1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
951
952
953
954
955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962
963
964
965
966
967
968
969
970
971
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981
982
983
984
985
986
987
988
989
990
991
992
993
994
995
996
997
998
999
1000
1001
1002
1003
1004
1005
1006
1007
1008
1009
1010
1011
1012
1013
1014
1015
1016
1017
1018
1019
1020
1021
1022
1023
1024
1025
1026
1027
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032
1033
1034
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041
1042
1043
1044
1045
1046
1047
1048
1049
1050
1051
1052
1053
1054
1055
1056
1057
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077
1078
1079
1080
1081
1082
1083
1084
1085
1086
1087
1088
1089
1090
1091
1092
1093
1094
1095
1096
1097
1098
1099
1100
1101
1102
1103
1104
1105
1106
1107
1108
1109
1110
1111
1112
1113
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119
1120
1121
1122
1123
1124
1125
1126
1127
1128
1129
1130
1131
1132
1133
1134
1135
1136
1137
1138
1139
1140
1141
1142
1143
1144
1145
1146
1147
1148
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170
1171
1172
1173
1174
1175
1176
1177
1178
1179
1180
1181
1182
1183
1184
1185
1186
1187
1188
1189
1190
1191
1192
1193
1194
1195
1196
1197
1198
1199
1200
1201
1202
1203
1204
1205
1206
1207
1208
1209
1210
1211
1212
1213
1214
1215
1216
1217
1218
1219
1220
1221
1222
1223
1224
1225
1226
1227
1228
1229
1230
1231
1232
1233
1234
1235
1236
1237
1238
1239
1240
1241
1242
1243
1244
1245
1246
1247
1248
1249
1250
1251
1252
1253
1254
1255
1256
1257
1258
1259
1260
1261
1262
1263
1264
1265
1266
1267
1268
1269
1270
1271
1272
1273
1274
1275
1276
1277
1278
1279
1280
1281
1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288
1289
1290
1291
1292
1293
1294
1295
1296
1297
1298
1299
1300
1301
1302
1303
1304
1305
1306
1307
1308
1309
1310
1311
1312
1313
1314
1315
1316
1317
1318
1319
1320
1321
1322
1323
1324
1325
1326
1327
1328
1329
1330
1331
1332
1333
1334
1335
1336
1337
1338
1339
1340
1341
1342
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347
1348
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373
1374
1375
1376
1377
1378
1379
1380
1381
1382
1383
1384
1385
1386
1387
1388
1389
1390
1391
1392
1393
1394
1395
1396
1397
1398
1399
1400
1401
1402
1403
1404
1405
1406
1407
1408
1409
1410
1411
1412
1413
1414
1415
1416
1417
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423
1424
1425
1426
1427
1428
1429
1430
1431
1432
1433
1434
1435
1436
1437
1438
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
1444
1445
1446
1447
1448
1449
1450
1451
1452
1453
1454
1455
1456
1457
1458
1459
1460
1461
1462
1463
1464
1465
1466
1467
1468
1469
1470
1471
1472
1473
1474
1475
1476
1477
1478
1479
1480
1481
1482
1483
1484
1485
1486
1487
1488
1489
1490
1491
1492
1493
1494
1495
1496
1497
1498
1499
1500
1501
1502
1503
1504
1505
1506
1507
1508
1509
1510
1511
1512
1513
1514
1515
1516
1517
1518
1519
1520
1521
1522
1523
1524
1525
1526
1527
1528
1529
1530
1531
1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
1538
1539
1540
1541
1542
1543
1544
1545
1546
1547
1548
1549
1550
1551
1552
1553
1554
1555
1556
1557
1558
1559
1560
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565
1566
1567
1568
1569
1570
1571
1572
1573
1574
1575
1576
1577
1578
1579
1580
1581
1582
1583
1584
1585
1586
1587
1588
1589
1590
1591
1592
1593
1594
1595
1596
1597
1598
1599
1600
1601
1602
1603
1604
1605
1606
1607
1608
1609
1610
1611
1612
1613
1614
1615
1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622
1623
1624
1625
1626
1627
1628
1629
1630
1631
1632
1633
1634
1635
1636
1637
1638
1639
1640
1641
1642
1643
1644
1645
1646
1647
1648
1649
1650
1651
1652
1653
1654
1655
1656
1657
1658
1659
1660
1661
1662
1663
1664
1665
1666
1667
1668
1669
1670
1671
1672
1673
1674
1675
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1686
1687
1688
1689
1690
1691
1692
1693
1694
1695
1696
1697
1698
1699
1700
1701
1702
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708
1709
1710
1711
1712
1713
1714
1715
1716
1717
1718
1719
1720
1721
1722
1723
1724
1725
1726
1727
1728
1729
1730
1731
1732
1733
1734
1735
1736
1737
1738
1739
1740
1741
1742
1743
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
1750
1751
1752
1753
1754
1755
1756
1757
1758
1759
1760
1761
1762
1763
1764
1765
1766
1767
1768
1769
1770
1771
1772
1773
1774
1775
1776
1777
1778
1779
1780
1781
1782
1783
1784
1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
1809
1810
1811
1812
1813
1814
1815
1816
1817
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2042
2043
2044
2045
2046
2047
2048
2049
2050
2051
2052
2053
2054
2055
2056
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
2072
2073
2074
2075
2076
2077
2078
2079
2080
2081
2082
2083
2084
2085
2086
2087
2088
2089
2090
2091
2092
2093
2094
2095
2096
2097
2098
2099
2100
2101
2102
2103
2104
2105
2106
2107
2108
2109
2110
2111
2112
2113
2114
2115
2116
2117
2118
2119
2120
2121
2122
2123
2124
2125
2126
2127
2128
2129
2130
2131
2132
2133
2134
2135
2136
2137
2138
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
2144
2145
2146
2147
2148
2149
2150
2151
2152
2153
2154
2155
2156
2157
2158
2159
2160
2161
2162
2163
2164
2165
2166
2167
2168
2169
2170
2171
2172
2173
2174
2175
2176
2177
2178
2179
2180
2181
2182
2183
2184
2185
2186
2187
2188
2189
2190
2191
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197
2198
2199
2200
2201
2202
2203
2204
2205
2206
2207
2208
2209
2210
2211
2212
2213
2214
2215
2216
2217
2218
2219
2220
2221
2222
2223
2224
2225
2226
2227
2228
2229
2230
2231
2232
2233
2234
2235
2236
2237
2238
2239
2240
2241
2242
2243
2244
2245
2246
2247
2248
2249
2250
2251
2252
2253
2254
2255
2256
2257
2258
2259
2260
2261
2262
2263
2264
2265
2266
2267
2268
2269
2270
2271
2272
2273
2274
2275
2276
2277
2278
2279
2280
2281
2282
2283
2284
2285
2286
2287
2288
2289
2290
2291
2292
2293
2294
2295
2296
2297
2298
2299
2300
2301
2302
2303
2304
2305
2306
2307
2308
2309
2310
2311
2312
2313
2314
2315
2316
2317
2318
2319
2320
2321
2322
2323
2324
2325
2326
2327
2328
2329
2330
2331
2332
2333
2334
2335
2336
2337
2338
2339
2340
2341
2342
2343
2344
2345
2346
2347
2348
2349
2350
2351
2352
2353
2354
2355
2356
2357
2358
2359
2360
2361
2362
2363
2364
2365
2366
2367
2368
2369
2370
2371
2372
2373
2374
2375
2376
2377
2378
2379
2380
2381
2382
2383
2384
2385
2386
2387
2388
2389
2390
2391
2392
2393
2394
2395
2396
2397
2398
2399
2400
2401
2402
2403
2404
2405
2406
2407
2408
2409
2410
2411
2412
2413
2414
2415
2416
2417
2418
2419
2420
2421
2422
2423
2424
2425
2426
2427
2428
2429
2430
2431
2432
2433
2434
2435
2436
2437
2438
2439
2440
2441
2442
2443
2444
2445
2446
2447
2448
2449
2450
2451
2452
2453
2454
2455
2456
2457
2458
2459
2460
2461
2462
2463
2464
2465
2466
2467
2468
2469
2470
2471
2472
2473
2474
2475
2476
2477
2478
2479
2480
2481
2482
2483
2484
2485
2486
2487
2488
2489
2490
2491
2492
2493
2494
2495
2496
2497
2498
2499
2500
2501
2502
2503
2504
2505
2506
2507
2508
2509
2510
2511
2512
2513
2514
2515
2516
2517
2518
2519
2520
2521
2522
2523
2524
2525
2526
2527
2528
2529
2530
2531
2532
2533
2534
2535
2536
2537
2538
2539
2540
2541
2542
2543
2544
2545
2546
2547
2548
2549
2550
2551
2552
2553
2554
2555
2556
2557
2558
2559
2560
2561
2562
2563
2564
2565
2566
2567
2568
2569
2570
2571
2572
2573
2574
2575
2576
2577
2578
2579
2580
2581
2582
2583
2584
2585
2586
2587
2588
2589
2590
2591
2592
2593
2594
2595
2596
2597
2598
2599
2600
2601
2602
2603
2604
2605
2606
2607
2608
2609
2610
2611
2612
2613
2614
2615
2616
2617
2618
2619
2620
2621
2622
2623
2624
2625
2626
2627
2628
2629
2630
2631
2632
2633
2634
2635
2636
2637
2638
2639
2640
2641
2642
2643
2644
2645
2646
2647
2648
2649
2650
2651
2652
2653
2654
2655
2656
2657
2658
2659
2660
2661
2662
2663
2664
2665
2666
2667
2668
2669
2670
2671
2672
2673
2674
2675
2676
2677
2678
2679
2680
2681
2682
2683
2684
2685
2686
2687
2688
2689
2690
2691
2692
2693
2694
2695
2696
2697
2698
2699
2700
2701
2702
2703
2704
2705
2706
2707
2708
2709
2710
2711
2712
2713
2714
2715
2716
2717
2718
2719
2720
2721
2722
2723
2724
2725
2726
2727
2728
2729
2730
2731
2732
2733
2734
2735
2736
2737
2738
2739
2740
2741
2742
2743
2744
2745
2746
2747
2748
2749
2750
2751
2752
2753
2754
2755
2756
2757
2758
2759
2760
2761
2762
2763
2764
2765
2766
2767
2768
2769
2770
2771
2772
2773
2774
2775
2776
2777
2778
2779
2780
2781
2782
2783
2784
2785
2786
2787
2788
2789
2790
2791
2792
2793
2794
2795
2796
2797
2798
2799
2800
2801
2802
2803
2804
2805
2806
2807
2808
2809
2810
2811
2812
2813
2814
2815
2816
2817
2818
2819
2820
2821
2822
2823
2824
2825
2826
2827
2828
2829
2830
2831
2832
2833
2834
2835
2836
2837
2838
2839
2840
2841
2842
2843
2844
2845
2846
2847
2848
2849
2850
2851
2852
2853
2854
2855
2856
2857
2858
2859
2860
2861
2862
2863
2864
2865
2866
2867
2868
2869
2870
2871
2872
2873
2874
2875
2876
2877
2878
2879
2880
2881
2882
2883
2884
2885
2886
2887
2888
2889
2890
2891
2892
2893
2894
2895
2896
2897
2898
2899
2900
2901
2902
2903
2904
2905
2906
2907
2908
2909
2910
2911
2912
2913
2914
2915
2916
2917
2918
2919
2920
2921
2922
2923
2924
2925
2926
2927
2928
2929
2930
2931
2932
2933
2934
2935
2936
2937
2938
2939
2940
2941
2942
2943
2944
2945
2946
2947
2948
2949
2950
2951
2952
2953
2954
2955
2956
2957
2958
2959
2960
2961
2962
2963
2964
2965
2966
2967
2968
2969
2970
2971
2972
2973
2974
2975
2976
2977
2978
2979
2980
2981
2982
2983
2984
2985
2986
2987
2988
2989
2990
2991
2992
2993
2994
2995
2996
2997
2998
2999
3000
3001
3002
3003
3004
3005
3006
3007
3008
3009
3010
3011
3012
3013
3014
3015
3016
3017
3018
3019
3020
3021
3022
3023
3024
3025
3026
3027
3028
3029
3030
3031
3032
3033
3034
3035
3036
3037
3038
3039
3040
3041
3042
3043
3044
3045
3046
3047
3048
3049
3050
3051
3052
3053
3054
3055
3056
3057
3058
3059
3060
3061
3062
3063
3064
3065
3066
3067
3068
3069
3070
3071
3072
3073
3074
3075
3076
3077
3078
3079
3080
3081
3082
3083
3084
3085
3086
3087
3088
3089
3090
3091
3092
3093
3094
3095
3096
3097
3098
3099
3100
3101
3102
3103
3104
3105
3106
3107
3108
3109
3110
3111
3112
3113
3114
3115
3116
3117
3118
3119
3120
3121
3122
3123
3124
3125
3126
3127
3128
3129
3130
3131
3132
3133
3134
3135
3136
3137
3138
3139
3140
3141
3142
3143
3144
3145
3146
3147
3148
3149
3150
3151
3152
3153
3154
3155
3156
3157
3158
3159
3160
3161
3162
3163
3164
3165
3166
3167
3168
3169
3170
3171
3172
3173
3174
3175
3176
3177
3178
3179
3180
3181
3182
3183
3184
3185
3186
3187
3188
3189
3190
3191
3192
3193
3194
3195
3196
3197
3198
3199
3200
3201
3202
3203
3204
3205
3206
3207
3208
3209
3210
3211
3212
3213
3214
3215
3216
3217
3218
3219
3220
3221
3222
3223
3224
3225
3226
3227
3228
3229
3230
3231
3232
3233
3234
3235
3236
3237
3238
3239
3240
3241
3242
3243
3244
3245
3246
3247
3248
3249
3250
3251
3252
3253
3254
3255
3256
3257
3258
3259
3260
3261
3262
3263
3264
3265
3266
3267
3268
3269
3270
3271
3272
3273
3274
3275
3276
3277
3278
3279
3280
3281
3282
3283
3284
3285
3286
3287
3288
3289
3290
3291
3292
3293
3294
3295
3296
3297
3298
3299
3300
3301
3302
3303
3304
3305
3306
3307
3308
3309
3310
3311
3312
3313
3314
3315
3316
3317
3318
3319
3320
3321
3322
3323
3324
3325
3326
3327
3328
3329
3330
3331
3332
3333
3334
3335
3336
3337
3338
3339
3340
3341
3342
3343
3344
3345
3346
3347
3348
3349
3350
3351
3352
3353
3354
3355
3356
3357
3358
3359
3360
3361
3362
3363
3364
3365
3366
3367
3368
3369
3370
3371
3372
3373
3374
3375
3376
3377
3378
3379
3380
3381
3382
3383
3384
3385
3386
3387
3388
3389
3390
3391
3392
3393
3394
3395
3396
3397
3398
3399
3400
3401
3402
3403
3404
3405
3406
3407
3408
3409
3410
3411
3412
3413
3414
3415
3416
3417
3418
3419
3420
3421
3422
3423
3424
3425
3426
3427
3428
3429
3430
3431
3432
3433
3434
3435
3436
3437
3438
3439
3440
3441
3442
3443
3444
3445
3446
3447
3448
3449
3450
3451
3452
3453
3454
3455
3456
3457
3458
3459
3460
3461
3462
3463
3464
3465
3466
3467
3468
3469
3470
3471
3472
3473
3474
3475
3476
3477
3478
3479
3480
3481
3482
3483
3484
3485
3486
3487
3488
3489
3490
3491
3492
3493
3494
3495
3496
3497
3498
3499
3500
3501
3502
3503
3504
3505
3506
3507
3508
3509
3510
3511
3512
3513
3514
3515
3516
3517
3518
3519
3520
3521
3522
3523
3524
3525
3526
3527
3528
3529
3530
3531
3532
3533
3534
3535
3536
3537
3538
3539
3540
3541
3542
3543
3544
3545
3546
3547
3548
3549
3550
3551
3552
3553
3554
3555
3556
3557
3558
3559
3560
3561
3562
3563
3564
3565
3566
3567
3568
3569
3570
3571
3572
3573
3574
3575
3576
3577
3578
3579
3580
3581
3582
3583
3584
3585
3586
3587
3588
3589
3590
3591
3592
3593
3594
3595
3596
3597
3598
3599
3600
3601
3602
3603
3604
3605
3606
3607
3608
3609
3610
3611
3612
3613
3614
3615
3616
3617
3618
3619
3620
3621
3622
3623
3624
3625
3626
3627
3628
3629
3630
3631
3632
3633
3634
3635
3636
3637
3638
3639
3640
3641
3642
3643
3644
3645
3646
3647
3648
3649
3650
3651
3652
3653
3654
3655
3656
3657
3658
3659
3660
3661
3662
3663
3664
3665
3666
3667
3668
3669
3670
3671
3672
3673
3674
3675
3676
3677
3678
3679
3680
3681
3682
3683
3684
3685
3686
3687
3688
3689
3690
3691
3692
3693
3694
3695
3696
3697
3698
3699
3700
3701
3702
3703
3704
3705
3706
3707
3708
3709
3710
3711
3712
3713
3714
3715
3716
3717
3718
3719
3720
3721
3722
3723
3724
3725
3726
3727
3728
3729
3730
3731
3732
3733
3734
3735
3736
3737
3738
3739
3740
3741
3742
3743
3744
3745
3746
3747
3748
3749
3750
3751
3752
3753
3754
3755
3756
3757
3758
3759
3760
3761
3762
3763
3764
3765
3766
3767
3768
3769
3770
3771
3772
3773
3774
3775
3776
3777
3778
3779
3780
3781
3782
3783
3784
3785
3786
3787
3788
3789
3790
3791
3792
3793
3794
3795
3796
3797
3798
3799
3800
3801
3802
3803
3804
3805
3806
3807
3808
3809
3810
3811
3812
3813
3814
3815
3816
3817
3818
3819
3820
3821
3822
3823
3824
3825
3826
3827
3828
3829
3830
3831
3832
3833
3834
3835
3836
3837
3838
3839
3840
3841
3842
3843
3844
3845
3846
3847
3848
3849
3850
3851
3852
3853
3854
3855
3856
3857
3858
3859
3860
3861
3862
3863
3864
3865
3866
3867
3868
3869
3870
3871
3872
3873
3874
3875
3876
3877
3878
3879
3880
3881
3882
3883
3884
3885
3886
3887
3888
3889
3890
3891
3892
3893
3894
3895
3896
3897
3898
3899
3900
3901
3902
3903
3904
3905
3906
3907
3908
3909
3910
3911
3912
3913
3914
3915
3916
3917
3918
3919
3920
3921
3922
3923
3924
3925
3926
3927
3928
3929
3930
3931
3932
3933
3934
3935
3936
3937
3938
3939
3940
3941
3942
3943
3944
3945
3946
3947
3948
3949
3950
3951
3952
3953
3954
3955
3956
3957
3958
3959
3960
3961
3962
3963
3964
3965
3966
3967
3968
3969
3970
3971
3972
3973
3974
3975
3976
3977
3978
3979
3980
3981
3982
3983
3984
3985
3986
3987
3988
3989
3990
3991
3992
3993
3994
3995
3996
3997
3998
3999
4000
4001
4002
4003
4004
4005
4006
4007
4008
4009
4010
4011
4012
4013
4014
4015
4016
4017
4018
4019
4020
4021
4022
4023
4024
4025
4026
4027
4028
4029
4030
4031
4032
4033
4034
4035
4036
4037
4038
4039
4040
4041
4042
4043
4044
4045
4046
4047
4048
4049
4050
4051
4052
4053
4054
4055
4056
4057
4058
4059
4060
4061
4062
4063
4064
4065
4066
4067
4068
4069
4070
4071
4072
4073
4074
4075
4076
4077
4078
4079
4080
4081
4082
4083
4084
4085
4086
4087
4088
4089
4090
4091
4092
4093
4094
4095
4096
4097
4098
4099
4100
4101
4102
4103
4104
4105
4106
4107
4108
4109
4110
4111
4112
4113
4114
4115
4116
4117
4118
4119
4120
4121
4122
4123
4124
4125
4126
4127
4128
4129
4130
4131
4132
4133
4134
4135
4136
4137
4138
4139
4140
4141
4142
4143
4144
4145
4146
4147
4148
4149
4150
4151
4152
4153
4154
4155
4156
4157
4158
4159
4160
4161
4162
4163
4164
4165
4166
4167
4168
4169
4170
4171
4172
4173
4174
4175
4176
4177
4178
4179
4180
4181
4182
4183
4184
4185
4186
4187
4188
4189
4190
4191
4192
4193
4194
4195
4196
4197
4198
4199
4200
4201
4202
4203
4204
4205
4206
4207
4208
4209
4210
4211
4212
4213
4214
4215
4216
4217
4218
4219
4220
4221
4222
4223
4224
4225
4226
4227
4228
4229
4230
4231
4232
4233
4234
4235
4236
4237
4238
4239
4240
4241
4242
4243
4244
4245
4246
4247
4248
4249
4250
4251
4252
4253
4254
4255
4256
4257
4258
4259
4260
4261
4262
4263
4264
4265
4266
4267
4268
4269
4270
4271
4272
4273
4274
4275
4276
4277
4278
4279
4280
4281
4282
4283
4284
4285
4286
4287
4288
4289
4290
4291
4292
4293
4294
4295
4296
4297
4298
4299
4300
4301
4302
4303
4304
4305
4306
4307
4308
4309
4310
4311
4312
4313
4314
4315
4316
4317
4318
4319
4320
4321
4322
4323
4324
4325
4326
4327
4328
4329
4330
4331
4332
4333
4334
4335
4336
4337
4338
4339
4340
4341
4342
4343
4344
4345
4346
4347
4348
4349
4350
4351
4352
4353
4354
4355
4356
4357
4358
4359
4360
4361
4362
4363
4364
4365
4366
4367
4368
4369
4370
4371
4372
4373
4374
4375
4376
4377
4378
4379
4380
4381
4382
4383
4384
4385
4386
4387
4388
4389
4390
4391
4392
4393
4394
4395
4396
4397
4398
4399
4400
4401
4402
4403
4404
4405
4406
4407
4408
4409
4410
4411
4412
4413
4414
4415
4416
4417
4418
4419
4420
4421
4422
4423
4424
4425
4426
4427
4428
4429
4430
4431
4432
4433
4434
4435
4436
4437
4438
4439
4440
4441
4442
4443
4444
4445
4446
4447
4448
4449
4450
4451
4452
4453
4454
4455
4456
4457
4458
4459
4460
4461
4462
4463
4464
4465
4466
4467
4468
4469
4470
4471
4472
4473
4474
4475
4476
4477
4478
4479
4480
4481
4482
4483
4484
4485
4486
4487
4488
4489
4490
4491
4492
4493
4494
4495
4496
4497
4498
4499
4500
4501
4502
4503
4504
4505
4506
4507
4508
4509
4510
4511
4512
4513
4514
4515
4516
4517
4518
4519
4520
4521
4522
4523
4524
4525
4526
4527
4528
4529
4530
4531
4532
4533
4534
4535
4536
4537
4538
4539
4540
4541
4542
4543
4544
4545
4546
4547
4548
4549
4550
4551
4552
4553
4554
4555
4556
4557
4558
4559
4560
4561
4562
4563
4564
4565
4566
4567
4568
4569
4570
4571
4572
4573
4574
4575
4576
4577
4578
4579
4580
4581
4582
4583
4584
4585
4586
4587
4588
4589
4590
4591
4592
4593
4594
4595
4596
4597
4598
4599
4600
4601
4602
4603
4604
4605
4606
4607
4608
4609
4610
4611
4612
4613
4614
4615
4616
4617
4618
4619
4620
4621
4622
4623
4624
4625
4626
4627
4628
4629
4630
4631
4632
4633
4634
4635
4636
4637
4638
4639
4640
4641
4642
4643
4644
4645
4646
4647
4648
4649
4650
4651
4652
4653
4654
4655
4656
4657
4658
4659
4660
4661
4662
4663
4664
4665
4666
4667
4668
4669
4670
4671
4672
4673
4674
4675
4676
4677
4678
4679
4680
4681
4682
4683
4684
4685
4686
4687
4688
4689
4690
4691
4692
4693
4694
4695
4696
4697
4698
4699
4700
4701
4702
4703
4704
4705
4706
4707
4708
4709
4710
4711
4712
4713
4714
4715
4716
4717
4718
4719
4720
4721
4722
4723
4724
4725
4726
4727
4728
4729
4730
4731
4732
4733
4734
4735
4736
4737
4738
4739
4740
4741
4742
4743
4744
4745
4746
4747
4748
4749
4750
4751
4752
4753
4754
4755
4756
4757
4758
4759
4760
4761
4762
4763
4764
4765
4766
4767
4768
4769
4770
4771
4772
4773
4774
4775
4776
4777
4778
4779
4780
4781
4782
4783
4784
4785
4786
4787
4788
4789
4790
4791
4792
4793
4794
4795
4796
4797
4798
4799
4800
4801
4802
4803
4804
4805
4806
4807
4808
4809
4810
4811
4812
4813
4814
4815
4816
4817
4818
4819
4820
4821
4822
4823
4824
4825
4826
4827
4828
4829
4830
4831
4832
4833
4834
4835
4836
4837
4838
4839
4840
4841
4842
4843
4844
4845
4846
4847
4848
4849
4850
4851
4852
4853
4854
4855
4856
4857
4858
4859
4860
4861
4862
4863
4864
4865
4866
4867
4868
4869
4870
4871
4872
4873
4874
4875
4876
4877
4878
4879
4880
4881
4882
4883
4884
4885
4886
4887
4888
4889
4890
4891
4892
4893
4894
4895
4896
4897
4898
4899
4900
4901
4902
4903
4904
4905
4906
4907
4908
4909
4910
4911
4912
4913
4914
4915
4916
4917
4918
4919
4920
4921
4922
4923
4924
4925
4926
4927
4928
4929
4930
4931
4932
4933
4934
4935
4936
4937
4938
4939
4940
4941
4942
4943
4944
4945
4946
4947
4948
4949
4950
4951
4952
4953
4954
4955
4956
4957
4958
4959
4960
4961
4962
4963
4964
4965
4966
4967
4968
4969
4970
4971
4972
4973
4974
4975
4976
4977
4978
4979
4980
4981
4982
4983
4984
4985
4986
4987
4988
4989
4990
4991
4992
4993
4994
4995
4996
4997
4998
4999
5000
5001
5002
5003
5004
5005
5006
5007
5008
5009
5010
5011
5012
5013
5014
5015
5016
5017
5018
5019
5020
5021
5022
5023
5024
5025
5026
5027
5028
5029
5030
5031
5032
5033
5034
5035
5036
5037
5038
5039
5040
5041
5042
5043
5044
5045
5046
5047
5048
5049
5050
5051
5052
5053
5054
5055
5056
5057
5058
5059
5060
5061
5062
5063
5064
5065
5066
5067
5068
5069
5070
5071
5072
5073
5074
5075
5076
5077
5078
5079
5080
5081
5082
5083
5084
5085
5086
5087
5088
5089
5090
5091
5092
5093
5094
5095
5096
5097
5098
5099
5100
5101
5102
5103
5104
5105
5106
5107
5108
5109
5110
5111
5112
5113
5114
5115
5116
5117
5118
5119
5120
5121
5122
5123
5124
5125
5126
5127
5128
5129
5130
5131
5132
5133
5134
5135
5136
5137
5138
5139
5140
5141
5142
5143
5144
5145
5146
5147
5148
5149
5150
5151
5152
5153
5154
5155
5156
5157
5158
5159
5160
5161
5162
5163
5164
5165
5166
5167
5168
5169
5170
5171
5172
5173
5174
5175
5176
5177
5178
5179
5180
5181
5182
5183
5184
5185
5186
5187
5188
5189
5190
5191
5192
5193
5194
5195
5196
5197
5198
5199
5200
5201
5202
5203
5204
5205
5206
5207
5208
5209
5210
5211
5212
5213
5214
5215
5216
5217
5218
5219
5220
5221
5222
5223
5224
5225
5226
5227
5228
5229
5230
5231
5232
5233
5234
5235
5236
5237
5238
5239
5240
5241
5242
5243
5244
5245
5246
5247
5248
5249
5250
5251
5252
5253
5254
5255
5256
5257
5258
5259
5260
5261
5262
5263
5264
5265
5266
5267
5268
5269
5270
5271
5272
5273
5274
5275
5276
5277
5278
5279
5280
5281
5282
5283
5284
5285
5286
5287
5288
5289
5290
5291
5292
5293
5294
5295
5296
5297
5298
5299
5300
5301
5302
5303
5304
5305
5306
5307
5308
5309
5310
5311
5312
5313
5314
5315
5316
5317
5318
5319
5320
5321
5322
5323
5324
5325
5326
5327
5328
5329
5330
5331
5332
5333
5334
5335
5336
5337
5338
5339
5340
5341
5342
5343
5344
5345
5346
5347
5348
5349
5350
5351
5352
5353
5354
5355
5356
5357
5358
5359
5360
5361
5362
5363
5364
5365
5366
5367
5368
5369
5370
5371
5372
5373
5374
5375
5376
5377
5378
5379
5380
5381
5382
5383
5384
5385
5386
5387
5388
5389
5390
5391
5392
5393
5394
5395
5396
5397
5398
5399
5400
5401
5402
5403
5404
5405
5406
5407
5408
5409
5410
5411
5412
5413
5414
5415
5416
5417
5418
5419
5420
5421
5422
5423
5424
5425
5426
5427
5428
5429
5430
5431
5432
5433
5434
5435
5436
5437
5438
5439
5440
5441
5442
5443
5444
5445
5446
5447
5448
5449
5450
5451
5452
5453
5454
5455
5456
5457
5458
5459
5460
5461
5462
5463
5464
5465
5466
5467
5468
5469
5470
5471
5472
5473
5474
5475
5476
5477
5478
5479
5480
5481
5482
5483
5484
5485
5486
5487
5488
5489
5490
5491
5492
5493
5494
5495
5496
5497
5498
5499
5500
5501
5502
5503
5504
5505
5506
5507
5508
5509
5510
5511
5512
5513
5514
5515
5516
5517
5518
5519
5520
5521
5522
5523
5524
5525
5526
5527
5528
5529
5530
5531
5532
5533
5534
5535
5536
5537
5538
5539
5540
5541
5542
5543
5544
5545
5546
5547
5548
5549
5550
5551
5552
5553
5554
5555
5556
5557
5558
5559
5560
5561
5562
5563
5564
5565
5566
5567
5568
5569
5570
5571
5572
5573
5574
5575
5576
5577
5578
5579
5580
5581
5582
5583
5584
5585
5586
5587
5588
5589
5590
5591
5592
5593
5594
5595
5596
5597
5598
5599
5600
5601
5602
5603
5604
5605
5606
5607
5608
5609
5610
5611
5612
5613
5614
5615
5616
5617
5618
5619
5620
5621
5622
5623
5624
5625
5626
5627
5628
5629
5630
5631
5632
5633
5634
5635
5636
5637
5638
5639
5640
5641
5642
5643
5644
5645
5646
5647
5648
5649
5650
5651
5652
5653
5654
5655
5656
5657
5658
5659
5660
5661
5662
5663
5664
5665
5666
5667
5668
5669
5670
5671
5672
5673
5674
5675
5676
5677
5678
5679
5680
5681
5682
5683
5684
5685
5686
5687
5688
5689
5690
5691
5692
5693
5694
5695
5696
5697
5698
5699
5700
5701
5702
5703
5704
5705
5706
5707
5708
5709
5710
5711
5712
5713
5714
5715
5716
5717
5718
5719
5720
5721
5722
5723
5724
5725
5726
5727
5728
5729
5730
5731
5732
5733
5734
5735
5736
5737
5738
5739
5740
5741
5742
5743
5744
5745
5746
5747
5748
5749
5750
5751
5752
5753
5754
5755
5756
5757
5758
5759
5760
5761
5762
5763
5764
5765
5766
5767
5768
5769
5770
5771
5772
5773
5774
5775
5776
5777
5778
5779
5780
5781
5782
5783
5784
5785
5786
5787
5788
5789
5790
5791
5792
5793
5794
5795
5796
5797
5798
5799
5800
5801
5802
5803
5804
5805
5806
5807
5808
5809
5810
5811
5812
5813
5814
5815
5816
5817
5818
5819
5820
5821
5822
5823
5824
5825
5826
5827
5828
5829
5830
5831
5832
5833
5834
5835
5836
5837
5838
5839
5840
5841
5842
5843
5844
5845
5846
5847
5848
5849
5850
5851
5852
5853
5854
5855
5856
5857
5858
5859
5860
5861
5862
5863
5864
5865
5866
5867
5868
5869
5870
5871
5872
5873
5874
5875
5876
5877
5878
5879
5880
5881
5882
5883
5884
5885
5886
5887
5888
5889
5890
5891
5892
5893
5894
5895
5896
5897
5898
5899
5900
5901
5902
5903
5904
5905
5906
5907
5908
5909
5910
5911
5912
5913
5914
5915
5916
5917
5918
5919
5920
5921
5922
5923
5924
5925
5926
5927
5928
5929
5930
5931
5932
5933
5934
5935
5936
5937
5938
5939
5940
5941
5942
5943
5944
5945
5946
5947
5948
5949
5950
5951
5952
5953
5954
5955
5956
5957
5958
5959
5960
5961
5962
5963
5964
5965
5966
5967
5968
5969
5970
5971
5972
5973
5974
5975
5976
5977
5978
5979
5980
5981
5982
5983
5984
5985
5986
5987
5988
5989
5990
5991
5992
5993
5994
5995
5996
5997
5998
5999
6000
6001
6002
6003
6004
6005
6006
6007
6008
6009
6010
6011
6012
6013
6014
6015
6016
6017
6018
6019
6020
6021
6022
6023
6024
6025
6026
6027
6028
6029
6030
6031
6032
6033
6034
6035
6036
6037
6038
6039
6040
6041
6042
6043
6044
6045
6046
6047
6048
6049
6050
6051
6052
6053
6054
6055
6056
6057
6058
6059
6060
6061
6062
6063
6064
6065
6066
6067
6068
6069
6070
6071
6072
6073
6074
6075
6076
6077
6078
6079
6080
6081
6082
6083
6084
6085
6086
6087
6088
6089
6090
6091
6092
6093
6094
6095
6096
6097
6098
6099
6100
6101
6102
6103
6104
6105
6106
6107
6108
6109
6110
6111
6112
6113
6114
6115
6116
6117
6118
6119
6120
6121
6122
6123
6124
6125
6126
6127
6128
6129
6130
6131
6132
6133
6134
6135
6136
6137
6138
6139
6140
6141
6142
6143
6144
6145
6146
6147
6148
6149
6150
6151
6152
6153
6154
6155
6156
6157
6158
6159
6160
6161
6162
6163
6164
6165
6166
6167
6168
6169
6170
6171
6172
6173
6174
6175
6176
6177
6178
6179
6180
6181
6182
6183
6184
6185
6186
6187
6188
6189
6190
6191
6192
6193
6194
6195
6196
6197
6198
6199
6200
6201
6202
6203
6204
6205
6206
6207
6208
6209
6210
6211
6212
6213
6214
6215
6216
6217
6218
6219
6220
6221
6222
6223
6224
6225
6226
6227
6228
6229
6230
6231
6232
6233
6234
6235
6236
6237
6238
6239
6240
6241
6242
6243
6244
6245
6246
6247
6248
6249
6250
6251
6252
6253
6254
6255
6256
6257
6258
6259
6260
6261
6262
6263
6264
6265
6266
6267
6268
6269
6270
6271
6272
6273
6274
6275
6276
6277
6278
6279
6280
6281
6282
6283
6284
6285
6286
6287
6288
6289
6290
6291
6292
6293
6294
6295
6296
6297
6298
6299
6300
6301
6302
6303
6304
6305
6306
6307
6308
6309
6310
6311
6312
6313
6314
6315
6316
6317
6318
6319
6320
6321
6322
6323
6324
6325
6326
6327
6328
6329
6330
6331
6332
6333
6334
6335
6336
6337
6338
6339
6340
6341
6342
6343
6344
6345
6346
6347
6348
6349
6350
6351
6352
6353
6354
6355
6356
6357
6358
6359
6360
6361
6362
6363
6364
6365
6366
6367
6368
6369
6370
6371
6372
6373
6374
6375
6376
6377
6378
6379
6380
6381
6382
6383
6384
6385
6386
6387
6388
6389
6390
6391
6392
6393
6394
6395
6396
6397
6398
6399
6400
6401
6402
6403
6404
6405
6406
6407
6408
6409
6410
6411
6412
6413
6414
6415
6416
6417
6418
6419
6420
6421
6422
6423
6424
6425
6426
6427
6428
6429
6430
6431
6432
6433
6434
6435
6436
6437
6438
6439
6440
6441
6442
6443
6444
6445
6446
6447
6448
6449
6450
6451
6452
6453
6454
6455
6456
6457
6458
6459
6460
6461
6462
6463
6464
6465
6466
6467
6468
6469
6470
6471
6472
6473
6474
6475
6476
6477
6478
6479
6480
6481
6482
6483
6484
6485
6486
6487
6488
6489
6490
6491
6492
6493
6494
6495
6496
6497
6498
6499
6500
6501
6502
6503
6504
6505
6506
6507
6508
6509
6510
6511
6512
6513
6514
6515
6516
6517
6518
6519
6520
6521
6522
6523
6524
6525
6526
6527
6528
6529
6530
6531
6532
6533
6534
6535
6536
6537
6538
6539
6540
6541
6542
6543
6544
6545
6546
6547
6548
6549
6550
6551
6552
6553
6554
6555
6556
6557
6558
6559
6560
6561
6562
6563
6564
6565
6566
6567
6568
6569
6570
6571
6572
6573
6574
6575
6576
6577
6578
6579
6580
6581
6582
6583
6584
6585
6586
6587
6588
6589
6590
6591
6592
6593
6594
6595
6596
6597
6598
6599
6600
6601
6602
6603
6604
6605
6606
6607
6608
6609
6610
6611
6612
6613
6614
6615
6616
6617
6618
6619
6620
6621
6622
6623
6624
6625
6626
6627
6628
6629
6630
6631
6632
6633
6634
6635
6636
6637
6638
6639
6640
6641
6642
6643
6644
6645
6646
6647
6648
6649
6650
6651
6652
6653
6654
6655
6656
6657
6658
6659
6660
6661
6662
6663
6664
6665
6666
6667
6668
6669
6670
6671
6672
6673
6674
6675
6676
6677
6678
6679
6680
6681
6682
6683
6684
6685
6686
6687
6688
6689
6690
6691
6692
6693
6694
6695
6696
6697
6698
6699
6700
6701
6702
6703
6704
6705
6706
6707
6708
6709
6710
6711
6712
6713
6714
6715
6716
6717
6718
6719
6720
6721
6722
6723
6724
6725
6726
6727
6728
6729
6730
6731
6732
6733
6734
6735
6736
6737
6738
6739
6740
6741
6742
6743
6744
6745
6746
6747
6748
6749
6750
6751
6752
6753
6754
6755
6756
6757
6758
6759
6760
6761
6762
6763
6764
6765
6766
6767
6768
6769
6770
6771
6772
6773
6774
6775
6776
6777
6778
6779
6780
6781
6782
6783
6784
6785
6786
6787
6788
6789
6790
6791
6792
6793
6794
6795
6796
6797
6798
6799
6800
6801
6802
6803
6804
6805
6806
6807
6808
6809
6810
6811
6812
6813
6814
6815
6816
6817
6818
6819
6820
6821
6822
6823
6824
6825
6826
6827
6828
6829
6830
6831
6832
6833
6834
6835
6836
6837
6838
6839
6840
6841
6842
6843
6844
6845
6846
6847
6848
6849
6850
6851
6852
6853
6854
6855
6856
6857
6858
6859
6860
6861
6862
6863
6864
6865
6866
6867
6868
6869
6870
6871
6872
6873
6874
6875
6876
6877
6878
6879
6880
6881
6882
6883
6884
6885
6886
6887
6888
6889
6890
|
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>
Varia | Project Gutenberg
</title>
<link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
<style> /* <![CDATA[ */
body {
margin-left: 10%;
margin-right: 10%;
}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
clear: both;
}
p {
margin-top: .51em;
text-align: justify;
margin-bottom: .49em;
text-indent: 1em;
}
.p2 {margin-top: 2em;}
.p4 {margin-top: 4em;}
.p0 {text-indent: 0em;}
hr {
width: 33%;
margin-top: 2em;
margin-bottom: 2em;
margin-left: 33.5%;
margin-right: 33.5%;
clear: both;
}
hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;}
hr.r5 {width: 5%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 47.5%; margin-right: 47.5%;}
@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} }
div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;}
table {
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; width: 60%;}
table.autotable td,
table.autotable th { padding: 4px; }
.x-ebookmaker table {width: 95%;}
.tdl {text-align: left; vertical-align: top;}
.tdr {text-align: right; vertical-align: top;}
.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
/* visibility: hidden; */
position: absolute;
left: 92%;
font-size: smaller;
text-align: right;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
font-variant: normal;
text-indent: 0;
}
.blockquot {
margin-left: 5%;
margin-right: 5%;
}
.bbox {border: 2px solid; margin-left: 25%; width: 50%; padding: 1em;}
.center {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em;}
.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;}
/* Images */
img {
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
}
img.w25 {width: 25%;}
.x-ebookmaker .w25 {width: 35%;}
.w50 {width: 50%;}
.x-ebookmaker .w50 {width: 75%;}
.figcenter {
margin: auto;
text-align: center;
page-break-inside: avoid;
max-width: 100%;
}
.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
.fnanchor {
vertical-align: super;
font-size: .8em;
text-decoration:
none;
}
/* Poetry */
.poetry {
display: block;
text-align: left;
margin-left: 0
}
/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry in browsers */
/* .poetry {display: inline-block;} */
/* large inline blocks don't split well on paged devices */
@media print { .poetry {display: block;} }
.x-ebookmaker .poetry {
margin-left: 5%;
margin-right: 5%
}
.poetry-container {
margin: 1.5em auto;
text-align: center;
font-size: 98%;
display: flex;
justify-content: center
}
.poetry .stanza {
padding: 0.5em 0;
page-break-inside: avoid
}
.poetry .verse {
text-indent: -3em;
padding-left: 3em
}
/* Transcriber's notes */
.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
color: black;
font-size:smaller;
padding:0.5em;
margin-bottom:5em;
font-family:sans-serif, serif; }
.xbig {font-size: 2em;}
.big {font-size: 1.3em;}
abbr[title] {
text-decoration: none;
}
/* Poetry indents */
.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;}
.poetry .indent12 {text-indent: 3em;}
.poetry .indent2 {text-indent: -2em;}
.poetry .indent20 {text-indent: 7em;}
.poetry .indent4 {text-indent: -1em;}
.poetry .indent6 {text-indent: 0em;}
/* Illustration classes */
.illowp100 {width: 100%;}
.illowp57 {width: 57%;}
.x-ebookmaker .illowp57 {width: 100%;}
/* ]]> */ </style>
</head>
<body>
<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VARIA ***</div>
<div class="blockquot bbox">
<h2>
By Agnes Repplier
</h2>
<hr class="r5">
<p>COUNTER-CURRENTS.</p>
<p>AMERICANS AND OTHERS.</p>
<p>A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY AND OTHER
ESSAYS.</p>
<p>IN OUR CONVENT DAYS.</p>
<p>COMPROMISES.</p>
<p>THE FIRESIDE SPHINX. With 4 full-page
and 17 text Illustrations by Miss <span class="smcap">E. Bonsall</span>.</p>
<p>BOOKS AND MEN.</p>
<p>POINTS OF VIEW</p>
<p>ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.</p>
<p>IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PAPERS.</p>
<p>ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.</p>
<p>A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected
by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library
for Young People.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>THE SAME. <i>Holiday Edition.</i></p>
</div>
<p>VARIA.</p>
<p class="center p2">
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br>
<span class="smcap">Boston and New York</span><br>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="001" style="max-width: 85.5em;">
<img class="w50" src="images/001.jpg" alt="">
</figure>
</div>
<h1>
VARIA
</h1>
<p class="center p2 big">
By AGNES REPPLIER, <span class="smcap">Litt. D.</span><br>
</p>
<figure class="figcenter illowp57" id="002" style="max-width: 33.75em;">
<img class="w25 p2" src="images/002.jpg" alt="">
</figure>
<p class="center p4">
BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br>
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br>
The Riverside Press, Cambridge<br>
</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center">
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY<br>
AGNES REPPLIER<br>
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br>
</p>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS.</h2>
</div>
<table class="autotable">
<tr>
<td class="tdl"></td>
<td class="tdr"> <span class="smcap">Page</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Eternal Feminine</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Deathless Diary</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_30">30</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Guides: A Protest</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_63">63</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Little Pharisees in Fiction</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_85">85</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Fête de Gayant</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Cakes and Ale</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_130">130</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Old Wine and New</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_155">155</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Royal Road of Fiction</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">From the Reader’s Standpoint</span></td>
<td class="tdr"> <a href="#Page_217">217</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class="p2">“Little Pharisees in Fiction” is reprinted by permission
of the publishers from “Scribner’s Magazine,” and “From
the Reader’s Standpoint” from “The North American
Review” (where it was called “The Contentiousness of
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span>Modern Novel Writers”).</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p class="center xbig">VARIA.</p>
<hr class="r5">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_ETERNAL_FEMININE">THE ETERNAL FEMININE.</h2>
</div>
<p>There are few things more wearisome in
a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous
repetition of a phrase which catches and holds
the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of
significance. Such a phrase—employed with
tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping
into the pages of what is, by courtesy,
called literature—is the “new woman.” It
has furnished inexhaustible jests to “Life”
and “Punch,” and it has been received with
seriousness by those who read the present with
no light from the past, and so fail to perceive
that all femininity is as old as Lilith, and that
the variations of the type began when Eve
arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute
the claims of her predecessor. “If the fifteenth
century discovered America,” says a
vehement advocate of female progress, “it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>
was reserved for the nineteenth century to
discover woman;” and this remarkable statement
has been gratefully applauded by people
who have apparently forgotten all about
Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine
de Medici, Saint Theresa and Jeanne
d’Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of
England, who played parts of some importance,
for good and ill, in the fortunes of the
world.</p>
<p>“Les Anciens out tout dit,” and the most
curious thing about the arguments now advanced
in behalf of progressive womanhood
is that they have an air of specious novelty
about them when they have all been uttered
many times before. There is scarcely a principle
urged to-day by enthusiastic champions
of the cause which was not deftly handled by
that eminently “new” woman, Christine de
Pisan, in the fourteenth century, before the
court of Charles VI. of France. If we read
even a few pages of “La Cité des Dames,”—and
how delightfully modern is the very title!—we
recognize the same familiar sentiments,
albeit disguised in archaic language and with
many old-time conceits, that we are accustomed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>
to hearing every day. Christine is
both amused and wearied, as are we, by the
foolish invectives of men against our useful
and necessary sex. She is forced to conclude
that God had made a foul thing when He
made woman, yet wonders a little—not unnaturally—that
“so worshipful a Workman
should have deigned to turn out so poor
a piece of work.” This leads her to reflect
on our alleged weakness and incapacity, of
which she finds, as do we, but insufficient
proof. She is firm to insist, as do we, that
if little maidens are put to school, and carefully
taught the sciences like men-children,
they learn as well, and make as steady progress.
What is more, she is able to prove
her case, which we often are not, by writing
a grave, solid, and systematic treatise on arms
and the science of war; a treatise which
handles every topic from the details of a
siege to safe conducts, military passports, and
the laws of knightly courtesy. And this
complete soldier’s manual was held to be of
practical value and an authority in those
battle-loving days. It may also be worth
while to mention that Christine de Pisan<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
supported an invalid husband, two poor relations,
and three children by her pen; and
what more could any struggling authoress of
our own century be reasonably expected to
accomplish?</p>
<p>Another interesting fact presented for our
consideration, in these days of Civic Clubs and
active training for citizenship, is that one of
the first Englishwomen who entered the field
of letters professionally, as a recognized rival
of professional men writers, entered it as a
politician, and a very acrid and scurrilous
politician at that, who made herself as abhorrent
and abhorred as any law-giver in England.
This was Mary Manley, who, in the
reign of Queen Anne, wrote the “New Atalantis,”
allying herself vigorously with the
Tories, and pouring forth the vials of her
venom on the Duke of Marlborough, and—what
is harder for us to forgive—on Richard
Steele, whom all women are bound to honor
a little and love a great deal, as having been,
in spite of many failings, our true and chivalrous
friend. Not one of all the modern
apologists who prate about us endlessly to-day
in print, in pulpit, on the platform, and on the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
stage, has reached the simple tenderness, the
undeviating insight of Steele.</p>
<p>These things, however, counted for little
with Mary Manley, who had less sentiment
and less reticence than most party writers of
even that outspoken and unsentimental age.
Perhaps to attack those high in power who
have done their country such priceless service
as did the Duke of Marlborough, and to attack
them, moreover, with an utter lack of
decency and self-respect, is not precisely the
kind of deed which warms our hearts to female
politicians; but it must be confessed that if
this vehement partisan in petticoats had all
the acerbity of a woman, she had all the courage
of one too. When her publisher was
prosecuted for the scandalous libels of the
“New Atalantis,” she did not seek to shelter
herself behind his responsibility; but appeared
briskly before the Court of King’s Bench,
acknowledged the authorship of her book, and,
with magnificent feminine effrontery, asserted
it was entirely fictitious. Lord Sunderland,
who examined her, and who appears to have
been vastly diverted by the whole proceeding,
pointed out urbanely certain passages of a distinctly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>
libelous character which could scarcely
have been the result of chance. “Then,”
replied the imperturbable Mrs. Manley, “it
must have been inspiration.” Again Lord
Sunderland interposed with the suggestion
that details of that order could not well be
traced to such a source. “There are bad
angels as well as good,” said Mrs. Manley
serenely, and escaped all penalties for her
wrong-doing; earning for herself, moreover,
solid rewards when the Tories returned to
power, which is something that never happens
to any would-be female politician of to-day.</p>
<p>For indeed the newly awakened and intelligent
interest which women are supposed to be
taking in things political is but a faint reflection
of the fiery zest with which our English
great-great-grandmothers threw themselves
into the affairs of the nation, meddling and
mending and marring everywhere, until Addison,
hopeless of any other appeal, was fain to
remind them that nothing was so injurious
to beauty as inordinate party zeal. “It gives
an ill-natured cast to the eye,” he wrote warningly,
“and a disagreeable sourness to the
look. Besides that, it makes the lines too<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
strong, and flushes them worse than brandy.
Indeed I never knew a party-woman who kept
her countenance for a twelvemonth.”</p>
<p>But little the ardent politicians cared for
such mild arguments as these. In 1739, on
the occasion of an especially important debate
in the House of Lords, the Chancellor gave
orders that ladies were not to be admitted,
and that the gallery was to be reserved for
the Commons. The Duchess of Queensberry,
the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Huntingdon,
and a number of other determined women presented
themselves at the door by nine o’clock
in the morning. When refused entrance, the
Duchess of Queensberry, with an oath as resonant
as the doorkeeper’s, swore that in they
would come, in spite of the Chancellor and
the Lords and the Commons to boot. The
Peers resolved to starve them into docility,
and gave orders that the doors should not be
opened until they raised their siege. These
Amazons stood there, so we are informed by
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, from nine in
the morning until five in the afternoon, uncheered
by food or drink, but solacing themselves
repeatedly by thumping and kicking<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>
at the doors with so much violence that the
speakers in the House were scarcely heard.
When the Lords remained unconquered by
such tactics, the two duchesses, well versed
in the stratagems of war, commanded half an
hour of dead silence; and the Chancellor
thinking this silence a certain proof of their
withdrawal (the Commons, who had been
kept out all this time, being very impatient to
enter), the doors were finally opened; whereupon
the astute and triumphant women rushed
in, and promptly secured the best seats in the
gallery. There they stayed, with magnificent
endurance, until after eleven at night, and
indulged themselves during the debate in such
noisy tokens of regard or disapproval that
the greatest confusion ensued. The newest of
new women is but a modest and shrinking
wild-flower when compared with such flaunting
arrogance as this.</p>
<p>Nor were the “platform women,” as they
are unkindly called to-day, unknown or even
uncommon in those good old times of domesticity;
for nearly a hundred and twenty years
ago the “London Mirror” printed a caustic
protest against the mannishness of fashionable<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
ladies, their pernicious meddling with things
which concerned them not, and, above all,
their calm effrontery in addressing public
audiences on political and social questions,
“with the spirit and freedom of the boldest
male orators.” In fact, several societies had
been already formed with the express view of
enlightening the public as to the opinions
of women on matters which were presumably
beyond their jurisdiction, and of pushing
these opinions to some ultimate and practical
conclusion,—which is the precise object of
similar societies to-day. For the determination
of the sex from the beginning has been,
not merely to assert its own intellectual independence,
like the heroine of Vanbrugh’s
comedy,—so out of date yet so strikingly
modern,—who affirms that the pleasure of
women’s lives is founded on entire liberty to
think and to do what they please; but there
was always the well-defined anticipation of
influencing by unconstrained thought and action
the current of affairs. They wished their
voices to count. When Dr. Sacheverell was
prosecuted by the Whigs for his famous sermons
on the neglect of the church by the government,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>
the women of London made his cause
their own. All duties and all diversions gave
way before the paramount excitement of this
trial. Churches and theatres were alike deserted.
“The ladies lay aside their tea and
chocolate,” writes Defoe pleasantly, “leave off
visiting after dinner, and, forming themselves
into cabals, turn privy councillors, and settle
the affairs of state. Gallantry and gayety are
given up for business. Even the little girls
talk politics.” Lady Wentworth, with her
customary acuteness, remarked that Dr. Sacheverell
would make the women good house-wives.
The laziest of them had ceased to lie
in bed in the mornings, since the trial began
every day at seven. So great was the enthusiasm
for the persecuted divine, that his conviction
and punishment, though the latter was
purely nominal, helped largely to overthrow
the Whig ministry, and added one more triumph
to the energetic interference, the “pernicious
meddling,” of women.</p>
<p>To understand, however, the full extent of
female influence in affairs of state, we should
turn to France, where for centuries the sex
has played an all-important part, for good and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>
ill, in the ruling of the land. Any page of
French history will tell this tale, from the
far-off day when Brabant and Hainault, and
England, too, listened to the persuasions of
Joan of Valois, raised the siege of Tournay,
and suffered the exhausted nation to breathe
again, down to the less impetuous age when
that astute princess, Charlotte Elizabeth, remarked—out
of the fullness of her hatred for
Mme. de Maintenon—that France had been
governed by too many women, young and old,
and that it was almost time the men began to
take a hand. Perhaps we can best appreciate
the force of feminine dominion when we read
the half-amused, half-exasperated comments
of Gouverneur Morris, whose diary, written
on the eve of the French Revolution, reveals
an intimate knowledge of that strange society,
already crumbling to decay. At a dinner in
the château of M. le Norrage, the political
situation is discussed with so much vehemence
by the men that the women’s gentler voices are
lost in the uproar, which sorely vexes these
fair politicians, accustomed to being listened
to with deference. “They will have more
of this,” says Morris shrewdly, “if the States<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
General should really fix a constitution. Such
an event would be particularly distressing to
the women of this country, for they would be
thereby deprived of their share in the government;
and hitherto they have exercised an
authority almost unlimited, with no small pleasure
to themselves, though not perhaps with
the greatest advantage to the community.”</p>
<p>He realizes this more fully when he goes
to consult with M. de Corney on a question
of finance, and finds that Mme. de Corney is
well acquainted with the matter. “It is the
woman’s country,” he writes with whimsical
dismay; and he is fain to repeat the sentiment
hotly and angrily when Mme. de Staël, who
was not wont to be troubled by petty scruples,
dupes him into showing her some papers, and
gossips about them to her father and Bishop
d’Autun. “She is a devilish creature,” says
the outraged American, feeling he has been
outwitted in the game; but it is difficult, in
the face of such little anecdotes, to distinguish
between the new woman and the old.</p>
<p>One thing is tolerably sure. The new
woman, to whatever century she belonged,—and
she has been under varying aspects the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
product of every age,—has never achieved
great popularity with man. This is not wholly
to her discredit; for the desire to look at life
from a standpoint of her own, while irritating
and subversive of general order, cannot reasonably
be accounted a crime. Yet when we consider
the invectives which have been hurled at
women from the day they were created until
now, we find that most of them have for their
basis the natural indignation which is born
of disregarded advice. The whole ground
for complaint is summed up admirably in
the angry remonstrance of Clarissa Harlowe’s
uncle, when his niece prefers the lover she has
chosen for herself to the suitor chosen for her
by her family. “I have always found a most
horrid romantic perverseness in your sex,”
says this experienced old man. “To do and
to love what you should not, is meat, drink,
and vesture to you all.” There lies the argument
in a nutshell; and if Richardson be the
first great English novelist who has painted
for us a woman moved by the secret and powerful
impulses of her heart, the unwritten and
irrefutable laws of her own nature, he has
also expressed for us in brief and accurate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
phraseology the masculine reading of this
problem. “Nothing worse than woman can
befall mankind,” says Sophocles apprehensively;
and far-off Hesiod, as cheerless, but
somewhat more philosophical, explains that
our sex is a necessary deduction from the
coveted happiness of life. Burton tells us of
an excellent old anchorite who fell into a “cold
palsy” whenever a woman was brought before
him; which pious and consistent behavior is
more to my liking than the gay ingratitude of
the Greeks, who drew their inspiration from
the fairness and weakness, the passion and
pain of women, and then bequeathed to all
coming ages the weight of their dispassionate
condemnation. Better to me is the old Sanskrit
saying, “The hearts of women are as
the hearts of wolves;” or the Turkish jibe
anent the length of our hair and the shortness
of our wits; or that last and final verdict
from the pen of our modern analyst, Mr.
George Meredith, “Woman will be the last
thing civilized by man,”—an ambiguously
brilliant epigram which waits for the elucidation
of the critics.</p>
<p>The really curious thing is, not that we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
should have been found in a general way
unsatisfactory, which was to be expected, but
that we should be held to blame for such
widely divergent desires. Take for example
the indifference of women to intellectual pursuits,
which has earned for them centuries
of masculine contempt; and their thirst for
intellectual pursuits, which has earned for
them centuries of masculine disapprobation.
On the one hand, we have some of the most
delightful writers England has known, calmly
reminding them that sewing is their one legitimate
occupation. “Now for women,” says
dear old Robert Burton, “instead of laborious
studies, they have curious needlework, cutwork,
spinning, bonelace, and many pretty devices of
their own making with which to adorn their
houses.” Addison, a hundred years later, does
not seem to have advanced one step beyond
this eminently conservative attitude. He
wishes with all his heart that women would
apply themselves more to embroidery and less
to rhyme, a wish which was heartily echoed
by Edward Fitzgerald, who carried unimpaired
to the nineteenth century these sound
and orthodox principles. Addison would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
rather listen to his fair friends discussing the
merits of red and blue embroidery silks than
the merits of Whigs and Tories. He would
rather see them work the whole of the battle
of Blenheim into their tapestry frames than
hear their opinions once about the Duke of
Marlborough. He waxes eloquent and even
vindictive—for so mild a man—over the
neglect of needlework amid more stirring
avocations. “It grieves my heart,” he says,
speaking in the character of an indignant
letter-writer to the “Spectator,” “to see a
couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea
for a whole afternoon”—and doubtless discussing
politics with heat—“in a room hung
round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.”</p>
<p>It has been observed before this that it is
always the great-grandmothers in whom is
embodied the last meritoriousness of the sex;
always the great-grandmothers for whom is
cherished this pensive masculine regard. And
it may perhaps be worth while to note that
these “proud, idle flirts” of Addison’s day
have now become <i>our</i> virtuous great-grandmothers,
and occupy the same shadowy pedestal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
of industrious domesticity. I have little
doubt that <i>their</i> great-grandmothers, who
worked—or did not work—the tapestries
upon the Addisonian walls, were in their day
the subject of many pointed reproaches, and
bidden to look backward on the departed virtues
of still remoter generations. And, by the
same token, it is encouraging to think that,
in the years to come, we too shall figure as
lost examples of distinctly feminine traits; we
too shall be praised for our sewing and our
silence, our lack of learning and our “stayathomeativeness,”
that quality which Peacock
declared to be the finest and rarest attribute
of the sex. What a pleasure for the new
woman of to-day, who finds herself vilified
beyond her modest deserts, to reflect that she
is destined to shine as the revered and faultless
great-grandmother of the future.</p>
<p>To return, however, to the contrasting nature
of the complaints lodged against her in
her more fallible character of great-grand-daughter.
Hazlitt, who was by no means
indifferent to women nor to their regard,
clearly and angrily asserted that intellectual
attainments in a man were no recommendation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
to the female heart,—they merely puzzled
and annoyed. “If scholars talk to women of
what they can understand,” he says, “their
hearers are none the wiser; if they talk of
other things, they only prove themselves fools.”
Mr. Walter Bagehot was quite of Hazlitt’s
opinion, save that his serener disposition
remained unvexed by a state of affairs which
seemed to him natural and right. He thought
it, on the whole, a wise ordinance of nature
that women should look askance upon all
intellectual superiority, and that genius should
simply “put them out.”—“It is so strange.
It does not come into the room as usual. It
says such unpleasant things. Once it forgot
to brush its hair.” The well-balanced feminine
mind, he insisted, prefers ordinary tastes,
settled manners, customary conversation, defined
and practical pursuits.</p>
<p>But are women so comfortably and happily
indifferent to genius? Some have loved it to
their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds
flame; and other some have fluttered about
the light, singeing themselves to no great
purpose, as pathetically in the way as the
doomed moth. At the same time that Hazlitt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
accused the whole sex of this impatient disregard
for inspiration, Keats found it only
too devoted at the shrine. “I have met with
women,” he says with frank contempt, “who
I really think would like to be wedded to a
poem, and given away by a novel.” At the
same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that
there were duties to the intellect which women
but seldom understood, Sir Francis Doyle protested
with humorous indignation against the
frenzy for female education which filled his
lecture-room with petticoats, and threatened
to turn the universities of England into glorified
girls’ schools. At the same time that
Froude was writing, with the enviable self-confidence
which was his blessed birthright,
that it is the part of man to act and labor,
while women are merely bound by “the negative
obedience to prohibitory precepts;” or,
in other words, that there is nothing in the
world which they ought to do, but plenty which
they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson
was insisting with all the vehemence of youth
that it is precisely this contentment with prohibitory
precepts, this deadening passivity of
the female heart, which “narrows and damps<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
the spirits of generous men,” so that in marriage
a man becomes slack and selfish, “and
undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral
being.” Which is precisely the lesson thundered
at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling in “The Gadsbys.”</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">That a young man married is a young man marred.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey
were in harder straits than the poor
woman, who has stepped down the centuries
under this disheartening, because inevitable
condemnation. Always either too new or too
old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless
after what concerns her not, or too passively
content with narrow aims and outlooks, she
is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts
her ass or leads him. Has the satire now
directed against the higher education of women—a
tiresome phrase reiterated for the most
part without meaning—any flavor of novelty,
save for those who know no satirists older than
the contributors to “Punch” and “Life”?
It is just as new as the new woman who provokes
it, just as familiar in the annals of society.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
Take as a modern specimen that pleasant
verse from Owen Seaman’s “Horace at
Cambridge,” which describes gracefully and
with good temper the rush of young Englishwomen
to the University Extension lectures.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Pencil in pouch, and syllabus in hand,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Hugging selected poets of the land,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Keats, Shelley, Coleridge,—all but Thomas Hood</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And Byron (more’s the pity!),</div>
<div class="verse indent0">They caught the local colour where they could;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And members of the feminine committee</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To native grace an added charm would bring</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Of light blue ribbons,—not of abstinence,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">But bearing just this sense—</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Inquire within on any mortal thing.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>This is charming, both in form and spirit,
and I wish Sir Francis Doyle had lived to
read it. But the same spirit and an even
better form may be found in Pope’s familiar
lines which mock—kindly as yet, and in a
friendly fashion—at the vaunted scholarship
of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent6">“In beauty and wit</div>
<div class="verse indent6">No mortal as yet</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To question your empire has dared;</div>
<div class="verse indent6">But men of discerning</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Have thought that, in learning,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">To yield to a lady was hard.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
<p>Even the little jibes and jeers which
“Punch” and “Life” have flung so liberally
at girl graduates, and over-educated young
women, have their counterparts in the pages
of the “Spectator,” when Molly and Kitty
are so busy discussing atmospheric pressure
that they forget the proper ingredients for a
sack posset; and when they assure their uncle,
who is suffering sorely from gout, that pleasure
and pain are imaginary distinctions, and that
if he would only fix his mind upon this great
truth he would no longer feel the twitches.
When we consider that this letter to the
“Spectator” was written over a hundred and
eighty years ago, we must acknowledge that
young England of 1711 is closely allied with
young England and with young America of
1897, both of whom are ever ready to assure
us that we are not, as we had ignorantly supposed
ourselves to be, in pain, but only “in
error.” And it is even possible that old
England and old America of 1897, though
separated by nearly two centuries from old
England of 1711, remain, when gouty, in the
same darkened frame of mind, and are equally
unable to grasp the joyous truths held out to
them so alluringly by youth.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
<p>Is there, then, anything new? The jests of
all journalism, English, French, and American,
anent the mannishness of the modern
woman’s dress? Surely, in these days of bicycles
and outdoor sports, this at least is a
fresh satiric development. But a hundred
and seventy-five years ago just such a piece of
banter was leveled at the head of the then
new and mannish woman, who, riding through
the country, asks a tenant of Sir Roger de
Coverley if the house near at hand be Coverley
Hall. The rustic, with his eyes fixed on
the cocked hat, periwig, and laced riding-coat
of his questioner, answers confidently, “Yes,
sir.” “And is Sir Roger a married man?”
queries the well-pleased dame. But by this
time the bumpkin’s gaze has traveled slowly
downwards, and he sees with dismay that this
strange apparition finishes, mermaid-fashion,
in a riding-skirt. Horrified at his mistake,
he falters out, “No, madam,” and takes refuge
from embarrassment in flight. Turn the
horse into a wheel, the long skirt into a short
one, or into no skirt at all, and we have here
all the material needed for the ever-recurring
joke presented to us so monotonously to-day.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span></p>
<p>The belligerent sex, Mr. Lang has called
us, and we are not stouter fighters now than
we have been through all the centuries, albeit
the methods of warfare have changed somewhat,
and changed perchance for ill. It is
pleasant to think that in the days when muscle
was better than mind (which days, thanks to
our colleges, are fast returning to us), and the
sword was very much mightier than the pen,
women held their own as easily as they do
now. Not only through the emotions they
inspired, as when the fair Countess of Salisbury,
beautiful, courageous, and chaste, heartened
the little garrison besieged at Warwick,
so that, as it is quaintly chronicled, “every
man was made as valiant as two men, by
reason of her kind and loving words.” Not
only through the loyalty they evoked, as when
the heroic Countess of Montford defended her
husband’s cause through twelve years of well-nigh
hopeless struggle, until, by her invincible
bravery and determination, she placed her unheroic
son upon the ducal chair of Brittany.
Not only through their astuteness in diplomacy,
as when the crafty Duchess of Brabant,
“a lady,” says Froissart, “of a very<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
active mind,” duped England, cajoled France,
and united the great houses of Burgundy and
Hainault in a double marriage, overcoming
the well-nigh insuperable obstacles by her
woman’s wit and her resistless resolution.
But when it came to downright fighting, these
hardy dames were not much behind their
husbands and brothers in the field. In that
sharp warfare which the Black Prince carried
into the heart of Spain, it chanced that Sir
Thomas Trivet at the head of an English force
laid siege to the Castilian town of Alaro. Its
garrison made a rash sortie, were trapped in
an ambuscade, and nearly every man was slain
or taken prisoner. Elated by this success,
and deeming the town an easy prey, the English
marched joyously to occupy it. But behold!
the women had closed the gates and
barriers, mounted the battlements, and were
ready to defend themselves against all comers.
Their men might be foolish enough to fall into
the enemy’s snares, but they would look after
their homes. Sir Thomas, like the gallant
Englishman he was, refused to make the
attack. “See these good women,” he said,
“standing like wolf-dogs on their walls. Let<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>
us turn back, and God grant our English
wives to be as brave in battle.”</p>
<p>The ludicrous side of female belligerency
has seldom been lacking in history. It is
admirably illustrated by the story, at once absurd
and tragic, of the unfortunate William
Scott of Harden, whose wife, an aggressively
pious woman, insisted on attending the forbidden
meetings of the Covenanters. Scott
was called before the Council, and told to
keep his lady at home. He answered, frankly
and sadly, that he could not. The Council,
arguing after the fashion of the Queen in
“Alice in Wonderland,” insisted that if he
had a wife he could oblige her to obey him,
and dismissed him with a serious warning. Off
to the Eildon Hills went Madam Scott, and
prayed as hard as ever. Her husband received
a second summons from the Council,
and was fined a thousand pounds for her obstinate
recusancy. Madam Scott, who now occupied
the proud yet comfortable position of
a martyr for the faith whose sufferings were
borne vicariously by another, clung more insistently
than before to her religious rights.
Scott was fined another thousand pounds.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
Madam Scott merely denounced the persecutors
of the righteous with redoubled vehemence
at the next gathering of the elect. The
luckless man was then actually imprisoned in
the Bass Fortress, where he remained three
years, while his triumphant spouse, secure
from molestation, trod her saintly path, and
prayed whenever and wherever she desired.
The revolting wife is not invariably a thing
of beauty, but it is hard to see how she
could carry her spirit of independence any
farther.</p>
<p>For indeed all that we think so new to-day
has been acted over and over again, a shifting
comedy, by the women of every century. All
that we value as well as all that we condemn
in womanhood has played its part for good
and for evil in the history of mankind. To
talk about either sex as a solid embodiment of
reform is as unmeaning as to talk about it as
a solid embodiment of demoralization. If the
mandrake be charmed by a woman’s touch, as
Josephus tells us, the rue, says Pliny, dies
beneath her fingers. She has made and
marred from the beginning, she will make and
mar to the end. The best and newest daughter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
of this restless generation may well read
envyingly Sainte Beuve’s brief description of
Mme. de Sévigné, a picture drawn with a few
strokes, clear, delicate, and convincing. “She
had a genius for conversation and society, a
knowledge of the world and of men, a lively
and acute appreciation both of the becoming
and the absurd.” Such women make
the world a pleasant place to live in; and,
to the persuasive qualities which win their
way through adamantine resistance, Mme. de
Sévigné added that talent for affairs which
is the birthright of her race, that talent for
affairs which we value so highly to-day, and
the broader cultivation of which is perhaps
the only form of newness worth its name.
Since Adam delved and Eve span, life for all
of us has been full of labor; but as the sons
of Adam no longer exclusively delve, so the
daughters of Eve no longer exclusively spin.
In fact, delving and spinning, though admirable
occupations, do not represent the sum
total of earthly needs. There are so many,
many other useful things to do, and women’s
eager finger-tips burn to essay them all.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Cora’s riding, and Lilian’s rowing,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Celia’s novels are books one buys,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Julia’s lecturing, Phillis is mowing,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Sue is a dealer in oils and dyes;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Flora and Dora poetize,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Jane is a bore, and Bee is a blue,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Sylvia lives to anatomize,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Nothing is left for the men to do.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>The laugh has a malicious ring, yet it is good-tempered
too, as though Mr. Henley were not
sufficiently enamoured of work to care a great
deal who does it in his place. Even the
plaintive <i>envoy</i> is less heart-rending than he
would have it sound, and in its familiar burden
we catch an old-time murmur of forgotten
things.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Prince, our past in the dust-heap lies!</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Saving to scrub, to bake, to brew,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Nurse, dress, prattle, and scandalize,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Nothing is left for the men to do.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_DEATHLESS_DIARY">THE DEATHLESS DIARY.</h2>
</div>
<p>Four ways there are of telling a curious
world that endless story of the past which it
is never tired of hearing. History, memoir,
biography, and the diary run back like four
smooth roads, connecting our century, our land,
our life, with other centuries and lands and
lives that have all served in turn to make us
what we are. Of these four roads, I like the
narrowest best. History is both partial and
prejudiced, sinning through lack of sympathy
as well as through lack of truth. Memoirs
are too often false and malicious. Biographies
are misleading in their flattery: there is but
one Boswell. Diaries tell their little tales with
a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious,
a closeness of outlook, which gratifies
our sense of security. Reading them is like
gazing through a small clear pane of glass.
We may not see far and wide, but we see very
distinctly that which comes within our field of
vision.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span></p>
<p>In those happy days when leisure was held
to be no sin, men and women wrote journals
whose copiousness both delights and dismays
us. Neither “eternal youth” nor “nothing
else to do” seems an adequate foundation for
such structures. They were considered then
a profitable waste of time, and children were
encouraged to write down in little books the
little experiences of their little lives. Thus
we have the few priceless pages which tell
“pet Marjorie’s” story; the incomparable
description of Hélène Massalski’s schooldays
at the Abbaye de Notre Dame aux Bois; the
demure vivacity of Anna Green Winslow; the
lively, petulant records of Louisa and Richenda
Gurney; the amusing experiences of that remarkable
and delightful urchin, Richard Doyle.
These youthful diaries, whether brief or protracted,
have a twofold charm, revealing as
they do both child-life and the child itself. It
is pleasant to think that one of the little Gurneys,
who were all destined to grow into such
relentlessly pious women that their adult letters
exclude the human element absolutely in
favor of spiritual admonitions, was capable,
when she was young, of such a defiant sentiment<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
as this: “I read half a Quaker’s book
through with my father before meeting. I
am quite sorry to see him grow so Quakerly.”
Or, worse and worse: “We went on the highway
this afternoon for the purpose of being
rude to the folks that passed. I do think
being rude is most pleasant sometimes.”</p>
<p>Of course she did, poor little over-trained,
over-disciplined Richenda, and her open confession
of iniquity contrasts agreeably with the
anxious assurance given by Anna Winslow to
her mother that there had been “no rudeness,
Mamma, I assure you,” at her evening party.
Naturally, a diary written by a little girl for
the scrutiny and approbation of her parents
is a very different thing from a diary written
by a little girl for her own solace and diversion.
The New England child is always sedate
and prim, mindful that she is twelve years old,
and that she is expected to live up to a rather
rigorous standard of propriety. She would no
more dream of going into the highway “for
the purpose of being rude to the folks that
passed” than she would dream of romping
with boys in those decorous Boston streets
where, as Mr. Birrell pleasantly puts it, “respectability<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
stalked unchecked.” Neither does
she consider her diary a vent for naughty
humors. She fills it with a faithful account
of her daily occupations and amusements, and
we learn from her how much wine and punch
little New England girls were allowed to drink
a hundred years ago; how they danced five
hours on an unsustaining supper of cakes
and raisins; how they sewed more than they
studied, and studied more than they played;
and what wondrous clothes they wore when
they were permitted to be seen in company.</p>
<p>“I was dressed in my yelloe coat black bib
and apron,” writes Anna in an unpunctuated
transport of pride, “black feathers on my
head, my paste comb and all my paste garnet
marquasett and jet pins, together with my
silver plume, my locket, rings, black collar
round my neck, black mitts and yards of blue
ribbon (black and blue is high taste) striped
tucker and ruffles (not my best) and my silk
shoes completed my dress.”</p>
<p>And none too soon, thinks the astonished
reader, who fancied in his ignorance that
little girls were plainly clad in those fine old
days of simplicity. Neither Marie Bashkirtseff<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
nor Hélène Massalski cared more about frippery
than did this small Puritan maid. Indeed,
Hélène, after one passionate outburst,
resigned herself with great good humor to the
convent uniform, and turned her alert young
mind to other interests and pastimes. If the
authenticity of her childish copy-books can be
placed beyond dispute, no youthful record
rivals them in vivacity and grace. It was the
fashion among the older <i>pensionnaires</i> of
Notre Dame aux Bois to keep elaborate journals,
and the little Polish princess, though she
tells us that she wrote so badly as to be in
perpetual penance for her disgraceful “tops
and tails,” scribbled away page after page with
reckless sincerity and spirit. She is so frank
and gay, so utterly free from pretense of any
kind, that English readers, or at least English
reviewers, appear to have been somewhat scandalized
by her candor; and these innocent revelations
have been made the subject of serious
diatribes against convent schools, which, it
need hardly be said, have altered radically in
the past century, and were, at their worst,
better than any home training possible in
Hélène Massalski’s day. And what fervor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
and charm in her affectionate description of
that wise and witty, that kind and good nun,
Madame de Rochechouart! What freedom
throughout from the morbid and unchildish
vanity of Marie Bashkirtseff, whose diary is
simply a vent for her own exhaustless egotism!
There must always be some moments in life
when it becomes impossible for us, however
self-centred, to intrude our personalities further
upon our rebellious families and friends.
There must come a time when nobody will
think of us, nor look at us, nor listen to us
another minute. Then how welcome is the
poor little journal which cannot refuse our
confidences! What Rousseau did on a large
scale, Marie Bashkirtseff copied on a smaller
one. Both made the world their father confessor,
and the world has listened with a good
deal of attention to their tales, partly from an
unquenchable interest in unhealthy souls, and
partly from sheer self-complacency and pride.
There is nothing more gratifying to human
nature than the opportunity of contrasting our
own mental and spiritual soundness with the
disease which cries aloud to us for scrutiny.</p>
<p>If the best diaries known in literature have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
been written by men, the greater number have
been the work of women. Even little girls,
as we have seen, have taken kindly enough
to the daily task of translating themselves
into pages of pen and ink; but little boys
have been wont to consider this a lamentable
waste of time. It is true we have such
painful and precocious records as that of young
Nathaniel Mather, who happily died before
reaching manhood, but not before he had
scaled the heights of self-esteem, and sounded
the depths of despair. When a boy, a real
human boy, laments and bewails in his journal
that he whittled a stick upon the Sabbath
Day, “and, for fear of being seen, did it behind
the door,—a great reproach of God, and
a specimen of that atheism I brought into the
world with me,”—we recognize the fearful
possibilities of untempered sanctimony. Boyhood,
thank Heaven, does not lend itself easily
to introspection, and seldom finds leisure for
remorse. As a rule, a lad commits himself to
a diary, as to any other piece of work, only
because it has been forced upon him by the
voice of authority. It was the parental mandate,
thinly disguised under parental counsel,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
which started young Dick Doyle on that delightful
journal in which spirited sketches
alternate with unregenerate adventures and
mishaps. He begins it with palpable reluctance
the first day of January, 1840; fears
modestly that it “will turn out a hash;” hopes
he may be “skinned alive by wildcats” if he
fails to persevere with it; draws an animated
picture of himself in a torn tunic running
away from seven of these malignant animals
that pursue him over tables and chairs; and
finally settles down soberly and cheerfully to
work. The entries grow longer and longer,
the drawings more and more elaborate, as the
diary proceeds. A great deal happened in
1840, and every event is chronicled with fidelity.
The queen is married in the beginning
of the year; a princess royal is born before
its close. “Hurra! Hurra!” cries loyal Dick.
Prince Louis Napoleon makes his famous descent
upon Boulogne, and Dick sketches him
sailing dismally away on a life-buoy. Above
all, the young artist scores his first success,
and the glory of having one of his drawings
actually lithographed and sold is more than he
can bear with sobriety. “Just imagine,” he<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
writes, “if I was walking coolly along, and
came upon the Tournament in a shop window.
Oh, cricky! it would be enough to turn me
inside out.”</p>
<p>He survives this joyous ordeal, however,
and toils gayly on until the year is almost
up and the appointed task completed. On
the 3d of December a serious-minded uncle
invites him to go to Exeter Hall, an entertainment
which the other children flatly and
wisely decline. What he heard in that abode
of dismal oratory we shall never know, for,
stopping abruptly in the middle of a sentence,—“Uncle
was going somewhere else first, and
had started,”—Richard Doyle’s diary comes
to an untimely end.</p>
<p>And this is the fate of all those personal
records which have most deeply interested and
charmed us. It is so easy to begin a journal,
so difficult to continue it, so impossible to
persevere with it to the end. Bacon says that
the only time a man finds leisure for such an
engrossing occupation is when he is on a sea
voyage, and naturally has nothing to write
about. Perhaps the reason why diaries are
ever short-lived may be found in the undue<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
ardor with which they are set agoing. Man
is sadly diffuse and lamentably unstable. He
ends by saying nothing because he begins by
leaving nothing unsaid. “Le secret d’ennuyer
est de tout dire.” Haydon, the painter, it is
true, filled twenty-seven volumes with the
melancholy record of his high hopes and bitter
disappointments; but then he did everything
and failed in everything on the same gigantic
scale. The early diary of Frances Burney is
monumental. Its young writer finds life so
full of enjoyment that nothing seems to her
too insignificant to be narrated. Long and
by no means lively conversations, that must
have taken whole hours to write, are minutely
and faithfully transcribed. She reads “The
Vicar of Wakefield,” and at once sits down
and tells us all she thinks about it. Her praise
is guarded and somewhat patronizing, as befits
the author of “Evelina.” She is sorely scandalized
by Dr. Primrose’s verdict that murder
should be the sole crime punishable by
death, and proceeds to show, at great length
and with pious indignation, how “this doctrine
might be contradicted from the very essence
of our religion,”—quoting Exodus in defense<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
of her orthodoxy. She is charmingly frank
and outspoken, and these youthful pages show
no trace of that curious, half-conscious pleading
with which she strives, in later days, to
make posterity her confidant; to pour into
the ears of future partisans like Macaulay her
side of the court story, with all its indignities
and honors, its hours of painful ennui, its
minutes of rapturous delight.</p>
<p>That Macaulay should have worked himself
up into a frenzy of indignation over Miss
Burney’s five years at court is an amusing
instance of his unalterable point of view.
The sacred and exalted profession of letters
had in him its true believer and devotee.
That kings and queens and princesses should
fail to share this deference, that they should
arrogantly assume the privileges of their rank
when brought into contact with a successful
novelist, was to him an incredible example of
barbaric stupidity. The spectacle of Queen
Charlotte placidly permitting the authoress
of “Cecilia” to assist at the royal toilet filled
him with grief and anger. It is but too apparent
that no sense of intellectual unworthiness
troubled her Majesty for a moment, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
this shameless serenity of spirit was more
than the great Whig historian could endure.
To less ardent minds it would seem that five
years of honorable and well-paid service were
amply rewarded by a pension for life; and
that Miss Burney, however hard-worked and
overdriven, must have had long, long hours
of leisure in which to write the endless pages
of her journal. Indeed, a woman who had
time to listen to Fox speaking “with violence”
for five hours, had time, one would imagine,
for anything. Then what delicious excitation
to sit blushing and smiling in the royal
box, and hear Miss Farren recite these intoxicating
lines!</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Whose every passion yields to nature’s laws.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>And as if this were not enough, the king, the
queen, the royal princesses, all turn their
heads and gaze at her for one distracting
moment. “To describe my embarrassment,”
she falters, “would be impossible. I shrunk
back, so astonished, and so ashamed of my
public situation, that I was almost ready to
take to my heels and run away.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span></p>
<p>Well, well, the days for such delights are
over. We may say what we please about the
rewards of modern novel-writing; but what,
after all, is the cold praise of reviewers compared
with this open glory and exaltation?
It is moderately impressive to be told over
and over again by Marie Corelli’s American
publishers that the queen of England thinks
“The Soul of Lilith” and “The Sorrows of
Satan” are good novels; but this mere announcement,
however reassuring,—and it is
a point on which we require a good deal of
reassurance,—does not thrill us with the
enthusiasm we should feel if her Majesty, and
the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York,
and the British public united in a flattering
ovation. The incidents which mark the irresistible
and unwelcome changes forced upon
the world by each successive generation which
inhabits it are the incidents we love to read
about, and which are generally considered too
insignificant for narration. In a single page
Addison tells us more concerning the frivolous,
idle, half torpid, wholly contented life
of an eighteenth-century citizen than we could
learn from a dozen histories. His diaries,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
meant to be purely satiric, have now become
instructive. They show us, as in a mirror, the
early hours, the scanty ablutions,—“washed
hands, but not face,”—the comfortable eating
and drinking, the refreshing absence of books,
the delightful vagueness and uncertainty of
foreign news. A man could interest himself
for days in the reported strangling of the
Grand Vizier, when no intrusive cablegram
came speeding over the wires to silence and
refute the pleasant voice of rumor.</p>
<p>It is this wholesome and universal love of
detail which lends to a veracious diary its
indestructible charm. Charlotte Burney has
less to tell us than her famous sister; but it
is to her, after all, that we owe our knowledge
of Dr. Johnson’s worsted wig,—a present, it
seems, from Mr. Thrale, and especially valued
for its tendency to stay in curl however roughly
used. “The doctor generally diverts himself
with lying down just after he has got a fresh
wig on,” writes Charlotte gayly; and this
habit, it must be admitted, is death and destruction
to less enduring perukes. Swift’s
Journal to Stella—a true diary, though cast
in the form of correspondence—shows us<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
not only the playful, tender, and caressing
moods of the most savage of English cynics,
but also enlightens us amazingly as to his
daily habits and economies. We learn from
his own pen how he bought his fuel by the
half-bushel, and would have been glad to buy
it by the pound; how his servant, “that extravagant
whelp Peter,” insisted on making a
fire for him, and necessitated his picking off
the coals one by one, before going to bed; how
he drank brandy every morning, and took his
pill as regularly as Mrs. Pullet every night;
and how Stella’s mother sent him as gifts “a
parcel of wax candles and a bandbox full of
small plum-cakes,” on which plum-cakes—oh,
miracle of sound digestion!—he breakfasted
serenely for a fortnight.</p>
<p>Now, the spectacle of Dr. Swift eating
plum-cakes in the early morning is like the
spectacle of Mr. Pepys dining with far less
inward satisfaction at his cousin’s table, where
“the venison pasty was palpable beef.” The
most remarkable diary in the world is rich in
the insignificance of its details. It is the
sole confidant of a man who, as Mr. Lang
admirably says, was his own Boswell, and its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
ruthless sincerity throws the truth-telling of
the great biographer into the shade. Were it
not for this strange cipher record, ten years
long, the world—or that small portion of it
which reads history unabridged—would know
Mr. Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty,
as an excellent public servant, loyal, capable,
and discreet. The bigger, lazier world,
to which he is now a figure so familiar, would
never have heard of him at all, thereby losing
the most vivid bit of human portraiture ever
given for our disedification and delight.</p>
<p>We can understand how Mr. Pepys found
time to write his diary when we remember
that he was commonly in his office by four
o’clock in the morning. We can appreciate
its wonderful candor when we realize how safe
he thought it from investigation. With the
reproaches of his own conscience he was probably
familiar, and the crowning cowardice of
self-told lies offered no temptation to him.
“Why should we seek to be deceived?” asks
Bishop Butler, and Mr. Pepys might have
answered truthfully that he didn’t. The romantic
shading, the flimsy and false excuses
with which we are wont to color our inmost<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
thoughts, have no place in this extraordinary
chronicle. Its writer neither deludes himself,
like Bunyan, nor bolsters up his soul, like
Rousseau, with swelling and insidious pretenses.
It is a true “Human Document,” full
of meanness and kindness, of palpable virtues
and substantial misdemeanors. Mr. Pepys
is unkind to his wife, yet he loves her. He
is selfish and ostentatious, yet he denies himself
the coveted glory of a coach and pair to
give a marriage portion to his sister. He
seeks openly his own profit and gratification,
yet he is never without an active interest in
the lives and needs of other people. Indeed,
so keen and so sensible are his solutions of
social problems, or what passed for such in
that easy age, that had philanthropy and its
rewards been invented in the reign of Charles
II. we should doubtless see standing now in
London streets a statue of Mr. Samuel Pepys,
prison reformer, and founder of benevolent
institutions for improving and harrowing the
poor.</p>
<p>If the principal interest of this famous diary
lies in its unflinching revelation of character,
a charm no less enduring may be found in all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
the daily incidents it narrates. We like to
know how a citizen of London lived two hundred
years ago: what clothes he wore, what
food he ate, what books he read, what plays
he heard, what work and pleasure filled his
waking hours. And I would gently suggest
to those who hunger and thirst after the
glories of the printed page that if they will
only consent to write for posterity,—not as
the poets say they do, and do not, but as the
diarist really and truly does,—posterity will
take them to its heart and cherish them.
They may have nothing to say which anybody
wants to listen to now; but let them jot down
truthfully the petty occurrences, the pleasant
details of town or country life, and, as surely
as the world lasts, they will one day have a
hearing. We live in a strange period of transition.
Never before has the old order
changed as rapidly as it is changing now. O
writers of dull verse and duller prose, quit the
well-worked field of fiction, the arid waste of
sonnets and sad poems, and chronicle in little
leather-covered books the incidents which tell
their wondrous tale of resistless and inevitable
change. Write of electric motors, of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
bicycles, of peace societies, of hospitals for
pussy cats, of women’s clubs and colleges, of
the price of food and house rent, of hotel bills,
of new fashions in dress and furniture, of gay
dinners, of extension lectures, of municipal
corruption and reform, of robberies unpunished,
of murders unavenged. These things
do not interest us profoundly now, being part
of our daily surroundings; but the generations
that are to come will read of them with
mingled envy and derision: envy because we
have done so little, derision because we think
that we have done so much.</p>
<p>If, then, it is as natural for mankind to
peer into the past as to speculate upon the
future, where shall we find such windows for
our observation as in the diaries which show
us day by day the shifting current of what
once was life? We can learn from histories
all we want to know about the great fire of
London; but to realize just how people felt
and behaved in that terrible emergency we
should watch the alert and alarmed Mr. Pepys
burying not only his money and plate, but his
wine and Parmesan cheese. We have been
taught at school much more than we ever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
wanted to know about Cromwell, and the Protectorate,
and Puritan England; yet to breathe
again that dismal and decorous air we must
go to church with John Evelyn, and see, instead
of the expected rector, a sour-faced
tradesman mount the pulpit, and preach for
an hour on the inspiriting text, “And Benaiah
... went down also and slew a lion in the
midst of a pit in time of snow.” The pious
and accomplished Mr. Evelyn does not fancy
this strange innovation. Like other conservative
English gentlemen, he has little leaning
to “novices and novelties” in the house of
God; and he is even less pleased when all
the churches are closed on Christmas Day, and
a Puritan magistrate speaks, in his hearing,
“spiteful things of our Lord’s Nativity.” His
horror at King Charles’s execution is never
mitigated by any of the successive changes
which followed that dark deed. He is repelled
in turn by the tyranny of Cromwell, the dissoluteness
of Charles II., the Catholicity of
James, and the heartlessness of Queen Mary,
“who came to Whitehall jolly and laughing
as to a wedding,” without even a decent pretense
of pity for her exiled father. He firmly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
believes in witchcraft,—as did many other
learned and pious men,—and he persists in
upsetting all our notions of galley slaves and
the tragic horror of their lot by affirming the
miserable creatures at Marseilles to be “cheerful
and full of knavery,” and hardly ever
without some trifling occupation at which they
toiled in free moments, and by which they
made a little money for the luxuries and comforts
that they craved.</p>
<p>In fact, an air of sincere and inevitable
truthfulness robs John Evelyn’s diary of all
that is romantic and sentimental. We see in
it the life of a highly cultivated and deeply
religious man, whose fate it was to witness all
those tremendous and sovereign changes which
swept over England like successive tidal waves
between the execution of the Earl of Strafford
and the accession of Queen Anne. Sharp
strife; the bitter contention of creeds; England’s
one plunge into republicanism, and her
abrupt withdrawal from its grim embraces;
the plague; the great fire, with “ten thousand
houses all in one flame;” the depth of national
corruption under the last Stuarts; the
obnoxious and unpalatable remedy administered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
by the house of Orange; the dawning
of fresh prosperity and of a new literature,—all
these things Mr. Evelyn saw, and noted
with many comments in his diary. And from
all we turn with something like relief to read
about the fire-eater, Richardson, who delighted
London by cooking an oyster on a red-hot coal
in his mouth, or drinking molten glass as
though it had been ale, and who would have
made the fortune of any modern museum. Or
perhaps we pause to pity the sorrows of land-lords,
always an ill-used and persecuted race;
for Sayes Court, the home of the Evelyns,
with its famous old trees and beautiful gardens,
was rented for several years to Admiral
Benbow, who sublet it in the summer of 1698
to Peter the Great, and the royal tenant so
trampled down and destroyed the flower-beds
that no vestige of their loveliness survived
his ruthless tenancy. The Tsar, like Queen
Elizabeth, was magnificent when viewed from
a distance, but a most disturbing element to
introduce beneath a subject’s humble roof.</p>
<p>If Defoe, that master of narrative, had written
fewer political and religious tracts, and
had kept a journal of his eventful career, what<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
welcome and admirable reading it would have
made! If Lord Hervey had been content to
tell us less about government measures, and
more about court and country life, his thick
volumes would now be the solace of many an
idle hour. So keen a wit, so powerful and
graphic a touch, have never been wasted upon
matters of evanescent interest. History always
holds its share of the world’s attention.
The charm of personal gossip has never been
known to fail. But political issues, once dead,
make dull reading for all but students of political
economy; and they, browsing by choice
amid arid pastures, scorn nothing so much as
the recreative. Yet Lord Hervey’s epigrammatic
definition of the two great parties, patriots
and courtiers, as “Whigs out of place
and Whigs in place,” shows how vital and
long-lived is humor; and the trenchant cynicism
of his unkind pleasantry is more easily
disparaged than forgotten.</p>
<p>On the other hand, we can never be sufficiently
grateful that Gouverneur Morris, instead
of writing industrious pamphlets on the
causes that led to the French Revolution, has
left us his delightful diary, with its vivid picture<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>
of social life and of the great storm-cloud
darkening over France. In his pages we can
breathe freely, unchoked by that lurid and
sulphuric atmosphere so popular with historians
and novelists rehearsing “on the safe side
of prophecy.” His courage is of the unsentimental
order, his perceptions are pitiless, his
common sense is invulnerable. He has the
purest contempt for the effusive oath-taking of
July 14, the purest detestation for the crimes
and cruelties that followed. He persistently
treads the earth, and is in no way dazzled by
the mad flights into ether which were so hopelessly
characteristic of the time. Not even Sir
Walter Scott—a man as unlike Morris as day
is unlike night—could be more absolutely free
from the unwholesome influences which threatened
the sanity of the world, and of Scott’s
journal it is difficult to speak with self-possession.
Our thanks are due primarily to Lord
Byron, whose Ravenna diary first started Sir
Walter on this daily task,—a task which grew
heavier when the sad years came, but which
shows us now, as no word from other lips or
other pen could ever show us, the splendid
courage, the boundless charity, the simple,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
unconscious goodness of the man whom we
may approach closer and closer, and only love
and reverence the more. Were it not for this
journal, we should never have known Scott,—never
have known how sad he was sometimes,
how tired, how discouraged, how clearly aware
of his own fast-failing powers. We should
never have valued at its real worth his unquenchable
gayety of heart, his broad, genial,
reasonable outlook on the world. His letters,
even in the midst of trouble, are always cheerful,
as the letters of a brave man should be.
His diary alone tells us how much he suffered
at the downfall of hopes and ambitions that
had grown deeper and stronger with every
year of life. “I feel my dogs’ feet on my
knees, I hear them whining and seeking me
everywhere,” he writes pathetically, when the
thought of Abbotsford, closed and desolate,
seems more than he can bear; and then, obedient
to those unselfish instincts which had
always ruled his nature, he adds with nobler
sorrow, “Poor Will Laidlaw! poor Tom Purdie!
This will be news to wring your hearts,
and many an honest fellow’s besides, to whom
my prosperity was daily bread.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span></p>
<p>Of all the journals bequeathed to the world,
and which the wise world has guarded with
jealous care, Sir Walter’s makes the strongest
appeal to honest human nature, which never
goes so far afield in its search after strange
gods as to lose its love for what is simply
and sanely good. We hear a great deal about
the nobler standards of modernity, and about
virtues so fine and rare that our grandfathers
knew them not; but courage and gayety, a
pure mind and a kind heart, still give us the
assurance of a man. The pleasant duty of
admonishing the rich, the holy joy of preaching
a crusade against other people’s pleasures,
are daily gaining favor with the elect; but to
the unregenerate there is a wholesome flavor
in cheerful enjoyment no less than in open-handed
generosity.</p>
<p>The one real drawback to a veracious diary
is that—life being but a cloudy thing at best—the
pages which tell the story make often
melancholy reading. Mr. Pepys has, perhaps,
the lightest heart of the fraternity, and we
cannot help feeling now and then that a little
more regret on his part would not be wholly
unbecoming. However, his was not a day<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
when people moped in corners over their own
or their neighbors’ shortcomings; and there is
no more curious contrast offered by the wide
world of book-land than the life reflected so
faithfully in Pepys’s diary and in the sombre
journal of Judge Sewall. New England is
as visible in the one book as is Old England
in the other,—New England under the bleak
sky of an austere, inexorable, uncompromising
Puritanism which dominated every incident
of life. If Mr. Pepys went to see a man
hanged at Tyburn, the occasion was one of
some jollity, alike for crowd and for criminal;
an open-air entertainment, in which the leading
actor was recompensed in some measure
for the severity of his part by the excitement
and admiration he aroused. But when Judge
Sewall attended the execution of James Morgan,
the unfortunate prisoner was first carried
into church, and prayed over lengthily by Cotton
Mather for the edification of the congregation,
who came in such numbers and pressed
in such unruly fashion around the pulpit that
a riot took place within the holy walls, and
Morgan was near dying of suffocation in the
dullest possible manner without the gallows-tree.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span></p>
<p>It is not of hangings only and such direful
solemnities that we read in Sewall’s diary.
Every ordinary duty—I cannot say pastime—of
life is faithfully portrayed. We know
the faults—sins they were considered—of his
fourteen children; how they played at prayer-time
or began their meals before grace was
said, and were duly whipped for such transgressions.
We know how the judge went
courting when past middle age; how he gave
the elderly Mrs. Winthrop China oranges, sugared
almonds, and “gingerbread wrapped in
a clean sheet of paper,” and how he ingratiated
himself into her esteem by hearing her grand-children
recite their catechism. He has a
businesslike method of putting down the precise
cost of the gifts he offered during the progress
of his various wooings; for, in his own
serious fashion, this gray-headed Puritan was
one of the most amorous of men. A pair of
shoe-buckles presented to one fair widow came
to no less than five shillings threepence; and
“Dr. Mather’s sermons, neatly bound,” was a
still more extravagant <i>cadeau</i>. He was also
a mighty expounder of the Scriptures, and
prayed and wrestled with the sick until they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
were fain to implore him to desist. There is
one pathetic story of a dying neighbor to
whose bedside he hastened with two other austere
friends, and who was so sorely harried by
their prolonged exhortations that, with his
last breath, he sobbed out, “Let me alone!
my spirits are gone!”—to the terrible distress
and scandal of his wife.</p>
<p>On the whole, Judge Sewall’s diary is not
cheerful reading, but the grayness of its atmosphere
is mainly due to the unlovely aspect
of colonial life, to the rigors of an inclement
climate not yet subdued by the forces of a
luxurious civilization, and by a too constant
consideration of the probabilities of being
eternally damned. There is nowhere in its
sedate and troubled pages that piercing sadness,
that cry of enigmatic, inexplicable pain,
which shakes the very centre of our souls
when we read the beautiful short journal of
Maurice de Guérin. These few pages, written
with no definite purpose by a young man
whose life was uneventful and whose genius
never flowered into maturity, have a positive
as well as a relative value. They are not
merely interesting for what they have to tell;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
they are admirable for the manner of the telling,
and the world of letters would be distinctly
poorer for their loss. Eugénie de
Guérin’s journal is charming, but its merits
are of a different order. No finer, truer picture
than hers has ever been given us of that
strange, simple, patriarchal life which we can
so little understand, a life full of delicate
thinking and homely household duties. At
Le Cayla, the lonely Languedoc château,
where “one could pass days without seeing
any living thing but the sheep, without hearing
any living thing but the birds,” the young
Frenchwoman found in her diary companionship
and mental stimulus, a link to bind her
day by day to her absent brother for whom
she wrote, and a weapon with which to fight
the unconquerable disquiet of her heart. Her
finely balanced nature, which resisted sorrow
and ennui to the end, forced her to adopt that
precision of phrase which is the triumph of
French prose. There is a tender grace in her
descriptions, a restraint in her sweet, sudden
confidences, a wistfulness in her joy, and always
a nobility of thought which makes even
her gentleness seem austere.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span></p>
<p>But Maurice de Guérin had in him a power
of enjoyment and of suffering which filled his
life with profound emotions, and these emotions
break like waves at our feet when we
read the brief pages of his diary. There is
the record of a single day at Le Val, so brimming
with blessedness and beauty that it illustrates
the lasting nature of pure earthly happiness;
for such days are counted out like
fairy gold, and we are richer all our lives for
having grasped them once. There are passages
of power and subtlety which show that
nature took to her heart this trembling seeker
after felicity, cast from him the chains of care
and thought, and bade him taste for one keen
hour “the noble voluptuousness of freedom.”
Then, breaking swiftly in amid vain dreams of
joy, comes the bitter moment of awakening,
and the sad voice of humanity sounds wailing
in his ears.</p>
<p>“My God, how I suffer from life! Not
from its accidents,—a little philosophy suffices
for them,—but from itself, from its substance,
from all its phenomena.”</p>
<p>And ever wearing away his heart is the restlessness
of a nature which craved beauty for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
its daily food, which longed passionately for
whatever was fairest in the world, for the
lands and the seas he was destined never to
behold. Eugénie, in her solitude at Le Cayla,
trained herself to echo with gentle stoicism the
words of A Kempis: “What canst thou see
anywhere that thou seest not here? Behold
the heavens and the earth and all the elements!
For out of these are all things made.”
Her horizon was bounded by the walls of
home. She worked, she prayed, she read her
few books, she taught the peasant children the
little it behooved them to know; she played
with the gray cat, and with the three dogs,
Lion, Wolf, and little Trilby whom she loved
best of all, and from whom, rather than from
a stupid fairy tale, it may be that Du Maurier
stole his heroine’s name. She won peace, if
not contentment, by the fulfillment of near
duties; but in her brother the unquenchable
desire of travel burned like a smouldering fire.
In dreams he wandered far amid ancient and
sunlit lands whose mighty monuments are part
of the mysterious legends of humanity. “The
road of the wayfarer is a joyous one!” he
cries. “Ah! who shall set me adrift upon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
the Nile!”—and with these words the journal
of Maurice de Guérin comes to a sudden
end. A river deeper than the Nile was
opening beneath his passionate, tired young
eyes. Remoter lands than Egypt lay before
his feet.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="GUIDES_A_PROTEST">GUIDES: A PROTEST.</h2>
</div>
<p>“Life,” sighed Sir George Cornwall Lewis,
“would be endurable, if it were not for its
pleasures;” and the impatient wanderer in
far-off lands is tempted to paraphrase this
hackneyed truism into, “Traveling would be
enjoyable, if it were not for its guides.”
Years ago, Mark Twain endeavored to point
out how much fun could be derived from these
“necessary nuisances” by a judicious course
of chaffing; and the apt illustrations of his
methods furnished some of the most amusing
passages in “Innocents Abroad.” But it is
not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth,
and that unquenchable spirit of humor which
turns a trial into a blessing. The facility for
being diverted where less fortunate people are
annoyed is a rare birthright, and worth many
a mess of pottage. Moreover, in these days
when Baedeker smooths the traveler’s path
to knowledge, guides are no longer “necessary
nuisances.” They are plagues to no purpose,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
whose persistency deprives inoffensive
strangers of that tranquil enjoyment they
have come so far to seek. Nothing is more
difficult than to dilate with a correct emotion
when every object of interest is pointed rigorously
out, and a wearisome trickle of information,
couched in broken English, is dropped
relentlessly into our tired ears.</p>
<p>It need not be supposed for a moment that
there is any real option about employing a
guide or dispensing with his services. There
is none. Practically speaking, I don’t employ
him. He takes possession of me, and never
relaxes his hold. In some parts of Europe,
Sicily for example, his unlawful ownership
begins from the first moment I set my foot
upon the soil. At Syracuse he is waiting at
the station, in charge of the hotel coach. I
think him the hotel porter, point out our bags,
and give him the check for our boxes. As
soon as we are under way, he leans over and
informs us confidentially that he is the English
interpreter and guide, officially connected
with the hotel, and that he is happy to place
his services at our disposal. At these ominous
words our hearts sink heavily. We know<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
that the hour of captivity is at hand, and
that all efforts to escape will only tighten our
chains. Nevertheless, we make the effort that
very day, resolved not to yield without a
struggle.</p>
<p>The afternoon is drawing to a close by the
time we are settled in our rooms, have had
a cup of tea, and have washed away some of
the dirt of travel. There is only light enough
left for a short stroll; and this first walk
through a strange city is one of my principal
pleasures in traveling. I love to find myself
amid the unfamiliar streets; to slip into
quiet churches; to stare in shop-windows;
to wander, with no other clue than Baedeker,
through narrow byways, and stumble unaware
upon some open court, with its fine old
fountain splashing lazily over the worn stones.
Filled with these agreeable anticipations, we
steal downstairs, and see our guide standing
like a sentinel at the door. He is prepared
to accompany us, but we decline his services,
explaining curtly that we are only going out
for a walk, and need no protection whatever.
It sounds decisive—to us—and we congratulate
one another upon such well-timed firmness,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
until, glancing back, we perceive our determined
guardian following us on the other
side of the street. Now, as long as we keep
straight ahead, pretending to know our way,
we are safe; but the trouble is we don’t know
our way, and in a few minutes it is necessary
to consult Baedeker and find out where
we are. We do this as furtively as possible,
gathering around the book to hide it,
and moving slowly on while we read. But
such foolish precautions are in vain. The
guide has seen us pause. He knows that we
are astray, that we are trying to right ourselves,—a
thing he never permits,—and he
is by our side in an instant. If the ladies
desire to see the cathedral, they must turn to
the left. It is very near,—not more than
a few minutes’ walk,—and it is open until
six o’clock. We think of saying that we don’t
want to see the cathedral, and of turning to
the right; but this course appears rather too
perilous. The fact is, we do want to see it
very much; and we should like, moreover,
to see it without delay, and alone. So we
thank Brocconi,—that is the guide’s name,—and
say we can find our way now without<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>
any trouble. And so we could, if we were
left to ourselves; but the knowledge that we
are still being pursued at a respectful distance,
and that we dare not pause a moment
for consideration, flusters us sadly. We come
to a point where two streets meet at an acute
angle, hesitate, plunge down the nearer, and
hear Brocconi’s warning voice once more at
our elbows. The ladies have taken a wrong
turning. With their permission, he will point
them out the road. So we surrender at discretion,
feeling all further resistance to be
useless, and are conducted to the cathedral
in a pitiable state of subjection; are marched
dolorously around; are shown old tombs, and
faded pictures, and beautiful bits of mosaic;
and then are led back to the hotel, and dismissed
with the assurance that we will be
waited on early the next morning, and that a
carriage will be ready for us by ten.</p>
<p>Perhaps our conduct may appear pusillanimous
to those whose resolution has never been
so severely tested. We feel this ourselves,
and deplore the cowardly strain in our natures,
as we trail meekly and disconsolately upstairs.
There is a little cushioned bench just outside<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
my bedroom door, and I know that when I go
to breakfast in the morning Brocconi will be
sitting there, waiting for his prey. I know
that when I come back from breakfast Brocconi
will be still sitting there, and that I can
never leave my room without seeing him in
unquestioned and ostentatious attendance upon
me. He stands up, hat in hand, to salute me,
every time I pass him; and after a while I
take to lurking, I might almost say to skulking
within my chamber, rather than encounter
his disappointed and reproachful gaze. With
the natural tendency of a woman to temporize,
I buy my freedom one day by engaging his
services for the next. If he will permit me
to go alone and in peace to the Greek theatre,
to sit on the grassy hill amid the wild flowers,
to look at the charming view and breathe the
delicious air for a long, lazy afternoon, I will
drive with him the following morning over
the dusty glaring road to Fort Euryelus, and
be marched submissively through the endless
intricacies of its subterranean corridors, and
have every tiresome detail pointed out to me
and explained with merciless prolixity.</p>
<p>On the same lamentably weak principle, I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
purchase—we all purchase—his faded and
crumpled photographs, so as to be let off from
buying his “antiquities,” a forlorn collection
of mouldy coins and broken bits of terra cotta,
which he carries around in a handkerchief
and hands down to us, one by one, when we
are prisoners in our carriage, and cannot
refuse to look at them. He is so pained at
our giving them back again that we compromise
on the photographs, though they are
the most decrepit specimens I have ever beheld;
almost as worn and flabby as the little
letters of recommendation which are lent to
us for perusal, and which state with monotonous
amiability that the writer has employed
Domenico Brocconi as guide and interpreter
during a three days’ stay in Syracuse, and has
found him intelligent, capable, and obliging.
I know I shall have to write one of these letters
before I go away. Indeed, my conscience
aches remorsefully when I think of the number
of such testimonials I have strewn broad-cast
over the earth to be a delusion and a
snare to my fellow man. It never occurred
to me that any one would regard them seriously,
until an acquaintance informed me,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
with some asperity, that he had employed a
guide on my recommendation, and had been
cheated by him. I felt very sorry for this;
for, beyond a little overcharging in the matter
of fees or carriages, which is part of the
recognized perquisites of the calling, no guide
has ever cheated me. On the contrary, he
has sometimes saved me money. My aversion
to him is based exclusively on the fact that
he strikes a discordant note wherever he appears.
He has always something to tell me
which I don’t want to hear, and his is that
leaden touch which takes all color and grace
from every theme he handles.</p>
<p>Constantinople, as the chosen abode of insecurity,
is perhaps the only city within the
tourist’s beaten track where a guide or dragoman
is necessary for personal safety, as well
as for the information he imparts. Baedeker
has ignored Constantinople, or perhaps the
authorities of that curiously misgoverned
municipality have forbidden his profane researches
into their august privacy. Labor-saving
devices find scant favor with the subjects
of the Sultan. Vessels may not approach
the docks to be unloaded, though there is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
plenty of water to float them, because that
would interfere with the immemorial privileges
of the boatmen. There is no delivery
of city mail, but a man can always be hired
to carry your letter from Pera to Stamboul.
Guide-books are unknown, but a dragoman is
attached to your service as soon as you arrive,
and is as inseparable as your shadow until the
hour you leave.</p>
<p>The rivalry among these men is of a very
active order, as I speedily discovered when I
stepped from the Oriental Express into that
scene of mad confusion and tumult, the Constantinople
station. It was drizzling hard.
I was speechless from a heavy cold. We
were all three worn out with the absurd and
fatiguing travesty of a quarantine on the
frontier. Twenty Turkish porters made a
wild rush for our bags the instant the train
stopped, and fought over them like howling
beasts. A tall man with a cast in his eye,
handed me a card on which my own name was
legibly written, and said he was the dragoman
sent by the hotel to take us in charge. A
little man with a nervous and excited manner
handed me a card on which also my name was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
legibly written, and said <i>he</i> was the dragoman
sent by the hotel to take us in charge. It was
a case for the judgment of Solomon; and I
lacked not only the wisdom to decide, but the
voice in which to utter my decision. There
was nothing for it but to let the claimants
fight it out, which they proceeded to do with
fervor, rolling over the station floor and
pounding each other vigorously. The tall
man, being much the better combatant,
speedily routed his rival, dragged him ignominiously
from the carriage when he attempted
to scale it, and carried us off in triumph.
But the race is not always to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong. The little dragoman
was game enough not to know when he was
beaten. He followed us in another carriage,
and made good his case, evidently, with the
hotel landlord; for we found him, placid and
smiling, in the corridor next morning, waiting
his orders for the day. I never ventured to
ask how this change came about, lest indiscreet
inquiries should bring a second dragoman
upon my devoted head; so Demetrius
remained our guide, philosopher, and friend
for the three weeks we spent in Constantinople.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
He was not a bad little man, on the
whole; was extremely patient about carrying
wraps, and was honestly anxious we should
suffer no annoyance in the streets. But his
knowledge upon any subject was of the haziest
character. He had a perfect talent for getting
us to places at the wrong time,—but
that may have been partly our fault,—and if
there ever was anything interesting to tell, he
assuredly never told it. On the other hand,
he considered that, to our Occidental ignorance,
the simplest architectural devices needed
an explanation. He would say, “This is a
well,” “That is a doorway,” “These are columns
supporting the roof,” with all the benevolent
simplicity of Harry and Lucy’s father
enlightening those very intelligent and ignorant
little people.</p>
<p>The only severe trial that Demetrius suffered
in our service was the occasional attendance
of the two Kavasses from the American
Legation, whose protection was afforded us
twice or thrice, through the courtesy of the
ministry. These magnificent creatures threw
our poor little dragoman so completely into
the shade, and regarded him with such open<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
and manifest contempt, that all his innocent
airs of importance shriveled into humility
and dejection. It is but honest to state that
the Kavasses appeared to despise us quite as
cordially as they did Demetrius; but we sustained
their scorn with more tranquillity for
the sake of the splendor and distinction they
imparted. One of them was a very handsome
and very supercilious Turk, who never condescended
to look at us nor to speak to us; the
other a Circassian, whose pride was tempered
by affability, and who was good enough to
hold with us the strictly necessary intercourse.
I hear it is said now and then by censorious
critics that American women are the most
arrogant of their sex, affecting a superiority
which is based upon no justifiable claim.
But I candidly admit that all such airy notions,
born of the New World and of the nineteenth
century, dwindled rapidly away before
the disdainful composure of those two lordly
Mohammedans. The old primitive instincts
are never wholly eradicated; only overlaid
with the acquired sentiments of our time and
place. I have not been without my share of
self-assertion; but my meekness of spirit in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
Constantinople, the perfectly natural feeling
I had in being snubbed by two ignorant
Kavasses blazing with gold embroidery, will
always remain one of the salutary humiliations
of my life.</p>
<p>I think there must be some secret system of
communication by which the guides of one city
consign you to the guides of another; for
I know that when we reached Piræus at
five o’clock in the morning, an olive-skinned,
low-voiced, mysterious-looking person, who
reminded me strikingly of Eugene Aram,
boarded the ship, knocked at my cabin door,
and gave me to understand, in excellent English,
that we were to be his property in
Athens. He said he was not connected with
any hotel, but would be happy to wait on us
wherever we went; and he had all three of
our names neatly written in a little book. I
responded as firmly as I could that I did not
think we should require his services; whereupon
he smiled darkly, and hinted that we
would find it difficult, and perhaps dangerous,
to go about alone. In reality, Athens is
as well conducted as Boston, and very much
easier to traverse; but I did not know this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>
then, so, after some hesitation, I promised to
employ my mysterious visitor if I had any
occasion for a guide. It was a promise not
easily forgotten. Morning, noon, and night
he haunted us, always with the same air of
mingled secrecy and determination. As it
chanced, I was ill for several days, and unable
to leave my room. Regularly after breakfast
there would come a low, resolute knock at my
door, and Eugene Aram, pallid, noiseless, authoritative,
would slip in, and stand like a
sentinel by my bed. It was extremely depressing,
and always reminded me of the
presentation of a <i>lettre de cachet</i>. I felt that
I was wronging my self-elected guide by not
getting well and going about, and his civil
inquiries anent my health carried with them
an undertone of reproach. Yet with returning
vigor came a firm determination to escape this
melancholy thraldom; and it is one of my
keenest pleasures to remember that on the
golden afternoon when I first climbed the
Acropolis, and looked through the yellow columns
of the Parthenon upon the cloudless
skies of Greece, and saw the sea gleaming like
a silver band, and watched the glory of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
sunset from the terrace of the temple of Nike,
no Eugene Aram was there to mar my absolute
contentment. This was the enchanted
hour, never to be repeated nor surpassed, and
this hour was mine to enjoy. When I am
setting forth my trials with all the wordy
eloquence of discontent, let me “think of
my marcies,” and be grateful.</p>
<p>Thanks to the protecting hand of England,
Cairo, which once was little better than Constantinople,
is now as safe as London. On
the Nile, it is hardly possible to leave one’s
boat, save under the care of a dragoman.
Even at Luxor and Assuân, the attentions of
the native population are of a rather overpowering
character. But at Cairo, whether amid the
hurrying crowds in the bazaars or on the quiet
road to the Gézirah, there is no annoyance of
any kind to be apprehended. Nevertheless, a
little army of guides is connected with every
hotel, and troups of irregulars line the streets,
and press their services upon you as you pass.
I noticed that while a great many Americans
had a dragoman permanently attached to their
service, and never went out unaccompanied,
the English and Germans resolutely ignored<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
these expensive and irritating inutilities. If
by chance they desired any attendant, they
employed in preference one of the ruminating
donkey-boys who stand all day, supple and
serious, alongside of their melancholy little
beasts. Upon one occasion, an Englishwoman
was just stepping into her carriage, having
engaged a boy to accompany her to the mosque
of the Sultan Hassan, when a tall and turbaned
Turk, indignant at this invasion of
his privileges, called out to her scornfully,
“Do you think that lad will be able to explain
to you anything you are going to see?”
The Englishwoman turned her smiling face.
I fancied she would be angry at the impertinence,
but she was not. She had that absolute
command of herself and of the situation
which is the birthright of her race. “It is
precisely because I know he can explain nothing
that I take him with me,” she said. “If
I could be equally sure of your silence, I
should be willing to take you.”</p>
<p>Local guides are as numerous and as systematic
in Cairo as in more accessible cities, and
they have the same curious tendency to multiply
themselves around any object of interest,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
and to subdivide the scanty labor attendant on
its exhibition. When we went to the Coptic
church, for example, a heavy wooden door was
opened for us by youth number one, who pointed
out the enormous size of the venerable key he
carried, and then consigned us to the care of
youth number two, who led the way through a
narrow, picturesque lane to the church itself,
and gave us into the charge of youth number
three, a handsome, bare-legged boy with brilliant
eyes, who lit a taper and kindly conducted
us around. When we had examined
the dim old pictures, and the faded missals,
and the beautiful screens of inlaid wood, and
the grotto wherein the Holy Family is piously
believed to have found shelter, this acute child
presented us to a white-haired Coptic priest,
and explained that it was to him we were to
offer our fee. I promptly did as I was bidden,
and the boy, after carefully examining and
approving the amount,—the priest himself
never glanced at it nor at us,—requested further
payment for his own share of work. I
gave him three piastres, being much pleased
with his businesslike methods, whereupon he
handed us back to youth number two, who had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
been waiting all this time at the church door,
and whom I was obliged to pay for leading us
through the lane. Then, after satisfying youth
number one, who mounted guard at the gate,
we were permitted to regain our carriage and
drive away amid a clamorous crowd of beggars.
It was as admirable a piece of organized
work as I have ever seen, and would have
done credit to a labor union in America.</p>
<p>On precisely the same principle, we often
find the railed-off chapels of an Italian church
to be each under the care of a separate sacristan,
who jingles his keys alluringly, and
does his best to beguile us into his own especial
inclosure. I have suffered a good deal
in Sicily and in Naples from sacristans who
could not be brought to understand that I had
come to church to pray. The mark of the
tourist is like the brand of Cain, recognizable
to all men. Even one’s nationality is seldom
a matter of doubt, and an Italian sacristan
who cherishes the opinion that English-speaking
people stand self-convicted of heresy, can
see no reason for my entering the sacred edifice
save to be shown its treasures with all
speed. So he beckons to me from dark corners,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
and waves his keys at me; and, finding
me unresponsive to these appeals, he sidles
through the little kneeling throng to tell me
in a loud whisper that Domenichino’s picture
is over the third altar on the left, or that
forty-five princes of the house of Aragon are
buried in the sacristy. By this time devout
worshipers are beginning to look at me
askance, as if it were my fault that I am disturbing
them. So I get up and follow my
persecutor, and stare at the forty-five wooden
sarcophagi of the Aragonese princes, draped
with velvet palls, and ranged on shelves like
dry goods. Then, mass being over, I slip out
of St. Domenica’s, and make my way to the
cathedral of St. Januarius, where another sacristan
instantly lays hands on me, and carries
me down to the crypt to see the reliquary of
the saint. He is a stout, smiling man, with an
unbounded enthusiasm for all he has to show.
Even the naked, fat, Cupid-like angels who
riot here as wantonly as in every other Neapolitan
church fill him with admiration and
delight. He taps them on their plump little
stomachs, and exclaims, “Tout en marbre!
Tout en marbre!” looking at me meanwhile<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
with wide-open eyes, as if marble angels were
as much of a rarity in Italy as in Greenland.
By the time his transports have moderated
sufficiently to allow me to depart, a tall, grim
sacristan, with nothing to show, is locking up
the cathedral, and I am obliged to go away
with all my prayers unsaid.</p>
<p>It is possible to be too discursive when a pet
grievance has an airing. Therefore, instead
of lingering, as I should like to do, over a still
unexhausted subject; instead of telling about
a dreadful one-eyed man who pursued me like
a constable into the cathedral of Catania,
and fairly arrested me at St. Agatha’s shrine,
whither I had fled for protection; instead of
describing an unscrupulous fraud at Amalfi
who led me for half a mile in the dripping
rain through a soaked little valley, under pretense
of showing me a macaroni factory, and
then naïvely confessed we had gone in the
opposite direction because the walk was so
charming,—instead of denouncing the accumulated
crimes of the whole sinful fraternity,
I will render tardy justice to one Roman guide
whose incontestable merits deserve a grateful
acknowledgment. He was a bulky and very<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
dirty man in the Castle of St. Angelo, to
whose care fourteen tourists, English, French,
and Germans, were officially committed. He
spoke no language but his own, and he set
himself resolutely to work to make every visitor
understand all he had to tell by the help
of that admirable pantomimic art in which
Italians have such extraordinary facility. It
was impossible to misapprehend him. If he
wished to show us the papal bed-chamber, he
retired into one corner and snored loudly on
an imaginary couch. When we came to the
dining-room, he made a feint of eating a hearty
meal. With amazing agility he illustrated
the manner of Benvenuto Cellini’s escape, and
the breaking of his ankles in the fall. He
decapitated himself without a sword as Beatrice
Cenci, and racked himself without a rack
as another unhappy prisoner. He lowered
himself as a drawbridge, and even tried to
explode himself as a cannon, in his efforts to
make us better acquainted with the artillery.
He was absolutely serious all this time, yet
never seemed flustered nor annoyed by the
peals of irresistible laughter which greeted
some of his most difficult representations. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
had but one object in view,—to be understood.
If we were amused, that did not matter; and
if we were a little rude, that was merely the
manner of foreigners. I do not wish to close
a chapter of fault-finding without one word of
praise for this clever and conscientious actor,
whose performance was limited to the ignoble
task of conducting travelers through a dilapidated
fortress, but whom I cannot consent to
look upon as a guide.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="LITTLE_PHARISEES_IN_FICTION">LITTLE PHARISEES IN FICTION.</h2>
</div>
<p>In that accurate and interesting study of Puritanism
which Alice Morse Earle has rather
laboriously entitled “Customs and Fashions in
Old New England,” there is a delightful chapter
devoted to the little boys and girls who
lived their chastened lives under the uncompromising
discipline of the church. With many
prayers, with scanty play, with frequent exhortations,
and a depressing consciousness of
their own sinful natures, these children walked
sedately in the bleak atmosphere of continual
correction. By way of pastime, they were
taken to church, to baptisms, and to funerals,
and for reading they had the “Early Piety
Series,” “Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes,”
“The Conversion and Exemplary Lives of
Several Young Children,” and a “Particular
Account of Some Extraordinary Pious Motions
and Devout Exercises observed of late
in Many Children in Siberia,”—a safe and
remote spot in which to locate something too<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
“extraordinary” for belief. To this list
Cotton Mather added “Good Lessons for
Children in Verse,” by no means a sprightly
volume, and “Some Examples of Children in
whom the Fear of God was remarkably Budding
before they died; in several parts of
New England.”</p>
<p>Small wonder that under this depressing
burden of books, little boys and girls, too
young to know the meaning of sin, were assailed
with grievous doubts concerning their
salvation. Small wonder that Betty Sewall, an
innocent child of nine, “burst into an amazing
cry” after reading a page or two of Cotton
Mather, and said “she was afraid she should
goe to Hell, her sins were not pardon’d.” It is
heart-rending to read Judge Sewall’s entry in
his diary: “Betty can hardly read her chapter
for weeping. Tells me she is afraid she is
gone back” (at nine). “Does not taste that
sweetness in reading the Word which once she
did. Fears that what was upon her is worn
off. I said what I could to her, and in the
evening pray’d with her alone.” It is scant
comfort for us, recalling the misery of this poor
wounded child, and of many others who suffered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>
with her, to know that Phebe Bartlett
was ostentatiously converted at four; that Jane
Turell “asked many astonishing questions
about divine mysteries,” before she was five;
and that an infant son of Cotton Mather’s
“made a most edifying end in praise and
prayer,” at the age of two years and seven
months. We cannot forget the less happy
children who, instead of developing into baby
prodigies or baby prigs, fretted out their helpless
hearts in nightly fears of Hell.</p>
<p>Nor is there in the whole of this painful
precocity one redeeming touch of human childhood,
such as that joyous setting forth of the
little St. Theresa and her brother to convert the
inhabitants of Morocco, and be martyred for
their faith; an enterprise as natural to keenly
imaginative children of the sixteenth century
as was the expedition two hundred years later
of the six little Blue Coat boys, who, without
map, chart, or compass, without luggage, provisions,
or money, started out one bright spring
morning to find Philip Quarll’s Island. Sunlight
and shadow are not farther apart than
the wholesome love of adventure which religion
as well as history and fairy-lore can<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
inspire in the childish heart, and that morbid
conscientiousness which impels the young to
the bitter task of self-analysis. The most
depressing thing about pious fiction for little
people is that it so seldom takes human nature
into account. I read not long ago an English
Sunday-school story in which a serious aunt
severely reproves her twelve-year-old niece for
saying she would like to go to India and have
a Bible class of native children, by telling her
it is vain and foolish to talk in that way, and
that what she can do is to be a better child
herself, and save up her money for the mission-box.
Now the dream of going to a far-off
land and doing good in a lavish, semi-miraculous
fashion is as natural for a pious and imaginative
little girl, as is the dream of fighting
savages for a less pious but equally imaginative
little boy. It is well, no doubt, that all
generous impulses should have some practical
outlet; but the aunt’s dreary counsel was too
suggestive of those ethical verses, familiar to
my own infancy, which began:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“‘A penny I have,’ little Mary said,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">As she thoughtfully raised her hand to her head,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">and described the anxious musings of this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
weak child as to how the money might be
most profitably employed, until at length she
relieved herself of all moral obligation by
putting it into the mission-box. It is not
possible for a real little girl to sympathize
with such a situation. She may give away
her pennies impulsively, as Charles Lamb gave
away his plum-cake,—to his lasting regret
and remorse,—but she does not start out by
worrying over her serious responsibility as a
capitalist.</p>
<p>The joyless literature provided for the children
of Puritanism in the New World was
little less lugubrious than that which a century
later, in many a well-tended English nursery,
made the art of reading a thoroughly undesirable
accomplishment. Happy the boy who
could escape into the air and sunshine with
Robinson Crusoe. Happy the girl who found
a constant friend in Miss Edgeworth’s little
Rosamond. For always on the book-shelf sat,
sombre and implacable, the unsmiling “Fairchild
Family,” ready to hurl texts at everybody’s
head, and to prove at a moment’s notice
the utter depravity of the youthful heart. It
is inconceivable that such a book should have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
retained its place for many years, and that
thousands of little readers should have plodded
their weary way through its unwholesome
pages. For combined wretchedness and self-righteousness,
for groveling fear and a total
lack of charity, the “Fairchild Family” are
without equals in literature, and, I hope, in
life. Lucy Fairchild, at nine, comes to the
conclusion “that there are very few real Christians
in the world, and that a great part of
the human race will be finally lost;” and modestly
proposes to her brother and sister that
they should recite some verses “about mankind
having bad hearts.” This is alacritously
done, the other children being more than equal
to the emergency; and each in turn quotes a
text to prove that “the nature of man, after
the fall of Adam, is utterly and entirely sinful.”
Lest this fundamental truth should be
occasionally forgotten, a prayer is composed
for Lucy, which she commits to memory, and
a portion of which runs thus:—</p>
<p>“My heart is so exceedingly wicked, so vile,
so full of sin, that even when I appear to be
tolerably good, even then I am sinning. When
I am praying, or reading the Bible, or hearing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
other people read the Bible, even then I sin.
When I speak, I sin; when I am silent, I
sin.”</p>
<p>In fact, an anxious alertness, a continual
apprehension of ill-doing, is the keynote of this
extraordinary book; and that its author, Mrs.
Sherwood, considered the innocence of childhood
and even of infancy an insufficient barrier
to evil, is proven by an anecdote which she
tells of herself in her memoirs. When she was
in her fourth year, a gentleman, a guest of her
father’s, “who shall be nameless,” took her on
his knee, and said something to her which she
could not understand, but which she felt at
once was not fit for female ears, “especially
not for the female ears of extreme youth.”
Indignant at this outrage to propriety, she
exclaimed, “You are a naughty man!” whereupon
he became embarrassed, and put her
down upon the floor. That a baby of three
should be so keen to comprehend, or rather
not to comprehend, but to suspect an indecorum,
seems well-nigh incredible, and I confess
that ever since reading this incident I have
been assailed with a hopeless, an undying curiosity
to know what it was the “nameless”
gentleman said.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span></p>
<p>The painful precocity of children anent
matters profane and spiritual is insisted upon
so perseveringly by writers of Sunday-school
literature that Mrs. Sherwood’s infancy appears
to have been the recognized model for
them all. In one of these stories, which claims
to be the veracious history of a very young
child, compared with whom, however, the
“fairy babes of tombs and graves” are soberly
natural and realistic, I found I was expected
to believe that an infant a year old loved to
hear her father read the Bible, and would lie
in her cot with clasped hands, listening to the
precious words. Though she could say but
little,—at twelve months,—yet when she saw
her parents sitting down to breakfast without
either prayers or reading, she would put out her
hands, and cry “No, no!” and look wistfully
at the Bible on the shelf. When two years
old, “she was never weary at church,” nor at
Sunday-school, where she sat gazing rapturously
in her teacher’s face. It is unnecessary for
any one familiar with such tales to be assured
that as soon as she could speak plainly she
went about correcting, not only all the children
in the neighborhood, but all the adults<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
as well. A friend of her father’s was in the
habit of petting and caressing her, though
Heaven knows how he had the temerity, and
she showed him every mark of affection until
she heard of some serious wrong-doing—drunkenness,
I think—on his part. The next
time he came to the house she refused sadly to
sit on his knee, “but told him earnestly her
feelings about all that he had done.” Finally
she fell ill, and after taking bitter medicines
with delight, and using her last breath to reproach
her father for “not coming up to
prayers,” she died at the age of four and a
half years, to the unexpressed, because inexpressible,
relief of everybody. The standard
of infant death-beds has reached a difficult
point of perfection since Cotton Mather’s baby
set the example by making its “edifying end
in praise and prayer,” before it was three years
old.</p>
<p>The enormous circulation of Sunday-school
books, both in England and America, has
resulted in a constant exchange of commodities.
For many years we have given as freely
as we have received; and if English reviewers
from the first were disposed to look askance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
upon our contributions, English nurseries absorbed
them unhesitatingly, and English children
read them, if not with interest, at least
with meekness and docility. When the “Fairchild
Family” and the “Lady of the Manor”
crossed the Atlantic to our hospitable shores, we
sent back, returning evil for evil, the “Youth’s
Book of Natural Theology,” in which small
boys and girls argue their way, with some kind
preceptor’s help, from the existence of a
chicken to the existence of God, thus learning
at a tender age the first lessons of religious
doubt. At the same time that the “Leila”
books and “Mary and Florence” found their
way to legions of young Americans, “The
Wide, Wide World,” “Queechy,” and “Melbourne
House,”—with its intolerable little
prig of a heroine—were, if possible, more
immoderately read in England than at home.
And in this case, the serious wrong-doing lies
at our doors. If the “Leila” books be rather
too full of sermons and pious conversations,
long conversations of an uncompromisingly
didactic order, they are nevertheless interesting
and wholesome, brimming with adventures, and
humanized by a very agreeable sense of fun.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
Moreover, these English children, although
incredibly good, have the grace to be unconscious
of their goodness. Even Selina, who,
like young Wackford Squeers, is “next door
but one to a cherubim,” is apparently unaware
of the fact. Leila does not instruct her father.
She receives counsel quite humbly from his
lips, though she is full eight years old when
the first volume opens. Matilda has never any
occasion to remonstrate gently with her mother;
and little Alfred fails, in the whole course of
his infant life, to once awaken in his parents’
friends an acute sense of their own unworthiness.</p>
<p>This conservative attitude is due, perhaps,
to the rigid prejudices of the Old World. In
our freer air, children, released from thraldom,
develop swiftly into guides and teachers. We
first introduced into the literature of the Sunday-school
the offensively pious little Christian
who makes her father and mother, her uncles
and aunts, even her venerable grandparents,
the subjects of her spiritual ministrations. We
first taught her to confront, Bible in hand,
the harmless adults who had given her birth,
and to annihilate their feeble arguments with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
denunciatory texts. We first surrounded her
with the persecutions of the worldly-minded,
that her virtues might shine more glaringly
in the gloom, and disquisitions on duty be
never out of place. Daisy, in “Melbourne
House,” is an example of a perniciously good
child who has the conversion of her family on
her hands, and is well aware of the dignity of
her position. Her trials and triumphs, her
tears and prayers, her sufferings and rewards,
fill two portly volumes, and have doubtless inspired
many a young reader to set immediately
about the correction of her parents’ faults.
The same lesson is taught with even greater
emphasis by a more recent writer, whose works,
I am told, are so exceedingly popular that she
is not permitted to lay down her pen. Hundreds
of letters reach her every year, begging
for a new “Elsie” book; and the amiability
with which she responds to the demand has
resulted in a fair-sized library,—twice as many
volumes probably as Sir Walter Scott ever
read in the whole course of his childish life.</p>
<p>Now if, as the “Ladies’ Home Journal”
informs us, “there has been no character in
American juvenile fiction who has attained<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>
more widespread interest and affection than
Elsie Dinsmore,” then children have altered
strangely since I was young, and “skipping
the moral” was a recognized habit of the
nursery. It would be impossible to skip the
moral of the “Elsie” books, because the residuum
would be nothingness. Lucy Fairchild
and Daisy Randolph are hardened reprobates
compared with Elsie Dinsmore. It is
true we are told when the first book opens
that she is “not yet perfect;” but when we
find her taking her well-worn Bible out of her
desk—she is eight years old—and consoling
herself with texts for the injustice of grown-up
people, we begin to doubt the assertion.
When we hear her say to a visitor old enough
to be her father: “Surely you know that
there is no such thing as a little sin. Don’t
you remember about the man who picked up
sticks on the Sabbath day?” the last lingering
hope as to her possible fallibility dies in
our dejected bosoms. We are not surprised
after this to hear that she is unwilling to wear
a new frock on Sunday, lest she should be
tempted to think of it in church; and we are
fully prepared for the assurance that she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
knows her father “is not a Christian,” and
that she “listens with pain” to his unprincipled
conjecture that when a man leads an
honest, upright, moral life, is regular in his
attendance at church, and observes all the
laws, he probably goes to heaven. This sanguine
statement is as reprehensible to Elsie as
it would have been to the Fairchild family;
and when Mr. Dinsmore—a harmless, but
very foolish and consequential person—is
taken ill, his little daughter pours out her
heart “in agonizing supplication that her dear,
dear papa might be spared, <i>at least until he
was fit to go to Heaven</i>.”</p>
<p>A few old-fashioned people will consider
this mental attitude an unwholesome one for
a child, and will perhaps be of the opinion
that it is better for a little girl to do something
moderately naughty herself than to
judge her parents so severely. But Elsie is
a young Rhadamanthus, from whose verdicts
there is no appeal. She sees with dismay her
father amusing himself with a novel on Sunday,
and begs at once that she may recite to
him some verses. Forgetful of her principles,
he asks her, when convalescing from his tedious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>
illness, to read aloud to him for an hour.
Alas! “The book her father bade her read
was simply a fictitious moral tale, without a
particle of religious truth in it, and, Elsie’s
conscience told her, entirely unfit for the Sabbath.”
In vain Mr. Dinsmore reminds her
that he is somewhat older than she is, and assures
her he would not ask her to do anything
he thought was wrong. “‘But, papa,’ she
replied timidly,”—she is now nine,—“‘you
know the Bible says, “They measuring themselves
by themselves, and comparing themselves
among themselves, are not wise.”’”
This text failing to convince Mr. Dinsmore,
he endeavors, through wearisome chapter after
chapter, to break Elsie’s heroic resolution,
until, as a final resource, she becomes ill in her
turn, makes her last will and testament, and
is only induced to remain upon a sinful earth
when her father, contrite and humbled, implores
her forgiveness, and promises amendment.
It never seems to occur to the author
of these remarkable stories that a child’s most
precious privilege is to be exempt from serious
moral responsibility; that a supreme confidence
in the wisdom and goodness of his parents<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
is his best safeguard; and that to shake
this innocent belief, this natural and holy
creed of infancy, is to destroy childhood itself,
and to substitute the precocious melancholy of
a prig.</p>
<p>For nothing can be more dreary than the
recital of Elsie’s sorrows and persecutions.
Every page is drenched with tears. She goes
about with “tear-swollen eyes,” she rushes
to her room “shaken with sobs,” her grief is
“deep and despairing,” she “cries and sobs
dreadfully,” she “stifles her sobs,”—but this
is rare,—she is “blinded with welling tears.”
In her more buoyant moments, a tear merely
“trickles down her cheek,” and on comparatively
cheerful nights she is content to shed
“a few quiet tears upon her pillow.” On
more serious occasions, “a low cry of utter
despair broke from her lips,” and when spoken
to harshly by her father, “with a low cry of
anguish, she fell forward in a deep swoon.”
And yet I am asked to believe that this dismal,
tear-soaked, sobbing, hysterical little girl
has been adopted by healthy children as one
of the favorite heroines of “American juvenile
fiction.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span></p>
<p>In all these books, the lesson of self-esteem
and self-confidence is taught on every page.
Childish faults and childish virtues are over-emphasized
until they appear the only important
things on earth. Captain Raymond, a
son-in-law of the grown-up Elsie, hearing that
his daughter Lulu has had trouble with her
music-teacher, decides immediately that it is
his duty to leave the navy, and devote himself
to the training and discipline of his young
family; a notion which, if generally accepted,
would soon leave our country without defenders.
On one occasion, Lulu, who is an
unlucky girl, kicks—under sore provocation—what
she thinks is the dog, but what turns
out, awkwardly enough, to be the baby. The
incident is considered sufficiently tragic to fill
most of the volume, and this is the way it is
discussed by the other children,—children
who belong to an order of beings as extinct,
I believe and hope, as the dodo:—</p>
<p>“‘If Lu had only controlled her temper
yesterday,’ said Max, ‘what a happy family
we would be.’</p>
<p>“‘Yes,’ sighed Grace. ‘Papa is punishing
her very hard and very long; but of course
he knows best, and he loves her.’</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span></p>
<p>“‘Yes, I am sure he does,’ assented Max.
‘So he won’t give her any more punishment
than he thinks she needs. It will be a fine
thing for her, and all the rest of us, too, if this
hard lesson teaches her never to get into a
passion again.’”</p>
<p>Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies
than to wallow in self-righteousness like this!</p>
<p>One more serious charge must be brought
against these popular Sunday-school stories.
They are controversial, and, like most controversial
tales, they exhibit an abundance of
ignorance and a lack of charity that are
equally hurtful to a child. It is curious to
see women handle theology as if it were
knitting, and one no longer wonders at Ruskin’s
passionate protest against such temerity.
“Strange and miserably strange,” he cries,
“that while they are modest enough to doubt
their powers and pause at the threshold of
sciences, where every step is demonstrable and
sure, they will plunge headlong and without
one thought of incompetency into that science
at which the greatest men have trembled, and
in which the wisest have erred.” But then
Ruskin, as we all know, was equally impatient<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
of “converted children who teach their parents,
and converted convicts who teach honest
men,” and these two classes form valuable
ingredients in Sunday-school literature. The
theological arguments of the “Elsie” books
would be infinitely diverting if they were not
so infinitely acrimonious. One of them, however,
is such a masterpiece of feminine pleading
that its absurdity must win forgiveness
for its unkindness. A young girl, having
entered the church of Rome, is told with confidence
that her hierarchy is spoken of in the
seventeenth chapter of Revelations as “Babylon
the Great, the mother of harlots and
abominations of the earth.” “But how do
you know,” she asks, not unnaturally, “that
my church is meant by these lines?”</p>
<p>“‘Because,’ is the triumphant and unassailable
reply, ‘<i>she and she alone answers to the
description</i>.’”</p>
<p>This I consider the finest piece of reasoning
that even Sunday-school books have ever
yielded me. It is simply perfect; but there
are other passages equally objectionable, and
a little less amusing. In one of the stories,
Captain Raymond undertakes to convert a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>
Scotch female Mormon, which he does with
astonishing facility, a single conversation being
sufficient to bring her to a proper frame
of mind. His most powerful argument is that
Mormonism must be a false religion because
it so closely resembles Popery, which, he
tolerantly adds, “has been well called Satan’s
masterpiece.” The Scotch woman who, unlike
most of her race, is extremely vague in
her theology, hazards the assertion that Popery
“forbids men to marry,” while Mormonism
commands it.</p>
<p>“‘The difference in regard to that,’ said
Captain Raymond, ‘is not so great as may
appear at first sight. Both pander to men’s
lusts; both train children to forsake their
parents; both teach lying and murder, when
by such crimes they are expected to advance
the cause of their church.’”</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Alas for the rarity</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Of Christian charity</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Under the sun!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>I would the pious women who so wantonly
and wickedly assail the creeds in which their
fellow creatures find help and hope, would
learn at least to express themselves—especially<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>
when their words are intended for little
children to read—with some approach to
decency and propriety.</p>
<p>“Gin I thocht Papistry a fause thing, <i>which
I do</i>,” says the sturdy, gentle Ettrick Shepherd,
“I wadna scruple to say sae, in sic
terms as were consistent wi’ gude manners,
and wi’ charity and humility of heart. But
I wad ca’ nae man a leear.” A simple lesson
in Christianity and forbearance which might
be advantageously studied to-day.</p>
<p>There is no reason why the literature of the
Sunday-school, since it represents an important
element in modern bookmaking, should
be uniformly and consistently bad. There is
no reason why all the children who figure in
its pages should be such impossible little
prigs; or why all parents should be either
incredibly foolish and worldly minded, or so
inflexibly serious that they never open their
lips without preaching. There is no reason
why people, because they are virtuous or repentant,
should converse in stilted and unnatural
language. A contrite burglar in one of
these edifying stories confesses poetically,
“My sins are more numerous than the hairs<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>
of my head or the sands of the seashore,”—which
was probably true, but not precisely the
way in which the Bill Sykeses of real life are
wont to acknowledge the fact. In another
tale, an English one this time, a little girl
named Helen rashly asks her father for some
trifling information. He gives it with the
usual grandiloquence, and then adds, by way
of commendation: “Many children are so
foolish as to be ashamed to let those they converse
with discover that they do not comprehend
everything that is said to them, by which
means they often imbibe erroneous ideas, and
perhaps remain in ignorance on many essential
subjects, when, by questioning their friends,
they might easily have obtained correct and
useful knowledge.” If Helen ever ventured
on another query after that, she deserved her
fate.</p>
<p>Above all, there is no reason why books
intended for the pleasure as well as for the
profit of young children should be so melancholy
and dismal in their character. Nothing
is more unwholesome than dejection, nothing
more pernicious for any of us than to fix our
considerations stedfastly upon the seamy side<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>
of life. Crippled lads, consumptive mothers,
angelic little girls with spinal complaint, infidel
fathers, lingering death-beds, famished
families, innocent convicts, persecuted schoolboys,
and friendless children wrongfully accused
of theft, have held their own mournfully
for many years. It is time we admitted, even
into religious fiction, some of the conscious
joys of a not altogether miserable world. I
had recently in my service a pretty little house-maid
barely nineteen years old, neat, capable,
and good-tempered, but so perpetually down-cast
that she threw a cloud over our unreasonably
cheerful household. I grew melancholy
watching her at work. One day, going into
the kitchen, I saw lying open on her chair a
book she had just been reading. It purported
to be the experience of a missionary in one of
our large cities, and was divided into nine separate
stories. These were their titles, copied
verbatim on the spot:—</p>
<p>The Infidel.</p>
<p>The Dying Banker.</p>
<p>The Drunkard’s Death.</p>
<p>The Miser’s Death.</p>
<p>The Hospital.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span></p>
<p>The Wanderer’s Death.</p>
<p>The Dying Shirt-Maker.</p>
<p>The Broken Heart.</p>
<p>The Destitute Poor.</p>
<p>What wonder that my little maid was sad
and solemn when she recreated herself with
such chronicles as these? What wonder that,
like the Scotchman’s famous dog, “life was
full o’ sairiousness” for her, when religion and
literature, the two things which should make
up the sum of our happiness, had conspired,
under the guise of Sunday-school fiction, to
destroy her gayety of heart?</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_FETE_DE_GAYANT">THE FÊTE DE GAYANT.</h2>
</div>
<p>As far as I have ever seen provincial
France, it appears to be perpetually <i>en fête</i>.
Religiously or patriotically, it is always celebrating
something; and it does so in a splendid
whole-hearted fashion, concentrating all
the energy of a town into a few days or a few
hours of ardent demonstration. <i>Les fêtes
religieuses</i> are without doubt the most charming
and picturesque; and the smaller the
place, the more curious and time-honored the
observances. It is wonderful, too, to note
the resources of even the poorest community.
Auray, with its few straggling streets, is little
better than a village; yet here, on the Fête
du Sacré Cœur, I saw a procession so beautiful
and so admirably organized that it would
have done credit to any city of France. Scores
of priests and hundreds of weather-beaten men
and women moved slowly through the narrow
lanes, or knelt before the rude altars that had
been erected at every turning. Not a house<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span>
in Auray that had not been hung with linen
sheets; not a rood of ground that was not
strewn with flowers and fresh green leaves.
Bands of little girls, dressed in blue and
white, surrounded the statue of the Madonna,
and the crimson banner of the Sacred Heart
was borne by tiny boys, with red sashes around
their waists and wreaths of red roses on their
curly heads, looking absurdly like Bonfigli’s
flower-crowned angels. One solemn child personated
the infant St. John. He wore a
scanty goatskin, and no more. A toy lamb,
white and woolly, was tucked under his arm,
and a slender cross grasped in his baby hand.
By his side walked an equally youthful Jeanne
d’Arc, attired in a blue spangled skirt and
a steel breastplate, with a helmet, a nodding
plume, a drawn sword, and a pair of gauzy
wings to indicate that approaching beatification
which is the ardent desire of every French
Catholic.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Notre mère, la France, est de Jeanne la fille,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">and she is to be congratulated on so blithely
forgetting the unfilial nature of her conduct.
At every altar benediction was given to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>
kneeling throng, and a regiment of boys beat
their drums and sounded their trumpets shrilly
to warn those who were too far away for sight
that the sacred moment had come. It seemed
incredible that so small a place could have
supplied so many people, until I remembered
what an American is wont to forget,—that in
Auray there were no two ways of thinking.
Spectators, affected or disaffected, there were
none. Everybody old enough and strong
enough to walk joined in the procession; just
as everybody at Lourdes joined in the great
procession of the Fête Dieu, when the hundreds
were multiplied to thousands, when the
mountain side at dusk seemed on fire with
myriads of twinkling tapers, and the pilgrim
chant, plaintive, monotonous, and unmusical,
was borne by the night winds far away over
the quiet valley of the Gave.</p>
<p>On these occasions I have been grateful to
the happy accident, or design, that made me
a participant in such scenes. But there have
been other days when provincial towns <i>en fête</i>
meant the acme of discomfort for wearied
travelers. It was no especial grievance, indeed,
that Compiègne should continue to celebrate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>
the 14th of July long after it had
merged into the 15th, by playing martial airs,
and firing off guns directly under my bedroom
window. I felt truly that I should have been
but little better off elsewhere; for there is not
a corner of France, nor a single French dependency,
that does not go mad annually with
delight because a rabble destroyed one of the
finest fortresses in Europe. But it did seem
hard that we should reach Amiens just when
the combined attractions of the races and a
fair had filled that quiet spot with tumult and
commotion. Amiens is not a town that takes
kindly to excitement. It is contemplative in
character, and boisterous gayety sits uneasily
upon its tranquil streets. Even the landlady
of our very comfortable hotel appeared to
recognize and deplore the incongruity of the
situation. Her house was full to overflowing;
her dining-room could not hold its famished
guests; yet, instead of rejoicing, she bewailed
the hungry crowds who had wrecked the harmony
of her well-ordered inn.</p>
<p>“If madame had only come two days ago,”
she protested, “madame would then have seen
Amiens at its best; and, moreover, she would<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>
have been properly waited on. My servants
are trained, they are attentive, they are polite,
they would have taken care that madame had
everything she required. But now! What,
then, does madame think of this so sad disorder?”</p>
<p>Madame assured her she thought the servants
were doing all that could be required of
mortal men; and, indeed, these nimble creatures
fairly flew from guest to guest, and from
room to room. I never saw one of them even
lapse into a walk. I tried to describe to her
the behavior of domestics in our own land,
recalling to memory a sudden invasion of one
of the Yellowstone Park hotels by a band of
famished tourists,—their weary waiting, their
humble attitude, their meek appeals for food,
and the stolid indifference of the negro waiters
to their most urgent needs. But this imperious
little Frenchwoman merely held up her
hands in horror at such anarchical conduct.
A mob of communists engaged in demolishing
the cathedral of Amiens would have seemed
less terrible to her than a mob of servants refusing
to wait swiftly upon hungry travelers.
She was so serious in her anxiety for our comfort<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>
that her mind appeared visibly relieved
when, on the second day, we decided that we
too were weary of noise and excitement, and
would move on that afternoon to Douai.
There, at least, we told ourselves, we should
find the drowsy quiet we desired. The image
of the dull old town—which we had never
seen—rose up alluringly before us. We
pictured even the station, tranquil and empty
like so many stations in rural France, with a
leisurely little engine sauntering in occasionally,
and a solitary porter roused from his nap,
and coming forward, surprised but smiling, to
handle our numerous bags. These pretty fancies
soothed our nerves and beguiled our idle idleness
until the three hours’ trip was over, and
Douai was reached at last. Douai! Yes;
but Douai in a state of apparent frenzy, with
a surging crowd whose uproar could be heard
above our engine’s shriek,—hundreds of
people rushing hither and thither, climbing
into cars, clamoring over friends, laughing,
shouting, blowing trumpets, and behaving
generally in a fashion which made Amiens
silent by comparison. For one moment we
stood stunned by the noise and confusion; and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>
then the horrid truth forced itself upon our
unwilling minds: Douai was <i>en fête</i>.</p>
<p>We made our way through the throng of
people into the square outside the station, and
took counsel briefly with one another. We
were tired, we were hungry, and it was growing
late; but should we ignore these melancholy
conditions, and push bravely on for
Lille? Lille, says Baedeker, has “two hundred
thousand inhabitants,” and cities of that
size have grown too big for play. We thought
of the discomforts which probably awaited us
at Douai in a meagre inn, crowded with noisy
<i>bourgeois</i>, and were turning resolutely back,
when suddenly there came the sound of drums
playing a gay and martial air, and in another
minute, surrounded by a clamorous mob, the
Sire de Gayant and his family moved slowly
into sight.</p>
<p>Thirty feet high was the Sire de Gayant,
and his nodding plumes overtopped the humble
roofs by which he passed. His steel
breastplate glittered in the evening sun; his
mighty mace looked like a May-pole; his countenance
was grave and stern. The human
pygmies by his side betrayed their insignificance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span>
at every step. They ran backward and
forward, making all the foolish noises they
could. They rode on hobby-horses. They
played ridiculous antics. They were but children,
after all, gamboling irresponsibly at the
feet of their own Titanic toy. Behind the
Sire de Gayant came his wife, in brocaded
gown, with imposing farthingale and stomacher.
Pearls wreathed her hair and fell upon
her massive bosom. Earrings a handbreadth
in size hung from her ears, and a fan as big
as a fire-screen was held lightly by a silver
chain. Like Lady Corysande, “her approaching
mien was full of majesty;” yet she looked
affable and condescending, too, as befitted a
dame of parts and noble birth. Her children
manifested in their bearing more of pride and
less of dignity. There was even something
theatrical in the velvet cap and swinging cloak
of her only son; and Mademoiselle Gayant
held her head erect in conscious complacency,
while her long brown ringlets fluttered in the
breeze.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Of course the village girls</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Who envy me my curls,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">she seemed to murmur as she passed stiffly by.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span></p>
<p>Happily, however, there was still another
member of this ancient family, more popular
and more well beloved than all the rest,—Mademoiselle
Thérèse, “<i>la petite Binbin</i>,”
who for two hundred years has been the friend
and idol of every child in Douai. A sprightly
and attractive little girl was Mademoiselle
Thérèse, barely eight feet high, and wearing
a round cap and spotless pinafore. In her
hand she carried a paper windmill, that antique
Douai toy with which we see the angels
and the Holy Innocents amusing themselves
in Bellegambe’s beautiful old picture, the
Altar-piece of Anchin. She ran hither and
thither with uncertain footsteps, pausing now
and then to curtsy prettily to some admiring
friends in a doorway; and whenever the pressure
of the crowd stopped her progress, the
little children clamored to be held up in their
fathers’ arms to kiss her round, smooth
cheeks. One by one they were lifted in the
air, and one by one I saw them put their arms
around la Binbin’s neck, and embrace her so
heartily that I wondered how she kept herself
clean and uncrumpled amid these manifold
caresses. As she went by, the last of that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>
strange procession, we moved after her, without
another thought of Lille and its comfortable
hotels. Comfort, forsooth! Were we
not back in the fifteenth century, when comfort
had still to be invented? Was that not
the Song of Gayant which the drums were
beating so gayly? And who yet ever turned
their backs upon Douai when the famous Ranz
des Douaisiens was ringing triumphantly in
their ears?</p>
<p>For this little French town, smaller than
many a ten-year-old city in the West, has an
ancient and honorable past; and her martial
deeds have been written down on more than
one page of her country’s history. The Fête
de Gayant is old; so old that its origin has
been lost in an obscurity which a number of
industrious scholars have tried in vain to penetrate.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Ce que c’est que Gayant? Ma foi, je n’en sais rien.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Ce que c’est que Gayant? Nul ne le sait en Flandre.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">The popular belief is that a knight of gigantic
size fought valorously in behalf of Douai
when the city, spent and crippled, made her
splendid defense against Louis XI., and that
his name is still preserved with gratitude by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>
the people whom he helped to save. Certain
it is that the fête dates from 1479, the year
that Louis was repulsed; and whether or not
a real Gayant ever stood upon the walls, there
is little doubt that the procession celebrates
that hard-won victory. But the Church has
not been backward in claiming the hero
for her own, and identifying him with St.
Maurand, the blessed patron of Douai. St.
Maurand, it is said, fought for the welfare
of his town as St. Iago fought for the glory of
Spain; and there is a charming legend to
show how keenly he watched over the people
who trusted to his care. In 1556, on the
night following the feast of the Epiphany,
Admiral Coligny planned to surprise the city,
which, ignorant of its danger, lay sleeping at
the mercy of its foe. But just as St. George,
St. Mark, and St. Nicholas aroused the old
fisherman, and went out into the storm to do
battle with demons for the safety of Venice,
so St. Maurand prepared to defeat the crafty
assailant of Douai. At midnight he appeared
by the bedside of the monk whose duty it was
to ring the great bells of St. Amé, and bade
him arise and call the brethren to matins.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>
The monk, failing to recognize the august
character of his visitor, protested drowsily
that it was too early, and that, after the fatigue
and lengthy devotions of the feast, it would
be but humanity to allow the monastery another
hour of slumber. St. Maurand, however,
insisted so sternly and so urgently that
the poor lay brother, seeing no other way to
rid himself of importunity, arose, stumbled
into the belfry, and laid his hands upon the
dangling ropes. But hardly had he given
them the first faint pull when, with a mighty
vibration, the bells swung to and fro as
though spirits were hurling them through the
air. So furiously were they tossed that the
brazen clangor of their tongues rang out into
the night with an intensity of menace that
awoke every man in Douai to a swift recognition
of his peril. Soldiers sprang to arms;
citizens swarmed out of their comfortable
homes; and while the bells still pealed forth
their terrible summons, those who were first
at the defenses saw for one instant the blessed
St. Maurand standing in shining armor on the
ramparts, guarding the city of his adoption as
St. Michael guards the hidden gates of paradise.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span></p>
<p>So the Church will have it that the knight
Gayant is no other than the holy son of Adalbald;
and as for Madame Gayant and her
family, who seem like a questionable encumbrance
upon saintship, it is clearly proved that
Gayant had neither wife nor child until 1665,
when the good people of Douai abruptly ended
his cheerful days of celibacy. Indeed, there
are historians so lost to all sense of honor and
propriety as to insist that this beloved Titan
owes his origin neither to Flemish heroism nor
to the guardianship of saints, but to the efforts
made by the Spanish conquerors of Douai to
establish popular pastimes resembling those of
Spain. According to these base-minded antiquarians,
Gayant was an invention of Charles
V., who added a variety of pageants to the
yearly procession with which the city celebrated
its victory over Louis XI.; and when
the Spaniards were finally driven from the
soil, the knight remained as a popular hero,
vaguely associated with earlier deeds of arms.
That he was an object of continual solicitude—and
expense—is proven by a number of
entries in the archives of Douai. In 1665,
seven florins were paid to the five men who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>
carried him through the streets, and twenty
pastars to the two boys who danced before him,
to say nothing of an additional outlay of six
florins for the white dancing-shoes provided
for them. Moreover, this being his wedding
year, two hundred and eighty-three florins—a
large sum for those days—were spent on
Madame Gayant’s gown, besides seventeen
florins for her wig, and over forty florins for
her jewels and other decorations. A wife is
ever a costly luxury, but when she chances to
be over twenty feet high, her trousseau becomes
a matter for serious consideration. In
1715, the price of labor having risen, and the
knight’s family having increased, it cost thirty-three
florins to carry them in procession,
Mademoiselle Thérèse, who was then too young
to walk, being drawn in a wagon, probably for
the first time. The repainting of faces, the
repairing of armor, the replacing of lost pearls
or broken fans, are all accounted for in these
careful annals; and it is through them, also,
that we learn how the Church occasionally
withdrew her favor from the Sire de Gayant,
and even went so far as to place him under a
ban. M. Guy de Sève, Bishop of Arras, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>
1699, and M. Louis François Marc-Hilaire de
Conzié, Bishop of Arras in 1770, were both
of the opinion that the fête had grown too
secular, not to say licentious in its character,
and, in spite of clamorous discontent, the procession
was sternly prohibited. But French
towns are notably wedded to their idols. Douai
never ceased to love and venerate her gigantic
knight; and after a time, perhaps through the
good offices of St. Maurand, he overcame his
enemies, reëstablished his character with the
Church, and may be seen to-day, as we had
the happiness of seeing him, carried in triumph
through those ancient streets that welcomed
him four hundred years ago.</p>
<p>The Fête de Gayant is not a brief affair,
like Guy Fawkes day or the Fourth of July.
It lasts from the 8th of July until the 11th,
and is made the occasion of prolonged rejoicing
and festivity. In the public square, boys are
tilting like knights of old, or playing antiquated
games that have descended to them from their
forefathers. Greased poles hung with fluttering
prizes tempt the unwary; tiny donkeys,
harnessed and garlanded with flowers, are led
around by children; and a discreet woman in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>
spangled tights sits languidly on a trapeze,
waiting for the sous to be collected before beginning
her performance. From this post of
vantage she espies us standing on the outskirts
of the crowd, and sends her little son, a pretty
child, brave in gilt and tinsel, to beg from us.</p>
<p>As it chances, I have given all my sous to
earlier petitioners, and I open my collapsed
pocket book to show him how destitute I am.
With a swift corresponding gesture he turns
his little tin canister upside down, and shakes
it plaintively, proving that it is even emptier
than my purse. This appeal is irresistible.
In the dearth of coppers, a silver coin is found
for him, which his mother promptly acknowledges
by going conscientiously through the
whole of her slender répertoire. Meanwhile,
the child chatters fluently with us. He travels
all the time, he tells us, and has been to Italy
and Switzerland. His father can speak Italian
and a little English. He likes the English
people best of all,—a compliment to our
supposed nationality; they are the richest,
most generous, most charming and beautiful
ladies in the world. He says this, looking,
not at my companions, who in some sort merit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span>
the eulogium, but straight at me, with a robust
guile that is startling in its directness. I have
given the franc. To me is due the praise.
Poor little lad! It must be a precarious and
slender income earned by that jaded mother,
even in time of fête; for provincial France,
though on pleasure bent, hath, like Mrs.
Gilpin, a very frugal mind. She does not
fling money about with British prodigality,
nor consume gallons of beer with German
thirst, nor sink her scanty savings in lottery
tickets with Italian fatuity. No, she drinks
her single glass of wine, or cider, or syrup
and water, and looks placidly at all that may
be seen for nothing, and experiences the joys
of temperance. She knows that her strength
lies in husbanding her resources, and that vast
are the powers of thrift.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, each day brings its allotted diversions.
Gayly decorated little boats are
sailing on the Scarpe, and fancying themselves
a regatta. Archers are contesting for prizes
in the Place St. Amé, where, hundreds of years
ago, their forefathers winged their heavy bolts.
A <i>carrousel vélocipédique</i> is to be followed by
a ball; carrier pigeons are being freed in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>
Place Carnot; a big balloon is to ascend from
the esplanade; and excellent concerts are
played every afternoon in the pretty Jardin
des Plantes. It is hard to make choice among
so many attractions, especially as two days out
of the four the Sire de Gayant and his family
march through the streets, and draw us irresistibly
after them. But we see the archers, and
the pigeons, and the balloon, which takes three
hours to get ready, and three minutes to be
out of sight, carrying away in its car a grizzled
aeronaut, and an adventurous young woman
who embraces all her friends with dramatic
fervor, and unfurls the flag of France as she
ascends, to the unutterable admiration of the
crowd. We hear a concert, also, sitting comfortably
in the shade, and thinking how pleasant
it would be to have a glass of beer to help
the music along. But the natural affinity, the
close and enduring friendship between music
and beer which the Germans understand so
well, the French have yet to discover. They
are learning to drink this noble beverage—in
small doses—and to forgive it its Teutonic
flavor. I have seen half a dozen men sitting
in front of a restaurant at Lille or at Rouen,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span>
each with a tiny glass of beer before him; but
I have never beheld it poured generously out
to the thunderous accompaniment of a band.
Even at Marseilles, where, faithful to destiny,
we encountered a musical fête so big and
grand that three hotels rejected us, and the
cabmen asked five francs an hour,—even
amid this tumult of sweet sounds, from which
there was no escaping, we failed ignominiously
when we sought to hearten ourselves to a
proper state of receptivity with beer.</p>
<p>At the Douai concerts no one dreamed of
drinking anything. The townspeople sat in
decorous little groups under the trees, talking
furtively when the loudness of the clarionets
permitted them, and reserving their enthusiastic
applause for the Chant de Gayant, with which,
as in honor bound, each entertainment came to
a close. Young girls, charmingly dressed, lingered
by their mothers’ sides, never even lifting
their dark eyes to note the fine self-appreciation
of the men who passed them. If they
spoke at all, it was in fluttering whispers to
one another; if they looked at anything, it was
at one another’s gowns. They are seldom
pretty, these sallow daughters of France; yet,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>
like Gautier’s Carmen, their ugliness has in it
a grain of salt from that ocean out of which
Venus rose. No girls in the whole wide world
lead duller lives than theirs. They have neither
the pleasures of a large town nor the
freedom of a little one. They may not walk
with young companions, even of their own sex.
They may not so much as to go church alone.
Novels, romances, poetry, plays, operas, all
things that could stimulate their imaginations
and lift them out of the monotonous routine of
life, are sternly prohibited. Perpetual espionage
forbids the healthy growth of character
and faculty, which demand some freedom and
solitude for development. The strict seclusion
of a convent school is exchanged for a
colorless routine of small duties and smaller
pleasures. And yet these young girls, bound
hand and foot by the narrowest conventionalities,
are neither foolish nor insipid. A dawning
intelligence, finer than humored precocity
can ever show, sits on each tranquil brow.
When they speak, it is with propriety and
grace. In the restrained alertness of their
brown eyes, in their air of simplicity and self-command,
in the instinctive elegance of their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>
dress, one may read, plainly written, the subtle
possibilities of the future. That offensive and
meaningless phrase, the woman problem, is
seldom heard in France, where all problems
solve themselves more readily than elsewhere.
Midway between the affectionate subservience
of German wives and daughters and the gay
arrogance of our own, with more self-reliance
than the English, and a clearer understanding
of their position than all the other three have
ever grasped, Frenchwomen find little need
to wrangle for privileges which they may
easily command. The resources of tact and
good taste are well-nigh infinite, and to them
is added a capacity for administration and
affairs which makes the French gentleman
respect his wife’s judgment, and places the
French shopkeeper at the mercy of his spouse.
In whatever walk of life these young provincial
girls are destined to tread, they will have
no afflicting doubts as to the limits of their
usefulness. They will probably never even
pause to ask themselves what men would do
without them, nor to point a lesson vaingloriously
from the curious fact that Douai gave
Gayant a wife.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="CAKES_AND_ALE">CAKES AND ALE.</h2>
</div>
<p class="center">“The Muses smell of wine.”</p>
<p>It is with reasonable hesitation that I venture
upon a theme which no pleading words
of Horace can ever make acceptable to a
nineteenth-century conscience. The world at
present is full of people to whom drinking-songs
are inseparably associated with drinking
habits, and drinking habits with downright
drunkenness; and it would be hard to persuade
them that the sweet Muses have never
smiled upon the joyless bestiality which
wrecks the lives of men. Even in days long
past, when consciences had still to be developed,
and poets sang that wine was made to
scatter the cares of earth, the crowning grace
of self-control was always the prize of youth.
When little Aristion, her curls crowned with
roses, drained the contents of three golden
goblets before beginning her dance, she was
probably as careful to avoid unseemly intoxication
as is the college athlete of to-day training<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>
for the gentle game of football; yet none
the less her image is abhorrent to our peculiar
morality, which can ill endure such irresponsible
gayety of heart. The perpetual intrusion
of ethics into art has begotten a haunting
anxiety lest perchance for one glad half-hour
we should forget that it is our duty to be
serious. I had this lesson forcibly impressed
upon me a few years ago when I wrote a harmless
essay upon war-songs, and a virtuous critic
reminded me, with tearful earnestness, that
while there was nothing really hurtful in such
poetry, it would be better far if I turned my
attention to the nobler contest which Lady
Somerset was then waging so valiantly against
intemperance.</p>
<p>Now, to the careless mind, it does not at
first sight appear that war-songs, considered
solely in their literary aspect, have any especial
connection with intemperance. I am not
even prepared to admit that drinking-songs
can be held responsible for drink. When
Englishmen began to cultivate habits of consistent
insobriety, they ceased to sing of wine.
The eighteenth century witnessed, not only
the steady increase of drunkenness in every<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>
walk of life, but also its willful and ostentatious
defense. From the parson to the ploughman,
from the peer to the poacher, all classes
drank deeply, and with the comfortable consciousness
that they were playing manly parts.
It was one of the first lessons taught to youth,
and fathers encouraged their sons—vainly
sometimes, as in the case of Horace Walpole—to
empty as many bottles as their steady
hands could hold. “A young fellow had better
be thrice drunk in one day,” says honest
Sir Hildebrand to Frank Osbaldistone, “than
sneak sober to bed like a Presbyterian.” And
there is true paternal pride in the contrast the
squire draws between this strange, abstemious
relative from town and his own stalwart,
country-bred boys, “who would have been
all as great milksops as yourself, Nevey,”
he heartily declares, “if I had not nursed
them, as one may say, on the toast and
tankard.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it was not in the eighteenth
century, with its deep potations, and its nightly
collapses of squire and squireen under their
mahogany tables, that the gay English drinking-songs
were written. The eighteenth-century<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>
drinker had no time and no breath to
waste in singing. Burns, indeed, a rare exception,
gave to Scotland those reckless verses
which Mr. Arnold found “insincere” and
“unsatisfactory,” and from which more austere
critics have shrunk in manifest disquiet.
Perhaps the reproach of insincerity is not
altogether undeserved. There are times when
Burns seems to exult over the moral discomfort
of his reader, and this is not the spirit
in which good love-songs, or good war-songs,
or good drinking-songs are written. Yet who
shall approach the humor of that transfigured
proverb which Solomon would not have recognized
for his own; or the honest exultation
of these two lines:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“O Whiskey! soul o’ plays an’ pranks!</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Accept a bardie’s gratefu’ thanks!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">or, best of all, the genial gayety of “Willie
Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut,”—sovereign, says
Mr. Saintsbury, of the poet’s Bacchanalian
verse?—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“O, Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">And Rob and Allan came to pree;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Three blither hearts, that lee-lang night,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Ye wadna find in Christendie.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span></p>
<p class="p0">Here at last is the true ring, without bravado,
without conceit, without bestiality,—only the
splendid high spirits, the foolish, unhesitating
happiness of youth:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“It is the moon, I ken her horn,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">But, by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>When Burns sings in this strain, even those
who wear the blue ribbon may pause and
listen kindly, remembering, if they like, before
leaving the world of “Scotch wit, Scotch
religion, and Scotch drink,” so repellent to
Mr. Arnold’s pitiless good taste, how another
jovial north-countryman has defined for them
the inestimable virtue of temperance. “Nae
man shall ever stop a nicht in my house,” says
the Ettrick Shepherd, “without partakin’ o’
the best that’s in it, be ’t meat or drink; and
if the coof canna drink three or four tummlers
or jugs o’ toddy, he has nae business in the
Forest. Now, sir, I ca’ that no an abstemious
life,—for why should any man be abstemious?—but
I ca’ ’t a temperate life, and o’ a’ the
virtues, there’s nane mair friendly to man than
Temperance.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span></p>
<p>Friendly indeed! Why, viewed in this
genial light, she is good-fellowship itself, and
hardly to be distinguished from the smiling
nymph whom Horace saw in the greenwood,
learning attentively the strains dictated to her
by the vine-crowned god of wine.</p>
<p>The best of the English drinking-songs were
written by the dramatists of the seventeenth
century, men who trolled out their vigorous
sentiments, linked sweetly together in flowing
verse, without the smallest thought or fear of
shocking anybody. Frankly indecorous, they
invite the whole wide world to drink with
them, to empty the brimming tankard passed
from hand to hand, and to reel home through
the frosty streets, where the watchman grins
at their unsteady steps, and quiet sleepers,
awakened from dull dreams, echo with drowsy
sympathy the last swelling cadence of their
uproarious song. Where there is no public
sentiment to defy, even Bacchanalian rioters
and Bacchanalian verses cease to be defiant.
What admirable good temper and sincerity in
Fletcher’s generous importunity!</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Drink to-day, and drown all sorrow,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">You shall perhaps not do it to-morrow:</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>
<div class="verse indent0">Best, while you have it, use your breath;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">There is no drinking after death.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Then let us swill, boys, for our health,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Who drinks well, loves the commonwealth.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And he that will to bed go sober</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Falls with the leaf still in October.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Upon this song successive changes have been
rung, until now its variations are bewildering,
and to it we owe the ever popular and utterly
indefensible glee roared out for generations
by many a lusty tavern chorus:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“He who goes to bed, and goes to bed sober,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Falls as the leaves do, and dies in October;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">But he who goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Lives as he ought to do, and dies an honest fellow.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>The most affectionate solicitude is continually
manifested by seventeenth-century poets
lest perchance unthinking mortals should neglect
or overlook their opportunities of drinking,
and so forfeit their full share of pleasure in
a pleasant world.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">is as much the motto of the drinker as of the
lover, and the mutability of life forever warns
him against wasting its flying moments in unprofitable
soberness.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Not long youth lasteth,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And old age hasteth.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“All things invite us</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Now to delight us,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">is the Elizabethan rendering of Father William’s
counsel; and the hospitable ghost in
Fletcher’s “Lovers’ Progress,” who, being
dead, must know whereof he speaks, conjures
his guests to</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Drink apace, while breath you have,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">You’ll find but cold drink in the grave.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Apart from life’s brevity and inconstancy,
there is always the incentive of patriotism and
national pride summoning the reveler to deep
and ever deeper potations. It is thus he
proves himself a true son of the soil, a loyal
and law-abiding Englishman.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“We’ll drink off our liquor while we can stand,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And hey for the honour of Old England!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">sang the Devonshire harvesters two hundred
years ago, connecting in some beery fashion
the glory of their native isle with the gallons
of home-brewed ale they consumed so cheerfully
in her name; and the same sentiment is
more intelligibly embodied in that graceless<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>
song of Shadwell’s which establishes conclusively
the duty of an honest citizen and taxpayer:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“The king’s most faithful subjects, we</div>
<div class="verse indent2">In service are not dull,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">We drink to show our loyalty,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">And make his coffers full.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Would all his subjects drink like us,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">We’d make him richer far,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">More powerful and more prosperous</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Than Eastern monarchs are.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>It may be noted, by way of illustration, that
Dryden, in his “Vindication of the Duke of
Guise,” remarks somewhat vindictively that
the only service Shadwell could render the
king was to increase his revenue by drinking.</p>
<p>Finally, in England, as in Greece and
Rome, black care sat heavily by the hearths
of men; and English singers, following the
examples of Horace and Anacreon, called
upon wine to drown the unwelcome guest.
“Fortune’s a jade!” they cried with Beaumont’s
Yeoman, but courage and strong drink
will bid the hussy stand. Davenant echoed
the sentiment defiantly in his mad round,</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Come, boys! a health, a health, a double health,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To those who ’scape from care by shunning wealth;”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span></p>
<p class="p0">and Ford gave the fullest expression to the
gay laws of Sans Souci in his drinking-song
in “The Sun’s Darling:”—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Cast away care; he that loves sorrow</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Lengthens not a day, nor can buy to-morrow;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Money is trash, and he that will spend it,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Let him drink merrily, Fortune will send it.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Pots fly about, give us more liquor,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Brothers of a rout, our brains will flow quicker;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Empty the cask; score up, we care not;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Fill all the pots again; drink on, and spare not.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>To pause in the generous swing of verses
like these, and call to mind Mrs. Jameson’s
refined and chilling verdict, “It is difficult
to sympathize with English drinking-songs,”
is like stepping from the sunshine of life into
the shaded drawing-room of genteel society.
Difficult to sympathize! Why, we may drink
nothing stronger than tea and Apollinaris
water all our lives; yet none the less the mad
music of Elizabethan song will dance merrily
in our hearts, and give even to us our brief
hour of illogical, unreasonable happiness.
What had the author of “The Diary of an
Ennuyée” to do with that robust age when
ennui had still to be invented? What was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>
she to think of the indecorous Bacchanalian
catches of Lyly and Middleton, or of the uncompromising
vulgarity of that famous song
from “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” or of the
unseemly jollity of Cleveland’s tavern-bred,
tavern-sung verse?</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Come hither, Apollo’s bouncing girl,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">And in a whole Hippocrene of Sherry,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Let’s drink a round till our brains do whirl,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Tuning our pipes to make ourselves merry;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">A Cambridge lass, Venus-like, born of the froth</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Of an old half-filled jug of barley-broth,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">She, she is my mistress, her suitors are many,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">But she’ll have a square-cap if e’er she have any.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Yet after discarding these ribald songs, with
which refined femininity is not presumed to
sympathize, there still remain such charming
verses as Ben Jonson’s</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Swell me a bowl with lusty wine,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Till I may see the plump Lyæus swim</div>
<div class="verse indent12">Above the brim.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">I drink as I would write,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">In flowing measure, filled with flame and sprite.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Or, if this be too scholarly and artificial, there
are the far more beautiful lines of Beaumont
and Fletcher:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“God Lysæus, ever young,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Ever honoured, ever sung,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Stained with blood of lusty grapes;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">In a thousand antic shapes</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Dance upon the maze’s brim,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">In the crimson liquor swim;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">From thy plenteous hand divine</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Let a river run with wine;</div>
<div class="verse indent4">God of youth, let this day here</div>
<div class="verse indent4">Enter neither care nor fear.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Or we may follow where Shakespeare leads,
and sing unhesitatingly with him:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Come, thou monarch of the vine,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!</div>
<div class="verse indent0">In thy vats our cares be drowned,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">With thy grapes our hairs be crowned,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Cup us, till the world go round—</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Cup us, till the world go round.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is only one drinking-song—a seventeenth-century
drinking-song, too—with
which I find it difficult to sympathize, and
that is the well-known and often-quoted verse
of Cowley’s, beginning,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“The thirsty earth drinks up the rain,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And thirsts and gapes for drink again.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Its strained and borrowed conceits which have
lost all charm in the borrowing, are not in accordance
with anything so natural and simple<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>
as conviviality. Men may give a thousand
foolish reasons for loving, and feel their folly
still unjustified; but drinking needs no such
steel-forged chain of arguments. Moreover
Cowley’s last lines,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Fill all the glasses up, for why</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Should every creature drink but I?</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Why, man of morals, tell me why?”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">give to the poem an air of protest which
destroys it. The true drinking-song does not
concern itself in the least with the “man of
morals,” nor with his verdict. And precisely
because it is innocent of any conscious offense
against morality, because it has not considered
the moral aspect of the case at all, it makes
its gay and graceless appeal to hearts wearied
with the perpetual consideration of social
reforms and personal responsibility. “Be
merry, friends!” it says in John Heywood’s
homely phrase,—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Mirth salveth sorrows most soundly:”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">and this “short, sweet text” is worth a solid
sermon in days when downright merriment is
somewhat out of favor.</p>
<p>The poet who of all others seems least aware<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>
that life has burdens, not only to be carried
when sent, but to be rigorously sought for
when withheld, is Robert Herrick. He is the
true singer of Cakes and Ale, or rather of
Curds and Cream; for in that pleasant
Devonshire vicarage, where no faint echo of
London streets or London taverns rouses him
from rural felicity, his heart turns easily to
country feasts and pastimes. It is true he rejoices
mightily in</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent20">“wassails fine,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Not made of ale, but spiced wine,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">yet even these innocent carousals are of Arcadian
simplicity. He loves, too, the fare
of Devon farmers,—the clotted cream, the
yellow butter, honey, and baked pears, and
fresh-laid eggs. He loves the Twelfth-Night
cake, with “joy-sops,”—alluring word,—the
“wassail-bowl” of Christmas, the “Whitsun
ale,” the almond paste sacred to wedding-rites,
the “bucksome meat and capring wine” that
crown the New Year’s board, and, above all,
the plenteous bounty of the Harvest Home.
In his easy, unvexed fashion, he is solicitous
that we, his readers, should learn, not “to
labor and to wait,” but to be idle and to enjoy,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span>
while idleness and joy still gild the passing
day.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">is the gay doctrine preached by this unclerical
clergyman. Even when he remembers perforce
that he is a clergyman, and turns his
heart to prayer, this is the thanksgiving that
rises sweetly to his lips:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth</div>
<div class="verse indent6">With guiltless mirth,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And giv’st me wassail-bowls to drink,</div>
<div class="verse indent6">Spiced to the brink.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Had the patronage of the Church never been
extended to Herrick, and had he lived on in
London, the friend of Jonson, and Selden,
and Fletcher, and kind, witty Bishop Corbet,
we should have lost the most charming pastoral
vignettes ever flung like scattered May-blossoms
into literature; but we should have
gained drinking-songs such as the world has
never known,—songs whose reckless music
would lure us even now from our watchful
propriety as easily as great Bacchus lured that
wise beast Cerberus, who gave his doggish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span>
heart and wagged his doggish tail, gentle and
innocent as a milk-fed puppy, when he saw the
god of wine.</p>
<p>The close of the seventeenth century witnessed
a revolution in English poetry, and the
great “coming event” of Queen Anne’s Augustan
age threw its shadow far before it,—a
shadow of reticence and impersonality. People
drank more and more, but they said less
and less about it. Even in the reign of
Charles II., though convivial songs were written
by the score, they had lost the ring of
earlier days; and we need only read a few of
the much-admired verses of Tom D’Urfey to
be convinced that periods of dissolute living
do not necessarily give birth to sincere and
reckless song. In the following century, sincerity
and recklessness were equally out of
date. Now and then a cheerful outburst, like
the drinking-song from Congreve’s “Way of
the World,” illumines our arid path, and
shows the source whence Thackeray drew his
inspiration for those delightful verses in “Rebecca
and Rowena” concerning the relative
pleasures of Pope and Sultan. Later on,
Sheridan gave us his glee in “The Duenna,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span>
and his ever popular toast in “The School for
Scandal,” which is not properly a drinking-song
at all. Then there came a time when the
spurious conviviality of Barry Cornwall passed
for something fine and genuine, and when
Thomas Haynes Bayly “gave to minstrelsy
the attributes of intellect, and reclaimed even
festive song from vulgarity.” And at precisely
this period, when a vapid elegance pervaded
the ditties warbled forth in refined
drawing-rooms, and when Moore alone, of all
the popular song-writers, held the secret of
true music in his heart, Thomas Love Peacock
wrote for respectable and sentimental
England five of the very best drinking-songs
ever given to an ungrateful world. No thought
of possible disapprobation vexed his soul’s
serenity. He lived in the nineteenth century,
as completely uncontaminated by nineteenth-century
ideals as though Robinson Crusoe’s
desert island had been his resting-place. The
shafts of his good-tempered ridicule were
leveled at all that his countrymen were striving
to prove sacred and beneficial. His easy
laugh rang out just when everybody was most
strenuous in the cause of progress. His wit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>
was admirably calculated to make people uncomfortable
and dissatisfied. And in addition
to these disastrous qualities, he apparently
thought it natural and reasonable and right
that English gentlemen—sensible, educated,
<i>married</i> English gentlemen—should sit
around their dinner-tables until the midnight
hour, drinking wine and singing songs with
boyish and scandalous joviality.</p>
<p>The songs he offered for these barbarian
entertainments are perfect in character and
form. Harmless mirth, a spirit of generous
good-fellowship, a clean and manly heart disarm,
or should disarm, all moral judgment,
while the grace and vigor of every line leave
the critic powerless to complain. “Hail to the
Headlong,” and “A Heel-tap! a Heel-tap!”
are the poet’s earliest tributes at the shrine
of Bacchus. He gained a fuller insight and
an ampler charity before he laid down his pen.
His three best poems, which cannot possibly
be omitted from such a paper as this, show
how time mellowed him, as it mellows wine.
We mark the ripening power, the surer touch,
the kinder outlook on a troubled world.
Peacock was but twenty-nine when he wrote<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>
“Headlong Hall.” He was thirty-two when
“Melincourt” was given to the world, and in
it his inimitable “Ghosts:”—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“In life three ghostly friars were we,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And now three friendly ghosts we be.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Around our shadowy table placed,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The spectral bowl before us floats:</div>
<div class="verse indent0">With wine that none but ghosts can taste</div>
<div class="verse indent0">We wash our unsubstantial throats.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts are we:</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To be laid in that Red Sea.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“With songs that jovial spectres chant,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Our old refectory still we haunt.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The traveler hears our midnight mirth:</div>
<div class="verse indent0">‘O list,’ he cries, ‘the haunted choir!</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The merriest ghost that walks the earth</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Is now the ghost of a ghostly friar.’</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts—three merry ghosts are we:</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Let the ocean be port, and we’ll think it good sport</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To be laid in that Red Sea.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>The next year, in “Nightmare Abbey,” appeared
the best known and the most admirable
of all his glees, a song which holds its own
even in an alien world, which is an admitted
favorite with singing societies, and which we
have all of us heard from time to time chanted<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span>
decorously by a row of sedate and serious gentlemen
in correct evening dress:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Seamen three! what men be ye?</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Gotham’s three wise men we be.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Whither in your bowl so free?</div>
<div class="verse indent2">To rake the moon from out the sea.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">And our ballast is old wine;</div>
<div class="verse indent4">And your ballast is old wine.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Who art thou so fast adrift?</div>
<div class="verse indent2">I am he they call Old Care.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Here on board we will thee lift.</div>
<div class="verse indent2">No: I may not enter there.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Wherefore so? ’Tis Jove’s decree</div>
<div class="verse indent4">In a bowl Care may not be;</div>
<div class="verse indent4">In a bowl Care may not be.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Fear ye not the waves that roll?</div>
<div class="verse indent2">No: in charmèd bowl we swim.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">What the charm that floats the bowl?</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Water may not pass the brim.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The bowl goes trim, the moon doth shine,</div>
<div class="verse indent4">And our ballast is old wine;</div>
<div class="verse indent4">And your ballast is old wine.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Last, but by no means least, in “Crotchet
Castle,” we have a drinking-song at once the
kindest and the most scandalous that the poet
ever wrote,—a song which is the final, definite,
unrepentant expression of heterodoxy:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“If I drink water while this doth last,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">May I never again drink wine;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">For how can a man, in his life of a span,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Do anything better than dine?</div>
<div class="verse indent0">We’ll dine and drink, and say if we think</div>
<div class="verse indent2">That anything better can be;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And when we have dined, wish all mankind</div>
<div class="verse indent2">May dine as well as we.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“And though a good wish will fill no dish,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">And brim no cup with sack,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring</div>
<div class="verse indent2">To illumine our studious track.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">O’er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes</div>
<div class="verse indent2">The light of the flask shall shine;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And we’ll sit till day, but we’ll find the way</div>
<div class="verse indent2">To drench the world with wine.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>With Peacock the history of English drinking-songs
is practically closed, and it does not
seem likely to be reopened in the immediate
future. Any approach to the forbidden theme
is met by an opposition too strenuous and universal
to be lightly set aside. We may not
love nor value books more than did our great-grandfathers,
but we have grown to curiously
overrate their moral influence, to fancy that
the passions of men and women are freed or
restrained by snatches of song, or the bits
of conversation they read in novels. Accordingly,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span>
a rigorous censorship is maintained
over the ethics of literature, with the rather
melancholy result that we hear of little else.
Trivialities have ceased to be trivial in a day
of microscopic research, and there is no longer
anything not worth consideration. We all
remember what happened when Lord Tennyson
wrote his “Hands all Round:”—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“First pledge our Queen, this solemn night,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Then drink to England, every guest.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>It is by no means a ribald or rollicking song.
On the contrary, there is something dutiful,
as well as justifiable, in the serious injunction
of its chorus:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent4">“Hands all round!</div>
<div class="verse indent4">God the traitor’s hope confound!</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To this great cause of Freedom, drink, my friends,</div>
<div class="verse indent2">And the great name of England, round and round.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Yet such was the scandal given to the advocates
of temperance by this patriotic poem,
and so lamentable were the reproaches which
ensued, that the “Saturday Review,” playing
for once the unwonted part of peacemaker,
“soothed and sustained the agitated frame”
of British sensitiveness by reminding her that
the laureate had given no hint as to what<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span>
liquor should be drunk in the cause of freedom,
and that he probably had it in his mind
to toast</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“the great name of England, round and round,”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class="p0">in milk or mineral waters. The more recent
experience of Mr. Rudyard Kipling suggests
forcibly the lesson taught our “Autocrat of
the Breakfast-Table,” when he sent his little
poem to a “festive and convivial” celebration,
and had it returned with “some slight
changes” to suit the sentiments of the committee:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Down, down with the tyrant that masters us all!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Hood, a good-tempered mocker always, took
note of the popular prejudice in his hospitable
lines by a “Member of a Temperance Society:”—</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Come, pass round the pail, boys, and give it no quarter,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Drink deep, and drink oft, and replenish your jugs.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>And Longfellow, with his usual directness,
went straight to the hearts of his readers
when, in simple seriousness, he filled his
antique pitcher, and sang his “Drinking
Song” in praise of water.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span></p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Come, old friend, sit down and listen!</div>
<div class="verse indent2">As it passes thus between us,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">How its wavelets laugh and glisten</div>
<div class="verse indent2">In the head of old Silenus!”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>This was the verse which New England,
and Mother England too, stood ready to applaud.
Every era has its cherished virtues,
and when the order changes, the wise do well
to change with it as speedily as they can.
Once there was a jolly old playwright named
Cratinus, who died of a broken heart on seeing
some Lacedæmonian soldiers fracture a
cask of wine, and let it run to waste. He is
mentioned kindly by ancient writers, but Peacock
is the last man to fling him a word of
sympathy. Once there was a time when
Chaucer received from England’s king the
grant of a pitcher of wine daily in the port of
London. What poet or public servant now
has, or hopes to have, such mark of royal
favor? Once Charles I. gave to Ben Jonson,
as poet laureate, one hundred pounds a year,
and a tierce of Spanish Canary. No such generous
drink comes now from Queen Victoria
to lend sparkle and vivacity to Mr. Austin’s
verse. Once Dr. Johnson, “the real primate,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span>
the soul’s teacher of all England,” says Carlyle,
declared roundly and without shocking
anybody, “Brandy, sir, is the drink for
heroes.” It is not thus that primates and
teachers of any land now hearten their wavering
disciples. Once the generous publishers
of “Marmion” sent Scott a hogshead of fine
claret to mark their appreciation of his verse.
It is not in this graceful fashion that authors
now receive their tokens of good will. The
jovial past is dead, quite dead, we keep repeating
sternly; yet its merry ghost smiles at us
broadly, in no way abashed by our frowns and
disapprobation. A friendly ghost it is, haunting
the secret chambers of our hearts with
laughter instead of groans, and echoes of old
songs in place of clanking chains,—a companionable
ghost, with brave tales to tell, and
jests to ease our pain, a word of wisdom when
we have wit to listen, a word of comfort when
we have time to heed.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Troll the bowl, the nut-brown bowl,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And here, kind mate, to thee!</div>
<div class="verse indent2">Let’s sing a dirge for Saint Hugh’s soul.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And drown it merrily.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="OLD_WINE_AND_NEW">OLD WINE AND NEW.</h2>
</div>
<p>Readers of “Old Mortality” will perhaps
remember that when Graham of Claverhouse
escorts Henry Morton as a prisoner to Edinburgh,
he asks that estimable and unfortunate
young non-conformist if he has ever read
Froissart. Morton, who was probably the last
man in Scotland to derive any gratification
from the Chronicles, answers that he has
not. “I have half a mind to contrive you
should have six months’ imprisonment,” says
the undaunted Claverhouse, “in order to procure
you that pleasure. His chapters inspire
me with more enthusiasm than even poetry
itself. And the noble canon, with what true
chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful
expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant
and high-bred knight, of whom it was
a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to
his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood
towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love!
Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>
over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be
it on the side he happens to favor or on the
other! But truly, for sweeping from the face
of the earth some few hundreds of villain
churls, who are born but to plough it, the
high-born and inquisitive historian has marvelous
little sympathy.”</p>
<p>I should like, out of my affection for the
Chronicles, to feel that Sir Walter overstated
the case when he put these cheerful
words into the mouth of Dundee; but it is
vain to deny that Froissart, living in a darkened
age, was as indifferent to the fate of the
rank and file as if he had been a great nineteenth-century
general. To be sure, the rank
and file were then counted by the hundreds
rather than by the thousands, and it took
years of continuous warfare to kill as many
soldiers as perished in one of our modern
battles. Moreover, the illuminating truth that
Jack is as good as his master—by help of
which we all live now in such striking brotherhood
and amity—had not then dawned upon
a proud and prejudiced world. Fighting was
the grand business of life, and that Jack did
not fight as well as his master was a fact<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span>
equally apparent to those who made history
and to those who wrote it. If the English
archers, the French men-at-arms, and the
Breton lances could be trusted to stand the
shock of battle, the “lusty varlets,” who
formed the bulk of every army, were sure
to run away; and the “commonalty” were
always ready to open their gates and deliver
up their towns to every fresh new-comer.
When Philip of Navarre was entreated to visit
Paris, then in a state of tumult and rebellion,
and was assured that the merchants and the
mob held him in equal affection, he resolutely
declined their importunities, concluding that
to put his faith in princes was, on the whole,
less dangerous than to confide it in the people.
“In commonalities,” observed this astute veteran,
“there is neither dependence nor union,
save in the destruction of all things good.”
“What can a base-born man know of honor?”
asks Froissart coldly. “His sole wish is to
enrich himself. He is like the otter, which,
entering a pond, devours all the fish therein.”</p>
<p>Now, if history, as Professor Seeley teaches
us, should begin with a maxim and end with
a moral, here are maxims and morals in abundance,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>
albeit they may have lost their flavor
for an altruistic age. For no one of the sister
Muses has lent herself so unreservedly to the
demands of an exacting generation as Clio,
who, shorn of her splendor, sits spectacled
before a dusty table strewn with Acts of Parliament
and Acts of Congress, and forgets the
glories of the past in the absorbing study of
constitutions. She traces painfully the successive
steps by which the sovereign power
has passed from the king to the nobles, from
the nobles to the nation, and from the nation
to the mob, and asks herself interesting but
fruitless questions as to what is coming next.
She has been divorced from literature,—“mere
literature,” as Professor Seeley contemptuously
phrases it,—and wedded to
science, that grim but amorous lord whose
harem is tolerably full already, but who lusts
perpetually for another bride. If, like Briseis,
she looks backward wistfully, she is at once
reminded that it is no part of her present
duty to furnish recreation to grateful and
happy readers, but that her business lies in
drawing conclusions from facts already established,
and providing a saddened world with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span>
wise speculations on political science, based
upon historic certainties. Her safest lessons,
Professor Seeley tells her warningly, are conveyed
in “Blue Books and other statistics,”
with which, indeed, no living man can hope
to recreate himself; and her essential outgrowths
are “political philosophy, the comparative
study of legal institutions, political
economy, and international law,” a witches’
brew with which few living men would care
to meddle. It is even part of his severe discipline
to strip her of the fair words and glittering
sentences with which her suitors have
sought for centuries to enhance her charms,
and “for the beauty of drapery to substitute
the beauty of the nude figure.” Poor shivering
Muse, with whom Shakespeare once dallied,
and of whom great Homer sang! Never
again shall she be permitted to inspire the
genius that enthralls the world. Never again
shall “mere literature” carry her name and
fame into the remotest corners of the globe.
She who once told us in sonorous sentences
“how great projects were executed, great advantages
gained, and great calamities averted,”
is now sent into studious retirement, denied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>
the adornments of style, forbidden the companionship
of heroes, and requested to occupy
herself industriously with Blue Books and
the growth of constitutions. I know nothing
more significant than Professor Seeley’s warning
to modern historians not to resemble Tacitus,—of
which there seems but little danger,—unless,
indeed, it be the complacency with
which a patriotic and very popular American
critic congratulates himself and us on the
felicity of having plenty of young poets of
our own, who do not in the least resemble
Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Keats.</p>
<p>Yet when we take from history all that
gives it color, vivacity, and charm, we lose
perchance more than our mere enjoyment,—though
that be a heavy forfeiture,—more
than the pleasant hours spent in the storied
past. Even so stern a master as Mr. Lecky
is fain to admit that these obsolete narratives,
which once called themselves histories, “gave
insight into human character, breathed noble
sentiments, rewarded and stimulated noble actions,
and kindled high patriotic feeling by
their strong appeals to the imagination.”
This was no unfruitful labor, and until we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span>
remember that man does not live by parliamentary
rule nor by accuracy of information,
but by the power of his own emotions and the
strength of his own self-control, we can be
readily mistaken as to the true value of his
lessons. “A nation with whom sentiment is
nothing,” observes Mr. Froude, “is on its
way to become no nation at all;” and it has
been well said that Nelson’s signal to his fleet
at Trafalgar, that last pregnant and simple
message sent in the face of death, has had
as much practical effect upon the hearts and
the actions of Englishmen in every quarter
of the globe, in every circumstance of danger
and adventure, as seven eighths of the Acts
of Parliament that decorate the statute-book.
Yet Dr. Bright, in a volume of more than
fourteen hundred pages, can find no room for
an incident which has become a living force in
history. He takes pains to omit, in his lukewarm
account of the battle, the one thing that
was best worth the telling.</p>
<p>It has become a matter of such pride with
a certain school of modern historians to be
gray and neutral, accurate in petty details,
indifferent to great men, cautious in praise or<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>
blame, and as lifeless as mathematicians, that
a gleam of color or a flash of fire is apt to
be regarded with suspicion. Yet color is not
necessarily misleading; and that keen, warm
grasp of a subject which gives us atmosphere
as well as facts, interest as well as information,
comes nearer to the veiled truth than a catalogue
of correct dates and chillingly narrated
incidents. It is easy for Mr. Gardiner to
denounce Clarendon’s “well-known carelessness
about details whenever he has a good
story to tell;” but what has the later historian
ever said to us that will dwell in our hearts,
and keep alive our infatuations and our antipathies,
as do some of these condemned tales?
Nay, even Mr. Gardiner’s superhuman coldness
in narrating such an event as the tragic
death of Montrose has not saved him from
at least one inaccuracy. “Montrose, in his
scarlet cassock, was hanged at the Grassmarket,”
he says, with frigid terseness. But
Montrose, as it chances, was hanged at the
city cross in the High Street, midway between
the Tolbooth and the Tron Church. Even
the careless and highly colored Clarendon
knew this, though Sir Walter Scott, it must<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>
be admitted, did not; but, after all, the exact
point in Edinburgh where Montrose was
hanged is of no vital importance to anybody.
What is important is that we should feel the
conflicting passions of that stormy time, that
we should regard them with equal sanity and
sympathy, and that the death of Montrose
should have for us more significance than it
appears to have for Mr. Gardiner. Better
Froissart’s courtly lamentations over the death
of every gallant knight than this studied indifference
to the sombre stories which history
has inscribed for us on her scroll.</p>
<p>For the old French chronicler would have
agreed cordially with Landor: “We might
as well, in a drama, place the actors behind
the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there,
as, in a history, push back valiant men.”
Froissart is enamored of valor wherever he
finds it; and he shares Carlyle’s reverence
not only for events, but for the controlling
forces which have moulded them. “The history
of mankind,” says Carlyle, about whose
opinions there is seldom any room for doubt,
“is the history of its great men;” and Froissart,
whose knowledge is of that narrow and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>
intimate kind which comes from personal association,
finds everything worth narrating
that can serve to illustrate the brilliant pageant
of life. Nor are his methods altogether unlike
Carlyle’s. He is a sturdy hero-worshiper,
who yet never spares his heroes, believing that
when all is set down truthfully and without
excuses, those strong and vivid qualities which
make a man a leader among men will of themselves
claim our homage and admiration.
What Cromwell is to Carlyle, what William
of Orange is to Macaulay, what Henry VIII.
is to Froude, Gaston Phœbus, Count de Foix,
is to Froissart. But not for one moment does
he assume the tactics of either Macaulay or of
Froude, coloring with careful art that which
is dubious, and softening or concealing that
which is irredeemably bad. Just as Carlyle
paints for us Cromwell,—warts and all,—telling
us in plain words his least amiable and
estimable traits, and intimating that he loves
him none the less for these most human qualities,
so Froissart tells us unreservedly all that
has come to his knowledge concerning the
Count de Foix. Thus it appears that this
paragon of knighthood virtually banished his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span>
wife, kept his cousin, the Viscount de Châteaubon,
a close captive until he paid forty thousand
francs ransom, imprisoned his only son
on a baseless suspicion of treason, and actually
slew the poor boy by his violence, though
without intention, and to his own infinite
sorrow and remorse. Worse than all this,
he beguiled with friendly messages his cousin,
Sir Peter Arnaut de Béarn, the commander
and governor of Lourdes, to come to his castle
of Orthès, and then, under his own roof-tree,
stabbed his guest five times, and left him to
die miserably of his wounds in a dungeon,
because Sir Peter refused to betray the trust
confided to him, and deliver up to France
the strong fortress of Lourdes, which he held
valiantly for the king of England.</p>
<p>Now, Froissart speaks his mind very plainly
concerning this base deed, softening no detail,
and offering no word of extenuation or
acquittal; but none the less the Count de
Foix is to him the embodiment of knightly
courtesy and valor, and he describes with
ardor every personal characteristic, every trait,
and every charm that wins both love and reverence.
“Although I have seen many kings<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span>
and princes, knights and others,” he writes,
“I have never beheld any so handsome,
whether in limbs and shape or in countenance,
which was fair and ruddy, with gray, amorous
eyes that gave delight whenever he chose to
express affection. He was so perfectly formed
that no one could praise him too much. He
loved earnestly the things he ought to love,
and hated those which it was becoming him to
hate. He was a prudent knight, full of enterprise
and wisdom. He had never any men
of abandoned character about him, reigned
wisely, and was constant in his devotions. To
speak briefly and to the point, the Count de
Foix was perfect in person and in mind; and
no contemporary prince could be compared
with him for sense, honor, or liberality.”</p>
<p>In good truth, this despotic nobleman illustrated
admirably the familiar text, “When a
strong man armed keepeth his court, those
things which he possesseth are in peace.” If
he ruled his vassals severely and taxed them
heavily, he protected them from all outside
interference or injury. None might despoil
their homes, nor pass the boundaries of Béarn
and Foix, without paying honestly for all that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span>
was required. At a time when invading armies
and the far more terrible “free companies”
pillaged the country, until the fair fields of
France lay like a barren land, the Count de
Foix suffered neither English nor French,
Gascon nor Breton, to set foot within his territories,
until assurance had been given that
his people should suffer no harm. He lived
splendidly, and gave away large sums of money
wherever he had reason to believe that his
interests or his prestige would be strengthened
by such generosity; but no parasite, male or
female, shared in his magnificent bounty.
Clear-headed, cold-hearted, vigilant, astute,
liberal, and inexorable, he guarded his own,
and sovereigns did him honor. His was no
humane nor tranquil record; yet judging him
by the standards of his own time and place, by
the great good as well as by the lesser evil that
he wrought, we are fain to echo Froissart’s
rapturous words, “It is a pity such a one
should ever grow old and die.”</p>
<p>The earlier part of the Chronicles is compiled
from the “Vrayes Chroniques” of Jean
le Bel, Canon of St. Lambert’s at Liège.
Froissart tells us so plainly, and admits that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span>
he made free use of the older narrative as far
as it could serve him; afterwards relying for
information on the personal recollections of
knights, squires, and men-at-arms who had
witnessed or had taken part in the invasions,
wars, battles, skirmishes, treaties, tournaments,
and feasts which made up the stirring tale of
fourteenth-century life. To gain this knowledge,
he traveled far and wide, attaching himself
to one court and one patron after another,
and indefatigably seeking those soldiers of distinction
who had served in many lands, and
could tell him the valorous deeds of which he
so ardently loved to hear. In long, leisurely
journeys, in lonely castles and populous cities,
in summer days and winter nights, he gathered
and fitted together—loosely enough—the
motley fabric of his tale.</p>
<p>This open-air method of collecting material
can hardly be expected to commend itself to
modern historians; and it is surely not necessary
for Mr. Green or any other careful scholar
to tell us seriously that Froissart is inaccurate.
Of course he is inaccurate. How could history
passed, ballad fashion, from man to man be
anything but inaccurate? And how could it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span>
fail to possess that atmosphere and color which
students are bidden to avoid,—lest perchance
they resemble Tacitus,—but which lovers of
“mere literature” hail rapturously, and which
give to the printed page the breath of the
living past? Froissart makes a sad jumble of
his names, which, indeed, in that easy-going
age, were spelt according to the taste and discretion
of the writer; he embellishes his narrative
with charming descriptions of incidents
which perhaps never went through the formality
of occurring; and he is good enough to
forbear annoying us with dates. “About this
time King Philip of France quitted Paris in
company with the King of Bohemia;” or,
“The feast of St. John the Baptist now approaching,
the lords of England and Germany
made preparations for their intended expedition.”
This is as near as we ever get to the
precise period in which anything happened
or did not happen, as the case may be; but
to the unexacting reader names and dates are
not matters of lively interest, and even the
accuracy of a picturesque incident is of no
paramount importance. If it were generally
believed to have taken place, it illustrates the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span>
customs and sentiments of the age as well as if
it were authentic; and the one great advantage
of the old over the new historian is that
he feels the passions and prejudices of his own
time, and reflects them without either condemnation
or apology. The nineteenth-century
mind working on fourteenth-century material
is chilly in its analysis, and Draconian in its
judgment. It can and does enlighten us on
many significant points, but it is powerless to
breathe into its pages that warm and vivid life
which lies so far beyond our utmost powers of
sympathy or comprehension.</p>
<p>Now, there are many excellent and very
intelligent people to whom the fourteenth
century or any other departed century is without
intrinsic interest. Mr. John Morley has
emphatically recorded his sentiments on the
subject. “I do not in the least want to know
what happened in the past,” he says, “except
as it enables me to see my way more clearly
through what is happening now.” Here is the
utilitarian view concisely and comprehensively
stated; and it would be difficult to say how
Froissart, any more than Tacitus or Xenophon,
can help us efficaciously to understand the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span>
Monroe doctrine or the troubles in the Transvaal.
Perhaps these authors yield their finest
pleasures to another and less meritorious class
of readers, who are well content to forget the
vexations and humiliations of the present in
the serener study of the mighty past. The
best thing about our neighbor’s trouble, says
the old adage, is that it does not keep us
awake at night; and the best thing about the
endless troubles of other generations is that
they do not in any way impair our peace of
mind. It may be that they did not greatly
vex the sturdier race who, five hundred years
ago, gave themselves scant leisure for reflection.
Certain it is that events which should
have been considered calamitous are narrated
by Froissart in such a cheerful fashion that it
is difficult for us to preserve our mental balance,
and not share in his unreasonable elation.
“Now is the time come when we must speak
of lances, swords, and coats of mail,” he writes
with joyous zest. And again he blithely describes
the battle of Auray: “The French
marched in such close order that one could not
have thrown a tennis-ball among them but it
must have stuck upon the point of a stiffly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</span>
carried lance. The English took great pleasure
in looking at them.” Of course the English
did, and they took great pleasure in fighting
with them half an hour later, and great
pleasure in routing them before the day was
past; for in this bloody contest fell Charles of
Blois, the bravest soldier of his time, and the
fate of Brittany was sealed. Invitations to
battle were then politely given and cordially
accepted, like invitations to a ball. The Earl
of Salisbury, before Brest, sends word to Sir
Bertrand du Guesclin: “We beg and entreat
of you to advance, when you shall be fought
with, without fail.” And the French, in return,
“could never form a wish for feats of
arms but there were some English ready to
gratify it.”</p>
<p>This cheerful, accommodating spirit, this
alacrity in playing the dangerous game of war,
is difficult for us peace-loving creatures to
understand; but we should remember the
“desperate and gleeful fighting” of Nelson’s
day, and how that great sailor wasted his
sympathy on the crew of the warship Culloden,
which went ashore at the battle of the
Nile, “while their more fortunate companions<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span>
were in the full tide of happiness.” Du
Guesclin or Sir John Chandos might have
written that sentence, had either been much in
the habit of writing anything,<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and Froissart
would have subscribed cordially to the sentiment.
“Many persons will not readily believe
what I am about to tell,” he says with
becoming gravity, “though it is strictly true.
The English are fonder of war than of peace.”
“He had the courage of an Englishman,” is
the praise continually bestowed on some enterprising
French knight; and when the English
and Scotch met each other in battle, the
French historian declares, “there was no
check to their valor as long as their weapons
endured.” Nothing can be more vivacious
than Froissart’s description of the manner in
which England awaited the threatened invasion
of the French under their young king, Charles
VI.—“The prelates, abbots, and rich citizens
were panic-struck, but the artisans and poorer
sort held it very cheap. Such knights and
squires as were not rich, but eager for renown,
were delighted, and said to each other: ‘Lord!
what fine times are coming, since the king of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</span>
France intends to visit us! He is a valiant
sovereign, and of great enterprise. There has
not been such a one in France these three
hundred years. He will make his people good
men-at-arms, and blessed may he be for thinking
to invade us, for certainly we shall all be
slain or grow rich. One thing or the other
must happen to us.’”</p>
<div class="footnote">
<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> Du Guesclin never knew how to write.</p>
</div>
<p>Alas, for their disappointment, when adverse
winds and endless altercations kept the
invaders safe at home! There was a great
deal of solid enjoyment lost on both sides,
though wealthy citizens counted their gains in
peace. War was not only a recognized business,
but a recognized pleasure as well, and
noble knights relieved their heavy fighting
with the gentler diversions of the tournament
and the chase. When Edward III. entered
France for the last time, he carried with him
thirty falconers laden with hawks, sixty couples
of strong hounds, and as many greyhounds,
“so that every day he had good sport, either
by land or water. Many lords had their
hawks and hounds as well as the king.”</p>
<p>A merry life while the sun shone; and if it
set early for most of these stout warriors, their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span>
survivors had but little leisure to lament them.
It is not easy to read Froissart’s account of
certain battles, serious enough in their results,
without being strangely impressed by the boyish
enthusiasm with which the combatants
went to work; so that even now, five centuries
later, our blood tingles with their pleasurable
excitement. When France undertook to support
the Earl of Flanders against Philip van
Arteveld and the rebellious citizens of Ghent,
the Flemish army entrenched themselves in
a strong position on the river Lys, destroying
all bridges save one, which was closely
guarded. The French, in the dead of night,
crossed the river in rickety little boats, a
handful of men at a time, and only a mile or
so distant from the spot where nine thousand
of the enemy lay encamped. Apparently they
regarded this hazardous feat as the gayest
kind of a lark, crowding like schoolboys
around the boats, and begging to be taken on
board. “It was a pleasure to see with what
eagerness they embarked,” says the historian;
and indeed, so great was the emulation, that
only men of noble birth and tried valor were
permitted to cross. Not a single varlet accompanied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span>
them. After infinite labor and danger,
some twelve hundred knights—the flower of
French chivalry—were transported to the
other side of the river, where they spent the
rest of a cold and stormy November night
standing knee-deep in the marshes, clad in
complete armor, and without food or fire. At
this point the fun ceases to sound so exhilarating;
but we are assured that “the great
attention they paid to be in readiness kept
up their spirits, and made them almost forget
their situation.” When morning came, these
knights, by way of rest and breakfast, crossed
the intervening country, fell upon the Flemish
ranks, and routed them with great slaughter;
for what could a mass of untrained artisans
do against a small body of valiant and accomplished
soldiers? A few days later, the decisive
battle of Rosebecque ended the war.
Van Arteveld was slain, and the cause of
democracy, of “the ill intentioned,” as Froissart
for the most part designates the toiling
population of towns, received its fatal blow.</p>
<p>Yet this courtly chronicler of battles and
deeds of chivalry is not without a sense of
justice and a noble compassion for the poor.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span>
He disapproves of “commonalties” when they
assert their claims too boisterously; he fails
to detect any signs of sapience in a mob; and
he speaks of “weavers, fullers, and other ill-intentioned
people,” as though craftsmen were
necessarily rebellious,—which perhaps was
true, and not altogether a matter for surprise.
But the grievous taxes laid upon the French
peasantry fill him with indignation; the distress
of Ghent, though brought about, as he
believes, by her own pride and presumption,
touches him so deeply that he grows eloquent
in her behalf; and he records with distinct
approbation the occasional efforts made by
both the French and the English kings to
explain to their patient subjects what it was
they were fighting about. Eloquent bishops,
he tells us, were sent to preach “long and fine
sermons,” setting forth the justice of the respective
claims. “In truth, it was but right
that these sovereigns, <i>since they were determined
on war</i>, should explain and make clear
to their people the cause of the quarrel, that
they might understand it, and have the better
will to assist their lords and monarchs.”
Above all, he gives us a really charming and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span>
cheerful picture of the French and English
fishermen, who went quietly about their daily
toil, and bore each other no ill will, although
their countries were so hard at war. “They
were never interrupted in their pursuits,” he
says, “nor did they attack each other; but,
on the contrary, gave mutual assistance, and
bought or sold, according as they had more
fish or less than they required. For if they
were to meddle in the national strife, there
would be an end of fishing, and none would
attempt it unless supported by men-at-arms.”
So perhaps there is one lesson of common
sense and forbearance we may learn, even
now, from those barbarous days of old.</p>
<p>As for the personal touches which give such
curious vitality to Froissart’s pages, they belong
naturally to an unscientific age, when
history,—or what passed as such,—biography,
court gossip, and legendary lore were
all mingled together, with no vexatious sifting
of material. The chronicler tells us in ample
detail every separate clause of an important
treaty, and then breaks off to recount, at great
length and with commendable gravity, the
story of the Lord de Corasse and his familiar<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span>
demon, Orthon, who served him out of pure
love, and visited him at night, to the vexation
and terror of his lady wife. We hear
in one chapter how the burghers of Ghent
spoiled all the pleasure of the Lord d’Estournaz’s
Christmas by collecting and carrying
away his rents, “which made him very melancholy,”
as well it might; and in the next we
are told in splendid phrases of the death of
Duke Wenceslaus of Bohemia, “who was, in
his time, magnificent, blithe, prudent, amorous,
and polite. God have mercy on his soul!”
It is hard to see how anything could be better
described, in fewer words, than the disastrous
expedition of William of Hainault against the
Frieslanders. “About the feast of St. Rémy,
William, Earl of Hainault, collected a large
body of men-at-arms, knights, and squires,
from Hainault, Flanders, Brabant, Holland,
Gueldres, and Juliers, and, embarking them
on board a considerable fleet at Dordrecht,
made sail for Friesland; for the Earl considered
himself as lord thereof. If the Frieslanders
had been people to listen to the
legality and reasonableness of the claim, the
Earl was entitled to it. But as they were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span>
obstinate, he exerted himself to obtain it by
force, and was slain, as well as a great many
other knights and squires. God forgive them
their sins!”</p>
<p>Surely that line about the unreasonable
Frieslanders is worthy of Carlyle,—of Carlyle
whose grim and pregnant humor lurks
beneath sentences that, to the unwary, seem
as innocent as the sheathed dagger before the
blade is sprung. He it was who hated with a
just and lively abhorrence all constitutional
histories, and all philosophy of history, as likewise
“empty invoice lists of Pitched Battles
and Changes of Ministry,”—as dead, he declared,
as last year’s almanacs, “to which
species of composition they bear, in several
points of view, no inconsiderable affinity.”
He it was, moreover, who welded together
history and literature, and gave us their perfect
and harmonious union in the story of the
“Diamond Necklace.” The past was enough
for Carlyle, when he worked amid her faded
parchments, and made them glow with renewed
color and fire. That splendid pageant of
events, that resistless torrent of life, that long
roll-call of honored names which we term<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span>
comprehensively history, had for him a significance
which needed neither moral nor maxim
to confirm it. If we can believe with him
that it is better to revere great men than to
belittle them, better to worship blindly than
to censure priggishly, better to enlarge our
mental vision until it embraces the standards
of other centuries than to narrow it in accordance
with the latest humanitarian doctrine,—then
we may stray safely through the storied
past, until even Froissart, writing in a feudal
chimney-corner strange tales of chivalry and
carnage, will have for us a message of little
practical service, but of infinite comfort in
hours of idleness and relaxation. It is an
engaging task to leave the present, so weighted
with cumbersome enigmas and ineffectual
activity, and to go back, step by step, to other
days, when men saw life in simpler aspects,
and moved forward unswervingly to the attainment
of definite and obvious desires.</p>
<p>One voice has been recently raised with
modest persistence in behalf of old-fashioned
history,—history which may possibly be inaccurate
here and there, but which gives to
the present generation some vivid insight into<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span>
the lives of other generations which were not
without importance in their day. Now that
we are striving to educate every class of
people, whether they respond to our advances
or not, it is at least worth while to make their
instruction as pleasant and as profitable as
we can. Mr. Augustus Jessopp, whose knowledge
of the agricultural classes is of that
practical and intimate kind which comes of
living with them for many years in sympathy
and friendship, has a right to be heard when
he speaks in their behalf. If they must be
taught in scraps and at the discretion of
committees, he believes that the Extension
lecturers who go about dispensing “small
doses of Ruskin and water, or weak dilutions
of Mr. Addington Symonds,” would be better
employed in telling the people something of
their own land and of their rude forefathers.
And this history, he insists, should be local,
full of detail, popular in character, and without
base admixture of political science, so that
the rustic mind may accustom itself to the
thought of England, in all Christian ages, as
a nation of real people; just as Tom Tulliver
woke gradually, under the stimulating friction<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span>
of Maggie’s questions, to the astonishing conviction
that the Romans were once live men
and women, who learned their mother tongue
through some easier medium than the Latin
grammar.</p>
<p>Again and again Mr. Jessopp has tried the
experiment of lecturing on local antiquities
and the dim traditions of ancient country
parishes; and he has always found that these
topics, which carried with them some homely
and familiar flavor of the soil, awoke a deep
and abiding interest in minds to which abstract
ethics and technical knowledge appealed
alike in vain. School boards may raise the
cry for useful information, and fancy that a
partial acquaintance with chlorides and phosphates
is all that is necessary to make of a
sulky yokel an intelligent agriculturist and a
contented citizen; but a man must awaken
before he can think, and think before he can
work, and work before he can realize his position
and meaning in the universe. And it
needs a livelier voice than that of elementary
chemistry to arouse him. “The Whigs,” said
Sir Walter Scott, “will live and die in the
belief that the world is ruled by pamphlets<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span>
and speeches;” and a great many excellent
people in every country will live and die in the
belief that the world is ruled by printed books,
full of proven and demonstrable truths. But
we, the world’s poor children, sick, tired, and
fractious, know very well that we never learn
unless we like our lesson, and never behave
ourselves unless inspired by precept and example.
The history of every nation is the
heritage of its sons and daughters; and the
story of its struggles, sufferings, misdeeds,
and glorious atonements is the story that keeps
alive in all our hearts that sentiment of patriotism,
without which we are speeding
swiftly on our path to national corruption
and decay.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_ROYAL_ROAD_OF_FICTION">THE ROYAL ROAD OF FICTION.</h2>
</div>
<p>“A tale,” says that charming scholar and
critic, M. Jusserand, “is the first key to the
heart of a child, the last utterance to penetrate
the fastnesses of age.” And what is
true of the individual is true also of the race.
The earliest voice listened to by the nations
in their infancy was the voice of the story-teller.
Whether he spoke in rude prose or
in ruder rhyme, his was the eloquence which
won a hearing everywhere. All through the
young world’s vigorous, ill-spent manhood it
found time mid wars, and pestilence, and far
migrations to cherish and cultivate the first
wild art of fiction. We, in our chastened,
wise, and melancholy middle age, find still
our natural solace in this kind and joyous
friend. And when mankind grows old, so
old we shall have mastered all the knowledge
we are seeking now, and shall have found ourselves
as far from happiness as ever, I doubt
not we shall be comforted in the twilight of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span>
existence with the same cheerful and deceptive
tales we hearkened to in childhood. Facts
surround us from the cradle to the grave.
Truth stares us coldly in the face, and checks
our unmeaning gayety of heart. What wonder
that we turn for pleasure and distraction
to those charming dreams with which the
story-teller, now grown to be a novelist, is
ever ready to lure us away from everything
that it is comfortable to forget.</p>
<p>And it was always thus. From the very
beginning of civilization, and before civilization
was well begun, the royal road of fiction
ran straight to the hearts of men, and along
it traveled the gay and prosperous spinners
of wondrous tales which the world loved well
to hear. When I was a little girl, studying
literature in the hard and dry fashion then
common in all schools, and which was not
without its solid advantages after all, I was
taught, first that “Pamela” was the earliest
English novel; then that “Robinson Crusoe”
was the earliest English novel; then that
Lodge’s “Rosalynde” was the earliest English
novel. By the time I got that far back, I
began to see for myself, what I dare say all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span>
little girls are learning now, that the earliest
English novel dates mistily from the earliest
English history, and that there is no such
thing as a firm starting-point for their uncertain
feet to gain. Long, long before Lodge’s
“Rosalynde” led the way for Shakespeare’s
“Rosalind” to follow, romantic tales were
held in such high esteem that people who
were fortunate enough to possess them in
manuscript—the art of printing not having
yet cheapened such precious treasures—left
them solemnly by will to their equally fortunate
heirs. In 1315, Guy, Earl of Warwick,
bequeathed to Bordesley Abbey in Warwickshire
his entire library of thirty-nine volumes,
which consisted almost exclusively, like the
library of a modern young lady, of stories,
such as the “Romaunce de Troies,” and the
“Romaunce d’Alisaundre.” In 1426, Thomas,
Duke of Exeter, left to his sister Joan a single
book, perhaps the only one he possessed, and
this too was a romance on that immortal
knight and lover, Tristram.</p>
<p>Earlier even than Thomas of Exeter’s day,
the hardy barons of England had discovered
that when they were “fested and fed,” they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span>
were ready to be amused, and that there was
nothing so amusing as a story. In the twelfth
century, before St. Thomas à Becket gave
up his life in Canterbury cloisters, English
knights and ladies had grown familiar with
the tragic history of King Lear, the exploits
of Jack the Giant Killer, the story of King
Arthur and of the enchanter Merlin. The
earliest of these tales came from Brittany,
and were translated from Armorican into
Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine
monk, and a benefactor to the world; but,
by the following century, Robin Hood, Tom-a-Lincoln,
and a host of sturdy English-born
heroes shared in the popular attention. It
must have been inexpressibly helpful to the
writers and compilers of early fiction that the
uncritical age in which they lived had not yet
been vitiated by the principles of realistic art.
The modern maxims about sinning against the
probabilities, and the novelist’s bondage to
truth, had not then been invented; and the
man who told a story was free to tell it as he
pleased. His readers or his hearers were
seldom disposed to question his assertions. A
knight did not go to the great and unnecessary<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span>
trouble of learning his letters in order to doubt
what he read. Merlin was as real to him as
Robin Hood. He believed Sir John Mandeville,
when that accomplished traveler told
him of a race of men who had eyes in the
middle of their foreheads. It was a curious
fact, but the unknown world was full of greater
mysteries than this. He believed in Prester
John, with his red and white lions, his giants
and pigmies, his salamanders that built cocoons
like silk-worms, his river of stones that rolled
perpetually with a mighty reverberation into
a sandy sea. Why, indeed, should these wonders
be doubted; for in that thrice famous
letter sent by Prester John to Manuel Comnenus,
Emperor of Constantinople, did he not
distinctly say, “No vice is tolerated in our
land, and, with us, no one lies.”</p>
<p>This broad-minded, liberal credulity made
smooth the novelist’s path. He always located
his romances in far and unknown countries,
where anything or everything might reasonably
be expected to happen. Scythia, Parthia,
Abyssinia, were favorite latitudes; Bohemia
could always serve at a pinch; and Arcadia,
that blessed haven of romance, remained for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span>
centuries his happy hunting-ground, where
shepherds piped, and nymphs danced sweetly
in the shade, and brave knights met in glorious
combat, and lovers dallied all day long under
the whispering boughs. In Elizabeth’s day,
Arcadia had reached the zenith of its popularity.
Robert Green had peopled its dewy fields
with amorous swains, and Sir Philip Sidney
had described its hills and dales in the four
hundred and eighty folio pages of his imperishable
romance. A golden land, it lies before
us still, brilliant with sunshine that shall never
fade. Knights and noble ladies ride through
it on prancing steeds. Well-bred shepherds,
deeply versed in love, sing charming songs,
and extend open-hearted hospitality. Shepherdesses,
chaste and fair, lead their snowy
flocks by meadows and rippling streams.
There is always plenty of fighting for the
knights when they weary of plighting their
vows, and noble palaces spring up for their
entertainment when they have had enough of
pastoral pleasures and sylvan fare. Ah, me!
We who have passed by Arcadia, and dwell
in the sad haunts of men, know well what we
have lost. Yet was there not a day when the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span>
inhabitants of the strange new world, a world
not yet familiar with commercial depression
and the stock exchange, were thus touchingly
described in English verse?</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“Guiltless men who danced away their time,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>And what gayer irresponsibility could be
found even in the fields of Arcadia?</p>
<p>“In Elizabeth’s day,” says M. Jusserand,
“adventurous narratives were loved for adventure’s
sake. Probability was only a secondary
consideration.” Geographical knowledge being
in its innocent infancy, people were curious
about foreign countries, and decently grateful
for information, true or false. When a wandering
knight of romance “sailed to Bohemia,”
nobody saw any reason why he should not, and
readers were merely anxious to know what
happened to him when he got there. So great,
indeed, was the demand for fiction in the reign
of the virgin queen that writers actually succeeded
in supporting themselves by this species
of composition, a test equally applicable to-day;
and it is worth while to remember that the
prose tales of Nash, Green, and Sidney were
translated into French more than a century<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span>
before that distinction was conferred on any
play of Shakespeare’s.</p>
<p>It need not be supposed, however, that
Romance, in her triumphant progress through
the land, met with no bitter and sustained
hostility. From the very beginning she took
the world by storm, and from the very beginning
the godly denounced and reviled her.
The jesters and gleemen and minstrels who
relieved the insufferable ennui of our rude
forefathers in those odd moments when they
were neither fighting nor eating, were all
branded as “Satan’s children” by that relentless
accuser, “Piers Plowman.” In vain the
simple story-spinners who narrated the exploits
of Robin Hood and Tom-a-Lincoln
claimed that their merry legends were “not
altogether unprofitable, nor in any way hurtful,
but very fitte to passe away the tediousness
of the long winter evenings.” It was not in
this cheerful fashion that the “unco gude”—a
race as old as humanity itself—considered
the long winter evenings should be passed.
Roger Ascham can find no word strong enough
in which to condemn “certaine bookes of
Chivalrie, the whole pleasure of whiche standeth<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span>
in two speciall poyntes, in open man-slaughter
and bolde bawdrye.” The beautiful
old stories, so simply and reverently handled by
Sir Thomas Malory in the “Morte d’Arthur,”
were regarded with horror and aversion by
this gentle ascetic; yet the lessons that they
taught were mainly “curtosye, humanyte,
friendlynesse, hardynesse and love.” The valorous
deeds of Guy of Warwick and Thomas
of Reading lent cheer to many a hearth, and
sent many a man with brave and joyous heart
to battle; yet the saintly Stubbes, who loved
not joyousness, lamented loudly that the unregenerate
persisted in reading such “toys, fantasies
and babbleries,” in place of that more
dolorous fiction, Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.”
Even Sir Philip Sidney’s innocent “Arcadia”
was pronounced by Milton a “vain, amatorious”
book; and the great poet who wrote
“Comus” and “L’Allegro” harshly and bitterly
censured King Charles because that unhappy
monarch beguiled the sad hours of
prison with its charming pages, and even, oh!
crowning offense against Puritanism! copied
for spiritual comfort, when condemned to die,
the beautiful and reverent invocation of its<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span>
young heroine, Pamela. “The king hath, as
it were, unhallowed and unchristened the very
duty of prayer itself,” wrote Milton mercilessly.
“Who would have imagined so little
fear in him of the true all-seeing deity, so little
care of truth in his last words, or honor
to himself or to his friends, as, immediately
before his death, to pop into the hand of that
grave bishop who attended him, for a special
relique of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen
word by word from the mouth of a heathen
woman praying to a heathen god.”</p>
<p>But not even the mighty voice of Milton
could check the resistless progress of romantic
fiction. Not even dominant Puritanism could
stamp it ruthlessly down. When “Pilgrim’s
Progress,” the great pioneer of religious novels,
was given to the world, England read it with
devout delight; but she read too, with admirable
inconsistency, those endless tales, those
“romances de longue haleine,” which crossed
the channel from France, and replaced the less
decorous Italian stories so popular in the preceding
century. Some of these prolix and
ponderous volumes, as relentless in dullness as
in length, held their own stoutly for centuries,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span>
and won allegiance where it seemed least due.
There is an incredible story narrated of Racine,
that, when a student at Port Royal, his
favorite reading was an ancient prose epic
entitled “Ethiopica; the history of Theagenes
and Chariclea.” This guileless work, being
too bulky for concealment, was discovered by
his director and promptly burned, notwithstanding
its having been written by a bishop,
which ought to have saved it from the flames.
Racine, undaunted, procured another copy,
and fearing it would meet with the same cruel
fate, he actually committed large portions of
it to memory, so that nothing should deprive
him of his enjoyment. Yet “Ethiopica”
would seem as absolutely unreadable a book
as even a bishop ever wrote. The heroine,
though chaste as she is beautiful, has so many
lovers, all with equally unpronounceable names,
and so many battles are fought in her behalf,
that no other memory than Racine’s could
have made any sort of headway with them;
while, just in the middle of the story, an old
gentleman is suddenly introduced, who, without
provocation, starts to work and tells all <i>his</i>
life’s adventures, two hundred pages long.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</span></p>
<p>The real promoters and encouragers of romance,
however,—the real promoters and encouragers
of fiction in every age—were women,
and this is more than enough to account for
its continued triumphs. There was little use in
the stubborn old Puritan, Powell, protesting
against the idle folly of females who wasted
their time over Sidney’s “Arcadia,” when they
ought to have been studying the household
recipe books. Long before Cromwell the
mighty revolutionized England, women had
wearied of recipes as steady reading, and had
turned their wanton minds to matters more
seductive. Wise and wary was the writer who
kept these fair patronesses well in view. When
John Lyly gave to the world his amazing
“Euphues,” he dexterously announced that it
was written for the amusement and the edification
of women, and that he asked for it no
better fate than to be read by them in idle
moments, when they were weary of playing
with their lap-dogs. For a young man of
twenty-five, Lyly showed an admirable knowledge
of feminine inconsistency. By alternately
flattering and upbraiding the subtle
creatures he hoped to please, now sweetly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span>
praising their incomparable perfections, now
fiercely reviling their follies and their sins, he
succeeded in making “Euphues” the best-read
book in England, and he chained with
affectations and foolish conceits the free and
noble current of English speech.</p>
<p>It was the abundance of leisure enjoyed
by women that gave the ten-volumed French
romance its marvelous popularity; and one
sympathizes a little with Mr. Pepys, though he
was such a chronic grumbler, when he laments
in his diary that Mrs. Pepys would not only
read “Le Grand Cyrus” all night, but would
talk about it all day, “though nothing to the
purpose, nor in any good manner,” remarks
this censorious husband and critic. More melancholy
still to contemplate is the early appearance
on the scene of female novelists who
wrote vicious twaddle for other women to
read. We may fancy that this particular
plague is a development of the nineteenth
century; but twenty years before the virtuous
Pamela saw the light, Eliza Heywood was
doing her little best to demoralize the minds
and manners of her countrywomen. Eliza
Heywood was, in Mr. Gosse’s opinion,—and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</span>
he is one of the few critics who has expressed
<i>any</i> opinion on the subject,—the Ouida of
her period. The very names of her heroines,
Lassellia, Idalia, and Douxmoure, are Ouidesque,
and their behavior would warrant their
immediate presentation to that society which
the authoress of “Strathmore” has so sympathetically
portrayed. These “lovely Inconsiderates,”
though bad enough for a reformatory,
are all as sensitive as nuns. They “sink
fainting on a Bank” if they so much as receive
letters from their lovers. Their “Limbs forget
their Functions” on the most trifling provocation.
“Stormy Passions” and “deadly Melancholy”
succeed each other with monotonous
vehemence in their “tortured Bosoms,” and
when they fly repentant to some remote Italian
convent, whole cities mourn their loss.</p>
<p>Eliza Heywood’s stories are probably as imbecile
and as depraved as any fiction we possess
to-day, but the women of England read
them eagerly. They read too the iniquitous
rubbish of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and no incident
can better illustrate the tremendous change
that swept over public sentiment with the
introduction of good and decent novels than<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span>
the well-known tale of Sir Walter Scott’s
aunt, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston. This sprightly
old lady took a fancy, when in her eightieth
year, to re-read Mrs. Behn’s books, and persuaded
Sir Walter to send them to her. A
hasty glance at them was more than enough,
and back they came to Scott with an entreaty
that he would put them in the fire. The
ancient gentlewoman confessed herself unable
to linger over pages which she had not been
ashamed nor abashed to hear read aloud to
large parties in her youth.</p>
<p>It must be remembered, however, that
Aphra Behn, uncompromisingly bad though
she was, wrote the first English didactic
novel, “Oroonoka,” the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
of its day. It has the advantage of “Uncle
Tom” in being a true tale, Mrs. Behn having
seen the slave, Oroonoka, and his wife, Imoinda,
in the West Indies, and having witnessed his
tragic fate. It was written at the solicitation
of Charles II., and was a popular anti-slavery
novel, with certain points of resemblance to
Mrs. Stowe’s famous book; in the grace and
beauty of its Africans, for example; in the
strength and constancy of their affections, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span>
in the lavish nobility of their sentiments.
Mrs. Behn knew as well as Mrs. Stowe that,
if you want to produce a strong effect, you
must not be too chary of your colors.</p>
<p>When the time came for the great flowering
of English fiction, when Fielding and Richardson
took England by storm, and France confessed
herself beaten in the field (“Who
would have thought,” wrote the Marquis
d’Argenson, “that the English would write
novels, and better ones than ours?”), then
it was that women asserted themselves distinctly
as patronesses well worth the pleasing.
To Smollett and Defoe they had never given
whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly
masculine writing was scarcely in their way.
But Fielding, infinitely greater than these,
met with no warmer favor at their hands. It
is easy to account for the present unpopularity
of “Tom Joneses” in decorous households by
saying that modest women do not consider it
fit for them to read. That covers the ground
now to perfection. But the fact remains that,
when “Tom Jones” was written, everybody
<i>did</i> consider it fit to read. Why not, when all
that it contained was seen about them day by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span>
day? Its author, like every other great novelist,
described life as he found it. Arcadia
had passed away, and big libertine London
offered a scant assortment of Arcadian virtues.
Fielding had nothing to tell that might not
have been heard any day at one of Sir Robert
Walpole’s dinner-parties. He had the merit—not
too common now—of never confusing
vice with virtue; though it must be confessed
that, like Dumas and Scott and Thackeray,
he took very kindly to his scamps; and we all
know how angry a recent critic permits himself
to be because Thackeray calls Rawdon Crawley
“honest Rawdon.” As far as can be
seen, Fielding never realized the grossness
of his books. He prefaced “Tom Jones” with
a beautiful little sermon about “the solid
inward comfort of mind which is the sure
companion of innocence and virtue;” and he
took immense credit to himself for having
written “nothing prejudicial to the cause of
religion and virtue, nothing inconsistent with
the strictest rules of decency, nor which can
offend even the chastest eye in the perusal.”
What more than this could be claimed by the
authors of “The Old Homestead” and “Little
Lord Fauntleroy”?</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span></p>
<p>I do not for one moment believe that it was
the blithe and brutal coarseness of Fielding’s
novels that exiled them from the female heart,
that inconsistent heart which never fluttered
over the more repellent indecency of “Pamela.”
Insidious influences were at work within the
dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman,
while less given to self-analysis and self-assertion
than her successor to-day, was just as
conscious of her own nature, its resistless force,
its inalienable laws, its permanent limitations;
and in Richardson she recognized the artist
who had divined her subtleties, and had given
them form and color. His correspondence with
women is unlike anything else the period has
to show. To him they had an independence
of thought and action which it took the rest
of mankind a hundred years longer to concede;
and it is not surprising to see the fervent
homage this stout little tradesman of sixty
received from his female flatterers, when we
remember that he and he alone in all his
century had looked into the rebellious secrets
of their hearts with understanding and with
reverence.</p>
<p>To any other man than Richardson, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span>
devout attentions of so many women would
have been a trifle fatiguing. They wrote him
letters as long as Clarissa Harlowe’s. They
poured out their sentiments on endless reams
of paper. They told him how they walked
up and down their rooms, shedding torrents
of tears over his heroine’s distress, unable
to either go on with the book, or to put it
resolutely down. They told him how, when
“Clarissa” was being read aloud in a bed-chamber,
the maid who was curling her mistress’s
hair wept so bitterly she could not go on with
her work, so was given a crown for her sensibility,
and sent out of the room. They implored
and entreated him to end his story
happily; “a turn,” wrote one fair enthusiast,
“that will make your almost despairing readers
mad with joy.” Richardson purred complacently
over these letters, like a sleek old
cat, and he answered every one of them, instead
of pitching them unread into the fire.
Yet, nevertheless, true and great artist that
he was, in spite of all his vanity, these passionate
solicitations moved him not one hair’s
breadth from his path. “As well,” says Mr.
Birrell, “hope for a happy ending for King<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span>
Lear as for Clarissa Harlowe.” She died,
and England dissolved herself in tears, and
gay, sentimental France lifted up her voice
and wept aloud, and Germany joined in the
sad chorus of lamentations, and even phlegmatic
Holland was heard bewailing from afar
the great tragedy of the literary world. This
is no fancy statement. Men swore while
women wept. Good Dr. Johnson hung his
despondent head, and ribald Colley Cibber
vowed with a great oath that this incomparable
heroine should not die. Years afterwards,
when Napoleon was first consul, an English
gentleman named Lovelace was presented to
him, whereupon the consul brightened visibly,
and remarked, “Why, that is the name of
Clarissa Harlowe’s lover!”—an incident
which won, and won deservedly for Bonaparte,
the lifelong loyalty of Hazlitt.</p>
<p>Meanwhile Richardson, writing quietly away
in his little summer-house, produced Sir
Charles Grandison, a hero who is perhaps as
famous for his priggishness as Lovelace is
famous for his villainy. I think, myself, that
poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled.
He is not half such a prig as Daniel Deronda;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span>
but he develops his priggishness with
such ample detail through so many leisurely
volumes. Richardson loved him, and tried
hard to make his host of female readers love
him too, which they did in a somewhat perfunctory
and lukewarm fashion. Indeed, it
should in justice be remembered that this
eighteenth-century novelist intended all his
books to be didactic. They seem now at times
too painful, too detestable for endurance; but
when “Pamela,” with all its loathsome details,
was published, it was actually commended
from the pulpit, declared to be better than
twenty sermons, and placed by the side of the
Bible for its moral influence. Richardson
himself tells us a curiously significant anecdote
of his childhood. When he was a little
boy, eleven years old, he heard his mother
and some gossips complaining of a quarrelsome
and acrimonious neighbor. He promptly
wrote her a long letter of remonstrance, quoting
freely from the scriptures to prove to her
the evil of her ways. The woman, being naturally
very angry, complained to his mother
of his impertinence, whereupon she, with true
maternal pride, commended his principles,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span>
while gently censuring the liberty he had
taken.</p>
<p>With Richardson’s splendid triumph to spur
them on, the passion of Englishwomen for
novel-reading reached its height. Young
girls, hitherto debarred from this diversion,
began more and more to taste the forbidden
sweets, and wise men, like Dr. Johnson,
meekly acknowledged that there was no stopping
them. When Frances Chamberlayne
Sheridan told him that she never allowed her
little daughter to read anything but the
“Rambler,” or matters equally instructive, he
answered with all his customary candor:
“Then, madam, you are a fool! Turn your
daughter’s wits loose in your library. If she
be well inclined, she will choose only good
food. If otherwise, all your precautions will
amount to nothing.” Both Charles Lamb and
Ruskin cherished similar opinions, but the
sentiment was more uncommon in Dr. Johnson’s
day, and we know how even he reproached
good Hannah More for quoting from
“Tom Jones.”</p>
<p>With or without permission, however, the
girls read gayly on. In Garrick’s epilogue<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span>
to Colman’s farce, “Polly Honeycombe,” the
wayward young heroine confesses her lively
gratitude for all the dangerous knowledge she
has gleaned from novels.</p>
<div class="poetry-container">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">“So much these dear instructors change and win us,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Without their light we ne’er should know what’s in us.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Here we at once supply our childish wants,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Novels are hotbeds for your forward plants.”</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Later on, Sheridan gave us the immortal Lydia
Languish feeding her sentimentality upon that
“evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,” the
circulating library. Lydia’s taste in books is
catholic, but not altogether free from reproach.
“Fling ‘Peregrine Pickle’ under the toilet,”
she cries to Lucy, when surprised by a visit
from Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony.
“Throw ‘Roderick Random’ into the closet.
Put ‘The Innocent Adultery’ into ‘The Whole
Duty of Man.’ Thrust ‘Lord Aimworth’
under the sofa. Cram ‘Ovid’ behind the
bolster. Put ‘The Man of Feeling’ into your
pocket. There—now for them!”</p>
<p>How “The Man of Feeling” ever went into
Lucy’s pocket remains a mystery, for it takes
many volumes to hold that discursive romance,
where everything from character to clothes is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span>
described with relentless minuteness. If a
lady goes to a ball, we are not merely told that
she looked radiant in “white and gold,” or in
“scarlet tulle,” after the present slipshod fashion;
but we are carefully informed that “a
scarf of cerulean tint flew between her right
shoulder and her left hip, being buttoned at
each end by a row of rubies. A coronet of
diamonds, through which there passed a white
branch of the feathers of the ostrich, was inserted
on the left decline of her lovely head.”
And so on, until the costume is complete.</p>
<p>By this time women had regularly enrolled
themselves in the victorious army of novel-writers,
and had won fame and fortune in the
field. Consider the brilliant and instantaneous
success of Frances Burney. Think of the
excitement she aroused, and the honors heaped
thick and fast upon her. A woman of twenty-six
when she wrote “Evelina,” she was able,
by dint of short stature and childish ways, to
pass for a girl of seventeen, which increased
amazingly the popular interest in her novel.
Sheridan swore he could not believe so young
a thing could manifest such genius, and begged
her to write him a comedy on the spot. Sir<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span>
Joshua Reynolds professed actual fear of such
keen wit and relentless observation. Dr.
Johnson vowed that Richardson had written
nothing finer, and Fielding nothing so fine as
“Evelina;” and playfully protested he was
too proud to eat cold mutton for dinner when
he sat by Miss Burney’s side. Posterity, it is
true, while preserving “Evelina” with great
pride, has declined to place it by the side of
“Tom Jones” or “Clarissa Harlowe;” but
if we had our choice between the praise of
posterity which was Miss Austen’s portion,
and the praise of contemporaries which was
Miss Burney’s lot, I doubt not we should be
wise enough to take our applause off-hand,—“dashed
in our faces, sounded in our ears,”
as Johnson said of Garrick, and leave the
future to look after itself.</p>
<p>It is pleasant, however, to think that the
first good woman novelist had her work over
rather than under estimated. It is pleasant
also to contemplate the really bewildering
career of Maria Edgeworth. Miss Edgeworth’s
books are agreeable reading, and her
children’s stories are among the very best ever
written; but it is not altogether easy to understand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span>
why France and England contended to
do her honor. When she went to London or
to Paris she became the idol of brilliant and
fashionable people. Peers and poets united
in her praise. Like Mrs. Jarley, she was the
delight of the nobility and gentry. The Duke
of Wellington wrote verses to her. Lord
Byron, whom she detested, extolled her generously.
Moore pronounced her “delightful.”
Macaulay compared the return of the Absentee
to the return of Ulysses in the “Odyssey.”
Sir Walter Scott took forcible possession of
her, and carried her away to Abbotsford,—a
too generous reward, it would seem, for all
she ever did. Sydney Smith delighted in her.
Mrs. Somerville, the learned, and Mrs. Fry,
the benignant, sought her friendship; and
finally, Mme. de Staël, who considered Jane
Austen’s novels “vulgar,” protested that Miss
Edgeworth was “worthy of enthusiasm.”</p>
<p>Now this was all very charming, and very
enjoyable; but with such rewards following
thick and fast upon successful story-writing,
it is hardly surprising that every year saw the
band of literary aspirants increase and multiply
amazingly. People were beginning to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span>
learn how easy it was to write a book. Already
Hannah More had bewailed the ever
increasing number of novelists, “their unparalleled
fecundity,” and “the frightful facility
of this species of composition.” What would
she think if she were living now, and could see
over a thousand novels published every year
in England? Already Mrs. Radcliffe had
woven around English hearths the spell of her
rather feeble terrors, and young and old shuddered
and quaked in the subterranean corridors
of castles amid the gloomy Apennines.
Why a quiet, cheerful, retiring woman like
Mrs. Radcliffe, who hated notoriety, and who
loved country life, and afternoon drives, and all
that was comfortable and commonplace, should
have written “The Mysteries of Udolpho”
passes our comprehension; but write it she
did, and England received it with a mad delight
she has never manifested for any triumph
of modern realism. The volume, we are
assured, was too often torn asunder by frantic
members of a household so that it might pass
from hand to hand more rapidly than if it
held together.</p>
<p>Mrs. Radcliffe not only won fame and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span>
amassed a considerable fortune,—she received
five hundred pounds for “Udolpho” and eight
hundred for “The Italian,”—but she gave
such impetus to the novel of horrors, which
had been set going by Horace Walpole’s
“Castle of Otranto,” that for years England
was oppressed and excited by these dreadful
literary nightmares. Matthew—otherwise
“Monk”—Lewis, Robert Charles Maturin,
and a host of feebler imitators, wrote grisly
stories of ghosts, and murders, and nameless
crimes, and supernatural visitations. Horrors
are piled on horrors in these dismal and sulphurous
tales. Blue fire envelops us, and persevering
spectres, who have striven a hundred
years for burial rites, sit by their victims’ bed-sides
and recite dolorous verses, which is more
than any self-respecting spectre ought to do.
Compacts with Satan are as numerous as bargain
counters in our city shops. Suicides
alternate briskly with assassinations. In one
melancholy story, the despairing heroine agrees
to meet her lover in a lonely church, where
they intend stabbing themselves sociably together.
Unhappily, it rains hard all the afternoon,
and—with an unexpected touch of realism—she<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span>
is miserably afraid the bad weather
will keep her indoors. “The storm was so violent,”
we are told, “that Augusta often feared
she could not go out at the appointed time.
Frequently did she throw up the sash, and view
with anxious looks the convulsed elements.
At half past five the weather cleared, and
Augusta felt a fearful joy.”</p>
<p>It might have been supposed that the gay,
good-humored satire of “Northanger Abbey”
would have laughed these tragic absurdities
from the land. But Miss Austen alone, of all
the great novelists of England, won less than
her due share of profit and renown. Her sisters
in the field were loaded down with honors.
When the excellent Mrs. Opie became a
Friend, and refused to write any more fiction,
except, indeed, those moral but unlikely tales
about the awful consequences of lying, her
contemporaries spoke gravely of the genius
she had sacrificed at the shrine of religion.
Charlotte Bronté’s masterpiece gained instant
recognition throughout the length and breadth
of England. Of George Eliot’s sustained
success there is no need to speak. But Jane
Austen, whose incomparable art is now the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span>
theme of every critic’s pen, was practically
ignored while she lived, and perhaps never
suspected, herself, how admirable, how perfect
was her work. Sir Walter Scott, it is
true, with the intuition of a great story-teller,
instantly recognized this perfection; and so
did Lord Holland and a few others, among
whom let us always gladly remember George
IV., who was wise enough to keep a set of
Miss Austen’s novels in every one of his
houses, and who was happy enough to receive
the dedication of “Emma.” Nevertheless, it
cannot be forgotten that fifteen years elapsed
between the writing of “Pride and Prejudice”
and its publication; that Cadell refused it
unread,—a dreadful warning to publishers,—and
that all Miss Austen ever realized from
her books in her lifetime was seven hundred
pounds,—one hundred pounds less than
Mrs. Radcliffe received for a single story, and
nearly two thousand pounds less than Frances
Burney was paid for her absolutely unreadable
“Camilla.” High-priced novels are by no
means a modern innovation, though we hear
so much more about them now than formerly.
Blackwood gave Lockhart one thousand pounds<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span>
for the manuscript of “Reginald Dalton,” and
“Woodstock” brought to Scott’s creditors the
fabulous sum of eight thousand pounds.</p>
<p>For with Sir Walter flowered the golden
age of English fiction. Fortune and fame
came smiling at his beck, and the great reading
world confessed itself better and happier
for his genius. Then it was that the book-shops
were besieged by clamorous crowds
when a new Waverly novel was promised to
the public. Then Lord Holland sat up all
night to finish “Old Mortality.” Then the
excitement over the Great Unknown reached
fever heat, and the art of the novelist gained
its absolute ascendency, an ascendency unbroken
in our day, and likely to remain unbroken
for many years to come. At present, every
child that learns its letters makes one more
story-reader in the world, and the chances are
it will make one more story-writer to help deluge
the world with fiction. Novels, it has
been truly said, are the only things that can
never be too dear or too cheap for the market.
The beautiful and costly editions of Miss
Austen and Scott and Thackeray compete for
favor with marvelously cheap editions of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span>
Dickens, that true and abiding idol of people
who have no money to spend on hand-made
paper and broad margins. It is the same
with living novelists. Rare and limited editions
for the rich; cheap and unlimited editions
for the poor; all bought, all read, and the
novelist waxing more proud and prosperous
every day. So prosperous, indeed, so proud,
he is getting too great a man to amuse us as
of yore. He spins fewer stories now, and his
glittering web has grown a trifle gray and
dusty with the sweepings from back outlets
and mean streets. He preaches occasionally
in the market-place, and he says acrimonious
things anent other novelists whose ways of
thinking differ from his own. These new, sad
fashions of speech are often very grievous to
his readers, but nothing can rob him of our
friendship; for always we hope that he will
take us by the hand, and lead us smilingly
away from the relentless realities of life to the
golden regions of romance where the immortal
are.</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span></p>
<h2 class="nobreak" id="FROM_THE_READERS_STANDPOINT">FROM THE READER’S STANDPOINT.</h2>
</div>
<p>It is a serious age in which we live, and
there is a painful sense of responsibility
manifested by those who have assigned to
themselves the task of directing their fellow
creatures, not only in matters spiritual, but in
all that pertains to intellectual or artistic life.
That we need guidance is plain enough; the
helping hand of patient and scholarly criticism
was never more welcome than now; but to be
driven, or rather hounded along the sunny
paths of literature by severe and self-appointed
teachers is not perhaps the surest way
of reaching the best that has been known and
thought in the world. Neither is it calculated
to increase our enjoyment en route. The
“personally conducted” reader must weary
now and then of his restricted range, as well
as of the peculiar contentiousness of his guides.
If he be reading for his own entertainment,—and
there are men and women who keep that
object steadily and selfishly in view,—if he be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span>
deep in a novel, for example, with no other
purpose than an hour’s unprofitable pleasure,
it is annoying to be told by the authors of
several other novels that he has chosen this
pleasure unwisely. He may be pardoned if,
in a moment of irritation, he tells the disputants
plucking at his sleeve to please go on
writing their fiction as well as in them lies,
and he will decide for himself which of their
books to read.</p>
<p>For it is not in the nature of man to relish
a too strenuous dictatorship in matters which
he cannot be made to believe are of very urgent
importance. When Mr. Hamlin Garland
says that American literature <i>must</i> be distinctly
and unmistakably American, that it <i>must</i> be
faithful to American conditions, it is difficult
not to reply that there is no “must” for us
of Mr. Garland’s devising. Let him write
his stories as he thinks best, and his many
admirers will read them with satisfaction; but
his authority is necessarily limited to his own
literary offspring. He cannot expect to whip
other people’s children. When Mr. Hall
Caine tells the good people of Edinburgh that
the novelist is his brother’s keeper, that it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span>
is “evasive cowardice” for him to deny his
responsibility, and that the mere fact of his
having written a book proves that he feels
himself something stronger than his neighbor
who hasn’t, we only protest, as readers, against
assuming any share in this spirit of acute conscientiousness.
Personally, I do not believe
that it is the duty of any man or woman to
write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there
would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
But even granting that the author goes to
work, like Mr. Caine, from the strictest sense
of moral liability, there can be no corresponding
obligation on our part to read the tale.
We hear too much of our failure to accept
and appreciate the gifts which the liberal gods
are now providing for us, and it would be
more modest, as well as more dignified, if
those who set the feast would forbear to extol
its merits.</p>
<p>As for the rival schools of fiction, they may
as well consent to live in amity side by side.
If they don’t “fill one home with glee,” they
fill many homes with that moderate gratification
which lightens a weary hour. Each has
its adherents; each gives its allotted share of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span>
pleasure to people who know very well what
they like, and who will never be converted
by arguments into reading what they don’t.
It is useless to tell a man who is halfway
through “The House of the Wolf,” and oblivious
for one blessed hour to everything in the
world save the fate and fortunes of three
French lads, that “the romantic novel represents
a juvenile and, intellectually considered,
lower stage of development than the realistic
novel.” He doesn’t care the value of a ha’penny
for stages of development. He is not
reading “The House of the Wolf” by way
of mental or moral discipline. He is not to
be persuaded into exchanging it unfinished for
“The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker,” because
more “creative intelligence” is required
to tell a story without incident—when there
is, so to speak, no story to tell. What is it
to him, if the book were hard or easy to write?
Why should he be reminded perpetually by
realists and veritists of the arduous nature of
their task? He did not put them to work.
The one and only thing which is of vital interest
to him is the tale itself. The author’s
point of view, his sense of personal responsibility,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span>
the artistic limits which he sets himself,
the difficulties which he piles in his own way
and heroically overcomes, the particular platform
from which he addresses the universe,
his stern adherence to actualities, his truthful
treatment of material,—all these things about
which we hear so much, mean nothing, and
less than nothing to the reader. Give him
the book, and he asks to know no more. He
judges it by some standard of his own, which
may not bear the test of critical analysis, but
which is more convincing to him than the
recorded opinion of the writer. The wife of
his bosom and his college-bred daughter are
powerless to persuade him that Tourguéneff
is a better novelist than Dickens. And when
he stoutly resists this pressure from within,
this subtle and penetrating influence of feminine
culture, it is worse than useless to attack
him from without with supercilious remarks
anent juvenility, and the immature stage of
his development.</p>
<p>It must be admitted that the realistic story-writers
are more prone to tell us about themselves
and their methods than are the heroic
narrators of improbable, but none the less<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span>
interesting, romances. Mr. Rider Haggard,
indeed, from time to time insinuates that he,
too, is trammeled by the obstinate nature of
facts, and that there is a restraining and
troublesome ingredient of truth mingled with
his fiction. But this is surely a pleasant jest
on Mr. Haggard’s part. We cannot believe
that he ever denied himself an incident in the
entire course of his literary life. Mr. Stevenson
defended with characteristic spirit those
keenly imaginative and adventurous tales
which have made the whole world kin, and to
whose splendid inspiration we owe perhaps
the added heritage of “Kidnapped” and
“Treasure Island.” Mr. Lang throws down
his gauntlet unhesitatingly in behalf of romance,
and fights her battles with joyous and
animating zeal. But Mr. Lang is not pre-eminently
a novelist. He only drops into
fiction now and then, as Mr. Wegg dropped
into poetry, in the intervals of more urgent
avocations. Moreover, it is seldom from these
authors that we gather our minute information
concerning the duties and difficulties of novel-writing.
They have been too wary to betray
the secrets of the craft. It is Mr. Garland,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span>
for instance, and not Mr. Stanley Weyman,
who confides to us what we had never even
suspected,—the veritist’s lack of control over
the characters he has created. “He cannot
shove them about,” we are told, and are
amazed to hear it, “nor marry them, nor kill
them. What they do, they do by their own
will, or through nature’s arrangement. Their
very names come by some singular attraction.
The veritist cannot name his characters arbitrarily.”</p>
<p>Small wonder he finds his task a hard one!
Small wonder he says so much about the difficulties
which beset him! He does his duty
by Mary Jane, provides her with a lover, and
laboriously strives to strew with novelistic
thorns the devious paths of courtship. What
must be his sentiments, when the ungrateful
hussy refuses, after all his trouble, to marry
the young man. Or perhaps she declines to
be called Mary Ann, and insists that her
name is Arabella, to his great annoyance and
discomfiture. Lurid possibilities of revolt
suggest themselves on every side, until the
unhappy novel-writer, notwithstanding his detestation
of the “feudal ideal,” as illustrated<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span>
by Sir Walter Scott, must sigh occasionally
for “<i>les Droits Seigneuriaux</i>,” which would
enable him to hang a few of his rebellious
puppets, “<i>pour encourager les autres</i>.” It
may be worth while, in this connection, to
remind him of the absolutely arbitrary manner
in which Mr. Anthony Trollope, that true
master of realism, disposed of Mrs. Proudie.
If ever there was a character in fiction whom
we should have trusted to hold her own against
her author, Mrs. Proudie was that character.
No reasonable creature will for a moment pretend
that an amiable, easy-going, middle-aged
gentleman like Mr. Trollope was a match for
the Bishop’s wife, who had, in her day, routed
many a stronger man. She had lived so long,
too. In novel after novel she had played her
vigorous part, until the right to go on living
was hers by force of established usage and custom.
Yet this is what happened. One morning
Mr. Trollope, while writing at the Athenæum
Club, enjoyed the salutary experience of hearing
himself criticised, and very unfavorably
criticised, by two of the club members. Among
other things, they said they were tired of
reading about the same people over and over<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span>
again; they thought if a man had not wit
enough to evolve new characters, he had better
give up composing novels; and they objected
especially to the perpetual domination of a
woman so odious as Mrs. Proudie. At this
juncture, Mr. Trollope could be silent no
longer. He arose, confessed his identity, admitted
his sin, and promised, by way of
amendment, to kill Mrs. Proudie “before the
week was out;” for were not the unfinished
chapters of the “Last Chronicles of Barset”
lying at that moment on his table? And
what is more, he kept his word. He slew Mrs.
Proudie, apparently quite oblivious to the fact
that he was interfering unwarrantably with
“nature’s arrangement.” I mention this incident
to show that it is possible for a really
determined author, who knows his rights and
will have them, to overcome the resistance of
the most obstinate character in his book.</p>
<p>For the rest, it does not appear to the peace-loving
reader that either the realist or the
romancist has any very convincing arguments
to offer in defense of his own exclusive orthodoxy.
When the romancist affirms that his
books lift men out of the sordid, painful realities<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span>
of life into a healthier atmosphere, and
make them temporarily forgetful of sadness
and discontent, the realist very sensibly replies
that he prefers facts, however sordid, to literary
anodynes, and that it is his peculiar pleasure
to grapple with things as they are. When
the realist remarks in turn that nothing is
easier than to write of love and war, but that
it “lacks distinction,” and shows a puerile and
childish mind, the romancist merely chuckles,
and clasps “Les Trois Mousquetaires” closer
to his heart. Neither of the combatants is
likely to be much affected by anything the
other has to say, and we, outside the ring, can
but echo Marianne Dashwood’s sentiment,
“This is admiration of a very particular kind.”
Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Lang have both distinctly
recorded their debt of gratitude to
Dumas. They cannot and do not claim that
he is at all times an edifying writer; but many
a weary hour has been brightened for them by
the magic of his art, many a fretful doubt laid
to rest by contact with his virile gayety and
courage. On the other hand, Mr. Boyesen
has just as distinctly and just as sincerely
assured us that Dumas had no charm nor spell<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span>
for him, and he has added his impression that
it is only those who, intellectually, never out-grow
their boyhood who continue to delight in
such “sensational chronicles of impossible
deeds.”</p>
<p>It is in this latter statement, which has been
repeated over and over again with as many
variations as a popular air, that the peculiar
temper of the realist stands revealed. He is
not only sure that stories of adventure are not
to his liking, but he is equally sure that those
who do enjoy them are his intellectual inferiors,
or at least that they have not reached a
mental maturity commensurate with his own.
He says so, with pleasing candor, whenever he
has the opportunity. He is, in general, what
the Ettrick Shepherd neatly terms “a bigot to
his ain abeelities,” and it would be hard to
convince him that Dumas is none the less, in
the words of Michelet, “a force of nature,”
because <i>he</i> is not personally stirred by that
force, or because he knows a number of intelligent
men who are no more affected than he is.
For myself, I can but say that, being constrained
once to spend two days in Marseilles,
the only thing that reconciled me to my fate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span>
was the sight of the gray Chateau d’If standing,
stern and solitary, amid the roughened
waters. “Banks and tariffs, the newspaper
and the caucus,” may, as Emerson says, “rest
on the same foundations of wonder as the
town of Troy and the Temple of Delphos;”
but, personally, I am more susceptible to Troy,
or even to the Chateau d’If, than I am to
banks, of which useful institutions Marseilles
contains a number, all very handsome and
imposing. This is, perhaps, a matter of temperament
and training, or it may be that mine
is one of those “primitive natures” for whose
“weak and childish imaginations,” as Mr.
Howells phrases it, such unrealities are a necessary
stimulant. It is true that I might, if
I chose, shelter myself under the generous
mantle of Dr. Johnson, who was known to
say that “the books we read with most pleasure
are light compositions which contain a
quick succession of events;” but, after all,
this was but the expression of the doctor’s
personal preference, and of no more weight
than are the words of living critics who share,
or who do not share, in his opinion.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span></p>
<p>“A good cause,” says Sir Thomas Browne,
“needs not to be patron’d by passion, but
can sustain itself upon a temperate dispute;”
and if scornful words be unneeded—and unheeded—in
matters of moment, they simply
run to waste when poured out over trivialities.
We are asked to take everything so seriously
in this unhumorous age, to talk about the
novel as a “powerful educational agent,” and
to discuss the “profound and complex logic of
reality” in a short story of mild interest and
modest wit. This confuses our sense of proportion,
and we grow restive under a pressure
too severe. Yet who shall say that the public,
big, amiable, and unconcerned, is not grateful
for every readable book that strays into its
path? Romance and realism, the proven and
the impossible, wild stories of youthful passion
and sedate studies of middle-aged spinsters,
tales of New England villages, tales of
Western towns, tales of Scotch hamlets, and
tales of the mist-lands beyond the mountains
of Africa, are all welcomed and read with
avidity. The novelist, unless he be inhumanly
dull, is sure of his audience, and he grows didactic<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</span>
from sheer excess of prosperity. When
the Rev. Mr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren)
wrote “Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush,” the
book went straight to many hearths and many
hearts. It was not an epoch-making work by
any means, but its homely pathos and humor
insured for it an immediate hearing, and most
comfortable returns. The critics united in its
praise, and the publishers gave us at once to
understand how many copies had been sold.
Why, then, did Mr. Watson, to whom the gods
had been so kind, lift up his voice in a few
short months to say supercilious things anent
all schools of fiction save his own? The world
is wider than Scotland, and local coloring is
not humanity’s one need. It will be long ere
we believe that the art of story-telling began
with “A Window in Thrums,” or that “Beside
the Bonnie Briar Bush” marks its final development.
Let us rather remember with gratitude
that Mr. Barrie, an artist too versatile to
be intolerant, has recorded, in place of delicate
self-analysis and self-congratulation, his sincere
reverence for Scott, and Dickens, and Thackeray,
and Fielding, and Smollett, “old-fashioned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span>
novelists of some repute,” whose horizon
is wide as the sound of our English tongue,
and whose sun is not yet set.</p>
<p>If we cannot have peace, let us then have
a truce, as in the old fighting days, a truce
of six months or a year. It would freshen
us amazingly to hear nothing for a whole
year about the “soul-searching veracity of Tolstoï,”
and a great many timid people might
pluck up heart to read that fine novelist, who
has been rendered so alarming by his admirers.
For a year the romancist could write of young
people who marry, and the realist of middle-aged
people who don’t; and, in the renewed
tranquillity of content, each workman might
perhaps recognize the strength of the other’s
position. For youth, and age, and marriage,
and celibacy are alike familiar to us all. We
have no crying need to be enlightened on these
subjects, though we cheerfully consent to be
entertained by them. “If the public do not
know what books to read,” says Mr. Lang
very truthfully, “it is not for lack of cheap
and copious instruction.” We are sated sometimes
with good advice, and grow a little tired<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span>
of education. There are days even when we
recall with mingled regret and gratitude the
gray-haired, unknown author of “Aucassin and
Nicolette,” who wove his tale in the humble
hope that it might for a brief moment gladden
the sad hearts of men.</p>
<p class="center p2">
The Riverside Press<br>
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS<br>
U · S · A<br>
</p>
<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
<div class="chapter transnote">
<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
<p>Punctuation errors have been corrected.</p>
<p>Page <a href="#Page_157">157</a>: “In commonalties” changed to “In commonalities”
</p></div>
<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VARIA ***</div>
</body>
</html>
|
