb the maiden Myro builds;
And, like a child, weeps that she could not save
These twain, her cherished playthings, from the grave.”
What can be prettier than such a requiem sung by Leonidas, and breathing
in every line a sentiment half natural, half assumed! We look back
into the past, and smile, but with no unfeeling mirth, to see the tiny
tomb with its cold and silent inmates whose shrill, amorous music is
hushed for evermore. Nor were they alone in their sad distinction, for
on every side other deserving insects were as decorously interred, and
as tunefully bewailed. The poet who mourned for the “maiden Myro’s”
playthings, was fain to sing with the same ready sympathy and the same
charming grace the praises of Philænida’s pet locust, loved and lost:
“What if small, O passer-by,
Be this stone! ’tis mine you see.
What if it you scarce descry!
Philænida gave it me.
“Praise her that she held me dear,
Me, her little locust, singing,
Whether in the stubble here
Or amid the bushes winging.
“Two long years she loved me well,
Loved my drowsy lullaby;
Me e’en dead did not repel,
As these verses testify.”
Another epigram by Mnasalcas bewails a similar loss, and inclines
us slowly to the painful conviction that all Greece must have been
in mourning for these short-lived insects, which, like poor Hinda’s
tantalizing gazelles, appear to have made a point of dying just when they
had grown most dear. It is a positive relief to find Meleager dedicating
his verses to a pet cicada which is still alive and enjoying its master’s
tender care:
“Cicada, you who chase away desire,
Cicada, who beguile our sleepless hours,
You song-winged muse of meadows and of flowers,
Who are the natural mimic of the lyre,
Chirp a familiar melody and sweet,
My weight of sleepless care to drive away;
Your love-beguiling tune to me now play,
Striking your prattling wings with your dear feet.
In early morning I’ll bring gifts to you
Of garlic ever fresh and drops of dew.”
There is an exquisite description in the first Idyl of Theocritus of a
deep bowl of ivy wood, the gift of a goatherd to the singer Thyrsis, on
which is carved, among other pastoral scenes, a boy weaving a locust cage
while he guards the vineyard from the foxes. Just such a dainty toy
he weaves as may well have been the habitation of those luxurious and
thrice-favored insects, the petted captives of Myro and fair Philænida:
“Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn old man is a
vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the rough
wall a little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there. Round
him two she-foxes are skulking, and one goes along the vine
rows to devour the ripe grapes, and the other brings all her
cunning to bear against the scrip, and vows she will never
leave the lad till she strand him bare and breakfastless.
But the boy is plaiting a pretty locust cage with stalks of
asphodel, and fitting it with reeds; and less care of his scrip
has he, or of the vines, than delight in his plaiting.”[3]
Kids and lambs are pastoral playthings which the rustic lovers of
Theocritus delight in offering to their fair ones; and in the Vth Idyl
Comatus complains to Lacon that he has given a bird to Alcippe and won
from her no kiss in return. Whereupon Lacon, in the true spirit of
amorous boastfulness, protests that he gave but a shepherd’s pipe to
his maiden, and sweetly she kissed and caressed him. A great hound,
strong enough to strangle wolves, a mixing bowl wrought by the hand of
Praxiteles, a vessel of cypress wood, a soft fleece from the newly shorn
ewe, and a brooding ring-dove are among the presents offered by these
shepherds in generous rivalry at the shrine of love.
But by far the most winning pet whose memory has come down to us
enshrined in Greek verse is the little wildwood hare, cherished by a
young girl, and sung by the poet Meleager. Gentler and more affectionate
than Cowper’s sturdy favorites, it shares with them a modest fame,
a quiet corner in the long gallery of prized and honored beasts. To
those who have loved Tiney and Puss from childhood, it is a pleasure to
see by their side this shrinking stranger, this poor little overfed,
much-caressed darling whose race was quickly run:
“From my mother’s teats they tore me,
Little long-eared hare, and bore me,
The swift-footed, from her breast.
Phanium, soft-handed, fed me
On spring flowers, and nourishèd me,
Fondling in her lap to rest.
“No more for my mother sighing,
Feasting daintily, then dying;
I by too much food was slain.
And she buried me with weeping
Near her house, that she, while sleeping,
Me in dreams might see again.”[4]
On what smooth Elysian sward does this little Grecian hare sport with
his English cousins? Fed, perchance, by Persephone’s white hand, they
gambol for evermore by the deep waters of Oblivion; and the gray ghosts,
flitting by, smile with sad eyes upon the nimble creatures who, shadows
in shadowland, yet bear in every limb rich memories of woodland glade,
and of the dear, life-giving soil of earth.
BATTLE OF THE BABIES
A warfare has been raging in our midst, the echoes of which have hardly
yet died sullenly away upon either side of the Atlantic. It has been a
bloodless and un-Homeric strife, not without humorous side-issues, as
when Pistol and Bardolph and Fluellen come to cheer our anxious spirits
at the siege of Harfleur. Its first guns were heard in New York, where
a modest periodical, devoted to the training of parents, opened fire
upon those time-honored nursery legends which are presumably dear to the
hearts of all rightly constituted babies. The leader of this gallant
foray protested vehemently against all fairy tales of a mournful or
sanguinary cast, and her denunciation necessarily included many stories
which have for generations been familiar to every little child. She
rejected _Red Riding Hood_, because her own infancy was haunted and
embittered by the evil behavior of the wolf; she would have none of
_Bluebeard_, because he was a wholesale fiend and murderer; she would
not even allow the pretty _Babes in the Wood_, because they tell a
tale of cold-hearted cruelty and of helpless suffering; while all
fierce narratives of giants and ogres and magicians were to be banished
ruthlessly from our shelves. Verily, reading will be but gentle sport in
the virtuous days to come.
Now it chanced that this serious protest against nursery lore fell into
the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang, the most light-hearted and conservative
of critics, and partial withal to tales of bloodshed and adventure. How
could it be otherwise with one reared on the bleak border land, and
familiar from infancy with the wild border legends that Sir Walter knew
and loved; with stories of Thomas the Rhymer, and the plundering Hardens,
and the black witches of Loch Awe! It was natural that with the echoes
of the old savage strife ringing in his ears, and with the memories of
the dour Scottish bogies and warlocks lingering in his heart, Mr. Lang
could but indifferently sympathize with those anxious parents who think
the stories of Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer too shocking for
infant ears to hear. Our grandmothers, he declared, were not ferocious
old ladies, yet they told us these tales, and many more which we were
none the worse for hearing. “Not to know them is to be sadly ignorant,
and to miss that which all people have relished in all ages.” Moreover,
it is apparent to him, and indeed to most of us, that we cannot take even
our earliest steps in the world of literature, or in the shaded paths of
knowledge, without encountering suffering and sin in some shape; while,
as we advance a little further, these grisly forms fly ever on before.
“Cain,” remarks Mr. Lang, “killed Abel. The flood drowned quite a number
of persons. David was not a stainless knight, and Henry VIII. was nearly
as bad as Bluebeard. Several deserving gentlemen were killed at Marathon.
Front de Bœuf came to an end shocking to sensibility, and to Mr. Ruskin.”
The _Arabian Nights_, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Paul and Virginia_—all the
dear old nursery favorites must, under the new dispensation, be banished
from our midst; and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished
exclusively on _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, and other carefully selected
specimens of milk-and-water diet.
The prospect hardly seems inviting; but as the English guns rattled
merrily away in behalf of English tradition, they were promptly met by
an answering roar from this side of the water. A Boston paper rushed
gallantly to the defense of the New York periodical, and gave Mr. Lang—to
use a pet expression of his own—“his kail through the reek.” American
children, it appears, are too sensitively organized to endure the
unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories. The British child may sleep
soundly in its little cot after hearing about the Babes in the Wood; the
American infant is prematurely saddened by such unmerited misfortune. “If
a consensus of American mothers could be taken,” says the Boston writer,
“our English critic might be infinitely disgusted to know in how many
nurseries these cruel tales must be changed, or not told at all to the
children of less savage generations. No mother nowadays tells them in
their unmitigated brutality.”
Is this true, I wonder, and are our supersensitive babies reared perforce
on the optimistic version of Red Riding Hood, where the wolf is cut
open by the woodman, and the little girl and her grandmother jump out,
safe and sound? Their New England champion speaks of the “intolerable
misery”—a very strong phrase—which he suffered in infancy from having
his nurse tell him of the Babes in the Wood; while the Scriptural
stories were apparently every whit as unbearable and heart-breaking. “I
remember,” he says, “two children, strong, brave man and woman now, who
in righteous rage plucked the Slaughter of the Innocents out from the
family Bible.” This was a radical measure, to say the least, and if many
little boys and girls started in to expurgate, the Scriptures in such
liberal fashion, the holy book would soon present a sadly mutilated
appearance. Moreover, it seems to me that such an anecdote, narrated
with admirable assurance, reveals very painfully the lack of a fine
and delicate spirituality in the religious training of children; of
that grace and distinction which are akin to saintship, and are united
so charmingly in those to whom truth has been inseparably associated
with beauty. There is a painting by Ghirlandaio hanging over the altar
in the chapel of the Foundling Asylum in Florence. It represents the
Adoration of the Magi, and kneeling by the side of the Wise Men is a
little group of the Holy Innocents, their tiny garments stained with
blood, their hands clasped in prayer; while the Divine Child turns from
his mother’s embraces, and from the kings’ rich gifts to greet the little
companions who have yielded up their spotless lives for him. Now, surely
those lean, brown Florentine orphans, who have always before their eyes
this beautiful and tender picture, absorb through it alone a religious
sentiment unfelt by American children who are familiar only with the ugly
and inane prints of American Sunday-schools, in which I have known the
line, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” to be illustrated by a man with
a magnifying-glass in his hand. Possibly our Sunday-school scholars,
being more accurately instructed as to dates, could inform the little
Florentines that the Innocents were not slaughtered until after the Magi
had returned to the East. But no child who had looked day after day upon
Ghirlandaio’s lovely picture—more appealing in its pathos than Holman
Hunt’s brilliant and jocund Triumph of the Innocents—could desire to
pluck “in righteous rage” that chapter from the Bible. He would have at
least some dim and imperfect conception of the spiritual meaning, the
spiritual joy, which underlie the pain and horror of the story.
This reflection will help us in some measure to come to a decision, when
we return to the vexed problem of nursery tales and legends. I believe it
is as well to cultivate a child’s emotions as to cultivate his manners
or his morals, and the first step in such a direction is necessarily
taken through the stories told him in infancy. If a consensus of mothers
would reject the good old fairy tales “in their unmitigated brutality,”
a consensus of men of letters would render a different verdict; and such
men, who have been children in their time, and who look back with wistful
delight upon the familiar figures who were their earliest friends, are
entitled to an opinion in the case. How admirable was the “righteous
rage” of Charles Lamb, when he wanted to buy some of these same brutal
fairy stories for the little Coleridges, and could find nothing but the
correct and commonplace literature which his whole soul abhorred! “Mrs.
Barbauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about,” he wrote
indignantly to papa Coleridge, “and have banished all the old classics
of the nursery. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld’s
books convey, must, it seems, come to a child in the shape of knowledge;
and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when
he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and that Billy is better than
a horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales
which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be
no bigger than a child.”
Just such a wild tale, fantastic rather than beautiful, haunted
Châteaubriand all his life—the story of Count Combourg’s wooden leg,
which, three hundred years after its owner’s death, was seen at night
walking solemnly down the steep turret stairs, attended by a huge black
cat. Not at all the kind of story we would select to tell a child
nowadays. By no means! Even the little Châteaubriand heard it from
peasant lips. Yet in after years, when he had fought the battle of life,
and fought it with success; when he had grown gray, and illustrious,
and disillusioned, and melancholy, what should come back to his mind,
with its old pleasant flavor of terror and mystery, but the vision of
Count Combourg’s wooden leg taking its midnight constitutional, with
the black cat stepping softly on before? So he notes it gravely down in
his Memoirs, just as Scott notes in his diary the pranks of Whippity
Stourie, the Scotch bogie that steals at night into open nursery windows;
and just as Heine, in gay, sunlit Paris, recalls with joy the dark,
sweet, sombre tales of the witch and fairy haunted forests of Germany.
These are impressions worth recording, and they are only a few out of
many which may be gathered from similar sources. That which is vital in
literature or tradition, which has survived the obscurity and wreckage
of the past, whether as legend, or ballad, or mere nursery rhyme, has
survived in right of some intrinsic merit of its own, and will not
be snuffed out of existence by any of our precautionary or hygienic
measures. We could not banish Bluebeard if we would. He is as immortal
as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this
uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who, thank
Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown up—will still
tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big brave brothers
come galloping up the road. We could not even rid ourselves of Mother
Goose, though she, too, has her mortal enemies, who protest periodically
against her cruelty and grossness. We could not drive Punch and Judy from
our midst, though Mr. Punch’s derelictions have been the subject of much
serious and adverse criticism. It is not by such barbarous rhymes or by
such brutal spectacles that we teach a child the lessons of integrity and
gentleness, explain our nursery moralists, and probably they are correct.
Moreover, Bluebeard does not teach a lesson of conjugal felicity, and
Cinderella is full of the world’s vanities, and Puss in Boots is one
long record of triumphant effrontery and deception. An honest and
self-respecting lad would have explained to the king that he was not the
Marquis of Carabas at all; that he had no desire to profit by his cat’s
ingenious falsehoods, and no weak ambition to connect himself with the
aristocracy. Such a hero would be a credit to our modern schoolrooms, and
lift a load of care from the shoulders of our modern critics. Only the
children would have none of him, but would turn wistfully back to those
brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid past, and of
which no hand shall rob them.
THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT
A great deal of generous scorn has been expended of late years upon those
old-fashioned novels in which the characters were given plenty to do,
and did it with a supreme energy and passion, only possible, perhaps,
within the enchanted precincts of fiction. Such stories, we are told, are
false to life, which is monotonous, uneventful, and made up day by day of
minute and tedious detail, small pleasures which are hardly recognizable
as such, and grim vexations which can never be persuaded to assume noble
or heroic proportions. The truthful representation of life being the only
worthy object of a novelist’s skill, it follows that his tale should be
destitute of any incidents save those with which we are all familiar in
the narrow routine of existence. We should be able to verify them by
experience—to prove them, as children prove their examples at school.
To meet these current severities of realism, the advocates of a livelier
fiction unite in saying a great many sarcastic and amusing things about
the deadly dulness of their opponents; about the hero and heroine who,
in the course of three volumes, “agree not to become engaged,” and about
the lady’s subtle reasons for dropping her handkerchief, or passing a
cruet at table. It may be hard work to build up a novel out of nothing,
they admit, but we can only echo Dr. Johnson’s words, and wish it
were impossible. Where is the gain in this perpetual unfolding of the
obvious? What is the advantage of wasting genuine ability upon a task the
difficulties of which constitute its sole claim to distinction?
But _is_ the so-called novel of character more difficult to write than
the novel of romance? This question can be answered satisfactorily only
by an author who has done both kinds of work sufficiently well to make
his opinion valuable; and, so far, no such versatile genius has appeared
in the field of letters. If we may judge by results, we should say that
artistic labor is as rare in one school of fiction as in the other,
and apparently as far out of the reach of the ordinary champion in the
arena. It is easy enough to be analytic; but it is extremely hard to be
luminous, or interpretative, or to know when analysis counts. It is easy
to stuff a book full of incidents; but it is hard to make those incidents
living pages in literature. After De Foe had led the way with _Robinson
Crusoe_, a whole army of imitators wrote similar tales of adventure;
but Robinson Crusoe is to-day the only shipwrecked mariner whose every
action awakens interest and delight. Mr. Stevenson in _The Black Arrow_,
and Mr. Rider Haggard in _Nada the Lily_, have given us stories rich
in horrors which do not horrify, and excitements which do not excite.
Mr. Stevenson’s tale is one bewildering succession of murders, plots,
hairbreadth escapes, bloody skirmishes, and perils by field and flood;
yet a gentle indifference as to which side wins is the only distinct
sentiment with which we follow the windings of his narrative. Sir Daniel
is a perjured villain; but it is with no stern sense of just retribution
that we see him fall under the fatal arrow. Master Dick is a stout young
soldier; but where is the breathless attention with which we pursue
every step of another young soldier, equally brave and quick-witted,
Quentin Durward of Glen-houlakin? Even Joan in her doublet and hose—a
device dear to the heart of the romanticist—is almost as uninteresting
as Joan in her petticoats; though perhaps the most striking scene in the
book is that in which Dick endeavors with hearty good will to administer
a little well-deserved chastisement to the supposed boy, and finds
himself withheld by some subtle apprehension of a secret he is far from
suspecting. To compare _The Black Arrow_ with _Ivanhoe_ or _Quentin
Durward_ is manifestly unjust. It is no shame to any man to be surpassed
by Scott. But when we remember the admirable and satisfying events in
_Treasure Island_, or the well-sustained interest of _Kidnapped_, it
seems incredible that Mr. Stevenson, of all novelists, should have
succeeded in telling a lifeless story of adventure.
As for _Nada the Lily_, its incidents are too monotonously painful to
do more than distress the reader. I am inclined to think that a greater
number of people die in the course of this tale than in all the rest
of English fiction, exclusive of Mr. Haggard’s other novels. They die
singly, in pairs, in groups, in armies, in whole tribes. They die in
battle, by fire, by torture, by starvation, at the hands of pitiless
slaughterers, and under the fangs of ghost wolves. They die for every
imaginable cause, and under every conceivable circumstance. To keep the
death-rate of such a story would be like keeping the death-rate of the
Deluge. There is the same comprehensive and all-embracing destruction.
This maybe true to Zulu history—in fact, Mr. Haggard tells us as much in
his preface to “Nada,” and few people are in a position to dispute the
point; but it is radically false to art, and impairs the natural vigor
of the tale. While one tragedy may be sombre and impressive, a dozen are
apt to be fatiguing, and half a hundred border closely on the burlesque.
Chaka, “a Napoleon and Tiberius in one,” reminds the irreverent reader
irresistibly of the Queen in _Alice in Wonderland_, who is all the time
saying, “Off with his head!” and ordering everybody to execution; the
only difference being that the Queen’s victims turn up blandly in the
next chapter, and Chaka’s never reappear. He it is who slays Unandi his
mother, Baleka his wife, all his children save one, all his enemies,
and most of his friends. Then his turn comes—and none too soon—to be
murdered, and Dingaan his brother, “who had the fierce heart of Chaka
without its greatness,” sets to work systematically to kill everybody
who chances to be left. By the time he, too, is flung over the cliff to
die, Mopo and Umslopogaas alone survive; the first because he has to
tell the tale—after which he promptly expires—and the second because he
has already been slain in battle during the progress of another story.
The most curious thing about this wholesale devastation is that Mr.
Haggard apparently deplores it as much as the rest of us. “It would
have been desirable to introduce some gayer and more happy incidents,”
he admits in his preface, “_but it has not been possible_.” Why has it
not been possible, we wonder? It is the privilege of a novelist to select
or discard material according to his good judgment. He is not writing
a history; he is telling a story. He is not chronicling events; he is
weaving a romance. He is an artist, not a recorder; and in the choice as
well as in the use of material lies the test of unblemished art.
What, then, is the vital charm which makes the novel of incident true
literature—the charm possessed by Dumas, and Fielding, and Sir Walter
Scott? Mr. Birrell, who is always in love with plain definitions, says
that if a book be full of “inns, atmosphere, and motion,” then it is a
good book, and he asks no more. Mr. Lang, who shares this hearty sympathy
for action, acknowledges that the best results are often obtained by the
simplest machinery. “Dumas,” he declares, “requires no more than a room
in an inn, where people meet in riding-cloaks, to move the heart with
the last degree of pity and terror.” Scott handles incident with the
matchless skill of a great story-teller. He shows the same instinctive
art in his situations that a great painter like Rembrandt shows in his
grouping. Every figure falls so inevitably into his right place that
it is impossible for us to imagine him in any other. Henry Bertram’s
return to Ellengowan is one of the most artistic and charming scenes in
fiction, though it is described with such careless simplicity. Perplexed
and fascinated by the childish memories tugging at his heartstrings, the
young laird gazes at his ancestral home, and listens with rapture—which
we share—to the fragment of a long-forgotten yet familiar song:
“Are these the Links of Forth,” she said,
“Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonnie woods of Warroch-head,
That I so fain would see?”
There may be people who are in no way moved by this home-coming, and
who feel no joy when Queen Mary’s boat glides over the dark waters of
Lochleven, and no horror at that ill-omened churchyard gossip which
ushers in the dreadful wedding of Lammermoor. I do not envy them their
composure; but what of King Louis’s visit to the Duke of Burgundy in
_Quentin Durward_, a situation so tense with passion that the least
imaginative reader may well tremble at the possibilities of every minute?
What of the sacking of Liege, the siege of Front de Bœuf’s castle, the
trial of Rebecca, the battle of Bothwell Bridge? He who could carry a
chilly indifference through such narratives as these would not care if
Shylock gained his suit, or King Harry lost the field of Agincourt. I
doubt if he would really care whether Hector or Achilles won the fight.
The casual incidents of life, the trivial possibilities of every day,
are treated by Dickens with extraordinary humor and skill; witness David
Copperfield’s journey to Dover, and Oliver Twist’s first introduction to
Fagin’s den. But his great situations are apt to be theatrical rather
than dramatic. It is not often that he reaches the sombre strength and
passion of that memorable scene where the convict reveals to Pip the
secret of his mysterious wealth. I do not know whether a great many
people read Bulwer’s novels nowadays. They belong to a past generation,
which perhaps was luckier than the present. But I do know that the rescue
of Glaucus from the arena was an epoch in my childhood, and the cry of
joy that rings from Nydia’s lips rang in my heart for years. I have an
inexpressible tenderness now for _The Last Days of Pompeii_, because of
the passionate suspense with which I read it when I was a little girl,
and the supreme gasp of relief with which I hailed the arrival of Sallust
and Calenus, while the lion crouches trembling in his cage. It is not
easy to criticise a book linked with such vivid memories, and perhaps
it is the association with early pleasures which gilds for many of us
the beguiling pages of romance. “We are all homesick, in the dark days
and black towns, for the land of blue skies and brave adventures in
forests, and in lonely inns, on the battle-field, in the prison, on the
desert isle.” It is useless, and worse than useless, to dispute over the
respective schools of fiction, instead of gladly enjoying that which we
like best; and there are different kinds of enjoyment for different kinds
of work. For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can
always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never
lay down.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] “The Pilgrims of the Sun.”
[2] Translated by Sir Theodore Martin.
[3] Translation of Mr. Andrew Lang.
[4] Translation of Lilla Cabot Perry.
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=Mr. Billy Downs and His Likes.=—By RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON, author
of “Dukesborough Tales.” Colonel Johnston has selected a number of his
most characteristic and entertaining stories, now first published in
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=Moonblight and Six Feet of Romance.=—By DAN BEARD. In “Moonblight”
the artist-author has brought into play all those resources of humor,
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the guise of a romance the lesson of the wrongs inflicted by capital on
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$1.00.
“A strange but powerful book.”—_Philadelphia Bulletin._
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he proposes are sensible and would be profitable, if
greedy capital could be induced to consider and try
them.”—_Springfield Republican._
“It is a witty, gay, poetical book, full of bright things and
true things, the seer donning a jester’s garb to preach in: and
one may be sure, under the shrug and the smile, of the keen
dart aimed at pride, prejudice, self-seeking, injustice, and
the praise for whatsoever is beautiful and good.”—_Hartford
Courant._
=The Prince and the Pauper. A Tale for Young People of all Ages.=—By
MARK TWAIN. New popular edition of this “classic” of American fiction.
It is a charming romance of the life and times of Edward VI., the boy
king of England, and is considered by many to be Mark Twain’s best
work. Pronounced by high authorities one of the best child’s stories
ever written. Uniform with the cheap edition of “Huckleberry Finn.”
Illustrated. Cloth, 12mo, $1.00.
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$1.00.
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from the Russian by Count Norraikow, with illustrations by the celebrated
Russian artist, Gribayédoff. Cloth, 12mo, $1.00.
“The stories in this volume are wonderfully simple and
pure.”—_Detroit Free Press._
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Transcript._
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of Tolstoi’s fables, and the work of translation is admirably
performed.”—_Chicago Standard._
=Life IS Worth Living, and Other Stories.=—By LEO TOLSTOI. Translated
direct from the Russian by Count Norraikow. This work, unlike some of
his later writings, shows the great writer at his best. The stories,
while entertaining in themselves, are written for a purpose, and contain
abundant food for reflection. Illustrated. Cloth, 12mo, $1.00.
=Merry Tales.=—By MARK TWAIN. The opening volume of the new “Fiction,
Fact, and Fancy Series.” Contains some of the author’s favorite sketches,
including his personal reminiscences of the war as given in “The Private
History of a Campaign that Failed.” Cloth, 12mo, 75 cents.
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of humor.”—_Boston Traveller._
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inimitable humor will appreciate.”—_Public Opinion._
“Some of these stories are deep with pathos: others bubble over
with humor. All of them are intensely interesting and readable
from the opening sentence to the closing line.”—_New Orleans
States._
Poetry.
=Selected Poems by Walt Whitman.=—Chosen and edited by Arthur Stedman.
Shortly before Mr. Whitman’s death, the old poet for the first time
consented to the publication of a selection from “Leaves of Grass,”
embracing his most popular short poems and representative passages from
his longer lyrical efforts. Arranged for home and school use. With a
portrait of the author. (“Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series.”) Cloth, 12mo,
75 cents.
“Mr. Stedman’s choice is skilfully made.”—_The Nation._
“The volume represents all that is best in Walt Whitman.”—_San
Francisco Chronicle._
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fresh and sweet, or epically grand and elemental, will be
preserved to the edification of young men and maidens, as well
as of maturer folk.”—_Hartford Courant._
“The intention of the editor has been to offer those of
Whitman’s poems which are most truly representative of his
genius. The selections have been well made, and those who have
yet to make acquaintance with this most original of American
poets will have reason to thank the publishers for this little
volume.”—_Boston Transcript._
=Flower o’ the Vine: Romantic Ballads and Sospiri di Roma.=—By WILLIAM
SHARP, author of “A Fellowe and His Wife” (with Miss Howard), “Life
and Letters of Joseph Severn,” etc. With an introduction by Thomas A.
Janvier, and a portrait of the author. As one of the most popular of
the younger English poets, equal success is anticipated for this first
American edition of Mr. Sharp’s poems. Its welcome in the American press
has been most hearty. Tastefully bound, with appropriate decorative
design. Cloth, 8vo, $1.50.
“This volume of verse, by Mr. William Sharp, has a music like
that of the meeting of two winds, one blown down from the
Northern seas, keen and salty, the other carrying on its wings
the warm fragrance of Southern fields.”—_The Literary World._
“These old ballads, whether in Scottish dialect or not, are
transfused with the wild, uncanny, shivering character of all
the old myths of the North, a strange pungent chill, so to
speak, as if the breath that gave them voice were blown across
leagues of iceberg and glacier.”—_Chicago Times._
“When Mr. Sharp leaves the North with its wild stories of love
and fighting and death, and carries us away with him in the
‘Sospiri di Roma’ to the warmth and the splendor of the South,
he equally shows the creative faculty. He is a true lover of
Earth with her soothing-touch and soft caress: he lies in her
arms, he hears her whispered secret, and through the real
discovers the spiritual.”—_Philadelphia Record._
“The poems combine a gracefulness of rhythm and a subtle
sweetness.”—_Baltimore American._
Travel, Biography, and Essays.
=The German Emperor and His Eastern Neighbors.=—By POULTNEY BIGELOW.
Cable despatches state that Mr. Bigelow has been expelled from Russia for
writing this volume. Interesting personal notes of his old playmate’s
boyhood and education are given, together with a description of the
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Times._
“An interesting contribution to evidence concerning
Russia.”—_Springfield Republican._
“A much-needed correction to the avalanche of abuse heaped upon
the German Emperor.”—_Philadelphia Inquirer._
“The book should have a place in the library of every student
of politics.”—_Boston Pilot._
=Paddles and Politics Down the Danube.=—By _Poultney Bigelow_. Companion
volume to “The German Emperor.” A highly interesting journal of a
canoe-voyage down “the Mississippi of Europe” from its source to the
Black Sea, with descriptions of the resident nations, and casual
discussions of the political situation. Illustrated with numerous offhand
sketches made on the spot by Mr. Bigelow. (“Fiction, Fact, and Fancy
Series.”) Cloth, 12mo, 75 cents.
=Writings of Christopher Columbus.=—Edited, with an introduction, by PAUL
LEICESTER FORD. Mr. Ford has for the first time collected in one handy
volume translations of those letters, etc., of Columbus which describe
his experiences in the discovery and occupation of the New World. With
frontispiece Portrait. (“Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series.”) Cloth, 12mo,
75 cents.
=Under Summer Skies.=—By CLINTON SCOLLARD. A poet’s itinerary. Professor
Scollard relates, in his charming literary style, the episodes of a
rambling tour through Egypt, Palestine, Italy, and the Alps. The text
is interspersed with poetical interludes, suggested by passing events
and scenes. Coming nearer home, visits to Arizona and the Bermudas are
described in separate chapters. The volume is attractively illustrated by
Margaret Landers Randolph, and is most suitable as a traveling companion
or as a picture of lands beyond the reach of the reader. Cloth, 8vo,
$1.00. (In Preparation.)
=Autobiographia.=—By WALT WHITMAN. Edited by Arthur Stedman. The story
of Whitman’s life, told in his own words. These selected passages from
Whitman’s prose works, chosen with his approbation, are so arranged
as to give a consecutive account of the old poet’s career in his own
picturesque language. Uniform with the new edition of Walt Whitman’s
“Selected Poems.” (“Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series.”) Cloth, 12mo, 75
cents.
=Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.=—By MRS. ALEXANDER IRELAND. A remarkable
biography of a wonderful woman, written and compiled by one in thorough
sympathy with her subject, from material made public for the first time.
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=Essays in Miniature.=—By AGNES REPPLIER, author of “Points of View,”
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Miscellaneous.
=Tariff Reform: The Paramount Issue.=—Speeches and writings on the
questions involved in the presidential contest of 1892. By WILLIAM M.
SPRINGER, Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of
Representatives, Fifty-second Congress. With portraits of the author and
others. This book is endorsed by Hon. Adlai E. Stevenson, Hon. Calvin S.
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the Campaign is the Tariff. Cloth, library style, $1.50; Paper, $1.00.
=Physical Beauty: How to Obtain and How to Preserve It.=—By ANNIE JENNESS
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“Earnestly and gracefully written.”—_New York Sun._
“The illustrations are pretty and suggestive.”—_The Critic._
=The Speech of Monkeys.=—By R. L. GARNER. Mr. Garner’s articles,
published in the leading periodicals and journals touching upon this
subject, have been widely read and favorably commented upon by scientific
men both here and abroad. “The Speech of Monkeys” embodies his researches
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