Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? As I transcribe once more that ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is there, with
As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon, and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle, and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by the ton—but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly anything that it couldn't buy—but such a simple thing as last year's snow!
Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker:
Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad, hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant pride and pomp of the earth—"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!" "Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow, gone—who knows where?—on the wind. "'Dead and gone'—a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his Death's Jest Book. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade:
"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac poetry.
For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention, the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs, crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,—such a vast treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away!
Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings, under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and—what women! What divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning of the great resounding moments of their lives—moments made out of real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and give place to lesser moments!
Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like moments of human exaltation—what are they now, but, so to say, the pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are passing, they are gone with last year's snow.
But the last year's snow of our personal lives—what a wistful business it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied with some fair face, or perhaps—being men—with several fair faces, once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably real memory can make them—all but bring them back—how vividly reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them, slipping from our grasp!
That summer afternoon,—do you too still remember it, Miranda?—when, under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs—do you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest pools, it is no use asking me to forget.
And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:—"This fairy hour—so real, so magical, now—some day will be in the far past; you will sit right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!
I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted pool just the same as when—but where are the laughing ripples—ah! Miranda—that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster?
They are with last year's snow.
Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child, and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in that enchanted land—whether we rode side by side through London streets in a hansom—"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it—(for our dream stretches as far back as that prehistoric day—How old one of us seems to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)—or sat and laughed at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and whispering over graves.
Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives, moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance and death.
Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again! What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more. Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity, begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun, and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been."
that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after.
Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic pathos. Superficial—or, if you prefer it, more normal—observers are made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled.
Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious material—were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a single summer day—it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and clean of heart—yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea, dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow.
And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too in the world of love and dream.
Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow.
According to the old Scandinavian fable of the cosmos, the whole world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent. The ancient name for it was the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had another significance. Today, however, the symbol may still hold good of a certain terrible and hideous reality.
Still, as of old, the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic wrigglers that multiply, a million a minute, in the covered cesspools of private life.
Printed history is so infested with this vermin, in the form of secret memoirs, back-stairs diarists, and boudoir eavesdroppers, that it is almost impossible to feel sure of the actual fact of any history whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laocoön, battling in vain with the strangling coils of the sea-serpent of Poseidon. We scarcely know what to believe of the dead; and for the living, is it not true, as Tennyson puts it, that "each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies"?
What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how eternally true to the methods of the gossip in all ages was Satan's way of going to work in that immortal allegory! Let us recall the familiar scene with a quoted verse or two:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan [otherwise, the Adversary] came also among them.
And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."
And the Lord said unto Satan: "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?"
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "Doth Job fear God for nought?"
Here we have in a nutshell the whole modus operandi of the gossip in all ages, and as he may be observed at any hour of the day or night, slimily engaged in his cowardly business. "Going to and fro in the earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a seed, leering an innuendo; seldom saying, only implying; leaving everywhere trails of slime, yet trails too vague and broken to track him by, secure in his very cowardice.
"Doth Job fear God for nought?" He only asks, observe. Affirms nothing. Only innocently wonders. Sows a doubt, that's all—and leaves it to work.
The victim may possibly be set right in the end, as was Job; but meanwhile he has lost his flocks and his herds, his sons and his daughters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague of boils. Actually—life not being, like the Book of Job, an allegory—he very seldom is set right, but must bear his losses and his boils with what philosophy he can master till the end of the chapter.
The race to which Job belonged presents perhaps the most conspicuous example of a whole people burdened throughout its history with a heritage of malignant gossip. In the town of Lincoln, in England, there exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"—a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their pastoral feasts. Such a wild belief in child-sacrifice by the Jews was widespread in the Middle Ages, and is largely responsible, I understand, even at the present day, for the Jewish massacres in Russia.
Think of the wild liar who first put that fearful thought into the mind of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown—gossip?
A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and death upon the neighbours or their cattle.
You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the malignant gossip.
In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too culpably particeps criminis in this phenomenon under consideration. If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps never entirely eradicate.
Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe about one another.
It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.
It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.
Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages for cosmopolitan rapprochements, is not invariably employed in the interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.
When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know Hamlet's opinion on the matter:
And again:
This, it is to be feared, is merely the sad truth, for mankind, while it admires both greatness and goodness, would seem to resent the one and only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its taste than the rumour that detracts from the great or sullies the good; and so long as the rumour be entertaining, it has little concern for its truth.
Froude, in writing of Caesar, has this to say admirably to our purpose:
In ages which we call heroic, the saint works miracles, the warrior performs exploits beyond the strength of natural man. In ages less visionary, which are given to ease and enjoyment, the tendency is to bring a great man down to the common level, and to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in some respects worse than ourselves; and if to these general impulses be added political or personal animosity, accusations of depravity are circulated as surely about such men, and are credited as readily as under other influences are the marvellous achievements of a Cid or a St. Francis.
The absurdity of a calumny may be as evident as the absurdity of a miracle; the ground for belief may be no more than a lightness of mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle tale floats in society, and by and by is written down in books and passes into the region of established realities.
The proportion of such idle tales seriously printed as history can never, of course, be computed. Sometimes one is tempted to think that history is mainly "whole cloth." Certainly the lives of such men as Caesar are largely made up of what one might term illustrative fictions rather than actual facts. The story of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it does not seem "illustrative"—that is, not in keeping with his general character—we are at liberty to reject. Both alike, however, were the product of the gossip, the embodied littleness of human nature endeavouring then, as always, to minimize and discredit the strong man, who, whatever his actual faults, at least strenuously shoulders for his fellows the hard work of the world.
The great have usually been strong enough to smile contempt on their traducers—Caesar's answer to an infamous epigram of the poet Catullus was to ask him to dinner—but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense of spirit in a waste of shame," have their achievements been bought, because of these curs that bark forever at the heels of fame!
And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack. Too often has the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of the gossips of Athens.
In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had brought her there. All Queen Elizabeth's popularity could not save her from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare's genius protect his name from the foulest of stains.
In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the little hand of Lady Macbeth. The more the stain is washed, the more persistently it reappears, like Rizzio's blood, as they say, in Holyrood Palace. To deny a rumour is but to spread it. An action for libel, however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of perpetuating it.
Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing Voltaire's story to the end of time.
"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable doubt.
All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the appeal to posterity is the most hopeless.
What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a mysterious malignity.
Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of his fatuous contemporaries.
Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now. It is only to us that it matters.
Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and so depraved an appetite for lies. Under such conditions, it is surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the chestnut forests of America. It first attacks the noblest trees. Like it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms.
It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his detection so difficult, and gives him his security. A great reputation may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought about its fall. It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous—
In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed. For one thing, they do not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something that they have heard—something, they are careful to add, which is probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a moment.
Then the fact stated or hinted is probably no concern of ours. It is not for us to sift its truth, or to bring it to the attention of the individual it tarnishes. Obviously, society would become altogether impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should thus, it is to be feared, only make things worse, and involuntarily play the gossip's own game. The best we can do is as far as possible to banish the tattle from our minds, and, at all events, to keep our own mouths shut.
Even so, however, some harm will have been done. We shall never be quite sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person concerned, it will probably in some degree colour our attitude toward him.
And with others, less high-minded than ourselves, the gossip will have had greater success. Not, of course, meaning any harm, they will inquire of someone else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be true. And so it will go on ad infinitum. The formula is simple, and it is only a matter of arithmetical progression for a private lie, once started on its journey, to become a public scandal, with a reputation gone, and no one visibly responsible.
Of course, not all gossip is purposely harmful in its intention. The deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the restless ennui that must be forever talking or listening to fill the vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as the whisper that discredits, or the story that ridicules, the distinction it envies, and the goodness it cannot understand.
The mystery of gossip is bound up with the mysterious human need of talking. Talk we must, though we say nothing, or talk evil from sheer lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently for the mere sake of talking, we shall probably be nearer to knowing why he prefers to speak and hear evil rather than good of his fellows.
Possibly the gossip would be just as ready to speak well of his victims, to circulate stories to their credit rather than the reverse, but for the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For the world has no anxiety to hear good of its neighbour, and there is no piquancy in the disclosure of hidden virtues.
'Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true; and the only poor consolation to be got out of it is that the victims of gossip may, if they feel so inclined, feel flattered rather than angered by its attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes individuality; and, all things considered, it may be held as true that those most gossiped about are usually those who can best afford to pay this tax levied by society on any form of distinction.
After all, the great and good man has his greatness and goodness to support him, though the world should unite in depreciating him. The artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame must have gossip for its seamy side, there are some satisfactions that cannot be stolen away, and some laurels that defy the worm.
The word "editor" as applied to the conductors of magazines and newspapers is rapidly becoming a mere courtesy title; for the powers and functions formerly exercised by editors, properly so called, are being more and more usurped by the capitalist proprietor. There are not a few magazines where the "editor" has hardly more say in the acceptance of a manuscript than the contributor who sends it in. Few are the editors left who uphold the magisterial dignity and awe with which the name of editor was wont to be invested. These survive owing chiefly to the prestige of long service, and even they are not always free from the encroachments of the new method. The proprietor still feels the irksome necessity of treating their editorial policies with respect, though secretly chafing for the moment when they shall give place to more manageable, modern tools.
The "new" editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to truckle to the public taste—or rather to his crude conception of the public taste. The only real editors of today are the capitalist and the public. The nominal editor is merely an office-boy of larger growth, and slightly larger salary.
Innocent souls still, of course, imagine him clothed with divine powers, and letters of introduction to him are still sought after by the superstitious beginner. Alas! the chances are that the better he thinks of your MS. the less likely is it to be accepted by—the proprietor; for Mr. Snooks, the proprietor, has decided tastes of his own, and a peculiar distaste for anything remotely savouring of the "literary." His broad editorial axiom is that a popular magazine should be everything and anything but—"literature." For any signs of the literary taint he keeps open a stern and ever-watchful eye, and the "editor" or "editorial assistant"—to make a distinction without a difference—whom he should suspect of literary leanings has but a short shrift. Mr. Snooks is seldom much of a reader himself. His activities have been exclusively financial, and he has drifted into the magazine business as he might have drifted into pork or theatres—from purely financial reasons. His literary needs are bounded on the north by a detective story, and on the south by a scientific article. The old masters of literature are as much foolishness to him as the old masters of painting. In short, he is just a common, ignorant man with money invested in a magazine; and who shall blame him if he goes on the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune. When he starts in he not infrequently begins by entrusting his magazine to some young man with real editorial ability and ambition to make a really good thing. This young man gathers about him a group of kindred spirits, and the result is that after the publication of the second number Mr. Snooks decides to edit the magazine himself, with the aid of a secretary and a few typewriters. His bright young men hadn't understood "what the public wants" at all. They were too high-toned, too "literary." What the public wants is short stories and pictures of actresses; and the short stories, like the actresses, must be no better than they should be. Even short stories when they are masterpieces are not "what the public wants." So the bright young men go into outer darkness, sadly looking for new jobs, and with its third number Snooks's Monthly has fallen into line with the indistinguishable ruck of monthly magazines, only indeed distinguishable one from the other by the euphonious names of their proprietors.
Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors.
Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good.
As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial individuality—but editorial individuality is the last thing the capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of the proprietor.
With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. Happily one or two—rari nantes in gurgito vasto—survive amid the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by the moneyed voice of the mob—a distinction to which, after all, they have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it is the best magazine that always makes the most money.