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<div>By Miss Repplier.</div>
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<p class='c004'>POINTS OF VIEW, 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.</p>
<p class='c004'>ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.</p>
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<p class='c005'>A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected
by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library
for Young People. 16mo, 75 cents; <i>Holiday
Edition</i>, 16mo, fancy binding, $1.25.</p>
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<div>HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.</div>
<div class='c000'><span class='sc'>Boston and New York.</span></div>
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<div>
<h1 class='c007'><span class='xxlarge'>ESSAYS IN IDLENESS</span></h1></div>
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<div>BY</div>
<div class='c000'><span class='xlarge'>AGNES REPPLIER</span></div>
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<div>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</div>
<div>HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY</div>
<div>The Riverside Press, Cambridge</div>
<div>1897</div>
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<div>Copyright, 1893,</div>
<div><span class='sc'>By</span> AGNES REPPLIER.</div>
<div class='c000'><i>All rights reserved.</i></div>
<div class='c008'>SEVENTH EDITION.</div>
<div class='c002'><i>The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.</i></div>
<div>Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.</div>
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<div><span class='xlarge'>To AGNES IRWIN.</span></div>
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<div class='chapter'>
<h2 class='c009'>CONTENTS.</h2></div>
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<table class='table0' summary=''>
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<td class='c011'> </td>
<td class='c012'><span class='xsmall'>PAGE</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Agrippina</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#agr'>1</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>The Children’s Poets</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#child'>33</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>The Praises of War</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#praises'>65</SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Leisure</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#leisure'>94</SPAN></td>
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<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Words</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#words'>113</SPAN></td>
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<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Ennui</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#ennui'>137</SPAN></td>
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<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Wit and Humor</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#wit'>168</SPAN></td>
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<tr>
<td class='c011'><span class='sc'>Letters</span></td>
<td class='c012'><SPAN href='#letters'>192</SPAN></td>
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<p class='c013'>“Leisure” is reprinted from “Scribner’s Magazine” by
permission of the publishers.</p>
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<div><span class='xlarge'>ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.</span></div>
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<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='agr' class='c009'>AGRIPPINA.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>She</span> is sitting now on my desk, and I glance
at her with deference, mutely begging permission
to begin. But her back is turned to
me, and expresses in every curve such fine
and delicate disdain that I falter and lose courage
at the very threshold of my task. I have
long known that cats are the most contemptuous
of creatures, and that Agrippina is the
most contemptuous of cats. The spirit of Bouhaki,
the proud Theban beast that sat erect,
with gold earrings in his ears, at the feet of
his master, King Hana; the spirit of Muezza,
whose slumbers Mahomet himself was not bold
enough to disturb; the spirit of Micetto, Chateaubriand’s
ecclesiastical pet, dignified as a
cardinal, and conscious ever that he was the
gift of a sovereign pontiff,—the spirits of all
arrogant cats that have played scornful parts in
the world’s great comedy look out from Agrippina’s
yellow eyes, and hold me in subjection.
I should like to explain to her, if I dared,
that my desk is small, littered with many
papers, and sadly overcrowded with the useful
inutilities which affectionate friends delight in
giving me at Christmas time. Sainte-Beuve’s
cat, I am aware, sat on his desk, and roamed
at will among those precious manuscripts
which no intrusive hand was ever permitted to
touch; but Sainte-Beuve probably had sufficient
space reserved for his own comfort and
convenience. I have not; and Agrippina’s
beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy
distracts my attention, and imperils the neatness
of my penmanship. Even when she is
disposed to be affable, turns the light of her
countenance upon me, watches with attentive
curiosity every stroke I make, and softly, with
curved paw, pats my pen as it travels over the
paper,—even in these halcyon moments,
though my self-love is flattered by her condescension,
I am aware that I should work better
and more rapidly if I denied myself this
charming companionship.</p>
<p class='c016'>But in truth it is impossible for a lover of
cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating
little friends, who give us just enough
of their regard and complaisance to make us
hunger for more. M. Fée, the naturalist, who
has written so admirably about animals, and
who understands, as only a Frenchman can
understand, the delicate and subtle organization
of a cat, frankly admits that the keynote
of its character is independence. It dwells
under our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures our
blandishments, and apparently enjoys our society,
without for one moment forfeiting its
sense of absolute freedom, without acknowledging
any servile relation to the human creature
who shelters it. “The cat,” says M. Fée,
“will never part with its liberty; it will
neither be our servant, like the horse, nor our
friend, like the dog. It consents to live as our
guest; it accepts the home we offer and the
food we give; it even goes so far as to solicit
our caresses, but capriciously, and when it suits
its humor to receive them.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Rude and masterful souls resent this fine
self-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and require
that it should have no will but theirs,
no pleasure that does not emanate from them.
They are forever prating of the love and fidelity
of the dog, of the beast that obeys their
slightest word, crouches contentedly for hours
at their feet, is exuberantly grateful for the
smallest attention, and so affectionate that its
demonstrations require to be curbed rather
than encouraged. All this homage is pleasing
to their vanity; yet there are people, less magisterial
perhaps, or less exacting, who believe
that true friendship, even with an animal, may
be built upon mutual esteem and independence;
that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy of
it; and that obedience is not essential to agreeable
and healthy intercourse. A man who
owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its
master; the term expresses accurately their
mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when
applied to the limited possession of a cat. I
am certainly not Agrippina’s mistress, and the
assumption of authority on my part would be
a mere empty dignity, like those swelling titles
which afford such innocent delight to the
Freemasons of our severe republic. If I call
Agrippina, she does not come; if I tell her to
go away, she remains where she is; if I try to
persuade her to show off her one or two little
accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous
but unswerving decision. She has frolicsome
moods, in which a thimble, a shoe-buttoner, a
scrap of paper, or a piece of string will drive
her wild with delight; she has moods of inflexible
gravity, in which she stares solemnly at her
favorite ball rolling over the carpet, without
stirring one lazy limb to reach it. “Have I
seen this foolish toy before?” she seems to be
asking herself with musing austerity; “and
can it be possible that there are cats who run
after such frivolous trifles? Vanity of vanities,
and all is vanity, save only to lie upon
the hearth rug, and be warm, and ‘think grave
thoughts to feed a serious soul.’” In such
moments of rejection and humiliation, I comfort
myself by recalling the words of one
too wise for arrogance. “When I play with
my cat,” says Montaigne, “how do I know
whether she does not make a jest of me? We
entertain each other with mutual antics; and
if I have my own time for beginning or refusing,
she too has hers.”</p>
<p class='c016'>This is the spirit in which we should approach
a creature so reserved and so utterly
self-sufficing; this is the only key we have to
that natural distinction of character which repels
careless and unobservant natures. When
I am told that Agrippina is disobedient, ungrateful,
cold-hearted, perverse, stupid, treacherous,
and cruel, I no longer strive to check
the torrent of abuse. I know that Buffon said
all this, and much more, about cats, and that
people have gone on repeating it ever since,
principally because these spirited little beasts
have remained just what it pleased Providence
to make them, have preserved their primitive
freedom through centuries of effete and demoralizing
civilization. Why, I wonder, should a
great many good men and women cherish an
unreasonable grudge against one animal because
it does not chance to possess the precise
qualities of another? “My dog fetches my
slippers for me every night,” said a friend
triumphantly, not long ago. “He puts them
first to warm by the fire, and then brings them
over to my chair, wagging his tail, and as
proud as Punch. Would your cat do as much
for you, I’d like to know?” Assuredly not!
If I waited for Agrippina to fetch me shoes or
slippers, I should have no other resource save
to join as speedily as possible one of the barefooted
religious orders of Italy. But, after all,
fetching slippers is not the whole duty of domestic
pets. As La Fontaine gently reminds
us:—</p>
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<div class='line'>“Tout animal n’a pas toutes propriétés.”</div>
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<p class='c013'>We pick no quarrel with a canary because it
does not talk like a parrot, nor with a parrot
because it does not sing like a canary. We
find no fault with a King Charles spaniel for
not flying at the throat of a burglar, nor with
a St. Bernard because we cannot put it in our
pocket. Agrippina will never make herself
serviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestimable
service. How many times have I rested
tired eyes on her graceful little body, curled
up in a ball and wrapped round with her tail
like a parcel; or stretched out luxuriously on
my bed, one paw coyly covering her face, the
other curved gently inwards, as though clasping
an invisible treasure! Asleep or awake,
in rest or in motion, grave or gay, Agrippina
is always beautiful; and it is better to be
beautiful than to fetch and carry from the
rising to the setting of the sun. She is droll,
too, with an unconscious humor, even in her
most serious and sentimental moods. She has
quite the longest ears that ever were seen on so
small a cat, eyes more solemn than Athene’s
owl blinking in the sunlight, and an air of
supercilious disdain that would have made
Diogenes seem young and ardent by her side.
Sitting on the library table, under the evening
lamp, with her head held high in air, her tall
ears as erect as chimneys, and her inscrutable
gaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room,
Agrippina inspires in the family sentiments of
mingled mirthfulness and awe. To laugh at
her in such moments, however, is to incur her
supreme displeasure. I have known her to
jump down from the table, and walk haughtily
out of the room, because of a single half-suppressed
but wholly indecorous giggle.</p>
<p class='c016'>Schopenhauer has said that the reason domestic
pets are so lovable and so helpful to
us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly,
the present moment. Life holds no future for
them, and consequently no care; if they are
content, their contentment is absolute; and
our jaded and wearied spirits find a natural
relief in the sight of creatures whose little cups
of happiness can so easily be filled to the brim.
Walt Whitman expresses the same thought
more coarsely when he acknowledges that he
loves the society of animals because they do
not sweat and whine over their condition, nor
lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
nor sicken him with discussions of their duty.
In truth, that admirable counsel of Sydney
Smith’s, “Take short views of life,” can be
obeyed only by the brutes; for the thought
that travels even to the morrow is long enough
to destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as we
know not what the morrow may bring forth.
But when Agrippina has breakfasted, and
washed, and sits in the sunlight blinking at
me with affectionate contempt, I feel soothed
by her absolute and unqualified enjoyment. I
know how full my day will be of things that I
don’t want particularly to do, and that are not
particularly worth doing; but for her, time
and the world hold only this brief moment of
contentment. Slowly the eyes close, gently
the little body is relaxed. Oh, you who strive
to relieve your overwrought nerves, and cultivate
power through repose, watch the exquisite
languor of a drowsy cat, and despair
of imitating such perfect and restful grace!
There is a gradual yielding of every muscle to
the soft persuasiveness of slumber; the flexible
frame is curved into tender lines, the head
nestles lower, the paws are tucked out of sight;
no convulsive throb or start betrays a rebellious
alertness; only a faint quiver of unconscious
satisfaction, a faint heaving of the tawny
sides, a faint gleam of the half-shut yellow
eyes, and Agrippina is asleep. I look at her
for one wistful moment, and then turn resolutely
to my work. It were ignoble to wish
myself in her place, and yet how charming to
be able to settle down to a nap, <i>sans peur et
sans reproche</i>, at ten o’clock in the morning!</p>
<p class='c016'>These, then, are a few of the pleasures to be
derived from the society of an amiable cat;
and by an amiable cat I mean one that, while
maintaining its own dignity and delicate reserve,
is nevertheless affable and condescending
in the company of human beings. There
is nothing I dislike more than newspaper and
magazine stories about priggish pussies—like
the children in Sunday-school books—that
share their food with hungry beasts from the
back alleys, and show touching fidelity to old
blind masters, and hunt partridges, in a spirit
of noble self-sacrifice, for consumptive mistresses,
and scorn to help themselves to delicacies
from the kitchen tables, and arouse their
households so often in cases of fire that I
should suspect them of starting the conflagrations
in order to win applause by giving the
alarm. Whatever a real cat may or may not
be, it is never a prig, and all true lovers of the
race have been quick to recognize and appreciate
this fact.</p>
<p class='c016'>“I value in the cat,” says Chateaubriand,
“that independent and almost ungrateful temper
which prevents it from attaching itself to
any one; the indifference with which it passes
from the salon to the housetop. When you
caress it, it stretches itself out and arches its
back responsively; but that is caused by physical
pleasure, and not, as in the case of the
dog, by a silly satisfaction in loving and being
faithful to a master who returns thanks in
kicks. The cat lives alone, has no need of
society, does not obey except when it likes, pretends
to sleep that it may see the more clearly,
and scratches everything that it can scratch.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Here is a sketch spirited enough, and of good
outline, but hardly correct in detail. A cat
seldom manifests affection, yet is often distinctly
social, and likes to see itself the petted
minion of a family group. Agrippina, in fact,
so far from living alone, will not, if she can
help it, remain for a moment in a room by herself.
She is content to have me as a companion,
perhaps in default of better; but if I
go upstairs or downstairs in search of a book,
or my eyeglasses, or any one of the countless
things that are never where they ought to be,
Agrippina follows closely at my heels. Sometimes,
when she is fast asleep, I steal softly
out of the door, thinking to escape her vigilance;
but before I have taken a dozen steps
she is under my feet, mewing a gentle reproach,
and putting on all the injured airs of
a deserted Ariadne. I should like to think
such behavior prompted by affection rather
than by curiosity; but in my candid moments
I find this “pathetic fallacy” a difficult sentiment
to cherish. There are people, I am
aware, who trustfully assert that their pets
love them; and one such sanguine creature
has recently assured the world that “no man
who boasts the real intimacy and confidence
of a cat would dream of calling his four-footed
friend ‘puss.’” But is not such a boast
rather ill-timed at best? How dare any man
venture to assert that he possesses the intimacy
and confidence of an animal so exclusive and
so reserved? I doubt if Cardinal Wolsey, in
the zenith of his pride and power, claimed the
intimacy and confidence of the superb cat who
sat in a cushioned armchair by his side, and
reflected with mimic dignity the full-blown
honors of the Lord High Chancellor of England.
Agrippina, I am humbly aware, grants
me neither her intimacy nor her confidence,
but only her companionship, which I endeavor
to receive modestly, and without flaunting my
favors to the world. She is displeased and
even downcast when I go out, and she greets
my return with delight, thrusting her little
gray head between the banisters the instant
I open the house door, and waving a welcome
in mid-air with one ridiculously small paw.
Being but mortal, I am naturally pleased with
these tokens of esteem, but I do not, on that
account, go about with arrogant brow, and
boast of my intimacy with Agrippina. I
should be laughed at, if I did, by everybody
who is privileged to possess and appreciate a
cat.</p>
<p class='c016'>As for curiosity, that vice which the Abbé
Galiani held to be unknown to animals, but
which the more astute Voltaire detected in
every little dog that he saw peering out of the
window of its master’s coach, it is the riding
passion of the feline breast. A closet door left
ajar, a box with half-closed lid, an open bureau
drawer,—these are the objects that fill a cat
with the liveliest interest and delight. Agrippina
watches breathlessly the unfastening of
a parcel, and tries to hasten matters by clutching
actively at the string. When its contents
are shown her, she examines them gravely,
and then, with a sigh of relief, settles down to
repose. The slightest noise disturbs and irritates
her until she discovers its cause. If she
hears a footstep in the hall, she runs out to
see whose it is, and, like certain troublesome
little people I have known, she dearly loves
to go to the front door every time the bell
is rung. From my window she surveys the
street with tranquil scrutiny, and, if boys are
playing below, she follows their games with a
steady, scornful stare, very different from the
wistful eagerness of a friendly dog, quivering
to join in the sport. Sometimes the boys
catch sight of her, and shout up rudely at her
window; and I can never sufficiently admire
Agrippina’s conduct upon these trying occasions,
the well-bred composure with which she
affects neither to see nor to hear them, nor
to be aware that there are such objectionable
creatures as children in the world. Sometimes,
too, the terrier that lives next door
comes out to sun himself in the street, and,
beholding my cat sitting well out of reach, he
dances madly up and down the pavement,
barking with all his might, and rearing himself
on his short hind legs, in a futile attempt
to dislodge her. Then the spirit of evil
enters Agrippina’s little heart. The window
is open, and she creeps to the extreme
edge of the stone sill, stretches herself at full
length, peers down smilingly at the frenzied
dog, dangles one paw enticingly in the air,
and exerts herself with quiet malice to drive
him to desperation. Her sense of humor is
awakened by his frantic efforts, and by her
own absolute security; and not until he is
spent with exertion, and lies panting and
exhausted on the bricks, does she arch her
graceful back, stretch her limbs lazily in the
sun, and with one light bound spring from the
window to my desk. Wisely has Moncrif
observed that a cat is not merely diverted by
everything that moves, but is convinced that
all nature is occupied exclusively with catering
to her diversion.</p>
<p class='c016'>There is a charming story told by M.
Champfleury, who has written so much and so
admirably about cats, of a poor hermit whose
piety and asceticism were so great that in a
vision he was permitted to behold his place
in heaven, next to that of St. Gregory, the
sovereign pontiff of Christendom. The hermit,
who possessed nothing upon earth but a
female cat, was abashed by the thought that in
the next world he was destined to rank with
so powerful a prince of the Church; and perhaps—for
who knows the secret springs of
spiritual pride?—he fancied that his self-inflicted
poverty would win for him an even
higher reward. Whereupon a second revelation
made known to him that his detachment
from the world was by no means so complete
as he imagined, for that he loved and valued
his cat, the sole companion of his solitude,
more than St. Gregory loved and valued all
his earthly possessions. The Pope on his
throne was the truer ascetic of the two.</p>
<p class='c016'>This little tale conveys to us, in addition
to its excellent moral,—never more needed
than at present,—a pleasing truth concerning
the lovability of cats. While they have
never attained, and never deserve to attain,
the widespread and somewhat commonplace
popularity of dogs, their fascination is a
more potent and irresistible charm. He
who yields himself to the sweet seductiveness
of a cat is beguiled forever from the simple,
honorable friendship of the more generous
and open-hearted beast. The small domestic
sphinx whose inscrutable eyes never soften
with affection; the fetich animal that comes
down to us from the far past, adored, hated,
and feared,—a god in wise and silent Egypt,
a plaything in old Rome, a hunted and unholy
creature, suffering one long martyrdom
throughout the half-seen, dimly-fathomed Middle
Ages,—even now this lovely, uncanny
pet is capable of inspiring mingled sentiments
of horror and devotion. Those who are under
its spell rejoice in their thralldom, and, like
M. Champfleury’s hermit, grow strangely wedded
to this mute, unsympathetic comradeship.
Those who have inherited the old, half-fearful
aversion render a still finer tribute to the
cat’s native witchery and power. I have seen
middle-aged women, of dignified and tranquil
aspect, draw back with unfeigned dismay at
the sight of Agrippina, a little ball of gray
and yellow fur, curled up in peaceful slumber
on the hearth rug. And this instinctive
shrinking has nothing in common with the
perfectly reasonable fear we entertain for a
terrier snapping and snarling at our heels,
or for a mastiff the size of a calf, which our
friend assures us is as gentle as a baby, but
which looks able and ready to tear us limb
from limb. It may be ignominious to be
afraid of dogs, but the emotion is one which
will bear analysis and explanation; we know
exactly what it is we fear; while the uneasiness
with which many people behold a harmless
and perfectly indifferent cat is a faint
reflection of that superstitious terror which
the nineteenth century still borrows occasionally
from the ninth. We call it by a different
name, and account for it on purely natural
principles, in deference to progress; but the
Mediæval peasant who beheld his cat steal
out, like a gray shadow, on St. John’s Eve, to
join in unholy rites, felt the same shuddering
abhorrence which we witness and wonder at
to-day. He simplified matters somewhat, and
eased his troubled mind by killing the beast;
for cats that ventured forth on the feast of
St. John, or on Halloween, or on the second
Wednesday in Lent, did so at their peril.
Fires blazed for them in every village, and
even quiet stay-at-homes were too often hunted
from their chimney-corners to a cruel death.
There is a receipt signed in 1575 by one
Lucas Pommoreux,—abhorred forever be his
name!—to whom has been paid the sum of a
hundred <i>sols parisis</i> “for having supplied for
three years all the cats required for the fire on
St. John’s Day;” and be it remembered that
the gracious child, afterwards Louis XIII.,
interceded with Henry IV. for the lives of
these poor animals, sacrificed to wicked sport
and an unreasoning terror.</p>
<p class='c016'>Girt around with fear, and mystery, and subtle
associations of evil, the cat comes down to
us through the centuries; and from every land
fresh traditions of sorcery claim it for their
own. In Brittany is still whispered the dreadful
tale of the cats that danced with sacrilegious
glee around the crucifix until their king
was slain; and in Sicily men know that if
a black cat serves seven masters in turn he
carries the soul of the seventh into hell. In
Russia black cats become devils at the end of
seven years, and in southern Europe they are
merely serving their apprenticeship as witches.
Norwegian folk-lore is rich in ghastly stories
like that of the wealthy miller whose mill has
been twice burned down on Whitsun night,
and for whom a traveling tailor offers to keep
watch. The tailor chalks a circle on the floor,
writes the Lord’s prayer around it, and waits
until midnight, when a troop of cats rush in,
and hang a great pot of pitch over the fireplace.
Again and again they try to overturn
this pitch, but every time the tailor frightens
them away; and when their leader endeavors
stealthily to draw him outside of his magic
circle, he cuts off her paw with his knife.
Then they all fly howling into the night, and
the next morning the miller sees with joy his
mill standing whole and unharmed. But the
miller’s wife cowers under the bedclothes, offering
her left hand to the tailor, and hiding
as best she can her right arm’s bleeding
stump.</p>
<p class='c016'>Finer even than this tale is the well-known
story which “Monk” Lewis told to Shelley of
a gentleman who, late one night, went to visit
a friend living on the outskirts of a forest in
east Germany. He lost his path, and, after
wandering aimlessly for some time, beheld at
last a light streaming from the windows of an
old and ruined abbey. Looking in, he saw a
procession of cats lowering into the grave a
small coffin with a crown upon it. The sight
filled him with horror, and, spurring his horse,
he rode away as fast as he could, never stopping
until he reached his destination, long
after midnight. His friend was still awaiting
him, and at once he recounted what had
happened; whereupon a cat that lay sleeping
by the fire sprang to its feet, cried out, “Then
I am the King of the Cats!” and disappeared
like a flash up the chimney.</p>
<p class='c016'>For my part, I consider this the best cat
story in all literature, full of suggestiveness
and terror, yet picturesque withal, and leaving
ample room in the mind for speculation. Why
was not the heir apparent bidden to the royal
funeral? Was there a disputed succession,
and how are such points settled in the mysterious
domain of cat-land? The notion that
these animals gather in ghost-haunted churches
and castles for their nocturnal revels is one
common to all parts of Europe. We remember
how the little maiden of the “Mountain
Idyl” confides to Heine that the innocent-looking
cat in the chimney-corner is really a witch,
and that at midnight, when the storm is high,
she steals away to the ruined keep, where the
spirits of the dead wait spellbound for the
word that shall waken them. In all scenes
of impish revelry cats play a prominent part,
although occasionally, by virtue of their dual
natures, they serve as barriers against the
powers of evil. There is the old story of the
witch’s cat that was grateful to the good girl
who gave it some ham to eat,—I may observe
here, parenthetically, that I have never known
a cat that would touch ham,—and there is the
fine bit of Italian folk-lore about the servant
maid who, with no other protector than a black
cat, ventures to disturb a procession of ghosts
on the dreadful Night of the Dead. “It is
well for you that the cat lies in your arms,”
the angry spirit says to her; “otherwise what
I am, you also would be.” The last pale reflex
of a universal tradition I found three years
ago in London, where the bad behavior of the
Westminster cats—proverbially the most dissolute
and profligate specimens of their race—has
given rise to the pleasant legend of a country
house whither these rakish animals retire
for nights of gay festivity, and whence they
return in the early morning, jaded, repentant,
and forlorn.</p>
<p class='c016'>Of late years there has been a rapid and
promising growth of what disaffected and alliterative
critics call the “cat cult,” and poets
and painters vie with one another in celebrating
the charms of this long-neglected pet.
Mr. M. H. Spielmann’s beautiful volume in
praise of Madame Henriette Ronner and her
pictures is a treasure upon which many an ardent
lover of cats will cast wandering and wistful
glances. It is impossible for even the most
disciplined spirit not to yearn over these little
furry darlings, these gentle, mischievous, lazy,
irresistible things. As for Banjo, that dear
and sentimental kitten, with his head on one
side like Lydia Languish, and a decorous
melancholy suffusing his splendid eyes, let any
obdurate scorner of the race look at his loveliness
and be converted. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson’s
pretty anthology, “Concerning Cats,”
is another step in the right direction; a dainty
volume of selections from French and English
verse, where we may find old favorites like
Cowper’s “Retired Cat” and Calverly’s “Sad
Memories,” graceful epitaphs on departed pussies,
some delightful poems from Baudelaire,
and three, no less delightful, from the pen of
Mrs. Tomson herself, whose preface, or “foreword,”
is enough to win for her at once the
friendship and sympathy of the elect. The
book, while it contains a good deal that might
well have been omitted, is necessarily a small
one; for poets, English poets especially, have
just begun to sing the praises of the cat, as
they have for generations sung the praises of
the horse and dog. Nevertheless, all English
literature, and all the literatures of every land,
are full of charming allusions to this friendly
animal,—allusions the brevity of which only
enhances their value. Those two delicious
lines of Herrick’s, for example,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“And the brisk mouse may feast herself with crumbs,</div>
<div class='line'>Till that the green-eyed kitling comes,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>are worth the whole of Wordsworth’s solemn
poem, “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves.”
What did Wordsworth know of the innate
vanity, the affectation and coquetry, of kittenhood?
He saw the little beast gamboling on
the wall, and he fancied her as innocent as she
looked,—as though any living creature <i>could</i>
be as innocent as a kitten looks! With touching
simplicity, he believed her all unconscious
of the admiration she was exciting:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“What would little Tabby care</div>
<div class='line'>For the plaudits of the crowd?</div>
<div class='line'>Over happy to be proud,</div>
<div class='line'>Over wealthy in the treasure</div>
<div class='line'>Of her own exceeding pleasure!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Ah, the arrant knavery of that kitten! The
tiny impostor, showing off her best tricks, and
feigning to be occupied exclusively with her
own infantile diversion! We can see her now,
prancing and paddling after the leaves, and
all the while peeping out of “the tail o’ her
ee” at the serene poet and philosopher, and
waving her naughty tail in glee over his confidence
and condescension.</p>
<p class='c016'>Heine’s pretty lines,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“And close beside me the cat sits purring,</div>
<div class='line in2'>Warming her paws at the cheery gleam;</div>
<div class='line'>The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring;</div>
<div class='line in2'>My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>find their English echo in the letter Shelley
writes to Peacock, describing, half wistfully,
the shrines of the Penates, “whose hymns
are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles,
the long talks over the past and dead, the
laugh of children, the warm wind of summer
filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm
of winter struggling in vain for entrance.”
How incomplete would these pictures be, how
incomplete is any fireside sketch, without the
purring kitten or drowsy cat!</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“The queen I am o’ that cozy place;</div>
<div class='line'>As wi’ ilka paw I dicht my face,</div>
<div class='line'>I sing an’ purr wi’ mickle grace.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little
god of domesticity, whose presence turns a
house into a home. Even the chilly desolation
of a hotel may be rendered endurable by these
affable and discriminating creatures; for one
of them, as we know, once welcomed Sir Walter
Scott, and softened for him the unfamiliar
and unloved surroundings. “There are no
dogs in the hotel where I lodge,” he writes to
Abbotsford from London, “but a tolerably
conversable cat <i>who</i> eats a mess of cream with
me in the morning.” Of course it did, the
wise and lynx-eyed beast! I make no doubt
that, day after day and week after week, that
cat had wandered superbly amid the common
throng of lodgers, showing favor to none, and
growing cynical and disillusioned by constant
contact with a crowd. Then, one morning, it
spied the noble, rugged face which neither man
nor beast could look upon without loving, and
forthwith tendered its allegiance on the spot.
Only “tolerably conversable” it was, this
reserved and town-bred animal; less urbane
because less happy than the much-respected
retainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinsefeld,
whom Sir Walter called his friend. “Ah,
mon grand ami, vous avez tué mon autre grand
ami!” he sighed, when the huge hound Nimrod
ended poor Hinse’s placid career. And if
Scott sometimes seems to disparage cats, as
when he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain to
one, in “Quentin Durward,” he atones for
such indignity by the use of the little pronoun
“who” when writing of the London puss.
My own habit is to say “who” on similar
occasions, and I am glad to have so excellent
an authority.</p>
<p class='c016'>It were an endless though a pleasant task to
recount all that has been said, and well said,
in praise of the cat by those who have rightly
valued her companionship. M. Loti’s Moumoutte
Blanche and Moumoutte Chinoise
are well known and widely beloved, and M.
Théophile Gautier’s charming pages are too
familiar for comment. Who has not read with
delight of the Black and White Dynasties
that for so long ruled with gentle sway over
his hearth and heart; of Madame Théophile,
who thought the parrot was a green chicken;
of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply resented
his master’s staying out late at night; of the
graceful and fastidious Séraphita; the gluttonous
Enjolras; the acute Bohemian, Gavroche;
the courteous and well-mannered Eponine,
who received M. Gautier’s guests in the
drawing-room and dined at his table, taking
each course as it was served, and restraining
any rude distaste for food not to her fancy.
“Her place was laid without a knife and fork,
indeed, but with a glass, and she went regularly
through dinner, from soup to dessert,
awaiting her turn to be helped, and behaving
with a quiet propriety which most children
might imitate with advantage. At the first
stroke of the bell she would appear, and when
I came into the dining-room she would be at
her post, upright on her chair, her forepaws on
the edge of the tablecloth; and she would present
her smooth forehead to be kissed, like a
well-bred little girl who was affectionately polite
to relatives and old people.”</p>
<p class='c016'>I have read this pretty description several
times to Agrippina, who is extremely wayward
and capricious about her food, rejecting plaintively
one day the viands which she has eaten
with apparent enjoyment the day before. In
fact, the difficulty of catering to her is so well
understood by tradesmen that recently, when
the housemaid carried her on an errand to the
grocery,—Agrippina is very fond of these
jaunts and of the admiration she excites,—the
grocer, a fatherly man, with cats of his
own, said briskly, “Is this the little lady who
eats the biscuits?” and presented her on the
spot with several choice varieties from which
to choose. She is fastidious, too, about the
way in which her meals are served; disliking
any other dishes than her own, which are of
blue-and-white china; requiring that her meat
should be cut up fine and all the fat removed,
and that her morning oatmeal should be well
sugared and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn.
My friends tell me sometimes that it is not
the common custom of cats to receive so much
attention at table, and that it is my fault
Agrippina is so exacting; but such grumblers
fail to take into consideration the marked individuality
that is the charm of every kindly
treated puss. She differs from her sisters as
widely as one woman differs from another,
and reveals varying characteristics of good and
evil, varying powers of intelligence and adaptation.
She scales splendid heights of virtue,
and, unlike Sir Thomas Browne, is “singular
in offenses.” Even those primitive instincts
which we believe all animals hold in common
are lost in acquired ethics and depravity. No
heroism could surpass that of the London cat
who crawled back five times under the stage
of the burning theatre to rescue her litter of
kittens, and, having carried four of them to
safety, perished devotedly with the fifth. On
the other hand, I know of a cat who drowned
her three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason,
apparently, save to be rid of them, and that
she might lie in peace on the hearth rug,—a
murder well planned, deliberate, and cruel.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“So Tiberius might have sat,</div>
<div class='line'>Had Tiberius been a cat.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Only in her grace and beauty, her love of
comfort, her dignity of bearing, her courteous
reserve, and her independence of character
does puss remain immutable and unchanged.
These are the traits which win for her the
warmest corner by the fire, and the unshaken
regard of those who value her friendship and
aspire to her affection. These are the traits so
subtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnet
which every true lover of cats feels in his heart
<i>must</i> have been addressed to his own particular
pet:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Half gentle kindliness, and half disdain,</div>
<div class='line'>Thou comest to my call, serenely suave,</div>
<div class='line'>With humming speech and gracious gestures grave,</div>
<div class='line'>In salutation courtly and urbane;</div>
<div class='line'>Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain,</div>
<div class='line'>For wiles may win thee, but no arts enslave;</div>
<div class='line'>And nowhere gladly thou abidest, save</div>
<div class='line'>Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign’st to dwell</div>
<div class='line'>Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,</div>
<div class='line'>Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;</div>
<div class='line'>That men forget dost thou remember well,</div>
<div class='line'>Beholden still in blinking reveries,</div>
<div class='line'>With sombre sea-green gaze inscrutable.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='child' class='c009'>THE CHILDREN’S POETS.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>Now</span> and then I hear it affirmed by sad-voiced
pessimists, whispering in the gloom,
that people do not read as much poetry in
our day as they did in our grandfathers’, that
this is distinctly the era of prose, and that
the poet is no longer, as Shelley claimed,
the unacknowledged legislator of the world.
Perhaps these cheerless statements are true,
though it would be more agreeable not to
believe them. Perhaps, with the exception
of Browning, whom we study because he is
difficult to understand, and of Shakespeare,
whom we read because it is hard to content
our souls without him, the poets have slipped
away from our crowded lives, and are best
known to us through the medium of their
reviewers. We are always wandering from
the paths of pleasure, and this may be one of
our deviations. Yet what matters it, after
all, while around us, on every side, in schoolrooms
and nurseries, in quiet corners and by
cheerful fires, the children are reading poetry?—reading
it with a joyous enthusiasm and an
absolute surrendering of spirit which we can
all remember, but can never feel again. Well
might Sainte-Beuve speak bravely of the clear,
fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Well
might he recall, with wistful sighs, “that
instinctive knowledge which afterwards ripens
into judgment, but of which the fresh lucidity
remains forever unapproached.” He
knew, as all critics have known, that it is only
the child who responds swiftly, pliantly, and
unreservedly to the allurements of the imagination.
He knew that, when poetry is in
question, it is better to feel than to think;
and that with the growth of a guarded and
disciplined intelligence, straining after the enjoyment
which perfection in literary art can
give, the first careless rapture of youth fades
into a half-remembered dream.</p>
<p class='c016'>If we are disposed to doubt the love that
children bear to poetry, a love concerning
which they exhibit a good deal of reticence,
let us consider only the alacrity with which
they study, for their own delight, the poems
that please them best. How should we fare,
I wonder, if tried by a similar test? How
should we like to sit down and commit to
memory Tennyson’s “œnone,” or “Locksley
Hall,” or Byron’s apostrophe to the Ocean, or
the battle scene in “Marmion”? Yet I have
known children to whom every word of these
and many other poems was as familiar as the
alphabet; and a great deal more familiar—thank
Heaven!—than the multiplication
table, or the capitals of the United States. A
rightly constituted child may find the paths of
knowledge hopelessly barred by a single page
of geography, or by a single sum in fractions;
but he will range at pleasure through the
paths of poetry, having the open sesame to
every door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essentially
a rightly constituted child, did not even
wait for a formal introduction to his letters,
but managed to learn the ballad of Hardy-knute
before he knew how to read, and went
shouting it around the house, warming his
baby blood to fighting-point, and training
himself in very infancy to voice the splendors
of his manhood. He remembered this ballad,
too, and loved it all his life, reciting it once
with vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whose
own unhappy childhood had been softened
and vivified by the same innocent delights.</p>
<p class='c016'>In truth, the most charming thing about
youth is the tenacity of its impressions. If
we had the time and courage to study a dozen
verses to-day, we should probably forget
eleven of them in a fortnight; but the poetry
we learned as children remains, for the most
part, indelibly fixed in our memories, and
constitutes a little Golden Treasury of our
own, more dear and valuable to us than any
other collection, because it contains only our
chosen favorites, and is always within the reach
of reference. Once, when I was very young, I
asked a girl companion—well known now in
the world of literature—if she did not grow
weary waiting for trains, which were always
late, at the suburban station where she went
to school. “Oh, no,” was the cheerful reply.
“If I have no book, and there is no one
here to talk with, I walk up and down the
platform and think over the poetry that I
know.” Admirable occupation for an idle
minute! Even the tedium of railway traveling
loses half its horrors if one can withdraw
at pleasure into the society of the poets and,
soothed by their gentle and harmonious voices,
forget the irksome recurrence of familiar
things.</p>
<p class='c016'>It has been often demonstrated, and as
often forgotten, that children do not need to
have poetry written down to their intellectual
level, and do not love to see the stately Muse
ostentatiously bending to their ear. In the
matter of prose, it seems necessary for them
to have a literature of their own, over which
they linger willingly for a little while, as
though in the sunny antechamber of a king.
But in the golden palace of the poets there is
no period of probation, there is no enforced
attendance upon petty things. The clear-eyed
children go straight to the heart of the
mystery, and recognize in the music of words,
in the enduring charm of metrical quality, an
element of never-ending delight. When to
this simple sensuous pleasure is added the
enchantment of poetic images, lovely and
veiled and dimly understood, then the delight
grows sweeter and keener, the child’s soul
flowers into a conscious love of poetry, and
one lifelong source of happiness is gained.
But it is never through infantine or juvenile
verses that the end is reached. There is no
poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and
it was not the least of his joys to know that
all over the English-speaking world children
were tuning their hearts to the music of his
lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously
over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the
insult seemed greater and more wanton when
this beloved idol of our nurseries deliberately
offered to his eager audience such anxiously
babyish verses as those about Minnie and
Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes
straying among the flowers. Is there in
Christendom a child who wants to be told by
one of the greatest of poets that</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Minnie and Winnie</div>
<div class='line in3'>Slept in a shell;”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>that the shell was pink within and silver without;
and that</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Sounds of the great sea</div>
<div class='line in4'>Wandered about.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Two bright stars</div>
<div class='line in3'>Peep’d into the shell.</div>
<div class='line in1'>‘What are they dreaming of?</div>
<div class='line in3'>Who can tell?’</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Started a green linnet</div>
<div class='line in3'>Out of the croft;</div>
<div class='line in1'>‘Wake, little ladies,</div>
<div class='line in3'>The sun is aloft.’”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>It is not in these tones that poetry speaks
to the childish soul, though it is too often in
this fashion that the poet strives to adjust
himself to what he thinks is the childish
standard. He lowers his sublime head from
the stars, and pipes with painstaking flatness
on a little reed, while the children wander far
away, and listen breathlessly to older and
dreamier strains.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“She left the web, she left the loom,</div>
<div class='line in1'>She made three paces thro’ the room,</div>
<div class='line in1'>She saw the water-lily bloom,</div>
<div class='line in1'>She saw the helmet and the plume,</div>
<div class='line in6'>She look’d down to Camelot,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Out flew the web and floated wide;</div>
<div class='line in1'>The mirror crack’d from side to side;</div>
<div class='line in1'>‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried</div>
<div class='line in6'>The Lady of Shalott.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Here is the mystic note that childhood loves,
and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linked
rhymes that makes music for its ears. How
many of us can remember well our early joy
in this poem, which was but as another and
more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with
Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” and “Undine,”
and all sad stories of unhappy lives!
And who shall forget the sombre passion of
“Oriana,” of those wailing verses that rang
through our little hearts like the shrill sobbing
of winter storms, of that strange tragedy
that oppressed us more with fear than pity!</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow,</div>
<div class='line in8'>Oriana,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Alone I wander to and fro,</div>
<div class='line in8'>Oriana.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>If any one be inclined to think that children
must understand poetry in order to appreciate
and enjoy it, that one enchanted line,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>should be sufficient to undeceive him forever.
The spell of those finely chosen words lies in
the shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—a
picture with indistinct outlines, as of
an unknown land, where the desolate spirit
wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole
poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imaginative
child, and its atmosphere of bleak despondency
darkens suddenly into horror at
the breaking off of the last line from visions
of the grave and of peaceful death,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“I hear the roaring of the sea,</div>
<div class='line in8'>Oriana.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>The same grace of indistinctness, though
linked with a gentler mood and with a softer
music, makes the lullaby in “The Princess”
a lasting delight to children, while the pretty
cradle-song in “Sea Dreams,” beginning,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“What does little birdie say</div>
<div class='line in1'>In her nest at peep of day?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>has never won their hearts. Its motive is too
apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced.
It has none of the condescension of “Minnie
and Winnie,” and grown people can read it
with pleasure; but a simple statement of obvious
truths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning,
however dexterously narrated in prose
or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful
soul in thrall.</p>
<p class='c016'>If it be a matter of interest to know what
poets are most dear to the children around
us, to the ordinary “apple-eating” little boys
and girls for whom we are hardly brave
enough to predict a shining future, it is delightful
to be told by favorite authors and
by well-loved men of letters what poets first
bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is
especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang
admit us a little way into his confidence, and
confess to us that he disliked “Tam O’Shanter”
when his father read it aloud to him; preferring,
very sensibly, “to take my warlocks
and bogies with great seriousness.” Of course
he did, and the sympathies of all children are
with him in his choice. The ghastly details
of that witches’ Sabbath are far beyond a
child’s limited knowledge of demonology and
the Scotch dialect. Tam’s escape and Maggie’s
final catastrophe seem like insults offered
to the powers of darkness; only the humor of
the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom,
to the childish mind, a desirable element of
poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott’s illustrations
can make “John Gilpin” a real favorite
in our nurseries, while “The Jackdaw of
Rheims” is popular simply because children,
being proof against cynicism, accept the story
as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy
for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoicings
over his restoration to grace and feathers.
As for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,”
its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and the
terror of what is to come helps little readers
over such sad stumbling-blocks as</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>lines which are every whit as painful to their
ears as to ours. I have often wondered how
the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that
bright-eyed group of alert and charming children,
all afire with romantic impulses, received
“The Cataract of Lodore,” when papa Southey
condescended to read it in the schoolroom.
What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and
grateful! What secret repulsion to a senseless
clatter of words, as remote from the silvery
sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters,
as from the unalterable requirements of poetic
art!</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“And moreover he tasked me</div>
<div class='line in2'>To tell him in rhyme.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Ah! unwise little son, to whose rash request
generations of children have owed the presence,
in readers and elocution-books and volumes of
“Select Lyrics for the Nursery,” of those
hated and hateful verses.</p>
<p class='c016'>“Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott,”
says Mr. Lang; with “Marmion,” and the
“Last Minstrel,” and “The Lady of the
Lake,” read “for the twentieth time,” and
ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scott
with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by firelight
in his mother’s dressing-room, when all
the household thought him fast asleep, and with
Pope’s translation of the Iliad, that royal road
over which the Muse has stepped, smiling,
into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to
Pope—poor little lame lad—with Spenser’s
“Faerie Queene;” with the brave adventures
of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, unblemished
and unfrighted, to do battle with
dragons and “Paynims cruel.” And so the
links of the magic chain are woven, and child
hands down to child the spell that holds the
centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the
unkind things which even the most tolerant of
critics are wont to say about Pope’s “Iliad,”
remembering as I do how many boys have received
from its pages their first poetic stimulus,
their first awakening to noble things. What
a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a
feeble, petulant child tossing with fever on his
little bed, and of his brother Francis stealing
up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side
and read him Pope’s translation of Homer.
The bond that drew these boys together was
forged in such breathless moments and in such
mutual pleasures; for Francis, the handsome,
spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, and
robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports,
had little in common with his small, silent, precocious
brother. “Frank had a violent love
of beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone of
mild complaint (and no wonder, we think, for
a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it
would have been hard to find). “But whenever
that was superseded by any humor or
circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used
to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration
and contempt.” More contempt than admiration,
probably; yet was all resentment
forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while
one boy read to the other the story of Hector
and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow
in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade,
as a tawny lioness paces round her young
when she sees the hunters coming through
the woods. As a companion picture to this
we have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing
Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by
the passionate impulse of these lines,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in18'>“In Aleppo once,</div>
<div class='line'>Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk</div>
<div class='line'>Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,</div>
<div class='line'>I took by the throat the circumcised dog,</div>
<div class='line'>And smote him, thus,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>that he struck himself fiercely on the breast
with an iron chisel, and fainted under the
blow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeare
is beyond the mental grasp of childhood,
when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on
winter nights to read “King Henry IV.,” and
Rossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by the
agony of Othello’s remorse.</p>
<p class='c016'>On the other hand, there are writers, and
very brilliant writers, too, whose early lives
appear to have been undisturbed by such
keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom
there are no well-loved and familiar figures
illumined forever in “that bright, clear, undying
light that borders the edge of the oblivion
of infancy.” Count Tolstoi confesses himself
to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his
fellow-students at the University of Moscow,
who seemed to him so coarse and inelegant,
and yet who had read and enjoyed so
much. “Pushkin and Zhukovsky were literature
to them,” he says wistfully, “and not, as
to me, little books in yellow bindings which I
had studied as a child.” But how, one wonders,
could Pushkin have remained merely a
“little book in yellow binding” to any boy
who had had the happiness of studying him as
a child? Pushkin is the Russian Byron, and
embodies in his poems the same spirit of restless
discontent, of dejected languor, of passionate
revolt; not revolt against the Tsar,
which is a limited and individual judgment,
but revolt against the bitter penalties of life,
which is a sentiment common to the youth of
all nations and of every age. Yet there are
Englishmen who have no word save that of
scorn for Byron, and I feel uncertain whether
such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being
boys at all. If to George Meredith’s composed
and complacent mind there strays any wanton
recollection of young, impetuous days, how
can he write with pen of gall these worse than
churlish lines on Manfred?—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Projected from the bilious Childe,</div>
<div class='line in1'>This clatterjaw his foot could set</div>
<div class='line in1'>On Alps, without a breast beguiled</div>
<div class='line in1'>To glow in shedding rascal sweat.</div>
<div class='line in1'>Somewhere about his grinder teeth</div>
<div class='line in1'>He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And summoned Nature to her feud</div>
<div class='line in1'>With bile and buskin attitude.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>There is more of this pretty poem, but I have
quoted as much as my own irascibility can
bear. I, at least, have been a child, and have
spent some of my childhood’s happiest hours
with Manfred on the Alps; and have with
him beheld</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in6'>“the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs</div>
<div class='line'>In dizziness of distance,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>and have believed with all a child’s sincerity
in his remorseful gloom:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in10'>“for I have ceased</div>
<div class='line'>To justify my deeds unto myself—</div>
<div class='line'>The last infirmity of evil.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now,
recalling, as it does, the time “when I was in
my father’s house, and my path ran down with
butter and honey.” Once more I see the big,
bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust which was
my daily task, my dear mother having striven
long and vainly to teach my idle little hands
some useful housewifely accomplishment. In
one corner stood a console-table, with chilly
Parian ornaments on top, and underneath a
pile of heavy books; Wordsworth, Moore, the
poems of Frances Sargent Osgood,—no lack
of variety here,—“The Lady of the Lake,”
and Byron in an embossed brown binding, with
closely printed double columns, well calculated
to dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Not
that mysterious and malignant mountain which
rose frowning from the sea, and drew all ships
shattered to its feet, was more irresistible in
its attraction than this brown, bulky Byron.
I could not pass it by! My dusting never got
beyond the table where it lay; but sitting
crumpled on the floor, with the enchanted
volume on my lap, I speedily forgot everything
in the world save only the wandering
Childe,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>or “The Corsair,” or “Mazeppa,” or “Manfred,”
best loved of that dark group. Perhaps
Byron is not considered wholesome reading for
little girls in these careful days when expurgated
editions of “The Vicar of Wakefield”
and “Paul and Virginia” find favor in our
nurseries. On this score I have no defense to
offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a
safe text-book for early youth; but having
never been told that there was such a thing
as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared
at least that alert curiosity concerning it
which is one of the most unpleasant results of
our present guarded system. Moreover, we
have Goethe’s word for it that Byron is not
as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly
he is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely
believe that if part of his attraction for the
young lies in what Mr. Pater calls “the
grieved dejection, the endless regret,” which
to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true
murmur of life, a better part lies in his large
grasp of nature,—not nature in her minute
and lovely detail, but in her vast outlines,
her salient features, her solemn majesty and
strength. Crags and misty mountain tops,
storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the
restless deep,—these are the aspects of nature
that childhood prizes, and loves to hear described
in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped
daisy, the yellow primrose, and the freckled
nest-eggs</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Hatching in the hawthorn-tree”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>belong to a late stage of development. Eugénie
de Guérin, who recognized as clearly as
Sainte-Beuve the “fine penetration” peculiar
to children, and who regarded them ever with
half-wistful, half-wondering delight, has written
some very charming suggestions about the kind
of poetry, “pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate,”
which she considered proper food for these
highly idealized little people,—“angels upon
earth.” The only discouraging part of her
pretty pleading is her frank admission that—in
French literature, at least—there is no such
poetry as she describes, which shows how hard
it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence.
She endeavored sincerely, in her “Infantines,”
to remedy this defect, to “speak to
childhood in its own language;” and her verses
on “Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings,” are
quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies.
No child is strongly moved, or taught the enduring
delight of song, by such lines as these,
but most children will take a genuine pleasure
in the baby angel who played with little Abel
under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll
and blew the first bubble, and who finds a
friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this
big gray world. Strange to say, he has his
English counterpart in Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson’s “Unseen Playmate,” that shadowy
companion whose home is the cave dug by
childish hands, and who is ready to share all
games in the most engaging spirit of accommodation.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“’Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin,</div>
<div class='line in1'>That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win;”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>a touch of combative veracity which brings us
down at once from Mademoiselle de Guérin’s
fancy flights to the real playground, where
real children, very faintly resembling “angels
upon earth,” are busy with mimic warfare.
Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose
verses, written especially for the nursery, have
found their way straight into little hearts.
His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy,
and the ease with which he enters into that
brilliant world of imagination wherein children
habitually dwell, make him their natural
friend and minstrel. If some of the rhymes
in “A Child’s Garden of Verses” seem a trifle
bald and babyish, even these are guiltless
of condescension; while others, like “Travel,”
“Shadow March,” and “The Land of Story-Books,”
are instinct with poetic life. I can
only regret that a picture so faultless in detail
as “Shadow March,” where we see the crawling
darkness peer through the window pane,
and hear the beating of the little boy’s heart
as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be
marred at its close by a single line of false
imagery:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,</div>
<div class='line in1'>With the black night overhead.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know
that shadows do not tramp, and that the recurrence
of a short, vigorous word which tells so
admirably in Scott’s “William and Helen,” and
wherever the effect of sound combined with
motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place
in describing the ghostly things that glide with
horrible noiselessness at the feet of the frightened
lad. Children, moreover, are keenly
alive to the value and the suggestiveness of
terms. A little eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance,
who was reciting “Lord Ullin’s
Daughter,” stopped short at these lines,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Adown the glen rode armed men,</div>
<div class='line in2'>Their trampling sounded nearer,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>and called out excitedly, “Don’t you hear the
horses?” She, at least, heard them as if with
the swift apprehension of fear, heard them loud
above the sounds of winds and waters, and
rendered her unconscious tribute of praise to
the sympathetic selection of words.</p>
<p class='c016'>There is, as we know, a great deal of poetry
written every year for childish readers. Some
of it makes its appearance in Christmas books,
which are so beautifully bound and illustrated
that the little foolish, feeble verses are forgiven,
and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether amid
more important accessories. Better poems than
these are published in children’s periodicals,
where they form a notable feature, and are,
I dare say, read by the young people whose
tastes are catered to in this fashion. Those of
us who are familiar with these periodicals—either
weeklies or monthlies—are well aware
that the verses they offer may be easily divided
into three classes. First, mere rhymes and
jingles, intended for very little readers, and
with which it would be simple churlishness
to quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry,
they are sometimes very amusing, and they
have an easy swing that is pleasant alike to
young ears and old. It must be a hard heart
that does not sympathize with the unlucky and
ill-mated gnome who was</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in4'>“full of fun and frolic,</div>
<div class='line'>But his wife was melancholic;”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>or with the small damsel in pigtail and pinafore
who comforts herself at the piano with
this engaging but dubious maxim:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Practicing is good for a good little girl;</div>
<div class='line in1'>It makes her nose straight, and it makes her hair curl.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>The second kind of verse appears to be written
solely for the sake of the accompanying illustration,
and is often the work of the illustrator,
who is more at home with his pencil than his
pen. Occasionally it is comic, occasionally
sentimental or descriptive; for the most part
it is something in this style:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>THE ELF AND THE BUMBLE BEE.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Oh, bumble bee!</div>
<div class='line in10'>Bumble bee!</div>
<div class='line in2'>Don’t fly so near!</div>
<div class='line'>Or you will tumble me</div>
<div class='line in2'>Over, I fear.”</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Oh, funny elf!</div>
<div class='line in10'>Funny elf!</div>
<div class='line in2'>Don’t be alarmed!</div>
<div class='line'>I am looking for honey, elf;</div>
<div class='line in2'>You sha’n’t be harmed.”</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Then tarry,</div>
<div class='line in10'>Oh, tarry, bee!</div>
<div class='line in2'>Fill up your sack;</div>
<div class='line'>And carry, oh, carry me</div>
<div class='line in2'>Home on your back.”<SPAN name='r1' /><SPAN href='#f1' class='c019'><sup>[1]</sup></SPAN></div>
</div></div>
</div>
<div class='footnote c020' id='f1'>
<p class='c021'><span class='label'><SPAN href='#r1'>1</SPAN>. </span>Oliver Herford in <i>St. Nicholas</i>.</p>
</div>
<p class='c016'>Now what child will read more than once these
empty little verses (very prettily illustrated)
when it is in his power to turn back to other
sprites that sing in different strains,—to the
fairy who wanders</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Over hill, over dale,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Thorough bush, thorough briar,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips’ ears;
or to that softer shape, the music of whose
song, once heard, haunts us forever:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Full fathom five thy father lies;</div>
<div class='line in3'>Of his bones are coral made;</div>
<div class='line in1'>Those are pearls that were his eyes:</div>
<div class='line in3'>Nothing of him that doth fade</div>
<div class='line in1'>But doth suffer a sea-change</div>
<div class='line in1'>Into something rich and strange.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true
fairyland, where Shakespeare and little children
wander at their will.</p>
<p class='c016'>Poems of the third class are intended for
growing girls and boys, and aspire to be
considered literature. They are well written,
as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems to
be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse-makers,
who, even when they have least to say,
say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. This
pretty, easy insignificance is much better
adapted to adult readers, who demand little
of poets beyond brevity, than to children,
who love large issues, real passions, fine emotions,
and an heroic attitude in life. Pleasant
thoughts couched in pleasant language,
trivial details, and photographic bits of description
make no lasting appeal to the expansive
imagination of a child. Analysis is
wasted upon him altogether, because he sees
things swiftly, and sees them as a whole. He
may disregard fine shading and minute merits,
but there are no boundaries to his wandering
vision. “Small sciences are the labors of our
manhood, but the round universe is the plaything
of the boy.”</p>
<p class='c016'>The painful lack of distinction in most of
the poetry prepared especially for him chills
his fine ardor and dulls his imagination.
Subtle verses about moods and tempers, calculated
to make healthy little readers emulate
Miss Martineau’s peevish self-sympathy;
melancholy verses about young children who
suffer poverty and disaster; weird and unintelligible
verses, with all Poe’s indistinctness
and none of his music; commonplace verses
about bootblacks and newsboys; descriptive
verses about snowstorms and April showers;
pious verses about infant prigs;—verses of
every kind, all on the same level of agreeable
mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harmless
that a baby could hear them without
blushing. Why, the child who reads “Young
Lochinvar” is richer in that one good and gallant
poem than the child who has all these
modern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolish
feet.</p>
<p class='c016'>For the question at issue is not what kind
of poetry is wholesome for children, but what
kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen
cases out of twenty, that which they love is
good for them, and they can guide themselves
a great deal better than we can hope to guide
them. I once asked a friend who had spent
many years in teaching little girls and boys
whether her small pupils, when left to their
own discretion, ever chose any of the pretty,
trivial verses out of new books and magazines
for study and recitation. She answered,
Never. They turned instinctively to the same
old favorites she had been listening to so long;
to the same familiar poems that their fathers
and mothers had probably studied and recited
before them. “Hohenlinden,” “Glenara,”
“Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” “Young Lochinvar,”
“Rosabelle,” “To Lucasta, on going to
the Wars,” the lullaby from “The Princess,”
“Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “Annabel Lee,”
Longfellow’s translation of “The Castle by the
Sea,” and “The Skeleton in Armor,”—these
are the themes of which children never weary;
these are the songs that are sung forever in
their secret Paradise of Delights. The little
volumes containing such tried and proven
friends grow shabby with much handling; and
I have seen them marked all over with mysterious
crosses and dots and stars, each of which
denoted the exact degree of affection which the
child bore to the poem thus honored and approved.
I can fancy Mr. Lang’s “Blue Poetry
Book” fairly covered with such badges of
distinction; for never before has any selection
of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to
childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over
its pages, I feel as if the children of England
must have brought their favorite songs to Mr.
Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own
darling might be admitted,—as if they must
have forced his choice into their chosen channels.
Its only rival in the field, Palgrave’s
“Children’s Treasury of English Song,” is
edited with such nice discrimination, such
critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless,—a
triumph of delicacy and good taste. But
much that childhood loves is necessarily excluded
from a volume so small and so carefully
considered. The older poets, it is true,
are generously treated,—Herrick, especially,
makes a braver show than he does in Mr.
Lang’s collection; and there are plenty of
beautiful ballads, some of which, like “The
Lass of Lochroyan,” we miss sorely from the
pages of the “Blue Poetry Book.” On the
other hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury,”
are those lovely snatches of song familiar
to our earliest years, and which we welcome
individually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr.
Lang shows them to us once more?—“Rose
Aylmer,” “County Guy,” “Proud Maisie,”
“How Sleep the Brave,” “Nora’s Vow,”—the
delight of my own childhood,—the pathetic
“Farewell,”—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,</div>
<div class='line in2'>We left fair Scotland’s strand;</div>
<div class='line in1'>It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,</div>
<div class='line in2'>We e’er saw Irish land,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>and Hood’s silvery little verses beginning,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“A lake and a fairy boat</div>
<div class='line in2'>To sail in the moonlight clear,—</div>
<div class='line in1'>And merrily we would float</div>
<div class='line in2'>From the dragons that watch us here!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>All these and many more are gathered safely
into this charming volume. Nothing we long
to see appears to be left out, except, indeed,
Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” and Herrick’s
“Night Piece,” both of them very serious omissions.
It seems strange to find seven of Edgar
Poe’s poems in a collection which excludes the
“Night Piece,” so true a favorite with all girl
children, and a favorite that, once rightfully
established, can never be thrust from our affections.
As for Praed’s “Red Fisherman,” Mr.
Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for
this “sombre” tale, which, I think, embodies
everything that a child ought not to love. It
is the only poem in the book that I wish elsewhere;
but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice
on my part. There may be little readers to
whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a
pleasing terror, like that which oppressed my
infant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brown
in the awful witch-haunted forest where Hawthorne
has shown us the triumph of evil things.
“It is his excursions into the unknown world
which the child enjoys,” says Mr. Lang; and
how shall we set a limit to his wanderings! He
journeys far with careless, secure footsteps;
and for him the stars sing in their spheres,
and fairies dance in the moonlight, and the
hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from
hard-won fields, and lovers fly together under
the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar,
and sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the northern
seas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a-Dale,
and stands by Marmion’s side in the
thick of the ghastly fray. He has given his
heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid of
Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her
death on the cruel Gordon spears, and to the
lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by
Barthram’s bier. His friends are bold Robin
Hood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white-plumed
Henry of Navarre, and the princely
scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make
“laughter for a month, and a good jest forever.”
A lordly company these, and seldom
to be found in the gray walks of middle age.
Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange,
and Prince Hal dare not show his laughing
face before societies for leveling thrones and
reorganizing the universe. We adults pass
our days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity,—abhorred
of Bunyan’s soul,—and our companions
are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr.
Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrubbing
his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and
the “deplorable young woman named Dull.”
But it is better to be young, and to see the
golden light of romance in the skies, and to
kiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands like
a star on the battlements. It is better to follow
Hector to the fight, and Guinevere to the
sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the Ancient
Mariner to that silent sea where the deathfires
gleam by night. Even to us who have
made these magic voyages in our childhood
there comes straying, at times, a pale reflection
of that early radiance, a faint, sweet echo
of that early song. Then the streets of the
Town of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Falstaff’s
great laugh frightens Mr. Despondency
into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us
under the wintry moonlight, and Porphyro
steals by with strange sweets heaped in baskets
of wreathed silver. Then we know that
with the poets there is perpetual youth, and
that for us, as for the child dreaming in the
firelight, the shining casements open upon
fairyland.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='praises' class='c009'>THE PRAISES OF WAR.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>When</span> the world was younger and perhaps
merrier, when people lived more and thought
less, and when the curious subtleties of an advanced
civilization had not yet turned men’s
heads with conceit of their own enlightening
progress from simple to serious things, poets
had two recognized sources of inspiration,
which were sufficient for themselves and for
their unexacting audiences. They sang of
love and they sang of war, of fair women and
of brave men, of keen youthful passions and
of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamonde
lingers “in Woodstocke bower,” and
Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte;
Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening
seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Cheviot
hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his
back. It did not occur to the thick-headed
generation who first listened to the ballad of
“Chevy Chace” to hint that the game was
hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on
a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as
poaching on a little one. This sort of insight
was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher,
and the nineteenth-century moralist. In
earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet
troubled himself about was a defensible motive
for the battle in which his soul exulted. His
business was to describe the fighting, not to
justify the fight, which would have been a task
of pure supererogation in that truculent age.
Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or
Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the
hard knocks they give and the stout men they
lay low!</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Johnie’s set his back against an aik,</div>
<div class='line in2'>His foot against a stane;</div>
<div class='line in1'>And he has slain the Seven Foresters,—</div>
<div class='line in2'>He has slain them a’ but ane.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>The last echo of this purely irresponsible
spirit may be found in the “War Song of
Dinas Vawr,” where Peacock, always three
hundred years behind his time, sings of
slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which
only his admirable versification can excuse:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“The mountain sheep are sweeter,</div>
<div class='line in1'>But the valley sheep are fatter;</div>
<div class='line in1'>We therefore deemed it meeter</div>
<div class='line in1'>To carry off the latter.</div>
<div class='line in1'>We made an expedition;</div>
<div class='line in1'>We met an host and quelled it;</div>
<div class='line in1'>We forced a strong position,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And killed the men who held it.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>There is not even a lack of food at home—the
old traditional dinner of spurs—to warrant
this foray. There is no hint of necessity
for the harriers, or consideration for the harried.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“We brought away from battle,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And much their land bemoaned them,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Two thousand head of cattle,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And the head of him who owned them:</div>
<div class='line in1'>Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,</div>
<div class='line in1'>His head was borne before us;</div>
<div class='line in1'>His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And his overthrow our chorus.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly
narrated; but if the lines were a hair-breadth
less mellifluous, I think we should call this a
very barbarous method of campaigning.</p>
<p class='c016'>When the old warlike spirit was dying out
of English verse, when poets had begun to
meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and
to counsel man, the good gods gave to England,
as a link with the days that were dead,
Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton before
or since has ever sung, of battlefields and
the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and
midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignall
banks, and the trooper shaking his silken
bridle reins upon the river shore:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Adieu for evermore,</div>
<div class='line in13'>My love!</div>
<div class='line'>And adieu for evermore.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>These are not precisely the themes which
enjoy unshaken popularity to-day,—“the poet
of battles fares ill in modern England,” says
Sir Francis Doyle,—and as a consequence
there are many people who speak slightingly of
Scott’s poetry, and who appear to claim for
themselves some inscrutable superiority by so
doing. They give you to understand, without
putting it too coarsely into words, that they
are beyond that sort of thing, but that they
liked it very well as children, and are pleased
if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of
unfortunates who, through no apparent fault
of their own, have ceased to take delight
in Scott’s novels, and who manifest a curious
indignation because the characters in them go
ahead and do things, instead of thinking and
talking about them, which is the present
approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why,
what time have the good people in “Quentin
Durward” for speculation and chatter? The
rush of events carries them irresistibly into
action. They plot, and fight, and run away,
and scour the country, and meet with so many
adventures, and perform so many brave and
cruel deeds, that they have no chance for introspection
and the joys of analysis. Naturally,
those writers who pride themselves upon
making a story out of nothing, and who are
more concerned with excluding material than
with telling their tales, have scant liking for
Sir Walter, who thought little and prated not
at all about the “art of fiction,” but used the
subjects which came to hand with the instinctive
and unhesitating skill of a great artist.
The battles in “Quentin Durward” and “Old
Mortality” are, I think, as fine in their way as
the battle of Flodden; and Flodden, says Mr.
Lang, is the finest fight on record,—“better
even than the stand of Aias by the ships in
the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers
in the Odyssey.”</p>
<p class='c016'>The ability to carry us whither he would, to
show us whatever he pleased, and to stir our
hearts’ blood with the story of</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in4'>“old, unhappy, far-off things,</div>
<div class='line'>And battles long ago,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>was the especial gift of Scott,—of the man
whose sympathies were as deep as life itself,
whose outlook was as wide as the broad
bosom of the earth he trod on. He believed
in action, and he delighted in describing it.
“The thinker’s voluntary death in life” was
not, for him, the power that moves the world,
but rather deeds,—deeds that make history
and that sing themselves forever. He honestly
felt himself to be a much smaller man than
Wellington. He stood abashed in the presence
of the soldier who had led large issues
and controlled the fate of nations. He would
have been sincerely amused to learn from
“Robert Elsmere”—what a delicious thing
it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading
“Robert Elsmere”!—that “the decisive
events of the world take place in the intellect.”
The decisive events of the world, Scott held
to take place in the field of action; on the
plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than
in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He
knew what befell Athens when she could put
forward no surer defense against Philip of
Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever
written in praise of freedom. It was better,
he probably thought, to argue as the English
did, “in platoons.” The schoolboy who fought
with the heroic “Green-Breeks” in the streets
of Edinburgh; the student who led the Tory
youths in their gallant struggle with the riotous
Irishmen, and drove them with stout cudgeling
out of the theatre they had disgraced;
the man who, broken in health and spirit, was
yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with
Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satisfaction
he desired, was consistent throughout
with the simple principles of a bygone generation.
“It is clear to me,” he writes in his journal,
“that what is least forgiven in a man of
any mark or likelihood is want of that article
blackguardly called <i>pluck</i>. All the fine qualities
of genius cannot make amends for it.
We are told the genius of poets especially
is irreconcilable with this species of grenadier
accomplishment. If so, <i>quel chien de
génie!</i>”</p>
<p class='c016'><i>Quel chien de génie</i> indeed, and far beyond
the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing
sordidness and seriousness of an industrial
and discontented age, struck a single resonant
note that rings in our hearts to-day like the
echo of good and joyous things:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!</div>
<div class='line in2'>To all the sensual world proclaim,</div>
<div class='line in1'>One crowded hour of glorious life</div>
<div class='line in2'>Is worth an age without a name.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered,
into admirable prose when Graham of
Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his
views on living and dying. At present, Philosophy
and Philanthropy between them are
hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the
field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it
should be a secondary consideration, or perhaps
no consideration at all, his sense of
duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like
Homer, held somewhat different views, and
absolutely declined to let “that jade Duty”
have everything her own way. It is the plain
duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare’s
side and guard her as they were bidden, instead
of which they rush off, with Sir Walter’s tacit
approbation, to the fray.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“No longer Blount the view could bear:</div>
<div class='line in1'>‘By heaven and all its saints! I swear</div>
<div class='line in5'>I will not see it lost!</div>
<div class='line in1'>Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare</div>
<div class='line in1'>May bid your beads and patter prayer,—</div>
<div class='line in5'>I gallop to the host.’”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>It was this cheerful acknowledgment of human
nature as a large factor in life which
gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave,
imperfect men; which enabled him to draw
with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le
Balafré, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William
of Deloraine. Le Balafré, indeed, with his
thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own
wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious
courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a
bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is
every whit as veracious as if he were the over-analyzed
child of realism, instead of one of
the many minor characters thrust with wanton
prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel.</p>
<p class='c016'>Alone among modern poets, Scott sings
Homerically of strife. Others have caught
the note, but none have upheld it with such sustained
force, such clear and joyous resonance.
Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always
too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion.
He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest
tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs.
Browning, who said she could not read the
“Lays” lying down; they drew her irresistibly
to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake
Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before
my eyes. I see—whether I want to or not—a
platform, and the poet’s own beloved schoolboy
declaiming with appropriate gestures those
glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings
of Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest
of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks
waver and reel before the charge of Stanley’s
men, how Tunstall’s stainless banner sweeps
the field, and how, in the gathering gloom,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“The stubborn spearmen still made good</div>
<div class='line in1'>Their dark impenetrable wood,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Each stepping where his comrade stood,</div>
<div class='line in3'>The instant that he fell.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>There is none of this noble simplicity in the
somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the
pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not
the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which
read a little like old Kaiser William’s war
dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand
times are the splendid swing, the captivating
enthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,” which
hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred.
Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were
King Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash.
The ardor for strife, the staying power of
quiet courage, all are here; and here, too, a
felicity of language that makes each noble
name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh
incentive to heroic deeds.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“With Spanish yew so strong,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Arrows a cloth-yard long,</div>
<div class='line in1'>That like to serpents stung,</div>
<div class='line in5'>Piercing the weather;</div>
<div class='line in1'>None from his fellow starts,</div>
<div class='line in1'>But playing manly parts,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And like true English hearts,</div>
<div class='line in4'>Stuck close together.</div>
<div class='line in6'>—————</div>
<div class='line'>“Warwick in blood did wade,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Oxford the foe invade,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And cruel slaughter made,</div>
<div class='line in5'>Still as they ran up;</div>
<div class='line in1'>Suffolk his axe did ply,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Beaumont and Willoughby</div>
<div class='line in1'>Bare them right doughtily,</div>
<div class='line in5'>Ferrers and Fanhope.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line c002'>“Upon Saint Crispin’s day</div>
<div class='line in1'>Fought was this noble fray,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Which fame did not delay</div>
<div class='line in5'>To England to carry;</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in1'>Oh, when shall Englishmen</div>
<div class='line in1'>With such acts fill a pen,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Or England breed again</div>
<div class='line in5'>Such a King Harry?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>Political economists and chilly historians and
all long-headed calculating creatures generally
may perhaps hint that invading France
was no part of England’s business, and represented
fruitless labor and bloodshed. But
this, happily, is not the poet’s point of view.
He dreams with Hotspur</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,</div>
<div class='line'>Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain,</div>
<div class='line'>And all the currents of a heady fight.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>He hears King Harry’s voice ring clearly above
the cries and clamors of battle:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;</div>
<div class='line'>Or close the wall up with our English dead;”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and
the field of Agincourt seem not only glorious
but righteous things. “That pure and generous
desire to thrash the person opposed to you
because he <i>is</i> opposed to you, because he is not
‘your side,’” which Mr. Saintsbury declares
to be the real incentive of all good war songs,
hardly permits a too cautious analysis of motives.
Fighting is not a strictly philanthropic
pastime, and its merits are not precisely the
merits of church guilds and college settlements.
Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, notwithstanding
the splendid example of Michael,
“of celestial armies, prince,” and there is at
present a shameless conspiracy on foot to
defraud even St. George of his hard-won glory,
and to melt him over in some modern crucible
into a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arian
bishop, too, by way of deepening the scandal!
We shall hear next that Saint Denis was a
Calvinistic minister, and Saint Iago, whom
devout Spanish eyes have seen mounted in
the hottest of the fray, was a friendly well-wisher
of the Moors.</p>
<p class='c016'>But why sigh over fighting saints, in a day
when even fighting sinners have scant measure
of praise? “Moral courage is everything.
Physical heroism is a small matter, often trivial
enough,” wrote that clever, emotional, sensitive
German woman, Rahel Varnhagen, at
the very time when a little “physical heroism”
might have freed her conquered fatherland.
And this profession of faith has gone on increasing
in popularity, until we have even a
lad like the young Laurence Oliphant, with
hot blood surging in his veins, gravely recording
his displeasure because a parson “with
a Crimean medal on his surplice” preached a
rousing battle sermon to the English soldiers
who had no alternative but to fight. “My
natural man,” confesses Oliphant naïvely, “is
intensely warlike, which is just as low a passion
as avarice or any other,”—a curious moral
perspective, which needs no word of comment,
and sufficiently explains much that was to
follow. We are irresistibly reminded by such
a verdict of Shelley’s swelling lines—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight,</div>
<div class='line in1'>The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade;”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>lines which, to borrow a witticism of Mr. Oscar
Wilde’s, have “all the vitality of error,” and
will probably be quoted triumphantly by Peace
Societies for many years to come.</p>
<p class='c016'>In the mean time, there is a remarkable and
very significant tendency to praise all war
songs, war stories, and war literature generally,
in proportion to the discomfort and horror
they excite, in proportion to their inartistic
and unjustifiable realism. I well remember,
when I was a little girl, having a dismal
French tale by Erckmann-Chatrian, called
“Le Conscrit,” given me by a kindly disposed
but mistaken friend, and the disgust with
which I waded through those scenes of sordid
bloodshed and misery, untouched by any fire
of enthusiasm, any halo of romance. The
very first description of Napoleon,—Napoleon,
the idol of my youthful dreams,—as a fat,
pale man, with a tuft of hair upon his forehead,
filled me with loathing for all that was
to follow. But I believe I finished the book,—it
never occurred to me, in those innocent
days, not to finish every book that I began,—and
then I re-read in joyous haste all of Sir
Walter Scott’s fighting novels, “Waverley,”
“Old Mortality,” “Ivanhoe,” “Quentin
Durward,” and even “The Abbot,” which has
one good battle, to get the taste of that abominable
story out of my mouth. Of late years,
however, I have heard a great deal of French,
Russian, and occasionally even English literature
commended for the very qualities which
aroused my childish indignation. No one has
sung the praises of war more gallantly than
Mr. Rudyard Kipling; yet those grim verses
called “The Grave of the Hundred Dead”—verses
closely resembling the appalling specimens
of truculency with which Mr. Ruskin
began and ended his brief poetical career—have
been singled out from their braver
brethren for especial praise, and offered as
“grim, naked, ugly truth” to those “who
would know more of the poet’s picturesque
qualities.”</p>
<p class='c016'>But “grim, naked, ugly truth” can never be
made a picturesque quality, and it is not the
particular business of a battle poem to emphasize
the desirability of peace. We all know
the melancholy anticlimax of Campbell’s
splendid song “Ye Mariners of England,”
when, to three admirable verses, the poet must
needs add a fourth, descriptive of the joys
of harmony, and of the eating and drinking
which shall replace the perils of the sea. I
count it a lasting injury, after having my
blood fired with these surging lines,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Your manly hearts shall glow,</div>
<div class='line in1'>As ye sweep through the deep,</div>
<div class='line in1'>While the stormy winds do blow;</div>
<div class='line in1'>While the battle rages loud and long,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And the stormy winds do blow,”—</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>to be suddenly introduced to a scene of inglorious
junketing; and I am not surprised that
Campbell’s peculiar inspiration, which was
born of war and of war only, failed him the
instant he deserted his theme. Such shocking
lines as</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“The meteor-flag of England</div>
<div class='line in1'>Shall yet terrific burn,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>while quite in harmony with the poet’s ordinary
achievements, would have been simply
impossible in those first three verses of “Ye
Mariners,” where he remains true to his one
artistic impulse. He strikes a different and a
finer note when, in “The Battle of the Baltic,”
he turns gravely away from feasting and jollity
to remember the brave men who have died for
England’s glory:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Let us think of them that sleep,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Full many a fathom deep,</div>
<div class='line in1'>By thy wild and stormy steep,</div>
<div class='line in8'>Elsinore!”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>To go back to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, however,
from whom I have wandered far, he is
more in love with the “dear delights” of battle
than with its dismal carnage, and he wins
an easy forgiveness for a few horrors by showing
us much brave and hearty fighting. Who
can forget the little Gurkhas drawing a deep
breath of contentment when at last they see
the foe, and gaping expectantly at their officers,
“as terriers grin ere the stone is cast
for them to fetch?” Who can forget the
joyous abandon with which Mulvaney the disreputable
and his “four an’ twenty young
wans” fling themselves upon Lungtungpen?
It is a good and wholesome thing for a man
to be in sympathy with that primitive virtue,
courage, to recognize it promptly, and to do
honor to it under any flag. “Homer’s heart
is with the brave of either side,” observes
Mr. Lang; “with Glaucus and Sarpedon of
Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus.”
Scott’s heart is with Surrey and Dacre
no less than with Lennox and Argyle; with
the English hosts charging like whirlwinds to
the fray no less than with the Scottish soldiers
standing ringed and dauntless around their
king. Théodore de Banville, hot with shame
over fallen France, cheeks his bitterness to
write some tender verses to the memory of a
Prussian boy found dead on the field, with a
bullet-pierced volume of Pindar on his breast.
Dumas, that lover of all brave deeds, cries out
with noble enthusiasm that it was not enough
to kill the Highlanders at Waterloo,—“we
had to push them down!” and the reverse of
the medal has been shown us by Mr. Lang in
the letter of an English officer, who writes
home that he would have given the rest of his
life to have served with the French cavalry on
that awful day. Sir Francis Doyle delights,
like an honest and stout-hearted Briton, to pay
an equal tribute of praise, in rather questionable
verse, to the private of the Buffs,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught,</div>
<div class='line in4'>Bewildered and alone,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>who died for England’s honor in a far-off
land; and to the Indian prince, Mehrab
Khan, who, brought to bay, swore proudly
that he would perish,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in10'>“to the last the lord</div>
<div class='line'>Of all that man can call his own,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>and fell beneath the English bayonets at the
door of his zenana. This is the spirit by
which brave men know one another the world
over, and which, lying back of all healthy
national prejudices, unites in a human brotherhood
those whom the nearness of death has
taught to start at no shadows.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Oh, east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall meet</div>
<div class='line in1'>Till earth and sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.</div>
<div class='line in1'>But there is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor birth,</div>
<div class='line in1'>When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here,
too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier to
hand than that much-desired bond of cultivation
which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will
one day knit the world together. The time
when Germany will no longer hate France,
“because the prose of France is perfect,”
seems still as far-off as it is fair; the day when
“intellectual criticism will bind Europe together”
dawns only in the dreamland of
desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at
the expense of “Peace Societies, so dear to
the sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmed
International Arbitration, so popular among
those who have never read history;” but criticism,
the mediator of the future, “will annihilate
race prejudices by insisting upon the
unity of the human mind in the variety of its
forms. If we are tempted to make war upon
another nation, we shall remember that we are
seeking to destroy an element of our own culture,
and possibly its most important element.”
This restraining impulse will allow us to fight
only red Indians, and Feejeeans, and Bushmen,
from whom no grace of culture is to be
gleaned; and it may prove a strong inducement
to some disturbed countries, like Ireland
and Russia, to advance a little further along
the paths of sweetness and light. Meanwhile,
the world, which rolls so easily in old and
well-worn ways, will probably remember that
“power is measured by resistance,” and will
go on arguing stolidly in platoons.</p>
<p class='c016'>“All healthy men like fighting and like the
sense of danger; all brave women like to hear
of their fighting and of their facing danger,”
says Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himself
the defense of war in his own irresistibly unconvincing
manner. Others indeed have delighted
in it from a purely artistic standpoint,
or as a powerful stimulus to fancy. Mr.
Saintsbury exults more than most critics in
battle poems, and in those “half-inarticulate
songs that set the blood coursing.” Sir Francis
Doyle, whose simple manly soul never
wearied of such themes, had no ambition to
outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boyhood.
“I knew the battle in ‘Marmion’ by
heart almost before I could read,” he writes in
his “Reminiscences;” “and I cannot raze out—I
do not wish to raze out—of my soul all
that filled and colored it in years gone by.”
Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by the
picturesqueness of a sea fight as was Canon
Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness
that the British privateers who went plundering
in the Spanish main were inspired by a
pure love for England, and a zeal for the
Protestant faith. He can say truly with the
little boy of adventurous humor,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“There is something that suits my mind to a T</div>
<div class='line in1'>In the thought of a reg’lar Pirate King.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>Mr. Lang’s love of all warlike literature is
too well known to need comment. As a child,
he confesses he pored over “the fightingest
parts of the Bible,” when Sunday deprived
him of less hallowed reading. As a boy, he
devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours
which were presumably sacred to the shrine of
Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us with
glowing words from the consideration of political
problems, or of our own complicated spiritual
machinery, to follow the fortunes of the
brave, fierce men who fought in the lonely
north, or of the heroes who went forth in
gilded armor “to win glory or to give it” before
the walls of Troy. In these days, when
many people find it easier to read “The Ring
and the Book” than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makes
a strong plea in behalf of that literature which
has come down to us out of the past to stand
forevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring the
hearts of all generations until human nature
shall be warped from simple and natural lines.
“With the Bible and Shakespeare,” he says,
“the Homeric poems are the best training for
life. There is no good quality that they lack;
manliness, courage, reverence for old age and
for the hospitable hearth, justice, piety, pity,
a brave attitude towards life and death, are all
conspicuous in Homer.” It might be well,
perhaps, to add to this long list one more incomparable
virtue, an instinctive and illogical
delight in living. Amid shipwrecks and battles,
amid long wanderings and hurtling spears,
amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear,
Homer teaches us, and teaches us in right joyful
fashion, the beauty and value of an existence
which we profess nowadays to find a
little burdensome on our hands.</p>
<p class='c016'>All these things have the lovers of war said
to us, and in all these ways have they striven
to fire our hearts. But Mr. Ruskin is not
content to regard any matter from a purely
artistic standpoint, or to judge it on natural
and congenital lines; he must indorse it ethically
or condemn. Accordingly, it is not
enough for him, as it would be for any other
man, to claim that “no great art ever yet rose
on earth but among a nation of soldiers.” He
feels it necessary to ask himself some searching
and embarrassing questions about fighting
“for its own sake,” and as “a grand pastime,”—questions
which he naturally finds it extremely
difficult to answer. It is not enough
for him to say, with equal truth and justice,
that if “brave death in a red coat” be no better
than “brave life in a black one,” it is at
least every bit as good. He must needs wax
serious, and commit himself to this strong and
doubtful statement:—</p>
<p class='c016'>“Assume the knight merely to have ridden
out occasionally to fight his neighbor for exercise;
assume him even a soldier of fortune,
and to have gained his bread and filled his
purse at the sword’s point. Still I feel as if
it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him
to have made his bread by sword play than
any other play. I had rather he had made
it by thrusting than by batting,—much more
than by betting; much rather that he should
ride war horses than back race horses; and—I
say it sternly and deliberately—much
rather would I have him slay his neighbor
than cheat him.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate as
this, it would not be altogether amiss to consult
the subject acted upon; in other words,
the neighbor, who, whatever may be his prejudice
against dishonest handling, might probably
prefer it to the last irredeemable disaster.
In this commercial age we get tolerably accustomed
to being cheated—like the skinned
eel, we are used to it,—but there is an old
rhyme which tells us plainly that a broken
neck is beyond all help of healing.</p>
<p class='c016'>No, it is best, when we treat a theme as
many-sided as war, to abandon modern inquisitorial
methods, and confine ourselves to
that good old-fashioned simplicity which was
content to take short obvious views of life. It
is best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightly
as we may. The finest poems of battle and of
camp have been written in this unincumbered
spirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatch
of song from “Rokeby:”—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“A weary lot is thine, fair maid,</div>
<div class='line in2'>A weary lot is thine!</div>
<div class='line in1'>To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,</div>
<div class='line in2'>And press the rue for wine.</div>
<div class='line in1'>A lightsome eye, a soldier’s mien,</div>
<div class='line in2'>A feather of the blue,</div>
<div class='line in1'>A doublet of the Lincoln green,—</div>
<div class='line in2'>No more of me you knew,</div>
<div class='line in16'>My love!</div>
<div class='line in2'>No more of me you knew.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>And this other, far less familiar, which I quote
from Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads, and which
is fitly called “The Wandering Knight’s
Song:”—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“My ornaments are arms,</div>
<div class='line in2'>My pastime is in war.</div>
<div class='line in1'>My bed is cold upon the wold,</div>
<div class='line in2'>My lamp yon star.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“My journeyings are long,</div>
<div class='line in2'>My slumbers short and broken;</div>
<div class='line in1'>From hill to hill I wander still,</div>
<div class='line in2'>Kissing thy token.</div>
</div>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“I ride from land to land,</div>
<div class='line in2'>I sail from sea to sea;</div>
<div class='line in1'>Some day more kind I fate may find,</div>
<div class='line in2'>Some night, kiss thee.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>Now, apart from the charming felicity of these
lines, we cannot but be struck with their
singleness of conception and purpose. “The
Wandering Knight” is well-nigh as disincumbered
of mental as of material luggage. He
rides as free from our tangled perplexity of
introspection as from our irksome contrivances
for comfort. It is not that he is precisely
guileless or ignorant. One does not journey
far over the world without learning the world’s
ways, and the ways of the men who dwell upon
her. But the knowledge of things looked at
from the outside is never the knowledge that
wears one’s soul away, and the traveling companion
that Lord Byron found so <i>ennuyant</i>,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“The blight of life—the demon Thought,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>forms no part of the “Wandering Knight’s”
equipment. As I read this little fugitive song
which has drifted down into an alien age, I
feel an envious liking for those days when the
tumult of existence made its triumph, when
action fanned the embers of joy, and when
people were too busy with each hour of life, as
it came, to question the usefulness or desirability
of the whole.</p>
<p class='c016'>There is one more point to consider. Mr.
Saintsbury appears to think it strange that
battles, when they occur, and especially when
they chance to be victories, should not immediately
inspire good war songs. But this is
seldom or never the case, “The Charge of the
Light Brigade” being an honorable exception
to the rule. Drayton’s heroic ballad was written
nearly two hundred years after the battle
of Agincourt; Flodden is a tale of defeat;
and Campbell, whose songs are so intoxicatingly
warlike, belonged, I am sorry to say, to
the “Peace at all price” party. The fact is
that a battle fought five hundred years ago is
just as inspiring to the poet as a battle fought
yesterday; and a brave deed, the memory of
which comes down to us through centuries,
stirs our hearts as profoundly as though we
witnessed it in our own time. Sarpedon, leaping
lightly from his chariot to dare an unequal
combat; the wounded knight, Schönburg,
dragging himself painfully from amid
the dead and dying to offer his silver shield to
his defenseless emperor; the twenty kinsmen
of the noble family of Trauttmansdorf who
fell, under Frederick of Austria, in the single
battle of Mühldorf; the English lad, young
Anstruther, who carried the queen’s colors of
the Royal Welsh at the storming of Sebastopol,
and who, swift-footed as a schoolboy, was
the first to gain the great redoubt, and stood
there one happy moment, holding his flagstaff
and breathing hard, before he was shot dead,—these
are the pictures whose value distance
can never lessen, and whose colors time can
never dim. These are the deeds that belong
to all ages and to all nations, a heritage for
every man who walks this troubled earth.
“All this the gods have fashioned, and have
woven the skein of death for men, that there
might be a song in the ears even of the folk
of after time.”</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='leisure' class='c009'>LEISURE.</h2></div>
<div class='lg-container-b c022'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Zounds! how has he the leisure to be sick?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>A visitor</span> strolling through the noble
woods of Ferney complimented Voltaire on
the splendid growth of his trees. “Ay,” replied
the great wit, half in scorn and half, perhaps,
in envy, “they have nothing else to do;” and
walked on, deigning no further word of approbation.</p>
<p class='c016'>Has it been more than a hundred years
since this distinctly modern sentiment was
uttered,—more than a hundred years since
the spreading chestnut boughs bent kindly
over the lean, strenuous, caustic, disappointed
man of genius who always had so much to
do, and who found in the doing of it a
mingled bliss and bitterness that scorched
him like fever pain? How is it that, while
Dr. Johnson’s sledge-hammer repartees sound
like the sonorous echoes of a past age, Voltaire’s
remarks always appear to have been
spoken the day before yesterday? They are
the kind of witticisms which we do not say
for ourselves, simply because we are not witty;
but they illustrate with biting accuracy the
spirit of restlessness, of disquiet, of intellectual
vanity and keen contention which is the
brand of our vehement and over-zealous generation.</p>
<p class='c016'>“The Gospel of Work”—that is the phrase
woven insistently into every homily, every
appeal made to the conscience or the intelligence
of a people who are now straining their
youthful energy to its utmost speed. “Blessed
be Drudgery!”—that is the text deliberately
chosen for a discourse which has enjoyed such
amazing popularity that sixty thousand printed
copies have been found all inadequate to supply
the ravenous demand. Readers of Dickens—if
any one has the time to read Dickens
nowadays—may remember Miss Monflather’s
inspired amendment of that familiar poem
concerning the Busy Bee:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“In work, work, work. In work alway,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Let my first years be past.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>And when our first years <i>are</i> past, the same
programme is considered adequate and satisfactory
to the end. “A whole lifetime of
horrid industry,”—to quote Mr. Bagehot’s
uninspired words,—this is the prize dangled
alluringly before our tired eyes; and if we
are disposed to look askance upon the booty,
then vanity is subtly pricked to give zest to
faltering resolution. “Our virtues would be
proud if our faults whipped them not;” they
would be laggards in the field if our faults did
not sometimes spur them to action. It is the
pæan of self-glorification that wells up perpetually
from press and pulpit, from public orators,
and from what is courteously called literature,
that keeps our courage screwed to the
sticking place, and veils the occasional bareness
of the result with a charitable vesture of
self-delusion.</p>
<p class='c016'>Work is good. No one seriously doubts
this truth. Adam may have doubted it when
he first took spade in hand, and Eve when
she scoured her first pots and kettles; but in
the course of a few thousand years we have
learned to know and value this honest,
troublesome, faithful, and extremely exacting
friend. But work is not the only good thing
in the world; it is not a fetich to be adored;
neither is it to be judged, like a sum in addition,
by its outward and immediate results.
The god of labor does not abide exclusively
in the rolling-mill, the law courts, or the cornfield.
He has a twin sister whose name is
leisure, and in her society he lingers now and
then to the lasting gain of both.</p>
<p class='c016'>Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mme. de Sévigné
and her time, says that we, “with our habits
of positive occupation, can scarcely form a
just conception of that life of leisure and
chit-chat.” “Conversations were infinite,”
admits Mme. de Sévigné herself, recalling the
long summer afternoons when she and her
guests walked in the charming woods of Les
Rochers until the shadows of twilight fell.
The whole duty of life seemed to be concentrated
in the pleasant task of entertaining
your friends when they were with you,
or writing them admirable letters when they
were absent. Occasionally there came, even
to this tranquil and finely poised French
woman, a haunting consciousness that there
might be other and harder work for human
hands to do. “Nothing is accomplished day
by day,” she writes, doubtfully; “and life is
made up of days, and we grow old and die.”
This troubled her a little, when she was all
the while doing work that was to last for
generations, work that was to give pleasure
to men and women whose great-grandfathers
were then unborn. Not that we have the
time now to read Mme. de Sévigné! Why,
there are big volumes of these delightful
letters, and who can afford to read big volumes
of anything, merely for the sake of the
enjoyment to be extracted therefrom? It was
all very well for Sainte-Beuve to say “Lisons
tout Mme. de Sévigné,” when the question
arose how should some long idle days in a
country-house be profitably employed. It was
all very well for Sainte-Beuve to plead, with
touching confidence in the intellectual pastimes
of his contemporaries, “Let us treat
Mme. de Sévigné as we treat Clarissa Harlowe,
when we have a fortnight of leisure
and rainy weather in the country.” A fortnight
of leisure and rainy weather in the
country! The words would be antiquated
even for Dr. Johnson. Rain may fall or rain
may cease, but leisure comes not so lightly
to our calling. Nay, Sainte-Beuve’s wistful
amazement at the polished and cultivated
inactivity which alone could produce such a
correspondence as Mme. de Sévigné’s is not
greater than our wistful amazement at the
critic’s conception of possible idleness in bad
weather. In one respect at least we follow
his good counsel. We do treat Mme. de Sévigné
precisely as we treat Clarissa Harlowe;
that is, we leave them both severely alone,
as being utterly beyond the reach of what we
are pleased to call our time.</p>
<p class='c016'>And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who,
taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it
as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusations
on the score of indolence. In the world
and of the world, yet always able to meet and
greet the happy solitude of Gascony; toiling
with no thought of toil, but rather “to entertaine
my spirit as it best pleased,” this man
wrought out of time a coin which passes
current over the reading world. And what
of Horace, who enjoyed an industrious idleness,
the bare description of which sets our
hearts aching with desire! “The picture
which Horace draws of himself in his country
home,” says an envious English critic,
“affords us a delightful glimpse of such literary
leisure as is only possible in the golden
days of good Haroun-Al-Raschid. Horace
goes to bed and gets up when he likes; there
is no one to drag him down to the law courts
the first thing in the morning, to remind him
of an important engagement with his brother
scribes, to solicit his interest with Mæcenas,
or to tease him about public affairs and the
latest news from abroad. He can bury himself
in his Greek authors, or ramble through
the woody glens which lie at the foot of
Mount Ustica, without a thought of business
or a feeling that he ought to be otherwise engaged.”
“Swim smoothly in the stream of
thy nature, and live but one man,” counsels
Sir Thomas Browne; and it may be this
gentle current will bear us as bravely through
life as if we buffeted our strength away in the
restless ocean of endeavor.</p>
<p class='c016'>Leisure has a value of its own. It is not a
mere handmaid of labor; it is something we
should know how to cultivate, to use, and to
enjoy. It has a distinct and honorable place
wherever nations are released from the pressure
of their first rude needs, their first homely
toil, and rise to happier levels of grace and
intellectual repose. “Civilization, in its final
outcome,” says the keen young author of
“The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,” “is heavily
in the debt of leisure; and the success of any
society worth considering is to be estimated
largely by the use to which its <i>fortunati</i> put
their spare moments.” Here is a sentiment
so relentlessly true that nobody wants to believe
it. We prefer uttering agreeable platitudes
concerning the blessedness of drudgery
and the iniquity of eating bread earned by
another’s hands. Yet the creation of an artistic
and intellectual atmosphere in which
workers can work, the expansion of a noble
sympathy with all that is finest and most
beautiful, the jealous guardianship of whatever
makes the glory and distinction of a
nation; this is achievement enough for the
<i>fortunati</i> of any land, and this is the debt
they owe. It can hardly be denied that the
lack of scholarship—of classical scholarship
especially—at our universities is due primarily
to the labor-worship which is the prevalent
superstition of our day, and which, like
all superstitions, has gradually degraded its
god into an idol, and lost sight of the higher
powers and attributes beyond. The student
who is pleased to think a knowledge of German
“more useful” than a knowledge of
Greek; the parent who deliberately declares
that his boys have “no time to waste” over
Homer; the man who closes the doors of his
mind to everything that does not bear directly
on mathematics, or chemistry, or engineering,
or whatever he calls “work;” all these plead
in excuse the exigencies of life, the absolute
and imperative necessity of labor.</p>
<p class='c016'>It would appear, then, that we have no
<i>fortunati</i>, that we are not yet rich enough to
afford the greatest of all luxuries—leisure to
cultivate and enjoy “the best that has been
known and thought in the world.” This is a
pity, because there seems to be money in plenty
for so many less valuable things. The yearly
taxes of the United States sound to innocent
ears like the fabled wealth of the Orient; the
yearly expenditures of the people are on no
rigid scale; yet we are too poor to harbor the
priceless literature of the past because it is not
a paying investment, because it will not put
bread in our mouths nor clothes on our shivering
nakedness. “Poverty is a most odious
calling,” sighed Burton many years ago, and
we have good cause to echo his lament. Until
we are able to believe, with that enthusiastic
Greek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that “intellectual
training is an end in itself, and not a mere
preparation for a trade or a profession;” until
we begin to understand that there is a leisure
which does not mean an easy sauntering
through life, but a special form of activity,
employing all our faculties, and training us to
the adequate reception of whatever is most
valuable in literature and art; until we learn
to estimate the fruits of self-culture at their
proper worth, we are still far from reaping the
harvest of three centuries of toil and struggle;
we are still as remote as ever from the serenity
of intellectual accomplishment.</p>
<p class='c016'>There is a strange pleasure in work wedded
to leisure, in work which has grown beautiful
because its rude necessities are softened and
humanized by sentiment and the subtle grace
of association. A little paragraph from the
journal of Eugénie de Guérin illustrates with
charming simplicity the gilding of common
toil by the delicate touch of a cultivated and
sympathetic intelligence:—</p>
<p class='c016'>“A day spent in spreading out a large wash
leaves little to say, and yet it is rather pretty,
too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or to
see it float on lines. One may fancy one’s self
Homer’s Nausicaa, or one of those Biblical
princesses who washed their brothers’ tunics.
We have a basin at Moulinasse that you have
never seen, sufficiently large, and full to the
brim of water. It embellishes the hollow, and
attracts the birds who like a cool place to
sing in.”</p>
<p class='c016'>In the same spirit, Maurice de Guérin confesses
frankly the pleasure he takes in gathering
fagots for the winter fire, “that little task
of the woodcutter which brings us close to
nature,” and which was also a favorite occupation
of M. de Lamennais. The fagot gathering,
indeed, can hardly be said to have
assumed the proportions of real toil; it was
rather a pastime where play was thinly disguised
by a pretty semblance of drudgery.
“Idleness,” admits de Guérin, “<i>but idleness
full of thought, and alive to every impression</i>.”
Eugénie’s labors, however, had other
aspects and bore different fruit. There is
nothing intrinsically charming in stitching
seams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one’s
fingers over a kitchen fire; yet every page
in the journal of this nobly born French girl
reveals to us the nearness of work, work made
sacred by the prompt fulfillment of visible
duties, and—what is more rare—made beautiful
by that distinction of mind which was
the result of alternating hours of finely cultivated
leisure. A very ordinary and estimable
young woman might have spread her wash
upon the grass with honest pride at the whiteness
of her linen; but it needed the solitude
of Le Cayla, the few books, well read and
well worth reading, the life of patriarchal
simplicity, and the habit of sustained and
delicate thought, to awaken in the worker’s
mind the graceful association of ideas,—the
pretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidens
cleansing their finely woven webs in the cool,
rippling tide.</p>
<p class='c016'>For it is self-culture that warms the chilly
earth wherein no good seed can mature; it
is self-culture that distinguishes between the
work which has inherent and lasting value
and the work which represents conscientious
activity and no more. And for the training
of one’s self, leisure is requisite; leisure and
that rare modesty which turns a man’s
thoughts back to his own shortcomings and
requirements, and extinguishes in him the
burning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings.
“We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching
ourselves from action, and become
perfect by the rejection of energy,” says Mr.
Oscar Wilde, who delights in scandalizing his
patient readers, and who lapses unconsciously
into something resembling animation over the
wrongs inflicted by the solemn preceptors of
mankind. The notion that it is worth while
to learn a thing only if you intend to impart
it to others is widespread and exceedingly
popular. I have myself heard an excellent
and anxious aunt say to her young niece,
then working hard at college, “But, my dear,
why do you give so much of your time to
Greek? You don’t expect to teach it, do
you?”—as if there were no other use to
be gained, no other pleasure to be won from
that noble language, in which lies hidden
the hoarded treasure of centuries. To study
Greek in order to read and enjoy it, and
thereby make life better worth the living,
is a possibility that seldom enters the practical
modern mind.</p>
<p class='c016'>Yet this restless desire to give out information,
like alms, is at best a questionable
bounty; this determination to share one’s wisdom
with one’s unwilling fellow-creatures is a
noble impulse provocative of general discontent.
When Southey, writing to James Murray
about a dialogue which he proposes to publish
in the “Quarterly,” says, with characteristic
complacency: “I have very little doubt that it
will excite considerable attention, and lead
many persons into a wholesome train of
thought,” we feel at once how absolutely familiar
is the sentiment, and how absolutely
hopeless is literature approached in this spirit.
The same principle, working under different
conditions to-day, entangles us in a network of
lectures, which have become the chosen field
for every educational novelty, and the diversion
of the mentally unemployed.</p>
<p class='c016'>Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly his
veneration for the old-fashioned schoolmaster
who taught his Greek and Latin in leisurely
fashion day after day, with no thought wasted
upon more superficial or practical acquirements,
and who “came to his task as to a sport.” He
has made equally plain his aversion for the new-fangled
pedagogue—new in his time, at least—who
could not “relish a beggar or a gypsy”
without seeking to collect or to impart some
statistical information on the subject. A gentleman
of this calibre, his fellow-traveler in
a coach, once asked him if he had ever made
“any calculation as to the value of the rental
of all the retail shops in London?” and the
magnitude of the question so overwhelmed
Lamb that he could not even stammer out a
confession of his ignorance. “To go preach
to the first passer-by, to become tutor to the
ignorance of the first thing I meet, is a task
I abhor,” observes Montaigne, who must certainly
have been the most acceptable companion
of his day.</p>
<p class='c016'>Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy with
insistent and arrogant industry. He could
work hard enough when circumstances demanded
it; but he “always felt an inclination
to do nothing,” and not infrequently gratified
his desires. “No man, sir, is obliged to do as
much as he can. A man should have part of
his life to himself,” was the good doctor’s
soundly heterodox view, advanced upon many
occasions. He hated to hear people boast of
their assiduity, and nipped such vain pretensions
in the bud with frosty scorn. When he
and Boswell journeyed together in the Harwich
stage-coach, a “fat; elderly gentle-woman,”
who had been talking freely of her own
affairs, wound up by saying that she never
permitted any of her children to be for a
moment idle. “I wish, madam,” said Dr.
Johnson testily, “that you would educate me
too, for I have been an idle fellow all my life.”
“I am sure, sir,” protested the woman with
dismayed politeness, “you have not been idle.”
“Madam,” was the retort, “it is true! And
that gentleman there”—pointing to poor
young Boswell—“has been idle also. He
was idle in Edinburgh. His father sent him
to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle.
He came to London, where he has been very
idle. And now he is going to Utrecht, where
he will be as idle as ever.”</p>
<p class='c016'>That there was a background of truth in
these spirited assertions we have every reason
to be grateful. Dr. Johnson’s value to-day
does not depend on the number of essays, or
reviews, or dedications he wrote in a year,—some
years he wrote nothing,—but on his own
sturdy and splendid personality; “the real
primate, the soul’s teacher of all England,”
says Carlyle; a great embodiment of uncompromising
goodness and sense. Every generation
needs such a man, not to compile dictionaries,
but to preserve the balance of sanity,
and few generations are blest enough to possess
him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in
the law courts until he was gray without benefiting
or amusing anybody. It was in the
nights he spent drinking port wine at the
Mitre, and in the days he spent trotting, like
a terrier, at his master’s heels, that the seed
was sown which was to give the world a masterpiece
of literature, the most delightful biography
that has ever enriched mankind. It
is to leisure that we owe the “Life of Johnson,”
and a heavy debt we must, in all integrity,
acknowledge it to be.</p>
<p class='c016'>Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter
Scott that he was “making himself in the
busy, idle pleasures of his youth;” in those
long rambles by hill and dale, those whimsical
adventures in farmhouses, those merry, purposeless
journeys in which the eager lad tasted
the flavor of life. At home such unauthorized
amusements were regarded with emphatic
disapprobation. “I greatly doubt, sir,” said
his father to him one day, “that you were
born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut!”
and one half pities the grave clerk to the Signet,
whose own life had been so decorously
dull, and who regarded with affectionate solicitude
his lovable and incomprehensible son.
In later years Sir Walter recognized keenly
that his wasted school hours entailed on him a
lasting loss, a loss he was determined his sons
should never know. It is to be forever regretted
that “the most Homeric of modern
men could not read Homer.” But every day
he stole from the town to give to the country,
every hour he stole from law to give to literature,
every minute he stole from work to
give to pleasure, counted in the end as gain.
It is in his pleasures that a man really lives,
it is from his leisure that he constructs the true
fabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb’s fellow-clerks
thought that because his days were
spent at a desk in the East India House, his
life was spent there too. His life was far
remote from that routine of labor; built up of
golden moments of respite, enriched with joys,
chastened by sorrows, vivified by impulses
that had no filiation with his daily toil. “For
the time that a man may call his own,” he
writes to Wordsworth, “that is his life.”
The Lamb who worked in the India House,
and who had “no skill in figures,” has passed
away, and is to-day but a shadow and a name.
The Lamb of the “Essays” and the “Letters”
lives for us now, and adds each year his
generous share to the innocent gayety of the
world. This is the Lamb who said, “Riches
are chiefly good because they give us time,”
and who sighed for a little son that he might
christen him Nothing-to-do, and permit him
to do nothing.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='words' class='c009'>WORDS.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'>“<span class='sc'>Do</span> you read the dictionary?” asked M.
Théophile Gautier of a young and ardent disciple
who had come to him for counsel. “It
is the most fruitful and interesting of books.
Words have an individual and a relative value.
They should be chosen before being placed in
position. This word is a mere pebble; that a
fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handicraft
is everything, and the absolute distinction
of the artist lies, not so much in his
capacity to feel nature, as in his power to
render it.”</p>
<p class='c016'>We are always pleased to have a wholesome
truth presented to us with such genial vivacity,
so that we may feel ourselves less edified
than diverted, and learn our lesson without
the mortifying consciousness of ignorance. He
is a wise preceptor who conceals from us his
awful rod of office, and grafts his knowledge
dexterously upon our self-esteem.</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Men must be taught as if you taught them not,</div>
<div class='line'>And things unknown proposed as things forgot.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody
naturally thinks he possesses it, and this
universal sentiment results in the misuse of
a material whose beauty enriches the loving
student beyond the dreams of avarice. Musicians
know the value of chords; painters
know the value of colors; writers are often so
blind to the value of words that they are content
with a bare expression of their thoughts,
disdaining the “labor of the file,” and confident
that the phrase first seized is for them
the phrase of inspiration. They exaggerate
the importance of what they have to say,—lacking
which we should be none the poorer,—and
underrate the importance of saying it in
such fashion that we may welcome its very
moderate significance. It is in the habitual
and summary recognition of the laws of language
that scholarship delights, says Mr.
Pater; and while the impatient thinker, eager
only to impart his views, regards these laws
as a restriction, the true artist finds in them
an opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe rejoiced,
to work within conditions and limits.</p>
<p class='c016'>For every sentence that may be penned or
spoken the right words exist. They lie concealed
in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabulary
enriched by centuries of noble thought
and delicate manipulation. He who does not
find them and fit them into place, who accepts
the first term which presents itself rather
than search for the expression which accurately
and beautifully embodies his meaning,
aspires to mediocrity, and is content with failure.
The exquisite adjustment of a word to
its significance, which was the instrument of
Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph;
the generous sympathy of a word with its
surroundings, which was the secret wrung by
Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of
language,—these are the twin perfections
which constitute style, and substantiate genius.
Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraordinary
degree Flaubert’s art of fitting his
words to the exact thoughts they are designed
to convey. Such a brief sentence as “Ten
thousand difficulties do not make one doubt”
reveals with pregnant simplicity the mental
attitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne,
working under fewer restraints, and without
the severity of intellectual discipline, harmonizes
each musical syllable into a prose of
leisurely sweetness and sonorous strength.
“Court not felicity too far, and weary not the
favorable hand of fortune.” “Man is a noble
animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the
grave.” “The race of delight is short, and
pleasures have mutable faces.” Such sentences,
woven with curious skill from the rich fabric
of seventeenth-century English, defy the
wreckage of time. In them a gentle dignity
of thought finds its appropriate expression,
and the restfulness of an unvexed mind
breathes its quiet beauty into each cadenced
line. Here are no “boisterous metaphors,”
such as Dryden scorned, to give undue emphasis
at every turn, and amaze the careless
reader with the cheap delights of turbulence.
Here is no trace of that “full habit of
speech,” hateful to Mr. Arnold’s soul, and
which, in the years to come, was to be the gift
of journalism to literature.</p>
<p class='c016'>The felicitous choice of words, which with
most writers is the result of severe study and
unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored
few—who should be envied and not imitated—to
be the genuine fruit of inspiration, as
though caprice itself could not lead them far
astray. Shelley’s letters and prose papers
teem with sentences in which the beautiful
words are sufficient satisfaction in themselves,
and of more value than the conclusions they
reveal. They have a haunting sweetness, a
pure perfection, which makes the act of reading
them a sustained and dulcet pleasure.
Sometimes this effect is produced by a few
simple terms reiterated into lingering music.
“We are born, and our birth is unremembered,
and our infancy remembered but in fragments;
we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension
of life.” Sometimes a clearer note is
struck with the sure and delicate touch which
is the excellence of art. “For the mind in
creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens
to transitory brightness.” The substitution of
the word “glow” for “brightness” would, I
think, make this sentence extremely beautiful.
If it lacks the fullness and melody of those
incomparable passages in which Burke, the
great master of words, rivets our admiration
forever, it has the same peculiar and lasting
hold upon our imaginations and our memories.
Once read, we can no more forget its
charm than we can forget “that chastity of
honor which felt a stain like a wound,” or
the mournful cadence of regret over virtues
deemed superfluous in an age of strictly iconoclastic
progress. “Never more shall we behold
that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
that proud submission, that dignified obedience,
that subordination of the heart which
kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit
of an exalted freedom.” It is the fashion
at present to subtly depreciate Burke’s power
by some patronizing allusion to the “grand
style,”—a phrase which, except when applied
to Milton, appears to hold in solution an undefined
and undefinable reproach. But until
we can produce something better, or something
as good, those “long savorsome Latin
words,” checked and vivified by “racy Saxon
monosyllables,” must still represent an excellence
which it is easier to belittle than to
emulate.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is strange that our chilling disapprobation
of what we are prone to call “fine writing”
melts into genial applause over the
freakish perversity so dear to modern unrest.
We look askance upon such an old-time master
of his craft as the Opium-Eater, and require
to be told by a clear-headed, unenthusiastic
critic like Mr. George Saintsbury that
the balanced harmony of De Quincey’s style
is obtained often by the use of extremely
simple words, couched in the clearest imaginable
form. Place by the side of Mr. Pater’s
picture of Monna Lisa—too well known to
need quotation—De Quincey’s equally famous
description of Our Lady of Darkness. Both
passages are as beautiful as words can make
them, but the gift of simplicity is in the
hands of the older writer. Or take the single
sentence which describes for us the mystery of
Our Lady of Sighs: “And her eyes, if they
were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor
subtle; no man could read their story; they
would be found filled with perishing dreams,
and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.”
Here, as Mr. Saintsbury justly points out, are
no needless adjectives, no unusual or extravagant
words. The sense is adequate to the
sound, and the sound is only what is required
as accompaniment to the sense. We are not
perplexed and startled, as when Browning introduces
us to</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“the Tyrrhene whelk’s pearl-sheeted lip,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>or to a woman’s</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>We are not irritated and confused, as when
Carlyle—whose misdeeds, like those of
Browning, are matters of pure volition—is
pleased, for our sharper discipline, to write
“like a comet inscribing with its tail.” No
man uses words more admirably, or abuses
them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That
he should delight in seeing his pages studded
all over with such spikes as “mammonism,”
“flunkeyhood,” “nonentity,” and “simulacrum,”
that he should repeat them again and
again with unwearying self-content, is an
enigma that defies solution, save on the simple
presumption that they are designed, like other
instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of
the sufferer. It is best to scramble over them
as bravely as we can, and forget our scars in
the enjoyment of those vivid and matchless
pictures in which each word plays its part,
and supplies its share of outline and emphasis
to the scene. The art that can dictate such
a brief bit of description as “little red-colored
pulpy infants” is the art of a Dutch master
who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us
with subdued vehemence the absolute realities
of life.</p>
<p class='c016'>“All freaks,” remarks Mr. Arnold, “tend
to impair the beauty and power of language;”
yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarre
with the picturesque that at present a great
deal of English literature resembles a linguistic
museum, where every type of monstrosity
is cheerfully exhibited and admired. Writers
of splendid capacity, of undeniable originality
and force, are not ashamed to add their curios
to the group, either from sheer impatience of
restraint, or, as I sometimes think, from a
grim and perverted sense of humor, which is
enlivened by noting how far they can venture
beyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredith
is pleased to tell us that one of his characters
“neighed a laugh,” that another “tolled her
naughty head,” that a third “stamped; her
aspect spat,” and that a fourth was discovered
“pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth,”
we cannot smother a dawning suspicion that
he is diverting himself at our expense, and
pluming a smile of his own, more sapless than
succulent, over the naïve simplicity of the
public. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtlety
rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor which
prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo’s
“dark Renaissance face perplexed with an incipient
laugh;” but really a very interesting
and improving little paper might be written
on the extraordinary laughs and smiles which
cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern
analytic fiction. “Correctness, that humble
merit of prose,” has been snubbed into a recognition
of her insignificance. She is as
tame as a woman with only one head and
two arms amid her more striking and richly
endowed sisters in the museum.</p>
<p class='c016'>“A language long employed by a delicate
and critical society,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot,
“is a treasure of dexterous felicities;”
and to awaken the literary conscience to its
forgotten duty of guarding this treasure is the
avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another
stylist, less understood and less appreciated,
Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantily
rewarded in an age which has but little instinct
for form, and which habitually allows
itself the utmost license of phraseology. That
“unblessed freedom from restraint,” which to
the clear-eyed Greeks appeared diametrically
opposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty,
and which finds its amplest expression in the
poems of Walt Whitman, has dazzled us only
to betray. The emancipation of the savage is
sufficiently comprehensive, but his privileges
are not always as valuable as they may at first
sight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his admirable
volume “French Traits,” unhesitatingly
defines Whitman’s slang as “the riotous
medium of the under-languaged;” and the reproach
is not too harsh nor too severe. Even
Mr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acute
and enthusiastic of his English critics, admits
sadly that it is “gutter slang,” equally purposeless
and indefensible. That a man who
held within himself the elements of greatness
should have deliberately lessened the force of
his life’s work by a willful misuse of his
material is one of those bitter and irremediable
errors which sanity forever deplores.
We are inevitably repelled by the employment
of trivial or vulgar words in serious
poetry, and they become doubly offensive
when brought into relation with the beauty
and majesty of nature. It is neither pleasant
nor profitable to hear the sun’s rays described
as</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“scooting obliquely high and low.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>It is still less satisfactory to have the universe
addressed in this convivial and burlesque fashion:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Earth, you seem to look for something at my hands;</div>
<div class='line in1'>Say, old Topknot, what do you want?”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>There is a kind of humorousness which a true
sense of humor would render impossible;
there is a species of originality from which the
artist shrinks aghast; and worse than mere
vulgarity is the constant employment of words
indecorous in themselves, and irreverent in
their application,—the smirching of clean
and noble things with adjectives grossly unfitted
for such use, and repellent to all the
canons of good taste. This is not the “gentle
pressure” which Sophocles put upon common
words to wring from them a fresh significance;
it is a deliberate abuse of terms, and betrays
a lack of that fine quality of self-repression
which embraces the power of selection, and is
the best characteristic of literary morality.
“Oh, for the style of honest men!” sighs
Sainte-Beuve, sick of such unreserved disclosures;
“of men who have revered everything
worthy of respect, whose innate feelings
have ever been governed by the principles of
good taste. Oh, for the polished, pure, and
moderate writers!”</p>
<p class='c016'>There is a pitiless French maxim, less popular
with English and Americans than with
our Gallic neighbors,—“Le secret d’ennuyer
est de tout dire.” Mr. Pater indeed expresses
the same thought in ampler English fashion
(which but emphasizes the superiority of the
French) when he says, “For in truth all art does
but consist in the removal of surplusage, from
the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing
away the last particle of invisible dust, back
to the earliest divination of the finished work
to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s
fancy, in the rough-hewn block of
stone.” That the literary artist tests his skill
by a masterly omission of all that is better
left unsaid is a truth widely admitted and
scantily utilized. Authors who have not
taken the trouble <i>de faire leur toilette</i> admit
us with painful frankness into their dressing-rooms,
and suffer us to gaze more intimately
than is agreeable to us upon the dubious
mysteries of their deshabille. Authors who
have the gift of continuity disregard with
insistent generosity the limits of time and
patience. What a noble poem was lost to
myriads of readers when “The Ring and the
Book” reached its twenty thousandth line!
How inexorable is the tyranny of a great and
powerful poet who will spare his readers nothing!
Authors who are indifferent to the
beauties of reserve charge down upon us with
a dreadful impetuosity from which there is no
escape. The strength that lies in delicacy,
the chasteness of style which does not abandon
itself to every impulse, are qualities ill-understood
by men who subordinate taste to
fervor, and whose words, coarse, rank, or unctuous,
betray the undisciplined intellect that
mistakes passion for power. “The language
of poets,” says Shelley, “has always effected a
certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of
sound, without which it were not poetry;” and
it is the sustained effort to secure this balanced
harmony, this magnificent work within
limits, which constitutes the achievement of
the poet, and gives beauty and dignity to his
art. “Where is the man who can flatter himself
that he knows the language of prose, if he
has not assiduously practiced the language of
poetry?” asks M. Francisque Sarcey, whose
requirements are needlessly exacting, but
whose views would have been cordially indorsed
by at least one great master of English.
Dryden always maintained that the admirable
quality of his prose was due to his long training
in a somewhat mechanical verse. A more
modern and diverting approximation of M.
Sarcey’s views may be found in the robust
statement of Benjamin Franklin: “I approved,
for my part, the amusing one’s self
now and then with poetry, so far as to improve
one’s language, but no farther.” It is
a pity that people cannot always be born in
the right generation! What a delicious picture
is presented to our fancy of a nineteenth-century
Franklin amusing himself and improving
his language by an occasional study
of “Sordello”!</p>
<p class='c016'>The absolute mastery of words, which is the
prerogative of genius, can never be acquired
by painstaking, or revealed to criticism. Mr.
Lowell, pondering deeply on the subject, has
devoted whole pages to a scholarly analysis of
the causes which assisted Shakespeare to his
unapproached and unapproachable vocabulary.
The English language was then, Mr. Lowell
reminds us, a living thing, “hot from the
hearts and brains of a people; not hardened
yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of
sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new
thought. Shakespeare found words ready to
his use, original and untarnished, types of
thought whose edges were unworn by repeated
impressions.... No arbitrary line had been
drawn between high words and low; vulgar
then meant simply what was common; poetry
had not been aliened from the people by the
establishment of an Upper House of vocables.
The conception of the poet had no time to cool
while he was debating the comparative respectability
of this phrase or that; but he snatched
what word his instinct prompted, and saw no
indiscretion in making a king speak as his
country nurse might have taught him.”</p>
<p class='c016'>It is a curious thing, however, that the more
we try to account for the miracles of genius,
the more miraculous they grow. We can
never hope to understand the secret of Homer’s
style. It is best to agree simply with
Mr. Pater: “Homer was always saying things
in this manner.” We can never know how
Keats came to write,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>or those other lines, perhaps the most beautiful
in our language,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in4'>“Magic casements, opening on the foam</div>
<div class='line'>Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>It is all a mystery, hidden from the uninspired,
and Mr. Lowell’s clean-built scaffolding,
while it helps us to a comprehensive
enjoyment of Shakespeare, leaves us dumb
and amazed as ever before the concentrated
splendor of a single line,—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“In cradle of the rude, imperious surge.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>There is only one way to fathom its conception.
The great waves reared their foamy
heads, and whispered him the words.</p>
<p class='c016'>The richness of Elizabethan English, the
freedom and delight with which men sounded
and explored the charming intricacies of a
tongue that was expanding daily into fresh
majesty and beauty, must have given to literature
some of the allurements of navigation.
Mariners sailed away upon stormy seas, on
strange, half-hinted errands; haunted by the
shadow of glory, dazzled by the lustre of
wealth. Scholars ventured far upon the unknown
ocean of letters; haunted by the seductions
of prose, dazzled by the fairness of
verse. They brought back curious spoils,
gaudy, subtle, sumptuous, according to the
taste or potency of the discoverer. Their
words have often a mingled weight and sweetness,
whether conveying briefly a single
thought, like Burton’s “touched with the
loadstone of love,” or adding strength and
lustre to the ample delineations of Ben Jonson.
“Give me that wit whom praise excites,
glory puts on, or disgrace grieves; he
is to be nourished with ambition, pricked forward
with honors, checked with reprehension,
and never to be suspected of sloth.” Bacon’s
admirable conciseness, in which nothing is
disregarded, but where every word carries its
proper value and expresses its exact significance,
is equaled only by Cardinal Newman.
“Reading maketh a full man, conference a
ready man, and study an exact man,” says
Bacon; and this simple accuracy of definition
reminds us inevitably of the lucid terseness
with which every sentence of the “Apologia”
reveals the thought it holds. “The truest
expedience is to answer right out when you
are asked; the wisest economy is to have no
management; the best prudence is not to be a
coward.” As for the <i>naïveté</i> and the picturesqueness
which lend such inexpressible charm
to the earlier writers and atone for so many of
their misdeeds, what can be more agreeable
than to hear Sir Walter Raleigh remark with
cheerful ingenuousness, “Some of our captaines
garoused of wine till they were reasonable
pleasant”!—a most engaging way of
narrating a not altogether uncommon occurrence.
And what can be more winning to the
ear than the simple grace with which Roger
Ascham writes of familiar things: “In the
whole year, Springtime, Summer, Fall of the
Leaf, and Winter; and in one day, Morning,
Noontime, Afternoon, and Eventide, altereth
the course of the weather, the pith of the bow,
the strength of the man”! It seems an easy
thing to say “fall of the leaf” for fall, and
“eventide” for evening, but in such easy
things lies the subtle beauty of language; in
the rejection of such nice distinctions lies the
barrenness of common speech. We can hardly
spare the time, in these hurried days, to
speak of the fall of the leaf, to use four words
where one would suffice, merely because the
four words have a graceful significance, and
the one word has none; and so, even in composition,
this finely colored phrase, with its
hint of russet, wind-swept woods, is lost to us
forever. Yet compare with it the line which
Lord Tennyson, that great master of beautiful
words, puts into Marian’s song:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“‘Have you still any honey, my dear?’</div>
<div class='line in1'>She said, ‘It’s the fall of the year;</div>
<div class='line in1'>But come, come!’”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>How tame and gray is the idiom which conveys
a fact, which defines a season, but suggests
nothing to our imaginations, by the side
of the idiom which brings swiftly before our
eyes the brilliant desolation of autumn!</p>
<p class='c016'>The narrow vocabulary, which is the conversational
freehold of people whose education
should have provided them a broader field,
admits of little that is picturesque or forcible,
and of less that is finely graded or delicately
conceived. Ordinary conversation appears to
consist mainly of “ands,” “buts,” and “thes,”
with an occasional “well” to give a flavor of
nationality, a “yes” or “no” to stand for
individual sentiment, and a few widely exaggerated
terms to destroy value and perspective.</p>
<p class='c016'>Is this, one wonders, the “treasure of dexterous
felicities” which Mr. Bagehot contemplated
with such delight, and which a critical
society is destined to preserve flawless and
uncontaminated? Is this the “heroic utterance,”
the great “mother tongue,” possessing
which we all become—or so Mr. Sydney
Dobell assures us—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare’s soul,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme,</div>
<div class='line in1'>And rich as Chaucer’s speech and fair as Spenser’s dream”?</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr.
Oscar Wilde to such rapturous and finely
worded praise,—praise which awakens in us
a noble emulation to prove what we can
accomplish with a medium at once so sumptuous
and so flexible? “For the material that
painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison
with language,” says Mr. Wilde. “Words
have not merely music as sweet as that of viol
and lute, color as rich and vivid as any that
makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian
or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure
and certain than that which reveals itself in
marble or in bronze; but thought and passion
and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs
indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised
nothing but language, they would still have
been the great art critics of the world. To
know the principles of the highest art is to
know the principles of all the arts.”</p>
<p class='c016'>This is not claiming too much, for in truth
Mr. Wilde is sufficiently well equipped to
illustrate his claim. If his sentences are
sometimes overloaded with ornament, the
decorations are gold, not tinsel; if his vocabulary
is gorgeous, it is never glaring; if his
allusions are fanciful, they are controlled and
subdued into moderation. Even the inevitable
and swiftly uttered reproach of “fine
writing” cannot altogether blind us to the
fact that his are beautiful words,—pearls
and amethysts M. Gautier would call them,—aptly
chosen, and fitted into place with
the careful skill of a goldsmith. They are
free, moreover, from that vice of unexpectedness
which is part of fine writing, and which
Mr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among the
literary workers of to-day; the desire to surprise
us by some new and profoundly irrelevant
application of a familiar word. The
“veracity” of a bar of music, the finely executed
“passage” of a marble chimney-piece,
the “andante” of a sonnet, and the curious
statement, commonly applied to Mr. Gladstone,
that he is “part of the conscience of
a nation,”—these are the vagaries which to
Mr. Saintsbury, and to every other student
of words, appear so manifestly discouraging.
Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of an
æsthetic sideboard which was described to
him as having a Chippendale feeling about
it, before which touching conceit the ever
famous “fringes of the north star” pale into
insignificance. A recent editor of Shelley’s
letters and essays says with seeming seriousness
in his preface that the “Witch of Atlas”
is a “characteristic outcome,” an “exquisite
mouse of fancy brought forth by what mountain
of Shelleyan imagination.” Now, when
a careful student and an appreciative reader
can bring himself to speak of a poem as a
“mouse of fancy,” merely for the sake of
forcing a conceit, and confronting us with the
perils of the unexpected, it is time we turned
soberly back to first principles and to our dictionaries;
it is time we listened anew to M.
Gautier’s advice, and studied the value of
words.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='ennui' class='c009'>ENNUI.</h2></div>
<div class='lg-container-b c023'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c015'>“<span class='sc'>Want</span> and ennui,” says Schopenhauer,
“are the two poles of human life.” The further
we escape from one evil, the nearer we
inevitably draw to the other. As soon as the
first rude pressure of necessity is relieved, and
man has leisure to think of something beyond
his unsatisfied craving for food and shelter,
then ennui steps in and claims him for her
own. It is the price he pays, not merely for
luxury, but for comfort. Time, the inexorable
taskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hard
with whip and spur when we are struggling
under the heavy burden of work; but stays his
hand, and prolongs the creeping hours, when
we are delivered over to that weariness of
spirit which weights each moment with lead.
Time is, in fact, either our open oppressor or
our false friend. He is that agent by which,
at every instant, “all things in our hands
become as nothing, and lose any real value
they possess.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Here is a doctrine distinctly discouraging,
and stated with that relentless candor which
compels our reluctant consideration. There
can be no doubt that to Schopenhauer’s mind
ennui was an evil every whit as palpable as
want. He hated and feared them both with
the painful susceptibility of a self-centred
man; and he strove resolutely from his youth
to protect himself against these twin disasters
of life. The determined fashion in which he
guarded his patrimony from loss resembled the
determined fashion in which he strove—with
less success—to guard himself from boredom.
The vapid talk, the little wearisome iterations,
which most of us bear resignedly enough because
custom has taught us patience, were to
him intolerable afflictions. He retaliated by
an ungracious dismissal of society as something
pitiably and uniformly contemptible.
His advice has not the grave and simple wisdom
of Sir Thomas Browne, “Be able to be
alone,” but is founded rather on Voltaire’s disdainful
maxim, “The world is full of people
who are not worth speaking to,” and implies
an almost savage rejection of one’s fellow-beings.
“Every fool is pathetically social,” says
Schopenhauer, and the advantage of solitude
consists less in the possession of ourselves than
in the escape from others. With whimsical
eagerness he built barrier after barrier between
himself and the dreaded enemy, ennui,
only to see his citadel repeatedly stormed, and
to find himself at the mercy of his foe. There
is but one method, after all, by which the invader
can be even partially disarmed, and this
method was foreign to Schopenhauer’s nature.
It was practiced habitually by Sir Walter
Scott, who, in addition to his sustained and
splendid work, threw himself with such unselfish,
unswerving ardor into the interests of
his brother men that he never gave them a
thorough chance to bore him. They did their
part stoutly enough, and were doubtless as
tiresome as they knew how to be; but his invincible
sweet temper triumphed over their
malignity, and enabled him to say, in the evening
of his life, that he had suffered little at
their hands, and had seldom found any one
from whom he could not extract either amusement
or edification.</p>
<p class='c016'>Perhaps his journal tells a different tale, a
tale of heavy moments stretching into hours,
and borne with cheerful patience out of simple
consideration for others. Men and women,
friends and strangers, took forcible possession
of his golden leisure, and he yielded it to them
without a murmur. That which was well-nigh
maddening to Carlyle’s irritable nerves and
selfish petulance, and which strained even
Charles Lamb’s forbearance to the snapping-point,
Sir Walter endured smilingly, as if it
were the most reasonable thing in the world.
Mr. Lang is right when he says Scott did not
preach socialism, he practiced it; that is, he
never permitted himself to assign to his own
comfort or convenience a very important place
in existence; he never supposed his own satisfaction
to be the predestined purpose of the
universe. But his love for genial life, his
keen enjoyment of social pleasures, made him
singularly sensitive to ennui. He was able,
indeed, like Sir Thomas Browne, to be alone,—when
the charity of his fellow-creatures
suffered it,—and he delighted in diverting
companionship, whether of peers or hinds; but
the weariness of daily intercourse with stupid
people told as heavily upon him as upon less
patient victims. Little notes scattered throughout
his journal reveal his misery, and awaken
sympathetic echoes in every long-tried soul.
“Of all bores,” he writes, “the greatest is to
hear a dull and bashful man sing a facetious
song.” And again, with humorous intensity:
“Miss Ayton’s father is a bore, after the fashion
of all fathers, mothers, aunts, and other
chaperons of pretty actresses.” And again,
this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Oh, James! oh, James! two Irish dames</div>
<div class='line in2'>Oppress me very sore:</div>
<div class='line in1'>I groaning send one sheet I’ve penned,</div>
<div class='line in2'>For, hang them! there’s no more.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c013'>That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings as
soon as they were over is proof, not of callousness,
but of magnanimity. He forgave his tormentors
the instant they ceased to torment
him, and then found time to deplore his previous
irritation. “I might at least have asked
him to dinner,” he was heard murmuring self-reproachfully,
when an unscrupulous intruder
had at last departed from Abbotsford; and
on another occasion, when some impatient lads
refused to emulate his forbearance, he recalled
them with prompt insistence to their forgotten
sense of propriety. “Come, come, young
gentlemen,” he expostulated. “It requires
no small ability, I assure you, to be a decided
bore. You must endeavor to show a little
more respect.”</p>
<p class='c016'>The self-inflicted pangs of ennui are less
salutary and infinitely more onerous than those
we suffer at the hands of others. It is natural
that our just resentment when people weary us
should result in a temporary taste for solitude,
a temporary exaltation of our own society.
Like most sentiments erected on an airy trestle-work
of vanity, this is an agreeable delusion
while it lasts; but it seldom does last after we
are bold enough to put it to the test. The inevitable
and rational discontent which lies at
the bottom of our hearts is not a thing to be
banished by noise, or lulled to sleep by silence.
We are not sufficient for ourselves, and companionship
is not sufficient for us. “Venez,
monsieur,” said Louis XIII. to a listless courtier;
“allons nous ennuyer ensemble.” We
fancy it is the detail of life, its small grievances,
its apparent monotony, its fretful cares,
its hours alternately lagging and feverish, that
wear out the joy of existence. This is not so.
Were each day differently filled, the result
would be much the same. Young Maurice de
Guérin, struggling with a depression he too
clearly understands, strikes at the very root of
the matter in one dejected sentence: “Mon
Dieu, que je souffre de la vie! Non dans ses
accidents, un peu de philosophie y suffit; mais
dans elle-même, dans sa substance, à part tout
phénomène.” To which the steadfast optimist
opposes an admirable retort: “It is a pity
that M. de Guérin should have permitted himself
this relentless analysis of a misery which
is never bettered by contemplation.” Happiness
may not be, as we are sometimes told, the
legacy of the barbarian, but neither is it a final
outcome of civilization. Men can weary, and
do weary, of every stage that represents a step
in the world’s progress, and the ennui of mental
starvation is equaled only by the ennui of
mental satiety.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is curious how much of this temper is
reflected in the somewhat dispiriting literature
which attains popularity to-day. Mr. Hamlin
Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called—I
think unfairly—“Main-Travelled Roads”
have deprived most of us of some cheerful
hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life
in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the
poverty of his Western farmers that oppresses
us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser
evils with its deadly breath, is not known to
these people at all. They have roofs, fire,
food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless
labor, the rough fare, the gray skies, the
muddy barnyards, which stand for the trouble
in their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of
living. It is the burden of a dull existence,
clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholy
of which they have sufficient intelligence
to understand. Theirs is the ennui of
emptiness, and the implied reproach on every
page is that a portion, and only a portion,
of mankind is doomed to walk along these
shaded paths; while happier mortals who
abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spend
their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual
and artistic excitation. The clearest denial of
this fallacy may be found in that matchless
and desolate sketch of Mr. Pater’s called “Sebastian
van Storck,” where we have painted for
us with penetrating distinctness man’s deliberate
rejection of those crowded accessories
which, to the empty-handed, represent the joys
of life. Never has the undying essence of
ennui been revealed to our unwilling gaze as
in this merciless picture. Never has it been
so portrayed in its awful nakedness, amid a
plenty which it cannot be persuaded to share.
We see the rich, warm, highly colored surroundings,
the vehement intensity of work and
pastime, the artistic completeness of every
detail, the solicitations of love, the delicate and
alluring touches which give to every day its
separate delight, its individual value; and,
amid all these things, the impatient soul striving
vainly to adjust itself to a life which seems
so worth the living. Here, indeed, is one of
“Fortune’s favorites,” whom she decks with
garlands like a sacrificial heifer, and at whom,
unseen, she points her mocking finger. Encompassed
from childhood by the “thriving
genius” of the Dutch, by the restless activity
which made dry land and populous towns
where nature had willed the sea, and by the
admirable art which added each year to the
heaped-up treasures of Holland, Sebastian
van Storck has but one vital impulse which
shapes itself to an end,—escape; escape from
an existence made unendurable by its stifling
fullness, its vivid and marvelous accomplishment.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is an interesting question to determine,
or to endeavor to determine, how far animals
share man’s melancholy capacity for ennui.
Schopenhauer, who, like Hartmann and all
other professional pessimists, steadfastly maintains
that beasts are happier than men, is disposed
to believe that in their natural state
they never suffer from this malady, and that,
even when domesticated, only the most intelligent
give any indication of its presence. But
how does Schopenhauer know that which he so
confidently affirms? The bird, impelled by an
instinct she is powerless to resist, sits patiently
on her eggs until they are hatched; but who
can say she is not weary of the pastime? What
loneliness and discontent may find expression
in the lion’s dreadful roar, which is said to be
as mournful as it is terrible! We are naturally
tempted, in moments of fretfulness and
dejection, to seek relief—not unmixed with
envy—in contemplating with Sir Thomas
Browne “the happiness of inferior creatures
who in tranquillity possess their constitutions.”
But freedom from care, and from the apprehension
that is worse than care, does not necessarily
imply freedom from all disagreeable
sensations; and the surest claim of the brute
to satisfaction, its absolute adequacy to the
place it is designed to fill, is destroyed by our
interference in its behalf. As a result, domestic
pets reveal plainly to every close observer
how frequently they suffer from ennui. They
pay, in smaller coin, the same price that man
pays for comfortable living. Mr. Ruskin has
written with ready sympathy of the house dog,
who bears resignedly long hours of dull inaction,
and only shows by his frantic delight
what a relief it is to be taken out for the mild
dissipation of a stroll. I have myself watched
and pitied the too evident ennui of my cat,
poor little beast of prey, deprived in a mouse-less
home of the supreme pleasures of the
hunt; fed until dinner ceases to be a coveted
enjoyment; housed, cushioned, combed, caressed,
and forced to bear upon her pretty
shoulders the burden of a wearisome opulence,—or
what represents opulence to a pussy. I
have seen Agrippina listlessly moving from
chair to chair, and from sofa to sofa, in a vain
attempt to nap; looking for a few languid
minutes out of the window with the air of a
great lady sadly bored at the play; and then
turning dejectedly back into the room whose
attractions she had long since exhausted. Her
expressive eyes lifted to mine betrayed her discontent;
the lassitude of an irksome luxury
unnerved her graceful limbs; if she could have
spoken, it would have been to complain with
Charles Lamb of that “dumb, soporifical good-for-nothingness”
which clogs the wheels of
life.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is a pleasant fancy, baseless and proofless,
which makes us imagine the existence of
fishes to be peculiarly tranquil and unmolested.
The element in which they live appears to
shelter them from so many evils; noises especially,
and the sharpness of sudden change,
scorching heats, and the inclement skies of
winter. A delightful mystery wraps them
round, and the smooth apathy with which they
glide through the water suggests content approaching
to complacency. That old-fashioned
poem beginning</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“Deep in the wave is a coral grove,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Where the purple mullet and goldfish rove,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>filled my childish heart with a profound envy
of these happy creatures, which was greatly
increased by reading a curious story of Father
Faber’s, called “The Melancholy Heart.” In
this tale, a little shipwrecked girl is carried to
the depths of the ocean, and sees the green sea
swinging to and fro because it is so full of joy,
and the fishes waving their glistening fins in
silent satisfaction, and the oysters opening and
shutting their shells in lazy raptures of delight.
Afterwards she visits the birds and beasts and
insects, and finds amongst them intelligence,
industry, patience, ingenuity,—a whole host
of admirable qualities,—but nowhere else the
sweet contentment of that dumb watery life.
So universal is this fallible sentiment that
even Leopardi, while assigning to all created
things their full share of pain, reluctantly admits
that the passive serenity of the less vivacious
creatures of the sea—starfish and their
numerous brothers and sisters—is the nearest
possible approach to an utterly impossible
happiness. And indeed it is difficult to look
at a sea-urchin slowly moving its countless
spines in the clear shallow water without
thinking that here, at least, is an existence
equally free from excitability and from ennui;
here is a state of being sufficient for itself,
and embracing all the enjoyment it can hold.
The other side of the story is presented when
we discover the little prickly cup lying empty
and dry on the peak of a neighboring rock,
and know that a crow’s sharp beak has relentlessly
dug the poor urchin from its comfortable
cradle, and ended its slumbrous felicity. Yet
the sudden cessation of life has nothing whatever
to do with its reasonable contentment.
The question is, not how soon is it over, or how
does it come to an end, but is it worth living
while it lasts? Moreover, the chances of death
make the sweetness of self-preservation; and
this is precisely the sentiment which Leigh
Hunt has so admirably embodied in those lines—the
finest, I think, he ever wrote—where
the fish pleads for its own pleasant and satisfactory
existence:—</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line'>“A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,</div>
<div class='line in1'>Quickened with touches of transporting fear.”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>Here, as elsewhere, fear is the best antidote
for ennui. The early settlers of America, surrounded
by hostile Indians, and doubtful each
morning whether the coming nightfall would
not see their rude homes given to the flames,
probably suffered but little from the dullness
which seems so oppressive to the peaceful agriculturist
of to-day. The mediæval women, who
were content to pass their time in weaving
endless tapestries, had less chance to complain
of the monotony of life than their artistic,
scientific, literary, and philanthropic sisters of
our age; for at any hour, breaking in upon
their tranquil labors, might be heard the
trumpet’s blast; at any hour might come the
tidings, good or bad, which meant a few more
years of security, or the horrors of siege and
pillage.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is pleasant to turn our consideration from
the ennui which is inevitable, and consequently
tragic, to the ennui which is accidental, and
consequently diverting. The first is part of
ourselves, from which there is no escape; the
second is, as a rule, the contribution of our
neighbors, and may be eluded if fortune and
our own wits favor us. Lord Byron, for example,
finding himself hard beset by Madame
de Staël, whom he abhorred, had the dexterity
to entrap poor little “Monk” Lewis into the
conversation, and then slipped away from both,
leaving them the dismally congenial task of
wearying each other without mercy. “A bore,”
says Bishop Selwyn, “is a man who will persist
in talking about himself when you want to talk
about yourself;” and this simple explanation
offers a satisfactory solution of much of the
ennui suffered in society. People with theories
of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their
kind, for no time or place is sacred from their
devastating elucidations. A theoretic socialist—not
the practical working kind, like Sir
Walter—is adamant to the fatigue of his listeners.
“Eloquence,” says Mr. Lowell feelingly,
“has no bowels for its victims;” and
one of the most pathetic figures in the history
of literature is poor Heine, awakened from his
sweet morning nap by Ludwig Börne, who sat
relentlessly on the edge of the bed and talked
patriotism. I hardly think that even this wanton
injury justified Heine in his cruel attack
upon Börne, when the latter was dead and
could offer no defense; yet who knows how
many drops of concentrated bitterness were
stored up in those dreary moments of boredom!
The only other instance of ennui which
seems as grievous and as cruel is the picture
of the Baron Fouqué’s brilliant wife condemned
to play loto every evening with the
officers of the victorious French army; an
illustration equally novel and malign of the
devastating inhumanity of war.</p>
<p class='c016'>In fact, amusements which do not amuse are
among the most depressing of earthly evils.
When Sir George Cornwall Lewis candidly
confessed that life would be tolerable were it
not for its pleasures, he had little notion that
he was uttering a witticism fated to enjoy
a melancholy immortality. His protest was
purely personal, and society, prompt to recognize
a grievance when it is presented, has gone
on ever since peevishly and monotonously echoing
his lament. We crave diversion so eagerly,
we need it so sorely, that our disappointment
in its elusiveness is fed by the flickerings of
perpetual hope. Ennui has been defined as a
desire for activity without the capacity for action,
as a state of inertia quickened by discontent.
But it is rather a desire for amusement
than for activity; it is a rational instinct
warped by the irony of circumstances, and by
our own selfish limitations. It was not activity
that Schopenhauer lacked. He worked
hard all his life, and with the concentrated
industry of a man who knew exactly what
he wanted to do. It was the common need of
enjoyment, which he shared with the rest of
mankind, and his own singular incapacity for
enjoying himself, which chafed him into bitterness,
and made him so unreasonably angry with
the world. “In human existence,” says Leopardi,
“the intervals between pleasure and
pain are occupied by ennui. And since all
pleasures are like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile,
thin, and transparent, ennui penetrates their
tissue and saturates them, just as air penetrates
the webs. It is, indeed, nothing but a
yearning for happiness, without the illusion of
pleasure or the reality of pain. This yearning
is never satisfied, since true happiness does not
exist. So that life is interwoven with weariness
and suffering, and one of these evils disappears
only to give place to the other. Such is
the destiny of man.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Now, to endure pain resolutely, courage is
required; to endure ennui, one must be bred
to the task. The restraints of a purely artificial
society are sufferable to those only whom
custom has rendered docile, and who have been
trained to subordinate their own impulses and
desires. The more elaborate the social conditions,
the more relentless this need of adjustment,
which makes a harmonious whole at
the cost of individual development. We all
know how, when poor Frances Burney was
lifted suddenly from the cheerful freedom of
middle-class life to the wearisome etiquette of
a court, she drooped and fretted under the burden
of an honor which brought her nothing
but vexation. Macaulay, who champions her
cause with burning zeal, is pleased to represent
the monotony of court as simple slavery
with no extenuating circumstances. He likens
Dr. Burney conducting his daughter to the
palace to a Circassian father selling his own
child into bondage. The sight of the authoress
of “Evelina” assisting at the queen’s toilet, or
chatting sleepily with the ladies in waiting,
thrills him with indignation; the thought of
her playing cards night after night with
Madame Schwellenberg reduces him to despair.
And indeed, card-playing, if you have
not the grace to like it, is the most unprofitable
form of social martyrdom; you suffer
horribly yourself, and you add very little to
the pleasure of your neighbor. The Baroness
Fouqué may have conquered the infantine imbecilities
of loto with no great mental exhaustion.
If she were painfully bored, her patience
alone was taxed. The Frenchmen probably
thought her a pleased and animated companion.
But Miss Burney, delicate, sleepy,
fatigued, loathing cards, and inwardly rebellious
at her fate, must have made the game
drag sadly before bedtime. It was a dreary
waste of moments for her; but a less intolerant
partisan than Macaulay would have some
sympathy to spare for poor Madame Schwellenberg,
who, like most women of rank, adored
the popular pastime, and who doubtless found
the distinguished young novelist a very unsatisfactory
associate.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is salutary to turn from Miss Burney and
her wrathful historian to the letters of Charlotte
Elizabeth, mother of the Regent d’Orléans,
and see how the oppressive monotony of
the French court was cheerfully endured for
fifty years by a woman exiled from home and
kindred, whose pleasures were few, whose annoyances
were manifold. Madame would have
enjoyed nothing better than a bowl of beer,
soup, or a dish of sausages eaten in congenial
company. She lunched daily alone, on hated
French messes, stared at by twenty footmen,
from whose supercilious eyes she was glad to
escape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madame
detested sermons. She listened to them endlessly
without complaint, and was grateful for
the occasional privilege of a nap. Madame
liked cards. She was not permitted to play,
nor even to show herself at the lansquenet
table. She never gambled,—in fact, she had
no money,—and it was a fancy of her husband’s
that she brought him ill luck by hovering
near. Neither was she allowed to retire.
“All the old women who do not play have to
be entertained by me,” she writes with surpassing
good humor. “This goes on from
seven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully.”
Supper was eaten at the royal table, where the
guests often waited three quarters of an hour
for the king to appear, and where nobody
spoke a word during the meal. “I live as
though I were quite alone in the world,” confesses
this friendless exile to her favorite
correspondent, the Raugravine Louise. “But
I am resigned to such a state of things, and
I meddle in nothing.” Here was a woman
trained to the endurance of ennui. The theatre
and the chase were her sole amusements; letter-writing
was her only occupation. Her
healthy German nature had in it no trace of
languor, no bitterness born of useless rebellion
against fate. She knew how to accept the inevitable,
and how to enjoy the accidental; and
this double philosophy afforded her something
closely resembling content. Napoleon, it is
said, once desired some comedians to play
at court, and M. de Talleyrand gravely announced
to the audience waiting to hear them,
“Gentlemen, the emperor earnestly requests
you to be amused.” Had Charlotte Elizabeth—long
before laid to sleep in St. Denis—been
one of that patient group, she would have
literally obeyed the royal commands. She
would have responded with prompt docility to
any offered entertainment. This is not an easy
task. “Amuse me, if you can find out how to
do it,” was the melancholy direction of Richelieu
to Boisrobert, when the pains of ennui
grew unbearable, and even kittens ceased to
be diverting. Amuse! amuse! amuse! is the
plea of a weariness as wide as the world, and
as old as humanity. Amuse me for a little
while, that I may think I have escaped from
myself.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is curious that England should have to
borrow from France the word “ennui,” while
the French are unanimous in their opinion that
the thing itself is emphatically of English
growth. The old rhyme,</p>
<div class='lg-container-b c017'>
<div class='linegroup'>
<div class='group'>
<div class='line in14'>“Jean Rosbif écuyer,</div>
<div class='line'>Qui pendit soi-même pour se désennuyer,”</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p class='c018'>has never lost its application, though the present
generation of English-speaking men are
able to digest a great deal of dullness without
seeking such violent forms of relief. In fact,
Mr. Oscar Wilde, prompt to offer an unwelcome
criticism, explains the amazing popularity
of the psychological and religiously
irreligious novel on the ground that the <i>genre
ennuyeux</i>, which no Frenchman can bring
himself to pardon, is the one form of literature
which his countrymen thoroughly enjoy.
They have a kindly tolerance for stupid people
as well, and the ill-natured term “bore” has
only forced itself of late years upon an urbane
and long-suffering public. Johnson’s dictionary
is innocent of the word, though Johnson
himself was well acquainted with the article.
As late as 1822, a reviewer in “Colburn’s
Magazine” entreats his readers to use the word
“bore;” to write it, if they please; to print
it, even, if necessary. Why shrink from
the expression, when the creature itself is so
common, and “daily gaining ground in the
country”?</p>
<p class='c016'>Before this date, however, one English
writer had given to literature some priceless
illustrations of the species. “Could we but
study our bores as Miss Austen must have
studied hers in her country village,” says
Mrs. Ritchie, “what a delightful world this
might be!” But I seriously doubt whether
any real enjoyment could be extracted from
Miss Bates, or Mr. Rushworth, or Sir William
Lucas, in the flesh. If we knew them, we
should probably feel precisely as did Emma
Woodhouse, and Maria Bertram, and Elizabeth
Bennet,—vastly weary of their company.
In fact, only their brief appearances make
the two gentlemen bores so diverting, even in
fiction; and Miss Bates, I must confess, taxes
my patience sorely. She is so tiresome that
she tires, and I am invariably tempted to do
what her less fortunate townspeople would have
gladly done,—run away from her to more
congenial society. Surely comedy ceases, and
tragedy begins, when poor Jane Fairfax escapes
from the strawberry party at Donwell,
and seeks, under the burning noonday sun,
the blessed relief of solitude. “We all know
at times what it is to be wearied in spirits.
Mine, I admit, are exhausted,” is the confession
wrung from the silent lips of a girl who
has borne all that human nature can bear
from Miss Bates’s affectionate solicitude. Perhaps
the best word ever spoken upon the creation
of such characters in novels comes from
Cardinal Newman. “It is very difficult,” he
says, “to delineate a bore in a narrative, for
the simple reason that he is a bore. A tale
must aim at condensation, but a bore acts in
solution. It is only in the long run that he
is ascertained.” And when he <i>is</i> ascertained,
and his identity established beyond reach of
doubt, what profit have we in his desolating
perfections? Miss Austen was far from enjoying
the dull people whom she knew in life.
We have the testimony of her letters to this
effect. Has not Mrs. Stent, otherwise lost to
fame, been crowned with direful immortality
as the woman who bored Jane Austen? “We
may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves,” she
writes, with facile self-reproach at her impatience,
“unequal to anything, and unwelcome
to anybody;” an apprehension manifestly
manufactured out of nothingness to strengthen
some wavering purpose of amendment. Stupidity
is acknowledged to be the one natural
gift which cannot be cultivated, and Miss
Austen well knew it lay beyond her grasp.
With as much sincerity could Emma Woodhouse
have said, “I may come in time to be a
second Miss Bates.”</p>
<p class='c016'>There is a small, compact, and enviable minority
among us, who, through no merit of
their own, are incapable of being bored, and
consequently escape the endless pangs of ennui.
They are so clearly recognized as a body
that a great deal of the world’s work is prepared
especially for their entertainment and
instruction. Books are written for them, sermons
are preached to them, lectures are given
to them, papers are read to them, societies
and clubs are organized for them, discussions
after the order of Melchizedek are carried on
monotonously in their behalf. A brand new
school of fiction has been invented for their
exclusive diversion; and several complicated
systems of religion have been put together for
their recent edification. It is hardly a matter
of surprise that, fed on such meats, they
should wax scornful, and deride their hungry
fellow-creatures. It is even less amazing that
these fellow-creatures should weary from time
to time of the crumbs that fall from their
table. It is told of Pliny the younger that,
being invited to a dinner, he consented to come
on the express condition that the conversation
should abound in Socratic discourses. Here
was a man equally insensible to ennui and to
the sufferings of others. The guests at that
ill-starred banquet appear to have been sacrificed
as ruthlessly as the fish and game they
ate. They had not even the loophole of escape
which Mr. Bagehot contemplates so admiringly
in Paradise Lost. Whenever Adam’s
remarks expand too obviously into a sermon,
Eve, in the most discreet and wife-like manner,
steps softly away, and refreshes herself with
slumber. Indeed, when we come to think of
it, conversation between these two must have
been difficult at times, because they had nobody
to talk about. If we exiled our neighbors
permanently from our discussions, we
should soon be reduced to silence; and if we
confined ourselves even to laudatory remarks,
we should probably say but little. Miss Frances
Power Cobbe, who is uncompromisingly
hostile to the feeble vices of society, insists
that it is the duty of every woman to look
bored when she hears a piece of scandal; but
this mandate is hardly in accord with Miss
Cobbe’s other requisite for true womanhood,
absolute and undeviating sincerity. How can
she look bored when she does not feel bored,
unless she plays the hypocrite? And while
many women are shocked and repelled by
scandal, few, alas! are wont to find it tiresome.
I have not even observed any exceeding
weariness in men when subjected to a
similar ordeal. In that pitiless dialogue of
Landor’s between Catherine of Russia and
Princess Dashkov, we find some opinions on
this subject stated with appalling candor.
“Believe me,” says the empress, “there is
nothing so delightful in life as to find a liar in
a person of repute. Have you never heard
good folks rejoicing at it? Or rather, can you
mention to me any one who has not been in
raptures when he could communicate such
glad tidings? The goutiest man would go on
foot to tell his friend of it at midnight; and
would cross the Neva for the purpose, when
he doubted whether the ice would bear him.”
Here, indeed, is the very soul and essence of
ennui; not the virtuous sentiment which revolts
at the disclosure of another’s faults, but
that deep and deadly ennui of life which welcomes
evil as a distraction. The same selfish
lassitude which made the gladiatorial combats
a pleasant sight for the jaded eyes which witnessed
them finds relief for its tediousness to-day
in the swift destruction of confidence and
reputation.</p>
<p class='c016'>There is a curious and melancholy fable of
Leopardi’s in which he seeks to explain what
always puzzled him sorely, the continued endurance
of life. In the beginning, he says,
the gods gave to men an existence without
care, and an earth without evil. The world
was small, and easily traversed. No seas divided
it, no mountains rose frowning from its
bosom, no extremes of heat or cold afflicted
its inhabitants. Their wants were supplied,
their pleasures provided; their happiness, Jove
thought, assured. For a time all things went
well; but as the human race outgrew its
infancy, it tired of this smooth perfection,
and little by little there dawned upon men the
inherent worthlessness of life. Every day
they sounded its depths more clearly, and
every day they wearied afresh of all they
knew and were. Illusions vanished, and the
insupportable pains of ennui forced them to
cast aside a gift in which they found no value.
They desired death, and sought it at their own
hands.</p>
<p class='c016'>Then Jove, half in wrath and half in pity,
devised a means by which his rebellious creatures
might be preserved. He enlarged the
earth, moulded the mountains, and poured into
mighty hollows the restless and pitiless seas.
Burning heat and icy cold he sent, diseases
and dangers of every kind, craving desires
that could never be satisfied, vain ambitions, a
babble of many tongues, and the deep-rooted
animosities of nations. Gone was the old
tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new
race, struggling amid terrible hardships, fought
bravely and bitterly for the preservation of an
existence they had formerly despised. Man
found his life filled with toil, sweetened by
peril, checked by manifold disasters, and was
deluded into cherishing at any cost that which
was so painful to sustain. The greater the
difficulties and dangers, the more he opposed
to them his own indomitable purpose, the more
determined he was to live. The zest of perpetual
effort, the keenness of contention, the
brief, sweet triumph over adversity,—these
left him neither the time nor the disposition
to question the value of all that he wrung
from fate.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is a cheerless philosophy, but not without
value to the sanguine socialist of to-day, who
dreams of preparing for all of us a lifetime of
unbroken ennui.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='wit' class='c009'>WIT AND HUMOR.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>It</span> is dubious wisdom to walk in the footprints
of a giant, and to stumble with little
steps along the road where his great strides
were taken. Yet many years have passed
since Hazlitt trod this way; fresh flowers have
grown by the route, and fresh weeds have
fought with them for mastery. The face of
the country has changed for better or for
worse, and a brief survey reveals much that
never met his eyes. The journey, too, was
safer in his day than in ours; and while he
gathers and analyzes every species of wit and
humor, it plainly does not occur to him for a
moment that either calls for any protection at
his hands. Hazlitt is so sure that laughter is
our inalienable right, that he takes no pains
to soften its cadences or to justify its mirth.
“We laugh at that in others which is a serious
matter to ourselves,” he says, and sees no
reason why this should not be. “Some one is
generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke;”
and, fortified with this assurance, he confesses
to a frank delight in the comic parts of the
Arabian Nights, although recognizing keenly
the spirit of cruelty that underlies them, and
aware that they “carry the principle of callous
indifference in a jest as far as it can go.”
Don Quixote, too, he stoutly affirms to be as
fitting a subject for merriment as Sancho
Panza. Both are laughable, and both are
meant to be laughed at; the extravagances of
each being pitted dexterously against those of
the other by a great artist in the ridiculous.
But he is by no means insensible to the charm
and goodness of the “ingenious gentleman;”
for sympathy is the legitimate attribute of
humor, and even where the humorist seems
most pitiless, and even brutal, in his apprehension
of the absurd, he has a living tenderness
for our poor humanity which is so rich in its
absurdities.</p>
<p class='c016'>Hazlitt’s definition of wit and humor is perhaps
as good as any definition is ever likely to
be; that is, it expresses a half-truth with a
great deal of reasonableness and accuracy.
“Humor,” he says, “is the describing the
ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing
it by comparing or contrasting it with something
else. Humor is the growth of nature
and accident; wit is the product of art and
fancy. Humor, as it is shown in books, is an
imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities
of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident,
situation, and character; wit is the illustrating
and heightening the sense of that absurdity by
some sudden and unexpected likeness or opposition
of one thing to another, which sets off
the quality we laugh at or despise in a still
more contemptible or striking point of view.”</p>
<p class='c016'>This is perhaps enough to show us at least
one cause of the endless triumph of humor over
wit,—a triumph due to its closer affinity with
the simple and elementary conditions of human
nature and life. Wit is artificial; humor is
natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable.
Wit is born of conscious effort; humor,
of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be
expressed only in language; humor can be
developed sufficiently in situation. Wit is the
plaything of the intellectual, or the weapon of
nimble minds; humor is the possession of all
sorts and conditions of men. Wit is truly
what Shelley falsely imagined virtue to be,
“a refinement of civilized life;” humor is the
property of all races in every stage of development.
Wit possesses a species of immortality,
and for many generations holds its own;
humor is truly immortal, and as long as the
eye sees, and the ear hears, and the heart
beats, it will be our privilege to laugh at the
pleasant absurdities which require no other
seed or nurture than man’s endless intercourse
with man.</p>
<p class='c016'>Nevertheless, an understanding of the differences
in nations and in epochs helps us to the
enjoyment of many humorous situations. We
should know something of England and of
India to appreciate the peculiar horror with
which Lord Minto, on reaching Calcutta, beheld
the fourteen male attendants who stood
in his chamber, respectfully prepared to help
him into bed; or his still greater dismay at
being presented by the rajah of Bali with
seven slaves,—five little boys and two little
girls,—all of whom cost the conscientious
governor-general a deal of trouble and expense
before they were properly disposed of, and in a
fair way to learn their alphabet and catechism.
Yet perhaps a deeper knowledge of time and
character is needed to sound the depths of Sir
Robert Walpole’s cynical observation, “Gratitude
is a lively sense of future favors;” although
this is indeed a type of witticism which
possesses inherent vitality, not depending upon
any play of words or double meanings, but
striking deep root into the fundamental failings
of the human heart.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is in its simplest forms, however, that
humor enjoys a world-wide actuality, and is
the connecting link of all times and places and
people. “Let us start from laughter,” says M.
Edmond Scherer, “since laughter is a thing
familiar to every one. It is excited by a sense
of the ridiculous, and the ridiculous arises
from the contradiction between the use of a
thing and its intention.” Even that commonest
of all themes, a fellow-creature slipping or
falling, M. Scherer holds to be provocative of
mirth; and in selecting this elementary example
he bravely drives the matter back to its
earliest and rudest principles. For it is a
weapon in the hands of the serious that such
casualties, which should excite instant sympathy
and alarm, awaken laughter only in
those who are too foolish or too brutal to experience
any other sensation. It would seem,
indeed, that the sight of a man falling on the
ice or in the mud cannot be, and ought not to
be, very amusing. But before we frown severely
and forever upon such vulgar jests, let
us turn for a moment to a well-known essay,
and see what Charles Lamb has to plead in
their extenuation:—</p>
<p class='c016'>“I am by nature extremely susceptible of
street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the
populace; the low-bred triumph they display
over the casual trip or splashed stocking of a
gentleman. Yet I can endure the jocularity
of a young sweep with something more than
forgiveness. In the last winter but one, pacing
along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation
when I walk westward, a treacherous
slide brought me upon my back in an instant.
I scrambled up with pain and shame enough,—yet
outwardly trying to face it down, as if
nothing had happened,—when the roguish
grin of one of these young wits encountered
me. There he stood, pointing me out with his
dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman
(I suppose his mother) in particular, till the
tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he
thought it) worked themselves out at the corners
of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous
weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling
through all with such a joy, snatched out of
desolation, that Hogarth—but Hogarth has
got him already (how could he miss him?) in
the March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman;—there
he stood, as he stands in the picture,
irremovable, as if the jest was to last forever,
with such a maximum of glee and minimum
of mischief in his mirth—for the grin of a
genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—that
I could have been content, if the honor
of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained
his butt and his mockery till midnight.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Ah, prince of kindly humorists, to whom
shall we go but to you for tears and laughter,
and pastime and sympathy, and jests and
gentle tolerance, and all things needed to make
light our trouble-burdened hearts!</p>
<p class='c016'>It is not worth while to deny or even to
soften the cruel side of humor, though it is a
far more grievous error to overlook its generous
forbearance. The humorist’s view of life
is essentially genial; but he has given stout
blows in his day, and the sound of his vigorous
warfare rings harshly in our unaccustomed
ears. “The old giants of English fun” were
neither soft-spoken nor soft-handed gentry,
and it seems to us now and then as if they
laid about them with joyous and indiscriminate
activity. Even Dickens, the last and greatest
of his race, and haunted often to his fall by
the beckoning of mirthless modern phantoms,
shows in his earlier work a good deal of this
gleeful and unhesitating belligerency. The
scenes between old Weller and Mr. Stiggins
might be successfully acted in a spirited
puppet-show, where conversation is of less
importance than well-timed and well-bestowed
pommeling. But we have now reached that
point of humane seriousness when even puppet-shows
cannot escape their educational responsibilities,
and when Punch and Judy are
gravely censured for teaching a lesson in brutality.
The laughter of generations, which
should protect and hallow the little manikins
at play, counts for nothing by the side of their
irresponsible naughtiness, and their cheerful
disregard of all our moral standards. Yet
here, too, Hazlitt has a seasonable word of
defense, holding indeed that he who invented
such diverting pastimes was a benefactor to
his species, and gave us something which it
was rational and healthy to enjoy. “We place
the mirth and glee and triumph to our own
account,” he says, “and we know that the
bangs and blows the actors have received go
for nothing as soon as the showman puts them
up in his box, and marches off quietly with
them, as jugglers of a less amusing description
sometimes march off with the wrongs and
rights of mankind in their pockets.” It has
been well said that wit requires a good head;
humor, a good heart; and fun, high spirits.
Punch’s spirits, let us hasten to admit, are
considerably in advance of his head and heart;
yet nevertheless he is wanting neither in
acuteness nor in the spirit of good-fellowship.
He has hearkened to the advice given by
Seneca many years ago, “Jest without bitterness”!
and has practiced this delightful
accomplishment for centuries, as befits the
most conservative joker in the world.</p>
<p class='c016'>Another reproach urged against humor
rather than wit is its somewhat complicated
system of lying; and much well-merited severity
has been expended upon such questionable
diversions as hoaxing, quizzing, “selling,” and
other variations of the game, the titles of
which have long since passed away, leaving
their substance behind them. It would be
easy, but untrue, to say that real humor has
nothing whatever to do with these unworthy
offshoots, and never encourages their growth.
The fact remains that they spring from a great
humorous principle, and one which critics have
been prompt to recognize, and to embody in
language as clear and unmistakable as possible.
“Lying,” says Hazlitt, “is a species of wit
and humor. To lay anything to a person’s
charge from which he is perfectly free shows
spirit and invention; and the more incredible
the effrontery the greater is the joke.” “The
terrors of Sancho,” observes M. Scherer, “the
rascalities of Scapin, the brags of Falstaff,
amuse us because of their disproportion with
circumstances, or their disagreement with
facts.” Just as Charles Lamb humanizes a
brutal jest by turning it against himself, so
Sir Walter Scott gives amusing emphasis to a
lie by directing it against his own personality.
His description of himself in his journal as a
“pebble-hearted cur,” the occasion being his
parting with the emotional Madame Mirbel, is
truly humorous, because of its remoteness from
the truth. There are plenty of men who could
have risked using the phrase without exciting
in us that sudden sense of incongruity which
is a legitimate source of laughter. A delightful
instance of effrontery, which shows both
spirit and invention, is the story told by Sir
Francis Doyle of the highwayman who, having
attacked and robbed Lord Derby and his
friend Mr. Grenville, said to them with reproachful
candor, “What scoundrels you must
be to fire at gentlemen who risk their lives
upon the road!” As for the wit that lies in
playful misstatements and exaggerations, we
must search for it in the riotous humor of
Lamb’s letters, where the true and the false
are often so inextricably commingled that it is
a hopeless task to separate facts from fancies.
“I shall certainly go to the naughty man for
fibbing,” writes Lamb, with soft laughter; and
the devout apprehension may have been justly
shared by Edward Fitzgerald, when he describes
the parish church at Woodbridge as
being so damp that the fungi grew in great
numbers about the communion table.</p>
<p class='c016'>A keen sense of the absurd is so little relished
by those who have it not that it is too
often considered solely as a weapon of offense,
and not as a shield against the countless ills
that come to man through lack of sanity and
judgment. There is a well-defined impression
in the world that the satirist, like the devil,
roams abroad, seeking whom he may devour,
and generally devouring the best; whereas his
position is often that of the besieged, who
defends himself with the sharpest weapons at
his command against a host of invading evils.
There are many things in life so radically unwholesome
that it is not safe to approach them
save with laughter as a disinfectant; and when
people cannot laugh, the moral atmosphere
grows stagnant, and nothing is too morbid, too
preposterous, or too mischievous to meet with
sympathy and solemn assurances of good will.
This is why a sense of the ridiculous has been
justly called the guardian of our minor morals,
rendering men in some measure dependent
upon the judgments of their associates, and
laying the basis of that decorum and propriety
of conduct which is a necessary condition of
human life, and upon which is founded the
great charm of intercourse between equals.
From what pitfalls of vanity and self-assurance
have we been saved by this ever-watchful presence!
Into what abysmal follies have we
fallen when she withholds her restraining
hand! Shelley’s letters are perhaps the
strongest argument in behalf of healthy humor
that literature has yet offered to the
world. Only a man burdened with an “invincible
repugnance to the comic” could have
gravely penned a sentence like this: “Certainly
a saint may be amiable,—she <i>may</i> be
so; but then she does not understand,—has
neglected to investigate the religion which retiring,
modest prejudice leads her to profess.”
Only a man afflicted with what Mr. Arnold
mildly calls an “inhuman” lack of humor
could have written thus to a female friend:
“The French language you already know;
and, if the great name of Rousseau did not
redeem it, it would have been perhaps as well
that you had remained ignorant of it.” Our
natural pleasure at this verdict may be agreeably
heightened by placing alongside of it
Madame de Staël’s moderate statement, “Conversation,
like talent, exists only in France.”
And such robust expressions of opinion give
us our clearest insight into at least one of the
dangers from which a sense of the ridiculous
rescues its fortunate possessor.</p>
<p class='c016'>When all has been said, however, we must
admit that edged tools are dangerous things to
handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.
“The art of being humorous in an agreeable
way” is as difficult in our day as in the days
of Marcus Aurelius, and a disagreeable exercise
of this noble gift is as unwelcome now as
then. “Levity has as many tricks as the kitten,”
says Leigh Hunt, who was quite capable
of illustrating and proving the truth of his assertion,
and whose scratching at times closely
resembled the less playful manifestations of a
full-grown cat. Wit is the salt of conversation,
not the food, and few things in the world are
more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards
life. “Je goûte ceux qui sont raisonnables, et
me divertis des extravagants,” says Uranie, in
“La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes;” and
even these words seem to tolerant ears to savor
unduly of arrogance. The best use we can make
of humor is, not to divert ourselves with, but
to defend ourselves against, the folly of fools;
for much of the world’s misery is entailed upon
her by her eminently well-meaning and foolish
children. There is no finer proof of Miss
Austen’s matured genius than the gradual
mellowing of her humor, from the deliberate
pleasure affected by Elizabeth Bennet and her
father in the foibles of their fellow-creatures to
the amused sympathy betrayed in every page
of “Emma” and “Persuasion.” Not even the
charm and brilliance of “Pride and Prejudice”
can altogether reconcile us to a heroine who,
like Uranie, diverts herself with the failings of
mankind. What a gap between Mr. Bennet’s
cynical praise of his son-in-law, Wickham,—which,
under the circumstances, is a little revolting,—and
Mr. Knightley’s manly reproof
to Emma, whose youthful gayety beguiles her
into an unkind jest. While we talk much of
Miss Austen’s merciless laughter, let us remember
always that the finest and bravest defense
of harmless folly against insolent wit is embodied
in this earnest remonstrance from the lips
of a lover who is courageous enough to speak
plain truths, with no suspicion of priggishness
to mar their wholesome flavor.</p>
<p class='c016'>It is difficult, at any time, to deprive wit
of its social or political surroundings; it is
impossible to drive it back to those deeper,
simpler sources whence humor springs unveiled.
“Hudibras,” for example, is witty;
“Don Quixote” is humorous. Sheridan is
witty; Goldsmith is humorous. To turn from
the sparkling scenes where the Rivals play their
mimic parts to the quiet fireside where the
Vicar and Farmer Flamborough sit sipping
their gooseberry wine is to reënter life, and to
feel human hearts beating against our own.
How delicate the touch which puts everything
before us with a certain gentle, loving malice,
winning us to laughter, without for a moment
alienating our sympathies from the right.
Hazlitt claims for the wicked and witty comedies
of the Restoration that it is their privilege
to allay our scruples and banish our just regrets;
but when Goldsmith brings the profligate
squire and his female associates into the
Vicar’s innocent household, the scene is one
of pure and incomparable humor, which nevertheless
leaves us more than ever in love with
the simple goodness which is so readily deceived.
Mr. Thornhill utters a questionable
sentiment. The two fine ladies, who have been
striving hard to play their parts, and only letting
slip occasional oaths, affect great displeasure
at his laxness, and at once begin a very discreet
and serious dialogue upon virtue. “In this
my wife, the chaplain, and I soon joined; and
the squire himself was at last brought to confess
a sense of sorrow for his former excesses.
We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and
of the sunshine of the mind unpolluted with
guilt. I was so well pleased that my little
ones were kept up beyond the usual time, to
be edified by so much good conversation. Mr.
Thornhill even went beyond me, and demanded
if I had any objection to giving prayers. I
joyfully embraced the proposal; and in this
manner the night was passed in a most comfortable
way, till at length the company began
to think of returning.” What a picture it is!
What an admirably humorous situation!
What easy tolerance in the treatment! We
laugh, but even in our laughter we know that
not for the space of a passing breath does
Goldsmith yield his own sympathy, or divert
ours, away from the just cause of innocence
and truth.</p>
<p class='c016'>If men of real wit have been more numerous
in the world than men of real humor, it is
because discernment and lenity, mirth and
conciliation, are qualities which do not blend
easily with the natural asperity of our race.
Humor has been somewhat daringly defined as
“a sympathy for the seamy side of things.”
It does not hover on the borders of the light
and trifling; it does not linger in that keen
and courtly atmosphere which is the chosen
playground of wit; but diffusing itself subtly
throughout all nature, reveals to us life,—life
which we love to consider and to judge from
some pet standpoint of our own, but which is so
big and wonderful, and good and bad, and fine
and terrible, that our little peaks of observation
command only a glimpse of the mysteries
we are so ready and willing to solve. Thus, the
degree of wit embodied in an old story is a matter
of much dispute and of scant importance;
but when we read that Queen Elizabeth, in her
last illness, turned wearily away from matters
of state, “yet delighted to hear some of the
‘Hundred Merry Tales,’ and to such was very
attentive,” we feel we have been lifted into
the regions of humor, and by its sudden light
we recognize, not the dubious merriment of the
tales, but the sick and world-worn spirit seeking
a transient relief from fretful care and
poisonous recollections. So, too, when Sheridan
said of Mr. Dundas that he resorted to
his memory for his jests, and to his imagination
for his facts, the great wit, after the
fashion of wits, expressed a limited truth. It
was a delightful statement so far as it went,
but it went no further than Mr. Dundas, with
just the possibility of a second application.
When Voltaire sighed, “Nothing is so disagreeable
as to be obscurely hanged,” he gave
utterance to a national sentiment, which is not
in the least witty, but profoundly humorous,
revealing with charming distinctness a Frenchman’s
innate aversion to all dull and commonplace
surroundings. Dying is not with him,
as with an Englishman, a strictly “private affair;”
it is the last act of life’s brilliant play,
which is expected to throw no discredit upon
the sparkling scenes it closes.</p>
<p class='c016'>The breadth of atmosphere which humor
requires for its development, the saneness anti
sympathy of its revelations, are admirably
described by one of the most penetrating and
least humorous of French critics, M. Edmond
Scherer, whose words are all the more grateful
and valuable to us when they refer, not to his
own countrymen, but to those robust English
humorists whom it is our present pleasure to
ignore. M. Scherer, it is true, finds much
fault, and reasonable fault ever, with these
stout-hearted, strong-handed veterans. They
are not always decorous. They are not always
sincere. They are wont to play with their
subjects. They are too eager to amuse themselves
and other people. It is easy to make
out a list of their derelictions. “Yet this does
not prevent the temperament of the humorist
from being, on the whole, the happiest that a
man can bring with him into this world, nor
his point of view from being the fairest from
which the world can be judged. The satirist
grows wroth; the cynic banters; the humorist
laughs and sympathizes by turns.... He has
neither the fault of the pessimist, who refers
everything to a purely personal conception,
and is angry with reality for not being such
as he conceives it; nor that of the optimist,
who shuts his eyes to everything missing on
the real earth, that he may comply with the
demands of his heart and of his reason. The
humorist feels the imperfections of reality,
and resigns himself to them with good temper,
knowing that his own satisfaction is not the
rule of things, and that the formula of the
universe is necessarily larger than the preferences
of a single one of the accidental beings
of whom the universe is composed. He is beyond
doubt the true philosopher.”</p>
<p class='c016'>This is a broad statement; yet to endure
life smilingly is no ignoble task; and if the
humors of mankind are inseparably blended
with all their impulses and actions, it is worth
while to consider bravely the value of qualities
so subtle and far-reaching in their influences.
Steele, as we know, dressed the invading
bailiffs in liveries, and amazed his guests
by the number and elegance of his retainers.
Sydney Smith fastened antlers on his sheep,
for the gratification of a lady who thought he
ought to have deer in his park. Such elaborate
jests, born of invincible gayety and high
spirits, seem childish to our present adult
seriousness; and we are too impatient to understand
that they represent an attitude, and
a very healthy attitude, towards life. The
iniquity of Steele’s career lay in his repeatedly
running into debt, not in the admirable temper
with which he met the consequences of that
debt when they were forced upon him; and
if the censorious are disposed to believe that
a less happy disposition would have avoided
these consequences, let them consider the careers
of poor Richard Savage and other misanthropic
prodigals. As for Sydney Smith,
he followed Burton’s excellent counsel, “Go
on then merrily to heaven;” and his path was
none the less straight because it was smoothed
by laughter. That which must be borne had
best be borne cheerfully, and sometimes a
single telling stroke of wit, a single word rich
in manly humor, reveals to us that true courage,
that fine philosophy, which endures and
even tolerates the vicissitudes of fortune,
without for a moment relinquishing its honest
hold upon the right. Mr. Lang has told us
such a little story of the verger in a Saxon
town who was wont to show visitors a silver
mouse, which had been offered by the women
to the Blessed Virgin that she might rid the
town of mice. A Prussian officer, with that
prompt brutality which loves to offend religious
sentiment it does not share, asked jeeringly,
“Are you such fools as to believe that the
creatures went away because a silver mouse
was dedicated?” “Ah, no,” replied the verger,
“or long ago we should have offered a
silver Prussian.”</p>
<p class='c016'>It is the often-expressed opinion of Leigh
Hunt that although wit and humor may be
found in perfection apart from each other, yet
their best work is shared in common. Wit
separated from humor is but an element of
sport; “a laughing jade,” with petulant
whims and fancies, which runs away with our
discretion, confuses our wisdom, and mocks at
holy charity; yet adds greatly, withal, to the
buoyancy and popularity of life. It makes
gentlefolk laugh,—a difficult task, says Molière;
it scatters our faculties, and “bears
them off deridingly into pastime.” It is a
fire-gleam in our dull world, a gift of the gods,
who love to provide weapons for the amusement
and discomfiture of mankind. But humor
stands on common soil, and breathes our
common air. The kindly contagion of its
mirth lifts our hearts from their personal apprehension
of life’s grievances, and links us
together in a bond of mutual tears and laughter.
If it be powerless to mould existence, or
even explain it to our satisfaction, it can give
us at least some basis for philosophy, some
scope for sympathy, and sanity, and endurance.
“The perceptions of the contrasts of human
destiny,” says M. Scherer, “by a man who
does not sever himself from humanity, but
who takes his own shortcomings and those of
his dear fellow-creatures cheerfully,—this is
the essence of humor.”</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<div class='chapter'>
<h2 id='letters' class='c009'>LETTERS.</h2></div>
<p class='c015'><span class='sc'>It</span> is one of the current complaints of to-day
that the art of letter-writing, as our great-grandfathers
and our great-great-grandfathers
knew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost.
Railways, which bring together easily and often
people who used to spend the greater portion
of their lives apart; cheap postage, which relieves
a man from any serious responsibility for
what he writes,—the most insignificant scrawl
seems worth the stamp he puts on it; the hurried,
restless pace at which we live, each day
filled to the brim with things which are hardly
so important as we think them, and which
have cost us the old rich hours of leisurely
thought and inaction,—these are the forces
which have conspired to destroy the letter, and
to crowd into its place that usurping and unprofitable
little upstart called the note. “The
art of note-writing,” says Mr. Bagehot, “may
become classical; it is for the present age to
provide models for that sort of composition;
but letters have perished. In the last century,
cultivated people who sat down to write took
pains to have something to say, and took pains
to say it. The correspondence of to-day is
like a series of telegrams with amplified headings.
There is not more than one idea, and
that idea soon comes and is soon over. The
best correspondence of the past is rather like
a good light article, in which the points are
studiously made; in which the effort to make
them is studiously concealed; in which a series
of selected circumstances is set forth; in which
you feel, but are not told, that the principle of
the writer’s selection was to make his composition
pleasant.”</p>
<p class='c016'>It is difficult not to agree with Mr. Bagehot
and other critics who have uttered similar
lamentations. The letter which resembled a
good light article has indeed disappeared from
our midst, and I am not sure that many dry
eyes have not witnessed its departure. Light
articles are now provided for us in such generous
measure by our magazines that we have
scant need to exact them from our friends. In
fact, we should have no time to read them, if
they were written. A more serious loss is the
total absence of any minute information or
gossip upon current topics in the mass of
modern correspondence. The letter which is
so useful to historians, which shows us, and
shows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordinary,
every-day life of prominent men and
women, this letter has also disappeared, and
there is nothing to take its place. We can
reconstruct the England, or at least the London
of George II. and George III. from the
pages of Horace Walpole. Who is there
likely to hand down in this fashion to a coming
generation the England of Queen Victoria?
Neither does the fact of Walpole’s being by
no means a bigot in the matter of truth-telling
interfere with his real value. He lies consciously
and with a set purpose here and there;
he is unconsciously and even inevitably veracious
in the main. There are some points,
observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost everybody’s
letters are true. “The delineation of
a recurring and familiar life is beyond the
reach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpole
was not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it was
too much trouble, even for him, to tell lies
on many things. His stories and conspicuous
scandals are no doubt often unfounded;
but there is a gentle undercurrent of daily
unremarkable life and manners which he
evidently assumed as a datum for his historical
imagination.”</p>
<p class='c016'>We may be quite sure, for example, on his
testimony, that people of fashion went to
Ranelagh two hours after the music was over,
because it was thought vulgar to go earlier;
that Lord Derby’s cook gave him warning,
rather than dress suppers at three o’clock in
the morning; that when a masked ball was
given by eighteen young noblemen at Soho,
the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches,
held up torches to the windows, and demanded
to have the masks pulled off and put on at
their pleasure, “but all with extreme good humor
and civility;” that he, Horace Walpole,
one night at Vauxhall, helped Lady
Caroline Petersham to mince seven chickens
in a china dish, which chickens “Lady Caroline
stewed over a lamp, with three pats of
butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling
and laughing, and we every minute expecting
to have the dish fly about our ears;”
that at the funeral of George II., the Duke of
Newcastle—that curious burlesque of an English
nobleman—stood on the train of the
butcher Duke of Cumberland to avoid the chill
of the marble. If we think these things are
not worth knowing, we had better not read
Walpole’s letters, for these are the things
which he delights in telling us. Macaulay
thought these things were not worth knowing,
and he has accordingly branded Walpole as a
superficial observer, a vain and shallow worldling.
How, he wonders, can we listen seriously
to a man who haunted auctions; who collected
bricabrac; who sat up all night playing cards
with fine, frivolous ladies; who liked being
a fashionable gentleman, and had no proper
pride in belonging to the august assemblage
of authors; and who, most deadly crime of all,
lived face to face with the great Whig leaders
of the day, and was not in the least impressed
by the magnitude of the distinction thus conferred
on him. But, after all, we cannot, every
one of us, be built upon the same solemn and
righteous lines. It is not even granted to
every one to be a fervent and consistent Whig.
Horace Walpole, you see, was Horace Walpole,
and not Thomas Babington Macaulay:
therefore Macaulay despised him, and called
on all his readers to despise him too. We can
only have recourse to Mr. Lang’s philosophy:
“’Tis a wide world, my masters; there is room
for both.” Walpole is the prince of letter-writers,
because writing letters was the inspiration,
the ruling passion of his life, and he
was preëminently qualified for the task. It
has been well said that had some evil chance
wrecked him, like Robinson Crusoe, upon a
desert island, he would have gone on writing
letters just the same, and waited for a ship to
carry them away. This is a pleasant conceit,
because the spectacle of Horace Walpole on a
desert island is one which captivates the idle
fancy. Think of his little airs and graces, his
courtly affectations, his fine clothes and frippery,
his dainty epicureanism, his sense of
good comradeship, all thrown away upon a
desert island, and upon the society of a parrot
and a goat. What malicious tales he would
have been forced to invent about the parrot!
It is best not to believe evil of any one upon
Walpole’s word, especially not of any one who
had ever attacked Sir Robert’s ministry; for
Horace’s filial piety took the very exclusive
form of undying enmity to all his father’s political
opponents. But when we have passed
over and tried to forget all that is spiteful and
caustic and coarse in these celebrated letters,
there is a great deal left, a great deal that is
not even the current gossip of the day. He
goes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughing
is out of fashion in that once gay capital.
“Good folks!” he cries, “they have no time
to laugh. There are God and the king to be
pulled down first, and men and women, one
and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition.
They think me quite profane for having
my belief left.” A few years later, Walpole
sees clearly that French politics must end in
“despotism, a civil war, or assassination.”
The age is not, he says, as he once thought,
an age of abortion; but rather “an age of
seeds which are to produce strange crops hereafter.”
Surely, even Macaulay might allow
that these are the words of a thinker, of a
prophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in the
market-place.</p>
<p class='c016'>Granted, then, that the light-article letter,
and the letter which gives us material with
which to fill up the gaps and crannies of history,
which holds the life of the past embalmed
in its faded pages, have disappeared, perhaps
forever. There is another letter which has not
disappeared, which never can disappear as long
as man stays man and woman, woman,—the
letter which reveals to us the personality of
the writer; which is dear and valuable to us
because in it his hand stretches out frankly
from the past, and draws us to his side. It
may be long or short, carefully or carelessly
written, full of useful information or full of
idle nonsense, We do not stop to ask. It is
enough for us to know from whom it came.
And the finest type of such a letter may surely
be found in the well-loved correspondence of
Charles Lamb. If we eliminated from his
pages all critical matter, all those shrewd and
admirable verdicts upon prose and verse; if
we cut out ruthlessly such scraps of news
as they occasionally convey; if we banished
all references to celebrated people, from the
“obnoxious squeak” of Shelley’s voice to the
generous sympathy expressed for Napoleon, we
should still have left—the writer himself,
which is all that we desire. We should still
have the record of that harmless and patient,
that brave and sorely tried life. We should
still see infinite mirth and infinite pathos interwoven
upon every page. We should catch the
echo of that clear, kind laughter which never
hardens into scorn. Lamb laughs at so many
people, and never once wrongs any one. We
should see the flashes of a wit which carries no
venom in its sting. We should feel that atmosphere
of wonderful, whimsical humor illuminating
all the trivial details of existence. We
should recognize in the turning of every sentence,
the conscious choice of every word, the
fine and distinctive qualities of a genius that
has no parallel.</p>
<p class='c016'>It matters little at what page we read. Here
is the sad story of Henry Robinson’s waistcoat,
which Mary Lamb tried to bring over from
France, but which was seized at the Custom
House, “for the use of the king,” says
Charles dryly. “He will probably appear in it
at the next levee.” Here is the never-to-be-forgotten
tea-party at Miss Benjay’s, where
that tenth-rate little upstart of a woman—type
of a genus that survives to-day—alternately
patronized and snubbed her guest;
flinging at him her pitiful scraps of information,
marveling that he did not understand
French, insulting him when he ventured
an opinion upon poetry,—“seeing that it was
my own trade in a manner,”—imparting to
him Hannah More’s valuable dogmas on education,
feeding him scantily with macaroons,
and sending him home,—not angry as he had
a right to be, as any other man would have
been in his place, only infinitely amused. And
then some people say that a keen sense of the
ridiculous is not a kindly sentiment! It is, we
know it is, when we read the letter to Coleridge
in which Lamb tells how he went to condole
with poor Joseph Cottle on the death of
his brother Amos, and how, as the readiest
comfort he could offer, he swiftly introduced
into his conversation Joseph’s epic poem,
“Alfred,” luring the mourner gently from his
grief by arousing his poetic vanity. The dear,
good, stupid Cottle, brightening visibly under
such soothing treatment, fixed upon his visitor
a benevolent gaze, and prepared himself for
melancholy enjoyment. After a while the
name of Alswitha, Alfred’s queen, was slipped
adroitly into the discourse. “At that moment,”
says Lamb, “I could perceive that
Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately become
a blessed spirit. In the language of
mathematicians, the author was as nine, the
brother as one. I felt my cue, and strong pity
stirring at the root, I went to work.” So the
little comedy proceeds, until it reaches its climax
when George Dyer, to whom all poems
were good poems, remarks that the dead Amos
was estimable both for his head and heart, and
would have made a fine poet if he had lived.
“To this,” says Lamb, “Joseph fully assented,
but could not help adding that he always
thought the qualities of his brother’s heart exceeded
those of his head. I believe his brother,
when living, had formed precisely the same
idea of him; and I apprehend the world will
assent to both judgments.” Now if we will but
try to picture to ourselves how Carlyle would
have behaved to poor Miss Benjay, how Walpole
would have sneered at Joseph Cottle, we
will understand better the harmless, the almost
loving nature of Charles Lamb’s raillery,
which we can enjoy so frankly because it gave
no pain.</p>
<p class='c016'>As for the well-known fact that Lamb’s letters
reflect nothing of the political tumult, the
stirring warfare, amid which he lived, it is
interesting to place by their side the contemporary
letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, the first
Earl of Minto, a correspondence the principal
charm of which is the revelation it makes
of a nature so fine and brave, so upright and
honorable, so wise and strong and good, that
we can best understand the secret of England’s
greatness when we know she has given birth
to such sons. To study the life of a man who
played so prominent a part in home and foreign
politics is to study the history of Europe during
those troubled years. In Lord Minto’s
letters we follow breathlessly the desperate
struggle with Napoleon, the ceaseless wrangling
of the Allies, the dangerous rebellions in
Ireland, the grave perplexities of the Indian
empire; and besides these all-important topics,
we have side-lights thrown upon social life.
We learn, for instance, that Mrs. Crewe, the
celebrated beauty and toast of the Whigs,
liked good conversation, and took an interest
and even a part, writes Sir Gilbert naïvely to
his wife, “in all subjects which men would
naturally talk of when <i>not</i> in woman’s company,
as politics and literature.” We learn
also—what we half suspected before—that
Madame de Stäel was so greedy of admiration
that she was capable of purchasing “any
quantity of anybody at any price, and among
other prices by a traffic of mutual flattery;”
and that she was never satisfied unless she
could have the whole conversation to herself,
and be the centre of every company.</p>
<p class='c016'>Now, it is hardly to be expected that the
letters of a great statesman and the letters of
an obscure clerk in the India House should
reveal precisely the same interests and information,
any more than it is to be expected that
the letters of the statesman—who was, after
all, a statesman and no more—should equal
in literary charm and merit the letters of the
clerk who was in addition an immortal genius.
But when we think how profoundly England
was shaken and disturbed by the discords and
apprehensions of those troubled times, how
wars and the rumors of wars darkened the
air, and stirred the blood of country bumpkins
and placid rural squires, it seems a little
strange that Lamb, who lived long years in
the heart of London, and must have heard
so much of these things, should have written
about them so little. He does learn when
there is a change of ministry, because he hears
a butcher say something about it in the market-place.
He cultivates a frank admiration
for Napoleon, whom all his countrymen hated
and feared so madly. He would be glad, he
says, to stand bareheaded at his table, doing
honor to him in his fall. And, after the battle
of Trafalgar, he writes to Hazlitt: “Lord
Nelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keeps
a slight fluttering in odes and elegies in newspapers,
and impromptus which could not be
got ready before the funeral.”</p>
<p class='c016'>These characteristic passages and others
like them are all we hear of public matters
from Charles Lamb, and few of us would ask
for more. It is the continual sounding of the
personal note that makes his pages so dear to
us; it is the peculiarly restful character of his
beloved chit-chat that keeps them so fresh and
delightful. And while there is but one Lamb,
there are many letters which have in them
something of this same personal quality, something
of this restful charm. The supply can
never be exhausted, because letter-writing—not
light articles now, nor brilliant semi-historic
narratives, but real letter-writing—is
founded on a need as old and as young as humanity
itself, the need that one human being
has of another. The craving for sympathy;
the natural and healthy egotism which prompts
us to open our minds to absent friends; the
desire we all feel to make known to others
that which is happening to ourselves; the
certainty we all feel that others will be profoundly
interested in this revelation; the
inextinguishable impulse to “pass on” experiences
either of soul or body, to share with
some one else that which we are hearing, or
seeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying,—these
are the motives which make letter-writing
essential and inevitable, crowd it into
the busiest lives, assimilate it with the dullest
understandings, and fit it into some crevice
of every one’s daily experience. Thus it happens
that there is a strong family resemblance
between letters of every age and every country;
they really change less than we are pleased
to think. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in one
of his delightful essays, quotes from a long
and chatty letter written, about the time that
Moses was a little lad, by an Egyptian gentleman
named Pambesa to a friend named Amenemapt,
and giving a very lively and minute
account of the city of Rameses, which Pambesa
was then happily visiting for the first
time. We have all of us had just such letters
from our absent friends, and have read
them with mingled pleasure, and envy, and irritation.
Pambesa the traveler is not disposed
to spare Amenemapt the stay-at-home any detail
of what he is missing. Never was there
such a city of the gods as this particular town
of Rameses which Amenemapt was not destined
to see. There might be found the best
of good living; vines, and fig-trees, and onion
beds, and nursery gardens. Stout drinkers
too were its jovial inhabitants, with a variety
of strong liquors, sweet syrups richer than
honey, red wine, and very excellent imported
beer. Its women were all well dressed, and
curled their hair enticingly, smoothing it with
sweet oil. They stood at their doors, holding
nosegays in their hands, and presenting
a very alluring appearance to this gay and
shameless Pambesa, who could hardly make up
his mind to pass them coldly by. Altogether,
Rameses was an exceedingly pleasant town to
visit, and the Egyptian gentleman was having
a very jolly time of it, and we, reading his
correspondence, fall to thinking that human
nature before the Exodus was uncommonly
like human nature to-day. This is one of the
delights of letter-reading, that it reveals to us,
not only the life of the past, but, better still,
the people of the past, our brothers and sisters
who, being dead, still live in their written
pages. For the scholar the interest lies in
what Pambesa has to tell; for the rest of us
the interest lies in Pambesa himself, who, so
many thousand years ago, drank the bitter
beer, and stared at the pretty girls standing
curled and flower-bedecked, with those demure,
faint smiles which centuries cannot alter
or impair.</p>
<p class='c016'>So it continues, as we run swiftly down the
years, the bulk of correspondence increasing
enormously at every stage, until we reach such
monuments of industry as the famous Cecil
letters, preserved at Hatfield, and comprising
over thirty thousand documents. It is pleasant
to feel we need read none of these, and that,
if we search for character, we may find it in
thirty words as well as in thirty thousand rolls
of musty parchment. We may find it surely
in that historic note dispatched by Ann,
Countess of Dorset, to Sir Joseph Williamson,
Secretary of State under Charles II., who
wanted her to appoint a courtier as member
from Appleby. Nothing could well be shorter;
nothing could possibly be more significant.
This is all:—</p>
<p class='c024'><span class='sc'>Sir</span>,—I have been bullied by an usurper, I have
been ill-treated by a court, but I won’t be dictated
to by a subject. Your man shall not stand.</p>
<p class='c025'><span class='sc'>Ann Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery.</span></p>
<p class='c013'>Now if you don’t feel you know Ann Dorset
pretty well after reading those four lines, you
wouldn’t know her if she left a diary as long
as Samuel Pepys’s; and if you don’t feel, after
reading them, that she is worth the knowing, it
is hopeless for her to try and win your regard.
Another and still more amusing instance of
self-revelation may be found in a manuscript
familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian
Library at Oxford. There, among other
precious treasures, is a collection of notes
scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and
by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the
tedium of Council. They look, for all the
world, like the notes which school-girls are
wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the
tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a
little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s,
writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see
his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characters
writes back that there is no reason why he
should not, if he can return in a few days, and
adds tentatively, “I suppose you will go with
a light train.” Charles, as though glowing
with conscious rectitude, responds, “I intend
to take nothing but my night-bag.” Clarendon,
who knows his master’s luxurious habits,
is startled out of all propriety. “Gods!” he
writes: “you will not go without forty or
fifty horse.” Then Charles, who seems to
have been waiting for this point in the dialogue,
tranquilly replies in one straggling line
at the bottom of the page. “I count that part
of my night-bag.” How plainly we can hear
the royal chuckle which accompanied this gracious
explanation! How really valuable is
this scrap of correspondence which shows us
for a moment Charles Stuart; not the Charles
of Sir Walter’s loyal stories, nor the Charles
of Macaulay’s eloquent invectives; but Charles
himself, our fellow mortal, and a very human
character indeed.</p>
<p class='c016'>If, as Mr. Bagehot affirms, it is for the present
day to provide models which shall make
the art of note-writing classical, we can begin
no better than by studying the specimens already
in our keeping. If we want humor,
pathos, a whole tale told in half a dozen words,
we have these things already in every sentence
of Steele’s hasty scrawls to his wife: “Prue,
Prue, look a little dressed, and be beautiful.”—And
again: “’Tis the glory of a Woman,
Prue, to be her husband’s Friend and Companion,
and not his Sovereign Director.”—Or
“Good-nature, added to that beautiful form
God has given you, would make an happinesse
too great for Humane life.”—And finally,
“I am, dear Prue, a little in Drink, but at
all times, Your Faithful Husband, Richard
Steele.”</p>
<p class='c016'>These bare scraps of letters, briefer, many
of them, than the “scandalous half-sheets”
which Prue was wont to send in return, give
us a tolerably clear insight into the precise
nature of Steele’s domestic happiness. We
understand, not only the writer, but the recipient
of such missives, poor petulant Prue, who
has had scant mercy shown her in Thackeray’s
brilliant pages, but whose own life was not
passed upon a bed of roses. We are eager
to catch these swift glimpses of real people
through a few careless lines which have
miraculously escaped destruction; or perhaps
through a brief aside in an important, but, to
us, very uninteresting communication; as, for
example, when Marlborough reopens a dispatch
to say that he has just received word of
the surprise and defeat of the Dutch general,
Opdam. “Since I sealed my letter,” he writes
with characteristic dryness, “we have a report
from Breda that Opdam is beaten. I pray
God it be not so, for he is very capable of
having it happen to him.” It is difficult not to
enjoy this, because, if we sat within the shadow
of Marlborough’s tent, we could not hear him
more distinctly; and the desire we feel to get
nearer to the people who interest us, to know
them as they really were, is, in the main, natural
and wholesome. Yet there must be some
limit set to the gratification of this desire, if
we are to check the unwarranted publishing
of private letters which has become the recognized
disgrace of literature. It is hard for us
to understand just when our curiosity ceases to
be permissible; it is harder still for editors to
understand just when their privileges cease to
be beneficial. Not many years ago it was possible
for Mr. Bagehot to say that he took comfort
in thinking of Shelley as a poet about
whom our information was mercifully incomplete.
Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is incomplete
no longer; but we have scant cause
to congratulate ourselves on what we have
gained by his disclosures. Mr. Froude, acting
up to an heroic theory of friendship, has pilloried
Carlyle for the pleasure and the pain of
gaping generations; but there are some who
turn away with averted eyes from the sordid,
shameful spectacle. Within the last decade
the reading world welcomed with acclamations
a volume of letters from the pen of one who
had made it his especial request that no
such correspondence should ever be published.
How many of those who laughed over the
witty, whimsical, intimate, affectionate outpourings
of Thackeray paused to consider
that they would one and all have remained unwritten,
could their author have foreseen their
fate. They were not meant for us, they never
would have reached us, had his known desires
and prejudices been respected. Many of them
are delightful, as when he tells with sedate
humor of his absurd proposal to Macaulay
that they should change identities at Sir
George Napier’s dinner, so as to confuse and
baffle a young American woman, the desire of
whose heart was to meet these two great lions,
and of Macaulay’s disgust at the bare notion
of jesting with anything so serious as his literary
reputation. Yet when the recipient of
these letters yielded to the temptation of publishing
them, she would have done well to suppress
those trivial, colorless, and private communications
which can have no possible value
or interest to others. An invitation to dinner
is of some importance the day that it arrives,
but it loses its vitality when reprinted forty
years after the dinner is eaten. There is horror
in the thought that a man of genius can
never promise himself that grateful privacy
which is the lot of his happier and less distinguished
brothers; but that after he has died in
the least ostentatious manner he knows how,
the whole wide world is made acquainted with
his diversions and his digestion, with his feeblest
jokes and his most tender confidences.
The problem of what to give and what to withhold
must be solved by editors who, having
laboriously collected their material, feel a natural
disposition to use it. When, as occasionally
happens, the editor regards the author
simply as his prey, he never conceives the desirability
of withholding anything. He is as
unreserved as a savage, and probably defends
himself, as did Montaigne when reproached
for the impropriety of his essays, by saying
that if people do not like details of that description
they certainly take great pains to
read them.</p>
<p class='c016'>Among the letters too charming to be lost,
yet too personal and frankly confiding to be
read without some twinges of conscience, are
those of Edward Fitzgerald, the last man in
all England to have coveted such posthumous
publicity. They reveal truthfully that kind,
shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intensely
conservative nature; a scholar without the
prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to
be judicial, an unwearied mind turned aside
from healthy and normal currents of activity.
Yet the indiscreet publishing of a private
opinion, a harmless bit of criticism such as
any man has a right to express to a friend,
drew down upon this least aggressive of authors
abuse too coarse to be quoted. It is easy to
say that Browning dishonored himself rather
than Fitzgerald by the brutality of his language.
This is true; but, nevertheless, it is
not pleasant to go down to posterity branded
with Billingsgate by a great poet; and it is
doubly hard to bear such a weight of vituperation
because a word said in a letter has been
ruthlessly given to the world.</p>
<p class='c016'>The unhesitating fashion in which women
reveal themselves to their correspondents
makes it seem treachery to read their printed
pages. Those girlish confidences of Jane
Austen to Cassandra, so frank and gay, so full
of jokes and laughter, and country gossip, and
sisterly affection, what a contrast they afford
to the attitude of unbroken reserve which Miss
Austen always presented to the world! Yet
now the world is free to follow each foolish
little jest, and to pass judgment on the wit it
holds. Those affectionate and not over-wise
outpourings of Miss Mitford, with their effusive
terms of endearment; those dignified and solemn
reflections of Sara Coleridge, humanized
occasionally by a chance remark about the
baby, or an inadvertent admission that she has
gone down twice to supper at an evening party;
those keen, combative, brilliant letters of Mrs.
Carlyle that are so bitter-sweet; those unreserved
and purely personal communications of
Geraldine Jewsbury which have no message
whatever for the public;—how much has been
given us to which we show scant claim! It is
true that in the days when the Polite Letter-Writer
ruled the land, and his baleful influence
was felt on every side, a great many women
wrote elaborate missives which nobody now
wants to read, but which were then more highly
prized than the gossiping pages we have learned
to love so well. These sedate blue-stockings
told neither their own affairs nor their neighbors’;
but confined themselves to dignified generalities,
expressed with Johnsonian elegance.
There was Miss Seward, for example, who at
times was too ridiculous for even Scott’s genial
forbearance; yet whose letters won her such a
reputation that we find them diligently sought
for, years after they were penned. Fancy
admiring groups of men and women listening
to Miss Seward’s celebrated epistles to
Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, one of which
begins:—</p>
<p class='c016'>“Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia,
is the regret you express for our separation!
Pleasant were the weeks we have recently
passed together in this ancient and embowered
mansion. I had strongly felt the silence and
vacancy of the depriving day on which you
vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely
to quarrel with the friendly coercion
of employment, at the very instant in which it
is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of
unavailing melancholy.”</p>
<p class='c016'>The letter which opens in this promising
manner closes, as might be expected, with a
fervent and glowing apostrophe to the absent
one:—</p>
<p class='c016'>“Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred
are thy delights! Sophia, thy mind is capable
of tasting them in all their poignancy. Against
how many of life’s incidents may that capacity
be considered as a counterpoise.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Now, in the last century, when people received
letters of this kind, they did not, as we
might suppose, laugh and tear them up. They
treasured them sacredly in their desks, and
read them to their young nieces and nephews,
and made fair copies of them for less favored
friends. Yet the same mail-bags which groaned
under these ponderous compositions were laden
now and then with Sir Walter’s delightful
pages, all aglow with that diffused spirit of
healthy enjoyment, that sane and happy knowledge
of life, that dauntless and incomparable
courage. Perhaps they carried some of Cowper’s
letters, rich mines of pleasure and profit
for us all, full to the brim of homely pleasant
details which only leisure can find time to note.
A man who was even ordinarily busy would
never have stopped to observe the things which
Cowper tells us about so charmingly,—the
bustling candidate kissing all the maids; the
hungry beggar who declines to eat vermicelli
soup; the young thief who is whipped for stealing
the butcher’s iron-work; the kitchen table
which is scrubbed into paralysis; the retinue
of kittens in the barn; the foolish old cat who
must needs pursue a viper crawling in the sun;
and the favorite tabby who ungratefully ran
away into a ditch, and cost the family four
shillings before she was recovered. Cowper
had time to see all these things, had time to
hear the soft click of Mrs. Unwin’s knitting-needles,
and the hum of the boiling tea-kettle;
and he had moreover the faculty of bringing
all that he saw and heard very vividly before
our eyes, of interesting us, almost against our
will, in the petty annals of an uneventful life.
It is no more possible for important city men,
heads of banking-houses and hard-working
members of Parliament, to write letters of this
kind, than it is possible for them to hold the
attention of generations, as Gray so easily
holds it, with a few playful lines of condolence
on the death of a friend’s cat, a few polished
verses set like jewels in the delicate filigree of
a sportive and caressing letter. “It would be
a sensible satisfaction to me,” he writes to
Walpole, “before I testify my sorrow, and the
sincere part I take in your misfortune, to know
for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara
and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), or
rather I knew them both together; for I cannot
justly say which was which. Then as to
your ‘handsome Cat,’ the name you distinguish
her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing
one’s handsome cat is always the cat one loves
best; or if one be alive and one dead, it is
usually the latter which is the handsomer.
Besides, if the point were never so clear, I
hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so
imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the
survivor. Oh, no! I would rather seem to
mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be
the tabby one that has met with this sad
accident.”</p>
<p class='c016'>Labor accomplishes many things in this
busy, tired world, and receives her full share
of applause for every nail she drives. But
leisure writes the letters; leisure aided by
observation, and sometimes—as in the case
of Mme. de Sévigné—by that rare faculty of
receiving and imparting impressions without
judicial reasoning, by that winning, uncontentious
amenity which accepts life as it is, and
men as they chance to be. There is no rancor
in the light laugh with which this charming
Frenchwoman greets the follies and frivolities
of her day. There is no moral protest in
her amused survey of that attractive invalid,
Mme. de Brissac, who lies in bed so “curled
and beautiful” that she turns everybody’s
head. “I wish you could have seen,” writes
Mme. de Sévigné to her daughter, “the use
she made of her sufferings; of her eyes, of
her sighs, of her arms, of her hands languishing
on the counterpane, of the situation, and
the compassion she excited. I was overcome
with tenderness and admiration as I gazed on
the performance, which seemed to me so fine.
My riveted attention must surely have given
satisfaction; and bear in mind that it was for
the Abbé Bayard, for Saint Herens, for Montjeu
and Plancy, that the scene was rehearsed.
When I remember with what simplicity <i>you</i>
are ill, you seem to me a mere bungler in
comparison.”</p>
<p class='c016'>This is good-natured ridicule, keen but not
condemnatory, without mercy, yet without
upbraiding. Sainte-Beuve, who dearly loves
Mme. de Sévigné, complains with reason that
she is not even angry at things which ought to
anger her, and that this gentle tolerance lacks
humanity when cruelty and wrong-doing call
for denunciation. Yet who can remember so
long and tenderly a friend fallen and disgraced?
Who can extend a helping hand so
frankly to a fellow mortal? Who can love so
devotedly, or sacrifice herself with such cheerful
serenity at the shrine of her deep affections?
Her memory comes down to us through
two centuries, enriched with graceful fancies.
We know her as one good and gay, gentle and
witty and wise, who, by virtue of her supreme
and narrowed genius, wrote letters unsurpassed
in literature. “Keep my correspondence,”
said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
in the heyday of her youth and pride. “It
will be as good as Mme. de Sévigné’s, forty
years hence.” But four times forty years
have only served to widen the gulf between
these two writers, and to place them in parted
spheres. Their work springs from different
sources, and is as unlike in inspiration as in
form. “It is impossible,” says Sainte-Beuve,
“to speak of women without first putting one’s
self in a good humor by the thought of Mme.
de Sévigné. With us moderns, this process
takes the place of one of those invocations or
libations which the ancients were used to offer
up to the pure source of grace.” In the same
devout spirit I am glad to close my volume
with a few words about this incomparable
letter-writer, with a little libation poured at her
shadowy feet, that my last page may leave me
and—Heaven permitting—my readers in a
good humor, cheered by the pleasant memories
which gild a passing hour.</p>
<div class='pbb'>
<hr class='pb c002' /></div>
<p class='c016'> </p>
<div class='tnbox'>
<ul class='ul_1 c002'>
<li>Transcriber’s Notes:
<ul class='ul_2'>
<li>Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
</li>
<li>Typographical errors were silently corrected.
</li>
<li>Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant
form was found in this book.
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul></div>
<p class='c016'> </p>
<SPAN name="endofbook"></SPAN>
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