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Title: Varia
Author: Agnes Repplier
Release date: December 16, 2023 [eBook #72434]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1897
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 VARIA ***
By Agnes Repplier
COUNTER-CURRENTS.
AMERICANS AND OTHERS.
A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY AND OTHER ESSAYS.
IN OUR CONVENT DAYS.
COMPROMISES.
THE FIRESIDE SPHINX. With 4 full-page and 17 text Illustrations by
Miss E. BONSALL.
BOOKS AND MEN.
POINTS OF VIEW
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.
IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PAPERS.
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.
A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside
Library for Young People.
THE SAME. _Holiday Edition._
VARIA.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
[Illustration]
VARIA
By AGNES REPPLIER, LITT. D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE ETERNAL FEMININE 1
THE DEATHLESS DIARY 30
GUIDES: A PROTEST 63
LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION 85
THE FÊTE DE GAYANT 109
CAKES AND ALE 130
OLD WINE AND NEW 155
THE ROYAL ROAD OF FICTION 185
FROM THE READER’S STANDPOINT 217
“Little Pharisees in Fiction” is reprinted by permission of the
publishers from “Scribner’s Magazine,” and “From the Reader’s
Standpoint” from “The North American Review” (where it was called “The
Contentiousness of Modern Novel Writers”).
VARIA.
THE ETERNAL FEMININE.
There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than
the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the
public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a
phrase--employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping
into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature--is the “new
woman.” It has furnished inexhaustible jests to “Life” and “Punch,”
and it has been received with seriousness by those who read the
present with no light from the past, and so fail to perceive that all
femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type
began when Eve arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims
of her predecessor. “If the fifteenth century discovered America,”
says a vehement advocate of female progress, “it was reserved for the
nineteenth century to discover woman;” and this remarkable statement
has been gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten
all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint
Theresa and Jeanne d’Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England,
who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the fortunes
of the world.
“Les Anciens out tout dit,” and the most curious thing about the
arguments now advanced in behalf of progressive womanhood is that they
have an air of specious novelty about them when they have all been
uttered many times before. There is scarcely a principle urged to-day
by enthusiastic champions of the cause which was not deftly handled
by that eminently “new” woman, Christine de Pisan, in the fourteenth
century, before the court of Charles VI. of France. If we read even
a few pages of “La Cité des Dames,”--and how delightfully modern is
the very title!--we recognize the same familiar sentiments, albeit
disguised in archaic language and with many old-time conceits, that
we are accustomed to hearing every day. Christine is both amused and
wearied, as are we, by the foolish invectives of men against our useful
and necessary sex. She is forced to conclude that God had made a foul
thing when He made woman, yet wonders a little--not unnaturally--that
“so worshipful a Workman should have deigned to turn out so poor a
piece of work.” This leads her to reflect on our alleged weakness and
incapacity, of which she finds, as do we, but insufficient proof.
She is firm to insist, as do we, that if little maidens are put to
school, and carefully taught the sciences like men-children, they
learn as well, and make as steady progress. What is more, she is
able to prove her case, which we often are not, by writing a grave,
solid, and systematic treatise on arms and the science of war; a
treatise which handles every topic from the details of a siege to safe
conducts, military passports, and the laws of knightly courtesy. And
this complete soldier’s manual was held to be of practical value and
an authority in those battle-loving days. It may also be worth while
to mention that Christine de Pisan supported an invalid husband, two
poor relations, and three children by her pen; and what more could
any struggling authoress of our own century be reasonably expected to
accomplish?
Another interesting fact presented for our consideration, in these days
of Civic Clubs and active training for citizenship, is that one of the
first Englishwomen who entered the field of letters professionally,
as a recognized rival of professional men writers, entered it as a
politician, and a very acrid and scurrilous politician at that, who
made herself as abhorrent and abhorred as any law-giver in England.
This was Mary Manley, who, in the reign of Queen Anne, wrote the “New
Atalantis,” allying herself vigorously with the Tories, and pouring
forth the vials of her venom on the Duke of Marlborough, and--what is
harder for us to forgive--on Richard Steele, whom all women are bound
to honor a little and love a great deal, as having been, in spite of
many failings, our true and chivalrous friend. Not one of all the
modern apologists who prate about us endlessly to-day in print, in
pulpit, on the platform, and on the stage, has reached the simple
tenderness, the undeviating insight of Steele.
These things, however, counted for little with Mary Manley, who had
less sentiment and less reticence than most party writers of even
that outspoken and unsentimental age. Perhaps to attack those high
in power who have done their country such priceless service as did
the Duke of Marlborough, and to attack them, moreover, with an utter
lack of decency and self-respect, is not precisely the kind of deed
which warms our hearts to female politicians; but it must be confessed
that if this vehement partisan in petticoats had all the acerbity of
a woman, she had all the courage of one too. When her publisher was
prosecuted for the scandalous libels of the “New Atalantis,” she did
not seek to shelter herself behind his responsibility; but appeared
briskly before the Court of King’s Bench, acknowledged the authorship
of her book, and, with magnificent feminine effrontery, asserted it
was entirely fictitious. Lord Sunderland, who examined her, and who
appears to have been vastly diverted by the whole proceeding, pointed
out urbanely certain passages of a distinctly libelous character which
could scarcely have been the result of chance. “Then,” replied the
imperturbable Mrs. Manley, “it must have been inspiration.” Again Lord
Sunderland interposed with the suggestion that details of that order
could not well be traced to such a source. “There are bad angels as
well as good,” said Mrs. Manley serenely, and escaped all penalties for
her wrong-doing; earning for herself, moreover, solid rewards when the
Tories returned to power, which is something that never happens to any
would-be female politician of to-day.
For indeed the newly awakened and intelligent interest which women are
supposed to be taking in things political is but a faint reflection
of the fiery zest with which our English great-great-grandmothers
threw themselves into the affairs of the nation, meddling and mending
and marring everywhere, until Addison, hopeless of any other appeal,
was fain to remind them that nothing was so injurious to beauty as
inordinate party zeal. “It gives an ill-natured cast to the eye,” he
wrote warningly, “and a disagreeable sourness to the look. Besides
that, it makes the lines too strong, and flushes them worse than
brandy. Indeed I never knew a party-woman who kept her countenance for
a twelvemonth.”
But little the ardent politicians cared for such mild arguments as
these. In 1739, on the occasion of an especially important debate
in the House of Lords, the Chancellor gave orders that ladies were
not to be admitted, and that the gallery was to be reserved for the
Commons. The Duchess of Queensberry, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady
Huntingdon, and a number of other determined women presented themselves
at the door by nine o’clock in the morning. When refused entrance, the
Duchess of Queensberry, with an oath as resonant as the doorkeeper’s,
swore that in they would come, in spite of the Chancellor and the
Lords and the Commons to boot. The Peers resolved to starve them into
docility, and gave orders that the doors should not be opened until
they raised their siege. These Amazons stood there, so we are informed
by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, from nine in the morning until five in
the afternoon, uncheered by food or drink, but solacing themselves
repeatedly by thumping and kicking at the doors with so much violence
that the speakers in the House were scarcely heard. When the Lords
remained unconquered by such tactics, the two duchesses, well versed
in the stratagems of war, commanded half an hour of dead silence;
and the Chancellor thinking this silence a certain proof of their
withdrawal (the Commons, who had been kept out all this time, being
very impatient to enter), the doors were finally opened; whereupon the
astute and triumphant women rushed in, and promptly secured the best
seats in the gallery. There they stayed, with magnificent endurance,
until after eleven at night, and indulged themselves during the debate
in such noisy tokens of regard or disapproval that the greatest
confusion ensued. The newest of new women is but a modest and shrinking
wild-flower when compared with such flaunting arrogance as this.
Nor were the “platform women,” as they are unkindly called to-day,
unknown or even uncommon in those good old times of domesticity; for
nearly a hundred and twenty years ago the “London Mirror” printed a
caustic protest against the mannishness of fashionable ladies, their
pernicious meddling with things which concerned them not, and, above
all, their calm effrontery in addressing public audiences on political
and social questions, “with the spirit and freedom of the boldest male
orators.” In fact, several societies had been already formed with the
express view of enlightening the public as to the opinions of women on
matters which were presumably beyond their jurisdiction, and of pushing
these opinions to some ultimate and practical conclusion,--which is
the precise object of similar societies to-day. For the determination
of the sex from the beginning has been, not merely to assert its own
intellectual independence, like the heroine of Vanbrugh’s comedy,--so
out of date yet so strikingly modern,--who affirms that the pleasure
of women’s lives is founded on entire liberty to think and to do what
they please; but there was always the well-defined anticipation of
influencing by unconstrained thought and action the current of affairs.
They wished their voices to count. When Dr. Sacheverell was prosecuted
by the Whigs for his famous sermons on the neglect of the church by
the government, the women of London made his cause their own. All
duties and all diversions gave way before the paramount excitement of
this trial. Churches and theatres were alike deserted. “The ladies lay
aside their tea and chocolate,” writes Defoe pleasantly, “leave off
visiting after dinner, and, forming themselves into cabals, turn privy
councillors, and settle the affairs of state. Gallantry and gayety
are given up for business. Even the little girls talk politics.” Lady
Wentworth, with her customary acuteness, remarked that Dr. Sacheverell
would make the women good house-wives. The laziest of them had ceased
to lie in bed in the mornings, since the trial began every day at
seven. So great was the enthusiasm for the persecuted divine, that his
conviction and punishment, though the latter was purely nominal, helped
largely to overthrow the Whig ministry, and added one more triumph to
the energetic interference, the “pernicious meddling,” of women.
To understand, however, the full extent of female influence in affairs
of state, we should turn to France, where for centuries the sex has
played an all-important part, for good and ill, in the ruling of
the land. Any page of French history will tell this tale, from the
far-off day when Brabant and Hainault, and England, too, listened
to the persuasions of Joan of Valois, raised the siege of Tournay,
and suffered the exhausted nation to breathe again, down to the
less impetuous age when that astute princess, Charlotte Elizabeth,
remarked--out of the fullness of her hatred for Mme. de Maintenon--that
France had been governed by too many women, young and old, and that
it was almost time the men began to take a hand. Perhaps we can best
appreciate the force of feminine dominion when we read the half-amused,
half-exasperated comments of Gouverneur Morris, whose diary, written on
the eve of the French Revolution, reveals an intimate knowledge of that
strange society, already crumbling to decay. At a dinner in the château
of M. le Norrage, the political situation is discussed with so much
vehemence by the men that the women’s gentler voices are lost in the
uproar, which sorely vexes these fair politicians, accustomed to being
listened to with deference. “They will have more of this,” says Morris
shrewdly, “if the States General should really fix a constitution.
Such an event would be particularly distressing to the women of this
country, for they would be thereby deprived of their share in the
government; and hitherto they have exercised an authority almost
unlimited, with no small pleasure to themselves, though not perhaps
with the greatest advantage to the community.”
He realizes this more fully when he goes to consult with M. de Corney
on a question of finance, and finds that Mme. de Corney is well
acquainted with the matter. “It is the woman’s country,” he writes with
whimsical dismay; and he is fain to repeat the sentiment hotly and
angrily when Mme. de Staël, who was not wont to be troubled by petty
scruples, dupes him into showing her some papers, and gossips about
them to her father and Bishop d’Autun. “She is a devilish creature,”
says the outraged American, feeling he has been outwitted in the
game; but it is difficult, in the face of such little anecdotes, to
distinguish between the new woman and the old.
One thing is tolerably sure. The new woman, to whatever century she
belonged,--and she has been under varying aspects the product of
every age,--has never achieved great popularity with man. This is
not wholly to her discredit; for the desire to look at life from a
standpoint of her own, while irritating and subversive of general
order, cannot reasonably be accounted a crime. Yet when we consider
the invectives which have been hurled at women from the day they were
created until now, we find that most of them have for their basis the
natural indignation which is born of disregarded advice. The whole
ground for complaint is summed up admirably in the angry remonstrance
of Clarissa Harlowe’s uncle, when his niece prefers the lover she has
chosen for herself to the suitor chosen for her by her family. “I have
always found a most horrid romantic perverseness in your sex,” says
this experienced old man. “To do and to love what you should not, is
meat, drink, and vesture to you all.” There lies the argument in a
nutshell; and if Richardson be the first great English novelist who
has painted for us a woman moved by the secret and powerful impulses
of her heart, the unwritten and irrefutable laws of her own nature,
he has also expressed for us in brief and accurate phraseology the
masculine reading of this problem. “Nothing worse than woman can
befall mankind,” says Sophocles apprehensively; and far-off Hesiod, as
cheerless, but somewhat more philosophical, explains that our sex is a
necessary deduction from the coveted happiness of life. Burton tells
us of an excellent old anchorite who fell into a “cold palsy” whenever
a woman was brought before him; which pious and consistent behavior
is more to my liking than the gay ingratitude of the Greeks, who drew
their inspiration from the fairness and weakness, the passion and pain
of women, and then bequeathed to all coming ages the weight of their
dispassionate condemnation. Better to me is the old Sanskrit saying,
“The hearts of women are as the hearts of wolves;” or the Turkish
jibe anent the length of our hair and the shortness of our wits; or
that last and final verdict from the pen of our modern analyst, Mr.
George Meredith, “Woman will be the last thing civilized by man,”--an
ambiguously brilliant epigram which waits for the elucidation of the
critics.
The really curious thing is, not that we should have been found in
a general way unsatisfactory, which was to be expected, but that we
should be held to blame for such widely divergent desires. Take for
example the indifference of women to intellectual pursuits, which has
earned for them centuries of masculine contempt; and their thirst for
intellectual pursuits, which has earned for them centuries of masculine
disapprobation. On the one hand, we have some of the most delightful
writers England has known, calmly reminding them that sewing is their
one legitimate occupation. “Now for women,” says dear old Robert
Burton, “instead of laborious studies, they have curious needlework,
cutwork, spinning, bonelace, and many pretty devices of their own
making with which to adorn their houses.” Addison, a hundred years
later, does not seem to have advanced one step beyond this eminently
conservative attitude. He wishes with all his heart that women would
apply themselves more to embroidery and less to rhyme, a wish which
was heartily echoed by Edward Fitzgerald, who carried unimpaired to
the nineteenth century these sound and orthodox principles. Addison
would rather listen to his fair friends discussing the merits of red
and blue embroidery silks than the merits of Whigs and Tories. He
would rather see them work the whole of the battle of Blenheim into
their tapestry frames than hear their opinions once about the Duke
of Marlborough. He waxes eloquent and even vindictive--for so mild a
man--over the neglect of needlework amid more stirring avocations.
“It grieves my heart,” he says, speaking in the character of an
indignant letter-writer to the “Spectator,” “to see a couple of proud,
idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon”--and doubtless
discussing politics with heat--“in a room hung round with the industry
of their great-grandmothers.”
It has been observed before this that it is always the
great-grandmothers in whom is embodied the last meritoriousness of
the sex; always the great-grandmothers for whom is cherished this
pensive masculine regard. And it may perhaps be worth while to note
that these “proud, idle flirts” of Addison’s day have now become
_our_ virtuous great-grandmothers, and occupy the same shadowy
pedestal of industrious domesticity. I have little doubt that _their_
great-grandmothers, who worked--or did not work--the tapestries upon
the Addisonian walls, were in their day the subject of many pointed
reproaches, and bidden to look backward on the departed virtues of
still remoter generations. And, by the same token, it is encouraging to
think that, in the years to come, we too shall figure as lost examples
of distinctly feminine traits; we too shall be praised for our sewing
and our silence, our lack of learning and our “stayathomeativeness,”
that quality which Peacock declared to be the finest and rarest
attribute of the sex. What a pleasure for the new woman of to-day, who
finds herself vilified beyond her modest deserts, to reflect that she
is destined to shine as the revered and faultless great-grandmother of
the future.
To return, however, to the contrasting nature of the complaints lodged
against her in her more fallible character of great-grand-daughter.
Hazlitt, who was by no means indifferent to women nor to their regard,
clearly and angrily asserted that intellectual attainments in a man
were no recommendation to the female heart,--they merely puzzled and
annoyed. “If scholars talk to women of what they can understand,” he
says, “their hearers are none the wiser; if they talk of other things,
they only prove themselves fools.” Mr. Walter Bagehot was quite of
Hazlitt’s opinion, save that his serener disposition remained unvexed
by a state of affairs which seemed to him natural and right. He thought
it, on the whole, a wise ordinance of nature that women should look
askance upon all intellectual superiority, and that genius should
simply “put them out.”--“It is so strange. It does not come into the
room as usual. It says such unpleasant things. Once it forgot to brush
its hair.” The well-balanced feminine mind, he insisted, prefers
ordinary tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and
practical pursuits.
But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some
have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame;
and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to
no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At
the same time that Hazlitt accused the whole sex of this impatient
disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the
shrine. “I have met with women,” he says with frank contempt, “who
I really think would like to be wedded to a poem, and given away by
a novel.” At the same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that there
were duties to the intellect which women but seldom understood, Sir
Francis Doyle protested with humorous indignation against the frenzy
for female education which filled his lecture-room with petticoats,
and threatened to turn the universities of England into glorified
girls’ schools. At the same time that Froude was writing, with the
enviable self-confidence which was his blessed birthright, that it
is the part of man to act and labor, while women are merely bound by
“the negative obedience to prohibitory precepts;” or, in other words,
that there is nothing in the world which they ought to do, but plenty
which they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson was insisting with
all the vehemence of youth that it is precisely this contentment
with prohibitory precepts, this deadening passivity of the female
heart, which “narrows and damps the spirits of generous men,” so
that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, “and undergoes a
fatty degeneration of his moral being.” Which is precisely the lesson
thundered at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in “The
Gadsbys.”
“You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,
That a young man married is a young man marred.”
Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey were in harder straits
than the poor woman, who has stepped down the centuries under this
disheartening, because inevitable condemnation. Always either too
new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after
what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and
outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or
leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education
of women--a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without
meaning--any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists
older than the contributors to “Punch” and “Life”? It is just as new
as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of
society. Take as a modern specimen that pleasant verse from Owen
Seaman’s “Horace at Cambridge,” which describes gracefully and with
good temper the rush of young Englishwomen to the University Extension
lectures.
“Pencil in pouch, and syllabus in hand,
Hugging selected poets of the land,
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge,--all but Thomas Hood
And Byron (more’s the pity!),
They caught the local colour where they could;
And members of the feminine committee
To native grace an added charm would bring
Of light blue ribbons,--not of abstinence,
But bearing just this sense--
Inquire within on any mortal thing.”
This is charming, both in form and spirit, and I wish Sir Francis Doyle
had lived to read it. But the same spirit and an even better form may
be found in Pope’s familiar lines which mock--kindly as yet, and in
a friendly fashion--at the vaunted scholarship of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu.
“In beauty and wit
No mortal as yet
To question your empire has dared;
But men of discerning
Have thought that, in learning,
To yield to a lady was hard.”
Even the little jibes and jeers which “Punch” and “Life” have flung so
liberally at girl graduates, and over-educated young women, have their
counterparts in the pages of the “Spectator,” when Molly and Kitty are
so busy discussing atmospheric pressure that they forget the proper
ingredients for a sack posset; and when they assure their uncle, who
is suffering sorely from gout, that pleasure and pain are imaginary
distinctions, and that if he would only fix his mind upon this great
truth he would no longer feel the twitches. When we consider that this
letter to the “Spectator” was written over a hundred and eighty years
ago, we must acknowledge that young England of 1711 is closely allied
with young England and with young America of 1897, both of whom are
ever ready to assure us that we are not, as we had ignorantly supposed
ourselves to be, in pain, but only “in error.” And it is even possible
that old England and old America of 1897, though separated by nearly
two centuries from old England of 1711, remain, when gouty, in the same
darkened frame of mind, and are equally unable to grasp the joyous
truths held out to them so alluringly by youth.
Is there, then, anything new? The jests of all journalism, English,
French, and American, anent the mannishness of the modern woman’s
dress? Surely, in these days of bicycles and outdoor sports, this at
least is a fresh satiric development. But a hundred and seventy-five
years ago just such a piece of banter was leveled at the head of the
then new and mannish woman, who, riding through the country, asks a
tenant of Sir Roger de Coverley if the house near at hand be Coverley
Hall. The rustic, with his eyes fixed on the cocked hat, periwig, and
laced riding-coat of his questioner, answers confidently, “Yes, sir.”
“And is Sir Roger a married man?” queries the well-pleased dame. But by
this time the bumpkin’s gaze has traveled slowly downwards, and he sees
with dismay that this strange apparition finishes, mermaid-fashion, in
a riding-skirt. Horrified at his mistake, he falters out, “No, madam,”
and takes refuge from embarrassment in flight. Turn the horse into a
wheel, the long skirt into a short one, or into no skirt at all, and we
have here all the material needed for the ever-recurring joke presented
to us so monotonously to-day.
The belligerent sex, Mr. Lang has called us, and we are not stouter
fighters now than we have been through all the centuries, albeit the
methods of warfare have changed somewhat, and changed perchance for
ill. It is pleasant to think that in the days when muscle was better
than mind (which days, thanks to our colleges, are fast returning to
us), and the sword was very much mightier than the pen, women held
their own as easily as they do now. Not only through the emotions
they inspired, as when the fair Countess of Salisbury, beautiful,
courageous, and chaste, heartened the little garrison besieged at
Warwick, so that, as it is quaintly chronicled, “every man was made
as valiant as two men, by reason of her kind and loving words.” Not
only through the loyalty they evoked, as when the heroic Countess of
Montford defended her husband’s cause through twelve years of well-nigh
hopeless struggle, until, by her invincible bravery and determination,
she placed her unheroic son upon the ducal chair of Brittany. Not only
through their astuteness in diplomacy, as when the crafty Duchess of
Brabant, “a lady,” says Froissart, “of a very active mind,” duped
England, cajoled France, and united the great houses of Burgundy and
Hainault in a double marriage, overcoming the well-nigh insuperable
obstacles by her woman’s wit and her resistless resolution. But when
it came to downright fighting, these hardy dames were not much behind
their husbands and brothers in the field. In that sharp warfare which
the Black Prince carried into the heart of Spain, it chanced that
Sir Thomas Trivet at the head of an English force laid siege to the
Castilian town of Alaro. Its garrison made a rash sortie, were trapped
in an ambuscade, and nearly every man was slain or taken prisoner.
Elated by this success, and deeming the town an easy prey, the English
marched joyously to occupy it. But behold! the women had closed the
gates and barriers, mounted the battlements, and were ready to defend
themselves against all comers. Their men might be foolish enough to
fall into the enemy’s snares, but they would look after their homes.
Sir Thomas, like the gallant Englishman he was, refused to make the
attack. “See these good women,” he said, “standing like wolf-dogs on
their walls. Let us turn back, and God grant our English wives to be
as brave in battle.”
The ludicrous side of female belligerency has seldom been lacking in
history. It is admirably illustrated by the story, at once absurd and
tragic, of the unfortunate William Scott of Harden, whose wife, an
aggressively pious woman, insisted on attending the forbidden meetings
of the Covenanters. Scott was called before the Council, and told to
keep his lady at home. He answered, frankly and sadly, that he could
not. The Council, arguing after the fashion of the Queen in “Alice in
Wonderland,” insisted that if he had a wife he could oblige her to obey
him, and dismissed him with a serious warning. Off to the Eildon Hills
went Madam Scott, and prayed as hard as ever. Her husband received a
second summons from the Council, and was fined a thousand pounds for
her obstinate recusancy. Madam Scott, who now occupied the proud yet
comfortable position of a martyr for the faith whose sufferings were
borne vicariously by another, clung more insistently than before to
her religious rights. Scott was fined another thousand pounds. Madam
Scott merely denounced the persecutors of the righteous with redoubled
vehemence at the next gathering of the elect. The luckless man was
then actually imprisoned in the Bass Fortress, where he remained three
years, while his triumphant spouse, secure from molestation, trod
her saintly path, and prayed whenever and wherever she desired. The
revolting wife is not invariably a thing of beauty, but it is hard to
see how she could carry her spirit of independence any farther.
For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and
over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century. All that
we value as well as all that we condemn in womanhood has played its
part for good and for evil in the history of mankind. To talk about
either sex as a solid embodiment of reform is as unmeaning as to talk
about it as a solid embodiment of demoralization. If the mandrake be
charmed by a woman’s touch, as Josephus tells us, the rue, says Pliny,
dies beneath her fingers. She has made and marred from the beginning,
she will make and mar to the end. The best and newest daughter of
this restless generation may well read envyingly Sainte Beuve’s brief
description of Mme. de Sévigné, a picture drawn with a few strokes,
clear, delicate, and convincing. “She had a genius for conversation
and society, a knowledge of the world and of men, a lively and acute
appreciation both of the becoming and the absurd.” Such women make the
world a pleasant place to live in; and, to the persuasive qualities
which win their way through adamantine resistance, Mme. de Sévigné
added that talent for affairs which is the birthright of her race, that
talent for affairs which we value so highly to-day, and the broader
cultivation of which is perhaps the only form of newness worth its
name. Since Adam delved and Eve span, life for all of us has been full
of labor; but as the sons of Adam no longer exclusively delve, so the
daughters of Eve no longer exclusively spin. In fact, delving and
spinning, though admirable occupations, do not represent the sum total
of earthly needs. There are so many, many other useful things to do,
and women’s eager finger-tips burn to essay them all.
“Cora’s riding, and Lilian’s rowing,
Celia’s novels are books one buys,
Julia’s lecturing, Phillis is mowing,
Sue is a dealer in oils and dyes;
Flora and Dora poetize,
Jane is a bore, and Bee is a blue,
Sylvia lives to anatomize,
Nothing is left for the men to do.”
The laugh has a malicious ring, yet it is good-tempered too, as though
Mr. Henley were not sufficiently enamoured of work to care a great
deal who does it in his place. Even the plaintive _envoy_ is less
heart-rending than he would have it sound, and in its familiar burden
we catch an old-time murmur of forgotten things.
“Prince, our past in the dust-heap lies!
Saving to scrub, to bake, to brew,
Nurse, dress, prattle, and scandalize,
Nothing is left for the men to do.”
THE DEATHLESS DIARY.
Four ways there are of telling a curious world that endless story
of the past which it is never tired of hearing. History, memoir,
biography, and the diary run back like four smooth roads, connecting
our century, our land, our life, with other centuries and lands and
lives that have all served in turn to make us what we are. Of these
four roads, I like the narrowest best. History is both partial and
prejudiced, sinning through lack of sympathy as well as through lack
of truth. Memoirs are too often false and malicious. Biographies
are misleading in their flattery: there is but one Boswell. Diaries
tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or
unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of
security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of
glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that
which comes within our field of vision.
In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women
wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us. Neither
“eternal youth” nor “nothing else to do” seems an adequate foundation
for such structures. They were considered then a profitable waste
of time, and children were encouraged to write down in little books
the little experiences of their little lives. Thus we have the few
priceless pages which tell “pet Marjorie’s” story; the incomparable
description of Hélène Massalski’s schooldays at the Abbaye de Notre
Dame aux Bois; the demure vivacity of Anna Green Winslow; the lively,
petulant records of Louisa and Richenda Gurney; the amusing experiences
of that remarkable and delightful urchin, Richard Doyle. These youthful
diaries, whether brief or protracted, have a twofold charm, revealing
as they do both child-life and the child itself. It is pleasant to
think that one of the little Gurneys, who were all destined to grow
into such relentlessly pious women that their adult letters exclude
the human element absolutely in favor of spiritual admonitions, was
capable, when she was young, of such a defiant sentiment as this: “I
read half a Quaker’s book through with my father before meeting. I am
quite sorry to see him grow so Quakerly.” Or, worse and worse: “We went
on the highway this afternoon for the purpose of being rude to the
folks that passed. I do think being rude is most pleasant sometimes.”
Of course she did, poor little over-trained, over-disciplined Richenda,
and her open confession of iniquity contrasts agreeably with the
anxious assurance given by Anna Winslow to her mother that there
had been “no rudeness, Mamma, I assure you,” at her evening party.
Naturally, a diary written by a little girl for the scrutiny and
approbation of her parents is a very different thing from a diary
written by a little girl for her own solace and diversion. The New
England child is always sedate and prim, mindful that she is twelve
years old, and that she is expected to live up to a rather rigorous
standard of propriety. She would no more dream of going into the
highway “for the purpose of being rude to the folks that passed” than
she would dream of romping with boys in those decorous Boston streets
where, as Mr. Birrell pleasantly puts it, “respectability stalked
unchecked.” Neither does she consider her diary a vent for naughty
humors. She fills it with a faithful account of her daily occupations
and amusements, and we learn from her how much wine and punch little
New England girls were allowed to drink a hundred years ago; how they
danced five hours on an unsustaining supper of cakes and raisins; how
they sewed more than they studied, and studied more than they played;
and what wondrous clothes they wore when they were permitted to be seen
in company.
“I was dressed in my yelloe coat black bib and apron,” writes Anna in
an unpunctuated transport of pride, “black feathers on my head, my
paste comb and all my paste garnet marquasett and jet pins, together
with my silver plume, my locket, rings, black collar round my neck,
black mitts and yards of blue ribbon (black and blue is high taste)
striped tucker and ruffles (not my best) and my silk shoes completed my
dress.”
And none too soon, thinks the astonished reader, who fancied in his
ignorance that little girls were plainly clad in those fine old days of
simplicity. Neither Marie Bashkirtseff nor Hélène Massalski cared more
about frippery than did this small Puritan maid. Indeed, Hélène, after
one passionate outburst, resigned herself with great good humor to the
convent uniform, and turned her alert young mind to other interests and
pastimes. If the authenticity of her childish copy-books can be placed
beyond dispute, no youthful record rivals them in vivacity and grace.
It was the fashion among the older _pensionnaires_ of Notre Dame aux
Bois to keep elaborate journals, and the little Polish princess, though
she tells us that she wrote so badly as to be in perpetual penance for
her disgraceful “tops and tails,” scribbled away page after page with
reckless sincerity and spirit. She is so frank and gay, so utterly free
from pretense of any kind, that English readers, or at least English
reviewers, appear to have been somewhat scandalized by her candor;
and these innocent revelations have been made the subject of serious
diatribes against convent schools, which, it need hardly be said, have
altered radically in the past century, and were, at their worst, better
than any home training possible in Hélène Massalski’s day. And what
fervor and charm in her affectionate description of that wise and
witty, that kind and good nun, Madame de Rochechouart! What freedom
throughout from the morbid and unchildish vanity of Marie Bashkirtseff,
whose diary is simply a vent for her own exhaustless egotism! There
must always be some moments in life when it becomes impossible for us,
however self-centred, to intrude our personalities further upon our
rebellious families and friends. There must come a time when nobody
will think of us, nor look at us, nor listen to us another minute.
Then how welcome is the poor little journal which cannot refuse our
confidences! What Rousseau did on a large scale, Marie Bashkirtseff
copied on a smaller one. Both made the world their father confessor,
and the world has listened with a good deal of attention to their
tales, partly from an unquenchable interest in unhealthy souls, and
partly from sheer self-complacency and pride. There is nothing more
gratifying to human nature than the opportunity of contrasting our own
mental and spiritual soundness with the disease which cries aloud to us
for scrutiny.
If the best diaries known in literature have been written by men, the
greater number have been the work of women. Even little girls, as we
have seen, have taken kindly enough to the daily task of translating
themselves into pages of pen and ink; but little boys have been wont
to consider this a lamentable waste of time. It is true we have such
painful and precocious records as that of young Nathaniel Mather, who
happily died before reaching manhood, but not before he had scaled the
heights of self-esteem, and sounded the depths of despair. When a boy,
a real human boy, laments and bewails in his journal that he whittled
a stick upon the Sabbath Day, “and, for fear of being seen, did it
behind the door,--a great reproach of God, and a specimen of that
atheism I brought into the world with me,”--we recognize the fearful
possibilities of untempered sanctimony. Boyhood, thank Heaven, does
not lend itself easily to introspection, and seldom finds leisure for
remorse. As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other
piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of
authority. It was the parental mandate, thinly disguised under parental
counsel, which started young Dick Doyle on that delightful journal
in which spirited sketches alternate with unregenerate adventures
and mishaps. He begins it with palpable reluctance the first day of
January, 1840; fears modestly that it “will turn out a hash;” hopes
he may be “skinned alive by wildcats” if he fails to persevere with
it; draws an animated picture of himself in a torn tunic running away
from seven of these malignant animals that pursue him over tables and
chairs; and finally settles down soberly and cheerfully to work. The
entries grow longer and longer, the drawings more and more elaborate,
as the diary proceeds. A great deal happened in 1840, and every event
is chronicled with fidelity. The queen is married in the beginning of
the year; a princess royal is born before its close. “Hurra! Hurra!”
cries loyal Dick. Prince Louis Napoleon makes his famous descent upon
Boulogne, and Dick sketches him sailing dismally away on a life-buoy.
Above all, the young artist scores his first success, and the glory
of having one of his drawings actually lithographed and sold is more
than he can bear with sobriety. “Just imagine,” he writes, “if I was
walking coolly along, and came upon the Tournament in a shop window.
Oh, cricky! it would be enough to turn me inside out.”
He survives this joyous ordeal, however, and toils gayly on until
the year is almost up and the appointed task completed. On the 3d of
December a serious-minded uncle invites him to go to Exeter Hall, an
entertainment which the other children flatly and wisely decline.
What he heard in that abode of dismal oratory we shall never know,
for, stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence,--“Uncle was going
somewhere else first, and had started,”--Richard Doyle’s diary comes to
an untimely end.
And this is the fate of all those personal records which have most
deeply interested and charmed us. It is so easy to begin a journal,
so difficult to continue it, so impossible to persevere with it to
the end. Bacon says that the only time a man finds leisure for such
an engrossing occupation is when he is on a sea voyage, and naturally
has nothing to write about. Perhaps the reason why diaries are ever
short-lived may be found in the undue ardor with which they are set
agoing. Man is sadly diffuse and lamentably unstable. He ends by
saying nothing because he begins by leaving nothing unsaid. “Le secret
d’ennuyer est de tout dire.” Haydon, the painter, it is true, filled
twenty-seven volumes with the melancholy record of his high hopes
and bitter disappointments; but then he did everything and failed in
everything on the same gigantic scale. The early diary of Frances
Burney is monumental. Its young writer finds life so full of enjoyment
that nothing seems to her too insignificant to be narrated. Long and
by no means lively conversations, that must have taken whole hours to
write, are minutely and faithfully transcribed. She reads “The Vicar of
Wakefield,” and at once sits down and tells us all she thinks about it.
Her praise is guarded and somewhat patronizing, as befits the author
of “Evelina.” She is sorely scandalized by Dr. Primrose’s verdict that
murder should be the sole crime punishable by death, and proceeds to
show, at great length and with pious indignation, how “this doctrine
might be contradicted from the very essence of our religion,”--quoting
Exodus in defense of her orthodoxy. She is charmingly frank and
outspoken, and these youthful pages show no trace of that curious,
half-conscious pleading with which she strives, in later days, to make
posterity her confidant; to pour into the ears of future partisans like
Macaulay her side of the court story, with all its indignities and
honors, its hours of painful ennui, its minutes of rapturous delight.
That Macaulay should have worked himself up into a frenzy of
indignation over Miss Burney’s five years at court is an amusing
instance of his unalterable point of view. The sacred and exalted
profession of letters had in him its true believer and devotee. That
kings and queens and princesses should fail to share this deference,
that they should arrogantly assume the privileges of their rank
when brought into contact with a successful novelist, was to him an
incredible example of barbaric stupidity. The spectacle of Queen
Charlotte placidly permitting the authoress of “Cecilia” to assist
at the royal toilet filled him with grief and anger. It is but too
apparent that no sense of intellectual unworthiness troubled her
Majesty for a moment, and this shameless serenity of spirit was more
than the great Whig historian could endure. To less ardent minds it
would seem that five years of honorable and well-paid service were
amply rewarded by a pension for life; and that Miss Burney, however
hard-worked and overdriven, must have had long, long hours of leisure
in which to write the endless pages of her journal. Indeed, a woman who
had time to listen to Fox speaking “with violence” for five hours, had
time, one would imagine, for anything. Then what delicious excitation
to sit blushing and smiling in the royal box, and hear Miss Farren
recite these intoxicating lines!
“Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,
Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.”
And as if this were not enough, the king, the queen, the royal
princesses, all turn their heads and gaze at her for one distracting
moment. “To describe my embarrassment,” she falters, “would be
impossible. I shrunk back, so astonished, and so ashamed of my public
situation, that I was almost ready to take to my heels and run away.”
Well, well, the days for such delights are over. We may say what we
please about the rewards of modern novel-writing; but what, after
all, is the cold praise of reviewers compared with this open glory
and exaltation? It is moderately impressive to be told over and
over again by Marie Corelli’s American publishers that the queen of
England thinks “The Soul of Lilith” and “The Sorrows of Satan” are
good novels; but this mere announcement, however reassuring,--and it
is a point on which we require a good deal of reassurance,--does not
thrill us with the enthusiasm we should feel if her Majesty, and the
Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York, and the British public united
in a flattering ovation. The incidents which mark the irresistible and
unwelcome changes forced upon the world by each successive generation
which inhabits it are the incidents we love to read about, and which
are generally considered too insignificant for narration. In a single
page Addison tells us more concerning the frivolous, idle, half torpid,
wholly contented life of an eighteenth-century citizen than we could
learn from a dozen histories. His diaries, meant to be purely satiric,
have now become instructive. They show us, as in a mirror, the early
hours, the scanty ablutions,--“washed hands, but not face,”--the
comfortable eating and drinking, the refreshing absence of books, the
delightful vagueness and uncertainty of foreign news. A man could
interest himself for days in the reported strangling of the Grand
Vizier, when no intrusive cablegram came speeding over the wires to
silence and refute the pleasant voice of rumor.
It is this wholesome and universal love of detail which lends to a
veracious diary its indestructible charm. Charlotte Burney has less to
tell us than her famous sister; but it is to her, after all, that we
owe our knowledge of Dr. Johnson’s worsted wig,--a present, it seems,
from Mr. Thrale, and especially valued for its tendency to stay in
curl however roughly used. “The doctor generally diverts himself with
lying down just after he has got a fresh wig on,” writes Charlotte
gayly; and this habit, it must be admitted, is death and destruction to
less enduring perukes. Swift’s Journal to Stella--a true diary, though
cast in the form of correspondence--shows us not only the playful,
tender, and caressing moods of the most savage of English cynics, but
also enlightens us amazingly as to his daily habits and economies.
We learn from his own pen how he bought his fuel by the half-bushel,
and would have been glad to buy it by the pound; how his servant,
“that extravagant whelp Peter,” insisted on making a fire for him, and
necessitated his picking off the coals one by one, before going to bed;
how he drank brandy every morning, and took his pill as regularly as
Mrs. Pullet every night; and how Stella’s mother sent him as gifts “a
parcel of wax candles and a bandbox full of small plum-cakes,” on which
plum-cakes--oh, miracle of sound digestion!--he breakfasted serenely
for a fortnight.
Now, the spectacle of Dr. Swift eating plum-cakes in the early
morning is like the spectacle of Mr. Pepys dining with far less
inward satisfaction at his cousin’s table, where “the venison pasty
was palpable beef.” The most remarkable diary in the world is rich
in the insignificance of its details. It is the sole confidant of a
man who, as Mr. Lang admirably says, was his own Boswell, and its
ruthless sincerity throws the truth-telling of the great biographer
into the shade. Were it not for this strange cipher record, ten years
long, the world--or that small portion of it which reads history
unabridged--would know Mr. Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, as
an excellent public servant, loyal, capable, and discreet. The bigger,
lazier world, to which he is now a figure so familiar, would never
have heard of him at all, thereby losing the most vivid bit of human
portraiture ever given for our disedification and delight.
We can understand how Mr. Pepys found time to write his diary when we
remember that he was commonly in his office by four o’clock in the
morning. We can appreciate its wonderful candor when we realize how
safe he thought it from investigation. With the reproaches of his own
conscience he was probably familiar, and the crowning cowardice of
self-told lies offered no temptation to him. “Why should we seek to
be deceived?” asks Bishop Butler, and Mr. Pepys might have answered
truthfully that he didn’t. The romantic shading, the flimsy and false
excuses with which we are wont to color our inmost thoughts, have
no place in this extraordinary chronicle. Its writer neither deludes
himself, like Bunyan, nor bolsters up his soul, like Rousseau, with
swelling and insidious pretenses. It is a true “Human Document,”
full of meanness and kindness, of palpable virtues and substantial
misdemeanors. Mr. Pepys is unkind to his wife, yet he loves her. He is
selfish and ostentatious, yet he denies himself the coveted glory of
a coach and pair to give a marriage portion to his sister. He seeks
openly his own profit and gratification, yet he is never without an
active interest in the lives and needs of other people. Indeed, so keen
and so sensible are his solutions of social problems, or what passed
for such in that easy age, that had philanthropy and its rewards been
invented in the reign of Charles II. we should doubtless see standing
now in London streets a statue of Mr. Samuel Pepys, prison reformer,
and founder of benevolent institutions for improving and harrowing the
poor.
If the principal interest of this famous diary lies in its unflinching
revelation of character, a charm no less enduring may be found in all
the daily incidents it narrates. We like to know how a citizen of
London lived two hundred years ago: what clothes he wore, what food he
ate, what books he read, what plays he heard, what work and pleasure
filled his waking hours. And I would gently suggest to those who hunger
and thirst after the glories of the printed page that if they will only
consent to write for posterity,--not as the poets say they do, and do
not, but as the diarist really and truly does,--posterity will take
them to its heart and cherish them. They may have nothing to say which
anybody wants to listen to now; but let them jot down truthfully the
petty occurrences, the pleasant details of town or country life, and,
as surely as the world lasts, they will one day have a hearing. We
live in a strange period of transition. Never before has the old order
changed as rapidly as it is changing now. O writers of dull verse and
duller prose, quit the well-worked field of fiction, the arid waste
of sonnets and sad poems, and chronicle in little leather-covered
books the incidents which tell their wondrous tale of resistless and
inevitable change. Write of electric motors, of bicycles, of peace
societies, of hospitals for pussy cats, of women’s clubs and colleges,
of the price of food and house rent, of hotel bills, of new fashions
in dress and furniture, of gay dinners, of extension lectures, of
municipal corruption and reform, of robberies unpunished, of murders
unavenged. These things do not interest us profoundly now, being part
of our daily surroundings; but the generations that are to come will
read of them with mingled envy and derision: envy because we have done
so little, derision because we think that we have done so much.
If, then, it is as natural for mankind to peer into the past as to
speculate upon the future, where shall we find such windows for our
observation as in the diaries which show us day by day the shifting
current of what once was life? We can learn from histories all we
want to know about the great fire of London; but to realize just how
people felt and behaved in that terrible emergency we should watch the
alert and alarmed Mr. Pepys burying not only his money and plate, but
his wine and Parmesan cheese. We have been taught at school much more
than we ever wanted to know about Cromwell, and the Protectorate,
and Puritan England; yet to breathe again that dismal and decorous
air we must go to church with John Evelyn, and see, instead of the
expected rector, a sour-faced tradesman mount the pulpit, and preach
for an hour on the inspiriting text, “And Benaiah ... went down also
and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow.” The pious and
accomplished Mr. Evelyn does not fancy this strange innovation. Like
other conservative English gentlemen, he has little leaning to “novices
and novelties” in the house of God; and he is even less pleased when
all the churches are closed on Christmas Day, and a Puritan magistrate
speaks, in his hearing, “spiteful things of our Lord’s Nativity.” His
horror at King Charles’s execution is never mitigated by any of the
successive changes which followed that dark deed. He is repelled in
turn by the tyranny of Cromwell, the dissoluteness of Charles II.,
the Catholicity of James, and the heartlessness of Queen Mary, “who
came to Whitehall jolly and laughing as to a wedding,” without even a
decent pretense of pity for her exiled father. He firmly believes in
witchcraft,--as did many other learned and pious men,--and he persists
in upsetting all our notions of galley slaves and the tragic horror
of their lot by affirming the miserable creatures at Marseilles to be
“cheerful and full of knavery,” and hardly ever without some trifling
occupation at which they toiled in free moments, and by which they made
a little money for the luxuries and comforts that they craved.
In fact, an air of sincere and inevitable truthfulness robs John
Evelyn’s diary of all that is romantic and sentimental. We see in it
the life of a highly cultivated and deeply religious man, whose fate it
was to witness all those tremendous and sovereign changes which swept
over England like successive tidal waves between the execution of the
Earl of Strafford and the accession of Queen Anne. Sharp strife; the
bitter contention of creeds; England’s one plunge into republicanism,
and her abrupt withdrawal from its grim embraces; the plague; the
great fire, with “ten thousand houses all in one flame;” the depth
of national corruption under the last Stuarts; the obnoxious and
unpalatable remedy administered by the house of Orange; the dawning of
fresh prosperity and of a new literature,--all these things Mr. Evelyn
saw, and noted with many comments in his diary. And from all we turn
with something like relief to read about the fire-eater, Richardson,
who delighted London by cooking an oyster on a red-hot coal in his
mouth, or drinking molten glass as though it had been ale, and who
would have made the fortune of any modern museum. Or perhaps we pause
to pity the sorrows of land-lords, always an ill-used and persecuted
race; for Sayes Court, the home of the Evelyns, with its famous old
trees and beautiful gardens, was rented for several years to Admiral
Benbow, who sublet it in the summer of 1698 to Peter the Great, and the
royal tenant so trampled down and destroyed the flower-beds that no
vestige of their loveliness survived his ruthless tenancy. The Tsar,
like Queen Elizabeth, was magnificent when viewed from a distance, but
a most disturbing element to introduce beneath a subject’s humble roof.
If Defoe, that master of narrative, had written fewer political and
religious tracts, and had kept a journal of his eventful career, what
welcome and admirable reading it would have made! If Lord Hervey had
been content to tell us less about government measures, and more about
court and country life, his thick volumes would now be the solace of
many an idle hour. So keen a wit, so powerful and graphic a touch,
have never been wasted upon matters of evanescent interest. History
always holds its share of the world’s attention. The charm of personal
gossip has never been known to fail. But political issues, once dead,
make dull reading for all but students of political economy; and they,
browsing by choice amid arid pastures, scorn nothing so much as the
recreative. Yet Lord Hervey’s epigrammatic definition of the two great
parties, patriots and courtiers, as “Whigs out of place and Whigs in
place,” shows how vital and long-lived is humor; and the trenchant
cynicism of his unkind pleasantry is more easily disparaged than
forgotten.
On the other hand, we can never be sufficiently grateful that
Gouverneur Morris, instead of writing industrious pamphlets on the
causes that led to the French Revolution, has left us his delightful
diary, with its vivid picture of social life and of the great
storm-cloud darkening over France. In his pages we can breathe freely,
unchoked by that lurid and sulphuric atmosphere so popular with
historians and novelists rehearsing “on the safe side of prophecy.” His
courage is of the unsentimental order, his perceptions are pitiless,
his common sense is invulnerable. He has the purest contempt for
the effusive oath-taking of July 14, the purest detestation for the
crimes and cruelties that followed. He persistently treads the earth,
and is in no way dazzled by the mad flights into ether which were so
hopelessly characteristic of the time. Not even Sir Walter Scott--a
man as unlike Morris as day is unlike night--could be more absolutely
free from the unwholesome influences which threatened the sanity
of the world, and of Scott’s journal it is difficult to speak with
self-possession. Our thanks are due primarily to Lord Byron, whose
Ravenna diary first started Sir Walter on this daily task,--a task
which grew heavier when the sad years came, but which shows us now, as
no word from other lips or other pen could ever show us, the splendid
courage, the boundless charity, the simple, unconscious goodness of
the man whom we may approach closer and closer, and only love and
reverence the more. Were it not for this journal, we should never have
known Scott,--never have known how sad he was sometimes, how tired,
how discouraged, how clearly aware of his own fast-failing powers. We
should never have valued at its real worth his unquenchable gayety of
heart, his broad, genial, reasonable outlook on the world. His letters,
even in the midst of trouble, are always cheerful, as the letters of a
brave man should be. His diary alone tells us how much he suffered at
the downfall of hopes and ambitions that had grown deeper and stronger
with every year of life. “I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees, I hear
them whining and seeking me everywhere,” he writes pathetically, when
the thought of Abbotsford, closed and desolate, seems more than he can
bear; and then, obedient to those unselfish instincts which had always
ruled his nature, he adds with nobler sorrow, “Poor Will Laidlaw! poor
Tom Purdie! This will be news to wring your hearts, and many an honest
fellow’s besides, to whom my prosperity was daily bread.”
Of all the journals bequeathed to the world, and which the wise world
has guarded with jealous care, Sir Walter’s makes the strongest appeal
to honest human nature, which never goes so far afield in its search
after strange gods as to lose its love for what is simply and sanely
good. We hear a great deal about the nobler standards of modernity, and
about virtues so fine and rare that our grandfathers knew them not;
but courage and gayety, a pure mind and a kind heart, still give us
the assurance of a man. The pleasant duty of admonishing the rich, the
holy joy of preaching a crusade against other people’s pleasures, are
daily gaining favor with the elect; but to the unregenerate there is
a wholesome flavor in cheerful enjoyment no less than in open-handed
generosity.
The one real drawback to a veracious diary is that--life being but
a cloudy thing at best--the pages which tell the story make often
melancholy reading. Mr. Pepys has, perhaps, the lightest heart of the
fraternity, and we cannot help feeling now and then that a little
more regret on his part would not be wholly unbecoming. However, his
was not a day when people moped in corners over their own or their
neighbors’ shortcomings; and there is no more curious contrast offered
by the wide world of book-land than the life reflected so faithfully in
Pepys’s diary and in the sombre journal of Judge Sewall. New England
is as visible in the one book as is Old England in the other,--New
England under the bleak sky of an austere, inexorable, uncompromising
Puritanism which dominated every incident of life. If Mr. Pepys went to
see a man hanged at Tyburn, the occasion was one of some jollity, alike
for crowd and for criminal; an open-air entertainment, in which the
leading actor was recompensed in some measure for the severity of his
part by the excitement and admiration he aroused. But when Judge Sewall
attended the execution of James Morgan, the unfortunate prisoner was
first carried into church, and prayed over lengthily by Cotton Mather
for the edification of the congregation, who came in such numbers and
pressed in such unruly fashion around the pulpit that a riot took place
within the holy walls, and Morgan was near dying of suffocation in the
dullest possible manner without the gallows-tree.
It is not of hangings only and such direful solemnities that we read
in Sewall’s diary. Every ordinary duty--I cannot say pastime--of
life is faithfully portrayed. We know the faults--sins they were
considered--of his fourteen children; how they played at prayer-time or
began their meals before grace was said, and were duly whipped for such
transgressions. We know how the judge went courting when past middle
age; how he gave the elderly Mrs. Winthrop China oranges, sugared
almonds, and “gingerbread wrapped in a clean sheet of paper,” and how
he ingratiated himself into her esteem by hearing her grand-children
recite their catechism. He has a businesslike method of putting down
the precise cost of the gifts he offered during the progress of his
various wooings; for, in his own serious fashion, this gray-headed
Puritan was one of the most amorous of men. A pair of shoe-buckles
presented to one fair widow came to no less than five shillings
threepence; and “Dr. Mather’s sermons, neatly bound,” was a still more
extravagant _cadeau_. He was also a mighty expounder of the Scriptures,
and prayed and wrestled with the sick until they were fain to implore
him to desist. There is one pathetic story of a dying neighbor to
whose bedside he hastened with two other austere friends, and who was
so sorely harried by their prolonged exhortations that, with his last
breath, he sobbed out, “Let me alone! my spirits are gone!”--to the
terrible distress and scandal of his wife.
On the whole, Judge Sewall’s diary is not cheerful reading, but the
grayness of its atmosphere is mainly due to the unlovely aspect of
colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement climate not yet subdued
by the forces of a luxurious civilization, and by a too constant
consideration of the probabilities of being eternally damned. There
is nowhere in its sedate and troubled pages that piercing sadness,
that cry of enigmatic, inexplicable pain, which shakes the very centre
of our souls when we read the beautiful short journal of Maurice de
Guérin. These few pages, written with no definite purpose by a young
man whose life was uneventful and whose genius never flowered into
maturity, have a positive as well as a relative value. They are not
merely interesting for what they have to tell; they are admirable for
the manner of the telling, and the world of letters would be distinctly
poorer for their loss. Eugénie de Guérin’s journal is charming, but its
merits are of a different order. No finer, truer picture than hers has
ever been given us of that strange, simple, patriarchal life which we
can so little understand, a life full of delicate thinking and homely
household duties. At Le Cayla, the lonely Languedoc château, where “one
could pass days without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without
hearing any living thing but the birds,” the young Frenchwoman found in
her diary companionship and mental stimulus, a link to bind her day by
day to her absent brother for whom she wrote, and a weapon with which
to fight the unconquerable disquiet of her heart. Her finely balanced
nature, which resisted sorrow and ennui to the end, forced her to adopt
that precision of phrase which is the triumph of French prose. There is
a tender grace in her descriptions, a restraint in her sweet, sudden
confidences, a wistfulness in her joy, and always a nobility of thought
which makes even her gentleness seem austere.
But Maurice de Guérin had in him a power of enjoyment and of suffering
which filled his life with profound emotions, and these emotions break
like waves at our feet when we read the brief pages of his diary. There
is the record of a single day at Le Val, so brimming with blessedness
and beauty that it illustrates the lasting nature of pure earthly
happiness; for such days are counted out like fairy gold, and we are
richer all our lives for having grasped them once. There are passages
of power and subtlety which show that nature took to her heart this
trembling seeker after felicity, cast from him the chains of care and
thought, and bade him taste for one keen hour “the noble voluptuousness
of freedom.” Then, breaking swiftly in amid vain dreams of joy, comes
the bitter moment of awakening, and the sad voice of humanity sounds
wailing in his ears.
“My God, how I suffer from life! Not from its accidents,--a little
philosophy suffices for them,--but from itself, from its substance,
from all its phenomena.”
And ever wearing away his heart is the restlessness of a nature which
craved beauty for its daily food, which longed passionately for
whatever was fairest in the world, for the lands and the seas he was
destined never to behold. Eugénie, in her solitude at Le Cayla, trained
herself to echo with gentle stoicism the words of A Kempis: “What canst
thou see anywhere that thou seest not here? Behold the heavens and the
earth and all the elements! For out of these are all things made.”
Her horizon was bounded by the walls of home. She worked, she prayed,
she read her few books, she taught the peasant children the little
it behooved them to know; she played with the gray cat, and with the
three dogs, Lion, Wolf, and little Trilby whom she loved best of all,
and from whom, rather than from a stupid fairy tale, it may be that Du
Maurier stole his heroine’s name. She won peace, if not contentment,
by the fulfillment of near duties; but in her brother the unquenchable
desire of travel burned like a smouldering fire. In dreams he wandered
far amid ancient and sunlit lands whose mighty monuments are part
of the mysterious legends of humanity. “The road of the wayfarer
is a joyous one!” he cries. “Ah! who shall set me adrift upon the
Nile!”--and with these words the journal of Maurice de Guérin comes
to a sudden end. A river deeper than the Nile was opening beneath his
passionate, tired young eyes. Remoter lands than Egypt lay before his
feet.
GUIDES: A PROTEST.
“Life,” sighed Sir George Cornwall Lewis, “would be endurable, if it
were not for its pleasures;” and the impatient wanderer in far-off
lands is tempted to paraphrase this hackneyed truism into, “Traveling
would be enjoyable, if it were not for its guides.” Years ago, Mark
Twain endeavored to point out how much fun could be derived from these
“necessary nuisances” by a judicious course of chaffing; and the
apt illustrations of his methods furnished some of the most amusing
passages in “Innocents Abroad.” But it is not every tourist who
bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which
turns a trial into a blessing. The facility for being diverted where
less fortunate people are annoyed is a rare birthright, and worth
many a mess of pottage. Moreover, in these days when Baedeker smooths
the traveler’s path to knowledge, guides are no longer “necessary
nuisances.” They are plagues to no purpose, whose persistency deprives
inoffensive strangers of that tranquil enjoyment they have come so
far to seek. Nothing is more difficult than to dilate with a correct
emotion when every object of interest is pointed rigorously out, and a
wearisome trickle of information, couched in broken English, is dropped
relentlessly into our tired ears.
It need not be supposed for a moment that there is any real option
about employing a guide or dispensing with his services. There is
none. Practically speaking, I don’t employ him. He takes possession of
me, and never relaxes his hold. In some parts of Europe, Sicily for
example, his unlawful ownership begins from the first moment I set my
foot upon the soil. At Syracuse he is waiting at the station, in charge
of the hotel coach. I think him the hotel porter, point out our bags,
and give him the check for our boxes. As soon as we are under way,
he leans over and informs us confidentially that he is the English
interpreter and guide, officially connected with the hotel, and that
he is happy to place his services at our disposal. At these ominous
words our hearts sink heavily. We know that the hour of captivity is
at hand, and that all efforts to escape will only tighten our chains.
Nevertheless, we make the effort that very day, resolved not to yield
without a struggle.
The afternoon is drawing to a close by the time we are settled in our
rooms, have had a cup of tea, and have washed away some of the dirt of
travel. There is only light enough left for a short stroll; and this
first walk through a strange city is one of my principal pleasures
in traveling. I love to find myself amid the unfamiliar streets; to
slip into quiet churches; to stare in shop-windows; to wander, with no
other clue than Baedeker, through narrow byways, and stumble unaware
upon some open court, with its fine old fountain splashing lazily over
the worn stones. Filled with these agreeable anticipations, we steal
downstairs, and see our guide standing like a sentinel at the door. He
is prepared to accompany us, but we decline his services, explaining
curtly that we are only going out for a walk, and need no protection
whatever. It sounds decisive--to us--and we congratulate one another
upon such well-timed firmness, until, glancing back, we perceive our
determined guardian following us on the other side of the street. Now,
as long as we keep straight ahead, pretending to know our way, we are
safe; but the trouble is we don’t know our way, and in a few minutes
it is necessary to consult Baedeker and find out where we are. We do
this as furtively as possible, gathering around the book to hide it,
and moving slowly on while we read. But such foolish precautions are in
vain. The guide has seen us pause. He knows that we are astray, that we
are trying to right ourselves,--a thing he never permits,--and he is
by our side in an instant. If the ladies desire to see the cathedral,
they must turn to the left. It is very near,--not more than a few
minutes’ walk,--and it is open until six o’clock. We think of saying
that we don’t want to see the cathedral, and of turning to the right;
but this course appears rather too perilous. The fact is, we do want
to see it very much; and we should like, moreover, to see it without
delay, and alone. So we thank Brocconi,--that is the guide’s name,--and
say we can find our way now without any trouble. And so we could, if
we were left to ourselves; but the knowledge that we are still being
pursued at a respectful distance, and that we dare not pause a moment
for consideration, flusters us sadly. We come to a point where two
streets meet at an acute angle, hesitate, plunge down the nearer, and
hear Brocconi’s warning voice once more at our elbows. The ladies have
taken a wrong turning. With their permission, he will point them out
the road. So we surrender at discretion, feeling all further resistance
to be useless, and are conducted to the cathedral in a pitiable state
of subjection; are marched dolorously around; are shown old tombs, and
faded pictures, and beautiful bits of mosaic; and then are led back to
the hotel, and dismissed with the assurance that we will be waited on
early the next morning, and that a carriage will be ready for us by ten.
Perhaps our conduct may appear pusillanimous to those whose resolution
has never been so severely tested. We feel this ourselves, and
deplore the cowardly strain in our natures, as we trail meekly and
disconsolately upstairs. There is a little cushioned bench just
outside my bedroom door, and I know that when I go to breakfast in
the morning Brocconi will be sitting there, waiting for his prey.
I know that when I come back from breakfast Brocconi will be still
sitting there, and that I can never leave my room without seeing him
in unquestioned and ostentatious attendance upon me. He stands up,
hat in hand, to salute me, every time I pass him; and after a while
I take to lurking, I might almost say to skulking within my chamber,
rather than encounter his disappointed and reproachful gaze. With the
natural tendency of a woman to temporize, I buy my freedom one day by
engaging his services for the next. If he will permit me to go alone
and in peace to the Greek theatre, to sit on the grassy hill amid the
wild flowers, to look at the charming view and breathe the delicious
air for a long, lazy afternoon, I will drive with him the following
morning over the dusty glaring road to Fort Euryelus, and be marched
submissively through the endless intricacies of its subterranean
corridors, and have every tiresome detail pointed out to me and
explained with merciless prolixity.
On the same lamentably weak principle, I purchase--we all
purchase--his faded and crumpled photographs, so as to be let off from
buying his “antiquities,” a forlorn collection of mouldy coins and
broken bits of terra cotta, which he carries around in a handkerchief
and hands down to us, one by one, when we are prisoners in our
carriage, and cannot refuse to look at them. He is so pained at our
giving them back again that we compromise on the photographs, though
they are the most decrepit specimens I have ever beheld; almost as worn
and flabby as the little letters of recommendation which are lent to us
for perusal, and which state with monotonous amiability that the writer
has employed Domenico Brocconi as guide and interpreter during a three
days’ stay in Syracuse, and has found him intelligent, capable, and
obliging. I know I shall have to write one of these letters before I
go away. Indeed, my conscience aches remorsefully when I think of the
number of such testimonials I have strewn broad-cast over the earth
to be a delusion and a snare to my fellow man. It never occurred to
me that any one would regard them seriously, until an acquaintance
informed me, with some asperity, that he had employed a guide on
my recommendation, and had been cheated by him. I felt very sorry
for this; for, beyond a little overcharging in the matter of fees or
carriages, which is part of the recognized perquisites of the calling,
no guide has ever cheated me. On the contrary, he has sometimes saved
me money. My aversion to him is based exclusively on the fact that he
strikes a discordant note wherever he appears. He has always something
to tell me which I don’t want to hear, and his is that leaden touch
which takes all color and grace from every theme he handles.
Constantinople, as the chosen abode of insecurity, is perhaps the
only city within the tourist’s beaten track where a guide or dragoman
is necessary for personal safety, as well as for the information
he imparts. Baedeker has ignored Constantinople, or perhaps the
authorities of that curiously misgoverned municipality have forbidden
his profane researches into their august privacy. Labor-saving devices
find scant favor with the subjects of the Sultan. Vessels may not
approach the docks to be unloaded, though there is plenty of water to
float them, because that would interfere with the immemorial privileges
of the boatmen. There is no delivery of city mail, but a man can always
be hired to carry your letter from Pera to Stamboul. Guide-books are
unknown, but a dragoman is attached to your service as soon as you
arrive, and is as inseparable as your shadow until the hour you leave.
The rivalry among these men is of a very active order, as I speedily
discovered when I stepped from the Oriental Express into that scene of
mad confusion and tumult, the Constantinople station. It was drizzling
hard. I was speechless from a heavy cold. We were all three worn out
with the absurd and fatiguing travesty of a quarantine on the frontier.
Twenty Turkish porters made a wild rush for our bags the instant the
train stopped, and fought over them like howling beasts. A tall man
with a cast in his eye, handed me a card on which my own name was
legibly written, and said he was the dragoman sent by the hotel to take
us in charge. A little man with a nervous and excited manner handed me
a card on which also my name was legibly written, and said _he_ was
the dragoman sent by the hotel to take us in charge. It was a case for
the judgment of Solomon; and I lacked not only the wisdom to decide,
but the voice in which to utter my decision. There was nothing for
it but to let the claimants fight it out, which they proceeded to do
with fervor, rolling over the station floor and pounding each other
vigorously. The tall man, being much the better combatant, speedily
routed his rival, dragged him ignominiously from the carriage when
he attempted to scale it, and carried us off in triumph. But the
race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The
little dragoman was game enough not to know when he was beaten. He
followed us in another carriage, and made good his case, evidently,
with the hotel landlord; for we found him, placid and smiling, in
the corridor next morning, waiting his orders for the day. I never
ventured to ask how this change came about, lest indiscreet inquiries
should bring a second dragoman upon my devoted head; so Demetrius
remained our guide, philosopher, and friend for the three weeks we
spent in Constantinople. He was not a bad little man, on the whole;
was extremely patient about carrying wraps, and was honestly anxious
we should suffer no annoyance in the streets. But his knowledge upon
any subject was of the haziest character. He had a perfect talent for
getting us to places at the wrong time,--but that may have been partly
our fault,--and if there ever was anything interesting to tell, he
assuredly never told it. On the other hand, he considered that, to
our Occidental ignorance, the simplest architectural devices needed
an explanation. He would say, “This is a well,” “That is a doorway,”
“These are columns supporting the roof,” with all the benevolent
simplicity of Harry and Lucy’s father enlightening those very
intelligent and ignorant little people.
The only severe trial that Demetrius suffered in our service was the
occasional attendance of the two Kavasses from the American Legation,
whose protection was afforded us twice or thrice, through the courtesy
of the ministry. These magnificent creatures threw our poor little
dragoman so completely into the shade, and regarded him with such
open and manifest contempt, that all his innocent airs of importance
shriveled into humility and dejection. It is but honest to state that
the Kavasses appeared to despise us quite as cordially as they did
Demetrius; but we sustained their scorn with more tranquillity for the
sake of the splendor and distinction they imparted. One of them was a
very handsome and very supercilious Turk, who never condescended to
look at us nor to speak to us; the other a Circassian, whose pride
was tempered by affability, and who was good enough to hold with us
the strictly necessary intercourse. I hear it is said now and then
by censorious critics that American women are the most arrogant of
their sex, affecting a superiority which is based upon no justifiable
claim. But I candidly admit that all such airy notions, born of the
New World and of the nineteenth century, dwindled rapidly away before
the disdainful composure of those two lordly Mohammedans. The old
primitive instincts are never wholly eradicated; only overlaid with the
acquired sentiments of our time and place. I have not been without my
share of self-assertion; but my meekness of spirit in Constantinople,
the perfectly natural feeling I had in being snubbed by two ignorant
Kavasses blazing with gold embroidery, will always remain one of the
salutary humiliations of my life.
I think there must be some secret system of communication by which
the guides of one city consign you to the guides of another; for I
know that when we reached Piræus at five o’clock in the morning, an
olive-skinned, low-voiced, mysterious-looking person, who reminded
me strikingly of Eugene Aram, boarded the ship, knocked at my cabin
door, and gave me to understand, in excellent English, that we were
to be his property in Athens. He said he was not connected with any
hotel, but would be happy to wait on us wherever we went; and he had
all three of our names neatly written in a little book. I responded as
firmly as I could that I did not think we should require his services;
whereupon he smiled darkly, and hinted that we would find it difficult,
and perhaps dangerous, to go about alone. In reality, Athens is as
well conducted as Boston, and very much easier to traverse; but I did
not know this then, so, after some hesitation, I promised to employ
my mysterious visitor if I had any occasion for a guide. It was a
promise not easily forgotten. Morning, noon, and night he haunted us,
always with the same air of mingled secrecy and determination. As it
chanced, I was ill for several days, and unable to leave my room.
Regularly after breakfast there would come a low, resolute knock at my
door, and Eugene Aram, pallid, noiseless, authoritative, would slip
in, and stand like a sentinel by my bed. It was extremely depressing,
and always reminded me of the presentation of a _lettre de cachet_.
I felt that I was wronging my self-elected guide by not getting well
and going about, and his civil inquiries anent my health carried with
them an undertone of reproach. Yet with returning vigor came a firm
determination to escape this melancholy thraldom; and it is one of
my keenest pleasures to remember that on the golden afternoon when I
first climbed the Acropolis, and looked through the yellow columns
of the Parthenon upon the cloudless skies of Greece, and saw the sea
gleaming like a silver band, and watched the glory of the sunset from
the terrace of the temple of Nike, no Eugene Aram was there to mar my
absolute contentment. This was the enchanted hour, never to be repeated
nor surpassed, and this hour was mine to enjoy. When I am setting forth
my trials with all the wordy eloquence of discontent, let me “think of
my marcies,” and be grateful.
Thanks to the protecting hand of England, Cairo, which once was little
better than Constantinople, is now as safe as London. On the Nile,
it is hardly possible to leave one’s boat, save under the care of
a dragoman. Even at Luxor and Assuân, the attentions of the native
population are of a rather overpowering character. But at Cairo,
whether amid the hurrying crowds in the bazaars or on the quiet road
to the Gézirah, there is no annoyance of any kind to be apprehended.
Nevertheless, a little army of guides is connected with every hotel,
and troups of irregulars line the streets, and press their services
upon you as you pass. I noticed that while a great many Americans
had a dragoman permanently attached to their service, and never went
out unaccompanied, the English and Germans resolutely ignored these
expensive and irritating inutilities. If by chance they desired
any attendant, they employed in preference one of the ruminating
donkey-boys who stand all day, supple and serious, alongside of their
melancholy little beasts. Upon one occasion, an Englishwoman was
just stepping into her carriage, having engaged a boy to accompany
her to the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, when a tall and turbaned
Turk, indignant at this invasion of his privileges, called out to her
scornfully, “Do you think that lad will be able to explain to you
anything you are going to see?” The Englishwoman turned her smiling
face. I fancied she would be angry at the impertinence, but she was
not. She had that absolute command of herself and of the situation
which is the birthright of her race. “It is precisely because I know he
can explain nothing that I take him with me,” she said. “If I could be
equally sure of your silence, I should be willing to take you.”
Local guides are as numerous and as systematic in Cairo as in more
accessible cities, and they have the same curious tendency to multiply
themselves around any object of interest, and to subdivide the scanty
labor attendant on its exhibition. When we went to the Coptic church,
for example, a heavy wooden door was opened for us by youth number one,
who pointed out the enormous size of the venerable key he carried,
and then consigned us to the care of youth number two, who led the
way through a narrow, picturesque lane to the church itself, and gave
us into the charge of youth number three, a handsome, bare-legged boy
with brilliant eyes, who lit a taper and kindly conducted us around.
When we had examined the dim old pictures, and the faded missals, and
the beautiful screens of inlaid wood, and the grotto wherein the Holy
Family is piously believed to have found shelter, this acute child
presented us to a white-haired Coptic priest, and explained that it
was to him we were to offer our fee. I promptly did as I was bidden,
and the boy, after carefully examining and approving the amount,--the
priest himself never glanced at it nor at us,--requested further
payment for his own share of work. I gave him three piastres, being
much pleased with his businesslike methods, whereupon he handed us
back to youth number two, who had been waiting all this time at the
church door, and whom I was obliged to pay for leading us through the
lane. Then, after satisfying youth number one, who mounted guard at the
gate, we were permitted to regain our carriage and drive away amid a
clamorous crowd of beggars. It was as admirable a piece of organized
work as I have ever seen, and would have done credit to a labor union
in America.
On precisely the same principle, we often find the railed-off chapels
of an Italian church to be each under the care of a separate sacristan,
who jingles his keys alluringly, and does his best to beguile us into
his own especial inclosure. I have suffered a good deal in Sicily and
in Naples from sacristans who could not be brought to understand that I
had come to church to pray. The mark of the tourist is like the brand
of Cain, recognizable to all men. Even one’s nationality is seldom a
matter of doubt, and an Italian sacristan who cherishes the opinion
that English-speaking people stand self-convicted of heresy, can see
no reason for my entering the sacred edifice save to be shown its
treasures with all speed. So he beckons to me from dark corners, and
waves his keys at me; and, finding me unresponsive to these appeals, he
sidles through the little kneeling throng to tell me in a loud whisper
that Domenichino’s picture is over the third altar on the left, or that
forty-five princes of the house of Aragon are buried in the sacristy.
By this time devout worshipers are beginning to look at me askance, as
if it were my fault that I am disturbing them. So I get up and follow
my persecutor, and stare at the forty-five wooden sarcophagi of the
Aragonese princes, draped with velvet palls, and ranged on shelves like
dry goods. Then, mass being over, I slip out of St. Domenica’s, and
make my way to the cathedral of St. Januarius, where another sacristan
instantly lays hands on me, and carries me down to the crypt to see the
reliquary of the saint. He is a stout, smiling man, with an unbounded
enthusiasm for all he has to show. Even the naked, fat, Cupid-like
angels who riot here as wantonly as in every other Neapolitan church
fill him with admiration and delight. He taps them on their plump
little stomachs, and exclaims, “Tout en marbre! Tout en marbre!”
looking at me meanwhile with wide-open eyes, as if marble angels
were as much of a rarity in Italy as in Greenland. By the time his
transports have moderated sufficiently to allow me to depart, a tall,
grim sacristan, with nothing to show, is locking up the cathedral, and
I am obliged to go away with all my prayers unsaid.
It is possible to be too discursive when a pet grievance has an airing.
Therefore, instead of lingering, as I should like to do, over a still
unexhausted subject; instead of telling about a dreadful one-eyed man
who pursued me like a constable into the cathedral of Catania, and
fairly arrested me at St. Agatha’s shrine, whither I had fled for
protection; instead of describing an unscrupulous fraud at Amalfi who
led me for half a mile in the dripping rain through a soaked little
valley, under pretense of showing me a macaroni factory, and then
naïvely confessed we had gone in the opposite direction because the
walk was so charming,--instead of denouncing the accumulated crimes of
the whole sinful fraternity, I will render tardy justice to one Roman
guide whose incontestable merits deserve a grateful acknowledgment.
He was a bulky and very dirty man in the Castle of St. Angelo, to
whose care fourteen tourists, English, French, and Germans, were
officially committed. He spoke no language but his own, and he set
himself resolutely to work to make every visitor understand all he had
to tell by the help of that admirable pantomimic art in which Italians
have such extraordinary facility. It was impossible to misapprehend
him. If he wished to show us the papal bed-chamber, he retired into
one corner and snored loudly on an imaginary couch. When we came to
the dining-room, he made a feint of eating a hearty meal. With amazing
agility he illustrated the manner of Benvenuto Cellini’s escape, and
the breaking of his ankles in the fall. He decapitated himself without
a sword as Beatrice Cenci, and racked himself without a rack as another
unhappy prisoner. He lowered himself as a drawbridge, and even tried
to explode himself as a cannon, in his efforts to make us better
acquainted with the artillery. He was absolutely serious all this time,
yet never seemed flustered nor annoyed by the peals of irresistible
laughter which greeted some of his most difficult representations.
He had but one object in view,--to be understood. If we were amused,
that did not matter; and if we were a little rude, that was merely the
manner of foreigners. I do not wish to close a chapter of fault-finding
without one word of praise for this clever and conscientious actor,
whose performance was limited to the ignoble task of conducting
travelers through a dilapidated fortress, but whom I cannot consent to
look upon as a guide.
LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION.
In that accurate and interesting study of Puritanism which Alice Morse
Earle has rather laboriously entitled “Customs and Fashions in Old New
England,” there is a delightful chapter devoted to the little boys
and girls who lived their chastened lives under the uncompromising
discipline of the church. With many prayers, with scanty play, with
frequent exhortations, and a depressing consciousness of their own
sinful natures, these children walked sedately in the bleak atmosphere
of continual correction. By way of pastime, they were taken to church,
to baptisms, and to funerals, and for reading they had the “Early
Piety Series,” “Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes,” “The Conversion and
Exemplary Lives of Several Young Children,” and a “Particular Account
of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions and Devout Exercises observed of
late in Many Children in Siberia,”--a safe and remote spot in which
to locate something too “extraordinary” for belief. To this list
Cotton Mather added “Good Lessons for Children in Verse,” by no means
a sprightly volume, and “Some Examples of Children in whom the Fear of
God was remarkably Budding before they died; in several parts of New
England.”
Small wonder that under this depressing burden of books, little boys
and girls, too young to know the meaning of sin, were assailed with
grievous doubts concerning their salvation. Small wonder that Betty
Sewall, an innocent child of nine, “burst into an amazing cry” after
reading a page or two of Cotton Mather, and said “she was afraid she
should goe to Hell, her sins were not pardon’d.” It is heart-rending
to read Judge Sewall’s entry in his diary: “Betty can hardly read
her chapter for weeping. Tells me she is afraid she is gone back”
(at nine). “Does not taste that sweetness in reading the Word which
once she did. Fears that what was upon her is worn off. I said what I
could to her, and in the evening pray’d with her alone.” It is scant
comfort for us, recalling the misery of this poor wounded child, and
of many others who suffered with her, to know that Phebe Bartlett
was ostentatiously converted at four; that Jane Turell “asked many
astonishing questions about divine mysteries,” before she was five;
and that an infant son of Cotton Mather’s “made a most edifying end in
praise and prayer,” at the age of two years and seven months. We cannot
forget the less happy children who, instead of developing into baby
prodigies or baby prigs, fretted out their helpless hearts in nightly
fears of Hell.
Nor is there in the whole of this painful precocity one redeeming touch
of human childhood, such as that joyous setting forth of the little
St. Theresa and her brother to convert the inhabitants of Morocco,
and be martyred for their faith; an enterprise as natural to keenly
imaginative children of the sixteenth century as was the expedition two
hundred years later of the six little Blue Coat boys, who, without map,
chart, or compass, without luggage, provisions, or money, started out
one bright spring morning to find Philip Quarll’s Island. Sunlight and
shadow are not farther apart than the wholesome love of adventure which
religion as well as history and fairy-lore can inspire in the childish
heart, and that morbid conscientiousness which impels the young to the
bitter task of self-analysis. The most depressing thing about pious
fiction for little people is that it so seldom takes human nature into
account. I read not long ago an English Sunday-school story in which a
serious aunt severely reproves her twelve-year-old niece for saying she
would like to go to India and have a Bible class of native children, by
telling her it is vain and foolish to talk in that way, and that what
she can do is to be a better child herself, and save up her money for
the mission-box. Now the dream of going to a far-off land and doing
good in a lavish, semi-miraculous fashion is as natural for a pious and
imaginative little girl, as is the dream of fighting savages for a less
pious but equally imaginative little boy. It is well, no doubt, that
all generous impulses should have some practical outlet; but the aunt’s
dreary counsel was too suggestive of those ethical verses, familiar to
my own infancy, which began:--
“‘A penny I have,’ little Mary said,
As she thoughtfully raised her hand to her head,”
and described the anxious musings of this weak child as to how the
money might be most profitably employed, until at length she relieved
herself of all moral obligation by putting it into the mission-box.
It is not possible for a real little girl to sympathize with such a
situation. She may give away her pennies impulsively, as Charles Lamb
gave away his plum-cake,--to his lasting regret and remorse,--but she
does not start out by worrying over her serious responsibility as a
capitalist.
The joyless literature provided for the children of Puritanism in the
New World was little less lugubrious than that which a century later,
in many a well-tended English nursery, made the art of reading a
thoroughly undesirable accomplishment. Happy the boy who could escape
into the air and sunshine with Robinson Crusoe. Happy the girl who
found a constant friend in Miss Edgeworth’s little Rosamond. For always
on the book-shelf sat, sombre and implacable, the unsmiling “Fairchild
Family,” ready to hurl texts at everybody’s head, and to prove at
a moment’s notice the utter depravity of the youthful heart. It is
inconceivable that such a book should have retained its place for many
years, and that thousands of little readers should have plodded their
weary way through its unwholesome pages. For combined wretchedness and
self-righteousness, for groveling fear and a total lack of charity,
the “Fairchild Family” are without equals in literature, and, I hope,
in life. Lucy Fairchild, at nine, comes to the conclusion “that there
are very few real Christians in the world, and that a great part of
the human race will be finally lost;” and modestly proposes to her
brother and sister that they should recite some verses “about mankind
having bad hearts.” This is alacritously done, the other children being
more than equal to the emergency; and each in turn quotes a text to
prove that “the nature of man, after the fall of Adam, is utterly and
entirely sinful.” Lest this fundamental truth should be occasionally
forgotten, a prayer is composed for Lucy, which she commits to memory,
and a portion of which runs thus:--
“My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile, so full of sin, that even
when I appear to be tolerably good, even then I am sinning. When I am
praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing other people read the Bible,
even then I sin. When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I sin.”
In fact, an anxious alertness, a continual apprehension of ill-doing,
is the keynote of this extraordinary book; and that its author, Mrs.
Sherwood, considered the innocence of childhood and even of infancy
an insufficient barrier to evil, is proven by an anecdote which she
tells of herself in her memoirs. When she was in her fourth year, a
gentleman, a guest of her father’s, “who shall be nameless,” took her
on his knee, and said something to her which she could not understand,
but which she felt at once was not fit for female ears, “especially not
for the female ears of extreme youth.” Indignant at this outrage to
propriety, she exclaimed, “You are a naughty man!” whereupon he became
embarrassed, and put her down upon the floor. That a baby of three
should be so keen to comprehend, or rather not to comprehend, but to
suspect an indecorum, seems well-nigh incredible, and I confess that
ever since reading this incident I have been assailed with a hopeless,
an undying curiosity to know what it was the “nameless” gentleman said.
The painful precocity of children anent matters profane and spiritual
is insisted upon so perseveringly by writers of Sunday-school
literature that Mrs. Sherwood’s infancy appears to have been the
recognized model for them all. In one of these stories, which claims
to be the veracious history of a very young child, compared with whom,
however, the “fairy babes of tombs and graves” are soberly natural
and realistic, I found I was expected to believe that an infant a
year old loved to hear her father read the Bible, and would lie in
her cot with clasped hands, listening to the precious words. Though
she could say but little,--at twelve months,--yet when she saw her
parents sitting down to breakfast without either prayers or reading,
she would put out her hands, and cry “No, no!” and look wistfully at
the Bible on the shelf. When two years old, “she was never weary at
church,” nor at Sunday-school, where she sat gazing rapturously in
her teacher’s face. It is unnecessary for any one familiar with such
tales to be assured that as soon as she could speak plainly she went
about correcting, not only all the children in the neighborhood, but
all the adults as well. A friend of her father’s was in the habit of
petting and caressing her, though Heaven knows how he had the temerity,
and she showed him every mark of affection until she heard of some
serious wrong-doing--drunkenness, I think--on his part. The next time
he came to the house she refused sadly to sit on his knee, “but told
him earnestly her feelings about all that he had done.” Finally she
fell ill, and after taking bitter medicines with delight, and using her
last breath to reproach her father for “not coming up to prayers,” she
died at the age of four and a half years, to the unexpressed, because
inexpressible, relief of everybody. The standard of infant death-beds
has reached a difficult point of perfection since Cotton Mather’s baby
set the example by making its “edifying end in praise and prayer,”
before it was three years old.
The enormous circulation of Sunday-school books, both in England
and America, has resulted in a constant exchange of commodities.
For many years we have given as freely as we have received; and if
English reviewers from the first were disposed to look askance upon
our contributions, English nurseries absorbed them unhesitatingly,
and English children read them, if not with interest, at least with
meekness and docility. When the “Fairchild Family” and the “Lady of the
Manor” crossed the Atlantic to our hospitable shores, we sent back,
returning evil for evil, the “Youth’s Book of Natural Theology,” in
which small boys and girls argue their way, with some kind preceptor’s
help, from the existence of a chicken to the existence of God, thus
learning at a tender age the first lessons of religious doubt. At
the same time that the “Leila” books and “Mary and Florence” found
their way to legions of young Americans, “The Wide, Wide World,”
“Queechy,” and “Melbourne House,”--with its intolerable little prig
of a heroine--were, if possible, more immoderately read in England
than at home. And in this case, the serious wrong-doing lies at our
doors. If the “Leila” books be rather too full of sermons and pious
conversations, long conversations of an uncompromisingly didactic
order, they are nevertheless interesting and wholesome, brimming with
adventures, and humanized by a very agreeable sense of fun. Moreover,
these English children, although incredibly good, have the grace to be
unconscious of their goodness. Even Selina, who, like young Wackford
Squeers, is “next door but one to a cherubim,” is apparently unaware
of the fact. Leila does not instruct her father. She receives counsel
quite humbly from his lips, though she is full eight years old when
the first volume opens. Matilda has never any occasion to remonstrate
gently with her mother; and little Alfred fails, in the whole course of
his infant life, to once awaken in his parents’ friends an acute sense
of their own unworthiness.
This conservative attitude is due, perhaps, to the rigid prejudices
of the Old World. In our freer air, children, released from thraldom,
develop swiftly into guides and teachers. We first introduced into the
literature of the Sunday-school the offensively pious little Christian
who makes her father and mother, her uncles and aunts, even her
venerable grandparents, the subjects of her spiritual ministrations. We
first taught her to confront, Bible in hand, the harmless adults who
had given her birth, and to annihilate their feeble arguments with
denunciatory texts. We first surrounded her with the persecutions of
the worldly-minded, that her virtues might shine more glaringly in
the gloom, and disquisitions on duty be never out of place. Daisy,
in “Melbourne House,” is an example of a perniciously good child who
has the conversion of her family on her hands, and is well aware of
the dignity of her position. Her trials and triumphs, her tears and
prayers, her sufferings and rewards, fill two portly volumes, and have
doubtless inspired many a young reader to set immediately about the
correction of her parents’ faults. The same lesson is taught with even
greater emphasis by a more recent writer, whose works, I am told, are
so exceedingly popular that she is not permitted to lay down her pen.
Hundreds of letters reach her every year, begging for a new “Elsie”
book; and the amiability with which she responds to the demand has
resulted in a fair-sized library,--twice as many volumes probably as
Sir Walter Scott ever read in the whole course of his childish life.
Now if, as the “Ladies’ Home Journal” informs us, “there has been
no character in American juvenile fiction who has attained more
widespread interest and affection than Elsie Dinsmore,” then children
have altered strangely since I was young, and “skipping the moral” was
a recognized habit of the nursery. It would be impossible to skip the
moral of the “Elsie” books, because the residuum would be nothingness.
Lucy Fairchild and Daisy Randolph are hardened reprobates compared with
Elsie Dinsmore. It is true we are told when the first book opens that
she is “not yet perfect;” but when we find her taking her well-worn
Bible out of her desk--she is eight years old--and consoling herself
with texts for the injustice of grown-up people, we begin to doubt
the assertion. When we hear her say to a visitor old enough to be her
father: “Surely you know that there is no such thing as a little sin.
Don’t you remember about the man who picked up sticks on the Sabbath
day?” the last lingering hope as to her possible fallibility dies in
our dejected bosoms. We are not surprised after this to hear that she
is unwilling to wear a new frock on Sunday, lest she should be tempted
to think of it in church; and we are fully prepared for the assurance
that she knows her father “is not a Christian,” and that she “listens
with pain” to his unprincipled conjecture that when a man leads an
honest, upright, moral life, is regular in his attendance at church,
and observes all the laws, he probably goes to heaven. This sanguine
statement is as reprehensible to Elsie as it would have been to the
Fairchild family; and when Mr. Dinsmore--a harmless, but very foolish
and consequential person--is taken ill, his little daughter pours out
her heart “in agonizing supplication that her dear, dear papa might be
spared, _at least until he was fit to go to Heaven_.”
A few old-fashioned people will consider this mental attitude an
unwholesome one for a child, and will perhaps be of the opinion that
it is better for a little girl to do something moderately naughty
herself than to judge her parents so severely. But Elsie is a young
Rhadamanthus, from whose verdicts there is no appeal. She sees with
dismay her father amusing himself with a novel on Sunday, and begs
at once that she may recite to him some verses. Forgetful of her
principles, he asks her, when convalescing from his tedious illness,
to read aloud to him for an hour. Alas! “The book her father bade
her read was simply a fictitious moral tale, without a particle of
religious truth in it, and, Elsie’s conscience told her, entirely unfit
for the Sabbath.” In vain Mr. Dinsmore reminds her that he is somewhat
older than she is, and assures her he would not ask her to do anything
he thought was wrong. “‘But, papa,’ she replied timidly,”--she is
now nine,--“‘you know the Bible says, “They measuring themselves by
themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”’”
This text failing to convince Mr. Dinsmore, he endeavors, through
wearisome chapter after chapter, to break Elsie’s heroic resolution,
until, as a final resource, she becomes ill in her turn, makes her
last will and testament, and is only induced to remain upon a sinful
earth when her father, contrite and humbled, implores her forgiveness,
and promises amendment. It never seems to occur to the author of these
remarkable stories that a child’s most precious privilege is to be
exempt from serious moral responsibility; that a supreme confidence in
the wisdom and goodness of his parents is his best safeguard; and that
to shake this innocent belief, this natural and holy creed of infancy,
is to destroy childhood itself, and to substitute the precocious
melancholy of a prig.
For nothing can be more dreary than the recital of Elsie’s sorrows and
persecutions. Every page is drenched with tears. She goes about with
“tear-swollen eyes,” she rushes to her room “shaken with sobs,” her
grief is “deep and despairing,” she “cries and sobs dreadfully,” she
“stifles her sobs,”--but this is rare,--she is “blinded with welling
tears.” In her more buoyant moments, a tear merely “trickles down her
cheek,” and on comparatively cheerful nights she is content to shed “a
few quiet tears upon her pillow.” On more serious occasions, “a low
cry of utter despair broke from her lips,” and when spoken to harshly
by her father, “with a low cry of anguish, she fell forward in a deep
swoon.” And yet I am asked to believe that this dismal, tear-soaked,
sobbing, hysterical little girl has been adopted by healthy children as
one of the favorite heroines of “American juvenile fiction.”
In all these books, the lesson of self-esteem and self-confidence
is taught on every page. Childish faults and childish virtues are
over-emphasized until they appear the only important things on earth.
Captain Raymond, a son-in-law of the grown-up Elsie, hearing that
his daughter Lulu has had trouble with her music-teacher, decides
immediately that it is his duty to leave the navy, and devote himself
to the training and discipline of his young family; a notion which, if
generally accepted, would soon leave our country without defenders.
On one occasion, Lulu, who is an unlucky girl, kicks--under sore
provocation--what she thinks is the dog, but what turns out, awkwardly
enough, to be the baby. The incident is considered sufficiently tragic
to fill most of the volume, and this is the way it is discussed by the
other children,--children who belong to an order of beings as extinct,
I believe and hope, as the dodo:--
“‘If Lu had only controlled her temper yesterday,’ said Max, ‘what a
happy family we would be.’
“‘Yes,’ sighed Grace. ‘Papa is punishing her very hard and very long;
but of course he knows best, and he loves her.’
“‘Yes, I am sure he does,’ assented Max. ‘So he won’t give her any more
punishment than he thinks she needs. It will be a fine thing for her,
and all the rest of us, too, if this hard lesson teaches her never to
get into a passion again.’”
Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies than to wallow in
self-righteousness like this!
One more serious charge must be brought against these popular
Sunday-school stories. They are controversial, and, like most
controversial tales, they exhibit an abundance of ignorance and a lack
of charity that are equally hurtful to a child. It is curious to see
women handle theology as if it were knitting, and one no longer wonders
at Ruskin’s passionate protest against such temerity. “Strange and
miserably strange,” he cries, “that while they are modest enough to
doubt their powers and pause at the threshold of sciences, where every
step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong and without
one thought of incompetency into that science at which the greatest men
have trembled, and in which the wisest have erred.” But then Ruskin, as
we all know, was equally impatient of “converted children who teach
their parents, and converted convicts who teach honest men,” and these
two classes form valuable ingredients in Sunday-school literature.
The theological arguments of the “Elsie” books would be infinitely
diverting if they were not so infinitely acrimonious. One of them,
however, is such a masterpiece of feminine pleading that its absurdity
must win forgiveness for its unkindness. A young girl, having entered
the church of Rome, is told with confidence that her hierarchy is
spoken of in the seventeenth chapter of Revelations as “Babylon the
Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” “But how
do you know,” she asks, not unnaturally, “that my church is meant by
these lines?”
“‘Because,’ is the triumphant and unassailable reply, ‘_she and she
alone answers to the description_.’”
This I consider the finest piece of reasoning that even Sunday-school
books have ever yielded me. It is simply perfect; but there are other
passages equally objectionable, and a little less amusing. In one of
the stories, Captain Raymond undertakes to convert a Scotch female
Mormon, which he does with astonishing facility, a single conversation
being sufficient to bring her to a proper frame of mind. His most
powerful argument is that Mormonism must be a false religion because it
so closely resembles Popery, which, he tolerantly adds, “has been well
called Satan’s masterpiece.” The Scotch woman who, unlike most of her
race, is extremely vague in her theology, hazards the assertion that
Popery “forbids men to marry,” while Mormonism commands it.
“‘The difference in regard to that,’ said Captain Raymond, ‘is not so
great as may appear at first sight. Both pander to men’s lusts; both
train children to forsake their parents; both teach lying and murder,
when by such crimes they are expected to advance the cause of their
church.’”
“Alas for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!”
I would the pious women who so wantonly and wickedly assail the creeds
in which their fellow creatures find help and hope, would learn at
least to express themselves--especially when their words are intended
for little children to read--with some approach to decency and
propriety.
“Gin I thocht Papistry a fause thing, _which I do_,” says the sturdy,
gentle Ettrick Shepherd, “I wadna scruple to say sae, in sic terms
as were consistent wi’ gude manners, and wi’ charity and humility of
heart. But I wad ca’ nae man a leear.” A simple lesson in Christianity
and forbearance which might be advantageously studied to-day.
There is no reason why the literature of the Sunday-school, since
it represents an important element in modern bookmaking, should be
uniformly and consistently bad. There is no reason why all the children
who figure in its pages should be such impossible little prigs; or why
all parents should be either incredibly foolish and worldly minded,
or so inflexibly serious that they never open their lips without
preaching. There is no reason why people, because they are virtuous
or repentant, should converse in stilted and unnatural language. A
contrite burglar in one of these edifying stories confesses poetically,
“My sins are more numerous than the hairs of my head or the sands of
the seashore,”--which was probably true, but not precisely the way in
which the Bill Sykeses of real life are wont to acknowledge the fact.
In another tale, an English one this time, a little girl named Helen
rashly asks her father for some trifling information. He gives it with
the usual grandiloquence, and then adds, by way of commendation: “Many
children are so foolish as to be ashamed to let those they converse
with discover that they do not comprehend everything that is said to
them, by which means they often imbibe erroneous ideas, and perhaps
remain in ignorance on many essential subjects, when, by questioning
their friends, they might easily have obtained correct and useful
knowledge.” If Helen ever ventured on another query after that, she
deserved her fate.
Above all, there is no reason why books intended for the pleasure as
well as for the profit of young children should be so melancholy and
dismal in their character. Nothing is more unwholesome than dejection,
nothing more pernicious for any of us than to fix our considerations
stedfastly upon the seamy side of life. Crippled lads, consumptive
mothers, angelic little girls with spinal complaint, infidel fathers,
lingering death-beds, famished families, innocent convicts, persecuted
schoolboys, and friendless children wrongfully accused of theft, have
held their own mournfully for many years. It is time we admitted,
even into religious fiction, some of the conscious joys of a not
altogether miserable world. I had recently in my service a pretty
little house-maid barely nineteen years old, neat, capable, and
good-tempered, but so perpetually down-cast that she threw a cloud over
our unreasonably cheerful household. I grew melancholy watching her at
work. One day, going into the kitchen, I saw lying open on her chair
a book she had just been reading. It purported to be the experience
of a missionary in one of our large cities, and was divided into nine
separate stories. These were their titles, copied verbatim on the
spot:--
The Infidel.
The Dying Banker.
The Drunkard’s Death.
The Miser’s Death.
The Hospital.
The Wanderer’s Death.
The Dying Shirt-Maker.
The Broken Heart.
The Destitute Poor.
What wonder that my little maid was sad and solemn when she recreated
herself with such chronicles as these? What wonder that, like the
Scotchman’s famous dog, “life was full o’ sairiousness” for her, when
religion and literature, the two things which should make up the sum of
our happiness, had conspired, under the guise of Sunday-school fiction,
to destroy her gayety of heart?
THE FÊTE DE GAYANT.
As far as I have ever seen provincial France, it appears to be
perpetually _en fête_. Religiously or patriotically, it is always
celebrating something; and it does so in a splendid whole-hearted
fashion, concentrating all the energy of a town into a few days or a
few hours of ardent demonstration. _Les fêtes religieuses_ are without
doubt the most charming and picturesque; and the smaller the place, the
more curious and time-honored the observances. It is wonderful, too, to
note the resources of even the poorest community. Auray, with its few
straggling streets, is little better than a village; yet here, on the
Fête du Sacré Cœur, I saw a procession so beautiful and so admirably
organized that it would have done credit to any city of France. Scores
of priests and hundreds of weather-beaten men and women moved slowly
through the narrow lanes, or knelt before the rude altars that had
been erected at every turning. Not a house in Auray that had not been
hung with linen sheets; not a rood of ground that was not strewn with
flowers and fresh green leaves. Bands of little girls, dressed in blue
and white, surrounded the statue of the Madonna, and the crimson banner
of the Sacred Heart was borne by tiny boys, with red sashes around
their waists and wreaths of red roses on their curly heads, looking
absurdly like Bonfigli’s flower-crowned angels. One solemn child
personated the infant St. John. He wore a scanty goatskin, and no more.
A toy lamb, white and woolly, was tucked under his arm, and a slender
cross grasped in his baby hand. By his side walked an equally youthful
Jeanne d’Arc, attired in a blue spangled skirt and a steel breastplate,
with a helmet, a nodding plume, a drawn sword, and a pair of gauzy
wings to indicate that approaching beatification which is the ardent
desire of every French Catholic.
“Notre mère, la France, est de Jeanne la fille,”
and she is to be congratulated on so blithely forgetting the unfilial
nature of her conduct. At every altar benediction was given to the
kneeling throng, and a regiment of boys beat their drums and sounded
their trumpets shrilly to warn those who were too far away for sight
that the sacred moment had come. It seemed incredible that so small
a place could have supplied so many people, until I remembered what
an American is wont to forget,--that in Auray there were no two
ways of thinking. Spectators, affected or disaffected, there were
none. Everybody old enough and strong enough to walk joined in the
procession; just as everybody at Lourdes joined in the great procession
of the Fête Dieu, when the hundreds were multiplied to thousands, when
the mountain side at dusk seemed on fire with myriads of twinkling
tapers, and the pilgrim chant, plaintive, monotonous, and unmusical,
was borne by the night winds far away over the quiet valley of the Gave.
On these occasions I have been grateful to the happy accident, or
design, that made me a participant in such scenes. But there have been
other days when provincial towns _en fête_ meant the acme of discomfort
for wearied travelers. It was no especial grievance, indeed, that
Compiègne should continue to celebrate the 14th of July long after
it had merged into the 15th, by playing martial airs, and firing off
guns directly under my bedroom window. I felt truly that I should have
been but little better off elsewhere; for there is not a corner of
France, nor a single French dependency, that does not go mad annually
with delight because a rabble destroyed one of the finest fortresses
in Europe. But it did seem hard that we should reach Amiens just when
the combined attractions of the races and a fair had filled that quiet
spot with tumult and commotion. Amiens is not a town that takes kindly
to excitement. It is contemplative in character, and boisterous gayety
sits uneasily upon its tranquil streets. Even the landlady of our very
comfortable hotel appeared to recognize and deplore the incongruity of
the situation. Her house was full to overflowing; her dining-room could
not hold its famished guests; yet, instead of rejoicing, she bewailed
the hungry crowds who had wrecked the harmony of her well-ordered inn.
“If madame had only come two days ago,” she protested, “madame would
then have seen Amiens at its best; and, moreover, she would have been
properly waited on. My servants are trained, they are attentive, they
are polite, they would have taken care that madame had everything
she required. But now! What, then, does madame think of this so sad
disorder?”
Madame assured her she thought the servants were doing all that could
be required of mortal men; and, indeed, these nimble creatures fairly
flew from guest to guest, and from room to room. I never saw one of
them even lapse into a walk. I tried to describe to her the behavior of
domestics in our own land, recalling to memory a sudden invasion of one
of the Yellowstone Park hotels by a band of famished tourists,--their
weary waiting, their humble attitude, their meek appeals for food,
and the stolid indifference of the negro waiters to their most urgent
needs. But this imperious little Frenchwoman merely held up her hands
in horror at such anarchical conduct. A mob of communists engaged in
demolishing the cathedral of Amiens would have seemed less terrible
to her than a mob of servants refusing to wait swiftly upon hungry
travelers. She was so serious in her anxiety for our comfort that her
mind appeared visibly relieved when, on the second day, we decided
that we too were weary of noise and excitement, and would move on that
afternoon to Douai. There, at least, we told ourselves, we should find
the drowsy quiet we desired. The image of the dull old town--which we
had never seen--rose up alluringly before us. We pictured even the
station, tranquil and empty like so many stations in rural France, with
a leisurely little engine sauntering in occasionally, and a solitary
porter roused from his nap, and coming forward, surprised but smiling,
to handle our numerous bags. These pretty fancies soothed our nerves
and beguiled our idle idleness until the three hours’ trip was over,
and Douai was reached at last. Douai! Yes; but Douai in a state of
apparent frenzy, with a surging crowd whose uproar could be heard above
our engine’s shriek,--hundreds of people rushing hither and thither,
climbing into cars, clamoring over friends, laughing, shouting, blowing
trumpets, and behaving generally in a fashion which made Amiens silent
by comparison. For one moment we stood stunned by the noise and
confusion; and then the horrid truth forced itself upon our unwilling
minds: Douai was _en fête_.
We made our way through the throng of people into the square outside
the station, and took counsel briefly with one another. We were tired,
we were hungry, and it was growing late; but should we ignore these
melancholy conditions, and push bravely on for Lille? Lille, says
Baedeker, has “two hundred thousand inhabitants,” and cities of that
size have grown too big for play. We thought of the discomforts which
probably awaited us at Douai in a meagre inn, crowded with noisy
_bourgeois_, and were turning resolutely back, when suddenly there
came the sound of drums playing a gay and martial air, and in another
minute, surrounded by a clamorous mob, the Sire de Gayant and his
family moved slowly into sight.
Thirty feet high was the Sire de Gayant, and his nodding plumes
overtopped the humble roofs by which he passed. His steel breastplate
glittered in the evening sun; his mighty mace looked like a May-pole;
his countenance was grave and stern. The human pygmies by his side
betrayed their insignificance at every step. They ran backward and
forward, making all the foolish noises they could. They rode on
hobby-horses. They played ridiculous antics. They were but children,
after all, gamboling irresponsibly at the feet of their own Titanic
toy. Behind the Sire de Gayant came his wife, in brocaded gown, with
imposing farthingale and stomacher. Pearls wreathed her hair and fell
upon her massive bosom. Earrings a handbreadth in size hung from her
ears, and a fan as big as a fire-screen was held lightly by a silver
chain. Like Lady Corysande, “her approaching mien was full of majesty;”
yet she looked affable and condescending, too, as befitted a dame of
parts and noble birth. Her children manifested in their bearing more of
pride and less of dignity. There was even something theatrical in the
velvet cap and swinging cloak of her only son; and Mademoiselle Gayant
held her head erect in conscious complacency, while her long brown
ringlets fluttered in the breeze.
“Of course the village girls
Who envy me my curls,”
she seemed to murmur as she passed stiffly by.
Happily, however, there was still another member of this
ancient family, more popular and more well beloved than all the
rest,--Mademoiselle Thérèse, “_la petite Binbin_,” who for two
hundred years has been the friend and idol of every child in Douai. A
sprightly and attractive little girl was Mademoiselle Thérèse, barely
eight feet high, and wearing a round cap and spotless pinafore. In
her hand she carried a paper windmill, that antique Douai toy with
which we see the angels and the Holy Innocents amusing themselves in
Bellegambe’s beautiful old picture, the Altar-piece of Anchin. She ran
hither and thither with uncertain footsteps, pausing now and then to
curtsy prettily to some admiring friends in a doorway; and whenever
the pressure of the crowd stopped her progress, the little children
clamored to be held up in their fathers’ arms to kiss her round,
smooth cheeks. One by one they were lifted in the air, and one by one
I saw them put their arms around la Binbin’s neck, and embrace her so
heartily that I wondered how she kept herself clean and uncrumpled amid
these manifold caresses. As she went by, the last of that strange
procession, we moved after her, without another thought of Lille and
its comfortable hotels. Comfort, forsooth! Were we not back in the
fifteenth century, when comfort had still to be invented? Was that not
the Song of Gayant which the drums were beating so gayly? And who yet
ever turned their backs upon Douai when the famous Ranz des Douaisiens
was ringing triumphantly in their ears?
For this little French town, smaller than many a ten-year-old city in
the West, has an ancient and honorable past; and her martial deeds
have been written down on more than one page of her country’s history.
The Fête de Gayant is old; so old that its origin has been lost in an
obscurity which a number of industrious scholars have tried in vain to
penetrate.
“Ce que c’est que Gayant? Ma foi, je n’en sais rien.
Ce que c’est que Gayant? Nul ne le sait en Flandre.”
The popular belief is that a knight of gigantic size fought valorously
in behalf of Douai when the city, spent and crippled, made her splendid
defense against Louis XI., and that his name is still preserved with
gratitude by the people whom he helped to save. Certain it is that the
fête dates from 1479, the year that Louis was repulsed; and whether
or not a real Gayant ever stood upon the walls, there is little doubt
that the procession celebrates that hard-won victory. But the Church
has not been backward in claiming the hero for her own, and identifying
him with St. Maurand, the blessed patron of Douai. St. Maurand, it
is said, fought for the welfare of his town as St. Iago fought for
the glory of Spain; and there is a charming legend to show how keenly
he watched over the people who trusted to his care. In 1556, on the
night following the feast of the Epiphany, Admiral Coligny planned to
surprise the city, which, ignorant of its danger, lay sleeping at the
mercy of its foe. But just as St. George, St. Mark, and St. Nicholas
aroused the old fisherman, and went out into the storm to do battle
with demons for the safety of Venice, so St. Maurand prepared to defeat
the crafty assailant of Douai. At midnight he appeared by the bedside
of the monk whose duty it was to ring the great bells of St. Amé, and
bade him arise and call the brethren to matins. The monk, failing to
recognize the august character of his visitor, protested drowsily that
it was too early, and that, after the fatigue and lengthy devotions of
the feast, it would be but humanity to allow the monastery another hour
of slumber. St. Maurand, however, insisted so sternly and so urgently
that the poor lay brother, seeing no other way to rid himself of
importunity, arose, stumbled into the belfry, and laid his hands upon
the dangling ropes. But hardly had he given them the first faint pull
when, with a mighty vibration, the bells swung to and fro as though
spirits were hurling them through the air. So furiously were they
tossed that the brazen clangor of their tongues rang out into the night
with an intensity of menace that awoke every man in Douai to a swift
recognition of his peril. Soldiers sprang to arms; citizens swarmed
out of their comfortable homes; and while the bells still pealed forth
their terrible summons, those who were first at the defenses saw for
one instant the blessed St. Maurand standing in shining armor on the
ramparts, guarding the city of his adoption as St. Michael guards the
hidden gates of paradise.
So the Church will have it that the knight Gayant is no other than the
holy son of Adalbald; and as for Madame Gayant and her family, who seem
like a questionable encumbrance upon saintship, it is clearly proved
that Gayant had neither wife nor child until 1665, when the good people
of Douai abruptly ended his cheerful days of celibacy. Indeed, there
are historians so lost to all sense of honor and propriety as to insist
that this beloved Titan owes his origin neither to Flemish heroism nor
to the guardianship of saints, but to the efforts made by the Spanish
conquerors of Douai to establish popular pastimes resembling those
of Spain. According to these base-minded antiquarians, Gayant was an
invention of Charles V., who added a variety of pageants to the yearly
procession with which the city celebrated its victory over Louis XI.;
and when the Spaniards were finally driven from the soil, the knight
remained as a popular hero, vaguely associated with earlier deeds of
arms. That he was an object of continual solicitude--and expense--is
proven by a number of entries in the archives of Douai. In 1665,
seven florins were paid to the five men who carried him through the
streets, and twenty pastars to the two boys who danced before him,
to say nothing of an additional outlay of six florins for the white
dancing-shoes provided for them. Moreover, this being his wedding year,
two hundred and eighty-three florins--a large sum for those days--were
spent on Madame Gayant’s gown, besides seventeen florins for her wig,
and over forty florins for her jewels and other decorations. A wife is
ever a costly luxury, but when she chances to be over twenty feet high,
her trousseau becomes a matter for serious consideration. In 1715, the
price of labor having risen, and the knight’s family having increased,
it cost thirty-three florins to carry them in procession, Mademoiselle
Thérèse, who was then too young to walk, being drawn in a wagon,
probably for the first time. The repainting of faces, the repairing of
armor, the replacing of lost pearls or broken fans, are all accounted
for in these careful annals; and it is through them, also, that we
learn how the Church occasionally withdrew her favor from the Sire de
Gayant, and even went so far as to place him under a ban. M. Guy de
Sève, Bishop of Arras, in 1699, and M. Louis François Marc-Hilaire de
Conzié, Bishop of Arras in 1770, were both of the opinion that the fête
had grown too secular, not to say licentious in its character, and, in
spite of clamorous discontent, the procession was sternly prohibited.
But French towns are notably wedded to their idols. Douai never ceased
to love and venerate her gigantic knight; and after a time, perhaps
through the good offices of St. Maurand, he overcame his enemies,
reëstablished his character with the Church, and may be seen to-day, as
we had the happiness of seeing him, carried in triumph through those
ancient streets that welcomed him four hundred years ago.
The Fête de Gayant is not a brief affair, like Guy Fawkes day or the
Fourth of July. It lasts from the 8th of July until the 11th, and is
made the occasion of prolonged rejoicing and festivity. In the public
square, boys are tilting like knights of old, or playing antiquated
games that have descended to them from their forefathers. Greased poles
hung with fluttering prizes tempt the unwary; tiny donkeys, harnessed
and garlanded with flowers, are led around by children; and a discreet
woman in spangled tights sits languidly on a trapeze, waiting for the
sous to be collected before beginning her performance. From this post
of vantage she espies us standing on the outskirts of the crowd, and
sends her little son, a pretty child, brave in gilt and tinsel, to beg
from us.
As it chances, I have given all my sous to earlier petitioners, and I
open my collapsed pocket book to show him how destitute I am. With a
swift corresponding gesture he turns his little tin canister upside
down, and shakes it plaintively, proving that it is even emptier than
my purse. This appeal is irresistible. In the dearth of coppers, a
silver coin is found for him, which his mother promptly acknowledges
by going conscientiously through the whole of her slender répertoire.
Meanwhile, the child chatters fluently with us. He travels all the
time, he tells us, and has been to Italy and Switzerland. His father
can speak Italian and a little English. He likes the English people
best of all,--a compliment to our supposed nationality; they are the
richest, most generous, most charming and beautiful ladies in the
world. He says this, looking, not at my companions, who in some sort
merit the eulogium, but straight at me, with a robust guile that is
startling in its directness. I have given the franc. To me is due the
praise. Poor little lad! It must be a precarious and slender income
earned by that jaded mother, even in time of fête; for provincial
France, though on pleasure bent, hath, like Mrs. Gilpin, a very frugal
mind. She does not fling money about with British prodigality, nor
consume gallons of beer with German thirst, nor sink her scanty savings
in lottery tickets with Italian fatuity. No, she drinks her single
glass of wine, or cider, or syrup and water, and looks placidly at all
that may be seen for nothing, and experiences the joys of temperance.
She knows that her strength lies in husbanding her resources, and that
vast are the powers of thrift.
Meanwhile, each day brings its allotted diversions. Gayly decorated
little boats are sailing on the Scarpe, and fancying themselves a
regatta. Archers are contesting for prizes in the Place St. Amé, where,
hundreds of years ago, their forefathers winged their heavy bolts.
A _carrousel vélocipédique_ is to be followed by a ball; carrier
pigeons are being freed in the Place Carnot; a big balloon is to
ascend from the esplanade; and excellent concerts are played every
afternoon in the pretty Jardin des Plantes. It is hard to make choice
among so many attractions, especially as two days out of the four the
Sire de Gayant and his family march through the streets, and draw us
irresistibly after them. But we see the archers, and the pigeons, and
the balloon, which takes three hours to get ready, and three minutes
to be out of sight, carrying away in its car a grizzled aeronaut,
and an adventurous young woman who embraces all her friends with
dramatic fervor, and unfurls the flag of France as she ascends, to the
unutterable admiration of the crowd. We hear a concert, also, sitting
comfortably in the shade, and thinking how pleasant it would be to have
a glass of beer to help the music along. But the natural affinity,
the close and enduring friendship between music and beer which the
Germans understand so well, the French have yet to discover. They are
learning to drink this noble beverage--in small doses--and to forgive
it its Teutonic flavor. I have seen half a dozen men sitting in front
of a restaurant at Lille or at Rouen, each with a tiny glass of beer
before him; but I have never beheld it poured generously out to the
thunderous accompaniment of a band. Even at Marseilles, where, faithful
to destiny, we encountered a musical fête so big and grand that three
hotels rejected us, and the cabmen asked five francs an hour,--even
amid this tumult of sweet sounds, from which there was no escaping, we
failed ignominiously when we sought to hearten ourselves to a proper
state of receptivity with beer.
At the Douai concerts no one dreamed of drinking anything. The
townspeople sat in decorous little groups under the trees, talking
furtively when the loudness of the clarionets permitted them, and
reserving their enthusiastic applause for the Chant de Gayant, with
which, as in honor bound, each entertainment came to a close. Young
girls, charmingly dressed, lingered by their mothers’ sides, never even
lifting their dark eyes to note the fine self-appreciation of the men
who passed them. If they spoke at all, it was in fluttering whispers
to one another; if they looked at anything, it was at one another’s
gowns. They are seldom pretty, these sallow daughters of France; yet,
like Gautier’s Carmen, their ugliness has in it a grain of salt from
that ocean out of which Venus rose. No girls in the whole wide world
lead duller lives than theirs. They have neither the pleasures of a
large town nor the freedom of a little one. They may not walk with
young companions, even of their own sex. They may not so much as to go
church alone. Novels, romances, poetry, plays, operas, all things that
could stimulate their imaginations and lift them out of the monotonous
routine of life, are sternly prohibited. Perpetual espionage forbids
the healthy growth of character and faculty, which demand some freedom
and solitude for development. The strict seclusion of a convent school
is exchanged for a colorless routine of small duties and smaller
pleasures. And yet these young girls, bound hand and foot by the
narrowest conventionalities, are neither foolish nor insipid. A dawning
intelligence, finer than humored precocity can ever show, sits on each
tranquil brow. When they speak, it is with propriety and grace. In the
restrained alertness of their brown eyes, in their air of simplicity
and self-command, in the instinctive elegance of their dress, one
may read, plainly written, the subtle possibilities of the future.
That offensive and meaningless phrase, the woman problem, is seldom
heard in France, where all problems solve themselves more readily than
elsewhere. Midway between the affectionate subservience of German wives
and daughters and the gay arrogance of our own, with more self-reliance
than the English, and a clearer understanding of their position than
all the other three have ever grasped, Frenchwomen find little need to
wrangle for privileges which they may easily command. The resources
of tact and good taste are well-nigh infinite, and to them is added
a capacity for administration and affairs which makes the French
gentleman respect his wife’s judgment, and places the French shopkeeper
at the mercy of his spouse. In whatever walk of life these young
provincial girls are destined to tread, they will have no afflicting
doubts as to the limits of their usefulness. They will probably never
even pause to ask themselves what men would do without them, nor to
point a lesson vaingloriously from the curious fact that Douai gave
Gayant a wife.
CAKES AND ALE.
“The Muses smell of wine.”
It is with reasonable hesitation that I venture upon a theme
which no pleading words of Horace can ever make acceptable to a
nineteenth-century conscience. The world at present is full of people
to whom drinking-songs are inseparably associated with drinking habits,
and drinking habits with downright drunkenness; and it would be hard to
persuade them that the sweet Muses have never smiled upon the joyless
bestiality which wrecks the lives of men. Even in days long past, when
consciences had still to be developed, and poets sang that wine was
made to scatter the cares of earth, the crowning grace of self-control
was always the prize of youth. When little Aristion, her curls crowned
with roses, drained the contents of three golden goblets before
beginning her dance, she was probably as careful to avoid unseemly
intoxication as is the college athlete of to-day training for the
gentle game of football; yet none the less her image is abhorrent to
our peculiar morality, which can ill endure such irresponsible gayety
of heart. The perpetual intrusion of ethics into art has begotten a
haunting anxiety lest perchance for one glad half-hour we should forget
that it is our duty to be serious. I had this lesson forcibly impressed
upon me a few years ago when I wrote a harmless essay upon war-songs,
and a virtuous critic reminded me, with tearful earnestness, that while
there was nothing really hurtful in such poetry, it would be better far
if I turned my attention to the nobler contest which Lady Somerset was
then waging so valiantly against intemperance.
Now, to the careless mind, it does not at first sight appear that
war-songs, considered solely in their literary aspect, have any
especial connection with intemperance. I am not even prepared to
admit that drinking-songs can be held responsible for drink. When
Englishmen began to cultivate habits of consistent insobriety, they
ceased to sing of wine. The eighteenth century witnessed, not only the
steady increase of drunkenness in every walk of life, but also its
willful and ostentatious defense. From the parson to the ploughman,
from the peer to the poacher, all classes drank deeply, and with the
comfortable consciousness that they were playing manly parts. It was
one of the first lessons taught to youth, and fathers encouraged their
sons--vainly sometimes, as in the case of Horace Walpole--to empty as
many bottles as their steady hands could hold. “A young fellow had
better be thrice drunk in one day,” says honest Sir Hildebrand to
Frank Osbaldistone, “than sneak sober to bed like a Presbyterian.” And
there is true paternal pride in the contrast the squire draws between
this strange, abstemious relative from town and his own stalwart,
country-bred boys, “who would have been all as great milksops as
yourself, Nevey,” he heartily declares, “if I had not nursed them, as
one may say, on the toast and tankard.”
Nevertheless, it was not in the eighteenth century, with its deep
potations, and its nightly collapses of squire and squireen under
their mahogany tables, that the gay English drinking-songs were
written. The eighteenth-century drinker had no time and no breath
to waste in singing. Burns, indeed, a rare exception, gave to
Scotland those reckless verses which Mr. Arnold found “insincere” and
“unsatisfactory,” and from which more austere critics have shrunk
in manifest disquiet. Perhaps the reproach of insincerity is not
altogether undeserved. There are times when Burns seems to exult over
the moral discomfort of his reader, and this is not the spirit in which
good love-songs, or good war-songs, or good drinking-songs are written.
Yet who shall approach the humor of that transfigured proverb which
Solomon would not have recognized for his own; or the honest exultation
of these two lines:--
“O Whiskey! soul o’ plays an’ pranks!
Accept a bardie’s gratefu’ thanks!”
or, best of all, the genial gayety of “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’
Maut,”--sovereign, says Mr. Saintsbury, of the poet’s Bacchanalian
verse?--
“O, Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,
And Rob and Allan came to pree;
Three blither hearts, that lee-lang night,
Ye wadna find in Christendie.”
Here at last is the true ring, without bravado, without conceit,
without bestiality,--only the splendid high spirits, the foolish,
unhesitating happiness of youth:--
“It is the moon, I ken her horn,
That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie;
She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,
But, by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!”
When Burns sings in this strain, even those who wear the blue ribbon
may pause and listen kindly, remembering, if they like, before leaving
the world of “Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink,” so
repellent to Mr. Arnold’s pitiless good taste, how another jovial
north-countryman has defined for them the inestimable virtue of
temperance. “Nae man shall ever stop a nicht in my house,” says the
Ettrick Shepherd, “without partakin’ o’ the best that’s in it, be ’t
meat or drink; and if the coof canna drink three or four tummlers or
jugs o’ toddy, he has nae business in the Forest. Now, sir, I ca’ that
no an abstemious life,--for why should any man be abstemious?--but
I ca’ ’t a temperate life, and o’ a’ the virtues, there’s nane mair
friendly to man than Temperance.”
Friendly indeed! Why, viewed in this genial light, she is
good-fellowship itself, and hardly to be distinguished from the smiling
nymph whom Horace saw in the greenwood, learning attentively the
strains dictated to her by the vine-crowned god of wine.
The best of the English drinking-songs were written by the dramatists
of the seventeenth century, men who trolled out their vigorous
sentiments, linked sweetly together in flowing verse, without the
smallest thought or fear of shocking anybody. Frankly indecorous, they
invite the whole wide world to drink with them, to empty the brimming
tankard passed from hand to hand, and to reel home through the frosty
streets, where the watchman grins at their unsteady steps, and quiet
sleepers, awakened from dull dreams, echo with drowsy sympathy the
last swelling cadence of their uproarious song. Where there is no
public sentiment to defy, even Bacchanalian rioters and Bacchanalian
verses cease to be defiant. What admirable good temper and sincerity in
Fletcher’s generous importunity!
“Drink to-day, and drown all sorrow,
You shall perhaps not do it to-morrow:
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.
“Then let us swill, boys, for our health,
Who drinks well, loves the commonwealth.
And he that will to bed go sober
Falls with the leaf still in October.”
Upon this song successive changes have been rung, until now its
variations are bewildering, and to it we owe the ever popular and
utterly indefensible glee roared out for generations by many a lusty
tavern chorus:--
“He who goes to bed, and goes to bed sober,
Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October;
But he who goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to do, and dies an honest fellow.”
The most affectionate solicitude is continually manifested by
seventeenth-century poets lest perchance unthinking mortals should
neglect or overlook their opportunities of drinking, and so forfeit
their full share of pleasure in a pleasant world.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,”
is as much the motto of the drinker as of the lover, and the mutability
of life forever warns him against wasting its flying moments in
unprofitable soberness.
“Not long youth lasteth,
And old age hasteth.
“All things invite us
Now to delight us,”
is the Elizabethan rendering of Father William’s counsel; and the
hospitable ghost in Fletcher’s “Lovers’ Progress,” who, being dead,
must know whereof he speaks, conjures his guests to
“Drink apace, while breath you have,
You’ll find but cold drink in the grave.”
Apart from life’s brevity and inconstancy, there is always the
incentive of patriotism and national pride summoning the reveler to
deep and ever deeper potations. It is thus he proves himself a true son
of the soil, a loyal and law-abiding Englishman.
“We’ll drink off our liquor while we can stand,
And hey for the honour of Old England!”
sang the Devonshire harvesters two hundred years ago, connecting in
some beery fashion the glory of their native isle with the gallons of
home-brewed ale they consumed so cheerfully in her name; and the same
sentiment is more intelligibly embodied in that graceless song of
Shadwell’s which establishes conclusively the duty of an honest citizen
and taxpayer:--
“The king’s most faithful subjects, we
In service are not dull,
We drink to show our loyalty,
And make his coffers full.
Would all his subjects drink like us,
We’d make him richer far,
More powerful and more prosperous
Than Eastern monarchs are.”
It may be noted, by way of illustration, that Dryden, in his
“Vindication of the Duke of Guise,” remarks somewhat vindictively that
the only service Shadwell could render the king was to increase his
revenue by drinking.
Finally, in England, as in Greece and Rome, black care sat heavily by
the hearths of men; and English singers, following the examples of
Horace and Anacreon, called upon wine to drown the unwelcome guest.
“Fortune’s a jade!” they cried with Beaumont’s Yeoman, but courage and
strong drink will bid the hussy stand. Davenant echoed the sentiment
defiantly in his mad round,
“Come, boys! a health, a health, a double health,
To those who ’scape from care by shunning wealth;”
and Ford gave the fullest expression to the gay laws of Sans Souci in
his drinking-song in “The Sun’s Darling:”--
“Cast away care; he that loves sorrow
Lengthens not a day, nor can buy to-morrow;
Money is trash, and he that will spend it,
Let him drink merrily, Fortune will send it.
“Pots fly about, give us more liquor,
Brothers of a rout, our brains will flow quicker;
Empty the cask; score up, we care not;
Fill all the pots again; drink on, and spare not.”
To pause in the generous swing of verses like these, and call to mind
Mrs. Jameson’s refined and chilling verdict, “It is difficult to
sympathize with English drinking-songs,” is like stepping from the
sunshine of life into the shaded drawing-room of genteel society.
Difficult to sympathize! Why, we may drink nothing stronger than tea
and Apollinaris water all our lives; yet none the less the mad music
of Elizabethan song will dance merrily in our hearts, and give even
to us our brief hour of illogical, unreasonable happiness. What had
the author of “The Diary of an Ennuyée” to do with that robust age
when ennui had still to be invented? What was she to think of the
indecorous Bacchanalian catches of Lyly and Middleton, or of the
uncompromising vulgarity of that famous song from “Gammer Gurton’s
Needle,” or of the unseemly jollity of Cleveland’s tavern-bred,
tavern-sung verse?
“Come hither, Apollo’s bouncing girl,
And in a whole Hippocrene of Sherry,
Let’s drink a round till our brains do whirl,
Tuning our pipes to make ourselves merry;
A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, born of the froth
Of an old half-filled jug of barley-broth,
She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many,
But she’ll have a square-cap if e’er she have any.”
Yet after discarding these ribald songs, with which refined femininity
is not presumed to sympathize, there still remain such charming verses
as Ben Jonson’s
“Swell me a bowl with lusty wine,
Till I may see the plump Lyæus swim
Above the brim.
I drink as I would write,
In flowing measure, filled with flame and sprite.”
Or, if this be too scholarly and artificial, there are the far more
beautiful lines of Beaumont and Fletcher:--
“God Lysæus, ever young,
Ever honoured, ever sung,
Stained with blood of lusty grapes;
In a thousand antic shapes
Dance upon the maze’s brim,
In the crimson liquor swim;
From thy plenteous hand divine
Let a river run with wine;
God of youth, let this day here
Enter neither care nor fear.”
Or we may follow where Shakespeare leads, and sing unhesitatingly with
him:--
“Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy vats our cares be drowned,
With thy grapes our hairs be crowned,
Cup us, till the world go round--
Cup us, till the world go round.”
There is only one drinking-song--a seventeenth-century drinking-song,
too--with which I find it difficult to sympathize, and that is the
well-known and often-quoted verse of Cowley’s, beginning,--
“The thirsty earth drinks up the rain,
And thirsts and gapes for drink again.”
Its strained and borrowed conceits which have lost all charm in the
borrowing, are not in accordance with anything so natural and simple
as conviviality. Men may give a thousand foolish reasons for loving,
and feel their folly still unjustified; but drinking needs no such
steel-forged chain of arguments. Moreover Cowley’s last lines,--
“Fill all the glasses up, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?”
give to the poem an air of protest which destroys it. The true
drinking-song does not concern itself in the least with the “man of
morals,” nor with his verdict. And precisely because it is innocent of
any conscious offense against morality, because it has not considered
the moral aspect of the case at all, it makes its gay and graceless
appeal to hearts wearied with the perpetual consideration of social
reforms and personal responsibility. “Be merry, friends!” it says in
John Heywood’s homely phrase,--
“Mirth salveth sorrows most soundly:”
and this “short, sweet text” is worth a solid sermon in days when
downright merriment is somewhat out of favor.
The poet who of all others seems least aware that life has burdens,
not only to be carried when sent, but to be rigorously sought for when
withheld, is Robert Herrick. He is the true singer of Cakes and Ale, or
rather of Curds and Cream; for in that pleasant Devonshire vicarage,
where no faint echo of London streets or London taverns rouses him from
rural felicity, his heart turns easily to country feasts and pastimes.
It is true he rejoices mightily in
“wassails fine,
Not made of ale, but spiced wine,”
yet even these innocent carousals are of Arcadian simplicity. He loves,
too, the fare of Devon farmers,--the clotted cream, the yellow butter,
honey, and baked pears, and fresh-laid eggs. He loves the Twelfth-Night
cake, with “joy-sops,”--alluring word,--the “wassail-bowl” of
Christmas, the “Whitsun ale,” the almond paste sacred to wedding-rites,
the “bucksome meat and capring wine” that crown the New Year’s board,
and, above all, the plenteous bounty of the Harvest Home. In his
easy, unvexed fashion, he is solicitous that we, his readers, should
learn, not “to labor and to wait,” but to be idle and to enjoy, while
idleness and joy still gild the passing day.
“Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying,”
is the gay doctrine preached by this unclerical clergyman. Even when
he remembers perforce that he is a clergyman, and turns his heart to
prayer, this is the thanksgiving that rises sweetly to his lips:--
“’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth,
And giv’st me wassail-bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.”
Had the patronage of the Church never been extended to Herrick, and
had he lived on in London, the friend of Jonson, and Selden, and
Fletcher, and kind, witty Bishop Corbet, we should have lost the most
charming pastoral vignettes ever flung like scattered May-blossoms
into literature; but we should have gained drinking-songs such as the
world has never known,--songs whose reckless music would lure us even
now from our watchful propriety as easily as great Bacchus lured that
wise beast Cerberus, who gave his doggish heart and wagged his doggish
tail, gentle and innocent as a milk-fed puppy, when he saw the god of
wine.
The close of the seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in English
poetry, and the great “coming event” of Queen Anne’s Augustan age threw
its shadow far before it,--a shadow of reticence and impersonality.
People drank more and more, but they said less and less about it. Even
in the reign of Charles II., though convivial songs were written by the
score, they had lost the ring of earlier days; and we need only read
a few of the much-admired verses of Tom D’Urfey to be convinced that
periods of dissolute living do not necessarily give birth to sincere
and reckless song. In the following century, sincerity and recklessness
were equally out of date. Now and then a cheerful outburst, like the
drinking-song from Congreve’s “Way of the World,” illumines our arid
path, and shows the source whence Thackeray drew his inspiration
for those delightful verses in “Rebecca and Rowena” concerning the
relative pleasures of Pope and Sultan. Later on, Sheridan gave us his
glee in “The Duenna,” and his ever popular toast in “The School for
Scandal,” which is not properly a drinking-song at all. Then there
came a time when the spurious conviviality of Barry Cornwall passed
for something fine and genuine, and when Thomas Haynes Bayly “gave to
minstrelsy the attributes of intellect, and reclaimed even festive song
from vulgarity.” And at precisely this period, when a vapid elegance
pervaded the ditties warbled forth in refined drawing-rooms, and when
Moore alone, of all the popular song-writers, held the secret of true
music in his heart, Thomas Love Peacock wrote for respectable and
sentimental England five of the very best drinking-songs ever given
to an ungrateful world. No thought of possible disapprobation vexed
his soul’s serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century, as completely
uncontaminated by nineteenth-century ideals as though Robinson
Crusoe’s desert island had been his resting-place. The shafts of his
good-tempered ridicule were leveled at all that his countrymen were
striving to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy laugh rang out just
when everybody was most strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit
was admirably calculated to make people uncomfortable and dissatisfied.
And in addition to these disastrous qualities, he apparently thought
it natural and reasonable and right that English gentlemen--sensible,
educated, _married_ English gentlemen--should sit around their
dinner-tables until the midnight hour, drinking wine and singing songs
with boyish and scandalous joviality.
The songs he offered for these barbarian entertainments are perfect
in character and form. Harmless mirth, a spirit of generous
good-fellowship, a clean and manly heart disarm, or should disarm,
all moral judgment, while the grace and vigor of every line leave the
critic powerless to complain. “Hail to the Headlong,” and “A Heel-tap!
a Heel-tap!” are the poet’s earliest tributes at the shrine of Bacchus.
He gained a fuller insight and an ampler charity before he laid down
his pen. His three best poems, which cannot possibly be omitted from
such a paper as this, show how time mellowed him, as it mellows wine.
We mark the ripening power, the surer touch, the kinder outlook on a
troubled world. Peacock was but twenty-nine when he wrote “Headlong
Hall.” He was thirty-two when “Melincourt” was given to the world, and
in it his inimitable “Ghosts:”--
“In life three ghostly friars were we,
And now three friendly ghosts we be.
Around our shadowy table placed,
The spectral bowl before us floats:
With wine that none but ghosts can taste
We wash our unsubstantial throats.
Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport
To be laid in that Red Sea.
“With songs that jovial spectres chant,
Our old refectory still we haunt.
The traveler hears our midnight mirth:
‘O list,’ he cries, ‘the haunted choir!
The merriest ghost that walks the earth
Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar.’
Three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts--three merry ghosts are we:
Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport
To be laid in that Red Sea.”
The next year, in “Nightmare Abbey,” appeared the best known and the
most admirable of all his glees, a song which holds its own even in an
alien world, which is an admitted favorite with singing societies, and
which we have all of us heard from time to time chanted decorously by
a row of sedate and serious gentlemen in correct evening dress:--
“Seamen three! what men be ye?
Gotham’s three wise men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?
To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
“Who art thou so fast adrift?
I am he they call Old Care.
Here on board we will thee lift.
No: I may not enter there.
Wherefore so? ’Tis Jove’s decree
In a bowl Care may not be;
In a bowl Care may not be.
“Fear ye not the waves that roll?
No: in charmèd bowl we swim.
What the charm that floats the bowl?
Water may not pass the brim.
The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.”
Last, but by no means least, in “Crotchet Castle,” we have a
drinking-song at once the kindest and the most scandalous that the
poet ever wrote,--a song which is the final, definite, unrepentant
expression of heterodoxy:--
“If I drink water while this doth last,
May I never again drink wine;
For how can a man, in his life of a span,
Do anything better than dine?
We’ll dine and drink, and say if we think
That anything better can be;
And when we have dined, wish all mankind
May dine as well as we.
“And though a good wish will fill no dish,
And brim no cup with sack,
Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring
To illumine our studious track.
O’er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes
The light of the flask shall shine;
And we’ll sit till day, but we’ll find the way
To drench the world with wine.”
With Peacock the history of English drinking-songs is practically
closed, and it does not seem likely to be reopened in the immediate
future. Any approach to the forbidden theme is met by an opposition too
strenuous and universal to be lightly set aside. We may not love nor
value books more than did our great-grandfathers, but we have grown to
curiously overrate their moral influence, to fancy that the passions
of men and women are freed or restrained by snatches of song, or the
bits of conversation they read in novels. Accordingly, a rigorous
censorship is maintained over the ethics of literature, with the rather
melancholy result that we hear of little else. Trivialities have ceased
to be trivial in a day of microscopic research, and there is no longer
anything not worth consideration. We all remember what happened when
Lord Tennyson wrote his “Hands all Round:”--
“First pledge our Queen, this solemn night,
Then drink to England, every guest.”
It is by no means a ribald or rollicking song. On the contrary, there
is something dutiful, as well as justifiable, in the serious injunction
of its chorus:--
“Hands all round!
God the traitor’s hope confound!
To this great cause of Freedom, drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.”
Yet such was the scandal given to the advocates of temperance by this
patriotic poem, and so lamentable were the reproaches which ensued,
that the “Saturday Review,” playing for once the unwonted part of
peacemaker, “soothed and sustained the agitated frame” of British
sensitiveness by reminding her that the laureate had given no hint as
to what liquor should be drunk in the cause of freedom, and that he
probably had it in his mind to toast
“the great name of England, round and round,”
in milk or mineral waters. The more recent experience of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling suggests forcibly the lesson taught our “Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table,” when he sent his little poem to a “festive and
convivial” celebration, and had it returned with “some slight changes”
to suit the sentiments of the committee:--
“In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
Down, down with the tyrant that masters us all!”
Hood, a good-tempered mocker always, took note of the popular prejudice
in his hospitable lines by a “Member of a Temperance Society:”--
“Come, pass round the pail, boys, and give it no quarter,
Drink deep, and drink oft, and replenish your jugs.”
And Longfellow, with his usual directness, went straight to the hearts
of his readers when, in simple seriousness, he filled his antique
pitcher, and sang his “Drinking Song” in praise of water.
“Come, old friend, sit down and listen!
As it passes thus between us,
How its wavelets laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus!”
This was the verse which New England, and Mother England too, stood
ready to applaud. Every era has its cherished virtues, and when the
order changes, the wise do well to change with it as speedily as they
can. Once there was a jolly old playwright named Cratinus, who died of
a broken heart on seeing some Lacedæmonian soldiers fracture a cask
of wine, and let it run to waste. He is mentioned kindly by ancient
writers, but Peacock is the last man to fling him a word of sympathy.
Once there was a time when Chaucer received from England’s king the
grant of a pitcher of wine daily in the port of London. What poet or
public servant now has, or hopes to have, such mark of royal favor?
Once Charles I. gave to Ben Jonson, as poet laureate, one hundred
pounds a year, and a tierce of Spanish Canary. No such generous drink
comes now from Queen Victoria to lend sparkle and vivacity to Mr.
Austin’s verse. Once Dr. Johnson, “the real primate, the soul’s
teacher of all England,” says Carlyle, declared roundly and without
shocking anybody, “Brandy, sir, is the drink for heroes.” It is not
thus that primates and teachers of any land now hearten their wavering
disciples. Once the generous publishers of “Marmion” sent Scott a
hogshead of fine claret to mark their appreciation of his verse. It
is not in this graceful fashion that authors now receive their tokens
of good will. The jovial past is dead, quite dead, we keep repeating
sternly; yet its merry ghost smiles at us broadly, in no way abashed
by our frowns and disapprobation. A friendly ghost it is, haunting
the secret chambers of our hearts with laughter instead of groans,
and echoes of old songs in place of clanking chains,--a companionable
ghost, with brave tales to tell, and jests to ease our pain, a word of
wisdom when we have wit to listen, a word of comfort when we have time
to heed.
“Troll the bowl, the nut-brown bowl,
And here, kind mate, to thee!
Let’s sing a dirge for Saint Hugh’s soul.
And drown it merrily.”
OLD WINE AND NEW.
Readers of “Old Mortality” will perhaps remember that when Graham of
Claverhouse escorts Henry Morton as a prisoner to Edinburgh, he asks
that estimable and unfortunate young non-conformist if he has ever read
Froissart. Morton, who was probably the last man in Scotland to derive
any gratification from the Chronicles, answers that he has not. “I have
half a mind to contrive you should have six months’ imprisonment,” says
the undaunted Claverhouse, “in order to procure you that pleasure.
His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself.
And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines
his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and
high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his
loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards
his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love! Ah, benedicite! how he will
mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side
he happens to favor or on the other! But truly, for sweeping from the
face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but
to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvelous
little sympathy.”
I should like, out of my affection for the Chronicles, to feel that
Sir Walter overstated the case when he put these cheerful words into
the mouth of Dundee; but it is vain to deny that Froissart, living in
a darkened age, was as indifferent to the fate of the rank and file
as if he had been a great nineteenth-century general. To be sure,
the rank and file were then counted by the hundreds rather than by
the thousands, and it took years of continuous warfare to kill as
many soldiers as perished in one of our modern battles. Moreover, the
illuminating truth that Jack is as good as his master--by help of
which we all live now in such striking brotherhood and amity--had not
then dawned upon a proud and prejudiced world. Fighting was the grand
business of life, and that Jack did not fight as well as his master
was a fact equally apparent to those who made history and to those
who wrote it. If the English archers, the French men-at-arms, and the
Breton lances could be trusted to stand the shock of battle, the “lusty
varlets,” who formed the bulk of every army, were sure to run away;
and the “commonalty” were always ready to open their gates and deliver
up their towns to every fresh new-comer. When Philip of Navarre was
entreated to visit Paris, then in a state of tumult and rebellion, and
was assured that the merchants and the mob held him in equal affection,
he resolutely declined their importunities, concluding that to put his
faith in princes was, on the whole, less dangerous than to confide it
in the people. “In commonalities,” observed this astute veteran, “there
is neither dependence nor union, save in the destruction of all things
good.” “What can a base-born man know of honor?” asks Froissart coldly.
“His sole wish is to enrich himself. He is like the otter, which,
entering a pond, devours all the fish therein.”
Now, if history, as Professor Seeley teaches us, should begin with a
maxim and end with a moral, here are maxims and morals in abundance,
albeit they may have lost their flavor for an altruistic age. For no
one of the sister Muses has lent herself so unreservedly to the demands
of an exacting generation as Clio, who, shorn of her splendor, sits
spectacled before a dusty table strewn with Acts of Parliament and
Acts of Congress, and forgets the glories of the past in the absorbing
study of constitutions. She traces painfully the successive steps by
which the sovereign power has passed from the king to the nobles,
from the nobles to the nation, and from the nation to the mob, and
asks herself interesting but fruitless questions as to what is coming
next. She has been divorced from literature,--“mere literature,” as
Professor Seeley contemptuously phrases it,--and wedded to science,
that grim but amorous lord whose harem is tolerably full already, but
who lusts perpetually for another bride. If, like Briseis, she looks
backward wistfully, she is at once reminded that it is no part of her
present duty to furnish recreation to grateful and happy readers,
but that her business lies in drawing conclusions from facts already
established, and providing a saddened world with wise speculations
on political science, based upon historic certainties. Her safest
lessons, Professor Seeley tells her warningly, are conveyed in “Blue
Books and other statistics,” with which, indeed, no living man can
hope to recreate himself; and her essential outgrowths are “political
philosophy, the comparative study of legal institutions, political
economy, and international law,” a witches’ brew with which few living
men would care to meddle. It is even part of his severe discipline to
strip her of the fair words and glittering sentences with which her
suitors have sought for centuries to enhance her charms, and “for the
beauty of drapery to substitute the beauty of the nude figure.” Poor
shivering Muse, with whom Shakespeare once dallied, and of whom great
Homer sang! Never again shall she be permitted to inspire the genius
that enthralls the world. Never again shall “mere literature” carry
her name and fame into the remotest corners of the globe. She who once
told us in sonorous sentences “how great projects were executed, great
advantages gained, and great calamities averted,” is now sent into
studious retirement, denied the adornments of style, forbidden the
companionship of heroes, and requested to occupy herself industriously
with Blue Books and the growth of constitutions. I know nothing more
significant than Professor Seeley’s warning to modern historians not
to resemble Tacitus,--of which there seems but little danger,--unless,
indeed, it be the complacency with which a patriotic and very popular
American critic congratulates himself and us on the felicity of having
plenty of young poets of our own, who do not in the least resemble
Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Keats.
Yet when we take from history all that gives it color, vivacity, and
charm, we lose perchance more than our mere enjoyment,--though that be
a heavy forfeiture,--more than the pleasant hours spent in the storied
past. Even so stern a master as Mr. Lecky is fain to admit that these
obsolete narratives, which once called themselves histories, “gave
insight into human character, breathed noble sentiments, rewarded and
stimulated noble actions, and kindled high patriotic feeling by their
strong appeals to the imagination.” This was no unfruitful labor, and
until we remember that man does not live by parliamentary rule nor by
accuracy of information, but by the power of his own emotions and the
strength of his own self-control, we can be readily mistaken as to the
true value of his lessons. “A nation with whom sentiment is nothing,”
observes Mr. Froude, “is on its way to become no nation at all;” and it
has been well said that Nelson’s signal to his fleet at Trafalgar, that
last pregnant and simple message sent in the face of death, has had as
much practical effect upon the hearts and the actions of Englishmen
in every quarter of the globe, in every circumstance of danger and
adventure, as seven eighths of the Acts of Parliament that decorate the
statute-book. Yet Dr. Bright, in a volume of more than fourteen hundred
pages, can find no room for an incident which has become a living force
in history. He takes pains to omit, in his lukewarm account of the
battle, the one thing that was best worth the telling.
It has become a matter of such pride with a certain school of modern
historians to be gray and neutral, accurate in petty details,
indifferent to great men, cautious in praise or blame, and as lifeless
as mathematicians, that a gleam of color or a flash of fire is apt to
be regarded with suspicion. Yet color is not necessarily misleading;
and that keen, warm grasp of a subject which gives us atmosphere
as well as facts, interest as well as information, comes nearer to
the veiled truth than a catalogue of correct dates and chillingly
narrated incidents. It is easy for Mr. Gardiner to denounce Clarendon’s
“well-known carelessness about details whenever he has a good story to
tell;” but what has the later historian ever said to us that will dwell
in our hearts, and keep alive our infatuations and our antipathies, as
do some of these condemned tales? Nay, even Mr. Gardiner’s superhuman
coldness in narrating such an event as the tragic death of Montrose
has not saved him from at least one inaccuracy. “Montrose, in his
scarlet cassock, was hanged at the Grassmarket,” he says, with frigid
terseness. But Montrose, as it chances, was hanged at the city cross
in the High Street, midway between the Tolbooth and the Tron Church.
Even the careless and highly colored Clarendon knew this, though Sir
Walter Scott, it must be admitted, did not; but, after all, the exact
point in Edinburgh where Montrose was hanged is of no vital importance
to anybody. What is important is that we should feel the conflicting
passions of that stormy time, that we should regard them with equal
sanity and sympathy, and that the death of Montrose should have for
us more significance than it appears to have for Mr. Gardiner. Better
Froissart’s courtly lamentations over the death of every gallant knight
than this studied indifference to the sombre stories which history has
inscribed for us on her scroll.
For the old French chronicler would have agreed cordially with Landor:
“We might as well, in a drama, place the actors behind the scenes, and
listen to the dialogue there, as, in a history, push back valiant men.”
Froissart is enamored of valor wherever he finds it; and he shares
Carlyle’s reverence not only for events, but for the controlling forces
which have moulded them. “The history of mankind,” says Carlyle, about
whose opinions there is seldom any room for doubt, “is the history of
its great men;” and Froissart, whose knowledge is of that narrow and
intimate kind which comes from personal association, finds everything
worth narrating that can serve to illustrate the brilliant pageant of
life. Nor are his methods altogether unlike Carlyle’s. He is a sturdy
hero-worshiper, who yet never spares his heroes, believing that when
all is set down truthfully and without excuses, those strong and vivid
qualities which make a man a leader among men will of themselves claim
our homage and admiration. What Cromwell is to Carlyle, what William of
Orange is to Macaulay, what Henry VIII. is to Froude, Gaston Phœbus,
Count de Foix, is to Froissart. But not for one moment does he assume
the tactics of either Macaulay or of Froude, coloring with careful
art that which is dubious, and softening or concealing that which
is irredeemably bad. Just as Carlyle paints for us Cromwell,--warts
and all,--telling us in plain words his least amiable and estimable
traits, and intimating that he loves him none the less for these most
human qualities, so Froissart tells us unreservedly all that has come
to his knowledge concerning the Count de Foix. Thus it appears that
this paragon of knighthood virtually banished his wife, kept his
cousin, the Viscount de Châteaubon, a close captive until he paid
forty thousand francs ransom, imprisoned his only son on a baseless
suspicion of treason, and actually slew the poor boy by his violence,
though without intention, and to his own infinite sorrow and remorse.
Worse than all this, he beguiled with friendly messages his cousin, Sir
Peter Arnaut de Béarn, the commander and governor of Lourdes, to come
to his castle of Orthès, and then, under his own roof-tree, stabbed
his guest five times, and left him to die miserably of his wounds in a
dungeon, because Sir Peter refused to betray the trust confided to him,
and deliver up to France the strong fortress of Lourdes, which he held
valiantly for the king of England.
Now, Froissart speaks his mind very plainly concerning this base deed,
softening no detail, and offering no word of extenuation or acquittal;
but none the less the Count de Foix is to him the embodiment of
knightly courtesy and valor, and he describes with ardor every personal
characteristic, every trait, and every charm that wins both love and
reverence. “Although I have seen many kings and princes, knights and
others,” he writes, “I have never beheld any so handsome, whether in
limbs and shape or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray,
amorous eyes that gave delight whenever he chose to express affection.
He was so perfectly formed that no one could praise him too much. He
loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated those which it
was becoming him to hate. He was a prudent knight, full of enterprise
and wisdom. He had never any men of abandoned character about him,
reigned wisely, and was constant in his devotions. To speak briefly and
to the point, the Count de Foix was perfect in person and in mind; and
no contemporary prince could be compared with him for sense, honor, or
liberality.”
In good truth, this despotic nobleman illustrated admirably the
familiar text, “When a strong man armed keepeth his court, those things
which he possesseth are in peace.” If he ruled his vassals severely and
taxed them heavily, he protected them from all outside interference
or injury. None might despoil their homes, nor pass the boundaries of
Béarn and Foix, without paying honestly for all that was required. At
a time when invading armies and the far more terrible “free companies”
pillaged the country, until the fair fields of France lay like a barren
land, the Count de Foix suffered neither English nor French, Gascon nor
Breton, to set foot within his territories, until assurance had been
given that his people should suffer no harm. He lived splendidly, and
gave away large sums of money wherever he had reason to believe that
his interests or his prestige would be strengthened by such generosity;
but no parasite, male or female, shared in his magnificent bounty.
Clear-headed, cold-hearted, vigilant, astute, liberal, and inexorable,
he guarded his own, and sovereigns did him honor. His was no humane nor
tranquil record; yet judging him by the standards of his own time and
place, by the great good as well as by the lesser evil that he wrought,
we are fain to echo Froissart’s rapturous words, “It is a pity such a
one should ever grow old and die.”
The earlier part of the Chronicles is compiled from the “Vrayes
Chroniques” of Jean le Bel, Canon of St. Lambert’s at Liège. Froissart
tells us so plainly, and admits that he made free use of the older
narrative as far as it could serve him; afterwards relying for
information on the personal recollections of knights, squires, and
men-at-arms who had witnessed or had taken part in the invasions, wars,
battles, skirmishes, treaties, tournaments, and feasts which made up
the stirring tale of fourteenth-century life. To gain this knowledge,
he traveled far and wide, attaching himself to one court and one patron
after another, and indefatigably seeking those soldiers of distinction
who had served in many lands, and could tell him the valorous deeds of
which he so ardently loved to hear. In long, leisurely journeys, in
lonely castles and populous cities, in summer days and winter nights,
he gathered and fitted together--loosely enough--the motley fabric of
his tale.
This open-air method of collecting material can hardly be expected to
commend itself to modern historians; and it is surely not necessary
for Mr. Green or any other careful scholar to tell us seriously that
Froissart is inaccurate. Of course he is inaccurate. How could history
passed, ballad fashion, from man to man be anything but inaccurate? And
how could it fail to possess that atmosphere and color which students
are bidden to avoid,--lest perchance they resemble Tacitus,--but which
lovers of “mere literature” hail rapturously, and which give to the
printed page the breath of the living past? Froissart makes a sad
jumble of his names, which, indeed, in that easy-going age, were spelt
according to the taste and discretion of the writer; he embellishes
his narrative with charming descriptions of incidents which perhaps
never went through the formality of occurring; and he is good enough to
forbear annoying us with dates. “About this time King Philip of France
quitted Paris in company with the King of Bohemia;” or, “The feast of
St. John the Baptist now approaching, the lords of England and Germany
made preparations for their intended expedition.” This is as near as
we ever get to the precise period in which anything happened or did
not happen, as the case may be; but to the unexacting reader names
and dates are not matters of lively interest, and even the accuracy
of a picturesque incident is of no paramount importance. If it were
generally believed to have taken place, it illustrates the customs
and sentiments of the age as well as if it were authentic; and the one
great advantage of the old over the new historian is that he feels the
passions and prejudices of his own time, and reflects them without
either condemnation or apology. The nineteenth-century mind working on
fourteenth-century material is chilly in its analysis, and Draconian in
its judgment. It can and does enlighten us on many significant points,
but it is powerless to breathe into its pages that warm and vivid life
which lies so far beyond our utmost powers of sympathy or comprehension.
Now, there are many excellent and very intelligent people to whom the
fourteenth century or any other departed century is without intrinsic
interest. Mr. John Morley has emphatically recorded his sentiments on
the subject. “I do not in the least want to know what happened in the
past,” he says, “except as it enables me to see my way more clearly
through what is happening now.” Here is the utilitarian view concisely
and comprehensively stated; and it would be difficult to say how
Froissart, any more than Tacitus or Xenophon, can help us efficaciously
to understand the Monroe doctrine or the troubles in the Transvaal.
Perhaps these authors yield their finest pleasures to another and
less meritorious class of readers, who are well content to forget the
vexations and humiliations of the present in the serener study of the
mighty past. The best thing about our neighbor’s trouble, says the old
adage, is that it does not keep us awake at night; and the best thing
about the endless troubles of other generations is that they do not in
any way impair our peace of mind. It may be that they did not greatly
vex the sturdier race who, five hundred years ago, gave themselves
scant leisure for reflection. Certain it is that events which should
have been considered calamitous are narrated by Froissart in such a
cheerful fashion that it is difficult for us to preserve our mental
balance, and not share in his unreasonable elation. “Now is the time
come when we must speak of lances, swords, and coats of mail,” he
writes with joyous zest. And again he blithely describes the battle of
Auray: “The French marched in such close order that one could not have
thrown a tennis-ball among them but it must have stuck upon the point
of a stiffly carried lance. The English took great pleasure in looking
at them.” Of course the English did, and they took great pleasure in
fighting with them half an hour later, and great pleasure in routing
them before the day was past; for in this bloody contest fell Charles
of Blois, the bravest soldier of his time, and the fate of Brittany was
sealed. Invitations to battle were then politely given and cordially
accepted, like invitations to a ball. The Earl of Salisbury, before
Brest, sends word to Sir Bertrand du Guesclin: “We beg and entreat of
you to advance, when you shall be fought with, without fail.” And the
French, in return, “could never form a wish for feats of arms but there
were some English ready to gratify it.”
This cheerful, accommodating spirit, this alacrity in playing the
dangerous game of war, is difficult for us peace-loving creatures to
understand; but we should remember the “desperate and gleeful fighting”
of Nelson’s day, and how that great sailor wasted his sympathy on the
crew of the warship Culloden, which went ashore at the battle of the
Nile, “while their more fortunate companions were in the full tide of
happiness.” Du Guesclin or Sir John Chandos might have written that
sentence, had either been much in the habit of writing anything,[1]
and Froissart would have subscribed cordially to the sentiment. “Many
persons will not readily believe what I am about to tell,” he says
with becoming gravity, “though it is strictly true. The English are
fonder of war than of peace.” “He had the courage of an Englishman,”
is the praise continually bestowed on some enterprising French knight;
and when the English and Scotch met each other in battle, the French
historian declares, “there was no check to their valor as long as
their weapons endured.” Nothing can be more vivacious than Froissart’s
description of the manner in which England awaited the threatened
invasion of the French under their young king, Charles VI.--“The
prelates, abbots, and rich citizens were panic-struck, but the artisans
and poorer sort held it very cheap. Such knights and squires as were
not rich, but eager for renown, were delighted, and said to each other:
‘Lord! what fine times are coming, since the king of France intends
to visit us! He is a valiant sovereign, and of great enterprise. There
has not been such a one in France these three hundred years. He will
make his people good men-at-arms, and blessed may he be for thinking to
invade us, for certainly we shall all be slain or grow rich. One thing
or the other must happen to us.’”
[1] Du Guesclin never knew how to write.
Alas, for their disappointment, when adverse winds and endless
altercations kept the invaders safe at home! There was a great deal of
solid enjoyment lost on both sides, though wealthy citizens counted
their gains in peace. War was not only a recognized business, but a
recognized pleasure as well, and noble knights relieved their heavy
fighting with the gentler diversions of the tournament and the chase.
When Edward III. entered France for the last time, he carried with him
thirty falconers laden with hawks, sixty couples of strong hounds, and
as many greyhounds, “so that every day he had good sport, either by
land or water. Many lords had their hawks and hounds as well as the
king.”
A merry life while the sun shone; and if it set early for most of these
stout warriors, their survivors had but little leisure to lament them.
It is not easy to read Froissart’s account of certain battles, serious
enough in their results, without being strangely impressed by the
boyish enthusiasm with which the combatants went to work; so that even
now, five centuries later, our blood tingles with their pleasurable
excitement. When France undertook to support the Earl of Flanders
against Philip van Arteveld and the rebellious citizens of Ghent, the
Flemish army entrenched themselves in a strong position on the river
Lys, destroying all bridges save one, which was closely guarded. The
French, in the dead of night, crossed the river in rickety little
boats, a handful of men at a time, and only a mile or so distant from
the spot where nine thousand of the enemy lay encamped. Apparently they
regarded this hazardous feat as the gayest kind of a lark, crowding
like schoolboys around the boats, and begging to be taken on board.
“It was a pleasure to see with what eagerness they embarked,” says
the historian; and indeed, so great was the emulation, that only men
of noble birth and tried valor were permitted to cross. Not a single
varlet accompanied them. After infinite labor and danger, some twelve
hundred knights--the flower of French chivalry--were transported to the
other side of the river, where they spent the rest of a cold and stormy
November night standing knee-deep in the marshes, clad in complete
armor, and without food or fire. At this point the fun ceases to sound
so exhilarating; but we are assured that “the great attention they paid
to be in readiness kept up their spirits, and made them almost forget
their situation.” When morning came, these knights, by way of rest
and breakfast, crossed the intervening country, fell upon the Flemish
ranks, and routed them with great slaughter; for what could a mass of
untrained artisans do against a small body of valiant and accomplished
soldiers? A few days later, the decisive battle of Rosebecque ended the
war. Van Arteveld was slain, and the cause of democracy, of “the ill
intentioned,” as Froissart for the most part designates the toiling
population of towns, received its fatal blow.
Yet this courtly chronicler of battles and deeds of chivalry is not
without a sense of justice and a noble compassion for the poor.
He disapproves of “commonalties” when they assert their claims too
boisterously; he fails to detect any signs of sapience in a mob; and
he speaks of “weavers, fullers, and other ill-intentioned people,”
as though craftsmen were necessarily rebellious,--which perhaps was
true, and not altogether a matter for surprise. But the grievous
taxes laid upon the French peasantry fill him with indignation; the
distress of Ghent, though brought about, as he believes, by her own
pride and presumption, touches him so deeply that he grows eloquent in
her behalf; and he records with distinct approbation the occasional
efforts made by both the French and the English kings to explain to
their patient subjects what it was they were fighting about. Eloquent
bishops, he tells us, were sent to preach “long and fine sermons,”
setting forth the justice of the respective claims. “In truth, it was
but right that these sovereigns, _since they were determined on war_,
should explain and make clear to their people the cause of the quarrel,
that they might understand it, and have the better will to assist their
lords and monarchs.” Above all, he gives us a really charming and
cheerful picture of the French and English fishermen, who went quietly
about their daily toil, and bore each other no ill will, although
their countries were so hard at war. “They were never interrupted in
their pursuits,” he says, “nor did they attack each other; but, on the
contrary, gave mutual assistance, and bought or sold, according as they
had more fish or less than they required. For if they were to meddle in
the national strife, there would be an end of fishing, and none would
attempt it unless supported by men-at-arms.” So perhaps there is one
lesson of common sense and forbearance we may learn, even now, from
those barbarous days of old.
As for the personal touches which give such curious vitality to
Froissart’s pages, they belong naturally to an unscientific age,
when history,--or what passed as such,--biography, court gossip, and
legendary lore were all mingled together, with no vexatious sifting
of material. The chronicler tells us in ample detail every separate
clause of an important treaty, and then breaks off to recount, at great
length and with commendable gravity, the story of the Lord de Corasse
and his familiar demon, Orthon, who served him out of pure love, and
visited him at night, to the vexation and terror of his lady wife. We
hear in one chapter how the burghers of Ghent spoiled all the pleasure
of the Lord d’Estournaz’s Christmas by collecting and carrying away his
rents, “which made him very melancholy,” as well it might; and in the
next we are told in splendid phrases of the death of Duke Wenceslaus
of Bohemia, “who was, in his time, magnificent, blithe, prudent,
amorous, and polite. God have mercy on his soul!” It is hard to see how
anything could be better described, in fewer words, than the disastrous
expedition of William of Hainault against the Frieslanders. “About
the feast of St. Rémy, William, Earl of Hainault, collected a large
body of men-at-arms, knights, and squires, from Hainault, Flanders,
Brabant, Holland, Gueldres, and Juliers, and, embarking them on board a
considerable fleet at Dordrecht, made sail for Friesland; for the Earl
considered himself as lord thereof. If the Frieslanders had been people
to listen to the legality and reasonableness of the claim, the Earl
was entitled to it. But as they were obstinate, he exerted himself
to obtain it by force, and was slain, as well as a great many other
knights and squires. God forgive them their sins!”
Surely that line about the unreasonable Frieslanders is worthy of
Carlyle,--of Carlyle whose grim and pregnant humor lurks beneath
sentences that, to the unwary, seem as innocent as the sheathed dagger
before the blade is sprung. He it was who hated with a just and
lively abhorrence all constitutional histories, and all philosophy
of history, as likewise “empty invoice lists of Pitched Battles and
Changes of Ministry,”--as dead, he declared, as last year’s almanacs,
“to which species of composition they bear, in several points of view,
no inconsiderable affinity.” He it was, moreover, who welded together
history and literature, and gave us their perfect and harmonious
union in the story of the “Diamond Necklace.” The past was enough for
Carlyle, when he worked amid her faded parchments, and made them glow
with renewed color and fire. That splendid pageant of events, that
resistless torrent of life, that long roll-call of honored names which
we term comprehensively history, had for him a significance which
needed neither moral nor maxim to confirm it. If we can believe with
him that it is better to revere great men than to belittle them, better
to worship blindly than to censure priggishly, better to enlarge our
mental vision until it embraces the standards of other centuries than
to narrow it in accordance with the latest humanitarian doctrine,--then
we may stray safely through the storied past, until even Froissart,
writing in a feudal chimney-corner strange tales of chivalry and
carnage, will have for us a message of little practical service, but of
infinite comfort in hours of idleness and relaxation. It is an engaging
task to leave the present, so weighted with cumbersome enigmas and
ineffectual activity, and to go back, step by step, to other days, when
men saw life in simpler aspects, and moved forward unswervingly to the
attainment of definite and obvious desires.
One voice has been recently raised with modest persistence in behalf of
old-fashioned history,--history which may possibly be inaccurate here
and there, but which gives to the present generation some vivid insight
into the lives of other generations which were not without importance
in their day. Now that we are striving to educate every class of
people, whether they respond to our advances or not, it is at least
worth while to make their instruction as pleasant and as profitable
as we can. Mr. Augustus Jessopp, whose knowledge of the agricultural
classes is of that practical and intimate kind which comes of living
with them for many years in sympathy and friendship, has a right to be
heard when he speaks in their behalf. If they must be taught in scraps
and at the discretion of committees, he believes that the Extension
lecturers who go about dispensing “small doses of Ruskin and water,
or weak dilutions of Mr. Addington Symonds,” would be better employed
in telling the people something of their own land and of their rude
forefathers. And this history, he insists, should be local, full of
detail, popular in character, and without base admixture of political
science, so that the rustic mind may accustom itself to the thought of
England, in all Christian ages, as a nation of real people; just as Tom
Tulliver woke gradually, under the stimulating friction of Maggie’s
questions, to the astonishing conviction that the Romans were once live
men and women, who learned their mother tongue through some easier
medium than the Latin grammar.
Again and again Mr. Jessopp has tried the experiment of lecturing on
local antiquities and the dim traditions of ancient country parishes;
and he has always found that these topics, which carried with them
some homely and familiar flavor of the soil, awoke a deep and abiding
interest in minds to which abstract ethics and technical knowledge
appealed alike in vain. School boards may raise the cry for useful
information, and fancy that a partial acquaintance with chlorides
and phosphates is all that is necessary to make of a sulky yokel an
intelligent agriculturist and a contented citizen; but a man must
awaken before he can think, and think before he can work, and work
before he can realize his position and meaning in the universe. And it
needs a livelier voice than that of elementary chemistry to arouse him.
“The Whigs,” said Sir Walter Scott, “will live and die in the belief
that the world is ruled by pamphlets and speeches;” and a great many
excellent people in every country will live and die in the belief that
the world is ruled by printed books, full of proven and demonstrable
truths. But we, the world’s poor children, sick, tired, and fractious,
know very well that we never learn unless we like our lesson, and never
behave ourselves unless inspired by precept and example. The history of
every nation is the heritage of its sons and daughters; and the story
of its struggles, sufferings, misdeeds, and glorious atonements is the
story that keeps alive in all our hearts that sentiment of patriotism,
without which we are speeding swiftly on our path to national
corruption and decay.
THE ROYAL ROAD OF FICTION.
“A tale,” says that charming scholar and critic, M. Jusserand, “is the
first key to the heart of a child, the last utterance to penetrate the
fastnesses of age.” And what is true of the individual is true also
of the race. The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their
infancy was the voice of the story-teller. Whether he spoke in rude
prose or in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which won a hearing
everywhere. All through the young world’s vigorous, ill-spent manhood
it found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far migrations to cherish
and cultivate the first wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened,
wise, and melancholy middle age, find still our natural solace in this
kind and joyous friend. And when mankind grows old, so old we shall
have mastered all the knowledge we are seeking now, and shall have
found ourselves as far from happiness as ever, I doubt not we shall
be comforted in the twilight of existence with the same cheerful and
deceptive tales we hearkened to in childhood. Facts surround us from
the cradle to the grave. Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks
our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder that we turn for pleasure
and distraction to those charming dreams with which the story-teller,
now grown to be a novelist, is ever ready to lure us away from
everything that it is comfortable to forget.
And it was always thus. From the very beginning of civilization, and
before civilization was well begun, the royal road of fiction ran
straight to the hearts of men, and along it traveled the gay and
prosperous spinners of wondrous tales which the world loved well to
hear. When I was a little girl, studying literature in the hard and
dry fashion then common in all schools, and which was not without its
solid advantages after all, I was taught, first that “Pamela” was the
earliest English novel; then that “Robinson Crusoe” was the earliest
English novel; then that Lodge’s “Rosalynde” was the earliest English
novel. By the time I got that far back, I began to see for myself,
what I dare say all little girls are learning now, that the earliest
English novel dates mistily from the earliest English history, and that
there is no such thing as a firm starting-point for their uncertain
feet to gain. Long, long before Lodge’s “Rosalynde” led the way for
Shakespeare’s “Rosalind” to follow, romantic tales were held in such
high esteem that people who were fortunate enough to possess them in
manuscript--the art of printing not having yet cheapened such precious
treasures--left them solemnly by will to their equally fortunate
heirs. In 1315, Guy, Earl of Warwick, bequeathed to Bordesley Abbey
in Warwickshire his entire library of thirty-nine volumes, which
consisted almost exclusively, like the library of a modern young
lady, of stories, such as the “Romaunce de Troies,” and the “Romaunce
d’Alisaundre.” In 1426, Thomas, Duke of Exeter, left to his sister Joan
a single book, perhaps the only one he possessed, and this too was a
romance on that immortal knight and lover, Tristram.
Earlier even than Thomas of Exeter’s day, the hardy barons of England
had discovered that when they were “fested and fed,” they were ready
to be amused, and that there was nothing so amusing as a story. In
the twelfth century, before St. Thomas à Becket gave up his life in
Canterbury cloisters, English knights and ladies had grown familiar
with the tragic history of King Lear, the exploits of Jack the Giant
Killer, the story of King Arthur and of the enchanter Merlin. The
earliest of these tales came from Brittany, and were translated from
Armorican into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, and
a benefactor to the world; but, by the following century, Robin Hood,
Tom-a-Lincoln, and a host of sturdy English-born heroes shared in the
popular attention. It must have been inexpressibly helpful to the
writers and compilers of early fiction that the uncritical age in which
they lived had not yet been vitiated by the principles of realistic
art. The modern maxims about sinning against the probabilities, and the
novelist’s bondage to truth, had not then been invented; and the man
who told a story was free to tell it as he pleased. His readers or his
hearers were seldom disposed to question his assertions. A knight did
not go to the great and unnecessary trouble of learning his letters in
order to doubt what he read. Merlin was as real to him as Robin Hood.
He believed Sir John Mandeville, when that accomplished traveler told
him of a race of men who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads. It
was a curious fact, but the unknown world was full of greater mysteries
than this. He believed in Prester John, with his red and white lions,
his giants and pigmies, his salamanders that built cocoons like
silk-worms, his river of stones that rolled perpetually with a mighty
reverberation into a sandy sea. Why, indeed, should these wonders be
doubted; for in that thrice famous letter sent by Prester John to
Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, did he not distinctly say,
“No vice is tolerated in our land, and, with us, no one lies.”
This broad-minded, liberal credulity made smooth the novelist’s path.
He always located his romances in far and unknown countries, where
anything or everything might reasonably be expected to happen. Scythia,
Parthia, Abyssinia, were favorite latitudes; Bohemia could always
serve at a pinch; and Arcadia, that blessed haven of romance, remained
for centuries his happy hunting-ground, where shepherds piped, and
nymphs danced sweetly in the shade, and brave knights met in glorious
combat, and lovers dallied all day long under the whispering boughs.
In Elizabeth’s day, Arcadia had reached the zenith of its popularity.
Robert Green had peopled its dewy fields with amorous swains, and Sir
Philip Sidney had described its hills and dales in the four hundred
and eighty folio pages of his imperishable romance. A golden land, it
lies before us still, brilliant with sunshine that shall never fade.
Knights and noble ladies ride through it on prancing steeds. Well-bred
shepherds, deeply versed in love, sing charming songs, and extend
open-hearted hospitality. Shepherdesses, chaste and fair, lead their
snowy flocks by meadows and rippling streams. There is always plenty
of fighting for the knights when they weary of plighting their vows,
and noble palaces spring up for their entertainment when they have
had enough of pastoral pleasures and sylvan fare. Ah, me! We who have
passed by Arcadia, and dwell in the sad haunts of men, know well what
we have lost. Yet was there not a day when the inhabitants of the
strange new world, a world not yet familiar with commercial depression
and the stock exchange, were thus touchingly described in English verse?
“Guiltless men who danced away their time,
Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime.”
And what gayer irresponsibility could be found even in the fields of
Arcadia?
“In Elizabeth’s day,” says M. Jusserand, “adventurous narratives
were loved for adventure’s sake. Probability was only a secondary
consideration.” Geographical knowledge being in its innocent infancy,
people were curious about foreign countries, and decently grateful for
information, true or false. When a wandering knight of romance “sailed
to Bohemia,” nobody saw any reason why he should not, and readers were
merely anxious to know what happened to him when he got there. So
great, indeed, was the demand for fiction in the reign of the virgin
queen that writers actually succeeded in supporting themselves by
this species of composition, a test equally applicable to-day; and it
is worth while to remember that the prose tales of Nash, Green, and
Sidney were translated into French more than a century before that
distinction was conferred on any play of Shakespeare’s.
It need not be supposed, however, that Romance, in her triumphant
progress through the land, met with no bitter and sustained hostility.
From the very beginning she took the world by storm, and from the
very beginning the godly denounced and reviled her. The jesters and
gleemen and minstrels who relieved the insufferable ennui of our rude
forefathers in those odd moments when they were neither fighting nor
eating, were all branded as “Satan’s children” by that relentless
accuser, “Piers Plowman.” In vain the simple story-spinners who
narrated the exploits of Robin Hood and Tom-a-Lincoln claimed that
their merry legends were “not altogether unprofitable, nor in any way
hurtful, but very fitte to passe away the tediousness of the long
winter evenings.” It was not in this cheerful fashion that the “unco
gude”--a race as old as humanity itself--considered the long winter
evenings should be passed. Roger Ascham can find no word strong enough
in which to condemn “certaine bookes of Chivalrie, the whole pleasure
of whiche standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open man-slaughter and
bolde bawdrye.” The beautiful old stories, so simply and reverently
handled by Sir Thomas Malory in the “Morte d’Arthur,” were regarded
with horror and aversion by this gentle ascetic; yet the lessons that
they taught were mainly “curtosye, humanyte, friendlynesse, hardynesse
and love.” The valorous deeds of Guy of Warwick and Thomas of Reading
lent cheer to many a hearth, and sent many a man with brave and joyous
heart to battle; yet the saintly Stubbes, who loved not joyousness,
lamented loudly that the unregenerate persisted in reading such “toys,
fantasies and babbleries,” in place of that more dolorous fiction,
Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.” Even Sir Philip Sidney’s innocent “Arcadia”
was pronounced by Milton a “vain, amatorious” book; and the great
poet who wrote “Comus” and “L’Allegro” harshly and bitterly censured
King Charles because that unhappy monarch beguiled the sad hours of
prison with its charming pages, and even, oh! crowning offense against
Puritanism! copied for spiritual comfort, when condemned to die, the
beautiful and reverent invocation of its young heroine, Pamela. “The
king hath, as it were, unhallowed and unchristened the very duty of
prayer itself,” wrote Milton mercilessly. “Who would have imagined so
little fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little care of
truth in his last words, or honor to himself or to his friends, as,
immediately before his death, to pop into the hand of that grave bishop
who attended him, for a special relique of his saintly exercises, a
prayer stolen word by word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to
a heathen god.”
But not even the mighty voice of Milton could check the resistless
progress of romantic fiction. Not even dominant Puritanism could stamp
it ruthlessly down. When “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the great pioneer
of religious novels, was given to the world, England read it with
devout delight; but she read too, with admirable inconsistency, those
endless tales, those “romances de longue haleine,” which crossed
the channel from France, and replaced the less decorous Italian
stories so popular in the preceding century. Some of these prolix and
ponderous volumes, as relentless in dullness as in length, held their
own stoutly for centuries, and won allegiance where it seemed least
due. There is an incredible story narrated of Racine, that, when a
student at Port Royal, his favorite reading was an ancient prose epic
entitled “Ethiopica; the history of Theagenes and Chariclea.” This
guileless work, being too bulky for concealment, was discovered by his
director and promptly burned, notwithstanding its having been written
by a bishop, which ought to have saved it from the flames. Racine,
undaunted, procured another copy, and fearing it would meet with the
same cruel fate, he actually committed large portions of it to memory,
so that nothing should deprive him of his enjoyment. Yet “Ethiopica”
would seem as absolutely unreadable a book as even a bishop ever wrote.
The heroine, though chaste as she is beautiful, has so many lovers, all
with equally unpronounceable names, and so many battles are fought in
her behalf, that no other memory than Racine’s could have made any sort
of headway with them; while, just in the middle of the story, an old
gentleman is suddenly introduced, who, without provocation, starts to
work and tells all _his_ life’s adventures, two hundred pages long.
The real promoters and encouragers of romance, however,--the real
promoters and encouragers of fiction in every age--were women, and this
is more than enough to account for its continued triumphs. There was
little use in the stubborn old Puritan, Powell, protesting against the
idle folly of females who wasted their time over Sidney’s “Arcadia,”
when they ought to have been studying the household recipe books. Long
before Cromwell the mighty revolutionized England, women had wearied
of recipes as steady reading, and had turned their wanton minds to
matters more seductive. Wise and wary was the writer who kept these
fair patronesses well in view. When John Lyly gave to the world his
amazing “Euphues,” he dexterously announced that it was written for
the amusement and the edification of women, and that he asked for it
no better fate than to be read by them in idle moments, when they were
weary of playing with their lap-dogs. For a young man of twenty-five,
Lyly showed an admirable knowledge of feminine inconsistency. By
alternately flattering and upbraiding the subtle creatures he hoped
to please, now sweetly praising their incomparable perfections,
now fiercely reviling their follies and their sins, he succeeded in
making “Euphues” the best-read book in England, and he chained with
affectations and foolish conceits the free and noble current of English
speech.
It was the abundance of leisure enjoyed by women that gave the
ten-volumed French romance its marvelous popularity; and one
sympathizes a little with Mr. Pepys, though he was such a chronic
grumbler, when he laments in his diary that Mrs. Pepys would not only
read “Le Grand Cyrus” all night, but would talk about it all day,
“though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner,” remarks this
censorious husband and critic. More melancholy still to contemplate
is the early appearance on the scene of female novelists who wrote
vicious twaddle for other women to read. We may fancy that this
particular plague is a development of the nineteenth century; but
twenty years before the virtuous Pamela saw the light, Eliza Heywood
was doing her little best to demoralize the minds and manners of
her countrywomen. Eliza Heywood was, in Mr. Gosse’s opinion,--and
he is one of the few critics who has expressed _any_ opinion on the
subject,--the Ouida of her period. The very names of her heroines,
Lassellia, Idalia, and Douxmoure, are Ouidesque, and their behavior
would warrant their immediate presentation to that society which the
authoress of “Strathmore” has so sympathetically portrayed. These
“lovely Inconsiderates,” though bad enough for a reformatory, are all
as sensitive as nuns. They “sink fainting on a Bank” if they so much as
receive letters from their lovers. Their “Limbs forget their Functions”
on the most trifling provocation. “Stormy Passions” and “deadly
Melancholy” succeed each other with monotonous vehemence in their
“tortured Bosoms,” and when they fly repentant to some remote Italian
convent, whole cities mourn their loss.
Eliza Heywood’s stories are probably as imbecile and as depraved as
any fiction we possess to-day, but the women of England read them
eagerly. They read too the iniquitous rubbish of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and
no incident can better illustrate the tremendous change that swept
over public sentiment with the introduction of good and decent novels
than the well-known tale of Sir Walter Scott’s aunt, Mrs. Keith of
Ravelston. This sprightly old lady took a fancy, when in her eightieth
year, to re-read Mrs. Behn’s books, and persuaded Sir Walter to send
them to her. A hasty glance at them was more than enough, and back they
came to Scott with an entreaty that he would put them in the fire.
The ancient gentlewoman confessed herself unable to linger over pages
which she had not been ashamed nor abashed to hear read aloud to large
parties in her youth.
It must be remembered, however, that Aphra Behn, uncompromisingly bad
though she was, wrote the first English didactic novel, “Oroonoka,”
the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day. It has the advantage of “Uncle
Tom” in being a true tale, Mrs. Behn having seen the slave, Oroonoka,
and his wife, Imoinda, in the West Indies, and having witnessed his
tragic fate. It was written at the solicitation of Charles II., and
was a popular anti-slavery novel, with certain points of resemblance
to Mrs. Stowe’s famous book; in the grace and beauty of its Africans,
for example; in the strength and constancy of their affections, and in
the lavish nobility of their sentiments. Mrs. Behn knew as well as Mrs.
Stowe that, if you want to produce a strong effect, you must not be too
chary of your colors.
When the time came for the great flowering of English fiction, when
Fielding and Richardson took England by storm, and France confessed
herself beaten in the field (“Who would have thought,” wrote the
Marquis d’Argenson, “that the English would write novels, and better
ones than ours?”), then it was that women asserted themselves
distinctly as patronesses well worth the pleasing. To Smollett and
Defoe they had never given whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly
masculine writing was scarcely in their way. But Fielding, infinitely
greater than these, met with no warmer favor at their hands. It is easy
to account for the present unpopularity of “Tom Joneses” in decorous
households by saying that modest women do not consider it fit for them
to read. That covers the ground now to perfection. But the fact remains
that, when “Tom Jones” was written, everybody _did_ consider it fit
to read. Why not, when all that it contained was seen about them day
by day? Its author, like every other great novelist, described life
as he found it. Arcadia had passed away, and big libertine London
offered a scant assortment of Arcadian virtues. Fielding had nothing
to tell that might not have been heard any day at one of Sir Robert
Walpole’s dinner-parties. He had the merit--not too common now--of
never confusing vice with virtue; though it must be confessed that,
like Dumas and Scott and Thackeray, he took very kindly to his scamps;
and we all know how angry a recent critic permits himself to be because
Thackeray calls Rawdon Crawley “honest Rawdon.” As far as can be seen,
Fielding never realized the grossness of his books. He prefaced “Tom
Jones” with a beautiful little sermon about “the solid inward comfort
of mind which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue;” and he
took immense credit to himself for having written “nothing prejudicial
to the cause of religion and virtue, nothing inconsistent with the
strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye
in the perusal.” What more than this could be claimed by the authors of
“The Old Homestead” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy”?
I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal
coarseness of Fielding’s novels that exiled them from the female
heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more
repellent indecency of “Pamela.” Insidious influences were at work
within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to
self-analysis and self-assertion than her successor to-day, was just
as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable
laws, its permanent limitations; and in Richardson she recognized
the artist who had divined her subtleties, and had given them form
and color. His correspondence with women is unlike anything else the
period has to show. To him they had an independence of thought and
action which it took the rest of mankind a hundred years longer to
concede; and it is not surprising to see the fervent homage this stout
little tradesman of sixty received from his female flatterers, when
we remember that he and he alone in all his century had looked into
the rebellious secrets of their hearts with understanding and with
reverence.
To any other man than Richardson, the devout attentions of so many
women would have been a trifle fatiguing. They wrote him letters as
long as Clarissa Harlowe’s. They poured out their sentiments on endless
reams of paper. They told him how they walked up and down their rooms,
shedding torrents of tears over his heroine’s distress, unable to
either go on with the book, or to put it resolutely down. They told
him how, when “Clarissa” was being read aloud in a bed-chamber, the
maid who was curling her mistress’s hair wept so bitterly she could
not go on with her work, so was given a crown for her sensibility, and
sent out of the room. They implored and entreated him to end his story
happily; “a turn,” wrote one fair enthusiast, “that will make your
almost despairing readers mad with joy.” Richardson purred complacently
over these letters, like a sleek old cat, and he answered every one of
them, instead of pitching them unread into the fire. Yet, nevertheless,
true and great artist that he was, in spite of all his vanity, these
passionate solicitations moved him not one hair’s breadth from his
path. “As well,” says Mr. Birrell, “hope for a happy ending for King
Lear as for Clarissa Harlowe.” She died, and England dissolved herself
in tears, and gay, sentimental France lifted up her voice and wept
aloud, and Germany joined in the sad chorus of lamentations, and even
phlegmatic Holland was heard bewailing from afar the great tragedy of
the literary world. This is no fancy statement. Men swore while women
wept. Good Dr. Johnson hung his despondent head, and ribald Colley
Cibber vowed with a great oath that this incomparable heroine should
not die. Years afterwards, when Napoleon was first consul, an English
gentleman named Lovelace was presented to him, whereupon the consul
brightened visibly, and remarked, “Why, that is the name of Clarissa
Harlowe’s lover!”--an incident which won, and won deservedly for
Bonaparte, the lifelong loyalty of Hazlitt.
Meanwhile Richardson, writing quietly away in his little summer-house,
produced Sir Charles Grandison, a hero who is perhaps as famous for his
priggishness as Lovelace is famous for his villainy. I think, myself,
that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled. He is not half such
a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with such
ample detail through so many leisurely volumes. Richardson loved him,
and tried hard to make his host of female readers love him too, which
they did in a somewhat perfunctory and lukewarm fashion. Indeed, it
should in justice be remembered that this eighteenth-century novelist
intended all his books to be didactic. They seem now at times too
painful, too detestable for endurance; but when “Pamela,” with all its
loathsome details, was published, it was actually commended from the
pulpit, declared to be better than twenty sermons, and placed by the
side of the Bible for its moral influence. Richardson himself tells us
a curiously significant anecdote of his childhood. When he was a little
boy, eleven years old, he heard his mother and some gossips complaining
of a quarrelsome and acrimonious neighbor. He promptly wrote her a long
letter of remonstrance, quoting freely from the scriptures to prove
to her the evil of her ways. The woman, being naturally very angry,
complained to his mother of his impertinence, whereupon she, with true
maternal pride, commended his principles, while gently censuring the
liberty he had taken.
With Richardson’s splendid triumph to spur them on, the passion of
Englishwomen for novel-reading reached its height. Young girls,
hitherto debarred from this diversion, began more and more to taste the
forbidden sweets, and wise men, like Dr. Johnson, meekly acknowledged
that there was no stopping them. When Frances Chamberlayne Sheridan
told him that she never allowed her little daughter to read anything
but the “Rambler,” or matters equally instructive, he answered with
all his customary candor: “Then, madam, you are a fool! Turn your
daughter’s wits loose in your library. If she be well inclined, she
will choose only good food. If otherwise, all your precautions will
amount to nothing.” Both Charles Lamb and Ruskin cherished similar
opinions, but the sentiment was more uncommon in Dr. Johnson’s day, and
we know how even he reproached good Hannah More for quoting from “Tom
Jones.”
With or without permission, however, the girls read gayly on. In
Garrick’s epilogue to Colman’s farce, “Polly Honeycombe,” the wayward
young heroine confesses her lively gratitude for all the dangerous
knowledge she has gleaned from novels.
“So much these dear instructors change and win us,
Without their light we ne’er should know what’s in us.
Here we at once supply our childish wants,
Novels are hotbeds for your forward plants.”
Later on, Sheridan gave us the immortal Lydia Languish feeding her
sentimentality upon that “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,”
the circulating library. Lydia’s taste in books is catholic, but
not altogether free from reproach. “Fling ‘Peregrine Pickle’ under
the toilet,” she cries to Lucy, when surprised by a visit from Mrs.
Malaprop and Sir Anthony. “Throw ‘Roderick Random’ into the closet.
Put ‘The Innocent Adultery’ into ‘The Whole Duty of Man.’ Thrust ‘Lord
Aimworth’ under the sofa. Cram ‘Ovid’ behind the bolster. Put ‘The Man
of Feeling’ into your pocket. There--now for them!”
How “The Man of Feeling” ever went into Lucy’s pocket remains a
mystery, for it takes many volumes to hold that discursive romance,
where everything from character to clothes is described with
relentless minuteness. If a lady goes to a ball, we are not merely told
that she looked radiant in “white and gold,” or in “scarlet tulle,”
after the present slipshod fashion; but we are carefully informed that
“a scarf of cerulean tint flew between her right shoulder and her
left hip, being buttoned at each end by a row of rubies. A coronet of
diamonds, through which there passed a white branch of the feathers of
the ostrich, was inserted on the left decline of her lovely head.” And
so on, until the costume is complete.
By this time women had regularly enrolled themselves in the victorious
army of novel-writers, and had won fame and fortune in the field.
Consider the brilliant and instantaneous success of Frances Burney.
Think of the excitement she aroused, and the honors heaped thick and
fast upon her. A woman of twenty-six when she wrote “Evelina,” she
was able, by dint of short stature and childish ways, to pass for a
girl of seventeen, which increased amazingly the popular interest
in her novel. Sheridan swore he could not believe so young a thing
could manifest such genius, and begged her to write him a comedy on
the spot. Sir Joshua Reynolds professed actual fear of such keen wit
and relentless observation. Dr. Johnson vowed that Richardson had
written nothing finer, and Fielding nothing so fine as “Evelina;” and
playfully protested he was too proud to eat cold mutton for dinner when
he sat by Miss Burney’s side. Posterity, it is true, while preserving
“Evelina” with great pride, has declined to place it by the side of
“Tom Jones” or “Clarissa Harlowe;” but if we had our choice between the
praise of posterity which was Miss Austen’s portion, and the praise
of contemporaries which was Miss Burney’s lot, I doubt not we should
be wise enough to take our applause off-hand,--“dashed in our faces,
sounded in our ears,” as Johnson said of Garrick, and leave the future
to look after itself.
It is pleasant, however, to think that the first good woman novelist
had her work over rather than under estimated. It is pleasant also to
contemplate the really bewildering career of Maria Edgeworth. Miss
Edgeworth’s books are agreeable reading, and her children’s stories
are among the very best ever written; but it is not altogether easy
to understand why France and England contended to do her honor. When
she went to London or to Paris she became the idol of brilliant and
fashionable people. Peers and poets united in her praise. Like Mrs.
Jarley, she was the delight of the nobility and gentry. The Duke of
Wellington wrote verses to her. Lord Byron, whom she detested, extolled
her generously. Moore pronounced her “delightful.” Macaulay compared
the return of the Absentee to the return of Ulysses in the “Odyssey.”
Sir Walter Scott took forcible possession of her, and carried her away
to Abbotsford,--a too generous reward, it would seem, for all she ever
did. Sydney Smith delighted in her. Mrs. Somerville, the learned, and
Mrs. Fry, the benignant, sought her friendship; and finally, Mme. de
Staël, who considered Jane Austen’s novels “vulgar,” protested that
Miss Edgeworth was “worthy of enthusiasm.”
Now this was all very charming, and very enjoyable; but with such
rewards following thick and fast upon successful story-writing, it is
hardly surprising that every year saw the band of literary aspirants
increase and multiply amazingly. People were beginning to learn how
easy it was to write a book. Already Hannah More had bewailed the
ever increasing number of novelists, “their unparalleled fecundity,”
and “the frightful facility of this species of composition.” What
would she think if she were living now, and could see over a thousand
novels published every year in England? Already Mrs. Radcliffe had
woven around English hearths the spell of her rather feeble terrors,
and young and old shuddered and quaked in the subterranean corridors
of castles amid the gloomy Apennines. Why a quiet, cheerful, retiring
woman like Mrs. Radcliffe, who hated notoriety, and who loved
country life, and afternoon drives, and all that was comfortable and
commonplace, should have written “The Mysteries of Udolpho” passes our
comprehension; but write it she did, and England received it with a mad
delight she has never manifested for any triumph of modern realism. The
volume, we are assured, was too often torn asunder by frantic members
of a household so that it might pass from hand to hand more rapidly
than if it held together.
Mrs. Radcliffe not only won fame and amassed a considerable
fortune,--she received five hundred pounds for “Udolpho” and eight
hundred for “The Italian,”--but she gave such impetus to the novel
of horrors, which had been set going by Horace Walpole’s “Castle of
Otranto,” that for years England was oppressed and excited by these
dreadful literary nightmares. Matthew--otherwise “Monk”--Lewis,
Robert Charles Maturin, and a host of feebler imitators, wrote grisly
stories of ghosts, and murders, and nameless crimes, and supernatural
visitations. Horrors are piled on horrors in these dismal and
sulphurous tales. Blue fire envelops us, and persevering spectres,
who have striven a hundred years for burial rites, sit by their
victims’ bed-sides and recite dolorous verses, which is more than
any self-respecting spectre ought to do. Compacts with Satan are as
numerous as bargain counters in our city shops. Suicides alternate
briskly with assassinations. In one melancholy story, the despairing
heroine agrees to meet her lover in a lonely church, where they intend
stabbing themselves sociably together. Unhappily, it rains hard all
the afternoon, and--with an unexpected touch of realism--she is
miserably afraid the bad weather will keep her indoors. “The storm was
so violent,” we are told, “that Augusta often feared she could not go
out at the appointed time. Frequently did she throw up the sash, and
view with anxious looks the convulsed elements. At half past five the
weather cleared, and Augusta felt a fearful joy.”
It might have been supposed that the gay, good-humored satire of
“Northanger Abbey” would have laughed these tragic absurdities from the
land. But Miss Austen alone, of all the great novelists of England, won
less than her due share of profit and renown. Her sisters in the field
were loaded down with honors. When the excellent Mrs. Opie became a
Friend, and refused to write any more fiction, except, indeed, those
moral but unlikely tales about the awful consequences of lying, her
contemporaries spoke gravely of the genius she had sacrificed at the
shrine of religion. Charlotte Bronté’s masterpiece gained instant
recognition throughout the length and breadth of England. Of George
Eliot’s sustained success there is no need to speak. But Jane Austen,
whose incomparable art is now the theme of every critic’s pen, was
practically ignored while she lived, and perhaps never suspected,
herself, how admirable, how perfect was her work. Sir Walter Scott,
it is true, with the intuition of a great story-teller, instantly
recognized this perfection; and so did Lord Holland and a few others,
among whom let us always gladly remember George IV., who was wise
enough to keep a set of Miss Austen’s novels in every one of his
houses, and who was happy enough to receive the dedication of “Emma.”
Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that fifteen years elapsed between
the writing of “Pride and Prejudice” and its publication; that Cadell
refused it unread,--a dreadful warning to publishers,--and that all
Miss Austen ever realized from her books in her lifetime was seven
hundred pounds,--one hundred pounds less than Mrs. Radcliffe received
for a single story, and nearly two thousand pounds less than Frances
Burney was paid for her absolutely unreadable “Camilla.” High-priced
novels are by no means a modern innovation, though we hear so much more
about them now than formerly. Blackwood gave Lockhart one thousand
pounds for the manuscript of “Reginald Dalton,” and “Woodstock”
brought to Scott’s creditors the fabulous sum of eight thousand pounds.
For with Sir Walter flowered the golden age of English fiction.
Fortune and fame came smiling at his beck, and the great reading world
confessed itself better and happier for his genius. Then it was that
the book-shops were besieged by clamorous crowds when a new Waverly
novel was promised to the public. Then Lord Holland sat up all night
to finish “Old Mortality.” Then the excitement over the Great Unknown
reached fever heat, and the art of the novelist gained its absolute
ascendency, an ascendency unbroken in our day, and likely to remain
unbroken for many years to come. At present, every child that learns
its letters makes one more story-reader in the world, and the chances
are it will make one more story-writer to help deluge the world with
fiction. Novels, it has been truly said, are the only things that can
never be too dear or too cheap for the market. The beautiful and costly
editions of Miss Austen and Scott and Thackeray compete for favor with
marvelously cheap editions of Dickens, that true and abiding idol of
people who have no money to spend on hand-made paper and broad margins.
It is the same with living novelists. Rare and limited editions for
the rich; cheap and unlimited editions for the poor; all bought, all
read, and the novelist waxing more proud and prosperous every day. So
prosperous, indeed, so proud, he is getting too great a man to amuse
us as of yore. He spins fewer stories now, and his glittering web has
grown a trifle gray and dusty with the sweepings from back outlets and
mean streets. He preaches occasionally in the market-place, and he says
acrimonious things anent other novelists whose ways of thinking differ
from his own. These new, sad fashions of speech are often very grievous
to his readers, but nothing can rob him of our friendship; for always
we hope that he will take us by the hand, and lead us smilingly away
from the relentless realities of life to the golden regions of romance
where the immortal are.
FROM THE READER’S STANDPOINT.
It is a serious age in which we live, and there is a painful sense of
responsibility manifested by those who have assigned to themselves
the task of directing their fellow creatures, not only in matters
spiritual, but in all that pertains to intellectual or artistic life.
That we need guidance is plain enough; the helping hand of patient
and scholarly criticism was never more welcome than now; but to be
driven, or rather hounded along the sunny paths of literature by
severe and self-appointed teachers is not perhaps the surest way of
reaching the best that has been known and thought in the world. Neither
is it calculated to increase our enjoyment en route. The “personally
conducted” reader must weary now and then of his restricted range, as
well as of the peculiar contentiousness of his guides. If he be reading
for his own entertainment,--and there are men and women who keep that
object steadily and selfishly in view,--if he be deep in a novel, for
example, with no other purpose than an hour’s unprofitable pleasure, it
is annoying to be told by the authors of several other novels that he
has chosen this pleasure unwisely. He may be pardoned if, in a moment
of irritation, he tells the disputants plucking at his sleeve to please
go on writing their fiction as well as in them lies, and he will decide
for himself which of their books to read.
For it is not in the nature of man to relish a too strenuous
dictatorship in matters which he cannot be made to believe are of
very urgent importance. When Mr. Hamlin Garland says that American
literature _must_ be distinctly and unmistakably American, that it
_must_ be faithful to American conditions, it is difficult not to reply
that there is no “must” for us of Mr. Garland’s devising. Let him write
his stories as he thinks best, and his many admirers will read them
with satisfaction; but his authority is necessarily limited to his own
literary offspring. He cannot expect to whip other people’s children.
When Mr. Hall Caine tells the good people of Edinburgh that the
novelist is his brother’s keeper, that it is “evasive cowardice” for
him to deny his responsibility, and that the mere fact of his having
written a book proves that he feels himself something stronger than
his neighbor who hasn’t, we only protest, as readers, against assuming
any share in this spirit of acute conscientiousness. Personally, I do
not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel.
In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it
unwritten. But even granting that the author goes to work, like Mr.
Caine, from the strictest sense of moral liability, there can be no
corresponding obligation on our part to read the tale. We hear too much
of our failure to accept and appreciate the gifts which the liberal
gods are now providing for us, and it would be more modest, as well as
more dignified, if those who set the feast would forbear to extol its
merits.
As for the rival schools of fiction, they may as well consent to live
in amity side by side. If they don’t “fill one home with glee,” they
fill many homes with that moderate gratification which lightens a
weary hour. Each has its adherents; each gives its allotted share of
pleasure to people who know very well what they like, and who will
never be converted by arguments into reading what they don’t. It is
useless to tell a man who is halfway through “The House of the Wolf,”
and oblivious for one blessed hour to everything in the world save
the fate and fortunes of three French lads, that “the romantic novel
represents a juvenile and, intellectually considered, lower stage of
development than the realistic novel.” He doesn’t care the value of
a ha’penny for stages of development. He is not reading “The House
of the Wolf” by way of mental or moral discipline. He is not to be
persuaded into exchanging it unfinished for “The Apprenticeship of
Lemuel Barker,” because more “creative intelligence” is required to
tell a story without incident--when there is, so to speak, no story
to tell. What is it to him, if the book were hard or easy to write?
Why should he be reminded perpetually by realists and veritists of the
arduous nature of their task? He did not put them to work. The one and
only thing which is of vital interest to him is the tale itself. The
author’s point of view, his sense of personal responsibility, the
artistic limits which he sets himself, the difficulties which he piles
in his own way and heroically overcomes, the particular platform from
which he addresses the universe, his stern adherence to actualities,
his truthful treatment of material,--all these things about which
we hear so much, mean nothing, and less than nothing to the reader.
Give him the book, and he asks to know no more. He judges it by some
standard of his own, which may not bear the test of critical analysis,
but which is more convincing to him than the recorded opinion of
the writer. The wife of his bosom and his college-bred daughter are
powerless to persuade him that Tourguéneff is a better novelist than
Dickens. And when he stoutly resists this pressure from within, this
subtle and penetrating influence of feminine culture, it is worse than
useless to attack him from without with supercilious remarks anent
juvenility, and the immature stage of his development.
It must be admitted that the realistic story-writers are more prone
to tell us about themselves and their methods than are the heroic
narrators of improbable, but none the less interesting, romances.
Mr. Rider Haggard, indeed, from time to time insinuates that he, too,
is trammeled by the obstinate nature of facts, and that there is a
restraining and troublesome ingredient of truth mingled with his
fiction. But this is surely a pleasant jest on Mr. Haggard’s part. We
cannot believe that he ever denied himself an incident in the entire
course of his literary life. Mr. Stevenson defended with characteristic
spirit those keenly imaginative and adventurous tales which have
made the whole world kin, and to whose splendid inspiration we owe
perhaps the added heritage of “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island.” Mr.
Lang throws down his gauntlet unhesitatingly in behalf of romance,
and fights her battles with joyous and animating zeal. But Mr. Lang
is not pre-eminently a novelist. He only drops into fiction now and
then, as Mr. Wegg dropped into poetry, in the intervals of more urgent
avocations. Moreover, it is seldom from these authors that we gather
our minute information concerning the duties and difficulties of
novel-writing. They have been too wary to betray the secrets of the
craft. It is Mr. Garland, for instance, and not Mr. Stanley Weyman,
who confides to us what we had never even suspected,--the veritist’s
lack of control over the characters he has created. “He cannot shove
them about,” we are told, and are amazed to hear it, “nor marry
them, nor kill them. What they do, they do by their own will, or
through nature’s arrangement. Their very names come by some singular
attraction. The veritist cannot name his characters arbitrarily.”
Small wonder he finds his task a hard one! Small wonder he says so
much about the difficulties which beset him! He does his duty by Mary
Jane, provides her with a lover, and laboriously strives to strew with
novelistic thorns the devious paths of courtship. What must be his
sentiments, when the ungrateful hussy refuses, after all his trouble,
to marry the young man. Or perhaps she declines to be called Mary
Ann, and insists that her name is Arabella, to his great annoyance
and discomfiture. Lurid possibilities of revolt suggest themselves
on every side, until the unhappy novel-writer, notwithstanding his
detestation of the “feudal ideal,” as illustrated by Sir Walter Scott,
must sigh occasionally for “_les Droits Seigneuriaux_,” which would
enable him to hang a few of his rebellious puppets, “_pour encourager
les autres_.” It may be worth while, in this connection, to remind
him of the absolutely arbitrary manner in which Mr. Anthony Trollope,
that true master of realism, disposed of Mrs. Proudie. If ever there
was a character in fiction whom we should have trusted to hold her own
against her author, Mrs. Proudie was that character. No reasonable
creature will for a moment pretend that an amiable, easy-going,
middle-aged gentleman like Mr. Trollope was a match for the Bishop’s
wife, who had, in her day, routed many a stronger man. She had lived
so long, too. In novel after novel she had played her vigorous part,
until the right to go on living was hers by force of established usage
and custom. Yet this is what happened. One morning Mr. Trollope, while
writing at the Athenæum Club, enjoyed the salutary experience of
hearing himself criticised, and very unfavorably criticised, by two
of the club members. Among other things, they said they were tired of
reading about the same people over and over again; they thought if a
man had not wit enough to evolve new characters, he had better give
up composing novels; and they objected especially to the perpetual
domination of a woman so odious as Mrs. Proudie. At this juncture, Mr.
Trollope could be silent no longer. He arose, confessed his identity,
admitted his sin, and promised, by way of amendment, to kill Mrs.
Proudie “before the week was out;” for were not the unfinished chapters
of the “Last Chronicles of Barset” lying at that moment on his table?
And what is more, he kept his word. He slew Mrs. Proudie, apparently
quite oblivious to the fact that he was interfering unwarrantably with
“nature’s arrangement.” I mention this incident to show that it is
possible for a really determined author, who knows his rights and will
have them, to overcome the resistance of the most obstinate character
in his book.
For the rest, it does not appear to the peace-loving reader that either
the realist or the romancist has any very convincing arguments to offer
in defense of his own exclusive orthodoxy. When the romancist affirms
that his books lift men out of the sordid, painful realities of life
into a healthier atmosphere, and make them temporarily forgetful of
sadness and discontent, the realist very sensibly replies that he
prefers facts, however sordid, to literary anodynes, and that it is his
peculiar pleasure to grapple with things as they are. When the realist
remarks in turn that nothing is easier than to write of love and war,
but that it “lacks distinction,” and shows a puerile and childish mind,
the romancist merely chuckles, and clasps “Les Trois Mousquetaires”
closer to his heart. Neither of the combatants is likely to be much
affected by anything the other has to say, and we, outside the ring,
can but echo Marianne Dashwood’s sentiment, “This is admiration of a
very particular kind.” Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Lang have both distinctly
recorded their debt of gratitude to Dumas. They cannot and do not claim
that he is at all times an edifying writer; but many a weary hour has
been brightened for them by the magic of his art, many a fretful doubt
laid to rest by contact with his virile gayety and courage. On the
other hand, Mr. Boyesen has just as distinctly and just as sincerely
assured us that Dumas had no charm nor spell for him, and he has
added his impression that it is only those who, intellectually, never
out-grow their boyhood who continue to delight in such “sensational
chronicles of impossible deeds.”
It is in this latter statement, which has been repeated over and over
again with as many variations as a popular air, that the peculiar
temper of the realist stands revealed. He is not only sure that stories
of adventure are not to his liking, but he is equally sure that those
who do enjoy them are his intellectual inferiors, or at least that
they have not reached a mental maturity commensurate with his own. He
says so, with pleasing candor, whenever he has the opportunity. He is,
in general, what the Ettrick Shepherd neatly terms “a bigot to his
ain abeelities,” and it would be hard to convince him that Dumas is
none the less, in the words of Michelet, “a force of nature,” because
_he_ is not personally stirred by that force, or because he knows a
number of intelligent men who are no more affected than he is. For
myself, I can but say that, being constrained once to spend two days
in Marseilles, the only thing that reconciled me to my fate was the
sight of the gray Chateau d’If standing, stern and solitary, amid the
roughened waters. “Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and the caucus,”
may, as Emerson says, “rest on the same foundations of wonder as the
town of Troy and the Temple of Delphos;” but, personally, I am more
susceptible to Troy, or even to the Chateau d’If, than I am to banks,
of which useful institutions Marseilles contains a number, all very
handsome and imposing. This is, perhaps, a matter of temperament and
training, or it may be that mine is one of those “primitive natures”
for whose “weak and childish imaginations,” as Mr. Howells phrases it,
such unrealities are a necessary stimulant. It is true that I might, if
I chose, shelter myself under the generous mantle of Dr. Johnson, who
was known to say that “the books we read with most pleasure are light
compositions which contain a quick succession of events;” but, after
all, this was but the expression of the doctor’s personal preference,
and of no more weight than are the words of living critics who share,
or who do not share, in his opinion.
“A good cause,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “needs not to be patron’d by
passion, but can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute;” and if
scornful words be unneeded--and unheeded--in matters of moment, they
simply run to waste when poured out over trivialities. We are asked to
take everything so seriously in this unhumorous age, to talk about the
novel as a “powerful educational agent,” and to discuss the “profound
and complex logic of reality” in a short story of mild interest and
modest wit. This confuses our sense of proportion, and we grow restive
under a pressure too severe. Yet who shall say that the public, big,
amiable, and unconcerned, is not grateful for every readable book
that strays into its path? Romance and realism, the proven and the
impossible, wild stories of youthful passion and sedate studies of
middle-aged spinsters, tales of New England villages, tales of Western
towns, tales of Scotch hamlets, and tales of the mist-lands beyond
the mountains of Africa, are all welcomed and read with avidity. The
novelist, unless he be inhumanly dull, is sure of his audience, and
he grows didactic from sheer excess of prosperity. When the Rev. Mr.
John Watson (Ian Maclaren) wrote “Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush,” the
book went straight to many hearths and many hearts. It was not an
epoch-making work by any means, but its homely pathos and humor insured
for it an immediate hearing, and most comfortable returns. The critics
united in its praise, and the publishers gave us at once to understand
how many copies had been sold. Why, then, did Mr. Watson, to whom the
gods had been so kind, lift up his voice in a few short months to say
supercilious things anent all schools of fiction save his own? The
world is wider than Scotland, and local coloring is not humanity’s one
need. It will be long ere we believe that the art of story-telling
began with “A Window in Thrums,” or that “Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush”
marks its final development. Let us rather remember with gratitude that
Mr. Barrie, an artist too versatile to be intolerant, has recorded, in
place of delicate self-analysis and self-congratulation, his sincere
reverence for Scott, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and Fielding, and
Smollett, “old-fashioned novelists of some repute,” whose horizon is
wide as the sound of our English tongue, and whose sun is not yet set.
If we cannot have peace, let us then have a truce, as in the old
fighting days, a truce of six months or a year. It would freshen us
amazingly to hear nothing for a whole year about the “soul-searching
veracity of Tolstoï,” and a great many timid people might pluck up
heart to read that fine novelist, who has been rendered so alarming by
his admirers. For a year the romancist could write of young people who
marry, and the realist of middle-aged people who don’t; and, in the
renewed tranquillity of content, each workman might perhaps recognize
the strength of the other’s position. For youth, and age, and marriage,
and celibacy are alike familiar to us all. We have no crying need
to be enlightened on these subjects, though we cheerfully consent
to be entertained by them. “If the public do not know what books to
read,” says Mr. Lang very truthfully, “it is not for lack of cheap and
copious instruction.” We are sated sometimes with good advice, and
grow a little tired of education. There are days even when we recall
with mingled regret and gratitude the gray-haired, unknown author of
“Aucassin and Nicolette,” who wove his tale in the humble hope that it
might for a brief moment gladden the sad hearts of men.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation errors have been corrected.
Page 157: “In commonalties” changed to “In commonalities”
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