In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers

Yet in an old Prayer-Book of 1737 there is a woodcut representing the king and Sir Kenelm Digby gazing into a circular mirror, in which are reflected the Houses of Parliament, and a man entering them with a dark lantern in his hand. Above, the eye of Providence is seen darting a ray of light upon the mirror. Below are legs and hoofs, as of evil spirits flying rapidly away. The truth is, so many conflicting details are related of Dr. Dee’s useful and benevolent possession that it has lost a little of its vraisemblance. We are wont to rank it confusedly with such mystic treasures as the mirror which told the fortunate Alasnam whether or not a maid were as chaste as she was beautiful, or the glass which Reynard described with such minute and charming falsehoods to the royal lioness, who would fain have gratified her curiosity by a sight of its indiscreet revelations.

It is never through magic mirrors, nor crystal balls, nor any of the paraphernalia now so abundantly supplied by painstaking students of telepathy that we approach that shadowy land over which broods perpetual fear. Let us rather turn meekly back to the fairy-taught minister of Aberfoyle, and learn of him the humiliating truth that “every drop of water is a Mirrour to returne the Species of Things, were our visive Faculty sharpe enough to apprehend them.” In other words, we stand in need, not of elaborate appliances, but of a chastened spirit. If we seek the supernatural with the keen apprehension which is begotten of credulity and awe, we shall never find ourselves disappointed in our quest. The same reverend authority tells us that “in a Witch’s Eye the Beholder cannot see his own Image reflected, as in the Eyes of other people,” which is an interesting and, it may be, a very useful thing to know.

Two curious stories having relation to the ghostly character of the mirror will best serve to illustrate my text. The first is found in Shelley’s journal; one of the inexhaustible store supplied to the poet by “Monk” Lewis, and is about a German lady who, dancing with her lover at a ball, saw in a glass the reflection of her dead husband gazing at her with stern, reproachful eyes. She is said to have died of terror. The second tale is infinitely more picturesque. In the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence is the beautiful tomb of Beata Villana, the daughter of a noble house, and married in extreme youth to one of the family of Benintendi. Tradition says that she was very fair, and that, being arrayed one night for a festival, she stood looking long in the mirror, allured by her own loveliness. Suddenly her eyes were opened, and she saw, close by her side, a demon dressed with costly raiment like her own, and decked with shining jewels like those she wore upon her arms and bosom. Appalled by this vision of evil, Beata Villana fled from the vanities of the world, and sought refuge in a convent, where she died a holy death in 1360, being then but twenty-eight years of age. Her marble effigy rests on its carven bed in the old Florentine church, and smiling angels draw back the curtains to show her sweet, dead beauty, safe at last from the perilous paths of temptation. In such a legend as this there lingers for us still the elements of mystery and of horror which centuries of prosaic progress are powerless to alienate from that dumb witness of our silent, secret hours, the mirror.

GIFTS.

Absurd though the tale appears, it has its counterparts in more sober annals, and few men of any prominence have not bewailed at times their painful popularity. Sir Walter Scott, who was the recipient of many gifts, had his fair share of vexatious experiences, and laughs at them somewhat ruefully now and then in the pages of his journal. Eight large and very badly painted landscapes, “in great gilded frames,” were given him by one “most amiable and accomplished old lady.” She had ordered them from an impoverished amateur whom she desired to befriend, and then palmed them off on Sir Walter, who was too gentle and generous to protest. A more “whimsical subject of affliction” was the presentation of two emus by a Mr. Harmer, a settler in Botany Bay, to whom Scott had given some useful letters of introduction. “I wish his gratitude had either taken a different turn, or remained as quiescent as that of others whom I have obliged more materially,” writes Sir Walter in his journal. “I at first accepted the creatures, conceiving them, in my ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrots, which, though I do not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure, if hung up in the hall among the armor. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! They might eat up my collection of old arms, for what I know.”

Finally, like the girl who was converted at a revival, and who gave her blue ribbons to her sister because she knew they were taking her to hell, Scott got himself out of the scrape by passing on the emus, as a sort of feudal offering, to the Duke of Buccleugh, and leaving that nobleman to solve as best he could the problem of their maintenance. The whole story is very much like the experience of Mr. James Payn’s lawyer friend, to whom a “grateful orphan” sent from the far East a dromedary, with the pleasant assurance that its hump was considered extremely delicate eating. As this highly respected member of the London bar could not well have the dromedary butchered for the sake of its hump,—even if he had yearned over the dish,—and as he was equally incapable of riding the beast to his office every morning, he considered himself fortunate when the Zoölogical Gardens opened their hospitable gates and the orphan’s tribute disappeared therein, to be seen and heard of no more.

Charles Lamb, on the other hand, if we may trust the testimony of his letters, appears to have derived a keen and kindly pleasure from the more reasonable and modest presents of his friends. Perhaps, like Steele, he looked upon it as a point of morality to be obliged to those who endeavored to oblige him. Perhaps it was easy for one so lovable to detect the honest affection which inspired these varied gifts. It is certain we find him returning genial thanks, now to Hazlitt for a pig, now to Wordsworth for a “great armful” of poetry, and now to Thomas Allsop for some Stilton cheese,—“the delicatest, rainbow-hued, melting piece I ever flavored.” He seems equally gratified with an engraving of Pope sent by Mr. Procter, and with another pig,—“a dear pigmy,” he calls it,—the gift of Mrs. Bruton. Nor is it only in these letters of acknowledgment—wherein courtesy dispenses occasionally with the companionship of truth—that Lamb shows himself a generous recipient of his friends’ good will. He writes to Wordsworth, who has sent him nothing, and expresses his frank delight in some fruit which has been left early that morning at his door:—

“There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents, be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, they are undoubtedly the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking on this point. The punctilio of acceptance, me-thinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend. Why should he not send me a dinner as well as a desert? I would taste him in all the beasts of the field, and through all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not displease me.”

It is hard not to envy Talfourd when one reads these lines. It is hard not to envy any one who had the happiness of giving fruit, or cheese, or pigs to Charles Lamb. How gladly would we all have brought our offerings to his door, and have gone away with bounding hearts, exulting in the thought that our pears would deck his table, our pictures his wall, our books his scanty shelves! “People seldom read a book which is given to them,” observes Dr. Johnson, with his usual discouraging acumen; but Lamb found leisure, amid heavy toil, to peruse the numerous volumes which small poets as well as big ones thought fit to send him. He accepted his gifts with a charming munificence which suggests those far-off, fabulous days when presents were picturesque accessories of life; when hosts gave to their guests the golden cups from which they had been drinking; and sultans gave their visitors long trains of female slaves, all beautiful, and carrying jars of jewels upon their heads; and Merlin gave to Gwythno the famous hamper which multiplied its contents an hundredfold, and fed the starving hosts in storm-swept Caradigion. In those brave years, large-hearted men knew how to accept as well as how to give, and they did both with an easy grace for which our modern methods offer no adequate opportunity. Even in the veracious chronicles of hagiology, the old harmonious sentiment is preserved, and puts us to the blush. St. Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar at the gates of Tours was hardly what we delight in calling practical; yet not one shivering outcast only, but all mankind would have been poorer had that mantle been withheld. King Canute taking off his golden crown, and laying it humbly on St. Edmund’s shrine, stirs our hearts a little even now; while Queen Victoria sending fifty pounds to a deserving charity excites in us no stronger sentiment than esteem. It was easier, perhaps, for a monarch to do a gracious and a princely deed when his crown and sceptre were his own property instead of belonging to the state; and picturesqueness, ignore it as we may, is a quality which, like distinction, “fixes the world’s ideals.”

These noble and beautiful benefactions, however, are not the only ones which linger pleasantly in our memories. Gifts there have been, of a humble and domestic kind, the mere recollection of which is a continual delight. I love to think of Jane Austen’s young sailor brother, her “own particular little brother,” Charles, spending his first prize money in gold chains and “topaze crosses” for his sisters. What prettier, warmer picture can be called to mind than this handsome, gallant, light-hearted lad—handsomer, Jane jealously insists, than all the rest of the family—bringing back to his quiet country home these innocent trophies of victory? Surely it was the pleasure Miss Austen felt in that “topaze” cross, that little golden chain, which found such eloquent expression in Fanny Price’s mingled rapture and distress when her sailor brother brought her the amber cross from Sicily, and Edmund Bertram offered her, too late, the chain on which to hang it. It is a splendid reward that lies in wait for boyish generosity when the sister chances to be one of the immortals, and hands down to generations of readers the charming record of her gratitude and love.

By the side of this thoroughly English picture should be placed, in justice and in harmony, another which is as thoroughly German,—Rahel Varnhagen sending to her brother money to bring him to Berlin. The letter which accompanies this sisterly gift is one of the most touching in literature. The brilliant, big-hearted woman is yearning for her kinsman’s face. She has saved the trifling sum required through many unnamed denials. She gives it as generously as if it cost her nothing. Yet with that wise thrift which goes hand in hand with liberality, she warns her brother that her husband knows nothing of the matter. Not that she mistrusts his nature for a moment. He is good and kind, but he is also a man, and has the customary shortsightedness of his sex. “He will think,” she writes, “that I have endless resources, that I am a millionaire, and will forget to economize in the future.”

Ah, painful frugality of the poor Fatherland! Here is nothing picturesque, nor lavish, nor light-hearted, to tempt our jocund fancies. Yet here, as elsewhere, the generous soul refuses to be stinted of its joy; and the golden crown of King Canute is not more charming to contemplate than are the few coins wrested from sordid needs, and given with a glad munificence which makes them splendid as the ransom of a prince.

HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

Nations, like individuals, stand self-betrayed in their pastimes and their jests. The ancient historians recognized this truth, and thought it well worth their while to gossip pleasantly into the ears of attentive and grateful generations. Cleopatra playfully outwitting Anthony by fastening a salted fish to the boastful angler’s hook is no less clear to us than Cleopatra sternly outwitting Cæsar with the poison of the asp, and we honor Plutarch for confiding both these details to the world. Their verity has nothing to do with their value or our satisfaction. The mediæval chroniclers listened rapturously to the clamor of battle, and found all else but war too trivial for their pens. The modern scholar produces that pitiless array of facts known as constitutional history; and labors under the strange delusion that acts of Parliament, or acts of Congress, reform bills, and political pamphlets represent his country’s life. If this sordid devotion to the concrete suffers no abatement, the intelligent reader of the future will be compelled to reconstruct the nineteenth century from the pages of “Punch” and “Life,” from faded play-bills, the records of the race-track, and the inextinguishable echo of dead laughter.

For man lives in his recreations, and is revealed to us by the search-light of an epigram. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure. The laugh that we enjoy at our own expense betrays us to the rest of the world, and the humorists of England and America have been long employed in pointing out with derisive fingers their own, and not their neighbor’s shortcomings. If we are more reckless in our satire, and more amused at our own wit, it is because we are better tempered, and newer to the game. The delight of being a nation, and a very big nation at that, has not yet with us lost all the charm of novelty, and we pelt one another with ridicule after the joyously aggressive fashion of schoolboys pelting one another with snowballs. Already there is a vast array of seasoned and recognized jokes which are leveled against every city in the land. The culture of Boston, the slowness of Philadelphia, the ostentation of New York, the arrogance and ambition of Chicago, the mutual jealousy of Minneapolis and St. Paul,—these are themes of which the American satirist never wearies, these are characteristics which he has striven, with some degree of success, to make clear to the rest of mankind. Add to them our less justifiable diversion at official corruption and mismanagement, our glee over the blunders and rascalities of the men whom we permit to govern us, and we have that curious combination of keenness and apathy, of penetration and indifference which makes possible American humor.

Now Englishmen, however prone to laugh at their own foibles, do not, as a rule, take their politics lightly. Those whom I have known were most depressingly serious when discussing the situation with friends, and most disagreeably violent when by chance they met an opponent. Neither do they see anything funny in being robbed by corporations; but, with discouraging and unhumorous tenacity, exact payment of the last farthing of debt, fulfilment of the least clause in a charter. Our lenity in such matters is a trait which they fail to understand, and are disinclined to envy. One of the most amusing scenes I ever witnessed was an altercation between an exceedingly clever Englishwoman, who for years has taken a lively part in public measures, and a countrywoman of my own, deeply imbued with that gentle pessimism which insures contentment, and bars reform. The subject under discussion was the street-car service of Philadelphia (which would have been primitive for Asia Minor), and the Englishwoman was expressing in no measured terms her amazement at such comprehensive and unqualified inefficiency. In vain my American friend explained to her that this car-service was one of the most diverting things about our Quaker city, that it represented one of those humorous details which gave Philadelphia its distinctly local color. The Englishwoman declined to be amused. “I do not understand you in the least,” she said gravely. “You have a beautiful city, of which you should be proud. You have disgraceful streets and trams, of which you should be ashamed. Yet you ridicule your city as if you were ashamed of that, and defend your trams as if you were proud of them. If you think it funny to be imposed on, you will never be at a loss for a joke.”

Yet corruption in office, like hypocrisy in religion, has furnished food for mirth ever since King Log and King Stork began their beneficent reigns. Diogenes complained that the people of Athens liked to have the things they should have held most dear pelted with dangerous banter. Kant found precisely the same fault with the French, and even the history of sober England is enlivened by its share of such satiric laughter. “Wood was dear at Newmarket,” said a wit, when Sir Henry Montague received there the white staff which made him Lord High Treasurer of England, for which exalted honor he had paid King James the First full twenty thousand pounds. The jest sounds so light-hearted, so free from any troublesome resentment, that it might have been uttered in America; but it is well to remember that such witticisms pointed unerringly to the tragic downfall of the Stuarts. Indeed, the gayest laugh occasionally rings a death-knell, and so our humorists wield a power which could hardly be entrusted into better hands. “Punch” has the cleanest record of any English journal. It has ever—save for those perverse and wicked slips which cost it the friendship of stouthearted Richard Doyle—allied itself with honor and honesty, and that sane tolerance which is the basis of humor. “Life” has fought an even braver fight, and has been the active champion of all that is helpless and ill-treated, the advocate of all that is honorable and sincere. The little children who crawl, wasted and fever-stricken, through the heated city streets, the animals that pay with prolonged pain for the pleasures of scientific research,—these hapless victims of our advanced civilization find their best friend in this New York comic paper. The girl whose youth and innocence are bartered for wealth in the open markets of matrimony, sees no such vigorous protest against her degradation as in its wholesome pages. It is scant praise to say that “Life” does more to quicken charity, and to purify social corruption than all the religious and ethical journals in the country. This is the natural result of its reaching the proper audience. It has the same beneficent effect that sermons would have if they were preached to the non-church-going people who require them.

When we have learned to recognize the fact that humor does not necessarily imply fun, we will better understand the humorist’s attitude and labors. There is nothing, as a rule, very funny, in the weekly issues of “Punch,” and “Puck,” and “Life.” Many of the jokes ought to be explained in a key like that which accompanied my youthful arithmetic; and those which need no such deciphering are often so threadbare and feeble from hard usage, that it is scarcely decent to exact further service from them. It has been represented to us more than once that the English, being conservative in the matter of amusement, prefer those jests which, like “old Grouse in the gunroom,” have grown seasoned in long years of telling. “Slow to understand a new joke,” says Mrs. Pennell, “they are equally slow to part with one that has been mastered.” But there are some time-honored jests—the young housekeeper’s pie, for example, and the tramp who is unable to digest it—which even a conservative American, if such an anomaly exists, would relinquish dry-eyed and smiling. It is not for such feeble waggery as this that we value our comic journals, but for those vital touches which illuminate and betray the tragic farce called life. “Punch’s” cartoon depicting Bismarck as a discharged pilot, gloomily quitting the ship of state, while overhead the young emperor swaggers and smiles derisively, is in itself an epitome of history, a realization of those brief bitter moments which mark the turning-point of a nation and stand for the satire of success. “Life’s” sombre picture of the young wife bowing her head despairingly over the piano, as though to shut out from her gaze her foolish, besotted husband, is an unflinching delineation of the most sordid, pitiful and commonplace of all daily tragedies. In both these masterly sketches there is a grim humor, softened by kindliness, and this is the key-note of their power. They are as unlike as possible in subject and in treatment, but the undercurrent of human sympathy is the same.

Is it worth while, then, to be so contentious over the superficial contrasts of English and American humor, when both spring from the same seed, and nourish the same fruit? Why should we resent one another’s methods, or deny one another’s success? If, as our critics proudly claim, we Americans have a quicker perception of the ludicrous, the English have a finer standard by which to judge its worth. If we, as a nation, have more humor, they have better humorists, and can point serenely to those unapproached and unapproachable writers of the eighteenth century, whose splendid ringing laughter still clears the murky air. It is true, I am told now and then, with commendable gravity, that such mirth is unbecoming in a refined and critical age, and that, if I would try a little harder to follow the somewhat elusive satire of the modern analyst, I should enjoy a species of pleasantry too delicate or too difficult for laughter. I hesitate to affirm coarsely in reply that I like to laugh, because it is possible to be deeply humiliated by the contempt of one’s fellow-creatures. It is possible also to be sadly confused by new theories and new standards; by the people who tell me that exaggerated types, like Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp, are not amusing, and by the critics who are so good as to reveal to me the depths of my own delusions. “We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English say of us,” writes Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. “We have recovered our balance. We know that since ‘Gulliver’ there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to Knickerbocker’s ‘New York;’ that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the ‘Biglow Papers.’”

Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving to be the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle satire of the American alongside of those trenchant and masterly pages which constitute the landmarks of literature? “Swift,” says Dr. Johnson, with reluctant truthfulness, “must be allowed for a time to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation.” He is a writer whom we may be permitted to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars, still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial lustre of Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope to “recover our balance” by confounding values, a process of self-deception which misleads no one but ourselves.

Curiously enough, at least one Englishman may be found who cordially agrees with Mr. Warner. The Rev. R. H. Haweis has enriched the world with a little volume on American humorists, in which he kindly explains a great deal which we had thought tolerably clear already, as, for example, why Mark Twain is amusing. The authors whom Mr. Haweis has selected to illustrate his theme are Washington Irving, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain and Bret Harte; and he arranges this somewhat motley group into a humorous round-table, where all hold equal rank. He is not only generous, he is strictly impartial in his praise; and manifests the same cordial enthusiasm for Boston’s “Autocrat” and for “The Innocents Abroad.” Artemus Ward’s remark to his hesitating audience: “Ladies and gentlemen! You cannot expect to go in without paying your money, but you can pay your money without going in,” delights our kindly critic beyond measure. “Was there ever a wittier motto than this?” he asks, with such good-natured exultation that we have a vague sense of self-reproach at not being more diverted by the pleasantry.

Now Mr. Haweis, guided by that dangerous instinct which drives us on to unwarranted comparisons, does not hesitate to link the fame of Knickerbocker’s “New York” with the fame of “Gulliver’s Travels,” greatly to the disadvantage of the latter. “Irving,” he gravely declares, “has all the satire of Swift, without his sour coarseness.” It would be as reasonable to say, “Apollinaris has all the vivacity of brandy, without its corrosive insalubrity.” The advantages of Apollinaris are apparent at first sight. It sparkles pleasantly, it is harmless, it is refreshing, it can be consumed in large quantities without any particular result. Its merits are incontestible; but when all is said, a few of us still remember Dr. Johnson—“Brandy, sir, is a drink for heroes!” The robust virility of Swift places him forever at the head of English-speaking satirists. Unpardonable as is his coarseness, shameful as is his cynicism, we must still agree with Carlyle that his humor, “cased, like Ben Jonson’s, in a most hard and bitter rind,” is too genuine to be always unloving and malign.

The truth is that, when not confused by critics, we Americans have a sense of proportion as well as a sense of humor, and our keen appreciation of a jest serves materially to modify our national magniloquence, and to lessen our national self-esteem. We are good-tempered, too, where this humor is aroused, and so the frank ignorance of foreigners, the audacious disparagement of our fellow countrymen, are accepted with equal serenity. Newspapers deem it their duty to lash themselves into patriotic rage over every affront, but newspaper readers do not. Surely it is a generous nation that so promptly forgave Dickens for the diverting malice of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” I heard once a young Irishman, who was going to the World’s Fair, ask a young Englishman, who had been, if the streets of Chicago were paved, and the question was hailed with courteous glee by the few Americans present. Better still, I had the pleasure of listening to a citizen of Seattle, who was describing to a group of his townspeople the glories of the Fair, and the magnitude of the city which had brought it to such a triumphant conclusion. “Chicago, gentlemen,” said this enthusiastic traveler in a burst of final eloquence, “Chicago is the Seattle of Illinois.” The splendid audacity of this commended it as much to one city as to the other; and when it was repeated in Chicago, it was received with that frank delight which proves how highly we value the blessed privilege of laughter.

Perhaps it is our keener sense of humor which prompts America to show more honor to her humorists than England often grants. Perhaps it is merely because we are in the habit of according to all our men of letters a larger share of public esteem than a more critical or richly endowed nation would think their labors merited. Perhaps our humorists are more amusing than their English rivals. Whatever may be the cause, it is undoubtedly true that we treat Mr. Stockton with greater deference than England treats Mr. Anstey. We have illustrated articles about him in our magazines, and incidents of his early infancy are gravely narrated, as likely to interest the whole reading public. Now Mr. Anstey might have passed his infancy in an egg, for all the English magazines have to tell us on the subject. His books are bought, and read, and laughed over, and laid aside, and when there is a bitter cadence in his mirth, people are disappointed and displeased. England has always expected her jesters to wear the cap and bells. She would have nothing but foolish fun from Hood, sacrificing his finer instincts and his better parts on the shrine of her own ruthless desires, and yielding him scant return for the lifelong vassalage she exacted. It is fitting that an English humorist should have written the most sombre, the most heart-breaking, the most beautiful and consoling of tragic stories. Du Maurier in “Peter Ibbetson” has taught to England the lesson she needed to learn.

The best-loved workers of every nation are those who embody distinctly national characteristics, whose work breathes a spirit of wholesome national prejudice, who are children of their own soil, and cannot, even in fancy, be associated with any other art or literature save the art or literature of their fatherland. This was the case with honest John Leech, whom England took to her heart and held dear because he was so truly English, because he despised Frenchmen, and mistrusted Irishmen, and hated Jews, and had a splendid British frankness in conveying these various impressions to the world. What would Leech have thought of Peter Ibbetson watching with sick heart the vessels bound for France! What a contrast between the cultured sympathy of Du Maurier’s beautiful drawings, and the real, narrow affection which Leech betrays even for his Staffordshire roughs, who are British roughs, be it rememberd, and not without their stanch and sturdy British virtues. He does not idealize them in any way. He is content to love them as they are. Neither does Mr. Barrie endeavor to describe Thrums as a place where any but Thrums people could ever have found life endurable; yet he is as loyal in his affection for that forbidding little hamlet as if it were Florence the fair. Bret Harte uses no alluring colors with which to paint his iniquitous mining camps, but he is the brother at heart of every gambler and desperado in the diggings. Humanity is a mighty bond, and nationality strengthens its fibres. We can no more imagine Bret Harte amid Jane Austen’s placid surroundings, than we can imagine Dr. Holmes in a mining-camp, or Henry Fielding in Boston. Just as the Autocrat springs from Puritan ancestors, and embodies the intellectual traditions of New England, so Tom Jones, in his riotous young manhood, springs from that lusty Saxon stock, of whose courage, truthfulness, and good-tempered animalism he stands the most splendid representative. “The old order is passed and the new arises;” but Sophia Western has not yet yielded her place in the hearts of men to the morbid and self-centred heroines of modern fiction. Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, perhaps, belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs—“the nicest little delicate things—rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit.” Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London streets,

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without peer.

THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY: A SPECULATION.

Is it, then, the mere desire to be obliging which induces a millionaire to surround himself with things which he does not want, which nobody else wants, and which are perpetually in the way of comfort and pleasure? Does he build and furnish his house to support the dealers, to dazzle his friends, or to increase his own earthly happiness and well-being? The serious fashion in which he goes to work admits of no backsliding, no merciful deviations from a relentless luxury. I have seen ghastly summer palaces, erected presumably for rest and recreation, where the miserable visitor was conducted from a Japanese room to a Dutch room, and thence to something Early English or Florentine; and such a jumble of costly incongruities, of carved scrolls and blue tiles and bronze screens and stained glass, was actually dubbed a home. A home! The guest, surfeited with an afternoon’s possession, could escape to simpler scenes; but the master of the house was chained to all that tiresome splendor for five months of the year, and the sole compensation he appeared to derive from it was the saturnine delight of pointing out to small processions of captive friends every detail which they would have preferred to overlook. It is a painful thing, at best, to live up to one’s bricabrac, if one has any; but to live up to the bricabrac of many lands and of many centuries is a strain which no wise man would dream of inflicting upon his constitution.

Perhaps the most unlovely circumstance about the “palatial residences” of our country is that everything in them appears to have been bought at once. Everything is equally new, and equally innocent of any imprint of the owner’s personality. He has not lived among his possessions long enough to mould them to his own likeness, and very often he has not even selected them himself. I have known whole libraries purchased in a week, and placed en masse upon their destined shelves; whole rooms furnished at one fell swoop with all things needful, from the chandelier in the ceiling to the Dresden figures in the cabinet. I have known people who either mistrusted their own tastes, or who had no tastes to mistrust, and so surrendered their houses to upholsterers and decorators, giving them carte blanche to do their best or worst. A room which has been the unresisting prey of an upholsterer is, on the whole, the saddest thing that money ever bought; yet its deplorable completeness calls forth rapturous commendations from those who can understand no natural line of demarcation between a dwelling-place and a shop. The same curious delight in handsome things, apart from any beauty or fitness, has resulted in our over-ornamented Pullman cars, with their cumbrous and stuffy hangings; and in the aggressive luxury of our ocean steamers, where paint and gilding run riot, and every scrap of wall space bears its burden of inappropriate decoration. To those for whom a sea voyage is but a penitential pilgrimage, the fat frescoed Cupids and pink roses of the saloons offer no adequate compensation for their sufferings; whitewash and hangings of sackcloth would harmonize more closely with their sentiments. Yet these ornate embellishments pursue them now even to the solitude of their staterooms, and the newest steamers boast of cabins where the wretched traveler, too ill to arise from his berth, may be solaced by Cupids of his own frisking nakedly over the wash-bowl, and by pink roses in profusion festooning his narrow cell. If he can look at them without loathing, he is to be envied his unequaled serenity of mind.

It is strange that the authors who have written so much about luxury, whether they praise it satirically, like Mandeville, or condemn it very seriously, like Mr. Goldwin Smith, or merely inquire into its history and traditions, like that careful scholar, M. Baudrillart, should never have been struck with the amount of discomfort it entails. In modern as in ancient times, the same zealous pursuit of prodigality results in the same heavy burden of undesirable possessions. The youthful daughter of Marie Antoinette was allowed, we are told, four pairs of shoes a week; and M. Taine, inveighing bitterly against the extravagances of the French court, has no word of sympathy to spare for the unfortunate little princess, condemned by this ruthless edict always to wear new shoes. Louis XVI. had thirty doctors of his own; but surely no one will be found to envy him this royal superfluity. He also had a hundred and fifty pages, who were probably a terrible nuisance; and two chair-carriers, who were paid twenty thousand livres a year to inspect his Majesty’s chairs, which duty they solemnly performed twice a day, whether they were wanted or not. The Cardinal de Rohan had all his kitchen utensils of solid silver, which must have given as much satisfaction to his cooks as did Nero’s golden fishing-hooks to the fish he caught with them. M. Baudrillart describes the feasts of Elagabalus as if their only fault was their excess; but the impartial reader, scanning each unpalatable detail, comes to a different conclusion. Thrushes’ brains, and parrots’ heads, peas mashed with grains of gold, beans fricasseed with morsels of amber, and rice mixed with pearls do not tempt one’s fancy as either nourishing or appetizing diet; while the crowning point of discomfort was reached when revolving roofs threw down upon the guests such vast quantities of roses that they were well-nigh smothered. Better a dish of herbs, indeed, than all this dubious splendor. Nothing less enjoyable could have been invented in the interests of hospitality, save only that mysterious banquet given by Solomon the mighty, where all the beasts of the earth and all the demons of the air were summoned by his resistless talisman to do honor to the terrified and miserable banqueters.

“Le Superflu, chose très-nécessaire,” to quote Voltaire’s delightful phrase, is a difficult thing to handle with propriety and grace. Where the advantages of early training and inherited habits of indulgence are lacking, men who endeavor to spend a great deal of money show a pitiful incapacity for the task. They spend it, to be sure, but only in augmenting their own and their neighbors’ discomfort; and even this they do in a blundering, unimaginative fashion, almost painful to contemplate. The history of Law’s Bubble, with its long train of fabulous and fleeting fortunes, illustrates the helplessness of men to cope with suddenly acquired wealth. The Parisian nabob who warmed up a ragout with burning bank notes, that he might boast of how much it cost him, was sadly stupid for a Frenchman; but he was kinder to himself, after all, than the house-painter who, bewildered with the wealth of Fortunatus, could think of nothing better to do with it than to hire ninety supercilious domestics for his own misusage and oppression. Since the days of Darius, who required thirty attendants to make his royal bed, there probably never were people more hopelessly in one another’s way than that little army of ninety servants awaiting orders from an artisan. The only creature capable of reveling in such an establishment was the author of “Coningsby” and “Lothair,” to whom long rows of powdered footmen, “glowing in crimson liveries,” were a spectacle as exhilarating as is a troop of Horse Guards to persons of a more martial cast of mind. Readers of “Lothair” will remember the home-coming of that young gentleman to Muriel Towers, where the house steward, and the chief butler, and the head gardener, and the lord of the kitchen, and the head forester, and the grooms of the stud and of the chambers stand in modest welcome behind the distinguished housekeeper, “who curtsied like the old court;” while the underlings await at a more “respectful distance” the arrival of their youthful master, whose sterling insignificance must have been painfully enhanced by all this solemn anticipation. “Even the mountains fear a rich man,” says that ominous Turkish proverb which breathes the corruption of a nation; but it would have been a chicken-hearted molehill that trembled before such a homunculus as Lothair.

The finer adaptability of women makes them a little less uncomfortable amid such oppressive surroundings, and their tamer natures revolt from ridiculous excess. They listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of Polonius, and their habit is occasionally costlier than their purses can buy; witness that famous milliner’s bill for fifteen thousand pounds, which was disputed in the French courts during the gilded reign of Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punishment of their extravagances falls on themselves or on their husbands. They do not, as is the fashion with men, make their belongings a burden to their friends. It is seldom the mistress of a curio-laden house who insists with tireless perseverance on your looking at everything she owns; though it was a woman, and a provincial actress at that, raised by two brilliant marriages to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who came to Abbotsford accompanied by a whole retinue of servants and several private physicians, to the mingled amusement and despair of Sir Walter. And it was a flower girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired wealth in the most sumptuous entertainments ever known even to that city of costly caprice. But for stupid and meaningless luxury we must look, after all, to men: to Caligula, whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank out of an ivory trough; to Condé, who spent three thousand crowns for jonquils to deck his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of Albuquerque, who had forty silver ladders among his utterly undesirable possessions. Even in the matter of dress and fashion, they have exceeded the folly of women. It is against the gallants of Spain, and not against their wives, that the good old gossip James Howell inveighs with caustic humor. The Spaniard, it would seem, “tho’ perhaps he had never a shirt to his back, yet must he have a toting huge swelling ruff around his neck,” for the starching of which exquisitely uncomfortable article he paid the then enormous sum of twenty shillings. It was found necessary to issue a royal edict against these preposterous decorations, which grew larger and stiffer every year, even children of tender age wearing their miniature instruments of torture. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighs Burton with melancholy candor; but it is not without some small compensations of its own. To realize them, we might compare one of Murillo’s dirty, smiling, half-naked beggar boys with an Infanta by Velasquez, or with Moreelzee’s charming and unhappy little Princess, who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-trimmed stomacher, gazes at us with childish dignity from the wall of Amsterdam’s museum. Or we might remember the pretty story of Meyerbeer’s little daughter, who, after watching for a long time the gambols of some ragged children in the street, turned sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic resignation, “It is a great misfortune to have genteel parents.”

LECTURES.

Now, is it industry or a love of sport which makes us sit in long and solemn rows in an oppressively hot room, blinking at glaring lights, breathing a vitiated air, wriggling on straight and narrow chairs, and listening, as well as heat and fatigue and discomfort will permit, to a lecture which might just as well have been read peacefully by our own firesides? Do we do this thing for amusement, or for intellectual gain? Outside, the winter sun is setting clearly in a blue-green sky. People are chatting gayly in the streets. Friends are drinking cups of fragrant tea in pleasant lamp-lit rooms. There are concerts, perhaps, or matinées, where the deft comedian provokes continuous laughter. No; it is not amusement that we seek in the lecture-hall. Too many really amusing things may be done on a winter afternoon. Too many possible pleasures lie in wait for every spare half-hour. We can harbor no delusions on that score.

Is it industry, then, that packs us side by side in serried Amazonian ranks, broken here and there by a stray and downcast man? But on the library shelves stand thick as autumn leaves the unread books. Hidden away in obscure corners are the ripe old authors whom we know by name alone. The mist of an unspoken tongue veils from us the splendid treasures of antiquity, and we comfort ourselves with glib commonplaces about “the sympathetic study of translations.” No; it can hardly be the keen desire of culture which makes us patient listeners to endless lectures. Culture is not so easy of access. It is not a thing passed lightly from hand to hand. It is the reward of an intelligent quest, of delicate intuitions, of a broad and generous sympathy with all that is best in the world. It has been nobly defined by Mr. Symonds as “the raising of the intellectual faculties to their highest potency by means of conscious training.” We cannot gain this fine mastery over ourselves by absorbing—or forgetting—a mass of details upon disconnected subjects,—“a thousand particulars,” says Addison, “which I would not have my mind burdened with for a Vatican.” If we will sit down and seriously try to reckon up our winnings in years of lecture-going, we may yet find ourselves reluctant converts to Mr. Bagehot’s cruel conclusions. It is the old, old search for a royal road to learning. It is the old, old effort at a compromise which cheats us out of both pleasure and profit. It is the old, old determination to seek some short cut to acquirements, which, like “conversing with ingenious men,” may save us, says Bishop Berkeley, from “the drudgery of reading and thinking.”

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other. At times we envy the happy Hermit of Prague, who never saw pen or ink; at times we think somewhat wistfully of the sedate and dignified methods of the past, when students, to use Sir Walter Scott’s illustration, paid their tickets at the door, instead of scrambling over the walls to distinction. It shows a good deal of agility and self-reliance to scale the walls; and such athletic interlopers, albeit a trifle disordered in appearance, are apt to boast of their unaided prowess: how with “little Latin and less Greek” they have become—not Shakespeares indeed, nor even Scotts—but prominent, very prominent citizens indeed. The notion is gradually gaining ground that common-school education is as good as college education; that extension lectures and summer classes are acceptable substitutes for continuous study and mental discipline; that reading translations of the classics is better, because easier, than reading the classics themselves; and that attending a “Congress” of specialists gives us, in some mysterious fashion, a very respectable knowledge of their specialties. It is after this manner that we enjoy, in all its varied aspects, that energetic idleness which Mr. Bagehot recommends as a deliberate sedative for our restless self-esteem.

Yet the sacrifice of time alone is worth some sorrowful consideration. We laugh at the droning pedants of the old German universities who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had well-nigh drowned the world with words. The Tübingen chancellor, Penziger, gave, it is said, four hundred and fifty-nine lectures on the prophet Jeremiah, and over fifteen hundred lectures on Isaiah; while the Viennese theologian, Hazelbach, lectured for twenty-two consecutive years on the first chapter of Isaiah, and was cruelly cut off by death before he had finished with his theme. But the bright side of this picture is that only students—and theological students at that—attended these limitless dissertations. Theology was then a battle-field, and the heavy weapons forged for the combat were presumed to be as deadly as they were cumbersome. During all those twenty-two years in which Herr Hazelbach held forth so mercilessly, German maidens and German matrons formed no part of his audience. They at least had other and better things to do. German artisans and German tradesmen troubled themselves little about Isaiah. German ploughmen went about their daily toil as placidly as if Herr Hazelbach had been born a mute. The sleepy world had not then awakened to its duty of disseminating knowledge broadcast and in small doses, so that our education, as Dr. Johnson discontentedly observed of the education of the Scotch, is like bread in a besieged town,—“every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.”

What we lack in quantity, however, we are pleased to make up in variety. We range freely over a mass of subjects from the religion of the Phœnicians to the poets of Australia, and from the Song of Solomon to the latest electrical invention. We have lectures in the morning upon Plato and Aristotle, and in the afternoon upon Emerson and Arthur Hugh Clough. We take a short course of German metaphysics,—which is supposed to be easily compressed into six lectures,—and follow it up immediately with another on French art, or the folk-lore of the North American Indians. No topic is too vast to be handled deftly, and finished up in a few afternoons. A fortnight for the Renaissance, a week for Greek architecture, ten days for Chaucer, three weeks for anthropology. It is amazing how far we can go in a winter, when we travel at this rate of speed. “What under the sun is bringing all the women after Hegel?” asked a puzzled librarian not very long ago. “There isn’t one of his books left in the library, and twenty women come in a day to ask for him.” It was explained to this custodian that a popular lecturer had been dwelling with some enthusiasm upon Hegel, and that the sudden demand for the philosopher was a result of his contagious eloquence. It seemed for the nonce like a revival of pantheism; but in two weeks every volume was back in its place, and the gray dust of neglect was settling down as of yore upon each hoary head. The women, fickle as in the days of the troubadours, had wandered far from German erudition, and were by that time wrestling with the Elizabethan poets, or the constitutional history of republics. The sun of philosophy had set.

One rather dismal result of this rapid transit is the amount of material which each lecture is required to hold, and which each lecture-goer is expected to remember. A few centuries of Egyptian history or of Mediæval song are packed down by some system of mental hydraulic pressure into a single hour’s discourse; and, when they escape, they seem vast enough to fill our lives for a week. “When Macaulay talks,” complained Lady Ashburton tartly, “I am not only overflowed with learning, but I stand in the slops.” We have much the same uncomfortable sensation at an afternoon lecture, when the tide of information, of dry, formidable, relentless facts, rises higher and higher, and our spirits sink lower and lower with every fresh development. “The need of limit, the feasibility of performance,” has not yet dawned upon the new educators who have taken the world in hand; and, as a consequence, we, the students, have never learned to survey our own intellectual boundaries. We assume in the first place that we have an intelligent interest in literature, science, and history, art, architecture, and archæology; and, in the second, that it is possible for us to learn a moderate amount about all these things without any unreasonable exertion. This double delusion lures us feebly on until we have listened to so much, and remembered so little, that we are a good deal like the infant Paul Dombey wondering in pathetic perplexity whether a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull.

“When all can read, and books are plentiful, lectures are unnecessary,” says Dr. Johnson, who hated “by-roads in education,” and novel devices—or devices which were novel a hundred and thirty years ago—for softening and abridging hard study. He hated also to be asked the kind of questions which we are now so fond of answering in the columns of our journals and magazines. What should a child learn first? How should a boy be taught? What course of study would he recommend an intelligent youth to pursue? “Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of anything to which he is inclined,” was the great scholar’s petulant reply to one of these repeated inquiries; and, though it sounds ill-natured, we have some human sympathy for the pardonable irritation which prompted it. Dr. Johnson, I am well aware, is not a popular authority to quote in behalf of any cause one wishes to advance; but his heterodoxy in the matter of lectures is supported openly by Charles Lamb, and furtively by some living men of letters, who strive, though with no great show of temerity, to stem the ever-increasing current of popular instruction. One eminent scholar, being entreated to deliver a course of lectures on a somewhat abstruse theme, replied that if people really desired information on that subject, and if they could read, he begged to refer them to two books he had written several years before. By perusing these volumes, which were easy of access, they would know all that he once knew, and a great deal more than he knew at the present time, as he had unhappily forgotten much that was in them. It would be simpler, he deemed, and it would be cheaper, than bringing him across the ocean to repeat the same matter in lectures.

As for Lamb, we have not only his frankly stated opinion, but—what is much more diverting—we have also the unconscious confession of a purely human weakness with which it is pleasant to sympathize. Like all the rest of us, this charming and fallible genius found that heroic efforts in the future cost less than very moderate exertions in the present. He was warmly attached to Coleridge, and he held him in sincere veneration. When the poet came to London in 1816, we find Lamb writing to Wordsworth very enthusiastically, and yet with a vague undercurrent of apprehension:—

“Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. ’Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the currents of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a net.”

This is well enough by way of anticipation; but later on, when Coleridge is a fixed star in the London skies, and is preparing to give his lectures on Shakespeare and English poetry, Lamb’s kind heart warms to his perpetually impecunious friend. He writes now to Payne Collier, with little enthusiasm, but with great earnestness, bespeaking his interest and assistance. He reminds Collier of his friendship and admiration for Coleridge, and bids him remember that he and all his family attended the poet’s lectures five years before. He tells him alluringly that this is a brand-new course, with nothing metaphysical about it, and adds: “There are particular reasons just now, and have been for the last twenty years, why he [Coleridge] should succeed. He will do so with a little encouragement.”

Doubtless; but it is worthy of note that the next time the subject is mentioned is in a letter to Mrs. Wordsworth, written more than two months later. The lectures are now in progress; very successful, we hear; but—Lamb has been to none of them. He intends to go soon, of course,—so do we always; but, in the mean while, he is treating resolution with a good deal of zest, and making the best plea he can for his defalcation. With desperate candor he writes:—

“I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself. If delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern. ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying.”

We can judge pretty well from this letter just how many of those lectures on Shakespeare Lamb was likely to hear; and all doubts are set at rest when we find Coleridge, the following winter, endeavoring to lure his reluctant friend to another course by the presentation of a complimentary ticket. Even this device fails of its wonted success. Lamb is eloquent in thanks, and lame in excuses. He has been in an “incessant hurry.” He was unable to go on the evening he was expected because it was the night of Kenney’s new comedy, “which has utterly failed,”—this is mentioned as soothing to Coleridge’s wounded feelings. He has mistaken his dates, and supposed there would be no lectures in Christmas week. He is as eager to vindicate himself as Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond, and he is as sanguine as ever about the future. “I trust,” he writes, “to hear many a course yet;” and with this splendid resolution, which is made without a pang, he wanders brightly off to a more engaging topic.

It is a charming little bit of comedy, and has, withal, such a distinctly modern touch, that we might fancy it enacted in this year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-four by any of our weak and erring friends.

REVIEWERS AND REVIEWED.

In these days of grace when all manner of evil-doers have their apologists; when we are bidden to admire the artistic spirit of Nero and the warm-hearted integrity of Henry the Eighth; when a “cult for Domitian” and a taste for Nihilists contend with each other in our estimation; it may not be ill-timed nor unduly venturesome to offer a few modest arguments in behalf of those Pariahs of modern literature, the anonymous reviewers of the press. They have been harshly abused for so many years. They have been targets for the wrath of authors, the scorn of satirists, the biting comments of injured genius. And now, when milder manners and gentler modes of speech are replacing the vigorous Billingsgate of our ancestors; when theologians and politicians make war upon one another with some show of charity and discretion, the reviewer alone is excluded from this semblance of goodwill, the reviewer alone—a thing apart from brotherhood—is pelted as openly as ever. The stones that are cast at him are so big and so hard that if he still lives, and, in a mild way, even flourishes, it must be because of his own irritating obtusiveness, because of his unpardonable reluctance to come forward decently and be killed.

Now, when I read the list of his misdeeds, as they are set forth categorically by irate novelists and poets, when I hear of his “ferocity, incompetence and dishonesty,” I am filled with heroic indignation and with craven fear. But when I turn from these scathing comments to a few columns of book notices, and see for myself the amiable effort that is made in them to say something reasonably pleasant about every volume, I begin to think that Mr. Lang is right when he complains that the ordinary anonymous reviewer is, as the Scotch lassie said of a modest lover, “senselessly ceevil,” good-natured and forbearing to a fault. If he sins, it is through indifference, and not through brutality. He is more anxious to spare himself than to attack his author. He has that provoking charity which is based upon unconcern, and he looks upon a book with a gentle and weary tolerance, fatal alike to animosity and enthusiasm. To understand the annoyance provoked by this mental attitude, we must remember that the work which is thus carelessly handled is, in its writer’s eyes, a thing sacred and apart; with faults perhaps,—no great book being wholly free from them,—but illustrating some particular attitude towards life, which places it beyond the pale of common, critical jurisprudence. Even the novelist of to-day sincerely believes that his point of view, his conception of his own art, and the lesson he desires to enforce are matters of vital interest to the public; and that it is crass ignorance on the reviewer’s part to ignore these considerations, and to class his masterpiece with the companion stories of less self-conscious men. What is the use of superbly discarding all models, and of thanking Heaven daily one does not resemble Fielding and Scott, and Thackeray, if one cannot escape after all from the standards which these great men erected?

It is urged also against newspaper critics that they read only a small portion of the books which they pretend to criticise. This, I believe, is true, and it accounts for the goodhumor and charity they display. If they read the whole, we should have a band of misanthropes who would spare neither age nor sex, and who would gain no clearer knowledge of their subjects through this fearful sacrifice of time and temper. “To know the vintage and quality of a wine,” says Mr. Oscar Wilde, “one need not drink the whole cask. One tastes it, and that is quite enough.” More than enough for the reviewer very often, but too little to satisfy the author, who regards his work as Dick Swiveller regarded beer, as something not to be adequately recognized in a sip. There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient. This is as much perhaps as they can afford to give it, and to write a brief, intelligent, appreciative notice of a partly read volume is not altogether the easy task it seems. That it is constantly done, proves the reviewer to be a man skilled in his petty craft; but we are merely paving the way to disappointment if we expect subtle analysis, or fervent eulogy, or even very discriminating criticism from his pen. He is not a Sainte-Beuve in the first place, and he has not a week of leisure in the second. We might console ourselves with the reflection that if he were a great and scholarly critic instead of an insignificant fellow-workman, our little books would never meet his eye.

Another complaint lodged periodically by discontents is that the author gains no real light from the comments passed upon his work, which are irritating and annoying without being in the smallest degree helpful. This is the substance of those sad grumblings which we heard some years ago from Mr. Lewis Morris; and this is the argument offered by Mr. Howells, who appears to think that Canon Farrar dealt a death-blow to reviewers in the simple statement that he never profited by their reviews. But at whose door lay the blame? It does not follow that, because a lesson is unlearned, it has never been taught. The Bourbons, it is said, gained nothing from some of the sharpest admonitions ever given by history. It is worth while to consider, in this regard, an extract from the Journal of Sir Walter Scott in which he mentions an anonymous letter sent him from Italy, and full of acute, acrid criticisms on the “Life of Bonaparte.” “The tone is decidedly hostile,” says Sir Walter calmly, “but that shall not prevent my making use of all his corrections, where just.” It is a hard matter perhaps for smaller men to preserve this admirable tranquillity under assault; to say with Epictetus, “He little knew of my other shortcomings or he would not have mentioned these alone.” Yet after all, it is an advantage to be told plainly what we need to know and cannot see for ourselves, I am sure that the most valuable lesson in literary perspective I ever received came from an anonymous reviewer, who reminded me curtly that “Mr. Saltus and Leopardi are not twins of the intellect.” When I first saw that sentence I felt a throb of indignation that any one should believe, or affect to believe, that I ever for a moment supposed Mr. Saltus and Leopardi were twins of the intellect. Afterwards, when in calmer mood I re-read the essay criticised, I was forced to acknowledge that, if such were not my conviction, I had, to say the least, been unfortunate in my manner of putting things. I had used the two names indiscriminately and as if I thought one man every whit as worthy of illustrating my text as the other. Such moments ought to be salutary, they are so eminently cheerless. A disagreeable lesson, disagreeably imparted, is apt to be taken to heart with very beneficial results. If it is wasted, the fault does not lie with the surly truth-teller, whose thankless task has been performed with most ungracious efficacy. “Truth,” says Saville, “has become such a ruining virtue, that mankind seems to be agreed to commend and avoid it.”

As for the real and exasperating fault of much modern writing, its flippant and irrelevant cleverness, the critic and the reviewer stand equally guilty of the charge. Mr. Goldwin Smith observes that the province of criticism appears to be now limited to the saying of fine things; and there are moments when we feel that this unkind and forcible statement is very nearly true. The fatal and irresistible impulse to emit sparks—like the cat in the fairy story—lures a man away from his subject, and sends him dancing over pages in a glittering fashion that is as useless as it is pretty. It is amazing how brightly he shines, but we see nothing by his light. “He uses his topic,” says Mr. Saintsbury, “as a springboard or platform on and from which to display his natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant wit.” We read, and laugh, and are entertained, and seldom pause to ask ourselves exactly what it was which the writer started out to accomplish.

Now the finest characteristic of all really good criticism is its power of self-repression. It is work within barriers, work which drives straight to its goal, and does not permit itself the luxury of meandering on either side of the way. In this respect at least, it is possible for the most modest of anonymous reviewers to follow the example of the first of critics, Sainte-Beuve, who never allowed himself to be lured away from the subject in hand, and never sacrificed exactness and perspicuity to effect. If we compare his essay on the historian Gibbon with one on the same subject by Mr. Walter Bagehot, we will better understand this admirable quality of restraint. Mr. Bagehot’s paper is delightful from beginning to end; keen, sympathetic, humorous, and sparkling all over with little brilliant asides about Peel’s Act, and the South Sea Company, and grave powdered footmen, and Louis XIV., “carefully amusing himself with dreary trifles.” Underneath its whimsical exaggerations we recognize clearly the truthful outlines and general fidelity of the sketch. But Sainte-Beuve indulges in none of these witty and wandering fancies. He is keenly alive to the proper limitations of his subject; he has but a single purpose in mind, that of helping you to accurately understand the character and the life’s work of the great historian whom he is reviewing; and, while his humor plays lambently on every page, he never makes any conscious effort to be diverting. Nothing can be more sprightly than Mr. Bagehot’s account of Gibbon’s early conversion to the Church of Rome, and of the horror and alarm he awoke thereby at the manor-house of Buriton, where “it would probably have occasioned less sensation if ‘dear Edward’ had announced his intention of becoming a monkey.” Nothing can be more dexterous than Mr. Bagehot’s analysis of the cautious skepticism which replaced the brief religious fervor of youth. But when we turn back to Sainte-Beuve, we see this little sentence driven like an arrow-point straight to the heart of the mystery. “While he (Gibbon) prided himself on being wholly impartial and indifferent where creeds were concerned, he cherished, without avowing it, a secret and cold spite against religious thought, as if it were an adversary which had struck him one day when unarmed, and had wounded him.” A secret and cold spite. Were ever five short words more luminously and dispassionately significant?

A sense of proportion intrudes itself so seldom into the popular criticism of to-day, that it is hardly worth while to censure the reviewer for not comprehending differences of degree. How should he, when the whole tone of modern sentiment is subversive of order and distinction; when the generally accepted opinion appears to be that we are doing everything better than it was ever done before, and have nothing to learn from anybody? This is a pleasant opinion to entertain, but it is apt to be a little misleading. The old gods are not so readily dislodged, and their festal board is not a round table at which all guests hold equal rank. If you thrust Balzac or Tolstoi by the side of Shakespeare, the great poet, it has been well said, will, in his infinite courtesy, move higher and make room. But you cannot bid them change seats at your discretion. Parnassus is not the exclusive pasture ground of the Frenchman or of the Muscovite. “Homer often nods, but, in ‘Taras Bulba,’ Gogol never nods,” I read not long ago in a review. The inference is plain, and quite in harmony with much that we hear every day; but how many times already has Homer been outstripped by long forgotten competitors! It is not indeed the nameless critic of the newspapers who gives utterance to these startling statements. They are signed and countersigned in magazines, and occasionally republished in fat volumes for the comfort and enlightenment of posterity. The real curiosities of criticism have ever emanated from men bearing the symbol of authority. It was no anonymous reviewer who called Dante a “Methodist parson in Bedlam,” or who said that Wordsworth’s poetry would “never do,” or who spoke of the “caricaturist, Thackeray.” It is no anonymous reviewer now who bids us exult and be glad over the “literary emancipation of the West,” as though that large and flourishing portion of the United States had hitherto been held in lettered bondage.