THE STREETS OF NEW YORK.
VEN the Pan-Americans protest that the streets of New York are dirty. It is very comical, but it is true, that all our marvellous prosperity, our genius of invention, our quickness of wit, and profusion of resource; all our patriotism and pride, our great traditions of liberty and heroism, our free soil, free speech, and free press; and all the force and intelligence of our free government—cannot keep the streets of New York clean. Miss Edwards, the most courteous and friendly of visitors, is compelled to say: "I found on all sides nothing but holes of mud, gutters, and dirt piles, an endless rush and a block of street traffic. There are so many dangers and the state of the highways is such as to make it incomprehensible to English people that enterprising Americans would long endure it."
Miss Edwards is familiar with the dirt of Egypt, which is universal and intolerable, but even that does not mollify or alleviate the awful impression of dirty New York. Then a Pan-American, perhaps from Bogota, from Callao, from Lima, from Santiago, from Buenos Ayres, from Rio de Janeiro, from Guayaquil—cities in which we had not supposed impeccable highways to be—politely flagellates us, and ignominiously discrowns Broadway. "It was impossible not to notice the deplorable condition of the streets. Our carriages plunged terribly into the holes which at frequent intervals were met with, and the wheels at every turn sent whirls of mud, which compelled the passers-by to keep at a respectful distance."
We may indeed reply that this is the fling of a Pan-American. And who, forsooth, is a Pan-American? Is he the superior—nay, does he presume to be the peer—of a North American? Are we not notoriously the greatest nation in the world? Does not our population reduplicate incalculably? Have we not carried civilization from sea to sea? Have we not the largest lakes, the longest rivers, the broadest prairies, the greatest cataract, in the world? And shall the minions of monarchies and the pigmies of tuppenny temporary republics snap their ridiculous fingers at us, and presume to say that the streets of New York are dirty? The idea is preposterous. It is contemptible. Moreover, it is insulting, and the streets of New York are—
It is plain sailing—or slipping, as chance may determine whether we go in the water or the mud—so far, but it is a little difficult to end that sentence in the same key. Let us try another, possibly a little less perfervid. The population of the United States is some sixty millions. Taken altogether they form undoubtedly the most intelligent community, with the highest average well-being, in the world. They are self-governing down to aldermen and coroners. More than in any country at any time in history, the will of the majority of the adult male population determines the government. The city of New York is one of the three or four chief cities of the world. It is confessedly the metropolis of this blessed and absolutely self-governing country, and the streets of New York can't be kept clean.
Is there any possible method of describing the unquestionable greatness and undoubted glory of the country, its resplendent history and its miraculous achievements, in an ascending and cumulative series of epithets and epigrams which shall end truthfully in the resounding allegation, "and the streets of New York are kept clean"? Indeed, is not this little joker worse than that of the thimble? Does he not grin at us from every pile of mud, and laugh out of every hole, and snicker and sneer on every side of the unremoved and apparently irremovable dirt and disorder?
It is absurd, as the boys say, to "blame" this situation upon somebody else—some street commissioner, or scavenger, or other officer, or employé. Nobody is ever guilty of misrule in this country but the rulers, and the rulers are the people. The citizens of New York elect the city officers who are to do the city work which the citizens pay for. They give some of those officers authority to dismiss others who are derelict in their duty, and the governor can deal with the chief officers who do not obey the command of the people. If the taxes are outrageously heavy, if the money is squandered, if the streets are dirty and city government a farce, nobody is to blame but the citizens. They have as good a government as they choose, and the kind of government they desire.
Then they desire dirty streets? Certainly. That is to say, they don't desire clean streets strongly enough to secure them. Then popular government has failed in cities? Rather there are some things in cities in which popular government is not especially interested. If there are two hundred and fifty thousand voters in the city of New York, how many of them really care enough for clean streets and proper municipal administration to spend time and trouble to secure them?
Consider the lilies of the field—that is to say, look at the aldermen and the municipal officers, the representatives in the State Legislature and in Congress that the city of New York elects. Do they represent what we call its intelligence and character? Yet undeniably they are representatives of the majority of the voters, and if that majority be corrupt or stupid, it is either because there are more knaves and fools than intelligent and honest citizens among the voters, or because such citizens do not care to take the trouble to vote and to be represented; in which case the Aldermen and Co. that we see are, morally speaking, true representatives of the city. The minions of monarchies and the pigmies of tuppenny temporary republics, as they bump and wallow and flounder, bespattered and contemptuous, through the streets of New York, may truly say that they are such streets as the citizens desire, because if the people desired clean streets, unless popular government be a failure, they would have them. If the mayor did not appoint officers who would clean the streets, they would require the governor to deal with the mayor.
Does it necessarily follow, because popular government is, upon the whole, the best government, that the governing people desire all good things that government can supply? Liberty they want, and equality, and fair play; but do they, because they are self-governing, desire beautiful buildings and clean streets? Might not a good-natured despot of fine taste and sanitary enlightenment and a sense of order give his dominions nobler public works and a better municipal administration than a republic which is neither tuppenny nor temporary, but in which there is easy and indolent indifference to public beauty and public order?
"Above all," said the English bishop to the young catechumen, "don't mistake zeal for knowledge." Above all, says the good genius of America, don't confound national bumptiousness with patriotism.
THE MORALITY OF DANCING.
HE gravity of the discussion of the morality of dancing is exceedingly amusing. The dancing of young people is as natural and instinctive as their laughing and singing, and the old Easy Chairs about the wall might as wisely quarrel with the song of the bobolink in the fields as with the dance upon the floor. But the grave censors who condemn it must be heard. There is reason in the way in which they often put their objections. Excitement, late hours, exposure of health, all these are bad. But, on the other hand, exercise, cheerfulness, friendly conversation, all these are good. The zealous censors confound uses and abuses. The Easy Chair has seen a worthy temperance apostle ingulfing cups of coffee in the pauses of an exhortation to abstinence, until it marvelled at the capacity of the apostolic stomach. Could there be no intemperance in coffee-drinking? But was coffee not to be drunk? The Easy Chair has seen such frantic gobbling at a railway eating-room that it could only gaze in wonder at the sottish and, so to speak, drunken eating. But is food not to be eaten? The Easy Chair has seen little children, extravagantly dressed and decorated, dancing in great hotel parlors on hot summer nights at an hour when they should all have been sound asleep in their beds, while their parents should have been soundly chastised for not putting them there. But is the dancing of young persons therefore wrong?
This is probably to the censorial mind nothing but the base compromise and sophistry of "moderate drinking." But nevertheless most of the evils of this kind are perversions of good things. There are a great many young and ignorant parents who become impatient with the incessant activity and restlessness of their children. They condemn them to sit still in a chair and make no noise. Dear madame, it is nature's intention that the child shall be restless, to develop his limbs. You apply to him rules that are fit and easy for us who are old, and whom nature equally admonishes to sit still in chairs. Our little Procrustean beds are merely furniture that tortures. The desire of youth for enjoyment is as worthy as its desire for knowledge, for truth, for excellence. And it is the spirit, not the method, of enjoyments which are not obviously wrong, that is chiefly to be regarded. A good man asks whether he could go from dancing to console a dying bed. But could he go from skating, or reading Pickwick, or from heartily laughing, to console a dying friend? Would it not, even in his own view, depend wholly upon the mood in which he was doing it?
Let him select an act which he would approve. Let him be reading a serious book, or thinking in his study, or going upon a visit of charity when he is summoned, and he would say that he could go with perfect composure and the utmost propriety. But how if he were peevish as he read the serious book, or if he were thinking angrily in his study, or if he were mentally reproaching the duty that drew him from his comfortable room to pay a visit of charity, could he then more properly hasten to console the dying than if he had been cheerfully dancing, his mind full of pleasant thoughts and the delight of the music and the measured movement? It is not the thing that he is doing, but the spirit in which he is doing it, that should be considered.
How different a view of the pleasant recreation of dancing may be taken by an intellectual man, from that of one who thinks the waltz a device of Satan, is shown by a passage of De Quincey, the beginning of which the Easy Chair will quote, and which will find an echo in many a memory: "And in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none (I say deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance; under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich and festal, the execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous action. And whenever the music happens not to be of a light, trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many persons feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz., derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever."
THE HOG FAMILY.
T is a good sign of the times that the crusade against the large and omnipresent family of Hog which the Easy Chair long ago preached has been vigorously renewed. Public manners are a common interest. The private conduct of the most famous personages is of small concern beyond their domestic circle. But the conduct of the person in the next room at a hotel, or in the next seat in a railroad car, is of great interest to us. Yet the remedy is not obvious. Even if we should propose a school of manners, it is not certain that the pupils for whom it would be especially designed would attend.
If a fellow-guest at the Grand Hotel of the Universe comes in at two in the morning, and going humming along the corridor to his room, flings his boot down upon the floor at his door with a resounding blow that awakens all neighboring sleepers, you may cover him with expletives, and consign him in imagination to a hundred direful dooms, but nevertheless he goes unpunished. Or you may suddenly confront him in all the majesty of nocturnal dishabille, and admonish him severely of the wicked selfishness of his ways. But the probability is that you will have either an extremely amused audience, who will "guy" your appearance without mercy, or receive a surly rejoinder in the form of a boot or a volley of vituperation. In any event, the school of manners will not be honored by the exercises.
Yet the Hog family is not American, nor is it by any means peculiar to this country. The Lady Mavourneen who said with enthusiasm that she could travel without insult from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that every American of the other sex seemed to make himself her protector, said only what is generally true of the American. He is naturally courteous and invincibly good-natured. Indeed, it is his good-nature which has permitted the family Hog to develop to such proportions. A man enters a hotel "as if it belonged to him." Will he not be forced to pay for his accommodation—and roundly? Shall he not take his ease in his inn? Is he not willing to settle for all the food, drink, comfort, trouble, that he may require or occasion? Shall he put himself out for others? If number one does not look out for itself, who will look out for it?
And to all this Jonathan good-naturedly assents. If number one takes more than his share of the sofa, Jonathan moves up. If number one puts his feet on a chair, Jonathan does not stare. If number one still more grossly demonstrates his porcine lineage, Jonathan dislikes to make trouble—until number one comes to despise those whom he insults, and plainly expects every circle to bow to the sovereignty of selfishness. This is a fatal form of good-nature, but it has a not unkindly origin. It springs from a social condition in which everybody is expected to help everybody else, because everybody needs help as in a frontier community. Indeed, in many a rural neighborhood still, this spirit of lending a hand is supreme. Everybody expects to submit to inconvenience, because he knows that he will require others to submit.
But these refinements of mutual dependence must not be allowed to justify the outrages of selfishness. The passenger in the boat or the train who occupies more than his seat, who sits in one chair, covers another with his feet, and a third with his bundles, and smokes, and widely squirts tobacco juice around him until his vicinity is not "a little heaven," but another kind of "h" below, is a public pest and general nuisance, for whose punishment there should be a common law of procedure. But this can be found only where there is a common contempt and resolution which will deprive him of his ill-gotten seats in the first place, and make him feel, in the second, the general scorn of his neighbors.
But as we are told constantly and correctly that we are a reading people, it is through reading that the members of the family which is hostis humani generis will learn that they are the most detestable and detested of the great families of the race. You, sir, whose eyes are skimming this page, and who never give your seat to a woman in the elevated car "on principle"—the principle being either that a woman ought not to get into a crowded car, knowing that she will put gentlemen to inconvenience; or that the company ought to forbid the entry of more passengers than there are seats; or that first come should be first served; or that number one, having paid for a seat, has a right to occupy it; or whatever other form the "principle" may assume—you are one of the host against whom the crusade is pushed. Thou art the—well, for the sake of euphony we will say man, but it is not man that is in the mind of your censors.
Or you, madam, who enter the railroad car with an air of right, and a look of reproval at every man who does not spring to his feet, and who settle yourself into the seat offered you without the least recognition of the courtesy that offers it—for you it would be well if the urbane mentor of another day were still here, who, having given his seat to a dashing young woman who seemed unconscious of his presence, looked at her until she impatiently demanded if he wanted anything, and he responding, said, blandly, "Yes, madam; I want to hear you say thank you."
Both this sir and madam may learn from the daily papers as from this page that even in a car where they recognize no acquaintance a cloud of witnesses around hold them in full survey, and whatever the fashion or richness of their garments, and however supercilious their air, perceive at once whether they belong to the family of ladies and gentlemen, or to that of Charles Lamb's "Mr. H." Thackeray's hero could not have been more aghast to see his divine Ottilia consume with gusto the oysters which were no longer fresh than Romeo to learn by his Juliet's question to that urbane mentor of other years that his mistress must be of kin to the unmentionable family.
The next time those boots are flung down in the reverberating hotel corridor there will be no harm in remarking to the clerk the next morning in the crowded office that it is not necessary for you to look upon the register to know that one of the Hog family arrived during the night.
THE ENLIGHTENED OBSERVER.
HE Enlightened Observer from Europe who is studying American institutions asked the Easy Chair the other day what was meant by the statement that a candidate for a high elective office had opened headquarters in the neighborhood of a nominating convention. The Enlightened Observer said that he had always supposed that such conventions were assemblies which nominated persons whose public services and personal ability and character had distinguished them among their fellow-citizens, and shown them to be especially fitted for the offices which were to be filled. "Am I mistaken," he asked, "in supposing that to be the theory of your institutions?"
The Easy Chair could not say that he was, and conceded that such was the theory.
"In other words," continued the Enlightened Observer, "a republic secures good government because it intrusts the government not to the chance of birth, which may give to Oliver Cromwell a son Richard, and make the heir of Alexander the Great an Alexander the Little, but because it calls to its great offices of every degree those citizens who have demonstrated their peculiar fitness."
"That is certainly the theory of our republican institutions," returned the Easy Chair.
"Well?" said the Enlightened Observer.
"Well?" echoed the Easy Chair.
"Yes, but why, then, does a candidate open headquarters?"
"Yes, certainly. Why—that is—it is to make himself known."
"But the theory seems to assume that he is known already. Is it that he performs public services at the headquarters, or exhibits there his character and abilities? Is not the time a little limited and the space somewhat inconvenient for such demonstrations? I am at a little loss. I can see that the personal appearance and manners of a candidate might be displayed favorably at a headquarters, and that, in a charming phrase of your country, he might dispense a generous hospitality in a hotel parlor, but how can he display his fitness for a high office in such narrow quarters as headquarters must be? Am I to understand that when Mr. John Jay was selected as a candidate for the Governorship of New York he had repaired previously to the place of nomination and had opened headquarters? Did General Washington pursue a similar course? If the services and character of a candidate have commended him to public favor and designated him as a suitable officer, why is not that enough?"
"Undoubtedly," answered the Easy Chair, "why isn't it? But I am afraid that you have not pursued your enlightened observations quite far enough, or you would have learned that in this country a kind providence is supposed to help those who help themselves, and that those who expect to have Governorships and Senatorships and other large and highly flavored political morsels offered to them on golden salvers and on bended knees will be seriously disappointed."
"I see," said, courteously, the Enlightened Observer, "that my excellent friend the Easy Chair is pleased to speak in metaphor. If I may penetrate it, he is declaring that great places are to be won like precious prizes, and do not drop into idle hands like fruit overripe. But if I may hold him to the point, is it not the theory of your institutions that it is services and character and ability that win the precious political prizes, and surely such qualities and services cannot be described as idle hands? I agree that providence helps those who help themselves, but who helps himself more than he who helps the entire community? And how does he help the community who opens headquarters to secure a prize for himself? Moreover, have I not heard that office should pursue the man, and not the man the office? Yet what is opening headquarters but pursuing office, as a hound a hare?"
The Easy Chair was obliged to suggest that there was no harm in knowing "the boys," and in showing the affability of a simple citizen "without airs," and making the acquaintance of important political personages, all of which the Enlightened Observer conceded, but still politely insisted that knowing the boys and showing affability and refraining from lofty demeanor did not demonstrate fitness for great place, and was a loss of proper personal dignity that ought not to be required of any one who had really approved himself as a suitable officer. He concluded that he might not have mistaken the theory, but he had certainly not apprehended the practice of our institutions.
"But surely," said the Easy Chair, "'tis but a small price to pay."
"True," said the Enlightened Observer, "it is a very small price; but I had not supposed that in the republic office was sold at any price. I thought that the good Santa Claus of public approval dropped it as a Christmas gift into the stocking of the most deserving. It seems, however, to be rather a raisin in snap-dragon—the prize of the toughest fingers."
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
HE beauty of Israel has fallen in its high place," said the voice of Emerson's friend and neighbor, Judge Hoar, trembling and almost hushed in emotion, and everybody who heard felt the singular felicity of the words. The plain little country church was crowded, and a vast throng stood outside in the peaceful April sunshine. Before the pulpit—the eyes forever closed, the voice forever silent—lay the man whose aspect of sweet and majestic serenity Death had not touched, and which recalled his own words: "Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house." It was the man who was beloved of his neighbors and honored by the world, whose modest counsel in grave affairs guided the village, and whose thought led the thought of Christendom. "He belonged to all men, but he is peculiarly ours," said Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet historic town of which Emerson's grandfather had been the minister, and in which he lived during the larger part of his life, and to which his memory will lend an imperishable charm.
Concord when he first knew it was already famous. A hundred years ago, at the bridge over the placid river, the Middlesex farmers, hastening as minute men from all the neighboring country, had obeyed the first military summons to fire upon the king's regulars; and the red-coated regulars, turning, had begun, amid the blazing patriot volley of twenty miles, their long retreat to Yorktown and over the sea. At the point where the highway by which the soldiers marched enters the village, under the hill along whose ridge the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more than forty years the scholar who belongs to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to Stratford.
"Nature," said Emerson in his first book, written in the old Manse at Concord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhabited, and which he has so beautifully commemorated—"Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and the earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life whoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became auxiliary to a man." So is Emerson associated with the tranquil landscape of the old Middlesex town—the gentle hills, the long sweep of meadowland, the winding river, the woodland, and the pastures under the ample sky. The broad horizon and rural repose were the fitting home of the lofty and beneficent genius whose life and word perpetually illustrated the supreme worth and beauty of truth, purity, and morality. Whoever saw him there or elsewhere, saw the "sweet and virtuous soul" which George Herbert likened to seasoned timber that never gives.
The sincerity and serenity of Emerson's character were unsurpassed. The freshness and glow of his interest in life were perennial. With a sober tenderness of regret he said to a friend who congratulated him upon his seventieth birthday, "Yet it is a little sad to me, for I count to-day the end of youth." In no other sense than the lapse of years, however, was it true. That auroral freshness of soul which is the distinctive charm of youth lingered when even memory somewhat failed. "How long it is since I have seen you!" he said at Longfellow's funeral to a friend whom he had accosted just before. But he said it with all that heartiness of sympathy and expectation which, in the golden prime of his life, when he was in many ways the most striking and original figure in his country, made him greet every comer as if he expected to hear from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken. A youth, fascinated by this simple graciousness of manner, declared that Emerson greeted the most ordinary persons like a King of Spain receiving an ambassador from the Great Mogul. The expectancy of his manner implied that every man had some message to deliver, and he bent himself to hear.
But his shrewdness of perception was exquisite. He did not take dross because he hoped for gold. His reproof was as sure and incisive as the stroke of a delicate Damascus blade. When a young man, hearing Emerson say that everybody ought to read Plato, followed his advice, and read, he thought, with the audacity of youth, that he detected faults in Plato, and wrote an essay to set them forth. He asked Emerson to read it, and when he returned it to the youth, Emerson said, pleasantly, "My boy, when you strike at the king, you must kill him." One day he sat at dinner with a distinguished company of statesmen. He was by far the most famous man at the table; but he modestly followed the conversation, turning from each guest who spoke, to the next, with the old sweet gravity of earnest expectation. When all the notable company had gone, a guest who remained said to him: "I saw you talking with the English Minister. He is a brilliant man, and I hope that you found him agreeable." "A very pleasant gentleman," replied Emerson; "but he does not represent the England that I know."
Despite this sharp apprehension, however, Emerson was sometimes unable to find any charm in writings which have apparently taken a permanent place in literature. He could see nothing interesting or valuable in Shelley. "When I read Shelley," he once said, "I am like a man who thinks that he sees gold at the bottom of a stream. He reaches for it, but his hands come up cold, with a little common sand in them." The waywardness and disorder of Shelley's life may have troubled him. But this would not have affected his intellectual judgment. His acute intellect was supremely independent and absolutely courageous. "He must embrace solitude as a bride," he said of the scholar; "he must have his glees and his glooms alone." When as a young man he quietly closed his pulpit door, and declined to preach any more, because he no longer felt any value in certain religious rites, there was no protest, nor ostentation, nor newspaper "sensation." It was simply the closing of a book that he had read, and the amazement and censure and grief of others could not possibly persuade him to do, or to say, or to affect, the thing that was not true. Emerson's moral and intellectual integrity was transparently simple, but it was sublime. It was not expressed in stormy self-assertion nor cynical contempt. It spoke in tranquil and beautiful affirmation, perfectly courteous, but absolutely sincere.
But no man more charitably and diligently sought to understand others, and to be just to what was obscure and foreign to him. He listened patiently to music. But it did not charm him. He was punctual in the duties of a citizen. But he had no proper political tastes. Yet for the true politics, the application of the moral law to the control of public affairs, no man was more perceptive or uncompromising. He was always on the right side of great public questions. His hospitable sympathy entertained every good cause, and in all our antislavery literature there is no nobler or more permanent work than his address upon the anniversary of West India emancipation in 1844. The only cloud that ever arose upon his regard for Carlyle was his displeasure with Carlyle's contemptuous and cynical sneers at our civil war. He was deeply impatient of doubtful and half-hearted Americans during the war. "They call themselves gentlemen, I believe," he said of certain persons, and in a tone which showed that his lofty and patriotic honor instinctively and utterly repudiated the pinchbeck claims of educated feebleness to bear "the grand old name of gentleman."
Those who recall Emerson when he was a clergyman in Boston remember a singular spiritual beauty in the man, and an indescribable charm of manner in his public speech. But apparently he impressed his earlier associates with the purity and refinement of his mind and life, his lofty intellectual tastes and sympathy, and his literary accomplishment, rather than by the peculiar force of a genius which was to give the most powerful spiritual impulse of the generation to American thought. This is the more singular because there was always something breezy and heroic in his tone, which might have led to the suspicion of the fact that he was from the first a fond reader of Plutarch, from whose "Lives" he draws so many illustrations. As in a mountain walk the traveller is suddenly aware of wafts of perfumed air, now of the wild-grape blossom, now of the azalea or sweet-brier, so the strain of Emerson suggests his sympathy with Plutarch and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and the Platonists.
But no one could describe accurately his "system" of philosophy, nor fit him into a "school" of poetry. He was content to call himself a scholar, and no name was more significant and precious to him. He shunned notoriety, but he had the instinctive desire of every artist and of all genius for an audience. When a friend asked him of a young man whose literary talent had seemed to him to promise great achievement, Emerson said: "He does nothing; and I doubted his genius when I saw that he did not seek a hearing." When his own first slight volume, "Nature," was published, they were but a few, a very few, who perceived in it the ripe and beautiful work of a master in literature and thought. The richness and originality and picturesque simplicity of this book, its subtle perception, its tone of jubilant power, and the soft glimmering light of lofty imagination which irradiates every page, do not lose by familiarity, and are as charming, although of course not so surprising, as when they first took captive the readers of nearly fifty years ago. With the eagerness of classification which characterizes many active minds, Emerson was immediately labelled a Berkeleyan, an idealist, and a mystic. But he eluded the precise classification as noiselessly and surely as a cloud changes its form. Astonishment, satire, indignation, contradiction, spent themselves in vain. Like a rose-tree in June, which blossoms sweetly whether the air be chilly or sunny, his thought quietly flowered into exquisite expression. You might like it or leave it. But the rose would be still a rose.
There was a fashion of calling Emerson obscure. But there is no style in literature of more poetic precision than his. It is full of surprises of beauty and aptness. His central doctrine of the identity of men, the grandeur of every man's opportunity, and the essential poetry of the circumstances of common life, was a living faith. "The great man," he said, "makes the great thing." "In the sighing of these woods; in the quiet of these gray fields; in the cool breeze that sings out of these Northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet; in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution—behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day—day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life—its sweetness, its greatness, its pain—which I so admire in other men." The temptation to complete the splendid passage is almost irresistible. But in every page you are drawn on as in a stately symphony of winning music.
This passage is from the Dartmouth College address, and it has all the flowing cadence of a discourse written to be spoken. Yet Emerson had little of the orator's temperament save the desire of an audience, and an earnestness which was pure and not passionate. But no orator in the country has exercised a deeper or more permanent influence. His discourses were but essays, but their thought was so noble, their form so symmetrical, their tone so lofty, and they were spoken with such alluring rhythm, that they threw over young minds a spell which no other eloquence could command. Emerson himself was very susceptible to the power of fine oratory. No man ever praised more warmly the charm of Everett in his earlier day. When Webster delivered his eulogy upon Adams and Jefferson in Faneuil Hall, Emerson was teaching in Cambridge, and Richard H. Dana, Jun., was one of his pupils. The day before Webster spoke, the teacher announced that there would be no school upon the morrow, and he earnestly exhorted his pupils not to lose the memorable opportunity of hearing the great orator. Dana was of an age to prefer fishing to oratory, and strolled off with his line to the river, where he passed the day. When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson with sympathetic interest asked him if he had heard Webster. The fisher, half ashamed, reluctantly owned his absence. Emerson looked at him with regret and almost pain, and said to him, gravely: "My boy, I am very sorry; you have lost what you can never recover, and what you will regret to the last day of your life."
But those who heard his own Divinity School address, or the Cambridge or Dartmouth oration, or the Emancipation address, would not exchange that recollection even to have heard the Olympian orator in Faneuil Hall. "Tell me," said a Senator famous for his oratory, to a friend in Washington, "what do you call eloquence? Repeat to me an eloquent passage." The friend quoted from Emerson the unequalled passage from the Dartmouth College address in which the scholar appeals to the young men to be true to the ideals of their youth—a passage which no generous youth can read to-day without deep emotion and a thrill of high resolve. The Senator listened with an air of perplexed incredulity. "Do you call that eloquent? Now see what I call eloquence," and he declaimed a glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent feeling. It was a passage from Charles Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Boston sixty years ago. But effective as it was, his friend reminded the Senator that if the test of eloquence be glow of feeling and splendor and sincerity of expression, with an inner power of appeal which searches the heart and moulds the life, no really greater results in this country could be traced to any speech than to that of Emerson, who read the greater part of his essays as addresses, and who sometimes reached a lyrical strain which not the magnificent Burke nor any other great orator surpasses.
—To talk of Emerson, even if the talker were not of the circle of his intimate friends, is to raise the flood-gate of happy and inspiring recollections. It is one of the tenderest of the thoughts that hover around his memory, as the low winds sigh through the pine-trees over his grave, that, as with Longfellow, there are no excuses to be made for grotesque eccentricities of genius, nor for a life at any point unworthy of so great a soul. He said of his friend Thoreau, who is buried near him, that he was like the Alpine climber who gathers the edelweiss, the flower that blooms at the very edge of the glacier. He too lived at those pure heights, and taught us how to tread them undazzled and undismayed. Happy teacher, whose long and lovely life illustrated the dignity and excellence of the truth, old as the morning and as ever fresh, that fidelity to the divine law written upon the conscience is the only safe law of life for every man. Noble and beneficent preacher, who, in a sense that the pensive Goldsmith did not intend,
"Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
OR forty years Mr. Beecher had been minister of Plymouth Church when on a Sunday morning suddenly came the news that his ministry and probably his life were ended; and he died a day or two afterwards. The preacher and the church were more widely known than any others in the Union, and during all his pastorate he was one of the most conspicuous figures in the country. He was undoubtedly also one of the most famous preachers of his time and of the English race, and the death of Wendell Phillips left him the most eminent of American orators. There have been popular preachers during Mr. Beecher's career, like Moffit and other revivalists, and there are always eloquent and scholarly orators in the American pulpit. The tradition of Summerfield presents a beautiful youth and a captivating speaker. The charm of Channing was profound and indescribable. But Beecher recalls Whitefield more than any other renowned preacher. Like Whitefield, he was what is known as a man of the people; a man of strong virility, of exuberant vitality, of quick sympathy, of an abounding humor, of a rapid play of poetic imagination, of great fluency of speech; an emotional nature overflowing in ardent expression, of strong convictions, of complete self-confidence; but also not sensitive, nor critical, nor judicial; a hearty, joyous nature, touching ordinary human life at every point, and responsive to every generous moral impulse.
Mr. Beecher was not a pioneer, nor a leader of forlorn hopes, but of the main column of the army. He marched just ahead of the advance, and touched with his elbows those who moved forward with him. He liked to feel the warmth of their breath upon his cheek, and the magnetism of their neighborhood. He spoke for them as they could not speak for themselves. He liked the crowd. The hum and throb of multitudinous life inspired and cheered him. He was at home in streets and towns; with a bright jest for every comer; a happy quip and repartee; with an eye and a heart for the unfortunate and forlorn, and a ready rebuke for insolence and injustice. He had nothing of the recluse or scholarly habit; no fastidious taste. He was fond of pictures and music and all forms of art, without especial aesthetic accomplishment; a man of cheery presence, of cordial address; with a willing word for the reporter, chaffing the interviewer; jumping on the street-car in motion; yet always seemly, and always, despite his slouched hat and careless dress, undeniably clerical, but with no undue professional sense of dignity or decorum.
In the pulpit, or, more truly, upon the platform—for whether preaching, or lecturing, or speaking at table or upon the stump, he seemed to be always upon the platform—he inculcated right living rather than traditional doctrine. He was a soldier of the church militant, but his warfare was with human wrong and misery, and false theories of life, and low aims and poor ambitions. He aimed to build up righteousness of life, and in the ardor of the strife he liked to pause and wink, and let fly a bright-tipped, winged word at the opponent, against whom he bore no kind of malice. He hated the wrong, but not the wrong-doer. Ardent and impulsive, his generous emotions often overwhelmed his judgment; and in politics, although the most popular of stump-orators, and never happier or more truly himself than in a political speech, in which, with the instinct of a born fighter, he "drank delight of battle," yet he sometimes amazed and confounded his friends, who, however, could not doubt his sincerity nor question his purpose.
The great cloud that fell upon his life seemed also to darken the country. The grief and consternation showed how strong a hold he had upon the national mind and heart, which indeed was never so firm as at the very moment that his good name seemed to be obscured. It was the most tremendous ordeal to which any public man of his peculiar character and quality of eminence has ever been exposed in this country. The most remarkable fact in it all was the way in which he endured it. The blacker the cloud appeared to be, the more sturdy was his stern defiance, and for weeks of seemingly accumulating and insurmountable obstruction he faced unflinchingly a possible doom the mere prospect of which might well have withered a brave heart conscious of innocence. That the cloud ever wholly disappeared cannot be said, in view of the tone of the press even as he lay dead in his house. But that he could never have maintained his position as he did if he had not been generally acquitted in the public mind seems to be indisputable. If the relation of his later life to the country was somewhat changed, the result was due to the decline of confidence in what had been believed to be his strongest quality, supreme good sense and sound judgment, rather than to doubt of his moral integrity.
No man lived more in the public eye and for the public than Mr. Beecher. In his speeches and sermons and writings he took the public into his confidence with a freedom that was characteristic and natural in him, but which would have been extraordinary in any other man. He could not pass through the street without universal recognition, and no man in the two cities was so well known to everybody as he. At public meetings and at dinners where he was to speak, he came late amid smiling and expectant applause, and with the air of saying, "Where MacGregor sits, there is the head of the table." He had the right to that air, for wherever he was to speak he was the chief orator. But he was no niggard of generous praise and sympathy, and no man spoke with more fervent eulogy and eloquent approval of other men. Doubtless, like an actor or singer, the long habit of receiving applause had made it pleasant to him, and as is the fact with all extempore speaking, the greater the applause the higher the eloquence of his strain. It is a reciprocal action. Of Mr. Beecher's later platform speeches, the most remarkable was his political address at the Brooklyn Rink in 1884, which was delivered amid a storm of enthusiasm, while in the delivery he was himself wrought to the highest feeling.
His power over the emotions of an audience was unsurpassed in this country probably since Patrick Henry. Thomas Corwin and Sergeant Prentiss perhaps were as great masters of humor and patriotic appeal upon the stump; but Beecher added to these a pathos and sentiment and poetic tone in which the others did not excel. He had not the fine, glittering, incisive touch of Wendell Phillips's fatal sarcasm and vituperation. Phillips stood quietly and played his polished rapier with a flexible wrist, but its point was deadly; Beecher smote, and crushed. One was the deft Saladin with his chased and curving cimeter, the other was Richard with his heavy battle-axe. In the great controversy in which both were engaged, upon the same side, indeed, but under different banners and wearing different colors, Beecher and Phillips, amid a chorus of eloquence, were the two chief voices. Garrison was not distinctively an orator, while Phillips was the especial and distinctive orator of the cause, and his fame as a public man belongs to that cause alone. But Beecher had many interests and relations, and his oratory had other strains. They were friends always, and Phillips spoke often in Plymouth Church, and uttered many a glowing word of his fellow-laborer.
When these words are published the freshness of the impression of Beecher's death will have passed, and from every part of the country his eulogy will have been spoken. The universal emotion, the warmth and tenor of the tributes, will have shown how eminent a figure he was, and that his death is felt to be a national loss. One of the papers described him as the last of a great generation, and Senator Cullom, speaking of Logan in the crowded Brooklyn Academy on the evening of Beecher's death, called a roll of illustrious names, of which his was the latest, and among which it surely belongs. His profession was the preaching of peace and good-will. But how often he must have felt that his Master came not to bring peace, but a sword! His buoyant temperament, his perfect health, his love of nature and of man, of children and flowers, of the changing sky and landscape, his abounding sympathy, his rich and sensitive humor, made his life joyous and often happy. But it was none the less a stormy life, ending at last, amid the sorrow of a country, in happy rest and the good fame of a great orator for human welfare.
THE GOLDEN AGE.
N this country we are inclined to believe that the epoch that followed the Revolution was one of the utmost purity and simplicity. But it was one of the "fathers" who said to a friend upon the adjournment of the first Congress, "Do you suppose such a set of rascals will ever assemble again?" In his diary John Adams appeals to the calmer mind and juster judgment of the coming age—meaning that in which we live, and from which we look wistfully back to old John Adams's cocked hat and knee-breeches as the symbols of a nobler time.
Then there is Fisher Ames, one of the famous orators and conspicuous leaders of the beginning of the century, who, studying his country at the time to which we recur as the age of high purpose and lofty men, bewails the sordidness, selfishness, and degradation around him. "Of course," he says, seventy years ago, "the single passion that engrosses us, the only avenue to consideration and importance in our society, is the accumulation of property: our inclinations cling to gold, and are bedded in it as deeply as that precious ore in the mine.... As experience evinces that popularity—in other words, consideration and power—is to be procured by the meanest of mankind, the meanest in spirit and understanding, and in the worst of ways, it is obvious that at present the incitement to genius is next to nothing."
We might suppose that we were listening to a contemporary cynic; and whoever reads the history of the politics of that time will find that "the better days of the republic" were very like the days in which we deplore their disappearance. When Mr. Ames died, Mr. John Quincy Adams wrote a review of his works, in which, with the equanimity and moderation of the golden age, he remarks, "It is a melancholy contemplation of human nature to see a mind so highly cultivated and so richly gifted as that of Mr. Ames soured and exasperated into the very ravings of a bedlamite." He then proceeds to speak of those who, without believing Mr. Ames's "absurd and inconsistent political creed," are selfishly eager for its propagation, being "choice spirits, amounting to at most six hundred" (their name was the Essex Junto!), and who hold that "the porcelain must rule over the earthenware, the blind and sordid multitude must put themselves, bound hand and foot, into the custody of the lynx-eyed, seraphic souls of the six hundred, and then all together must go and squat for protection under the hundred hands of the British Briareus."
To this gentle strain Mr. John Lowell replied in a similar vein, beginning by speaking of the malignity of Mr. Adams's sarcasm, and of his following Mr. Ames to the grave with crocodile tears, informing him that he had no need to assail Mr. Ames's friends with all the venom of an infuriated partisan, because he had already obtained his reward for "ratting" from the Federalists, and this act of gratitude to his benefactors was unnecessary. Mr. Lowell ends his reply by saying that in the course of a short political life Mr. Adams had received more than seventy thousand dollars from the public, and that while no man pitied Mr. Ames, "Mr. Adams is an object of sincere commiseration with many a man of high and honorable feelings, while it is to be doubted whether he is the object of envy to any man on earth."
These are glimpses of the golden age, of that "better day" of the republic with which our own is so often and so injuriously contrasted. Indeed, there is no finer cordial for despondency than a glance at the paradise that hovers behind our retreating steps. The mountain traveller turns and sees a lovely vision floating in the sky.
| "How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair, |
| Was Monte Rosa, hanging there— |
| A thousand shadowy-pencil'd valleys, |
| And snowy dells in a golden air." |
Good lack! he cries, are those the crags and precipices along which I slid and stumbled in terror of my life? The hanging gardens of the past, the halcyon epoch of our history, the lost paradise of our fathers, are all crags and precipices along which the race and our country have stumbled and slid. If any man is disposed to think that he has fallen upon evil times, let him open his history. It is a marvellous tonic.
Does he think republics ungrateful? Look at Mr. Motley's vivid portrait of John of Barneveld. When he was seventy-two years old he writes from his prison to his wife and family: "I receive at this moment the very heavy and sorrowful tidings that I, an old man, for all my services done well and faithfully to the fatherland for so many years ... must prepare myself to die to-morrow." Does he think irreligion undermining society? Look into Smiles's "Huguenots in France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes." For attending Huguenot meetings men were captured by soldiers and sentenced to the galleys, mostly for life. They were chained by the neck with murderers and other criminals, and were quartered in Paris in the dungeon of the Chateau de la Tournelle. Thick iron collars were attached by iron chains to the beams. The collar was closed around the prisoner's neck, and riveted with blows of a hammer upon an anvil. Twenty men in pairs were chained to each beam. They could not sleep lying; they could not sleep sitting or standing up straight, for the beam was too high for the one and too low for the other. This was done in the name of religion. The age of Louis the Fourteenth is called one of the great epochs of the world. It was an age in which the king's mistress persuaded him to slaughter and banish hundreds of thousands of his subjects because of their religious faith, and the great preachers of his church applauded, and the Holy Father approved, and even Madame de Sévigné, whose letters some young ladies at Newport and Saratoga are diligently reading, and sighing for the good old witty times in which she lived, wrote of the most innocent and most devoted men: "Hanging is quite a refreshment to me. They have just taken twenty-four or thirty of these men, and are going to throw them off."
The golden age is not yesterday or to-morrow, but to-day. It is the age in which we live, not that in which somebody else lived. The trouble, vexation, corruption, weakness, selfishness, meanness, which dismay us and tempt us to despair are the old lions that have always beset the path. No man is born out of time; and what man living to-day, who is not pinched with poverty or disease, would have lived a thousand years ago? If our politics seem mean and our men small, how does Alfred's time seem, or the glory of Athens, or the court of Louis the Fourteenth, or Luther's Germany? What did Jefferson think of Hamilton, or the Aurora say of Washington?
SPRING PICTURES.
N a late beautiful spring afternoon the Easy Chair rolled itself into the suburbs for a stroll. There were everywhere the signs of the advance of a great city and the pathetic forlornness of the municipal frontier. Pleasant country-houses, spacious, rambling, with broad piazzas and gardens and lawns, had been apparently suddenly overtaken by streets and stone sidewalks and lamps. There were the rattle and shriek of the incessant railway trains near by. Tall factory chimneys smoked and machinery hummed and steam-whistles blew all around the quiet old houses. The contrast gave them a kind of conscious life. They seemed to be aware of the incongruity of their character with the new neighborhood. They had a helpless air, as if nothing remained but submission to division into regular building lots and the absolute extinction of rural seclusion and charm. There was the impression of a faint and futile struggle between city and country, in which, indeed, for a moment the excellence of each was lost, but the result of which was not doubtful.
As the Easy Chair pushed on, it saw in fancy the old pastoral peace and retirement of the places when they were indeed in the country. It recalled the noted men of that older day who sought here relaxation and repose. There was the placid river, on which no restless steamer foamed, but only silent sloops drifted or careened. Yonder were the leafy coves under the wooded and rocky banks, from which the Indian had but recently paddled his canoe. No railroad harmed the virgin shyness of the shore. It was El Dorado, Arcadia, the land of Goshen. It was the home of peace, of plenty, of content.
Such a poet, such a painter, is idealizing memory on a spring afternoon in the suburbs. It seemed so gross a wrong that sidewalks and gas lamps and factory chimneys and steam-whistles should invade and devastate the tranquil fields that indignant imagination filled them as fact with all the fancies that tranquil fields suggest. Doubtless in the closets of those quiet houses there were the bones of plenty of old skeletons. Those spacious, sunny rooms were the scenes of the familiar domestic tragedies against which not the most romantic of country-houses can shut the door. Up those steps have swayed and hesitated the doubtful feet of the oldest son, heir of precious hopes and child of fervent prayers, hesitating and lingering at hours long past midnight, watched for and waited for by the mother's heart that breaks but does not falter. In that broad hall, on the brightest of May mornings, the daughter of the house has stood, radiant as the day, and crowned with orange blossoms. There have met the hopes and joys of youth, the tears and blessings and farewells of older years. The pretty pageant filled the house, and faded slowly and utterly away. The old house has known, too, the solemn shadow that falls on every house. It seems to regretful memory the abode of unchanging delight. But from that door the slow procession moved, and those whose hospitable smile and word had hallowed every room returned no more. They are gone, the bride, the parent, the friend; "they are all gone, the old familiar faces," the age, the society, the politics, the interests. They are all gone. Why should not the house go too?
It was early spring, and the Easy Chair, looking up, saw half a dozen kites flying in the air. A little further, and laughing girls were skipping rope. Boys were spinning peg-tops and playing marbles and driving hoops. The boys and girls who lived in the quiet old country-house did the same a hundred years ago. They flew kites and drove hoops, and that little bride skipped rope and carried dolls. The age, the society, the politics, the interests, were very different. They are, indeed, all changed. But tops are changeless, marbles are immortal, and so are boys and girls. They know nothing of the old house over which the Easy Chair becomes pensive. They belong to the new time, which demands its demolition.
PROPER AND IMPROPER.
ONGFELLOW has commemorated in a beautiful sonnet the delightful evenings of Mrs. Kemble's readings; and certainly it was a singular pleasure to see and to hear her. Her historic name associated her with her uncle John and her aunt Mrs. Siddons, and she had always the port of one conscious of a famous lineage. She used to say, with a half-humorous, half-proud emphasis, that she belonged to her majesty's players, and in her presence it was easy to believe that her majesty's players were an important body in the state. Her power of identification with the various characters in the plays, and the skill with which she maintained the individuality throughout, were always remarkable, and the symmetry and completeness of the whole performance left nothing to be criticised. The only observation that suggested itself might be that the stage traditions were evident in her rendering. But that, in turn, only suggested the further question whether the traditions were not worthy of respect. Dramatic and histrionic forms of art, like all others, are but representations of nature under certain conditions and limitations. They are not an imitation, a fac-simile, and every man will be at odds with any work of art in any kind who does not bear this in mind.
The spectator complains of unnaturalness upon the stage; the substance of his feeling is that people do not talk and act so in ordinary life. That is true; but if the theatre should show us men and women doing upon the stage what they do in ordinary life, the theatre would be no more attractive than the street or the parlor. It is not the spectacle of ordinary life that we expect to see in the theatre. It is a view of human life and nature under ideal conditions, and it is as irrelevant to require that the player shall seem to us like the man with whom we have been transacting business as that he should speak plain prose instead of blank verse. If Mrs. Kemble had read the words of Rosalind or of Portia, of Shylock or Mercutio, as if they were neighbors of hers and people whom we were in the habit of meeting, the effect would have been ludicrous. When she came in—the Fanny Kemble of Talfourd and of the wild enthusiasm of the grandfathers of to-day, ripened into the comely and queenly woman—and seated herself at the little table on which the great volume lay open, she was the magician who was to open to us the realm of faery, the world of imagination, not to take us back into the familiar scenes of the world of New York or Chicago. The spell was resistless. The deep, rich, melodious voice flowed out like an enchanted singing river, along which we glided seeing visions and dreaming dreams. To sit and listen to her was like sitting and watching Titian laying on the canvas the gorgeous tints which before our eyes took on the forms of men and angels. A rarer, a more refined delight, which of us has known? Did it ever occur to us that Mrs. Kemble was doing anything improper, anything unwomanly? In the wonderful picture of Portia that "her voice's music" drew, was there anything a little repulsive, a little unfeminine?
This question was suggested to the Easy Chair by the remark of one of the most devoted and delighted of all the listeners at those readings, that he was very sorry to see that the University of London had decided to admit women to all its degrees upon precisely equal terms with men. The secret reason of the regret, of course, is the feeling that there would be something unwomanly in the act of competing for a degree which would open the pursuit of professions—especially the medical profession—which are usually and often exclusively cultivated by men.
Yet, when pressed, the Easy Chair's interlocutor admitted that there was nothing more essentially unfeminine in the practice of medicine by a woman than in the recitation of Shakespeare for the entertainment of a miscellaneous crowd. It is a question of habit, not of instinct, nor of principle, nor of reason. When the old Greek and Oriental idea of absolute seclusion and subordination is abandoned, a woman's reading from Shakespeare for the pleasure of the public is an action not different in kind from her practising medicine or serving on a school committee. This generation, however, is more used to the one than to the other. It is a habit, nothing more.
Charles Lamb regrets in one of his later essays that "we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavors; as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; ... why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery."
It is not in cookery alone that this mystery is still unsolved. Why, for instance, should it seem a womanly use of Heaven's gift that Jenny Lind should sing for the pleasure of a thousand men, and something strange and unfeminine that Portia should plead with eloquence in a court to save a hapless woman from prison or the cord? Why is it fitting that Mrs. Kemble should professionally read Shakespeare, and "queer" that she should professionally attend women in peril and sickness? Do we not naturally and logically glide into the part of the citation from Lamb that we just now omitted?—"why salmon (a strong sapor per se) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot." Must we not say that we are as yet but in the rudimentary knowledge of what is and is not feminine?
When the example of the London University is not singular, but when all opportunities are opened equally to all talent and vocation, when it is not forbidden a woman to do any honorable work for which she is by nature and by study and training properly equipped, unless the laws of nature fail, will any greater catastrophe befall, will there be any more signal reversion of the order of things, than if cabbage should come at last to be eaten with roast beef, and currant jelly cement an alliance with the mutton's shoulder?
BELINDA AND THE VULGAR.
T is perhaps because the Easy Chair sometimes discusses questions of behavior that it is occasionally asked to express an opinion upon more difficult social points. Thus it was lately requested to say whether it did not think that the great want of our society is a social standard. The inquiry was made by the lovely Belinda, who was charmingly dressed for a select party, and the Easy Chair was obliged to own that it did not at once comprehend the scope of the inquiry, and to seek an explanation. As Belinda proceeded to elucidate her meaning it seemed to be tolerably plain that she was contemplating some kind of rank, or visible and recognized distinction, which should separate "society" from what is not society, and it was impossible not to feel that, however high the dividing line, and however small the circle which it enclosed, she was herself included within it.
The Easy Chair thereupon described to her a conversation which it held long ago with a distinguished man upon English social life and the advantages of an aristocracy. The distinguished man's views were very much like those which are set forth in Disraeli's "Sibyl" and "Coningsby," and which were known forty years ago as those of Young England. They proposed a national life blended of feudal romance and modern philanthropy. There was to be a gracious nobility of very blue blood which had been clarified in the veins of the Plantagenets, who were to live in stately castles in the midst of superb demesnes, and to be exceedingly good to their tenants and retainers, for whom there were to be May-poles, and flitches of bacon at Christmas, and greased poles to climb at appropriate times, and sacks to run races in, and who were to be visited at their neat little cottages, when they were ill, by the ladies from the castle, and who were to be industrious and obedient and humble and grateful, and, above all things, to know their place. The nobility were to own the land, and govern the country, and live in splendid idleness, and the happy peasantry were to do all the work, and bow respectfully when the nobility passed by, and go to bed when the curfew tolled, and to make no trouble.
This was the Young England programme, and the Arcadia of the Disraeli novel. And this also showed its familiar features in the talk of the distinguished man as he bewailed the social bareness of American life and descanted upon the charm of an ancient and well-ordered society. But when the Easy Chair mischievously asked him whether he did not think that he might tire of the greased pole, and the dance upon the lawn, and the gracious patronage, and the respectful gratitude, the amusing bewilderment of the distinguished man showed that in his admiration of the society that he described he assumed always that he was to belong to the class that lived in the stately castles and benignly condescended to the humble cottagers. His view, therefore, was very simple. It was merely that he should like to live in splendid idleness, steeped in luxury, and surrounded by respectful servants.
Belinda listened to this story, of which the Easy Chair made no application, with a slight blush; and to the polite inquiry, what kind of social standard she contemplated, she responded that she meant a certain fixed line which should exclude the vulgar. But she was immediately silent, as if reflecting upon a difficult proposition, and did not answer when she was asked what she thought would be the consequence of removing the vulgar from the circles which she considered most select.
Her benevolent attention invited further question, especially as at the same moment a lady entered the room who bore one of the most noted family names in the country, and most familiar in fashionable annals, a family which delights to trace its lineage to a royal source. This proud dame had married her daughter as if by main force to a coroneted lord of hereditary acres. It was a familiar fact of the society in which she was a conspicuous figure, and it was impossible not to ask: "Can there be anything more coarsely vulgar than to sell a daughter for money and a title to a man for whom she does not care; and shall we begin to erect the social standard by expelling the vulgar offender?"
Belinda was still silent, and the brilliant rooms began to fill and murmur with a gay company. Among them came the loud and diamonded Mrs. Smasher, to whose unparalleled fêtes even Belinda would be almost willing to request a card. The Smasher lineage is not renowned or regal; the Smasher mind is imperfectly educated; the Smasher manners are those of the suddenly rich who are not also suddenly refined.
"Is any conceivable vulgarity greater than the Smasher vulgarity, O Belinda; and shall we continue these exercises by expelling also this essentially vulgar person?"
Belinda was still silent. She has remained silent even to this day.
DECAYED GENTILITY.
ECAYED gentility has great interest for the novel-reader, and the man and woman who "have seen better days" are familiar figures in actual life. Hampton Court is regarded by some travellers with pensive regard as a kind of almshouse for this class of the indigent, and institutions nearer home are described with a deferential courtesy and avoidance as homes for decayed gentlewomen. It cannot be pleasant to the persons themselves to be so described, but the founders of such places have perhaps a comfortable sense of reflected honor, as if the impulse to provide a retreat of the kind were of itself a sign of "very gentility." Despite the plaintive little plea which the description itself urges for this decayed class of our fellow-beings, the people who "have seen better days" are not generally an engaging multitude. A person whose chief distinction is that he was once more prosperous than he is now seems to renounce any present claim upon consideration, and to offer his inability as a ground of regard. It is an appeal to pity, but pity of old has a disagreeable relative.
The pathos of the appeal lies, first, in the sense of contrast, and then in the spiritual rather than the material poverty which it discloses. The lady who lets lodgings, and whose air and the allusions of whose conversation constantly suggest that she has seen better days, is a person who is mastered by circumstances, and therefore does not compel respect. But a woman who is the perfectly self-respecting lady fulfils simply the duty of the moment with no conscious appeal for sympathy; and if by chance you discover that she has been more prosperous, the fact that she has not the conceit of it strengthens your regard. For it is no personal credit to have been more prosperous. As your landlady shows you the convenience of the room, she lets fall that her father the Bishop, or her uncle the Senator, or her lamented cousin the millionaire would be deeply grieved if he could know that his kinswoman was actually letting lodgings.
"Then, madam, you have seen better days?"
"Ah, sir—"
But how is it personally creditable to the good woman that her uncle was honorable and her cousin rich? She recalls the circumstances of others at the expense of her own character. The lodger wishes to hire rooms upon their own merits. He resents the bribery of pity to take them. If they are a little stuffy, they certainly seem no airier because his landlady once sat upon a crimson sofa and read novels all day long. If some philanthropist builds a retreat to which she can retire gratis, and pass her declining years in regretful recollection of the crimson sofa, so let it be. Such a retreat may be dedicated to sentimental repining. But a woman of spirit and character never becomes a decayed gentlewoman, however destitute she may be.
This refusal to succumb to circumstances and to make the best of it, which is all that can be asked, is charmingly sketched in Lamb's Captain Jackson. The Captain's frugal table had the air of a feast, such was the magic of his cheerfulness. His plain cheese was served like Stilton or Roquefort, and slipping a shred of it upon his guest's plate, he contented himself with the rind, gayly declaring that the nearer the bone the sweeter the meat. Poverty was no pleasanter to him than to the rest of us. But had he gone to the almshouse he would not have complained, and in no word or sigh of his would you have discovered that he had seen better days.
The family of Captain Jackson is by no means extinct. The other day the Easy Chair met one of them in Broadway—an elderly gentleman in a well-brushed, exceedingly threadbare suit, moving briskly along the pavement. His greeting was alert and courteous. There was a little chat of the day's news, a gay jest or two, and then good-morning. Half a century ago this was a young man about town, the heir of a fortune, a youth of "family" who dressed and drove and dined and danced like the golden youth of to-day. When the first Italian opera troupe came, he was nightly behind the scenes. In the circle of Knickerbocker wits he was one. He wrote verses, and had a kind of literary name. His portrait was published in a weekly paper. He sat at the good tables. His name was Fortunio.
Everything is gone but the cheerful spirit. Nobody knows exactly how he lives, but only that it is in extreme poverty. But he preserves the tone of prosperity. He writes notes in a beautiful and graceful hand upon very cheap paper. "You remember our conversation the other morning about 'Anstey's Bath Guide'; and if you will look in your Fraser for this month, you will find that I was right." Here is the assumption that every gentleman takes Fraser, and that your correspondent may have dipped into his before you have looked at yours. Doubtless he had seen it—at some reading-room, perhaps, or on Brentano's counter.
One day we had spoken of a famous author. A little while afterwards came a comely package containing an old and choice work of his, and a note: "Dear Easy Chair,—I thought it might be a pleasure to you to own this rather uncommon copy of an author whom you evidently admire, and which it is a pleasure to my shelves to spare." What a fine air of elegant leisure in a library! But the "shelves" were a few remnant books, probably worthless to sell, but affording the friendly soul true satisfaction in giving. Fortunio is not a decayed gentleman. His gentility, in the best sense, is in full vigor. Everything but that, indeed, is decayed. But there is no unmanly moping about better days, although in few men's lives could there be a sharper contrast between the past and the present.